About

Thoughtful debate elevates us all. In For Heaven’s Sake, Donniel Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevi revive the Jewish art of constructive discussion on topics related to political and social trends in Israel, Israel-Diaspora relations, and the future of Zionism in Israel and on the global stage.

The podcast draws its name from the concept of machloket l’shem shemayim, “disagreeing for the sake of heaven” and is part of the Institute’s iEngage Project.

Agony and Uncertainty Transcript

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.
Donniel: Hi, friends. This is Donniel Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevi from the Shalom Hartman Institute. And this is our podcast, For Heaven’s Sake, Israel in Ceasefire. Between the last podcast and this one, 500 days have passed. Today is day 502, in which many of our hostages are still in Gaza. We’re coming to the end of stage one of the hostage deal. Tomorrow’s going to be a really hard day where the coffins and the bodies of the Bibas family, mother and children, are going to be returned.

And Yossi and I, as we were trying to think about what should we call today’s podcast, we really didn’t know because we’re in this, in a, we don’t, there’s so many mixed feelings. There’s been so many mixed feelings throughout these. 500 plus days, but we settled on that maybe the most accurate feeling right now is “agony and uncertainty.” It’s going to be a very hard day tomorrow.

It was a hard day when we saw the gaunt faces of hostages who were being starved. And we know that the men who are waiting for stage two, we know in fact that they’ve been starved and tortured to a much greater degree. And tomorrow, even though we knew for a long time that the Bibas children and mother were killed, you still held hope, you know, until it’s not final. And tomorrow is happening. And it’s not bringing October 7th to a close. It’s the opposite. It’s opening it up again. It’s the consequences of it as it sits in front of us in a very, very stark, immediate and harsh manner.

And Israeli society…I feel sorry for us collectively, for the emotional agony and uncertainties and turmoils and feelings that we’re supposed to go through because everything is so raw. Like nobody has any degree of separation, not because it’s our direct family, it’s because it is our family, yes, there’s no degree of separation emotionally from everything that’s happening and it’s almost getting to be too much.

But today we’re going to talk, we’re going to try to understand where Israelis are. What does tomorrow mean? And when this podcast comes out early Thursday morning in North America, the Bibas bodies will have been returned and Israel will be going through a very, very difficult time. Television is trying to help us a little bit. They said they’re not going to film like this. We don’t want to see this. We don’t want to. This is something, you know what I’m saying, it’s too much for us.

But what’s also part of too much is to try to figure out where we’re going, because stage one is coming to an end. Four bodies are going to come back on Thursday. The last six live hostages of the stage one will be returned on Shabbat. Another four the following week. And with that stage one comes to an end. And then we have 59 people left. 35 confirmed dead, 24 hopefully still alive, hopefully trying to save them.

But that’s part of stage two, which I want us to talk about too, because what does even stage two mean? What do we think is happening? So let’s try to make sense of, even trying to figure out where we are, where we are as a people, what we’re looking forward to, what’s going to be possible as tomorrow, stage one comes to an end, and stage two, the negotiation for stage two, with all of its uncertainty begins.

So Yossi, it’s nice to be with you.

Yossi: Good be with you. Good to be with you in this agony and uncertainty.

Donniel: You’re my favorite person to share agony and uncertainty with. I don’t know, I have no one else who I could share it to this degree.

Opening thoughts about tomorrow and about where you feel Israeli society is right now?

Yossi: This is one of those moments where I feel that each of us is a microcosm of the whole society and that each of us can speak about where the emotional state of the nation is at with a fair amount of authority. And where I feel I’m at and the nation is at is that if, I think, if I let my mind go toward the Bibas family, I’m this close to weeping at any moment. And there’s this sense of fragileness, emotional fragileness.

None, no hostages were as deeply embraced by Israelis and by Jews around the world as the Bibas family, a nine-month-old baby, a four-year-old taken into captivity, along with 80-year-olds, it’s just the depravity is unfathomable. And that’s all going to be coming back. And Israeli society doesn’t have a lot of reserves, a lot of emotional reserves right now. And so along with the agony, we’re going to see a new, a fresh outbreak of rage, which is always dangerous emotionally. You know, agony, suffering, but the rage, where does that take us?

Donniel: And we know who plays on that rage. The Bibas family didn’t just have a special place in Israeli consciousness. They had a very special place amongst the youth and the children in Israel. October 7th, the kids, their pictures, they related to that and in the schools, the projects and speaking about it. And just like a week or two ago, my oldest granddaughter was saying, you know, maybe they’re still alive. She was holding, like she needs them to be alive.

Yossi: Right. The education ministry has sent a letter to teachers to prepare them for conversations tomorrow on this.

Donniel: Because they were waiting, because our kids, this was hope. And kids could identify with the little children. And I remember my wife was a psychologist, was trying to begin to prepare my granddaughter. No, they’re probably dead. And she couldn’t hear. I said, Adina, she’s not ready right now. She can’t.

Yossi: Right. We’re all in the emotional place where your granddaughter is. We’re all children right now.

Donniel: And they were really, you know, with all of the destruction, they were hoping. This was their little hope, you know, with all the suffering. You know, if Netanyahu wanted a total victory, I think the youth of Israel, their total victory was the Bibas children. That was the total victory. That would have sort of somehow the barbarism and the frustration and the pain.

Yossi: I was reading an interview with kids today about the Bibas family and they were all saying, you know, well, we don’t know. We don’t know yet. And just because Hamas said, you know, one 11 year old girl said, well, just because one 11 year old girl said, just because Hamas says they’re dead, they’re playing with our heads. It’s one more form of psychological torture. And it’s so amazing, you know, that—and these kids, have such a—and it’s so depressing. They have such a highly developed sense of the ways in which Hamas tortures us psychologically. And they said we shouldn’t fall for it. They’re just trying to get to us.

And they did. Hamas got to us. They really did. Congratulations.

Donniel: I heard the same thing. You always feel the abnormality of Israel when you see the emotional strain that you have to put on kids. On us, we’re damaged. We’ll handle it. Life comes and goes. But when you see that, that’s always the hardest. So tomorrow is going to be a very, very hard day.

But it’s in the midst of so much uncertainty. And I want to just state again the issue of rage, which I always get frightened of, but especially when it gets so politically manipulated. And tomorrow is just going to be one more evidence of the fact that there is no total victory.

Yossi: Where the rage plays into the uncertainty is that we don’t know how the return of the Bibas family is going to play out on the Israeli psyche. And it can go in one of two ways. It can go in the direction of Israelis saying, this is it. We have to bring them down. We can’t allow them to stay in power another moment. And that, of course, strengthens the government’s position of continuing the war.

Or it can go in the opposite direction. We can’t allow Hamas to hold our hostages for another moment, and let’s just end it now. And so far, the polls are showing that there is a majority, even a strong majority, supporting the conclusion of the, the continuation of the hostage deal. But once you factor in the range, it’s really hard to know because then people are not necessarily acting out of their highest sense, their highest sense of responsibility. And it’s very easy when you’re in that place, and I know that place of rage very well, it’s easy to confuse your rage for the greater moral good. Satisfying your rage, which is about the honor and dignity of the Jewish people, is necessarily a moral good. And that’s where things get tricky.

Donniel: And that leads us to the second issue that we really have to figure out because part of where that rage is going to play out is in the midst of a very deep uncertainty. Once stage one is over, and stage one was in many ways easy, because stage one, Hamas got back its prisoners, its terrorists, members, we got back a certain number of people. But everything else was sort of less of our house, of our family, but everything else was more or less put on hold. It’s true. Netzarim, which was the most important thing that we had to carry and hold, the Netzarim corridor, all of a sudden this permanent military presence was dismantled and I don’t know, 48 hours and we’re gone. And somehow the world hasn’t fallen apart yet, but it’s still, you know, we’re, everything is still in limbo.

Stage two is not just about bringing back the 59 members of our family and another thousand, 2000 terrorists being released. It involves a declaration of the end of the Gaza war. And we know what America wants. Witkoff, Trump, it’s very clear. They want stage two. They want all the hostages home. We know that. We know what many of the Arab countries want. That’s also clear. I’m not even going to try to figure out what Hamas wants.

But what we don’t know, and this is part of the rage and uncertainty and difficulty, is that we don’t know what our government wants. Our government extensively says we want stage two, but hostage families, when they want to really try to exert pressure or to have some clarity, they go to the Trump administration. They don’t speak to our prime minister. They try to figure out, okay, are we going to get stage two? It’s, it’s, it’s Witkoff and Trump.

Yossi: It’s so interesting, if you look at the posters at the hostage demonstrations, none of them are directed toward appeals to Netanyahu. No one’s appealing to Netanyahu. It’s all appeals to Trump. President Trump, please continue. Please bring—President Trump, bring our hostages home. No one even has expectations anymore of Netanyahu.

Donniel: So is it just because he can’t? Is it because he doesn’t want to? Is it because he doesn’t want to talk? Is that because stage two officially declares the war to be over before we have the complete victory? You know, there’s all these deals now. We’ll talk about them in a moment, but this is part of that. We just don’t even know what our government wants. Where are we going with this? Everybody, they’re declaring, yes, we want stage two. But are you willing to declare an end of the war? That is what stage two is about.

Yossi: I think that, Donniel, I think that if Netanyahu were able to determine the next stage of events without pressure from Trump, without pressure from Israeli society, he would opt for continuing the war, and sacrificing the rest of the hostages. And I say that for two reasons.

The first most obvious reason is because he won’t have a government if he gives in to the pressure to end the war now. But no less important for him is his own private war for his historical legacy. And he believes that his legacy, or undoing the disastrous impact on his legacy of October 7th is to deliver total victory. You know, we related to that slogan initially as a kind of demagoguery, but I think it actually reflects his deepest need, how he understands his own most urgent self-interest. And Netanyahu at this point, I believe, is motivated mostly by self-interest.

Let’s not say entirely. I’ll leave a little bit of space for the national good. But he is looking at his legacy. And if the war ends inconclusively, if it ends with Hamas still able to claim some form of victory, that for him, I think, is unbearable.

So this is where he’s at right now, where his government is at a more complicated place. The ultra-Orthodox parties are on record as supporting the continuation of the trade, of the hostage deal, but they won’t present an ultimatum in the way that the far right does. The only ultimatum the ultra-Orthodox parties will present is for their own community’s self-interest. And funnily enough, the only people that I trust in this government to be speaking in the name of what they imagine to be the national self-interest is the far right. The others are opportunists in one form or another. But Smotrich, Ben Gvir, they mean it. They believe this is really in Israel’s best interest.

Donniel: You know, but as you see, again, I’m not going to hear, you know, bear witness to Netanyahu’s integrity, but there is an objective problem here. And it’s not just when we see the starving faces or tomorrow we’re going to have to get back, take back coffins. You see Hamas in control and 500 days of war, you do ask the question, like, what’s going on here? There is a very strong natural frustration when you see how, I don’t know, you know, again, how much control they have. They have enough. They still have all these Toyotas, Jeeps, and they’re able to put on shows and there seems to be an abundance of weapons and soldiers, they’re there, there’s nobody else there. And so you ask, if this so quickly, what did we even, what was this for?

And I want to share with you, there was a very interesting thing said by the chief of staff on, I think it was Saturday night, I heard it, when he was speaking to a group of Navy SEALs. And we had just seen and witnessed the hostage release show, know, these shows that they have all the time. And he turned to these super heroic soldiers and he said, don’t get depressed when you see this so-called bravado of Hamas, he said. Don’t let that, don’t buy their propaganda. When we go back to fight, they will see who we really are.

So first of all, this is Herzi Halevi, who’s not Netanyahu and he’s already resigned. He has no political agenda here, maybe his own legacy. But first of all, it’s not if, it’s when we go back to fight. Somehow, he was also, they’re going to see, like what we didn’t do these last 500 days is one thing, you know, but they’re going to see just this one more punch, one more operation. That fantasy of somehow rectifying, changing the situation.

It’s a similar part to the fantasy of transfer, of somehow, you know, transfer is they’re all going to be gone, so our problem is finished. One more military attack. You know, if we just don’t do stage two and we just allow our army, because our army will then show them something that somehow we didn’t show them before, that aside the politics, there’s a very deep human need to see that. There’s something very incomplete where we are right now. And I don’t think our society has dealt with how incomplete the reality is.

Yossi: The truth is that we don’t know whether we’ve already defeated Hamas. We may well have already made it impossible for Hamas to effectively govern. We don’t know. So yes, we see them strutting about with their weapons and in their jeeps and their masked men. Is that a government? And what are they governing? Is Gaza even capable at this point of being a coherent entity after the mass destruction there? So we actually don’t know the answer to that. And this is something you and I have talked about over the last 15 months repeatedly, which is how do we know when we’ve won?

And it’s interesting that the hostage families and the committee that they’ve created in their support system have answered that with a slogan, which is total victory will be when we welcome the hostages home. And so that’s not really the answer to the question you’re raising. And I have a different answer, Donniel, because I very much am of that Israeli mindset that we’re not going to let go of this war. I believe that we have to pause this war, even if it means definitively ending this stage. But at some point, God willing, when the hostages are back, we need to resume, if not the war on a mass expression, with air and ground forces. I want to see us move to the phase of hunting down the whoever is left alive from October 7th in the way that the Mossad did after the Munich massacre. For ten years the Mossad continued to hunt down and killed most of those responsible for Munich.

Donniel: But what is that, Yossi? Like, again, I just wanted to give space for it in the midst of this uncertainty, the desire to still see some military solution. We’re still looking for it. So you’ve now come up with a nuance, because you don’t want a Munich-type hunting for 40,000 Hamas terrorists. You must have some list of 10, 20, whoever it is that you… Maybe it’s… Maybe the people we… It’s what?

Yossi: Oh no, think it’s 3,000. It’s whoever crossed into Israel on October 7th and we’re able to identify. That’s who we hunt down. That’s who we hunt down.

Donniel: Yossi, God bless you. God bless you. I don’t want to… I don’t want to get into debate over the desire. I would just put on the table what does hunting 3,000 people in the midst of Gaza look like? How many battalions and how many soldiers need to be there and how long the war needs to go on? There’s… you’re still looking for some military answer, but I… I appreciate it. You want it.

Yossi: Yes, yes, absolutely.

Donniel: You want a little more blood. I am with you.

Yossi: I want the historical record to show that they didn’t get away with October 7th.

Donniel: I know, but that’s part of the problem, Yossi. I know. I know I’m not arguing. I’m just saying that’s part of the uncertainty we’re in right now because I agree with you.

Yossi: I would say uncertainty, I wouldn’t define it as part of the problem. I think that that is very much in keeping with the ethos that we’ve developed over 70 years here, which is that you don’t get away with certainly that kind of atrocity.

Donniel: I just think comparing the Munich murderers with this 3000, I don’t know, whatever. Again, I think it’s just a different size operation, but I think part of what you’re looking for, again, we’re not, neither of us are great military strategists, so we’re not, a serious conversation as to what’s militarily possible or not, is…

Yossi: I’m, this is, I’m speaking emotionally, what I would like to see.

Donniel: Fair enough. I don’t want to call it, that’s why I don’t want to call it… I don’t want to use the word fantasy because I’m not, that would be pejorative. Like it’s a debate. I hear you. But that’s part of the issue. Part of the issue is and that’s paradoxically, that’s Netanyahu and a large of members of Israeli society. There’s still needs. There’s some militarily unfinished business that’s in our hands to complete. And if we do that, we’re going to come to some other version of a total victory.

But right now, it’s really interesting if I could just shift from that way of achieving a total victory to the political discourse. And it’s interesting that as part of this uncertainty is last week, the central issue in Israel was the Trump transfer plan. That’s all anybody could talk about. So now, Smotrich is speaking about it and in order to accrue some political coverage, seems like our Minister of Defense just, he’s a very strange man. It’s like his commitment is to make sure that he’s in the press somehow every couple of days. So he’s putting together, he gave the army instructions to put together a plan. What is this? Put together a plan because he’s also talking about only the voluntary transfer. So there’s a plan in which those Gazans who want to leave will leave. Okay. We’ll leave that aside.

But other than that, nobody’s really talking about it anymore. The press aren’t talking about it. It’s sort of all the conversation that it’s not going to happen has taken over. Jordan has said, no, Egypt has said, Saudi or all the people who are supposed to do it since America’s not putting money or, or boots on the ground, all the other boots and money have already said no. So it’s sort of, it’s sort of gone.

And even today, it was reported that Trump officially says that that was my plan, but if the Arab states come up with another plan, I’ll be very happy to get behind it. And I’m sure that’s what Foreign Secretary Rubio heard when he was in Saudi Arabia, so that’s sort of gone.

Now you’re starting to have all these Arab plans coming forth. The Egyptian and Saudi plan to reconstruct Gaza with the Gazans there, put up the money. But they’re all talking about, and this is where we’re all getting stuck right now, they all assume that Hamas is going to have to relinquish some of its control. But Hamas has no incentive to do so.

And so, like, Gideon Sa’ar, our foreign minister, said something that, you know, I don’t know if it’s achievable, but at least I could understand why he would say it. He’s starting to speak about a demilitarized Gaza. He’s not interested, he’s not talking about hunting or getting rid of or—but nobody’s running around now with machine guns. We’re trying to get there, but again, in order to get there, our government has to put forth a plan on how they plan on getting there. What is it that you mean to do?

So our government says, Hamas, we’re not going to talk to anymore. We tried that with Qatar and that hasn’t worked. We’re not going to talk with the Palestinian Authority. So who is it? Who’s going to demilitarize Gaza? How are we going to get there? We’re beginning to have other conversations emerging, but since it’s like we’re in limbo as, and this in limbo is not a theoretical limbo. This in limbo has to get resolved for stage two of the hostage deal to get to be implemented.

Yossi: Now, it’s very interesting because there is an international community that’s happening around us, above us, beneath us, but not with us, because we’re actually not part of any conversation right now for a stage two. And this government right now is frozen, frozen in between the competing polls of the far right and the Trump administration.
Now, what’s interesting about this international conversation is that everyone needs some kind of a fig leaf in order to promote their plan. So the basis for all of these plans is for the Palestinian Authority to return to Gaza. Now, Hamas has said they’ll accept the PA forming the government. Now, obviously, Hamas intends to regroup and to be the power behind the scenes, much the same way that Hezbollah is trying to regroup now and return to its place as the power behind the throne in Lebanon.

But the Americans, in order to promote the PA as a legitimate force in Gaza, the Americans needed Mahmoud Abbas to repudiate the so-called pay for slave program where the Palestinian Authority pays pensions to the families of anyone who murders Jews. And the PA officially repudiated the pay for slave program until just recently. But look, we all have experience with the PA’s announcements and implementation. And no one in Israel is taking that announcement seriously. But I think the Trump administration is taking it seriously because they need that fig leaf.

Now, the Arab nations need the fig leaf of a Palestinian authority in place in Gaza in order to begin the process of investing in the reconstruction of Gaza. So everyone is looking for their fig leaf. The problem is we don’t have a fig leaf that would satisfy this government. What does this government want? And that brings us back really full circle to your question.

Again, think I have a sense of what Netanyahu wants. He also knows that in order to achieve that, he’s going to have to go head to head with the Trump administration. And Netanyahu is, you know, maybe one way, a nice way to put it is he’s cautious. Another way to put it is he’s cowardly. Netanyahu doesn’t do well up against bullies.

Donniel: You know, just to conclude, I think your observation about fig leaves is really, really helpful because, and it’s understandable, we don’t want a fig leaf, we want something substantive. For us, this is not politics. This is not, you know, an image. The question is, what’s, how do we continue to live? If it was just a fig leaf, I’m all in. What fig leaf do you want? Like, I’m in.
I think it’s not just the Netanyahu government that doesn’t know at this moment of agony and uncertainty what it wants, or maybe as you said it does, I think Israeli society doesn’t know. There’s a closure that we see is eluding us. There is no plan put forth that someone said could give you a different closure or a different form of victory. And as you said, for a large part of Israeli society. The only total victory at this stage is the hostage release. But right now that total victory and the other total victory of removing Hamas are in conflict with each other. That’s the essence of the dilemma of stage two.

Yossi: And Donniel, the release of the Bibas bodies is a pathological parody of our hope of closure.

Donniel: So with all of this uncertainty. Let’s all just wish the Bibas family all of Israel strength tomorrow. And seeing six live people coming home on Shabbat might help a little bit. And we’re going to need a lot of, I don’t want to say we’re going to need clarity, because we’re not going to have clarity. We’re entering into a period of profound, profound uncertainty. And it starts tomorrow with the agony.

Yossi, it’s good to be with you.

Yossi: Good be with you, Donniel.

Donniel: This is For Heaven’s Sake, Israel in ceasefire, day 502.