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.
Faces of the Hostages Transcript
Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.
Donniel: Hi, this is Daniel Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevi from the Shalom Hartman Institute, and this is our podcast, For Heaven’s Sake, now, Israel in Ceasefire. Today’s day 494, in which our hostages are, as we now know, well some of them are dead, and those who are alive are basically being starved to death.
And our theme for today, like so often during the year, was dictated by the reality of Israel. And there’s no issue more central to Israeli public discourse, private discourse, on the news, in the newspapers, in families, people one to each other, I can’t tell you how many times. It’s simply faces of the hostages.
When this last three came home, basically half the size, or as the doctor said, they were at a verge of starvation, which was about to lead to death. Death was imminent. You know, we’ve seen everything. Israelis have seen everything this last year. They’ve seen everything, done a lot. October 7th, you know, people saw, we imagined, but I think it was so horrific we didn’t show the full pictures.
Here, you just saw the face of, not just of the hostages, but also what we experienced as the face of evil. And it hit Israelis so deeply.
If after Trump announced his Gaza real estate deal, there was intrigue or interest, and you know Netanyahu said we have to investigate, and Benny Gantz says, you know, he’s thinking out of the box, let’s talk, whatever it is.
After Shabbat, when we saw these faces, it’s like for Israelis, it’s self evident that we need a transfer and it’s for many Israelis, you know, again, our theme today is to try to understand what’s happening in Israeli society. Last week we did an assessment, a moral and a practical assessment of what this even means and for me still transfer is so antithetical to everything that I feel as a Jew. And as a Zionist, and I would have great difficulty embracing an Israel which engages in transfer.
It’s just, for me, there’s lines that just, this is not who we are. But, you know, one of the great advantages is that it’s almost self-evident everywhere in the world. You know, Yossi, you and I, we spoke with a very serious diplomat today who said, it was, like, self-evident that it’s not going to happen.
But there are two places where this plan is alive and well. One is in Trump’s world, which starts first and foremost by him. And even though there’s been tremendous criticism about the plan and even in the Republican Party, in Trump’s world, you have to line up. And as we’ve learned, you know, Trump never apologizes, never takes anything back. Something might change. It might not happen. He’ll forget. He’ll divert. He’ll blame, but he doesn’t change. But he’s been digging down and repeating, “Will not be allowed back and the notion of it being a voluntary transfer everybody has to leave. It’ll be voluntary because why would they not want to improve their life and get out of a death scene?” So in Trump’s universe, it’s alive and well.
The only place outside of Trump’s universe that this plan is being taken seriously. It’s actually now even more than seriously. It’s almost like a lifeline is in Israeli society. And our job today is to try to understand why. Why? What’s happened? What is it? Is that Israelis have all of a sudden become racist, fascist?
I don’t believe that. So, our job today is to try to figure out how we understand Israeli society and so, why for us has this been embraced to the level of almost self evidency?
Yossi: I think you and I share this sense of astonishment. I’m using a neutral word.
Donniel: It’s a great word.
Yossi: How did it come to pass? How did it come about so quickly, where virtually the entire political establishment, right, center, even to some extent left, has been muted. And it’s condemnation of the idea of transfer, the mainstreaming, as we talked about last week of Meir Kahane’s ideas that were once considered to be so beyond the pale, and when I say once considered, I mean, two weeks ago.
Donniel: Right. As so far, right. In our ancient history.
Yossi: Yes. And how volatile the situation is here. In trying to understand this, I’ve been speaking to a lot of people, I’ve been calling up friends, Israelis, whose, whose opinion I respect, and asking them what they think.
Donniel: As long as it’s not taxi drivers.
Yossi: Uh, no, no, no. Taxi drivers, you don’t have to ask what they think, they’ll tell you. But I, no, no, this is, these are people whose opinion I often rely on. And I asked them what they thought, and almost every one of them said, let’s see if it can happen. And my instinctive response was, but don’t you understand that this now paints us in the world as ethnic cleansers.
We’re going to be blamed for an ethnic cleansing that’s not going to happen. It’s the very fact that we’ve embraced it as a society, over 80%, according to one poll that I saw, supports the Trump plan. And so cool. The response that I get virtually from everyone is they hate us anyway. They’re accusing us of genocide.
Donniel: Anyway.
Yossi: Anyway. Anyway. I call it the Im Kvar Syndrome. Im Kvar is the Hebrew term that means if they’re already doing this, then we might as well. Im Kvar. And the Im Kvar Syndrome here is if we’re already being accused of the most outrageous crimes. Then you know what? Let’s do what’s good for us and get rid of this problem which is a volcano sitting on our border.
Donniel: Now, what does this mean? Like, could you explain that logic? What’s the logic? What’s, or, is it a logic or is it a psychology? It’s despair. Well, how do you understand it? Because it’s not a rational argument.
Yossi: No. What it’s, what it really is saying is that Zionism failed. Zionism made two promises to the Jewish people. The first was to return us to our land and become a sovereign nation here again. But the second, no less crucial promise for the founders of Zionism, Herzl and others, was to return the Jewish people to the community of nations.
And the mood here is that that second promise has failed. That’s the post October 7th consensus. And the depth of outrage and hurt even deeper than the outrage is the sense of aggrievement that so much of the world has so readily portrayed us as what Hamas really is. And there are consequences to this. And that’s playing out in the public. That’s one of the reasons, it’s not the only reason. But one of the factors is Im Kvar.
And this reminds me of the last great outbreak of Im Kvar in Israeli society, which happened in 1975. 1975, the settlement movement, Gush Emunim, was just getting going. They were repeatedly trying to settle in the Northern West Bank in Samaria, and the labor government of that time headed by Rabin kept sending the army in and unceremoniously evacuating them.
And they kept settling at a play, trying to settle at a place called Sebastia. It was an abandoned Ottoman railway station. And two weeks after the UN voted to declare Zionism racism, November 9th, 1975, they tried. One last time, an eighth time, and this time the government backed down. And I did some research into it, because why did the government back down, man? And it was staring me in the face.
The Zionism racism resolution radicalized Israeli society. I read op-eds by liberal columnists who wrote, until the UN vote, I was against settlement. Now, what do we have to lose? This is a Zionist response. Screw them. And it wasn’t coming from this place of endorsing the settlements. It was coming from this, this place of rage and hurt. And the sense that Zionism failed to restore us to the community of nations. Fast forward, literally 50 years later, and we’re back in a Sebastia moment. And it’s taking its deepest expression.
Donniel: It’s this, in this. Really interesting. There’s something very sad about it, but very human, how we just think we’re these autonomists deciding principles and rationality and plans and we’re weighing things, nothing to do with that.
It’s just, you put me in this place, and I’m just, I don’t care anymore. Like, what you’re gonna think of me just doesn’t matter.
Yossi: And it’s interesting, Donniel, because Israelis always used to say, “We don’t care what the world thinks.” But they did.
Donniel: We always do. That’s the funniest thing. We obsess about it. But, we obsess about it. But we always want to be seen as the heroes. We love, you know, we’re the heroes, we’re the psychological, military, moral heroes. But when we don’t achieve that, it’s like we, but who cares? But who cares? Who cares about the world? There’s another dimension that I’ve been, you know, I am so deeply bothered by this conversation.
Not yours, I mean, by the overall conversation, I very much appreciate what you said. The conversation about legitimizing transfer and trying to understand. And on Saturday night, one of Israel’s most prominent journalists, Amit Segal, is interviewing Benny Gantz. And he says to him, with like a smirk and a smile, he says, hello, good evening, member of Knesset, Gantz.
I want to welcome you to the transfer camp, because you accepted, and the only Israeli politician who explicitly came out a few days later, now, like a week later, was Yair Golan. Came out against, against. Yes, he actually made a, he’s still speaking principally in practical terms, it’s feasibility, but he also spoke it’s moral terms. Other than that, he says, welcome. And Benny Gantz tried to say whatever Benny Gantz said, it worked, didn’t work, doesn’t matter. He says, no, we shouldn’t use that word.
But still, how did this, which was just unthinkable, Israelis still aren’t fully embracing the consequences of the ideology, um, because they still prefer to speak about this as transfer, miratzon. How do you say that in English? Voluntary transfer. The idea of compulsory transfer is like, they, even though that’s what they’re talking about. Because if everybody from Gaza has to leave, and now it’s clear, nobody’s coming home, Trump says that and Israelis aren’t interested in a temporary, they’re interested in just changing the scenario, where is this coming from?
And I understood it from the faces of the hostages. We saw Holocaust faces. We saw Auschwitz faces. We saw Jews, which we weren’t supposed to see ever again. That people kill Jews. Okay, it’s true, October 7th was a pogrom, but it wasn’t a holocaust. It was not, and we spoke about that. You can’t associate it with a holocaust. Jewish people were still strong, and we were able to defend ourselves. There’s something about the holocaust which hit us personally, and Israel is the antidote to the Holocaust, and it’s not supposed to happen. We saw Holocaust faces, and I think what Israelis experienced is a level, not of military danger and of hatred, but of antisemitism. And Israelis by and large don’t experience antisemitism. Antisemitism is what happens.
Yossi: Israelis don’t know what it is, really. They don’t know. My kids have no idea.
Donniel: We don’t know what it is. You know, we have terror attacks, but it’s political. It’s religious. We use the word antisemitism, but we don’t really experience, Israeli-Arab-Palestinians are not antisemitic at all. They want to live in Israel. And Palestinians, and Judeans, Samaritans, Gaza are far away. But we didn’t see it, even though we hear the term Yitbahal Yehud, kill the Jew. We don’t live with the existential experience of antisemitism, and antisemitism is something that happens outside of Israel. And we have a solution for it. Our solution is, move to Israel. You don’t want anti Semitism, come here.
We saw it. I think the faces just said, I see something. And I don’t think Israelis know how to deal with anti Semitism of this level. That’s the evil we spoke about. And, you know, October 7th, Hamas’s military abilities. Those are things we could deal with. You know, let’s have more soldiers. We’ll draft the ultra Orthodox. We’ll keep Hezbollah. Each one, there’s a military solution. There is today a military solution. To Hamas endangering Israel in the future. There is, you know, as long as we ensure and watch and make sure that they don’t, even if they control, politically Gaza, we’re much stronger than we used to be. And the whole balance of power has changed.
So for that, you could say there’s a solution, the army. But for antisemitism, that raw hatred, seeing it, seeing that this is what you’re doing. It’s like, you could argue that not all civilians in Gaza are Hamas and they’re not all terrorists and they’re noncombatants, but we just see these people of hatred now. And I think that, like, the only solution that Israelis, like, they didn’t even imagine it, and when Trump mentions it, like, let’s just, let’s just bring this to an end. I’m not justifying it, but I, but this visual antisemitism, these hostage faces, has changed Israeli society.
Yossi: The impact of these three faces coming right after Trump’s announcement of his plan, together has been transformative on the Israeli psyche. And I think you’re right. I think that you speak about antisemitism. The Holocaust has really been abstract, increasingly abstract for Israeli society, and understandably so. The last of the survivors are slowly fading, and we’re already well into the third generation.
And there was a sense that the Holocaust is transitioning into history.
Look, you know, in less than 10 years from now, we’re going to be observing the centenary of Hitler’s rise to power. It really is history. And then suddenly these faces appear, and the black and white old photographs suddenly come alive.
And I was listening to the coverage. The live coverage from Israeli reporters, the imagery that they were invoking was entirely Holocaust. They looked at the faces and they said, this is what the Muselmann men looked like. And the Muselmann was a term that was used in the camps to describe those who are on the verge of death. The totally emaciated, those who have no will to live.
And then someone else argued, well, that’s not really true because they still, they’re walking and they have a will to live. But just the whole, the whole debate, are they Muselmann and are they not Muselmann? This isn’t supposed to happen in the state of Israel.
Donniel: You know, I wonder whether now we’re facing a potential, you know, Hamas said they’re suspending the deal, the hostage release. I wonder whether they’re suspending it because the images that we’re going to be seeing are going to be even worse. It’s almost like, let me postpone it, you force me to do it, and then, meanwhile I’ll try to fatten them up, or I don’t know what I’m going to do, or you can’t, it’s because they’ll die if you do that, but it’s a very, very delicate process, as I’ve learned from doctors, from nutritionists. But, it’s like almost, I need you to push for it more, because if this, there’s a rage that is emerging from this.
Yossi: I thought we’d seen the peak of Israeli rage after October 7th. Somehow this, and it’s hitting directly into the Shoah. And that’s something that Israelis don’t know how to deal with.
Donniel: We just don’t. It’s like we’re not wired and that’s why when along comes Donald Trump and offers, “they’re gone,” it just hits in a place that no matter whether it’s an immoral abomination or not, and people could argue or whatever, but it just, it’s so tempting, and so in Israel, it’s so funny, in Israel it’s funny, when you hear Israeli discourse about this, now all of a sudden Israelis are for the transfer but for humanitarian reasons. All of a sudden we’re humanitarians. What’s wrong? What’s wrong with transfer? I wanna transfer because they don’t have a life now. And or technically, how could you rebuild Gaza while they’re still there?
So I think there’s this ambivalence. We know it’s not who we’re supposed to be. Yeah, but the anger it, it’s not vengeance. It’s not like after October 7th there was a vengeance. When you see the faces, you just say. I have no possibility of a future with you next to me.
Yossi: One of Israel’s leading reporters, Danny Kushmaro, said that when he saw the faces, he couldn’t control himself. He said, who can live next door to these people? Trump is right. We have to get rid of them.
Donniel: And he didn’t plan this. He himself…
Yossi: No, no, no, no. And, and, and no one contradicted him. That was that moment, that, that first encounter.
Donniel: You see, right, because like Israeli society is always waiting to see the faces. That’s the picture we’re waiting for. I’d like to introduce an idea. I want to talk with a key piece of Torah that I was raised on, an article that my father wrote in the 80s, early 80s, called “Auschwitz or Sinai.” And my father challenged Jewish people to say, who do we want to be? You know, he was very different than your Abba and the way you were raised.
Yossi: I’d say. I’d say.
Donniel: And he said, what do you want to do? Do you want to build a Jewish community on the memory of Auschwitz? That this is what defines us as Jews? That the hatred of others and some sense of unity and collective loyalty to prevent the never again notion. Is this the Jewish story? Or is the Jewish story Sinai, a system of values and laws that demands and challenges us to greatness, to moral, spiritual greatness.
And he said like, that’s our choice. And I was raised on that and there’s something as I was thinking about that article for today. My father believed in the 80s that Auschwitz was a memory. And he was saying, what do you want to do? You want to build your identity on a memory? Or do you want to build your identity on a value system?
I think part of what we’re being challenged today is in the faces, and I’m not comparing, I’m not saying this is Auschwitz or this antisemitism is not a memory, and it’s not on social media. It’s not just on campus. It’s not like something, someone said something that made me uncomfortable, you know, or someone judged Israel inconsistently, you know, to critique Israel more than you critique others.
There is a level of existential antisemitism that you see, and here, the challenge that my father didn’t imagine, but I believe this is my challenge, this is our challenge, is, it’s not Auschwitz or Sinai. When you’re experiencing this level of antisemitism, how do you bring Sinai into the story? And it’s very hard. I understand Israelis. I’m like shocked by it, you used the word astonishment, I’m disturbed by it. But when I think about it, I can understand psychologically what’s going on. But my father gave us a choice. Auschwitz or Sinai. And I think part of the great challenge that we’re facing now is Sinai in the midst of this antisemitic experience.
Yossi: You’ve put your finger on what always aggravated me about your father’s essay. And that, of course, is his most well known essay. It’s a canonical text here at the Institute. And what deeply troubled me about the essay was one word. Or. Or. Auschwitz or Sinai. Auschwitz and Sinai. See, he thought Auschwitz was yesterday, that’s why he could say or.
But even if it’s yesterday, it’s such a revelatory moment in Jewish history, and it undermines the credibility of the argument. Because of course I agree with him, of course Sinai has to supersede Auschwitz, but not erase it.
Donniel: Right, that’s, yes, it’s true. For him it was an either-or. And I appreciate your critique, but today it’s certainly not an either or. Today it’s Auschwitz and Sinai. So how do you do that? How do we bring this, how do we bring some Sinai? This whole moral conversation that you and I take for granted that Israelis aren’t even willing to think about. How do we bring that back into the conversation?
Yossi: I just want to say one thing about, before dealing with this, going back to your observation about, this was Israel’s moment of encountering antisemitism.
Literally and metaphorically face to face. This was the moment for Israel that the rest of the diaspora has been experiencing since October 7th. They have been experiencing the renewal of antisemitism in its most raw form. And we’ve experienced the renewal of existential threat, but different. Now, in some way, emotionally, we’re aligned with the Diaspora.
Donniel: But world Jewry doesn’t have the option of banishing antisemites. So like, so paradoxically, when Israel says to world…
Yossi: Jewry, of transferring Americans.
Donniel: Like when Israel has encountered antisemitism outside of Israel, it says, move here. And when it encounters it here, it says, I want to move you outside of here. It’s always moving. Because antisemitism, you don’t deal with it. Like, what are you supposed to do with this raw hatred? Okay, maybe it takes a generation of re-education, but when you experience it, your immediate instinct is, move. It’s like, this is not something that you accommodate in the midst of your life.
And I think part of the evidence that it’s not existential antisemitism to such an extent, to such a degree, for example, in North America, is the fact that most North American Jews aren’t even contemplating moving. They’re not selling their real estate holdings. So, I’m not belittling it, but here, it’s this, Gaza, this level of starving and reminding us of that evil, I just want to move it outside. So how do we, do you have any ideas on how do we go beyond?
Yossi: I’ll, I’ll answer in a personal way. And that’s my own family experience. And my father emerged from the Shoah, determined not to have children. And he said, it ends here. I am not going to be responsible for bringing Jewish children into the world. And the story that he told me that I grew up on, I was five years old when he’s telling me about how he and his friends, right after the war, they sat around and they got drunk all day, not just all night, all day.
And then he tells me this story that one day he had a vision of his parents who were killed in the war and they came to him and they didn’t say a word. They just looked at him with severity. And I don’t know if he was drunk, I don’t know if he thought this was a real vision, I don’t know. But this is the story he told me.
He said, I understood that they were telling me, is this how you were raised? And then from that moment, he pulled himself together. And then he actually turned his parents home into a shelter for Jewish girls coming back from the camps. And so, he turned all of this nihilism into a very Jewish response. And that was his Sinai moment.
Now that was a, that’s a personal story. But multiply that throughout the survivor community in the, in 1945, through the displaced. And then through the whole Jewish world. The Jewish world had a Sinai moment in 1945. And that moment was that not only are we going to rebuild, but we’re actually going to triumph. And we went from the lowest point in our history, which was 1945, to what I still believe is the peak moment of Jewish history. We’ve never had more power. We’ve never been more central on the world stage.
And so what I think we need to do now is own the success story of the last 80 years. I think it’s the most remarkable achievement of survival in Jewish history, even more in some ways. Then after the destruction of the Second Temple, and we could talk about that. I feel very strong strongly. But I’m very uncomfortable with the return of Holocaust imagery. I actually hate it because I feel that it’s undermining one of the greatest achievements in Jewish history.
Donniel: It’s interesting, even though we use the term Holocaust, I don’t see it as Holocaust imagery as much as. We’re not reimagining the past, we’re looking at our present in a different way. And that is very challenging. How do you move beyond a narrative of the past to a higher vision? But when they’re both here in the present, I don’t have any great answers. As a teacher, I’m struggling, and I speak with my students. That’s why when I mentioned before that so many Israelis are speaking about this as voluntary transfer and we’re helping people, it’s a humanitarian obligation.
You know, I was teaching a group of high school students here and we were analyzing the Trump peace plan and I asked them, you know, what did you think about it? One said, you know, some talks about the practicality and one raised the moral issue. And he says, you know, moral issue, is this what we do? And then on the other hand, he said, What are we doing to them? Is that a moral issue? Is it a moral obligation in order to protect ourselves? And then I said, maybe there’s the moral side that we have to transfer them for God’s sake.
But the minute I hear that conversation, I feel that it’s not all lost because, you know, even though Meir Kahane, you know, transfer, it’s there’s serious challenges. But there’s also an awareness that this is something that we shouldn’t do. And so I’m wondering, you know, and part of this whole process over these last 494 days, something that I’ve been talking about nonstop when we spoke about fighting a just war, justly at the end of the day, asking ourselves when you fight.
Evil, how do you not become evil? And I think the front line of that now is this transfer issue. When you’re facing antisemitism, it’s going to be impossible to have compassion towards Gazans. It’s like if you feel, you see it, but what about at least? What is it about who we should be? Who do we want to be? And it’s very hard in Israel’s political environment where nobody talks about that. We’re certainly not Smotrich but also not Gantz and Lapid, a little bit Yair Golan. Who do we want to be?
And whether we can help Israelis… It’s just, we’re gonna see more faces, and we’re gonna start getting coffins back. And some of those coffins, heaven forbid, might be very, very little coffins, with little babies. And the response of—Just disappear. I don’t want to kill you. I wouldn’t do that. I’m not going to mass bomb and slaughter you. But just get the F out of my life.
And along comes Donald Trump and offers that on a silver platter. And of course we’re going to be enticed. It’s human for us to be enticed. The question almost is could we transcend humanity, for the sake of humanity, like what? Talk about a dilemma. Last words, Yossi?
Yossi: You know, what gives me hope, I don’t see any real receptivity in the Israeli public right now, any real opening for a serious moral conversation, which is not there now.
But I do see a volatile political Atmosphere in which anything is possible. So for example, a strong majority of Israelis will answer affirmatively in one poll that they support the Trump initiative. I saw another poll this past week, which has gotten almost no attention, that 60 percent of Israelis say that they would accept a two state solution in the context of a regional peace led by Saudi Arabia.
Now, what those two polls together tell me is…
Donniel: That Israelis are insane.
Yossi: Is that Israelis will take whatever, will consider whatever’s possible, whatever they think might work. Now for your moral conversation, that’s not good news. But there may be a better outcome here than what seems possible at this moment.
Donniel: Thank you, Yossi. This is a really hard time. What we’re hoping is that we’re going to see some more hostage faces, on Shabbat, on Saturday, knowing fully well that we’re going to see horrific things. But it’s 494 days. This is Israel in ceasefire and in profound turmoil, with some hope. Hopefully. We don’t know. Thank you, Yossi. Thank you.
