Ayala Dahan
Yonathan Machlis
Hope isn’t optimism—it’s the stubborn decision to keep building even when you can’t see the outcome.
On this episode of Identity/Crisis, Yehuda Kurtzer sits down with alumni of Hartman’s Hazon Leadership Initiative, Ayala Dahan and Yonathan Machlis to talk about the civic work of showing up and how young Israeli activists can draw on hope in the face of political, religious, and communal divides. They explore how a generation builds trust and solidarity and what it means to organize not just against what’s broken, but toward a better society.
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Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.
Yehuda: Hi everyone. Welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show from the Shalom Hartman Institute, creating better conversations about the essential issues facing Jewish life. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer. We’re recording on Tuesday, February 3rd, 2026. We are grateful to the William Davidson Foundation for supporting the Shalom Hartman Institute’s digital work, including this podcast.
Noi: For me, it’s the people I really, really believe in young Israelis and the… you know, after October 7th that all of us felt that where is welfare, social services? The politicians, the prime minister, nobody talked to us. For hours, we opened the TV and the only people who talked to us were the journalists and the spokesman for the IDF. So I’m looking up and I see nobody, but I’m looking at the people and that gives me hope.
Yonathan: Whatever I can, I am trying to do to make sure that we win this election, I talk with my Navy cadets in the university, try to reach to them out. I go, I talk when I talk to young people. I tell them, don’t think that anybody knows better than you. Not any Knesset member, not any minister, not the prime minister, no professor, knows better than you. This is your future. You need to take things into your end and go out there and do whatever you can to change things to the better.
Ayala: I grew up thinking that there will be this like. One person that will come and save us this Superman that will go into politics and we will be saved and everything will be amazing. And I’ve come to realize that that is not going to happen. So I definitely realized that what is going to happen is, is a group effort.
Yehuda: So I’m gonna tell you what all of that was about, what those quotes were, but first I wanna share a few words about hope. In his letter to the Romans, in chapter eight, Paul writes that, “hope that is seen is not hope, for who hopes for what is seen?” This description of hope makes it sound similar to faith. There’s no great shakes in believing in something like God or any other truth if it is already demonstrated or if it’s already proven. The greatness of faith is in its willingness to look beyond that which is known and to take the imaginative leap of belief.
Hope for Paul requires that same kind of leap. I think a different world is possible, even though I don’t see it, and I persist in the belief that I will. Earlier in that same letter to the Romans, Paul also talks about hope in the context of Abraham, he writes that Abraham hoped against hope, that God’s promise to him would be fulfilled.
You reread the story of Abraham and you see how courageous Abraham was in listening to God’s call. Abraham was the inheritor of generations of skeptics about God’s message. There was no precedent for Abraham to believe that the promises granted to him by God about his future, his future descendants, and the land of Israel would fully come true. All he had from God was a promise without precedent. His belief that it would be fulfilled demanded of him to maintain hope in the possibility that it would, an act of moral courage without any legs for it to stand on besides his own.
You know, the only real descent I think that Jews have against Paul’s version of hope as it became Christian doctrine, is that we, Jews do not believe that faith alone achieves the hope of salvation in our lifetime. We, Jews believe in hope for redemption. For us, though, it’s more prolonged. The Jews are the people of the marshmallow test.
Hope is a strange thing. It’s not optimism. Optimism is about believing that things will get better. Hope is an act of persistence in the possibility that it can. I’m gonna overgeneralize here and say that even those of us that are hopeful or optimistic, sometimes we’re a little bit cynical, that hope means anything on its own. We know those jokes that God only helps those that help themselves, that help is a meaningless sensibility unless we get to work.
I think that’s probably true when we think about hope as an emotional element in a strategy of social change in those contexts, it doesn’t do much on its own, but I wonder whether that underplays the sheer power that a commitment to hope actually can have, the ways that it’s not just a piece of how change agents make change, but maybe somewhere between a necessary underlying precondition to change and a powerful act in its own right that deserves some of the credit when the hope is actually fulfilled.
Abraham had to keep going. He had to keep walking. He had to keep serving God in the hope that the promise will be fulfilled. Was it that he kept walking that ultimately made it work, or was it the hope itself?
Needless to say, hope is in a weird place these days. I think one of the root moments of our collective ambivalence about hope in America may have been a speech by Sarah Palin in 2010 when she attacked the Obama administration. Saying, “Now, a year later, I gotta ask the supporters of all that, ‘How’s that hopey, changey stuff working out?’”
In Israel, the roots of pessimism run deeper. You can no longer hear the echoes of Rabin stumbling his way through. Shir HaShalom. The Israeli hymn of hopefulness drowned out as it has been for decades by the ringing sound of the bullets from his assassin and all of the bullets since.
You know the interesting thing looking back at the promise to Abraham is that the promise still holds, both there in Israel for the Jewish people, and here in America. We live in these countries that are built on and premised on promise, and on covenants that were meant to enact that promise. Here in America, we are the inheritors of ancestors who thought they were building a city on a hill, the founders and framers who saw themselves breaking new ground in a society that could do things differently than anywhere ever before, a society in America that would ultimately welcome Jews together with other minorities as citizens and stakeholders as part of its unfolding ethos that it was writing, even as it was building the society itself.
I’m watching immigrant children rounded into ICE vans in Minnesota, and it’s not that I don’t believe that America doesn’t have a founding promise in its heart and soul. I just feel less hopeful that we will be the people who witness its fulfillment. And I’ll confess that for a lot of my life, I try to think about hope with just a long view. Like, okay, this is a setback, but eventually things will get back on the right track. But you can get derailed for an awfully long time and sometimes ships or trains, if we wanna stay consistent to the metaphor, sometimes they just don’t write themselves.
I was in Israel this past week and there is so much brokenness and sadness. I bore witness, once again, to a society that’s still picking up the pieces from a war that is by no means over, but you see cracks of light. It was a privilege to be in Israel as Israelis welcomed back. The body of Ran Gvili, of Blessed Memory, the last hostage held in Gaza. It felt for a moment like the society was exhaling for the first time in over two years.
And if you look closer, you see where hope lives in the people who never lost hope. Throughout this time, the activists who never stayed silent. The leaders of tomorrow who are already showing up today to build something amidst all the fear and the wreckage. Hope is not just a feeling or an act of faith. Hope entails looking to find the people who give you hope. It’s the act of seeking a plausibility structure in human beings. It’s not really about a promise from God. It’s about faith in people.
Some months ago, we here at Hartman North America felt that the relentless analysis that we were providing of what was going on in Israel, it’s been driving our podcasts and our programs throughout this war, all of that was insufficient in our educational mission. Yes, our English-speaking audiences needed translators to help them understand the present. But our work at the Shalom Hartman Institute is to build the future, not merely to understand the present. Conveniently, we work with many of the exact Israelis in Israel who are doing just that.
Today I am joined by two young activists. They’re both alumni of our groundbreaking Hazon program in Israel, a study and training program for university students who are seeking to transform Israeli society through social change. They recently came to the US and Canada as part of a Hartman sponsored tour that we called Pathways to Hope. Being in their presence was good for my soul, and it was great for my blood pressure. I’m happy that they’re here with us to describe what they saw and where the work of hope actually lies. You heard two of their voices earlier in this podcast, right at the top of the episode.
Ayala Dahan is the Alumni Program Director of Hazon at Hartman. She’s been active in political life, including serving as the former chair of Yesh Atid at the Hebrew University and other roles in politics. She was among the founders of the student protest against the judicial overhaul and previously served as the CEO of the social justice organization Ma’agalei Tzedek. She’s currently pursuing a Master’s in Gender Studies at Tel Aviv University.
And Yonathan Machlis is the Director of the Center for Social Justice in Haifa. He leads the student chapter of Brothers and Sisters in Arms, also serves as a TA at the Department of Public Administration and Policy in the School of Political Science at the University of Haifa.
Yonathan, Ayala, thank you for being with me here today. I’m gonna start with a big question. When I was in Israel last week, I heard somebody talk about how there’s like an impatience in Israel for the older generation after the war. I’ve heard this expressed as like, here these young people came and saved the state of Israel, fought in an existential war for its survival, defeated its regional enemies. I’ve heard young people in Israel referred to as arayot, as lions, and that maybe has accelerated some of the impatience that Israelis have for the, let’s say, over 70 crowd who has led Israel for a long time.
I’m wondering if you feel that around you and what it makes you feel about your responsibilities to public leadership right now. Maybe, Yonathan, I’ll start with you.
Yonathan: I don’t know if to call it impatient, but we are led by a very specific demographic since the beginning of Israel, which is to be frankly, old white men. And I think that the younger generation, they don’t have impatient, they’re more confident in themself after they saw the stuff that they do, they did in the world. I hope that that is a blessing, that a lot of the younger people in Israel will get into politics and will use their voice to change and to shape the future of Israel in the next few years.
So, I don’t know if to call it impatient, but much more confident. I think the younger generation is used to not to tell the older generation what is going on and not, like, use their voice. So now that they’re using their voice, it seems like impatient, but I think it’s a good thing.
Yehuda: Ayala, let me turn to you. You’re not just a kind of “next generation activist,” but you also work in mobilizing young activists in Israeli society. I’m curious for your thoughts also on how the culture of activism has shifted, especially after two years of war, especially with the emergence of this next generation of leaders, and whether you also see that this is pushing against, you know, as Yonathan indicated, the hegemony of a set of leaders who have been influential in Israeli society for so long.
Ayala: Yeah, so first of all, just to say that I’m very, very excited to be here. I do feel like Yonathan, in my circles, with students, with activists, students with political activists, I can see the same thing, meaning people are impatient or are not willing to take the classic figure of a politician that we had until now.
But I think it’s important to understand and to be patient as someone that wants to be in politics and as someone who believes that young people need to take over, basically, the political system. I think we need to be patient because we need to remember that a lot of young people are doing and did a lot of reserve duty. And I think that takes time and, and in general, like all of the young people had such a difficult and challenging time through the war and even before that, with this judicial reform, I think we need a little bit more time to figure out how exactly we’re going to do that.
I mean, are we going to get into the system as it’s built right now, the parties that are built right now, or are we going to build a whole new thing? I believe we need a little bit of time to think about it, but I definitely agree that I feel like the people in Israel do want new leaders and new young leaders that will bring a change.
Yehuda: So let me back up now and ask you both and I’ll start with you, Ayala. You know, as you said, like it’s been such a turbulent couple of years and such a hard couple of years. I would love it if you could just share a little personally about what those two years have literally been like for you. I mean, I know how complicated it must have been to have been, you know, helping to lead this mass movement against the judicial reform process and then suddenly get snapped out of it by a war that required something very different of you. So I wonder if you could just tell that story about what your war was, in terms of your life and your work, over the last two plus years.
Ayala: Yeah, we, and when I say we, I mean me and my friends, my activist friends here in Jerusalem, the student protest, we faced the war. I mean, the war started after we’ve been on the streets for 40 weeks. And being in a protest is not an easy thing at all. I mean, you come to this place, usually you are on the road, and police are all around you, and sometimes people that disagree with you can be very, very violent towards you. So it’s a very tough place to be in.
So me and my friends thought that that was like the worst period of time that happened to us. But then the war broke out, and at first we were all very much shocked, but then we realized as a group that people needed help and no one helped them. So at 12 o’clock on the 7th of October, my friends and I published this phone number on the news saying, “Hi, if anybody needs help, this is a number that you can call. Please call us.” And it was insane. The requests and all of the people that needed help, that called that number. It was overwhelming.
But luckily we had a group of people, a group of students and other groups here in Jerusalem that knew how to function together really well because we had 40 weeks of doing that. So in a way that was a good thing.
So we established this emergency room in Jerusalem. We helped people with anything that you can think about. For example, people needed to be, whole families needed to be evacuated from active war zones, and they didn’t have anywhere to go. They didn’t have cars, they didn’t have a house to stay in, clothing, food, doing laundry, all of the basic stuff that families usually need, that people usually need, they did not have that.
So I remember the first days being at the civil emergency room, we just found places for family to stay. And we asked for donations for clothes and toys, and we tried to figure out how to entertain the kids that were already very, very troubled from what they saw, but we tried to make it as normal as it can be, if you can say that something was normal at that first few months.
And I remember there was a certain point that we asked people to stop giving donations because we literally didn’t have any place to put them in because people were so willing to help. So that was like a, a really crazy experience.
Yehuda: I’m wondering if it felt at all dissonant or strange to you to go from one moment kind of doing all of this active protest against the government and then a minute later to be still mobilizing, but actually in support of the state, if you will, instead of being kind of oppositionally to the state.
Ayala: Yeah, I think that at that point we realized how deep the problem is. I think that before the war broke out, we thought that it’s something that we can fix by being on the streets and protesting. And that was like generally it. We had more stuff, but that was the big thing. But then we realized that the government is so unfunctioning and the problem is so rooted in the system, so it was this, I think, even deeper understanding of the problem that our generation needs to solve.
Yehuda: It’s powerful because it attests to the difference between, like, coding something as a particular political problem to be solved as opposed to looking at like a much larger set of environmental and social conditions that need to be repaired.
I wanna come back to that a little bit later, but let me come to you, Yonathan. Tell us a little bit about your two plus years since October 7th,
Yonathan: You know, when I’m trying to think about the man, the person that I was before October 7th, it’s really hard to think of how I was, I mean, maybe blissfully ignorant before October 7th because of the events that transpired on October 7th. On October 7th, really, in the morning I got up from the, all the alarm that went from the missile that came from Gaza, and I opened the TV. I looked at and saw the, the van that drove through Sderot, came from the Gaza Strip, and I immediately know that something is horribly wrong.
I got a text from my commanding officer in the reserve duty. He told us, don’t wait for orders. Just come, just come to base. On October 7th, I was in my grandma’s house in Ramat Gan, which is in the center of Israel, really close to Tel Aviv. And I remember I lied to her. I said, I told her I’m going to Haifa because my girlfriend at the time, now my fiance, I told her that she was scared, so I’m driving to Haifa. But what I really did is I drove to Haifa to get my gear, my military gear. I took my gear and went to base, I called all my soldiers. I’m a squad commander in the reserve duty, so I called my soldier, told them to come to base.
And I remember on this drive I was really tired. It’s not a habit of mine, but I was up late the night before on October 6th, of course, that on October 6th I was up until four in the morning. So I was really tired and the whole drive to Haifa, and then the drive to the base, I thought about my funeral, because I didn’t know where I’m going to, I thought about my funeral. I thought what everybody will say on my grave because I really didn’t know where I’m going to.
I came to base and I remember we opened the storage where all the military gear was and the gear was so old and there were no bulletproof vest, and I was so angry or really, really angry, and I thought to myself, this is enough to, to change the government. This is enough of a mistake that they will have to resign. Just the, just the Bulletproof vest. I thought it was the worst thing in the world. I was mistaken, of course.
And I, since then, like my life have changed. I spent six months fighting. First in the Gaza envelope, then in the Gaza Strip itself. So I was really a changed man, for the good and the bad, for all the reasons. So, I mean, I don’t know the person that I was before. It really changed me to the core.
Yehuda: I’ve heard stories from some people who came out of Gaza who had been involved in serious social activism before the war, who said some version of, I was fighting with my fellow Israelis before the war, and then I fought alongside of my fellow Israelis in Gaza, and now I don’t wanna fight against them anymore.
And I, I’m very sympathetic to that. Like it kind of makes sense, like you don’t want the country to devolve into a civil war, especially when you get reminded of how much you hold in common with each other.
So can you talk a little bit about the ways in which your motivation for social activism has changed because of the war, and whether… To what extent you feel like any of those stories reinforced what you held in common with other Israelis, or maybe created a greater sense of urgency about what you need to do to take back control of a society that’s a little lost?
Yonathan: I mean, I can relate to what you just said, but it’s not how I feel. I feel like it’s still in my power to be more active, and I’m thinking to myself that I’m actually saving lives when I’m trying to win the election, to try to get rid of this horrible government. You know, we stayed in Gaza for so much time after October 7th, and we lost so many really great people. So many. Like the best people that I knew. I lost some really good friends that were amazing people and I thought that we were there for too long and I, when I’m looking at, about their death, I don’t know if it was necessary. And I think the government, in some way, is in charge of their death.
So when I’m fighting against the government, when I’m active, I’m, I’m really thinking that I’m saving the life of the future soldiers because I see them as, like, a force of destruction that try to destroy the Israeli society, the Israeli country, and fighting them, it’s like a continuum of my reserve duty. So this is how I feel about it.
Yehuda: You know, as I listened to both of you and the story that you have experienced in terms of your activism, you both had, kind of different, kind of mobilizations. Yonathan, you ran into the war, Ayala, you ran into the home front. It’s just very striking to me. I’m not creating hierarchies and preferences, but there was a very different, kind of, very prominent and and visible young people mobilizing among American Jews, and that included both the less-reported support for the state of Israel throughout the war, and the very widely reported encampments, student protests against the war that were taking place here.
So it, it almost feels as though Jewish young people, both in Israel and in North America were activated. And I’m curious to hear from both of you. Maybe we’ll start with you, Yonathan, and then Ayala. What did you see happening outside of Israel and how did it make you feel to follow a story where it looked like, not just Jews, but people around the world were responding very powerfully to this war—to what extent did it make you feel like you were part of a global movement or maybe on the wrong side of that movement? And what was that experience like for you to the extent that you were able to pay attention to anything going on besides your service in the war itself?
Yonathan: I want to say something first, that I will never forgive the encampment and all, a lot of the student that protest against Israel after October 7th, because they said so many misguided and ignorant thing that made me protect the stuff that Bibi is saying. I will never forgive them for this, that they make me tell good stuff about Bibi, at first.
When I look at the protest in North America and in Europe too, and even Australia now with the horrible scene that we saw in Sydney, I mean, I can understand why they did it. We are doing really, really crappy job at hasbarah, to do publicity. The minister in our government was saying really, really stupid thing like, we gonna nuke Gaza, we gonna settle Gaza, and stuff like this, which is really doesn’t help us at all.
It’s really difficult when you know the truth is really complicated. The way I see it is that we went into a war—we couldn’t ignore October 7th, and we had to go to war, but we went to war without a plan, without a way to end it, which created a lot of suffering on both sides. And the fact that we stayed in Gaza for two years made a lot of citizens in Gaza to suffer. Also, a lot of our soldiers have died. And we are to blame for, for staying in this situation for so long.
How I see it, and I, when I was involved in fighting and when I was in active duty, the IDF of is, is moral military, there’s no way to look at it differently, because the people of Israel, they don’t have like this hate that they think that we have, that we just want to kill Arabs and we just want to destroy Gaza. It’s not true in many ways. This is really false. But I can see, when they look at the situation in Gaza for two years, we don’t have a plan, we are just destroying another part of the strip again and again, we are conquering the same neighborhood, we are killing a lot of people. I can see how they can look at it as genocide. The truth is always, like, much more complicated. We are not like trying to wipe up the Gaza strip, but war is is brutal. War is the worst. I saw it in my eyes, always destroying the, the souls of everybody. So the continuance of the war made it happen.
Yehuda: So it’s striking to hear Yonathan talk about the sense of like, I’m fighting a war and people are standing and protesting against me and totally misunderstanding what’s taking place. And Ayala, I guess I’m curious for your perspective, because I think that what’s very striking for, kind of an outsider, like an American like me who’s both watching young people here in North America responding to what they see going on in Israel, and listening to both of you as people who are both patriots to your country, but also critics of it, is that all the young people are motivated by a passion for democracy and social change and fairness, and it just translates into one kind of language about Israel outside of Israel in a different kind of language within Israel.
I’m curious how it sounds to you and whether you think there’s something salvageable here between these populations, some of whom are carrying out their frustration with protesting against Israel and some of whom are carrying out their frustration by trying to build Israel from the inside.
Ayala: Yeah, so I can say that at the beginning, we were so shocked that we didn’t really, I at least didn’t really watch the news. It took me like a month or two to realize what’s happening outside of Israel, and I was shocked also. But I think the key element here is that in Israel, and also I think outside of Israel, if we’re talking about the protests in America and Canada, that there’s no perception of a gray area.
I believe that if we, like Yonathan said, I don’t like the word hasbara, yeah? But I think that if we were able to present people, activists, political liberal activists like me, like Yonathan, like a lot, a lot of people, young students that are saying, we love Israel, but we want a democratic country. We criticize our government. We are not our government and people like us exist. We believe in human rights and democracy and liberal values, and I feel like it comes a lot of the times. The people that protest, I believe outside of Israel and also in Israel, they just cannot comprehend the state of being against your government and what it does, and being very criticizing of what the government does here in Israel, but still wanting to be here, being a Zionist, wanting to live in peace. So I think that can be a solution. Or something that may change people’s perspective.
Yehuda: Yeah. So you came at our invitation here in North America to speak to North American audiences precisely about this question of—what does hope and social change look like in Israel? And to put a face on it. And it was partly important to us here at Hartman because oftentimes we are seen and understood as an educational institution where the lay leaders in our communities are obviously a very important audience for us, but sometimes they don’t fully see the ways that the institute is also trying to actually change realities on the ground in Israel.
We think that—exactly to your point, Ayala—that when North American Jews actually see people who share their values trying to change Israel from the inside, it actually makes it possible for them to retain their position as liberal Zionists in a diaspora, and you came to kind of tell that story. So I’ll start with you.
What was that experience like of coming to North American Jewish communities and trying to tell that story? What surprised you in terms of what people asked you or were curious about, and also what did you feel you learned about Diaspora Jewry from the experience of trying to come and describe your experiences over the last couple of years?
Ayala: That’s a good question. I came there and I didn’t realize the depth of how our actions and also the actions of Jews outside of Israel, how we affect each other, and how we’re so, so, so connected. I mean, I consider myself a person that usually sees the bigger picture, but it’s very, very hard to see the bigger picture when you are here in Israel experiencing the war and experiencing firsthand all of the events that happened to you.
And once I met these amazing communities in North America, I met people that were curious about my personal experience, but also. I got a lot of comments and also, Yonathan got a lot of comments about how we gave them hope. But I came back to Israel hopeful. So hopeful. I think three years I haven’t been that hopeful because seeing the understanding, the importance of the connection with Jews outside of Israel and understanding that we are connected, and that people… I’ll say Jews outside of Israel are seeing things that we don’t see, and also holding the belief and being Zionists in a society that is very, very against that.
And just seeing them inspired me and gave me so much hope that I came back to Israel so hopeful, and it gave me motivation to do even more things because I had, in my head, I was always connected to Jews outside of Israel. My mother is from London. I have family outside of Israel. But suddenly I realized that our responsibility is not just for Jews and Israelis in Israel, but also for Jewish communities outside of Israel. And that gave me a lot of hope and motivation to do the change that we need here.
Yehuda: Yeah, that’s a proof of the whole concept, right? Because I felt that too. I think I’ve been to Israel maybe a dozen times since the war started and going there both helps me understand things in a totally different way than I can see from here. It goes to what Yonathan spoke about earlier, but it also has reminded me of that every time I despair about things going on in Israel, that decision is like an abandonment of the Israelis, Jewish and Palestinian, who are trying to change the reality on the ground.
Yonathan, if I’m not mistaken, I think this was maybe your first time in the States, so this had another layer for you as well on this trip. So I’m curious, the same question, what you learned and what you felt you were able to communicate, but also, it must have been overwhelming to you to kind of come to terms with both America and the American Jewish community itself. And Canadian.
Yonathan: Yeah I was not ready for the weather at all, mentally I was at all at the sites in the States and in Canada. I already really want to come back. I will say that a lot of the average Israeli are looking down and not giving extra thought to the Jewish community in North America, which is, I think it’s, it’s a grave mistake. It’s really a sin. The Jewish community in North America is doing the job of the government in many ways, in trying to support Israel and trying to convey the message that there is no genocide in Gaza or there is a liberal demographic in Israel, so it’ll, it is really amazing to see the people that make it happen.
I was really awe at the love that they have to the Israeli people and the country, and how much they care and how much pride they have in being Jewish, which is really different in North America in many ways, because it’s like, when you are in Israel, it’s like you have to be Jewish because there is enemies in the, in the borders, and we have to unite and it’s our identity, they trying to exterminate us, they try to expel us, they try to kill us. So it’s, it’s, in many ways it’s much easier to be Jewish and you don’t have a lot of other choices, also. It’s not that hard to keep Shabbat, it’s not that hard to keep kosher, so I was really amazed at how much pride they have in the Jewish identity, the Jewish history, the Jewish story.
So it was really amazing and we really had amazing conversations. I mean, I remember we met the teen fellowship program in Boston and they were such an amazing and so intelligent, a couple of young teens that they knew about Israel much better than the most average Israelis, which was, was amazing to see. I mean we had so many deep, really deep, deep conversation with very knowledgeable people that know about the country a lot and very complicated the conversation. And we managed to, to found, you know, our common ground and understand that there is a, it’s a really complicated situation right now.
And it’s really hard and I mean, the Jewish community in North America. I mean, a lot of people will say like, oh, they didn’t have October 7th. But it was a really tough couple of years for the Jewish community, the rise of anti-Semitic. And we talked with a couple of the Hillel students, that, the Hillel young professional working in the campus. And they, they told a story about really hard time they had on campus when they felt so alone, but still they held their ground and weren’t ashamed of being Jewish and supporting Israel, which was amazing to see.
Yehuda: So let me ask you both one last question, which is, you know, there are a lot of reasons to be very, very anxious about the future of Israel. Even coming out of the war, the news stories about what’s taking place in the West Bank are not good. The crime and the violence against the Palestinian Israeli sector continue to be issues of social fairness, Haredim, et cetera, and all of those negative and pessimistic stories really drive the news.
I would love to hear from each of you briefly—what’s one thing where you think you’re making progress and what’s one source of inspiration for you? And Yonathan, you’ll go first.
Yonathan: I will say that last Saturday, last Shabbat, there was a huge protest against the rise of violence inside the Arabs communities in Israel, and it was a joint protest that was led by the Arabs, but there were so many Jewish people. So many Israeli Jews and all of the protest organization help them. And I can say that my organization, the Social Justice Center, is really involved in the situation.
And I mean, I don’t think that there was a protest like this in the history of Israel, a joint protest of Israeli, from the mainstream, from the center, from the left-wing, couple of right-wing people, all together with Arabs that are leading the protest and demanding that the police will do something about the rise of violence inside the Arab community, which is skyrocketing. I mean, it’s, it’s, you cannot believe the data when you look at it, it’s like it was of more than 100% since 2021, which is crazy.
So, I mean, it give me hope when I see stuff like this, when I see a lot of people that are not giving up. Also, I think it send a strong method of shared living in Israel. I live in Haifa, which is a mixed city. And I see every day a lot of activity between the Jewish and Arab population in Haifa that try really hard to live together peacefully. I’m seeing like an advance in this regard, giving me a lot of hope. And sometimes the polls, when I look at the polls, I’m sad, sometimes I’m happy, so…
Yehuda: May it stay that way.
Ayala, how about you? Where do you see a ray of light of opportunity and what’s giving you inspiration to continue doing the work?
Ayala: So I think I see success by being with my community and seeing how we were talking at the beginning of the conversation about how we needed the younger generation to become leaders and to get in all of these fields in society and change things from the inside. I see that with my group of friends. I have friends that are building political power. They have these routines that they go from door to door, they talk to people about how important it is to have Israel, and make it even a greater democratic, liberal country and how we need to fight for it for our future.
And I see my friends that are in the educational system and they teach young kids about democracy and pluralism. And I have friends that are part of the tarbut, how do you say tarbut?
Yehuda: The culture.
Ayala: Yeah. They’re doing art and cultural events and I see how that base of leadership is building. So, I think we’re successful at bringing a base of people that in a few years, will absolutely be able to change the system from the inside, and what gives me hope—I’m a very pessimistic person, unfortunately. I wish I was naturally a positive person, but I am very pessimistic.
And I remember being every Saturday night outside of Dimona, the city that I grew up in, with my parents protesting and standing with the sign of Segev Kalfon that was kidnapped. And I remember for a lot of months we didn’t even have—we’re friends with his family, we’re neighbors of his grandmother, his beautiful grandmother that we love a lot. I remember we didn’t know if he’s alive or not because we didn’t have any videos. We just knew that he was kidnapped because one video from the 7th of October was circling around the internet and after 11 months we heard that he is captured, from people that came back from captivity, and then after two years and a little bit, he came back. And now he’s with his family.
And I remember the day that he came back, I was shocked. I was absolutely shocked, even though I stood almost every Saturday night and I visited his family, and I really hope that he will come back. There was something in me that was like, oh, what are the chances?
And seeing him today, being with his family, building himself back, seeing all of the hostages that were alive and those who were not coming back to their families was such an eye-opening thing of realizing how sometimes reality changes and gives us hope, even if it’s hard to hold it. So I’m taking that experience with me to the future of Israel and I’m telling to myself that things won’t stay as they are and things will change, and I want to be part of that change. I know they will change, and I want to be part of that positive change. So that’s, that walks with me through everything I do.
Yehuda: I’ll just close with this. I started with Avraham and I’ll end with Avraham. The rabbis wonder about what was so special about Abraham that differentiated him from everyone who came before, and they analogize Abraham to a man who walked by a burning building, and presumably everyone else walks by the burning building and says, oh, that’s terrible that that’s burning, or, I wonder what’s going on. Abraham is the first person who comes along and says, I am responsible, and takes responsibility for what’s taking place.
So the difference between the change agents who actually change history, and most of us are those that look around and see something burning and decide by themselves that they are responsible. I’m grateful to both of you. I’m grateful to the Hazon program to be educating and taking a lead from folks like you who see the burning buildings around you and decide to step into the fire. Thanks so much for being on the show today.
Yonathan: Thank you so much for having us, Yehuda.
Ayala: Thank you so much for having us. Thank you.
