The following is a transcript of Episode 162 of the Identity/Crisis Podcast. Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.
Yehuda: Hi everyone, welcome to Identity Crisis, a show about news and ideas from the Shalom Hartman Institute. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer and we’re recording on Tuesday, October 31st, 2023.
You know, there are so many stories to tell about the past few weeks of Israel at war, and it’s hard to know what to prioritize. On this show, we did two episodes of personal narratives, one with Israelis describing the first few traumatic and terrifying hours and some of their initial conclusions that they were drawing about their immediate and long-term future. And then another episode with gap year students, Americans and Israelis, describing what it meant to be in the presence of the other during this crisis.
We also did an episode on the crisis mobilization response in Israel and an episode on diaspora Jews right now. And meanwhile, over on our sister podcast, For Heaven’s Sake, Donniel Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevi have been going deep on all dimensions of the war as reflective issues and trends in Israeli society.
There are just so many stories, so many angles, and I think that many of us still feel that we’re all just grasping at all that’s happened just in the matter of a few weeks in Jewish history.
This week I wanted to take on an issue that I’ve lost a lot of sleep about, even though I can’t quite tell if this is a story about this war or about something else entirely I felt almost instantly after October 7th, and then I saw that my own instinct was confirmed by a number of thought pieces that have emerged in the last few weeks, some parts of the Jewish left had broken.
While the vast majority of world Jewry stood aghast in mourning and in solidarity with Israelis and with the state of Israel after the Hamas attacks, a portion of the Jewish left splintered off with other parts of the left quickly shifting the narrative to one of Israeli genocide, a slander that took root even before the Israeli military’s response fully began, and argued incessantly, and continues to argue, about context and root causes to what Hamas did as a way that, in my view, seemed to be mitigating, if not excusing, Hamas’s behavior.
I don’t need to recap for this audience the full extent of these moral failures in the past few weeks. For instance, a Yale professor who went on Twitter to equate all Israeli citizens as occupiers and therefore legitimate targets for attack, all the rallies around the world that at times have included full-throated endorsements of Hamas, two chapters of Black Lives Matter in America that celebrated the attacks with iconic images of terrorists descending by parachute.
In total, it seems to me to represent a sea change in the volume and the vociferousness of how anti-Israel critics are using their voices. Actually, I would say it seems like there’s two splits taking place at once.
One split within the progressive Jewish camp between organizations like JStreet and Truah that are trying to hold the line that we might call progressive Zionist in a moment like this with others on the far left that have stepped well outside the solidarity camp, organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now.
But on top of that, a second split, a divide between the Jewish left here and the Israeli left there. I felt that second story mounting for a long time. I’ve had quiet conversations for nearly a decade now with friends on the Israeli left, actually a lot of people with whom I share a lot of political instincts, friends who cannot relate at all to some of the progressive values and language that is spouted oftentimes in support of them by their supposed American Jewish allies. This includes overwhelming support by parts of the progressive left here for a kind of dismantling of Israel, remaking of it into a single state, a position widely rejected by overwhelming numbers of Israelis and Palestinians. It includes a deep hatred of any Israeli military response ever, a position that’s incoherent to leaders in the Israeli left, many of whom are military veterans. It includes an overwhelming suspicion of nationalism in general, and Zionism in particular.
I’ve felt this tension mounting over the past year, with a divide emerging even around the judicial reform protests, when some of those voices on the American Jewish left refused to take seriously a set of protests that seemed only interested in reforming Israeli democracy as opposed to radically unmaking it, in contrast to progressive leaders in Israel who were trying to leverage the protests rather than fighting against them.
To understand the Israeli left, you do a lot worse than thinking about the curious case of Yair Golan, a military man turned left politician, who really struggled to compete as a politician in an Israeli society that has grown very skeptical about left politics, but who immediately following the Hamas incursion on October 7th, put his uniform back on, drove directly towards the violence, and single-handedly saved lives and fought off Hamas terrorists.
Golan helps tell the story about Israeli leftism that makes it one of a kind, a political ideology that is realistic about Israel’s external and existential threats, that’s realistic about Israel’s long-term political prospects for peace, that’s realistic about the necessity for a strong military and a willingness to fight in it, and yet is not compromising about the moral character of the state. I think it’s a coherent position within Israel, but it might be an increasingly lonely one as part of the global left.
And this should remind you also of our conversation a few weeks ago with Effie Shoham, an Israeli professor turned organizer, with three sons called up into the army right now, who spent the first 10 months of 2023 organizing against the government’s proposed judicial reforms, and then the last three weeks organizing the social sector in support of the soldiers and the dispossessed families from the Israeli South.
These are not paradoxical commitments, but they’re complicated ones, and they deserve to be unpacked. This was the spirit with which I wanted to talk to today’s guest, Mickey Gitzin. We tried to schedule this talk even during the judicial reform when it also would have been coherent, but it’s especially important now. Mickey is the director of the New Israel Fund in Israel. Prior to joining NIF, Mickey was the founding director of Yisrael Chofshit, a leading grassroots organization fighting for separation of religion and state in Israel. Mickey has worked directly in Israeli politics as a spokesperson for a member of Knesset for the Meretz Party, as well as in the cultural sphere advocating for arts and culture in Israel’s geographic and socioeconomic periphery. Mickey also served in the IDF, as well as a shaliach for the Jewish Agency in South Bend, Indiana. He’s also a huge mensch.
Mickey, thank you for coming on the show today. And let me just start as I’m starting with all of my Israeli friends and family. How are you? How is your family? How are you holding up?
Mickey: Yeah, it’s not an easy question to ask, like definitely in such setting. Those are very difficult days. And the amount of people I personally know that have been hurt by the current situation, either people were now kidnapped in Gaza or people were killed or people that were in the kibbutzim or the towns around it, it feels very close to home, I think that, I would be very frank, as opposed to many other occasions, difficult occasions in the Israeli story, this one feels very much at home. There are so many peace activists and people who are connected to our work in chair society that have been affected personally in this.
And then looking at my two daughters who are three and a half and one and a half and think about them in the situation just doesn’t, doesn’t leave me. It’s very close and I feel very devastated.
Yehuda: I want to stay with you, but we have urgent things to talk about that go beyond even the personal, and I apologize for that. I gave an analysis about Israel and the global left. I’m curious whether that analysis resonates with you and what it feels like right now to be an Israeli leftist who’s a veteran of the IDF. I’m not going to ask you to what extent you support Israel’s military strategy right now, but presumably like most Israelis, you certainly support Israel’s right to defend itself against these kind of attacks and to root out Hamas.
So I’m curious how it feels right now to be part of a global left that seems to have totally divided itself from the Israeli left experience.
Mickey: So, I’ve been involved and I know the Israeli left and the international left for quite a while. And I was definitely not surprised in any way.
Being at NIF now actually makes it much easier because our values are very clear and where we stand is clear. You know, we are for human rights, we are for peace, we are for security, and then when it comes to, you know, we can’t excuse any terror attack in any situation in any time. You can’t excuse yourself with unprecedented violence against Israeli Jews or against Palestinians, and then it becomes clear to me, but definitely there is a huge split between the Israeli left and I would say the Jewish left that I feel part of and we feel part of and the international left.
I think that I’ve been critical of parts of the American left for quite a long time, for not understanding, for looking at everything through, for example, the gender and racial lands or, for example, looking at everything as multicultural democracy rather than understanding that nations exist and the national story of the Jewish people and the Palestinian people are extremely important to the people of this region, not their perspective of multicultural democracy, but our kind of democracy, which is a different democracy than other democracies have.
And at the same time, you know, having a very clear understanding that the occupation is wrong and Israeli policy vis-a-vis the Palestinians would bring them to where we are today. And I do it because I’m a humanist and I think that way because I belong to the left.
I’ve been basically in the last few months, my job has completely changed. I’ve been actually helping people, you know, we’ve been funding people to stay in hotels, the Jewish refugees and the Bedouin refugees that found themselves unrooted from their homes, were funded by NIF’s money. And we were there with the Bedouin community and the people from Ofakim and the kibbutz movement. And we are in very critical point.
At the same time, you know, you asked me, what do I think about the military operation? So I think first of all, Israel, of course, it’s not even a question, has the right to defend itself and has to defend itself, because that’s part of what countries are all about. They need to defend and prove that there is a reason for it.
But my criticism of the Israeli government vis-a-vis this operation has nothing to do with the use of force necessarily, but more so of the lack of strategy, right? There is no military operation needs to serve a military operation, instead of a political goal and a political ending. And I think that part of the problem today is that Israel cannot define well enough what it tries to achieve because unrooting Hamas, and I’ve dealt with this issue also in my military service, is a very broad concept, which has to have concrete measurements and concrete goals that they cannot actually define at the moment.
And also, what does it mean? You know, what does it mean for the Palestinian Authority? What does it mean for what’s going on in the West Bank? What does it mean for the future of Israel in the region? Who are our partners? Joe Biden has proved himself again and again to be the partner of the Israeli society and government in this case. But Israel hasn’t decided yet that we are part of the Joe Biden camp or the liberal democracy camp.
So those are the questions that I ask myself, rather than does Israel have the right to defend itself or using force is legitimate or not.
And of course, I work in a shared Jewish-Arab organization and part of my employees are Palestinian citizens of Israel, who have families in Gaza and I see them and I talk to them and I feel strongly about people who are hurt in Gaza, and are not searching for revenge or not seeking for blood, and unfortunately, there are people in my community who do, but I’m not there at all.
And I think that also that’s something that we need to take into account. So we are doing what we’re doing. But when the moment we know our end goal, we will also know what we’re trying to achieve by using force and I’m, my heart goes to the people of Gaza. I’m not ignoring it. And it’s important. It doesn’t make you less of a patriot or like less of Israeli.
In order to be in Israel and in order to be a person who believes in the roots of the Israeli story, you have to care about what’s going on in Gaza. You have to care about the people of Gaza. My pain in a way is that in certain circles of the Jewish communities and the Israeli society, that if you show pain or you show emotion towards the people of Gaza, you’re of course considered to be outside of the legitimate discussion. And I’m not willing to play this game. I have friends and close family members who have been affected by the current situation. And I have colleagues who are affected in the current situation in Gaza, and I see both of them.
Yehuda: You said a lot there and I want to unpack pieces of it, but part of what you laid out was the kind of complicated and sophisticated agenda of what it means to be an Israeli leftist, where you can both have a humanitarian sensibility about victimhood on all sides, the understanding that Israel has military legitimacy to defend itself, a certain kind of criticism of the government that is rooted in strategy as opposed to existential.
You know, you’re not criticizing the legitimacy of Israel. You validated Israel as both a national project and Palestinian national project. I’m going to pick apart pieces of that. I’m just curious. To me, it sounds it is a complicated and coherent position. It is an unpopular position in the Israeli society right now. We can talk about that a little bit later. But let me go back to where we originally started, which is why has this become a hard position do you think for the global left to get behind?
What happened over the last 10 or 20 years? Is it intellectual trends around, you know, post-colonial thinking, race and gender? Is it lack of relationships between Israeli left and the global left? Is it a deep failure to understand it? Is there something else? Is it anti-Semitism? What have been the forces that you think have made that complicated story one that no longer finds resonance or echo among the global left?
Mickey: In a way, it’s all of the above, I think. I think you gave a lot of reasons for it. So I’ll actually start with, you know, with the problem that we have in Israel that actually created this situation in a way.
I think that the fact that we as a society and the Israeli left has become smaller and smaller in a way, has made the occupation and settlement project our main story, kind of like made the entire Israeli project as something that the international left cannot relate to. I think we haven’t paid attention enough to what does it mean strategically.
But at the same time, I think that what you just mentioned about the post-colonialism and race and gender, they’re kind of like theories that connected to it. I think that I would say it’s intellectual laziness. People are not aware that not every political story is the same. And, you know, I refuse to look at the Israeli story as part of colonialism. I think the Jews belong in this region and they were not sent by anyone to this region. You know, you can go historically into it and, you know, there is also nowhere to send us, you know, where would I go? To the former Soviet Union? Like there is no such a story there.
It doesn’t mean that you cannot criticize Israel for certain policies. And I do think that there is also a root of antisemitism, of like, you know, you start with an original true story and then you portray it, you know, along lines connected to what Jews are in the world and how they control the world and how they control the US and all these kind of stories that we keep on hearing over and over again.
The issue of personal connection have a lot less to do with that in a way because I don’t see them really personally connected or know the story of Palestinian activists. I actually feel that I know better and I’m closer to Palestinian activists and I feel that I understand their story in a way better. I think that certain Palestinian activists have taken the language of the international left as if they’re supporting them, although I think it’s a limited support.
If I were a Palestinian, I would not support the international left as my support system, but still. But I don’t want to take off the responsibility of us as Israelis, as a society, right? Not as Israeli. I think that we as a society kind of like thought we could keep living in the current reality with the occupation, with the split between Gaza and the West Bank, with expanding settlements, with a broad story and such, and there’s not going to be any price.
And the price came, and it of course came, I don’t connect, for me, it’s a full disconnection between the acts of Hamas and the occupation and such. Pure brutality is pure brutality, but I think that in the international context of it, it is connected to the reality of Israel making settlements and occupations number one political priority and kind of like turning its back and calling on anti-semites everyone who disagrees with this policy and then if everything is anti-Semitism and if everything is illegitimate, so there is no kind of like nuanced conversation like we are holding now.
So my vision for this kind of discussion and I care less about the international left, I have to admit I’m less impressed with its power, I’m much more impressed with people who search power and search influence and political impact.
And there you have to hold serious conversation, which is connected to visions and to rights and to humanism and to nationalism and all these kinds of things. And I think that in that case, we will need to give up a lot of our illusion that there is no price for the current reality in Israel. And those people will need to push forward a viable solution or reality that is based on realism and not on ideological concepts that do not exist actually in the region that we live in.
You know, I’ve had, one of my staff people that I respect the most is a Palestinian younger person. We’ve argued today on the concept of colonialism quite hard. And yeah, I think that that’s, I’m said to see irrelevant equations are coming up in this discussion. By the way, it’s much easier for me to accept the notion of apartheid when it comes to the West Bank than the notion of colonialism. And I think that to be accurate serves the purpose much more than using big words that are popular among certain groups rather than being accurate. And there is a lot of criticizing on when it comes to Israeli policy.
That’s what I do. I’m trying to improve Israel. I’m trying to build better Israel for all the people who live here. But I think that the need of certain groups within the left to analyze everything through the same lens is just intellectual laziness as I said.
Yehuda: It’s pretty clear to me and to most observers who’ve watched this story for a long time that you even see it literally in elections and political parties, that the Second Intifada was the main force that eviscerated the political power of the left in Israel. Basically a fatigue by Israelis about the possibility of a final status agreement with Palestinians or the empowerment of Palestinians even beyond what had been promised in Oslo, a wide perception that when Arafat declined the offer at Camp David in 2000, that there was no Palestinian interest in really reconciling this agreement.
And so for 20 years now, the left has suffered under this burden of advocating for a change in the status quo with an overwhelming Israeli perception that there’s no, for lack of a better word, no Palestinian partner.
At the same time, as you just said, it’s not actually entirely a left position in Israel to feel that the occupation is a corrosive force. I talked to centrists and even right-wingers who feel the occupation is bad. They wish they didn’t have it or they wish they weren’t implicated by it. So I want you to connect those dots between a perception that this is bad and the belief that is not reconcilable because the left has a different theory about what’s supposed to happen because of how bad the occupation actually is.
Mickey: Yeah, my favorites are those who say, yeah, the occupation is bad, but we have no other option. Actually, we do have another option. Even if you think there is no partner, you don’t make expansions of settlements your first priority if you think that the occupation is bad. You redefine the work of the military. You limit the ability of extreme settlers to act violently against Palestinians, and you’re not allowing expansion of the same strategy. So there is an alternative, even if there is no Palestinian partner, right?
The second thing is that, you know, now it’s supposedly what everyone thought all the time. The Palestinian Authority could have been a partner. They’re not the ideal partner. They’re not part of the Zionist movement. But I think that, you know, the way they acted vis-a-vis security and connected to other things show that if we allowed this body to develop and work in a better way and not run all the right-wing campaigns on their back, they would be much more efficient and practical and helpful in the field.
But we cannot forget actors that are supposedly centrist now or something like Bennett or so on talking about full annexation of 60-something percent of the West Bank, which is area C, or even the decision, the very clear decision of Ariel Sharon to go into unilateral disengagement.
I have to remind our listeners that this engagement has happened after Arafat was not around, Abu Mazen, we all knew who he was, was already in control, it was the beginning of his term, his term, if you can say, there is an endless term, but yeah, his time as the Palestinian leader and people like Yossi Beilin that said it very clearly, if we’re not gonna say, if we’re not gonna make sure that we know who is taking charge of Gaza, more extreme forces will take over. It was clearly said, you have Yossi Beilin on record saying that, right?
So I don’t know who is the naive and who is not, but definitely the Second Intifada has broken a lot of things for Israelis and for Palestinians. At the end of the day, when you talk to Palestinians, there was a big price they paid for the Second Intifada and for the, take-or-leave-it kind of approach of Barak.
And Oslo was a lot for them, but it was also that a lot, you know, a lot that was taken from them, for example. Checkpoints, for example, things that have changed lives of Palestinians in many ways. So I think that one is those who say that occupation is a problem, but don’t have any clear proposal of what we can change tomorrow in order to reduce the level of occupation. Because again, it’s exactly like the war. If you have a clear goal, if you know what’s your political end game, you play accordingly.
And the political end game of every Israeli government that has been around since Olmert was to continue the, what they call, managing the conflict kind of approach. And if when you manage the conflict, you don’t try to achieve anything and you are not engaging in a situation of not negotiation, even before negotiation, of creating more tensions between Jews and Palestinians.
We’re speaking now about the reality in Gaza, but the level of settler violence protected by the Israeli military in the West Bank now is the highest we’ve seen in the last, I think three or four years.
President Biden has called it very clearly, something needs to stop it, no one is stopping it. So, and those are not really extreme elements of the settler movement only, those are the forefront soldiers of the settler movement. So there are things that can be done and those who feel uncomfortable the current reality, they need to call it off and they need to be able to point at those who lead it.
And I think that part of what has happened to the Israeli center that they became, they stopped being interested in the reality and they thought, you know, they were asking themselves what are their opinions according to polls and what we see that Netanyahu and his allies do exactly the opposite. They influence the public opinion, not actually polling and saying what the public thinks, but actually pushing the public that supports them in a way in the center did not do it.
And was the left too weak to do it? Yes. And also lacked leadership, I think, and they are here, you know, a civil society, I have to say, you know, and the only backing of this left wing in Israel, and NGOs and political forces are not the same.
Political forces need to have the ability to lead realistically and programmatically in current reality. And human rights organizations, for example, are completely different. They need to highlight dark sides of certain societies, regardless to the political situation. But the problem is, when you didn’t have political left, you all of a sudden saw human rights activists as the only representations of the left. And that’s bad both politically and ideologically. Like I’m not there at all. I always say that I’m extremely happy that we have both strong IDF and strong B’Tselem, like those are two needed aspects of Israeli society, a military that protects you and human rights space that can highlight the wrongs of the military.
Yehuda: Yeah, but also, I mean, also when human rights activists are the only public representatives of the left, it makes them very easy targets for de-legitimization and critique and so on. We can come back to that, and I do want to come back to settler violence – which we covered even last year already with – I believe it was an episode with Haviv Rettig Gur about the magnitude of this problem in Israeli society and how deeply embarrassing it is actually as a Zionist to watch those incidents take place, not to mention dangerous for Palestinians.
But you’ve argued so far that the Israeli government has had as its North Star only managing the conflict. And I guess implicitly the counter argument to that is that the North Star or the vision is actually working towards peace. But part of the obstacle, just to play devil’s advocate, is that if the vast majority of Israelis believe that the occupation can be attenuated, in other words, it can be made less costly, but that in the long run, there is no possible way that Israel will ever withdraw its troops in a significant way from either blockading Gaza or controlling the West Bank out of a perception that if Israel left the West Bank tomorrow and basically allowed Palestinian society to make the choices it wanted to make, you’d wind up with Hamas and therefore Iran at its borders.
I guess I’m curious, what does the pursuing peace position look like if many Israelis believe that the constraint here is some version of permanent military occupation? And is that a position that the left can live with?
Mickey: No. First of all, it’s not a question only for Israelis. The notion that a country can have citizens and then people under its control with no rights cannot happen as long as you want to think of Israel as democracy. If a country like Israel cannot protect its borders without occupying other people with no basic civil rights and I can give you what does it mean. You know, it’s no civil rights means, you know, sound to people like just, but we’re talking about arresting children under the age of 13 for two days in jail without letting their parents know. Stopping, you know, mothers in checkpoints. Like, it has very clear implications on people lives.
So I think that Israel must do everything it can do in order to ensure reality in which it’s either pursuing two-state solution that allows Palestinians some sort of independence or to think differently. And because I don’t think that the one-state reality is anything that we want to do, we need to, it’s our own interest to keep ourselves as democracy and a country that can allow itself security.
So yes, we can definitely have some, you know, security arrangements and so on, but you cannot allow yourself a reality in which you keep on controlling people’s life without allowing them full equality. That’s one. The funniest thing or the weirdest thing is that most security experts actually live closer to where I stand than closer to those who think that we can live and control the Palestinians forever.
You can use military excuses for controlling the West Bank, but at the end of the day, the real project that Israel was pursuing in the last at least 15 years, but much more, I think since Gush Emunim had started, is actually the legitimacy of the settler movement. Israel has fought Ben and Jerry’s, as far away as it sounds, over the settlements, not over the actual existence of the state of Israel. Our president, a dear friend of mine, who I respect, seriously respect, said that this is like political terror.
You know, there is that much you can accept as part of a security discussion and then you go into, you know, real actions on the ground. The real actions on the ground show something completely different. So even if you think, even if you think that Israel will need to control in some ways the West Bank forever, which I don’t think and Yair Golan doesn’t think and many other people who have expertise in the field don’t think that way, don’t make the settlements your most important political project.
And if it’s not about security, which I don’t think it’s about security, it’s about political power of a certain group within certain political reality within Israel. And complete failure of the Israeli center to care or to define interests in this space. Think about people like Gadi Eisenkot, the new minister that just joined the government. When you hear Gadi Eisenkot talking before joining government, he said that the number and priority for him is to look on a different reality when it comes to the Palestinian conflict, because that’s the number one risk for Israeli society, even if you look at the Iranian issue and so on, because those are connected. Then when he joins politics, because polls tell him one thing, he stops talking about it completely or he’s not willing to say two-state solutions. So I think that it’s a lot to do with political courage and understanding of the political reality.
But going back to the discussion that was very, very popular in Israel just a few weeks ago about democracy, one cannot define Israel or any other country as democracy if its future-looking reality is a reality in which you have citizens and people who are under Israeli control who are forever not going to be citizens. That’s just unacceptable, democratically, not even nothing to do with peace and security.
Yehuda: I’d love to believe that you’re right that it’s simply a matter of political courage, but it actually feels like a storytelling problem. That organizations and people who believe in what you believe, what I share with you, I believe as well, simply don’t buy the story and are in some ways willing in the long run to say, I’m willing to jeopardize a little bit of democracy for what I perceive as security.
Now you’ve said the security establishment by and large doesn’t buy that story. But it does feel like we have, Mickey, a narrative problem. Not necessarily a values problem, but a narrative problem. NIF has been attacked for decades by folks on the political right who have succeeded not in getting NIF to fail, but in planting a seed of suspicion for folks in the center of like, well, I don’t know if I think that they’re bad, but I don’t want to have anything to do with them.
By the way, some of those same forces came after the Hartman Institute. We’ve been subject to campaigns in the public square for positions as basic as supporting the IDF’s code of ethics as dissidents. So we have a narrative problem. And you’re going to have a much worse narrative problem after October 7th than you even had after the second Intifada.
Mickey:
You might be right. You’re probably right. I can’t disagree with that. I do think that we have a narrative problem. But we were just not there to fight our narrative. I think that we have a quite good narrative, by the way. We were those who said that Hamas is not a partner, and Smotrich and Netanyahu are on record saying that we need to strengthen Hamas in order to diminish the power of the Palestinian Authority because they want two-state solution while Hamas doesn’t want it. So we have that.
And I think that we were not courageous enough to fight for it. We probably did not tell the right story. We probably did not have the right, you know, people to deliver this message. And I think all of it is completely correct. But I think it’s also, you know, connected to the fear of, you know, you mentioned Yair Golan. Yair Golan was basically chased after by the right for saying things that are, you know, quite accepted today.
And you know, you mentioned Hartman Institute. When people went far away from us as NIF, and I’m not talking about Hartman, I’m talking about in general, people try to go farther away from NIF, so they’re not connected to the left-wing stigma. But then they went after them because populism works the way populism works.
If you’re not part of them fully, 100%, not even 99%, if you’re not 100% them, you’re on their other side. And if you’re on the other side, you’re a traitor. And people who don’t understand this game now, after Trump and after the last 10 months here in Israel, they will never understand it. They will always try to think that if they just had a different story, would say something completely different, they’re not going to be chased after. And I have to say, today and yesterday and three weeks ago, that’s the same story.
Now, after what would happen after October 7, the truth, I don’t know the answer. And I think that actually, and maybe I’m just a believer, I think that part of the elements of the two-state solutions could actually be much more powerful at the moment. People do understand, I think, more than they understood in the past, that the IDF cannot be on every hilltop in the West Bank and then protect the southern border of Israel, definitely when you have also a north, important problem.
People do understand today that Israel cannot be policing Gaza Strip and it will need to have some sort of a Palestinian or international intervention there. You know, people like Minister Miki Zohar from Likud said maybe the PA needs to be the body that takes over Gaza, but you know it’s quite clear for people who want to hear it, that the PA says, rightly so, that without a political, peaceful vision and going forward in the West Bank, they were not going to take over Gaza. It’s not going to happen. They’re not going to be only our protégé in the field, like those who will do the work that Israel does for them. It will have a price.
And I think that in that matter, I don’t know what’s going to happen in the US in November. But I think that as long as we see an administration closer to the one now Americans have, I think that that’s part of the goal. Israel cannot live under the illusion that it can continue business as usual after October 7. It needs to think internationally. It needs to think regionally. And it needs to take the Palestinians into account, the moderate Palestinians, because the decision to strengthen Hamas, it was a decision by this current government.
Again, we have Smotrich and Netanyahu on record saying it, brought us to the reality in which we are now. I’m not talking about multicultural democracy, as parts of the left have imagined to itself. I’m talking about two-state solution that actually allows both Jews and Palestinians, their rights and equality and their ability to express their national identity as they deserve.
But I don’t see any practical political solution that does not include any political path forward. And I see that you are following it, so you know, but I don’t know if your listeners do. The right-wing in Israel is pushing for Jews to go back to Gaza Strip. They’re speaking about expelling Palestinians into Gaza and Jordan as if jeopardizing the peace agreement with the Jordan and Egypt would be no price to pay.
So if I’m actually thinking about people who are naive or people who are not connected to reality and so on, I think that lies much more in the right wing today in Israel than what we call today left wing in Israel.
The only issue is the issue of perception and the issue of who is a loyalist and who is not. And in the moment that you have no feeling or no emotional connection to what’s going on in Gaza, you’re all of a sudden a patriot, although you’re presenting a reality that will destroy the state of Israel, while people like myself that emotionally feel very strongly about the state of Israel, about the people of Israel who just spent his time, his effort, his money to bring people of Ofakim, Netivot, and Sderot into hotel rooms in Yam Hamelech and in Jerusalem and other places, because we have empathy to the people and the children of Gaza, where all of a sudden our traitors work. What? Like this is an unacceptable perception.
I’m a patriot, I’m an Israeli, I care for Israelis, Jews, and Palestinians and I think that the future of this region lies on our relationship with the Palestinians, A, our regional relations, and international allies. The reality in which Israel doesn’t decide between Russia and Ukraine or trying to portray Orban of Hungary as one of our best friends, and Netanyahu with huge pictures of Trump and Putin has brought us to where we are.
And at the end of the day, the countries that supported us are the US, led by President Biden, the Prime Minister of the UK was here, the French leader was here, and so on. So we need to, Israel cannot keep on playing this game. Are we a liberal democracy? And then it has limitations, but it has also fruits to it, or we’re not.
Are we an occupier that lives according to pre-45 rules or we are a country of the new world? All these decisions must come now as something that we take into account and push forward. And I think that the reality is very unfortunate and the reason why we came so far is the reason we came so far, but it needs to be solved.
And the thing that actually bothers me the most is current political forces are trying to go after and create tensions between Jews and Arabs or Jews and Palestinians within Israel. You know, we invest a lot of our thinking and a lot of our funding into thinking how you deescalate or create the reality in which Jews and Arabs continue working and living together here within Israel. And also those who try on purpose to, yeah, exactly, to light the fire where it is.
Yehuda: Right, just see discontent.
So, there’s some just interesting observation that I want to talk to you about Palestinian citizens of Israel. But an interesting observation is that usually when people observe political divides between right and left, the conventional argument is that the right represents the status quo and that the left is always moving.
In fact, it’s an interesting way when Pew studied partisanship and polarization in America, one of the things that they notices is that between the 90s and, you know, 2010s, the right position basically stayed the same, but that the left moved further left.
But one of the things that you’re pointing out, and I want our listeners to pay attention to, is that actually the left stayed the same between the 90s and now, and that the right has moved further right. So when you hear something like, we want to reclaim post-2005, we want to reclaim a settlement agenda in Gaza, and the left, as represented here by the head of the New Israel Fund is arguing about the two-state solution. What you should rightly hear is that the left has largely stayed in the same place. But the reason why some people perceive it as further and further left is because the right actually was the one that did that movement. And I think that’s just an interesting turnabout that feels very different than what you oftentimes see in global politics.
Mickey: I agree on that. I feel bad to be perceived as the conservative as you can imagine, but you’re right about it. And I think that, you know, and I spoke to my friend, May Pundik, recently who’s leading A Land for All in Israel and so on and she said like, we can’t only bring the solutions from the nineties. And I agree with her, you know, there are certain things that we need to change.
We’re supporting now a program led by a collaboration of Mitvim, which is a foreign affairs Institute and some others, there are certain things that we thought in the 90s that are actually not applicable today. For example, what kind of authority the Palestinian Authority would be, what kind of measurements you need to be on the ground.
But the end game, are we talking about one state, two states, you know, as President Trump said in the past, I don’t care if it’s one state. I care, actually. I care. And I think that at the end of the day, definitely after October 7, my personal opinion is that it should have pushed us, I don’t know if that’s going to be the case, closer to the two-state end game.
Yehuda: Do you feel constrained right now about the tone or the volume around criticism of Israeli leadership in the midst of war? I mean, I’m sure that, you know, I see it in the American Jewish community, the rules are a little bit different now because people are wary and worried that when you’re obligated to kind of stand in solidarity with the Israeli people in the midst of this war, the rules are a little bit different around criticism.
I’m curious how that registers for you. I mean, by definition, positions of the New Israel Fund by virtue of the fact that they have been outside of the political system and apropos what you said earlier about the role of NGOs in Israel, you’ve had to be very vocal at all times about things that you see as going wrong.
I’m curious whether you feel at all constrained right now that if you are as outspoken in your criticism of Israeli leadership that it’s going to paint you outside the possibility of being able to be effective changemakers.
Mickey: First of all, luckily, we are not alone anymore. For many years, the fight of democracy was an NIF kind of struggle, and we spoke this language, and so on. And today, we feel like part of a bigger movement, and we are hearing and seeing people who are much more critical than we are. Because we are criticizing and looking at the issues on the virtue. We are not political actors, and we’re not about yes or no, Netanyahu. That’s not our game.
But I think there are very strong forces today who are very critical of how the prime minister Netanyahu saying that the leadership that has brought us so far cannot continue leading.
I think that we will do what we always do, you know, as a non-partisan player, as a civil society organization, we’ll have our voice very clear on issues that we believe are wrong and very clear on things that we think are right, right?
Like, that’s what we’ve always done, you know, as opposed to the image that we might have had in certain circles. We’ve worked with Israeli governments all through the years, you know, on social justice issues and housing issues and issues to do with the development of the Arab population in Israel and will continue to do so.
But we will also not sound ourself on things are going to the wrong directions, including connected to issues to do with the military operation in Gaza, we’ll say what we think. If we see human rights violations, we will call them human rights violations. And if we see a non-strategic way forward, we would call it that way. I think that that’s what we do and that’s what we need to do.
You know, speaking of what I just said, you know, right-wing players have not stopped criticizing and working, you know, pushing their agenda, even for one second after October 7. Liberal funders and liberal aspects of society have been busy night and day and creating, basically offering an alternative government to the people who were affected.
You know, NIF was paying, you know, my director of finance, he was paying directly to hotels
to host people in places. We kind of like shifted completely into helping people on the ground. So I think that very, very soon, we will need to go back to our position and portraying or putting forward an alternative vision to the current reality that includes criticizing Israeli certain policies and supporting others.
My job is not to replace any political player, it’s to be clear on my values and clear on my actions and that’s what we do. You know, everyone talks about peace and security kind of like angle of that, but one of the things that we’ve learned as a society that the concept of a state, the concept of a government has completely disappeared. No government was in action. Philanthropy is actually taking over what government should have done. People didn’t know where to go. People of Ofakim were sent back to a space in which their family members were massacred just a week ago because the government was not there.
So when I look at reality, and of course the international discussion or even the Jewish discussion outside of Israel is mainly about the Palestinians, the Hamas and so on, I look at it also in the perspective of like, what does it mean, a state? What is the social responsibility of the state? Where does the state stand when it comes to those who were affected in the current reality?
You know, I got a request today for 50,000 shekels to buy washing machines for people in hotels because they don’t have a system in which they can wash their clothes, and the hotel washing systems do not hold it. And I had to make a decision. I haven’t made it, I have to admit, to the point, because it’s not our job, and I have to mention, but on the other hand, what do you do with people that have nowhere to go and have no clean clothes and no educational systems?
And that’s a reality that is as important and as critical for the future of the state of Israel than the peace and security discussion that I feel very close to and I feel very connected to, but it’s part of what other people talk about.
Yehuda: 100%. And it’s felt as though, I’ve heard from many Israelis on all sides of the political aisle that the government has simply been so weighed down by its own self-interest for the past year in particular that its capacity to hold up the social safety net has just been completely eviscerated, that they are overwhelmed, and that so much of that work has fallen on the NGO sector.
And I will share with you when I was in Israel, I think the thing that most broke my heart was just walking by some hotel that’s been taken over by refugees from the southern part of Israel and watching late at night, it’s probably 11 p.m., there was a woman standing by the couch in the lobby with her laundry all over the couch just folding laundry by herself. It just totally broke my heart as a person with nowhere to go, no systems to support her, and dependent entirely on the goodwill of strangers and the NGO infrastructure to figure out what she’s going to do with the rest of her life.
Mickey: And philanthropy, you know, I work in this space of philanthropy and that’s an amazing opportunity to thank those amazing Jews from around the world who support us. But at the same time, philanthropy should be selective. It depends on the ability to raise funds. It depends on the political perception of certain people.
Yehuda: Correct. It should be able to patch holes as opposed to being fully responsible for the system.
Mickey: Government needs to be universal. The fact that the kibbutz movement have a full system to protect its people and places like Ofakim and Netivot and Sderot doesn’t have it because those towns shows itself so clearly at the moment. And these differences should not have happened in a functioning country in any other place in the world. And you know what? I don’t care about other places in the world as much as I care about Israel. I’m in pain about it, as much as I mean pain in other aspects that were discovered after October 7.
Yehuda: Let me ask one last question. You’ve been very generous with your time. We alluded to it before. It’s one of the pieces of the story that’s most breaking my heart. You know, we at Hartman over a year ago established our own Center for Shared Society. We lean into the responsibility of Zionist organizations in particular, not just left organizations who sometimes are uncomfortable talking about Zionism, but especially Zionist organizations to embrace the agenda of shared society between Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel.
Our work is primarily in the education system and it’s around narrative and values as opposed to talking politics. You get to politics eventually, but you really have to build a much stronger and more resilient capacity of Israeli citizens, whether they’re Jewish or Palestinian, to see themselves as part of a shared whole. It’s been exciting to build this work and really complicated for an institution like ours.
At Hartman, we’ve made a commitment that if we’re going to have a research center that’s focused on questions facing Israeli society, it should have proportional representation from Palestinians. We brought Palestinians into our leadership at the institute. And there’s a sense of tremendous fragility right now about this work. It’s one of the things that’s breaking my heart because it’s the only future for an Israeli democracy is for its citizens to see themselves as part of the same shared whole. There’s tremendous vulnerability being experienced right now by Palestinian citizens of Israel because of crackdowns by the Israeli police and military out of suspicion that Palestinians are supporting Hamas. There is vigilante behavior by Jews against Palestinian citizens of Israel. And a lot of this work feels very vulnerable.
What do we need to do for now to maintain this agenda of working towards shared society? And what are we going to need to do for the future to build up this agenda to be seen as the mainstream agenda that anyone who’s involved in the Zionist project wants to be a part of?
Mickey: So first of all, to see the things you just said. Things that you just said so clearly are not clear to most American Jews or Israelis. Palestinian citizens of Israel are going through hell these days. They’re afraid to say anything. They’re afraid to show empathy with their families in Gaza. They’re afraid to go to school or university or anything like that. People are arrested for everything. It really brings people to the days of the military control over Palestinian citizens of Israel. So first of all see it. Call it as it is. It’s extremely important.
Second, work directly on de-escalation before even building shared society, make sure that you do everything you can in order to prevent violent actions, you know, from Jews to Palestinians, but vice versa of course, as well.
And then three, don’t forget the future of Israel is connected to a shared society and Jews and Arabs who live here together. And I think that there are very clear actions. You know, we’ve just formatted a joint philanthropic venture to support such initiatives exactly because of that, because we do understand that these relationships are very, very vulnerable. And the moment, this relationship is going to go back. We will be in deep trouble in, you know, much more than anything else. And I wanna say something, it also needs to, you need to call it by its name, there are certain political actors that are working to creating these tensions, right? It’s not coming out of nowhere.
There is a reason why the police acts the way the police acts and there is a reason why Minister Smotrich is banning funds that were supposed to be sent to Arab towns in Israel. And there are certain groups in Israeli society that work very, very hard, including some national religious elements of society that try all the time to create these tensions alive. And one of the things is to build in a positive way this shared society aspect, but those who are not calling the enemies of shared society by their name are also creating a problem.
And by the way, Jews and Arabs alike, there are enemies of the concept of shared society
not only among Jews but also among Arabs. It’s true that there is a majority-minority kind of relationship here. And it’s very clear who’s responsible and who is creating an uncomfortable reality.
But at the end of the day, I haven’t heard of one Jew that was arrested because of incitement online. One. And believe me, go to my personal Facebook page and see if there is no reason for them to be arrested. But I have people that I met personally and I know that said like everything by the hands of Allah, fine, you know, whatever that means, who were arrested because some people could interpret it in the wrong way.
So I think that it’s extremely important. And actually, you know, coming from the center to see it. And I have to give a great, you know shout out like Minister Gantz has seen it and acted accordingly and spoke very clearly about it, which is not true about the rest of the leaders, but he was there. He was even came to the shared war room, as we call it, like a space in the Rahat, Jewish-Palestinian space in Rahat that were handing out food for families in Jewish communities and in Arab communities in order to show solidarity with the Arab communities.
There were small actions that could be taken in this moment in order to see it. And yes, the most important thing is to kind of like stop the police brutality and the unclear arrest when it comes to Arabs, while Jews are free to do whatever they want, you know, including chasing people like myself for political opinion.
Yehuda: Thanks to everyone listening to our show this week and special thanks to my guest, Mickey Gitzn, director of the New Israel Fund. Identity Crisis is produced by M. Louis Gordon, our executive producer is Maital Friedman, and the show was produced with assistance from Sam Ballow and Tessa Zitter. This episode was edited by Gareth Hobbs at Silver Sound NYC and our music is provided by Socalled.
For more ideas from the Shalom Hartman Institute about what’s unfolding right now, sign up for our newsletter in the show notes or you can visit us at shalomhartman.org/israelatwar. We’re always looking for ideas of what to cover in future episodes. If you have a topic you’d like to hear about or comments on this episode, you can write to us at identitycrisis@shalomhartmanorg. You can rate and review our show on iTunes to help more people find it. You can subscribe to Identity Crisis everywhere podcasts are available. We’ll see you next week, stay safe, and thanks for listening.
