In a headline-grabbing speech, Benjamin Netanyahu asked Israelis to embrace life as a “super-Sparta,” cut off from a hostile world— which begs the question: who do Israelis want to be after October 7? 

Sparta Nation Transcript

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Donniel: Hi friends, this is Donniel Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevi from the Shalom Hartman Institute. And this is our podcast, For Heaven’s Sake, Israel at War, a collaboration between the Hartman Institute and Ark Media. And today is day 711.

Our theme for today, we’re calling it Sparta Nation, following Netanyahu’s really very troubling, troubling speech yesterday. Israel is experiencing, as we all know, unprecedented. It’s not just boycott and criticism, real, deep distancing from Israel. It’s alienation from Israel. It’s not even political. They’re just alienated. When at the Emmys, the actress says, “Free Palestine,” they’re cheering. It’s just, they’re not on our team anymore. And for whatever the reasons are, we’re not going to get into that right now. But you know, we’ve spoken about it. We’re under a magnifying glass, whether it’s fair or not fair. And people are looking at us and saying, “I don’t want to be a part of you.”

And in the midst of that, with the deep criticism, not of whether the war was justified, but whether we at all even are concerned about fighting a just war anymore. We’re now starting Merkavot Gidon Bet, “the Chariots of Gidon, stage two.” Today, the war in Gaza City was launched in greater intensity. And to the condemnation of the world, and as well as the lack of support of the majority of Israelis, and in particular, the lack of support from the chief of staff of the army. But we started. And people are watching, and our minister of defense today announces, “Gaza is burning.”

And you wonder, we’re upset about people saying there’s war crimes, genocide. Since when is burning Gaza the objective of our war? Since when is that the objective? Last week he says, the skyline of Gaza is changing, because we’re bombing high-rise towers, because their ability to watch and to film us and to shoot at us from these towers is very significant. But this is the conversation going on in the midst of all of this alienation that we’re feeling so deeply. And Netanyahu says, people, this alienation, get used to it. This is now the new us. And he says, it’s not our fault.

Because of course, Netanyahu doesn’t take responsibility, neither for October 7th or any fault. He does take responsibility for successes. But this is not our fault. He says, we are being alienated in the world. People are disinstating themselves for two primary reasons. The first is Islamic immigration to European countries. And the second is the social media prowess of Qatar and China. And since these are forces obviously beyond our control, we now have to accept this new reality. And he articulated us by saying, we have to recognize that we’re going to be super Sparta.

Yossi: And that’s exactly the word you use. Super, not—Sparta isn’t enough. It’s super Sparta.

Donniel: Super. We’re going to be The Sparta. I spoke about warrior nation, but it’s much worse. We’re going to talk. What is he even doing? And we’re going to try to understand that. But what Netanyahu in essence did—and this is the framing for today’s conversation—Netanyahu is shifting the war and the last… close to two years from being only a war of self-defense, a war to defeat, a despicable, corrupt, immoral terrorist enemy, to being a war that is transforming our identity as Israelis.

And we have to talk about that because that is both a dramatic radical move, and as I’m going to argue, it’s also, I believe, going to be a source for great hope. That’s what we’re going to talk about. And my question to you would be, Yossi, what’s your take on Sparta nation?

But before I ask you about this almost infamous, horrific statement that was condemned by everybody, our podcast on Doha last week received a very large number of comments from really great listeners, loyal listeners who wrote and critiqued us, but critiqued us very lovingly and respectfully and said, I think you forgot something. Neither of you took into account in your analysis of whether this is right or wrong. The fact that we tried to assassinate people who were in the middle of negotiations with. Is there a moral flaw? Do you have a moral responsibility to people who you’re negotiating with? You’re in the midst of negotiation. The head of the Mossad said, don’t bomb until we get an answer on the hostage deal.

At that moment, we didn’t have all the facts. We didn’t have the perspective now and the wisdom that we have from the infinite amount of time that’s passed the equivalent of 10 years, which is a week in Israeli time.

But were we wrong, do you believe, Yossi, in leaving that out?

Yossi: We were wrong, with an explanation.

Donniel: Okay, good.

Yossi: And you touched on the explanation, which is that when we conducted our conversation, we didn’t know certain key facts. And the most important fact that we didn’t know was whether Israel had coordinated with Trump. Because if Netanyahu had coordinated with him, it would have changed the entire nature of the attack. It would have meant that Trump had reached the conclusion that, as we say in Hebrew, “ein l’mi ledaber,” there’s no one to talk to. Hamas is not negotiating seriously.

And in fact, we did mention that the day before the attack, Trump had issued an ultimatum to Hamas saying, you’re not going to hear this again from me. This is your final warning. So then Israel attacks the next day. And it seemed logical to assume that Trump had given the green light for this attack. And the fact that he didn’t meant that this was criminal, and I use the word criminal, in several ways.

First of all, that it endangered the lives of the hostages. You’re negotiating for the hostages’ release, and then you do a move that’s going to make it all the more difficult to free them. So before we get to trying to assassinate the negotiators, the first, for me, the first immoral element here is endangering the people you are ostensibly trying to free. The second, of course, is if you’re going to negotiate with murderers, people who do deserve to be assassinated, you need a time out, and you say, “Okay, we’re negotiating now, and we’re leaving that for later.”

Donniel: For later.

Yossi: And we didn’t do it. So yes, in retrospect, I think that…

Donniel: Our audience is onto something.

Yossi: Yes.

Donniel: It’s interesting, you know, I don’t use the term “immoral.” For me, the point that really shifted my feeling about the bombing in Doha was when it was reported really so clearly, and it was only a few days after, that the head of the Mossad said, “You don’t do this. Let’s wait for the answer.” Right. That, I said, Oh my God. Let’s wait for the answer. There was an answer still to be given that we hadn’t received yet.

Yossi: So I’ll quote you, what you would say to me, and what I’m about to say, is I naturally suspect, as do many Israelis, that Netanyahu was deliberately trying to sabotage negotiations because we were getting closer. Now, what you would say is, “I don’t go that far.”

Donniel: I don’t know.

Yossi: But maybe you do now.

Donniel: Maybe. I don’t know. I’m going to leave it. All I know is that, who were we trying to assassinate? There were a couple of articles. Were you trying to assassinate the heads of Hamas, or were you trying to assassinate the hostage deal? So like that was the play. When all is said and done, I still wouldn’t use the word “immoral” that you used. Because these people, these are the advocates and the implementers of October 7th, and genocidal attacks against them. They have a death penalty on them at all times.

Now, I agree. If you’re in the midst of negotiation, wait for the answer. I wouldn’t say it’s immoral. I’d say it’s wrong. I’d use another term.

Yossi: It’s good to occasionally be to your left.

Donniel: Even though I don’t believe that the term “moral” is to the left. That’s part of the right-wing/left-wing craziness. It’s not. It’s not.

Yossi: Right, right. That’s right. That’s right. No, you’re right.

Donniel: We should know. It shouldn’t. But okay, but enjoy being to my left. Even though our audience—

Yossi: It was good for five seconds.

Donniel: In the studio, you’re to my right. The audience always sees you to my left, I think. I don’t know if they reverse it or not. But in any event, we have more wisdom now. And we also have the wisdom of knowing that they weren’t even in the building. And that it really was sloppily planned, other than the fact that now we reclaimed a new objective of the mission. The objective of the mission was not to assassinate them. There’s also spokespeople saying it was much better that they weren’t assassinated, because then the assassination would have been terrible. Now that we didn’t assassinate, all we want to tell them is, and Netanyahu himself said, “You should know. There’s no amnesty.”

Okay, so whatever it is, we changed, Doha, the fact that we were negotiating should have impacted, and we didn’t take that into account in our conversation. And to our audience, thank you very, very much. Very much appreciated both the content of what you said, and also the way you said it.

And now, let’s go back. Netanyahu giving us a new identity. We’re now not startup nation, we’re Sparta nation. What are your first thoughts about this?

Yossi: I think you’re right, Donniel, to frame this as much deeper than an off-the-cuff remark. Netanyahu is making an attempt to change our identity. But before I answer your question about how that does impact on the national identity, I’d like to talk for a moment about what this means in terms of Netanyahu’s identity. Because this speech marks one more level in the decline and fall of this Prime Minister, and in the tragedy, the unfolding tragedy of Netanyahu.

And this is a guy who started out his career promising to be a new kind of Israeli leader. He’s not going to be the leader that comes from Europe. He’s American-educated. He’s Israeli-born. He’s going to connect us to the globalizing world. An MIT graduate, the first Israeli Prime Minister, and probably only, to this day, who actually understands economics.

And it’s also interesting, Donniel, because the stream of right-wing revision of Zionism that his father comes out of and that he inherited ideologically, were known as the “Statist Zionists.” And their whole emphasis was connecting Israel to the international community. It was going back to the Herzl-ean effort of trying to link Israel to the great powers and to establish international legitimacy for Zionism. And Netanyahu wrote a book, 1990, which was called A Place Among the Nations.

This was the promise of the young, ambitious Benjamin Netanyahu. And to go from there to Sparta Nation, in a way, it’s the final undoing of his own legacy. And we know that part of the tragedy of Netanyahu is the tendency to undo his own successes. And he did help bring about start-up nation. It happened in large part on his watch. And now he’s destroying it. And even just on the most basic level of, is it even possible for us to be Sparta Nation?

Donniel: What is Sparta nation? Extrapolate a little bit what Sparta really means. And we’re not just Sparta, by the way, we’re super Sparta.

Yossi: Yeah, super Sparta.

Donniel: Because we’re the chosen people, we can’t just be Sparta, we’re going to out-Sparta Sparta. We’re going to be the best at dying. Yes, please.

Yossi: The most important Sparta that ever was. The most elemental meaning of Sparta is a nation that lives by the sword and whose identity, deepest identity, is of the warrior. Now, if you look at the history of Israel, we avoided that identity. When we created the state three years after the Holocaust, it would have in some ways made sense for us to become Sparta Nation. Not only were we coming out of the Holocaust, but we were going from the Holocaust into permanent existential war.

And yet, the leaders of Israel, the people of Israel, Holocaust survivors, the generation that came out of the Holocaust, rejected Sparta Nation. And the greatness of Israel all these years has been the attempt to balance Athens and Sparta. We aspire to not just be a warrior nation, but to be a great cultural center. And thanks in large part to Netanyahu, an economic success story.

Donniel: Now, when you talk about Sparta Nation, I don’t know if I mentioned this to the audience. I’ve spoken about this recently a lot, about I came to Israel about… When did you come in what year?

Yossi: 1982.

Donniel: So, I came to Israel in 1971. And as a young child, I still heard this notion, which was a Sparta-ish narrative in Israel in Hebrew it goes, “tov lamut be’ad artzeinu,” “It is good to die for our country.” Recognizing that battle was essential and that sacrifice was going to be essential.

Now, I was part of the generation right then and then, it’s post-’73, where we said, no, it’s not good to die. It’s good to live for our country. But we’re willing to die. But I still heard.

Yossi: It wasn’t a supreme value.

Donniel: It wasn’t. I heard, like, we don’t need to sacrifice. Maybe we could actually think that war should come to an end. And the general who was the chief of staff when I was in the army, he still advocated the idea. The chief of staff…

Yossi: Raful.

Donniel: Raful advocated the idea that we can’t speak about peace because it’s going to weaken us. Everybody has to be prepared for perpetual war. And that means we’re going to die. We’re going to be dying. But we shifted. And so, we never were Sparta nation, but we were willing to recognize that dying was an essential part of our identity. But also, there’s another dimension of Sparta that we have to remember. And it’s such a strange thing that he’s quoting this. Because Sparta was not only a warrior nation, the value of life was dependent on your ability to contribute to being a warrior nation, right. And that’s why weak children, people who were sick, were left to die.

Yossi: They were put on mountain tops.

Donniel: Put on mountain tops.

Yossi: Handicapped children were left to die.

Donniel: You had no value. And my colleague, Tomer Persico, who wrote this phenomenal book, it now just came out in English on the image of God.

Yossi: I just got it.

Donniel: You just got it.

Yossi: Terrific.

Donniel: Terrific book on the centrality of the image of God, on shaping Jewish identity and liberal identity in general. He said, all the nations around us, not just Sparta, everybody in the Middle East and in Europe, this notion of leaving the infirmed aside to die was a common practice, with the exception of one country. There was only one people that never did it. Guess who? Jews.

Yossi: The super Sparta.

Donniel: The super Sparta, because the notion of the image of God, of all life having value independent of its purpose in that sense, like the Kantian principle, treat every human being as an end and not as a means. When you’re Sparta or super Sparta, people are a means for the nation. And that was not our way.

Yossi: You know the telltale detail that Netanyahu offered about how deep his spiritual corruption has gone, is that he defined the future Israeli economy as being based on our arms industry. Now this is something that the—

Donniel: And on internal—we’re not going to be an export nation anymore. We have to get used to the fact that we have to produce on our own, we’re not going to be able to import and we’re not going to be able to export, and that’s the super Sparta.

Yossi: And it’s very funny, by the way, just as a historical aside, it was the Kibbutz movement in the 1920s and 30s that had this vision of an economically self-sufficient Jewish state. Because that was kind of a socialist romantic idea. We don’t want stuff. We don’t want to be rich.

Donniel: What are we going to buy? We don’t want to be rich. There’s nothing that they have that we need, you know?

Yossi: Yeah, yeah. And so here is our most, and here’s another irony here, our most hedonistic leader ever, is the guy who’s going to lead us into this ascetic condition of statehood. But anyway, if you go back to his statement where he talked about the key is going to be an economy based on arms production. Now, yes, we obviously need to continue maintaining our highly developed arms industry.

But again, go back to Israel in the 1950s. Do you know what we were exporting to Africa?

Donniel: Agriculture.

Yossi: Agricultural expertise. We were inviting future African leaders. This is the 1950s. Israel is an impoverished country. And we’re exporting agriculture.

Donniel: Knowledge.

Yossi: Knowledge to the third world. We’re sending experts, kibbutzniks, to the third world. Now, why were we doing it?

Donniel: That’s Tikkun olam, right?

Yossi: Well, we were doing it for a very practical reason.

Donniel: That’s fair enough.

Yossi: We were trying to break the siege. But that’s exactly the point. You do everything you can to break the siege. By turning yourself into a super arms exporter, what you’re doing is saying the siege is permanent. And I’m going to go along with it.

Donniel: And you’re changing our i—Here it is. A people who’s supposed to be a light unto the nations is now, not just warrior nation, but the teacher of war to the world.

So now, let’s now use the standard that I learned in my philosophy classes, where when somebody says, and I’ve said this before, and when someone says 32 and 36 is 67, you say, excuse me, you made a mistake, it’s 68. But if somebody says 32 and 36 is 5,623,312, you know they’re not doing math. They’re doing something else, and then you have to ask, so, what are you doing?

This is so out of character. So you have a theory, and this is part of something you’ve been speaking about, that Netanyahu is dismantling everything, his legacy, but why would he want to do so? One of the answers is, he went crazy after the trial. It’s not the same Netanyahu. The second answer is, which is coherent, is that he’s speaking to his coalition. Smotrich or Ben Gvir like Sparta nation, and it’s a real paradox how the religious, how ultra-nationalism is defeating and changing even their identity, and they would even conceive of being the Hellenistic Sparta nation, which is so antithetical to the Jewish story.

Yossi: Exactly, exactly.

Donniel: So the second answer is, he’s speaking to them.

Yossi: Okay, what he’s doing and what the far right has done in embracing super Sparta is destroying their own religious basis of “am levadad yishkon,” a nation that shall dwell alone. Now you and I are not big fans of that to begin with, but at least in the traditional conception of a nation that shall dwell alone, the purpose was to be a holy people, right? To be a nation of priests and a holy people.

Donniel: And so you’re separate by a certain sublime holiness.

Yossi: Yes. That’s what defines your separateness. Now what Netanyahu is saying to the cheers of the religious far right—

Donniel: Which is unbelievable.

Yossi: —is the purpose of being separate is to be separate.

Donniel: See, it’s interesting because I learned this from my daughter, Michal, who’s writing her PhD on the religious Zionist community. The religious Zionist actually rejected the notion of being a nation that lies apart. And they saw the purpose of Israel as being a light which will ultimately repair and bring enlightenment to the world. And the Jewish nationalism Rabbi Kook speaks about, and Rabbi Amiel they say is unlike any other nationalism.

Other nationalisms are for the sake of their citizens. Jewish nationalism is for the sake of the world, in the service of the world. So even the Bil’am prophecy, “you are a nation that lies apart,” is antithetical. But what’s that antithetical? Ultra-nationalism. The nationalist ethos of warrior nation. But why would Netanyahu say that? I think I said 32 plus 36 is 5 million something, something, something, something. Why would he say that? Netanyahu doesn’t shoot from the cuff. And he didn’t need it right now for his coalition. Ben Gvir and Smotrich aren’t going anywhere.

I have a theory substantiated by facts, obviously. I’ll select the facts that fit my theory. Why should I be any different than anybody else? And I even have polls, which we’ll get to in a moment. Thank God I have polls. But my sense of Israel right now is that Netanyahu is beginning to lose his base. He lost about a third of his base with judicial reform. When he went down, I think it’s from 37, from 20 to 25 in the polls. He still has his seats in the Knesset. There’s no poll that gives Netanyahu more than 25. And some of them from time to time, it goes down to 18. He’s been in the 22 to 25 very consistently now for a while. But he still lost about 10, about a third of his base.

Yossi: No poll shows him able to put a coalition.

Donniel: But he doesn’t go back anywhere near. He lost through judicial reform people who felt his policies no longer reflected their policies. Who stayed with him? The people who are just-Netanyahu people. The people who support Netanyahu, not because of his policies, but because they believe that Netanyahu is essential for the future of Israel. Netanyahu is what gives them the sense of security that they could live in Israel.

I believe that over the last couple of months, especially over the summer, he’s beginning to lose his base because his base are like the rest of Israel who travel. They’re not isolationists. These are people who want to be part of the world. They want to travel. They want to be in the world, not certainly for economic purposes, but for psychological.

Yossi: You’re right. Israelis are the most passionate travelers.

Donniel: You can’t travel anymore. There’s nowhere.

Yossi: Look, I just went with my son. We took a five-day trip to Georgia, the country. And one of the main reasons we went there is because we knew that Israelis are still welcome there.

Donniel: Now, every day, I follow every single Israeli news site with the exception of one. They are reporting regularly, every day, front lines, what Israelis are experiencing when they’re going to this place or that place, this attack, this boycott, this protest, the world is shrinking on us.

Yossi: Let me guess, it’s Channel 14 that’s not reporting this.

Donniel: No, it’s Makor Rishon.

Yossi: Oh, interesting.

Donniel: It’s Makor Rishon.

Yossi: The religious Zionist…

Donniel: Because part of religious Zionists don’t even like, I have religious Zionist cousins who never leave Israel. You’re not supposed to leave Israel. It’s the Holy Land. But if there’s an attack, they’ll report it too. Europe, Israel’s backyard, doesn’t feel safe. Our soldiers, our young people, South America, it’s not safe. It’s not just that they’re arresting soldiers, which is bad enough. Just, we’re not welcome anymore.

Our audience won’t necessarily understand this. Israelis will. One of the major gateways for Israelis to the world is the Eurovision singing competition. Sports was never that big because we’re not that good at sports. So we had a good basketball team, Maccabi Tel Aviv, and so the Euro League, that’s important. But in most cases, Israel wasn’t part of Europe. We were put in Asia or Middle East, where people wouldn’t even compete with us, so we had no chance. Then we’re put into Europe, but we can’t really succeed there. So it’s never been a great story.

The one area… already in the 70s, we won the Eurovision. I think it was…

Yossi: Repeatedly.

Donniel: Repeatedly. Even last year with all the anti-Semitism, we won the popular vote. And the judges, of course, the anti-Semitic judges, it was a vote based on popular vote and judges. The judges put us into second place when we should have been in first. But now there’s five countries who are now declaring that we’re going to boycott the Eurovision if Israel participates. The world is shrinking.

And his base is now asking, this war in Gaza, okay, I’m there. October 7th, we can’t live with Hamas. Necessary. The existential war, the “milchemet t’kumah,” how would I translate it? This is the war of Israel’s rebirth, rebirth out of the dangers of Hamas, as if it’s parallel to ’48. Whatever it is, this is the necessary just war and whatever price we have to pay.

But I think part of what’s happening now, and you see this with the amount of people showing up in the army, there’s fatigue. And not only fatigue in serving in Gaza, there’s fatigue of the consequences of Gaza. And it’s changing who we are, what our experience is as Israelis in the world. It’s changing our experience. And Israelis are saying, this is not what I want.

And Netanyahu, like most Israelis, but he has the most skilled pollsters, every day measures where Israelis are, and he doesn’t speak off the cuff. Everything is measured. He basically realized, I have to marshal my just-Netanyahu people with an ideology. And that ideology is, it’s not me. It’s not Gaza. It’s not even anti-Semitism. He even dropped the anti-Semitism card. It is Muslims, Muslims in Europe, and it is social media skills, and it is just an inevitable, and he’s giving them now a new vision. Here, if you’re with me now, we’re Sparta.

And Sparta, by the way, is not like Masada, where, because, you know, that’s dying nation, that’s suicide nation. There’s a nobility of fighting, even though Sparta ultimately is destroyed too. But he eloquently leaves that aside.

Yossi: Israelis are not going to buy it.

Donniel: They’re not.

Yossi: Because we have been told over and over again, by Netanyahu himself, that the promise of Zionism is a better life for individual Jews and for the Jewish people. And first, Netanyahu destroyed that promise of a safe refuge on October 7th, by allowing October 7th to happen on his watch. And now he’s destroying the promise of a good life that Israel solemnly made to the Jewish people. And you know, you mentioned religious Zionists earlier. There’s something really interesting about the relationship between Israel and the community of nations that religious Zionists saw as messianic.

Donniel: That’s correct.

Yossi: And what was the promise, what is the promise of the messianic era? That the Jewish people is going to find safety and acceptance in the world. And here, Zionism comes along and begins the process, which Rav Kook, the great theologian, mystic of religious Zionism, saw as literally messianic.

And you know who else saw this, Donniel? The Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, whose vision of an imminent messianic era depended, in part, on the growing acceptance of the Jewish people in the world. He loved America because Jews were accepted in America. He loved Israel because Israel was enhancing the Jewish place in the world. And he saw this not in psychological terms, in we’re feeling proud; he saw this literally in messianic terms. And so this is the most anti-messianic, to say nothing of anti-Zionist, speech that any Israeli prime minister has ever made.

Donniel: You know, Mondays is my day with my grandchildren. I leave work early. I spend four to five hours with my grandchildren. I’m called Baba. That’s instead of Saba, Grandpa. My oldest granddaughter named me Baba. I told her my name is Saba, which is grandfather in Hebrew, and she didn’t hear the “s” and she gave me my name. I’m Baba. It’s Baba time.

And we had a glorious time yesterday. It was just, you know, sometimes there’s kids, different ages, works better, works less. Everybody was in great moods. We just had the greatest time. We did art projects and we had sushi. We were just, I dropped them off. It was just perfect.

And then I come home and I listen to the news and I hear this and I listen to Netanyahu’s super Sparta speech. I have to tell you, Yossi, I was sick.

Yossi: I felt sick too.

Donniel: One of the challenges since my mother died is that things affect me more deeply. A lot of my defense mechanisms aren’t, they’re not as guaranteed. I can’t count on them. It just, I literally, I can’t tell you, Yossi, I felt sick. In my nature, I held on to something because Israelis aren’t going to buy this.

And now let me quote a poll. Let’s spread the good news, whether the poll is right or wrong. I think it’s indicative of something. There’s a poll by an organization, I won’t quote it. It was put out in one of Israelis’ major newspapers, Walla News, said that 78% of Israelis, when asked, “Do you support a Trump peace plan that involves the following features: End of the war, disarming Hamas, return of hostages, an expansion of the Abraham Accords, including Saudi Arabia and creating a front against Iran, and in order to do so, not annexing the West Bank and quite to the contrary, beginning the process of separation from the Palestinian people, all of the above.”

When you look at every poll, Israelis, they don’t believe in it, it’s not possible. This pollster presented a vision, a utopia, and 78% of Israelis said yes. So whether it’s exactly 78…

Yossi: What, a utopia that is realistic. That’s possible.

Donniel: But from Israelis, because once Donald Trump is behind it and you add Saudi Arabia, all the rest comes in. We know Hamas, hostages, all of the above, and everybody knows that if we now annex the West Bank, that’s the end. The Emirates said, “Abram Accords is over if you annex.” Egypt, Sisi, turns to Israeli society in the Doha meeting, and he turns, he says, “I’m not talking to the government. Israelis, I want you to know, all peace in our region is now being undermined, and I’m your peace partner.”

So here it is. Of course, pollsters all depend on how you ask the question.

Yossi: Let’s say it’s 60%. That’s still extraordinary. It’s extraordinary.

Donniel: But he excited an imagination. What I think is basically happening, you don’t have, and I’ve mentioned this in the past, we don’t have an anti-war movement here because of Gaza rights. We don’t have an anti-war movement because it’s criminal. Even though there’s increasing numbers of reservists who are now signing and saying, this is not who we’re supposed to do, and who themselves are speaking about significant moral shortcomings in the way the war is being fought.

You have some, but the primary anti-war movement is to bring back the hostages. You speak about it a lot. The moral imperative. It’s not the moral rights of Gazans, it’s the moral rights of the hostages.

Netanyahu’s shifting the discourse to identity is actually possibly the beginning of a new future. We’re seeing it. And when he uses these terms, he’s trying to claim it and win it. But as you said, he won’t. This is not the Israel that Israelis want. I’m willing to fight for my survival. I’m willing to go to war. I’m willing to do all of the above, 500 days, 600 days, bring it on, if there’s a cause. But when you have a war, which is no longer, I believe, a just war, it’s lost that cause.

Even the chief of staff said the objective of capturing Gaza City, I don’t know if you noticed, he didn’t say it’s to defeat Hamas, it’s to defeat the Gaza Brigade. Okay, so you get that. What about the other brigade? It’s something else now, and now they’re asking themselves, what type of life is left for us? What is this doing to us as a people? And I’m hoping that that will begin to generate a new conversation about the war, not to speak about a new conversation towards the next elections.

Yossi, we’re at a time, last thoughts. And what are your last thoughts about all of this very, very strange, troubling, disturbing time?

Yossi: I share your basic optimism for one simple reason. To create Sparta requires Spartans. Israelis are the farthest removed from the disciplined… people are going to line up and take orders. Jews are an anarchic people. And Jews are also a people that like to live nicely. Israelis like the good life. And we don’t want to go back to the way things were. When I moved to Israel, it was just on the border of the old austere Israel and the beginning of the new successful Israel. And I don’t want to go back to an Israel where you had to wait, and I’m just using this as a metaphor, three years, have a phone. But that’s what Sparta means. We’re not Spartans. We don’t want to live in Spartan conditions. We have a prime minister who is the exact opposite of Sparta.

Donniel: No, he’ll go for Sparta, as long as there’s champagne and cigars.

Yossi: Yes, yes. I don’t know. Well, it’s a problem because he also likes to dine in the world’s best restaurants.

Donniel: Non-Kosher restaurants.

YossiL Yes. It’s a fantasy. It’s ludicrous. What worries me, of course, is the fact that we are descending more and more into the nightmare vision of a nation that shall dwell alone in the worst way possible without the spiritual and moral nobility of what the Torah intended. And this is what we need to find against.

Donniel: In listening to your final thoughts, there is one section of Israel which does welcome Sparta, but it’s not Netanyahu’s base.

Yossi: That’s right.

Donniel: It is a subsection of the religious Zionists.

Yossi: Yes.

Donniel: And it is the ultra-nationalist Ben Gvir voters. So Netanyahu, in this, was actually reaching out to an audience that’s no longer his.

Yossi: And they’ll never vote for him.

Donniel: And they’ll never vote because they see the truth. They’re not Netanyahu. They don’t vote Netanyahu because they know that he’s a two-statist, that he’s a compromiser. But he’s trying to wear this language and, in the meantime, this identity.

So to our audience, the war has a new dimension. It’s now also a battle over identity. And Netanyahu took a stand. I think a destructive one, one that’s not going to help him.

Yossi: Self-destructive.

Donniel: And one that we begin to see something else emerging. I would love, and I do, and I run around Israel and I talk about moral imperatives. One of the sad things is how little that resonates. But maybe a question about, who do you want to be? Who do you really want to be super Sparta? And since the majority of Israelis don’t, maybe that will begin a new direction for all of us.

Yossi, it’s such a pleasure to be with you.

Yossi: This is great. Thank you.

Donniel: Really a pleasure. And friends, this is, For Heaven’s Sake, Israel at War, day 711.