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In a frenzied media cycle, Identity/Crisis creates better conversations about the issues facing contemporary Jewish life. Host Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, talks with leading thinkers to unpack current events affecting Jewish communities in North America, Israel, and around the world, revealing the core Jewish values underlying the issues that matter most to you.

The Centre Must Hold Transcript

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

Justus: Hi everyone. Welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show from the Shalom Hartman Institute, creating better conversations about the essential questions facing contemporary Jewish life. We’re recording on September 10th, 2024. I’m Justus Baird, your guest host. I direct Hartman’s Research Center and our interfaith work. Today’s episode is about politics, specifically centrism as a political ideology.

I want to introduce today’s episode by talking about something that might seem a little off-topic: marital compromise. My wife and I, we’re both rabbis. We met in rabbinical school, but we weren’t at the same school. She was at JTS, the Rabbinical School for the Conservative Movement, and I was at HUC, the Seminary for the Reform Movement. This was back in 2002, more than 20 years ago. And as we contemplated getting married, our friends, even the leadership of the seminaries, were all curious and some were quite concerned. They peppered us with questions.

How will it work? They asked. What do mean? We said we love each other. You know, they asked, how will you keep Shabbat? How will you keep kosher? What will your policy be about performing interfaith marriages?

Our friends and teachers weren’t wrong to ask these questions. We were training to become rabbis of different ideological movements, movements that actually do have different, even competing, ideological commitments. And if we were going to build a home and maybe a family together, we were going to have to develop a single practice. So, as we dated, we tackled these questions, and by tackling, I mean we talked. A lot.

I was in LA, she was in New York, and we talked almost every day by phone. We set aside Mondays and Thursdays, Torah reading days, to focus on the hard questions of our relationship: Shabbat, kashrut, and interfaith marriage. I won’t tell you how we answered these questions because the point of this story is not what the answers were. Suffice it to say that on various questions we both changed our practices, though I think I changed a lot more than she did. And on other questions, like whether we would officiate at interfaith marriage, we kept our individual commitments, and to this day, our practice is different.

We’ve been married 19 years now. During those years, I’ve counseled dozens of other couples preparing to get married. I feel pretty safe in saying that if you scratch the surface of any marriage that has lasted more than a few years, you will find many instances where that couple constructed some type of compromise so that the relationship could work. Whether you’re married or not, I think you understand that listening to each other and making compromise is marriage 101.

But something happens when we expand out from a partnered couple to a community and then to our larger society. Couples are expected to work things out in order to live together and maybe raise kids. But when we practice local or state or national politics, somehow the value of working things out, and especially the idea of compromise, seems to switch from a positive value to a negative value. Politicians championing compromise are perceived as disloyal and weak, while those that dig in their heels, even if it means getting nothing done, are perceived as loyal and strong. We all know that our societies have become politically polarized.

This is true in the US, in Israel, and in most other countries. People choose where to live based on their politics, where to go to shul based on their politics, even whom to marry based on their politics. Political polarization has changed the political landscape dramatically.

We used to talk about liberal versus conservative, but now we have added extreme versions on either side. We unconsciously talk about the far left and the far right as if they are independent political tribes. And what’s even worse is that the practice of politics seems to have become a game in which each team tries to get just enough votes to win a ruling majority, and then once we’re in power, Our goal is to ram through every legislative change, judicial ruling, and administrative appointment that we can with little to no concern for the views of the opposition.

Needless to say, this situation shows little to no respect for the idea of centrism, which is what we’re going to talk about today. I’m here with an expert on political centrism, Yair Zivan. Zivan served as an advisor to Yair Lapid during Lapid’s tenure as Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, and now as leader of the opposition. Yair Zivan was also an aide for President Shimon Peres, and this summer he published a book of essays about political centrism titled, The Centre Must Hold: Why Centrism is the Answer to Extremism and Polarization. Yair, welcome to Identity,Crisis.

Yair: Thank you for having me.

Justus: So Yair, let me start by saying that I do not have what we might call a political mind. I have strong moral and sometimes even political convictions, but in general, I look to others for expert political or policy analysis. As I read parts of the book and listened to the conversations you’ve been having about these issues, I got a sense that centrism as a concept is not very well understood by everyone.

One of the claims is that centrism is not the middle ground, the midpoint between left and right, which is what many of us might think of when we hear the word centrism. So tell us what you and other thinkers who are championing these ideas mean by the word centrism. And maybe given my introduction, is compromise a key part of it?

Yair: So it’s interesting, I’ll jump in with the compromise part to go off from your introduction and compromise is certainly a part of it, it’s not all of it. One of the things you said in your introduction perhaps part jokingly was that you felt you’d given up or you’d changed more than your wife had as part of the compromise, but the result was worth it. The overall, I would hope, outcome of that compromise is one that you’re pleased with and don’t regret.

The idea of compromise when it comes to centrism is not finding the political middle. It’s not to say, you believe one thing, I believe another. Now where’s the exact middle point between the two? You believe in keeping interfaith marriage, I believe in not ordaining interfaith couples, so we’ll only do it 20 days or 15 days a month and on the other days we won’t do it. That’s a middle point. That is not the type of compromise that centrism talks about.

It actually talks about the kind of compromise that you are talking about, the one that requires us to have difficult conversations to engage with the issues deeply, and then to come out with something where maybe not everybody’s happy, not everybody has everything they want, but everybody can live within one society.

And I think one of things that you implied and started to say in your introduction, which is exactly right, is we have this idea that compromise is important. It’s a positive value, I’d say certainly in family life, when you’re in a team, when you’re working with other people, but then when it gets to politics, it’s a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of betrayal, it’s a sign of a lack of conviction.

The fault for that, by the way, lies with moderates, centrists, with people who haven’t fought enough for those words and there are, I think, a series of other words and other concepts that we could add to that. Moderation, pragmatism, nuance. Those words have all become associated with weakness or fuzziness or lack of clarity, of a mushy middle point in politics rather than us standing up and saying and this is what the goal of the book is and the conversations that I’ve been having and lots of others as well saying, actually, those things are positive values which are, what make our society work, the argument that I’m trying to make in the book to broaden out to your question.

There is a thing called political centrism. It’s a coherent worldview with a coherent political program. It has a set of principles and values that we can go into and we can talk about in more depth. And I can pick out kind of a few of them. But it’s based around an approach that embraces and champions things like compromise and moderation and pragmatism as positives, as the building blocks of what makes a political society work, a democratic political society work. And I want to give an example from politics.

In the Israeli Knesset we have 120 members. I work for Yair Lapid, the leader of the opposition, and if after the next elections we were by some miracle to get 61 votes and able to pass through any piece of legislation we wanted, any reform we wanted, any budget we wanted, with 61 votes for and 59 votes against.

And I had to water down what it was we wanted to do in order to broaden that consensus from 61 to 75 or 80 or 90 members of Knesset. I would do it. Not because I have to. It’s not compromised from a position of weakness. It’s compromised from a position of strength that says there is a value to building a broader consensus around a set of values, around a set of principles, being very clear on what our red lines are, but trying to broaden that out.

And I think that comes from a slight sense of humility, maybe the other side has something to add to the conversation and to contribute towards the policy we’re making. I think it creates better policy, more sustainable long-term policy, and it creates a healthier political environment. Your marriage works because you know that your wife will compromise on something that’s really important to you and she knows you will do the same for her. A political system works if the opposition and the government or the coalition know that there is a basic level of respect. There are basic rules of the game that both sides will keep. Centrism tries to hold that together.

The broader point, I think beyond that, is centrism today is the place where we fight for liberal democracy. Not just as a governing idea, but liberal democracy as a set of structures, a set of institutions, a set of values and a way of doing politics. That means freedom of speech. It means an independent judiciary. It means a strong civil society. It means protecting the institutions of state from people who try to politicize them. That’s a core part of what political centrism I think brings to the table today.

There are a series of others I think that we can go into as well. Equality of opportunity, the idea that the primary role of government is to give everybody the opportunity to succeed. It’s not equality of outcome. You have to work hard. We believe in innovation and entrepreneurship and people working hard in order to succeed. But we also understand that not everybody starts from the same place. And the goal of government is to try to give people the best opportunity in life. It’s why you see in the book and in centrists in general such a focus on issues like education, health, infrastructure and I’d say kind of fighting crime or anti-social behaviour as key components to being able to give everybody that quality of opportunity.

The other thing that I would add and we’d be happy for us to talk about more is centrism offers a complete antidote to much of the politics today which is driven by fear, division, anger and it’s always us against them. And one of the things that centrism tries to bring to the table is what I heavily borrow, or I should say steal, from former chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who was, I think, one of the great thinkers and writers of our time, an inspiration to me and many others, I’m sure.

And Rabbi Sacks talked about the politics of hope. And he talked about the politics of hope as opposed to optimism, which he called a passive virtue, he talked about hope as an active virtue, as creating a positive vision and then going out and doing it. And I think that inspires much of what political centrism tries to do. It links into this idea of liberal patriotism, of a positive national vision that we can all unite around, that we can create. And I think when you start to put those things together, you get the building blocks of what this political movement is, and this political approach is, and why it’s so fundamentally different to the politics that dominates, I think, most of Western society sadly today.

Justus: Okay, great. So you brought up a number of things that I know we’re going to talk about during the conversation. Before we get to some of them, want to, if you still feel a little confused about whether centrism is about creating a political party or a recipe for how a political leader leads. So let me give you these two options and maybe you can react to them.

One case would be centrism as a recipe for a political party. A second option would be centrism as a recipe for political leadership, more of a set of behaviors that a member of any political party that isn’t extreme could embrace. And I’m asking because I can imagine an individual politician from a liberal or conservative party embracing some or even all of the values and practices that you started to mention and that you describe in the book, you could have a Republican centrist or a Democratic centrist.

Another way to ask the question is if we take the case of the US, a two-party system, would it be better if both the Republican and Democratic parties adopted these values? Or would it be better to create a new third centrist party that competes with the left and the right, which seems pretty unlikely to happen?

Yair: So in the book I talk about the different types of political systems that exist. There are places where there is space for a centrist political party that unites centrist forces within it as Yesh Atid does in Israel. It’s a long-standing centrist party with principles and ideals, a set of policy commitments if you will, and a centrist mindset to how to govern. It was what allowed Yair Lapid to form the previous government and hand over the Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, of a much smaller party, recognizing the value of compromise and pragmatism in that situation.

There are systems where you only really have two political parties, where it’s very difficult for a third party to break through, the US being one example. In those places, the thing that I would advocate for is strong centrist factions within those parties. I’m a realist by nature. Not everybody is going to be a centrist. There are always going to be people who think differently and that’s okay. The goal should be for there to be strong centrist factions that either dominate the leadership of the party, as I would say happened in the Labour Party in the United Kingdom which rejected the politics of the far left, dragged the party backm and is led by the moderate centrist faction within the Labour Party today, as Tony Blair did before them and as Keir Starmer is doing today.

The same can be true on the conservative side in the UK, on the Republican side in the United States. One of the authors in the book is Malcolm Turnbull, who was the leader of the Liberal Party in Australia, that’s the center-right party if you will, and to create that strong faction that does one of two things, either it dominates and leads the party in the ideal situation, or, it says to the leader of the party, you can’t govern without us and without our style and without our approach to politics.

That is to say, there might be a very loud fringe in our party today. Whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican, I imagine you would be able to identify with that. A radical fringe within the party that makes a lot of noise. The goal of a strong centrist faction in both of those parties is to say to the leader of the party, it’s fine that they’re there, but you should know they’re smaller than us, they’re less important than us, and you need us in order to govern. We have to be as committed to our values as the fringes are to theirs.

One of the problems that I think people identify with centrism that I would like to combat and a misconception that I would like to overcome is this idea that we’re not as committed. Because we embrace ideas like moderation and compromise, we’re less committed than the fringes, than the extremes. Daniel Lubetzky in his essay says, radicals wake up in the morning thinking about changing the world, moderates wake up in the morning thinking about lunch. So we have to not be thinking just about lunch, we have to be thinking about how we want the world to look and then we have to go out and do it. That I think is the answer, which is it adapts to the different political systems where you can create a large, strong, powerful, centrist party where the system allows it, as Macron did in France, as Yair Lapid did here in Israel, I think it’s great. Where it’s not, you build the strong faction within the two -party system.

Justus: Okay, so my next question is about why someone who’s really passionate about their political views would want to adopt centristism. So early in my career, I worked in what we might call the religious left. These were people of many different faiths who were progressive on most issues and passionately so. We focused on issues of LGBTQ equality, racial justice, economic inequality, climate.

And the people that I worked with, and I’ll include myself in this description, we were very passionate about our views and we believe that we had the moral high ground and we wanted to win. And different leaders within that group advocated different methodologies. Some focused on legislative change, some on community organizing or social change. But someone in that environment, really deep on the left or the right, let’s say, why would they embrace centrism? Is centrism a political identity primarily for people who don’t identify completely with the left or the right? Or does it have something to offer people who are passionate liberals or passionate conservatives?

Yair: I think centrism lays out something that you can passionately get behind. Look, I respect people who have strong political views and I think that’s okay. Why do I think centrism is more attractive? Because in the end, my goal is to be effective. My goal is to move things forward.

You gave the example of LGBT rights, something I’m personally very passionate about and committed to and have been as long as I’ve had political awareness. I look at the way it was done in the UK over the years, slower than I would like. Gay marriage in the UK took longer than I would have wanted it to take, but in a way it was done so effectively that it’s not a political issue anymore. There’s no talk about whether it is or isn’t right. It was done gradually, pragmatically, and in a way that is so effective that it’s taken it off the table, which is, as far as I’m concerned, a success. A success that maybe takes a bit longer than you would want it to when you’re on the radical fringes.

The other thing that I would say is if you believe, as I do, that polarization is a danger to our ability to function as a society, then having a purist political view on something, being unable or unwilling to move towards the centre, to look for areas of compromise, to maybe learn from the other side, I think puts you in a position where you’re unwittingly, I would hope, doing damage to the fabric of society.

Now, there are people that you can’t compromise with. Not everybody is part of the tent. There is a value and I have a ton of respect for people who lead and kind of drag us further forward on issues that maybe we’re not seeing enough, right? The sense doesn’t advocate a status quo. I always upset my conservative friends here when I tell them that Edmund Burke wrote about a commitment to the past, the present and the future, right? The generations that were, that are and that will be. It’s not just about what was. It’s not about keeping things as they used to be, also about what comes next. He was a centrist, they just claimed him very effectively for the conservative movement.

I think there is a value when that politics is meant to make things better. The problem we have today is that the fringes have become infused with extremism and it’s no longer about pushing a particular policy agenda. There are too many people on the extremes whose goal is to undermine the foundations of our political system. And that I think is where it gets dangerous.

Now I talk about the far left and the far right and it’s important to kind of clarify because I think people always kind think about their own political space that they’re in and say, well, I don’t really see a danger from the political left where I am, or I don’t really see a danger from the political right. There are absolutely places where one side of the political map, one extreme is more prominent and more dangerous than the other. It’s not always a balance between the two sides.

Today in Israel, the risk to us comes from an extreme far, right? That is the one of the things that I identify as one of the biggest dangers to Israeli society into Israeli democracy. There are places in Latin America where you could point to a far left that I think is far more problematic than a far right, say spaces in academia for example, where a far left is much stronger and a much more dominant and worrying force. So it’s not always, and it’s important to say, it’s not always that there’s equal dangers on each side.

Centrism has the advantage, I think, of being able to call out the extremes on both sides. That is to say, I don’t have any problem calling out a radical far left voice at the protests that I go to here in Israel for the hostages. I believe bringing back hostages is the most urgent priority for the state of Israel today. I don’t have a problem calling out far left voices that are inciting to violence in these protests, just as I don’t have a problem calling out far right voices that are inciting against the hostage families.

My criticism sometimes of people on the centre left and on the centre right who start to bleed towards those places. They’re very quick to criticise the other side and less so to criticise their own side. And I think, you know, we’re on a podcast that talks about Jewish issues. We see that with antisemitism all the time, right? A very quick reaction to call out antisemitism that comes from what you perceive to be the other side and slightly less enthusiasm to call out antisemitism from your own side.

Justus: I want to focus on these extremes the left and the right for just a moment. In Yair Lapid’s essay in your book, he argues that seeing our societies as separated between left and right is kind of outdated and that the real struggle we are facing is between moderates and extremists, and I heard you tell a story about using that line to publicize the book, so talk a little bit about this reframing. Do you see this is a core move of centrism, of putting the the left and right together against the extremes? And if so, what are the implications for the non-extremist parties? And could framing our political battles this way actually lead to a center left and center right parties that they feel like they’re in some kind of shared work together against the extremes?

Yair: Sure, so I don’t think it’s something that the centre is doing. I think it’s something that exists within society. One of the things that we often talk about is politics as a horseshoe, rather than as a spectrum. So if you imagine that the left is on one side of the horseshoe and the right sits on the other, you have the centre at the top of the horseshoe in between. But the left and the right are closer to each other. And the reason they’re closer to each other is because some of the things are fundamentally the same.

You take the issue of Israel at the moment. If I was to give you a text by some of the far right critics of Israel and some of the far left critics of Israel and remove just a couple of words, you wouldn’t be able to tell which was which. They are so close together in the adoption of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and the language that they use that it’s really indistinguishable, often one from the other. So when you think about politics as a horseshoe, you realize that it really is the center against the extremes. The extremes that are trying to tear apart, I think, the fabric of liberal democracy, which I will say may be not always a thing that’s vocalized enough in modern political discourse, I think liberal democracy is the best form of government that we have. I think it’s important, I think it gives us the individual freedoms that we have, I think it secures the foundations of our society, I think it improves itself and fixes itself which is an enormous value, and I think it’s worth defending.

The fringes are about tearing that apart. I give the example of freedom of speech where the far right says we’re always censored and we’re pro free speech and we want complete free speech and that’s true all the way up to the point when they start banning books they don’t like in libraries. And you think about that and you say, okay, that’s because when we get into this horseshoe theory, you see that the fringes are actually much closer together and it’s the center that holds that ground of liberal democracy as a core value and of the institutions that come from it.

So what I think it allows us to do when we frame politics like that in our head and the political system, the political space like that allows us to create a government like the government that Yair Lapid was able to create with Naftali Bennett. A government that brings together people who are not all centrist. Not every member of our coalition, we had eight parties in that coalition, I was privileged to serve in that government, not every party was a centrist party. But the governing ethos of the coalition was centrist. And when did it fall apart? It fell apart when some of the fringes went back to an all or nothing politics and said, if I don’t get everything I want my way, and we heard it from people in Meretz and we heard it from people in the Naftalia Bennett party, it tore the whole thing apart and everybody ended up with nothing.

The value of thinking about politics like that is that it does allow you to create wider coalitions. It does allow you to bring people together and it does allow you to govern with a focus on something that often gets lost, which is it is not about a pure ideological victory of one side over the other. Ultimately, the goal of politics, the goal of government, when you win an election you form a government, is to make people’s lives better. That’s the primary goal. That’s what we should be focused on. And that you are able to do with a centrist mindset and a centrist governing principle for a coalition, even if you’re bringing in people who aren’t necessarily centrist, who don’t think of themselves and who don’t hold all the same views as you do.

Justus: Okay, so I want to ask one question that’s a little bit outside of politics. If this is a stretch for you, can tell me. But I want to see if you can apply these ideas to Jewish communities and how they work. So think with me for a moment about how centrism as a set of commitments and behaviors might apply to Jewish communal life. If I’m a rabbi of a synagogue or a Hillel professional on campus or a lay leader in a federation, all of these Jewish leaders are navigating extreme political polarization, especially around attitudes toward Israel. And most of the voices that these Jewish leaders are hearing from are from those two places at the bottom of the horseshoe, the passionate extremes. How might these ideas about centrism shape the way that Jewish leaders lead through this particular environment that we’re living in?

Yair: So it’s interesting. First of all, I think you’re doing a much better job in the US than we are in Israel in terms of keeping communities together. There’s a lot that Israel can learn from the US in terms of creating Jewish spaces where people come together and talk. Friends here in the Reform movement, I imagine, struggle to see a situation where they sit around a table with Orthodox leadership in a way that happens far more regularly in the United States, whether through organizations, communal organizations, or spaces that are created by various organizations. So one is, think I would say, you’re already doing a better job in the diaspora than I think we’re doing here. And that’s tragic and that is something that we have to deal with here in Israel, I think in the long run.

The way to do it, and this is a reflection of the political system in the Jewish community, leadership system, because it’s a leadership issue, is to have those voices be loud and amplified, the voices of centrism, the voices that say, wait, we have to find a way to live together, we have to keep our community together, we all have to compromise, we all have to find pragmatic ways forward. We should be talking in ways in terms of hope, because that’s something that has always driven us forward. It’s interesting, you know, the book, when I looked back and this was not intentional, has a disproportionate number of Jewish authors and some of them I didn’t know they were Jewish when I asked them to write, I found out later in conversations or references that they wrote.

And I tried to think about why that is and I think there are two reasons why there’s such an overlap between centrism and the Jewish community that can apply to Jewish communal life. One is perhaps more than any other community, any other faith group, we know the dangers of extremism. We know where extremism leads through our own history and our texts of what extreme positions have done to us as a people in the past and external extremist forces and what they’ve done to us throughout our history. So we should be more aware than anyone about the dangers of extremism and therefore by default also the values of centrism.

The second thing is we have a very long and proud tradition of arguing, of fighting things out, of sitting and debating and discussing. And after we come to a conclusion, it’s not, you know, we think about Jewish texts. It’s not that the conclusion is then a compromise between Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai. The conclusion is one side or the other, but they’re still able to keep sitting and debating, the debates continue, the conversations continue and we find that sometimes it’s one, sometimes it’s the other.

We find within our communities throughout our history the ability to value those conversations and debates. That’s something that we need to keep going. That’s actually somewhere where as a community not only can we rally around that as a concept I think, but we can also lead. It’s something that I believe is intrinsic to who we are as a people. We should be able to move that out to the society around us as well. So those, I think, are two of the reasons.

And the way to do it really comes back to the same thing I say to political people and political figures. And that is you have to be passionate about it. You have to believe in it and you have to fight for it and you have to stand up and talk about it. And you have to say, look, when a rabbi stands up in front of their community on Friday night or on Shabbat morning, and gives a dvar Torah and talks about the value of moderation and pragmatism and talks about the importance of compromise within our homes, within our communities and within our wider society, that is a voice that people listen to. And I think there is an opportunity there to strengthen those voices.

Justus: Great, so thanks for moving in that direction. So I want to focus on the pragmatism side with my next question. You’ve framed centrism as having a very, very deep commitment to getting things done, at least as an equal or maybe even occasionally greater value than particular ideological commitments. And some of the writers in the book acknowledge that champions of centrism have a steep hill to climb in terms of popularizing these ideas. And I want to say, you don’t have to be a marketing expert to know that embrace complexity is not going to be a successful political tagline.

So I want to raise the stakes a little more on this question I’m trying to formulate about making centrism popular. You mentioned Daniel Lubetzky’s essay. Also in that essay, he tells a personal story about realizing how the extremists in both Israeli and Palestinian societies were the ones dominating the media while the moderates were quietly seeding the media landscape. And it seems kind of to be a general truth that extreme fear-mongering views are more successful at grabbing attention, which is one reason that our society is politically polarized.

So what are some of the ways that you think centrist-leaning politicians, parties, ideas can be communicated more successfully. Can centrism actually compete in today’s media landscape?

Yair: So there are a few questions I think within your question. There’s the question of the traditional media and how we deal with traditional media, where I think we’re okay. I think if we are confident and coherent and articulate and passionate, we can compete in traditional media. It’s true that there are trash media outlets that look for clickbait and are just interested in the cheap headline. I don’t know how much they shape people’s political opinions and I think we can overcome that, I’ll say how in a moment, because it links to the second part.

The second challenge is social media which is a completely different area and one that we certainly have to find solutions for. In both those cases, and a part of me is critical I think of centrists here, we kind of use that as an excuse. We use it as something to hide behind. It’s more difficult. Okay, it’s more difficult. That’s our challenge, right? There’s lots of things that make being a centrist more attractive, which is we speak to a wider potential audience. There are more people who can be convinced by our arguments than on the fringes. I also think we’re right.

But the way to do it is to create a narrative that people can get behind. You look at the most successful centrist politicians and the narrative that works time and time again is one of hope. It’s one that creates a positive national story. I was in the US recently and it was the anniversary of Clinton’s acceptance speech at the DNC. You go back and you read that first speech. It is a speech full of hope, full of values, full of a positive national story. Clinton was a archetype of a centrist in the 90s. There have been changes since then, there have been policies that have moved on. But as an idea of how to do centrism, I go back to that speech a lot as a fantastic way of looking at how to craft that narrative. I would say Blair did the same in the UK. JFK certainly. I think Obama campaigned certainly as a centrist and “hope” was the merchandise, right, it was on all the t-shirts. There is something about creating that positive narrative that allows you to combat the challenges of media and social media.

The other thing is, I would just say, just be better at it. Don’t back down. One of the things, look, here in Israel, what is one of the things that the right, particularly the extreme right, tries to tag everybody else with is that they’re more patriotic. Why were the protests here against the judicial overhaul so successful? The symbol of those protests was the Israeli flag. They were a patriotic protest movement. We said, this is for Israel. This is for the country that we love. This is for Zionism. This is for something that we believe in and we’re passionate about.

And one of the realizations that a lot of people had is, we’re not willing to give up patriotism to the right. Nor, by the way, am I willing to give up empathy to the left, that the left are the only people that care about the weakest in society, that just isn’t true. And so we have a responsibility, I think, to be clear in our messaging to create an overarching narrative that gives people something rally around and to be no less passionate, not to give ground.

And I’ve said this before, but when I uploaded the first tweet about the book, and maybe the mistake is that I uploaded it onto Twitter, as opposed to on LinkedIn and Facebook and there the responses were much more reasonable, but within 20 minutes of tweeting about the book I was a communist, Nazi, a genocide denier, the whole book was a scam to cover for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, or it was a scam to convince right-wing people to secretly vote for a communist left, or a scam to convince left-wing people to secretly vote for a Nazi right. There was a barrage of abuse.

Now I understand the inclination to kind of hide under the table and say leave me alone. But that isn’t going to win us elections and that isn’t going to give us the ability to change the society around us. We have to be willing to fight back and we have to be strong and we have to be committed. We have to be able to develop a thick skin and take the abuse that comes from the extremes and win normal people over. And I really believe that we can do that and we are doing that.

I’m given hope by the situation in Israel today. When you look at polls, and there’s not much to be hopeful about in Israel, but after the most horrific terror attack, the most difficult year of our lives, after all the tragedy and the sadness and the darkness that we have gone through this past year, and it has been undoubtedly the worst year of our collective lives as a country, and it goes on every day with the hostages being held in Gaza. Despite that, the normal reaction is for a country to move sharply to the right, to become darker, more suspicious, more aggressive, to look for simpler solutions.

And you look at the polls in Israel and that isn’t what’s happened. Israeli public has moved broadly to the center. They’ve moved towards more centrist voices. The government that we were in, that Yair Lapid led, today has a majority in every single poll. Look at a poll that came out just last night. It’s a coalition, the coalition that we had back then today would have 66 seats, because the Israeli public says, we actually realise that we don’t want that. We want something different.

And so I’m hopeful that with the right message, it helps if you have charismatic leaders who can deliver it. But with the right overall narrative and the passion behind it, I think we can overcome the challenges that exist in media. I will say, and I’m careful because I am a passionate defender of a free press, and a free press means a press that is allowed to write things we don’t like and allowed to criticise us and has to do those things. I will say media has a responsibility and journalists should always be asking themselves whether they are contributing, I think, not to centrism, not to a particular political party or movement, but to a healthier society, whether they are doing their job in the best possible way. I think there are very good people in media and I think there are also people who fall short of that standard.

Justus: Okay, so let me ask the last question where you took us, which was with Israeli society and to see if you can apply centrism to the thorniest political challenges. Last week, Israeli society and Jews around the world mourned the murder of six of the hostages. And I’ll speak for myself here that it feels like rescuing the hostages has become almost politically impossible and maybe even physically impossible. Today marks 340 days in captivity. How would centrist approach the hostage crisis?

Yair: I think it’s a good example actually of where we don’t look for a middle ground. The centrist position is very clear I think, which is to say bringing back the hostages is the most urgent issue. It’s not the most important in and of itself, it is the most urgent. It’s important that we destroy Hamas. It’s important that we allow people to move back to the north and live safely. It is important and much more urgent that we bring the hostages back home. That, I think, is a very clear centrist position. It’s why there is overwhelming support for a deal, right? And that deal might be difficult and we should never forget the enemy that we’re dealing with a horrific terror organisation. And you know, when we apportion blame for the situation that we’re in, Hamas is to blame, Hamas is responsible for the situation that we’re in.

But the reason there is such widespread support for a deal is the understanding that the importance is obviously there and the urgency is at the height. There are, and I want to try and word this carefully, there are a number of reasons why it’s so important to bring back the hostages. The first one is we need to save their lives. The government, the state, the institutions, including the security forces failed those people, failed in the most basic task of protecting them on October 7th. The state of Israel didn’t protect its citizens. We have a responsibility to bring them back. We have a responsibility to save lives.

There’s a Jewish responsibility there that I’m constantly amazed doesn’t get more attention within public discourse in the Jewish state. I think pidyon shevuyim should be a phrase that we hear every single day from the religious leadership of this country and I’m sad to think we hear it enough from them. So there is an incredibly strong, and is most important is the moral case of saving those lives, and bringing those people home who the country failed.

There’s also a very practical reason, which is, Israeli society will not be able to heal and rebuild unless we bring them back. Bringing them back is the foundation of being able to rebuild the trust in Israeli society, the solidarity in Israeli society, the unity in Israeli society. We ask every parent in this country, most parents in this country, to send their 18 year old children into the army, and we ask a fair number of them to go and fight, with the understanding that we will do everything to bring them back. If that understanding fails, something fundamental about Israeli society falls. That is not something that we can afford as a country, as a people. And so it, I think, should be very clear. And I would say it’s a position that has a huge majority of support in Israel. The most urgent issue facing us is bringing back the hostages.

Now, what does the centrist position say about the wider strategic picture? And I think Yair Lapid has articulated this for the past few months with more clarity than I think anybody else. We need to think wider than the moment that we’re in. Once we’re able to do the deal to get the hostages, even if that means ending the war at this point, we need to now think about how we rebuild, how we look at the wider picture, how we move forward with the integration with Saudi Arabia, the regional normalization process, how we diffuse the situation in the West Bank, which is a boiling point, and how we readdress our national security concept to allow us to be both ready and able to fight at a time when we will need to fight, again, to be prepared for that, how we go about rebuilding within that our economy and our society and you look at the wider picture.

That, I think, is the centrist approach. It says, we’re balancing between competing tensions here. There’s no doubt about that, right? One of the core things that we talk about. But that balance requires us to look at a wider picture. I’m glad you asked the question and I think because I think it’s such a clear example. Centrism is not about the middle ground. It’s not about finding the 50-50 point between two extreme points. And the return of the hostages is probably one of the clearest issues on our national agenda of that approach.

Justus: All right, and with that, we’re going to close. Yair Zivan, I want to thank you for joining Identity/Crisis. Congratulations on the book, The Centre Must Hold. And thank you for pushing those of us who are centrist to be passionate and to raise our voices.

Yair: Thank you very much.