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Why We’re Losing the War Over Israel’s Legitimacy Transcript
Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.
Donniel: A train crash has happened vis-a-vis Israel’s perception. And for many Israelis, you get the feeling that they’re not even looking to go to the train station.
Yossi: We are no longer in a fact-driven conversation. We’re in a narrative world. And narratives are formed instantly, often in the most superficial way. And we’re still arguing facts. We veer as a people from outrage against the attacks against us to shame about what we ourselves are doing.
Donniel: We have phenomenal answers, which will convince everyone who never had a question. The minute you have a question, all of our spokespeople fail.
Hi friends, this is Donniel Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevi from the Shalom Hartman Institute. And this is our podcast, For Heaven’s Sake, in collaboration with Ark Media. Today’s Tuesday, May 19th. And our theme for today is why we’re losing the war over Israel’s legitimacy.
And I want from the outset to make a distinction, which is a very important distinction in Hebrew. In English, it’s also important, but it’s not as self-evident. Between the term called achra’i and the term ashem. Literally, are you responsible? And the other one, ashem, are you guilty?
Now, there could be responsibilities that don’t necessarily imply guilt. And as we’re talking about this, our job is to try to understand and help, help, understand, help Israel, help. You know, our loyalties are clear. And sometimes as critics, we come down very hard on our community. And unfortunately, sometimes we, it’s legitimate.
But on the issue of Israel’s legitimacy, there are things that we might say we need to do, but it would be superficial in our environment to say, you know, we’re guilty, ashamnu, bagdnu, you know, like, here it is, let’s beat our chests. Everything we’ve done wrong. Because we’re only part of the story. There are so many factors going on in the world that we’re gonna talk about, that we could kvetch about.
Now, at some point, I wanna go beyond, because what’s most interesting to me is also where we could be responsible and where we could actually change. But I don’t want it to be a dumping. Because that’s not constructive also. Because when you dump, a person also feels overpowered and then it’s not constructive. You don’t take responsibility either. And so from the outset, that distinction was one that Yossi and I, we both felt was really important to put forth.
But over the last two podcasts, we were talking about some of the issues that are at the frontline of the battle over Israel’s legitimacy. One of the issues was hilltop youth, which while in Israel is an issue, it’s considered to be a minor issue, a minor phenomena within Israeli society. We intentionally called it “The Hilltop Youth and Israel’s Moral Challenge,” because we weren’t just looking at the hilltop youth, we were looking at a culture of complacency, a culture of changing the channel and not focusing on it. Even though it’s the numbers are, not everyone in Israel is committing pogroms against Arabs. But we did that issue.
Then we looked at Nicholas Kristof’s article. And something is changing. Something is changing. And we have to understand what’s happening. Now for many of us, there’s very often a feeling of a lack of agency. We have no agency. There’s a world against us, there’s trends, and it’s nothing that we could do. Now we wanna look at some of those trends, but we also wanna look at what we can do.
Now one of the interesting things to put on the table at the outset is that this is a conversation which is almost non-existent in Israeli society. And there’s very little difference between Netanyahu and Bennett and Lieberman and Eisenkot, with the exception of Yair Golan. There’s a feeling that the world is against us. Every attack on our legitimacy is an act of antisemitism. There’s larger moves. And we’re not even aware to the extent of how Israel’s legitimacy is now becoming even a security issue for the future of Israel.
It’s like I think about, there’s a train crash that happened already. And we could point to so many examples. And Kristof’s article could just be one of them that he could even say such ludicrous things half the time. It’s just you could say anything you want. A train crash has happened vis-a-vis Israel’s perception. And for many Israelis, you get the feeling that they’re not even looking to go to the train station. They’re not even, it’s just they’re on a completely different plain.
And there too, some of it is understandable. Because Israelis are also dealing with sirens and missiles, and we wanna know, when is Trump gonna attack, and not attack. We don’t have the emotional energy to ask, okay, so how does America, or how does the world think about the war? We’re at another immediate challenge. We wanna know what are we supposed to do in Gaza now that Hamas has reclaimed its space? What are we supposed to do in Lebanon?
We’re at another stage, but for Israel’s wellbeing, Israel and our friends around the world. This is one of the most critical fronts, and in many ways, maybe the most dangerous front for us. Because we’re not gonna do that well in the world if our friends are Argentina, a general in Uganda, and half of America. Like that’s not a prescription.
Yossi: And Micronesia.
Donniel: Let’s not forget Micronesia and Somaliland. Like somewhere along the line, it’s just, you know, this was not the way it was beforehand. And so we wanna talk, we’re gonna talk, and share feelings and thoughts. And so Yossi, let’s start with you. Where did you start this conversation?
Yossi: Well, I start with Zionism, because this isn’t how it was supposed to play out. Zionism was supposed to free us from the vise of excessive world scrutiny, of exaggerating our most negative traits and taking negative individual Jews and turning them into metaphors for the whole Jewish people. Those classical anti-Semitic moves were supposed to be negated by Zionism. Zionism was going to quote, “normalize the Jewish people, “restore us as a nation among nations,” a normal country.
There’s nothing normal about Israel. There never was anything normal about the Jewish state. And so that’s one piece of it. And the Zionists still revolt against it because Zionism taught us that, you know, if you will it, it’s no dream. All you have to do is have the initiative, have the determination, and you’ll be able to change your reality. And we did change our reality to some extent. We changed lots of elements of our reality, but not this. Not the way we’re perceived in the world.
And in fact, Israel has become the lightning rod for the renewal of an obsessiveness with Jews and unhealthy obsessiveness we talked about last week. You know, we talk about the crisis of Zionism. The first crisis of Zionism is psychological because on the one hand it succeeded more than any other revolution. On the other hand, it failed disastrously in one of its principal goals. So that’s… Putting that on the table. And I’m not sure what to do with that.
The second thing, Donniel, is that there are forces that have been unleashed that really are beyond our control. The renewal of antisemitism on a global level, which we’ve never seen in history, outbreaks of antisemitism were always localized, or in the case of Nazism, it infected a continent. But because of social media, antisemitism is now global.
And we don’t know what to do with the resurrection of the irrational because the last 80 years of Jewish history have been pretty rational. And we’ve been in the happy ever after, secular Western ending of, certainly of antisemitism. And now the insanity is back.
And there’s one more element here, Donniel, which I think we need to put into the mix. And this is also a return of the irrational. And that is that we’re experiencing a civilizational crisis. Now, we’ve been talking about Kristof and say, how is it possible, the New York Times? And, you know, I used to write for the Times, Donniel, I was so proud every time an op-ed would appear in the Times. Today I wouldn’t write for them. And so I feel that we’ve lost one of the essential gatekeepers of Western civilization. And the Kristof article is a symptom.
But then I was thinking of a deeper symptom. Did you see the conversation between Hassan Piker, the podcaster, and the three journalists at the Times? Did you see this, Donniel?
Donniel: Yes.
Yossi: That’s how it’s—just to briefly summarize. Hassan Piker sat down with, I think, two or three leading young journalists, one from the New Yorker, one from the New York Times, and they had this fun conversation about when is theft permitted? When can you walk into your local Whole Foods store and steal? Well, it’s all okay because it’s all corporations. Is murder okay? And, you know, to their great moral credit, they all seem to agree that random murder is not okay. Although they did it in a very lighthearted way. And what was so stunning for me wasn’t just this conversation. It was that the Times published it without comment.
And so Kristof coming with his libel a couple of weeks later is happening in a wider context. And one can see this, and this is how I see it very personally as a former journalist. I see it as the collapse of my beloved profession. I see it as the collapse of an institution that I look to as that’s the pinnacle. If you can appear on the Times op-ed page, you’ve made it. And certainly you’re addressing exactly the kind of people you want to write to. Today, I don’t feel that way. I don’t know that I have a conversation anymore with the readership of the Times.
And so there’s a civilizational breakdown that’s happening and the return of antisemitism, which has two features. It’s the obsessiveness with Jews and it’s symbolizing the Jews. It’s turning the Jews into the symbol of whatever civilization most detests. Those expressions of antisemitism emerge in times of civilizational crisis. So that’s the background to which I bring to this conversation.
Donniel: Thank you for that. I wanna respond a little bit, not respond or debate, but just in light of your comments, it evokes a number of thoughts and feelings. The first is that Zionism was completely wrong. If you wanna disappear, you don’t go and build your state in the holiest land of the world. I always say, if you want, go to the South Pole and have territorial negotiations with penguins. From the beginning, if Jews wanted to disappear—
Yossi: By the way, Donniel, Patagonia was one of the alternative options to the land of Israel for resettling Jews.
Donniel: By the way, that—I didn’t even know that. That’s coherent. Uganda would have been insane too. If you wanna really disappear, Jews as it is aren’t gonna disappear in the intersection of monotheism. But here, and to lay claim to Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish people, it’s like there was something insane about us. And I think part of us is that we have to accept that.
And we also have to accept that we chose to be part of the Western world. Zionism was a Western enterprise. We saw ourselves as the light of Western nationalism. And as such, you’re gonna be—like if we wanted to be some third world country, people would forget about us. But we wanna be at the center. We wanna be a model. We talk about ourselves as such. We wanna be players in history. And therefore the notion that normalcy will make Jews disappear—
Yossi: It’s a beautiful insight. Beautiful.
Donniel: It’s insane.
Yossi: And just one thing about being Western, it’s caught up with us because much of the West now loathes itself. It loathes its history. It’s ashamed of itself. And here we are saying, but wait a minute. We bought into Western democracy and Western ideals, and now we’re left stranded and spinning in the wind in the Middle East. We don’t want you. You’re an embarrassment to us.
Donniel: You’re an embarrassment. So this is one observation. The second, as you were talking about the growth of antisemitism and the civilization breakdown, I found myself being very ambivalent. Like, I think we have to say it, but I think we love saying this too much. Like, so what do I do with it?
Yossi: That’s a Zionist question. That’s a Zionist question, Donniel. What do I do? What do I– Okay, what do I do? So there’s something that’s offensive to the Zionist sensibility to say, oh, I’m facing these overwhelming forces of civilizational breakdown on antisemitism. What do I do? But okay.
Donniel: Fair enough. But, you know, the old answer of Zionism doesn’t work either anymore. Because what was the core classic solution? If you want to kvetch, or forget kvetching, if you want to see antisemitism, and at different generations, different people are the ones who are warning, ringing the antisemitism bell, and very often they feel lonely. Now you don’t feel lonely. Now it’s, you know, join the choir. So everybody’s counting, and we’re all talking about the antisemitism and the antisemitism, antisemitism.
But, you know, there used to be an answer, Yossi. And you know what the answer is? Move to Israel. Israel was going to be the port that anybody who was on a boat, if you were Jewish, you needed to land, land in Israel. And Israel’s law of return basically still states that anybody who anywhere in the world would be attacked for being a Jew gets automatic citizenship in Israel, whether that was the intent or not. That is at the end of the day what it does. Anybody, if you’re attacked, come home.
But now in this environment, Israel’s not viable. If the world goes antisemitic, Israel’s not viable. We’re not as open to self-sacrifice as the Iranians are. What they’re able to withstand, that’s not us. We don’t have the natural resources. We don’t have the numbers. All of the above, we’re not viable without an American veto. We even need Holland to supply us with parts for F-35s.
Like, you know, the whole success of Israel, and this is Zionism’s success, where it was remarkably successful, is it integrated Israel in the midst of the world. It didn’t separate the Jews from the world. It separated us in a space, but it created a hyper-interconnectivity on an economic, cultural, personal, on so many levels. We’re part of the world.
So, like, part of me turns to you, and that’s why I want to go to the next stage, but I want to honor what you said, because I think psychologically it’s a big part of the conversation. But sometimes, like, why don’t you realize that it’s over? Like, antisemitism, the world is over. They’re all hating us. We’ve lost Europe, like you said, the whole thing. We’ve lost them. We’ve lost Africa. We’ve lost Asia. We’re losing the West and North America. It’s all up.
So, like, I’m hearing it, and I’m just wondering. So, part of me can’t accept it. Not that I’m debating facts. It’s just like, what do you want me to do? So, you want me to just sit down in mourning and pour ashes on my head? Like, you know? So, I don’t even want to talk. I want it to bear, but I want to concentrate personally on all the friends that we could regain. Why are we losing our friends? Aggravates me. But I’m not silencing yours because it’s part of the story, too.
Yossi: No, no, Donniel—I think that the Israeli public is very ambivalent about this question, because on the one hand, they hate us. It’s the return of antisemitism. On the other hand, look at the reaction among Israelis toward the Eurovision. We came in number two, second year in a row.
And there’s no other country in the world that relates to the Eurovision the way Israelis do. Because Eurovision is not just a referendum on the candidate you’ve sent. It’s a referendum on whether your country has the right to exist. And whether we still have friends. And the reaction among Israelis was, wait a minute. They don’t all hate us. Look at this. We still have friends in Europe.
Donniel: But anybody who doesn’t vote for us—antisemite, like you remember, it’s like you got, oh, antisemite. And then we turn up, worst number. But we are insane. The Eurovision is insane.
Yossi: Well, look, we were boycotted by six countries at the Eurovision. There are people who vote against us because they hate us. On the other hand, there seems to be lots of people around the world who either are still neutral to indifferent or may even still quasi-admire us.
Donniel: Or, Yossi, or—one second. Maybe we had a good song. Maybe, maybe, maybe it’s just a singing, maybe it’s just a singing competition. Maybe that’s what it is.
Yossi: It wasn’t that. It wasn’t. No… Nothing is so straightforward with us anymore. But I think that what I’m trying to say, Donniel, is that Israelis are not entirely indifferent to what you’re saying. They want to be convinced that we’re still in the game, that Zionism hasn’t failed, that we’re not on our way to becoming the ultimate Jewish ghetto. There’s—Israelis don’t want that.
Donniel: The Israelis don’t realize the extent of the problem. And I know every time I travel—and I just came back from three weeks and you’re still in Vancouver. It’s very hard. You know, I love when I land in Israel because I love Israel. There’s no place in the world I’d rather live. I actually like it here. You know, if one of those people, like in the survey, are you happy? I would say I’m happy. Like, I’m happier here than anywhere else in the world.
But there is a shift when you land and you realize the enormity of certain questions and Israelis, they’re like, there’s a la-la-la, like, you don’t even—don’t you understand? Our politicians aren’t talking about it, our people aren’t asking, what we could do?
But it’s not just us, Yossi. There’s also a deep sense. You know, I just experienced North America. And I know from colleagues of mine who just came back from Australia, there’s people who are asking, is it over? And then—but they’re not moving. They’re not selling their homes. They’re not selling their real estate businesses. They’re not living in suitcases. So there’s just this—so don’t even know, you know, like there’s Bret Stephens just—all of them, Bret Stephens and others for years now who have, you know, are talking about whether we’re over obsessing about anti-Semitism, how do we fight it? And that, shouldn’t we do Jewish education? All of those are important questions. But is the world really coming to an end? So some of it is like, I don’t know if denial of it is a mistake or it’s actually very coherent. But let’s, let’s—can we move on? Or you wanna stay, you wanna talk more?
Yossi: I just want to say one last point which is that I think that we need to be very specific about how different parts of the Jewish people are responding to this moment of return of obsessiveness about the Jews. In large parts of the smaller diasporas, Jews are increasingly living on psychological suitcases. Most of them are not packing, but the question is being asked more and more, do we have a future here? In the United States, we are starting to hear those questions.
Donniel: And Canada.
Yossi: Canada it’s very, Canada is very strong. In the English speaking diaspora outside of the United States, the question, “Do we have a future here?” is being asked with great urgency. And not that necessarily people are acting on it, but the first stage is coming to that point where very many Jews around the world are saying, we have a crisis that may not go away. In the United States, it’s less acute. But the questions are starting.
Donniel: So could we, Yossi, is it okay with you, we’re twenty five minutes into the popdcast, is it okay if we shift from—
Yossi: Yeah, let’s, let’s do that.
Donniel: Are you okay with that? But you’re right. In that sense, I would have never started the way you started. What it’s—but the, the—but I think you’re giving voice to part of the feeling that if we don’t give voice to it, you’re violating distinction between responsibility and guilt. And I think it’s very, very important. And I really thank you for it because it’s not, it wouldn’t be my Torah. It’s like not where I go.
But let’s now shift to say, okay, there’s the anti-Semites, whether they’re winning, not winning. Some people, like, you know, they’re winning. You know, it’s like there’s this, like, what is it you get out of it, of their winning is an interesting question. And whether Jews function that way for 3000 years or at least the last 2000 years is a very interesting question. Like, what part of the cup did you see and how much do you focus and what do you focus on?
But one of the things that I feel very powerfully, and I know a lot of people critique me on this, is that I’m focusing on the friends that we have lost. I’m focusing on them. And since I also want to ask, even if I’m not guilty, are there things that are… Do I have responsibility, which means are the things that I could change? Could we just understand why it is that there has been this tipping point? We’re being tipped on. It’s just like boom. It’s like falling. It’s cascading almost out of control. How can we identify the causes of this? Because you can’t do anything about something unless you understand what are some of the causes. So, Yossi, could you take this one, please?
Yossi: We’re an interesting people in the sense that… I mean, interesting people in many, many senses. Some of it good, some of it less good. But we are an interesting people in that we were formed by a story. We are a narrative-based people. And yet, we also are driven by this obsession with facts. We want to define the world. We want to explain the world through what’s tangible.
And the way that we have defended Israel over the years is with facts. You say this about 1948 in Nakba? Yeah, but look, in 1947, we accepted you in partition. We are no longer in a fact-driven conversation. We’re in a narrative world. And narratives are formed instantly and often in the most superficial way. And we’re still arguing facts. The Jewish community is still publishing lists of facts. Well, we, you know, look at the percentage of casualties in Gaza compared to—and there was something that you said, Donniel, in one of our conversations about Gaza a year ago, two years ago, who knows, everything, time, again, is so flexible these last few years. But you said, the distinction of “genocide”—
Donniel: I use the term, Yossi, time is not flexible, time is squished. And we all feel it. We all feel it.
Yossi: Really, I have no idea it was that conversation three weeks ago, three years ago.
Anyway, you had said that the accusation of genocide isn’t necessarily meant literally or the way we think of it.
Donniel: Legally.
Yossi: Right. And we’re still arguing the legal definition of genocide. And that’s not what the world is arguing. They’re arguing the ruins of Gaza, the genocidal statements of Smotrich and Ben Gvir. And so you can’t win that argument. It’s an emotional argument. It’s a narrative. And so that’s the first piece of how we’re not speaking the language of this time. There are a few young Jewish heroes who are out there on social media fighting this war on its own terms. I can’t do it. I don’t have that language. I belong to the generation of facts. And so I don’t have that language. But we do have some terrific people out there. Not enough, but they’re extraordinary. So that’s one piece of our inadequacy in meeting this threat.
Another is that the anti-Zionists have been preparing the ground for decades. They have systematically dismantled, deconstructed the Zionist and Israeli story. And they’ve done so by targeting every critical stage of the Zionist story. And I’ll give you a few examples briefly.
The founding of Zionism in 19th century Europe is settler colonialism. It’s European settler colonialism. The founding of the Jewish state in 1948 is Nakba, is ethnic cleansing. The creation of a thriving Israeli society is apartheid. We created an apartheid society. And the final station in this systematic process of delegitimization is genocide. You fight your wars in a genocidal way.
And so put those four accusations together. Settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, genocide. And you have the perfect narrative of evil. They have built a wall around us. And there’s no escaping that indictment. If you’re guilty of only one of those crimes, you’re already on a very slippery slope toward pariah status. The convergence of all four of those accusations. And you’re finished.
Listen to what they say. You’re worse than the Nazis. Why are we worse than the Nazis? Because we’re guilty of modernity’s greatest sins, all of them together. And there’s an extra element here. And it’s the element of hypocrisy. Because you Israelis, you Jews, you claim not only that you’re not guilty of the worst crimes, you claim to be the paragons of good and justice. And look at you. You’re actually the worst people on the planet. And it’s that hypocrisy. It’s the exposure of the chosen people. And I see that on social media all the time. They love using this as the chosen people. They’ll take some clip from Gaza and say, you know, “the chosen people at work.”
And so there’s so much of this coming out. And we’re facing, on the one hand, a systematic, very well-thought-out campaign. And on the other hand, the eruption of primal forces. And we don’t know what to do about either. We are completely helpless in facing it.
Donniel: So Yossi, as I hear you now, I don’t know if I’m more depressed than the first part, whether this is just as inevitable as antisemitism. But I want to take some of the things you said.
Yossi: But it isn’t. It isn’t.
Donniel: Okay, that we’re going to come to in the third stage. That we’ll come to in a moment. But I want to build on what you said. I don’t want to argue, and I really appreciate it. But I want to take a couple of the concepts that you mentioned and point to how the pro-Israel community was completely unprepared.
You spoke about the fact that we’re a people of stories, but we build our defense on facts. But it—and that we are in an era in which facts don’t matter anymore. And we haven’t figured that out yet. And we haven’t told better narratives. And we’ll come to that in a moment. Like, how is it that you engage?
But I want to point to a particular feature of pro-Israel conversation that this multi-tiered attack on Israel has undermined. You know, I feel that a lot of the Israel conversation is a phenomenal conversation for 1990s. It’s like we’re like the general perfectly prepared for yesterday’s war. So a big part of the Israel story is we tell a story of our past.
And it’s not just that colonialism undermines the Jewish past of our relationship to Israel. It does that. It takes away from the Jewish people our story. But even on another level, it takes away from us some of our core defenses. Because we tell a story about ourselves. And here it’s not even a factual story. It’s a story with facts. But we tell a story of a people who came home and who were willing to compromise at every moment in our history.
We were willing to accept, like the Mishnah in Tractate Bava Metziah said, “Two people are fighting over a garment.” This one says, “I found it.” This one says, “I found it.” This one says, “It’s all mine.” This one says, “It’s all mine.” Jewish law says, “You have to divide it.” And the Jewish people were always willing to accept half of our dream.
That is such a deep part of the story we’re telling. We said, don’t you know us? Don’t you see us? We’re great people. Every time there’s an option for peace, we accept it no matter what the consequences are. We accept it. We capture everything. We have the greatest defeat in ’67. We’re willing to talk from the first moment. And then we get the three “nos” of Khartoum. You know, we’re willing, we embrace Oslo and we get the Second Intifada. We engage in withdrawal from Gaza. Don’t you know us?
It’s not facts, even, Yossi. There’s a story we’re telling ourselves about ourselves as this profoundly compromising people. That, how could you not respect us? How could we not be your heroes? We are the peace heroes of the world. And this is so deep in Israeli discourse. When people are saying, “No people love peace more than the Jews.” Which is an interesting statement like, “Why do we love peace more than other people?” But it doesn’t matter. But this is our story.
What genocide does—excuse me, what colonialism does is it doesn’t just undermine the fact that we aren’t a foreign element in the Middle East. We’re not a European implant. But what colonialism does is it changes the condemnation of Arabs and the adulation of Jews for the one for rejecting peace and the other for embracing peace.
Yossi: It’s a great insight.
Donniel: Because if it’s colonial, the fact that you were willing to accept half of what doesn’t belong to you is not something that’s that impressive. Like we have to understand that that’s the genius of the colonial conversation, is that it says, “So what?”
But what’s even more important is that Arab rejection of peace is no longer a moral failure. It’s an expression of a national right that the colonized don’t have to accept somebody who wants to give them half, at most, of their land. Like that, how could you say no? What do you mean, how could I say no? You said, oh, I’m so impressed. You’re willing to take half of what’s not yours. Go to the Mishnah. The Mishnah is that no one owns it and now we have to find out. But if it’s not yours and you’re claiming half, you’re a thief from the beginning. And then, so, it just changes, not the fact, the story.
And then comes genocide. Because you know what genocide does? Genocide says history doesn’t matter. You know, Jews, you want to tell a story about your greatness since the moment you came into Israel? You want to speak about your moral superiority? You want to speak about Islamic terror? You want to tell that story in order to come up with the ideal notion that the conflict is complicated? The minute genocide is put on the table—and it wasn’t put on the table before October 8th or 7th, etc., or November 14th—once genocide comes into the conversation, history doesn’t matter anymore. Because it doesn’t matter how wonderful you were in the past. It doesn’t matter what you did and how open to compromise you are. Now you’re just baby killers. And you’re right. And even if it’s not the technical definition, you’re just baby killers. You kill women and children. It’s what you do. You just kill people. That’s what you know how to do.
Yossi: It’s also what you want to do. It’s an expression of your natural tendency.
Donniel: It’s what you want, it’s all you want. Again, it’s your natural, that’s what—it’s just who you—And so history doesn’t matter. And when we encounter the colonial and the genocide accusation, it’s not just a factual debate. I would add, it changes the whole narrative of the story we told the world about ourselves and the way the world saw us. And now it paints a whole completely different stage.
Now within this, within your analysis and my analysis, is there something, anything that we feel that we could do? How does an empowered, powerful people look at this and instead of just mourning, like what do we do? Forget the anti-Semites. We’re not talking about them. We’re not talking about the absurd. How do we rebuild a story, Yossi? And I know it’s going to take time because, as I said, the tipping point is against us. And we’re going to have to build slow blocks to change that conversation.
Yossi: Look at the last two podcasts that we did, Donniel. We did a podcast on the hilltop youth, the obscenity of young Jews in Judea and Samaria, attacking, burning, slaughtering the animals of their neighbors, and maiming and occasionally murdering. And even worse than the deeds of a few hundred extremists is the fact that the Israeli government is either disinterested or elements within the Israeli government are actively covering for them, making all of us complicit in these crimes.
The next podcast we did was on Kristof, accusing us of rape, systematic rape, doing what the genocide accusation does. On October 7th, we faced a genocidal enemy that was preenacting its genocidal vision. That’s what October 7th was. And so when you immediately turn the tables, and it happened on October 8th, the accusations of Israel committing genocide before we even had time to respond, we’re still identifying the bodies of the massacre and already Israel is conducting genocide.
Mayor Mamdani, before he was mayor, was out on the streets a week later, leading chants of genocide against Israel. We hadn’t even launched a ground offensive. And so the, the, the way in which that works is projection and erasure. You erase the crime that was committed against Israel, and then you project that crime onto Israel.
And Kristof does the same thing. He takes the systematic raping of October 7th and now puts that on Israel. Israel is the one that’s really doing the systematic raping.
Donniel: So what do we do, Yossi? So what do we do, Yossi? So what do you do?
Yossi: Well, I’m putting the two together, because on the one hand, we’re guilty of something here with the hilltop youth. There’s a guilt there that we as a society, as an Israeli society, as a Jewish people, have to own. And at the same time, we’re fending off the most outrageous accusations.
And so when you put these two conditions of contemporary Jewish life together, the emotional condition is that we veer as a people from outrage against the attacks against us to shame about what we ourselves are doing. And part of our confusion, part of our inability to respond coherently, is that we’re emotionally overwhelmed between outrage and shame.
Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that one part of the Jewish people has taken on the responsibility of shame and another part of the Jewish people has taken on the responsibility of protective outrage.
And we need a coherent Jewish voice that’s morally coherent, that can speak with contempt to the Nicholas Kristofs of the world on the one hand, but can also look at ourselves and say, “You know, “ashamnu bagadnu, we’ve betrayed, we’re guilty, we’ve betrayed our own most basic moral standards.” And it’s really hard to hold those two positions simultaneously.
Donniel: I love this. Do you know why? Because when I hear people who are Israel’s spokespeople in the media, the reason why they’re so ineffective is they’re not capable of doing the dual move that you mentioned.
If they could, the whole attitude, like, if someone asked a question and we just speak the outrage, we’re certain, we have this—we don’t give an inch, and everybody knows that you failed for a yard. What do you mean you’re not giving an inch? Or you failed for a mile, like something’s going on and we won’t give an inch, like we’re going to fight every inch.
And our spokespeople, they fail completely. As I said the last time, we have phenomenal answers, which will convince everyone who never had a question. The minute you have a question, all of our spokespeople fail. And I think you’re pointing to a certain art of what it means to be a spokesperson and how you validate your humanity as a person.
It’s like, Tal Bekar, our friend and colleague, always says that one of the jobs is to be a character witness for Israel. And part of the way you’re a character witness is by who you are. And if you don’t combine outrage and shame, you’re not a character witness. And so you lose, here it is, you’re defending Israel, but nobody wants to be with you. So why would they be convinced by your arguments?
And I love that, and I think it’s—I want to add another dimension. But if we could just implement what you’re speaking about, that’s a dayenu. Then when you have both, there’s processes that could be, tha could unfold. But certainly in our public personas, we think shame is going to endanger us. And we don’t realize that outrage is also endangering us. So, that’s one.
Yossi: Or outrage, outrage without shame when shame is necessary.
Donniel: Of course, exactly. So each one without the other. And so, and as you said, there’s different voices. And those who are just shamed aren’t defending and those who are outraged are failing at defense. So what do we left? This is not, Houston, we have a problem. There is a number of other dimensions.
First, I think we have to understand as a people how much the conversation has changed. You know, it’s not by accident that generals are always prepared for the last war. As people, when we feel that we’re ready for something, we want to make sure that reality fits what we’re ready for. We don’t even have categories. So we want to stay in the same place. We’re comfortable there.
The destructiveness of this, though, is what we have to be aware of right now. And we have to start by understanding that our core defenses, while still a part of our own inner narrative, are completely ineffective. That’s where we start.
The second, I would build on what you said, is we have to ask, what are the policy implications for shame? I think one of the things that Israel has to begin to do, it has to act like a society that recognizes there are things for which it has to give it accounting. And you know, the rule of the ICC is that you don’t intervene in a country with a functioning judiciary. Because I don’t have to. I only intervene in countries which don’t protect human rights.
Yossi, we got to change our discourse here from the beginning. There has to be a culture which is willing to put on the table some things, not just those things. You know, we’re now all upset about the social media of soldiers. It’s not just when it comes to social media. People have to understand that—are you really a moral agent? Now, it’s going to take a while, but that’s who we are, Yossi. So of course we’re flawed and failed, but we also have to begin to build the frameworks of rebuilding who we are.
Another one is if there’s no people who love peace more than the Jews, I’d like to hear from Israeli politicians something that they’re willing to do about it. Tell me. Tell me. Like, what are you willing to do? What are the risks? So I know the Palestinian Authority are not ideal partners, but now in Gaza, since you didn’t think Turkey and Indonesia are going to help you, so now you have what are you willing to do? There has to be a discourse of political compromise in Israel that doesn’t exist.
You know, the language of complete victory has taken over not just when we’re fighting in Gaza, but whenever we’re talking about the future. And there is no practical compromise in our visions about the future. And here I’m going to get into your territory. There’s nothing we can do as long as this is our government. And the change of government is not just to heal us. It is for me now, it is one of the greatest existential needs for the survival of this country.
Just look at today’s news. Today, our Minister of Finance and the Minister in the Ministry of Defense, in charge of the West Bank, Judea and Samaria. He heard that the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant against him and they’re kept quiet. What is his response? Did you see his response? Oh, it’s lovely. He said, I’ve had it with this anti-Semitic court. My response is, I am going to finally demolish Khan al Ahmar, I’m gonna—like, a village—this is what he said! Like, this contentious Bedouin village—my response is to show you that I don’t give—I don’t know if you’re allowed to say it—I don’t give a shit.
Yossi: No, no, no.
Donniel: Like, anything, if this is the response.
Yossi: No, no, my response—no, Donniel. My response is to show you that you’re right about me. That’s what Smotrich was saying to the court.
Donniel: So like, who are we talking about? Who are we talking to? And it starts from our Prime Minister and every minister down. There’s not one of them who is capable of being a character witness for Israel on the basis of their character. It’s your character. It’s what you say.
And so there’s multiple stages, first understanding the problem and all of us, anybody who says this is going to be simple as a fool. It’s going to take years. And because of tipping point, I’m going to believe that it doesn’t take generations, but it’s going to take years.
And part of it is going to start by recognizing what doesn’t work, start by trying new things, by reclaiming a character to Israel and to the Jewish people, to finding our friends who are distancing from us and who aren’t anti-Semites and putting in place leaders who are worthy. Leaders who are worthy. And if it’s not political leaders, then it has to be religious leaders. It has to be heads of NGOs. It has to be educational leaders. The voice has to ring forth. A Torah rings forth from Zion, and we have to start taking responsibility for that Torah. It’s gone on for a long time, Yossi. Last words and then we’ll bring this to a close.
Yossi: I want to take it full circle to what you touched on, which is how do we hold on to our friends? Because really what we’ve talked about today, Donniel, are parts of this phenomenon that really we can’t do anything about. And we have to look at those. We have to understand them and accept the fact that this is now the new reality.
But that’s not the entire story because we have friends, I still believe many friends. And I see it when I travel around the country. When I tell people I’m from Israel, I see the response of Americans. We haven’t lost yet. We’re losing, but we haven’t lost yet. And how do we hold on to that goodwill?
And there we have to look at ourselves. Certainly look at this government. And I—
Donniel: Don’t get you started. Okat, good.
Yossi: Don’t get me started. Okay, good. Don’t get me started. But without a change in this government, we’re just going to be sinking deeper and deeper because we’re handing our enemies—
Donniel: Everything.
Yossi: —the proof they’re looking for to demonize us. And so we need to stop this bizarre dance. And the example of Smotrich that you raised, it’s classic. You’re accusing me of ethnic cleansing. I’m going to go and prove that you’re wrong by destroying a Bedouin village. You can’t win. You can’t win under those circumstances.
And so we need to take responsibility for what is in our hands. We need to acknowledge that this is far greater, that there are forces that are being unleashed that are beyond our control. And in this very complicated, agonizing reality, do what Zionism told us to do, which is take responsibility.
Donniel: Ah. And no matter how bleak it is, don’t despair.
Yossi: Don’t despair.
Donniel: Jews, giving up is not an option. Yossi, it was just a pleasure being with you. Thank you, my friend.
Yossi: Always great to talk about anti-Semitism with you.
Donniel: Be well, people. Be well.
