For decades, Yossi Klein Halevi has been one of the preeminent diagnosticians of the Israeli soul. From his hundreds of columns for the New Republic among other publications, his regular podcast with Donniel Hartman of the Shalom Hartman Institute and his now classic book, Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation, he has helped generations understand and map the complexity of Israel and its internal divides.
Yossi, with a keen historical awareness born of his Holocausts-survivor parents, has also argued consistently that the State of Israel has a moral obligation to ensure that no committed enemy of the Jewish people ever obtains the possibility of attacking the Jews with weapons of mass destruction. For that reason, he has long advocated that Israel do whatever was needed to take out Iran’s nuclear program.
Now, that has happened. We spoke with Yossi about his feelings post the Iran War and Israel’s accomplishments — but mostly, we turned our attention to the future. What now needs to be healed in Israeli society? What was broken, and by whom? What would it take to make things better, and who has to go to make that possible?
Yossi Klein Halevi was born in Brooklyn and moved to Israel in 1982. He is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.
In 2013 he was a visiting professor of Israel Studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary and served as a writer in residence at the University of Illinois. He was a senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem from 2004 until 2010.
He writes for leading op-ed pages in the US, including the Times and the Wall Street Journal, and is a former contributing editor to the New Republic. He is also an published writer and has written four books: Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist (1995), At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew’s Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land (2001), Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation (2013), and Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor (2018) which was a New York Times Bestseller.
The link at the top of this posting will take you to the full recording of our conversation; below you will find a transcript for those who prefer to read, prepared for our paid subscribers.
When things in Israel get complicated, which, of course, they often do, and I want to hear someone think out loud in a way that mirrors my own moral anguish at times, but who infuses me nonetheless with a sense of purpose and optimism, with level-headed analysis and much, much more. Almost invariably, my soul and my mind go to my friend Yossi Klein Halevi. Yossi Klein Halevi, as many of you know, is really, I think, one of the leading thinkers and writers in the English language about Israel today. He's written a number of books. I will mention his most famous best-selling book, Like Dreamers, the story of the Israeli paratroopers who reunited Jerusalem and divided a nation. Interesting Interestingly enough, his most recent book, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor, became a New York Times best seller. At a different point in time, and we're not going to do it today, it would be really very interesting to talk to Yossi a little bit about whether or not he would frame that book in quite the same way, given that everything that we have been through.
Yossi Klein Halevi, as I'm sure most of our listeners know, and we will, of course, include full biographic information in the notes for today's conversation, is a senior fellow at the Shalom Heart Ministry Institute in Jerusalem. His 2013 book, which I mentioned, won the Jewish Book Council's Everett Book of the Year award. Another is for My Palestinean neighbor. As I said, it was a New York Times best seller. He writes leading op-ed pages in the US, including The Times, The Wall Street Journal. He's a former contributing editor to the New Republic. You can hear him on the Shalem Hartman Institute podcast with Daniel Hartman very often. He's everywhere as well he should be because he's really a unique voice in in the Jewish world. Yossi, first of all, thank you for your friendship, and thank you for taking the time on what for all of us is, I think, both a very busy week, and frankly, a little bit of a PTSD week. We're still coming out of whatever we were in to share some thoughts today. I really want to talk to you more about Israel's future and its soul. But before we get there, I want to acknowledge that of all of the people who have been, I think, people, men and women who the American Jewish center and left have come to really revere, I think you're the only one who for years has been unabashedly calling for an Israeli strike on Iran.
I know that this is very deeply affected by your family's own Holocaust history and your parents' experience and so on and so forth, your own profound sense of the way in which Israel needs to erase Jewish vulnerability to whatever extent that it could. But again, you are really among the very few people who have been rapidly listened to on the left and in the center who have been saying this for years. So you'll see, now we've done it, and we don't know exactly what we've accomplished yet, but it certainly appears that we did some major damage to their program. Talk to me about how you're feeling after so many years of calling for this, now that the Jewish State finally did what it did.
Danny, it's great to be with you, and I'm really grateful to your podcast. If for no other reason, it gives us a chance to see each other and exchange ideas. Really a pleasure. I'd also like to acknowledge that my partner in the work that I did on Iran, especially the writing, over the years, was Michael Oren. We started 20 years ago. We started writing about the Iranian threat and very actively supporting Netanyahu's campaign to galvanize the international community and speaking. Then, of course, when Michael became ambassador, he took that commitment several considerable steps forward. Much, if not most, of what I know about the Iranian threat, aside from what my own Jewish gut tells me, really comes from Michael. That's really the background to my answer to you, which is, first of all, I feel this enormous sense of relief. Also, it just feels a little bit surreal. After all these years of warning and urging Israel to launch a preemptive strike, Michael and I never urge the United States to get involved militarily. We were asking for the ordinance that we would need to launch a strike, but we felt that we didn't have the right as Israelis to make those demands of America.
That President Trump was right to recognize that Iran is not just an Israeli problem. It's a scandal that so much of the international community has not recognized that. But Michael and I, from the beginning, felt that our focus needs to be on Israel, and we need to take responsibility for our own defense. There's not only this this deep sense of relief that I feel, and also, I should say, gratitude. Gratitude to two leaders whom I feel ambivalent about. Well, regarding Netanyahu, I don't feel any ambivalence about. As you and I were partners in another effort to deal with what we regarded as a different existential threat, an internal threat that was presented by Netanyahu's coalition. That was the threat to the Israeli success story, to startup nation, that Netanyahu's assault on the judiciary and on the democratic ethos was really an assault on the foundations of what has made Israel a modern, successful country. I don't think that was fully appreciated by many diaspora Jews, that where you and I were coming from was not only trying to save Israeli democracy, but more deeply, trying to save the Israeli edge that we have over our enemies.
What's played out in the skies of Iran in these last couple of weeks is an expression of startup nation. What worried us, if I could speak for you as well, and I think on this, I do. What worried us most deeply of all was that this coalition of ultra-nationalists and ultra-Orthodox was threatening to undermine our long-term ability to maintain our security advantage over our enemies. When I say that this was an existential threat, I mean that literally. And yet, the attack, Israel's preemptive attack on Iran, compelled me to issue a public expression of gratitude to Netanyahu. You know the expression that is ze ole li labriut [it a cost to my health]? It was very hard.
I felt he deserved our gratitude, not only for this strike, but for leading the campaign for the last two decades against a nuclear Iran, and doing so in the face of ridicule, in the face of accusations of warmongering. He held the line. One of the surreal aspects of this time for me is publicly acknowledging and appreciating the man who I otherwise regard as an existential threat to Israel. Of course, the other surreal element here is that all these years, my assumption, at least, was that if we would launch a preemptive strike and then America would join in with its bunker busters and its ability to maintain constant pressure on Iran, there's no question that we would eliminate the nuclear threat at least for 5, 10 years, giving the Iranian people the time to bring the regime down. And by weakening the prestige of the regime, also weakening its its capacity to instill terror within the Iranian people. Will it play out that way? It still might. We don't know. But in the end, for me, the question isn't whether we've uprooted their nuclear capacity entirely or whether we've dealt with not only their hardware, but their knowledge.
We've tried to do that, of course, by assassinating scientists. But the deeper question, the most important long-term question is, will a strike against Iran, would a strike against Iran, undermine the regime from within. That remains the big unknown. My sense is that in the short term, our strike will lead to a rallying around the regime because that's a natural instinct. The Iranian people are no less patriotic than we are. But my hope is, and more than a hope, really, is that the morning after the morning after, they're going to look around and say, Where has this regime led us? It's one disaster after another. The Islamic Revolution is destroying Iran and Iranian civilization. So that's still my very active hope for this moment.
Thanks for that. I want to talk about one other piece of this Iran puzzle before we move on to something that has really nothing to do with Iran, which is the main focus today, which is healing Israel's soul. But when you and Mati Friedmann and I wrote those two pieces in the Times of Israel, already a few years ago, it was during the height of the judicial reform crisis. We were trying to convince Americans, American Jews, particularly, that to be a supporter of Israel did not mean always to support its Prime Minister. And in fact, at that point, to be a genuine, loving supporter of Israel meant to come out on the side of those who were opposing judicial reform because we saw that as an existential threat to the state that we love and care about. I think it's fair to say that there was not an overwhelming response of people calling the heads of all the various organizations, which we won't mention now, and saying to their leadership, You know what? We've actually changed our mind. It didn't happen. We got some support. We took some heat. That's the way the world works.
That's fine. But if you, back in the day when you and Michael were working at the Shalem Center, and I then joined a little bit later, and the three of us were hanging around on the third floor on Yosua Binun Street, and you guys were really working very hard on the Iranian nuclear stuff, among other things, I think we I would have guessed if we had had a cup of coffee up there on the third floor, that if the day ever came, that Israel attacked Iran's nuclear program with the endorsement and participation of the President of the United States and American military, that American Jews would somehow say, Oh, my God, thank you. Thank you, Israel. Thank you, America. Thank you, God, if one is inclined that way. This is a great day in the history of the relationship between Israel and America, and it's a great day for the Jewish state. We've heard some of that, but we've heard a lot of not that as well. I wonder what you think has changed in the last 20 years that have made some American Jews on the center and the right unable to critique Bibi because any critique of Bibi, even when he's destroying the judicial system, feels somehow unpatriotic and almost treasonous.
On the other hand, this inability of many American Jews who obviously hate war, as do you and I, to come out and say, This was a necessary thing. This was the right thing. We applaud it. There hasn't been nearly as much of that as we would have imagined there might be 20 years ago. What do you think that's about?
I think we're experiencing the consequences of two developments. The first is the rise, the empowerment of the global lynch mob against Israel. The mainstreaming of frankly genocidal slogans like "From the River to the Sea" and "Globalize the Intifada". That has had a chilling effect on the willingness, understandably, of many Jews, not only on the right, also in the center, and some on the center left, to publicly criticize Israel and join the lynch mob. We were experiencing experiencing some of that blowback, you, me, and Mati, when we wrote our open letter. I'm sure you heard this, too, and I heard it from many of my friends in America. You're asking us to join in the movement to delegitimize Israel. I said, No, we're actually not. They said, Yes, okay, but it will have that consequence. On the other side, for liberal Jews, the rise of this government really catalyzed a long-term trend of understandable, justifiable anxiety about where Israel is heading morally, the deepening of our rule over another people, Israel being turned gradually, but seemingly inevitably, into a binational state, in which the only way we can retain power is by denying the Palestinians any citizenship. When you put these two forces together, you really come up with, I think, part of what we've experienced in the last couple of years and maybe culminating in the Iranian attack.
Do you have any hope that this turn of events might begin to heal the rift between Israel and some American Jews, or is it your sense that we're just going to see a winding and a deepening?
In terms of liberal American Jewry, it depends how long this government lasts. Liberal Jewish friends of Israel, and certainly liberal non-Jewish friends of Israel, and they still exist. That's something we really shouldn't forget. They can somehow, or many of them can somehow stomach the ongoing occupation of the Palestinian people because we have compelling security arguments for that. But when you combine that with the assault on civil liberties in Israel, the contempt for non-Orthodox denominations, which is another way of telling American Jews that we don't respect your Jewish identity, and we don't even respect the Jewishness, the literal Jewishness of many of you. The combined impact of the internal and external right-wing turn is going to have inevitably devastating consequences. I don't place all the blame on the government. Certainly, there are trends within the liberal American Jewry that are very destructive on their own terms. The fact that the last repository of wokeness sometimes seems to be parts of American Jewry. We don't need to go any farther than the 20% of New York Jews who apparently supported Mahdani's candidacy, which, as we say in Hebrew, ein milim, no words. There are native homegrown destructive tendencies within American Jewry that have met and converged with the destructive tendencies in Israel.
What worries me deeply about the future of the relationship between the two great population centers of the Jewish people, and when we talk about the Jewish people today, we're really talking about Israel and American Jewry with some support systems around the world, but close to not quite as close to 90 %. If American Jewry and Israel continue to distance from each other to the point where we no longer share the most minimal Jewish language and sensibility, then the Jewish people effectively becomes dysfunctional. You and I are among those who share this dual identity. We still are in some sense, you and I, I think, American Jews. We never left the community. You and I are among those who have really made it our career and mission to live on the Ben Gurion-JFK Line and to devote ourselves to trying to strengthen the relationship, to salvage the relationship. It's particularly painful for us to see what's happening. My deepest worry for the future health of the relationship is twofold. First of all, it's the growing inability of each community to understand or even particularly take interest in the Jewish life that the other has created and on the fringes of both communities, we're seeing the rise of deeply destructive forces.
In Israel, the growing threat of anti-democracy. Among American Jewry, a growing, if still, fringe phenomenon of Jewish anti-Zionism. If these two trends continue to grow, we will lose any ability to feel that we share the same fate. Israel that is not democratic and a liberal American Jewry that is not Zionist have nothing, literally nothing in common. There's no shared languages, no shared commitment. We're two separate peoples. And that causes me to lose sleep.
Understandably. And I share the loss of sleeps. And I want to come to this question about the future of the soul of Israel. We're speaking a week-ish after the ceasefire. We have not gone to the shelter.
We could spell week in two ways.
Right. In two different ways.
Depending how it plays out.
Yes, I meant W-E-E-K, but the W-E-A-K could also fit here. But we're a week more or less after the war. We're seeing, I think, a still ongoing sense of trauma and deeply shaken people. We were frightened in a way that we weren't necessarily, those of us in Jerusalem, which wasn't hit at all, we're not necessarily frightened for our own skin, though we had no way to know that they wouldn't change their minds and start hitting Jerusalem, too. But to watch my grandchildren and to see other people in in safe rooms and in shelters and to watch little kids not really understand why everybody's a bit stressed out, even if we're trying to pretend that we're not stressed out and why we're waking them up in the middle of the night and cuddling with them in the middle of this dark room with the window bolted shut and all that. So this is a country very much in PTSD, which we won't get to now. But it's also a country that I think is beginning to look ahead. Now, let's just say hypothetically, we don't know where this is going, but let's just say hypothetically, we're able to shut down the Gaza War in the next few weeks, as many people are beginning to speak about publicly.
Let's say, hypothetically, we don't know that there's a deal being cooked up with Trump in which in some way that gets us the hostages back, though it's far from clear what leverage anyone has on Hamas at this point. But let's assume that somebody knows something that we don't know and we can get the hostages back. Some Arab countries take responsibility for Gaza. Israel gets partial sovereignty over parts of the West Bank. What some people are saying is going to happen, Syria and Saudi Arabia join the Abraham Accords. Donald Trump gets his Nobel Peace Prize. Maybe he shares it with Bibi Netanyahu. Okay, let's just say, hypothetically, that all that happens. It's a lot to imagine at the moment, but reputable journalists are talking about it. That doesn't actually heal any of what you and Mati and I were so worried about a couple of years ago. It doesn't heal any of the internal divisiveness, the hatred between religious and secular in too many places, the absolute disgust on the part of the secular and the religious with the Haredi population legislation that has refused to serve and continues to refuse to serve, a deep divide in this country over the judiciary, a deep divide in this country over marauding gangs in Judea and Samaria on the West Bank, which were at one point, and I use these quotes very ironically, only attacking Palestinians, but most recently now have attacked the IDF and burned IDF trucks, and no government, left, right or center has ever been willing to put their foot down and put a stop to that.
It's a country with housing costs that make young people wonder if they should stay. I mean, we could go on and on and on. But after all of the successes of Iran and Lebanon and maybe peace with Saudi Arabia and Syria and some quiet with Gaza, all of that happens. We're a hurting place, and we're a broken place. I think a lot of people outside this country don't think about in those ways, but we are. And you're the person whose soul most speaks to me. I really want to hear from you, what needs to happen over the next one to five years? And under whom, not necessarily the name of that person, but what a person. So that as we're in the last chapter of our careers and the last few chapters of our lives, thank God, We've had long, good, productive lives, but we're not going to be around forever. And we want to know when we get called on high that we're leaving for our children and our grandchildren, something that we're proud of and that's sustainable. What do you think has to happen in the next few years for that to be the case?
Danny, first of all, my sense is that we're not yet in the phase of PTSD because we're still experiencing the trauma itself, the hostages. As long as the hostages aren't in home, it's still October 7th in some way because it's still October 7th for them. The uncertainty of even whether the war with Iran will resume, and it can resume any day. We may discover something essential about the nuclear program that we missed, and now we have a chance to get to it. We're still living the actual events, which makes it really hard for us to think clearly about the morning after. But my sense of where we'll be when we do leave the trauma phase and enter the PTSD phase is that we will be faced with a very stark choice. The choice is between October 6th and October 8th. October 6th, of course, is the metaphor for the year leading up to October 7th, when we were being torn apart by a government that deliberately incited one part of the nation against the other and saw its political strength as coming from activating its base against other fellow Israelis, fellow Jews. October 8th was the extraordinary pivot from the lowest point of our schism in our history, which is really saying something, to one of the peak moments of Israeli unity.
I actually think that it was the most extraordinary achievement of national unity in our history, precisely because we were coming from schism. Now, you and I remember May and June 1967, and we remember the powerful sense of unity that swept not only Israel, but the entire diaspora. We've had other moments of extraordinary unity. 1973, the Yom Kippur War, the Antebe rescue, the rescue of the Ethiopian Jews. But I really do think that this was our greatest achievement because it was so unexpected. It was so unlikely. If you had asked me on October 6th, do you think there's anything that could ever pull us back together again in the way that we were, say, in May 1967, I don't think I would have said yes. We surprised ourselves with our ability to re-inhabit the instincts of peoplehood. Of course, it didn't last, and it can't last. Those peak experiences never last, and you do have to go back to some routine. But one of the reasons that it didn't last is because this government reverted to form. The DNA of this coalition is hatred of internal enemies. My colleague at the Hartman Institute, Tal Becker, has noted the difference between nationalism and ultra-nationalism.
Nationalism seeks to unite a people against an external enemy. Enemy, ultra-nationalism seeks to unite its base against a perceived internal enemy. We have an ultra-nationalist government. The tragedy of the Likud is that it was once a Nationalist Party, and it became an ultra-nationalist party. When I think about what needs to heal, it brings me back to our Prime Minister. It's hard to single out the worst offense of Netanyahu against the State of Israel. But maybe, for me, maybe his most serious offense was dividing the mainstream Zionist Israeli majority and tearing it apart and turning it against itself. The reason why I think this was so serious is because what you have in Israel are, on either side of the spectrum, on one side, you have Haredim, the ultra-Orthodox, who reject Israel as a democratic state and want Israel to just be a Jewish state, of course, in their image. On the other side of the spectrum, you have the Arab population that rejects Israel as a Jewish state and wants Israel only to be a secular democracy. These are the two fastest-growing segments of the Israeli population. Between the two of them, they're close to 35% of the population, which means that close to 35% is not Zionist or anti-Zionist or rejects the Zionist ethos of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.
It is the mainstream, that 65%, 70% of Israel, that holds us together without a relatively unified mainstream. Of course, the mainstream is always divided, but it was not divided on the foundational principles of how we understand Israel. That's what this government did. It tore apart the mainstream and turned it against itself. In some ways, our most bitter divide became the Jewish/democratic divide within the Zionist mainstream. This, for me, is an unforgivable crime against Israeliness and against our future. What has to heal here is the reconstruction of a mainstream Zionist majority united around minimally shared ideas of what we mean by Israel as a Jewish state and Israel as a democratic state.
There's so much to talk about with regard to all of this. We'll come back and do that in another conversation, I hope, many times. But you're saying that there are certain things that the Netanyahu government and Bibi Netanyahu at personam have done to divide this country, I think, for his own political purposes and for an array of other reasons. And some of that, as you said, is really an unforgivable crime against the state of Israel and a sin against the Jewish people. I don't want to get into this political figure or that political name, but as somebody who worries deeply about this country and yet whose soul is bound up with the bond of this country's future, do you see the kinds of energies and people on the political horizon that you hope that in a few years we can begin to embark on a deep healing process? Or do you think we're still waiting to see if and when and whether that can bubble to the surface?
Well, what we do see, and this is an essential precondition for the healing of Israel, is a very strong longing among Israelis to transcend the divisiveness. And that's expressed for me in every poll that has been released by a credible organization since October 7th, and that shows a consistent victory for the opposition, sometimes overwhelmingly, sometimes a smaller majority, but in no poll that I've seen. Again, aside from channel 14, which is the Netanyahu propaganda mouthpiece, every single poll consistently shows that this government of divisiveness will lose. And I think that that's the main reason why people are so desperate for change. We need a government that will work to try to bring us together. And look, we had such a government. We had that government before this coalition took over, and it was an extraordinary coalition of right, left, and center, and even of Arab and Jewish parties the first time in the country's history. And so the old Benet coalition succeeded in modeling the diversity of Israel in a way, in the opposite way, that the Netanyahu coalition. The Netanyahu coalition was the most homogeneous government in Israel's history. It went right, more right, and farthest right.
And we never had a right-wing government like that. There was always a party, at least one party, in the mix that was more centrist, that would be able to temper some of the ideological leanings. And that was true as well on the left. And so this is the worst government in Israel's history precisely because it is the least pluralistic, politically, ideologically. I certainly see forces within the political system, not to mention names, but Naftali Benet. What I appreciate about Benet is that he's right wing and pluralist at the same time. This, post October 7th, especially, this is a right-wing country. And the next government is going to be led one way or another by a right-wing politician. The question is, which one? Is it going to be a politician who sees anyone who's outside of their coalition as an enemy? Or is it going to be a right-wing politician who sees his most important job as not implementing an ideological agenda, but healing Israel? And we do have such figures. So I'm very hopeful for the morning after. I'm less hopeful that the morning after is imminent. We could be in a really prolonged, agonizing, slow death of this divisive coalition.
But the healing, God willing, will come. I believe in Israel. I believe in the Jewish people, and it will come. At the same time, I know that this government has already done tremendous damage to Israel. I worry about lasting systemic damage to the civil service, to the Israeli ethos, to what we call the dignity of the state, the political system's ability and willingness to uphold the the dignity of the state, which was once really what united Likud and labor was a commitment to this. That's the other sin of this government, the other sin among many.
Among many, right.
I believe that a strong majority of Israelis want to see the restoration of some basic semblance of social coherence and want to see the restoration of the dignity of the state. And so for those reasons, I guess that makes me an optimist.
It does make you an optimist. I think you're an optimist in your very soul, in your very core. And I think that it's your love of Israel and your DNA-based optimism that have, quite rightly, made you one of the most beloved and revered figures commenting on Israel and the soul of the Israeli people for many, many, many years.
Well, thank you. And you certainly fit that description. I'm deeply grateful to you.
But I'm grateful to you for your time today, for sharing with us in this really historic moment, your thoughts about what we've just accomplished, what we still have to accomplish, where the future might lead. Once again, to my friend and teacher, Yossi Klein Halevi, my deepest, deepest thanks.
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