Whenever this war ends, whether that is in a few weeks (very unlikely) or a few years (quite possible), Israelis are going to have to return to the question of what kind of country, constitutionally and Jewishly, this state should be.
A year ago, before anyone could imagine what October 7 would do to the Jewish state and to Jewish history, hundreds of thousands of Israelis were taking to the streets to fight to save their democracy. Though most of them probably couldn’t articulate it, says Tomer Persico, they were fighting for an Israeli form of liberalism.
Will this war have any impact on that? Will the war strengthen Jewish identity at the expense of liberalism here (classic liberalism, the rights of the individual, etc., not “left wing” liberalism)? In our conversation, Persico speaks about the strange fact that there are almost no books in Hebrew on liberalism, explains why he wrote one, and muses on the future of Israeli society now that 2023 was the year of judicial reform and 2024 was the year of existential war.
Before we get to liberalism, what is happening in the north? Obviously, Israel is trying to significantly degrade Hezbollah either (a) so as to get Hezbollah to agree to withdraw beyond the Litani River, which UN Resolution 1701 has long demanded, or (b) in order to soften them before a ground invasion, which does not seem around the corner, but if, when it happens, will signal all out war, and possibly regional war.
Does Israel want an all out war? Yes, says Amit Segal, one of Israel’s leading journalists and a well known TV personality. We do want an all-out war, we just don’t want it to look like we started it. Segal explains why (clip was all over social media, including here; we’ve added subtitles):
Until that war breaks out (news sources are reporting that Israelis are buying copious amounts of food, but that it’s not clear whether it’s for Rosh Hashanah or stocking up for war), what’s going on in the north is as close as one can get, without actually “being at war.”
Interestingly, though the days of arial dogfights are long since behind us (and Hezbollah has no planes, in any event), Israelis are seeing and sharing widely (which is why we’re sharing them here) scenes that are about as close to dogfights as is possible these days—Israeli planes shooting down Hezbollah UAV’s. This one (I don’t know who filmed it) was shared widely yesterday: you can see the UAV destroyed in the very first seconds of the video; pieces of it continue to fly, and then the jet that destroyed it comes into the picture:
Finally, before we get to today’s podcast, that irrepressible Israeli humor, even in wartime. Israeli news sources noted two days ago that Sinwar has not been heard from for some time now, leading some to suspect that he’s dead or injured. Of course, we’ve been looking for him for a year, so it’s not clear why not knowing where he is now is such a big deal.
The assumption that our not hearing from him means that he’s dead has led to all sorts of very Jewish jokes, a classic mix of Jewish and Israeli. Here’s but one:
“Seriously, we haven’t heard from Sinwar for three days so we assume he’d dead? I didn’t know that my mother had been appointed head of Military Intelligence.”
Dr. Tomer Persico is the Koret Visiting Assistant Professor of Jewish and Israel Studies in the department of of Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures, the Berkeley Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies, and Center for Jewish Studies at UCM Berkeley, and the Shalom Hartman Institute Bay Area Scholar in Residence.
His fields of study are contemporary spirituality, Jewish modern identity, Jewish renewal, and forms of secularization and religiosity in Israel. He has taught at the Department for Comparative Religion in Tel Aviv University for eight years.
Tomer is a scholar and prolific author. His first book, The Jewish Meditative Tradition (Hebrew), was published by Tel Aviv University Press. His second book, In God’s Image: Selfhood, Freedom and Equality (Hebrew) was published by Yedioth in 2021, and is available here in English.
His third book, Liberalism: its Roots, Values and Crises, about which he speaks with us today, was published in July 2024.
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, available specially for paid subscribers to Israel from the Inside.
Our guest today is someone that we've had on the podcast for Israel from the Inside before. And the reason that we've had him before, and we're having him again, is that I find Tomer Persico to be one of the most interesting and thoughtful writers and thinkers about the freedom of religion in Israel, Judaism and religion, renewed Judaism in Israel, and now, based on his most recent book, which we're going to talk about today, liberalism in Israel. Liberalism, obviously, the subject of much discussion all across the world, in England in its recent elections, in France in its recent elections, what's happening in Eastern Europe. Israel is hardly the only society wrestling with the future of liberalism and the challenges to liberalism and so forth, but it is also wrestling with it. And Tomer's is one of the first books to deal with that specific issue very recently. And I wanted to bring him on to share with us his thoughts about liberalism in Israel.
Tomer is the research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, a Rubenstein fellow at Rachman University, and a senior research scholar at UC Berkeley Center for Middle Eastern Studies. His fields of expertise, where he writes and speaks very, very, very, very widely are contemporary spirituality, Jewish modern identity, Jewish renewal, and forms of secularization and religiosity in Israel.
He's written a number of books, which we will list in print on the post. I'll just mention his most recent book, which we're going to talk about today. It's called Liberalism and its Roots, Values, and Crises. It was just published a few weeks ago in Israel. Tomer, as I said before, is an activist for freedom of religion, has written hundreds of articles on these subjects for popular media, including regular contributions to Haaretz. He and his wife and sons live in Jerusalem. So Tomer, first of all, thank you very much for coming back on the conversation.
Thank you so much for inviting me.
I'm holding the book here. It's really, really a great book. I read the book before when I had it only as a PDF, but now seeing it with a real cover is really very exciting. The book is part of a larger series, and you're editing that series. So what I'd love to have you tell us about a little bit is the series. Why a series on liberalism in Israel now? There's a lot of things going on in Israel that one could say liberalism is not on the top six things we have to worry about, which I know you don't agree with and I don't agree with, but nonetheless, why a series now? And then we'll talk a little bit about your definition of liberalism, and we'll go into that in a moment. Tell us, why are Israelis beginning to put out books on liberalism, particularly now?
As you can see from holding the physical book, the book is short. It's 100 pages in Hebrew. It's an introductory book, and the whole series is meant to be an introductory series on what we call Etgarei HaDemokratia, the Challenges of Democracy. That's the series. This is the first book on liberalism. We will have planned 10 more books, at least. The next book will be Dori Klagsbald, the very famous lawyer in Israel who will write about the investigative committees, which are formerly designated by the state to investigate some great crisis.
Right. There's a lot of discussion now, whether we're headed towards a whole series of investigative committees based on October 7th.
And we'll have a book on the rule of law by Yitzchak Zamir, former justice of the Supreme Court, we'll have a book by Eva Illouz on the failures of the left, by the way, who is an international thinker, and such.
She's very typical of parts of the left which feel very abandoned by the left in light of what happened on October 7th. Because she's a woman of the left, but feeling very...
I imagine she was very close to some of the people who are now challenging, perhaps, the very existence of Israel.
Right.
So that's the series. We planned this series before the war.
Well, you started writing the book even before the judicial reform.
I started writing about liberalism even before the judicial reform as a part of witnessing the global crisis in liberalism and trying to respond to that. Of course, it became much more relevant during the judicial overhaul. Then we thought about having this series out, short books, introductory for the Israeli public to enrich the discourse in Israel about these ideas, because there are so many books on liberalism in English, in the US, in Europe, introductory books, serious philosophical books... In Hebrew, you almost have nothing. Menny Mautner wrote a bit, but really, that's it.
How do you explain that?
It's strange.
Because a lot of American non-fiction gets translated into Hebrew. I mean, you walk into Steimatzky and you see lots of America's books in Hebrew. Why has that stuff not made it into Hebrew?
Yeah, you don't even have a translation on liberalism or like an introductory book. I think in Israel, we tend to focus, first of all, on Judaism, the Jewish people, the Jewish state, et cetera. And we use the word democracy a lot. We almost don't use the word liberalism here.
Because it sounds left?
I think many people don't even know what it exactly is, what it's supposed to help us with. We're talking about, you know, we're struggling for democracy, we're strengthening democracy, we're weakening democracy. We don't talk about liberalism. And into that lacuna, I wanted to bring this book and to really get people to understand a bit better what they are fighting for.
Okay, great. So that gives us a little bit of perspective on this book and its place in the current Israeli intellectual, social discourse. Let's talk about liberalism a little bit. As we just said, there are literally, I think in the last eight years, since the Trump campaign, there's been an explosion of books about liberalism of all different views. People on the left, people on the right, people who argue that liberalism got what was coming to it, people that argue that liberalism should be mourned and brought back and everything in the middle. Give us, just because not everybody who's listening reads all those books all the time... Some people have real things to do with their lives. Give us your working definition of liberalism because people very often conflate it, obviously, with the left, which is not at all what it means.
That's exactly the first thing I wanted to say. We're not talking about progressivism, which is what the word liberalism means for many Americans. Liberalism is the radical left. We're not talking about that.
Or even the left left. It's not even the left.
We're talking about a political structure, a system that holds that the individual has certain dimensions or depth which the free exercise of constitutes their liberty. If I get to express myself in these certain dimensions, I am free. These dimensions are called our rights. And what liberalism says is that the government, the current administration, whatever it is, has to protect these dimensions, these rights. Liberalism also holds that these dimensions are universal. Everybody has them. All humans have them. And as such, humans are equal to each other, equal essentially, and equal in that they deserve to be protected around these dimensions. Okay, so if this is liberalism, we immediately notice that it focuses on the individual. It is a contract or a pact between the individual or a bunch of individuals and the system, the government.
Basically, social contract theory, whether it's Hobbes or Locke or any...
Exactly. More Locke than Hobbes because Hobbes didn't talk about rights except the right to be-
Or Rousseau, maybe a little bit more.
Yeah. Locke already gives us a preliminary list of rights. This is what really liberalism is. It's a list of rights that the government has to hold. It's the social contract that explains why the government is dependent on the consent of the governed, and that consent is dependent on the government protecting our rights. Locke would say a government that does not protect the individual rights is an illegitimate government, and we have a right to rebel against it.
We're talking American Revolution. We're talking about the French Revolution. We're talking about that whole period.
English Civil Wars, even before. Locke and Hobbes lived in those times and had to explain why it was reasonable and justified and legitimate to oust the king. To first, Oliver Cromwell, of course, killed the king.
That's one way of ousting.
But in the bloodless revolution, the glorious revolution, the king was simply replaced. Now, the king was replaced by decision of the parliament. Does the parliament have a right to remove a king and place another king? This is a monarchical system, but the king is beholden to the parliament. This is the great novelty at that time of liberalism. The power is with the representative, with the parliament, and the king does not have absolute power. He is beholden to the parliament.
Now, liberalism in the world is in crisis. I think everybody would recognize that. We've mentioned a couple of examples. Why is liberalism in crisis? What has caused liberalism to be so much on the defensive in the several decades?
We're in a peculiar situation in which, on the one hand, liberalism has been totally victorious, has had this victorious run, at least for the last 30 years, ever since the Soviet Bloc collapsed. Liberalism is the only game in town. There's not another serious ideology that challenges liberalism and suggests a different way to construct society. We don't remember how rich and intricate and interesting fascism and communism were. These were serious systems that had explanations why a just society, a good society is a society in which there is a supreme leader who holds absolute power and he channels the will of the people and expresses it in some romantic way, or the proletariat, they are the representative of the truth and they can construct a society through their dictatorship at first and then blah, blah, blah. These were serious alternatives to the liberal order. We don't have that today.
You're not calling today's populism a serious alternative to the liberal order?
No, it's a threat to liberalism.
But it's not its own worldview.
I don't think. And you can see populists around the world, from India through Hungary to the United States, talk about freedom and equality. They talk in the name of liberal values. Then they add a few things, and we can talk about populism, what exactly it is, and how they construct their political tactics. But they don't present an alternative. What is an alternative, by the way, and does challenge the liberal order today, is religious fundamentalism. Religious fundamentalism, which in the West is a minority. We all have a lot of religious-- in Israel a bit more, in Islamic countries, of course, a lot more. This is a real challenge in the way that it does offer, it does suggest a whole other way of constructing society. We can have Sharia law. We can have a Halachic theocracy, we want to return to the days of King David, we want a temple, we want to sacrifice animals. This is a totally different understanding of society. But populism isn't, and then fundamentalism, I say, is a minority in the West. And we have another challenge, which I mentioned in the book for the liberal order, which is on the left: extreme, I would say radical, Identitarian politics on the left.
I'll differentiate this from identity politics. Identity politics, liberal identity politics, your run-of-the-mill identity politics is a minority claiming equal rights, claiming an equal piece of the democratic and liberal pie. Blacks or Jews or LGBT, et cetera. Women, of course, say, "We are discriminated against. We are not getting our equal share voting, et cetera. Please." And we know that these struggles have often been successful, at least in the West, in the last 200 years.
Radical Identitarian politics says, "We actually don't want an equal piece of your pie. The whole pie is corrupt, it's rotten. The whole pie is colonialist or capitalist or something that we don't like. We actually want to go our own way and establish our own society." So you've got a person like Andrea Dworkin, radical feminist thinker from the '70s, '80s, saying, "We don't want to be equal to men. Men are oppressive by nature. Every act of intercourse is rape. Every act. We want to establish our own society, our own state of women, a state made up only of women." That's also the difference between Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. King came in the name of basic liberal values, equality-
He wanted America to be the best version of itself.
Yeah.
It says it held America up to the values of the Constitution. It said, be loyal, be true to what you yourself signed. Malcolm X says something different altogether. He says, "We don't want to be part of the game. We want to be a nation of Islam" or whatever kind of structure they were establishing there. That's what I mean by Identitarian politics. And today you've got Identitarian politics, specifically now or the last few months, you saw an explosion of them around post-colonial ideas. Right?
On American campuses post October 7th, where they, by the way, not only protested against Israel, they also burned American flags.
That's exactly it. You can see people saying, writing on the internet, "We want to bring the whole Western order down. We want the whole of the West to crumble." Again, it is 'colonialist', it's 'imperialist', it's 'capitalist'. Whatever they think is the worst sin, the whole West is complicit, and Israel is the epitome.
So now let's talk about liberalism in Israel a little bit.
Liberalism, you gave us a brief... We can't obviously go into great detail, but you gave it as a little bit of a sense of why liberalism is at... liberalism is under threat. I mean, there's an interesting argument by Patrick Deneen at the University of Notre Dame in America, where he actually makes the interesting claim that liberalism is in trouble, ironically, because the focus on the individual attacked the very institutions that were supposed to produce the kinds of citizens that liberalism needed. So if you needed the family person, the family-oriented person who's committed to all the, you know, the basic things that people in the West are committed to, then he argues that the attack on the church, the attack on the school, and then there was one other one. It was the church, the school, and I'm missing that third one.
The nation state, perhaps?
I'm thinking it was something else, but it doesn't matter. By definition, since you argue that the church can no longer tell me what to think or what to do, the church becomes a much more weakened institution, which it clearly is in America. But then the church doesn't produce the people with the values that were the kinds of citizens that Jefferson and Hamilton and others had in mind. Same thing with a school. People don't want this being taught, they don't want that being taught. Before you know it, there's no common curriculum. There's no sense of citizenry. There's no sense of belonging to a larger whole because that's indoctrination. He actually argues that by hyper-focusing on the individual, liberalism set the stage for its own collapse because it destroyed those institutions that it desperately needed in order to keep its citizens going.
I like Deneen's first book. I think it's good, and I agree with his general direction, and I'll phrase it my way. Liberalism has been, again, the only game in town for the last 30 years, at least. This total victory of the liberal logic-
Thirty years because of the fall of Communism.
Yeah, '92, the fall of the Communist bloc. This total victory, of course, accentuated everything that liberalism stood for. That's good if we are convinced, as I am, that liberalism is basically the only system today that can manage a society of diverse individuals without violence. But, it also accentuated liberalism's drawbacks- its Achilles' heel. Which is that liberalism does not tell a story. Now, this is a feature of liberalism which became a bug, and I'll explain how. Liberalism sets the ground rules for all of us. We have our rights, we're equal to each other and in front of the law, and we do our thing. Now, liberalism takes a lot of care not to tell us what 'our thing' is. Liberalism does not direct us in a specific direction.
You have thinkers like Ronald Dworkin using the word procedural to describe liberalism's envelope on the social order. It's the procedural laws that make the system tick: you stop at a red light and you don't steal. But liberalism or the liberal state does not tell you what the good life is, what you should aspire to. If you want to be a Yeshiva student or be a scientist and look for a cure for cancer or be rich and famous, or whatever. It's your thing. Now, again, that's a feature of liberalism. It's the very logic of liberalism. But when it's the only game in town, it becomes a bug. Why? Because liberalism brings us towards a situation, towards a state in which things are so open before us and there's no communal logic that holds us together, just as Deneen says. It brings us into a post-national era, certainly a secular era. We don't have these meta-narratives that hold society together and that give us some story about who we are, where are we situated in terms of past, present, future, solidarity with who, et cetera. It doesn't give us an identity.
Now, for some people, this is fantastic. This free-willing, individualistic society is just what they want, and they usually also profit from it. Great. For a lot of people, this causes anxiety. For a lot of people, they need that sense of belonging to something bigger than them. I think it's the most natural human-
It's a drive. It's a need.
Sentiment. Yeah, it's nothing to look down on. These people look for a story. If we remember the rivals, the challenges of liberalism right now, which we pointed at populism, we pointed at religious fundamentalism, and we pointed at any Identitarianism on the left, they all give you an identity. The populist leader says, I will protect your identity as true Americans, as true Hungarians, as true Jews... Against the European Union or the globalists or the elites or the judicial system or all the people, academia, all the people who don't understand our authentic identity. Religious fundamentalism certainly gives you a very robust identity. Right? "We're coming back to the days of King David", et cetera. And Identitarian politics, it's in the name. You are this social warrior, social justice warrior. You're black or you're a minority of another sort or you're LGBT, et cetera.
Obviously, that's who you are and you struggle in the name of that. So I understand the crisis of liberalism as a crisis of identity. People are looking to be a part of something bigger than them, and liberalism can't give them that. They will look until they find something that can give them that.
I want to come to Israel, specifically, obviously, because that's the focus of what we do. You mentioned at the beginning that we haven't, in Israel, talked very much about liberalism, which is part of the reason for this series of books to get the wider conversation about liberalism going. It's not only religious fundamentalism, which tells you a story. I mean, what I would call normal, non-fundamentalist religious life. I mean, you and I are both part of that each in our own way. But the communities of which we're a part, which are hardly fundamentalist and are hardly extremist, they tell a story. I mean, by virtue of the ritual practices and the liturgy and the texts which root us, they tell a story about a people that's come back to a land and so on and so forth. And I wonder, to a certain extent, whether or not, whether perhaps one of the reasons that liberalism didn't quite become the cat's meow in Israel is because it doesn't tell a story. And this is a country built on a story. America is built on a story, too, but the story is very, very, very old.
Therefore, there's very few people who get raised in America now thinking about that story all the time. Whereas here, the battle for the story is still an ongoing battle. I wanted to ask you in light of that, whether you maybe agree, maybe you disagree, but has what's happened since October 7th, maybe a little bit during the judicial reform before, but especially since October 7th, and this truly existential war in which we find ourselves, is this going to give liberalism a boost because it's going to give Israelis a sense of a story so liberalism is not threatening because I have my story anyway? Or is it going to be more of a danger to liberalism because I need a story and liberalism doesn't provide it, so I don't need liberalism? What's going to happen to liberalism in Israel as a result of October 7th and onwards?
It's a difficult question. Before the war, we found ourselves within an unbelievable civic awakening by people who were demonstrating week after week in numbers that proportionately to the population in Israel are, I think, unheard of in the West.
Right, right.
Week after week for nine months or 10 months.
It was 39 weeks in a row.
Yeah. And fighting for democracy, fighting really for liberalism, even if they could not articulate it exactly. Fighting for the protection of our Supreme Court, which in Israel is the only device we have to protect our rights. We don't have a constitution, don't have two houses of parliament, don't have a federal system. That's all we have. Don't have a Bill of Rights. That's what we have, the Supreme Court. And they were fighting to protect the Supreme Court. Now, the war, I think, certainly gives us a story, I think, in the way that it pushes us, thrusts us deep back into the Jewish story. I think the war really brought up, conjured up, as it were, from history, all the sites and memories that we learned about in school as things of the past to the present.
Things of the past and things that don't happen here, they happen there.
Yeah, they happen in Eastern Europe. And pogroms, really, this is what it was. I think for many, I think- I'm sure- that many people are much more connected to their Jewish identity today, even in ways that they can't articulate, but simply feeling a part of Jewish history, feeling another link in that chain of long Jewish history, with all its travails and et cetera. Now, I don't know how that will influence liberalism in Israel. A lot of times, Judaism in Israel, to my great sorrow, is juxtaposed against liberalism and against democracy. It's like we have a Jewish and democratic state. People think, the more Jewish you are, the less democratic you are, the more democratic, the less Jewish. My previous book about the image of God, about the idea of how the image of God is seminal in the Western, liberal order, was a part of my attempt to show Jews in Israel, look, liberalism stems from our tradition. Not only, of course, it's not enough, but we, Judaism gave the world the idea that all people were created in the image of God, and that is inherent and was historically significant in the development of liberalism. That's my attempt to tell Jews, the liberal order is ours. We should embrace it.
But as I said, many times it's juxtaposed. And, of course, for people today on the populist right and on the fundamentalist right, they certainly have an agenda of making it juxtaposed. These people- you know- it's not even an interpretation. They say it. "The West is a problem, Western values are a problem, liberalism is a problem, and we want a more Jewish state", which for them means a less liberal state. And I think one of the questions for the next few years will be whether Jewish and Israeli society will be able to stand against these people, to reject their idea of Judaism and of the Jewish state, and to be very clear that there's no contradiction between Judaism and liberalism and that their way, their offer for a Jewish identity, which is anti-liberal, has to be rejected.
Okay, so I want to pick up and then ask you something about where we find ourselves in Israel now, because you say that there's no alternative. Liberalism is the only game in town. There's Communism, but it's gone since '92. There's Nazism, which is, thankfully, mostly gone. There's Identitarian politics, which whatever it is, is not taking over the world so quickly yet. I mean, who knows? But it's not so far taking over the world. It's hard to see that it would. Now, in Israel, you're saying there is a little bit of an alternative, which is a very Jewish quasi-fundamentalist or actually fundamentalist take on the world, which thinks about democracy and Jewish as being in tension, and it's a zero-sum game. So the more Jewish, the less democratic, the more democratic, the less Jewish, and so on and so forth.
Can somebody here tell a different story? In other words, is there a possibility in Israel, not for intellectuals like Tomer Persico to write books about this, but a much more populist view in which Israelis say to themselves, "Yeah, there is an alternative that that tells a Jewish story that is deeply embedded in liberal values, and we have something to say".
Right now, it would be very hard to think about what it is that... there's no left in Israel, what the center has to say. My question to you is, why is there not... We've had 10, 11 months since all of this started. Why have we not seen a serious opposition grow? Why are there no new people who've come out of Gaza? Hundreds of thousands of people went into Gaza to fight and came out and said, "That's it. A new time in Israel, I'm not letting it happen." But nobody's really come to the floor. There's all kinds of programs like the Fourth Quarter and Tohnit HaMe'a, the Project of the Century. These are all great people doing great things. But no opposition is really bubbling to the surface with its own story, with its own story that's deeply liberal and very Jewish, and definitely not fundamentalist. Why is that?
This is a situation that frustrates me so much. We've had perhaps the worst crisis and the worst negligence leading to a crisis ever in Israel. And this government is still in power. There's no serious opposition that challenges it. It's unbelievable. I think there's a few reasons for that. First of all, that the war, the crisis, the terrible massacre on the 7th of October, shifted the public even more right than they were. So people are not open to listening to solutions that include leftists, quote unquote or no quote unquote, ideas like, let's say, two-state solution. If you're coming from a liberal point of view, at the end, you have to address that problem somehow. I don't believe a serious liberal person can say, yes, we are going to militarily control millions of people forever. You might say "Now is not the time, but in 10, 20 years time, yes, we will need to give the Palestinians their own state."
Or at least separate from them in some way.
Some way, yeah. Some autonomy, something. But even that is very hard to say to the public today. I think another very fundamental reason is that for a long time, the left and the secular public in Israel, which is, of course, is mostly not left, have not articulated for themselves what their Judaism is. They don't have a robust Jewish identity. They don't have a way to confront ultra-Orthodox, even Orthodox, and say to them, "We are not less Jewish than you. We express our Judaism differently, but our Judaism is a legitimate and equal expression in the public sphere to your Judaism." They don't have that. Now, we used to have that. We, I mean, the secular... I'm not secular, but the great cluster of non-Orthodox Jews in Israel... Ben Gurion had that.
Well, because he grew up Orthodox.
No, he had another Jewish identity. For Ben Gurion, Judaism was building a nation state in the land of Israel.
No, I understand, but my point only is that many of the founders, many of the secular founders here, had, as part of their toolkit, a deep Jewish literacy. So they could use that toolkit and that literacy to build a new Jewish narrative.
For sure.
Whereas the grandchildren of those people and the great-grandchildren of those people who now inhabit Israel just don't even have any of the literacy to be able to have that conversation.
But they don't even have the grand narrative that their grandparents had. Why didn't the grand narrative continue and develop even? It didn't- socialism.
Why?
Socialism died, first of all. Socialism was a very big part of it.
When socialism died, nothing came up in its place.
"We are building a just society to take care of the poor and the needy according to the visions of the prophets"-- all that. That's vanished. There's no socialism today to speak of. That was a big part of that Jewish identity. So that's gone. For many, nationalism as a Jewish identity, Zionism in its very primal existence, that's also diluted, gone. And so they don't have that, and it's very hard for them to stand up and confront the Orthodox and the ultra-Orthodox without that.
And finally, I will say it's also about Netanyahu. Netanyahu, a very talented person, and not only him, has made Israel's political arena warped around him, around a single person. And Netanyahu has not only remade the political arena in Israel in his image, you can either be for him or against him, but you don't have another option. But even our political opinions are now shaped by what Netanyahu is willing or unwilling to say. It's unbelievable. Netanyahu says of himself, "I will prevent the Palestinian State." And nobody can say, "We think that's wrong." And you can remember how it played out during the argument about the Iran nuclear deal with the United States. Netanyahu said, "The United States has to drop out of that deal. We have to cancel that deal." Nobody was brave enough to say, "Maybe we should keep that deal."
There were some Israeli intelligence people who actually argued that the deal was good for Israel and you should not-
Yeah, but politicians, no opposition. It's unbelievable. So these three reasons, I would say, hamper the opposition in Israel, and it brings us to this unbelievably tragic situation in which this government is the most failed government ever in Israel, not only the 7th of October, but even since they are not making the correct decisions, even economically, and there's no opposition.
Is there a sense that there's not going to be any opposition until the Bibi era is over? Or, how optimistic are you that- we're having this conversation, obviously, in the summer of 2024. How optimistic are you that by 2030, six years from now, we're going to have an Israel that is more on track with a robust liberal conversation? There'll be middle, there'll be center, there'll be right, maybe there'll even be some left, who knows? But the give and take, the social contract, the cultural conversation that was once Israel can be restored, or do you think that it's part of the past?
I think so much depends on the next government. I think the next government will be a government without Netanyahu and without the religious extremists.
I think the government after the next government, frankly, by the way, I think he may win one more time.
Oh, my God.
I think, but I don't know. It depends on when the elections are. If elections were to happen today, he would win.
I don't think so. But okay.
Polls say.
I don't know. I don't know. Perhaps. But whenever... I think the next government will be a wide-ranging government from the Zionist left to the center right without the Likud. It will have so many challenges before it. It will have so many things on its plate to take care of. And a lot depends on what that government will do in terms of Haredi, ultra-Orthodox serving in the army. Or at least being defunded in at least some of their budgets. In terms of the fundamentalists, in terms of the hilltop youth, and I'm using this in a very broad term, that just two weeks ago entered the IDF base without permission? It's broken. It's unbelievable, the craziness here. A lot depends on how successful and how brave that government will be in challenging and in taking care of these challenges. I don't know. If they succeed, we will see an upward vector in Israel, and I think Israel can rebuild itself, et cetera. If not, I fear that the downward spiral we are in will continue.
Until?
I mean, Israel is not going to be eliminated, but it can be a failed state. I mean, the elite will emigrate away. Already there was just a big article in Haaretz on doctors leaving. There's a real brain drain of doctors in Israel, and we don't have enough as it is.
We don't produce enough doctors.
People will leave. Whoever will be able to will leave in order to ensure a better future for their children. It's clear. It happens in Turkey. It happens in Venezuela, of course. It happens in Russia. It happens. What will remain is a very weak and very diluted, poor state that will have nuclear armaments, according to foreign... But, it will be a very far cry from the Israel that we all dreamed about and tried to... and even realized for some decades.
Which is why the book comes out. To come back to the beginning of our conversation, the reason for a book about liberalism and the reason for a series about all of these issues, whether it's governmental commissions of inquiry or whatever, is to begin to build inside Israel a new conversation among Israelis about the very core ideas that make up the democracy, the liberal democracy that this place is or has been, at least. And so the book is just more than, I think- and that's why I wanted to have this conversation with you- the book is much more than just yet another book written by a very smart guy about a very important issue. It's a book that comes to a society, I think, thirsting for ideas. And for people like you and me who desperately want these ideas to take root, it's a book that comes at a time when we hope that these ideas can take root, because as you say, otherwise, there's a spiral here that we may not get out of. And that's an unthinkably horrible, sad way to go.
So I'm very grateful to you. I think many of our listeners probably had no idea that there's not a wide-ranging literature in Hebrew about liberalism. I mean, you go into Barnes & Noble in America, you can't avoid it. But here in Israeli bookstores, you actually can't find it. I think they probably didn't know that. I think they probably didn't think so much about this notion of the story- as liberalism not having a story, whereas Israel is being so story-oriented and wondering about that. And again, thinking about the future of a restoring of some national narrative, which is not fundamentalist and not necessarily really only religious, is a new challenge for Israel that is particularly pressing in a moment like this. So it's good for us to take a step back from the day-to-day news and a step back from who's doing what to whom out there on the battlefield and think about the larger vision for the country. And for your taking the time to have the conversation, I'm very grateful.
Music credits: Medieval poem by Rabbi Shlomo Ibn Gvirol. Melody and performance by Shaked Jehuda and Eyal Gesundheit. Production by Eyal Gesundheit. To view a video of their performance, see this YouTube:
Israel's great civic and Jewish awakening—is it good or bad for Israel's liberalism?