If the video below by the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, and his vision for the world, doesn’t send chills down your spine, well … you’re in better shape than I am. As American students who are not Muslim and know virtually nothing about the Middle East now wear kaffiyehs all over campus (a member of the Harvard administration with whom I spoke this week estimated the number at 20% of the students wearing them—a number for which I cannot vouch, of course), one can only wonder if they understand that in the vision of the world that the Muslim Brotherhood (like Hamas) propagates, these students, too, would also end up dead.
We’ll come back to that.
First, the tentative schedule for this week:
MONDAY (03/18): We’re going to offer a few glimpses into the soul of Israel at this time, when war has become the “new normal,” with Gaza a slog and the north far, far from resolved. Yarden Roman Gat, who was held hostage and released around fifty days into her captivity, gave an interview to Yediot Ahronot which appeared last week. Only one thing made her cry in captivity, she says—Israeli radio. And not for the reasons you might think. That, plus some videos from the Hebrew press that cast light on Israel’s soul these days.
TUESDAY (03/19): Many of the expressions of “faith” that the average English-language reader hears coming from Israel are hardly, ahem, inspiring. But whether we ourselves are personally on a faith-quest, knowing about the beauty of some visions of Judaism in Israel are key to understanding who and what the Jewish State is. Today, we’ll focus on the “faith-filled left.”
WEDNESDAY (03/20): A finance and investment expert, Shelly Hod Moyal co-leads iAngels, a firm she co-founded and scaled to becoming one of the most active venture funds in Israel. We hear from her the story of her extraordinary success, learn about her firm and its social commitments (Arabs and Haredim also work there) and also find out why she’s so optimistic about Israel’s future. We’ll post an excerpt for everyone, and the full conversation for our paid subscribers.
THURSDAY (03/21): If Chuck Schumer needs to get business cards printed up any time in the near future, he should probably add “Chief of Bibi Re-election Campaign.” Most Israelis have had it with Netanyahu, but they are incensed at Schumer’s trying to meddle in our internal political system (even if they agree with Schumer’s assessment of the PM). Biden and Schumer are trying to punish Bibi, but they’re actually boosting him, because they don’t begin to understand Israelis society. Might Bibi make it politically? It’s less unthinkable than it was not long ago, so we hear a leading Israeli commentator, Lior Schleien, share his assessment of what another Bibi term would look like.
FRIDAY (03/22): Breaches of protocol in the IDF are becoming more frequent—it’s a sign of the rage and worry wafting through Israel. Last week, we wrote about Brigadeir-General Dan Goldfus who took on Netanyahu, and in normal times, would have been fired—but of course wasn’t. Today, we’ll see a military ceremony that was attended by the father of one of the women soldiers at a base that was overrun on October 7. She was killed, perhaps burned to death. We’ll see the incident, and reflect on what is unfolding in Israel write large.
One of the “complications” of Israel’s ongoing negotiations with Hamas is that the way the bartering is presented in the press, it sounds like there are two reasonable parties working out a contract. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. No matter how critical one might be of some of what Israel is up to (some people are critical, some are not), a reminder of the worldview against which Israel is at war is crucial.
MEMRI, a phenomenal research center that tracks radio, TV and print in the Arab world, recently made the following video available. As MEMRI wrote:
Kuwaiti Islamic scholar and Muslim Brotherhood leader Tareq Al-Suwaidan said in a lecture in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia that he met with Ismail Haniyeh a week before the lecture. He said that Palestine will be free, that October 7 was a “very clear start” to this, and that Hamas cannot be crushed. Al-Suwaidan said that Istanbul is in the hands of the Muslims and so will Rome be “one day too.” He said that normalizing relations with Israel makes the leaders of Arab countries “traitors” to Islam and the Islamic nation. Al-Suwaidan said that the tunnels in Gaza were all built in one year, during the rule of Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood President Mohamed Morsi, whom he said supplied the equipment.
Even on the historical point, Al-Suwaidan is more than a bit “inaccurate”—the tunnels were not all dug in one year, for example. But still, we need to hear him to remind ourselves what Israel is fighting now, and what the West will soon have to fight as well.
And now for something much more enjoyable than Al-Suwaidan. I’ve known Alex Sinclair for years—he’s a talented educator and thinker, and now, it turns out, he tells a good yarn, too! He gave me a copy of his just-published novel, PERFECT ENEMY, which was both thought-provoking and a heck of a lot of fun.
It’s not quite science fiction, but there’s some cloning. That’s not a spoiler: it’s on the cover. I asked Alex to tell us about the novel, and then pressed him into whether or not be would have written the same book had he written it after October 7th.
Alex Sinclair is Chief Content Officer at Educating for Impact, and an adjunct lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Alex has written and spoken widely on Jewish education, Israel-Diaspora relations, and Israeli politics, in both academic and popular contexts. He has worked or consulted for a wide variety of Jewish educational and communal institutions in North America, Europe and Israel.
His first book, published in 2013, Loving the Real Israel: An Educational Agenda for Liberal Zionism, was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, and his debut novel, Perfect Enemy, was published in 2023. He holds an M.A. (Oxon) and M.St. from Balliol College, Oxford, and a Ph.D. from Hebrew University.
Alex lives with his wife and their three children in Modi'in, Israel.
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.
I had the pleasure, not that long ago, of spending really a wonderful Shabbat reading a book that a friend and colleague had dropped off at my front door while I was away in the south and picked it up on a Shabbat evening, spent most of Shabbat reading it. I confess I did go to Shul, but it was really a great tale. And I reached out to the author, Alex Sinclair, to talk about his book “Perfect Enemy”, which has just come out.
Alex is the is Chief Content Officer at Educating for Impact. He's also an adjunct lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has written and spoken widely on Jewish education, on Israel- Diaspora relations, and Israeli politics, both in academic and in popular contexts. He's worked for and consulted for a wide variety of Jewish educational and communal institutions in North America, in Europe, and in Israel.
His first book, which was published about a decade ago in 2013, was called “Loving the Real Israel: An Educational Agenda for Liberal Zionism”, and it was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. His debut novel, the one that I just mentioned, called “Perfect Enemy”, was just published. Alex holds an MA and an MST from Balliol College in Oxford and a PhD from Hebrew University. He and his wife live with their three children in Modi'in-, Israel, which is about situated midway basically between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
So, Alex, first of all, thank you so much for taking the time to join with us. You and I have known each other for a very long time, and when you reached out about your book, I was very excited for you a number of reasons. By the way, I also wrote a novel, and I spent a lot of time working on it. I even went to Iowa to the writer's workshop to work on it, and I spent whatever… and every person that I gave it to basically said very nicely, this is horrible. And eventually, after a number of years, including my children making endless fun of me, I gave it up. Writing a novel is a really not easy craft. And even for someone like you or me, who writes a lot of nonfiction, making the switch to fiction is a very, very hard thing to do. And you did it. You really wrote a great, great story, and I had a lot of fun with it.
But it's also clear that the book is about much more than the characters themselves. It raises profound issues about the Israeli- Palestinian conflict, about the moral issues inherent in Zionism.
So why don't we start out by having you tell us why a guy like you, who's trying to keep out of trouble and just be a very top-notch Jewish educator about Zionism, liberal Zionism, and so on and so forth. How did you get this as we say in Israel, “juk b’rosh”, I mean, literally a cockroach in the head, but it sort of means a be in your bonnet or whatever to write a novel? Where did this come from?
First of all, thank you very much for having me on this podcast, and it's a pleasure and an honor. I've been a massive fan of yours for many, many years. I don't know if you remember all the way back to when, I think this was like 25 years ago, when I invited you to speak to a group of students that I was working with. So, I really appreciate this.
I remember it well. It was 25 years ago, and I was ten years old, so I remember it.
Yeah, there you go. Exactly. That means I was about five. Look, I spent a lot of years, as you said, like writing stuff and teaching about Israel. I used to teach a course at JTS, and I worked with students, and I wrote the occasional op ed. Nothing like the level and the depth and the extent that you do, but I dabbled in that kind of stuff. And at some point, I got to the point of feeling that I had said everything that I wanted to say about Israel, and I felt I was kind of repeating the same stuff over and over again, and that other people were doing it better than me anyway, so what was the point? And then, as say, I mean this phrase, cockroach in your head, I love that phrase, because that's exactly where, when I got this juk in my head, I thought, maybe one day I'll write a novel.
In brackets, this is the second piece of fiction that I've ever written. The first piece was when I was ten years old, and I wrote a story for a competition in London for Capital Radio. Wait, it gets even funnier. It was a story. It was called “Tales for a Princess”, and this was just before Prince William was going to be born, and I wrote a story for Princess Diana to read to Prince William. And it was one of six winners out of the whole of London. So, when I was ten years old, that was my first piece of fiction I ever wrote.
And I don't know whether it is, I doubt it was because of that, but I thought to myself, you know what? Maybe I'll start to write something fictional. And I started writing. I had this crazy idea, and the book is a bit of a crazy idea and I started writing. And as you say, I think my goal really was to write something that would be fun and enjoyable and kind of a great read for readers and also to get people thinking about Israel, to kind of raise issues about Israel in Israeli society and Israeli politics that I think about a lot. And that was actually one of the hard things, too. Some people who read early versions of it said, it's too educational and you're being too deductive and too much. And so, I had to cut a lot of that stuff out and find what I hope is a good kind of middle ground.
Yeah, I think you did find a very good middle ground. I mean, people like you and me who care deeply about this place and who want to share our views or get people thinking, even if we, so to speak, go off the pedagogical rails and do something different, like telling a story, there is a tendency to preach a bit, and I thought that you stayed very far away from that. I mean, you could clearly hear the educational questions. It was really clearly a novel written by a thoughtful educator, but I think it stayed very well away from the preachy thing.
So, I don't want to step on any landmines here, another phrase that we use commonly in Israel. So why don't you tell us whatever you want the audience to know about the plot of the book now so, I don't say anything that you wouldn't want them to know in advance of their reading it. What's the book about? What's the basic premise of the book? Where does it take place? Whatever you want to share, go ahead, and share with us to make us, I wanted to read it. I read it and loved it, but to get other people to want read it.
Great. So, yeah, it's hard to give away the book without, to talk about the book without giving away spoilers, because it's one of those books where there's a lot of twists and turns and it doesn't end up going the way you think it might be going. But that's part of the fun of it. The initial premise of the book is that you have an Israeli scientist who has found a way to clone Hitler from old samples of his DNA. That's not giving away anything because that's even on the blurb on the back cover of the book. So, you have this scientist who works for one of these sort of what looks like a kind of a standard Israeli startup biotech firm in Tel Aviv, in a swanky building in Tel Aviv. And they found a way to clone Hitler.
Why he wants to clone Hitler, why there are different people involved in the project who maybe have different ideas, that's already getting into spoiler territory. So, I don't want to do that. But I would say, really, the book is an exploration of trauma and how do we as Israelis, and I would say we as Jews, react to trauma? We're an incredibly traumatized people. Maybe I want to say something about the Holocaust, maybe in this conversation, Danny, if we can because I think that is really central to this, as well.
But we're a traumatized people. That's all the more so after October the 7th. How do you respond to trauma as a people, as a person and as a people? Do you want to kind of fight back? Do you want to kind of get revenge on the person or people who have been causing you that trauma? Do you want to kind of push it into a different direction? Those are questions that we face as a people today in a massive way, and we always have. And in a way, the books are kind of a bit of an exploration of that. I think it does in like a fun way and an interesting way. But ultimately, that's one of the kind of core questions that's lying at the heart of the book.
Okay, we're going to come back to post October 7th in a bit, but I'll just mention, since you mentioned the issues of trauma and revenge, I think it's going to be very interesting to see how Israelis themselves, five years from now, ten years from now, feel about this war that we're conducting. There is overwhelming support in Israel for this war. You see very little anti-war protesting. You see very little conversation about whether or not Israel has over bombed, over destroyed. I'm not sure that that's going to be the case in five or ten years. It's very possible that we will begin to ask ourselves questions about whether this was really Holocaust trauma. You perpetuate a pogrom on our side of the border, and you murder, and you burn and you kidnap and you rape and you mutilate and you maim. You will unleash all of our, I wouldn't say necessarily repressed, but stored up rage about how we've been treated over history. And you get what you get. I'm not saying it's justified. I'm not saying it's not right now, but I think the issues that you just raised are going to become issues for Israeli society to think about when the fires of the cannons, so to speak, have begun to settle down.
But let's go back to before October 7th. We're not going to see any more about the plot of the book, which has lots of twists and turns and characters of all different sorts, good people, bad people, honest people, dishonest people, and so on and so forth. It has its share of action scenes and all of that.
As an educator, before October 7th, what were some of the kinds of questions beyond what you just said about Holocaust and so forth, what were you hoping people would sit around the Shabbos table having just read the book, passing it around, or even better, every single person in the family buying their own copy of course…
Buying a copy for themselves and five copies for their friends.
Exactly. Somebody always says to me, you know, I just lent a copy of your book, and I say, that's terrible. Why did you do that? But in any event, let's say people are sitting around the Shabbos table and everybody in the family has just read your book within the last week or week and a half, what were the kinds of questions that you would hope, not only about Holocaust, but about contemporary Israel that you would have hoped would have emerged from their having engaged with your novel “Perfect Enemy”?
Yeah. I think one, there's a few, one I'll start with this is I would talk about the rise of the extremist right, the extreme right wing. That is one of the themes and the kind of sort of sets of characters who emerge in the book are you know, I would say, broadly speaking, people from the kind of Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben-Gvir kind of worldview. There's one of the major characters who turns out pretty early on so, maybe it's not even too much of a spoiler, this guy Yoav, who's a Akivah’s funder, turns out to be somebody from that kind of worldview, broadly speaking.
And I think for me, for many years now, that's been something that I find deeply disturbing about Israeli society and about where we're going. I mean, I know that you said we don't want to talk about October the 7th, but I'll bounce quickly into it. You can't not. I think one of the challenges that we face right now, not we, I'll speak for myself, one of the challenges that I feel right now as an Israeli, as a Jew, is, I feel like we're fighting two different battles here. We're fighting, l'havdil, we're fighting a battle against Hamas, who, as you say, want to kill us and want to murder and rape and all of those kinds of things. And that's a battle that has to be won if we're going to survive here, if we're going to exist here.
And at the same time, we have this other battle. I would almost call it a struggle for the soul of the Jewish people. And again, I'd say, l'havdil, I'm not making any comparisons, but l'havdil, it's a spiritual battle, intellectual, a theological struggle against people whose view of Judaism and Jewish history and Jewish theology is just anathema to most of what I believe about Jewish history and Jewish theology, even though in terms of practice they're probably not a million miles away from me, which is one of the other kinds of interesting things.
So, I really wanted the book to raise that question almost to put front and center if these kinds of people, this kind of worldview, if that's really the worldview that's going to dictate the future of who we are as a Jewish people. Let's dig into that. And obviously, I'm digging into it in the book in a slightly, you go just beyond the realms of reality, but pushing people just beyond that realms of reality. What goes on in the book, the plot of the book is fiction and is borderlines on, let's say, called it science fiction. It's not really science fiction…
It’s not really close to science fiction. It’s close to possible…
But even if the plot itself is a little, let's say, outlandish, the kinds of sentiments that Yoav and other people in the book say are a hair's breadth away from the kinds of things you hear being said in the Knesset every day. So, I would want people to think about that and to talk about that in a serious way. And I also did my very, very best to humanize those people. I tried really not to have Yoav be a kind of one-dimensional baddie, bad guy. And there's some scenes in the book, there's a scene that takes place in yeshiva, where a joyous scene, I won't say more than that because it's maybe giving away a spoiler, but I really tried through that scene and a couple of others to really to humanize people, because I know many people who, let's say, live in the settlements or in Judea and Samaria, however you want to define them and who are wonderful people and who have been friends and colleagues of mine, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm sure you do, too. We all do. So, I didn't want to kind of fall into that trap, which sometimes people on the left do, of kind of making those people one dimensional bad.
So, I tried to really make them human and try to really show that side, and also to kind of show the problematics of that kind of worldview. So that's one major issue that I want people to walk away from the book thinking about.
Yeah, I think you did a fabulous job there, by the way, I have to say, even though Yoav and you already gave away his name, so that's not a spoiler, is this sort of Smotrich-esque, Ben-Gvir-esque worldview kind of person, and he is, quote unquote, maybe the bad guy in the book. He's not all bad. In other words, he's motivated by a love of the Jewish people.
Correct.
He's not a southern American racist who just hates people because of the color of their skin for no other reason. He has huge issues with the Palestinians, obviously. He has a view about Israel's politics and Israel's future, which, again, may not be your view, definitely not my view. But he does come off as much more principled and not evil, really, just you and I would say not the kind of Israel that we want. But again, I think that actually makes it a more fruitful conversation around that proverbial Shabbat table because if he was just all monolithically bad, there's not much to discuss. But he's not monolithically bad.
Okay, there's other characters there who represent other kinds of views in the book. The main female protagonist represents a different view. So, I don't want to say much more. You'll tell us which characters you want to talk about and which ones you don't. But what were other views that you wanted people to walk away from thinking about?
So maybe I'll talk about this female character, Hadas, who's an Israeli politician from the left, from the Labor Party. One friend of mine, when they read it, and there's an opening scene where it talks about a labor politician trying to revive the Labor Party. So, he said, “oh, so it's a fantasy novel then”.
That's the part that's science fiction, not the cloning. Resurrecting the Labor Party, that's probably science fiction.
All right. Anyway, so it's fiction. So, she's this kind of left winger. She's kind of broadly based, I guess, on a kind of Stav Shaffir sort of that kind of young, up and coming kind of a character. I guess that was what I vaguely had in my mind as I was writing her. I don't know, Stav Shaffir. I've never met her. But the other character, who I'll mention is based on a real person. So, I'll say something about that in a minute. So, there's Hadas, and maybe I'll mention now she's in a relationship with this Palestinian businessman named Omar. He's a Palestinian from East Jerusalem. So, he's one of these people who has this strange status where they're not Israeli citizens, but they have residency in Jerusalem, and they don't live in the West Bank. So, they're one of these kind of strange Palestinians who have sort of status that's between, if you like, West Bank Palestinians and Arab Israelis.
Right. Just to give our listeners some background. So, the people that live in East Jerusalem, for example, are not Israeli citizens. They do not have Israeli passports, for example. They cannot vote in national elections, but they can vote in municipal elections. And they actually have access to Israeli health care. They have exactly the same health care access that you and I have. So, they really are sort of in the midst. They're not Israeli citizens. They're not not Israeli citizens. They are somewhere in the middle. And Omar, in this book, he's part of that world and is an interesting exposure to that complicated set of loyalties and feelings that that brings out.
So, he is actually based on somebody that I met. I used to do tours with students and bring interesting people to speak with students. And a few times I had this guy, I won't reveal his actual name, but a guy who was an East Jerusalemite, very kind of smooth talking, really fascinating to listen to guy, very wealthy guy, businessman. He was somebody who would talk to my students every now and then. And so, I vaguely had him in mind when I was writing.
So, Hadas and Omar are in this secret relationship, and they have to keep it secret because she's a Jewish Israeli politician. He's a Palestinian from East Jerusalem. That would not play well for either of them. And they talk about this in their very first scene. And the Hadas- Omar plot and the Akivah- Yoav plot run kind of parallel for the first half of the book. They come together at one point. I can't say about when and where and how, obviously, but I would say that Hadas represents a kind of more liberal view of Zionism. But she's also not, another Hebrew phrase we may have to translate, a tallit shkula t’chelet. She's also not a tallit…
A tallit that is all turquoise, right. Or another phrase is “he lo chaya b’seret”. She's not living in a movie. She's not disconnected from reality.
And she's not perfect. And in fact, none of the characters in the book are perfect. None of the characters are unambiguous or morally pure. And that's also another kind of, I think, a really important thing that I wanted. I wanted everyone to be messy because I think everybody here is messy. And there are scenes, again, without giving away spoilers, there are scenes at the end of the book where Hadas does stuff which is really dodgy, as we say, where I come from, where used to come from, really iffy. And I really wanted to show, just as with Yoav, I wanted to show that Hadas… well maybe to me as the writer, I'm more naturally going to identify and sympathize with somebody like Hadas, but I really wanted to problematize her as well and to show that people on the left also do stupid things and crazy things and bad things. I didn't want to let anyone out this with a free pass.
There's another character I do want to say, given that you and I are two white males of a certain, well, I'm much, much younger than you, but I was going to say, of a certain generation talking. I did want to say there's another very strong female character in the book called Sahinish, who's an Ethiopian Israeli woman, who's Hadas’s parliamentary aide. And one of the relationships that I really like in the book is the one between Hadas and Sahinish. I was very conscious as a straight white man of writing this book that the book should pass. I think it's called the Bechdel test, which is this test of do two female characters talk about something other than a man in a serious of. I really consciously wanted to develop those two female characters, and I think I did do that. I think there's a great relationship between them. And Sahinish also plays a really important role in the book. So that's another character.
And that's just, I'll say one other thing, then I'll come up for air, that’s another thing I wanted to do in the book is to really give a sense of Israel's diversity. Right? There's a whole bunch of different characters. You have Yoav, who's the religious Zionist guy. You have Hadas, who's the lefty secular Tel Aviv liberal.
You have Akiva, who I won't say too much about because he's complicated. You have Sahinish, who's an Ethiopian Israeli. There's a gay character. There's the guy for the Arab, from East Jerusalem. So, I really wanted to as much as I could, you can't have everybody, but I wanted to have a diverse cast of characters, let's say, because I think that Israel's diversity is also something that people often forget about or don't put front and center. And I did want to kind of give a little bit of a nod to Israel's diversity, which can be one of our great strengths, if we allow it to be one of our great strengths.
Yeah, there's a tremendous amount of diversity in the book also. I mean, just in one scene, again, without going into detail, when one of the characters is driving eastward towards the West Bank, towards Judea and Samaria, whatever one wants to call it, and they pass through Bnei Brak, and you have a description there of what Bnei Brak looks like, or when they get to the settlements where they're going, you do see kind of almost the purity of soul of some of the settlers, which I think comes across in a very beautiful way, even if obviously they represent the worldview that the book does not wholeheartedly endorse.
Let's do the counterfactual. Let's say, hypothetically, Alex Sinclair was writing this book now, and it hadn't already come out. There is a way in which Hadas’s very standard liberal, not pollyannish, not naive, not silly, but nonetheless deeply committed to an arrangement with the Palestinians that is workable and attainable. That's been the standard fare of the Israeli left and even parts of the Israeli center for a very long time. We were kibitzing before about how resurrecting the labor party is the one part of the book that's really science fiction. The party itself has died, but in many people's minds, the idea itself, at least until October 6th, had not died. Can you just sort of reflect a little bit on if you were still writing that book right now, would you have written any of it differently, you think?
Yeah. It's such a hard question. I'll answer it on two levels. One about the book, and then one about the kind of the general things. Look, on the one level, I do everything differently now after October the 7th. I tie my shoelaces differently, I put the kettle on for a cup of tea differently. I hang out with friends differently. I go to shul differently. I experience shul differently. Everything is different. And sometimes that's different in a way which grabs you by the lapels and throws you to the floor in despair. And sometimes that's different in a way, which its like you got a twinge if you've got a bad back, and sometimes it's okay for a few hours, and then it twinges you and reminds you that it's there. So, in some ways, everything is different. So, of course, the book would be different, and I would be writing it differently.
And then, on the other hand, you walk around Israeli Israel today, and on the surface, at least, I mean maybe this is true in Modi’in. It may be different in Jerusalem, where maybe you are used to having more tourists around and there are less tourists, but in Modi’in, you walk down the center strip of Modi’in, the cafes are popping, everyone's out. You can't get a reservation at restaurants again. I was at a wedding the other night that was postponed. It was meant to happen, son of friends of ours, it was meant to happen, like a week or two after October the 7th, they postponed it. They decided now to do it again. It was a wedding and dancing. Everything you would expect in an Israeli wedding.
So, on the one hand, so everything looks like it's going on back to normal, quote unquote, except you scratch away the surface at those conversations going on in the cafes and what people are talking about over the reception. And this one's got a son in Gaza, and this one's got a brother who's on the north of Lebanon, et cetera, et cetera. And Modi’in, of course, is one of the places where, one of the highest places in the country in terms of people serving. So, we're in this weird situation right now as a society, I think the way I experience it, where nothing's the same, everything kind of has got back to normal, but everything's not really back to normal. So, it's a whole kind of mix of those different things. So, how that would actually translate into how the novel would be different, it's kind of hard for me to know.
I would with your permission, you know I'll bounce now into the first part of the question, which was the general question about the general political question and kind of almost put the novel down for a second. I think that the key word of what you said there was “attainable”, because I think that for me, at least, the kind of the core challenge here or the end goal, I don't think has changed after October the 7th. It's still the same as it was on October the 6th, which is you've got to get to, I believe one has to get to a situation where there are two states living side by side, both of them with security and dignity. I can't see any other long-term solution to this situation that we're in other than that one that can work.
Now, how you get there now, I think, obviously, is much more complicated after October the 7th. And Israelis, understandably are much even more skeptical about that word attainable and that word security and even that word dignity than we were before October the 7th. But I think ultimately, you've got to get there. One thing I do in work in education is about outcomes-based planning, starting with the outcome in mind, design, thinking, thinking, painting the picture of what you have, where you want the students to be or the community to be, whatever it might be, in ten years time, in 20 years time, and then kind of working back from that. So, I think that that long term picture, for me at least, hasn't changed. We have to try to get there. How we get there is much harder right now. So, I don't know if that's still being pollyannaish and still kind of, if Hadas is going to say that to Israeli society, she's going to get laughed out of the room.
Well, now, but you don't know how it'll be in October of 2025.
Well, correct, correct. But I also think there's got to be a way of saying it. Listen, that's the end goal. Let's agree on that as an end goal without saying we're going to do that tomorrow and without saying we're going to do silly things tomorrow. But at least I think for us, and I think also for the world, if we're clearer about this is our end goal, we realize we have to get there. Obviously, that's what we're, now let's talk about how we get there and take seriously for both sides, what does that mean? Security and dignity. We'll promise to take it seriously for the Palestinians, if you, world, promise and Palestinians and Arabs around us promise to take it seriously of what it means for us. But anyway, so that's a long way to go there…
The only thing I'll say by way of concluding, and I really can't thank you enough for taking the time to have this conversation. I was really touched by what you said that on the surface, everything is the Same and just scratch the surface and nothing is the same and you know, you gave the example of going to shul as being different, and you gave the example of going to a cafe being different. And I just had two of those… I was sitting in a cafe, I don't know, about a week or two ago, right up the street from me. A cafe that I go to all the time, that I’ve been going to it for decades. And I was with a friend. And all of a sudden, there's this pause in the conversation. And we could hear all the tables around us and every single table was talking about their kids in the army. Every single one. And my friend said to me, there was a time when you'd go to a cafe, and this one is talking about her marriage, and that one's talking about his job, and those people are talking about their kids, and this one's talking about investments and whatever people talk about. And everybody was talking about exactly the same thing.
So you'd look into the cafe, you poke your head in, and you'd say, oh, life is back to normal. But if you eavesdrop a little bit and you listen to the Hebrew, you see, actually, nothing is back to normal. And again, also without mentioning any names, the parents of one of the hostages, daven and my shul. And the experience of being, well, the father is obviously physically much closer to me in the room, to just be near him, and to experience the obvious pain and anguish on his face, especially as those prayers for the hostages are said. It changes going to shul. Going to Shul is an entirely different experience. We've also, many of us, added in different things to the liturgy. Whether it's Avinu Malkenu during the week or other things during Shabbat. But as you said before, I thought it was just so important to point out, even though it's not directly about your novel “Perfect Enemy”. It's just important for what you said, for people to understand how yeah, you can get off the tour bus and look around, and it looks like unless they drive you to the otef or they drive you to here or there, looks like life is back to normal. Yes, but no.
And I think that the next book that you write, and I know that you're already working on another novel. So, hopefully we'll have a conversation about that one when it comes out, too. But it'll be interesting to see how the Israel that you describe in that next novel, which is still very much in process, is a different Israel from the novel that you wrote, probably in ‘21, ‘22, ‘23 and so forth.
Anyway, I want to thank you for the conversation. I want to thank you for dropping off a copy of the book at my front door when I was out of town. I want to thank you for reaching out about the book itself. I had a really, really fun time with the book. And I said to my wife as soon as I put it down, I said, this is a great yarn. You really got to read this. And it's on her pile now, too. So really, Mazal Tov, on the book, it's a great accomplishment. Wish you a lot of success with it. And I look forward to seeing you again in person and down the road to reading your next book.
Todah rabah, and please remember, don't lend it to anybody.
No, absolutely not. Absolutely not. And we'll, of course, post links to it and all of that. All right, Alex, thanks so much. Once again Mazal Tov. And to all of us here in Israel and beyond, b’sorot tovot, prayers for much better news in the weeks and months to come.
Amen.
Impossible Takes Longer is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and at other booksellers.
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:
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Perfect enemies come in all forms—some terrifying, others entertaining in the best sense of the word.