Professor Ephraim (Effie) Shoham-Steiner is a historian specializing in Medieval Jewish History. He is an associate professor at the Department of Jewish History at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Be’er Sheva (BGU). He is also the director of The Center for the Study of Conversion and Inter-Religious Encounters at BGU.
His research focuses on the social aspects of Jewish history. His first book published originally in Hebrew titled: חריגים בעל כורחם: משוגעים ומצורעים בחברה היהודית באירופה בימי הביניים (מרכז שז"ר: ירושלים 2007). This book was later published in English titled: On the Margins of a Minority: Leprosy, Madness, and Disability among the Jews of Medieval Europe (Wayne State University Press: Detroit 2014). He has edited a collection of essays titled: Intricate Interfaith Networks: Quotidian Jewish Christian Contacts in the Middle Ages. His second book is titled: Jews and Crime in Medieval Europe and was published by Wayne State University Press. He is currently researching the medieval Jewish community of Cologne.
Professor Shoham’s research is fascinating, yet we spoke with him not because of his academic credentials, but because of his intense involvement in the Jerusalem anti-judicial-reform protests. This is a two-part conversation. In it Prof. Shoham explains:
In Part I, why he has long been worried that the battle in Israel’s streets could turn bloody and violent, and why, if anything, he is getting more worried, and
In Part II, first, why, though he has been an Orthodox Jew his entire life, he has now stopped wearing his kippah in public, and second, what he thinks might happen if faculties strike Israeli universities, seeking to prevent the academic year from opening in mid-October.
We are posting Part I on Wednesday of this week and Part II on Thursday of this week.
The link at the top of this posting will take you to the full recording of our conversation; below is a transcript for those who prefer to read, available only to paid subscribers to Israel from the Inside.
These are complicated times in Israel, and one of the things that we're trying to do in Israel from the Inside is to look at them from a real multiplicity of perspectives. We've interviewed people who are in favor of the judicial reform, most notably Professor Moshe Koppel of the Kohelet Forum, who spoke very eloquently about why the changes were needed. We've heard from people in the academic world who were opposed to the reforms. We've heard from people who think that reform is necessary, but that particular reform went too far. We've talked to people all over the map about the implications of this socially, culturally, militarily, politically, diplomatically. We're going to take a little bit of a new direction today.
I'm sitting with a friend, the person that I actually see in shul very often, a person who's a friend of my kids also. I guess you're sort of between our generations, Effie. Professor Ephraim Shoham, Effie is a historian at Ben-Gurion University in Beer Sheva in the Negev. He specializes in Medieval Jewish History. He's associate professor at the department there, and between 2018 and ‘21, he served as the head of the Center for the Study of Conversion and Interreligious Encounters. He's written a lot. His first book has a much more interesting title, I think, in Hebrew than in English. In English, it's called On The Margins of a Minority, which is titillating to a certain extent, but “Harigim B’al Kurcham: Meshugai’im U’Metzuarim B’Hevra HaYehudit B’Yeropa B’Yamai HaBenaim” translates sort of as marginalized against their will, the insane and the leprous in the Jewish community of the Middle Ages.
That's the best translation I've heard.
That's the best translation you've heard. Okay. All right. You can use it when you publish it again in English. He's working on a new book, actually, on crime in Jewish medieval Europe.
That came out already.
That came out. Okay. That book is already out. Is it in English?
It is in English. Wayne State University Press, 2021.
Great. Okay. So, this is going to be a great book. I really think it should be a Netflix series and is now working on the history of the Jews of Cologne. So, Effie is a very accomplished academic, and we are sitting today not to talk about the things that he is so accomplished in when it comes to the academic world. What are we going to talk about? There are three things that I want to talk to you about. The first one is I remember explicitly; I wrote this letter with Yossi Klein Halevi and Matti Friedman. I just looked up not long ago. It came out on February 2, which seems like a different universe. Back then, really, what we were worried about was Ben-Gvir and Smotrich. Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, seemed to us to be thugs, and the thugs had been let into the pen, and we were ashamed, and we were worried what's this going to do to the Israel democracy? And if only that was our problem now. And I remember you and I were standing in shul, and I'll just say for the record that I was there to pray. you were there to talk. You got me to talk, not the other way around. And you were surprised that we'd written the letter. You were surprised that I'd written the letter. Because you said you see me as a little bit more to the right. And I remember defending myself by saying, well, there's a lot of people to the right of me, which you said, but that's true. We had a whole conversation about the letter, and then you said something that I still remember kind of just shook me, and you said, there's no way this does not end in violence.
Indeed.
And we were talking once again in shul, and I'll say, by the way, that you actually came over to where I was sitting. So, I did not start the conversation. I was there to pray. And you said to me again, this is going to end in violence. So, the first thing I want to talk to you about is what does that actually mean? I find it hard to disagree, but I don't know exactly how that plays out. You've thought about this a lot. I want to talk about that. Second thing that I want to talk about is a phenomenon more and more people are talking about, which is the phenomenon of the religious crisis that this crisis, which is political on the surface, judicial, whatever legislative, is causing. There are a lot of people who are part of the community, the larger community, of which you and I are a part, sort of what people would call the kippah shruga community, the modern Orthodox community, people who are observant. They just do the observant thing, and it's always been a central part of their identity. But who may be left, who may be center, many are right. But for the people in the center and the left, you see it all over Facebook posts of my students, for example, saying, “I'm done, I can't identify publicly anymore, wearing a kippah, doing whatever. This is just breaking something in me”. And I know that you feel…
I want to stress this in the sense that this is not breaking away from being observant.
I understand completely.
This is breaking away from sociologically associating with this fraction of the Israeli public arena.
And not using public symbols….
And statements.
Right. So, like not wearing all the time, which I'm assuming you always did in the past, whatever. So that's the second issue. That's a heartbreaking issue, and I really want to try to get our listeners to understand the depth of the personal crisis that many people are experiencing here. And the third thing actually does cut a little bit towards your professional work, which is that at the week which we're having this conversation, the various faculties of Israel's universities are talking about striking and not opening the academic year at the beginning, right after the holidays until something, until the legislation is suspended, until the government falls. I don't know exactly what, but I'm just trying to understand how that plays out, because what if the legislation doesn't get tabled and what if the government doesn't fall? You all can't strike for two years and not open the universities. So how do you not get backed into a corner and look like you kind of just collapsed? And is this a smart idea or not? So those are the three things that I want to hear from you about.
Let's start talking about violence. You've said to me on several different occasions, you're a very thoughtful, smart guy. You're a sociologist/ historian. I mean, your history is sociological. So, you think about societies in a certain kind of way, and you're really worried about Jew-on-Jew violence here.
Yes, I am.
Talk to me.
I’m extremely concerned with that. I'll say this, first of all, we should remember that back in the founding days of Israel, in 1948, there was almost violence with the Altalena. In June 1948, the Etzel bought arms and munitions in the United States. They were shipped to Israel aboard a freighter called the Altalena. And the Altalena arrived at the shores of Tel Aviv. And there was a serious deliberation what to do with these munitions and arms because the Etzel, the Irgun, were still not a part of the IDF.
Well, it was technically part of the IDF, but it really hadn't been…
And there was serious concern, and it took two very profoundly concerned figures like David Ben-Gurion on the one hand, and especially Menachem Begin on the other, to realize that this situation was so volatile it needed to be handled with extreme, extreme caution.
Of course, Ben-Gurion did order them to open fire.
And Ben-Gurion ordered them to open fire. I think that Ben-Gurion also had in mind a different group in the Palmach, which was armed and part of his…
Which he already knew he was going to shut down.
Exactly. So, this was part of a larger operation that he was thinking of, of trying to make sure that Israel's armed forces are not political in the sense that they abide by a political party, but rather are part of Israel's government and under its auspices and under its command. And this could have turned into a civil war at the inception of the country. And Menachem Begin was there with a huge personality to stop it from happening, but it was yay close.
Okay. Now, by the way, let's just make sure everybody understands. People were killed. There was shooting. There was shooting between Jews and Jews, and IDF soldiers were killed. And interesting enough, by the way, Ben-Gurion would not allow the Etzel soldiers who'd been killed to be buried inside Tel Aviv. He wanted them buried out in the boonies, and then he wanted the ship sunk. He had the ship dragged away because he didn't want that to become some sort of you know shrine or whatever. So, we've had our civil war. It was very short, but people did die. And I guess your point is we don't have David Ben-Gurion and we don't have Menachem Begin.
Exactly. My concern is that we're here at a point where, first of all, we have a very deep tear within Israeli society. And this tear is very rapid. It's happening very quickly. It's escalating very quickly. And the fact of the matter is that there are people on both sides that have access to arms.
Well, everybody has access to arms practically.
Right, and there are way more firearms in Israeli society than ever before. And I'm afraid that there are always people on the extreme who will revert to violence at some point. And the question is, of course, who is going to be there and who's going to be responsible enough to curb that violence?
Well, let's start out before we get to who's going to be responsible to curb it. Who's inclined to use violence?
First of all, I think that what we see, and this is something that's been going on for a while. There are people, especially people living in the West Bank, that feel more at ease at using firearms and using arms when it comes to conflicts with local Palestinians. And we've seen this time and again, we've seen extreme settlers, not all the settler body, not of course, the run of the mill people who live in the West Bank in what was known as Yehuda v'Shomron, but people who are what we call na’ari hagvaot…
Hilltop youth and people who are on the sidelines and on the margins of society. And these people a) have access to arms. They also expressed intent to use them, and they usually use these arms and use them when they intimidate Palestinians. Now, I'm afraid of this kind of slippage between using violence and using intimidation upon a civil body of people whom they, of course, see as the enemy, agitators and so on and so forth. But that is, again, a slippery slope. In other words, if I identify someone as the enemy and I see him as a target to my defensive, so to speak, efforts, once an enemy is identified, does it really matter if he is from my sociological group or from someone else's? Is he from my denomination or not? If he threatens my being, my beliefs, if I disassociate myself from him to a point that I do not see the common ground between us as I used to before or as he has used to before? In other words, the rift is now creating a situation where the disassociation between two fractions may actually lead to one seeing the other as an enemy, an enemy that may be on the receiving end of violence.
Right. By the way, I mean, a lot of the rhetoric, even of members of the government, I mean, certainly Ben-Gvir, in the way that he's responded to the shooting in a Palestinian village a few weeks ago.
And Mr. Smotrich when he was referring to Huwara…
Erasing them from the map…
Obliterating.
So, let's just go back. So, there are people in Israel who've been saying in the press in the last couple of weeks that what happened in this Palestinian village a couple of Friday nights ago was the first shot across the bout. In other words, it looks on a certain level, just like more settler Palestinian violence, which we've had tragically for decades, and the government has not cracked down in it, by the way left-wing governments haven't cracked down on it, right wing governments, centrist governments. Nobody's cracked down in it, which is to me, by the way, is a great failure of Israeli society. And it's also very perplexing as to why left-wing governments haven't cracked down. But, okay, we'll leave that aside. We won't deal with that right now. But a lot of people in the press are saying, yes, it was settler violence at Palestinians. And again, exactly what happened there is still not clear. And people are saying they did try to kill, they didn't mean to kill, et cetera. But the press is saying that was actually the first shot. And what you're saying, so that was the first instance, and there they shot Palestinians. But then you could imagine, like you and I, where the same thing's happening, but this time the IDF is sent in, right? The IDF is sent in. Settlers are attacking Palestinians. You got to go. And all of a sudden, the settlers are using. But now there's IDF soldiers between them. Can you see a world in which they shoot soldiers?
First and foremost, I want to remind you that we already saw settler violence against IDF soldiers.
Not with guns, though.
Not with guns, but with intimidation, with damaging IDF property, with damaging IDF vehicles, with people. And not everything is reported. A lot of this is sometimes put aside, in other words, to create, not to escalate the situation. But I do have reports of IDF soldiers coming back from, especially people who do miluim, who do reserve duty and who are basically Israeli civilians, who wear a uniform for a month, perform security duties in the West Bank and then return to their civilian lives. And they report a lot of animosity, a lot of violence, a lot of intimidation, a lot of a sense of detachment between some of the settlers, the extreme settlers, and the IDF, which is there to protect them. And when the IDF does not meet their demands in what they see as protection, the IDF becomes the enemy and becomes aligned with whoever these people see as the enemy. And that is where I see a possibility where this erupts into violence.
Is that where it erupts into violence? Or do you see other places where it erupts? When you have this sort of nightmarish scenario of us devolving into violence, when you think about it, it's extreme settlers…
Not necessarily, no…
Because it could start inside the green line, right?
Let’s give another example…
We have 150,000 people in Tel Aviv Saturday night.
Right. We have 150,000 people in Tel Aviv every Saturday night. We had, a few weeks ago, a couple of hundred people standing not too far from a highway in Kfar Saba, and one of the people who, the highway was blocked by protesters, and one of the people who was lined up in the traffic jam decided to bypass the traffic jam and knocked over a few of the protesters. So, someone reverted into violence. Now, I don't know what the ideological motivation was behind it, but there is so much gasoline in the air that it would take something very small to cause an eruption. And sometimes even media coverage of an event like that that would misinterpret an incident or brand a certain incident as violence of one faction against the other would cause a chain reaction that eventually would escalate this entire situation into something that is uncontrollable and not being able to be contained any longer. And people will feel that they need to kind of align with their own.
And there's two camps that are heavily armed that you can actually, in your own mind, as a serious intellectual Israeli, imagine people starting to shoot each other in the streets of Tel Aviv or Jerusalem?
Not yet. Not yet. But if this is something I would have never have thought of before, this is now somewhere on my scope already. In other words, this is something I thought would never come. And now, given the escalation, given how volatile its political situation became, given these few instances that already played out and could be interpreted as such, this all puts the violent option up there where previously it was never there.
Okay, so there's nightmares that we have that we didn't used to have.
Right. Indeed.
Okay, or doomsday scenarios of some sort, which once were unthinkable now are hopefully unlikely, but they cross one's mind.
Indeed.
Let me ask you the other side. So, I'm a regular protest goer. Often, I see you at the protests. There's a book to be written about the evolution of the T-shirts at the protests. No, there really is. Maybe not a book. It's an article. Right, but you started out the shirts were all blue with white print. “Habayit Hameshutaf”. Our shared home. Then they started to get… “Titnagdu!” with an exclamation point, like pushback or resist. And then there was one of “Hademokratia b’nefshenu”. That was a little softer. Last week I got that one.
And then you eventually get the fist.
This week… I just buy them because it's nice to have T-shirts to work out in, right? It said “Demokratia O’mered”, right? Democracy or rebellion or revolution.
Right.
So, when I went to the table to ask the people who were selling the shirts, “what does the shirt actually mean?” I wanted to get the shirt no matter what, I just liked the shirt. But what does it actually mean? And I said, it was two people, a man and a woman behind the table. And I said, what does that actually mean? And they said, It's a very good question. I said, meaning you have an answer, or you don't have an answer? They said, we don't really know. I said, okay, but what you're saying essentially is that this and then I pointed to the protest, which was happening 50 yards away. This is not working. In other words, it's very moving. And there's 150,000 people in Tel Aviv every Saturday night, and there's 10,000 to 15,000 people in Jerusalem, and there's Haifa, and there's Ashdod, and this, this and that. And it's all very nice and people add up all the numbers, hundreds of thousands of Israelis. But at the end of the day, this is week 32, it didn't stop anything. And you can throw in the pilots, and you can throw in all of the naval units, and all these people, everybody thought this was going to be the thing that stops it. Nothing's stopping it. So, at a certain point, I've been asking myself, are there people on the center/ left or the people who are even on the right, by the way, who just oppose this judicial reform, and there are many people on the right who oppose this, right?
And it's really more than people would acknowledge.
Correct. And we may see that. We may see people peeling away from the Likud, actually in the Knesset, Dallal and others. But I've said to myself, there's probably people out there who are in the anti-judicial reform party who are saying to themselves, what am I going to say to my grandchildren? Like, am I going to say, well, we went to a lot of protests, but at the end of the day, the protests didn't work, and that's how this became a non-democracy. And the grandchildren are going to wrinkle their brow and say, well, what do you mean? I mean, we don't think so well of people in other regimes that we won't mention who said, well, you had to follow law. You couldn't go kill people. And it ended up where it ended up. Could you see a world in which people on the left say, I don't want to do this? And I really like the fact that these protests are law abiding and we consider ourselves the democratic, the cultured, the educated, but it's not working. So, at the end of the day, if I'm going to protect this democracy, I'm going to have to actually cross a line to more than blocking highways, right? Because blocking highways also, they come, they bring the water cannon, you get wet, people disperse, and the traffic goes through. So, none of this is working. And if Bibi is intent on pushing this through, then at a certain point, do you, Effie, see a point where people on the left - center, anti whatever, whatever on the say, no, actually, if we're going to stop this from becoming a non-democracy or worse, becoming a dictatorship, we're going to have to cross that line. Is that…?
It’s a very, very tricky question. I think our inclination is never to revert to violence, and I think most of the crowd that assembles and the people who are committed to the protest and are committed to stopping this judicial reform do not think of violence even as a last resort. I'm not saying that this is not part of some discourse on the extreme… And there are two things that I want to mention here. First and foremost, we should remember that part of the people who oppose the judicial reform are people who call themselves “Achim L’neshek” or Brothers in Arms, people who are ex-military. They're all ex-military. We are… Israeli society is basically ex-military. I think one of the reasons this protest is so diligent and keeps on the way it does is because people have a sort of commitment that some of them acquired during their military service. In other words, you do not leave the trenches. You stick. Right. You stay until the battle is won. So, there's a military ethic behind a lot of what is going. On both sides, by the way.
Well, of course, on both sides, because both sides have served.
Right.
Except for Smotrich and Ben-Gvir.
Right, but except for those who do not serve. And interestingly enough, you see, for instance, that the Haredi fraction is shying away from that.
Right? Well, they're in an impossible situation because they can't say anything about the pilots not being willing to fly when they're not willing to get drafted themselves. So, they're kind of hunkering behind the…
And I think they're getting very good strategic advice to steer clear from that conversation because it would only get them to lose points.
Correct. And by the way, there's a whole conversation going on here in Israel, which is not our subject now, but there's a lot of people writing saying the Haredim understand they made a mistake in joining this.
I think they made a huge mistake.
And I wrote a piece in The Atlantic not that long ago, which I haven't actually put out on Israel from the Inside, but I told a story, which I got permission to use, so I can repeat it here, that Yedidia Stern told me that he went to Aryeh Deri’s house and Yedidia Stern who is himself a law scholar, a great Jewish prudential mind, but he's very sympathetic to the Haredi world. You know, he's a religious guy. He's not Haredi at all, but he's got a soft spot in his heart for them. And he went to Aryeh Deri, who is really one of the leaders of the Haredi world and the political figure at the helm, at the crux of some of these laws and whatever. And he said to Deri, you have to understand, you are about to make thousands and thousands of Haredi kids very hungry. And Deri looked at him and said, what are you talking about? And he said, look, eventually the center left is going to be back in power. Six months, six years. I don't know when it's going to happen, but it's going to happen. They're going to be back in power. And when they do this time, nobody's going to care how hungry the kids are. They're going to turn off the spigot on all your funding and the fact that they get their only hot meal at a yeshiva. So, they're not going to have a hot meal. You guys are playing with fire here. And I think that if when Yedidia said that to Deri, probably in February, March, that was considered kind of wow, I think now that's not so wow anymore. People understand that the Haredim really overplayed their card, the rage against the Haredim now….
Although, I think that when now Knesset is going to meet again after the chagim, sometime in October, because that's when Knesset will be back in session. I think the Haredim are going to try very hard to push the legislation of the draft law.
Well, that's all they care about.
Right. That is why they are in this game. That's their chip in the game.
Well, the only way they can pass that law, by the way, is getting rid of judicial review. That's true because if they don't get rid of judicial review so for them this doesn't work unless they strike down judicial review. But if you strike down judicial review, most people would say that's a huge chunk of democracy just falling into the ocean. Okay, so we have this whole notion of the Haredim kind of being an exception. They're a problem, you mentioned that. So, we kind of went off on that side. So now you're saying it's more or less a kind of, I don't know, a fringe of the left or certain people on the left. By the way, you mentioned the “Achim L’neshek”, the Brothers in Arms…. everybody who was an officer in the Israeli army automatically has a right, I mean, you know this, but everybody else may not, has a right to a gun. You get an automatic gun permit if you were an officer in the army. Several of the leaders of Achim L’neshek have had their gun licenses revoked because they were ostensibly a threat to society, which is a very heavy-handed move.
It's a very heavy-handed move on the one hand and on the other hand, if you remember, just a few weeks back, part of Ben-Gvir’s plan to battle terrorism was to arm many civilians. So, it runs exactly against that point.
So, he is taking away the arms of people who are officers who are totally trained to use them and making it easier for people who are not trained to be able to get arms.
Exactly. So, in that respect, I think, and that, again, plays into what I was saying about violence before. In other words, Mr. Ben-Gvir is trying to get Israeli society, I would say flooded with weapons, with licensed weapons at the hands of many people. I'm not sure what about psychological screening? Usually police were very, very diligent about it. People had to go through screening. You had to be with some sort of military background or at least some sort of training.
And you had to show a need, by the way.
You had to show a need. You had to make a strong case for receiving the firearm, either because it's your vocation as a security guard or…
Where you worked….
Where you live or so on and so forth. And now I'm under the impression that Mr. Ben-Gvir at least is trying to shy away from that and give away as many arms as you want so that these people who to this point did not have access to weapons will have access. And the people who already had access to weapons, their weapons license would be revoked. So, somebody is definitely thinking along the lines of who's going to stockpile arms if this conflict goes south. Okay? And that kind of feeds into my argumentation that this may be a forerunner for something that will play eventually out as violence.
And just to push this one step further and then we'll wrap up this particular part of the conversation. What if it doesn't work? I mean, what if all the protests and the pilots and the 8200 people and it just doesn't work? And it's all noble and you can discuss whether the pilots should or shouldn't fly, blah, blah, blah, but in the end it doesn't work. Is this mass of hundreds of thousands of people who are sitting on the streets every week, your sense just by knowing Israeli society intimately the way that you do, are they going to say, well, we tried, but at the end of the know, I mean, the Knesset had a majority and they won. And you're shaking your head no. What are they going to do?
I don't know. I honestly don't know. I think that it runs against every bone in a lot of people's bodies to use violence. You're pushing me on this, and I expect you want to hear or you're…
No, no, I just want you to say what you think.
I think that this is to this fraction of society, using internal violence is something that is completely off the charts.
How about all these tech people who were in 8200 or in all these cyber units. They now live in Tel Aviv, and they run high tech firms, but they know a lot. Would they hack government systems and take down the tax authority?
Maybe.
Take down the government system?
Maybe. They may have to.
Shut down the airport by hacking the security of the airport and saying flights can't go in or out?
Maybe.
Because that doesn't hurt anybody as long as you announce in advance that you're doing it.
Right, but maybe. I don't know. I honestly don't know. I think that there is definitely a hope or a feeling that at the end of the day, the protests will push government into the direction of at least stopping or curbing the judicial reform. Is this going to spill over into violence from that side? I doubt, but maybe something like that, yes.
So last question on this. You've pointed actually two contradictory, deeply embedded ethos. I don't know if that's a word, but there's one ethos and another ethos deeply embedded in this centrist - left, whatever you want to call it, group. One is, because they're all post army people, you do not leave the trenches. You do not lose the battle. The other is you don't use violence civilly. And those are going to, at the end of the day, perhaps come up exactly against one another. You either have to use violence or you have to lose the battle.
Agreed. There's one component we did not speak about, and it's what the army, as an armed force is going to do in a case of a constitutional conflict. Is the army going to say, we are not going to listen to the government because the government is running against the most fundamental…
Let's just understand make sure everybody understands what this… We've actually had pieces on this. But just to make sure everybody understands, the constitutional crisis is really when the government changes the law, the Supreme Court then says, you can't change the law. And then the government says, we no longer think the Supreme Court has the authority to say that or maybe anything…
And then the question would be who from the branches of the executive will side with government and who will side with the Supreme Court?
So, you have the army, you have the Shin Bet, you have the Mossad.
Right.
And what's your inkling?
I think they will side with the court. I think they will side with a court. It seems to me that this is where this is playing out, and this is something, I think…
The Mossad has said explicitly that they're going to side with the court.
And I think also we've heard as much from the Shin Bet, from the sherut. The army has not been clear about this.
But if you know Herzi [Herzi Halevi]…
Yes.
He grew up in this neighborhood. He went to school, high school in this neighborhood. His wife went to high school across the street. Right. I mean, it's very hard to imagine him being on the wrong side of this…
I agree. I agree.
And if you think of the army and the Mossad and the Shin Bet all come out on the side of the court, that does what?
That puts a very, very heavy hand on the side of the court in the sense that it weighs in very profoundly.
And you think it leads some people who are right now pro-reform to realize…
That we have outplayed our hand, we've outplayed our hand.
So that's not necessarily the settler youth who were whatever they are, but it could be…
And it doesn’t necessarily play out as violence.
Correct. But as the Simcha Rothmans of the world, civil people, you can agree or disagree with them, but they live within civil society. You say there's a people on the right at that point who are going to say, okay, this just didn't work. By the way, if you read the Israeli press on the right, read Makor Rishon, which actually fundamentally sort of supports the reform. Every week, they go to great pains to say, they did it this week and they did it the week before, the government has made every possible mistake that it could playing this out.
As far as public relations go, this is a catastrophe.
There are people that say, by the way, this is going to be the beginning of the end of the right. Just like the Intifada was the beginning of the end of the left, because it proved that the left didn't have a vision for the country that was not based on a deal with the Palestinians, and no deal with the Palestinians was then possible. People say now that this is going to be the beginning of the end of the right because the right has a vision, but it has shown complete incompetence when it comes to ruling. Anyway, you said it to me in February. You said it to me in August. Both times you said in shul, this has to end in violence. We just had to talk about it because it's just too dark and too important, and this country matters too much not to learn from somebody like you about what you're thinking and how you see the world.
Impossible Takes Longer is now 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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