Today’s episode is a little different from the usual. Yeah, I know, I’ve been saying that a LOT recently. With life-changing news breaking every thirty seconds or so, Unpacking Israeli History has had to adapt.
As of Tuesday, June 24, Israel and Iran have technically accepted a ceasefire, and have been thoroughly reprimanded by President Trump, though what happens next is anyone’s guess. We’ve invited Dr. Tal Becker to discuss what all of this means.
Dr. Becker doesn’t know it, or at least he didn’t before we spoke, but he’s had a massive influence on the way I think. The truth is that I did not even realize it until we had our conversation. Somewhere towards the end of the conversation, I actually started to feel emotional when I realized this.
Come to think of it, I mean, of course he has had a huge impact on my life. He’s the former legal advisor to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a veteran member of successive Israeli peace negotiation teams who played an instrumental role in negotiating and drafting the Abraham Accords that normalized relations between Israel, the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan. Currently, he serves as the Vice President of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, where he leads educational initiatives on Israel and the Jewish world, including the popular Engaging Israel series.
So he was the perfect person to unpack everything that’s going on right now – not as a pundit, not as a talking head, but as a careful student of history.
And – as I say all the time – if you want to understand the current moment, you gotta go back to the history. Our conversation was long and wide-ranging and full of so many gems that I’m going to be turning over in my mind for the next few months.
Like I said, I don’t mind telling you that our conversation made me borderline emotional. I don’t usually get fluttery teary-eyed feelings when I’m recording (and I am kinda hoping he did not notice it) – but as I’ve said repeatedly and will probably keep saying for weeks, there’s no more business as usual anymore. Come to think of it, in the past few years, there probably never was.
So why the emotional overload?
Because in this wide-ranging, erudite, fascinating conversation, Dr. Becker hit on the mission of Unpacking Israeli History without even trying. I think you’ll pick up on this, but in case you don’t…I have to be on the nose a bit here. And it’s towards the end, but in his framing of this current war, and of all the factors that brought us here, and of all the possibilities that lie before us, he said something really, really important. It struck a chord with me.
When people talk about Israel – whether they’re talking about it as the source of all evil or the biggest miracle the Jewish people have experienced in 2,000 years (two very different things) – what they’re really talking about is their values.
They’re not really talking about the legal definition of, say, genocide. Or of state-building. Or of war crimes or obligations under international law or preemptive versus preventive strikes. That’s not what people are really talking about. Those are the words, the external trappings, but there’s something internal taking place.
Let’s be real. Most people have no expertise whatsoever in any of these things. What we’re really talking about when we throw around these loaded words – all of which have precise legal definitions – we’re really presenting a litmus test: do we share the same moral commitments? Do we hold the same values about what is important and morally right? And those are complicated questions without easy answers.
And that’s the whole point of this podcast: bringing together a community of curious humans connected not by ideology or dogma but by the pursuit of these complex truths. We have Muslims and Christians and Jews and Buddhists who listen to this podcast. We have people across the world. Americans, Australians, Brits, Mexicans. Heck, we got a whole contingency from New Zealand.
When producing this podcast, we’re not looking for mass consensus or agreement on every point of policy. We’re not telling you what to think. That’s not what we do here.
What we are trying to build – what we have built, as far as I’m concerned, but we gotta build it more and more – is a community of people from all over the spectrum, all religions, all backgrounds, all walks of life, who might not agree (not just might, won’t agree) on policy but are united in the pursuit of untangling and sandboxing in complexity. The listeners of UIH are committed to being part of this sort of community. Whether we all realize it or not. Yes, we all have our tribes, our people, our allegiances. And that is not only natural; in my opinion, it is healthy. But, this podcast community goes beyond that.
And to do that, to really untangle the complexity, you have to understand – and be open to! – a few basic things. One, the presence of Israel in the region. You have to understand that Israel isn’t some European colonizer that’s dropped in to take and extract and steal and kill. You have to view Israel not as some rogue criminal state but as a flawed country full of humans who are trying their best to live side by side with their neighbors, to say, “hey, we have a seat at the middle eastern table, just like you.”
You have to see this not as a war that started 12 days ago, or even 20-odd months ago on October 7, but as a longer story with a complex history that began in 536 BCE, whose turning point came in 1979, and whose continuation is being written right now, as we speak.
That’s just a small handful of the things we spoke about in this conversation. It was long, it was fascinating, and it was full of insights, which I’m gonna summarize at the end of the recording in our usual fashion – five fast facts, and an enduring lesson.
I hope you enjoy and learn from Dr. Becker as much as I did. Here we go.
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Tal, I want to thank you so much for joining us on Unpacking Israeli History.
The topics I want to explore with you are as follows. I want to hear from you about Iran’s theology, about what the difference is between preemptive and preventive strikes. I want to think maybe if we get to it, about Sinwar’s miscalculation of the 7th of October. I want to talk about the pursuit of peace. This is something that you’ve spoken extensively about.
But before we do any of that, Tal, I wanna speak to you again, not as Dr. Becker, but as Tal. Just right now, what is it like to be in your life right now? I’m in South Florida, you’re in Israel. What is your life right now like?
Dr. Becker: Well, I think the overwhelming sense is this kind of profound uncertainty that things don’t just change by the day, they feel like they change by the minute. You know, we’re recording at a time when it felt like there might be a ceasefire, then maybe there isn’t a ceasefire, then maybe there will be one. And the kind of coping with that uncertainty, which is something that has accompanied us, I think, since October 7, but has become very intense with the conflict with Iran, I think is something that is affecting every, every Israeli.
One of my daughters the other day, was on a Zoom, they’re doing Zooms at school. And the teacher asked what was the name of the war we were in, and she gave the previous name for the war with Gaza, which was Harvot Barzel, Swords of Iron or whatever, and the teacher had to correct her and say, no, actually now there’s a new thing, and I kind of felt that that was a bit of a metaphor for the moment, that we’re just overwhelmed and exhausted, I would say. But also, I think there’s a deep resilience in Israeli society, and a deep understanding that it was necessary to deal with these critical threats that Iran and its proxies presented Israel.
Noam: So Tal, thoughts, prayers, everything with you and your family and you know half of my team actually lives in Israel and everything you’re describing, the exhaustion, and I could see it, like I could feel it, and the fact that you’re sharing with us right now is incredibly meaningful. I know there are a lot of things pulling at you right now, but I want to…
Dr. Becker: There’s a good chance I won’t be coherent, Noam, so I’m also glad you’re taking the risk.
Noam: Okay. I have a sense that you will be, but don’t worry, don’t worry. It’s all good. The Unpacking Israeli History listenership is, they’re kind and you don’t have to worry about that.
So here’s what I want to start with, because this is a history podcast, I want to start with thinking about this maybe 20 years from now. And the way I want to frame it is like this. Since Israel’s strike on Iran just under two weeks ago, the time of this recording, many of us have been drowning in the seemingly endless stream of breaking news updates, right? This is what I spoke about at the beginning. Israel bombed this. America did this. Ceasefire. No ceasefire. Last night, I went to sleep and texted my team, ceasefire. In the middle of the night, woke up and they were like, no ceasefire. And so there’s a lot. We’re just constantly refreshing the news, looking at WhatsApp updates, more, more, more. And of course, things are changing. They’re changing by the minute.
I want to know, I want to take a step back with you, though. Like I said, we’re a history podcast. I want you to imagine you’re telling your children, your grandchildren, about this moment in time. What’s the story you tell them? What’s happening in June 2025? How did we get to this moment? Not what does the future look like? But how do we get to this moment?
Dr. Becker: Yeah, so I want to respect the history part of this and just say that I think, to some extent, one of the ways to think about Israel in the Middle East is that Israel is a question to the Arab and Muslim world as to whether they can live with difference. Whether they can accept another people who have a story of belonging here that can somehow coexist with the Muslim people’s belonging. And in a way, the events that are happening now are part of that long question about whether and to what extent the Muslim world broadly, the Shia and the Sunni world are able to come to terms with the Jewish people’s self-determination here and their story.
And it feels to me in a way, one way to think about Israeli history is that it’s been a constant tension between what you might call the criminalization of Israel versus the normalization with Israel, right? And can Islam have a version of itself that is authentic, that can see a Jewish self-determination as somehow reconcilable?
And one of the big challenges, I think, from a theological perspective, is that Israel is the product, to some extent, of the defeat of the Ottoman Caliphate that existed for over 400 years, defeated in World War I essentially by Christian powers. And I think Islam has both a kind of practical challenge but also a theological question about, how can it reconcile itself to an entity that emerged as a result of the defeat and to some extent the humiliation of Islam and this caliphate. And I feel in a way that the confrontation between Israel and Iran, or I should say between Iran and Israel, because I mean let’s be honest here Noam, I think sometimes the coverage is a little strange because there isn’t a symmetry here, right? Iran would like to destroy Israel and Israel would like not to be destroyed by Iran. That is not a story of two countries in conflict, right?
And we are now at a really important chapter in that story as to whether the forces that have made it as part of their identity, their theological mission, the rejection of the Jewish presence here, will this be a moment where both their capabilities have been taken away significantly, but also, and not less importantly, whether the appeal of that entire story, that entire way of understanding Islam will be taken away.
So that’s the context I would try to put it in for my children.
Noam: I appreciate that. And that’s very helpful because I wanted to go over just a lot of details and data that I have on Iran that I looked into in preparing for this, in researching for this.
I want to talk about what it means to be Iranian. I want to understand a little bit more about the theology of Shia Islam as it relates to the Iranian government.
There was a lot of noise about the doomsday clock. The doomsday clock, which was reportedly bombed by Israel a few days ago at the time of this recording, had a countdown with the caption X years, Y days, and Z hours left before destruction of Israel. It’s due to expire in 2040 and has been counting since 2017. To your point about Israel is a country that’s trying to not be destroyed, Iran is a country that has said it wants to destroy Israel. There is an asymmetry there.
And you said there are two competing visions of the Middle East. There’s the criminalization of Israel versus the normalization of Israel. When I started looking into the data about Iranians, I was really, really interested to understand a lot more about Iranians and kind of how they view Israel, how they view their own religion. And I saw that the statistics were actually that the people were significantly less religious than the leadership. As a matter of fact,the 2020 study that I saw was like 85 to 90% of people, according to the government, identifies as Shia Islam. But the reality is the vast majority of people, something like 30%, actually identify as that. And many people identify as atheists. They don’t care. they’re something else.
And then I started looking at data about prayers. And apparently, Iranians pray a lot less than other Muslim and Arab countries. And I was just so confused because when I thought about Iranians, what I think about is I look at the Ayatollah and I’m like, oh, this is what it means to be Iranian. This eschatological worldview that says the world will end eventually and Israel will be destroyed. And that’s part of the whole process, the criminalization that you speak of.
Who are Iranians? In terms of their theology, could you explain a little bit more? To what extent is the Iranian theology of the regime itself critical in thinking about what it’s trying to do towards Israel?
Dr. Becker: Yeah, I mean, it’s a really important question. And I think that Iran, first of all, I think it’s worth understanding it’s a civilization. We’re talking about the Persian civilization. And there are a few countries in the Middle East that can make that claim to a kind of civilizational status. You could probably talk about Israel in that perspective, and the Jewish people, and about Egypt. Not many other countries have that status. And it’s a society and a civilization with a lot of internal contradictions, including between a kind of Persian identity, I would say, and its Shia identity, which was a newer in the history of Iran and Persia, a newer development.
And there’s a big distinction, I think, that many, many people comment about, between the regime on the one hand and those who are adherents to the doctrines of the Islamic revolution, the idea fundamentally that, you know, as is famously spoken about, Iran is a cause more than it is a country, right? It is the representative of the Shia across the Middle East, and the Shia are a minority in many countries across what is largely a Sunni Middle East. A sense, I think, of discrimination that a lot of Shia feel about the way Shia are treated in the Sunni Arab world.
And yes, this eschatological vision and a radical agenda about not just Iran’s place in the region, but a kind of hegemony and the need to export the revolution and the destruction of Israel is part of that.
You know, Iran has probably its leader, Khamenei, is 86 years old. One of the, I think, the oldest authoritarian leaders in the world, and the longest, who’s been in power since, I think, ’85. And Iran has had three big policy objectives, I think, from the founding of the revolution, really: the destruction of Israel, the removal of the US from the Middle East, and the upending of the US-led world order. The view that the West is a fundamentally corrupting force, and yes, a theological, a deep theological dimension to the desire to export the Shia revolution.
At the same time, even if you’re not committed to that ideological vision, there are some within Iran, I think, who can see a kind of rationale between Iran protecting itself and being a force for exporting the revolution from a more nationalist perspective. The Iranians are Persians. Most of the Middle East is made up of Arab Sunni countries. And there has been a kind of regular Iranian fear that peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors would kind of create an alliance of Israel and the Arab world against the Persians. And so they’ve had a vested interest, even without the theological dimension in kind of stoking the Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab conflict, a big fear that this would be a way for the West to kind of dominate the Middle East and undermine them. The regime is unpopular in Iran. It’s not just that it’s very fragile and weak in terms of the economy and resources, and now its defenses and so on. It is largely regarded as a regime that is hated by much of its population, which is made up of very diverse groups.
And that probably is one of its greatest sources of fragility. If you think about what Iran has done, and I think what this moment is in terms of really a crisis moment for Iran, it has invested very, very heavily in exporting the revolution in ballistic missiles, nuclear weapons and its proxies at the expense of its population, which were largely, as you mentioned, not necessarily part of this big Shia revolution, certainly as the years moved on from the 1979 revolution. So they have a huge crisis of internal legitimacy as well, because they have essentially neglected, betrayed and abandoned their own people for the sake of an agenda that is not particularly popular within Iran.
Noam: That’s really interesting because when I, again, when I was thinking about the data, one of the, one of the data pieces I saw is that over 60, I don’t know if this is fully accurate, so someone fact check me please, but if I saw that over 60% of Iran’s population is under 35. That means most were born after the 79 revolution. It kind of reminds me a little bit when people talk about that the Gazans voted in Hamas. Then I’m like, well, actually, over 50% of Gazans are under the age of 18, and they were not there to vote in Hamas when the last elections took place. So there’s been many Iranians associate religion with repression, corruption, and hypocrisy. And when over 60% of Iran’s population is under 35, and most were born after the ’79 Revolution for sure, they’re far more secular. There’s urbanization, there’s education, there’s internet access, there’s protests, there’s martyrdom fatigue. There’s all of these different aspects of what it means to be Iranian today. And the regime has so much power over them.
I wanna know, you’ve done so much work in your incredible career with the Abraham Accords. I want you to speak a little bit about, you know, whether or not you see what you see as the history of the Abraham Accords in terms of there’s criminalization that’s of Israel. That’s one side. That’s the Iranian regime. But to what extent could there be has there been normalization and the history and how did you get there? What are some of the things that you needed to do to get the aspects of the Arab world, much of the Arab world, to actually have a normalized relationship with Israel?
Dr. Becker: Yeah, I mean, it’s a good question and it plays differently in different countries. But let’s start off with, we think about Iran’s big assets. They, you know, they have invested a lot in the nuclear weapons capability, they’ve invested a lot in their missile capability, they’ve invested a lot in their proxies, Hamas, Hezbollah and others. But there is a fourth dimension, which is almost the engine for all of it. And that is the realm of ideas, the ideology. And the ideology and in all ways, when you’re in confrontation, you’re dealing with this combination of capabilities on the one hand, but ideas and ideology and intentions on the other, right? So the story that Iran and its proxies tell is a story of Jews and Muslims or Muslims and I guess infidels, whether it’s Christians or Jews require a zero-sum contest with the other, with Jews, with Muslims, with Shia, with Sunni, depending on where you are.
And, you know, I sometimes put this in terms of the way I think about normalization with Saudi Arabia. Normalization with Saudi Arabia is, in some ways, it’s the kind of the diplomatic equivalent or the conceptual equivalent of dismantling Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Because if the nuclear weapons program is about the capabilities, what normalization is about, is about the story.
Is it possible to imagine a different kind of Jewish Muslim relationship? Almost, I would say, a Judeo-Muslim civilization. And if I could put this in a kind of broad context, in a way when you think about Israel’s relationship with the Christian West, we have had periods throughout history where this idea of Judeo-Christian civilization was unthinkable, right, because Jews were considered as somehow either the killers of Christ or someone that had to be overcome. And there needed to be a reimagining of the Judeo-Christian relationship, which took a very long time following the Holocaust, I think it made some significant progress, of course, especially with the Vatican and so on.
I think it’s possible to imagine in a similar kind of way that what is at stake here is the nature of the Judeo-Muslim civilization, the Judeo-Muslim relationship. And Iran represents one version of that. And Hezbollah and Hamas and all these forces represent a version that reconciliation is an abomination to Allah. It is unacceptable. The reason why Israel existed, according to this view, was created after the collapse of the caliphate, was probably because Muslims were not devout enough.
Noam: Like in Hebrew, Umu’vnei chata’einu galinu me’artzeinu, because of our sins, we’ve been exiled from our land. Right?
Dr. Becker: There is almost a parallel there to the concept of Hester Panim, the concept of a kind of turning away. This couldn’t have happened to us unless we were not devout enough. And therefore, to be a devout Muslim also means to be committed to the destruction of Israel. Maybe it’s even a measure of your commitment. And what the Abraham Accords represent, what normalization as an aspiration represents, is a different way of envisaging the Jewish-Muslim relationship, or even the Jewish-Christian-Muslim relationship. And that’s why I think it’s so important. You asked what made it happen. There was a whole set of factors that played into it, but that’s the core dynamic.
Noam: So that’s so important to understand. I’m so fascinated. Is it that Sunni Islam has an aspect of it that’s different than Shia Islam? I mean, I know there’s this concept, I’m not gonna pronounce it well, Valahat-e-Faqih, I don’t know if that’s how you say it. It’s the concept of guardianship of the Islamic jurists. It’s the whole concept of it’s a system of governance that’s underpinned the way Iran operates since the country’s 1979 Islamic revolution. And the theory is, I’ve always understood it, is that it justifies the rule of the clergy over the state. Is that, is, and is there something about Shia Islam that is different than Sunni Islam that’s leading to the Saudis having one worldview from their monarchy versus Iranians? Is Shia Islam more extreme in this way? Or is it just that the Iranians are having, as you said it very helpfully, it’s the cause, it’s more than a country, it’s a cause. So help me.
Dr. Becker: So I guess like, unlike some people who do podcasts, I don’t want to pretend to be an expert on everything. I’ve lived in Israel a long time, but I haven’t acquired the ability to talk with certainty about certain things that I don’t know. So the finer distinction between Sunni and Shia is not something I’m an expert in, in terms of this issue. Obviously, there’s radical Sunni forces in Al Qaeda and Hamas and ISIS and others, and there are radical Shia forces. There were versions of Shia which were much more moderate and passive, as I understand it. So I don’t think it’s inherent necessarily to whether you are Shia or Sunni, whether there is a capacity for some measure of tolerance and coexistence.
I think it is the particular version of Shia Islam that the revolution under Khomeini and its thinkers and theologists developed, as developed by Khomeini as well, as well as the kind of the particular logic that Iran embraced in terms of its own regime’s survival, by presenting itself at the forefront of the battle against Israel, it could be seen as uniting the Muslim world and really compete with some of its Arab competitors about that. It could probably use that as a way to deflect from internal problems and justify a lot of things that were, you know, wrong within Iranian society itself, always blaming it on the West’s intrusion or on Israel and so on and so forth. So there was a mixture of factors that pushed a more radical version of Shia.
In principle, Israel, and it’s really important to understand this, Israel has no conflict with Iran as a state or with Iran as a society or with the Iranian people. We had great relations with Iran before 79, before the revolution. And there’s every reason to think that if we ever get to a post-Iranian regime reality, there will be great relations again between Israel and the Iranian people, because we share so much. And, you know, I like this language of the not the Abraham Accords, but the Cyrus Accords, as a way of a kind of imagining a relationship between Shia and Jews that could be the parallel of the Abraham Accords with the Sunni countries.
Noam: Can you say a little bit more about the Cyrus Accords?
Dr. Becker: I’m talking about the figure Cyrus, which is so famous in.
Noam: 2500 years ago.
Dr. Becker: Yes, but in Jewish thought as someone who enabled the Jewish return to ancient Israel and the reestablishment of the temple as a signal that there isn’t an inherent conflict between the Persian civilization and the Jewish civilization. And there is a way to imagine a reality of Israeli-Iranian relations that are not so fraught and not so zero sum, but on the contrary, based on partnership and a shared desire for prosperity. What I’m trying to say basically, is there’s no reason why the same vision we have for Jewish Sunni relations couldn’t be translated into a vision for Jewish Shia relations, or at least Jewish Iranian Jewish Persian relations, since we were there before.
Noam: Okay, you said something about that you don’t feel comfortable being that you’re an expert in all things Islam. So I appreciate that. Here’s one thing that you’re absolutely an expert in, international law. Absolutely. And there’s nothing to be modest about in this context. I actually was in The Hague a few months ago, and the entire time, you don’t know this, but I was thinking about you representing Israel. When I was there, I was like, Tal Becker definitely has spent time here. Tal Becker definitely has a lot to say about international relations.
And one of the things that I remember years and years and years ago, when I was in college, I interned for a legal scholar named Alan Dershowitz at the time. And I never even met him. I was in college just like doing research and writing, research and writing, research and writing.
And the topic was, if Israel does a strike against Iran, this is 2007, Tal, so talk about history, 2007. If Israel does a strike against Iran, is that considered preventive or preemptive? The fact that 18 or whatever years later, this just happened, it feels for me, like for so many of us who have been in the space, for you especially, you’ve probably been thinking about this for a long, long, long time.
Could you explain to me what the difference is between a preventive strike and a preemptive strike and maybe give a few examples in history where something’s been preventive versus preemptive and maybe even give an example, if you can, of something that maybe of a time where maybe there could have been a preemptive strike and the lack of preemptive strike caused problems by not engaging in a preemptive strike.
So I said a lot, but just talk to me about preventive versus preemptive in history and how this situates itself.
Dr. Becker: So a couple of preliminary things, Noam. First of all, international law is not like the tax code, where you kind of fill out the pink form or the green form. It’s quite contested. And I’m a little bit allergic to the language of certainty on each of these things. And I have to kind of push back a little bit on the terms, because I think it’s a little misleading. As I understand it, and I should say, I’m a recovering lawyer right now. So I’m not in the mode of thinking about these things. I think I’ve done enough international law for my life for now.
But fundamentally, Israel was already in an ongoing conflict with Iran for a very significant amount of time, not just because of the, you know, attacks that took place between in October and April and the exchanges between Israel and Iran, but also because of the way in which Iran has essentially been the force behind the proxy war against Israel in a whole host of ways. And because of that, from a strict legal perspective, we’re not in the realm of the debate, I think, between preventive and preemptive, which is about whether you, what are the conditions for launching a war, we are already in an ongoing armed conflict with Iran. So I think that that way of framing it is a misleading framing.
Now, having said that, preemptive is typically described as an attack you do preemptively, like, but because you are subject to an imminent threat, you have no alternative, you have no more chances of delay, there are no other alternatives but to act preemptively. And in the classic literature of international law, there has been, I think, growing understanding that a preemptive action in that way really kind of because of an imminent threat that is unavoidable is a legitimate form of self-defense. And some people, for example, refer to the Six Day War as a kind of classic example of preemptive self-defense in that way.
Preventive self-defense is used to describe a measure that’s taken before that imminence. In other words, that there’s really no other option, right? You do something in advance, and there’s discussion in the literature of international law whether in a reality, particularly when you’re facing a country that’s developing nuclear weapons capability, whether that distinction between preventive and preemptive is really that clear, because, you know, you don’t always know when that very last moment is.
The doctrine of preemptive self-defense, as it’s described. Without getting into too much, if I remember it, is like this old incident called the Caroline incident, I think, in the 19th century, which was a kind of conventional battle where you had to act preemptively. But what do you do when you’re facing an enemy that’s developing a nuclear weapons capability? Imminence isn’t exactly the term, or if it is, the concept of imminence shifts.
And so I’m not sure that the distinction between preventive and preemptive is that clear. But as I said, in any event, I’m not sure that’s the right legal framing for this issue, because we are effectively engaged in a conflict with Iran.
And certainly since October 7th, it’s a little bit of an illusion to think that what’s been happening here is all of a sudden there’s this brand new confrontation with Iran, when in fact it has been an Israeli-Iranian confrontation all along. So in short, I think that the legal debate has missed the point.
Noam: Very interesting. Very, very, very interesting. That’s the whole framing of this not being preventive or preemptive, but current, meaning it’s something that Israel and Iran already admired or were already mired in this. Definitely didn’t think about it from that perspective. That is very, very, very helpful. Very helpful.
I want to shift gears. We spoke a bit about the international legal aspect of this. We spoke a bit about the Iranian regime versus the Iranian people. I want to shift gears to Sinwar and the 7th of October. And there was an article by Jeffrey Goldberg recently in The Atlantic in which he said, and I’m going to read to you what he said. He said:
In the end, the October 7th massacre, Sinwar order did not cause the destruction of Israel, but instead led to the dismantling of its enemies. Hamas is largely destroyed and most of its leaders, including Sinwar, are dead, assassinated by Israel. Hezbollah in Lebanon is comprehensively weakened. Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, Iran’s main Arab ally, in exile in Moscow, his country now led by Sunni Muslims hostile to Iran’s leaders. Iran’s skies are under the control of the Israeli Air Force, and its $500 billion nuclear program appears to be, at least partially, rubble and dust.
He continues:
He underestimated the desire of Israelis to live in their ancestral homeland, basing his conclusion on an incorrect understanding of how Israel sees itself. Not since Nasser has anyone in the Middle East been proved so wrong so quickly.
I wanna get your reflection on that.
Dr. Becker: Yeah, so a couple of things about that. I think it’s right to say that so many of Israel’s adversaries misunderstand us. They try to put Israel into the frame of a colonial story, like the French in Algeria, or the Italians in Libya, and they therefore assume that if they make us bleed enough and suffer enough, there will be some kind of capitulation. And that’s, I think, a failure to understand that from the Israeli Jewish perspective, we are a people that is 3,500 years old. And the idea that we’re a colonial presence, a kind of foreign entity here is just incoherent to the average Israeli Jew, and I think many Jews around the world as well.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t a difficult conflict here. That doesn’t mean that Palestinians don’t also belong. I believe they do. And I think that one of the big struggles here is figuring out how to, you know, create space for Jewish and Palestinian self-determination that isn’t a suicide pact and isn’t understood in zero-sum terms. But fundamentally, you will always get it wrong if you think that we are somehow, we are think of ourselves as somehow a foreign presence here and not children of this place. That’s also part of the idea of the Abraham Accords. The Abraham Accords are a statement that this is an agreement between peoples who belong here. It’s not an argument about who the land belongs to. It’s an understanding that we both belong to the land.
Where I think that article maybe gets it a little bit wrong is that it measures success or failure only in kinetic terms, only in terms of capabilities, right? Now, that’s very important. And, and in the sense of, you know, Israel’s military achievements, there has been really, I think no one would have thought Israel would have achieved so much militarily in terms of setting back Hamas and Hezbollah and Assad and Iran as well. But that’s unfortunately not only the only metric.
And I’ve mentioned this on another podcast I did, but I’ll repeat it because I’m not sure how much there’s an overlap. There’s a really interesting, interesting distinction between the way Clausewitz and Sun Tzu talk about victory in war. Clausewitz and Sun Tzu, two people from very different times, very different places, but they each wrote a book on the art of war and war strategy. And Clausewitz says that victory in war is about the physical domination of your enemy, in a way that the enemy loses the capability essentially to be able to fight anymore and the ability to fight you. And on that metric, on a kind of Clausewitzian metric, Sinwar’s calculation was devastatingly bad.
But Sun Tzu says that actually in a different way, and he says in war, you’re not just fighting the capabilities of your enemy. You’re basically not even fighting your enemy, you’re fighting the strategy of your enemy. And victory in war in Sun Tzu’s language is really about defeating the strategy of your enemy. And if you can do that with the most minimal amount of force possible, then that’s the ultimate victory.
Now, in that sense, what is the strategy of our enemy? Right? So I think one component of the strategy, if you look at Hamas and Iran and Hezbollah, one component of that strategy is to make the idea of coexistence with Israel, something that is impossible to contemplate if you’re an authentic Muslim or an authentic Palestinian. That Israel should be seen as this pariah, this illegitimate entity that you cannot coexist with.
And so I think one of the big questions in this war is not just what have we done to affect the capabilities of our enemies? The second component is what have we done to target the strategy that seeks to make resistance to Israel, so-called resistance to Israel, and the commitment as an authentic Muslim to the destruction of Israel, as the organizing principle for so many Muslims in the Middle East? And on that metric, I think we still have a way to go. The fact that Sinwar has been set back and Hezbollah has been set back has created a real opportunity to not just set back the capabilities, but also to set back the story. But we need to capitalize on that opportunity. And I think where that article gets it wrong is that it measures victory only in Western terms of capabilities, rather than in terms of what Sun Tzu would talk about in terms of have you set back the appeal of that agenda and that story?
Noam: So that is, one of the things I love learning from you and hearing you is the, I try to think in terms of categories, in terms of groups of two or groups of three. So this is a very helpful heuristic for me to think this whole idea through.
I wanna talk about, as we spoke about Sinwar a little bit and what Hamas did on the 7th of October and then the reaction to it, even with all this, you’ve been a major pursuer of peace. You’ve written articles about this, about pursuing peace. And I want to go into the history briefly with you. It’s a question that I get asked very often, and I want to get your take on it. There are so many moments when people would make the argument– I’m going to speak for people who would make this argument– that Israelis tried to make peace with the Palestinians so many times, and I could go through the history very simply:
UN Resolution 181, the acceptance of the UN Partition Plan, that never happened. After 67, there was what they called the Naksa, there was the setback, and then there was the three no’s during Khartoum. Then there was the Camp David Accords with Egypt. So thankfully that took place. There was peace between Israel and Egypt. 93 was the Oslo Accords. 95 was Oslo II. 2000 was the Camp David Summit in which there was Barak, Arafat, and Clinton, and Israel ostensibly offered the Palestinian state with parts of East Jerusalem, 90% plus of the West Bank. That was rejected by Arafat. There was no serious counter-proposal. Second Intifada was right after. 2001 was the Taba Talks, was a more generous Israeli offer around 97% of the West Bank. 2005 was the Gaza disengagement. 2007 to 2008 was the Annapolis conference and the Ehud Olmert offer, which was a nearly full withdrawal from the West Bank, land swaps, shared control of Jerusalem, some solution for some refugees, etc., etc. Then we had the Kerry initiative in 23, the Trump peace plan, people forget about that, the peace to prosperity.
That’s a lot. Okay. And I talk about the history of Israel all the time. When you talk about pursuing peace, are you talking about pursuing peace with who? With the Palestinians, with Hamas, with Hezbollah, with Iraq? Who are you talking about in terms of making peace? I skipped Jordan in 94, sorry. But like there’s, and Abraham Accords, of course, that’s broader Arab world. When you talk about pursuing peace, what are you talking about? Who are you talking about?
Dr. Becker: Yeah. So first of all, I want to kind of point out an attention that I often see in the way people think and talk about this issue. I think there’s a human need to have stories that have beginnings, middles and ends, right? And we think of peace as the kind of end of the road. And we want also this war with Iran to be like the culmination of there was October 7, and then there was Gaza, and then there was Lebanon, and then there was Syria, and then there was Iran, as if we kind of move from a situation of uncertainty and chaos and war to this kind of utopian moment of, of peace, and we’re headed there, and then everything will make will make sense.
And there’s a tension there because foreign policy is not a story with a beginning, middle and an end, right? And I think about foreign policy generally as trying to have more peace, more prosperity, more security, more dignity for more people, more of the time. And there will be adversaries, and there will be proponents of that. And what you’re really trying to do is that those who are in favor of coexistence have the momentum, shape the agenda, and the adversaries are more and more marginalized and have less capabilities to advance their objectives.
And the story of peacemaking, in my view, has been a story of sometimes having more momentum and sometimes having less momentum. And the question right now is whether we can take advantage of the fundamental, almost miraculous setback that the enemies of peace have faced in order to create momentum again for coexistence.
What is this war about? In my view, this war has always been about denying the enemies of peace the ability to dictate the future of the Middle East. And what we need to do is take away both their capabilities, but also the appeal of their agenda. And there’s one more thing I think when you ask me specifically what I mean when I talk about peace, I’ve been in this business for a very long time. And I often ask myself why I have survived longer than a lot of my colleagues in the business. Maybe I never got the memo to move on with my life. I’m not sure. But one of the things is this. When we talk about security, we understand that there is no such thing as this kind of complete security. In the human condition, there’s more security and less security. And yet somehow when we talk about peace, we think about it in these complete, almost messianic terms. And if you can’t achieve that kind of peace, then you’re kind of naive to even think about it and talk about it. And I think that’s the kind of fundamental mistake that the blessing of having a sovereign Israel and having agency is that you get to work on having more peace rather than less peace.
And what I mean by peace is having more people who in their consciousness and in their actions do not see the other as a reason for violence, a reason for conflict, a reason to be in a zero-sum contest. There’s a beautiful phrase in our tradition in Psalms which is, seek peace and pursue it. It’s interesting that it doesn’t say seek peace and achieve it. Why doesn’t it tell you to achieve it? And I think the answer is, who the hell are you? You know, you don’t have the capacity to achieve peace. You don’t control all the variables. There are forces that will be opposed to it. There are forces within your own society that will be either very skeptical about it or opposed to it. And there are certainly forces in the region who are fundamentally opposed to it, irreconcilable forces. They’re not going away. But does it stop you from being a pursuer?
And here, by pursuit of peace, I want to just say, I don’t mean just the kind of soft version of this. Harming the enemies of peace, taking away their capabilities, ensuring that Hamas doesn’t govern Gaza, ensuring that Iran doesn’t have ballistic missiles, that is part of the pursuit of peace.
It’s not a warmonger’s agenda to want to take away the capacities of the enemies of peace in order to harm us. But I think when I talk about peace, what I’m talking about fundamentally is making it so that there are more people who in their sense of identity of who they are and in their relationship with one another, do not think that being true to themselves requires being in a zero-sum contest with the other. And there, there is always more to do.
Noam: Are there, you’re Jewish Israeli, are there Jewish Israelis who are enemies of peace?
Dr. Becker: I think there are illiberal voices in Israel who see themselves in a kind of zero-sum contest in the region. And I think there are others who because of all the efforts you mentioned, and so many disappointments, you know, the offers that Israel made being rejected, the degree to which there has been terrorism, the kind of genocidal agenda of some of our enemies, feel like peace is not possible. And I think, you know, I don’t rule out the idea that peace in the language that they imagine it, some utopian moment where the enemies will disappear, is possible, I don’t know. There’s no university you go to to get a degree in that.
But what I would say is that the question is, is more peace possible? And in that sense, it’s two things. Is it possible for our enemies to have less capabilities to shape the reality? And is it possible for people who are more moderate, more pragmatic, more concerned with prosperity and stability to have more capabilities and more agenda? I think that is possible. So even if I understand and appreciate the idea that some kind of messianic peace feels naive and even dangerous, I share that view, right? I still think that the pursuit of peace is a fundamental national security interest, as well as kind of essential to Jewish identity.
Noam: Speaking of central to Jewish identity, I want to get your quick take on Zionism. We just did a recorded a 35 minute podcast where I just riffed basically on what Zionism has meant to me in this moment, the philosophy of Zionism, the history of Zionism. And there were some names and ideas that I quoted in terms of thinking about Zionism. One of those names was Moshe Halbertal, who explained that Zionism is a movement that’s aimed to deliver the Jews from the historical disgrace of dependence on other entities to determine their fate. And then I didn’t get to this, but I’ve always found that that’s not enough, that that’s kind of a starting point, but it’s not the goal of Zionism. That’s kind of a prerequisite of Zionism, but the goal of Zionism is to do something much larger, much bigger.
Years ago, you taught me like a three-pronged approach to Zionism that I’ve used countlessly. There’s like there’s being normal, there’s being exceptional, and what’s the third? Remind me of the third. Safety, safety. Safety, safety, right. Safety, normal, exceptional. Three goals of Zionist, meaning, and I’ll just say it, the goal number one of Zionism is to be rescued, to be safe, to say, you know what, we are protected from others. That’s the goal of Zionism. Goal number two of Zionism from Tal Becker is that Zionism, that Jews should just simply be normal, like everyone else, that they have a seat at the table, the United Nations, that they are also participating in Eurovision, that they’re, you know, those sorts of examples. And then goal number three of Zionism is to be exceptional, to go to Nepal, to go to Kenya, to go to Haiti, to do all these amazing things. That’s the goal of Zionism.
How do you see, I’ve always wanted to ask you this since you taught this to me eight years ago, for you, Dr. Tal Becker, when you look at the history of Zionism and your vision of Zionism, what do you see as the goal of Zionism?
Dr. Becker: Yeah, so I want to talk about it at two levels. I think the first level is, you know, Zionism as basically the Jewish people’s right to self-determination. I believe every people has a right to self-determination and let’s think a minute about what it means, what the right to self-determination means, right?
Noam: I need to interrupt you. Self-determination is at the end of the sentence or is it also in their ancestral homeland?
Dr. Becker: No, obviously in their ancestral homeland. Yes.
Noam: No, because, because some of the people on social media with me will go back and forth. They’re like, well, you could have that in Uganda. You could have that in other places. And, you know, even in your–
Dr. Becker: I mean, the Uganda thing, I’ve always been struck. I think it was Chaim Weizmann, you know, who said, you know, there’s a reason why I visit my grandmother and not just some old woman up the street. She’s my grandmother, right? So the idea that self-determination would happen not in the place where the Jewish people’s story is told is not really respecting that right. And again, I don’t think that means that the Palestinian people also don’t have a right to self-determination, but that they have a right to self-determination that doesn’t deny our right, and it doesn’t include a right to diminish.
And that has been a real struggle, I think. But just to go back to self-determination for a second before I touch on your question. You know, the most important human rights convention, now I’m going to be a bit of a lawyer, is the International Covenant on Civil and political rights. And it’s really interesting that Article 1 of that convention says that the first human right mentioned in the Human Rights Convention is the right of people to self-determination. And that’s a little strange because you might think human rights are about individual rights, so why mention self-determination first?
And I think that fundamentally there is a human right of belonging. People have a right to belong to a collective, which is to say they have a right to feel like they have a past and a future, and they’re part of something bigger than themselves. And that idea of self-determination is the right of peoples to give meaning to their lives through the belonging of a collective and being part of a collective story. And I think that’s a right that belongs to all, that should be recognized by all people.
And at its most basic element, that is what Zionism is about. Zionism is about the Jewish people’s right to do that, like all other peoples. I think it makes Jews need to be advocates for the rights of self-determinations of others. You can’t be an advocate only for your own rights. You should also be an advocate for the rights of others, I believe, but not in a way that is suicide. And that has been a big problem for as long as Palestinian identity, to the degree to which it is defined by, or more by denying the rights of Jews rather than building up Palestinian rights, that’s created a real problem at the essence of this conflict.
Now, to your point, I think, I’ll put it this way, from the perspective of the Jewish people, people that’s about 3,500 years old, as you mentioned, I think we have been preoccupied by three big questions for so much of that history. How will we be safe? How will we be normal or accepted? And how will we be exceptional? How can we give expression to our tradition and our values and ideas in exceptional ways?
And the slight nuance that I would make on what you said, Noam, is that I don’t think of Israel as the place where Jews are safe, normal and exceptional. It’s not like the answer to the Jewish predicament. It’s the place where we do the work to realize those objectives. And I think to some extent, part of the kind of questions that people have had about Israel, and I think especially younger Jews, you see younger generations of Jews who kind of feel like Israel has somehow disappointed because it hasn’t answered effectively each of those questions:
Are Jews safer? Well, yes, we have an army to protect us and it’s done amazing things, but we’re also threatened.
Are we accepted and normal? Well, yes, to some extent, but no, there’s BDS and there’s delegitimization and so on.
Are we exceptional? In some ways, yes, in some ways we’re normal and a bit too normal. And in some ways, our exceptionalism might even be problematic in the eyes of others.
So I don’t want to create this idea that Israel is the answer. In my mind, it’s more the therapist’s room where we do the work on building and creating that. And in my view, Jewish life in the diaspora is not different. Those questions about security and acceptance and exceptionalism are also relevant questions for Jews in the diaspora or in world Jewry generally. And in every community in North America and in Canada and in Australia and in France, those communities are also struggling. And I see this as the Jewish people struggle to answer that question in different ways. In Israel, yes, but also in the diaspora.
Dr. Becker: I love that Tal. I learned a lot. I need one more thing from you before I let you go. I’m going to South Africa in a couple months as I’m an Aspen Fellow, and I’m going to be spending a week there. And I got to be honest with you, I’m a little bit anxious about going. It’s the country that has historically, or I should say in the past couple years not been such a had such a great relationship with Israel and on this podcast I show the good the bad and the ugly we go through the history of Israel we actually talk about Deir Yassin, Kfar Qassem, Qibye, Sabra and Shatilla, we’d go through all of the difficult moments in Israeli history, we talk about different aspects of how to deal with the Palestinian refugee crisis, how to talk about 1948 as a celebration for Jewish Israelis, but as a devastation for Palestinian Arabs. We do all of that.
And still, I feel like this, there’s something going on with the broader world that they talk about Israel in a way that is antagonistic, in a way that’s seemingly a bit one-sided. And I want to know from you, A, do you have any advice for me in South Africa? And B, I want to know if you have thoughts about if there’s something else or maybe I’m over-speaking now, but is it antisemitism? That’s just like the type of thing that my mother and father want to ask me all the time. Is it just antisemitism that Tal Becker is working against when everyone is voting one way and Tal’s making the argument in the courts and they’re showing me the videos? Is that what it is? Is it something else? What is it?
Dr. Becker: This is a really complicated issue, Noam, I mean, it requires a lot of time. So I’ll just try to give a little bit of it. First of all, I think there’s a fundamental question about who is persuadable Right, who are we talking to? We’re all in our social media silos and there is in some circles real hostility to Israel and real antisemitism that frankly it just doesn’t matter what you say in those audiences. And I think it’s important to understand as part of this that one of the big questions is how do people form their opinions and change their opinions. And it’s actually quite rare to find a person that changes their opinion simply because of a persuasive argument. It’s really unlikely for someone to change their opinion if it is not socially acceptable in their circle to have that view.
And one of the big challenges, I think, of this moment, is to create communities where being serious, and looking at things in a complex way, is its own form of community and sense of belonging, right. And that’s maybe one of the contributions of your podcast, if it can create a community that says we’re not automatically pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian, what makes us think that we are a community is that we’re serious people and we want to understand things seriously. Because unless it’s socially acceptable, it’s very unlikely for a powerful argument, as powerful as it may be, to be the, you know, there’s no magic elevator pitch here. So that’s one thing I would say.
The second thing I would say that I think is important is that, you know, I was trained as a lawyer, I’ve done a lot of my work as a lawyer. But I think a lot of the people we’re talking to are not lawyers. And something that’s going on here that we’re not sensitive enough to, I think, is worth noting. You know, when Israel is accused of something, I think the natural response of a lot of people who are sympathetic to Israel is to look up the legal definition of the term, right? Accused of genocide, let’s look up the legal definition and then make a legalistic argument as to why it doesn’t meet that definition. And there’s a place for that, right? Because some of these charges, in my view, are outrageous. They’re very poorly substantiated. And they often rely, and this is a separate topic, which we won’t have time to go into, they rely on sources of information whose credibility is very questionable. And the way in which people look, where do I know what the truth is, or what I think the truth is, is a really important question in these conversations. There’s a reliance, for example, on the UN as a source of legitimacy in a lot of these places, including in South Africa, which I think is really questionable, whether political bodies and the way that they operate can be a source of that legitimacy. But my point is something else. Sometimes when people are engaging with you in that argument and they say, you know, I think I accuse you of this, and then you look up the legal definition and you say, I’m not meeting that, you think you’ve refuted their argument, but they may not even know what the legal definition is. That’s not what’s happening here.
In a way, what they’re asking is, do you share my moral commitments? Do you share my moral concerns? Because I’m worried about civilian casualties in Gaza. I’m worried about X. And a legalistic response isn’t an effective way to engage that]. The question that the unbearable dilemma that Gaza, for example, presents is what do you do when you’re fighting an irreconcilably evil force that is willing to use its own civilian population as its camouflage and immunity? And I think what these people, what that audience wants to hear is that you share their moral commitments to the protection of civilians, but you help them understand what an impossible reality has been created by Hamas’s complete disdain for life and for the law.
It doesn’t absolve us of our obligations. And we have to convey that we share those moral commitments, but in a reality in which we’re fighting an enemy that wants to maximize Palestinian suffering, not just Israeli suffering.
So I think, you know, there’s a lot of little thoughts there together. But I think the core in connecting to people that you want to try to expand their appreciation of this is to make sure that they see that you share their moral commitments, number one, and to create a community that is based on a shared commitment to a better future.
At the end of the day, if Hamas remains in power in Gaza, Palestinians will continue to be terrorized by Hamas, and we will never be able to reach a post-Hamas reality where coexistence is possible. And everything we do needs to be measured against that objective of creating the conditions for there to be more peace. That includes defeating the enemies of peace, but not in the process losing our commitment to the rule of law and to our moral obligations which are critical at this moment.
Noam: Dr. Becker, thank you so much for joining us at Unpacking Israel History. Your wisdom, your moral guidance is so deeply appreciated. You gave me a lot of terminology that I’m gonna be thinking about For a long long time and gonna be sharing with our millions of listeners at Unpacking Israeli History. So thank you. Thank you. Dr. Becker for joining us and please stay safe. Stay strong.
Dr. Becker: And stay in touch. Thanks so much. So good to be with you.
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Do you get why Dr. Becker has influenced me so deeply? What a guy.
As we were talking, I was furiously scribbling notes, isolating the ideas that made my brain light up. Here they are, translated into Five Fast Facts.
- So much of this war is animated by an internal Iranian struggle between being Shia and being Persian. Between being the type of Muslim who believes it’s their religious duty to criminalize Israel and being the type of Muslim who believes the future lies in normalizing Israel as just another country in the Middle East.
- All of that means that the enemy isn’t a single group. It’s not just the IRGC, or Hamas, or a specific version of Shi’a Islam. It’s both more or less complicated than that. The enemy is anyone who doesn’t want peace. That’s it.
- Israel’s initial strike against Iran – and the strikes that followed – were neither preemptive nor preventive. They were merely a turning point, a continuation in a war that’s been raging since 1979, when Ayatollah Khomeni took power and made it his mission to wipe out the Jewish state.
- But Khomeni and his proxies made – and keep making – a fatal mistake. They are fighting this war as though they’re fighting colonists. As though if they just make life miserable enough for Israelis, they will pack up and leave. They haven’t understood yet that their narrative of the Jewish people is completely wrong. And that as long as they continue to see us this way, they will continue losing.
- The more practical Arab and Muslim states, like the UAE, have reconciled themselves to the fact that Israelis and Jews are not colonists, but natives. That’s why the Abraham Accords takes its name from our shared forefather, reflecting our shared roots in this place.
Those are your five fast facts, but here’s one enduring lesson as I see it – or at least, as Dr. Becker helped me to see it.
There are multiple ways to evaluate the success of this war – even as it’s ongoing. (Yes, right now there’s a ceasefire, but this is the Middle East, so by the time this comes out who knows what will happen.) There’s the Clausewitz school, which says that victory is physical domination of the enemy. By that metric, Israel has already won. But the Sun Tzu school says that victory means fighting your enemies’ strategy until it no longer commands the people’s hearts and minds. In other words, killing an idea – or at least making it completely impractical and untenable.
And the idea we need to kill isn’t even “Muslims have a religious duty to kick out the Jews.” That’s part of it, but it’s not the whole thing. The idea we need to kill is the narrative that so many people have about us.
We’re interlopers. Europeans. Colonists. Johnny come latelys to a part of the world that doesn’t belong to us.
But the Jewish people are the children of this land. Our story starts here. Many ordinary Iranians recognize that. They’re still proud of Cyrus the Great, who recognized this fact more than 2500 years ago when he gave the order that the Jewish people, who were then in exile in Babylon, were now allowed to return to their homeland, to rebuild their temple, to restore their own sovereignty.
The Islamic Republic will likely not recognize this fact. Nor will Hamas or the Houthis. Their ideology has poisoned and blinded them. They won’t let go of it now.
But ordinary people, they’re a different story. Ordinary people do not benefit from war, or from totalizing and inaccurate narratives about the enemy. Ordinary people just want to live. That’s why ordinary people are the target.
The Torah commands us to pursue peace. Tzedek, tzedek tirdof, it tells us in the Hebrew Bible. But tirdof, pursue, is not the same as achieve. Nothing is guaranteed to us. All we can do is try. And if the goal is to change the narrative, if the target is ordinary people’s hearts and minds, then every single one of us is on the front lines. Not because we want to shove ideology down anyone’s throat. Not because everyone needs to agree. That’s not gonna happen, and it’s not the goal. The goal is simply to change the story that lives in ordinary people’s heads, to borrow from another very influential thinker. The goal is simply to help people understand and engage with basic history.
And that’s why we’re doing this. That’s why you’re here.
Political leaders are fond of slogans like ABSOLUTE VICTORY. Nitzachon mukhlat. I don’t know what that means anymore. If you’re going by the Clausewitz school, I guess it means eliminating Iran’s nuclear program and bringing the IRGC to its knees. But if you’re going by Sun Tzu, victory looks a lot more humble and a lot more complicated and, in some ways, a lot more democratic. Because it is in our hands. By being here, by listening, by being part of this community, you are already playing your part. And that’s the biggest privilege and responsibility I can imagine.