Some people think there is one correct way to be a Zionist. One definition of Zionism. But there have actually been many, often in open conflict with each other, sometimes within the same person.
The man I’m speaking with today has been a mentor and friend of mine for many years, not only because he’s always been so wise and thoughtful and genuine, but also because he’s been so many different things at different times, and so willing to introspect and learn and change. At different points, he’s been a militant loyal to the Jabotinsky-Kahane line of Jewish power, a young idealist pulled toward the settler movement and then pushed away by his own doubts, a centrist convinced that almost everyone in this conflict is right about something, and now a wartime defender of the Jewish story itself. Same man, several sincerely held Zionisms.
Yossi Klein Halevi, thank you for speaking with me.
Noam: Yossi, awesome to be in conversation with you.
Yossi: Great to be with you, Noam.
Yossi, so you’re somebody who is a mentor to many people, who you’re somebody who a lot of people consider their mentors, even if you don’t even know you’re their mentors. And so for years before I even started this work on the story of Israel, the history of Israel, I I I’ve been following your work. And your work has been a tremendous inspiration to me. so I’ll thank you.
Yossi: That means a lot to me, thank you, Noam, and the amazing work that you and your team do. And to think that if I had any indirect impact on you, that really means a lot.
Noam: It’s been a huge impact and I want to talk about these eras with you your life in the earlier part of your life you were very attracted to Two different types of Zionism, a revision of Zionism of Jabotinsky to an extent, maybe, and an attraction to Beitar, an attraction to a certain aspect of Kahane as well, referring to Mayor Kahane. I want you to tell me what was so attractive to you about those types of Zionism growing up.
Yossi: Well, you know, it’s strange because I was out of sync with the unfolding Israeli story. I joined the Israeli right when we were so beyond the panel that we were barely considered part of the mainstream. And I’m speaking now first of all of Beitar. Beitar was the youth movement. I guess it still exists in some bare form. But this was the youth movement of Jabotinsky, Menachem Begin.
And so we’re talking about Brooklyn of the 1960s, early 70s, and there were a few dozen of us. And you know, we used to march in the Israel Day Parade with all the other Zionist youth movements, and we marched in military formation. We were kind of a paramilitary-minded organization.
And almost all the other Zionist movements were left. Even Bnei Akiva, the religious Zionist movement, which today is quite right-wing, was a socialist Zionist group in those years. I’m talking about 1966, 67. It was the Six-Day War that started to change religious Zionism. But in its earlier incarnation, religious Zionism was socialist and so strange today. And if you look at the Bnei Akiva, I don’t know whether it’s still true today, but the emblem was the Ten Commandments and a sheaf of wheat.
And the sheaf of wheat was borrowed as well from the socialist youth movements. And so Beitar, we were the black sheep of Zionism.
And we were also the losers of the Zionist story. Menachem Begin was in seemingly permanent opposition. He could not win an election for 30 years. The first three decades of Israel’s history was labor, labor, labor.
And so what drew me to the, what were then, fringes, and of course today, is Israel’s is mostly politically right wing, I missed my moment. What drew me to the right was definitely a soft spot for losing causes, which is what it seemed to be then. And also the feeling that they had been right in the years leading up to the Holocaust, all the other Zionist movements had been wrong, that it was only Jabotinsky, and I still believe this, who clearly saw the coming storm and tried actively to warn the Jews of Europe to flee.
And the other Zionist movements, they were doing sacred work in preparing the ground for the future state. They were building the state. But they weren’t actively engaged in preemptive rescue in the way that Jabotinsky and Beitar were.
So I felt a kind of a retroactive loyalty to the thwarted rescuers. They had tried and it was all very personal. They had tried to save my family. That’s how I felt. And so I felt this loyalty to Jabotinsky and Begin and Beitar. plus they had great uniforms. They had the best uniforms.
Noam: So that’s how that’s how a young boy makes a decision?
Yossi: It helped. And there was a kid in my class, I went to a yeshiva day school and he was in Beitar and every Israel Independence Day he’d come to school in this really great uniform with epaulettes and dark blue, like a police shirt and blue pockets. I said, I gotta be part of this. I want that.
Noam: So that’s part of it. The other part though, like you said, is different is Meir Kahane. And one of things that you said about Meir Kahane is you said you saw Kahane as the Jewish Malcolm X. Right. So can you say more about that?
Yossi: Yeah, I mean it’s interesting because Mayor Kahane as a boy had been in a Beitar-y. Now he was actually in the radical wing of Beitar. Beitar itself wasn’t militant enough. He needed to go an extra step. And the way that played out for Kahane in the 1940s, which is when he was in Beitar, was Beitar was supporting the Etzel, the Urgun, Menachem Begin’s underground. And Kahane was supporting the Lechi, the Stern group, which was more extreme. So you could see already then where this guy was going to end up. And when Kahane started the Jewish Defense League, this is in 1968, and the year is very important, and I’ll come to that in a moment, he was really drawing very very overtly from Beitar and the Jabotinsky movement. He called himself a Jabotinsky Zionist, and the texts that JDL, the Jewish Defense League, was promoting in those years, were classic revisionist, Zionist right-wing texts. And it was only later when Kahane moves to Israel that he founds a whole new stream of right-wing ideology which we today call Kahanism, but that’s maybe we’ll get to that a little little later.
But the significance of the Jewish Defense League emerging in 1968 was that you had a convergence of once-in-a-lifetime historic events. So first of all, there was the Six Day War in 1967, which had an enormous galvanizing impact on the whole Jewish world. It changed Soviet Jewry. The Soviet Jewish Renaissance, the Zionist revolt against the enforced assimilation policy of the Kremlin begins, is triggered by the pride that Soviet Jews felt with the Israeli victory.
And in America it also had a galvanizing impact on us and one of the main expressions of that was the emergence of the JDL because what we felt was why are we still getting beaten up in Brooklyn when Jewish reality has been fundamentally changed in the Middle East? We wanted in. We wanted part of
Noam: So do you, just go all the way to the present right now, with the antisemitism that exists in the world today, can you imagine a Jewish defense league emerging with the same sort of passion?
Yossi: So I think that we need to really look a little more deeply at the conditions that created the JDL.
So one of them was the Six-Day War, this tremendous pride in Israel, and the Zionization of a whole generation of American Jews, my generation of American Jews, drew its Jewish identity primarily from Israel, which seems so counterintuitive today.
Noam: Why?
Yossi: Because of the growing alienation from Israel.
Noam: Meaning Israel used to give you a Jewish identity.
Yossi: And now for many young American Jews it’s undermining their Jewishness. So there was the Six Day War, there was this deep pride in Israel.
It was also the time when the second generation, the children of Holocaust survivors, were starting to come of age. I come from a survivor family and and and many, not all, but many of the activists JDL were from survivor Families and Kahane gave voice to the rage of the second generation.
And the third tremendous event, I mentioned very briefly a moment ago, was the rise, the revolt of Soviet Jewry against the Kremlin, where you had Soviet Jews risking their lives to demand an exit visa to Israel. And that really radicalized a lot of us. I I had been active in the Soviet Jewry movement, starting basically a year after it was founded. I joined in 1965. I was twelve. And it was peaceful, it was the most peaceful movement. The student struggle for Soviet Jewry was the founder, really, of the movement. And then Kahane came along and said, This isn’t good enough. We need to adopt the tactics of the black power movement of the new left which was the kind of precursor of today’s progressive woke movement. And we borrowed their rhetoric, we borrowed their tactics. We used, we drew our inspiration from the violence that that was happening in America at the time.
And that’s the other factor that you have to consider, which is the sixties. It was the sixties. And I mean, you know, when you’re when you’re kind of stuck as I was in a remote corner of Orthodox Jewish Brooklyn, you know, growing up in Borough Park. And you see this unbelievable excitement, you know, the music, the music coming from San Francisco. And I was a vicarious hippie, you know, and I just desperately wanted to go to Woodstock. I was fifteen or sixteen. And of course my parents didn’t want me. But the sixties had a major impact on everyone I knew in JDL.
And in fact my closest friend in the JDL had come from SDS, the Students for Democratic Society, and just said, this is the Jewish version.
Noam: Ah.
Yossi: And Kahane himself was deeply influenced by the sixties. Now he was on the right, but it’s hard to explain because the sixties weren’t just a political experience, they were a cultural phenomenon. And and okay, Kahane was right wing, but he was still part of the sixties, you know, and and so there was really there was this kind of a seamless, which in retrospect seems ridiculous, but there was this seamless continuity from Hate Ashbury and the Berkeley free speech movement and the Black Panthers and the JDL. It all somehow made sense.
Noam: It so doesn’t make sense right now. Like looking at it, like to imagine someone wearing Birkenstocks, smoking weed, listening to the Grateful Dead.
Yossi: No, no, totally, totally. But because it was all but you have to understand if all Yeah right, but Noam, everything was still in its embryonic form. And so you know you could have these kind of hybrid experiences.
I’ll give you an example. You know, while I was being drawn to the JDL, I was also very interested in the radical Zionists on the left. There was this whole flowering, it’s an organization called the Jewish Liberation Project. There were all of these college Zionist newspapers coming really from the left, advocating a two-state solution, which no
Noam: In the early seventies?
Yossi: I’m talking about 1969, 1970. And I was reading these papers because I was publishing a high school newspaper at the time called Achtud, which means unity, that was a pro-JDL newspaper, and we distributed it in Jewish high schools in the New York area.
And so I was part of an organization called the Jewish Student Press Service, which was overwhelmingly left wing Zionist. They were all very Zionist, but very left wing. And I was right wing, but I was part of it. And the only other newspaper that was right wing but was part of the Jewish student press service was the newspaper called Never Again, which was the official paper of the JDL. And we were kind of an unofficial JDL thing.
Noam: Fascinating. I wanna just tell you something that Yehuda Mirsky, who wrote a remarkable biography on Rav Kook said about your book, Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist. He said to me that all young people who are incredibly passionate about their ideas should read Yossi Klein Halevi’s Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist. Because you’re somebody who you went through this experience of seeing something that is right wing, that is strongly right wing. And it’s not that you said, hey, I don’t want to be part of Zionism at all. You said I don’t want to be part of, for you, this type of Zionism. And you ended up moving to Israel, you go into the army, I’m going to Era two now, and you’re in it’s in the early 1980s, I believe.
Yossi: 1982.
Noam: 1982. And you are pioneering and you have this I would call it a land centered religious Zionism. and you were I don’t know if this is true about you, but in 2018, in Letters to My Palestinian Neighbors, you said in visitingHebron, you said if we didn’t belong here, we don’t we didn’t belong anywhere. There’s something about the land that spoke a lot to you.
Yossi: Yeah.
Noam: The pro is that it makes the settler movement’s argument for itself as continuous with not a betrayal of classical Zionist pioneering. And the con is what was the argument that I wanted to ask you, is, what’s the argument that finally ended this romance, this land that you care so deeply about and is it a moral thing for you? Is it a strategic thing for you? What was it then?
Yossi: Yeah, great question. The romance isn’t over. Of course it is.
Noam: The romance is there?
Yossi: Of course it is. Absolutely. I I think that I still believe that on one level, if we don’t belong in Hebron, we don’t belong anywhere. Hebron is the oldest Jewish community in the world. Goes back to Abraham and Sarah, it’s four thousand years old. The first Jewish cemetery is Hebron. And my experience in Hebron, which might frame this part of our conversation, is that there’s no place in the world that I feel that I belong more to than Hebron, and no place that I feel more disoriented in.
Noam: Mm-hmm.
Yossi: And the two are inseparable parts of that experience. So I am
Noam: So you’re saying that your romance, I believe in letters you wrote that the romance with the settlement movement. Maybe that’s something that you had. That’s something that ended. The land, the romance of the land stays, but the romance
Yossi: Yeah, yeah, the truth is the truth is I always had an ambivalent relationship with the settlement movement and by ambivalent I mean ambivalent in its old meaning, which means that you’re conflicted. I was conflicted. Part of me was very drawn in. In fact when Sarah, my wife and I first moved here, we very briefly, like I mean for two days, considered joining one of the groups that founded a new settlement. And we dropped out very very quickly. We realized that we did for various reasons. We can discuss or not and why we don’t belong there. we felt culturally alienated we felt that
Noam: Why did you
Yossi: It was too closed in. Physically, the settlements were surrounded by barbed wire and that was a kind of a metaphor I felt that I didn’t come to Israel to live in a self-enclosed kind of a ghetto. And so it was initially I would say almost an aesthetic aversion. And even as I had great respect and still do for those of my friends who moved to settlements who helped found settlements. I have friends who founded, helped found Tekoa, Shiloh, these are foundational places on the map. And so there’s nothing extraneous for me in this story. And the other thing that I’ve always felt about settlers and still feel this way very strongly, is that if anything the settlers prove that we really are indigenous to the entirety of this land because only an indigenous people would be crazy enough to defy the whole world and to take all of the enormous risks that the settlement movement has brought to us.
Noam: There’s no analogue for any other people.
Yossi: I mean, I see so much of the settlement movement in political terms that’s problematic, which is the segue that we can come to now, in terms of threatening Israel as a Jewish majority state, as a democratic state. I see so much of what’s gone wrong in Israel, the assault on democracy as coming from the settlement movement, coming from Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, who was the spiritual father of the settlement movement, the son of Rav Kook, who immediately after the Six Day War issued his famous pronouncement saying no government of Israel has the right to withdraw from any of the God given lands. Now, what he’s saying is that he is putting his authority above the democratically elected government, which is exactly the crisis we’re in now where we have an assault against the the institutions of democracy coming from from a an illiberal right which was not the right that I was part of.
Menachem Begin’s son, Benny Begin, who for many years was a Likud Knesset member, was a cabinet minister, defined his father’s Likud as a liberal national party. Liberal in the sense that it believes in pluralism, in democracy, in the rule of law, in the primacy of law. That not only majorities have rights, but also minorities. This is classic Begin and classic Jabotinsky. That’s what I was raised on. And Netanyahu himself was once a liberal national national Zionist. But because of his legal complications he turned against liberal democracy. Pure so pure pure
Noam: You think, is that a statement or an opinion?
Yossi: That’s a statement. But you know, in Israel all opinions are state. This is another statement. But anyway, in terms of what you were asking about the settlements, my break with supporting in even emotionally, I wasn’t really a political supporter except for those two days where I joined the settlement group. But the feeling that the wariness that I had toward the settlement movement was the dogmatism that was always there and the fact that there was never a serious internal conversation, and I’ve studied this, I’ve written about the settlement movement, and there was never a serious conversation convened by the leaders of the settlement movement to discuss what actually are we going to do with all these Palestinians who we are forcibly absorbing into the Jewish state, whom we don’t want in our society, and they themselves don’t want to be part of our society. How’s this going to work?
Noam: So the religious sign is around why it’s no like regarding
Yossi: Never, there was never a serious conversation. The Escher Council. Well Rav Aharon Lichtenstein and that circle made their break with the settlement movement. Yeah, sure, for exactly the reasons that I’m saying. They they
Noam: You’re saying they wouldn’t consider themselves part of the settlement movement?
Yossi: They would consider themselves
Noam: Even though the reason I’m to to explain it to everyone, meaning they are they were leaders of the yeshiva in the settlement.
Yossi: And and it was the first military yeshiva in the settlements. Yeah. And certainly in the early years I think Rav Amital, I don’t know about Rav Lichtstein, but certainly Rav Amital would have considered himself very much part of it. Although there was always a c kind of a subtle edginess between him and Hanan Porat who was the head of, was basically the de facto head of the settlement.
Right, the Gush Emonim Project. He was the he was the main face behind that. And he would he would have debates with Rav Amital personally. Wasn’t he technically a student of Rav Amital? He wasn’t but he would really push back. He did.
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Yeah, I and they were very close.
The students. He did. And Rava Amital always gave him respect. But he didn’t, Rav Amital didn’t sign up on the Gush Emunim project. It was always part of him that held back. And then and then after 1982 in the Lebanon War, he broke publicly with the settlement movement and came out for territorial compromise. And you know, what happened to me in, when I moved to Israel, I came as a journalist, as a working journalist. I was already a journalist in New York. I came, I was almost thirty when I moved here. And so I didn’t start a career, I just really continued it. And I’m saying that because being able to land in Israel and immediately start working as a journalist was a tremendous gift because being a working journalist in Israel was a kind of a way of studying the society that I just joined from within. And I would be able to go in and out of all of the different Israels. One week I’d be writing about a settlement, the next week I’d be writing about peace now on the left and then I’d go into the Haredi, the ultra Orthodox community, and Arab Israelis. And going in and out of all of these different worlds and listening, because that’s what a journalist has to do. I don’t know if that’s if they do that anymore, but at least that’s how I was taught journalists are supposed to practice their craft. You listen. And you try to understand all of the different ways that these different Israels understand this place and what their vision is, what their fears are. And so I did a lot of listening. And I came to the conclusion that everybody’s right. Everybody here’s right about something. And nobody is right about everything.
And and and let’s look at the settlements as an example, the Palestinian question more more broadly. I would speak to people on the left and they would say, well, okay. What happens the day after we annex? Are we a Jewish state? Not if we give everybody citizenship, they’ll outvote us. Well then if we don’t give them citizenship, are we a democratic state? not if we don’t give them citizenship. And I listened and I said, Well, well, yeah, you’re right.
And then I would speak to my friends who were still on the right, and they would say, okay, who do you make peace with? You’re gonna make peace with Arafat? Listen, listen to what they say. They don’t accept our legitimacy here. They don’t accept our indigenousness. There’s no part of the Palestinian national movement that accepts our right to be here. So who do you make peace with?
And I said, Wow, that’s right. You’re right too. You know the old Jewish joke, right? How could you both be right and you’re right too? And that was and the person who said, You’re right too, that’s the centrist.
Noam: I was gonna ask you to define what does it mean to be a centrist.
Yossi: So this for me, specifically on this issue, although I think it’s broader than the Palestinian issue, the centrist or the center is that place that tries to hold the essential insights from across the political spectrum. And so I have a left-wing side, and that left wing side says, nothing good is going to come for Israel if we become the permanent rulers over another people. This is a catastrophe for us. And then I have a right wing side that says, yeah, okay, so what are you gonna do about it? Who are you gonna make peace with? And so for many years my position was, well, we can’t occupy the Palestinians and we can’t make peace with the Palestinians. And so what do we do? That was my starting point. And where that led me, the operative policy was unilateral withdrawal. And what was so strange is that Ariel Sharon, who had been the stalwart of the settlement movement, really in some ways the master builder, he built the settlements. He built the settlements in Gaza. And then he dismantled it. Sharon giveth, Sharon taketh away.
Noam: He’s even in East Jerusalem he’s got he’s got his own
Yossi: He bought down his house. He bought yes, yes, yeah. Over one of the arches in the Muslim quarter. And so Sharon, in, nobody could have predicted this, was elected as Prime Minister in his elder years in 2002, and he comes in rather than the old Sharon, he comes in as a centrist. And he tells the Israeli public, yes, I built those settlements. But it didn’t work. We can’t, eight thousand Jews in Gaza can’t hold on to a million and a half Palestinians.
Noam: Yeah.
Yossi: And so and then but he also says something very subtly, which I think most people missed, which is that the reason I believe we need to unilaterally withdraw without seeking an agreement with the Palestinians is A because we can’t occupy them and B we can’t make peace with them.
I’m not going to sit and try to do with Arafat or Arafat’s successor what the Labor Party tried to do and failed in the nineteen nineties. There’s no peace to be made with the Palestinians. But we also can continue occupying them. So let’s unilaterally draw whatever border we determine is necessary for our defense. And in Gaza, Gaza’s so small there’s no room to draw a border except you go back to the international border. And so that’s why I supported unilateral withdrawal because I felt here finally is a centrist position. That’s not just a centrist sensibility.
Noam: retroactively if you go back twenty one years, would you still support unilateral withdrawal?
Yossi: Yeah, I would, but I would say we would have to do it in a different way. In two ways. First is you make sure that when you uproot Jews from their homes, you have decent alternatives for them. You don’t put them in trailer parks, you don’t let them sit for years on unemployment lines. Radicalized radicalized smoke.
Noam: Do you think that right?
Yossi: And we’re still paying the price for the way it was done. Smotrich is wrong when he says this was done undemocratically. There was a clear majority for this.
Noam: Was there a national referendum?
Yossi: No. And I think there should have been. That’s another way in which I would have done this differently. And the final way that I think should, so, three points. The final point is really
Noam: Maybe I was leading the, maybe that was a, my perspective right through and there.
Yossi: But I think I think that’s right. There should, when you when you when you impose on yourself a churban, a destruction, and there’s no more terrible word in Hebrew than destruction, and you cause the destruction on yourself, you can only do that when there’s a very clear national consensus.
Noam: Okay, so what’s the third?
Yossi: The third is that and here Sharon deeply disappointed me. I expected that with the first rocket that would fly over the international border, we would hit back hard. Even if it fell in a cow patch. Nothing happened. Nothing happened. Doesn’t matter. You violate that border, we’re going back in. Not to occupy, but we’re going we already hit strong. And we didn’t do it. And we allowed the other side to get used to a situation where it became normalized to fire rockets into Israeli neighborhoods. Because they were only at in those years they were primitive rockets and they didn’t do great damage. Those rockets were intended to terrorize, not necessarily to kill. And they terrorized the entire South. And we allowed that to happen. Sharon allowed that to happen. So that’s the, those are the mistakes I think.
Noam: You used a couple words. As someone who hosts Unpacking Israeli History, I teach the history of Israel. It’s what I do. And naturally, as you can imagine, people have different perspectives about words that I choose to use. So Yossi, one of the things that you have been famous for, at least in in my head, is you coined this phrase which is, It’s not the case that the Israelis are occupying the land, but they are occupying a people. What does that mean?
Yossi: A Jew is not a stranger in Judea. And the settlers are absolutely right. I am not a stranger in Hebron. If I’m a stranger in Hebron, I’m a stranger in Tel Aviv. And so I’m not occupying any part of the land between the river and the sea, but I am occupying another people that shares this land, however uneasily and unhappily with me. And first of all, for my own self-interest, I need to free myself from the untenable situation, untenable from the perspective of Jewish history, Jewish identity, who we always thought of ourselves as people, our place in the world, before we even get to the demographics and the the the question of the future of Israeli identities, Jewish and democratic, just from the perspective, spiritual perspective, I can’t I can’t celebrate my wholeness, the wholeness on the back of a broken people. I can’t do that. And if there’s any chance of reconciling with that people, even if it means giving up part of the land that belongs by right to me, then I need to do that. Between the river and the sea, you have two peoples, each of whom have the same slogan, from the river to the sea, as to quote the language of the Vishn of Kudashi. It’s all mine. And both peoples I most Israelis believe that
Noam: Who says that? Israelis said that you said that?
Yossi: Of course. I went I went to the Shuk Hacarmel in Tel Aviv and I said, Do you know any necklaces that show the state of Israel with like dotted lines in different places? The guy looks at me and goes, The hell’s wrong with you? Yeah, I mean you Are you kidding me? It’s like Aza and and the West Bank, Jr and Jada’s. I was I like, I was being a journalist, I was interested.
It’s the look if you look at the pre-67 map of Israel, it looks like somebody took a big bite out of it. Correct. And it’s or it was drawn by an arthritic hand. You know? And then you look at the post 67 map and wow, it’s like this diamond. Beautiful. It’s it’s liter you know, it’s like a diamond, it’s diamond shape. And it looks whole rather than ragged. And so of course it’s my land.
But this other people believes it’s their land. Now when I when I favor in principle, I’m not talking about the practicalities of a two-state solution because I don’t see that.
Noam: I’ll get to that in one minute. Let’s fall on to
Yossi: But the principle of it is that I am not, if there ever will be some form of a political arrangement between us and the Palestinians, I will not be giving back land. I’m giving up land. It’s a really important distinction. Giving back land means it’s not mine. I’m giving back stolen land. Giving up land means I’m giving up something that belongs to me.
In the same way that if Palestinians ever make that compromise, they will be giving up part of the land that they believe belongs to them. So that’s the distinction.
Noam: You used another word. This is the second word I want to talk about is Palestinian identity. I had a guy named Nas Daily in one of the order of Nusai on my podcast. And one of the things that he said
Yossi: Great guy. such a fan. Would you send them a fan note?
Noam: I will, I will. And and he was talking about Palestinian identity. Like he identifies as Palestinian and then I got so many comments on Instagram saying there’s no such thing as a Palestinian, there’s no such thing as a Palestinian. And and so so I wanna know your take. Is it should we be using the term Arab or Palestinian? Is there such a thing as a Palestinian?
Yossi: I believe in respecting a person’s right to self to self-identity. Let’s not talk about self-determination of a people. Not every people deserves a state. You have to prove that you can manage a state. From what I’ve seen of the Palestinian national movement over the last 30 years, they have blown every opportunity. So this notion that the Palestinian people deserve a state, you have to earn a state. We were not given a state. We created a state before the state was officially born. And when the UN recognized two states, it was recognizing a Jewish state that was already in existence. Israel was not created by the UN. It was it was recognized. That’s an enormous difference.
Now but but every people have the right to define themselves in whatever way they want. If there is now a Palestinian people, a hundred years ago there was not a Palestinian people. Peoples have different trajectories. Peoples are born through different processes. Yes, it’s true. The Palestinian people were born largely in conflict with another national identity. You know, there was an old bitter Israeli joke that Zionism is the most successful national liberation movement in history because it created two national movements, and it kind of did. And this there’s something so vulgar about saying there’s no such thing as a Palestinian identity. You want our identity to be recognized. And look what’s happened to us since October seventh. We are the target of a global movement to deny our right to define ourselves as a people.
What does Mamdani say? You’re a religion. Thank you very much, but I actually have a different understanding of who I am. You know, I think I’m a duck, but you know better. You know that I’m actually a goose. But no, I just feel I’m a duck. And it actually matters more who I think I am than who you think I am. And that’s what I say to the anti-Zionists, and that’s what I say to Jews on the right. Don’t erase another people’s right to their identity. No matter how angry, and I understand the anger at the Palestinian national movement. I’m exploding with anger since October 7th. But you are forbidden to do unto others what you don’t want unto yourself, and that means you must respect the right of another people to define itself as a people.
Noam: Last question. My last question, Yossi, is what message do you have for all young people right now who are exploring their Jewish identity, exploring Zionism as non-Jewish people who want to understand what this whole Jewish Zionist project is about? Is it something to test? Is it something to explore more? What do you, what’s your message?
Yossi: I’ll say two things. One is that my generation had it much easier because we grew up in the immediate aftermath of the Shoah, the Holocaust, when it was obvious that the Jews needed a home. We grew up with an Israel that was socialist, that said all the right things in the world that that and the Arab world was led by dictators and and and autocrats and kings. And so it was easy. It was easy to be a Zionist. Today it’s much more difficult, for all kinds of obvious reasons. But I think that young Jews need a historical perspective. We need to be able to step out of this moment and think, how will Jewish history look back at this time? We are still in the first steps of working out the fulfillment of the greatest Jewish dream, which seemed so far-fetched for 2,000 years that Jews believe that only the Messiah could actually gather the Jews back here. And so we are in the messy process. And sometimes it’s brutal. Sometimes it’s a really discouraging process. And I’m speaking as someone who has been in the active opposition to the Netanyahu government for a long time. And and sees this government as antithetical to my vision of of a Jewish and democratic state. But there needs to be some sense of historical consciousness, some sense of historical depth. And I think that this is the most thrilling moment since Mount Sinai to be a Jew. That’s a very big statement. But I really believe that because what we’re doing today is trying to figure out what four thousand years of Jewish history means.
And if God forbid this place, the State of Israel, fails in whatever way, for whatever reason, it will be a devastating, retroactive judgment on all of Jewish history. All of Jewish history was wrong. It was a mistake. It was based on so much of Jewish identity, of Judaism, of Jewish religion, of hope, was based on this return. And I’m not ready after eighty years of statehood to pronounce this a failure. And even if God forbid this government somehow gets reelected, I don’t believe it will. But even if that happens, I’ll just redouble my efforts to fight for the Israel that I believe in. And so the idea that Jews could walk away from this story, I understand if you don’t have a strong Jewish identity. Jews have always walked away from from Judaism and I have no argument with that. If that story doesn’t feel compelling enough to you, doesn’t feel worth it to you to carry, and carrying the story, as we know since October seventh, carries really serious consequences. You can walk away from that story. But if you still identify as a Jew, being Jewish is important to you. And here I’m thinking of the growing rise of of Jewish anti-Zionism, the return of left-wing Jewish anti-Zionism. How can you excise the heart of the Jewish experience for thousands of years, or for that matter, the practical center point of Jewish life today? How do you walk away from this story? And if you do walk away, you’re going to leave this story to who? To those who are going to distort it in a way that you feel is the opposite of what Judaism means to you. You’re, by default you’re handing the core of the Jewish story to that camp. And I can’t do that. This is my story as much as it is Ben Gvir’s and Smotrich’s. And I’m going to fight them.
Noam: Yossi, thank you so much for joining Unpacking Israeli History. You are a national treasure. You are a teacher of this generation. You’re a mentor to so many. I’m going to be thinking about and reflecting on your ideas for a long time. Thank you so much for joining.
Yossi: Thank you, Naam, and thanks for everything you did. Thank you.