Noam: Hey, I’m Noam Weissman and you’re listening to Unpacking Israeli History, the podcast that takes a deep dive into some of the most intense, historically fascinating and often misunderstood events and stories linked to Israeli history. This episode of Unpacking Israeli History is generously sponsored by Andrea and Larry Gill. If you’re interested in sponsoring an episode of Unpacking Israel History or even just saying what’s up be in touch at noam@unpacked.media. That’s noam@unpacked.media. Okay, cool.
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Today I have the honor of doing something a little bit different, but I do this every now and then. I’m speaking with a guest. Her name is Toba Hellerstein. Toba is a leading expert on public perception, antisemitism and emotionally attuned communication, something that is so desperately needed in the broader world and also in the Jewish, and Israel, and Israel-Palestine world. With a background in diplomacy, intelligence, and narrative strategy, she has advised global leaders, the Israeli government, and major philanthropic institutions. She is the author of American Perceptions of Jews and Israel, the first in-depth IRB qualitative study exploring how Americans form beliefs about Israel and Jews and what could be done to change hearts and minds.
So Toba, first of all, what’s up? How you doing?
Toba: Hey, good to be here.
Noam: Awesome to have you here. So there are a lot of reasons why I wanted to speak with you. But the most important is that, here’s what happened. There was an article that I read of yours that you wrote in the Sapir journal from a few months ago. It is entitled, Actually, Feelings Don’t Care About Your Facts. By the way, the title didn’t have a tone like I just said it, but like that’s how I read it. Like actually, actually, feelings don’t care about your facts.
I saw your article and I printed it out for the weekend to read at my leisure and as it was Shabbat and I don’t write on Shabbat, I found myself itching to take notes. Anyway, Saturday night comes and goes, typically some pizza, nachos, and TV with my wife, but anyway, I digress. The first thing Sunday morning, I get an email from you, Toba, and you tell me that many people reached out and said that you and I, we had to speak.
And so what happened is we spoke briefly. I don’t know if you remember the conversation, I remember the conversation. I then shared your article with a number of colleagues and they were like, Noam, this is what we talk about. I said, yes, yes, but Toba did research on this and gave beautiful language and captured it so briefly.
So now what I wanna do is I wanna have a real convo with you about everything that you wrote, yes, in that article, but your broader research and the topic of, actually, facts don’t care about your feelings. Cool?
Toba: Sounds good.
Noam: All right, let’s do this. Let’s do this. So People think, you know, people who listen to Unpacking Israeli History, they think I love Israeli history, which I get because, Unpacking Israeli History, but I’m actually more interested in your work than the history work. I tell that to my team all the time. Like, really like the, like the history matters, the facts matter, but it’s about a lot more than that.
So the first thing you said in your article, it really got to me. It was your first line. You said you don’t bring facts to a feelings fight. What do you mean by that?
Toba: Yeah, I mean, I think we’re having two different conversations. So, you know, the Jewish community and the people who we’re talking to, who we’re trying to persuade or have them understand our perspective, we’re having two entirely different conversations. So the name of the game is people’s emotional buy-in into the conflict. And here’s why. Almost everyone who you talk to, even those who claim to be activists, as we all know, know extremely little about the actual conflict, know extremely little about Israel and the history.
And so because their emotional buy-in didn’t come from facts or mastery of the history, it came from something else. And so when we try to talk to them about the facts as though that’s how they got interested or how they formed an opinion, we’re missing the whole point. So when I say you bring facts to a feelings fight is when we think about the war of perception and the propaganda war. None of this has to do with facts. It has to do with how do, let’s say for an American context, but this is relevant for other countries as well, of course, how do Americans come to orient to Israel, Israelis, Palestinians, Hamas, all the different players? What’s their emotional buy-in? What does it bring up for them in terms of things that they do know about, things that they are familiar with, and what are those sorts of circuits. And so when we have a conversation debating about fact, it’s totally inaccessible and it’s actually, ironically, it’s actually irrelevant at times.
Noam: So it’s irrelevant and I was wondering if it’s another word which is harmful.
Toba: I mean, I think what’s harmful is missing the emotional point. So it’s not that facts of themselves are harmful. It’s that focusing on the facts usually means that we’re missing the point. And when you’re missing the point, there’s harm, right?
Noam: I just think about this in the context of like a spousal conversation. Like if I’m having a fight with my wife, I never do, never.
Toba: Hypothetically, yeah.
Noam: But suppose I were to have a hypothetical, just engaging in hypotheticals here. And if we disagree about something, it’s a stupid example, bringing out the garbage, okay? Okay, the garbage comes to my house obscenely early in the morning, like obscenely early.
And I can make the argument that, did bring out the garbage, but it was too late. I don’t know if that’s a bad example. And you can fight about, know, did you take out the garbage in time? Did you not take out the garbage in time?
Toba: So this is a great example. So if you’re having this conversation with your wife, it’s not that you can’t make reference to the garbage being taken out and at the time, right? Those would be the facts. It’s not like you can’t make reference to that. It’s about, you know, for her, maybe it’s about feeling like she’s not being recognized for all the work that she is doing. Maybe it’s feeling like there’s an imbalance. Maybe it’s feeling like she reminds you and she feels like you don’t listen to her, right? So there’s a root issue here.
But for that example, it’s not like you can’t make reference to the garbage, it’s, that’s, sort of, it’s secondary or tertiary, right? The primary conversation is the emotional charge and where that came from.
And so the reason why I’m pushing back is just that I have conversations with people where they take this a little bit too literally and then they end up getting really frustrated down the line, saying, well, how can I have this conversation not using any facts? And so that’s why I try to clarify that. So if you say, look, I did take out the garbage, but you’re totally right. I did not do it at the right time. And you did remind me. And it’s like you’re still referencing it, but you’re making the topic of the conversation what it actually is, which is not about the garbage, if that makes sense.
Noam: Right. There was a YouTube video a while ago, a commercial called It’s Not About the Nail. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that one.
Toba: Uh uh.
Noam: Oh, it’s a good one. YouTube it right after this. It’s not about the nail where the boyfriend girlfriend, I don’t know, they get in a fight. She’s got a nail sticking out of her head and she’s arguing with the boyfriend and she’s saying, you know, she feels so uncomfortable and all of her sweaters are getting snagged. And he’s like, well, if you just take the nail out of your forehead and she’s like, you’re not listening, you’re just not listening.
It’s like a great 30 second clip about the the facts versus the feelings. And and I’ve been thinking about that clip a lot. It might be a little misogynistic at this point, but the the broader the bro.
Toba: I’ll let you know after I watch it, you know? I’ll talk to your wife about it.
Noam: Yeah, let me know. Let me know. By the way, need to say this, Raizie never gets upset at me for the garbage. OK. The point is that like there’s this line that the conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro always says, facts don’t care about your feelings. And I think that that is true, but it’s equally true that feelings don’t care about your facts very often. And so, and so–
Toba: Yeah, they’re totally two separate ideas. And by the way, I actually don’t totally buy into this paradigm anyway, but there is a way in which, you know, objective things happened, and it’s not because you felt a certain way that those objective things didn’t happen, but that’s a totally different context than the context of trying to convince people or engage with them. So that’s like, if you want to understand like a series of events, potentially feelings wouldn’t matter, although I would argue with that. But if you’re in a context of we’re trying to understand why people don’t understand us, then the entire thing is relational. Nothing there is factual. It’s all relational.
Noam: Right, right. OK, so you say specifically with regard to Israel, and if I’m misquoting you, you will clarify, but you basically make the argument that we should stop defending Israel through maps, legal claims or casualty casualty charts and instead tell the story and instead tell the story of a moral nation that wrestles with power, stumbles, chooses hard paths and keeps driving.
And this is the story Americans instinctively understand, you say, as the flawed but worthy hero. And you give examples of Batman. And I like the example of Batman because he battles villains as well as his inner demons, as opposed to someone like Superman, who someone just said to me, I can’t remember who they were, like, Superman’s so boring. He’s so disinteresting. And then like, obviously Iron Man, he’s simultaneously fighting the corrupt and his own alcoholism, right? So tell me more about this concept of the flawed hero that you think when people are talking about Israel, they should talk about Israel as a flawed hero. What does that mean?
Toba: Yeah, well actually I want to back up to the earlier point you made about, you know, talking about Israel in terms of, you know, facts and dates and figures versus the story. You know, unless you know about the region, you’ve studied it, most Americans know almost nothing about it. And so the idea of this is a human story, this is a universal story that anyone can relate to in their personal lives, in their societies, figuring out ways to describe things that are emotionally resonant because they’re familiar and accessible.
And then when we talk about the flawed hero aspect, so the idea here is we focus a lot on the “what.” We focus on, we did this thing and we’re going to defend why we did this thing, but it’s about the thing, right?
And that has a lot of issues in general because people don’t emotionally resonate with an achievement or with an action. They connect with a person, a culture, way of values, a way of feeling and thinking. But in a war context, it’s infinitely worse because there’s no way to conduct a good war. It’s just not possible.
And so especially in a context like today, we have to focus on the why and the who. The why is actually also in service of the who. Who are we? So when we say why, it’s all about the connection between what we’re doing and who we are. And what’s really important about this is that when people trust who we are, they will give us grace on what we do.
And by the way when I say hero, we’re not talking about people who are perfect and this is partially because it doesn’t pass the sniff test because no one knows any perfect people. And people hate government, so they definitely don’t know any perfect government. And so embracing that there is a noble heroic set of values that we’re defending and we might get that wrong and we probably do get that wrong.
But the difference here is let’s say there’s debate over whether we got the thing wrong. If there’s debate, we’re basically saying, okay, yes, tie our values to our action and we’re dying on the wrong hill there. So with the flawed hero, it allows for the imperfection, which by the way, no one actually believes the opposite. So it’s owning something that feels emotionally true, because I think we have a tendency of being overly polished and overly scripted. But it also, it differentiates between the who and the what. we, the who we are and our values, this is the heroic piece. And the flawed is like, we’re not gonna always execute that correctly.
And so what that means is, it gives us a lot of spaciousness to, even if you don’t, even if you agree with everything that’s happening of the way that the war is being conducted, it’s, every war is just messy. It’s just inherently messy. And so we don’t want to be tied to messy outcomes where there’s destruction. We care about loyalty. We care about survival and resilience. We want to protect our families. And everyone will relate to that. And it’s sort of like, yeah, it’s really hard to actually act upon that. And no one can get that right. And people can kind of be on board for that journey.
Just want to add one more thing. I think we shoot ourselves in the foot and we do a lot more damage when all of the talking points and Israel defenses sound like we are representatives of the government because it’s really two dimensional.
Noam: When we say doesn’t work, Like I’ll give you an example. Someone wrote this to me. There’s a debate going on right now, but it’s something that will be relevant a year from now, two years from now, three years from now, whenever this is being listened to. They send me the list based on Hamas’s July 15th list, key studies, Hamas Ministry of Health and IDF data. We know that 29,000 civilians versus 23,000 terrorists were killed. That’s roughly a ratio of 1.3 to one. That’s a highly targeted war on Hamas.
So what that means is 52,000 died directly from hostilities, both civilians and terrorists, plus around seven to 8,000 natural deaths, AKA fell off the stairs, etc. 29,000 civilians among 2 million population in a very densely populated area is very low. By very, I mean very. It includes eliminations of key terrorists and almost all Hamas’s leadership in Gaza, as well as tens of thousands of terror targets struck. meaning that sort of argument, let’s say, if someone wants to make an argument and they’re getting in a fight with their friend or with their professor or, you know, you’re saying like, stop it. That’s not helpful.
Toba: I’m definitely saying that. The problem with what you just read is that it’s very, very sterile. And when you have a sterile tone or your content is sterile around people dying, you come across as cruel.
I was talking to some people recently who were explaining how they were trying to, some of the talking points that they were using on campuses was around explaining why there was no starvation or they were trying to explain this. And I’m like, the natural reaction people are going to have is, at best, the best reaction someone could have is, okay, so they’re dying for other reasons? So I think where we want to start with the person that you’re talking to, if they’re saying Israel’s committing a genocide, I think we have to start with what orienting to what is their frame of mind. So I do a lot of this of like, are they someone who’s really compassionate and they’re watching a lot of footage and they’re feeling really sad? Are they angry because they’re looking at, they look through the world as this binary oppressor oppressed and they’re thinking about things closer to home around maybe ICE and police brutality, and they’re projecting it on Israel? Like what’s their sort of frame of mind?
But I’ll say something that would be, most people, I think this is, most people will have some piece of the compassion, the burn it down crowd, which is the people I talk about who hate institutions and feel a lot of contempt and anger and sort of justify all sorts of violence to accomplish that. like the Luigi Mangione kind of situation, this is kind of rinse and repeat. They are the exception to this, but most people will have some sense of compassion driving this. So I do think for whomever you’re speaking to, it would be really important to start off with saying, you know, one person dying is too many. And we’re trying to figure out how to make sure that a terrorist group that terrorizes our people and their own people don’t keep on doing that. And they’re doing everything in their power to increase destruction. And we don’t know how to balance that. And we’re doing the best that we can.
It’s actually a really simple, simple thing, that what it does is it de-weaponizes. Because when you say we’re doing everything right, this was statistically, this is the right ratio, and we’re the amount of civilians as it relates to all these other conflicts, when we’re litigating, we’re in a debate mode. And so people are going to find ways to disagree because they’re feeling that something is not right. And then they’re gonna be engaging from that stance, but we’re never getting to the crux.
So if you start with the crux, which is, it’s horrendous to watch so many people die and it makes us sick. Start there. And by the way, there’s no blame assigned there, right?
Noam: But I think that’s where it gets sticky. That’s my question. Can you also add to the sentence, it’s horrible what’s taking place here. I wish it weren’t taking place here. There are Israeli soldiers that are acting in a not okay way. And that is horrible also, as is true in any war, that soldiers don’t behave well. And sometimes orders that are delivered are not orders that we would be proud of or that I am personally proud of, especially when you look through history. Can you say that also?
Toba: Of course, this is the thing is that we have this black and white way of thinking of, we have to defend everything or be really squeaky clean in order to have the right to defend ourselves. And like this is, so if we’re arguing, which I think this is the argument around anti-Zionism versus people’s political views of Israel, the differentiation there is existential, right? So you can disagree about government and policy, but like if the country has the right to exist, if it has the right to defend itself, we can quibble about the other things, right?
But I think for this though, in what you said, and this is really important, what you just laid out was all the right things to say. But what I usually hear, and maybe this was just because you were, you were saying it here, but what I usually hear is people taking a very similar tone as you did of like, okay, I’m going to do the preamble and then I’m going to tell you what I really think.
And the thing that makes this work so challenging is that, most people know very little about the conflict, but humans are really good at sensing authenticity and tone and emotional presence. And what’s really, really painful for us is that the way to validate what we need to validate to shift the conversation, we need to be with the discomfort of what the war is bringing.
And so I think that the emotional tone of that really, really matters because once again, if we’re just validating technically those things, we’re almost, we’re like, half back in the facts conversation at that point.
Noam: Right. Right. And I get why it’s like, listen, I do a history podcast and I care a lot about history. Like a lot, a lot. I’m super pro fact. I’m super pro research, pro knowledge, but I’m also very pro stories, feeling empathy and understanding.
And what I want to do with you, Toba, is I want to go through just a few moments in Israeli history. Like the dark moments in Israeli history. And I want to go through kind of how the standard pro-Israel world would talk about it, then I wanna, again, these are historical moments that I did not prep you with. So I wanna get your take on it and you have to be on your feet right now, Toba. and tell me how you would talk about this moment. Okay, ready? Here we go.
1982, Sabra and Shatila. Here’s the story. If anyone wants to know the whole story, well, there’s an Unpacking Israeli History episode on it, so check it out in the show notes, Sabra and Shatila. So here’s what happened in a paragraph.
During Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to eject the Palestine Liberation Organization from Beirut, the IDF allowed Christian phalangist militiamen to enter the Sabra neighborhood and adjacent Shatila refugee camp, which is an area the Israeli army had encircled. Over three nights, these phalangists slaughtered a few thousand Palestinian and Lebanese civilians while Israeli soldiers did not intervene. And it’s not 100% clear whether they knew what was happening. There was a commission later on by Israel called the Kahan Commission that deemed Israel indirectly responsible for the massacre of these people, forcing Defense Minister Ariel Sharon to resign and 400,000 Israelis demonstrated in Tel Aviv demanding accountability, at the time the largest protest in the nation’s history.
So the standard pro-Israel, Hasbara response to the story of Sabra and Shatila in which a few thousand were massacred, yes by Phalangists, but encircled by Israel was this. It’s something that I heard for years until we did content on it. And this is it. This wasn’t our fault, meaning Israel’s fault or the Jewish people’s fault. If you’re outside of Israel, the reality is we are associated with Israel all the time. So this wasn’t our fault or Israel’s fault. It was the phalangists who did the killing. The IDF didn’t know what was going on. And plus Israel launched the Lebanon war to stop terrorism, meaning from the PLO, from across the border. And that is the standard response.
What is the Toba Hellerstein response in which you have either the flawed hero frame or maybe something that’s the emotional reframe? What is that?
Toba: You know, it’s interesting, something I, because I’m doing another round of research and something I’m seeing a lot from Jews who become very anti-Zionist, anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian is that they felt like they were lied to when they were learning about Israel and the conflict growing up. I mean, look, this is, this is not, I think my responses are going to probably be pretty boring because they’re pretty consistent, which is this, the idea of creating a squeaky clean story, right? Of like, there was zero responsibility whatsoever. It sounds like propaganda. And by the way, that doesn’t mean you have to say we’re horrible and we allowed a lot of people to die because we’re cruel, right? There’s this tendency of like, there are these two extremes. Now I would need more, I would need a little bit more context.
But to me, what this really looks like is, Israel was defending itself in Lebanon. And while we were there, there are all of these internal dynamics between different groups in Lebanon that made things extremely complicated. And there was a time where one of those groups had similar interests that we did.
And I don’t know if this is true. I’d have to have a little bit more information, I have to see what the Kahan commission actually said, but it could be possible that individual soldiers turned the other way because they weren’t entirely sure what the dynamics were. But really what we’re talking about is like a military is allowed to not do things perfectly.
Like that’s kind of the least common denominator here, right?
And what I imagine, I don’t know if this is true, but I imagine is the hasbara, and I think there’s two ways to do hasbara. One is we are trying to advance the position of the Israeli government. Like this is the history that the Israeli government has acknowledged, that we want to make sure that there is literacy on so that people are mirroring back the way that we tell our history, we want them to see history that way. That’s one way.
Another way is making sure that people think Israel has the right to exist. Those are two very different agendas. And you would treat this extremely differently depending. So like for me, I am not a proponent of Jewish diaspora education and activism being a mirror to whatever the Israeli government would like to advance. I don’t agree with that because being Zionist is not about supporting whatever government is in power or wherever government had created the historical archives and had sort of collected things in certain ways. It’s existential. It’s that we’re proud that Israel exists. We think that we have the right to defend ourselves, right? It’s like, it’s very, very simple.
So to me, this sort of explanation that you gave sounds like the sounds like trying to make sure that people adopt the version of history that we’ve adopted. But the thing is, if we take the more strategic, more pragmatic, and doesn’t have this downside of seeming like propaganda.
And by the way, you don’t need to be armed with a ton of facts for normal people to be doing this is if someone comes to you and says, well, I heard about this massacre and that massacre. You don’t need to have all the specifics to say, I don’t know exactly what happened, but like, yeah, I’m sure the Israeli government has messed up at times. Hasn’t every government done that?
Noam: Right. I’m going to be self-congratulatory for a second. That’s kind of what we do in this podcast or try to do or try to do is I feel like it could be liberating for people because otherwise you force people into saying if it’s not a genocide then it’s going to be a massacre. If it’s not a massacre it’s going to be, I don’t know, a famine. It’s going to be mistreatment of minorities. It’s going to be, pick an issue that any single country has.
And if you have the standard Hasbara approach, the standard response, it’s amazing that almost every single one of these will always be, well, it’s not really true. Well, it’s not really true. And what you’re suggesting is a liberation from that. It’s actually, no, no, no, these things are true. And the problem, maybe they are true.
Toba: Right. Or maybe they are, or maybe you don’t know.
Noam: Right, maybe they are true, maybe they are true, maybe they aren’t true, but aspects could be true and you could still have a strong relationship with Israel even with moral failures.
Toba: This is the crux, and this is a bit of a, you know, I talk a lot in my work about the collective Jewish trauma response. This is a bit of a product of it, right? Of like, we have to make sure that everything is polished and sanitized so that people don’t have the weaponry with which to claim that we’re illegitimate. And there’s a lot of truth to this, right?
Noam: Yeah, it happens. Isn’t it all the time? Like, isn’t it still all the time? Anyone that goes on Piers Morgan? I don’t know. they’re like having these what I consider these inane conversations about like they’re like “fact”ing at each other and also just yelling. And it’s just like there’s this there’s this the defenders of Israel, I often feel are as bad as anybody else.
Toba: Yeah, I think what happens is this idea of anything that we’ve ever done that could be considered wrong, we have to defend it because otherwise that will be used to justify horrible things that were done to us or our lack of right to exist. And here’s the thing, the people who are going to be using any fact possible to say we shouldn’t exist, we can’t convince them anyway.
And by the way, they’re actually a small percentage of the population. Most Americans are adopting opinions because of the ways that they’re associating tone or the images that they’re seeing and they’re kind of putting things together. This is not about trying to find the people who are hell, hell bent on extinguishing Israel and finding every fact to be able to arm themselves to that. That’s not our goal. Our goal is most Americans because that was the turning point in the last 20-so years and of course since October 7th as well, is most Americans. And for them, they have a lot of understanding that governments are imperfect and make mistakes. That’s really intuitive to them.
If you think about America today, it’s so polarized that at any given moment, 50% of the population hates their government and thinks their government doesn’t represent them. So that’s good news for us, because what it means is Americans are really good at differentiating between a government and a people. So what this means is like, if Americans say, you know what, I think that the way that we’ve handled different international wars as America was wrong, how many people would actually say, that means that 9/11 was justified? They really should have attacked us. Almost no one makes that jump. And that’s because people appreciate that there’s a difference between people and government. They don’t think that people should be responsible for that.
And they also don’t think that because there was a lot of controversy and violence around the founding of America that we now don’t have the right to have a country. No one makes that jump either.
Noam: Right. Or a few people, we should say. It’s such a fringe. Right. Yeah. Right. Right.
Toba: It’s such a radical, radical, it’s such a fringe view, right? And so I think that’s the sort of analogous framework we want.
Noam: But Toba, is it a fringe view to say that Israel shouldn’t exist?
Toba: No, it’s not. That is not a fringe view. No.
Noam: It’s not. So that is very, that feels very existential to the Jewish state of Israel.
Toba: Yes, 100%, but here’s actually where we’re talking about the facts versus feelings. So when you went through examples of different massacres and things that happened and whether or not we were responsible for that. So that’s going through the facts of like, I’m gonna weigh out the good things that Israel did for the world and the bad things, and I’m gonna make a determination of whether or not Israel should exist based on this. So I’m gonna look at all of Israel’s medical achievements and Tikkun Olam, and I’m gonna look at all the terrible things Israel’s done, and we’re gonna weigh this out. And basically the way that we argue is like, these things didn’t really happen, or even if they did, they’re outweighed by all these good things that we’ve done in the world. That is all fact. That’s all litigation. The people who say Israel does not have the right to exist, it’s not because they have an inventory of everything that Israel’s done good and bad. They know almost nothing about it.
Their emotional buy-in comes to, and I talk about this a lot, is archetypes. So the way that they conceive of Israel is a symbol of something that they’re already disgusted by or angry at. And what the other side has done a great job of is because they are trafficking in emotions, they’ve been able to create this emotional buy-in where Israel is a symbol of something that people already hate, which means that they’re bypassing facts and the litigation entirely.
So I’ll talk a little bit about archetypes. So archetypes is this Jungian idea throughout society.
Noam: Who’s, what’s Jungian? What does Jungian mean?
Toba: Carl Jung, it’s a very famous psychologist who talks about different ways that the psyche works. So this idea of throughout history and time and culture, you have these recurring characters, know, in Greek mythology and the Bible and, Star Wars, you know, you have like the hero, the victim, the king, the Joker, right? You have these personas that you don’t need to know anything about a situation, but if something is painted as that persona, you can understand it. You can attach to it.
So archetypes when it comes to this conflict are so important because it’s infinitely complicated. And so they’re relying on how are they emotionally orienting?
So if you think about the archetypes of Israel and let’s say the Palestinians, the Israel archetype is, the king, the ruler. So what that means is it’s one archetype for both the people and the government. And this worked really, really well if you’re lobbying Congress and you want them to entrust you with weapons systems, you’re like the king has authority and you can trust him. There’s no chaos, there’s a lot of stability. It’s great if you’re lobbying for weapons systems. It’s great if you’re trying to get the business community to feel like their investment will be safe, if they put it in Israeli startups, but it’s not a gen pop strategy. Okay. And the other huge problem of the king is that you do one thing wrong and you fall from grace and you’re a tyrant. But the problem with it is that any, any story that comes out that’s negative immediately makes it a counterproductive archetype.
On the other side, the Palestinians, they have two archetypes.
Noam: Before you get to Palestinians, let me understand the Israel one. So the Israel one is if they are the king, if Israel is the king, where on the one hand, there’s great deals taking place. On the other hand, it’s not necessarily something that everyone relates to the king or wants to relate to the king or has a relationship with the king. Is that right or no?
Toba: I think in theory, if you think about this in like a Greek story or something, you could in theory have this benevolent king that everyone loves and respects, but it’s not practical because in practice, in real life, governments do things wrong. So it’s–
Noam: Or governments do things that you strongly disagree with.
Toba: So it’s actually, it’s great, you can have a king as an archetype in a story, but you don’t want that in real life because with social media and news, there’s no way to control the narrative, and the problem is any negative story will instantly change what could have been a positive archetype to probably the most Machiavellian one.
Right? A tyrant who is just seeking its own power and control and will do whatever it takes to maintain that. And that’s exactly how Israel’s painted now. Right? And if you think about traditional hasbara, we’re basically arguing, no, it’s a benevolent king. You should love him. He’s doing everything he can to protect everyone. You know, we didn’t do anything wrong. That’s what we’re arguing. So we’re reinforcing that archetype. On the other side.
Noam: Okay. The Palestinians, yeah.
Toba: They have two archetypes. One is the people, so this is like the child or the victim, so it’s total innocence. And the other archetype is Hamas, which is the anti-hero. What’s really amazing about a dual archetype, so first, it differentiates between people and government, which means that the people, the victim, has no moral responsibility for what the anti-hero did. Okay? So it’s differentiating, which is really great.
And then the other really clever thing about this is the antihero is so poignant in American society today because it’s all an antihero is all about the elites are so corrupt and terrible that the only way to protect the people and fight against these horrible evil people is to be just as ugly or uglier than they are. So what’s great about an anti-hero is you’re totally inoculated from responsibility of doing heinous things because it was part of, it’s like anything horrible that you do, it’s just proof of how horrible the entity is that you’re fighting against.
Noam: So in a non-Israeli history context, it’s the way some people, and I find this heinous, are celebrating the death, the murder of Wesley LePatner, right? That kind of thing.
Toba: Yes, exactly. This is like, this is like Luigi Mangione, the United CEO on the left. This is Trump on the right. This is not political. This is all throughout American society and politics is the antihero. And you see this in every political ideology you have this.
And by the way, you’re a Trump supporter, you would agree with this as well, is that you would say, well, I know that I don’t like the way he acts, but like he has to, like look what he’s taking on. So this is not a political statement. This is really observational, is that if you agree with whatever the actor is, if you agree with Luigi Mangione, you’d be like, well, I don’t like killing, but like what else was he supposed to do, right?
Noam: Okay, got it. So that’s Israel and Palestinians.
Toba: The reason why I brought this up is to say that what, as you can tell as we talk through the archetypes, this is people’s attachment to, let’s say, Israel as a tyrant, Israel as an oppressor. It’s not because they know a lot about Israel, it’s because they’re really energized and angry about institutions and groups that they view as oppressive, let’s say, in America, and then Israel becomes a symbol for that.
Noam: So let me give you an example, another example that’s gonna weigh in here.So another story that’s told is the Declaration of Independence 1948. Israel’s 970-word Declaration of Independence read by David Ben-Gurion on May 14th, 1948, roots Jewish sovereignty in the natural and historic right of the Jewish people while vowing that the state will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race, or sex, safeguard freedom of religion, conscience, language, education, and culture, and extend an outstretched hand of peace to both Arab citizens and neighboring states. So that is the, if I’m telling the story of the Declaration of Independence, that’s a basic, you know, simple paragraph about it.
And the standard hasbara is to say, see from day one, Israel promised equal rights to all and compare that to the Hamas charter, compare that to the PNC Charter, from 1964, and see how they spoke. It’s amazing how awful and evil they are, and look at how beautiful the Declaration of Independence is. Look how benevolent this state is. Look at this king, to use your metaphor. There’s a promised equal rights to all. Israel is a liberal democracy just like the West, just like the US. So I think you and I would both now argue, and certainly from your research, that does not work to talk like that, correct?
Toba: Yes. Well, what I would say, I mean, we’re talking about the two different goals of hasbara. I’m, you know, all of my work is about what I think the goal should be, which is about people believing that Israel has the right to exist and is a normal country. So if you are trying to advance the agenda of the Israeli government, then you actually have a different goal. You want people to think that your, you are acting perfectly from your legal and constitutional, know, foundational documents, right? So this is the difference between like, you know, in America, if someone says, you know, well, Israel is not living up to this. It’s like, yeah, we haven’t really found a country yet who lives up to their founding documents.
Noam: Right, that, yes, the promise was made, but Israel has not always lived up to it, and that’s true.
Toba: There’s an analogy that I like, and this is very Jewish philosophical, is like the climbing of the ladder. This idea of throughout life, you don’t have to get to the top of the ladder, but you should be looking upward to try to be going up. So to me, if we’re talking about this example, what’s really important about this and that comparison is no one’s gonna be perfect. No one’s going to be actually able to enact all of the ideals in their founding documents, but it does tell you where they’re trying to get to. And that directionality matters.
Noam: Uh-huh, it says something about the aspirations.
Toba: Exactly, and the aspirations, we’re not going to achieve them, we’re gonna fall short of them, but it matters what your compass is, what direction are you trying to walk towards.
Noam: Got it, got it. Okay, have one more question for you because you wrote about, you’ve also written about how people talk about Zionism. you speak about how people, how the community has, how the world speaks about Zionism. So you have a reframe for that? What is your historical or your philosophical or your definitional reframe of Zionism?
Toba: Of Zionism. Well, first I’ll say I’m not a huge fan of using that word in outreach and people I know are very precious about words, but you all words were just created in order to help people understand a particular concept. You know, we’re really married to the word antisemitism, but since this is historical podcast, as you know, that was invented by proud German antisemites and now we really need that word. Zionism was just a word to help us understand how to get back home, right?
So I would say our attachment to the word is another echo chamber problem, but to answer your broader question of how I’m defining it. So what I found is that it just in the same way that in an American context, if I say, I am pro-life, that doesn’t just mean that I believe in life. It means something. It means that I’m against abortion. And this is important because it’s the semantics matter. The words that we use are not just how we want to use them. It’s how people are hearing them.
So I can’t say, you know, I believe in law and order without people thinking that I have a particular view around the police. I can’t say that I believe that I’m pro-life without people having thinking that I have a particular view about abortion. so the using the word Zionism, we have to understand how that’s being heard, and what’s very, very clear is that there are large swaths of Americans who are very happy to accept that the Jews get a homeland and a country and they still hate Zionism. Because guess what? That word has been identified as something totally different. And what we do is we try to save the word, but the whole point is to save the country. It’s not to save the word. We can have any other word. It doesn’t matter. It’s just language.
But in terms of your question of how to define these things, to me there’s a really clear line between what is a political distinction and what’s an existential distinction. So to me, us as Jews and as Zionists, what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to explain and show and make people feel that Israel is a country full of people who are humans, who have the right to not just defend themselves but to like, live and love and be imperfect and aspire and mess up, right? Like we have the right to exist imperfectly the way that any other country has the right to exist.
And I think that oftentimes, so what I see often is people in our community saying, well, these people are saying that they’re having political statements against Israel, but they’re actually anti-Zionist statements. And that’s often true, but on the inverse, I also see people on our side saying, well, you’re being anti-Zionist when sometimes it’s not. And that really, really matters because, and I would say the conflation for the former is more than the conflation for the latter in all fairness. I think that we do this far less than that they’re doing it.
Noam: Mm-hmm. And when you say we, I know you keep on saying we, but in my head, what we is the people who believe it’s also right to exist? Is that who the we is? Who’s the we here?
Toba: Yeah, mean, depending on what I said, it’s either we Jews, we Zionists, we people who believe Israel’s right to exist. Yeah. Yeah.
Noam: Right. Right. It’s a broad, I’m just saying for like for me, for me personally, but anyone listening, it’s a broad category of millions of millions of people.
Toba: The problem is in American discourse, what the language is is around having people be pro-Israel. It’s like you’re either anti-Israel or pro-Israel. And that’s a really dangerous binary because think about any country in the world. Exactly, am I pro-Napal? And so if I’m being told, if I’m…
Noam: Are you pro Spain? you pro Spain? All right. You’re big, big Nepal gal, big Nepal gal.
Toba: Totally, yeah. But what we’re doing is when we were creating this like black and white binary where we’re like, if you’re not with us, you’re against us. But guess what? If most Americans say, I don’t know what’s going on over there, I don’t have a strong opinion, we win because we know how to work strategically with leaders in business and government.
Our problem is a gen pop problem because most Americans are now being mobilized against Israel. Actually,
Noam: Not just Americans, Brits, Canadians, Australians. Right, yeah.
Toba: Totally, totally. I’m talking about American context here, but no, 100%. So, but that’s a gen pop problem. So if most people in these different countries said, it’s complicated over there, I don’t really know what’s going on, I don’t have an opinion, we’re doing great. The problem is, and this goes to the piece in Sapir about feelings, is that we, we as Zionists who are trying to defend Israel’s right to exist, okay, let’s say, we want our outreach to feel cathartic for us. So we want people to say, man, you’re right. Israel is wonderful and great and you’ve been up against so much. Like, wow, like these other people are horrible and you’re wonderful because that feels like we’re being seen and we’re being known and we’re being valid. That feels so cathartic. And the sneaky, sneaky, uncomfortable thing is that if most Americans just said, I don’t really know what’s going on. I don’t hate Israel. I don’t know much about it. That’s actually a win for us.
Noam: For me, for the Jewish world, I still want every single Jewish person in the world to know the history and story of Israel Zionism, Jewish history. Like I’m a crazy, I’m maniacal, obsessive that I cannot stand and it makes me sad when so many Jewish people graduate high school or go to university and go to the professional world and don’t know the story of Israel. I think it’s a remarkable story. I think it’s got ups and downs, but it’s the story of the Jewish people. So as a member of the Jewish people, I think it’s important to know the story.
Toba: For us. For us.
Noam: Yes. And then my bid is within the Israeli-Palestinian conflict though, I also am equally militant about the fact that people who do have a seat at the table and are in the streets protesting that they have a responsibility to learn the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on both sides of the political aisle. If you’re going to be entering the streets, I want people to learn the history, the different perspectives, the facts.
Toba: Well, would argue there’s two different categories here. So like I live in Texas. I didn’t grow up here. But in Texas, every student has to take a bunch of Texas history classes. You know, this is normal for Americans in general. You have to take American history classes. This is a very normal expectation to say that you’re from this group. You should know about the group that you’re from and the history. So that’s internal, right? That makes total sense. Every country and group in the world wants that, right? That’s really, really normal. I would draw a distinction to me between that and when you said, I want everyone engaged in the debate or in activism to really know every, to have a really good mastery or maybe I’m exaggerating, a reasonable mastery.
Noam: I think it’s, if I’m going to be passionate about pro-life, pro-choice, and I’m going to go into the streets and start advocating, I think it’d be reasonable. I’m not taking away from your thesis of the communications at all, at all, at all. I’m saying from the perspective of the person, of the consumer, not from the perspective of the communicator to that person, but from the perspective of the consumer of, of it, I think it is responsible to learn the history. And I would even say it’s responsible to learn the different sides of the issue.
Toba: Totally. No, of course I agree with that, but what we’re talking about is a normative statement, right? We’re like, they should, it would be good, it would be moral, it would advance society, it would advance them, it would be growth. So that’s a normative statement, and I totally agree with that. I think the world that I live in is like the positive world of strategy and what will people do?
Noam: What will people do? Exactly, exactly. Yeah.
Toba: What works, but I totally agree with you and I think that of course the world would be a better place if people had actually understood the content of their opinions. I mean, there’s no question about that.
Noam: That would be great. Listen, that’s what I’m trying to do in this podcast. That’s what we’re trying to do. also so important, was marking down the notes about the, because the content is often less important when you’re trying to communicate and persuade than the context and the stories around it, than the tone, than the framing, than understanding the person who you’re speaking to, the person you’re speaking to, the person that if you know who you’re speaking to, that matters more probably than the content itself that you’re sharing.
Toba: Yeah, and think about history though. History, this happens all the time that we have a certain understanding of history and then a new historian comes out and there’s more archival support or some memoir and we realize, wow, like there was this whole other thing that happened and we have to adapt the way that we view history. But think about this in an Israel context. Think about this from a Jewish student, young person context or Jews in general. If we’re focusing only on the history and not on the teaching of like who we are and how that played out in history. What that means is, say you gave the example of the 1982 with the phalangists. Let’s say we taught students about that, about exactly what happened. What happens if there was a memoir that came out, and it could go either way. It says something a little bit different. Maybe it’s better, maybe it’s worse, whatever it is. If the person who is learning, if the Jewish person who knows the story, if they have this story in their mind of who we are and like, this balance of like we don’t do everything perfectly but we’re trying to do our best, no piece of additional information will undermine their framework.
Noam: Right. They’ll hold on to it.
Toba: And this is what I see for especially Gen Z Jews. And this is what I see for Gen Z Jews who end up being anti-Zion. let’s say they’re fundamentally don’t believe Israel should exist the reason the the primary reason I hear from people is that they were taught something about Israel and they realized that there was it was so much more complicated they went there and they met people or they were in college and they met Arabs or Palestinians are like wow like, no one ever told me about that. And guess what reaction you have when you feel lied to. You get angry and you get rebellious.
Noam: No one told me about Nakba, no one told me about Deir Yassin, no one told me about Sabra and Shatila, no one told me about these moments.
Toba: Exactly. And that resentment gets directed towards Israel and Jews.
Noam: Yeah, resentful, resentful. And you become, and you become not trusting. You say the authority that’s been sharing these stories with me has been lying. What else are they lying about? What else are they omitting?
Toba: 100%. 100%. 100%. And by the way, and this is relevant for non-Jews as well, when we talk about like, including nuance and complexity is that Americans are bombarded with propaganda and are extremely cynical about these simplistic frameworks of like, we did great. So trust is core to all of this.
And even when we talk about who we are and our values, that actually comes down to trust too. It’s like, if I hear something happened and I don’t know the details, do I default to thinking that it was an accident or that they did it on purpose? This is how you go from like, a lot of people died and it was horrible to genocide potentially, right? Cause it’s like, was this intentionally designed?
And so the idea of like, do I trust you? Do I think that you have reasonable values? And then Jews who I talk to, whether they’re friends or Jewish organizations doing Hasbara, do you seem trustworthy?
Noam: You smell it, you smell it.
Toba: You can smell it from a mile away. The thing that’s such a shame is when I work with organizations that are on the front lines and I talk to the people who are, who are doing that work, they’re such reasonable, brilliant people, but they’ve sort of been trained that they have to carry that burden on their shoulders of this really simplistic, and like that’s, I can see the sigh of relief when they feel like they have permission just to like show up and share the values and share their positions honestly.
Noam: All right. Well, hopefully we could do a heck of a lot more of that. I want to thank Toba. I want to thank you so much for joining me. It was so awesome to have this conversation with you ever since I read that article in the Sapir journal. Actually, Feelings Don’t Care About Your Facts. I’ve been thinking a lot, a lot about this, and I’ve been looking forward to this conversation. And I just want to thank you so much for joining Unpacking Israeli History. So thank you, Toba.
Toba: Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Noam: So that was my conversation with Toba Hellestein, and we’re doing something a little different now. So, friends, here are your five fast feelings (see what I did there?) – and as always, stay tuned for the enduring lesson as I see it.
#1: I was really struck by Toba’s idea to always keep in mind who you’re talking to. Is the person sad? Angry? Why are they feeling that way? It could be communicating with a loved one, friend, parent, child, etc. No matter what – start with the person. Know who you are talking to FIRST and THEN share your content and feelings.
And, I should add…remember your own feelings. Am I angry? Am I sad? Defensive? Is my heart racing? Am I calm?
#2: Sometimes, it’s not about the nail. Meaning, it’s not about the facts on the ground very often.
#3: I’ll admit it, because these are my five feelings. The reframe of Zionism, it stung a little. I personally think we need to reclaim the term Zionism, because it’s been co-opted by people who don’t seem to know what the term Zionism is, that bothers me. I think people should be proud to be Zionists, because it’s a good thing. But also, Toba is right too. Getting hung up on the word Zionism distracts from the ideas, from the real messages. And if you’re talking to someone and the term Zionism means something different to them than it does to you, and that distracts from the fundamental conversation, well, that’s counterproductive.
In her article in Sapir, she said: “Instead of antisemitism, talk about exclusion, fear, and erasure. Instead of Zionism, talk about belonging, safety, and freedom. Israel activism’s fixation on vocabulary is the dry result of its lack of emotional attunement. This becomes even more problematic in times of war when people’s screens are flooded with images of tanks, airstrikes, and hungry families.” Wise, wise points.
#4: Stop. Litigating. And this is something that I say to myself all the time, don’t fight indoctrination or litigation with indoctrination or litigation. Fight with education. And that’s essentially what she’s saying.
#5: Israelis are humans, people, real people. Israel is a country of people that should be allowed to mess up and make mistakes. They have a right to exist like anyone else.
And maybe a bonus, because this one keeps sticking in my craw, #6: Toba’s archetypes are awesome. Thinking about the dangers of the King archetype, and the victim versus the antihero, and how we can reimagine the flawed hero. This blows my mind, and I hope it impacted you in the same sort of way. It kind of reframed so much of the story for me.
So those are your fast facts…or feelings… but here’s one enduring lesson as I see it.
I’m a sensitive person. I try not to be. I think of myself as collected, as chill, I don’t get ruffled, I don’t yell. That’s just not me.
But Israel, slash the story of the Jewish people…it’s just so important to me. It’s part of my identity. Israel comes only after my family, God, and let’s be honest, sports. In no particular order. Okay, maybe before sports. And it’s not just me, it’s emotional. It’s intense. It’s real.
So when people come at me with specific cases and try to act like they’re simple, like they nailed Israel, gotcha, what do you think about this, or what do you think about that. My reflex at one point was to argue with them and sometimes, sometimes I still do.
Like, someone says, “Israel committed genocide in the Nakba, and they’re trying to do it again right now, in Gaza!” I feel my blood pressure rising. I can feel myself warming up more than I do now. In that moment, back in the day, my instinct wasn’t to say, “hmm, I wonder where they’re coming from. I wonder what stories they’ve heard, what photos they’ve seen, what Palestinians they’ve met, maybe which Israelis they met.” My instinct is, WRONG. You’re an educator, Noam, explain it to them. Tell them why they’re wrong.
But what I’ve learned over the last few days, and today with Toba, I need someone to remind me of something I preach regularly, but sometimes need to internalize more, that really, “feelings don’t care about my facts.” And that the people who fill my inbox every day, whose videos I see on instagram and tiktok, that actually, there’s a context for where they’re coming from. To be sure, some people operate out of bad faith. Yeah, it’s true, BUT, many don’t. And recognizing that, and speaking to them from that place, can do wonders if we’re going to get to a place of peace, eventually.
There’s a social psychologist I’m a big fan of named Jonathan Haidt. He writes a lot about this, about psychological lenses you can actually use that change people’s minds. And his argument, backed by real research, is this: Moral judgments start in the gut, not the head. Vivid stories, faces, and emotions create an intuitive “this feels right/wrong” reaction. Only after that can logic and data lock the change in place.
And this makes sense, right? It’s a story. Like, let’s say you work for the Red Cross, and you’re trying to convince people to donate blood. Your instinct might be, hey, let’s lay it out. These are the numbers. We’re facing a severe shortage. We need X amount of blood, that means Y number of people donating every Z months, you get it. But the truth is, that won’t work. You need a story. To spur blood donations, you have to talk about Maria, a 6-year-old leukemia patient who needs daily transfusions. Because the story sparks empathy that statistics rarely do.
And for Israelis, Palestinians, for anyone trying to understand this whole thing, it works the same way. And I need to say this, I’m talking to myself here, too. Yes, facts are important. Numbers, statistics, data, it will always matter. All important. But communicate with stories, with people. Israelis are people. Palestinians are people. Once we can acknowledge that, and to do so in a really true way, we can then start to really speak, because we’ve already really listened.
So thank you, Toba, for joining me today. And folks, even more so than ever, I’m going to ask you, email me. I want to hear what you think about this conversation. What do you want to ask Toba more about? What do you want to ask me more about in this conversation? What challenges do you have to this approach? Bring it on, and hopefully we’ll be able to make a Part 2, addressing some of these questions. You already know it – email me at noam@unpacked.media.