If you’ve followed Unpacking Israeli History for a while, you know I try to keep the temperature down. One of my bits is to “rise above the noise.” Words matter. And the old saying—“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me”—was wrong. Words do hurt. And there is one word that charges us in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict more than any other. It’s a word I’ve almost never used on this show: genocide.
For me, and maybe for you too, the very sound of it slams the brakes on the conversation. Genocide is the ultimate accusation; it makes me think of Rwanda, the Holocaust, Darfur. It’s always felt like a category mistake to apply it to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, however difficult that conflict has been.
But today, I don’t need to tell you that this word is everywhere. It’s on protest signs, in the halls of the UN, around dinner tables. Hundreds of podcasters have shared their thoughts—some more carefully than others. A few, in particular, struck me as important, even if I didn’t fully agree with their framing. Ezra Klein devoted an episode to it.
“What is this?
This is a war crime.
This is a crime against humanity. But more and more people are using another word, a word that I’ve stayed away from on this show, genocide. Is this a genocide?”
Coleman Hughes weighed in.
“I want to discuss the charge of genocide, because this is one of the most serious charges made against Israel.”
Yehuda Kurtzer reflected on it
“We have terminologies like genocide, laden with so much power that they force us to act. No serious moral person can say, yes, I agree it’s a genocide, but… genocide is a conversation ender.”
And they were joined by many others adding their voices to the conversation.
And dozens of you—literally dozens—have written in: Come on, Noam. This is nuts. What’s going on? Are you going to address it?
And this is reductive, sure, but the push has come from both sides. From the “right”: “Noam, they’re smearing Israel. This is antisemitism all the way down. Are you going to say something?”
And from the “left” – “Noam, you’re all about acknowledging the good, the bad and the ugly about Israel’s history. Israel is committing genocide and evil, and you’re just standing by!”
Here’s the thing, folks. You know this about me. I’m not a hot take guy. I’m not a debater. So after a few weeks of constant thinking, and fighting with myself, and talking to everyone and incessantly discussing it with anyone around me, I’m ready to speak with you, our Unpacking Israeli History community. Not just more noise, not just more criticism, not just more hasbara, but something that feels… well, transparent and reflective.
Some context, though. This matters. Genocide is also a word that I, and honestly, many, many Jewish people are particularly sensitive to. Why? Well, because the origin of the term emerges in the aftermath of the Holocaust, when the Nazis decimated a third of world Jewry and for a few years, the world stood by and let it happen. So, the Jewish people, who emerged like a phoenix after this sui generis catastrophe in Western history, and created the Jewish state, for amongst other reasons, a safe haven for the Jewish people – to prevent pogroms, to prevent holocausts – well, yea, the Jewish people will be quite sensitive to the accusation of genocide, not as the victim of one, but the culprit of one.
That part’s in Sharpie, not pencil.
And yet, something shifted over the past month or two, and it caught me off guard.
Suddenly, the conversation in Israel and about Israel—inside Jewish communities, on the world stage, and in living rooms—has turned intensely toward the question of morality. Not tactics, not military strategy, but whether Israel, the one and only Jewish state, is living up to its own ideals, its own moral code, in the midst of this war.
What I am doing right now is describing a current reality.
I’ve been hearing people—people who love Israel, who have served it, who call themselves Zionists—wrestle publicly with questions that cut to the bone: Is Israel, this place I love, doing the right thing? Will these choices Israel is making leave us proud, or haunted, years from now?
Many people have found themselves doomscrolling, reading and rerereading and asking themselves, “if people I trust are asking whether Israel is crossing moral red lines, what does that say about the war, about us, and about the values that hold this society together?”
For me, this conversation has happened over and over: at shabbat meals, with friends, speaking with colleagues outside the Jewish world, wondering with me, back and forth slack fights (conversations) with colleagues on my team, and so much more. And when I’m this tangled up, there’s someone else I call: my friend Gil Troy.
Gil is a historian, commentator, and Distinguished Scholar of North American History at McGill University. He’s written extensively on Zionism, Israeli identity, and the Jewish people’s place in the modern world, including books like The Zionist Ideas and Never Alone, co-authored with one of the greatest heroes of the Jewish people, Natan Sharansky. Known for blending rigorous history with clear, accessible analysis, Gil has become a leading voice on how Israel is perceived in the global arena. His work focuses on placing current controversies in their deeper historical and ideological context, and on exploring the moral foundations of Zionism—making him exactly the person I wanted to speak to about how Israel can and should think about morality in wartime.
I wanted to challenge Gil, to really help be a guide to the perplexed. So, I asked the hard questions.
We unpacked how the idea of Israel’s morality is being tested at this moment, why moral language is suddenly so prominent in public discourse, how history can help us separate signals from noise, and what this all tells us about the war, about the Jewish people, and about the future of Zionism itself. This was a sweeping conversation. We looked at the facts on the ground, the values in the public square, and the historical precedents for moments when a nation’s self-image was on the line.
Before going into this conversation, I was thinking there were four possible lenses for thinking about this whole debate:
The legal approach: what the international law says, what courts decide.
The hasbara approach: the PR battle, making Israel’s case to the world.
The political approach: how all this plays with allies and enemies.
And the moral approach.
And for me, and for everyone who emailed me asking about this, the moral approach seemed to be the one that matters most right now.
So what do I mean by that?
Well, let’s rewind a bit. Back in 1937, the Jewish leadership in pre-state Palestine coined this phrase, tohar haneshek, also known as “purity of arms.” And the Jewish leadership I’m referring to is the Hagana. They wanted to distinguish themselves from groups like the Irgun, who were viewed as using retaliation as a method. Later, in 1994, the IDF actually codified this into its official code of ethics. It said soldiers should only use force to the degree required, and avoid unnecessary harm to civilians. And in 2001, the philosopher Moshe Halbertal helped revise it, making it crystal clear: Israeli soldiers must not harm non-combatants, and must preserve their humanity even in combat.
Those are beautiful ideals. But how do they play out when the other side fights dirty?
I’ll give you an example. In 2006, during the Second Lebanon War, Hezbollah used civilians as human shields. Hundreds of Lebanese civilians died. And a group of rabbis from the Orthodox Rabbinical Council of America came to Israel on a solidarity trip. And they basically asked: does Judaism really require an Israeli soldier to risk his life in order to save civilians who Hezbollah is deliberately endangering? Rabbi Basil Herring said their statement wasn’t a halakhic ruling, but their best attempt to apply Jewish values. In other words, even purity of arms was being called into question. By the way, this is something I learned from a conference with Moshe Halbertal in 2014 (I think!), and it’s stayed with me since.
And here’s the thing: that same debate is raging right now.
There are basically three schools of thought.
The first I’m going to call the Avishai Margalit slash Michael Walzer view, which, in short, says that Israel must actively intend not to kill civilians, even if that means risking its own soldiers. A short quote from Walzer’s book Just and Unjust Wars sums it up perfectly: “If saving civilian lives means risking soldiers’ lives, the risk must be accepted.”
The second view is from philosopher Asa Kasher, which says that, no, once warnings are given in a place Israel doesn’t control, the responsibility shifts. The soldier’s life comes first. Here’s a line from an interview Kasher gave to Haaretz: “ does not control the civilian population, its primary moral duty is to protect the lives of its own citizens, including soldiers, and not to endanger them in order to save the lives of enemy civilians.”
And the third one, is the harder one, in some ways. A more hardline view, articulated by Shalom Lamm, which says, look, survival trumps everything. Putting soldiers at risk to avoid civilian casualties is a kind of misplaced morality. And again, a quote: “One may question whether the Palestinian civilians are quote, innocent. One may argue that putting dozens of Israeli soldiers at risk is not a higher, but a misplaced morality. The targets in Jenin could have been taken from the air or with overwhelming air support to greatly minimize Israeli casualties. The fact that the decision was rendered in that instance to go with ground forces alone is akin to a decision that they expected hundreds of thousands of US casualties would have been worth it in invading the Japanese home islands rather than taking the war, the very hard war, to the civilians of Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki”
So: three worldviews. All seem sort of reasonable, in their own ways, if I’m honest. And here’s the question: which one guides Israel today?
Now, here’s where I need to admit something. A few weeks ago, I was giving a talk, one of my “go-to”s, so to speak, what I call my “10 commandments of Israel engagement.” I think it went okay. And at the end, someone in the audience asked me point-blank: “Noam, just tell me. Gaza, right now. Is it genocide or not? Yes or no.”
And I did the thing I always tell people not to do. I started reciting definitions. I tried to talk about the technicalities. And I watched another person in the audience literally shake their head as I spoke. Later this person got in touch with me and said: “Noam, you told us not to bring facts to a feelings fight… but that’s exactly what you did.” (By the way, shoutout to recent episode with Toba Hellerstein, check it out if you haven’t yet.)
And guess what, this person was right.
Because once you frame this conversation as “is it or isn’t it genocide,” people’s brains go into fight-or-defend mode. It’s all of a sudden an amygdala conversation, not a pre-frontal cortex one. And you can’t have a real conversation anymore.
So instead of getting trapped there, I want us to step back.
Let’s remember: the word “genocide” itself is relatively new. Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish lawyer who fled Poland just after the Nazi takeover in 1939, coined it in the 1940s, only 80 years ago, at the time of this recording. And since then? Plenty of civilians have tragically been killed in wars in horrific numbers: Vietnam, Algeria, Sri Lanka, Chechnya, Dresden, Sudan, and the list goes on. And yet, since its adoption by the UN in 1948, no country has ever been convicted of genocide. Think about that.
So yes, we can and should debate Israel’s war in that context. But I don’t want us to stop there.
Because the deeper question, the one that matters to me, and I think to many of you, is this: what does morality demand of a Jewish state at war? What can history teach us about where to draw the line? And what happens when our survival and our values collide?
That’s what I explored with Gil Troy.
Two notes before you listen.
If you’re feeling unsettled, maybe wondering how to reconcile Israel’s survival with Israel’s soul, stick with us. I can’t promise you comfort, but I can promise you clarity, context, and maybe, by the end of the episode, a way to think about morality in wartime without turning the conversation off.
Also, I viewed my role in this conversation as one of sharing ideas that I, and perhaps many of you, have been hearing and discussing, and I wanted to present these ideas in their most compelling light to really get Gil to talk them through, no matter how challenging these ideas were.
One last prefatory remark, and this might be the most important one. It’s historical context.
In late 1967, Israel’s silver tongued Minister of Foreign Affairs, Abba Eban, declared, “If Algeria introduced a [UN] resolution declaring that the earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 164 to 13 with 26 abstentions.’
And I think it was the late 1960s when Yotam Taharlev, the famous Israeli artist, developed the song, “haolam kulo negdeinu”:
Ha’olam kulo negdeinu, Ze nigun atik me’od.
The whole world is against us…This is a very ancient tune.
Ha’olam kulo negdeinu, lo nora, nitgaber.
The whole world is against us. Don’t worry, we will overcome.
There were probably around 0 settlers when Eban made his quip and I don’t know, a few hundred when Taharlev wrote this song.
Why am I telling you this? Why does this matter?
For two reasons.
If you want to understand Israelis, and frankly, many Jewish people around the world, like, if you are genuinely interested in understanding where they are coming from…then Israelis often basically feel, “If everything’s a fire drill, eventually no one leaves the building.”
In 1948, when the Jews finally got a state, they were accused of genocide. In the aftermath of 1967, they were accused of genocide. In 1975, when the UN passed “Zionism is racism” some described Israel’s actions as genocidal. This went on and on throughout Israel’s history, and then just days after Hamas attacked Israel, we started hearing accusations of genocide…not against Hamas, but against Israel. It was in December 2023 that South Africa officially filed its case at the International Court of Justice, accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza, making it the first state-to-state legal accusation under the Genocide Convention.
So, Israelis have heard this before, and Israelis, many of them – not all – start tuning this all out.
And here is the second reason why this all matters…Israelis have been hardened. If you – I am talking to the general world – want Israelis to listen to you, or take your criticism seriously, then it behooves you to look at the history of the conflict, and ask, have my criticisms overwhelmed my praises? There are some Israelis who absolutely wholeheartedly believe that the war in Gaza has become unjust. In my opinion, and here I am opining rather than reporting, I believe more Israelis would take criticism better if they also did not see an obsession with condemning Israel over the past 77 odd years. Keep that in mind as you listen.
Radical empathy.
This was not an easy conversation, but I believe you will get a lot from it. I know I did.
—
Noam: Gil, it’s so good to be back with you here. We spent a lot of time together in the past few years, but haven’t seen you recently. So it’s good to see you, my friend.
Gil Troy: Always good to learn with you and bond with you.
Noam: It’s good times. I wanna start with you giving me the history of genocide. Just what’s the history of the topic of genocide?
Gil Troy: So two different directions. One, the word itself emerges in the wake of World War II, in the wake of the systematic, intentional hunting down of Jews wherever Nazis could find them. And those three dimensions of it being systematic, being intentional, and it being comprehensive were kind of the pillars that led the international conversation and ultimately for the coining of this term, which means murder of a nation. It’s interesting if you turn it to Hebrew, Retzach Am.
it’s a much more sort of, it’s a grosser term. It means murdering a nation and that’s genocide. Unfortunately, as a historian I have to point out that while you would start the conversation there if you’re telling what is the story of the word, in human history, wars have been an ongoing reality, brutality has been an ongoing reality, and there have been campaigns to wipe out human beings and groups of human beings before.
So for example, when we talk about the most infamous genocides of the 20th century, we often add the Armenian genocide, and it’s by the Turks. And you just have to be careful as a historian on the one hand to acknowledge that that’s a term that applies, I truly believe, because over a million Armenians were killed by the Turks, but that occurred during World War I, and the word genocide only really emerged during World War II.
Noam: So it’s interesting, this legal definition which was coined by Raphael Lemkin, who was actually a Polish Jew who escaped the Nazis, sought asylum in the United States. Like you said, after the Holocaust this newly formed UN takes up like Lemkin’s proposal and they define the term genocide as acts committed. This is December of 1948 right. A few months after the state of Israel was created by the way.
So they define genocide as acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. I want to understand a little bit more about this in the history since 1945 and 1948, but I want to add one more thing because you mentioned the Armenian genocide. Raphael Lemkin, I believe, was very moved by what he saw in World War I when the Turks committed genocide against the Armenians.
And he saw what was happening to the Jewish people, and he says, this is like, this is pretty horrible what happened to Armenians, what happened to the Jews. And he creates this definition. But since 1945, 1948, and correct me if I’m wrong or help me understand this better. Has there not been any country that has officially been convicted of genocide? Or has there been any country that’s been convicted of genocide?
Gil Troy: When we talk about the most outrageous example of genocide in recent years, we tend to talk about Rwanda. And the only reason why I didn’t mention in the opening was because I wanted to give the historical point about the Armenian genocide. And what happened in Rwanda was that I think I’d imagine 100 days, 800,000 Rwandans were slaughtered. Again, so when we talk about genocide, but Bill Clinton himself, when in his memoirs and subsequently, he regrets the fact that he and the international community did not officially deem it a genocide as it was happening. Why? Because in 1948, the world was so appalled by the scale and the systematic nature of the Nazi genocide that part of the genocidal, part of the treatise around genocide was that the United States of America was compelled to act. And Bill Clinton with his Vietnam War background, and there’s a whole fascinating story about how Bill Clinton evolved as a president and learned, let’s say during Kosovo, the need to use American power, but we’ll put that aside. At that moment, during the Rwandan genocide, he didn’t want the United States of America and the State Department, didn’t want the United States of America to be compelled to intervene, partially because they had been burned in other parts of Africa. So they didn’t officially call it a genocide and he regrets that.
So it’s a term that has been bandied about. We also have to mention the Sudanese genocide in Darfur, which is a little more complicated, only because it’s been prolonged over such a long period of time. And again, there used to be a kind of consensus that genocide was either like the Rwandan slaughter or the Nazi slaughter or Armenian slaughter, focused, systematic, ongoing. There’s no justification morally for what’s happening in Darfur and the degree to which it’s stretched out makes it even more heartbreaking, but it just doesn’t fit the same kind of classic definition.
Noam: I Remember I used to have, I still wear bracelets, you see them? But I used to wear a bracelet like maybe it was 20 years ago, I used to have this green bracelet, a save Darfur bracelet on. And I remember spending a couple years really going to protests, like really often going to protests. And I remember sometimes even having fights with, this is such an inside baseball moment in the Jewish yeshiva world, where we would, I had like fights with like the rabbis as to whether or not what was more important to study Torah or to protest on behalf of Darfur. I remember that part of my history and part of the history of the world very, very seriously, but I believe it’s the case that nobody has officially been convicted of genocide, which is something to hold onto.
Gil Troy: Correct.
Noam: Now, I wanna go to something else, which is Israel. And I wanna understand what your relationship is to Israel. You’ve written about Zionism, you’ve written about the history of Israel, you’re a J Post writer, you’re part of JPPI, Jewish People Policy Institute. You’re constantly in this space. Just talk to me about your relationship to Israel? What is it?
Gil Troy: So first of all, I’m sitting speaking to you from Jerusalem and I’m sitting speaking to you as someone who was in Jerusalem on October 7th and experienced the fear, the horror, the terror, the fury. And I think it’s important for us to put the anger on the table. Even as I reject Joe Biden and other people’s accusation that Israel’s war has been mostly driven by vengeance. I think it’s been driven by a desire to restore deterrence.
I have children who have been in and out of the army, serving one son over 420 days of reserves. And he was part of the miracle the first day that scrambled up north and made sure that there wasn’t a slaughter 10 times or even worse if Hezbollah had attacked.
We’ve buried close friends. I’ve seen not just everybody that talks about the cliche of how heartbreaking it is for a parent to bury a child. Well, I’ve experienced grandparents burying grandchildren, and all the other permutations, one of my sons lost six really close friends on October 7th alone. So I have skin in the game. I’m putting that out there emotionally.
I’m right now as we speak, 82 kilometers, 50 miles from Gaza. And just said, just welcomed my son-in-law who is in middle of his, I think 330th day of reserves in a 90 day sprint, which doesn’t feel like a sprint to him. He’ll be missing the holidays with his new wife and my daughter. So that’s one piece.
Second piece is that I’m a trained American historian. I’m a recovering professor in many ways, having over 20 years ago, when we’ve talked about this before, seen what was happening on the university campuses then and feeling betrayed then. I don’t need people to be pro-Israel. I just needed to know the intellectual integrity to acknowledge that it’s complex. And the speed, back then, 23, 24 years ago, when Yasser Arafat turned away from negotiation and turned toward terror, the speed with which academics, who could make anything complicated, oversimplified about Israel and just threw cliches, back then it was Israel apartheid, Zionism racism, Israel imperialism, today it’s settler colonialism, that broke my covenant with academia.
So I continued to write about the American presidency and continued to love to read about books, read books about the American presidency and about American history. But increasingly, since that time, I’ve written more and more about Zionism. And the kind of Zionism I try to articulate and celebrate is, I hate the phrase Israel advocacy in the same way that I hate the Hebrew word hasbara, which is translated as propaganda, but it means explanation. Israel advocacy implies that Israel needs a lawyer and that every conversation A should be about the conflict and B should be some kind of defense. I prefer the term identity Zionism. Cause to me, and we’ve talked about this a lot before, what identity Zionism means is an opportunity to celebrate identity, tradition, community, to create a big tent left and right where we actually focus on what unites us, not just what divides us.
And these days, especially when I talk about identity Zionism and I talk about a healthy form of liberal democratic nationalism and to be obnoxious, this is the theme of a book that I recently wrote called, To Resist the Academic Intifada, Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream. I want the Zionist dream to rhyme with or evoke the American dream. Because increasingly, when I talk about Zionism, I talk about identity Zionism, I’m speaking to young Americans left and right and saying, there’s a formula that Zionism has created of being proud of who you are, being able to be critical, being able to be self-critical, but also being proud of who you are, knowing your roots, knowing your story, having a sense of purpose, having a sense of community.
And that’s part of the reason why even while Israel is under the gun, Israel scores eighth on the formal happiness index. so Zionism is not perfect, but Zionism has a formula which I think is essential to helping America revive. And in my world, liberalism, liberal democratic nationalism, Zionism and Americanism rhyme much more than they clash. And my Americanism also is a big, tent left, right, open-ended Americanism where we have lots of room to disagree, but lots of room to agree and to respect and to build a conversation. But I don’t feel very passionately about these issues.
Noam: No, you seem you seem like totally chill about it all. So I wrote down a lot of things as you were talking. And I’m going to get to those in a little bit. But I want to connect your Zionism, your connection to Israel as you described it, your personal connection, your historical connection, all the different types of connections that you have.
I want to go to something that you spoke. I want to go back to even before Raphael Lemkin. I want to talk about the 1930s. And before there was a state of Israel, there was a number of Jewish leaders and Jewish community in the state of Israel. And there was an organization called the Hagana. The Hagana articulated this idea of what’s called Tohar Hanechech or purity of arms. And their goal was to set themselves apart from the Irgun’s violence as they saw it. The later the IDF actually codified this, the concept was use force only when necessary, avoid unnecessary harm to civilians. Moshe Halbertal updated it in 2001. It was about preserving your humanity even in combat, which is quite stirring language.
But when you’re fighting enemies who put civilians in harm’s way, AKA Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, there’s a challenge of the concept of purity of arms as a guiding principle. And I want to ask your take on this. I want to understand what you think is the case.
Is it the case that purity of arms, this concept that I just mentioned, is that more of an aspiration or is it an actual practice?
Gil Troy: Let’s take a step back. The 1930s is very important and the desire for Zionism to return Jews to history and return Jews to power, but to wield power morally. But part of that moral, part of that ethics was, not wielding power and just sitting as they did in the pages of the Talmud without the responsibility of power. We’re going to talk about purity. Let’s add another “ty” and talk about responsibility, your responsibility to defend yourself, responsibility to defend others, will put that in tension.
But I also want to put on the table that I’m an American historian. And I not only have studied just war theory in the context of civil war, where we learned that war is hell, and World War I and World War II, but also unlike so many Americans who seem to have forgotten during Iraq and Afghanistan. And I have frustration. I’m frustrated with two “c”s, people’s inconsistency and their hypocrisy. And two other “t”s are, I like complexity and humility. And so taking all these terms together are the way I try to judge the question of purity in arms. I need Israel, just like I need America, and I need every democratic army to aspire to, and not just aspire to, but be defined by the rules of war, the laws of war, international law. Even as I say that, I say that a moral law is like fudge that’s not fattening. It’s a contradiction in terms. The decision to go to war, civil war, World War I, World War II, October 7th, the decision to go to war, often wars in self-defense and often wars for justice, for righteous causes, is necessarily saying that international relations, diplomacy, normal politics is broken down. And I have no choice. I have no choice but to resort to force. It has to be a last resort, and it has to be an unhappy choice. So that’s from above.
Let me take one more stab at it and speak as a war dad. Speak as someone who literally put hands, lay hands on my children on October 7th, on October 8th when the second one flew home from Sri Lanka to go straight to the army. And for the first time in my life, I uttered the priestly prayer out loud, because I have a bad Hebrew accent, so I usually just say it quietly, and I said it out loud, and I sent them off to war. I cannot morally, if we’re talking about morally, have sent them off to war on October 7th or every day since without telling them, win. Don’t come with a partial victory. Don’t come with a stalemate. You need to win. Winning means, to me, restoring deterrence. Winning means applying force so that we, our side, defeat the enemy. Winning also means being able to pass the mirror test. And that’s where the essence of your question comes in.
I’m so proud of what Israel has done over the years. I’m so proud of the work that my friend and neighbor Moshe Habertal did in defining the rules of war and defining morality and purity of arms. Because I need my kids, to not just look over their shoulder because somebody politically is gonna come after them, but to look in the mirror every day and say, I did my best under the ugliest of conditions.
And that’s why I keep on going back to my favorite tease of humility and complexity. You want to judge? Fine, judge. But at least have a little bit of humility to say, in 1975, 80% of the United States Congress had served in the military. In 19, in 2024, 20% of the elected Congress had served in the military. And that by the way is three times the percentage of Americans, about 6% who have served in the military. So it’s more than 6%, more than three times. If you’ve never experienced combat, if you don’t know what it’s like to walk into a room as my sons have and not know, as once happened, somebody’s gonna burst out of a closet door with a machine gun, to not know what it’s like to be in three-dimensional urban warfare where they not only hide behind civilians, but the threat can come right directly at you in your dimension from above and from below. At least take a breath.
The remote control moralism, the degree to which people sit in studios like we do and throw thunderbolts of judgment without acknowledging how messy the situation is, how difficult the choices are. And without that humility is what most upset me about the conversation. And then please criticize because if we don’t criticize and frankly, if we don’t feel not only criticized but scrutinized, then we might get sloppy.
But on the other hand, also see the degree to which Israel has really tried, I’m talking about the last 23 months of combat. Again and again, Israel has tried to be as moral as possible, given the broader goal of the war, which is to restore deterrence and to defend Israel. And I would add, not just defend Israel, but to defend Israel, the Jewish people and Western civilization.
Noam: I’m going to challenge you on a lot of what you just said. I hope that’s okay. Not complexity, not about humility, but I couldn’t agree with you. I cannot overstate, how important those two words are to life, to life and sorry for preaching with you, humility and complexity is so important.
And within that complexity, I want to read to you from a soldier who spent 330 days in the fighting in Gaza, who wrote this:
I don’t want to kill children. I never wanted to kill children. I never wanted to kill anyone. The quote just war, however, has become unjust for the hostages and for us as a society. I will be fighting our enemies forever. In order for me to have the privilege of continuing to show up for my country in the future wars, I am required to show up for this unjust part of this war. And I hate it and it hurts.
So Gil, I want to ask you, and I’m staying away from the word genocide for now. I want to ask you what your thoughts are and reflections are on that, on the 350,000 or so people who are protesting in Israeli society. I want to know what you think about, you said the humility and the complexity of it all. I want to definitely add to what you’re talking about, which is someone named David Grossman who served in the IDF, right? So he’s been there
Gil Troy: And buried a son.
Noam: Buried his son who was killed in a war and has said that he believes that with mounting civilian deaths UN warnings of famine and Israeli NGOs legal filings appear to have crossed the rhetorical or his rhetorical red line prompting him to adopt the genocide vocabulary publicly for the first time. And he said, and I quote:
For years, I refused to use the expression genocide, but now I can’t not use it. I want to speak as a man who has used all of his abilities to avoid, to define Israel as a country that is committing genocide. And now with deep pain and a broken heart, I am forced to admit that this is what is happening before my eyes.
Now I want to put Grossman’s use of the term genocide to the side for now. We’ll come back to it. I want to stay with the text message that I received about the concept of a just war versus an unjust war and the feeling amongst people, amongst soldiers–
Gil Troy: Some people.
Noam: that Gideon’s Chariot, this current part of this war is a different part of the war than the first part of the war or parts one and two. And I want to get your reaction to that, not the genocide part, the part about this feeling of many Israelis humbly who have been in war, who have fought with your children together and are now feeling like they have to be part of something that they’re as big of a Zionist as anyone. They love Israel as much as anyone. So I’m asking you what your thoughts are on how to unravel that.
Gil Troy: So first in the spirit of humility and complexity, and it’s become an empty cliche, but it isn’t, I honor his service. And if he were in front of me, the first thing I would do would be hug him. I would hug him. And the second thing I would do, and I would ask him the question I ask every single miluimnik, every single reservist, every single soldier I see, I say, how’s your soul? And I think that’s the most important thing.
I think we have to distinguish between two levels of morality in war. There are many, many, just for the sake of this podcast, I’ll keep it somewhat simple. One is the overall, arching goal of the war and the day-to-day fight. Okay, I’ll take the day-to-day fight, because it’s in some way simpler, and then get to the overarching nature of the war. So I’m hosting a group of rabbis from Philadelphia, and I get the most condescending compliment I’ve ever gotten in my life, where one rabbi says, you speak as if you acknowledge complexity. No, she said, you seem to be a complex thinker, but your language is very harsh. And I would go in, wow, which was basically trying to say is shut up. And the next question from the rabbi, from another rabbi was, I’ve been here in Israel for three days, which is in November, December of 2023. I haven’t heard anything about morality of war. And I said, I want you to know that my kids struggle with it every single day. And I just happened to go from that interaction to have coffee with my son who had just come back from a theater of war. And I’m being vague on purpose.
And I said to him, said, tell me, how would you navigate this? How do you answer this? He said, you know, it’s a very funny thing. Just yesterday, my tsevet, and it’s important to use the Hebrew word, which is my unit, but it means my family, my team, my buddies, and I went into a situation where we arrested somebody. I’m not going into more details. And during the arrest, I looked and I saw one of the guys was acting too aggressively. Now he said, this is happening in a matter of seconds. He said, if I stop at that moment, we’re all dead because the clock is ticking and the bad guys and there are enemies, there are bad guys mobilizing and we have to get in and out as quickly as we can. But he said, I made a mental note. And after every operation we have, and this isn’t a special thing, this is part of, you you read about this in Startup Nation, we have what they call tachkir, we have an interrogation, an nvestigation of us, where we look back and said, what did we do right and what did we do wrong? And I made a mental note to say that I was gonna say something, but he said, I didn’t have to because as soon as we started, my commander looked at that guy and said, you’re benched and said, you were too aggressive.
Now you could look and say, wait a minute, he’s benched, that’s a slap on the wrist. Let me tell you, when you’re part of a unit fighting in those days for, again, we all believed Western civilization and the home front, to be benched, is a penalty. And so I think those are the stories that don’t get out. The stories that don’t get out are the degree to which there are units in the Israeli army. I have a friend who’s a lawyer who before every operation, before every Air Force barrage are checking the targets and commanders on the ground, but also pilots in action have the right to abort a mission if they think too many civilians will be killed. That’s part one.
Part two. I don’t use the term that I learned from the Pentagon of collateral damage because that sanitizes horrible, tragic losses of life. And even if we can do an analysis and say Hamas is exaggerated and why do we believe Hamas including 8,000 at least natural deaths, 63, 53, throwing these terms around of 30,000, 20,000 deaths is heartbreaking and tragic.
Okay, now the the second part, I’m not smart enough, and I know very few people who really are, to know what the exact right thing to do on the hostages and on this operation. So let’s separate the two.
Hostages. I didn’t believe on October 8th, October 9th, as we were absorbing the fact that 250 human beings had been wrenched from their home, including babies, including what, an 88 year old man and woman? I didn’t believe any of them would come home. The fact that over 100 of them have come home safely shows that this government, and I have lot of about this government, has somehow done some things right and brought them home. So now we have a situation where we have 50 left and guesses are 20, perhaps even fewer, are alive.
I wish more people would be able to say, you know, I don’t know. Should Bibi Netanyahu do everything possible to get the last 20 remaining out? Or should he take 10 at a time? I don’t really believe that Hamas will ever let the last 10 out willingly. So all I need and all I wish some of the protesters on both sides would do in Channel 14, which is the right-wing channel, and Channel 12, which is considered to be more left-wing from my right-wing friends, I wish people would just say, wow. This is a series of really unhappy choices where we talk about human beings like playing cards. It’s messy, it’s complicated, it’s painful. I’m not sure what’s best, but I personally don’t really believe that Hamas will ever voluntarily relinquish the lesson because they’re driving us crazy and dividing us.
Now, to go to this critique of this young, I’m assuming man, I get it. Our government, and by the way, in 2017, I called for Bibi Netanyahu to resign and get a pardon because I’d seen, I’m no genius, but I’d seen when Bill Clinton was president and he was under the gun because the Monica Lewinsky scandal, I don’t care where you stand on the Monica Lewinsky scandal, but I saw what he did. I saw how the president of United States turned against institutions and turned against values in a fight for his life. I said, this is the same thing that’s gonna happen. So I have no problems criticizing Bibi Netanyahu. I’m devastated that he’s continued after October 7th, A, not to take responsibility for the failures of October 7th, B, not to unify the nation. So I have my criticisms. But, and my major criticism on this is, again, put you and me aside. That young man, my kids have not heard a clear articulation from the prime minister of exactly why they’re doing what they’re doing. Nevertheless, I can make a very good case and I can quote Colonel John Spencer from West Point and I can quote Winston Churchill and leading, and U.S. “Unconditional Surrender” Grant. That was his name. The intense debate that America had toward the end of World War II, toward the end of the Civil War, when do we finish? Do we take a complete victory? Risking my kids’ lives? Or when do we stop? At least acknowledge that it’s hard. And I can see, because we’re a democracy, that there are people like David Grossman and that young man who think we’re going too far.
And I can see others who say, like John Spencer said, until Hamas is utterly defeated and pulls out and every last hostage is freed, then we have to continue fighting. And that’s the lesson of World War II. That’s the lesson of the Civil War. I can make both cases, but again, what I most need is for people to ramp down the judgment and ramp up the empathy.
Noam: So when you look back at the history, And I want to like present one side of an issue that I’m feeling right now, which is why I feel frustrated at times with the rush to condemn. When you learn about the bombing of Hamburg or when Stalin replied to Hitler’s war of annihilation with this phrase, if he wants a war of annihilation, he will have one, right? Or when the Union chose to burn down 40 % of Atlanta. Or you want to compare to huge conflicts and genocides that did take place, the Holocaust in which 63 % of European Jews were killed or Rwanda in which 70 to 75 % were killed in 100 days or Armenians 50 to 70 % or Cambodia of the total population 20 to 25%. I view Hamas as the Nazis of today. They are annihilationist. I’m not talking about the Palestinians. I’m not at all talking about the Palestinians. I’m talking about Hamas. I’m talking about Hamas’s worldview and the leaders there. That is who I’m talking about. They are the Nazis of today. That’s on one side. On the other side, there have been things that Israel has done during this war, which are viewed as war crimes. When I say Israel, I mean, Israeli soldiers that have, there have been intentional things, I think, at times that soldiers have done, which are bad. Because why? Because it’s war. And you said it’s scary. It’s horrible. It’s horrific. Now, do I think that most people are doing that? No. Is it happening at times? Yes.
My question is this then, with both of those caveats. When the question is asked to Americans, and this just came out, do you believe or not believe (and now we’re going to get into the G word) that Israel’s committing a genocide in Gaza. If you look at the numbers over 65 years old, 61% say no, 39% say yes. That is a higher percentage than I anticipated. But more than that, if you’re between the ages of 18 to 24, 55% of Americans believe, according to the latest Harris poll that just came out, 55% of 18 to 24 year olds believe that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza compared to 45% who do not believe this.
Now in the past, people like you and I might say, and I have said this by the way, that if you call Israel genocidal, I think that you are engaging in antisemitic rhetoric. Like meaning, do you believe that that, you I don’t know, roughly 50 % of Americans are are are antisemitic by by making this argument? Do you believe that David Grossman is not to use his name specifically? But I just did. But when you have 50% of Americans and probably way more Europeans and way more Australians and way more South Africans feeling this way and Canadians. How do we have this conversation? How should this conversation take place?
Gil Troy: Sorry, before we get to genocide, and I’m not trying to avoid the subject, but you threw in a couple of things about war crimes and about abuses by Israeli soldiers. The three most important things when it comes to the question of war crimes are one, again, And are there structures in the Israeli government, and especially the Israeli military machine, the IDF, that try to determine whether every target, every military operation, is justified or not. And by the way, the word thrown around proportionality doesn’t mean is the amount of destruction we unleash proportional to the amount of destruction they absorb. Portionality means is it a justified military target? That’s one test.
The second test is are there mechanisms from a free press to protests, to a judicial response civilly in the event of war crimes?
And three, is the military continuing ongoing investigations.
And by all those three standards, while Israel is not perfect, no country is perfect, no democracy is perfect, Israel is comparable to the United States of America, if not exemplary. And John Spencer and others at West Point say it’s teaching America. That’s part one. Part two, we talk about World War II, we talk about Civil War. I’m old enough that my closest friends who when they yell and scream at me in New York and I yell and scream with them back, from the Upper West Side and I say, know, beware the speed with which you…
Noam: You’re not so old that your friends were in the Civil War.
Gil Troy: No, but I am so old that we lived through the Iraq War and Afghanistan War. A, didn’t know anybody who actually served there, right? But more than that, I heard their silence. I never had a conversation about the tens of thousands of Iraqis, the tens of thousands of Afghanis who were being killed. I never had a conversation about the ambulances, about the hospitals, about the aid workers who were being killed then. And I will never forgive Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, because on April 1st, 2024, when seven aid workers were killed in the World Food Kitchen disaster, Lloyd Austin, who had led the American fight in Afghanistan and in Iraq, didn’t get up and explain to the American people the concept of fog of war and that war crimes have to be intentional and all kinds of things happen. And I don’t care about this. I’m not speaking as a Jew or an Israeli. I’m speaking as an American historian. He missed the opportunity to teach Americans about what’s going on.
Noam: Wait, before you get to genocide, need to double click on this for a minute. Gil, are you saying that you don’t think that there are specific soldiers that have intentionally done things that are wrong?
Gil Troy: No, I’ll see you and raise you. They’re 18 years old, they’re 25 years old, they’re bored, their adrenaline is rushing, they’re pissed off, they’re frustrated, they’re terrified. If we had social media during World War II, not only would we know that the greatest generation was not just looking at Betty Grable pinups, but they were speaking with language that let’s just say is not politically correct, and that all kinds of horrible things happen. You don’t think that sometimes Italians, I’m not even talking about Nazis, came out with their hands up.
Noam: Yeah, right. Of course it did. Of course it did. But that’s the, that’s the, that’s the hypocrisy that you hate. That’s the hypocrisy.
Gil Troy: And they ended up with bullets in their head. because war is hell. Right, so that’s the hypocrisy. So all I want is make sure that we are consistent and that we, so I can’t control every idiot soldier. I can demand that officers be taught Taharat haneshek, purity of arms. I can demand that my government, and my government, I’m sorry to say, hasn’t done enough, to make sure that protesters can protest, that educators can educate about this, that criticisms can go forward.
But I’m speaking to you freely from Jerusalem without being inhibited. I have to make sure that the IDF’s mechanisms for ferreting this out, for whistleblowing, for prosecuting, and I use the word prosecuting, not just slap on the wrist thing, which isn’t a word. So what I was talking about was, are there mechanisms?
I’m not a pie in the sky naive guy who believes that any army is perfect, but I need us to have perfectly defensible and perfectly effective mechanisms when those things happen because they will. They’ll happen when you’re fighting terrorism, they’ll happen for cops, they’ll happen sometimes after street arguments. By the way, sidebar, but in Israel, if you…If you have a handgun license and you get into a crash, you’re not allowed to exit the car unless the vehicle is burning until you take your gun and put it in your glove compartment.Why? Because they know that human beings are nuts. And when I come out of a car where I just had a crash and you know I’m cut me off and I have the adrenaline, I better not have a gun in my back no matter how well-trained I am, no matter how lovely I am.
It’s not to say that Israeli gun laws are perfect, it’s to say that human beings are crazy, but also human beings are wonderful. And law helps us bring out the wonderful and try to keep in the crazy.
Okay, given that context, and again, to be self-promoting, I have this book called The Essential Guide to October 7th, and its aftermath. And it’s short punchy and it has things like what does genocide really mean? But what it also does on one page is I looked and this really gets to what’s going on with the American people. And I’ve been very careful. Yes. If you started calling Israel a genocidal force on October 7th, you’re probably antisemitic. Yes. When there was a Harvard University panel on October 23rd and they used the word genocide 13 times and they didn’t use the word hostage once.
That was not just biased, that was not just unacademic, it was not just illiberal, but it was probably antisemitic. But I’m not going to call somebody in the Midwest who’s hearing the word since then from all these people, genocide, genocide, genocide.
Long before October 7th, look it up, we have seen a campaign, a systematic campaign to link Israel with genocide. Since October 7th, it’s increased. Okay, that’s part one.
Now part two, one of the points I make in the book is that the United States was involved in the Battle of Mosul, which is a very difficult, ugly battle in Iraq to free a city from ISIS, from a Hamas-like annihilation and a jihadist terrorist group. The United States was not only involved, but led the coalition. 10,000 civilians at least who were pro-America, pro-West were killed as quote unquote collateral damage. I call them tragic deaths. The United States barely acknowledged it. The New York Times ran 80 articles in the nine month battle. In the first nine months of this war, the New York Times ran 6,000 articles about Israel and Gaza. Just this week, Thomas Friedman, a Jew, a well-known columnist, wrote a column about how Israel’s becoming a pariah state, and he improvised a remarkable thing, a new standard for wartime. He said, because Israel has eliminated most of the top commanders in Hamas, and it’s only now going after low-level commanders and terrorists, then that’s probably a war crime in and of itself.
War has always been fought, grunt to grunt, soldier to soldier, cannon fighter to cannon fighter. And the need to kind of articulate these new standards of warfare, these new moral standards is to me, I wouldn’t call it antisemitic because that’s lazy, shocking and sloppy. And so I go back to what I said at the beginning, genocide. Is it intentional? Is it systematic? Is it wherever Palestinians are? Is it wherever Gazans are? No, Israel for all its flaws had only entered this conflict when they were attacked and attacked in the most vicious way by what you call an annihilationist terrorist organization, which I agree with, because October 7th shook me. But I actually, I thought it was actually quite bigoted on the part of people not to take Hamas seriously. They said, those are just their words. I took them seriously. I knew that they had a genocidal charter and their genocidal intentions. So I asked the question, why use the word genocide? If it’s not systematic, if it’s not intentional, why use that word? And I have two answers.
Noam: Hold on to these two answers, but let me let me add to this I’m not even gonna use words like names like Itamar Ben-Gvir or Betzalel Smotrich, I’m gonna use names like Galit distilled at Barian who said Gaza must be erased fire and pillars of smoke on the heads of the Nazis, and Judea and Samaria, Jewish rage will make the land tremble all over the world here the IDF needs revenge and cruelty anything less would not be moral and Amichai Eliyahu, another member of Knesset who that was what that was actually what when when Adbaryan spoke that was right after the 7th of October that was on November 2023 but then just last month a member of Knesset Amichai Eliyahu said the government is racing to wipe out Gaza we are eliminating this evil we’re eliminating its residents Gaza will become completely Jewish so now give me your two answers with regard to those like so this is what Americans are hearing and it could be the media is amplifying this, right? So like help us Americans.
Gil Troy: So I’ll get to that point, but my point is that given the degree to which the words Israel and genocide have been linked, given the disproportionate coverage and the obsession, and given on the one hand the innocent campaign, let’s call it that, of just sort of like the repetition, and then the systematic campaign, it’s not surprising that people who aren’t really paying attention would start making that linkage.
And that’s a different point. Because you’re asking me a different, so that’s because you were asking me how could reasonable Americans, good people, come to this conclusion. I don’t believe that they’re quoting, that they’re reading the quotes that you’re reading, right? And so that’s why I think my overall point is more that there’s a kind of, there’s a mentality, we have moral panics, right? Everybody knows that Donald Trump won in 2016 because of Vladimir Putin. Oh, maybe it’s not true. Let’s go back to the, let’s go back to COVID and how many beliefs there were that were true and how many beliefs there were that weren’t true. So we’re living in an era where we’ve seen, and now also in the United States of America, we have one world that believes everything bad about Trump and can’t say anything good. We have another world that believes everything good about Trump. So the fact that there are polls showing Americans, Australians, Brits believing things that are thrown into the air, and it doesn’t surprise me, it depresses me, but it’s a bigger issue. And let’s talk about epistemology. I just wanted to throw that word in so I could be fancy.
Noam: Right, Mm-hmm, okay. That’s good, it’s fancy. Theory of knowledge, theory of knowledge, boom.
Gil Troy: You know, theories of knowledge. Right.Look, the question you ask troubles me. I mentioned, and it was partially a virtue signal, but partially not, that I called for Bibi Netanyahu’s resignation in 2017.
Before October 7th, if we were talking about my critiques of Bibi Netanyahu, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of the State of Israel, I would have added, A, that he didn’t resign in 2017, but B, that he allowed the nation to become so dysfunctional. And I kept on writing in the Jerusalem Post, hey guys, we have real enemies out there, beware. But the third piece, what I thought was inexcusable, and unfortunately he’s done other inexcusable things, which were even worse, was that bringing in Itamar Ben-Gvir to his government, mainstreaming that kind of bigotry, and I don’t call it racist because it’s not a racial issue between Arabs and Jews, it’s a national issue, it’s a bigoted issue, that kind of bigotry was inexcusable and anti-Zionist and against my Zionist principles. Okay?
Now I have a situation where I’m stuck as an Israeli citizen, and again as an Israeli war dad, with members of the Knesset, the parliament, members of the cabinet, who say reprehensible things. Where do you stand on vaccines and RFK Jr.? I think the United States of America should again have a little bit of sympathy and empathy for what it’s like to have cabinet members who may embarrass you, to have Marjorie Taylor Greene or AOC, I don’t care where you stand, right or left, who in your parliament embarrass you. In order to reach the standard of genocide, it doesn’t mean that in a healthy democracy, you have voices like David Grossman and like that soldier you you quoted and many other soldiers I can quote, ranging from them to Ben-Gvir, Smotrich and Eliyahu Omai, who embarrass me, who outrage me, who infuriate me and who worse betray me and betray the Zionism that I’m so committed to that we talked to at the beginning. We need that robust debate.
If I have a choice between shutting them down and then potentially having them use their power to shut down David Grossman, I’d rather absorb the blows from the far left and the far right. And I’m a centrist. I’m someone who worshiped in the church of Ed Koch who said, if you agree with me on seven of 12 things, please vote for me. If you agree with me on 12 of 12 things, please see a psychiatrist. So I need as a lowercase D Democrat to absorb all that.
But to accuse Israel of genocide? By the way, you don’t think after Pearl Harbor, I could find you 20 quotes, 30 quotes, 40 quotes from, I’ll be racist, and I’m using that term sloppily on purpose, Southern congressmen who said, we gotta burn the Japs, right? And worse. In order for it to reach the standard of genocide, it goes back to what you read at the beginning. Is it systematic? Is it intentional? Is it wherever they are? The degree to which we have Palestinians in Knesset, we have 20% of our doctors representing 20% of the Israeli Arabs in Israel, similar percentage serving as doctors, you know, we have 20% Arab doctors. It’s just, again, I go back to the deeper issue. The two deeper issues, one, why use those terms and how have those terms gotten traction? And if I was speaking to David Grossman, I’d say, why are you being a useful idiot to people who don’t have your love, to people who don’t have your commitment?
And in many ways, I would say it’s tarnishing not just your reputation, but your holy son’s reputation, because it’s a brush that people have used also to tar him and his soldiers in Lebanon, the second Lebanon war when they fell. And it breaks my heart to have that conversation. How could it be that people are throwing this term around when it’s so not the term? How could it be that Oxfam, and again, I have this in my essential guide, that Oxfam said six months into the war that this is the bloodiest, the bloodiest, not one of the bloodiest, the bloodiest conflict in the 21st century.
Well, I’m speaking to a group of students from McGill University and I said, what about the 3 million killed in the Congo? What about the 600,000 killed in Syria? It’s 10 times, it’s 50 times more. And a young African man said, thank you. Nobody acknowledges this. So without excusing every Israeli government disaster, without ever voting for any of these, I call them goon-atics, I had to make up a word, and this was long before October 7th. Without being an apologist, I do think people have to ask the question of how is it that we’ve jumped on this bandwagon and when we see the degree to which it was manipulated, the degree to which there’s Qatari money and Turkish money and there’s a whole web of organizations pushing this one narrative, the degree to which so many the encampments had the exact same color tent.
I don’t just smell antisemitism. I smell, and I’m not a conspiracy guy, but I smell a systematic campaign to manipulate us and to work on our minds. Having said that, let’s have a robust debate. Let’s struggle with the moral issues. But I want to say one more controversial thing.
Noam: Please.
Gil Troy: When we go back to Netanyahu, now you’ve seen I’ve bashed him, I think one of the greatest things, if I was writing Bibi Netanyahu’s biography, and obviously there are other chapters that still need to be written, one of the greatest gifts he gave to Israel was repeatedly defying Joe Biden and the American press and Thomas Friedman and much of the American Jewish establishments calls for a ceasefire, which started in November and there was a temporary ceasefire which helped get out over 50 hostages. But the constant calling for a ceasefire, which appears to sound like it’s calling for peace, but often calling for a peace that’s too quick or too sloppy is actually condemning us to a prolonged war.
Now, at what point is Bibi Netanyahu wrong? Really good question. I’m not sure. But again, I go back to what I said at the beginning. At least let’s acknowledge when Joe Biden finished his four years in office and he went to the State Department and he gave his farewell address to the State Department, which wasn’t his farewell address to the American people, but it was his farewell foreign policy address. And he boasted, it’s fascinating, he boasted about Iran’s been weakened, Hezbollah’s been weakened, Hamas has been weakened, and Syria collapsed. And then he said, yes, Israel had a role in it. But he didn’t add, because Israel defied me, I went, wow, just sit with the complexity, sit with the messiness of life. and sit with the real horrible choices that Netanyahu faces, that the chief of staff of Israel faces, that every one of our soldiers faces, and that frankly, American Jews, and I’ll go to American Jews and non-Jews in a second, but American Jews who are in the eye of this storm, who love Israel, who are proud of Israel, who want a moral Israel, but who wake up every day and are bombarded by this campaign, think how difficult it is for them. I have tremendous empathy for them, for you. And I have tremendous empathy for non-Jews, who, they follow the conflict as carefully as I followed the Turkish Greek conflict over Cyprus, which I understand continues even though it’s a Cold War, or India and Kashmir. And then I’m asked by a pollster to opine. I’m not gonna call them antisemitic for following the trends, but I hope that if we were having a conversation, we could sit with my favorites, complexity and humility.
Noam: Right. So let me ask you this. We have just a great community of listeners and we we thankfully get just we go back and forth and emails with with our listeners and we have a whole community and it’s it’s really special.
Gil Troy: By the way, I’m so proud of the amazing work you’ve done. You’ve really, because it goes back to the first time we met. Sorry to interrupt you, but you talked about the need to live with complexity and you talked about the need to bring an Israel conversation, which wasn’t just rah rah sis bum bah. And you’ve not only lived it, but you’ve fulfilled it and you’ve spread it and really just, it’s a real privilege to see this. It’s really been amazing to see the flourishing. Sorry.
Noam: Thank you. That means a lot. means a lot. Seven. Seven years ago. Seven years ago is when, yeah. Yeah, that was great. Coffee Bean, that’s where we hung out.
So here’s what I to ask you. This is from a listener. The listener wrote, his name is Eitan, he grew up in Israel, he now lives in the US. He sent a really thoughtful email after our last episode and I want to read to you a piece of it and then get your reaction to this. Because I’m an American and there’s humility that I want to do my best to impart to others and also for myself. Sometimes I live up to it, sometimes I really don’t. But I really try to think that way and I have my producer Rivky to beat me up if she feels like I’m not doing a good enough job on that.
But I want to read to you a piece of what Eitan wrote to me. He said:
For me, a win for American Zionists would be that Israel would live up to its ideals. For that to happen, the discourse on Israel is crucial. We can’t just be cheerleaders. We shouldn’t be bystanders who disregard the hard truth to paint a rosy picture.
Then he says to me:
Noam, you live by those words when it comes to history but do you also live by them when it comes to current events?
So Gil, think Eitan’s really asking this, what counts as a win for American Zionists? Is it Israel’s survival alone? Is it defending Israel against accusations like genocide? Or is it, as he says, Israel living up to its ideals? Which means talking honestly about difficult war moments that some call war crimes, some call unjust war behavior, some call heroism on the other side of it, about morality, about uncomfortable stuff. And I want to ask, do you agree with him? What does it mean for us American Jews who have power to a degree, but also responsibility, to use your word, in this conversation? What would you say directly to Eitan and to others who are worried we’re just enabling and being cheerleaders and not engaging? What would you say to someone like Eitan?
Gil Troy: First, let me step back and say that when David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of the state of Israel, one of the key founders of the state of Israel, was asked 10, 15 years into the Zionist project, well, has Zionism fulfilled all its dreams and all its ideals? And he said, not yet. And I, I think you, I think this young man, Eitan, we’re all not yet Zionists. We’re not yetters.
We always wanna remember the dreams, always wanna remember the ideals, but we also have no choice, because we return to history to be realists. And at this point, Israel is in a fight for its life. We call it a seven front war, but this war that we’re talking about, which is the fight against delegitimization, the fight against all the lies. And I’m old enough to understand that there are different moments in life. And I think this is a moment in life where we maybe put our self-righteousness and our judgmental-ness on hold until Israel is in a situation where things are a little more stable. And I say that with humility and I say that with pain.
There was a fascinating blog in the Times of Israel that I just read yesterday by a woman named Janet Eisenstrasse called American Jews Wounds are Self-Inflicted. She identifies herself as a Black Jew, and she says Jews need to learn from the black community. All kinds of people had different thoughts about Black Lives Matter, but we had solidarity at a moment when we felt our community was under attack. She, as a Jew, was saying that she feels that there isn’t enough solidarity. Now, I sitting in Israel, first of all, I to give what I call hakarat ha-tov. Wow.
Noam: Hakarat hatov, meaning recognition of good, gratitude.
Gil Troy: I keep on saying, God bless America. I don’t know, I’m getting emotional, recognition of good. I don’t know if you can imagine how meaningful it was for me when the Gerald R. Ford came streaming down Mediterranean for the United States of America to show after October 7th that American power is behind us to make sure we weren’t gonna go under. I don’t know if you know how meaningful it was for me, all the emails that I got from my Jewish and non-Jewish friends, are you okay? What’s going on? This is really horrible. My rabbi friend, I don’t wanna mention his name, who I’ve never seen angry.
The first time I ever saw him angry was when he told me the story of coming to Ben Gurion Airport with eight duffel bags worth of stuff that he and his congregants had raised and brought Kevlar vests and helmets and food and being stuck at Israeli customs. And he had to be bad cop while his other friend tried to be good cop. So first of all, I know there are tensions and there are criticisms, but I start by saying thank you for the embrace and thank you for caring. Not just caring, but shame.
Anger is a form of joining and a form of belonging. And there I’m actually stealing a line from the great Harvard moral philosopher, Michael Sandel. He said, I’m not ashamed of the behavior of Assad of Syria. Even though as a human being, I have a certain feeling of shame. I’m ashamed because I care. So even though I came on a little strong at the beginning, I reflect sometimes and certainly respect some of the anguish and some of the agony.
And I do want us to have a conversation about morality. Not only that, but I think Israelis need to hear from their American Jewish brothers and sisters and their American non-Jewish brothers and sisters about how it looks, how it feels, what’s going on. And for us to have these kind of difficult, complicated conversations. The yelling matches that I’ve had with my close friends on the Upper West Side helped me clarify where I stand. But when they yell at me and they say, how come you don’t have enough empathy for the Palestinians?
And I said, is there anybody else in New York who’s right now sitting and thinking, hmm. I don’t think I’m empathetic enough to the people who really want to kill me or really hate me. Do African-Americans sit around going, you know, those Ku Klux Klan white supremacist guys, they look really good in their white suits and they kind of have fun with NASCAR. We should be more empathetic. The notion that in a wartime, in a fight for our survival, in a fight for our reputation, the first place that so many American Jews have to go to is empathy for the other and self-criticism and not just self-criticism, but using really, really harsh judgmental words is a moral challenge to American Jews. So at the same time that I want to have the moral challenge from American Jews, I want to give a moral challenge and say how much of this is about your need to be comfortable? How much of this is your living with a certain kind of comfort that we can’t necessarily get? And how much of this conversation will evolve? And maybe we have to hold our moral firepower to three months from now, six months from now, a year from now, when hopefully all the hostages are freed.
Hopefully we have a different government and hopefully we have a different situation on the ground. And yes, then I can start thinking about, wow, what do I do for the Palestinians? But right now, what I most have to do is figure out how do I win this Eighth Front War, including the War of Reputation. Now that includes also showing an empathy for the Palestinians, not in a performative way, but as a human being, because I take no joy in the suffering of any child and the suffering of any innocent and the suffering of any bystander in war and I know what that means because I’ve buried friends who’ve been caught. And so let’s just sit with the complexity.
Noam: Gil, me add another layer based on something that you, I think you’ve said or I can’t sometimes I say this as a major compliment. Sometimes I can’t distinguish between what you said and the time Sharansky said, because sometimes it’s like co-authored and I don’t, can’t remember who said what or someone said something separately. yeah, but one of the things that I deeply believe for the American Jewish community is this. And if I can make a movement of this, I will. The American Jewish community, when I say the American Jewish community, I mean the American Jewish communities.
I mean, reform, Haredi, mean, Orthodox, conservative, I mean it all. I think that anyone that goes through a Jewish federation, Jewish community, Jewish school, Jewish youth group, Jewish camp, whatever, should have something called a shnat Sheirut, should serve, do something, go to Israel as part of your Jewish experience and give and be part of the Jewish community. Do something of giving, do something of being part of. I believe that to be the case.
The flip side of that, I would love to create a movement of that. Anyone that wants to get part of that, let me know. 501C3, pending.
Gil Troy: I’m with you.
Noam: You’re with me that, right? But here’s there’s a flip side of that. I think you and or Natan Sharansky, hero Natan Sharansky, have said something, correct me if I’m wrong, but that the world or the American Jewish community should have representatives that are not in the Knesset, but some, Israel’s parliament, but something like on the side of it, something to give advice or guidance or counsel, something like that to have a voice. And the reason I think it actually matters is because I don’t think it’s fair for Israeli Jews. And this is my position now. Now I’m second opinion, not doing the history facts, whatever. I don’t, I there’s something that I struggle with for Israelis and Israeli Jews specifically to think that every single thing that they do, good, bad, whatever it is, they could do fully and it has no impact on all of us living in the diaspora and just deal with it. And just like it is what it is folks. And like, that’s what it is. And like you chose not to live in Israel. That’s your choice. You’re in the United States of America. There’s 5.8 to 7 million of you. You know what? It is what it is. No, there are consequences on all sides of it. And, and to ask American Jews to simply be on the sidelines and to be cheerleaders, I actually believe is to the detriment of Zionism, which is the opposite of being a cheerleader and the opposite of being passive. To be a Zionist is to be active. I think we agree on that. So how do feel about those points?
Gil Troy: So first of all, give you an A. The first time Natan Sharansky and I publicly wrote something together was an article in Mosaic calling for a parliament which would meet in sync with the Israeli parliament, which has three sittings a year. And so prior to those three sittings, there would be a parliament of the diaspora to give opinions in the same way that we have environmental impact statements, in the same way
Noam: So Professor Troy I got an A I got an A on that.
Gil Troy: that we, before we pass a law in Knesset or in the Congress, should and do, at least in Israel, have financial impact statements, there should be a diaspora impact statement. And that’s also a phrase that the great historian Jonathan Sarna has used. And so we were talking about a mechanism of that and that became one of the chapters in our book, Never Alone. So indeed, that is our, and it comes from exactly that. What you articulated perfectly, which is that it’s unfair for American Jews to be fully implicated often by our actions and not have a voice. And so we were trying to figure out how do you have a voice, but of course it would be advisory and not statutory because there is a difference between paying taxes, living here and serving in the army. And so that was an attempt to kind of square that circle.
When I use the word solidarity, solidarity and cheerleading are different, right? And when I talk about context and when I talk about different times, I think, you know, in the same way that it’s one thing to disrobe when you’re about to go into a shower and another thing to disrobe in Times Square. So too, there are different times when different voices are heard and needed, different conversations are heard and needed and different contexts where it works.
And so I absolutely want around Shabbat tables and even in the public square conversations about what Israel’s doing, the rights and wrongs of it. And again, I think that Israel can learn from American Jews just like American Jews can learn from Israel. But I think it has to be done with proportion. I think it has to be done in a way. And what does solidarity mean? My definition of patriotism, which is basically solidarity. Patriotism is loving your country because of its politicians sometimes, but despite its politics always. Sometimes we win. And I love Donald Trump and I love Joe Biden or I love Bibi Netanyahu or I love Yair Lapid and we win, we’re in power. And then it’s really easy to be a patriot. But to be a patriot, to have solidarity when you hate the politicians, when you’re embarrassed by the government and yet you love your country anyway, what does that love mean?
Now, sometimes love means giving loving critique. It always means keeping that love and keeping that sense of proportion and being strategic and not just emoting. And I hear a lot of emoting. I hear a lot of judgment. And I just want us to think more in terms of partnership on both sides in the same way that I’m infuriated when Israeli religious people dismiss the reform movement.
By the way, you went back to Darfur in the reform movement. The reform movement was among the leaders in America of bringing consciousness about what was happening in Darfur. Give them the phrase I used before, hakarat ha-tov, acknowledgement of the good.
And by the way, when you talk about national service, I want to speak to our non-Jewish friends and say how much better America would be if it learned a little bit from Israel about national service, about giving back, about having a sense of purpose, about making your university years not just about me, me, me, my, my, my, more, more, more, now, now, now, but us, those beautiful words, us and we, which are often missing in the American vocabulary. And that’s why we need a healthy back and forth. And that goes back to what I said in the beginning, the core of my Zionism is a healthy exchange between Americanism and liberalism and Zionism. And that means struggling with these war issues, but also doing it in a way that said, I’ll acknowledge that I was silent during Iraq and I feel guilty about that. At least guilt, my mother said it was a wasted emotion, but you know, it can actually be saying, okay, you know, maybe I’m taking some responsibility, be a little bit late, but huh, maybe America faced really, really difficult choices in Mosul and I was silent there. Why am I so quick to use the word genocide in Gaza when Israel was doing nothing on October 7th except trying to celebrate Simchat Torah and they unleashed the most horrific rapes and massacres and kidnappings and torture. So the proportion is sometimes missing.
Noam: Gil, with due respect to Mama Troy, I disagree with her assessment on guilt. It’s a very healthy emotion. Shame, shame is unhealthy. Guilt is very healthy. But but
Gil Troy: Yeah. That’s interesting. Although I just don’t have shame actually shows a mark of belonging. So there’s something there too, but yeah, complicated.
Noam: Okay, separate conversation. So in Israel, the Israeli government, you just hear this word all the time. Bousha, tit bayesh, tit bayesh. It’s like constantly, that’s like the number one insult. Like, shame, shame, shame, shame. Right, exactly.
Gil Troy: Right, Be ashamed, be ashamed, right, right. And that finger, you got that finger down pat.
Noam: Dikembe Matambo, for our basketball friends in reference. Okay, wagging the finger. Give me a Gil Troy pithy classic guilt, joy, pithy line about something that we should be hopeful about in what’s going on in Israel. It’s incredibly painful, incredibly difficult, incredibly traumatizing for so many sides of this, but just give me something pithy and hopeful.
Gil Troy: I am so proud of the next generation, both the generation of American Jews and non-American Jews who’ve stood up and defended Israel and celebrated Israel and not allowed the enemies to set our agenda. And I’m so proud of the young Israelis who have sacrificed everything, life, limb, sanity, family, time to defend Israel, the Jewish people and Western civilization.
And yes, this is a very difficult moment at this moment, but when I step back and I think of how lost we were, how terrified we were on October 7th, and I see, and one of the advantages of living here is I wake up every day and I see heroes and I see miracles and I see an improvement. And my cousin Adele, who lived on Kibbutz Nireem and was stuck in a safe room for 11 hours and came out to see her entire social ecosystem and her kibbutz destroyed, she’s living there again. We’re flourishing. We have overcome tremendous odds and we continue to be among the happiest people. We continue to be a people of tradition.
I don’t buy into this notion that we’ve lost, we’ve won. A year ago, we would have been terrified about what was gonna happen if we dared to attack Hezbollah. Look at what Israel’s done vis-a-vis Iran, for the world.
So I acknowledge I’m not minimizing the pain. I’m not acknowledging the loss. I’m not acknowledging the embarrassment I’ll even use and the difficulties ahead. But when I step back and I certainly think in historical terms, I think this is gonna go down as one of the defining moments in Israeli history, but also one of the great moments of the last 40, 50 years, because we’ve shown that you can attack us, but like the Phoenix, we get knocked down, but we rise up again. And we’ve risen up again. And I believe that the Israel that’s gonna come after this government, with these young soldiers, with these young heroes is gonna be better than ever. We’re gonna have new partnerships with the diaspora and our brothers and sisters, Jewish and non-Jewish are gonna come and help rebuild the North and help rebuild the South. And we’re gonna rebuild a new conversation that’s gonna heal America, heal Israel and heal the world.
Noam: Thank you so much, Gil. I really, really enjoyed the conversation. Very, very helpful. Very, very difficult, but great, great, great, great stuff. Thank you.
Gil Troy: Great. Thanks for the question. These are, you know, not easy. These are the questions, right? Yeah.