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 Jody and Ari Storch. As always my email, Noam@unpacked.media.
As always email me at noam at unpacked dot media and subscribe to us on all the social channels Just search unpacking Israeli history. You’ll find it. Okay.
If you’re a regular listener, might have heard that a few months ago we were promoting something special. No, not Nerd Corner Alerts t-shirts, though we do have those. Check out our merch store. They’re amazing. I love our merch. It’s become the only thing I wear. Okay. But anyway, it’s not what I’m talking about. It was something else.
On Sunday, June 10th. Unpacking Israeli History had our first very own live show in one of my favorite cities in the United States, Chicago. I actually think Chicago is underrated as a city. I don’t know if that’s a hot take or not, but I think it’s underrated. Like when people hear the word city, I don’t know, they think of London, New York, Paris, Paris, sorry, Sydney, but I gotta say, Chicago’s up there. It’s up there.
You might know this by now, but our typical episodes are not only a ton of work, but they go through rounds and rounds of research and writing and dad jokes. It’s a whole process and my team is just awesome. We write, we edit, we tweak, we edit some more.
There are dozens of hours of work before we even get to the recording. But live episodes with guests who might go rogue, with unexpected audio glitches, where I could trip over my words, with hundreds of people watching me waiting for magic. Are you not entertained? To be honest, it was daunting. I was nervous. I speak publicly a lot. But I’m secretly always a little anxious beforehand. Don’t tell anyone. But unpacking Israeli history style? How could we even do that?
Well, we decided it’s time to go for it. But at that point, the question was, what kind of episode do we want to make? We realized we really needed someone exciting. Someone who could really speak to Israeli history in depth, but was also a storyteller. Someone I was excited to speak with and hear from more than anything. Someone who was often in the room where it happened, which is how we landed on the whip smart Dr. Michael Oren.
The night was amazing. It wasn’t perfect, those glitches, they happened. Hey, life is messy when it’s live, it’s just how it is. But it was amazing, it was really amazing.
And even more amazing, we knew after that this had to be an episode. Almost 500 people in that room engaged. There were tears at moments. There was laughter. There was learning. There was education. And it was entertaining. So we had to share it with the rest of you.
Now here’s what’s interesting. As I said, we recorded this on Sunday, June 10th. And if you know Michael Oren, you’ll know that among the dozens of fascinating topics we discussed, and you’ll hear it all soon, one of the things we talked about that we had to talk about was Iran. Michael has been banging the drum of Iran for literally decades, for decades. We talked about the JCPOA, the red lines, how Israel needed to stop Iran. If no one else would, according to Michael Oren, it was riveting. It was special.
But also it was hypothetical, right? Just two people who nerd out over Israeli history talking about the history and speculating about the future. But you know what happens? 100 hours later, like truly I think it was actually 100 hours, Israel started its surprise attack on Iran’s nuclear program leading to the next 12 days of war. And the conversation about Israel’s history with Iran was completely rewritten.
Now some of the conversation we had that night is sort of obsolete. For example, Michael literally called for Israel to bomb Iran and it literally happened 100 hours later, which was really crazy, but okay. So we thought, is this episode now silly to release? And the answer is no, not at all. It really isn’t. I and my producer, Rivky, watched the video too many times just to be sure. And if I do say so myself, even with the changing reality of the world, the episode really holds up. And so I give you our first ever live episode. Can’t wait to come to your city soon.
APPLAUSE
INTRO
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. If you’re interested in sponsoring an episode at Unpacking Israeli History or even just saying, what’s up, be in touch with me at noam@unpacked.media.
Before we start, check us out on Instagram, YouTube, anywhere and everywhere we are there. And of course, shoot me a note, hit me up at noam@unpacked.media.
This episode is an incredibly special one on so many levels. One, we’re recording this live in Chicago, baby. That’s, that’s right.
Two, two. It’s the first time we’re taking the show on the road and we said we got to do this. We got to do this in Chicago.
And three, we have the most awesome guest joining me today. And that awesome guest is none other than statesman, historian, soldier and bestselling author and former member of Knesset. Thank you. The one and the only Dr. Michael Oren. So without further ado. So without further ado.
Yalla! Let’s do this.
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Noam: Welcome, Michael, and thank you so much for joining us.
Dr. Oren: Noam. Great pleasure. Great pleasure. Long Chicago.
Noam: Michael, here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna hear a little bit about your personal story. We’re gonna then go into different games that I like to play. I’m a lot of fun as a person, like very nerdy games. So we’re gonna play them together and we’re gonna have fun, okay? And then I’m gonna ask you another few more personal questions. We’re gonna have, as every episode ends with five fast facts. Then you’re gonna hear an enduring lesson as I see it. And then we’ll do some Q&A.
So Michael, you have done a lot in your life. You can equally call yourself a historian, a soldier, a diplomat, a novelist, a novelist, a politician. What I want to hear is this. Tell me the inflection point in your life that made you go from an American from New Jersey, kind of Zionist, kind of smart, kind of interested in politics, to writing the definitive book, this book right here, the definitive book on 1967, to become the Israeli ambassador to the United States, to join the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, to serve as Deputy Minister in the Prime Minister’s office. I want to hear from you what that inflection point was for you growing up here in the States.
Dr. Oren: Wow, not so smart as a kid, by the way. We were talking about having also learning disabilities before, and you said something about being ADHD. I had every letter in the alphabet. I mean, ADB, BZZ, I had everything, dyslexic and everything. So I was sort of a basket case as a kid, but the worst part of it was I was the only Jewish kid growing up in a working class Sicilian neighborhood.
It’s actually the neighborhood where they shot the first two seasons of The Sopranos, until the neighborhood told The Sopranos to get out. They didn’t like it. And I used to get the hell beat out of me as being a Jew. I was called a Christ killer every day. I’d come home with like a bloody nose, black eyes, and my father, who was a World War II veteran, landed on Normandy Beach, had fought all the way through Europe with his brother Joe, my uncle Joe, and had liberated a concentration camp.
And they took pictures of the horrors they saw there, I carry them in my cell phone. And when I come home with this bloody nose, he’d open up the album and you say, you see that son? You see that? That’s why we need a strong state of Israel. And when you hear those words and you’ve just been called a Christ killer, that has a very profound impact on you.
Years later, I was 15. Two things happened to me when I was 15. I woke up one morning and said, oh my God, I’m Jewish. And I had no idea. I didn’t know what the Talmud was. I didn’t know what kashrut was. I had read my bar mitzvah. I got bar mitzvah, but I got bar mitzvah in transliteration. I read it in English. know, barut shatah, that kind of thing. I woke up one morning and said, I’m Jewish. I know nothing about being Jewish. And I went out to find a rabbi. I found a wonderful Chabad rabbi, Shalom Gordon, who with great patience began to teach me gemara. The film I have today are from Rabbi Gordon.
And then I joined the Zionist youth movement. And at any good Zionist youth movement, the first trip we made was to Washington, D.C. And there I met Israel’s ambassador to the United States. And being a very chutzpahdik kid, I ran up and I shook his hand and I said, that’s what I want to be when I grow up. I want to be Israel’s ambassador to the United States, literally a serious vow. Everything I did after that was designed to get me to that goal. The gentleman’s name was Yitzhak Rabin.
I later became an advisor to Yitzhak Rabin. And so these were the inflection points. And it’s just been an extraordinary journey.
We were talking about a mutual friend of ours, Yossi Klein Halevi, who’s actually my best friend. He calls me the Forrest Gump of the Jewish people because I worked with Rabin, I worked with Peres, I worked with Moshe Dayan, believe it or not. I’m that old. I was the last advisor to Abba Eban. That kind of thing. So all of these were huge milestones in my development as a Zionist.
Noam: Wow, so those are incredible moments. By the way, Here comes a nerd corner alert. I could be wrong about this, but the year that you probably went to see Rabin was it 73?
Dr. Oren: It was probably 72.
Noam: 72. I messed up the nerd corner alert. OK. 72, but that’s OK. I was close enough.
Dr. Oren: mentioned to somebody that I worked with, Moishe Day, a young person, they looked at me and they said, my God, you are so, so old.
Noam: Okay, so we have something else in common actually. It’s actually very special. Your father fought Normandy. My grandfather fought Normandy. So he was there, D-Day, as well. So it’s pretty amazing.
Yeah, shout out. Shout out to Saba Irving, Saba Irving, who my son, Ayal Yitzhak, who’s here, was named for. And my daughters, Liana and Nisa, as well.
RUBICON MOMENTS
OK, so I want to transition to historical moments. We’re going to play a little game. And this is a history podcast. So I want to talk about history.
A personal crossroad is when there are moments where a single decision sets your life on a whole new course. And I want to talk and shift to Israel’s Rubicon moments, the ones that changed everything.
Now I want to frame this a bit for everyone. A Rubicon moment is a point of no return. A bold, decisive move that fundamentally changes the course of events. The phrase comes from 49 BCE when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon River with his army, an act that defied Roman law and kicked off civil war. When he crossed, he actually said the die is cast.
Since then, crossing the Rubicon has come to mean three things. It’s a critical decision when there’s no turning back. It’s a risky or it’s a transformative move. And it’s a moment when ambiguity ends and history begins.
Now I want to explain Rubicon moments. I’m an educator, so I want to explain what this looks like. A Rubicon moment happens all over the place. It could be in politics, Russia invading Ukraine. In history, the US Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. In business, Steve Jobs going back to Apple. And in life, quitting a job to start something new. There are lots of Rubicon moments.
Michael, let’s try something. I want us to go back and forth, no repeats, picking what we each believe are Israel’s most significant Rubicon moments. Small decisions, big consequences. Moments that once they happened, there was no turning back. You ready? Go. Okay, as our special guest, I’ll let you go first. Rubicon moment number one. Go.
Dr. Oren: May 14th, 1948. So the Zionist executive meets in the Art Museum of Tel Aviv. The building was chosen on purpose because it had the thickest walls of any building in the city. And the assumption was that if the state of Israel was proclaimed on that day, that the Egyptian Air Force would bomb Tel Aviv and that this would be the only building in the city that could maybe withstand that bombing.
What happened?
And the Zionist executive met, but the problem is several members couldn’t reach Tel Aviv because they were besieged in Jerusalem. And the Zionist executive was completely divided between people who were in favor of declaring the state and those opposed to declaring the state. And among the people opposed to declaring the state were people like Moshe Sharett, no small people. Sharett had just come back from a visit to Washington and he had met with George Marshall, the Secretary of State, the most influential military figure of his generation, the architect of World War II victory.
And Marshall had said to Moshe Sharett, if you declare the Jewish state, you will not be alive another three weeks. All of you will be dead. And he began to call up, believe it or not, 300,000 American reservists to save the Jews of Palestine because they were all going to die. And Sharett came back to Ben-Gurion and said, we can’t do this. We’re going to have another Holocaust within three years. We can’t do this. And it came down to literally this vote. And the Jewish state was to claim on the basis of about two votes.
I told you earlier, I worked with Shimon Peres. Peres told me that he once looked, that day on May 14th, he looked in the drawer of Ben-Gurion’s desk and there was a note from the head of the Haganah that says we have enough bullets to fight for one week. One bullet to fight for one week. And Israel’s about to be invaded by five Arab armies that were lavishly armed by the British and the French. So think about this moment where Ben-Gurion has to make this decision. Do I do this, and change the arc of Jewish history? But why do this, and I am responsible for the death of 600,000 Jews, three years almost to the date after the end of the Holocaust? May 14, 1948, May 8, 1945. He makes that decision. And because of that decision, I’m sitting here tonight, you’re sitting here tonight, we’re all sitting here tonight.
Noam: OK, I just want to state, this isn’t a competitive game because you’re going to win this game. So it’s not competitive. I’m going to give a different, yes, Declaration of Independence is very big. Five weeks later is my Rubicon moment number one. Five weeks later. Five weeks later, that’s my Rubicon moment number one, where there’s an Irgun ship named the Altalena. And it arrives in Kfar Vitkin just north of Netanya with rifles, the ammunition, the immigrants. Menachem Begin demanded 20% of the ammunition go to the Irgun. David Ben-Gurion, the leader of the Haganah, refused. And during the unloading, a fight broke out.
Now, Ben-Gurion ordered Yitzhak Rabin, who you mentioned earlier, to shell the Altalena. Begin told his men to stand down. 16 Irgun men killed, three Haganah.
Who’s the hero in the story? it depends on who you ask and how you view the story and the narrative. You could say, well, Ben-Gurion’s the hero. Why is he the hero? Because he’s the one who said we have to have one army, period. We have to have one unified experience, period. And he’s the one who made it happen. People argue that one of the reasons that the Palestinians don’t necessarily have the same exact success as the Israelis is because they’ve never had their Altalena moment. They’ve never had the moment where there are multiple factions and one says, we are taking control and we’re going to take lead. And that’s what’s going to happen, period.
Or it could be Menachem Begin who’s the hero. Because Menachem Begin said, do not raise a hand against a brother, not even today. It is forbidden for Hebrew weapon to be used against Hebrew fighters. He said, milchemet achim, me’olam lo. Civil war, never. And if Begin did not make that decision, that moment where he said, stand down, I don’t know if the Israelis, if the Jewish people would have the experience that they’ve had since 1948. Rubicon moment number one for me.
Dr. Oren: Rubicon number two. 1916, a Polish-Jewish doctor named Chaim Weizmann who couldn’t get a job in Poland or in Austria where he’d gone to medical school, had to go to Manchester, England and get a job as a chemist working in a factory. And he, you know, really wasn’t really interesting for him. Wasn’t doing anything. Britain was in war and it was in a terrible situation. 1916 was the year of the terrible bloodbaths on the Western Front and the British were running out of artillery shells.
And one day, this Chaim Weizmann lights a match next to some mold on a piece of corn and it blows up. And it turns out that Chaim Weizmann invented acetone, which then became the major fuel for the rest of the British Army during the remainder of World War I, for the artillery shells. So this obscure Polish-Jewish chemist finds himself catapulted into leadership circles in Great Britain, the greatest empire of its day.
Now, Chaim Weizmann just happened to be a Zionist. A chance meeting on a train platform with Herzl years before had transformed him into a die-hard Zionist. This is what I want to be. And because he developed acetone, Chaim Weizmann comes into contact with the foreign minister of Great Britain, the guy named Alfred Lord Balfour.
And just at this moment, 1917, the British Army is about to defeat the Turks in what was then called Palestine. And Balfour comes up with this notion. I’m a religious Christian. I believe that the land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people. I’m going to give this land in the name of the British Empire to the Jewish people. Together with Chaim Weizmann, they start to sell this idea to the British government. The British government looks at these two individuals and said, you’re crazy. We need Arab oil. Why are we going to annoy these people? Don’t do this.
This Chaim Weizmann says, know, I got this guy, I know this guy in Washington who is also kind of a Zionist. His name is Louis Brandeis. And he happens to be a good friend, I think, of Wilson, the president. Maybe we’ll all go to Washington and talk to him, because we get the Americans to say to the British, well, you better issue this declaration or the United States won’t send troops to Western Europe during World War I. Maybe we can do this.
And so they go, Weizmann and Balfour, in May 1917, we actually have the date, May 10th, 1917, they go with Brandeis into a meeting in the Oval Office with Woodrow Wilson, and 12 minutes later they come out with Wilson’s agreement for this Balfour decoration, which be issued that November. In that 12 minutes, everything hung.
And the Balfour Declaration becomes the basis of the British mandate in Palestine, which becomes the basis of the 1947 partition resolution, creating a Jewish and an Arab state in the land of Israel after 2,000 years. All because somewhere along the line, an obscure chemist lit up a piece of corn and invented acetone.
Yeah. And tell me there’s not meaning to Jewish history. Really.
Noam: Michael, I don’t want to be weird here, but you’re really good at this game. You’re good. You’re good.
So we learned three great moments in Israeli history. I’ll give you a fourth. The fourth is a story that my father told me, and my mother as well.
In November of 1977, he said they were in Israel, and they said the absolute craziest thing happened, the most unimaginable thing happened. It was November 9th, 1977, and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat said he was willing to go to the Israelis’ home in Jerusalem and discuss peace. This is what he said. I have it in my notes here.
And I’ve chosen this difficult road which is considered, the opinion of many, the most difficult road. I’ve chosen to come to you with an open heart and an open mind. I’ve chosen to present to you and in your own home the realities devoid of any schemes or whims, not to maneuver or to win a round, but for us to win together. The most dangerous of rounds and battles in modern history. The battle of permanent peace based on justice.
Israel had snipers on the rooftops in case Sadat’s plane was a trap and the terrorists jumped out. It was a small decision to get on a plane. A small thing, you just put your feet on a plane. He made that decision and since then the path towards peace between Israelis and Arabs started with Israel making peace with the most powerful Arab country in the world at the time. Rubicon moment number four, Anwar Sadat.
Dr. Oren: Number five. It’s a deeply personal one. You’re not going to find it in any history book. I’d gotten out of the Israeli army. I’d been a lone soldier, out for about two weeks. As they say, my feet weren’t dry yet.
And I get a call from a certain office in the Israeli government saying, are you willing to go to the Soviet Union and work underground with the Zionist underground? It’s a very rough period. Brezhnev, everybody was in this underground, knew they were going to be sent to Siberia within a certain amount of time. And how could I say no? So I volunteered.
Had some very rudimentary training, learned how to say ya ne ponimayu in Russian, which means I don’t understand Russian. And in the winter of 1981 was sent out to meet with the Zionist underground. Terrified, absolutely terrified.
And my first contact on a deserted train station platform in Moscow was a young, brash, handsome, fearless individual named Yuli Edelstein. From there we went into the Ukraine, into places no one ever heard of. You don’t want to go to these places like Uzhgorod and Vinica. And I met with the heads of these underground.
Many of them, you should know, were teenage girls, teenage women, who were something out of the books of the Warsaw ghetto, who were absolutely fearless in the face of the KGB. And they all knew they were going to be arrested and sent to Siberia eventually, but they taught themselves Hebrew and they were committed to making aliyah. And the story is this. It was Passover.
And we were going to have a seder like you see in the Middle Ages, behind closed curtains, with no one to see us. And I was going with the person I went to Israel with, another recently released lone soldier from the Golani Brigade. No one’s perfect. And we were walking toward the building. We were supposed to meet this family on the second floor. And behind each of the tree was a big KGB thug with a baseball bat. And they were going to kill us.
And the head of the underground in this city was a young woman named Yehudit. And she saw this from the window. She opened the window and started screaming, rape, rape, rape. So all the windows in the courtyard opened up. And the KGB people came out with their baseball bats. She ran downstairs. This woman was less than five feet tall. And one of the KGB people lifted her up like this. And she said something in Russian. Later, she told me what she said. What are you going to do, beat me up too?
Then we ran upstairs. We got through the very early part of the seder before the door burst in and they arrested my friend and myself. And they took us down the stairs. And as they led us down by the scruffs of our neck down the second story, all the members of this underground stood on that first story and sang Hatikvah.
So, it’s hard for me to tell this story. I say this story because it was these heroes, and you know, I’ve been in the army a long time. I’ve seen a lot of heroism in my life. I’ve never seen heroism like this. These people took down an empire. These people took down the Soviet empire. You all know Natan, but there are many Natans out there. And then they came to Israel, a million of them. And they transformed the country.
And we talk about the start-up nation. So much of that start-up nation were the thousands and thousands of engineers and physicists who came to the land of Israel and transformed cities like Be’er Sheva, totally unrecognizable. So this is the inflection moment. The inflection moment, 1989, the fall of the Soviet Empire and the mass aliyah to Israel.
It was because of not, you know, not someone making a decision, not someone discovering an explosive device, but because of thousands of young people mainly who stood up and risked everything for what they believed and for our people.
Noam: Okay, I’m a competitive guy, you won three to two, I will not say my last one. That last example is actually incredibly profound because it really shows, in my opinion, what Zionism is. And Zionism is, it’s a verb, it’s someone who acts, someone who does, and someone who engages. It’s not someone who pontificates, it’s not someone who just believes something, it’s someone who gets their fingernails dirty and gets involved and gets engaged and gets invested and does things. And that’s what you’re talking about.
So we have five events, Declaration of Independence, Altaalena, Weizmann and Balfour, Sadat, and the taking down of the Soviet Empire in 89, which led to an unbelievable influx of Soviet Jews into Israeli society. There it is, our first game of Rubicon Moments.
And by the way, if any of you are YouTube Unpacked fans, we have videos on the women of the Refusenik movement, which is an incredible video, podcasts on the Refusniks. It’s such an important story.
And it’s an example of a story that’s not about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And I love telling stories of Israel that are not just about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s just about Zionist identity. And when we reduce the story of Israel to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we’re not really telling the story of Israel. We’re telling an aspect of the story, but there’s a lot more to the story.
“WHAT IF”S OF ISRAELI HISTORY
I have mentioned a few times that I like basketball. Specifically, like Bill Simmons. I don’t know if you know who Bill Simmons is. He is probably the number one sports podcaster. I try to learn a lot from my rebbe, Bill. And Bill has a game called What If. “What If?” The great what ifs of sports history.
So I want to play a game with you, Michael, called “What If”s. What ifs of Israel history. These are the moments that didn’t happen, but easily could have. Near misses, the road not taken, the decisions that had they gone another way might have changed everything.
So I want to give you an opportunity to share with me an example. What’s a good what if of Israeli history? Like it could have happened. It might have happened. It would shifted everything if it didn’t happen. What’s a good what if of Israeli history?
Dr. Oren: 1972, the year I met Yitzhak Rabin, King Hussein of Jordan came up with the notion of the United Hashemite Kingdom program. It was an idea for a federation between what they called the West Bank and Jordan. At the same time, Israel’s minister of labor, their defense, Yigal Allon, came up with program called the Allon Plan, which called for Israel to annex parts of the West Bank, the Jordan Valley, East Jerusalem, and the Etzion block, the Gush Etzion block, and have the rest maybe, it gets to Jordan. And these two programs came about almost at the same time.
But the missed opportunity was that Israel rejected the United Hashemite Kingdom program, and the Jordanians and the Palestinians and all the other Arabs rejected the Allon Plan. So you could conceivably have a situation today where the Jordan Valley would be part of Israel, sovereign part of Israel, the annexation that people talk about, Gush Etzion part of Israel, East Jerusalem part of Israel, in an agreed formula with Israel and sovereign Arab states at the time. A missed opportunity.
Noam: And what would have looked different?
Dr. Oren: Well, everything would have been different. I mean, before 1974, before Arafat’s speech at the UN, which I covered as a student reporter, so Arafat goes to the United Nations.
Noam: 1974, is that with the rifle?
Dr. Oren: He had a holster, wasn’t sure, but he lifted up his arms. I’m holding up an olive wrench and a gun and gun in one hand and he lifted up and he saw he had a pistol under his jacket. No one talked about the Palestinian issue. Even at the Munich massacre, the Harvard Museum massacre in 1972, Black September, those weren’t Palestinians, they were Arab terrorists, weren’t Palestinian terrorists.
And so the Palestinian issue is really much a creation of the 1970s for the world. I’m not saying about the Palestinians, they thought of themselves as Palestinians. Remember, in 1947, the partition resolution calls for the creation of a Jewish state and an Arab state, not a Jewish state and a Palestinian state. And if you’re referring to Palestinians before 1948, it was Jews.
If you, anybody old enough to have gone to the World’s Fair in 1939 in New York, the Palestinian pavilion there was the Zionist pavilion. You could go and have a genuine Palestinian dinner of schnitzel. No kidding, I’ve had the menu, all right? So this was a very belated notion, the notion of Palestinian nationalism.
So 1970, 72 was before all of this. And people weren’t thinking about the Palestinian issue. They were thinking about what was then known rather quaintly as the Arab-Israeli conflict. Remember it? Well before the Arab-Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it was an Arab-Israeli conflict. It was a state-to-state conflict. So, missed opportunity. Missed opportunity. The Palestinians weren’t going to accept it, but who knows?
Noam: Are you, I just want to understand this for myself a little bit and people listening, are you suggesting that there’s no such thing as Palestinian national identity or that Palestinian national identity emerged later?
Dr. Oren: There was no international recognition of Palestinian national identity. It wasn’t on anybody’s agenda. People weren’t thinking about it. People started thinking about it very seriously in the 70s.
Noam: That is, would call, an example that no one here thought of for sure. No one was like, you know what, that example that Michael just said. Okay, so that’s why this is unpacking his early history. There it is. I’m gonna give a different example, an example that I think about, but I feel like you might disagree with me on this, which I like. I encourage disagreement. That’s a good thing.
What if Shimon Peres won the 1996 elections? What if on May 29th, 1996, things change? What if this surprise victory for Benjamin Netanyahu, which was by a margin of under 30,000 votes, less than 1% of the total number of votes cast.
Now the context to remind everyone listening is that this was right after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. And they were in conversation about peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Oslo 2 had just happened in 1995. There were conversations. There were also suicide bombs. And a year before that, was Baruch Goldstein in 1994 killing Palestinians. There was a lot going on. A lot going on. The initial exit polls had predicted that Shimon Peres would win. When he went and went to sleep with Perez, this was the line, and they woke up with Netanyahu. Labor had the largest party in Knesset.
Do you agree that that is a what if? That if Perez had defeated Bibi Netanyahu, that things would have looked different between the two parties, Israelis and Palestinians. Now I know that Netanyahu largely did continue the peace process at the time, the Wye River Agreement in 1998, and then lost in 1999, but how do you see it? Is that a what if or is it not a what if?
Dr. Oren: It’s not quite.
Noam: Say why?
Dr Oren: Not quite. Let me explain. I was in government at the time. I lived through all this. And it was also an intensely personal experience. I was an advisor on interchurch and interfaith affairs in the Rabin government. Very interesting job. But in the summer of 1995, the suicide bombers began. And one of the victims was my sister-in-law, a Jewish day school teacher from New Haven, killed on the way up to Mount Scopus in a bus bombing. And there were a number of bus bombings. And in the government, we were urging Prime Minister Rabin to halt the peace process. And Rabin at the time was coming out and saying that all these really who were killed were victims of peace. And we were saying to him, Mr. Prime Minister, this is not washing. We’re losing. We’re hemorrhaging support. And the polls were showing that if the elections were held then, say in November of 1995, we would lose. And we were already starting to look for jobs.
And so public opinion had shifted significantly against the Oslo process. And the fact that Netanyahu could win by any margin so close after the assassination of Rabin showed the degree to which the population had shifted. And so if Shimon Peres had won, and remember I had worked with Shimon Peres for years also and I had great regard for him, but it wouldn’t have affected what was going on on the Palestinian side.
And the Palestinians had embarked on a reign of terror, which would come to a head in climax in October of 2000 in the Second Intifada. And Peres was the last person, last person in the Second Intifada, by the way, to actually acknowledge that Arafat was guilty and culpable and complicit in the bombings. I know this for a fact from other people I worked with in government.
Ultimately, it wouldn’t have changed because the Oslo Process was flawed at its core. And not just because the Palestinians actually don’t want a two-state solution, and I, as an historian, not just as someone who’s been involved in politics, I cannot adduce one shred of evidence over the last 100, 120 years that the Palestinians actually want a two-state solution. They actually hold the world’s record of a people who have turned down a two-state solution. 1937, 47, can I go on? 2000, 2001, 2008.
But. Also because the process itself was flawed. I’ll never forget, and I hope I don’t go on too long, looking at the Oslo Accords in government in 1993, September 1993, and I’m flapping through this thing, and I get to an exchange of letters between Rabin and Arafat at the end. And in these exchange of letters, Yitzhak Rabin recognized the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. He used the P word. There’s a Palestinian people.
Arafat wrote back and said, I recognize Israel. And I remember looking at this and saying, uh-oh, we’re in big trouble because there’s no symmetry here. And to this day, to this day, not a single Palestinian leader, even the most left-wing Palestinian leader, has ever recognized the existence of a Jewish people, has ever recognized the existence of a second temple, a first temple. All the artifacts we dig up are all fabricated. They call it, our history, fabricated history.
And if you want to look for the essence of the conflict right there, you could have a two-state solution, but one state’s going to be legitimate and the other state’s going to be transient. And you will immediately have the conflict will go on. So back then in 1993, I realized that this process was fundamentally flawed. And that flaw came into fruition in 1995, 1996, and of course, in the year 2000.
Noam: Okay, so we’re not gonna do many more what ifs. Yes, okay. I’m gonna ask a question. I just wanna explain something you said just to be on the nose a bit. Meaning you described what Rabin did as talking about the Palestinian people as opposed to Arafat not mentioning Israel as a Jewish state, right? That’s the-
Dr. Oren: Again, the fundamental demand in our peace process of both, of Ehud Barak, Tzipi Livni, and Bibi Netanyahu, all of us demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as the Jewish state. Understand that that’s not a frivolous demand. By the way, Obama supported that too, because we understood that if we’re going to recognize a Palestinian state as the nation state of the Palestinian people, there has to be recognition that’s mutual of Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people. Otherwise, you’ll have immediate irredenta the next day.
And no Palestinian has ever, ever come close to recognizing that. And I participated in the last round of negotiations with the Palestinians, and it was Saeb Erekat, passed away from COVID, who said–
Noam: I going to ask you about the Saeb Erekat question. I want to hold on to that for a second. I want to challenge you on an idea here.
As anyone who listens to Unpacking Israeli History knows, that one of the things I like to talk about is bias. Confirmation bias, which is seeing what we expect to see. Desirability bias, which means seeing what we want to see. And I think broadly speaking, people, I can’t speak for people in this room, but broadly speaking, a lot of people in this room care a lot about Israel, care a lot about Zionism, and certainly want to align themselves, even if it is objectively right, the history you are teaching and talking about, they want to agree with you. They want it. Meaning, it is good for their brains to make sure that they don’t have cognitive dissonance and go to sleep at night feeling like, wait, I don’t understand how these two ideas collide. So I want to challenge you on a different what if.
Is there an example, and I’ll get to Saeb Erekat in a minute. Is there an example in Israeli history where you could look back and you have been part of so many different aspects of Israeli history and you’re a historian of Israeli history? I want to know is there any moment that you could look back at Israeli history and say there’s a what if here if Israel did something slightly differently there would be something could have been different or is it the case you’re a Zionist I’m a Zionist we love Israel, It’s all part of our DNA. But just to internally challenge myself, is there an aspect of a what if within Israeli society of things might have been different if or not?
Dr. Oren: We can go back to 1949 when Ben-Gurion gave a blanket exemption for military service to the Haredim. We know what happened with that.
But let’s take something from my personal experience. September 2012, ancient history. You remember there was a presidential election going on, Barack Obama against Mitt Romney? Very close election. And there was a great fear in Washington and the White House that Israel that summer would undertake military action against Iran, against the Iranian nuclear program. And within Israel, this was hugely controversial with most of the security heads of the Mossad, of the army coming out against the Prime Minister saying, we’re not going to do this, we’re not going to do this, we’re not going to do this.
And though I was ambassador and as ambassador one does not have an opinion, one represents a government, but behind the scenes I was very much in favor of what we call euphemistically perhaps kinetic action against the Iranians. A.
nd tremendous tremendous pressure from the Obama administration on us pressure within Israel on the Prime Minister and there was a big question about whether Israel was going to act. I went to sleep every night with the phone next to my ear, assuming that the phone would ring at 2, 3 o’clock in the morning. and I get that, you know, 3 a.m. phone call.
It didn’t happen. In September, the Prime Minister went to the United Nations and some of you may be old enough to remember and the United Nations he drew a bomb, remember this?, on a piece of paper and drew a red line across the bomb. That red line was at 250 kilograms of uranium enriched to 20%. And that Israel would only act if Iran passed that red line.
Right after that, we retired to a room and the Prime Minister called the President and said, well, you asked for time and space. I just gave you time and space.
Unfortunately, with that time and space, the President negotiated a secret agreement with Iran that was not to Israel’s interest, a very, very dangerous agreement, the JCPOA. And in exchange for not going to war against Iran, the White House issued, without actually anyone attaching their name to it, a certain word about the Prime Minister. He basically being called a coward for backing down.
So the what if is, what if he hadn’t drawn that bomb? What if we hadn’t waited till today when Iran has not amassed 250 kilograms of 20% enriched uranium, but enough 60% enriched uranium to make nine nuclear weapons? What if he had acted back in September 2012?
And the course of the Middle East would have been very different. Maybe Hamas wouldn’t have been so powerful. Hezbollah wouldn’t have been so powerful. The Houthis, held the, whoever heard of the Houthis, right? Who knows? That’s a huge what if. And it has nothing to do with the Palestinians in that way. It has to do with us and Iran.
Noam: Now I am reluctant to enter a political discussion, but thoughts are now going. Is what you’re seeing with President Trump right now, is that a continuation of President Obama? Is that different, is it similar, how do you see it?
Dr. Oren: On the Iranian issue, there’s not a tremendous amount of difference. Here the president pulled out of the JCPOA in 2018, calling it the worst agreement ever. And now we see renewed negotiations between Iran and the United States. They were, again, a surprise to us, as they were a surprise to us back when those negotiations began in 2013. We were not informed in advance.
And the president actually went further than Joe Biden did because Biden did not have direct negotiations with Iran. He had indirect negotiations with Iran. It was Obama who had direct relations with Iran.
And here now we get into speculation because the press is saying many things and the administration’s position has changed several times, whether they were seeking initially the position was they were seeking to cap enrichment at 3.4%, which is precisely what the JCPOA was about. Now they’re saying that Iran will not have the right to enrich on their side which is the Israeli position. We call for the dismantlement of Iran’s nuclear facilities. So it’s not quite clear but there is clearly pressure on Israel not to act kinetically. And the president was asked asked very expressly in a press conference several days ago Have you told mr. Netanyahu not to attack Iran and he said yes. He said, I told him it would not be a very good idea at this time.
Noam: Okay, so at the time of this recording, everyone listening, that’s where we are right now. And who knows how things will change with time.
ROOM WHERE IT HAPPENED
So we did what ifs, we did Rubicon moments. I wanna go into one last aspect is, in the room where it happened. You said something to me right before this conversation. We had a preliminary conversation together and I was very interested in the room where it happened. You were telling me a story about Saeb Erekat, and you said that your 20, 30, 40 years of learning, of studying history, and university didn’t prepare you, or you didn’t have even an iota of the amount of understanding that you had from one meeting with Erekat. You didn’t tell me what happened at that meeting, but I’m now excited to hear what happened and what you heard.
Dr. Oren: Okay, so this is the last round of negotiations with the Palestinians. We actually sat and talked with the Palestinians. And he said something to our delegation. Said that Caravaca, was the chief negotiator for the Palestinians. Chief negotiator for the Palestinians, very intelligent individual, very cunning, and a survivor, a political survivor in a rough neighborhood. And he said to us, quote unquote, you want us to recognize you as the Jewish state.
Who was Sayyid
Dr. Oren: Don’t you understand that you’re asking us to negate our identity?
Years of study down the tubes. Here we are talking about borders and Jerusalem and settlements and this. And suddenly you realize this conflict is about identity.
We wake up in the morning and we are Jews. We are Jews because of 4,000 years of Jewish history and belief and tradition. We don’t wake up in the morning and we are not Jews because we are not Palestinians. They wake up in the morning and they are Palestinians because they’re not us. And that’s what he’s basically saying. And that by making peace and a peace that’s actually a real peace based on mutual recognition.
By the way, I recognize as a Palestinian state, Palestinian people. And I think that Palestinians under certain circumstances have a right to self-determination and what they regard as their homeland. If that makes me a leftist, then so be it.
I recognize there’s a policy. Doesn’t mean you’re going to actualize that right. But that right has never, ever been reciprocated by any Palestinian leader.
Here was our fight. There was Saeb Erekat, telling us why. Because if we recognize you as a Jewish people, if we recognize that there was a second temple and a first temple and a King David and a King Solomon, then we cease to exist. And I thought to myself, how do we possibly, possibly overcome that?
And that yes, this conflict can be managed much better. I’ll plug my new book called 2048, which has the longest chapter in this. It’s about the history of how Israel could live another 100 years starting on our 100th birthday, 2048. But the longest chapter is about the peace process and how we can move forward given the fact that the two-state solution is not going to happen. But there are other ways of moving forward and being creative about it that we can better manage this conflict.
But I can’t solve the Palestinians’ identity crisis for them. I got enough problems with our own identity crisis, right? But I can’t create an identity for them. I’ll end just to one point. If you look up in the New York Times, I don’t recommend you do this.
There was an article that appeared several years ago about the opening of a museum of Palestinian identity in Namala. Beautiful building, gorgeous building, had a huge ceremony. New York Times covered it, but there was one little glitch. The museum was empty. Look it up. And if you ask me the core of the conflict, this is what it is.
LOOKING FORWARD
Noam: So I wanna go, this is a history podcast, but I wanna think about what it looks like to look ahead, to look forward. Majority of the time on this podcast, we are talking about what happened, the story of Israel, the story of the Jewish people. When I introduced you earlier, I said that if there’s anyone that could help us unpack the complicated aspects of Israel’s past in order to make sense of the present, that it’s you, Michael, that you have been in the rooms where it happened, that you are a historian with a perspective, with a perspective.
And I think it’s important to know that you do have a perspective that you are sharing. We spent a lot of time looking back, reflecting on these turning points, missed opportunities perhaps, what ifs, Rubicon moments. But you said something in Ally, you said:
I’m a historian. I routinely say in response to anybody asking me about the future, I have enough difficulty predicting the past.
You know what I was gonna say, so exactly. But I wanna ask a question about the future right now. And not about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but about the American-Jewish-Israeli-Jewish conflict. I wanna know for you, what does the future of this relationship look like? How do we become closer? How do we become allies with each other? How do we become a people that feels connected? Do you feel like where we’re supposed to be? Do you feel like there’s work to be done? What does the future look like in our relationship? I’m American, you’re Israeli.
Dr. Oren: It’s an extraordinary moment. An extraordinary moment in its pain, its horror, our loneliness, Jewish loneliness today. I think it’s our overwhelming feeling that we’re so much alone in the world today. And much, much hangs in the balance. Much of what hangs in the balance is maybe not in our hands.
Should an agreement with Iran be concluded that resembles the JCPOA, then Iran will enrich itself again. It will once again take over Syria. will rebuild Hezbollah. It will rebuild Hamas. And we’ll find ourselves, more or less, back on the eve of October 7. But if Iran is cowed, if the Iran nuclear program is dismantled, then Israel could have peace with Syria. East could have peace with Lebanon, peace with Saudi Arabia entirely again. important progress can be made on the Palestine issue as well. Everything hangs in the balance right now.1
The American Jewish community is, as many physicists say about the universe, expanding and contracting at the same time. It’s contracting through assimilation, intermarriage, but it’s also expanding, certainly in the Orthodox parts of the community, through big families like your own, where they have almost no intermarriage. So the American Jewish community in the future may be smaller, I’m not so certain, but it’s going to be more grounded in its Jewish learning.
And performance is going to be more connected to the state of Israel. It is. So I’m actually optimistic about the future of American Jewry. I want to tell you this right now. And that’s where I am.
Noam: That’s important.
Dr. Oren: But we also have to acknowledge that we occupy different realities. And the most important thing we can do is to talk to one another, and I know this sounds rather smarmy, but to have Israeli Jews come here and see the American Jewish reality and have American Jews go there because there’s really no substitute. I can give you all the hasbara on the world, all the explanations, all the history books in the world, but there’s no substitute to actually coming and living in the state of Israel and seeing what it’s like. That is absolutely true.
We have to invest much, much more in Jewish education. We’re fighting antisemitism on so many different levels now. And yes, we’ve learned in a Churchillian sense that we can fight antisemitism in the courts and in the classrooms and certainly on the computer screens. But the most important way of fighting antisemitism, and this has been the rule for the last 3,000 years, is by investing in ourselves and our own identity. That will also, by investing in Jewish identity, will also bring our two communities closer together, ultimately. Again, it all hangs on the balance right now.
A last thought, because I said that this is an extraordinary moment in Jewish history. It’s one of those rare moments in Jewish history where every single one of us, everyone in this audience, can make a difference. Can actually do something material that can make a difference by being involved, by going out and fighting, by educating, by standing up for who we are.
FIVE FAST FACTS
Noam: Thank you. Thank you, Michael. I want to conclude this episode the way I always conclude, which is with five fast facts. And I’m going to have my producer, Rivky Stern, bring out five fast facts from this episode of Unpacking Israeli History. Thank you, Rivky.
Number one. Number one. This is how we do it. Israel has had a few special Rubicon moments. May 14th, 1948, of course, when the state of Israel was declared. That moment changed the arc of Jewish history. Five weeks later, the Irgun ship, Altalena, shows up on the shores of the Mediterranean. Ben-Gurion’s decision that Israel needed one army and Begin’s decision to stand down ensured Israel would have a unified future. In 1977, Anwar Sadat came to Israel and opened up the possibility of peace between Israel and Arab countries. And the heroism of the Jewish Zionists of the USSR not only took down the Soviet empire, but transformed Israel. And none of those would have happened without Chaim Weizmann, no relation, inventing acetone. That’s fast fact number one.
Number two, the Allon Plan and the United Hashemite Kingdom program came out at around the same time, but Israel rejected the Jordanian plan and Jordan and Palestinians rejected the Allon Plan. If these groups had been open to hearing one another, how different would the map and conversation be today?
Number three, Shimon Peres lost the 1996 national election, and Netanyahu won shockingly by under 1% of the votes cast. This was soon after Rabin’s assassination in Oslo 2. If Peres had defeated Netanyahu, what could have happened differently? Spoiler, Michael is not convinced this one would have changed much.
Number four, in 2012 Israel had to make a decision whether or not to take action against Iran’s nuclear facilities. They never did. America and Iran signed the JCPOA. But what if they had decided to take action back in the fall of 2012?
And number five, the future of the relationship between Israel and the American Jewish community is uncertain, but American spending time in Israel, Israeli spending time in America is critical as is investing in Jewish education.
Those are your five fast facts, but here’s one enduring lesson as I see it.
Before we wrap, I want to bring in something I read recently that really stuck with me. In a piece for Sapir, which is a phenomenal journal. Yes, my older brother, Chanan, is the director of the Sapir Institute. It’s true, but it is phenomenal. Toba Hellerstein reflected on how today it’s not enough to talk about facts. We’re living in a moment where feelings often don’t care about your facts. This is something I say very often. There are pundits who say facts don’t care about your feelings. And it’s equally true that feelings don’t care about your facts.
And yet, and this is the part that got me, truth still matters. Context still matters. And history, especially Israeli history, doesn’t get simpler the more you learn. It gets more textured, more layered, more human.
Hellerstein closed with a line that really hit me. She wrote, Israel should stop being referred to as this knight in shining armor, this perfect place. Rather, she said, Israel is a flawed hero. A different framing, a flawed hero. A flawed hero is something that all of us who watch Hollywood movies can connect to. A flawed hero.
And I thought that’s it. That’s the story we’re trying to tell here. Not perfection, not PR, but real, real, flawed, courageous, messy, inspiring heroism. And just before we close, after what I’m sure everyone here tonight and hopefully everyone listening will agree was a really fascinating conversation, let me ask everyone here, what makes Israel flawed? What makes Israel heroic?
I’m an educator, so I like to end with questions. How do you think about that? And can you have a serious relationship with a country and with a people that is both flawed and heroic at the same time?
Michael, there you go.
Dr. Oren: David. What what we have the only national epic where all the characters are flawed and deeply flawed. That’s right. And by the way most national epics are stories of national success. Ours are epic book is a story of failure. Right. Amazing. So it’s easy for us as Jews to accept this.
Noam: So I want to thank everyone here. I want to thank the listeners, everyone listening.
EP2: Q&A
Noam: And I want to bring Rivky back on stage so that we could do a little Q&A. Rivky?
Rivky: That was amazing. And thank you all so much for sending in so many questions. We’re not going to be able to read so many of them today, but we got a bunch of incredible ones. We’re going to do some Israel open mics based on some of these questions. OK, there’s some really good ones.
OK, this is something I’m sure you know, both of you have definitely addressed this before, but this is something that I think all of us here struggle with to some extent and always are trying to figure out this balance. The question of antisemitism and anti-Zionism. How are they the same? How are they not the same? Are they not the same? Michael, would love to, we’ll start with you.
Dr. Oren:L I think that the two have become almost inseparable. You have to labor hard to understand somebody who’s saying, I’m anti-Zionist, but I’m not antisemitic. Because what that person is saying is that there are 194 states in the world, but only one of them doesn’t have a right to exist, which just happens to be the Jewish state.
Moreover, the vast majority of people who saying that Israel doesn’t have the right to exist are saying that Israel’s existence will end by violent means. From the river to the sea. Globalize the Intifada. What does that mean? The Intifada which a thousand Israelis were blown apart. That’s antisemitic. That the people who are focused obsessively on our conflict with the Palestinians, but care not a whit. About a half a million Syrians massacred in the Civil War, or God knows how many Sudanese killed in their civil strife, or in Yemen where hundreds of thousands of people were killed, but focused obsessively only on the Jewish state.
That’s just the beginning. Forget about all the accusations of genocide and apartheid, etc, which just ended up… I’ve have been involved in, hasbara is a horrible word, ‘public diplomacy’ for decades now. And I’ve come to a conclusion that behind the vast majority of headlines you read, including the headlines that appeared last week that accused Israel of killing 50, 60 Palestinians who were waiting for aid, behind those headlines lurk classic antisemitic tropes right out of the Middle Ages.
Because why would Israel kill 50, 60 Palestinians waiting for aid? Because Jews enjoy killing people. Jews enjoy killing children. Jews are a vengeful people. It’s right out of the 11th century, what we’re up against, you know, when we say about our PR so bad, we’re taking a different direction, we’re up against not just 1.4 billion Muslims who may not like us, we’re up against 2,500 years of antisemitism, which are deeply, deeply ingrained in Western thinking.
Speaker 1 (01:20:56.928)
of pick me up.
Noam: I don’t know, listen, I view myself as a relatively patient person when it comes to education. I get asked this question a lot and I don’t love it. I don’t love it because I believe that it doesn’t matter.
Like, it matters in some definitional way, matters in some like maybe legal way, and so, so let me put that– it matters for legal reasons and political. OK, I get it. But as an educator, I want to. Young people to understand. Listen. Do you know that 50% of world Jewry lives in Israel? Something like that, 48% if I’m off by a little bit.
Do you know that the, when you come onto a subway and say, all the Zionists here, get out, do know what that does to me? Do you know what it makes me feel? Do you understand, like, for somebody who cares for millions of Jewish people, and Christians and Muslims, by the way, there are Muslim Zionists, there are many more Christian Zionists than Jewish Zionists.
And for Jewish people, it doesn’t really matter whether it’s technically antisemitic because you’ll always get caught. If you’re a young person, you’ll always get caught. You will be told, Satmar, they’re also anti-Zionist, right? And so therefore, wait a second. Wait a second. Wait a second. It’s not a problem. Are they antisemitic? Uh-uh. And so it’s kind of like you’re playing a game that you don’t have to be forced into playing.
Someone does not believe that the Jewish people have a right to live in their ancestral homeland. Whether or not that’s technically antisemitic or not is interesting from my Yeshiva days, talmudically, but it’s less interesting in a day-to-day sort of way. It’s painful, it’s violent, and whether or not it’s technically antisemitic, anti-Zionism suffers from an antisemitic problem.
Rivky: A couple people wrote in with different variations of this question, so I’m gonna paraphrase a little bit. Both of you, and Unpacking Israeli History, care a lot about nuance, care a lot about telling a complicated story. What do you do in your personal life, in your educational life, when you have some people who come to you saying, you know, people are attacking Israel all over the world. Why do you have to take such nuance? Why don’t you just be pro-Israel, just be proudly pro-Israel and call it a day? And on the other side, you’re trying to tell this complicated story, people and Gazans are dying, people in Gaza are starving. Why do you need to tell this nuanced story? Talk about the victims. What do you do when you’re trying to tell this complicated story? What do you respond to people like this who have this kind of strong one side?
Noam: Can I start on this one?
Rivky: Please.
Noam: At OpenDor Media, I get made fun of for one word and one word only, nuance. If anyone’s putting on a Purim shpiel making fun of me, they’d be like, nuance, guy says nuance a lot. So I really, I don’t believe in nuance merely as a strategic method of communication. I believe that it is the way I see the world.
I see the world in a textured way. And I think people would see the world in a textured way if they didn’t have certain defense mechanisms up. And the defense mechanisms are legitimate. Jewish people need to protect themselves. Jewish people need to have an element of tribalism. Jewish people need to be particularistic.
The first paragraph of Aleinu is all about that. Being particular, being tribal. And there’s a second paragraph, which is to do something positive for the world outside of the Jewish people. So when I think of the word nuance and teaching about Israel, and I wrote my dissertation in 2013 or something like that about this very topic, was trying to say to the world, or 2014, 2015, I don’t know, something like that, I was trying to say to the world, we could figure out a way to be passionate about my own identity without sacrificing empathy for the other. It is possible to have conviction, to care deeply about your own, and also never, ever lose empathy for the other.
So when do we do this? Why do we do this? Number one, credibility. If I have any desire to reach people who are unsure about the story of Israel and think, there’s no credibility. You simply, you are talking to yourself, you’re going like this. it’s like, by the way, it’s like chat GBT. You think chat GBT is saying, chat GBT is just mirroring what you think and you’re like, it’s a very capitalistic thing, but it’s another conversation. Anyway. But that’s credibility.
Number two is I love to say that my form of education, my style of education came from an Israeli construction site. And what does it say at an Israeli construction site? Sakana, kan bonim. Danger, we’re building here. And it’s in a place of danger that you build by asking tough questions, by being curious. I got this idea from Menachem Leibtag, a phenomenal Tanakh scholar. And it’s so important when teaching the story of Israel, not just Tanakh. Because when we study Tanakh, you’re right, it’s the exact same thing. You’ve got to be able to do that.
And, and, and, I want to caveat what I just said. There are times, there are episodes that we have not released on Unpacking Israeli History because we, but I, don’t feel comfortable sharing these stories right now. I don’t want to tell certain stories right now. Talleyrand, the famous diplomat who served under Napoleon said that treason is a matter of dates. It’s a matter of dates.
And I want to be able to share all stories, but there are certain times, there’s a time for this kind of story, and time for another time. There’s a time for another type of story. And so sometimes, when the Jewish people are being attacked the way they were attacked on the 7th of October, I press pause. I press pause.
And then the way, I think three months after the 7th of October is different than nine months after, it’s different than 18 months after. But I don’t want to just constantly think that the Jewish people, the Jewish state is weak and vulnerable and therefore I can’t share stories. We must share our stories. And if we’re not the one to share our stories, this is a warning to everyone listening. They will find the stories on Google, on TikTok, on YouTube, from their friends, in universities. And if we allow other people to tell and teach these stories and not us, shame on us.
Dr. Oren: You have a nuanced response to the question about nuance. And I have to answer it as three different people, alas. So I’ll answer it as someone who writes about Israeli history, as an historian, as someone who defends Israel pretty much every day in the world media, and as an Israeli, as a father and a grandfather.
As an historian, my job is to understand. I have to look at my own prejudice and say these are obstacles. How do I get over my obstacles if the truth lies beyond them?
I’m writing a book about the current war. I struggle with this every single day. Every day trying to reach that truth. In this book I actually say that in the introduction. And that’s my role as an instructor. So that’s what’s the nuance. I have to get beyond our explanations to get to something very fundamental.
As someone who goes on TV to defend Israel every time, and it never fails to happen, someone mentions 53,000 Palestinians killed, 54,000 Palestinians. I stopped them immediately and said, hold it. That’s a lie, and it’s an antisemitic lie.
It’s a lie because it doesn’t take into account that 22,000 terrorists have been killed by Israel. Several thousand Palestinians have been killed by Palestinian rockets falling short or being shot by Hamas last week.
And out of a population of 2.2 billion people over the course of 19 months, roughly 8,000 people die of natural causes. You deduct all that for the 53, you’re to get very close to a one-to-one combatant to civilian fatality rate. And it’s a ratio that has not been equaled by any army in modern history. When the United States fought in Afghanistan and Iraq, at the very least it was nine civilians killed to every combatant. Nine. All right? And that’s why it’s a lie. It’s a medical lie because it’s basically saying that Jews enjoy killing young people. They always say it’s 53,000, most of them children. Why is that? Because Jews killed children. We know this from the 12th century.
So that’s my job. My job when I get up on TV is different than my job to being a historian.
My job as a father, my job as a grandfather, my job as a citizen of the state of Israel is to defend my family. This organization, Hamas, and the society that supports it, and make no mistake about it, I don’t care what the world says, Hamas did not fall out of Mars into Gaza. Hamas is a creation of Palestinian society.
They don’t want to create a Palestinian state. They don’t want two-state solutions. They want to destroy us. By the way, Palestine doesn’t even appear on the word Hamas. They want to create an Islamic state and recreate the medieval Islamic caliphate by first destroying us. OK, that’s what they want. And yes, we make tremendous mistakes all the time in Gaza, because yes, we are a flawed hero. But the state of Israel has to do everything in its power to defend my children and defend my grandchildren, defend my homeland.
Excuse me, if occasionally or more than occasionally that makes us look bad on CNN or occasionally it makes some people in certain communities in this country uncomfortable, then so be it. Then so be it.
Rivky: We’re gonna do one more question. And this is for both of you, and I’m really interested here. If you could send out one short message to all young Jews, Israel, America, anywhere else, what would it be? What would you say? Michael, let’s start with you if you don’t need a second.
Michael: It’s a quick one. Quick one, na’ar hayiti, gam zakanti. What do I mean? We’ve talked about the historical perspective of what it was like on May 14th, 1948 to declare a state in the face of having nothing, know, really no allies, no resources, about to be attacked by six Arab armies, five Arab armies, really nothing, enough bullets to pack for one week and you turn around and you create this. Create a country which is one of the few countries in the world, really, that has never known a second of non-democratic governance.
And the only country on that list has never known a second of peace. A country that has revived the Hebrew language, that has absorbed Jewish refugees from 70 different countries, seven of the world’s leading universities, etc. I wouldn’t go into all the talking points, But now, it becomes a country. I’ve been living in the state of Israel now for close to 50 years. And the country I came to back in 1970s was a country that was the Wild West. It had nothing.
Our major export item was orange juice. We had no relations with China, no relations with India, no relations with what was then the Soviet bloc, no relations with Africa, no strategic alliance with the United States, no peace with Egypt, no peace with Jordan, no peace with the Abraham Accord countries. The food was horrible. Even the falafel was bad.
And by the way, three million Jews caught behind the Soviet bloc were not free.
You scoot ahead in my vast lifetime and see what Israel, even now, even in these darkest days, what Israel looks like today compared to the Israel I found in the early 1970s, where every Jew in the world is free. And we don’t even make orange juice anymore. And the funny thing is people come on culinary tours to Israel. That’s the funniest thing in the world. Can’t get over that. People come for the food.
So my message to Jews here in Israel is sometimes when it looks so dark and looks like there’s no hope, look backward. Look backward before you look forward. Look where we have come in our 77 years. Look what I’ve come in the last 50 years, what I’ve witnessed with my own eyes.
If you would have told me back then, this is what Israel would look like today with peace with Egypt and Jordan, peace with UAE, peace with Bahrain, peace, peace, peace, a strategic alliance with the United States, which is the deepest and most multifaceted strategic alliance with the United States that had with any foreign power in the post-World War II period. I could spend a couple hours talking about that. I’d say you’re nuts. You’re crazy. It cannot be.
If you ask me why I’m optimistic about the future, it’s because I understand our past. This is why being an historian is so, important to being optimistic about our future and believing.
Noam: I’ll just add that first of all I’m grateful Dr. Oren that you sat with me here tonight to speak about the story of Israel, to tell your stories, which is in many ways intertwined with the story of Israel. You could go through your life and your life is the story of Israel, last 50 years and then the American-Israeli relationship, it’s truly truly remarkable. So thank you, thank you so much for sitting here with me.
My message to all people, to young people, is just twofold. One is the great grandson of the Ba’al Shem Tov, Rabbi Nachman from Breslov, he taught that if you’re Jewish, he said, asur l’hityaesh. He said it’s forbidden to give up. He said it’s forbidden, it’s not allowed. It is not allowed.
You cannot think just because there’s 2 billion of them and 15 million of you because there’s 3.2 billion hashtags stand against Israel, whatever, I don’t know, and 300 million stand with Israel just because of these things that are out there, just because the number games don’t seem to work out, just because you feel the antisemitism, you feel the Jew hatred, you feel disconnected, you’re unsure of yourself, you’re not sure if you should wear a kippah in public or a Star of David in public, you’re not sure, you’re not allowed to give up hope. You’re not allowed to despair.
I think that this generation really needs to internalize that as much as possible, that there could be no yaesh, there could be no despair, and that the Jewish people created a Jewish state, recreated a Jewish state with a concept that’s the opposite of yaesh. Then they created a national anthem, which is Hatikvah, which is the hope. And I want young people to constantly be thinking that that is something that is a yearning, that is a drive, and yaesh cannot happen.
But the only way to do that is part number two. You cannot simply be fighting against something else. You have to know and own your story. Because if you own your story, you know your story, you know where you came from, like Dr. Oren is saying, you understand, know where you came from, then you’re Teflon. You’re invincible. Nobody could do anything to you.
You have thickness, you have thick identity. No one could do anything to you. So number one is never despair. It’s forbidden, forbidden to despair. And number two is, own your story. If you own your story, that’ll help make sure that nobody, nobody will ever despair again.
I want to end by saying a few things. I want to say thank yous. Thank yous to the security for making sure that we are all safe.
I want to say thank you to my whole team, to the Open Door Media team. If you guys could just stand up. If you’re here, please stand up. There’s so many people that make this event possible, that do all the work. Everyone should see these people. Our CEO, Andrew Savage, our head of content, Hart Levine, senior producer, David Coleman, regional director, Beth Janis, Judith, marketing, made this whole thing happen, Rivky Starner, producer. Ryan Rabinowitz, who’s not here right now, but is our CMO and made this whole thing happen. Rivky, am I missing anyone? I got it, I nailed it. I also want to thank my children, Eyal, Liana, and Nisa, and specifically Liana, who missed her Sium, finishing Parshah tomorrow to be here, to be at this event. So thank you so much for being here.
Own your story, Lilah Tov.