Hey, I’m Noam Weissman and this is Unpacking Israeli History, the podcast that takes a deep dive into some of the most intense, historically fascinating, and often misunderstood events and stories linked to Israeli history. This episode of Unpacking Israeli History is generously sponsored by Andrea and Larry Gill and Jody and Ari Storch. If you want to sponsor an episode of Unpacking Israeli History, or if you just want to say hey, be in touch at noam@unpacked.media.
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I am not in my normal studio right now. I’m traveling. I’m actually in Baltimore, Maryland, and I have the opportunity to be in conversation with my dear friend, Haviv Retig Gur. The reason we had to have this conversation over the weekend is because we had to reflect on a story that many of us have been hearing about. Many people have been curious about, many people have reached out about. The recent Nicholas Kristof piece in the New York Times about alleged sexual abuse and torture of Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons was one of those stories that we had to cover.
I was dreading reading it after October the 7th, after the videos, after the kidnappings, after the sexual violence committed against Israelis. There is a part of me that wants to shut down when I hear accusations thrown back at Israel, especially now in a world where so many Jews feel like the rules are different for us, where accusations spread before facts do, where Israelis often viscerally feel the profundity of Greek philosopher Aeschylus, who declared 2,500 years ago that in war, truth is the first casualty, where nuance, that controversial and polarizing word, dies instantly, where people who never once marched for Syria or Sudan or Yemen, or the people of Iran suddenly speak about Israel as if it is the singular moral rot, the moral evil on earth. It hurts. It hurts.
And yet, there are things we do not get to look away from, even when they arrive wrapped in propaganda, even when they are amplified by people who are not operating in good faith, even when the world is hypocritical, even when our enemies lie.
Because if even some of these allegations are true, if detainees were abused, sexually humiliated, tortured, brutalized, then something is happening inside Israeli society that demands attention. Not because Israel is uniquely evil. No, not at all. But as a Jewish person, the story of Israel is part of my identity.
Today’s conversation with Haviv probably is not going to be so easy. We’re going to talk about propaganda, about media responsibility, about the collapse of trust, about dehumanization after October 7th, about whether prolonged trauma changes societies in ways that are hard to reverse. And maybe most painfully, we wrestle with this question. How do Jews hold onto moral seriousness while simultaneously feeling under siege?
My dear friend, Haviv Retig Gur, he’s a journalist. And after Kristof’s article came out, Haviv published a long and very emotional response. And I don’t say the word emotional as some sort of pejorative, but he produced this very long and emotional piece on Substack and his Substack and on his excellent podcasts, Ask Haviv Anything. And what struck me about it was that he refused to choose between two instincts that often feel impossible to hold together. On the one hand, he argued there is a genuine global propaganda ecosystem fighting against Israel, one that traffics in exaggeration, distortion, and sometimes outright lies. but on the other hand, Haviv also wrote this:
And despite all of it, dear Jews, there really is abuse.
And he said, we fix the broken things within us as if the pogromists and their simpering Kristof don’t exist.
That tension, I think, is the conversation. Haviv, thank you so much for joining me.
Haviv: Good to be here, Noam. Maybe not specifically for this conversation, but generally good to be here.
Noam: Let’s start from the very beginning. Before we get into whether the article is fair, propagandistic, exaggerated, morally necessary, or anything else, I think we need to slow down and ask a simpler question, which is what is Nicholas Kristof actually alleging in this piece in the New York Times? Because I think a lot of people either immediately accepted it and they said, see, there’s moral decay, there’s horrific stuff going on in Israel or immediately dismissed it without actually sitting with the details and implications of what’s being claimed. When you strip away the rhetoric, could you tell me, what is Kristof fundamentally arguing?
Haviv: He brings forward 14 specific claims of various kinds of sexual assault by Israeli security forces against Palestinians.
Some of them on the face of it sound believable, possible. Such things happen in many places in the world and may have happened here. Some of them sound extraordinarily far-fetched, even just biologically.
And all of them are first-person claims made to Kristof. And some of the first-person claims made to Kristof, there’s no corroborating evidence, which in itself is not unusual or necessarily disproof in cases of sexual assault, obviously.
But some of them are made by just Hamas propagandists and institutions that raise money to advance literal propaganda for the literal organization called Hamas and who have been caught lying multiple times in the past. For example, the Euro-Med human rights monitor or whatever it’s called, which was apparently the source of most or connected to Kristof to most of the of the people making the claims. They have in the past alleged that Israel created a thermal weapon that vaporizes Palestinians and that’s an explanation why their bodies are missing where there should be more bodies and all kinds of very stupid strange fantastical claims Because they’re a propaganda outlet and they’re nothing else. there’s no newspaper there. There’s no, you know, they’ve never broken an important story.
And so what Kristof did was bring forward a story where my gut instinct when I’m reading in a New York Times column about sexual assault is to say, holy crap, there’s sexual assault there. And it hurts more if it’s my people, so to speak, whoever my people happen to be. But it seems like a clean, straightforward sexual assault story.
And then so much just, rape by dogs trained to rape humans and reports about things like somebody claiming that they’re raped at the beginning of every shift. So shift on shift on shift comes in and rapes them and things that you know, Kristof, you know, the New York Times, had it taken these stories and gone into serious reporting and corroboration and challenged the Israeli authorities and demanded answers and gotten answers. And then we would have seen those answers.And maybe the answers will validate some of the claims and maybe invalidate some of them. And maybe, for all I know, there are six indictments against the soldiers involved or the security officers involved. I don’t know anything because it was published as an opinion column, which for some reason, the New York Times thinks is kosher journalism. It was something where I went in expecting hard-hitting, serious claims that Israel has to answer for.
There are thousands of prisoners from the Gaza war and there were hundreds of new prison guards drafted urgently to oversee the thousands of prisoners as reservists, as people who are not well trained or whose training was years ago. And if you tell me that that system in some places has degenerated into inappropriate activity up to and including extreme, handful of extreme cases, I will say that is possible. It’s a little bit like telling me the American prison system in some places has collapsed and there’s extreme abuse in some corners of it. You’re not going to fall off your chair. It’s a real country and it’s a real prison system and it’s in the middle of a war and every one of those prison guards watch Hamas footage of massacres of Israelis on their way into the prison system.
So it’s not that I’m incapable of believing that there’s abuse, but if there is abuse, why do you need to do it so badly? Why do there need to be such strange fantasies? Why do there need to be so many propagandists who are the only people listed?
He even just as a final point, he even when the case of the dog rape story links to a tweet by a man I consider mentally ill, a UCLA, a formerly Israeli UCLA academic, chased out of UCLA because of some sexual impropriety who then turned extreme anti-Zionist and shared this on a podcast. And then he said there’s no evidence that he has of it. And that’s the link by Kristof to this insane claim that then turns out was actually started by Euro-Med who thinks Israel incinerates people with thermal weaponry that nobody understands how it could work scientifically.
So it’s a shameful moment for the New York Times. And it’s ridiculous and it could only happen on Israel. It’s journalism as part of a campaign to destroy and not a campaign to shed light. That is shedding darkness in every direction that it turns when it comes to Israel.
Noam: Okay, Haviv, so I want to hold onto that for a little bit and come back to it. I want to talk about your feelings though, while reading this and why feelings is an incredibly important part of the experience of internalizing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s just such a huge part of it. There, you wrote something that was emotionally honest after reading the Kristof piece and I don’t know if I don’t hear it right now in your description of it, but here’s what you said. You said it’s agony to read about Israeli criminality. And then you shared that discovering obvious falsehoods in the article was almost a relief because it gave you permission to doubt the entire narrative.
And when I…When a lot of people, when I speak to people, a lot of people like if I’m walking on the street, people will come over to me and say, hey, how do you deal with this issue of this bad moment in Israeli history? How do you deal with that? Is it true that Israel does this? Is it true that Israel does that? Is it true? And I’m like, listen, I’m not like on the ground to know, but is it possible that Israel has done horrible things and does horrible things to answer?
So yes, if your relationship to Israel is dependent on an infallible Israel, then your relationship is not going to endure. So number one, learn how to be okay with there being Israeli criminality at points. If you’re dependent on that, your relationship is not going to be a good one.
Haviv: I mean, I mean, America has done a lot of bad things. Is America no longer a valid identity, country, order, political order? What is that? if, if imagine, right, you just discovered Abu Ghraib.Alright, well that’s it. The 250-year American experiment, I’m sorry, it’s not morally tenable to have in America. Is that really the response? It’s a stupid response. It’s not just that if your relationship with Israel can’t handle the fact that it’s a real country that’s going to make terrible mistakes. The prisons in Israel are full of criminals. You know what mean? Like, it’s a society. If that was your relationship, that it was somehow some kind of a moral, you know, paragon to which you aspired, then you were not actually in a relationship with Israel. You were not in a relationship with a real country and real people. You were with a relationship, in a relationship with a cartoon that only ever existed inside your own head. The claim that Israel has to be, needs to be, that it failed some kind of standard. None of those claims are serious. Nobody would make them against anyone but Israel. And so this moment is a moment of a really strange discrepancy. What I want is to be able to be an Israeli saying, crap guys, we’re doing something wrong, which I think in some of these cases, not specifically in the Kristof article, I can’t make heads or tails of what’s true and false there because I know there’s false stuff. So why would I trust the rest?
There are dozens, it’s exceeded 100, I don’t remember exactly how many, maybe it’s even 200, of real indictments. I talked to at one point as a journalist to prosecutors in the Israeli military, there are real cases of abuse in the prison system. Now, does that shock you? There are 2000 claims outstanding at this moment, I read in the news, against the New York prison system for abuse. Does that mean that New York state is somehow is shocking or evil or illegal or?
So I want to have that conversation about what the problems are because some of them are serious and we shouldn’t look away. And then over here on the other side, there is a completely psychopathic and insane and politics reordering and society shifting obsession with Israel and Jews and Israeli and Jewish criminality as being a cosmic evil that must be defeated for the world to ever emerge into a new better day. That is pure old antisemitism. That is what Kristof is engaged in.
But also, a real society really screwing up on some things I think, my society and I want to have that. How do you create that distance? And one of the ways that I think you create that psychological distance, you mentioned that it was emotional. I think you meant the cursing. I curse, I think four times and that’s only because my wife took out a good three or four more curses in the text before I hit publish, you know. But the cursing is to create that psychological distance.
Can I curse here? I don’t mean to curse here if I’m not allowed.
Noam: Yeah, yeah, can say what you gotta say. Say what you gotta say.
Haviv: The Kristoff column is evil, stupid, wrong, and fuck ‘em. And I say that so that I can push them so far away that the din that they make and the sense that one nation can stand, not in moral judgment.
But the idea that if I judge them immoral, then something about their value and legitimacy to exist as a nation is now questionable and I’m allowed to question it. That whole universe of that whole mental world, that whole fundamentally bigoted mental world has to be pushed so far over the horizon for us, for our experience, that we’re free again.
There are two ways that they can hurt us. They can hurt us by making us, by hating us, abusing us, making us hated around the world, but also they can hurt us by being so obsessively and often so just lying about the, you know, the cosmical evil of us that we can’t actually have a real conversation about the real problems within us. That’s also a kind of limitation that they impose on us. I refuse to be limited in any of those ways. And so fuck them off to the distant ends of the earth. And I, among my people, which is really what it was addressed to. All kinds of people responded to it in weird ways. Andrew Sullivan responded to it and said, this guy seems to be having a nervous breakdown. Andrew Sullivan had this interview with Eli Lake about the Israel question in which Andrew Sullivan threw one idiotic talking point unexamined after another. He has become a very shallow person on any of these questions. He doesn’t know much and he doesn’t want to know anything. is an emotional kink for him.
He’s not my audience. My audience is my people. Push the evil campaign so far from us that we can deal seriously amongst ourselves with the actual problems because there are problems.
Noam: I think that when you talk about the pushing away in order to deal with our current, our actual problems, I’m going to be releasing a podcast very soon about the history of Israeli self-critique and to demonstrate when and where Israeli self-critique takes place and the conditions in which one needs to operate in order to be willing to be self-critical.
Because what you’re talking about, Haviv, is that what I was gonna ask you is like, when I read the piece of Kristof, I was reminded of this cunning feature of the brain called confirmation bias. The way confirmation bias works when reading a piece like this is it’s so wily. After reading a piece like this, if I want to believe what he said, I merely ask, can I believe it? And if I do not want to believe what he said, I ask a different question, must I believe it?
But the situation with this sort of article, I think what it did is it did something else. It brought up this real tension of is it psychologically possible to remain morally open while also feeling constantly accused? And I think that that question is the thing that really I struggled with the most.
Is it possible, what are the psychological conditions in which Israelis will be willing from your perspective, Haviv, to be morally serious and morally open to these sorts of issues? Let’s assume 5%, 10%. I don’t know the number that are true or whatever the number is true from the claims.
The issue that I see is there’s no world in which Israelis are going to respond to this and be like, Kristof, you know what? Thank you for holding up a mirror to our society. Without you, I’m not sure we would have been willing to be self-critical. But now, Nicholas Kristof, you came out, you really shed some light. We’re on this. We’re in this together. We’re going to work on it.
I don’t believe that that is and he states by the way that that’s actually his stated goal. His stated goal is that hopefully by virtue of the fact that he published this piece, Israeli society will be willing to be tougher and it’s and I’m like Habibi, Nicholas, I don’t think you understand the way the human brain works, my friend. So what are the conditions? Did you have a similar reaction?
Haviv: Yeah. But it’s not his stated goal.
Haviv: His audience is not Israelis. The audience is never Israelis. It’s a conversation that, yes, of course he says.
Noam: He says though, Haviv, Haviv, Haviv, know his audience is not, but he’s saying what his goal is. So his goal is to change it, but you believe that that’s malarkey.
Haviv: Yes, yes, he’s… that’s a… Yes, I think that’s propaganda cover for what the real goal is. I think that’s cover because the way it’s framed is a conversation really that could only happen among foreigners who have transformed the question of Israel into a defining question of their politics. And it’s a toolkit that exists embedded deep, deep in Western civilization from Christianity, from Islam, where the Jew is defined as the other against which I define myself. And so if I want to say that I am a person of faith and the Jews are people who do not have faith, I’m the opposite.
The Jew is the opposite of what I am. I project onto the Jew what it is that I am not. So I deal righteously. The Jew is a lying cheat. I am landed and grounded. The Jew is a cosmopolitan. If I’m a nationalist, like a Nazi or an Italian fascist, I have an ancient tradition, the Jew is the wandering universalist trying to, communist trying to break down my nation. If I’m a communist, of course, the Jew is the tribalist trying to ruin the great proletariat and universal right brotherhood of man. The Jew is the opposite of whatever I am.
It begins in early Christianity, and it is the same model and structure of it today.
The hatred of Israel goes beyond the hatred of China as if Israel’s crimes are greater than China’s. The hatred of Israel goes beyond the hatred of the perpetrators of the Yemen war as if, what? What Yemen suffered wasn’t five times to 10 times worse than what Gaza suffered. First of all, death toll. Second of all, in the mass starvation of children that’s actually happened, there was actually a mass starvation of something like 85,000 children who starved to death. And those people doing that war with Western weapons and Western money and Western intelligence support didn’t elicit a single protest, whereas the Gaza war elicited more protests, longer protests, more regular protests than ever in the history of Western protest, more than Vietnam, more than apartheid South Africa, more than all of it put together.
And across nations, you know, when you say that to an American anti-Israel person, they say, well, I fund you. Well, first of all, the Yemen war, you also kind of funded to some degree, but also It happened in Amsterdam, it happened in Brazil, it happened in Indonesia. So I don’t think funding us was the drive.
It’s the identical phenomenon.
A politics has been created, in which a critique of the West has become, has defined itself, shaped itself around this scapegoat for Westernism.
The accusations against Israel are accusations that the progressive left makes of Western civilization. But now, instead of being the heir to the great crimes of the West, imperialism, colonialism, I get to project those crimes onto someone else, fight them and be on the right side of all of those moral equations. They’re the opposite of what I am. This is the classic structure. It is the social function of antisemitism.
By the way, this is considered deep racism when it’s done to Muslims and Hindus. And that’s Edward Said’s. Edward Said wrote a book called Orientalism, where the whole argument of Orientalism is that Europe defined itself, Westernism, in some senses, even whiteness, as by projecting the opposite of what it thought of itself onto the East. So I am masculine and rational and scientific and advanced. The East is feminine and irrational and non-scientific and backward. And that image of creation of the East as a way to counter project myself as Europe created its own understanding of itself. That’s Edward Said. And there’s a professor Derek Penslar of Harvard, head of Israel studies at Harvard published a volume of essays called, Orientalism and the Jews in which he points out that the Europeans maybe learned to do this on the Jews. They’ve been doing this on the Jews for many, many centuries before they started doing this to Islam. So when you point out this very same structure, right, that’s considered something that every Middle Eastern studies professor in America has to agree with. You can’t be an anti-Saidian and get a job in a university in America today. But when the exact same structures apply to the Jews, that’s just being a progressive. So I stand in this hall of judgment before people who define themselves by my cosmic evil. And then your point, and you’re right to make it, is how do I then turn around and talk to my own people and be like, hey, you’re supposed to now turn around and fix yourself and out loud debate your own wrongs and your own failings.
And my simple answer is, In this moment, the Zionist answer is, forgive me, I’m going to become known for this, even though I almost never curse. Fuck them. All of them. To the ends of the earth. None of them matter. Let them all jump in a lake. Let them all fall over the ends of the earth. We will talk ourselves about our problems.
The question of prisoner abuse is real. It’s real. Our own prosecutors tell us it’s real. Our own minister who is the worst crime police and prisons minister we’ve ever had because mass waves of crime are happening that he doesn’t care about because he’s busy doing his radical right politics are helping to drive a real serious problem and we have to deal with this problem and we have to look at it because we have to make sure that we remain a competent society and a decent society. And you know what? We are. We are. You can make a lot of points about the Gaza war and you should make points about the Gaza not the crazy psychopathic, Western, antisemitic drive that’s embedded so deep in their society they can’t see it when they’re acting it out.
But it’s a serious war with a lot of wounded and dead civilians. It’s not like it’s like, therefore nobody gets to complain because antisemitism. Of course you can complain. you should, God forbid there should be wars that don’t have complaints, that don’t have people seriously criticizing it. But it is nevertheless a decent society.
And just one final point, connected to your specific question of when you’re standing the dock accused at that scale, at a civilizational scale, at a definitional evil scale of cosmic, you’re the thing that is colonialism and imperialism and apartheid and genocide. There isn’t a word that you are and you are all the great evils of their own history so that they can stand against their own evils. Even when you stand in that, so you said, so how do you talk about your own problems? By the way, it’s cognitively, I think, very similar to the experience Israelis have had for 77 years of being told day in, day out by their neighbors, by hundreds of millions of people around them, we’re coming to kill you all. You know how much, how hard it is to have empathy, nevermind sympathy, when they’re coming to kill you, when their whole politics are organized around it? What do people think Hamas says to Israelis? Like you’re sitting there in a propaganda war over in the West, the Israelis say something, the Palestinians say something, everybody’s on one side or another.
Hamas, never mind what people are saying to you. You’re not the protagonist in this story. Israelis and Palestinians are. What does Hamas actually say to Israelis every day? It says that we’re coming to murder you and your children. And if you pull out of the West Bank, we’re going to take over that space and murder you from there. Everywhere you ever pull out of, we’re going to murder you from that place. That’s what happened after withdrawal from Lebanon. That’s what happened after withdrawal from Gaza. And it’s definitely every Israeli will tell you just about what’s going to happen if we ever pull out of the West Bank.
Do you know what hearing that from the Palestinians does to the Israeli mind? Do you know how much space is left for sympathy, for empathy? Let’s imagine for a moment, Noam, that you and I are secret lefties who desperately want peace, reconciliation, love, and two nation states living side by side, shopping in each other’s shopping malls. Let’s say that’s our fantasy.
Noam: That’s a great fantasy.
Haviv: How do we clear that space when the major political force of the other side only ever speaks to Israelis in exterminationist terms? And so, you know, that’s the same kind of cognitive problem. Now I would say very simply, the Western fantasies, the Western antisemitism, we push it off the edge of the horizon. We do tell them, we do tell them to go look for somebody, to deal with their own, they’re going to crush their own societies with this antisemitism, organizing them around the Jews. Every problem is now the Jews. Listen to Tucker Carlson about the Jews inventing pornography. What a psychopath.
And we deal with our own stuff as if they don’t exist. That’s my view. Sorry that was so long.
Noam: I struggle with this issue. It’s 78 years. I was doing the math. 78 years, by the way. And by the way, it’s even more than 78 years if we’re fully honest. It’s been longer than that. But one of the reasons that Israel never even created a constitution was because it was always dealing with the urgent front of the important. During the 1948s, one of the reasons, 48, 49, they didn’t have time to create a constitution.
I view that as some sort of metaphor for Israeli society to an extent not ever being able to deal with higher level issues because they’re constantly under attack. And Israelis have constantly been under attack. There’s a term for that, there’s a phrase that David Ben-Gurion is famous for saying, is, It doesn’t matter what non-Jews say, it matters what Jews do. And I agree with you, I agree with you, Haviv.
Where I’m saying I don’t know, I can’t figure out where to believe what you’re saying is if you do believe F-um, if you do believe what Ben Gurion said, it doesn’t matter what they say, it matters what we do. One of the things that, you’re, you’re a friend, you’re a proper friend of mine, and I texted you after your long post, which like, you know, got me all jazzed up and a lot of people were reaching out and being like, yeah. Or some people were like, what did Haviv say? Or like, it was one of those two reactions. And I said to you, the one thing that I, the one thing I’ll look at our WhatsApp conversation right now, I’ll go to it right now. And one of the things that I texted you was, I said the following, I said, you had a a serious response to me.
But I said, why do you keep calling Itamar Ben-Gvir incompetent? That’s the minister that you’re referring to. That seems like you’re being forgiving to him and not assigning actual moral darkness to what he is doing, to what he does in the Israeli prison system. Like, why did you use the word incompetent?
Because incompetent, to me, and maybe I’m misunderstanding the word, comes across as, I don’t know, maybe the guy has decent intentions, but he’s not doing a great job overseeing it. He’s not doing a good job. Were he, you know, if he took a, if he, if he was, you know, 10 years old and he finally got like an executive functioning tutor, then maybe he’d be more competent and maybe he’d actually, you know, do the right thing in the Israeli prison system.
And I want to challenge you on the word incompetent when you refer to Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Israeli prison system. Is that what it is or is there, if you’re actually going to put people who are not operating good faith to the side, is there actual things that Israeli society needs to work through?
And not just from the level of competence versus incompetence, but through a level of there’s some sort of moral decay happening within Israeli society in this sort of moment, for an example like this.
Again, I want to be clear. I made the point already that there’s no psychological world in which that Israel will respond positively to what Kristof said. As matter of fact, they’re suing the New York Times right now. And I deeply understand that because what he did is libelous, it’s horrific, it’s antisemitic, all of those things. But if you’re going to follow your philosophy, which is the Zionist ethos of F them, I want to hear what you think should be taking place within Israeli society to respond to this moment.
Haviv: Yeah, that’s a very good and apropos question. Itamar Ben-Gvir wants a war, a total war, because he thinks we’ll win it. And he is not anything between Israelis and Palestinians. And he is not anything remotely as bad as Hamas for very specific reasons that I’m happy to delineate. But that specific point he shares with, with Hamas, which is that they also want an absolute total, complete, total war in which one nation succeeds and one nation fails, falls, collapses, either dies or is expelled. That is what I believe he believes. That is what I believe he has always believed. The man had Kahane’s picture in his living room for decades until he tried to run in Israeli politics, just centered enough to be a legitimate far rightist. So he then took down that picture. He also had a picture of Baruch Goldstein, the mass murderer in the Hebron terror attack in 1994. So vile racists and mass murderers of Muslims at prayer are people he heroicizes. And so absolutely, that is exactly what it looks like morally.
Just to remind people, Kahane said many things. One of the things he said was that the peace process would fail because the Arabs would take the guns they’re given as a security forces to run Palestinian cities and they would turn them on us and murder us. And people are like, you see Kahane was right, Kahane was right. 50% of Israeli politics was arguing that at the time.
You don’t have to go to Kahane to see that that’s right. The thing that distinguished Kahane from, say, Benjamin Netanyahu in the 90s was that Kahane would present in 1985, if I’m not mistaken, people can look this up, presented a bill in the Knesset to make sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews a felony, a crime that has to be investigated, that the state has to actively investigate, not even just a misdemeanor that if a cop catches you, then it’s a problem. An actual felony that has to be investigated by the state. Presented that bill to the Knesset to make Jew non-Jew sex illegal. That is, you want to talk about apartheid, that is literally South African apartheid. That is racism taken to a kind of perfection. And that is Kahane. Everything else that Kahane argued and said beyond that totalizing kind of just deeply European 19th century blood racism, everything else about Kahane was shared by others. So you can say not Kahane was right, but that guy was right or the other one was right, right?
Kahane specifically what’s unique about him was that racism. And so for Kahane to be on the guy’s wall tells you something very profound about Ben-Gvir and it’s who he’s been his entire adult political life. And he’s doing fairly well politically. He’s, you know, in the best polls, he may be 10% of the Israeli electorate and the less good polls, he’s 5 % of the Israeli electorate.
What do those 10% and 5% actually make of him? Probably less than what he actually is, but nevertheless that he can kick in the pants of the right-wing establishment, all kinds of other things. People will vote extremes even when they themselves don’t actually give extreme answers on polls. These are dynamics that we know from every European country currently experiencing a flourishing of the far right. So all of that is true. And Ben-Gvir didn’t just give the order in the prison system to lower the amount of benefits that prisoners get, prisoners in the Israeli prison system, Palestinian prisoners, security prisoners for terrorism offenses, terrorism suspicions, some of them not imprisoned on trial after a trial or during a trial process, but imprisoned on administrative detention without a trial, because there’s not enough evidence against them, or there’s national security evidence against them, which doesn’t meet the bar of civil prosecution. That’s several thousand people. They have all kinds of rights.
For example, they used to, three years ago, they would bake their own bread, their own pita bread in prison. For example, they had access, they got degrees. They got online degrees from online Israeli universities. For example, they had all these visits by family that were very, very organized and systematic and frequent. They had a lot of benefits and he canceled most of those benefits. He massively lowered their level quality of life.
And he visited in a famous video a prison where prisoners were brought out and made to kneel on the ground with their faces on the floor. Now, I don’t know the details of these prisoners. If these prisoners were Nukhba fighters who crossed on October 7 and murdered children, I don’t mind their humiliation. I am horrified by the kind of prancing sort of, I am going to humiliate them kind of theatrics that our minister of prisons is doing with them as props, because that is a collapse of our prison system and our prison standards and our legal system and our own morality. You know, even if these people deserve just to die, you know, in a court ordered death sentence, which is something I do believe about the Nukhba force of Hamas. I am in that very narrow sense, radicalized toward the only death sentence I’ve ever believed in, which is specific to those Hamas people who cross that border.
So Itamar Ben-Gvir is a moral, I think, inasmuch as he has the space to become one, he will be a moral disaster. And then I’m going to say something a little controversial. The moral question is secondary for me. I’ll explain very simply why. I think it’s very important, morality. The son of a rabbi, morality is fundamental to a healthy society. But it’s unconvincing to people who think everything is at stake. I have discovered in 25 years of Israeli-Palestinian conversations, that when I come to Palestinians and I say to them, how could Hamas bomb a school bus? I mean, a morning bus in Jerusalem full of school children. How could they do? Why would you think that would be a healthy thing for the Palestinian cause? It demolished the Palestinian cause, the 140 bombings of the second Intifada. Their answer to me is not, my goodness, you’re right. I didn’t realize the moral depravity of it. That is not their answer because they’re not children.
Their answer is everything is at stake. You did this because we had no other recourse. Now I disagree with them. had no other recourse. Hamas argues they have no other recourse, but Hamas destroyed every peace process it ever touched. Second, that aside, the reason they think that they’re not interested in the moral conversation about their behavior is that they think that they face an existential threat. If you come to Israelis now and you say, how could you behave in the bad ways you behave? Israelis will say to you, they will literally murder my children. You think it’s some kind of a figurative thing. You think in abstractions. You think this is about a morality play running in your head over there in New York or Miami or London. They will literally physically in this world, every Israeli parent, every Israeli parent, every Arab Israeli parent, watched Hamas hold families hostage, murder the parents in front of the kids because these videos are on the internet, and then mock the kids as they eat from the fridge in the family home while the children sit there. And then those children, on, the better odds are they themselves were then killed. Every Israeli parent went through that experience knowing the video is real. They will definitely murder my, I don’t give a rat’s petoot what your morality says. I genuinely don’t.
And if I have to do evil things so that that never happens to my family, those evil things are going to happen, you better believe it. And I would be immoral not to do them. And so I don’t like the question, the conversation about morality because it’s totally meaningless to people who feel besieged.
And one last sentence and I’m done. I’m sorry, my answers are long today. But these are fundamental things. But the last point is when I say incompetent, I mean it in the way that I use the word when I talk about Arab countries around us. Not that it isn’t immoral. It’s immoral. The Egyptian dictatorship is profoundly immoral. It jails people. The Egyptian prison system is, by the way, the claims about the Egyptian prison system, which receives massive amounts of US money every year, make, raise the hair on the back of your neck. I mean, it is horrifying, horrifying regime with horrifying prison system. But, the worst thing it does to Egypt is that it’s allowing the slow collapse of its economy because the army owns half the economy and the whole country has become a kind of just, it’s not that there’s corruption in Egypt, it’s that there’s almost nothing but corruption in Egypt. The powers that be literally own everything, the Ditto Iran. And these countries are in slow collapse.
And as they descend into this slow collapse, they come to believe conspiratorially that the whole world is set against them, when in fact the World Monetary Fund, the International Monetary Fund and the American government and everybody would like them to actually succeed and flourish, but they themselves are collapsing so badly they have to convince themselves it’s everyone else’s fault but their own. That is a deep, deep incompetence that I often explain is a lot of the reason for Israel’s success in war.
You know, the Iranian Air Force never took off in the war in June and in the six week war just now. It literally never flew against the Israelis and the Americans. Why did it never even take off? Because it doesn’t functionally really exist. Why does the Air Force not functionally exist? Because the Iranian regime needs to make sure that the Iranian military isn’t strong enough to overthrow the Iranian regime. So the Iranian regime has a separate ideological military called the Revolutionary Guards. They have some competent forces, not an Air Force, but the Iranian military is actually not very competent. So you have a state that for reasons that are structural and ideological, not because the Iranians literally couldn’t run Intel if they, if they were living in America as free people. In Iran, they can’t run an Intel because in Iran, all the structures of government and political culture, all those structures are structures that actually force you into a state of incompetence. In that sense, in the sense of moral and ideological degradation, absolutely. But also it turns us incompetent. Like the dangerous thing with Ben-Gur to me is that what if the Palestinians are not removable?Morally, it would be horrifying to remove them. But if they’re not removable, what does that total war for all time, generationally, actually do to Israel? Arguably, that is exactly that kind of Arab world incompetence where ideology trumps policy, it trumps strategy.
That’s how you produce, for example, I really don’t want to connect the two, but I’m just saying when ideology trumps just careful thinking and strategy and good policy, countries degrade, countries weaken, countries become poor, countries become radicalized. The Haredi education system. I love Haredi education. Haredi moral education is something I want my kids to have. They need English and math too. And large parts of Haredi kids don’t have that. I call that a kind of incompetence. Now these people sit and study more hours than my kids do, where they learn a lot of English and math, but the actual learning hours, the Haredi kid is probably learning more than my kid. But they’re not learning enough things to actually participate in a modern economy. So he’s incompetent. That doesn’t at all mean he’s not also immoral. That was the long way of saying that.
Noam: Haviv, I want to ask you one last question about journalism. This is putting your journalist hat on. And I tend not to be a conspiratorial thinker. I actually loathe conspiratorial thinking because I think it actually makes people dumber. I think it makes people have to go through the process of seeing and exploring evidence and making sense of the evidence. And if you don’t understand the evidence, then you try to all of sudden make up a story that makes you feel better. I think it’s a very dangerous feature of the human brain. And I think there’s a direct relationship between conspiratorial thinking and antisemitism.
Bracket that for a second, but I wanna put your journalist hat on. I want you to do this for a second because I do the one conspiratorial moment that I have is timing in this article. This article came out almost simultaneously with renewed public discussion and investigations into the sexual violence committed against Israelis on October the 7th. I think for a lot of people around the world, and you don’t have to be Jewish or Israeli to notice this, the timing felt emotionally loaded. It felt something that made people’s hearts race a little bit perhaps. As a journalist, just don’t know how this, I’m not a journalist, you are, so I don’t know how this works with a newspaper.
Did that timing strike you as meaningful, as intentional, as coincidental perhaps or something else? Because it seemed odd that that article came out the day, the day before the renewed public discussion and investigations were reported in all the different news outlets about the horrific systemic sexual violence that was committed against Israelis on October 7th.
Haviv: The biggest report we have with the most evidence, with thousands of interviews, with thousands of video hours, details and specificity and names and times and all the public statements by all the victims, all of that all in one major report and a day before, which by the way, we know that the Israelis offered to the New York Times, the New York Times declined to run that freaking story.
And not only did they decline, that meant that they also knew they had a May 12th embargo. That’s when people give you a story ahead of time so you can be ready to publish. But they say, the condition for giving you the story is you can only publish it at that time when everyone will publish together. The fear often that PR firms or just advocates or activists have is that if one outlet publishes it first, the second outlet won’t publish it because then it’ll just look like they’re behind the other outlet, that’s the way journalistic outlets sometimes compete. And so there was an embargo that the New York Times knew about.
taking that data point, the fact that this thing published a day before, and the fact of the people who gave it to Kristof, for example, Euro-Med, all of that tells me, I’m utterly convinced of it.
It would be just a one in tens of thousands chance that it’s totally coincidental, that he created the one storm, the one stink, that they didn’t wait to report in the news pages on these stories. But it ran as an opinion piece with massive claims of sexual assault.
Can you imagine specific claims of sexual assault in an op-ed without it being reported? Why wouldn’t you report this? Why wouldn’t this be five front page articles in the New York Times if these specific cases are real? Report it as news. When did the New York Times transfer that to the op-ed? And the answer is when you need to make a deadline because you’re trying to preempt a massive Israeli report on every agonizing detail of Hamas sexual criminality. And that’s what this was ultimately about. And it’s what it was only about. This wasn’t about revealing sexual assaults. This was about covering and hiding sexual assault. And so they ran with sexual assault that are hard to trust.
There has been sexual assault. These are millions of people living all, I mean, my point is not that there isn’t Israeli criminality and that you won’t find it if you look for it. Of course you’ll find it. You’ll find it in the indictments of the Israeli prosecutor. My point is this wasn’t about that. That’s not what this was about because nobody would ever do this in this way and the timing is guaranteed an attempt to cover and hide and lessen the blow of the report on Hamas sexual criminality the day after, which means that if Kristof knew that timing, then Kristof doesn’t actually oppose sexual assault. Kristof just prefers one side sexual assault to another side’s sexual assault.
In fact, his phrasing is deliberately tailored to make sure you understand that whatever you think Hamas did, the Israelis are worse because he says these examples, these 14 examples with zero corroborating evidence and taken from activists, you should know is what Israelis experienced on October 7. He writes those words. People should look up the exact sentence. Is what Palestinians experience every day.
Noam: I’ll tell you the… He writes the horrific abuse inflicted on Israeli women on October 7th now happens to Palestinians day after day.
Haviv: That’s in the piece. Day after day. In other words, the whole point of the piece is you’re about to hear the scale of Hamas’s crimes. So I want to tell you because I got it from Euro-Med and we’re to do it the day before. It’s about covering for sexual assault. so Kristof has gone so deep into this cosmic evil framing of the world’s one Jewish state, that he now will cover for every crime, but he’ll do it in ways that of course say that all crime is bad, I’m just gonna cover for every crime. That’s the heart of it, that timing. The New York Times was told the day that would publish, the Israeli report would publish, and this publishes a day before, and the people running it.
Now, if he didn’t know about the Israeli report and somebody at the New York Times forgot to tell him, or he didn’t get that email to the newsroom about the embargo, that’s incompetence in the simple sense of the word, and then his handlers, his handlers who he names in the piece. mean, the, you know, Euro-Med is one of them, there’s one or two others. His handlers manage that. And they are nothing but that PR campaign. so yes, absolutely, that is not a conspiracy. There is no chance it wasn’t that.
Noam: Wow, Haviv, thank you for our conversation. I know this was a tough conversation about a topic that is so difficult to talk through, so difficult to deal with, so frustrating, causes so much anger. And when I described your initial reaction as emotional, like I said, it’s not a pejorative. I think that for anyone like you or me to not be emotional after that article, that would have been strange. That would have been odd.
So I thank you for the intensity in which you spoke, the direct nature in which you spoke, and also the willingness to explore what it means for Israeli society to operate independent of the external threats, the external claims, the external demonization.
That is a conversation that I think is a conversation that if Israeli society is going to continue to live out the dream and the promise of Zionism, it’s going to need to take very seriously for itself. And my wish for the world is to allow Israeli society to actually do that, to actually allow Israeli society to behave independently of, and if the world is going to demonize and delegitimize and do all the things that the world too often does about Israeli history, which is my favorite topic as everyone here knows, if it allows the Jews and it allows Israelis to be self-critical, I assure you there’s nothing that Jews and Israelis like to do more than be self-critical. So, what do you say, Haviv?Haviv: You know, that hurts me when you say it that way. It physically grinds in my ear that the world allows. There is no world and it doesn’t allow. the world is living through its own insanity andNoam: Yep, fair.
Haviv: And we don’t have to be bothered by it. Yeah.
Noam: Yep. Yep. Yep. Stay tuned everyone. Stay tuned everyone for an episode on the history of actually Israel and Israeli society dealing with these sorts of things. Because it’s a fascinating history. Haviv, thank you so much for joining me today. As always, such a pleasure to have you on as the journalist you are, as the podcaster you are, and as the friend you are. So thank you so much for joining.
Haviv: But Noam, I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me on. Thanks, Noam.
Noam: Unpacking Israeli History is a production of Unpacked, an OpenDor Media brand. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a rating on Apple or Spotify. It really helps other people find our show. One more time, I love hearing from you. I really do. And I know this episode is definitely gonna spark some conversations. So hit me up, email me at noam@unpacked.media. This episode was produced by Rivky Stern. Our team for this episode includes Rob Pera, Jenny Falcon, and Ari Schlacht. I’m your host, Noam Weissman. Thanks for being here and see you soon.