Haviv: Welcome to Jerusalem. It’s a it’s a privilege to have you as an honored guest in this. Great. I’m just claiming to represent that I represent Jerusalem now. In the name of the Holy Land.
Noam: Thank you for having me.
Haviv: You’re welcome.
Noam: Let me ask you a question I want to ask here. Yeah. The voice that you talk with is, that’s your real voice?
Haviv: You mean this.
Noam: Just soothing voice?
Haviv: Yeah, I do.
Noam: I have the voice you talk to your wife with.
Haviv: Yeah. I mean, I mean, it depends, you know, if she’s telling me I’m doing something wrong, and then my voice rises a couple probably octaves to be very defensive, but, No, this is this is it, by the way. Never. You know, I started getting compliments when I started a podcast. I never knew that I had a radio phonic voice. I kind of always thought I had a slightly higher pitched voice. Maybe, I don’t know, I have a very. A voice is very good for arguments.
Noam: What is that? It’s like.
Haviv: You know, in guitar they call it dynamic range. You can go down, you can go up, you can go loud, you can go quiet. You know, it’s it’s very it’s useful for expressiveness, but it is my natural voice. Yes. In fact, in fact, parenting has, I think, made my voice much more useful because, when you’re telling kids to do something, as, you know, as all dads know, modulating your voice is something you intuitively, instinctively and constantly take to doing.
Because sometimes you really need to be threatening and sometimes you need to deliver, critique, but in a way that’s acceptable. And so your voice becomes this tool. And, so being a dad, I think is a good prep for being a podcaster or a reader of audiobooks or whatever. I sing badly. Yes. Okay.
Noam: But you sing.
Haviv: Constantly and.
Noam: Badly. Not well.
Haviv: Yeah. You know, in Hebrew, I’m on key. Not even kidding. In Hebrew, I sing on key in English, where my voice is half an octave higher. Maybe automatically I’m off key, like I cannot sing to you now. American pie on key.
Noam: American pie.
Haviv: Whatever. Give me an American, you know, song with a voice is the signature. You can’t sing Wonderwall. There’s yelling, you know? But like, I can’t sing. But, but anything that happens in a synagogue, anything that happens, a Shabbat dinner, anything that, Israeli folk songs, Israeli pop rock.
Noam: Yeah. What’s your favorite?
Haviv: My favorite is probably Dror Yikra to the tune of, Sloop John B.
Noam: How does that go?
Haviv: I’m going to be off key.
Noam: Thank you for doing it.
Haviv: There you go.
Noam: All right, so now that we got that out of the way, but I know wondering about your voice. Well, it’s an awesome voice. But I want to speak to you so much about my experience in Israel right now. The last three days where, we went to the Erie, we went to, the two of us, or, we went to near us, we were on the the border of Gaza. We went to Tel Aviv, went to Jaffa, we went to Jerusalem and the Old City. Jerusalem. We went to the Muslim quarter, the Christian quarter, all different nooks and crannies. And it feels like this country is like, on the one hand, this huge mosaic of different fragments of society and on the other hand, there’s this heaviness, there’s this intensity.
It almost feels like an I don’t want to use too strong a word, but I will use the word like a tinderbox, like something that could happen at any moment. All these different people together. And and I’m just coming to you as my therapist right now to help me reflect on that.
Haviv: I think it’s a tinderbox. I think both sides are absolutely convinced the other side actually wants to remove them, and it wouldn’t take much for that to spiral out of any kind of control. I think that, the Israeli authorities have allowed certain just political movements, minority political movements, even very minority political movements, nevertheless, to not be reined in, to not just build out the capability to cause harm, which I’m talking partly about the the edges of the politics that have been violent and have been or tilting toward welcoming and justifying, in this great, you know, public sort of culture war over the sorry, the draft and the welfare state.
But that’s that’s small potatoes compared to, the, Israeli extremists in the West Bank that fraction of a fraction of an edge of the settlement movement that’s just decided to go berserk and violent and no one, you know, and it’s the funny thing, every time I say that right wingers will flood my comment section in any platform, Spotify or YouTube or wherever, and say, how could you? You know, it’s not even true. It’s not. It doesn’t exist. There’s a propaganda war against us. That’s all it is.
And in fact, it is significantly a propaganda war. A lot of incidents claimed to be Jewish violence in the West Bank have been untrue. And there nevertheless is also a real actual wave of mass of of significant violence.
And the fact that it’s, a very small group of people doesn’t help because it’s terrorism. It’s the psychological effect it has on the target population, on the Palestinians is as big as if it was a lot of people. But that’s how terrorism works. Israelis know that better than anyone. And so.
Noam: Yeah, somebody who is in conversation with me and others, said, listen, all these challenges that are happening, it’s just 1% of people.
Haviv: Yeah, but it’s not 1% of people because the entire system can’t bring them in, can’t crack down, can’t crush them. We have a system called administrative detention where you don’t have enough evidence to arrest somebody, but you know that they’re at the core of some terrorist organization or movement or, or attack series of attacks, and you can hold them for six month intervals approved by a court, but nevertheless, once every six months without trial, without, by the way, showing them evidence.
And it’s a it’s supposed to be a stopgap counterterror measure that is now existed for decades. And, you know, my, my dad, who was an attorney in the 80s, argued at the time and argued since that, what you do in the West Bank, you’ll eventually do to Israeli citizens as well.
And so these things bleed. If you have a democratic deficit somewhere, it will eventually it will justify itself. It will get people used to it and it will grow. This is a terrible danger to Israeli civil rights, not just the Palestinian civil rights. And, and it did. It expanded to Israeli terrorists, in the extremes of, of this movement and this government has lifted that that, institution has lifted as remove the ability of the IDF in the West Bank to arrest known agitators and violent attackers and assailants carrying out these terror attacks against Palestinian villages and towns.
And, and so the whole thing has now exploded. And, that’s a signal. It’s 1% and it’s a signal of an inability to rein it in over at the 50% and 80% in the mainstream. So, when small groups that do crazy things that nobody wants can’t be reined in by the larger systems, because coalition politics means that the far right has an outsized influence over decision making, basically been very smart, which basically run the West Bank.
Now that’s smart, which is not the minister of defense. There’s a separate minister of defense managing the army, managing the wars. Smart, which is a minister in the Defense ministry alongside the minister of Defense, who’s essentially his entire prerogative is the West Bank. And that’s so he’s the minister of the West Bank. And that’s how things look. That’s how things look.
Noam: So that tinderbox is real. I mean, like when I was in the old city of walking near, the Temple Mount, walking towards an area, those that you could go to, the Temple Mount that was stopped by Israeli police because they said this area is just for Muslims to enter, which is very interesting for me. I never experienced that.
They didn’t let me in because they presume I wasn’t a Muslim. And, I thought that was like, like a moment of there’s a, there’s you don’t see it, but there’s this like, there’s this tension that exists around the most severe, serious, intense spiritual, religious, national place in the world, which is where we’re sitting right now. Jerusalem, let’s it’s very real.
Haviv: I just I want to say that that’s long standing is one and, that the and the police take great pains and have for decades and it’s considered very good that they separate the Jews and the Muslims at the holy sites. And.
Noam: They need to do that. What does that say about religion?
Haviv: Because in agitator, you know, holding up a sign and screaming, what they’re screaming in the public square is totally legitimate. And democracy and agitator, starting, a violent altercation at the holy site at public prayers, whether Jewish or Muslim. There have been cases of Muslims on the Temple Mount throwing rocks down to the plaza of the Western Wall.
And cases of Jewish people who argued for prayer, Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount, which I’m not opposed to, even though that’s considered a very right wing position. I think it’s a reasonable one. But, but, but separately, you know, not as an act of domination, but as an act of actual religious expression. And so some people are agitating for that.
You know, let’s seek out violent incidents because they think that if they can have violent altercations with Muslims on the Temple Mount, they further the goal of of of more Israeli police intervention and control in the Temple Mountains. And that’s really a warping of of of what prayer is. And it’s the opposite of what prayer is.
Noam: So yeah. All right. So one of the things I did is every single person and this is the I told you, this is a therapy session where you’re helping me explore all these responses. I’ve gotten to my podcast, all these, responses I’ve gotten to the questions I’ve been asking. What I need is right of these. And, I want to know what your whole thing is through.
So one of the questions that I kept asking Israelis, I kept asking them, What is Zionism? And they’re all different answers of what Zionism is. What answer? This guy who’s from hashomer hatzair, which is this, Socialist youth movement that’s about building the land of Israel.
He moved to near us recently, and he said, my initial Zionism is that the Jewish people should have national self-determination in the land of Israel, and that’s part of his definition. The Palestinians should have, national self-determination. I thought that was fascinating. I said, that’s part of your definition of Zionism is that. And he said, of course, because if I want my people to have national self-determination, then I want that means I want all peoples to have national self-determination that has me far from that’s a lot, from, the table set up, that’s the you know, what his ideas of he when he said you called me a Zionist, That’s a bit arrogant to call me a Zionist, if you guys to call. What a privilege to be called a Zionist right here in America, a Zionist. It’s a slur. In Australia, it’s a slur. The Z word is a slur. He was saying no to be. As I said, it’s not a slur. It’s the perfect to call yourself.
It’s like it’s a dare. You call me as I just I haven’t done enough. I didn’t build enough. I didn’t hired enough. Right. And that’s that’s a different articulation of Zionism. And then I know that a woman who are leading by a woman who’s trying to figure out where she fits into Israeli society, she’s doing a tremendous amount to fight misogyny, to fight any sort of the 24 feminism in Israeli society.
And she’s wondering what it was I did to her is a little bit of superiority. And she just she wants to be part of Israeli society. And I so I wanted to ask you, after going through all that and asking anyone about Zionism, is I want to ask you, should we be retiring the term Zionism? You always define Zionism with me on this podcast and in your podcast, always as a Zionism is the ultimate rescue project.
That’s always a you. Right? But then you had Sam Harris on your podcast and Sam Harris said to you, I don’t know if you guys practice beforehand or not, but it kind of like came up almost like out of nowhere on the podcast. And he goes, I just want to tell you one thing, copy of y’all. He knows it is like this, but y’all got to get rid of the term Zionism.
It’s a love. It confuses everyone. No one knows what it means. It means this. It doesn’t mean that it’s it doesn’t work. Good God, the state of Israel, you’re there already. And it’s starting to mean something that it doesn’t actually mean. So just enough using that term help me deal with all of this. How do you think about this?
Is Sam Harris right? Should we stop using the term Zionism?
Haviv: Such a fascinating question. Can I take a can I go back to the last question and just add something? I think I answered it badly. I just want to just because, you know, the the worst stuff is on the other side, not on our side.
Noam: It’s the other side.
Haviv: Which is the tinderbox being Hamas really is taking over every three. And let me just say that properly, and just to, to add, you know, you could see on the Israeli side the signals of the tinderbox, but, on the Palestinian side, the single signals, if anything, even stronger. The takeover of every political space by Hamas and its ideas and the just the conviction by Israelis and Palestinians that the other side is coming for them means that they’re all they’re all standing ready for, for a fight that they believe is existential.
So the tinderbox is is very powerful and really bad. Ideas are spreading. And, and you’re exactly right to feel that, okay. Okay, so. But the.
Haviv: Zionism.
Noam: It’s your thoughts on that question should be, should we retire the word Zionism?
Haviv: So the thing is, Zionism has been many, many things to many, many people. Still is. People call themselves religious Zionists. They have a different sense of what the meaning of history is, what God wants of the Jews, whether there is a God, what the land looks like, the shape of it, the purpose of it, then people who consider themselves left wing socialist Zionists on the classic Israeli model.
Or American liberal Zionist, the word Zionism in America is a radically different word. It’s a word that describes a kind of sense of attachment to the Jews of Israel that carries with it all the baggage of American guilt over the motionless ness of American Jewry and the Holocaust, and then the the sort of soaring and the an immense mobilization of American Jews after, before 67 and after 67, built on the guilt of having done very little in the Holocaust.
And and then Israel being this fantasy of perfection and utopia in the 70s and 80s, and maybe a little bit of a sense of of Jewish strength and pride and then Israel just not being good, being, you know, sensing that Israel is now a villain in the world. And that’s that being experienced by America, this whole dramatic arc that American Jews have undergone is all coded into the word Zionism, that when you’re talking about it, is in Israeli and Hebrew, is totally missing.
Like, we have no idea what that whole vision and universe and, just now had a little back and forth on X with an anti-Zionist Jewish writer at Jewish Currents., he was arguing that even though America is bad, I think that’s literally how he argued this.
Nevertheless, he’s been there five generations, and he doesn’t think he should go back and can’t go back. His ancestors fled before the Holocaust from Poland, basically. And, he has nowhere else to to live. He’s a fifth generation American.
And this pro-Palestinian, Muslim person on On X who was going after him, said, and then he says to this person, where should I, where should I go?
And this person responds, because this person is just a random antisemite, responds Gehenim. Which is, you know, the Muslim people, right? And so this person is telling them you should die. And, I commented on this conversation that this anti-Zionist Jew and antisemitic Muslim were having, pointing out that both of them were making the case for Zionism. Which is sad and stupid and tone deaf and historically illiterate and, but there it is.
And, he responds to that by saying, I don’t support, nothing Israel does is justified, you know, by the antisemitism of, of of of some people in I don’t know what in America and like nothing Israel does opposing what Israel does isn’t anti-Zionist, opposing the existence of Israel and the survival of those millions who didn’t get into America, the very millions you were referencing that your parents managed to get into America to avoid that fate, that anti-Zionism is the desire for all these Jews to be, to not have survived. And he didn’t respond.
But it’s it’s it’s it’s a demonstration of how this American conversation about Zionism is really just American. And it’s about the American experience of American conversations over five generations of America. It has nothing to do with what’s going on on the ground. What’s going on, on the ground is that you have a society made up of millions of people who come from radically different cultures, but always believe they were one thing, and they then had to become that one thing in real life, because every other option was death, destruction and expulsion. And they did that.
And so you’ll have your religious Zionism that says it’s not possible that the worst period in human history is also the deadliest, the most awful, the most evil is also the period of the greatest flourishing of human history. And also at that moment of the best and the worst, all the Jews returning to the land that almost word for word, fulfillment of the messianic prophecy and the prophets of the Bible. It’s not possible that that’s all accidental. And so there is a messianic meaning to this arc of Zionism.
And then you’ll have the secular Zionist. The Marxist Zionists are saying, no, this is just part of the great socialist revolution of building more equality in the world. Those are people more likely to say if the Jews have a state, the Palestinians have to have a state.
And then you’ll have, Revisionist Zionists or just more hard nosed and hawkish, and you’ll have, cultural Zionists like Ahad Ha’am, Writing that, being that Zionism is core function is actually creating a model society that contributes the great things that Jews can contribute to the world. But frames, that it builds in a particular Jewish context.
So we start being like Germans doing physics and who are accidentally Jewish and Russians doing literature, who are accidentally Jewish, but in fact, Jews as Jews doing all of this stuff.
All of these ideas, all percolate through the minds of all different people. There’s a lot of religious Zionist that don’t really think the Messiah is coming, because the state of Israel exists, but they think that thinking so is moral is a signal of moral belonging and devotion. And there’s a lot of secular Zionists who don’t expect a Marxist revolution. But damn it, the Jews survived. And that’s enough.
Noam: And that’s that for you enough. But you’re not answering my question. Yeah, should we retire the word Zionism. And now I will. I will push you on this because there was I had a debate with, another, friend who’s joined by Toba Hellerstein, and she was making the argument, you know, because I love, I lose, I go, I think you don’t understand that from the outside world, we should retire the word Zionist and we should talk about, do you believe that Jews should have belonging? Jews should have peoplehood? Different words that mean the same thing practically. But like Sam Harris said, there is a saying we should get rid of the word Zionist because it it has a deleterious effect on the other, because for whatever reason, it’s started to mean something else. And when a word loses its translation, its ability to communicate, then it loses its value. What’s the purpose of of it’s.
Haviv: It’s not for whatever reason. It’s because a vast and deep and abiding bigotry has transformed a word that refers to the very survival of millions of Jews into a categorical evil, which everyone must define themselves against. It’s a vast, unbelievable propaganda tool deployed against the Jews as a precursor to denying that they have a right to even have self-determination, or self-reliance or self-defense or survival.
Sam Harris was making a particular point that’s extremely salient for liberals in California, which is what he is and where he lives. In fact, I told him on the podcast, look, I teach Zionism. If we retire the word Zionism, I’m out of work. And he said, well, you know, I don’t want to put you out of work, but, but the point is larger. In California, facing the audiences that Sam Harris faces, where his audiences, the people he’s been talking to for decades about a thousand things about neuroscience and atheism and a thousand other things that he deals with, Israel is a small piece. He thinks Israel is a symbolic of a much larger war of of of intellectual, you know, standards and concepts that have to do with Western civilization and with understanding the dangers of extreme religion and all these other things that he thinks are all, converge on the question of Israel and the Gaza war, on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
So he’s he’s having his debates out there. And in some sense, they’re much, much larger than the debates the Jews are having. And yeah, maybe Zionism is a really dumb thing for him to be using that word. And as he says, it’s not useful to him because he said, you know, when I say Zionism, I then have to I then set myself 15 steps back because now I have to say, oh, and it’s not what you think it is.
In fact, what I mean is Jewish, this Jewish that survived, you’re already on the back foot. So what a tactical what a dumb tactical move to insist on Zionism.
But the problem with me retiring the word Zionism is that millions of Jews across 7 or 8 generations use that word to describe their survival, their culture creation, their nation building.
And it meant a dozen things. And the debate between those dozen things produced the modern Israeli consciousness and psyche and culture and meaning of things, and to retire the word, because, what? Assholes out there in the craziness of the world that use us. The one of Sam’s other points, which kills counter to the retired Zionism point in my book.
I just have to say, I deeply admire Sam, and, you know, I keep, whenever we talk, I keep poking him about religion. You know, there’s like, we disagree on fundamental things, right? But.
Noam: You are a rabbi’s son at the end of the day.
Haviv: You’re right. And, and even his atheism is super rabbinic, but I won’t tell it that to his face, but, but he’s, he’s a I admire him deeply for seriousness, for honesty, for changing his mind, for also making serious cases about things. But, if I retire the word Zionism, I succumb. I admit, that, he made this point, he made this point that there maybe 15 million Jews all told. I mean, we could probably only get 9 million of them on Yom Kippur into a synagogue. But let’s imagine there’s 15 million, and we’re not going to win the algorithms. We’re not going to win the propaganda war. The forces set against us, on a weekday are a hundred times our size.
And on, weekend, you know, 200 times ours, right? It’s not possible. And so what do we do with a grand discourse and built, built. I’m sorry for saying this, especially to left wing listeners. My only excuses that I think it’s true built deeply into the theological infrastructure of Christianity and Islam and Christianity has come a long way, but Islam has refused to come that long way, in modern times, especially, is a positioning of the Jew as the obstacle to redemption, as the denier of Christ, as the denier of the great revelation to the prophet, as the, it is core dogma to Islam, including wonderful, modernized pacifist Muslims of the Amadeus School for example, that the Jews received a real revelation and then intentionally warped it.
And, and the Jew is positioned for centuries. I mean, in the Crusades, I mean in the Byzantine period. I mean, you will read this in Saint Augustine. It is witness theory that the Jew must be oppressed for all time, because the Jew failed to accept Christ. This isn’t even deicide. This isn’t extreme antisemitism. This is core, dogmatic, mainstream, principled, the Jew positioned as the antithesis to the good, to the Christian, to the believer, to the Muslim.
Noam: The state of Israel poured cold water all over.
Haviv: And as Max Weber taught us, when a society secularized as he was writing about France, it carries over the mental frameworks from its religion into its secular life. In other words, it doesn’t secularized and how it thinks it just the in the content of the thoughts. And so this idea that there can be an intersectional villain where all the bad somehow intersects into a single and you can’t actually point to a particular thing that villain is doing wrong.
In other words, the Gaza where you can say is a terrible war, but you can’t say it’s the worst war. It’s not even the worst war within 300 miles of it. So what do you mean? That this is the one thing that Western leftist politics have to organize around that intersection of that Jew? The positioning of the only Jewish state in the world as the as the antithesis to the good and all the good.
And Zionism is a code for that. What? Why is Zionism a slur? Because you are the opposite of all the things, the opposite of universalism and fairness and equality and justice and truth. Now you’re talking about millions of people who would have died otherwise. You’re talking about refugees, the most desperate refugees in the world.
Mamdani in New York has started to talk about Nakba survivors. There’s a woman who was in the Nakba as a young child. She survived the Nakba. That is an explicit attempt to transform the Nakba into the moral arc, to give it the moral cachet in Western moral understanding of the Holocaust.
Because the thing about the Nakba is very nearly everyone who was in it, over 99% of the people who were in it survived it. Whereas in the Holocaust, significantly more than two thirds did not survive it. You actually would have to survive the Holocaust. You didn’t have to survive the Nakba. The Nakba was something that Jews experienced about 12 times within 20 years of the Palestinian displacement.
Now, it doesn’t mean it’s not foundational and central to the Palestinian story, and we shouldn’t grapple with it and talk about it. And by the way, critique and critique Israel about it.
But the idea that it replaces the Holocaust as a, as the great moral paradigm of the West is an explicit antisemitic attempt to say the Jew is all the evil things. That is not a reason to give up Zionism. That’s a reason to hold on to it and tell the world to go fuck itself.
Noam: So I think sometimes what happens is when you have that deep, passionate and clear distillation of Zionism, you’re you start one, you get angry, almost both get angry.
Yeah. What is it that happens when getting angry? So I want to show you the quote, that I just had on my, my podcast where I interviewed Nas Daily, Nuseir Yassin. I’ll play you this one clip, but it got a lot of reactions with people, and it was not about Zionism, but it was about Palestinian identity, though. Now he’s from the northern part of Israel. He’s another citizen of Israel. And I asked him this question if enough people here’s what I say to the people who say, there’s no such thing as a Palestinian, that they’re just Arabs who live In the region, what would you say to them? I say to them is, who the hell cares. If enough people identify as to understand it? That means it is a thing, right? Whether you like it or not.
So engender a lot of conversation. And one person a very famous influence on a need for Israelis. So if enough people believe the like, we must accept this truth that it’s an entire identity that was solely created to create a real identity. The very foundation of an Arab Palestinian was rotten from the beginning. Nothing good comes from feeding a lie.
And then someone else says, I agree. If the identity is to destroy another, then there is a problem.
Let’s stop there for a second.
And you were the viral clip on this question. Like you, you’re saying don’t retire the word Zionism. Should Palestinians retire the word Palestinian like, is there such a thing as a Palestinian?
yeah, I would side with me, say, look, it puts me in a very silly position. The the single most powerful, sanely and popular political faction in the Palestinian national movement today genuinely believes I should not exist and my children should be dead.
Noam: Who is that?
Haviv: Hamas, who would still win elections. And especially in the West Bank? And, and I’m supposed to now say that a Palestinian national movement that believes that about me, that I’m a fake thing that shouldn’t exist, but I’m supposed to not come out and defend the fact that they claim to be a thing that exists?
It’s profoundly annoying. They made it annoying. So that’s A. B. I have an allergy. I get an itch whenever, whenever people get to abstract. The abstractions are coping mechanisms of of people watching from outside. And I don’t care about the abstractions.
There was never a German people until suddenly there was a German people. There were German speakers, various dialects bleeding into different kinds of German in different places. Some of them ended up part of Bismarck’s Germany. But in the context of the Franco-Prussian War, the unification of Germany and the previous round of unification by Napoleon by a conqueror coming in, there was this particularly historical contingency that convinced most of the German speakers of the world, though not all, there’s still Austrians. There’s something else, apparently, for some reason. Not that I can tell from the outside that there’s such a thing as a German people, a German nation, that it has a history. After World War Two, they still got to be a people. Nobody questioned whether Germany should exist. There is no crime that would make an identity not exist until, by the way, people come to obviously the Jews, at which point the existence of Israel is somehow believed to be up for debate because there’s this vast, deep structural bigotry, at the heart of Muslim discourse on us and at the heart of Western discourse on us.
And to pretend it isn’t there is. The data tells us it’s there. Everything the comparisons tell us it’s there.
So, my attitude toward the question of whether or not there are Palestinians is it is a falsehood that some of the versions of this are false, like the KGB invented Palestinian identity in 1964 at the Arab League summit in Cairo, when the PLO is founded, no.
However, Palestinian identity was invented at some point, ironically, often by Christians, Christian Arabs, the newspaper Falestin, these are early, newspapers. I think they’re founded right around the World War One.
Noam: I think they’re in 1911, 1912.
Haviv: Okay, so with plus minus five years, I should have said that at the beginning, I would have sounded smarter.
Noam: You’re good.
Haviv: And these newspapers are vehicles for talking in two ways about Palestinian nationalism. One, they framed the land of Palestine in the way the Jews understand the Land of Israel, which Muslims never did. Muslims never saw this land, ever.
In the history of Islam, Palestine, the first administrative district after the Muslim conquest, which is right after the Muslim conquest, is Jerusalem, is the Jerusalem Jaffa corridor. To Muslims, Jerusalem is Philistine inasmuch as there is a Philistine. And the administrative district of the Ottoman Empire never saw this place as a land. Tiberius and the Sea of Galilee were always Beirut or Damascus. There were some reorganizations of provinces. They were not Philistine in Muslim in the Muslim understanding.
So where do Palestinians come to understand the shape of the land itself, that they define their nationalism? According to the Christians of the land, the Christians of the land, unsurprisingly, think of the shape of the land exactly the way the Jews think that the shape of the land, on account of how they got it from the Jews. And Christian Arab nationalists in the early 20th century, begin to talk intellectually, seriously produced newspapers, produce literature about the existence of a distinctly Palestinian identity, and why the Christians in in Palestine and in Syria and in Lebanon and in Iraq and all over the Arab world. Why are they the very first torchbearers of Arab nationalist sentiment and ideas? Because they’re desperately trying to avoid after the Ottoman Empire is in collapse and retreating and the Arabs are now trying to build a new Arab border, they’re desperately trying to avoid Islamic dominance, where they will be a second class citizen minority. And so they want a secular Arab nationalism.
So that process that we saw in Syria, that we saw in Lebanon, that we saw in Iraq, that process was identical among Palestinians. And in as much as there is an Iraqi identity, which is to say it could fall apart, you know, Kurds and Sunni and Shia Iraq has been torn and set against itself. But there’s also an Iraqi identity that really is. Both are true at once. And how they sort of interact with each other is a big part of Iraqi history and the history of that region for the last two centuries.
In that sense, there is a Palestinian identity. And if you make a case that in fact, Islam never actually saw Palestine, that included the Galilee or the Negev, that’s true. And that doesn’t mean there isn’t a Palestinian people.
But the more important point is that they’re not me. They don’t. They’re not my people. So there are different people. What do they call themselves? Who cares? They could call themselves Tajik or Kurd or French.
Noam: But you respect that, they’re called their identity is Palestinian for them.
Haviv: If they don’t want to be Jews as an ethnic identity, it’s a national identity. No, but we’re talking within Israel. You can have Palestinian and Jew, right? As as national identities.
So if they don’t want to be the national identity called Jew and yes, you know, we’re both now very much feeling the way Jews are many different things, all at once. Yes, but if they don’t want to be what I am, my people, and I don’t want them to be my people, I mean, if you convert to Judaism, I desperately want you. You’re a brother and a sister. But if. But if they don’t want to, and I don’t want them to, and there are separate people, I have to treat them like they are distinct people of their own. So they’re Arab? Yeah, they’re Arab.
By the way, you know, Iraqis and Moroccans don’t have mutually intelligible language. They have radically different history. They have different economy, different culture, different everything. They’re all Arab in some sense or another. That doesn’t mean they’re literally the same. So, functionally, forget abstractions. The history doesn’t give us good answers, because the history is the history of all Arab nationalism, which means that this is as legitimate as any other Arab nationalism. Or if you don’t think nationalism in principle, imagined communities of nations are legitimate, then it’s you should not believe.
If you don’t believe the Jews get to be a people, but you do believe the Palestinians get to be a people. You’re an incoherent bigot.
Noam: But if you believe, the Jews have a national identity…
Haviv: Yes. I think the Jewish national identity rests on more planks. But also I think that it doesn’t take that many planks. Put it this way. What the hell is an Austrian national identity? It’s a function of an Austro-Hungarian empire.
Noam: Shared culture–
Haviv: That was a distinct imperial power when Germany was unifying. If it hadn’t been, it would have been part of Germany, wouldn’t it? Or maybe not. Maybe they’re actually different. I’m speaking out of total ignorance of Austrians. And I’ll tell you a dark secret. Most people making these claims and these having these debates overseas about whether there’s a real whether Jew is a national identity or not, whether Palestinians a national identity or not, are speaking out of total ignorance of our cultures, our identities and our histories.
There is one functionally, there’s a Palestinian people. It doesn’t matter if in some grand moral scheme it literally doesn’t mean like it.
Noam: Hey, there’s like people say, I’m pterodactyls. That’s not that’s not the same thing as like a lot of Palestinian.
Haviv: Put it this way. If most of the, if nearly all the people saying they’re pterodactyls all live in the same place and all share a language and culture, and they also have wings, they get to call themselves pterodactyls.
Noam: I hear you.
Haviv: It’s not American identity fashioning in that radical, individualistic American sense that almost every American debate is about, like, I get to identify as a gender, I get to identify as a religion, I get to identify as a people. It’s not that that’s a uniquely American phenomenon, and that’s fascinating. It’s part of American culture.
Noam: And we Americans, we don’t need to export that to everyone.
Haviv: These are real tribes. You want to say there’s no such thing as Palestinians. They’re just a bunch of Arab tribes that feel that they belong to each other and fight for each other and and demand a grand story of redemption together. Okay. What have you told me? Not to call them Palestinians. To call them some other name? You haven’t told me much.
Noam: So you help me understand what Zionism is and therefore maybe pissed off some of the left. You help me understand that you believe that Palestinian national identity is something that is real. Because identities are constructed over time. They may have pissed off some of the right. Yes. So greta job today, Haviv. Now, let’s, continue our tradition.
Haviv: Who’s left to piss off?
Noam: Oh, I’ll tell you exactly. So, Rahm Emanuel was just in Israel and he spoke in Tel Aviv, and he seems to be running for president. It seems to be something that’s happening in the US. They gave this major speech in Tel Aviv. And the thrust of the speech was the initial, the beginning with Rahm Emanuel talking about how was, you know, relative to the underground in Israel and his uncle was is buried, I think the Mount of Olives or something like that, and like, like a real connection to this place.
But he’s American, he’s running for an American president, and he’s saying that the relationship between America and Israel, that the alliance, the very unique special alliance, has existed in different ways for almost 80 years, he says. We have to start thinking about this differently, that there’s this idea of unconditional support, this idea of no matter what funding Israel has led to a disaster within Israel.
And what I want you to comment on is the future of what you think the future should be in the American Israel Alliance, because one of the steps that should get us to pause and think is that four years ago, 55% of Americans had positive favorability towards Israel, compared to 37% now. And J.D. Vance said something that was really hurtful to Israelis. I don’t know how inaccurate it was, but it was hurtful when he said, listen, don’t piss off the only America, the only friend you have left, meaning America 11 billion this year was referring to the state of Israel is Sparta. We are Sparta, meaning we are, we are like this Ben-Gurion line of law. The needle of too much. That’s it doesn’t matter when you say that. If the Jews do like we are on our own, we’re going to fight for fight. We’re going to be on our own and fight for ourselves. And it doesn’t matter what the outside world says.
So I want to understand you, as an Israeli, where do you see the future going in this American, US, Israel a lot. Where should we go?
Haviv: Netanyahu use the word Sparta to refer to, creating indigenous, military industrial base. Not that we are on our own and should be on our own. That was misquoted by the press. You’re reflecting exactly what you read, but he was not saying we’re on our own.
I wish he had, because I believe that. I am that that crazy, right wing radical on this question, that he isn’t. We shouldn’t be on our own, but we better well be prepared to be on our own. Or what the hell is the point, then? We don’t have that self-determination that we keep talking about.
Look, the Rahm Emanuel speech was trying to thread all kinds of strange needles. You know, he starts out by affirming what Israelis think they know. The Palestinians kept getting peace offers and kept rejecting them. So he pissed off all the Palestinian crowd and the pro-Palestine crowd.
And then he said, but the Israelis really can’t just be, you know, militaristic all the time. So he pissed off the Israelis, who are like, what you don’t understand what’s happening.
And so he tried to thread all these needles, but these, these, these, these raindrops, he’s dancing between only really exist in his own imagination. None of them are, none of them are real. In other words, nowhere in his speech did I hear, a solution to the problem that we face, an ideological movement that genuinely actually wants us dead. The axis of Hamas and Iran and Hezbollah that crosses a Shia-Sunni divide that has been there for 150 years of theology behind it, that is built a vast, grand strategy that is born in Algeria, and all of these thinkers and scholars and theologians and is willing to destroy their own polities on the altar of destroying us, because the the salvation of Islam from centuries of weakness is what they think they’re doing. And therefore Nasrallah has said this, Sinwar has said this. Hamas has said that there will be more October 7th for all time.
They don’t mind the destruction of their polities. Why? They’re not crazy, they’re not extremist or rather, these are words used by journalists as shorthand, to actually not have to actually explain what story they think they’re living in.
And when you actually dig down into that story, you discover they’re actually under terrible. The Iranian regime will never stop trying to destroy Israel, because it has tried to prove Shiism able to redeem Islam from this weakest thing that ever pushed Islam back, where cynicism failed for a century.
That is so foundational to their understanding of themselves as an Islamic revolution in history that they will never not come for us.
One of the most amazing assumptions that I’ve encountered in the Western press in Britain, in the United States and Canada and many others. Obviously, I focus mostly on English.
I don’t follow French press closely, but in, we’ll call it in the Anglophone Western press, is this assumption that Israel has engaged Hezbollah in Lebanon. Israel launched those wars. Israel launched the war with Iran.
The first attack from the Iranian mainland on Israel, they brought Iran into the fold, into the war, was Iran in June 2024, and it was a retaliation for an Israeli killing of an Iranian general. That’s true. But he was the Quds Force commander in Syria, overseeing the Hezbollah strikes that were emptying Israelis, a direct combatant commander who literally sits on the Shura Council of Hezbollah, the man was ordering daily rocket barrages of Israeli cities that were emptying and demolishing Israeli cities for six months before the Israelis targeted him. And he’s not killed in Iranian territory.
And the Iranian answer is 300+ missiles from Iranian territory. Hezbollah three times has gone to war against Israel when Israel didn’t want that and nobody wanted, Lebanon desperately didn’t want that.
And everything that Israel has done in Lebanon is a Hezbollah starting of a war, three different times in three years.
Where did Rahm Emanuel explain to us what we do if the enemy really is actually coming for us? And if you don’t address that, this is the problem with living in these unbelievably shallow, self-serving moral abstractions from far away. Rahm Emanuel thinks that the Israel U.S. relationship is primarily about his feelings of identification with an Israel he wants to be proud of, and is no longer making him proud. And that’s causing him problems in his social world. That has nothing to do with the real us. Those. That’s a cartoon version of us that only exists to serve his own social feelings, moral feelings. We’re real people and we’re dealing with a real problem.
Now, I have criticized Netanyahu several hundred times in the last three years, and I think that Netanyahu’s failings in the last three years, even if some of his decisions were courageous and absolutely correct, some of his failings will literally cost us victory against this great enemy that we face over a long war.
And yet, this Netanyahu is not wrong on this is the enemy. And if you don’t have an answer for missing out for how to fight this enemy, Hamas, Hezbollah, Hamas thinks it’s winning in Gaza, and all of its supporters think it’s winning in Gaza because the suffering of Gazans has nothing to do with this equation. It’s only about the destruction of Israel as part of a great redemptive story, which, by the way, there’s a Venn diagram that overlaps the kind of anti-colonialist, progressive discourse on Israel and the Islamist redemption of Islam discourse on Israel.
So the destruction of Israel really is the point. And all the suffering Palestinians have in the eternal war to destroy this great thing that is the villain of the universe is worth it.
And so nobody cares that Hamas will tyrannize Palestinians. Nobody cares about Palestinian suffering. Nobody cares that they’re more dead using American weapons in a different war somewhere else. It’s really just about Israel. And if that’s true, then what the hell? What the what is what I’m doing other than just succumbing to to the bigotry here?
Noam: So seven years from now, what’s the relationship like?
Haviv: The relationship was never, ever as close or as good as Rahm Emanuel pretends. And President Obama, by the way, when Rahm was his chief of staff, gave a speech where he said Israel needs to. This is years ago, and paraphrasing, so forgive me if it’s not precise. But he said Israel needs to go back to its liberal roots, to the golden years.
And I remember hearing that speech and I remember laughing out loud. I remember being shocked by the like, who writes, who writes his speeches? Israel under Golda was much less liberal than Israel today, under Netanyahu. Now, maybe that’ll change if Ben-Gvir is the future of Israel, as you know, Ezra Klein believes maybe, maybe we’re living through history for the first time, but it’s still more liberal than it was under Golda. It’s the American Jewish fantasy of Israel.
Noam: What do you mean by that, more liberal?
Haviv: You name it, you name it. Integration of Arabs in every avenue and field of Israeli public life.
Noam: LGBTQ
Haviv: LGBTQ, public debates. You know, it was right wing, right wing media outlets. The government didn’t like were illegal in the 70s. And right wing media outlets today are not illegal. And also left wing media outlets are not illegal and nobody’s illegal.
Noam: Music.
Haviv: Music, the Mizrahi political universe, political world, attention coming in from marginalization to the heart of power equality in a hundred different ways, including Arabs, including in every way now since the Second Intifada. That’s not true for the Palestinians in the West Bank, but Israel in 1999, the situation of Palestinians under military rule was better than in the 70s.
And so there simply isn’t a standard you could possibly bring by which Israel of Golda is somehow more the Democratic Party’s vision of a liberal society than Israel of Netanyahu in 2010. It’s simply not. Unless you’re not talking about any reality on the ground, you’re only talking about the fantasies of his speechwriters who are basically American Jews. Right? The Axelrods, the Rahm Emanuels.
So Rahm Emanuel is engaging with an American Jewish fantasy. None of his audience was Israeli in that speech. We were props. His audience was America. He’s running for president, or he’s running for vice president, which is probably more likely. I don’t think he thinks the Democrats will literally put him at the top of the ticket, but they might put an AOC at the top of the ticket, and they need to hold the establishment, you know? And so to create that broad coalition, they might put him as number two. I think that’s what he’s aiming for. And that means that we are props.
And so he’s doing to us what everyone else does to us, which is live his own moral morality play and his own political fantasies through us.
Noam: Do you think Israel will be more independent?
Haviv: Israel in 1948 was under an American military blockade. And that’s after Marshall told Sharett that we would die. It expected there was a major part of that, of that administration, of the Truman administration, that expected us to literally be exterminated. And we were still under that blockade and a British blockade. At the same time, Israel in 1956 was pushed back by Eisenhower, and one of Eisenhower’s explicit threats was U.N. sanctions. Israel in 67 had no American help. Israel begins to become an American ally in the 70s because Americans bogged down in Vietnam and Israel protects Jordan from a Syrian invasion. Israel is pro-American, even though America was never pro-Israel.
Israel remains pro-American despite being very communist, and it nevertheless doesn’t side with the communists. So the communists are building out Arab armies to destroy it. And therefore Israel is in the American camp by default. And in the 70s, the Pentagon decides to make good on that and actually build that alliance.
Israel, at its most desperate and its weakest and its most threatened, had no American help of any kind. If anything, the Americans made everything harder and actually were dangerous for Israel. And Israel since then has only ever been what America needed it to be. This fantasy that the American support for Israel is based on some kind of clever Israeli trick of the light that we somehow control all the politicians, that AIPAC can just buy all the politicians. This is, it is based in certain bigotries, but it’s also stupid. It’s profoundly stupid.
If you want to develop Iron Dome and you’re the Pentagon, and the Israelis think they can do it, and the American defense industries think that it’s not possible, which was the opinion in 2006. You will give the Israelis a 10th of the money that it would cost Lockheed Martin or Boeing to do it, and they will actually pull it off. The Pentagon treats Israel like an R&D shop every time the Pentagon pays for something, every time Congress sends money over to us for that kind of R&D, America co-owns that system. America, by the way, makes the interceptors of arrows, iron domes, all that stuff. The Americans have never been stupid. I’ll say more than that. AIPAC and negotiating and helping Congress shepherd through Iron Dome funding and helping President Obama make the decision to actually fund Iron Dome funding, AIPAC was keen on making sure that America co-owned the system so that Israel is actually useful to America, because if it really is just a charity case, it’s unsustainable.
So with the far left now wants to do and you see, like, you know, Ro Khanna is talking about how this article 224 that’s going to merge Israeli and American, you know, missile development in America will lose its sovereignty. It’s how he called it.
It’s like literally just a military R&D, a cooperation. That’s literally all it is. They’re lying there. Actually. People should look this up, not on one eye but on two, because I sometimes hallucinate. But look it up it they’re lying. Almost nothing being said about Israel. Not pro not anti is is anything but American mythmaking.
And I think Rahm Emanuel showed up here and did more American mythmaking. And if in the American mythmaking,
Americans love lying to themselves, we are now in the, sitting in the aftermath of the, Plattner fiasco for the Democrats right.
What the hell was that? What the hell was that? A month, a month ago, I said everything we’ve now learned. Why the hell are the Democrats so stupid that they’re going to take this insane risk? And lo and behold, the insane risk turned out to be exactly what everyone knew it would be. But all the Democratic establishment went and and went to him and validated and wrote on Twitter and wrote on the– Americans are spending their time lying to themselves about stupid things and not thinking clearly.
America was never as beholden to Israel. It only became a great Israeli ally when Israel became very useful after Israel had won the great existential wars that proved that it could not be kicked out.
And so America in the future, if it really cuts Israel off, I mean, cuts Israel, I don’t mean the 4 billion go away, which is, you know, Israel’s wealthy, it might not need I mean, it won’t cooperate with Israel in developing new technologies.
Germany, Israel last year. We don’t know the data for this year yet, but for 2025 was unprecedented in this scale. By by like by double the previous year in the scale of defense exports to Europe, to Germany, Israel will still be useful and it will still be innovating, and it will still produce technologies that if America doesn’t clone, somebody else is going to buy.
Normal: That’s why there are European advocacy organizations, and things like that exist as opposed to just AIPAC, which is for the Americans.
Haviv: But the German defense budget is is flowing into Israel without any need for advocacy by the Jewish community of Germany. If Americans myth make themselves into cutting off our reliance, we will be a little bit weaker, but not so weak that we won’t be able to defeat our enemies. Our enemies will think we’re very weak, because our enemies have spent 100 years convincing themselves the only reason they can’t kill a bunch of ratty little Jews is that we have some foreign empire helping us out, and they will say, well, the excuse is gone.
The foreign empires abandoned them. Now’s the time to strike. If you don’t think that that’s what the Iranian regime is going to think, then you don’t know the first thing about the Iranian regime. And there will be more war because of that cutting of of that aid.
And you know what? Maybe that’s a good thing because when we defeat them, then without the excuse of, well, we didn’t just get defeated by Jews, we got defeated by the great American empire. When we defeat them, then they won’t have that excuse and they’ll start having to look around and say, maybe the Jews aren’t magic. Maybe we are seriously screwing up. Maybe our kleptocracy and dictatorships and incompetence is the problem.
And, so I just almost nothing being said about this conversation in America today impresses me at all. The past is a fake past. The future is not going to be as bad as they say. The past wasn’t as good as they pretend it never was. And the future is not going to be as bad as they pretend.
Noam: It never was the way it was.
Haviv: And the Jews of Israel will still have to stand on their own two feet. And if America doesn’t want to be our ally, then it won’t be our ally until we’re useful again. And then it’ll be our ally anyway. Even though even if they’re not, like, moved emotionally to be our ally. Don’t ever let people be moved emotionally to be your ally. Don’t rely on that. That’s not what it ever was.
Noam: Thank you so much.
Haviv, a real honor to sit with you in the holy city of Jerusalem. Thank you so much.
Haviv: Thank you. It’s great to be here. An honor to be here. I love the podcast. Thank you.