Noam: Hey, I’m Noam Weissman and you’re listening to Unpacking Israeli History, the podcast that takes a deep dive into some of the most intense, historically fascinating and often misunderstood events and stories linked to Israeli history. This episode is sponsored by Andrea and Larry Gill, Jodi and Ari Storch and the Marcus Family Foundation. If you’re interested in sponsoring an episode of Unpacking Israeli History or even just saying what’s up, be in touch at noam@unpacked.media.
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You know, for a while, if you wanted to “understand” Israel, there were a few go-to books. Myths and Facts. Remember that one? Probably not, but I definitely do, classic Hasbara 101. Hasbara, meaning like explaining or maybe propaganda, but not necessarily in bad way, not in a nefarious way, you know, Hasbara explaining something. It came out in the early 90s with the goal of setting the record straight. Here are the myths. Here are the facts. Here’s what they say negatively about Israel. Then here’s the response. Boom. Now you’re ready to win your dorm room argument. You got this.
Then about 10 years later, Alan Dershowitz wrote The Case for Israel and later The Case for Peace and then The Case Against Israel’s Enemies. That era was all about showing one side very clearly making your case, proving the other side wrong. And by the way, then books emerged, The Case for Palestine. And then later on, there were YouTube videos called “The Truth About the West Bank” and then the counter YouTube video, which was “The Real Truth about the West Bank.” And listen, I get it. It made sense in a world where people thought truth could be bullet pointed and also just like shoved into your head if you knew the thing, the thing.
But here’s the thing, when you throw out and you throw around words like myth and fact and the case for or the case about or the truth about, it can make the entire conversation feel like a courtroom drama, us versus them, right versus wrong, black and white. It’s a form of litigation in many ways. But litigation is for the courtroom, education is for the classroom.
And that cuts in all ways, by the way. If you’ve been listening for a while, you know litigation is not my style. Yes, my grandfather probably wanted me to be a lawyer. And I still remember when I was in second grade and he sat me in Inbal Hotel, which was then known as the LaRome Hotel, telling me I was gonna be a great lawyer, New York style, not just in Baltimore, but New York. I became an educator though, not a litigator. Sorry, Saba.
So I try for that not to be my style, not to be a litigator, but to be an educator. When I’m at my best, I know that that is just not how history or identity really works. The truth is way messier. Myths aren’t necessarily lies. Facts aren’t always simple. And the case is rarely closed.
So in this two-part episode of Unpacking Israeli History, we’re doing something different. We’re not trying to win the argument. We’re trying to understand the story. We’re going to take some of the big myths, the ones that helped build Israeli society and examine them and maybe myths not just that built Israeli society, but also myths that the broader world thought about and thinks about. And we want to break them apart, question them, unpack them, if you will, and ask in the wake of the 7th of October, do these stories still hold up? Have they changed? Have we?
Some of these myths are empowering, some are dangerous. Most are a little bit of both. Now, I want to make something clear. When I say myth, I don’t mean a lie. Myths aren’t necessarily false. They’re framing devices. They’re the stories we tell to make sense of a complicated world, to give chaos some shape. A myth might simplify things, sure, but it also reveals what a society wants to believe about itself, its fears, its hopes, its identity.
But I’m not doing this alone. Today, I am joined by my friend, journalist and analyst, and host of the excellent podcast, Ask Haviv Anything, Haviv Rettig Gur. Someone who understands that stories are never just stories, they’re how nations survive and sometimes how they break. Haviv, thanks for coming onto the show. I’m really looking forward to this.
Haviv: Noam, it’s such an honor to be here. I love what you do. I love Unpacking Israeli History. Let’s do this.
Noam: Let’s go. Okay. Thank you, Haviv. So in this episode, I want to specifically explore the myths of power. What stories has Israel told itself about security control and its place in the world? And how do those hold up after October 7th?
So here’s how I want to structure it. I’m going to name an important myth and we’re going to discuss it. I want to hear how it’s true, how it’s not true, maybe which aspects are true, which aspects are less true, how it’s changed, whether it’s been shattered in recent years and everything else. Ready?
Haviv: I’m all set. Raring to go.
Noam: Okay, here we go. I am going to put a timer on. Okay, so we’re going to go through three myths and I want to get your take on the myth and have a reflection on it. So here we go. Myth number one, there is no occupation in the West Bank.
Haviv: The debate over the term occupation is a debate over the kind of control Israel exercises in the West Bank. Occupation is a legal term. It is a legal term drawn from the Geneva Conventions and international law in which it’s actually a really good thing. It’s a wonderful thing and an important thing. Occupation is the idea that you have country A fighting a war against country B. Country A takes some territory from country B. Country B citizens remain in the territory now controlled by A.
Those citizens from B do not have rights within the political order of country A, because they’re not part of it. And it’s in middle of a war and there’s very dangerous things happening all around. Belligerent occupation is the international legal idea that rights kick in automatically in that moment. And rights of the occupier, rights of the occupied, and also responsibilities of both. Basically, they’re not allowed to kill each other. If it lasts any significant amount of time, the occupier also has responsibility to provide certain services to the occupied. That’s the idea of occupation.
Now, there is a technical legal debate which is, to me, deeply uninteresting. And the debate is, does Israel’s control of the West Bank constitute belligerent occupation? And the reason it might not constitute belligerent occupation is that belligerent occupation, specifically territory taken from another state that had sovereign control over that territory. The West Bank was not taken from a state that had sovereign control over that territory. Jordan, when it ruled the West Bank up until 67, did claim control, did claim sovereignty, but it was recognized, I think, by Britain and Pakistan. Don’t think, the world did not recognize Jordanian control over the West Bank. And so it was a territory that doesn’t fit exactly under the rubric of what the literal legal standards of international law say an occupation is.
And so the Israelis have argued officially, this is the position of the Israeli state, that even though it does owe protections to the people living there, and even the protections of occupation, the land is not under belligerent occupation.
So therefore there’s no occupation. Now, why is that a big dramatic significant legal argument? Because the Israelis want to be able to do settlements.
By the way, people think of the West Bank as maybe a string of Palestinian cities on the watershed mountain range in the middle of the West Bank, and that is where most Palestinians live in the West Bank. But the holiest place in Judaism, the Temple Mount and the Western Wall, those are in the West Bank under the 67 ceasefire line that was, know, in 67, the Israelis went over. And so for just about all Israeli Jews, I mean, all the way deep into the left wing edge of merits, the Kotel, the holiest place Jews have access to is not negotiable. Even if it’s belligerent, it doesn’t matter what the international community decides it is. It’s literally the holiest place in Judaism.
And by the way, when the Jordanians ruled the old city of Jerusalem, they demolished synagogues, medieval ancient synagogues. The Jewish quarter of the Old City is beautiful and broad and has beautiful plazas and public wifi. And the rest of the old city is tiny little narrow alleyways. Why? Because the Jordanians destroyed the Jewish quarter.
So the Israelis argue very, very simply that for the part of Israeli politics that wants to build settlements, the land is not belligerently occupied. And all Israelis will agree on that in certain areas of Jerusalem. Is the West Bank under occupation?
I happen to believe that the international legal constructs are secondary. And they’re secondary because there’s something more important than law. And that’s morality. Palestinians in the West Bank do not vote for the sovereign of the West Bank, which is the Israeli military governor of the West Bank. And that’s an imbalance. That’s not okay. That’s not sustainable. That’s immoral. And that, let’s call that occupation.
Now, that’s not the technical legal term occupation, and maybe the Israeli legal case is pretty good, and there’s so much politics around it that international legal bodies won’t admit the Israelis have a good legal case if they disagree with the politics. So, you know, and the Kotel is ours. And I don’t care what anybody says and what legal, technical standing that means.
So is there occupation? Absolutely. And also no. And it depends what part of the West Bank, what part of Jerusalem and whose rights you’re talking about. For the purposes of Palestinian rights and ultimately independence, yes, there is an occupation. The Israelis have a moral debt to the Palestinians. There has to be a solution. For the purposes of the Kotel? Absolutely not.
And maybe we need new words. Maybe we need new words.
Noam: That’s interesting. Maybe we need new words.
So I want to jump on that. Let me go through aspects of the history itself. Aspects of the history itself is that we have area A, area B, and area C in the 1990s that were established during the Oslo Accords. Area C is roughly 60% of the West Bank. It’s under full Israeli control. Around 400,000 Israelis, around 300,000 Palestinians live there.
The rest is marked up by areas A and B, which are predominantly under Palestinian control. There has been no formal Israeli annexation. Palestinian self-rule is fragmented and limited. We know in terms of the history of the different aspects of the term occupation, we know that the state of Israel and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs says that Israel’s presence in the territory is often incorrectly referred to as an occupation.
UN resolution 242, however, says the following: It says that there should be a withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict. And then it says, termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every state in the area and their right to live in peace with insecure recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.
We also know about the fourth Geneva Convention in 1949, which states the following: Article 2: In addition to the provisions which shall be implemented in peacetime, the present convention shall apply to all cases of declared war or of any other armed conflict which may arise between two or more of the high contracting parties, even if the state of war is not recognized by one of them. The convention shall also apply to all cases of partial or total occupation of the territory of a high contracting party, even if the said occupation meets with no armed resistance.
What I find really interesting is that you just said that maybe we need a different term besides occupation. When I think of my own memory of being in Jerusalem as a kid and I would go near the Prima Kings Hotel, I don’t know if you remember this, but there were all these protests that said die l’kivush, end the occupation. And I remember thinking that kivush, occupation, conquering, it’s a horrific term. I don’t like using that term at all, at all, at all.
And then just recently, just last week, Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister of the Israeli government said, maybe we should start using the term occupation. Maybe it’s okay to just have the term occupation utilized. And I was just like, wow, just think about how different that is in the mid nineties when I was growing up and I would go to Israel in the summers and I would see, you know, this term and be horrified by it. And then seeing, Bezalel Smotrich say, you know what, maybe we should embrace the term.
And now you have Haviv saying, you know what actually, maybe we need a new term. I’ll tell you why I think that last point is really important. Micha Goodman wrote a book that I think is so important. It’s called Catch 67. And in this book, he explains the following. He explains that ever since the war in 1967, Israel has administered a military regime over a civilian population. He says that the reality is the state of Israel controls all the territory surrounding the enclaves governed by the Palestinian Authority. The towns themselves are under Palestinian self-government, but Palestinians must travel on roads under Israeli control whenever they want to visit neighboring towns. The IDF can decide on which roads the Palestinians may or may not travel. And occupation is defined as military rule over a civilian population. But the IDF is not in the territories only to rule over another civilian population. It is also there to protect its own civilian population. And so therefore he concludes the following, he concludes that while the land can never be said to be occupied, just like you’re saying, Haviv, the Palestinian people are absolutely occupied. That is his conclusion. What’s your conclusion?
Haviv: I think that’s basically right. But Bezalel Smotrich isn’t talking about occupation in the international sense. He uses the word kivush, which means occupation. It also means conquest. You know, there’s a public relations strategy that parts of the religious right have been engaged in for a generation in Israeli politics in which they’re trying to convince other Israelis that, for example, the West Bank is the biblical heartland, which historically it is. And they call that kivush levot, right? Conquest of the hearts. Kivushes, you know, could be used romantically and it could be used as a reference to a space program that wants to put people on the moon. So when Bezalel Smotrich says we have to be willing to use the word kivush, what he means is, we have to be willing to just say it’s okay to take territory. It’s okay to take territory. The inadmissibility of territory in wars in the modern international sort of legal framework, he says, maybe doesn’t make sense for us. We have terrible enemies. We’re a tiny, tiny country. And if you hold the highlands in the Golan Heights, you’re much, much safer than if you don’t hold the highlands. And you know what? Screw it. Sometimes you got to just take the highlands. That’s what he’s arguing.
Now, I’m not sure I agree with it. I certainly agree with it in certain pieces of the Golan Heights, but I’m not sure I agree with it in the West Bank because the other meaning of occupation, Micha Goodman’s sense of it, which is fine, the debate about land is profound for Israelis. It’s real. It’s not technical legalism because if we accept the, for example, European Union understanding of international law of occupation as it relates to the 67 war, to the outcome of the 67 war, we lose the Kotel.Noam: People forget that. People really forget that point. Like the kotel’s part of that. Yeah.
Haviv: And that’s not right. I share that idea of the Kotel. I share that point, I share the idea that I don’t care what the international agreed upon line is. The world is not going to protect me. The world doesn’t get to make demands of me. And I am actually threatened unlike, you know, Belgium making these decisions for itself, right?
But there is, I don’t want, the reason I want new words isn’t to remove the stigma of occupation. It’s the opposite. The Palestinians live under military rule for generations. That’s not sustainable. That’s not permanent. It will not be permanent.
I have a 14 year old son. He’s going into the army in four years. He’s going to be what? What is he going to say? I don’t know where he’s going to serve. Maybe he’s going to be doing something cool in the Air Force against real enemies like Iran. And I don’t have to worry about these moral questions. Maybe he’s going to be like me, infantry that often cycles through the West Bank. And then he’s standing at checkpoints like I did 25 years ago dealing with Palestinian grandmothers trying to get to their grandkids and passing through between cities.
Now, suicide bombers during the Second Intifada blew up at our checkpoints. I absolutely respect and agree with the existence of those checkpoints. We saved lives. And also, we were the reason that grandmas were standing in the heat of the sun getting checked by soldiers who don’t speak her language and aren’t citizens of her shared country. And so, there is military rule of the Palestinians and it has to be something on the table, and it is not the final result of this conflict. And it has to be solved.
And so I want a word for that, that doesn’t mean I lose the Kotel, because then I lose Israelis. So yes, we have to talk about the… Micha Goodman’s formulation is the land isn’t occupied, the people are occupied. We have to solve that problem. Fine. You know, whatever formulation we can find. By the way, I just use military rule. Military rule is the bad thing. It has to end.
You want to give them all citizenship? Give them all citizenship. You want to carve out some kind of two-state solution between us and them? Carve it out. You want to carve out a two-state solution between us and Jordan, where Jordan gets two-thirds of the West Bank and all the Palestinian population on the West Bank? I don’t know. You could get creative, but it’s not going to end with military rule over millions.
Noam: Okay, there you have it. And I think hopefully, one of the things that I’m getting from this, just from myth one, this was fun, is, you know, the concept of a myth is that it’s important for self-conception in one way or the other. And to hear us, I think, just me reflecting on this with you is like, we’re allowed to make things that are complex, actually complex. And if you simplify the complex, it’s a problem. And if you complexify the simple, it’s a problem. It’s actually complex and that’s what we just did.
We were two minutes over myth number one, maybe three minutes, but we did a good job. I’m actually kind of proud of us. It’s pretty good.
Haviv: Me too. So let’s do four minutes under the next one. We can do this. I believe in us.
Noam: Okay, fine. Ready? Here we go. All right. Myth number two. Myth number two is the following. Kind of builds on this question of the West Bank and what you said about the suicide bombings in a way. Myth number two is Yigal Amir ended the peace process by assassinating Yitzhak Rabin. That’s the myth. Wait, before you tell me your thoughts on the myth, have a great nerd corner alert. Bling. You ready for this, Raviv? No Googling. Who is the last Jewish person that was assassinated for political motivations before Yitzhak Rabin in Israel..
Haviv: Bernadotte?
Noam: No, he’s not a Jewish. Last Jewish, last Jewish politically motivated person killed by, killed by let’s say even another Jew in Israel.
Haviv: I mean, it’s not Gedaliah.
Noam: Well, Gedaliah is a great example. You’re going back 2,500 years, mad respect on that and caused, but I still fast on his behalf. So we should probably do something for him. you’re gonna get it.
Haviv: Ohhhh. Kastner, Kastner.
Noam: Oh, interesting answer! Interesting. He wasn’t like at the highest level. Kastner, by the way, shout out to our Kastner trial episode. Can I tell you what I think is the answer? Haim Arlosoroff. 1933. 1933. That’s the closest to the Rabin assassination. Okay, by the way, have to do an episode on Arlosoroff’s assassination and the whole story of the Havera. We’re to do a whole episode on it because it’s so just so important. OK, but Hviv, do you myth Yigal Amir ended the peace process? What are your thoughts?
Haviv: Absolutely not. For one thing, the peace process was already stumbling. At the time, Rabin himself was very, very concerned with it. His last speech in the Knesset, people can Google it and watch it live, probably I’m sure somewhere on the YouTubes, there’s, you know, with English subtitles. There was real concern that Yasser Arafat, the sort of Algerian style anti-colonial terrorist, you know, the leopard did not change his spots and was, you know, saying things in Arabic that were opposite of what he was saying in English. And Rabin was very concerned.
And so A, the peace process wasn’t so healthy when Rabin was assassinated. The left was losing in the polls. The left was actually not set to win the next election. Rabin’s assassination bumped the left’s polling numbers tremendously. It actually had suddenly a martyr, and it looked like the religious right was more a stumbling block than Arafat to peace. And so the left actually rallied because of that assassination. A series of suicide bombings in the months leading up to the ’96 election, right after the Rabin assassination, lost the left that election by the narrowest margin in the history of an Israeli election, by 30,000 votes. Netanyahu beat Peres.
But it was very close and every single poll had Peres win. And so that’s A.
B, Netanyahu actually implemented the agreement. Almost everything Rabin had actually committed to. He pulled out of Jericho, he pulled out of Hebron, he pulled out of the cities and towns of Gaza. And he actually signed the 98 Y River memorandum, which was the last thing Palestinians and Israelis have signed, right? That’s Netanyahu.
C. Ehud Barack wins an election as head of Labor and is more explicit about Palestinian statehood than Rabin ever was.
Noam: That’s right. That’s right. So far we’re in full agreement. Okay, keep going. This is interesting.
Haviv: And D, and this is the end of it. In 2006, after Sharon’s disengagement from Gaza, which was a right wing attempt to re-institute a large parts of the Israeli political right, okay, don’t tell anybody, this is just us, this is just our secret, large parts of the Israeli political right in the 90s and in early 2000s secretly had wished the left had succeeded and ended the occupation and ended the control and separated from the Palestinians.
And how do I know that? Because when the left crashes and burns in the second Intifada and those 140 suicide bombings that shattered the left and it still has not recovered today, then the right built out an idea called unilateral withdrawal. What if we can pull out and the occupation and military rule over the Palestinians without actually signing a deal with an Arafat who can’t sign a deal, without actually waiting for them to not be dysfunctional and radicalized. What if we can do that?
Sharon’s disengagement from Gaza at the time was popular. Today, of course, it’s not, but at the time it was popular. And after Sharon does that in 2005, Olmert comes into the story as the number two Likud, Sharon leading the right-wing Likud party, pulled us out of Gaza. Just to clarify what I’m saying, the right tried to separate. Sharon also pulled four little settlements out of the Northern West Bank at the time. And then Olmert came in after Sharon had his terrible stroke and he’s headed into the 2006 election. And Olmert announces something that he would come to call his convergence plan, which is a withdrawal from the West Bank. Olmert wins an election in 2006 after telling the Israelis he’s planning a pullout from the West Bank. So not only did he not end the peace process. Rabin’s assassination gave the peace process another 10 years of life.
Noam: That is a hot take right there, Haviv Rettig Gur. And I am not even going to comment on it, especially because of the fact that I forgot to press the timer button. So I have no idea if we even got through 10 minutes there or not. So that is on me.
Haviv: I don’t think it was even five. Let’s just call that a win.
Noam: Totally. I think it was, by the way, but I like it’s a hot take. Just historically, just let’s remember that between 1994 and 1996, Hamas conducted 10 major suicide bombings that killed over 250 Israelis. He delayed, Rabin delayed the implementation of Oslo to, due to all the political and public unrest that existed. So, and everything you’re saying, I think lines up pretty well.
The only thing that I want to add, notwithstanding that I said I wouldn’t add anything, I want to read to you a line from Rabbi Aaron Lichtenstein, who was the former head of the yeshiva actually in Gush Etzion, which is in the West Bank, which is in Judea and Samaria. And that is what he said after this happened. He said, “naturally, the shame should be felt by our camp, the national religious camp more than any other. Here was a man who grew up in the best of our institutions. A day before the murder, he could have been cited as a shining example of success and achievement and a source of communal pride. Coming from a deprived background, he studied in a yeshiva high school, attended a great yeshivat header, [which is a military yeshiva, kind of, like they do both military and they study Torah] and was accepted to the most prestigious division of Bar Ilan University. Today we hide behind the phrase ‘a wild weed’ from the outskirts of our society. But if a day before the murder, we would have said proudly, see what we have produced. We must say it now as well. See what we have produced. It is indefensible that one who is willing to take credit when the sun is shining should shrug off responsibility when it begins to rain.”
So I do not know, I do agree with you, Haviv, that Yigal Amir did not end the peace process. And I also think that what Rabbi Lichtenstein said is really important for us to remember that we do make a big impact with our educational system, with our educational approach. Anything that led to Yigal Amir doing that educationally needs to be purged from the educational system. Do you agree with me on that or no?
Haviv: Yes, I actually think that religious Zionism has less responsibility for Amir than even Rav Lichtenstein, the great teacher and scholar and leader of religious Zionism in his day, thought. Yigal Amir told us over the years why he did it. He wanted, Rabin was elected in 1992 and did not literally say I’m going with Arafat to a peace process. And Amir said, I wanted a referendum on Oslo, and that referendum that he then got by assessing the prime minister put Netanyahu in place, who then withdrew from all the places Rabin had committed to withdraw from. Netanyahu ended up implementing Oslo II in ways Rabin hadn’t. But then we had another referendum in ’99 and another one in 2006, referendum meaning election, and the Israeli public did want separation. And so I don’t think religious Zionism is at fault for that.
If anything, he would, he was on the far right edges of a kind of fascistic, non-democratic politics that, you know, it’s possible to sit in a religious Zionist yeshiva and have other political views. So anyway, I don’t blame them.
Noam: You don’t blame them? Okay.
Haviv: But yeah, but if you produce this student and he comes from your yeshiva, you should be worried about that. And I think the rabbi was right to say those things.
Noam: Okay, good, good, Good, okay. So there we have two different myths that we’ve explored the complications of these myths. And I wanna do a third myth with you right now. Third myth is the following. It’s just, it’s a tough one. The IDF, the Israel Defense Force is going to protect Israeli citizens no matter what.
And let me read you the mission of the IDF:
The mission of the IDF is every ground aerial and naval operational activity and exercise we conduct is first and foremost carried out for the sake of defending the state of Israel and its civilians. We face terrorist organizations like Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, all of which pose a regional and international threat. We further leverage our capabilities to provide humanitarian aid to countries worldwide in times of crisis and develop groundbreaking technologies and tactics in the field of defense. We focus on maintaining the security of Israeli civilians every single day, but our activities aim to contribute to the overall safety of civilians everywhere. We believe that courage, loyalty and diversity unified by the common goal of defense are essential to our mission. When combined, they create the unique strength that enables the IDF to thrive. People from every corner of Israel, every religion and every walk of life come together in order to serve in the IDF. Our soldiers invest their time, withstand challenges and often risk their lives to protect the state of Israel from its enemies and ensure the safety of the people they love. We are the Israel Defense Forces. Defense is our mission. Security is our goal.
On October the 7th, Haviv, Hamas breached the high tech fence, around 22 Israeli communities, killed over 1,200 people, took over 250 people as hostage. Some communities waited hours before receiving military backup. Hamas used power gliders, drones, and ground troops, exposing failures in both tech and human intel. So what do you think, Haviv? That myth, the IDF will protect Israeli citizens. True, false?
Haviv: I have many thoughts. My first thought is whoever wrote that mission should be fired. That’s so long and so convoluted and so annoying. That’s not how you would produce a mission statement for your organization, right?
Noam: Much shorter, much shorter.
Haviv: That’s A. B, the IDF probably has the most extraordinary record in the history of armies in its ability with a given set of limited resources to defend a vulnerable group of people against vast forces massed against it. It is hard to imagine another army that pulled off the kinds of wars, the kinds of successes, and produced the kind of security that Israel enjoys.
The IDF sometimes fails. The idea that you might sometimes fail, for example, Noam, I believe it is one of your missions in your life to protect your family. That doesn’t mean that it is totally impossible that any robber will ever get into your house to steal stuff. That doesn’t mean that your kid will not have a fist fight in school. That doesn’t mean that you let every moment be there to protect everyone all the time.
That is a catastrophic failure, October 7th. So was ’73. I think other things are catastrophic failures that are not sort of registered in the public consciousness as catastrophic failures like the ’82 Lebanon war.
And yet, imagine Israel without the IDF. Imagine the last 19 months with it. Imagine any 10 minutes of Israeli history without the IDF. The IDF will protect Israeli citizens from harm. It will not protect them absolutely perfectly. did not, the establishment of the IDF did not make Israelis invincible in this world. But it’s, show me another army that has done what this army has done.
People think today, you know, the technological edge is so enormous. We have this alliance with America. We have the aid from America. Before the aid from America, we spent 5% of our GDP on defense. No European country comes close. America doesn’t even spend that. And the IDF was delivering similar levels of success and safety in the 50s when we were a third world country. In the 60s, when we were using second tier French planes and weapons. The IDF is an extraordinary organization that has absolutely defended Israel and Israeli citizens.
This is a question that flows, I think, from the real Sophie’s choice of hostages. Do we fight Hamas to the death or rescue hostages if it’s not possible to do both? Maybe it’s possible to do both, maybe it’s not.
And there, if the IDF chooses to destroy Hamas, and even at the cost of not getting the hostages out in another hostage deal, people say, well, maybe it’s not defending Israeli citizens. Maybe it doesn’t prioritize defending Israeli citizens. Folks, we taught our enemies that taking hostages at a mass scale is our Achilles heel. If the IDF does not exact on the enemy the kind of harm that the future enemy will not want to absorb, namely total destruction of the Hamas infrastructure, and organization, there will be more hostage taking.
This is not a debate between do we prioritize some abstract goal of destroying Hamas or protecting our citizens. This is a debate between do we protect the citizens that are now in trouble or do we protect the citizens that will definitely be in trouble if Hamas remains in power. I’m not saying which one is correct. Maybe you can do both in some complex way. I’m just saying, the idea that if the IDF is told by the political echelon to prioritize winning against Hamas over getting hostages out, that that means the IDF no longer protects Israeli citizens, that’s no longer its mission, is simply a misunderstanding of this situation.
And so, yes, absolutely it’s a myth. The IDF absolutely protects Israeli citizens and will continue to do so, and few armies have done it as well or as comprehensively as ours.
Noam: The only thing I want to add to that is a complicating factor, not exactly related to the myth itself, but the when you look at how many Jewish Americans have been killed in the last 75 years, or Jewish Australians have been killed in the last 75 years, or how many Jewish Brits or Jewish Canadians or Jewish Mexicans have been killed for being Jewish compared to Jewish Israelis have been killed in the last 75 years. I mean, the numbers aren’t close.
The number of Jewish Israelis being killed is significantly more than in any other country, but that’s not what–
Haviv: I’m not sure that’s true. American Jews, we’ve talked about this in the past, have a huge advantage over Israelis in that get to, their Jewishness is separate from their Americanness. How many American Jews have been killed in war? How many American Jews were killed in the Vietnam War? How many American Jews were killed in the Iraq War? How many American Jews were killed in World War II in the United States security services and militaries. You have seven or eight militaries over there. I don’t even understand how it works. But how many were killed in all of that?
And you have to add those to the number because when American Jews go to war, they don’t go to war as Jews, they go to war as Americans. And then when they go to synagogue, they go to synagogue as Jews. So there’s this bifurcation that cannot exist for Israelis. We go to war as Jews and we go to synagogue as Jews. They’re the same thing. And so it’s not fair to judge based on that bifurcation. Yes, more Israelis have died in war. Also–
Noam: And terrorist attacks.
Haviv: Yes, also the entirety of the Israeli death toll in the total in the totality of the existence of the state of Israel is like 12 hours at Auschwitz. So the world before Israel, okay, and a week in World War I with the deaths of six figure numbers of Jews in Eastern Europe. You don’t only have to go to the Holocaust. The safety of Jews since the founding of Israel, plus the Jews who built Israel couldn’t have gone to America. So it’s not like we’re asking why didn’t they pick the safer choice? They weren’t allowed to pick the safer choice. America had quotas.
Noam: Fair, fair. Right, I’m just saying even if the numbers bear out more on my side than on your side on this, but your framing is definitely way to do a little alchemy and to mess it up a bit. But even still, the difference is that the Jewish state is the only country in the world that is there to protect its civilians, its citizens for being Jewish exclusively.
And also obviously non-Jews as well, but that’s, that is the trade off to an extent. The trade off is the dignity to protect yourself. And that is a major trade off. And it’s not always going to work. Like you said, like it’s not, I don’t have a guard outside my house to use your analogy, Haviv. I’m protecting, my wife is protecting us. We’re protecting ourselves. That’s who’s protecting us, not somebody else. And that’s the dignity of the decision to have a Jewish state.
Those are our three myths for today’s episode. Those are very interesting myths to explore.
We’ve spent this entire first part unpacking myths that feel like they’re about policy or security, but they’re really about trust in systems and leaders and stories we’ve been told about how safe we are. And in part two, we’re gonna go even deeper, not into missiles or fences, but into meaning. What stories has Israeli society told itself about its essence, its morality, its uniqueness, its unity? Because when those myths break, it’s not just about danger, it’s about identity.
Haviv, I’m so excited to dive into all of this with you in part two. It’s gonna be great.
Unpacking Israeli History is a production of Unpacked, an open door media brand. Subscribe wherever you’re listening to this pod and follow Unpacked on all the regular social media channels. Just search for it @UnpackedMedia and Unpacking Israeli History and go check out Ask Haviv Anything. Check it out. It is awesome.
This episode was produced by Rivky Stern. Our amazing guest is Haviv Rettig Gur and our team for this episode includes Alex Harris, Adi Elbaz, and Rob Pera. I’m your host, Noam Weissman. Thanks for listening. See you next week.