Noam: Okay, here we go. Hey everyone, welcome to Wondering Jews with Mijal and Noam.
Mijal: I’m Mijal.
Noam: And I’m Noam and this podcast is our way of trying to figure out the Jewish world. We don’t have it all figured out, but we’re gonna try to figure out some big items together. And today we have our first returning guest, Haviv Rettig Gur. Haviv, welcome.
Haviv Rettig Gur: Thank you Noam, thank you Mijal, it’s a pleasure to be here.
Mijal: Sorry. So good to have you, Haviv, and really just great to have you in a way to help us respond and understand current events. So, Noam, what do you think? Should we just jump in into what’s been like in our minds?
Noam: Pleasure to have you. Pleasure to have you, Haviv. Let’s explore. Let’s wonder with Haviv. Haviv is everywhere right now. You’re really everywhere, Haviv. And right now you’re in New Jersey, I believe. And I’m in… Where am I? I’m in DC. Mijal is also in New Jersey. And there’s a lot going on in Israel right now. And there’s a lot that Mijal and I are wondering about. Mijal, before this, before getting Haviv on the show, you said you had a great framing of the two questions you wanted to ask. Do you remember what those were?
Mijal: Yeah, I feel like just I’m thinking about like the second that Shabbat was over and I opened up the news and reading about like the horrific, horrific attack by Hezbollah that killed 12 Druze children in Israel and just thinking about this potential new front and like war in the north. And then also today reading about, was it today, yesterday? Like everything’s just blurring together. Reading also about just like some more news about what’s happening in Israel, different accusations around what’s happening in prisons and just like some anarchy happening. It all just feels a little bit confusing. Confusing more because like everything’s happening very quickly, very rapidly. So could you just help us understand even just like the news cycle of the last three days, particularly this attack in the north of Israel? And also just what’s happening internally. Do you think about them differently? Are they connected? How are you thinking about them right
Haviv: The question of the north has really reached a boiling point. It’s possible that everybody’s going to walk back from the brink, but it’s also possible that we’re at the beginning of an escalation.
It’s actually, very few people are going to be making that decision, so it’s very hard to predict what the decision will be. On Saturday, a Hezbollah rocket fired from southern Lebanon hit apparently by accident, was aimed in the general direction of towns, but it wasn’t aimed specifically for that particular target. It hit a soccer field in which a children’s elementary school league basically was playing a game. 12 kids were killed, dozens more were wounded. These are ranging in age from 16 down to, believe, the youngest is nine, if I’m not mistaken. The wounded themselves are sometimes, some of them are horribly wounded, really severely maimed.
So the number of lives fundamentally altered is much larger than the death toll itself of 12, which is horrific enough. And that, it was a strike by Hezbollah that hit a very specific in particular and fascinating community. Majdal Shams, the town where the rocket struck, is a Druze town, but it’s on the Golan Heights, which means it is a community that, because the Druze are a religious and cultural and ethnic, I don’t know, maybe best word is tribal minority in Israel, in Lebanon, in Syria, and a few other countries.
Each place where this group lives, they have a religious obligation. Their religion is an offshoot of Islam. It’s fascinating. It’s very mystical. It’s very secretive, which some sort of mystical, neoplatonic, monotheistic religions are. People can look up these words on Wikipedia. They’re not as complex as they sound. But the Druze are religiously obligated to be loyal to the government that rules over them. And so the Druze in Syria are loyal to Assad, to the Assad regime, openly, publicly. And explicitly, and the Druze in Israel are deeply loyal to Israel and serve in the Israeli army and have reached some of the highest ranks in the Israeli army. Majdal Shams, because it’s on the Golan Heights, is a village that for many, many years maintained its loyalty to Syria, mandated by its religion. But there’s now an age gap where younger people, especially probably as a function of the Syrian civil war, in 2011, Syria kind of fell apart, and it didn’t feel to lot of young Jerusalem, the Golan, like there was a future of remaining loyal in any sense to Syria, and a lot of them, thousands of residents of Majdal Shams alone, not a majority. Maybe between 20% and 40%, the numbers are hard to actually nail down.
But a significant number actually got Israeli citizenship and just sort of finalized their relationship with Israel. And so it’s a town where the older generation is still pro-Syrian. The younger generation is pro-Israel. And Hezbollah just fired a rocket that killed kids of a community that also has a large Lebanese contingent, which even though, you know, the in the Galilee are loyal to Israel and the in southern Syria are loyal to Assad and the in Lebanon are loyal to Lebanon, they’re all loyal to each other as well.
How does that happen? How does that function in the Middle East? Welcome to the layered identities and complexities of the Middle East. Hezbollah has a problem now and that problem is that it just murdered the children of a community in Lebanon it cannot afford to lose. And also gave the Druze who feel a deep connection and loyalty to the Jews who served with us, mean, deeply served with us, fight wars with us, our wars with us. My platoon commander in the army, which is the lowest level officer, my direct lieutenant in the infantry when I served 23 years ago, or however old I am, was a Druze man named Kamal and a wonderful guy. And I lay in ambushes on the mountain sides of the West Bank trying to catch the suicide bombers coming into Jerusalem during the Second Intifada with Kamal and led by Kamal. With my life.
So the closeness of how the Jewish sense that we have to respond profoundly, mean, a culture sense. The state of Israel has to defend itself and has to deter enemies and therefore there has to be a response just as a state. But also there’s a real sense in Israeli society that we have to defend the Druze and avenge the Druze and deter attacks on the Druze.
At the same time within Lebanon, Druze who are not pro-Israel and don’t like Israel and maybe even hate Israel now are very angry at Hezbollah. It’s incredibly complex moment in which the Israeli response is gearing up and inside Lebanon there are all these dynamics and Hezbollah is really on its back feet. So I’ll stop there, but that’s just sort of the bird’s eye view of what just happened in Majdal Shams.
Noam: Haviv, I want to talk about the complexity here. Recently, Anita Shapira, who’s an Israeli historian, was on another podcast, 18 Questions, 40 Israeli Thinkers, I think. And she was talking about the fact that in the North, she said the following. She said, I was amazed. I was really amazed. The Syrians attacked and bombed the settlements in the North and in the Jordan Valley, and children studied in underground shelters. So, OK, this was part of our life, but this government projected panic, projected fear, did not project stand fast. And this is something that we never had before. She’s basically saying that the government right now, in Israel as a failed government, is not protecting the people in the north. And is that the reason why the Druze community, who you say in such a romantic way, Kamal was your commander and there’s such a strong relationship between the two, but it seems like the Druze community didn’t really want to have Israeli government ministers come to their community and express consolation. It seemed actually that they were quite perturbed by the appearance of Israeli government figures.
Haviv: I think they feel like the Israeli leadership has failed them. All Israelis in the north, 80,000 Israelis, haven’t been able to go home. A third of the houses of city of Metula are destroyed. Probably 10 kibbutzim have to be rebuilt from the ground up along the northern border. Tens of thousands of families have scattered to the winds because they haven’t been able to go home for 10 months. And the Israeli government hasn’t done what it takes, exacted costs from the enemy that, and the enemy in this case is not simply Hezbollah, it’s really Iran, which turned on Hezbollah and activated Hezbollah to cause these. We’ve created a new normal where we do not respond forcefully to entire sections of the country being emptied out by these enemies.
The Druze, a lot of their religious obligation to loyalty to the state that rules them, isn’t a loyalty to the state that rules them. There is there, you know, we’re working with things that, it’s hard to know in detail because it is actually a secretive religion to the point where most Druze don’t know the details of their own religion. So a big part of the religious obligation to loyalty has to do also with a deep connection to the land and clinging to the land and not, like most Israeli residents of the far north, including Jews, including Arabs, clearing away from the rocket fire, or at least very close to the rocket fire, where, you know, sirens don’t have time to warn you with sufficient time to get to bond shelters. So the far north of Israel is emptied out, except for the Druze.
And the Druze, therefore, have been in the thick of the bombardment. And when the Israeli ministers went to visit, the anger at a government that has failed to protect them was very, very profound. Did not see there, we did not see pro-Syrian demonstrations against Israeli ministers showing up. 20 to 30 or 40 % of Majdal Shams is already pro-Israel or actually Israeli. But we saw angry Israelis is what we saw when they were kicking out those ministers. Israeli residents of the North would have behaved the same way and in some cases did.
Mijal: Haviv, I have a question for you because you said Israel has not been responding forcefully enough to the fact that essentially it had to evacuate so many citizens from the north and the south and has not been responding to Iran really who has been driving all of these proxy terrorist groups. I guess sometimes I have this feeling and I’m curious to, you know, I’ve turned to you Haviv both for information but for wisdom and sometimes I think therapy.
But sometimes I really get nervous. How many fronts and how many battles can one little country really hold? How can Israel have like… Because, sorry, I’ll explain to you why I’m asking this. When this horrible, tragic attack happened, I think the reason… There were two reactions. There was absolute shock as to the tragedy and anger and just pain for those children.
And then there was this collective gasp of like, okay, we are going into something more serious now. There’s going to be a much more prolonged, intensive war. The North Front might open up. And you think about the Southern Front with Gaza, with Hamas, Hezbollah, you think about the Houthis in Yemen, you think about what’s happening from so many directions, and Iran, and dealing with terrorist threats like this week in France in the Olympics against Israeli Jews.
And part of me is like holding all of this and watching it. And yeah, I want to say they’re not responding forcefully enough, but I’m also like, how much can one little, even though it’s powerful, little country really hold all the different fronts it’s confronting.
Haviv: We’re Jews. It isn’t given to us to be safe and happy. There were no such options in our history. It’s not, you know, how did the Jews end up in Israel? By the vast majority, they’re refugees who couldn’t remain in many of the lands that are now declared enemies of them. So however many fronts the enemy opens up is the number of fronts we have to face.
I think that a great many of the fronts that you feel we face as distinct fronts are not distinct. They’re a single front. There is the Palestinian front, which is a very complex front because we, face a mortal enemy that wants to massacre every one of our children and is willing to destroy the Palestinian cause in Gaza itself on the altar of our destruction.
At the same time, we also owe the Palestinians a tremendous moral debt in basic rights and independence from us and all of that story. So that’s a very complex front, and it’s a big front, and it’s an important front, and it’s a war front. It’s also a front that is not a war front, right? There’s also a larger political question.
And then there’s a second front, and that second front is Iran. And Hezbollah is Iran, and the Houthis are Iran. And every rocket that’s ever launched at us from Syria, basically since the 73 war or every attack from Syria, not since the 73 war, that’s dumb, please cut that. Every threat we face in Syria and Iraq in the last 20 years is Iran. And so we don’t face many fronts. We face two enemies, the pieces of Palestinian politics that are our enemy and also I submit, not every Palestinian agrees with me, the mortal enemies of any good Palestinian future.
Haviv: And then we face this Iranian enemy, this country that has no border with us and no interests in Israel, which for reasons of sort of eschatological, redemptive, restorationist ideology that seeks to redeem Islam from centuries of weakness through the destruction of the Jews because the Jews are the weakest thing to ever push Islam back in any way, that Iran is all the other fronts that you’re talking about. So when I say we need to exact a serious cost, I’m exactly talking about shrinking those many fronts that the enemy has managed to open up against us and force us to fight on all of them to a single front where we exact costs from the head of the snake, where we exact costs from Iran itself. And the frustration is that Iran doesn’t feel any costs. It feels that it has been able to brutalize us, set a new standard for the suffering we have to live with routinely, and not face any real costs that we are capable of delivering for that behavior.
Noam: So that’s the geopolitical analysis that you’re working off. And what’s so interesting to me is, Iran’s not an Arab country. Sometimes in the United States of America, we make the mistake when we call it the Arab-Israeli conflict. Iran’s not an Arab country. It’s a Muslim country, but it’s not an Arab country. And so there’s something else going on here. I would also submit that it has something more to do, not just about the theological, eschatological end of days sort of discussion, but also about the, their connection between Israel and the United States as some sort of imperial forces that are at odds with them since the fall of the Shah in the late 70s. And so I think it’s a combination of those things. But I want to kind of talk about something a little bit different with you now that the other part of what Mijal started with, which is I’m a young American Jew, I’m not a young American Jew, but I am Jewish and I’m American and I’m not that young. okay, okay. So
Mijal: Nice, Noam. Nice.
Haviv: Young at heart, young at heart.
Noam: And I want to understand, want to understand, Haviv, I want you to speak to me. I want to really get this. Recently in the news and stay Taman, there’s a story of in the southern part of Israel of the IDF being infiltrated by people who are protesting the fact that IDF soldiers were arrested for allegedly assaulting a Palestinian prisoner. Right? And there was some sort of, some people are either describing it as a January 6th insurrection moment and some people are saying, well, actually it’s just a different form of protest just like the Israeli center left, whatever you want to call it, was protesting the judicial reforms. Which one is it? And I want to like, if I’m a young American Jew, how do I look at this and not be, what the hell’s going on? What are you doing? What is going on?
Haviv: Yeah, well, it’s been a wild two days in Israel, right? Just to seal with a little pink ribbon the Hezbollah question, Israel retaliated just a few hours ago, as we record, where it took out the most senior military commander in Hezbollah itself, man responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans and hundreds and hundreds of Israelis. And we don’t know if that’s the end of the Israeli response. If the Israeli response is limited to Hezbollah, I think it will not be a significant, a worthwhile response for the blood of 12 children. But also, I don’t think it’ll have a deterrent effect. But nevertheless, we don’t know if that’s now escalating. So that’s dramatic and big and everyone’s watching very closely. And then we have this Sdei Teiman, is a prison facility in which Nukhba force fighters, these are Hamas fighters, who carried out the October 7 massacre and were caught by Israel. And they are housed in this facility. There have been numerous reports from the prisoners themselves who were released for various reasons or from relatives that there are abuses happening at this facility. Reports sufficient enough to bring international attention, reports sufficient enough to bring Israeli law enforcement attention, reports sufficient enough for the Attorney General of Israel to focus in this place and on the forces operating there and on whether or not there has been misbehavior. One particular prisoner, and I don’t know if we’re allowed to say who it is because there’s a little bit of a censorship on some of these very sensitive questions, but journalists in Israel have a sense of who it is and also who the suspected soldier is. And one particular prisoner was hospitalized with severe trauma, physical trauma, to his rectum. There were soldiers who allegedly, but there’s a wounded prisoner, they didn’t rape him in the sense of that it wasn’t sexual, but they inserted.
And they also beat him, and they also inserted something into his anus, apparently a cell phone. These are reports that are fuzzy. Some of these are leaks from the police. You don’t know how much the leak is accurate or not accurate. Significant abuse, dramatic abuse, abuse that is, there’s no debate about whether it’s criminal and massively criminal. In other words, it’s not that we have a prisoner who is complaining that he said something about one of the and guards mothers and he was beaten or kicked, which would be a problem. it’s a kind of violence where the response needs to be disciplinary and it needs to be significant, not this. Here we’re talking about assault that is potentially sexual in nature, that is profound, that is torture.
And the military police swung into this place. They stormed the base. Military police officers were wearing face masks to hide their identities. And they arrested 10 people, 10 soldiers, 10 reservists, very, very quickly. And they immediately separated them and began to interrogate them. They didn’t want these soldiers able to coordinate their stories ahead of time. It’s a significant criminal case and that is not a crazy procedure and it’s something that the imagery in the Israeli public space, the Israeli public debate, masked military police swarming into a base with reservists who are people who have given up their lives for months and months and months to fight Hamas to make the country safe and are very loved and very cared for in the Israeli public right now, arresting these reservists and treating them in the way they were treated, which is just very sort of blunt and aggressive, created a tremendous blowback primarily at the beginning on the Israeli far right.
I mean, extreme right. I mean, the farthest right political parties you can have, Otzma Yehudit, for example. And some of the members of Knesset of Otzma Yehudit declared on Twitter that they were rushing down to Sdei Teiman to protect the soldiers, and they were going to have a protest. And you had this protest where a lot of far-right activists gathered at the base and then stormed the base.
Now, at no point, there were some anti-Israel activists or far-left activists who were then posting on Twitter these marauders of the base had surrounded the facility where the prisoners were kept and they were about to go in and massacre the prisoners and there was a lot of this sort of panic-mongering. But the real story is quite astonishing itself, which is that they stormed the base with members of Knesset in tow, with ministers of government in tow, and created this astonishing scene where some of the activists storming the base were wearing army uniforms because they themselves were reservists, active reservists.
And so it was a breakdown of law and order facilitated by political leaders in response to images that were hard images to see, which was the arresting of these reservists. But the military police was acting on the orders of the JAG, of the Judge Advocate General, the Chief Law Enforcement Officer of the Army, in response to hard evidence of a very serious crime. And so… I guess that’s the end of the sort of factual laying out of the situation and then what do we make of it? The fighters of the Nukhba force.
I’ll put it this way. I am intellectually opposed to the peace brought to guys. I don’t know what’s happening. It’s not 10 PM for me. It’s like 4 AM for me. Just want to clarify that I am intellectually opposed to the death penalty. If the state of Israel for populist political reasons were to institute a death penalty for the Nukhba force fighters, I’m just going to be completely honest here. I would struggle emotionally to care.
Noam: You’re good, you’re good.
Haviv: I’m opposed to it in theory. Death penalties are bad. We have a death penalty in Israel for Nazis, actual Nazis, not neo-Nazis nowadays who march and marches. Actual Nazis, we have a death penalty. We don’t have a death penalty for anything else in our law. If we institute a death penalty for the nuclear force, technically I oppose it, intellectually, but I don’t care. I don’t care if they live or die. They deserve death, morally.
We don’t torture prisoners. We don’t torture prisoners because evil is contagious. And torture and heartlessness is contagious. And injustice is contagious. And so what happened here is something that can’t happen, that cannot happen. It’s a breakdown of law. It’s a breakdown of morality. It’s a breakdown of enforcement. It’s a breakdown of military discipline. These are reservists. We’re talking about whether the IDF can give somebody an assignment and have that assignment carried out. On top of all the moral and criminal and other questions, it’s a massive breakdown of military justice and military order and military discipline. For all these reasons, nobody’s confused about what has to happen and what should happen.
But there’s a lot of politics around the imagery of it. I’ll give you my response as an Israeli citizen just in one sentence because there’s another thing that concerns me, that frustrates me, that angers me. And here I’m not speaking as an analyst and I’m not trying to be objective and I apologize if that comes across and people are upset by it. These members of Knesset, who went charging out of the Knesset, tweeting their charging out of the Knesset to go defend these reservists on these unbelievably awful charges that they should have legal defense, but they don’t need to have a moral defense.
were not actually worried about the reservists. These politicians were campaigning. And what do I mean campaigning? These are politicians who have not gone charging out of the Knesset and tweeting angrily and with righteous indignation about the suffering of the Israelis in the North, about the suffering of Israelis in the south, about left-wing voters on the kibbutzim that were devastated by October 7, about the government’s own incapacity to pass basic reforms and basic budgets to help those people, about the massive problems in the $8 billion corporation called the Tkuma Initiative, which is supposed to rebuild the southern communities and which is having a lot of trouble getting on its feet. And for anybody, there’s no constituency for whom they have gone out of the Knesset in that way. And they did it in this case. They saw in this case the legal law enforcement system within the army, supported by the attorney general, the civil law enforcement system, swing into action because of the severity of alleged crime. And they had a NUCHBE force guy being defended by the judicial system and the legal system. That’s the theory, right? Against the great heroic reservists. And they saw an opportunity to make political hay.
And that’s it. This is an empty act and not a serious act and not an act by people who think they have responsibility for how the army actually functions and for law enforcement and for actual justice, which is actually hard and difficult. And sometimes you have to make painful decisions and politically unpopular decisions. So I’m very upset at them for suddenly finding their voice after for 10 months, not really having a voice for most vulnerable Israelis who could have used their help.
Mijal: Haviv, can I… Thank you for laying all this out so clearly. I’ll go back to the framing Noam made about us sitting here in America and watching this happening. And I’ll just be very frank, for me, my first reaction emotionally is I wanted to just close my computer and not look at the news and just avoid everything that’s happening. And I think I’ll speak almost, I’ll allow myself what I think is almost like a self-centered, like how does this affect me in America for a second?
I think that part of the challenge from where I’m sitting is that we are sitting here in an increasingly hostile environment in many spaces that takes every single one of Israel’s flaws and mistakes and causes like the worst criminal in the world, which is so much intense antisemitism. We are in a society that doesn’t understand the difference between a front against Palestinians and against Iran and what’s happening in the region. And I’ll just say for me, there’s almost like an immediate reaction is like, what do I do as someone who loves Israel, supports Israel, loves Israelis, will fight with everything I have to do what I can from here, to help the Jewish people in the Jewish state. And what do we do when we see these really, really ugly things? And we know there’s so many bad actors just waiting. Like, you can just see them excited on Twitter to pounce and to pretend that this is, like, this is terrible. But to see this not only as one incident, but now to say, look, you see, all of the things that you said happened on October 7th, you see you’re doing them as…
So that’s like a first, and I’m very aware that it’s a very naval gaze and, you know, reaction, but I’m curious if you have some thoughts
Haviv: I’m trying to overcome my Israeliness because my Israeli response is very simple.
Mijal: Go for it. This is the reason. You can be, you can.
Noam: No, don’t overcome it. Be it. Yeah, yeah, what is
Haviv: All those people who sit in judgment, you have to now stand before them and be judged? Why do you have to stand before them and be judged? I’ll spare you the suspense and Mijal, I don’t have to tell you this, you know it and Noam, you know this very, very well. Israel is going to disappoint you. Israel is a human society with tremendous challenges and problems. Deep divides, polarization, tribalism. We strange amalgamation of West and East.
In the Middle East, they look at the gay pride parade of Tel Aviv and they’re a little bit horrified. And in the West, they look at our tribal politics and they’re a little bit horrified. And they both blame us. And they don’t notice that these are pieces of the other half of humanity that we somehow manage to incorporate in this very tense sort of combination. And therefore, we are blamed in the West for having Middle Eastern ways of thinking, and they don’t apply these moral judgments to other Middle Easterners. It’s just we’re the problem, and vice versa is also true. One of the insights and one of the earliest commandments of Zionism from very, very early in the development of political Zionism in the 1880s is the idea that the Jew does not stand, explain themselves and allow themselves to be judged in the mind of the non-Jew. We are not in a, Yeah, there’s so much Israeliness happening here, yeah.
Mijal: Wait, Haviv, can I be Israeli and interrupt you for a second? We’re doing this here. Yeah, thanks. Nice. I totally hear this. I also feel like I’ve had different conversations with you over the year, this last year, in which we speak about the tremendous significance of standing up, of knowing the Jewish story, of telling the Jewish story.
Noam: I’m gonna be American, I’m just gonna sit here and listen and judge from the side.
Haviv: Be polite. And judgment aside.
Mijal: and of finding those potential people who can be persuaded or informed or in conversation with and really seeking to have a partner than allies. I would just love like, know, when is it from where you’re sitting, you say, you know, I do not have to tell my story or explain myself to you to sit in judgment.
And when is it that we say, actually, here in America, I am not going to the army. I am not doing the same things my friends and relatives are doing in Israel. And for many of us, the way, Haviv, psychologically and socially, one of the main things that we do is actually tell the Jewish story, Israel’s story, and defend it. And that’s the way that so many people I speak with, like I’ve spoken with a bunch of people today and yesterday about the news. And one of the first reactions is, how do I explain this on Instagram? That people ask me about it. And that’s, I think, part of the responsibility that many American Jews are feeling right
Haviv: But sometimes Israel will do wrong. I don’t know how to defend it. I don’t want to defend it. It’s wrong.
Mijal: No, I’m not saying we should defend it. I’m not saying we should defend it in this case.
Noam: But isn’t that the answer? But isn’t that the answer that sometimes Israel does things that are wrong? And the question that therefore I think people are struggling with is when Israel does something that’s wrong that shouldn’t be defended. Your Israeli response before, Haviv, I get it and there’s part of me that’s like, yeah, I like that Israeli response. The other part of me is like,
Haviv: Of course you’re not saying that, but you’re saying what happens?
Noam: We’re connected, Haviv, and you’re Israeli and I’m American and there’s 7 million of us and 7 million of you and, or 5 .6 million of us, whatever the number is, but there’s plenty of us and plenty of you and we’re deeply connected and your fate is my fate and your destiny is my destiny and we’re connected and our stories are connected and we do everything we can to help support you and you do everything you can to help support us. And so we can’t just say screw the American Jews who are struggling with this. There’s got to be something more to
Haviv: I just want to say a few things. One, I don’t say, screw the American Jews. What I say is, and what I meant was, yeah, standing before the haters who aren’t going to give us the benefit of the doubt.
Noam: or screw the haters.
Haviv: And now we have to defend, or if not defend, then in some ceremonial ritual of absolution or of requesting our redemption from them, admit Israel’s evil? Screw them. Israel’s a society. There’s bad stuff in it and amazing good stuff in it. And the bad stuff sometimes is bad. And it’s a human society. One of the, I think, struggles that American Jews have with Israel, and it’s a struggle and doesn’t matter how much you love Israel it’s going to be a struggle and it’s built into the structure of what Israel is and what American Jews are. It is that as an American Jew you get to be a Jew in this incredibly pristine and pure way. In other words, Mijal and Noam, you’re Americans and you’re also Jews but the only things you do as Jews are good things like community and podcasting, by which I mean education, and charity work, and thinking deep thoughts. All your Jewish activity, actual acting as Jews, is good stuff.
But as Americans, you’re screwing a lot of things up. You know, we have universal health care for poor people, right? And you don’t. And that’s horrifically immoral. The average American dies four years younger than the average Israeli. You know, when they die. In other words, you do terrible things to your own society. You’re an incredibly stratified society and a society that in terms of social capital has basically dissolved in an unbelievably lonely society. You often bomb third world countries. I don’t know if you’re aware. And you do these things, but you don’t do them as Jews. You do them as Americans. And so all the in the American Jewish experience is an American thing. And all the, there’s a lot of good in America as well, but I’m just saying when you, when you as a society are, feel yourself doing something bad, have to explain, Abu Ghraib happened to America. It didn’t happen to Jews. Jews, as Jews within America, because America, you offload all the bad stuff to the sort of political public space that is America. As Jews, you get to be pristine and pure and only do good things. Well, I don’t have that privilege. I have to do all of it as a Jew because of what Israel.
So my scandals are Jewish and my criminals are Jewish and my political corruption is Jewish and my, you know, synagogue and charity work and volunteering and community building and all that is all Jewish as well. So, you know, how dare Israel have a crime, have a mistake, have a tragedy, have a long simmering injustice is like asking how dare America have that. It’s not like asking how dare American Jews have that.
So you want to come before your, I have a huge privilege. You have the privilege of your Judaism being detached from real world messiness because you are real world messy, but as Americans, not as Jews, I have a different kind of privilege, which is that I don’t have to live among non-Jews to explain myself to those non-Jews. You do live among them. So you don’t get to just sort of flippantly say this Israeli thing of, I don’t stand in judgment. do they think they are, right? But you struggle to defend Israel because,
You really do think of Jewish, and again, I’m talking to people who are deeply aware of these gaps and who’ve read books about this, and I don’t mean literally you two, but American Jews, when they struggle to defend Israel, their thinking of Israel in the terms of American Jewish thinking of what being Jewish is, which is this very pristine thing, when they need to think of Israel as an America. Defend America, right? It’s not such a struggle, yeah.
Mijal: You know, it’s so interesting that you’re saying this. I think that I’ve often wondered how much this need to defend the actions of Israel creates like an artificial relationship. It’s almost like I think often like my relatives, I love them, I adore them. My relationship is not dependent on whether I have to explain them to an external audience. I don’t need to agree with them or be in alignment with them or describe them effectively to argue for my relationship. And I think there’s this pressure in America that we feel like we cannot have this ethnic bonds that aren’t able to be explained through American moral terms and through terms of everything just being good in American terms. So I think that’s part of the challenge that we
Haviv: Can I also submit that it’s maybe a kind of prejudice against Jews? The idea of other American audiences, of other Americans, that they are an audience that can make this demand. I don’t think, maybe I’m wrong, and maybe I’m detached. I don’t live in America, and I’m not deeply sort of daily enmeshed in American debates. I don’t think American Azeris or Armenians are asked to explain the Armenia-Azerbaijan war. I don’t think American Arabs are asked to validate or justify the immoralities of the vast, massive, six-figure death toll wars that have hit the Arab world in the last ten years. I don’t think that immigrants to America or minorities in America have to stand in judgment in that way.
And when Jews have to stand in judgment in that way, to me that’s very, very clearly the idea that a Jew, that there’s some kind of moral popularity contest, a Jew must win to validate themselves, is so profoundly prejudicial.
Mijal: So, Haviv, I actually think we should have like a whole conversation around like unique standards, double standards. How do we think about this, both in terms of Israel and American Jewry? I would agree with you that part of it is certain bias, but I think it’s not just, but I think some of it is natural. What I mean by this is that Israel and Zion and Jerusalem are at the center of the religion of billions of people around the world.
Zion and Israel were like some of the blueprint for how America was built through its founders with a Judeo-Christian heritage and tradition. And there’s all of these Christians in America who care about Israel tremendously. So I don’t think it is merely bias and prejudice that brings up these questions and interrogations of the special relationship between America and Israel and between American Jews and Israel over and over again.
I think there’s a combination there of both bias, prejudice, and also just like, you’ve said this before, it happens to be that the Jewish people and Israel are an exception to many, many rules, and that they are the center of many, stories. And that’s partially what draws so much attention and so much demand to explain oneself morally, I think.
Noam: Yeah, and and have you on top of what Mijal is saying, isn’t it? Can’t we also say your Azerbaijan, Armenia example? I mean, over 300 billion dollars has been given by the United States to Israel since its founding. And so won’t Americans, in addition to the prejudice, I’m with you on the prejudice, but there’s something more that Americans are literally investing in that they might want to have a stay in in a different way than having the Azerbaijan
Haviv: I’ll put it very simply, every demand made in America of American Jews to justify themselves, to justify Israel’s moral positions. Russia invaded Ukraine, Russia is ruled by a dictator. I don’t think Russian Americans are asked to publicly explain or answer for or debate or I don’t think most Americans would say that you can’t love Russia as a person of Russian heritage because Russia is so much more than any dictator in any war in any conflict in any specific problem even when it’s an enemy of the United States. I genuinely don’t think that that is a demand made. Now again I’m not a Russian American, in the middle of a lot of tension between American and Russian. So maybe I’m just missing it because it’s not happening to me. But I submit to you, it’s different. And that’s true
Mijal: No, you’re not missing it, Haviv. We agree with you. It’s unique standards and it’s really prejudiced. And thinking about the Israelis in the Olympics right now, I’m horrified at what they’re going through just to compete in sports.
Haviv: Right, and it’s also
Noam: By the way, Russia’s not playing the Olympics. Just saying. Just saying. Russia was, got the boot.
Haviv: It’s the one, yeah. Yes. Yes, but massive human rights abusers. had a game with Mali in which Israel was protested. Folks, look up human rights abuse. Google human rights abuse as Mali and just read for 30 seconds. Then stop reading so that you can sleep at night. just, know, the hypocrisy. Israel might be monstrous, the hypocrisy is still impossible, unbelievable and astonishing. But that is all true in Britain. That is all true in France.
Britain and France do not provide military aid to Israel. That’s my first point. My second point is I don’t think this is applied to Egyptians and America gives Egypt 1 .3 billion a year. It used to be 1 .7 billion, but because of human rights abuses, it was lowered a little bit. But still it’s 1 .34 billion. But beyond that, America spends something like $80 billion a year on foreign deployments. And those foreign deployments are the fundamental defense strategy of countries like Japan. What is Japan’s basic self-defense strategy? It faces China, faces North Korea, it faces real enemies with real capabilities. And its fundamental national defense strategy is America. And the entire Cold War, Western Europe didn’t build armies. Why didn’t it build armies? I love the comparison that I once heard of Western Europe during the Cold War to the Hobbits. Tolkien in the Hobbits talks about the Shire being protected for so long that they forgot they were protected.
That Western Europeans were protected by somebody else. were protected by America. America spends vast, vast, vast sums, I mean 25 times what it spends on Israel’s defense. It spends on the defense of other countries. It doesn’t spend it with cash because we don’t take American blood and put American blood on the line. American troops actually protect South Korea, the South China Sea, protected Western Europe from the Soviet bloc during the Cold War.
You know, maybe, maybe it’s American aid that makes Israel front and center in the American, you know, moral imagination. Or maybe that’s the one excuse they can fall back on and it doesn’t explain why the identical process is happening in Canada and Britain and France and countries that donate zero, give zero aid to Israel. And in fact, if there was no aid, it would still be happening and it would still have the same processes. And in fact, America gives vast amounts to many other countries. Sometimes it’s not cash, sometimes it’s literal soldiers, and still doesn’t make these moral demands there. Or make moral demands of their local minority to explain the morality of the country that is demanded when it does something wrong. So I really think it’s unique. I really think it’s just the Jews.
Mijal: You know, Haviv, it’s funny, part of what I wanna say is I wanna repeat your words back to you, like we are Jews, what were you expecting? In whatever society we’re in, I think we’re gonna stand out in different ways, some good and some hard. Can I take us back to the beginning of this conversation? Because I feel like we just spent some time in America and I actually just wanna go back to Israel. Is that okay?
Noam: That’s helpful. That’s helpful.
Mijal: OK, all right. So, Haviv, could you tell us, mean, you’re right now, you mentioned you were in Jersey doing some lectures, but what’s the mood in Israel right now? I’m thinking about, think for me, like I mentioned before, the attack in the north was both tragic and a signal of failure and vulnerability and pain, and also kind of like fear for what’s to come. And then there’s this internal turmoil and infighting and moral stains. And can you invite us a little bit into the mood in Israel right.
Haviv: There is a tremendous frustration. Many Israelis from across the political spectrum, deep, deep critics of the government and profound and loyal supporters of the government who defended vocally and seriously. There’s a shared frustration across all of these constituencies, these groups, these publics, at the sense that we have lost a very important thread. We are not, we don’t have, or our leaders don’t have answers to, for example, Hezbollah, to this vast threat that has so many sort of knock-on threats called Iran, to Gaza. mean, you know, Israelis look at what happened in Sdei Teiman, and they feel all the feelings all at once. Apparently there was a genuinely horrible crime.
These reservists, and never mind the one specific reservist is the central suspect and it turns out we’re working off initial reports. I’m not going to name names because I don’t know enough. I don’t know it. I don’t know it to be true enough to name names. But apparently is a far right activist with a history of violence that actually had trouble getting drafted to the reserve when they tried to volunteer multiple times because they have this problematic history. And so why were they then prison guards, this very complex and problematic prison guarding people who are deelly aided. A lot of questions have to be asked here. If you can have a crime like that in a prison. And it’s not the only accusation by the prisoners themselves over the last 10 months of abuse. There are other accusations. None of them with quite that evidence. None of them with quite that extremity, as far as I know. But apparently there’s a culture problem there. And that culture problem has to be dealt with and it has to be dealt with in defense of the rights of people who massacred children. It is an extraordinarily painful moment. what the Israelis are feeling about it is all the things all at once. The breakdown of military discipline is actually frightening and horrifying and frustrating. And the politicians posturing over all this pain is disgusting and horrifying. And also, their Nukhba force.
Most Israeli Jews just think to themselves, it’s OK, but they deserve to die. And so it’s hard to also then summon empathy of any kind. But also, it’s such a dangerous slippery slope. And Israelis feel that and talk about that. And right wing pundits are saying these things. The left is obviously saying these things. It’s more easy for the left to say these things. They’re sort of intellectually, ideologically, politically primed, and they don’t pay costs. On the right, they’re saying these things as well. And so all these things are all happening at once.
And the net result of all contradictions that people are feeling. A government that, on one hand, is fighting a bitter war in Gaza, paying tremendous costs, exacting tremendous costs from Palestinian civilians to chase down Hamas with grim determination. And Hamas sets those costs, it hides in those tunnels, but nevertheless, the willingness, this is a government that in one sense is ruthless and determined to destroy that enemy, and in another sense, has allowed entire swaths of Israel to be undefended and to be emptied and to let Iran have its way with and show that we are in fact deterrable and cannot restore deterrence against the enemy. All of these feelings all at once.
We feel like we are in a situation in which we do not have a leadership that is providing answers. And it’s easy to dump it all on Netanyahu, and I think Netanyahu bears more fault than anyone else, but it’s not even close to just Netanyahu. It’s a larger leadership problem and a larger sense of a collapse of morale because we don’t seem to have a leadership with a firm hand on the till, with a firm hand on the tiller, and that can offer us answers and guidance in this difficult moment. So it’s a frustrating and a little bit bitter moment, and a lot of Israelis, I think, feel lost right now.
Noam: Well, Haviv, thank you for sharing your thoughts on two really tragic moments in the story since the 7th of October. The tragic moment of Masjid al-Shamz, the tragic moment of Sdei Teiman in very different ways. But Mijal and I really appreciate it wondering together with us. So thank you.
Mijal: Yeah, and maybe I’ll just close by saying, mean, I just listening to it’s funny, I feel almost guilty, like listening to to you express the sense of of just feeling like loss of morale and the challenges. And I’m just speaking very frankly and emotionally here. I feel almost like we spent so much of our conversation talking about how American Jews justify ourselves when we are not facing kind of like the same things. And I’m just acknowledging my own reaction and just also saying that I hope you and others, if there are things that those of us who love Israel, imperfections and all, can do from across the ocean, especially at moments, not only of external enemies, but of low morale, that hopefully you can reach out to us, we can reach out to you, and we can help each other.
Haviv: Thank
Noam: Thank you.
ADDITION – ASSASSINATION OF ISMAIL HANIYEH
Noam: Mijal and Haviv, as we were just recording right now, as we’re talking about Sdei Teiman and as we’re talking about Hezbollah in the north and we just found out that Ismail Haniyeh was killed, assassinated in Iran, in Tehran. This is shocking. What do you make of it, Haviv? I know it’s happening right now and I’m asking you on the spot, but what do you…
Haviv: Yeah, it’s astonishing. I don’t know many details. But there is a kind of rolling operation in which Israel appears to be assuming Israel did it, which is a very safe assumption, not Israel has not, as of 10 minutes in, Israel has not said anything yet. So assuming Israel did it, it’s within 10 hours, Israel has taken out the number two guy in Hezbollah and the number one guy in Hamas. Ismail Haniyeh is the top political leader of Hamas, who used to be the top leader of Hamas in Gaza itself. And he’s now head of what’s called the Political Bureau of Hamas, which is the top political leader of Hamas. He was visiting Tehran. He was in a secret apartment in Tehran to keep him safe. He had a bodyguard with him, and it was apparently a 2 AM missile strike in Tehran that blew up the apartment, killed him and the bodyguard. Hours after he, 10 hours after killing the number two guy in Hezbollah in Lebanon, and hours after he met the Supreme Leader of Iran, Khamenei. Hezbollah and Khamenei’s people and the Revolutionary Guard commanders have been consulting in the last 10 hours about how to release the statement about the assassination of the senior Hezbollah guy.
And as that is happening, there’s also consultations with Hamas, and then Haniyeh is killed in Tehran. If this is Israeli, then it is an Israeli statement of capability and it is an Israeli warning and it may not be over and it’s worth saying in between the Israeli attack in Dahia and Beirut and what it appears to be an Israeli attack in Tehran The United States conducted an airstrike in Iraq against a drone production facility That was connected to Iran as well There seems to be the beginning of a much more serious response if it stops.
It’s significant. It’s not dramatic. These are things that Hamas and Hezbollah both know how to come back from. It’s embarrassing, certainly for the Iranians, if the Israelis did this in the heart of Tehran, but it’s no more than that. But if this is the beginning of a serious campaign to cut the head off the snake, so to speak, and target leaderships for the decisions they are making that are hurting Israelis and Israel, it’s a good thing.
Noam: Well, thank you for those thoughts. just have one more, I think, difficult question. I almost feel uncomfortable asking, but it’s on my mind. How do the hostage families, how do think they’re reacting to a moment like this?
Haviv: The hostage families are desperate. We know that of the 120 people still held by Hamas, more than half are already dead. That’s confirmed by IDF intelligence. I don’t know to assess that. I don’t know the intelligence, but the IDF has said it, and it’s probably reasonable to assume that that’s fairly good intelligence. So the dozens left, you, if we go in a serious way after these enemies, they’re in danger. Breaking of news of the torture of a prisoner at Sdei Teiman creates a desire in Hamas to reciprocate, retaliate, to put out a video of the torture of an Israeli hostage potentially. Tremendous danger. These families are in absolute psychological torment for 10 months.
And they’re certainly watching this. I’ll just say, you know, if there’s a silver lining, and it’s proven a very big silver lining until in the past, in the past 10 months at various points, when Hamas is up against the wall, when it feels pressure, it becomes more willing to negotiate and it becomes more willing to negotiate at lower prices that Israel can actually pay. And when it doesn’t feel that pressure, it raises the price massively and it makes it impossible for Israel to actually pay the price and get hostages out. massive, massive pressure on Hamas, which leads Hamas to conclude that the only way Hamas stops an Israeli campaign of the type that may now be beginning, assuming it isn’t already over, that kind of massive pressure be the thing that gets more hostages out. That has already proven itself back in November. And repeatedly, the last time Hamas was willing to seriously negotiate was within 36 hours of Israel entering Rafah, which they thought Israel wouldn’t do because there was by demonstration pressure to tell the Israelis not to, held the Israelis back for three months.
Mijal: But does this, Haviv, does this create pressure on Hamas in the way that entering Rafah did? Because that, I think, creates actual pressure as to where those who are still in Gaza, the fighters are still hiding. Does this create pressure or like a panic? Sorry.
Haviv: Yeah, no, if there’s a panic demand from the political leadership in Qatar, in Iran, in Turkey that is coordinating with these supportive powers that are helping Hamas in as much as Hamas can be helped at the with Israel cutting off the supply line through the Egyptian border, but nevertheless is doing what it can. If there’s a sense that there’s a massive panic and pressure from that political leadership on Hamas in Gaza, will Sinwar, who’s actually commanding in Gaza, then release hostages to sort of respond to that panic, to help the political leadership? I honestly don’t know. There have been schisms before between these different levels, layers.
Sometimes Hamas pretends that there’s a schism within its leadership as a way to divert pressure on the leadership to act a certain way by just claiming that it can’t control its own people, things like that. Short answer is I don’t know. It can’t hurt.
We don’t today have a way to get the hostages out. Hamas’s demand is that it survive the war. And that is not something the Israeli government should give or can give. But if we can lower Hamas’s demand to survive the week, to survive the month, that is something that makes it easier. That’s a very cartoonishly sort of simplistic way of talking about it, but the basic dynamic is that. So it might be the disaster for the hostages. It might be the beginning of a turnaround that actually makes it doable.
Noam: Thank you, Haviv. Thank you, Mijal.
Mijal: Thank you.
Haviv: Alright, thanks guys.