War, grief, and Zionism: A conversation with ambassador Yechiel Leiter

S3
E16
52mins

In this powerful and deeply personal episode, Noam and Mijal are joined by Dr. Yechiel Leiter, Israel’s Ambassador to the U.S. and grieving father of Major Moshe Yedidya Leiter, z”l, who fell in Gaza after October 7th. Together, they confront hard questions: What does it mean to lead while grieving? How does one reconcile faith and sacrifice in wartime? Together, they explore the importance of dissent and ask when does criticism cross a line?

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Noam: Hey everyone, welcome to Wondering Jews with Mijal and Noam. I’m Noam.

Mijal: And I’m Mijal.

Noam: And this podcast is our way of trying to unpack those really big questions being asked by Jewish people, by non-Jewish people about the Jewish story, about the Jewish people, about the Jewish state often, about Judaism. We absolutely do not have it all figured out, but we try to learn together, to wonder together. As we say every single week, and we mean it every single week, we really, really enjoy and appreciate hearing from you. So please send questions, suggestions, feedback, disagreement, pretty much anything. Email us at WonderingJews@unpacked.media. Again, WonderingJews@unpacked.media.

Mijal: Today’s episode is an important one. It’s a timely one. We are going to wonder about sacrifice, war, dissent, about what it means to stay in relationship with our people, with our faith, with Israel, especially when we are not all in agreement. Our very special guest today is Yechiel Michael Leiter, PhD, Ambassador of Israel to the United States. He is a long-time public thinker and political leader.

More personally, he’s a grieving father. His son, Major Moshe Yedidia Leider, zichrono l’vracha, was killed in Gaza soon after October 7th. And on the topic of grief, just two weeks ago, two of his embassy staff, Yaron Linsky and Sarah Milgrim, were killed in D.C.

Noam: So it’s, yes, it’s gonna be an honor to have the ambassador on our podcast and to be in conversation with us. And we wanted to talk with Dr. Leiter, not just as an ambassador though, but as a human being. How do you process faith when you’ve sacrificed something that’s precious? How do you hold complexity and conviction at the same time? How do you disagree? How do you disagree? How do you lead in a public that disagrees with you?

So these are some of what we have been thinking about and wondering about this week. And I’m so grateful to be in conversation with you, Ambassador Leiter. Ambassador Leiter, thank you so much for being with us.

Ambassador Leiter: It’s good to be with you, Noam, Mijal. Very often I spend my day wondering. So if I have two insightful Jews to wonder with for a podcast, I’m delighted. Thank you for the opportunity.

Mijal: That’s awesome. Ambassador, where are you speaking to us from?

Ambassador Leiter: I’m here in my office at the Israeli Embassy in Washington.

Mijal: And I know that you’ve worn a lot of different hats, whether as a political advisor to different leaders in the Israeli government, a scholar, an ambassador, as a father. In all of these roles, which one feels most urgent to you right now?

Ambassador Leiter: Well, I’m a big advocate of mindfulness, of being aware of where you are at a particular time and being there. I think very often we spend so much of life in one place, thinking and concentrating on another. And one of the things that I’ve learned in my years is that the qualitative aspect of time, that if you are more connected with where you are at a particular time in your life, that it has far more meaning. right now I’m very, very focused on my job as envoy to the United States, as Israel’s ambassador. I am fully engaged. I spend a great deal of time not only interfacing with the White House and Congress, Senate, but also with the street, with the Jewish community, with the Christian community.

I leave Washington pretty much every weekend to spend a long weekend with different communities around the country. I’ve been just in the short time that I’m here. I just landed at the end of January and I’ve been to such cities as Miami. I just got back from Atlanta, LA, New York. And what I do is I engage with the local media. I engage with different synagogues of all denominations, churches. spend my Sundays in churches and in between university students who I think have been amazingly on the front line against this soaring antisemitism in this country. So I want to empower students as well. So I’ve been to UCLA, universities in Florida, Princeton, gave a lecture recently, students that got together in Atlanta, I spent time here in Washington, GW, and Georgetown to be as much as possible as I can with students.

So an answer to your question is I am, I feel that my life has basically been a lead up to this position. And the only reason I took it really was because, as you mentioned in your introduction, I did lose my son. I was ready for some free time, just to read and teach, retirement. And when the prime minister called and asked me to take the position, I had to consult with my son somewhere up there in the Garden of Eden. And he told me to do it. Here I am.

Noam: Ambassador Leiter, I want to stay on this aspect of your son about Moshe Yedidya. I want to hear a little bit more about who he was, not just in uniform, but as your son, as a human being, as a person.

Talk to us for like a minute or two. I’m sure you can say a lot, a lot, a lot. But like, who was Moshe?

Ambassador Leiter: Well, you can see him right over my shoulder there. He’s in back of me on the wall. And the smile of brimming with confidence in life was really everything about him. He spent 15 years in special ops in the Air Force. He was very smart, very able. The equivalent of the US Delta Force, that’s our Sheldag. And most of his operations are still classified. I don’t even know about them.

But I know that he was very, very able and courageous. Many of his soldiers told me about operations without being too specific about how he would get them out of the most complicated situations and bring them to safety, very often outside the country in a very volatile neighborhood. But at the age of 33, he was sent to protect the Israeli delegation of doctors and medics who were sent to the Philippines after the earthquake in 2014.

And when he came back from guaranteeing their protection, he told me, I’m leaving the army, I’m going to med school. I said, Moshe, you’re out of your mind. You’re 33, you’ve got four kids at the time. How are you going to med school now? And he said, listen, when I saw the doctors saving lives of people, pulling them out of rubble after four or five days buried alive. After experiencing that, I want to dedicate my life to saving people, to bringing life. I spent 15 years as a special operator, as a commando, and now it’s time for me to give life.

So he worked very, very hard. He gave up on his army career and he got into med school. And while in med school, he would do 80, 90 days of reserve duty a year. He was a real patriot.

One of the things he did during the course of his medical education to make a living was to run a program, actually it was the minister of defense that approached him and asked him if he would run a program which inducts Haredi, ultra-orthodox young men, into an intelligence unit in the army. It’s called Shmoneh-Matayim, 8200, which is the largest intelligence operation in Israel. And it was floundering. It had just started, and they knew that Moshe could connect with everybody. It was a breakdown of communication between the army and the Haredi leadership, but Moshe knew how to talk to anybody. You can drop him in the middle of the hinterland of China and he’d find a way to get along with everybody. That’s just who he was. So he brought them together and turned the program into a stellar success. And from 82 original enlistees, they now have some 350 every year. So it’s doing very, very well.

And that’s that’s the person who he was. And he led his forces. He actually led the division. He was at the head of the pyramid that led the forces into Gaza because the general of the Southern Command knew of his abilities and said he wants him at the head of the battalion that went in. And on Friday afternoon on the 15th day of the war, his command team went into a booby-trapped house looking for a tunnel that might have been holding hostages, was certainly holding missiles, and and hidden camera that must follow him and when he found shaft of the tunnel they exploded a massive explosion that killed him and three of his command team. The other side of the wall of other five members of his command team lost their legs. There’s much more say about Moshe, and he was just a beautiful beautiful individual.

Noam: Yeah. Ambassador, the thing that I think about a lot is for years I was a high school teacher. I was a principal actually in a school for many years in Los Angeles. And the story that I found to be the most really inspiring, complicating, provocative, getting students to think, getting students to feel was the story of the binding of Isaac, which is the story where Abraham binds his son Isaac, sacrifices Isaac for a broader cause, know, suspension of something in order to serve God. Ultimately, Abraham does not go forward with the binding. It stops at a certain point in time, but it’s a passage that I think about often.

And I wanna know, as an Israeli, as a father, as a parent, like I’m a father, I have a son, I have three daughters, Mijal’s a mother with children. Do you, a father, does that story animate how you think about decisions that Israelis have to make very often? Do you think about sacrifice often?

Ambassador Leiter: No, it’s a very, very perceptive question. Interesting. We have never met, we’ve never spoken about this. But I actually, from the time of the Shiva, for Moshe, I’ve spoken about this quite a bit. I think that it’s a mistake to see the story of the binding of Isaac in completely binary terms. Either there’s no sacrifice or there’s a full-fledged sacrifice, binding the son and putting the wood down to actually burn him and so on.

I think that throughout the course of life as parents, we make Abrahamic choices. When we teach our children values, we’re making an Abrahamic choice because there could be short-term loss by encouraging standards. You could lose something. You’re kind of, you’re binding yourself, you’re holding yourself back from an immediate gratification. That’s a binding of Isaac. When you teach somebody to delay gratification, which we do as parents, right?

And then we take it even further. If you’re talking about fighting for values, you want to fight for equality before the law. You want to fight for the rights of minorities. You want to fight for the right to live in Israel. You want to fight for security in Israel. It all comes with sacrifice.

Usually big decisions in life, value-laden decisions, necessitate sacrifice. So there are these Abrahamic, Isaiah-ic decisions that we make throughout our life. And I think that’s the main significance of the binding of Isaac, the main thrust of the story.

But of course, at the end of the day, there’s also the possibility of the ultimate sacrifice. When an Israeli parent sends his son and daughter to the army and sends them into a war zone, there is the possibility of getting a knock on the door. And when you do that with clarity of mind and conviction of soul, you’re reenacting, so to speak, the Abraham-Isaac relationship. if that perhaps wouldn’t have been in the background of our grasp on life, you know, of our theoretical backdrop for Jewish conviction, maybe we wouldn’t have survived all these years. Maybe we wouldn’t have remained loyal to the ideas and ideals that our forefathers and mothers provided for us from the very outset of Judaism.

Mijal: You know, Ambassador, I have some family serving right now in Israel. I’m thinking a lot every day about my sister. Her fiance is right now serving as a reservist, is going to have a break to get married and go back. And I wonder, as someone who is so dedicated personally and professionally to translating between the Israeli Jewish experience, the American Jewish experience, I’ll just say personally, for me, sometimes I wonder how much gets lost in translation.

How much do I not understand because I haven’t served, for example, right? How is the vantage point from Israel different than it is here? Even like your language right now, speaking of sacrifice, I have found speaking with Israeli Jews, friends and relatives, that it’s much more common there to speak in this way.

And then here in the West, the language is a little bit different. It’s much more focused on personal aspiration and what we want to build. And sacrifices, even, look down in as giving up of the self and maybe even being manipulated by the collective. So I’m wondering how you see these different perspectives and if you’ve had some thoughts about how to bridge the gap, whether some gaps cannot be breached.

Ambassador Leiter:I don’t know if the focus is necessarily on bridging the gap. I think your insight into the difference of societies is spot on. Look, Israel, despite not having an hour’s worth of peace, ever, And yet, yet we always rate on the top 10 happiness index in the world, right? How do you square that? You’re constantly on the defensive, you’re constantly in a state of war, and yet your population is happy. And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that there’s meaning. We’re constantly reminded of the meaning. By the very fact that we have such an intensive civil life means that you choose it, because you believe in something. You feel every day that you’re fulfilling a meaning. look, Israel in many respects, know that the philosopher David Hume gave a bad rap to miracles, there, you know, it’s kind of, there’s unavoidable miracles here. I mean, look, the only country in the world today with replacement fertility, replacement fertility means a minimum of 2.1 children per family, which guarantees a future. If you don’t have 2.1 children per family, there is no future unless you have massive immigration, for example. I mean, who’s going to work? Life expectancy goes up. Somebody has to pay for those pensions, right? If there’s nobody working, if there’s no young generation, who’s going to ensure life expectancy? And if you want to try to understand the whole issue of immigration in the West, this has a lot to do with it. When you have the numbers of children plummeting, to 1.5, 1.6 as it is in the United States today. In Europe it’s even less, 1.2, 1.3. In Asia, forget about it, it’s all under one. There’s simply no children whatsoever in Korea, Japan, China. You have a real crisis situation. Israel is the only country, the only country in the OECD. The OECD is the Organization of Developed Nations, 36 in number. The only one with replacement fertility.

Now how do you figure that? Three generations after Holocaust? I mean, just yesterday we were written off. third of the people are annihilated. And yet we’re the only people with replacement fertility. Does that have something to do with happiness as well? So when you’re involved in such a society, there’s a statement of purpose really just by getting up in the morning. And that changes the focus of your life on a societal level as well. Do I think that

We have something to lend, something to be borrowed by other countries in the West, not only in the West, but really around the globe. Yes, I do. think that we have this expression in Hebrew, ki m’tzion tetzeh Torah, from Zion will the Torah go forth. It’s not only the Torah as it’s written at Sinai, but ideas, creative ideas, the ideas of the people, the example of the people, what we’ve been able to accomplish.

Another example in terms of miracles, you know, when I came to Israel in 1978 in Scranton, Pennsylvania, I was 18 and I went into a dormitory and there was a gizmo on my shower. I said, what’s that gizmo? And they said, well, after two minutes it shuts the water off because there’s no water in the country. You can’t shower for more than two minutes. And today we are a net water exporter. We’re exporting water to Jordan. 90 % of our industrial water is recycled wastewater. It’s the highest in the world.

Mijal: Ambassador, it’s so interesting for me to hear you speaking with lot of hope and optimism and really raising up the positive, the amazing aspects of Israel. And yet I actually wondered when I knew we were going to have the opportunity to be in conversation with you, I wonder how it would feel from the outside, it feels like to represent Israel right now in America and in the world stage.

At a moment where many people actually think that things are helpless and hopeless, using the words that you just said. I mean, just to bring to the fore some of the difficulties and the challenges that we are facing right now, at your own, like a very recent tragedy just two weeks ago, two of your embassy staff members, Yaron Lushinsky and Sarah Milgrim, were murdered in DC. by somebody who witnessed a said was shouting, I did this for Gaza, free Palestine. Soit’s very interesting for me to hear you insisting on the purpose and the confidence and the positivity.

And at the same time, I also wanna ask you, you are representing Israel right now when it’s incredibly isolated, when it’s being attacked. And yeah, and even when embassy staffers are physically attacked. Can you describe for us not only the ways that you think about the aspirational positive aspects of Israel, but really this moment and what you and your embassy is confronting in terms of opposition?

Noam: Yes, I want you to answer that question, Ambassador, but I’m going to also, right after you answer this question, giving you forewarning, I’m going to ask you a complicated, provocative question. So get ready.

Ambassador Leiter: That’s a very interesting warning. What am I supposed to do to prepare myself?

Noam: Just keep going, keep going.

Mijal: It’s like a trigger warning.

Noam: Trigger warning. Yeah, exactly.

Ambassador Leiter: Look, obviously, this has been a very, very difficult few weeks. The embassy staff is, we have a very large embassy staff here at Israel Embassy in Washington. People are still in PTSD. These two beautiful people were close to all of us. mean, Yaron Leshinsky, I didn’t have much quality time with him. He’s a research assistant to the head of our Middle East desk. But he was so quiet and unassuming. And he just, worked just three or four doors from my office.

And it was always wonderful to come in in the morning and pass by his room and say, hi, Boker tov. And I just had such a sweet smile. And Sarah, I mean, I used to see her all the time on the first floor where we have our public diplomacy office. And she would host many events in the embassy. And she’d walk into the big room at auditorium with her red hair and beautiful smile and just breathe life into everybody. It’s a tremendous loss. And we’re definitely licking our wounds from that murder. But I found, getting back to your question, that the more I get out onto the turf, I get into the university campuses, I get into the communities around the country, and the more I can interface with people, there’s understanding. If you can explain the situation in Gaza, you can explain what it is that we’re dealing with, the Iranian regime. What this attempt to eradicate Israel is, why there’s the rise of antisemitism. People get it, people understand. look, I was in a church, the Free Chapel Church, on Sunday to give a sermon. I mean, you can’t believe the number of people that were there. it’s 3,000 people on a Sunday morning who choose not to go golfing but to come to a prayer service. And then the pastor told me while I was upstage that there’s another 30,000 people online.

I spoke that Sunday morning for about half hour with 33,000 people. the applause when I talked about the message from Jerusalem was a thunderous applause. And there are many tens and millions of people out there who identify with Israel and the cause of Israel and what Israel’s dealing with right now. We just have to talk to them. We have to engage them. Are we losing a younger generation? Yeah. And that’s why I spend so much time doing podcasts like yours and getting out there to university campuses. I just set up for the first time a national advisory board of Jewish students around the country so that can meet with them once a month and interface with them on issues. Hopefully get direction, give direction, but the important thing is to collaborate so that we can contend with this difficult time we’re going through together.

Mijal: I think that some of, some of us have the sense here in America, and I’m saying this as somebody wholly committed to Israel, but I often get the sense that from here, from the outside, when we look at the Israeli government, what its public officials are saying out loud, sometimes we get the sense that they are not actually investing as much in explaining Israel’s case to the world. Like when different things happen in the news, there’s always an accompanying article saying like the Israeli government is taking a very long time to explain this or like it’s not even trying anymore because of like, know, the bad media environment.

And to me, part of what I have been wondering is, I don’t think that Israel needs to base its military or government decisions only based on how we feel here in America. But thinking about the Jewish people and knowing that we are bound in covenant to each other, I know that many American Jews are feeling very frustrated and actually thinking, well, wouldn’t we want public statements by Israeli politicians and officials coming from Israel to really reflect a greater degree of sensitivity as to how this is affecting us and the way that there is rising hatred and antisemitism. And again, not that it justifies it, but I wonder what you would respond to that critique.

Ambassador Leiter: Well, Mijal, you’ve touched on one of the most difficult aspects of my job. I I wish that, you know, every minister who made a comment publicly on the airwaves would consult with me beforehand. If that would be the case, I think we’d have a lot less provocative statements coming out of the cabinet. But look, we’re a democracy, and people make statements not necessarily for, you know, public consumption or for international consumption but for their own constituents.

I think it’s important to emphasize something here and if I can come to the defense of people who are unfortunately expressing themselves in a less than constructive manner. Look, we are dealing with a war. Society in Israel is dealing with a war now a year and a half long. This has daily effects on people. People are suffering. Please understand that we lost 900 soldiers in addition to the 1,200 people slaughtered on October 7. It’s over 2,000 people. If you do the math, you’re talking about 65,000 Americans dead in a year and a half. Can you imagine that number? 65,000 people dead to, to an enemy that killed them. And when you talk about two thousand people you’re talking about tens of thousands of family members but you’re also talking about tens of thousands of families that were removed from their homes both in the Gaza envelope and in the north we’ve had to double and triple and quadruple our social workers and psychologists in the system to just deal with it, with a, an entire people in, in, I can’t even say PTSD, it’s not PTSD, because it’s not post yet, we’re still in the war.

We just lost soldiers this morning. I don’t know if you saw the news in a booby-trapped house. As we’re talking, there’s two soldiers that are still trapped underneath the rubble. And we just got hit by a ballistic missile from Yemen yesterday. The day before, we got hit by a ballistic missile coming in from Syria. We had to take out seven installations in Beirut operated by Hezbollah to create attack UAVs. know, the kind of UAVs that just attacked the Russian Air Force. That’s what they’re building in Beirut after the ceasefire. We have to contend with that. We have to contend with terrorism on a daily basis, whether it’s Molotov cocktails or drive-by shootings throughout the communities in Judea and Samaria. There’s all sorts of incitement going on in the old city of Jerusalem. These are things we have to deal with day in and day out. And sometimes there are going to be people who say things that are unfortunate, that shouldn’t have been said, but everything has to be put in perspective. 

At the bottom line, we did not allow starvation in Gaza, period. We had sent in 92,000 semi-trailers, 1.6 and half million tons of food and humanitarian aid over the past year and a half. A huge amount, far in excess of what’s necessary. Despite the reports, despite the warnings, do you know that BBC warned of starvation over the past year and a half, 88 times. We counted them. 88 times. Now, we’re apparently very inefficient. Inefficient. If we can’t starve people, if we’re warned about it, 88 times. Well, nobody starved because we didn’t allow starvation. And that’s despite the fact that it was clear that when our materials that were being sent in, when these semi-trailers were being sent in, they were immediately being co-opted. They were being taken over by Hamas.

And then Hamas is selling the material that NGOs from around the world raise to support humanitarian funding. They’re using it to reconstitute their terror organization. So if a minister comes out and says, what’s going on? Why are we supporting people who are shooting at our sons and daughters? There’s a logical background to that. And nevertheless, the prime minister and the government took a decision that despite the fact that the food is being hijacked and is being used by Hamas against our own soldiers, are still going to allow it in. We’re still going to encourage it to come in. We’re still going to facilitate it coming in.

Noam: Telling the story of Israel has been complicated forever, since Israel has been created and even before it’s been complicated. It’s been difficult. Lots of different reasons for why it’s particularly challenging. It could be because in recent years, Israel is stronger than the Palestinians. It could be because, because there’s a lot of antisemitism in the world. It could be because Israelis are not the best at communicating often. It could be because, and this is what I’ll say, not what you’ll say, at some points in time Israel does not behave perfectly. And my question that I wanna ask you is this. You said that David Hume made miracles kind of unpopular. And David Ben-Gurion famously said this line. He said, in order to be a realist in Israel, you have to believe in miracles. He also said,I think it was to President Truman, he said, my job is much harder than your job. Your job is to be the president of a few hundred million people. My job is to be the prime minister of a million prime ministers or something like that. And,

Ambassador Leiter: That was actually, actually Chaim Weizmann said that to Truman.

Noam: Chaim Weizmann said that? Okay. There you go. And so, so that idea strikes a chord for me because there are so many people in Israel, so many Israelis that have strong opinions. And strong opinions is part of very often what it means to be Jewish as well, having these like really strong opinions.

Ambassador Leiter: Let me correct you. There’s nobody in Israel that doesn’t have strong opinion.

Noam: Okay. Okay, okay, fine. you recently, you said something that got a strong reaction. You warned recently against what you called blood libels against the prime minister and that language understandably sparked very very strong reactions and you were upset about this idea that That there were other leaders in Israel that were suggesting that Bibi Netanyahu’s goal in this war was to remain in power and you were very upset that people were making these suggestions that the war was not about returning the hostages, that the war was not about defeating Hamas, but something else.

When Channel 12 said that 55% of Israelis believe that Bibi’s main goal is to remain in power, and when the IDI just did a survey in which 48% of Israelis do not think versus 37% who do think, that this Operation Chariots of Gideon, which they’re doing right now, they believe that it will not bring hostages back. And 49% of Israelis believe that it will not defeat Hamas versus only 38. % who believe it will. 

My question to you is, I’m a teacher, I’m an educator, and when I use language, and I mess up often, by the way, I mess up often, and human beings mess up often. But the language of blood libel is a language that is, and to say that one person or two people, but really 55% of Israelis are not trusting the prime minister right now, it seems. And I wanna add to that, Rav Moshe Lichtenstein, who is the head of the Yeshivat Har Etzion in the West Bank, what is often referred to as Judea and Samaria, he, He said about the war, said, Ad Kan, enough. The war has, his language was, it’s exhausted itself. It’s time to pivot. And polls in Israel seem to be suggesting things like that

So I want to know how you think about this. you, like the language of blood libel, do you still hold that language? And for me as an American Jew, I’m not Israeli. have Israeli family who’ve been fighting in this war. Do you think of dissent as treasonous or do you feel that it is okay to have strong dissent within Israel? How do you think about all this?

Ambassador Leiter: I appreciate the question. It’s always important to clarify things as best we can. Let me begin by saying that I delight in differences of opinion. I’m a Talmudist. I studied Talmud for many years. And the essence of the oral law is a form of argumentation. It is presented as insisting on two sides of the issue. We have an expression in the Talmud, or chavurta or mituta. Either we have a friend to debate with or death. Right? Give me a friend or give me death because otherwise only hear yourself. We are not guilty in Israel of only hearing ourselves. We have a very, very robust democracy.

I’ll never forget two years ago, a half a year before the war, I brought 30 countries, representative of 30 countries from think tanks to Jerusalem throughout the region, Middle East and Africa, Horn of Africa, for a conference. And it was in middle of the big demonstrations over judicial reform. And you know judicial reform issue has torn the country apart for several years now. And they were astounded at what they saw. They came from countries where you don’t have 100,000 people on the streets in favor and 100,000 people on the streets against any issue. And if there are, it’s usually very bloody. You know, and here we are, the streets of Jerusalem are shut down. We’re two stories down in a hotel discussing regional cooperation. I mean, it was so counterintuitive, but that’s part of our life. We can do things simultaneously. And right now we’ve been conducting a very difficult war at the same time when we’ve been confronting issues such as judicial reform, such as the draft of the haredim in Israel. mean, issues that really run to the very a vein of our society. And the debate is intense. Now, there’s also a very intense debate over the government. And God bless that we have an opposition. Thank God we have an opposition. I don’t, for one moment, challenge that fact at all.

The reference that I made in that interview to a blood libel was not on the opposition. It was, there is a blood libel against the state of Israel right now. It starts with the prime minister at the ICC. You have an attempt to put the stain of Cain on the forehead of the prime minister. When you say that he is guilty of war crimes, he’s guilty of genocide, and you issue an arrest warrant for his arrest, to the fact that when he comes to the United States, he can’t actually fly directly. He’s got to fly over U.S. Army bases, because if he were to land in Europe, he could be arrested. This is insanity.

He’s conducting a defensive war against a band of jihadis armed to the teeth, encouraged by Iran, with the declared intent of eradicating us. And sometimes I think we lose the main message of the Holocaust, which is if someone says they’re going to kill you, believe them. We just kind of forget that. This is the intention of the Iranian ring of fire around our country, where Iran runs these proxies intent on destroying us. That was the goal of October 7th. The idea was that at the same time, Hezbollah would come through the tunnels in the north and do what Hamas did in the south at the same time, and as they were slaughtering our populations, thousands of people. Iran would fire ballistic missiles into the center of the country so the army wouldn’t be able to get there. Remember, after October 7th, the miracle was that we were able to regroup after the surprise attack and within seven, eight, 12 hours, the army was there and fought with the terrorists. Otherwise, they would have gotten to Tel Aviv, okay?

Now imagine they couldn’t have gotten there because we have ballistic missiles falling in the center of the country. We don’t have roads left. They couldn’t get out of the center of the country to get to the periphery. Okay? That was the plan. We have to confront with that. The prime minister is leading this effort to push back this attempt to eradicate us. And he’s being accused of war crimes.

So when you go on Ehud Olmert, you go on television and you say as a former prime minister that that Israel is committing war crimes, what are you doing? You’re playing into a blood libel. Now, if you have an agenda to topple the prime minister, that’s fine. That’s a domestic internal agenda. And I, as an ambassador, I don’t relate to that. I mean, somebody could ask me for commentary, that’s fine. But I’ll certainly grant legitimacy and actually encourage opposition because that’s what a robust democracy does.

And I have a problem with, you know, Olmert making those accusations in the country. But why are you going to the BBC, which, you know, as I said before, 88 times has accused us of starvation, which has a particular narrative. If you’re playing into that narrative, you’re doing something very dangerous. And it’s my job as ambassador explaining Israel to the world that this is wrong. It’s very difficult when somebody comes back to me and says, well, you know, your ex-prime minister is saying the same thing. What am I supposed to say? You know, he’s entitled to his opinion, but he’s doing something very wrong. And he shouldn’t be playing into this blood libel. Well, there’s a certain line, which I said in that interview, that you can’t cross. And I think he and some others crossed that line. I was flagging it for them. And I hope they listened. I hope they picked up the cue and realized that you can do what you need to do to topple the government. That’s your job as the opposition. But it’s not your job to lend credibility, credence, to a blood libel because it’s being labeled, it’s being libeled not only at the Prime Minister, but the Prime Minister as the leader of the State of Israel and the Jewish people. It goes down to me, it goes down to you, it goes down to every soldier. And you know what? At the end of the day, it goes down, it trickles down to every Jew. Yaron and Sarah were shot dead by an assassin because they were Zionists.

They were Zionists because they identified with Israel. And to the shooter, they were identifying with a genocidal regime that doesn’t have a right to exist. So if you, members of the opposition, are playing into that narrative, you shouldn’t be doing it. And it’s my job to call them out.

Mijal: You know, Ambassador Leiter, I have a lot of sympathy for what you’re saying, especially because part of the conversations I have with a lot of people is how do you have a nuanced perspective? How do you have criticism in an environment that is like rife with antisemitism? It’s very, very hard to actually figure out how to speak up, how to ask questions when I know that words can be weaponized so easily.

I do want to offer though just a counter perspective just to add to the conversation for us to consider. There are many people that actually believe that supporting the current prime minister is not the same as supporting Israel. Because I’ll get WhatsApp messages from students of mine who are like, you know, Mijal, I’m a Zionist. I’m glad Israel exists, but like, I really don’t like what this minister said, or I really feel like that what the prime ministers did here right now, it’s dangerous, dangerous for Israelis, dangerous for Jews in America. And part of what they are insisting and saying is, can we assert that there is one thing which is Zionism, which is believing in the right of Jews to have their own state and self-determination?

And that that is different from you know, a partisan allegiance, let’s say towards Likud or Netanyahu or whatever that is. So for many people that actually feels like an important project to help preserve their integrity in the way that they speak about Zionism and some others argue again, it’s not my position, but I want to represent it. Others argue that it’s also a matter of Jewish safety in America, let’s say towards Likud and Netanyahu or whatever that is. So for many people that actually feels like an important project to help preserve their integrity in the way that they speak about Zionism and some others argue, again, it’s not my position but I want to represent it, others argue that it’s also a matter of Jewish safety in America. That if we’re able to create daylight between any particular government and that if we’re able to create daylight between any particular government and the project of the Jewish state, whatever that government is, that that will help ensure the safety of Jews around the world. So I want to name these voices and bring them into the conversation because I do think that there is a lot of fear right now for Jews all around the world, and we are all grappling with really impossible situations that feed up allegiances, commitments, and just different questions that keep coming up.

Ambassador Leiter: I think that’s very fair. I mean, I’m not advocating supporting one party or one particular politician in Israel. That’s not the issue. The issue is let’s just be very careful about if and when we’re crossing the line.let’s take for example, J Street supporting an arms embargo on Israel. Okay? Now, I don’t expect Jewish organizations to support a particular government, particular prime minister. But when J Street favors an arms embargo in Israel, that’s crossing a line. And, you know, they’re just out of the tent. They cannot be in the tent. I’ll be happy to explain it. If J Street comes and says, we are pro-Palestinian, I have no problem engaging with them. But you can’t say that you’re pro-Israel.

Noam: Could you explain why that’s crossing a line?

Ambassador Leiter: You could be a pro-Zionist and do everything you can to harm the Jewish state. So you’re out of the tent. Don’t be duplicitous. Be honest, is what I say to J Street. Be honest. Don’t be so duplicitous. You do everything to support those who are working to curb and limit and potentially endanger the state of Israel. We were facing a seven front war and Bernie Sanders and company initiated an arms embargo, supported by J Street. Everybody’s entitled to their opinion and you want to work towards a different government in Israel, that’s legitimate. But if you work to limit arms at a time when we’re at war, we’re being choked, we’re being attacked on seven fronts, and you initiate an arms embargo, so you’ve crossed the line. Now it’s legitimate if you’re pro-Palestinian. Just don’t call what you’re doing pro-Israel. It’s not pro-Israel, it’s not pro-Zionist. You’re perfectly entitled to be pro-Palestinian. And by the way, if they come to me and say, want to debate you as a pro-Palestinian, I debate Palestinians. But I’m not going to debate someone who says parades around something they’re not.

Noam: Right, just representing another point of view on that, again, not agreeing with J Street’s decision to support that. I also remember that a month after, within the first month or two after the 7th of October, J Street put out a pretty strong statement saying how awful the attack was on Israel and Israel’s right to defend itself.

Ambassador Leiter: Think of where we are. Think of what you’re saying, We’re thanking somebody, we’re expressing appreciation for allowing us to defend ourselves. I love it. It’s great. Thank you very much, J Street, for allowing us the privilege of defending ourselves. It’s like when people say to me, you know, I firmly believe that Israel has a right to exist. really? Would you say that to Belgium? How about the Congo?

Noam: Right. Right.

Ambassador Leiter: Do you really believe that Japan has a right to exist? How about India? Would you say that to any other country? But if somebody says to the Jewish people, we believe you have a right to independent sovereignty in the land of Israel. Well, we’re supposed to prostrate ourselves, salute and say thank you. Sorry, I don’t say thank you for that. We’re not any less entitled. We’re more entitled to our sovereignty in the land of Israel than most countries in the world. We were a nation state long before they were nation states. If we want to get into, we have time to get into history. I’d love to unpack that.

Noam: Well, we have a whole other podcast. It’s called Unpacking Israeli History, which teaches the history and the story of Israel and Zionism. So that’s a whole other podcast. 

Mijal: That’s Noam’s other podcast.

Noam: Okay, Mijal, let’s, I just wanted you to just end with a closing comment, question, idea after we had the opportunity to have conversation with Ambassador Leiter to go through what it is to be an individual, what it is to be a human, what it is to be a father, what it is to be an ambassador, what it is to engage with two Americans like us who are asking provocative questions as Jewish Americans who want to understand how Israel views, how the ambassador views how we should be thinking about things.

Mijal, wanted you to just close with a comment, question, insight, whatever it is.

Mijal: Yeah, well, Ambassador, guess I’ve been thinking a little bit about marriage therapy, couples therapy, I’m going somewhere with this, don’t worry. like I think that when I think about part of the work of this moment, there’s so many fronts and just to hear you…

Ambassador Leiter: You’re going very personal,

Mijal: describe the people you’re talking to and the things you’re explaining. And I almost hear in what you’re saying, like a call for us to understand there’s really complicated things here, so many complex things, like don’t just look at the headlines, try to understand things a little bit better. And I think in addition to that, there’s this work of, of, of couples therapy or relationship therapy of what does it mean to look at the Jewish people around the world to understand that we are facing different contexts. I’ll borrow from a in relationships, who have different dreams and nightmares. And what does it mean not necessarily to get different parts of the Jewish people to agree with each other, but to understand each other better? Which I think to me is part of the goal of this moment. So just to ask you a final short articulation, if you were thinking right now as somebody who’s representing Israel and Israel’s government here in America and getting to know American Jews and I’ll focus on American Jews right now and Israeli Jews, but if you have to give a little bit of advice right now, what would that advice be either different advice to each part or like one joint one to both?

Ambassador Leiter: Wow, there’s so much to say. I’ll put the focus on two small issues that I think are very broad and that really direct me during the course of my day. Number one is the bipartisan aspect of Israel. And we talked about J Street and really they’re the only ones for me that are out of the tent. Everybody else needs to be in the tent, everyone. Everyone who has the whole kaleidoscope of opinions as long as they’re not compromising Israel’s right to exist by, you know, embargoing munitions and so on. But all the gamut of opinion is very important for the discussion. So when I go out, even though I pray in an Orthodox synagogue, I go to speak and partake in prayers, in reform and conservative synagogues. I want to be together with my people. And I want to have them afford them the opportunity of expressing their concerns and their opinions on religion, on Israel, on the nature of Judaism in the United States and anything I have to offer in that regard as part of the discussion is key, is really very important. And that also translates itself to my political work. When I go to the Hill, it’s always a bipartisan day. And by the way, it’s very challenging because Washington at this time, as you know, has a very partisan atmosphere. And in this partisan atmosphere, I insist, when I go to the Hill, I was all day Wednesday, from nine o’clock in the morning to four o’clock in the afternoon, meeting after meeting, it’s always half Democrats, half Republicans. And some of the members of the House that I meet with are openly opposed to Israeli policies and have participated in the very embargo that J Street has advocated for. But I engage them because I really believe that Israel has to be bipartisan, not only because it’s politically astute, but because I identify with ideologically, I think that Israel has to be above the political fray.

And that leads me to the second point, which is something I learned from my son. He would come home from basic training and he was in Special Ops in the Air Force. I mean, it’s a very grueling training. they would go on these Thursday night marches in the dark for 15 hours, 20 hours with 65, 70 kilograms on their backs. And it really was breaking their knees and their lower spine. And they’d become home exhausted. And I would ask them, how do you contend with all that weight on your back? And my son would answer me, he said, I have a patent that I developed. I add weight. I said, what do mean you add weight? And he smiled. He was always smiling. He said, I add the hopes and prayers and dreams of my Bubbies and my Zadies throughout the generations. I put them on my shoulders and then the weight becomes easier to bear.

I think that if we remember that we are carrying, we’re a generation, even though there’s a couple of years between us, Mijal and Noam, but we’re a generation in general right now together we’re all carrying this weight on our shoulders of the hopes and prayers not guilt and suffering of the Holocaust but the hopes and prayers dreams of our grandmothers and grandfathers over two thousand years that kept the promise that the day will come when we’ll all be able to return to the land of Israel. The land of Israel which is the land of Israel two thousand years before it was Palestine.

And we have come home, we’re not interlopers, we’re not occupiers, we’re not colonialists. We’ve come home. If there’s land to be negotiated over, it’s disputed land. It’s not occupied land. Let’s change the language. It’s disputed and we’re going to say what’s ours and the other side can say what’s theirs and we can negotiate peace. We’ve been trying to do this now for decades. We keep withdrawing, we keep giving up on the land and we keep getting terrorism.

So that process has to be addressed. But the important thing is that in our mindset, on our hearts, we carry what my son carried right into Gaza as he led the forces, hopes and prayers and dreams and promises of our people for millennia.

Mijal: That’s a beautiful, beautiful imagery that I think is going to stay with us. And it’s really important to hear how important it is to have different points of view. And the three of us, by the way, might have different opinions about the tent and what it should look like and who should be in it. But we are definitely taking that with us and really grateful for everything you shared, Ambassador.

Thank you. Thank you so much, Ambassador.

Noam: Ambassador Leiter, thank you. Thank you for joining us to think with us to wonder with us out loud For us to hear different perspectives for us to share different ideas listen to different ideas listen to different ideas Listening very hard to do but that’s what we all have to do.

Thanks for joining us.

Ambassador Leiter: Absolutely. Thank you so much.

Noam: Wondering Jews is a production of Unpacked, part of OpenDor Media. Today’s episode was hosted by me, Noam Weissman. Our producer is Michael Weber and Rivky Stern.

We’d love to hear what this conversation sparked for you. Email us at WonderingJews@unpacked.media or find us on social @WonderingJews. And if you appreciate the conversation, always, shoot us, rate us five stars, review the podcast, tell us what you think. Hopefully it was interesting, insightful, and got you to think and wonder. That’s what we do. All right, thanks so much. See you next week.

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