Ask Haviv Anything - Episode 0: History That Matters

Episode Date: February 5, 2025

"Ask Haviv Anything" is a podcast about history, a podcast you, dear listener, will help to shape and direct, focusing not just on what I want to talk about but on what you want to learn and discuss. Nothing is off limits. We're going to talk about big and painful things, and also beautiful and fascinating things, wars and identities and painful history. And also more light-hearted things. Humor matters, especially when facing tough subjects.Join me on this journey.Please join me on Patreon to support this project: https://www.patreon.com/AskHavivAnything

Hi, everybody. Welcome to my new podcast. This is a very exciting moment. One of the more exciting things I've ever done. A little bit scary. I have been a guest on many, many platforms of other people. I've never had my own platform. This is that.

My name is Javiv Gould. I'm a journalist from Israel. I cover all of the most contentious and controversial and difficult and extremely painful topics. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict questions of identity and war and peace and history and contentious history. And that's what this podcast is going to be about. It's going to be about our present-day politics, deep dives into that politics. It's going to be about history, about narratives, about disagreements,

and about trying to sift through those layers to get to the lived experience of real people. I'm incredibly excited about it. I've been teaching for many years, I guess, about 19 years. now in informal, all various kinds of informal institutions and frameworks, but almost always with four walls around me and a crowd of students I could see. I haven't really had this experience of building out a platform where I have a conversation over these sort of digital airways. And so this is going to be new for me. And I want to just tell you very briefly this sort of introductory, very short little pre-episode, if you will, to introduce what this is going to be.

It's a very particular kind of podcast and format. It's me. It's what I think is useful to you and to audiences. And if you agree, I hope you'll join me. I'm going to be doing a deep dive into history, politics, the present day, and I'm going to be doing it based on your questions. And that's something I'm going to get to in one minute. But first I want to tell you my principles. I have four fundamental principles that I'm going to be using and employing in this podcast throughout.

These have served me well as I have dealt and taught and written about really contentious and painful topics and allowed me to build audiences that aren't just people who agree with me and aren't just people who are like me, but across big divides of culture and across big divides of historical experience and politics. Principle one, and I'll go through these very quickly and we'll get to the fourth. format, and then I'll give you a little bit of a hint of the first episode next week. Principle one, good history, good political analysis, are diagnostic. They're not moralizing, they're not self-validating, they're not politicized. The worldviews and experiences of real people are the subject of good history.

The assumption to produce good history is that people, human beings, are smart. They're three-dimensional. If their behavior confuses us, that's our fault. There's something we don't see that they see. Other people we look at know more about their situation and what's happening to them than we do, not less. This is a controversial point because a great many observers of this place, a great many Israelis when looking at Palestinians and Palestinians when looking at Israelis. They assume that they know what's happening to the other side. The other side is, you know, oblivious, unaware, silly, unconscious of what's happening to it, truly, and they assume they can explain. I can't tell you how many times I've had people explain to me in Israeli what it is that we Israelis don't understand that the rest of the world understands, and I cannot tell you how many times that happens to Palestinians online in, you know, diplomatic forums, in think tank conferences and panels. Folks, it works the other way. Palestinians know what's happening to them. They're smart, serious, thoughtful people. There are reasons they act and respond the way they do.

Understanding those reasons isn't agreeing with those reasons. Failure to understand those reasons means you're not really going to be able to predict what they do next. You're not really going to be able to converse with them in a serious, profound way that might influence them. Everything I just said is true of Israelis as well. And we're going to see it. I'm going to show it to you.

I'm not going to just claim it. When Secretary of State John Kerry in his last speech, a Secretary of State explained to Israelis that everybody knows how the conflict ends, so just do it already. That was not a useful contribution, because actually Israelis know more than Secretary of Secretary Kerry, and there are real reasons Israelis feel stuck. Left-wing Israelis feel stuck on questions of Palestinian independence,

and not because they're stupid, because they know more than the rest of the world, not less. And so I truly believe this at a fundamental level on all sides of every conflict. we're going to learn the lived history of the other side. Folks, that's really easy to say and obvious about a place where you have no horse in the race. In a conflict like ours, to talk that way about the other side is very discomforting. And we're going to do it anyway, because understanding is the beginning of everything.

It's necessary to defeating an enemy. It's necessary to making peace. It's necessary for sympathy, but it isn't sympathy. It's also necessary to victory. Principle number two. Good history is the lived experience of millions of people. It isn't just what elites are talking about. It isn't just what intellectuals are interpreting, how they're interpreting, what it is they're saying about that lived experience. I'll give you an example from my world. If all you know about Zionism are the intellectuals of Zionism,

the um hess and lillian bloom and pinsker and nordow and ishada am and herzl and you read them deeply and richly and learn them and think you know zionism because you know all the authors of the zionist book-show you don't know zionism all those people put together could not have created in israel millions of fleeing refugees had to create in israel and if you don't know their experience what they were fleeing that's not easily available in the ordinary run of Zionist bookshelf or of the Zionist syllabus at an ordinary modern Western university. I mean, not just the anti-Zionist syllabus of some professors or most professors, but even the pro-Zionist syllabus of a professor who looks favorably on Zionism. You're still going to get that elite discourse, that intellectual discourse, and miss the lived experience of millions. What we're going to be doing here is try to focus not only,

the elites matter, the ideas matter, they build institutions, They frame things. Ordinary people frame things in terms that elites produce. But we're not just going to stick to the elites. We're going to learn that lived historical experience on all sides and really understand things that are invisible to people who only know elite history. Principle number three. Good history inoculates us, immunizes us to shallow ideology. One of the stories that I tell about my work, I'm involved in multiple projects, teaching history right now, because I think teaching history is the urgent task of this moment.

And one of the reasons is that I've been on a lot of college campuses over the last 16 months, and I've met a lot of college students in the West, mostly in the United States. And I've discovered that they don't know their story. Jewish college students especially don't know the history that produced, the Jews of today. the Israeli Jews, the American Jews, the British Jews, Australian Jews, they genuinely don't know. And because they don't know when they face a concerted campaign against their story, targeting their story, to rewrite that Jewish history, it's so intense on Wikipedia that Wikipedia has had to actually ban systematically people from editing articles about the Jewish experience because the anti-Zionist crowd has been targeting Wikipedia.

Well, it's also in the curriculum at Columbia and Brown and Harvard. There is a concerted effort to rewrite the story of the Jews in ways that are not the lived experience of the Jews. And when the Jewish students don't know their history and their story, I'll tell you an example where this first really became something that I saw clearly and, and frankly, a little bit frighteningly. It just became so stark. I was giving a talk at last spring, spring of 2024, I believe. I was giving a talk in a big hall at Harvard Law School. And after the talk, a student comes up to me and says,

I can't cross Harvard Yard, which I believe is where the encampment was, without somebody screaming at me, Zionism is colonialism. I looked at the kid, I said to him, all right, well, you know, that sucks. I'm sorry you have to go through that. That really doesn't sound pleasant. And the kid looks at me and says, no, it really hurts when that happens. I didn't really take him seriously. I said, OK, you know, I hear you.

Buck up, right? Israelis your age are in a war. You can handle this. And the kid looks at me and says, No, what hurts is that I don't know the answer. People are telling this person, Zionism is colonialism. This person feels some kind of connection, affinity with the Zionist Jewish story or the other half of the Jewish people who are Israelis,

and they don't have an answer. And on a college campus, people with intellectual gravitas, with social standing, your professors might be telling you Zionism and colonialism, so you have to have a real grounding to be able to stand up to that and know the answers, know that there are answers, and, by the way, have a serious debate about it. Consider what it is there saying.

Judge it. Have the tools to do that. if your professors are advocates rather than analytical people trying to complicate your world, which is what a professor really should be, then that's going to be very difficult for you to do. So I didn't have all these thoughts. I heard him say, you know, I don't know what to answer, and I got a little bit of, I got a little bit angry at this kid. Poor kid. I said to him, you don't know the answer. Zionism is colonialism, really?

90% of Israeli Jews are refugees. They're the grandchildren of refugees. And when they were fleeing to the land of Israel, they had nowhere else to go, literally nowhere else to go. There were quotas on Jewish immigration in the United States, not just in the 20s, in the 30s, as Nazism takes hold in Europe. And in the 40s during the Holocaust,

there was a whole debate about it. Roosevelt didn't want to ask Congress to lift those quotas, even when everybody by the spring of 1943 knew about Auschwitz knew everything about Auschwitz. And then in 1946, when Jews are still languishing on the land of their murderers in D.P. camps in Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen. And in 1948, the Jews are still in those D.P. camps in Europe. And so Jews literally had nowhere to go, not Canada or Britain or Australia or Argentina, you name it. They had nowhere to go but this place. 90% refugees with nowhere else to go

is not the usual run of colonialist project. Also, the Jews of Israel have an ancient tradition of belonging. Every synagogue in 2,000 years, no matter where it is, on earth, praise to Jerusalem. Every Jew has to say once a day if they're religiously observant. Talk about the temple and talk about Jerusalem. Every Passover satyr ends with next year in Jerusalem. It is impossible to be a Jew without being connected to that land.

Ritually, you can be a Jew and, you know, be anything you want, Buddhist, you know, but you cannot be an observant religious Jew of any kind and be totally detached from the land. That's not something that exists in any other colonialism, right? French churches did not pray toward Algeria when France started settling Algeria in 1830. That simply is not true of any other colonialist project. And also, we have no mother country, I said to this kid. Who sent us? We come from 60 different lands. as refugees, we have nowhere to go back to. The reason the French could be terrorized out of Algeria

was that there was France to go back to. That's why the British could leave Kenya. Well, what if there wasn't a place to go back to? The anti-colonial strategy that flows from analyzing us as a colonialist project doesn't make sense anymore. So the answer to Zionism is colonialism is that if, to call us colonialism,

you have to expand the definition of the word so much that it has no diagnostic value anymore. Yeah, we're colonialism, except for all the actual important ways, that we're a national movement, that we're not motivated by economic gain, which is generally true of colonialism, that no other country sent us, that we have an ancient tradition of belonging, and that we're all refugees. Other than that, colonialism. My two-minute rant is over.

The kid takes a step back. He has this embarrassed smile on his face. I think he's embarrassed for me. And he says to me, holy shit I'm invincible and he walks out he was moved

he was amazed and what did I tell him I told him the most basic outline of the most basic sketch of the Jewish story that produced Israel I didn't exonerate Israel

from any mistake or any crime I didn't justify anything wrong wrong, I didn't reduce or take away any of the Palestinian experience. I didn't actually have a debate with anything and anyone. I just told them the most simple, basic fact about how this is actually a complicated millions of people had a certain historical experience, and it was profound and complex.

And it already shattered the simple ideological screaming on the college camps. Good history inoculates us to shallow ideologically. You can have this good history and stay left wing and you can have this good history and stay right wing. You can be pro-Palestinian, you can be Palestinian nationalist as a Palestinian. Good history will still do you well. It'll serve you, it'll give you the tools to seriously think and deal with the other side, seriously think and deal with your own situation, and just plan for the future better. Good history inoculates us to bad ideology.

And principle number four, and this is my most important principle, and I believe in it with all my heart and all my soul. I have spent 19 years in journalism, with sort of a side hustle and teaching history. That's my joke. I teach history informally, as I said. I always have taught and dealt with contentious questions, questions of deep investment,

that people are deeply invested in, their identities are invested in, questions of life and death, questions of war, questions of peace, painful history, identity, you know, conflicting narratives. And this last principle is what saw me through all of it. And I call it the honest attempt. It is my promise, it is my most important principle. The honest attempt goes very, is just, I'll explain it very simply. when you try to teach about a place like this,

a place that is endlessly discussed, a place that is layered and complex with history and ideas, there are Israelis and Palestinians and Jews and Muslims and Christians and Druze and Circassians and unbelievable, and each one is a narrative, and each one within themselves is multiple contested narratives, sometimes leading to internal civil wars in each of these groups, and all of it layered one on top of another in infinite complexity.

it is an ocean, not a puddle. It's almost impossible to encapsulate. And I will come and try to teach you something about this place and about this history and about this story and about the present day of these people. And I will try to be objective, and I will try to be correct, and I will absolutely guaranteed unquestionably fail

because it literally is impossible to teach the objective, comprehensive historical truth. And the great question that faces journalists, the faces history teachers, that faces professional historians, is always, what do I do with the fact that there is more knowledge than I can possibly encompass, understand, teach? What do I do with the fact that I will fail to be objective, no matter how hard I try? There are two ways to respond. The first way is the bad way. The first way are the people who say, if objective journalism is impossible, Might as well be an activist.

I might as well be a paladin of the good and correct and moral and just. I might as well claim the mantle of moral leadership. I might as well fix the world. I might as well make my journalism matter by making it change things. It's so alluring, it's so enticing. There's only one problem with it. And you see the problem when you see the other kind of journalist. Because the other kind of journalist says,

it's impossible to tell the story objectively, but I'm going to try anyway. I'm going to critique myself. I'm going to look for other voices. I'm going to expand the conversation. I'm going to challenge conventional wisdom. That journalist is a much better journalist, the journalist who tries knowing they're going to fail

and then fails to be objective, is an infinitely better journalist, an infinitely better historian, an infinitely better teacher. than the one who thinks I can't be objectives I'm not even going to try. They expand the conversation instead of shrinking it because once you become an activist

you have to manipulate and you have to hide in order to sustain an activist line which is a narrow line and once you manipulate and hide you shrink our shared knowledge our capacity to have a conversation. The honest attempt is everything and those who surrender it

aren't doing it for you. They're doing it for their own egos. So this is my promise to you. My promise to you, my guiding light, the thing that has held me strong through a career spent almost exclusively and contested and controversial subjects

is that I'm going to try and fail and still try. Those are my principles. Let me really quickly tell you about the format and then finish this because this is just an introductory opening salvo right for what will be a podcast it's not even the first episode um the format it's called ask chaviv anything you're in the driver's seat you will ask and i will essentially take on that

homework assignment of your question and i will go to my bookshelf my bookshelf is a real bookshelf it takes up a whole wall in my house it's shelves and books and everything and i will find the answers to your questions. If your questions are about quantum physics, the answers are not going to be very good. So make sure the questions are things that I deal with, by the way. Send me down rabbit holes I've never gone down or don't want to go down. If multiple people ask me a certain topic, I will go to that topic even if I have to learn it from scratch. That's my commitment to you. This is going to be driven by you. This is going to be a conversation. It's not about just what I want to teach. I will teach what I want to teach. It's also about what you want to learn.

and we will go there. Um, we're going to cover big things, painful things, beautiful things, fascinating things, war, identity, painful history. I'm going to try and do a lot of humor. Um, I've been at this a while. Everybody I know, even in the darkest times, laughs. And it's okay also, too. Talk about silly things, just interesting, quirky things. You will be in the driver's seat.

So step one, you're going to send in questions about history, about politics, deep dives behind what's happening in the headlines, whatever interests you. Step two, I go to my library, I bring back answers. Um, big answers, answers that try to make sense out of the chaos. Um, and step three, that's it. Two steps. Um, except that step three, um, will be other things. In other words, we don't have to limit ourselves only to that format.

That will be the main format. But I might want to introduce you to a friend of mine, a colleague of mine, a teacher of mine. There might be interviews. There might be more on this feed. And I think you will like those things. Step four is not a step. It's a commitment. It's a commitment that I will definitely, definitely break.

I'm breaking it right now. I commit to you to try to be short, brevity, not to talk too long and too much. If you know me, you're laughing. I am not known for brevity, as you might be able to tell from this introduction, but I'm going to try very, very hard. I want this to be something you can listen to on your commute, while you're washing dishes, while you're taking a run, you know, doing other healthy things that your spouse or your roommate will appreciate.

That's me contributing to world peace right there. I'm definitely going to fail, but I've already explained. It's better to have a standard you don't always live up to than not to try. And so, you know, I'm going to set myself a target of 30 minutes an episode, and that'll keep the actual episodes to 40 minutes. If I set myself a target of 40 minutes, it'll be 50. So it's important to do that. One final, but really critical thing. I want this to be two things.

I want this one to be a community of learning. I want there to be a give and take. And two, I want it to keep the lights on. I want it to pay the bills. I want it to be sustainable. I'm going to be devoting two to three days every week full time to this, to talking to the community, to doing the research, to writing episodes, to coming to producing the episodes. I have to pay a part-time salary to an audio producer, an excellent one, and I have to be able to keep the lights on. I have a mortgage and I have kids.

So the history episodes, the educational episodes are going to be available to the ones. They're not going behind a paywall, no way, no how. That's the point, the heart and soul of this whole project. But there will be a Patreon. It'll be a pretty low fee. It'll be $5 a month. And what will be behind the Patreon will be a couple of things. One, you're going to get the episodes a couple days before everybody else. So you can lord it over them. Two, there will be bonus content. We already have some thoughts about what that will be. And the big thing is that subscribers will be the ones ask the questions. Everybody will have access to the answers, but the questions will come from subscribers. I'm not just going to teach out of my library. I'm going to recommend books over in that community

on Patreon. I'm going to read your feedback. I will, you know, I will be both student and teacher. Your questions, your answers, they're going to be the lifeblood of this community. You will bring me information I don't know. You will correct me if I make a mistake and I will publicly tell people about that mistake in the following episode. It's very important to have a correction mechanism. And if you care about this work, if you believe like me, the deepening our understanding of our history,

of this moment, is the urgent task of this time, then please support me in trying to do this. Please join us. $5 a month is a fairly low bar. You can also buy subscriptions for family, for friends, for college students in your life. And you can do all of that at patreon.com

slash ask Haviv. Anything. Chaviv is just H-A-V-I-V-V. There's no C or K or anything in there. Finally, you can sponsor an episode. If you want to give more, if you want to upgrade our content with a part-time editor, better equipment, production values,

I think this is pretty good. I'm willing to learn how to do better. Sponsoring an episode is going to help us do that. to talk about sponsoring an episode, you can reach out to me at Chaviv at Ask Haviv Anything.com. We've only just begun. We already have some pretty cool dreams about where this can go, and sponsorship is going to make those bigger things possible.

Friends, in the Talmud and Masachet, Kiddushin, in the tractate of Kedushin, page 40B, there's a very, very famous exchange in which the rabbis are at. asked, um, which is more important? Learning or action? Doing. And Rabbi Tarphon, one of the biggest curmudgins of the Talmudic era, answers that doing is more important. What you do in this world is the critical thing. And Rabbi Akiva may be the great hero of the Talmud disagrees. And he said Learning is greater than action. And the rest of the rabbis agree with Rabbi Akiva. They side with him, and they explain that Gamara gives us their reason.

It says study is greater because study leads to action. So let's get to studying. The first episode is coming next week. Just a little taste of what's coming. We're going to reveal, in this first episode, for the very first time, Theodore Herzl's actual, secret, true, and unknown journey to Zionism. If you're a Jewish kid who grew up in Jewish education, you were taught that Herzl became a Zionist during the Dreyfus affair,

that great treason trial, mistrial, a terrible miscarriage of justice, that set France on fire in the 1890s, in which the Jewish artillery captain Alfred Dreyfus was falsely accused. of treason, and witnessing that trial covering it as a journalist turned Herzl Zionist. That is incorrect. You learned wrong, and we're going to discover the real journey that Herzl took to his Zionism. I call it secret and unknown, because it actually is actually quite unknown, but I will be relying on excellent and highly regarded historians in telling that story.

his actual journey from profound belief in assimilation deep commitment to assimilation he joined a German nationalist youth movement in college or fraternity in college to essentially founding political Zionism it's much more interesting

than anybody has ever told you and that's going to be our first episode so join me on this journey join me at Patreon send me emails talk to me I'll see you next week.