Ask Haviv Anything - Episode 62: Hard times make strong Jews. Live in London with Daniel Schwammenthal.

Episode Date: November 20, 2025

Today's episode is a very special show which was recorded live on November 10, 2025 at the Finchley United Synagogue - Kinloss in London. Haviv had the pleasure of sharing the stage with Jewish Chronicle Editor Daniel Schwammenthal. We had a great discussion about growing antisemitism in England, the war in Gaza, the possibility of upcoming elections in Israel and the many challenges facing Israelis and Jews today.We would like to thank Jonathan and Debra Field, who have been long-time supporters of this podcast, for bringing Haviv to London and sponsoring the event. We would also like to thank Rabbi Dr. Yoni Birnbaum, the Senior Rabbi of Finchley United Synagogue, for welcoming Haviv. If you like what we do here, please join our Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything. There you can ask the questions that guide the topics we cover on the podcast, join in our great discussions where listeners share news and valuable resources, and take part in our monthly livestreams where Haviv answers your questions live.If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [e-mail]⁠.Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

Hi, everybody. Welcome to a new episode of Ask Haviv Anything. This one is a special live recording of an event I was at a talk I gave, or a Q&A that I gave, at Finchley United Synagogue in London. It was part of the community's centenary, Kinloss 100, which is going to be this coming year. They are 100 years old, the Kinlaas Synagogue in 2026. and I had the distinct pleasure of sharing the stage with Daniel Schwamintel, a man I respect highly and have known for many, many years.

It drew a crowd of nearly 400 people. It was a lot of fun. There were some serious big questions. Fast forward to the very last one. You won't be disappointed, I think. I am very proud of the conversation that we had there. I want to thank Jonathan and Deborah Field, who have been longtime supporters of this podcast.

for sponsoring the event, for bringing me to London. And of course, I want to thank Rabbi Dr. Yoni Birnbaum, the senior rabbi of Finchley United Synagogue, for welcoming me. We had some conversation ahead of time. Rabbi, you were very tolerant, including when I uttered a curse on stage. You took it better than I did.

It was a warm and interesting conversation and community, and I'm really glad to have experienced it. talked about the anti-Semitism of this moment when it isn't anti-Semitism. We talked about elections potentially coming up in Israel. We talked about the challenges Israel faces today. We talked about the war. We talked about social media. We talked about Britain and multiculturalism. We talked about, you know, all kinds of things that interested the community. I hope you learn from it, enjoy it. You know, I hope it makes you think. Some of it will make you nervous and anxious and sad.

It was a wonderful conversation and I'm very grateful to the community. Before we get into the show, I want to invite everyone to join our Patreon. If you're interested in asking the questions that we deal with on this podcast, that comes from our Patreon subscribers. It is a marvelous form of discussion

where people share comments, but they share resources. They share knowledge in ways that I have benefited from tremendously. I am there answering questions, dealing with issues, you also get to take part in our monthly live stream where I answer your questions live

for as long as you ask them. Last one I think went on for two and a half hours. And most people stayed throughout. So it's interesting and wonderful little community that we've built here. On with the show. I hope you enjoy it. Thank you very much, Rabbi. Thank you so much for being here this evening. For me, this is a

real delight. My claim to fame is that I didn't discover, Habib, but I noticed him much, much earlier than most people. When I was working in Brussels, part of my job was to try to explain Israel to diplomats. And about 12, 13 years ago, I brought Khabiv to Brussels, and we had about 15, 20 diplomats from across Europe. And I think there was definitely also, at the time, somebody from the UK. And these guys don't do necessarily, very productive work, but they do work a lot.

They have to go to meetings, write reports, send them back to capitals. To get them for more than 45 minutes in the room to listen to somebody is a big deal. After two and a half hours, the restaurant where we had booked, they kicked us out because they were hanging at every word. She was saying this was the most impactful event. And so for me, this is a real, real treat to be the one asking Habib anything. I will not exploit this opportunity and be assured that you will also have the opportunity to ask your questions. Let's start with the Trump deal.

Very, very brief, I heard you several times saying, now that the war is over, is it? Yeah. No. Thank you, first of all, so much. The problem with compliments at the beginning is that now I, I can. can only fail. So it's an honor to be here. Thank you for the invitation and for bringing me and to be here today with you. Is the war over? There are two forces in this world that wants this war to be over. One is the Trump administration, which is a significant element in

the world. But there's an even more powerful one when it comes to the question of the war being over in the narrow context of Israelis and Palestinians, which is that like all, Israelis wanted to be over and that's I think the reason that I actually think the war probably is over now what do I mean by the war the war is the kinetic maneuvering war in Gaza that's over Gaza has already the half of Gaza has already been retaken by Hamas functionally de facto in the sense that Hezbollah controlled Lebanon in the sense that they'll they can kill anybody they want to kill so everybody is doing what they say

And in that sense, the Israeli Hamas contest over the future of Gaza, whether it is a future that Israel can live next to, or it is a future that Hamas insists on making a future Israel literally cannot live next to, in every version that that grammar of that sentence allows, that contest remains. And the comparison that people often make is Lebanon. In other words, in Lebanon, Chisbalah ruled without responsibility. because there was this Lebanese state. And Hamas would like to rule Gaza without being responsible for Gaza, because then it can blame every problem. For example, the fact that it's very hard to send in, I don't know what, hundreds of thousands of tons of concrete into Gaza, billions and billions of dollars into Gaza.

The rebuilding of Gaza is something very nearly everyone on Earth wants, and Hamas is demanding to control it, to the point where the Trump administration has discovered that they can't actually force their hand on the ground in Gaza. Nobody on this earth will die for Gaza. Nobody. Israeli soldiers are willing to go into fire to save Israel from Hamas, to protect Israel. And so they will fight Hamas, even at the cost of their deaths. There's nobody on this earth who will fight Hamas for Gaza itself. not any of its allies, supporters, lovers, protesters,

marchers, not any regime in government in the Middle East that spends basically validates its own dictatorship by claiming to be the vanguard of the war against that nobody will actually fight for Gaza. And so Hamas really kind of controls the ground uncontested. Trump said if Hamas doesn't release the last bodies, that's one point a couple weeks ago, then we're going to do terrible harm to Hamas.

And the White House spokesperson was asked by a journalist. What is Trump talking about? Is America going to enter the Gaza war? And she said, no, no, Trump means that somebody else is going to go into Gaza and do this terrible war against the... Okay. The contest over the future of Gaza, Hamas would like to be the rulers of Gaza without being

the government of Gaza, and they have already insinuated themselves into the ruling authority being built out under the Trump plan by simply winning an agreement. an implicit, quiet, but reported agreement of the Americans, of the Egyptians, Saudis, Qataris, et cetera, that they can veto people who will be part of that transition government. Vito of who can serve in the transition government

is ruling Gaza. The reason UNRWA was totally infiltrated by Hamas, wasn't that UNRWA literally institutionally in Geneva, where did they say, was actually Hamas? it was that if Hamas didn't want you to get one of the 13,000 UNRRA salaries paid out in Gaza, mostly to teachers, you couldn't get it. So you didn't need to be Hamas to be an UNRWA employee, but you needed to be someone, Hamas wasn't opposed to being an UNR employee.

And if they needed one of their people to receive that salary, then you didn't get that job because one of their people needed that salary. And in that sense, it was totally under the control of Hamas, even if it wasn't officially under the control of Hamas. So the war over the future of Gaza, a war in which Israel would like Gaza to be an emirate with natural gas fully developed in its territorial waters and a beautiful, happy place. And Hamas, the great and glorious resistance, would like it to look like it looks now for all time, if it means the ultimate destruction of Israel.

That war continues. But it will continue roughly the way Lebanon is going. I don't know if you've noticed, or if one of you heard my podcast episode a couple of episodes ago, where this was mentioned by the expert I was interviewing. In the roughly years since the ceasefire with Chisbalah, Israel has killed an average of one Chisbalah fighter a day. Well, that's an excellent ceasefire for Israel. And that's come with almost zero harm to Lebanon's civilians or infrastructure.

That would be a fantastic situation for Israel in Gaza. It would be a terrible situation for Gaza, not because Gazans care if Hamas lives or dies so much, turns out they don't actually want to be ruled by Hamas, but because it prevents a serious rebuilding. And so we're in a very weird situation in which it is more in the Israeli interest to rebuild Gaza at this moment than it is in Hamas' interest to allow that process to move forward if they can't control it. So you're saying when the time comes when Hamas, in theory, would have to disarm and that next stage comes and it's fairly unlikely this will happen, it will not trigger a real relaunch of the war. It will more resemble the Lebanon scenario.

Yeah, with a caveat that three people will be making that decision. And it's very hard to predict what three people will decide. It's fairly easy to predict what a million people want to do, polling, et cetera, but it's hard to predict what three people want to do. So if Nizeno thinks this is make or break, he has to, he has no choice. For some reason, he thinks this, I should just tell you, I don't think Nizania was going to do it, both because I think he achieved the fundamental war goal, which was not the war goal he declared, absolute total victory, which was, you know, I don't know an Israeli who didn't roll their eyes when he said that,

but his actual war goal was to transform Hamas from a strategic liability for Israel to a strategic liability only for themselves, or arguably for Gaza. Hamas now can prevent the rebuilding of Gaza. It cannot hurt Israel. And that's a victory. It's a tragic victory. It's not a fun victory. It's not like the enemy is defeated and surrendered and, you know, in the, I don't know what, Iran model or Hezbollah model.

But nevertheless, it is in military terms of victory. So Netanyahu now has that victory. I should also say we have polls from the week before the ceasefire or two weeks before the ceasefire. 70% of Israelis wanted the war to end. And when Netanyahu ended it, his polling rose, depending on the poll, it rose different amounts, but there were people in the center willing to support him but sick of the war that they attached to him. So I don't think politically he can go back to war. So from your analysis, the result of, it's not peace, but this deal, where first of all, we got all the living hostages back,

We got at this stage even most of those that had been murdered and taken their body taken hostage. And Israel still controls a majority of the strip, so as a security insurance, that is in your analysis a relatively good outcome from Israel's perspective, even though it doesn't quite fulfill what Netanyahu claimed he would have wanted. Now, there were a lot of people, I don't know a lot, but certainly a lot of people who made a lot of noise in Israel, who wanted a war to have ended a year ago under very, very different circumstances. There are a lot of people in this country, including in the Jewish community,

that wanted it for understandable reasons. Where would we be now if that had happened? a deal, the deal, a much less favorable deal that was on the table a year ago had been accepted by Israel. So I'll just say, you know, this isn't a good end to the war, okay? This is the worst imaginable kind of war. It's a, it's a war of maneuver inside civilian populations. The moral horror at images of dead children is absolutely the correct. decent reaction to a war like that. The profound and ridiculous and deeply undermining manipulation

lies in the fact that that is the only war anyone will ever see images of and that these marches for Gaza, which are absolutely the correct reaction to a terrible war, will never happen again unless Israel is once again involved and that they're totally unprecedented in the history of Britain and also in the history of like France and Holland and New York. So both are true at once. In other words, we are seeing a deeply manipulative. It is about the Jews, but it is about the Jews at the origin point. At the end point, decent people are radicalized by images of the broken bodies of children. That is the correct response. In other words, to take this way, it's not just to the point that I don't say, oh, look, great, yay, Gaza's we've won. That's not what we should feel

or understand about the Gaza War, but it is a militarily successful war the way it ended. If it had ended a year ago, and this was a big debate, you're exactly right, by very serious people in Israel. There were offers in the past, ceasefire offers, then Netanyahu turned down. I, if any of you have heard the podcast or heard me generally in the last two years, Nick Netanyahu has made not every mistake in the book, but every odd-numbered page mistake in that book of mistake. I really think there had been a series of serious problematic errors of judgment by the Israeli government, some of which have had terrible costs for Palestinians and for Israelis. But this was not on offer then.

There was never on offer. All the hostages come out at the beginning, front-loaded, all the living hostages. All the dead hostages as well come out. Hadar Goldim, held by Hamas since 2014, they knew exactly where he was. They knew where they all were. We caught them on video. You guys, I'm sure, have seen this, burying a body so it can be found just as the Red Cross shows up. They weren't looking.

They kept it in storage. They knew exactly where everybody was. It's all only ever a game. And they know everything and they know everywhere and don't ever believe them. And none of that was on offer. And the idea that this, you know, I've even, I've been harassed by some, you're going to be shocked to hear this, some anti-Israel activists on Twitter, who have claimed forever that Hamas offered to return all the hostages like on October 8th.

But you guys wanted to destroy Gaza. A, no. Hamas's condition was to rule Gaza. Hamas can't rule Gaza. by the way, there has never been on paper, Hamas, not ruling Gaza, agreed to by the Arab world, not agreed to by Hamas,

but agreed to by the Arab world and by the American administration. And yeah, of course they're going to fail. Everything in the Middle East fails, but that's not the point. The point is, that's the condition Israel agreed to, and that's what Israel is committed to, and it doesn't have to be committed to anything unless that was never on paper.

And also getting everybody back in a serious way with Gaza's future delineated, defined by the Qataris. The Qataris signed onto Trump's plan as a future that isn't Hamas, that is demilitarized, and I don't know how to put this. Imagine if you in this room, okay, were the governor of Gaza. I know a British person should not imagine themselves

governing the Middle East, but I'm just saying, I know their sensitivities. I'm just saying, imagine you govern Gaza. And imagine some energy companies from, I believe, Holland and the United States come to you and say, hey, there are huge gas reserves in Egypt's territorial waters, and enormous gas reserves in Israel's territorial waters.

Why don't we look in Gaza? And lo and behold, there's gas in Gaza's territorial waters. Now again, you are the governor of Gaza. What would you do? Wouldn't you make use of that gas? Wouldn't you pump a quarter trillion dollars into Gaza in 10 years? Wouldn't that be like your project? Wouldn't you put on hold permanent forever wars you might have with your neighbors because of your particular strain of religion and just get the money out?

You guys with me? Who here likes money? This is my point. So this plan envisages a genuinely different future for Gaza. Hamas, of course, are totally opposed to it because that's what Hamas is and will always and forever be. And that was not on offer. So there wasn't an agreement with the world. There wasn't a front-loading of the release of the hostages. There wasn't a disarmament of Gaza as something the world said should happen. None of that was there.

And by the way, this deal, the Israeli government committed publicly that the Smotrich and Ben-Gvier vision, for example, annexation, settlement, expulsion of Gazans is not the future of Gaza. in order to get the rest of it. The Israelis really wanted this deal for Gaza to the point where Netanyl finally stood his ground against that part of his coalition. So none of that was on offer and almost nothing said about this Israeli government,

which I've criticized constantly, but almost nothing said about it by these pundits and by these activists in this mass libel campaign has been true. And if it has been true, nobody can explain what just happened. In your assessment, What is the most profound way that this war the last two years has changed Israeli society?

I think it reminded us that we are still tremendously vulnerable, which we'd forgotten, we were so powerful and our enemies so cowed by our great firepower, we thought. And it also reminded us that we are immensely strong because we could rise to meet enemies who had built out a campaign and a strategy to defeat us for decades. That had been their number one priority. the tunnel project of Hamas is by far the biggest thing Palestinians have ever built. All of Gaza's economy was bent to it. It is immense.

It is extraordinary. It is a genuinely extraordinary achievement. Few people. Nobody has ever built anything like it, even remotely like it. And it was the investment almost of the totality of Gaza's economy in building this war. and Hamas had been doing it for 12 to 15 years. I mean, Gilad Shalid in 2006 was kidnapped in one of the very first tunnel operations. So what is that?

20 years almost. And then you have Iran. Iran. Imagine being an Iranian. You have a regime that sits on top of some of the wealthiest areas on this earth in terms of energy. Iran should be one of the richest countries in the world. world, but they're so unbelievably extreme and radicalized and also just incompetent and stupid. I mean, it's got to be embarrassing to be an Iranian general right now.

Literally, to walk in the street, you feel like you have to, you should feel like you have to apologize to everybody. Not for oppressing them all, for failing. Your excuse for oppressing Iran, your excuse for wasting the economy of Iran, all those decades, on an insane regional adventures, which was that you were. going to defeat the Zionist entity, prove that the Shia can do what the Sunni couldn't for a hundred years, and begin the new and great Islamic return into history as a great conquering, confident power, instead of the last couple centuries of Islam, which feels like weakness and retreat.

You were that, that's what you were. The revolutionary regime of Iran was going to defeat Israel, and it spent a lot, everything. It built armies only tailored to that. The proxy system was so expensive. Iran never bothered to build an air force. Please go home and Google the Iranian Air Force. I am not exaggerating. It is an air force that can do anything except fly.

And there's a reason for it, because it had spent the entirety of its efforts on the proxy strategy, because the destruction of Israel was a cornerstone of its theology. Not strategy. Israel has zero relevance to Iran strategically. literally no relevance of any kind. There's no border there, there's no interest in Israel, nothing. If anything, there's some Persians, Jews in Israel,

who would love to visit Iran and spend some shekels in Iran, which given the state of Iran's currency, they could use. The point is, all these enemies had spent a generation preparing our destruction, and they fell like dominoes the second we stood up. We learned that too. So we learned that you can never underestimate the enemy. They will actually come for you.

Hamas was willing to have this war. It would not have built 500 kilometers of tunnels under Gaza if it didn't expect this exact kind of war. And it would not have kept every one of Gaza's children out of those tunnels by force for the two years that have just passed if it did not expect this exact kind of war. It built this exact war. It was willing to destroy Gaza on the altar of destroying Israel.

Iran was willing to sacrifice Iran's economy for two generations on the altar of destroying Israel, and still we toppled them as soon as we understood that. So I think we discovered that we are vulnerable, and that, by the way, probably is the reason we also then discovered, remembered that we are strong. Now, we are basically in an election year. In Israel or here? In Israel? So it will have to happen within a year, but you may inform as it may happen even earlier.

What is your best guess? Who will be the next prime minister? I hate this question because if I get it right, okay, he was the expert. He came in from Israel. He got it right. If I get it wrong, you'll start wondering if I understand Israeli politics. Nobody will remember what I say. It's going on on my own podcast.

I'll put it this way. There is good reason to think that elections are coming sooner rather than later. The Netanyahu, as I said, his polls are doing better after the ceasefire. And also, he is really, really in a pickle with the draft law. Ariadari trying to help Netanyahu out by having Shas support the Bismuth version of the draft law. If that's all Chinese, don't worry about it. The more pro-Kharadi version of the draft law has actually massively led to a rebellion within Shas among many Shas rabbis against Ariadari. So there's the tension between Likud and the Haredi parties in the Qaeda community and Likud's actual voters.

I'm talking about ordinary people. Never mind Netanyahu Derry. They could agree on anything. but Likud voters are overrepresented in the soldiers who have served in the last two years. And ultra-Orthodox voters, I would say less so shas, although also shas, obviously, is less represented, but more Shas voters go to the army than on the Ashkenazi-Khraidi side. It's so great to be in a room and I could just throw these words around. You can't do that in like, you know, NBC.

So, so there. there they really, that gap is huge, it's deep, it's painful. And if Netanyo passes any kind of draft law that his people can live with, he has probably lost a significant number of Charedi votes. I mean, he'll lose the rabbis. It doesn't matter if UTJ desperately wants to send the coalition. If the Garibati doesn't let them, they won't. And so they have real, genuine problem with the draft law. We're just talking politics here, right? Not what I think should happen as a voter as an Israeli. So just the politics of it. So Nizeniao will probably need to go to an election before passing a draft law. And then his excuse to the Supreme Court

that it isn't advancing is that we're in an election. And so it's probably going to be sooner rather than later. That's my guess. And if it's sooner, if Nizteniao does do that, which is the politically wise thing to do. By the way, the other side is already setting up an election on the draft law. I don't know if you saw your ear-Lapid's speech two weeks ago. Raise your hand if you know what I'm talking about. Okay, so the people raising their hands, you remember it because it shocked you and your socks came off. You were so shocked. What did the Pede say? He said, if you don't serve, you don't vote. What? No, what? Don't serve, you don't vote? We have. We have. We have. We exemptions for artists, extraordinary athletes. We have exemptions for pacifists. We don't have a lot

of pacifists because we're in the Middle East, but we have exemptions for them. You don't serve, you don't vote. Lapid himself is a liberal, deep liberal. All his life he's been a liberal. Why is he suddenly staking out this amazingly anti-liberal, rather extraordinary, shocking position? because he wants a clear-cut election that is only a referendum on the draft law. Do the Kharidim need to serve? That's it. He wants the election to be about nothing else because he's not sure he can win any other election. And he is sure that he can divide Likud if that's what the election is about.

And Nizania, therefore, must avoid that being the topic of the election at all costs. He wants to run on Iran because he did a great job in Iran. So that's what he wants to run on. I suspect because I'm already having these conversations and because the Ayr-Lapid is already sticking out insane positions he doesn't believe in, and because Benjamin Netanyahu has to pass a real breaking point with the Haredi parties, he can't afford going into an election, that the election is coming sooner. If it is sooner, Netanyahu's path, so in a parliamentary system, right, it's not about who wins. There's no race for prime minister.

There's race for coalitions. and when you have a lot of parties like us, unlike you, we have a lot of parties, so it becomes this complicated question of the mathematical path. Netanyahu's path is shorter. In every poll, by the way. Every poll in two years he's lost. Most Israelis don't want him as prime minister, but everyone else would have a harder time putting together a coalition, which is why his inner right-wing religious coalition has

to be splintered for anyone else to have a chance. That's Lapid's calculation. And the one thing it can be splintered on is the drug. And you assume that the sort of anti-baby block will remain firm, that nobody will, after the elections, when we get again, you know, the sort of neither side is really able to build a coalition if we get that kind of result again, you think they will remain. Many guns is now trying, has been trying to stake out a middle ground to be the kingmaker, so to speak, as Bennett was. in the Bennett-Lopi government, in the Bennett, yeah, the Ben-Lopi government. And because Ben-Guns is trying to stake out that middle ground, Benny Gans is pulling below the electoral threshold.

There's very little appetite today for people crossing sides that way. In other words, taking the votes of one side and moving to the other. There's very little appetite today. Israelis are, how shall I put this? This is a really corrupt government. And it is a really pathetic political class. I'm going to show wearing a keep up talking politics. I apologize, but it's his fault.

If you followed all the different sagas, Netanyahu trying to appoint his son to a senior position, his son who spent the entirety of this war in a Miami hotel, to a senior World Science Organization position through Lykruid. And Duduamsalem, a senior, Le Kood guy and a minister in this government who's literally decided to appoint all of his friends to all the government corporations that his technical ministerial post allows him to do. And just one, you know, there's another minister who has a corruption scandal and the

the root corruption scandal that just broke. And the unbelievable point of the military advocate general turning out to have lied to the Supreme Court. There's a very serious legal question about what happened that's the Tehrman, but the top lawyer of the army lying to the Supreme Court is a fundamental breaking of everything. An army, the army's top lawyer is the last lawyer who should ever be allowed to lie to the super. That's the most dangerous breakdown of that, of that particular hierarchy you can imagine. And so that we are ruled by an elite that every single Israeli went through October 7, every single Israeli, every single one.

Khareti Israelis mobilized every medical charity they control and run and built, and Khmeridim and Israel built the biggest and most extraordinary medical charities in the country that aren't, you know, billion-dollar hospitals. Everybody mobilized, everybody unified, except the political class, except that elite that never stopped fighting its petty little wars. and there is a desire, first of all, to start to get to serious about some of the problems that have to be fixed. The draft law is a real problem if you've done 150 days a year in two years. That's a problem.

Your family life is collapsing. Your business is collapsing. And entire sections of the country, mainly because of political reasons, things that they don't have to serve while they do have to be protected. And so a lot of that stuff's breaking down. A lot of the willingness to tolerate that kind of politics is breaking. down. I think this is a good thing. I think that this generation of venal, by the way, we have, it's a, it's a historic thing. If you know the story of Israeli generations, Ben-Gurian, I don't want to talk too much on this. I apologize. Okay. Ben-Gurian was like massively corrupt. The state owned all the businesses. I guess that's Marxism. That's not corruption. But he would appoint party officials, party apparatchiks, to run all the businesses. I guess that's Marxism. I guess that's not corruption. But he would appoint party- the major industries. But he was never personally corrupt. It was corruption for the party. He actually ended his extraordinary political career, amazing, like historic political career,

as like a working class, like a poor guy without any money in his bank account. Menachem Begin from that generation, ends his prime ministership and retires to a rented apartment in a working class neighborhood of Jerusalem. He doesn't even own his apartment. And Likud was not not corrupt under Begheg. But it was for the party. It was not for the man. And the next generation is Barack, Olmert, Bibi. There's nothing they've ever seen that they haven't tried to grab. It's like the culture and there's constant scandals. And, you know, Bibi has been in it longer. So like there's a lot more scandals, but it's the culture of that entire generation. This generation of Israelis, the 30-year-olds, the 40-year-olds, the kids who went into Gaza, and the kids who overflew Iran, they know that they

are better people, more extraordinary people, more giving people, than the generation that makes the decisions today in Israel. And when they're swept away, you will see a better Israel, a less corrupt Israel, an Israel that learned a lot of those lessons. So I forget what the question was, but I want to get some of the way. It was a very good answer. Much better than the question. Last question for me. So are there new people coming from a new generation?

Will we see some of them in the next election, or will we still have to live with this generation and maybe the next time around? We don't really have party systems open to new people. So most of the parties in the Knesset are internally, dictatorships. I mean, Yir Lopid decides who's on the list. Viktor Lieberman decides who's on the list.

Aria Derry pretends to ask the rabbis who's on the list, but actually decides who's on the list. And there are places where there are primaries. On the far left, they're real primaries, because, you know, on the far left, people of principle, we make fun of them, but they're the only

people who will actually have real primaries, even if it means they lose. That's more important, the principle. Likud has primaries, no? The Kud has primaries. It's the biggest party with primaries, but not really. And the reason I say not really is that 15 years ago, Likud had these immensely strong institutions, real debates.

At the Likud Central Committee, there would be a debate about, for example, when Sharon was head of Likud, going to the disengagement, there were debates in the Central Committee of Likud, the 3,000 people in the Likud Central Committee who at different points in time, either set the Knesset list or other things. And they had real debates about the DECODE. disengagement. And Sharon was losing ground to Netanyahu's faction in the debates in the actual, can you imagine a debate today within Likud? There are no debates today within Likud. Everything is what

Netanyahu needs. The secretariat, Israel Katz, the current defense minister, one of the most important things he did at one point in his political career was demand to become the head of the secretariat. They ran the entire Likud election ground game. They could no longer really has activists standing at what do they call them the circles roundabout thank you um standing at every roundabout in israel holding up signs like they used to 15 years ago lecud today is basically a twitter campaign leuc's political campaigns today are basically more social media than anything else run very very centrally from nittanyo um and and by the way that that weakening of those institutions within And just to clarify, almost every other party in the Knesset is worse, okay?

I mean that very seriously. I comment Likud just to show you that even Likud, with that old tradition instituted by Began himself, there's this complete loyalty, complete unity, no real debates, no real serious institutions. And so where would the new critic young person who wants to rebuild things differently, run things differently, throw out the corruption, throw out the minister, throw out the minister, who think they're in politics to appoint their friends to government companies, where would such a person even begin in Likud politics? You used to rise up the Likud list from chapters.

Yereev-Lavin, the Justice Minister, he begins his career as the Tel Aviv chapter of Likud and rises up through the chapter and then rises up to the National List and rises up, etc. Many of Likud's people rose up through the chapters. There are almost no chapters anymore. It's just this centralized, basically, PR campaign now, the Likud infrastructure. And so young people can't really come in, not on the left, not on the right. And I think that therefore we're going to see them kept out just long enough for them to get very, very angry.

In 20 years, you're going to hear about how Israeli politics is really destabilizing because of a mass movement to throw out the corrupts morons who run the place. And everything's going to be shocking and you're going to be startled and there's going to be mass protests and prime ministers will resign. And there'll be a new politics with new political parties and everybody's going to be surprised. And then I'm going to pull this little recording out and I'm going to say, yeah. So it's not a politics that can absorb new people, unfortunately. But you know, these new people, this new generation, they're Israelis. They're going to find a way. All right.

Now it's up to you to ask, if anything. Let's collect maybe three, four questions and make it questions and not too long savings. Young men here. Okay, easy questions. All right. There's a debate about Mahmahman Abbas and the Palestinian Authority. There's a debate happening in the Western press that is incomprehensible to me. It's a debate about whether the Israelis are willing to have the Palestinian Authority come into Gaza as part of the Gaza governance.

And there is this assumption. I heard some pundits say this, maybe to Pierce Morgan. I don't know. I hear, whatever. Yeah, guys, don't take this as racist, but all Western pundits look like this. the same to me. I don't, I don't, I have trouble distinguishing between them. But the point is that this discussion about will Netanyahu let them or not because they want to divide Gaza, and to me that's all ridiculous. The only thing the PA could give us, Israelis, Palestinians,

everyone on earth who wants a better future for Gaza, the only thing it could give is a replacement for Hamas. And the only thing it can never be is a replacement for a Hamas. And it has nothing to do with us Israelis suspecting that they actually kind of agree with Hamas on every single thing except whether to fight a war now. Like that's the only issue they disagree with them. It has nothing to do with that.

Palestinians deeply, profoundly, viscerally despise the people. PA. They hate the PA. They, by the way, think Hamas created a disaster and has no future other than disaster. But it's a disaster born of dignity, of the dignity of never cowing, never falling, never failing, always standing for the idea that the Jews can all be kicked out eventually. That's at least a dignified disaster. What the PA offers is an undignified petty kleptocracy disaster. The PA decided to be Instead of being what everybody wishes a Palestinian potential state would be, which is any kind of success story, any kind of success story, okay? It doesn't have to be Switzerland.

It can be Tunisia. Refused to be anything like it. And so if Mahmoud Abbas is polling among Palestinians in the single digits, how the hell is he going to take over Gaza? Like, how is he actually going to do that? If he comes and takes over Gaza, because you need a Palestinian governor of Gaza, it shouldn't be Tony Blair. I don't know if it should be or not, but I could see a Palestinian feeling that way. He would actually create more opposition to him than Tony Blair would at this point in Gaza.

And because Tony Blair would at least be seen as an outsider bringing in a lot of money, whereas Mahmoud Abbas would be seen as an insider stealing all the money. And so there is simply, it has not, like, yes, if you then get to the Israeli government, you will encounter a lot of Likud, certainly Smaltrichin Bangvir saying the P.A. is cannot possibly rule. But you're never even going to get to the point where the Israelis have a say because Palestinians will reject him outright. So everyone who pins their hopes on him is wishcasting. They're just, they're hoping against hope. You know, that feeling that if they just hope enough, this might be the heart of prayer. So I don't want to say too much bad against wishcasting. I'm just saying, that was a joke. I'm allowed to make jokes like that. My dad's a rabbi.

Okay, moving on. It's a disaster, and it can't possibly work, and it has nothing to do with Israelis. Once Israelis are in the picture, once again, it can't possibly work. But you don't even have to adopt the Israeli government's position whatsoever. You'll never get there. Palestinians will convince you he can't do it. What do I see when I look at Britain?

He can get me in trouble. I'm going to lose friends over this. But it's what I say when I look at Britain, is that Israel's GDP per capita has surpassed Britons. Because Britain is in decline, and it's a managed decline. You're doing it very well. But there simply isn't any serious measure in which this country isn't poorer than it was and going to get poorer still. And it has something to do. You know, you're having such a fascinating and intense debate about identity and immigration.

and I really am just too ignorant to show up and tell you anything about that debate. I really just don't know enough. But I have to say that there is something I do see here, which I see everywhere else. So I'm going to allow myself to talk about it. Every time I hear Britain's debate between English identity or British identity and multiculturalism, I am deeply confused. And sometimes I'm confused because I generally don't understand. And sometimes if we're confused when we look at something, it's because the thing itself is confused about what it is. I think your debate about multiculturalism is confused. What does multiculturalism mean? It means that Englishness, if you will, or Britishness, is an empty vessel in which cultures live together, some tension, some cooperation, whatever. But the vessel of being a country, that vessel is neutral.

is empty of content. I'm an Israeli Jew. One of the most precious things you could give your children is a thousand years of culture. Is who you are and who you have been. Now, I'm an Israeli Jew who firmly believes that a nation can be multiracial. I'm a little worried about multicultural.

I'm a little worried about multicultural because culture is the single most important decision decider of human behavior. It's a single most important thing to having a cohesive country. No culture is better than other cultures. I don't know if you know the reason we Israelis are so happy in the international happiness indices and secular Israelis have higher birth rates than any developed nation in the world has a lot to do with us being kind of quite Middle Eastern. Mizrahi culture, Arab culture in Israel is one of our superpowers. It's not that It's not that other cultures are bad.

It's that not having your own, not believing it. There has been an elite project. I told you I'm going to lose friends, but I'll just lose them now and do it fast. Pull off the band-aid. There has been an elite project in Britain, in America, in Canada, generally in the English-speaking world, and also France and Germany and other places in the West, to empty identity of distinctiveness and culture, and into that empty vessel pour any old random things.

thing, and I'm not talking about human beings. I'm talking about literally any idea unexamined. And so you now have in Britain, you have a very small minority of radical Islamists. They are tiny. They're not, most Muslims are not. They're tiny. And they can run your streets because everybody else is an empty vessel. You look at an idea, and you say, that's not me, that's not us, and you spit it out. But if you don't know what me and us is, you can't look at an idea and say that. I sometimes think that the tension between Israeli Jews and the rest of the West is that we know exactly who we are.

And to Westerners who have been trained by generations of elites, to not know who you are, because of a misunderstanding of what happened in the 20th century, because of a misunderstanding of where colonialism comes from or where World War II came from as thinking too much about your own culture or thinking your culture was too good. Chauvinism, loving your own culture too much,

is what caused the Holocaust. Chauvinism is not what caused the Holocaust. Very specific mental models of othering, of very specific communities and groups that are based in an ancient tradition of how exactly you understand yourself in relation to those groups cause the Holocaust. Germanness did not cause the Holocaust.

There's a beautiful book, The Pity of It All by Amoselon. Israeli historian turned anti-Zionist. But nevertheless, a smart guy. That was a joke. Don't worry about it. They don't all land. Amoselon, in The Pity of It All, basically try, It's a beautiful history, first of all, but he basically tries to argue that it could have ended differently.

I agree with him. By the way, that's a stupid argument for anti-Zionism, because it didn't end differently. It ended exactly the way it ended. But it could have ended differently. It isn't inherently biologically German to commit a Holocaust. And the idea that you would then no longer have Germanness as the answer to World War II or to the 20th century is itself fraught with all the problems that, frankly, Europe faces today. And I want to say one last thing. You are not as moral and kind and gentle as you believe, and there is real danger in what is happening now in the West. And what do I mean by that? When Europe turned nice, after World War II, as a lesson of the terrible, terrible tumultuousness and massacres and genocides of World War II, Europe decided from

now on we're going to be nice. You know why they turned nice? Do you know why they suddenly had tolerance for their minorities? Because there were no minorities left. That's what Europe turned nice. There's nothing special about post-war Europe, except that they had succeeded in the destruction of minorities. Sometimes by drawing borders, that's the good way. And sometimes by mass expulsions, slightly less good way. And sometimes by mass genocide.

Europe did not ever get tested. Europe has spent 80 years thinking it's now the most moral place in the world without ever actually testing itself. And now suddenly Europe has large minorities. What's happening to European politics? They're radicalizing. LePan can win 40% of an election in France, something nobody could imagine 25 years ago.

Now we're testing. Europe needs confidence. The West needs to know who it is, what it is. Anybody can come in. Sure, let them in. Know who you are, and they become part of you. You know that Hindus in America are now socioeconomically higher than Jews in America? It's a selection thing.

ticking Silicon Valley's salaries. They're just drawing all of the brains out of India. Not all the brains. There's a lot of brains left in. I'm just saying it's this, but they're coming in and they're becoming Americans profoundly. Conservative Indian American politicians. They're joining deeply the culture. They want to be that.

Don't forget who you are and immigration is safe. Forget who you are and you are literally asking not for the immigrant to be the problem. You will be the problem in 20 years. You will be the thing turning on the minorities in 20 years if you really continue with this project of not knowing who you are. Nobody's ever going to talk to you again. Thank you. Yossi Koin is a handsome spy.

I have never seen him do anything else. I cannot testify to whether he'll be a good politician. His book is a book. I know nothing bad about it. him. There's apparently some Qatar connection, but so many people have a Qatar connection now. I barely know whether to hold it against him.

So, yeah, I don't know much about Yossi Korn. I'm not sure Yossi Koyne knows exactly what he wants to be. He wants to be prime minister. He doesn't quite have that path. He isn't building a campaign ground game in Likud. So he's not

actually, he doesn't want to get dirty in politics, but he wants to win the political game. So many talented politicians are willing to get their hands. dirty that I don't know if that's a winning strategy. Khadim in the future of Israeli society. This is the painful one. It's really easy to tell you about the breakdown of your society. It's a little, this hurts.

I'm going to put it real simple. I am very optimistic and confident that it's going to be okay. And here's why. Because I am completely convinced that it is going to completely collapse. And that's not a bad thing. Anybody here who's ever tried to raise kids knows that sometimes you just got to let them fall. Most of the time, you just got to let them fall. They really need it.

They deeply need. They need to find out they can stand back up. Here's the thing about Israeli society. We have only ever fixed anything when we catastrophically failed and collapsed. So my favorite example on this is the inflation of the 1970s and 80s. Between 77 and 85, we had eight years of triple digit inflation, triple digit per year, meaning everybody's life savings were wiped out by year two, but they still weren't earning enough to feed themselves in year three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

And three years into this horrific fiscal crisis mainly caused monetary. crisis mainly caused by the politicization of monetary policy. The Bank of Israel was forced, by law had to set monetary policy by what the politicians wanted. Okay, you guys should be laughing because, of course, the Bank of England was established in 1688, as a set, and the Americans did this with Alexander Hamilton, and the Israelis in the 80s still have a Bank of Israel subject to politicians, because Jews are good with money, apparently. And, um, and, um, and, um, The root controlled industry still. It was still very much the Mapai economy that the Ben-Gurian Mapai had built.

And the economy was in free fall. And in 1980, they threw out the lira and issued the shackle to try and stop the stem the bleeding. And it didn't work. And the shackle basically continued to, it was literally 250% inflation the next year, if memory serves. And so five years later, it's such a bad emergency because we're eight years into triple-digit inflation. They finally get around to a national unity government, an emergency government that brings in some experts from America, including a guy named Stanley Fischer, an important economist who would later be the Bank of Israel governor, many, many years later, of an economy he basically saved. And they enacted drastic reforms, including limiting the power of East of Drupe, including, that's the big labor union for the one person in the room who came with a friend who doesn't know who that is.

That's the big Israeli sort of umbrella labor union, including the Bank of Israel law, which was passed in 1910. which made the Bank of Israel independent of the government, including many, many of these reforms. And inflation was finally – and by the way, they threw out the shackle and issued the new shackle. They didn't give it a new name because they weren't sure this new currency would last the year. It wasn't worth setting up a committee to find the name. And that's how bad things were. And so the Israeli economy's bottom completely – I mean, it's hard to imagine. the competent Israel we have today,

one of the most fiscally responsible countries in the world, our debt to GDP is like 60%. That's almost German levels of responsibility. They wish this was like... Yes, 10 years ago. We're an incredibly fiscally responsible country to the point where in the 2009 fiscal collapse around the world, Israel's economy didn't shrink.

It stopped growing for one year and then kept growing. And one of the reasons was we weren't like leveraged. Everybody has to put 30% down on a mortgage. So we didn't have mortgages like 98.5% leverage. And all these many, many reasons, Israel's economy, Israel's fiscal laws, everybody's falling asleep. This is the important thing. Israel's fiscal law are very conservative and very responsible. That's not because Jews are good with money. That's because we're post-traumatic from complete collapse. When did we build the astonishing intelligence system that we have? World leading. World leading. The Iran war was

what you can do with human intelligence. MI6, MI5, barely touch human intelligence anymore. The CIA is almost entirely invested in signals intelligence, and cyber, and AI, and all that. Israel still believes in spies, apropos Yossi Korn. Deeply believes in it, and the Iran war is what you can do if you have real spies seriously, and you've invested in it and thought about it carefully for 50 years. What built that intelligence system? The utter and total and existentially dangerous collapse of 73.

So Israel builds world-leading, astonishing things only after, okay? We go off the cliff. We're nearing the cliff, nearing the cliff, go over the cliff, we're falling, we're still bickering about whose fault it is, we're falling, we're falling. A centimeter and a half above ground. Well, who am I kidding? We smash into the ground, look around and say, well, that hurts, and pick up the pieces and build the best things in the world.

So that's our system. The Haredi economy cannot survive. They cannot survive. They literally cannot feed themselves. They have to work. Half of them work. Half of them work. Half of them work.

You don't get to not say that. I'm talking about the men. Like 80% of the women work. But that hides that a lot of them work in the community in very low-paying, basically teaching jobs in their own schools. And so even that's not very productive work, and it's not well-trained work. They don't have the 10%, 20% that you need for a successful, productive economy

that go off to learning university and work in high tech. There are some inroads into high tech by the Khadim, but because the population is growing so fast, they're actually shrinking as a percentage, even though they're growing in real numbers. And so this is a community that simply cannot feed itself and demands the right to take everybody else's money so that it can choose not to work in mass numbers as a cultural choice.

Guess what? That's going to fail. As soon as Bibi's gone, as soon as Likud's coalition breaks up, And it might even be before Bibi's gone, and it might even be literally the next coalition with Likud in charge, because they could might choose a centrist party because its own voters might say, look, we're not so scared to the left anymore.

The Jaredin didn't stand with us in the war. And all of that's all true all at once. It's going to collapse on them. They are building something they know is going to collapse because their own politics are so used to other people protecting them, other people paying for them. It's not their fault. any group of people on this earth, if you pay for them the way we have paid for

Khmeridim in Israel, you will ruin them in exactly this way. There isn't even the gratitude. One of the greatest mitzvv is Akharata Tov, recognition of the good. There isn't gratitude. There was this big ethos at the birth of the state of the Qaridi community. There was 3% of the country at the time that they had to rebuild everything that was shattered and lost in the Holocaust. Most of the Jews killed in the Holocaust spoke Yiddish.

Most of the Jews killed in the Holocaust were traditional Jews. They were not Anne Frank. As Professor Darrohn puts it very poignantly. They were not like Westerners. They looked like Haredin. And this idea that they have to rebuild. But folks, in the last 77 years, they have rebuilt. The Mir Yashiva today in Jerusalem is 5,000 students.

The Mir Yashiva in Mir, at its height, was 400. They have rebuilt. a tenfold and it's gorgeous and it's breathtaking and Zionism gave them that gift and they should work pay taxes, serve if you come to me as a community

and you say to me I can't serve in the military for religious reasons I believe you I don't even need to know your religion I believe you but then you you run massive medical charities Khadim can be medics we know it because they run the second biggest

medical service in Israel, Zaka, and it's extraordinary. Why can't you then come and say, any kid, any 19-year-old who isn't studying full-time in yeshiva, has to volunteer in a national service civilian, non-military

component of the medical core of the IDF that doesn't at all work with the military, it coordinates with the military, but isn't military, and literally just spend the two years that an infantry kid from Tel Aviv is in the infantry, this kid will spend as a medic. Taking care of soldiers, taking care of car accidents, whatever, a national service.

If the Kharedi leadership came to me and said, we can't do military, we can't religiously. So we will find ways to serve as meaningfully as the military. Like, for example, religious Zionist girls usually don't serve, but they are thousands of teachers in underprivileged schools. They volunteer as teachers for the same period of time that secular girls serve in the military. I think that would be extraordinary, but they're not doing that. They're not looking for solutions. They're looking to close ranks. They're looking to not serve.

They're doing exactly what happens when you give your kids everything, and they hate you for it. And that's the problem. And it's going to break down. They're literally economy. They're 13% of the country. We literally can't afford it anymore. It will crash. It will collapse.

It will be horrifying. It will be awful. And then we will build something great and beautiful. It's very easy to fix this. but all the politics have to crash and burn for it to happen. So I'm extremely optimistic that a catastrophe is ahead of us, and then we're going to do the right thing. Let me just follow up on this.

But the statistics that you just rattle off, the labor participation rate, isn't there already a sign that they have already somewhat crashed and are already, at least in some aspects, have changed their lives? Okay, these are low-paid jobs, but they are working. There is a tremendous development compared to 20 years ago. I have to check that I think the numbers are in retreat, in part because the numbers going to work are growing,

but the numbers not going to work are growing faster. And it's about, I mean, it's about per capita. Like, my tax burden to pay for their non-work is, is growing, even if more Haredim are working. So I'm a big fan of them having six kids on average. There's some towns in Israel, Haredi towns like Beit. I think the median age is 11 and a half. That's a town where the average family is nine children.

It just makes me tired to say that. I suddenly so. I really truly am a big fan of that, but really, I actually believe that that is one of the, my wife is the oldest of eight, and her family is always around, and that's great. That's why we got them here. This is all going to be broadcast.

She's going to edit this episode. But I think that the really, the really important point is you need to have a sustainable economic model, and they refuse to have a sustainable economic model, and they're going to have to, I mean, I don't know how to, reality matters. Reality matter. by the way, Jews know that reality matters. In the end, if it's not sustainable, it's going to crash. All right, let's do at least one more round.

Gentlemen here. Okay. Yeah, let's do an episode of Anglo Jewry. But I don't know if you're going to like it. I think Britain is less... You will like it, the Jews. I think Britain is less... the hero in the story of the Jews' arrival, then it pretends to itself.

And I think that Britain's story of World War II, when it comes to standing, Churchill, standing his ground on Hitler, he absolutely saved Europe. I don't think there's a question. That moment when Stalin was on Hitler's side, when the Americans were off doing their thing, he saved Europe. When it comes to the Jews, Britain did everything possible. to herd the Jews into the gas chambers and they continued to do them when they found out there were gas chambers involved and even the Even that beautiful moment I saw last the last you have an annual celebration of the of the kinder transport

The kinder transport were 15,000 kids saved by Britain and orphaned in fact in the war why were they orphaned? Who decided that they they would be orphaned. The British saved the kids on the condition that they would be. They literally took 15,000 kids out of the control of the Nazis to save their lives. That's how they framed it to themselves, but wouldn't allow the parents to come with them because that counted as Jewish migration. The British to save those children orphaned those children.

And the British count that to this day as their great act of charity. I have never heard a greater defense of Zionism in the history of the world than defining that as kindness. And so there's, I would be honored and delighted. And by the way, I'll get it wrong and you'll send me emails correcting me, and that'll be part of the conversation, and that'll be magnificent. Absolutely. Saudi joining the Abraham Accords.

Yeah, the Saudis really kind of want to take Israel off the table. Israel is a radicalizing element in Islam. The Saudis are sick of radical Islam because radical Islam burns everything to the ground that it touches. it is unbelievably stupid and incompetent. If you had an ideology that fought a war against a few million Jews, like 11 times in a century and lost every time, at some point you've got to say it's not a competent ideology.

And that's kind of what you hear when you go to the Gulf. You don't hear from the Gulf states, there's a theological debate, there's all this. You know, it's a Salafist kind of Muslim Brotherhood line that created Hamas and Qatar with Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who it's really adopted this particular kind of ideology, and I always tell people on the Pagas, read Rashid Riyid Rida, the the theologian in Cairo, and it's important, and it's a, but the actual debate is, come on, like how, like, we would like a competent Arab country.

In the Arab world, Muslim societies are basically failed. One version or another have failed. Apologies to, like, Morocco. Really apologies, because it's different. But by and large, that's the story. And they're sick and tired of it. And so they want competence. And one of the signals slash correlators, correlates slash causes maybe of failure is obsession

with Jews. And what's interesting hearing a Saudi or an Emirati talk that way is that you, that's Ruth Weiss talks that way. Professor Ruth Weiss said one of the great American Jewish intellectuals who is a great scholar of Yiddish literature and Hebrew literature, but also a great scholar of anti-Semitism. And she says, you know, in 1948, the Arab country, they had all just been de-imperialized, decolonized in the case of North Africa, de-this, de-that, and they were suddenly independent, and they had choices. And they could have chosen to do the smart thing, which is take the enormous resources given to them by God and build a marvelous, extraordinary civilization.

or they could obsess about Jews for 70 years and ruin everything and just use it as a justification for terrible dictatorships and horrific wars and fail at everything. And they chose the second. And so the people going to the Abraham Accords are really keen on choosing the first. My point is it's not about Jews for them. It's about how talking about Jews is coded in Muslim Arab societies as failure, as a thing. that will ultimately lead us to fit. And so they're absolutely coming to the Abraham Accords. They need a political window to do it. And it's hard after the Gaza War to find that political window,

and that's completely understandable. And of course, we know from Cignoir's own letters that one of the triggers for the timing of October 7 was that it was imminent, in his view. And I have no reason to suspect that's not true. Is what happens on X real? That's a great question. For those of us spending an unhealthy amount of time on X, I think what's happening on X is real. If you learn, if you, I grew up on Herzl, which gives me tremendous advantages and maybe some disadvantages in thinking about Jewish questions.

Herzl looked around at a society that was electing anti-Semitic mayors like Karl Lugar, a society that was organizing itself around ideas about Jews. and he was astonished. He was astonished at the sheer raw boredom of people to organize their lives around the Jew next door. Like, why would Viennese society, when they're still in Austro-Hungarian Empire, care about Jews?

Like, who can you guys know Jews, right? They're not that interesting. Like, why? Like, imagine organizing around the Dutch. The Dutch are really getting a hammering today. Like, why would you organize your society around hatred of the Dutch? It doesn't make sense. And Herzl begins to analyze it and he talks about how Christians in European Christian societies understood their position based on the legal, you know, the legal suppression of Jews.

Jews are at the bottom, so they're at the top. And when that's washed away in emancipation, the Christians need to bring to Christian societies need to then bring in social and cultural ways of pushing the Jews back down to the bottom because they no longer have the legal structures. And so it's about what the Christian is as he defines himself, not about the Jew. He was talking about 19th century Vienna, okay? He's not talking about today. Anti-Semitism is about me, the anti-Semite, and my own story of myself. It always is. It's never about the Jew.

And therefore, also, Herzl says there's nothing the Jew can do about it, so you leave because you can't, and it's going to end in a catastrophe because one of the Herzl's arguments is that these psychological things, these subtle, vague, kind of fuzzy things, they build up a kind of potential energy, a kind of a cloud with tremendous electrical energy that just needs to find that spot that it can hit that triggers the outflow and the whole thing erupts. And so you can, he says, you can begin to, I'm paraphrasing obviously, but because he said it in high German, but he says you can begin to sense the immense power building up in this psychological cloud. And it's going to end very badly. And what happens on X,

what happens on Instagram, what happens on TikTok, what happens in Tucker Carlson's show, what happens when Charlie Kirk has assassinated, what happens in the marches in London. These are, on the one hand, the situation of Jews legally has never been better. On the other hand, formally on paper, on the other hand, there is a psychological energy. And when the energy erupt, and it always erupts, it always erupts.

Okay, there's this idea, I forget where I learned it, of the moral entrepreneur. The moral entrepreneur is when you have a certain state of everybody morally agreeing on something, a certain sense of what the moral way of things is, the order of things is. And the reality, people's beliefs about their reality, people's actual lived experiences, slowly drift away because everything changes all the time from this accepted understanding. And pretty soon you have a disparity between what everybody knows to be true and what everybody's allowed to say or how they say or the vocabulary they have to talk about what's happening to them. And when that disparity builds, there is always the moral entrepreneur, that one person who walks over here, sometimes from the elite, sometimes on the bottom up, and says, hey, none of that stuff we thought was the moral order of things is true anymore. Or maybe it never was true.

This is now true. And you all know it. You all feel it. that person can be a good person or a bad person. It could be a Hitler, for example. Hitler did that. That's what Hitler did. And it can also be,

societies can also, cultures can also correct to the more moral. I think Martin Luther King was that as well and created a new black middle class consciousness that profoundly changed the black American experience in a very positive way. But that moral entrepreneur corrects for that gap. There's a gap building. There's a gap.

There's a gap between the reality and the vocabulary and certainly the elite vocabulary and there will be moral entrepreneurs and they might be evil and they might be good and if we don't understand it, we don't see it we don't see around corners the way Herzl saw around corners we will be shocked when it erupts and so we need to do that now. We need to understand

what is happening to us and we need to see it and we need to prepare for it and by the way affect it profoundly. This is the most powerful generation of Jews that has ever lived in every possible sense. the Israelis in all the sense of Israel, that Israel is powerful. And you, you in Britain, there's never been a generation of British Jews more able to affect their own fate. If you haven't yet woken up to that, it's because it's not bad enough yet.

May it never be bad enough, and may you all stay asleep. But if it does get bad enough, you will wake up, and you need to understand and see what it's happening. X is a great way to track. You'll get swept into silliness, and there's a lot of bubbles, but there's a cohesive, also, trend and shift that we see in politics. polls. Young people in America today, half of them, their number one source of news is TikTok, according to polls, and they have radicalized to the left, and they have also, and nobody

pays attention to this, and I don't know why, radicalized to the right. And so the basic truth is they've radicalized. Good luck America in 40. Like everybody's like, aha, they're not going to love Israel anymore in 20 years. Your time is up. Like, guys, America's headed for some really bad times that have nothing to do with like Israel is your smallest problem if you take seriously the polls of kids who are getting their news from it tick-ton what happens if Israel loses America is your next question look I'm Israeli I can only answer this one way I apologize it's going to be okay okay I want to tell you a dark secret about America's relationship with Israel please don't tell anybody outside this room this stays with us

when Truman recognized Israel in 1948 within 11 minutes minutes of Israel's founding. He then said, but don't give them any guns and put us under an arms embargo in a war where the State Department's actual belief, including literally said, I think by George Marshall to Moschis Charet, was that we would lose the war, and that would be an extermination war if we'd lost that war. And they decided to nevertheless place is under an arms embargo, and so did the British. And I don't know what to tell you. Like, they love us enough to recognize us immediately, but then don't give us guns for that existential moment. When did America begin to deal with Israel at a strategic level in a relationship, in an

alliance level? Kennedy, in the 1960s, is the first president to sell us missiles. And one of the reasons he's selling us these missiles is that he begins to suspect that we might be building nukes. Don't tell anybody. This is just us here. And the solution that the Kennedy administration develops to this problem of a nuclearizing Israel, in the Middle East, the Arab countries have gone totally into the Soviet camp. Israel is the only country they're available to the Americans. Egypt is playing both fields, but basically the Americans can't trust them. Israel is the American ally, but they don't want nukes in the Middle East, the

Kennedy administration. So how do we prevent Israel from introducing nukes into the Middle East? They actually sent nuclear inspectors, and the Israelis took them around on some fake visits. It was adorable. But what actually happened was Kennedy, basically, the Kennedy administration came up with the idea of the bear hug. we don't want Israel to ever feel endangered enough to ever use a nuke. And how do we do that?

We hold them close and we tell them we're protecting them. That's how it began. And it has never not been a strategic decision by America. One of the most interesting things about this theory developing on the American right, as the American right radicalizes, that Israel somehow controls America through APAC, is that it assumes that all American administrations and about the United States, in about 70 years have been morons. And that's the assumption.

And I don't think Americans are as dumb as conservative American patriots think America is. So that was the relationship. It was useful to America. When we're not useful to America, Eisenhower didn't think we were useful to America. Eisenhower didn't like us. Eisenhower turned against us.

America will turn on us. America will protect us. We don't depend on America. America only ever came to our side when we were already a major power in the region that was useful to America. And as long as we remain a serious power that is useful, by the way, forget the love of Americans to Israel, Israelis love for America is the permanent thing, because the Israelis know something that Europeans have allowed themselves to forget, less so Britons, but certainly

continental Europeans, which is that the American-led world order is the best world there has ever been. And so the Israelis love America in a way that is deep and visceral and born of the Jewish experience in a way that America just sees Israel. It's just a thing that, you know, is either useful or not useful. If we lose America, that's not a disaster. It means we lose the F-35s. That's an expensive thing to lose. I've lost iPads. I've never lost an F-35. That's, it's an expensive thing to lose. But then we fight harder and more fiercely. What we have actually done in the last two years, what we've done with Iran, what we've done in every war we've ever fought, basically since 73, was only used tiny fractions of our power calibrated to particular environments. We have

unimaginable firepower. And if our enemies push us to the brink and we are literally against the wall and it's actually existential, we can burn the entire Middle East down without nukes. Now, we probably shouldn't. That would be a bad thing to do. But what I'm saying is that our immense firepower and also the deep friendship we have had with the West has not so much protected us as it has protected our enemies. And if America abandons us and Britain abandons us, by the way, you need us more than we need you for intelligence, for missiles, you're trying to build an iron beam now. Ours is already deployed. Welcome to the party. But if the West abandons us, we should be more worried about our enemies than us, because they will.

see it as a moment of opportunity. They will do the stupid thing they always do, and they will be crushed worse because we will be more desperate. So that's what I think will happen if I'm, in other words, it's going to be okay. Israelis have a very different sense of what okay means, but it's going to be okay. There's so much here. Consequences of a genocide campaign. The consequences of the genocide libeles and the campaign, and look, the problem isn't literally the word genocide is that it's all the words. All the words. There's not a single word that hasn't been deployed

in Israel. It's not one. Name it. You did imperialism? We're imperialists. You did colonial. France did colonialism? We're colonialists. There's not a word that we are not. And that's amazing. Think of the achievement of

doing all the things. All of them. France didn't do all the things. It just did like two. We did all the things. At some point, it's ridiculous. And the tragedy of it, of course, is that it overwhelms not us, but the words. Like, there are genocides. They're happening.

They're out there. And rarely has the genocider been eager to get their hostages back to end the war. That is not a common feature of genocide. and rarely have the genocidaires elected three times governments to retreat and hand territory and independence to the genocidee in democratic election. Like, these are rare occurrences, meaning they've never happened in context of genocide. And by the way, I do not tell people not to criticize Israel. I don't tell people not to be deeply set against Israel. I don't tell people not to be horrified at the Gaza War.

All war is horrific. This is a kind of war that's especially horrific, and you should be horrified. And there's all kinds of politics around it. Hamas wanted this war. They want to do it to my kids. They radicalize me every day. Maybe you should look at that. Maybe you should, while critics, look at that point.

That might be a significant point. But don't look away from the Gaza war. Don't think Israel's okay. Obviously, it's not okay. It's a country. It's made every mistake in the book. But to just throw everywhere, there's literally academics now, working in little like email groups.

I mean, this is literally happening now, trying to figure out if it's reasonable to accuse us of ecocide. And there's another group of academics trying to figure out if it's reasonable to, if they can make it stick to accuse, there's like 11 sides now that have all been thrown at it.

How do you recover from it? This actually connects to the next question, and I want to answer them together. The World War II, the post-World War II, golden age for Jews is over because Israel's a global pariah. Fuck them. What did you just say? What did you just say?

You just said, and your question, which is a totally reasonable, that was you, right? Totally reasonable question. Except for the premise, which we accept, which is that if Israel is evil, let's imagine for a moment, Israel is led by an evil government doing evil things. By the way, in slightly different context, I think Israel is led by a vaguely incompetence slash corrupt slash not always doing the right thing government, occasionally doing terrible things. I mean, I have written 1,500 essays in the last 20 years, take a look at them. They're mostly complaining, okay? I sometimes write essays about what we're doing right and nobody reads them. So I just, that's your fault, the readers.

But what you're saying is that if Israel is doing wrong, then it is expected, reasonable, a natural reaction to turn on the Jews in Britain. Now let's do this exercise for Muslims. What? Obviously, that's a horrific thing to say. There are actual genocides by regimes in the Muslim world in the name of Islam. That's what the regimes claim. Anybody beating down the doors of the Muslim community,

marching in their hunt, demanding that Muslims answer for it? Ever? And if you suggested such a thing, they would call you a bigot. You know why? Because you'd be a horrific bigot. Guys, we can't be expected to not turn on our Jews. Look at what Israel's doing. Fuck you.

I wish I knew another answer, especially now that I realize the rabbi is sitting right here. I apologize. Let me intervene here, just for one moment. Not for the rabbi, but not just for him. But there is a special deviousness here. Because it's a lie, and because it is a lie, we Jews, those who are Zionists, stand with Israel.

So what if you're a normal person, you don't know nothing about the Middle East, you hear every day Israel is committing the most horrendous war crime, is committing genocide, and you believe it. And I must say at this point, I am astonished that there is still a single person out there who doesn't believe it. It shows how little trust people have in the media that not everybody has been brainwashed. But if you are really convinced that Israel is committing genocide, and there is a Jew over there who holds the Israeli flag up high and says, I stand with that country,

then in a way it is justified, quote-unquote, to be angry at that Jew. Because a Muslim here doesn't go around and say, I am, I mean, there are the extremist Islamists who stand with, al-Qaeda or whatever you want to use as the example and and that's the deviousnessness and that's where the danger lies because if you really convince me this committing genocide we are guilty by association the people who turned on Jews don't look for the ones holding flags was the Manchester synagogue flying an Israeli flag they don't look for flags and the

Jewish attachment is, I'll do it real simple. Raise your hand if you think Israel is doing anything wrong of any kind. Okay, 90% of you think it is and 10% of you don't raise hands. Raise your hand if the war made you uncomfortable, not because of what other people say, because of the actual war. Raise your hand if you're not 100% sure, BB's decisions at every turn was the moral decision. more of you think there's a lot of hands up here by the way right down jews have every opinion under the sun no jew thinks that supporting israel means

believing and agreeing with everything in israeli government does no jew has ever uttered that opinion that is a fantasy jew that only exists in the anti-Semites imagination every single person in this room because you know a lot about israel has a long list of complaints about israel and i'll tell you a secret every muslim i've ever met has a long list of complaints about Muslim countries and the countries they're from. Muslim countries is bigger than, you know, we're not a missionizing religion. So the Christians and the Muslims get to have two billion and we get to have, you know, 10 million, a little 15 million.

So it's a little bit of a different context. But even it, but at those two different scales, the relationship is identical. Nobody thinks their side is perfect. There's never been such a person who thinks their side is perfect. And and the turning on Jews, that's, that is absolutely bigotry. By the way, if you see somebody flying a Palestinian flag and you assume that they want a genocide of Jews, you might be also a bigot.

It is possible to believe in the Palestinian national identity without wanting a genocide of Jews. I know too many such Palestinians. I grew up in Jerusalem. You can't avoid them. We can't avoid each other. To ever think that you can't... So the person who turns on the Jew flying the flag,

and they're not turning on the Jews flying the flag, there isn't a synagogue on earth that doesn't have guards outside. That wasn't true 15 years ago. Not one on earth, and that was not true 15 years ago. It used to be a crazy thing. The president of Yemen used to have his special guard. Today, the Moroccan King's guard protects the tiny little leftover Jewish community that still remains in Morocco.

That used to be a weird thing in the Arab world. Now it's every synagogue in New York. Has to have security. Has to have doors that lock. Has to have a guard outside on Shabbat. That's new. And the libel campaign is structured for it. And I'll tell you another thing.

You are tiny people. You are 15 million on this earth. You can't win a Twitter debate about anything. You don't have the numbers to drive the algorithm. So we don't have the numbers to drive the algorithm. algorithm. We're never going to win the debate. The campaign against us is a construct that is built to explain the entirety of the world. If I'm Western academia and I'm looking at this world today, is Zionism really the number one enemy of humanity? One of the most amazing artifacts of this moment

that in the future, intellectual historians and cultural historians at this moment will start books with, I promise you, is Greta Tunberg. Because 10 minutes ago, Greta Tunberg was explaining to us that we here in an existential crisis of climate change that is going to kill all of us. And then Gaza happened. And then we're just, I don't know what happened to the climate. It fixed itself. This is a serious question, a serious question. Are there other problems or is there only, and then people challenge her, and apparently she said something like Israel is the spearhead, the vanguard of global capitalism. So she defeats Israel, then she defeats capitalism, and then the climate sorts itself out. I don't know what you're saying.

You don't know things. That is not a thing. The Jews are part of a vocabulary of organizing the world into particular ways and categories and ways of understanding things. And I have podcast episodes about this, but I'll just send you to books by 400 people than me. And then you'll see it. And once you see it, you can't unsee it.

This is foundationally anti-Semitism. The fact that the only war they will ever see on their phones, that a person, again, that a person saw dead children on their phone and came out to March is the right answer to seeing those dead kids. That is decency. That the only kids they will ever see is Gaza. That some of the kids they saw were from Syria repurposed for Gaza. And when people found out it wasn't a kid from Gaza, it was actually a kid from Syria. The image disappeared from the algorithm. Because it didn't matter anymore that this child was killed in the Arab world. It only mattered if Jews did it. That is the manipulation. What should Jews do to it?

You cannot stand before it. You cannot defeat it. You cannot win. It is organized. It is society organizing. On the progressive left, being anti-Zionist, is a pillar of identity, because Zionism is police brutality. Zoran Mamdani taught us that. is imperialism, Zionism is colonialism, Zionism is settler colonialism, which is the worst kind. Zionism is genocide. There isn't a word that Zionism isn't. And so to stand against Zionism is to stand against all evil. How is that possible? How can a nation of refugees? Refugees be all the evil of the world. And we know how. It's exactly the same old thing. And one last point, every racist there has ever been thought they were right. And every anti-Semite in the history of

Jews thought they were righteous. So the fact that they think they're right and righteous is no evidence at all. The Jews stand in the way of the redemption of the world is core dogma of early Christianity and early Islam. And it's a core dogma of Marx. And it's a core dogma of Nazism. And it's a core dogma of the progressive left today. Some reason, only Israel. Why can't, for example, the illiberalism of the Muslim world be standing in the way of the redemption of the world. Isn't that a thing? Why can't the failed states of Africa, some states in Africa, by the way, are halfway to Norway. There's an extraordinary good story happening in Africa.

Africa is a big place that only Westerners use one little word for. Ghana is a radically different place from Zambia. But why can't the bottom billion at the UN Human Development Reports? That's what they call the really deeply failed states and societies and economies. Why can't they be the problem? Why can't they be the thing we all obsess about? It's an old thing recast. And if we understand it and see it, by the way,

we know we can respond to it, the way the Zionists responded to it. The Zionists told us, maybe they were wrong, but so far they're the only success story we have facing this. They told us you cannot penetrate the fog. The anti-Semi builds around themselves a fog of a story about themselves. You cannot convince them through that fog that they're wrong. They're not talking to you. They're not talking about you.

The Jew in this imagination, in this imaginary that they've created, is not literally a living person that you are. It's a character they need to exist so they know who they are, and you will not convince them otherwise. So you leave, and you don't stand before them for judgment. So what do we, now, just last point, I get to go back to Israel and not have to live with these people. I apologize, I truly do. You have to stay here and live with them. So that's the best advice you're going to get from me. Finally, reforms of Israeli politics.

We're really, I want to tell you real quick, reforms of Israeli politics, I've written so much. I mean, I spent a decade asking these questions of professors. This is the thing I actually know about. All the rest is just kind of Wikipedia. No, just not, we don't, don't ever read Wikipedia on anything. Israel's system has served it very well. It gets a bad rap.

We have that national party list system where you vote for a party, you don't vote for a candidate. We don't have direct election of MPs. It served us extraordinarily well because Israel was a society fractured into many, many tribes. And the national proportional representation party list system that we have basically express those tribes and allow them to come to a parliament and organize our lives together at parliament. And even though there was always coalition and opposition and some parties like the vast majority, of the Arab parties have always been outside the coalition. Some have sat in, Ram famously recently, but there were others earlier in past decades, small ones.

But Arabs were always in the parliament voting, and many, many factions needed their votes, and they always campaigned and negotiated very well. If you follow the career of Ahmad Tibi, an important Israeli member of Knesset, Arab Israeli member of Knesset, he was one of the major wheelers and dealers in the Knesset, and did a lot of good things for his community, even though he never sent a coalition. And so there's always these tribes that would go into the parliament, and in the parliament, they would organize our lives.

The fracturedness of us, the tribalism of us, that this system expressed, but it also ended up reinforcing. It's very Middle Eastern, okay? In Lebanon, kids learn in school systems that belong to their millet, their confessionary faith, their community. In Israel, you learn in a system built to your identity. Arab kids learn in

Arabic schools. Jewish kids learn in Hebrew schools. Religious learn with the religious schools and secular and secular schools. What we express on the election day by voting for those parties, we also express in our education system. We live in these tribes deeply, just like the Lebanese, just like the Syrians, just like the Iraqis. We are very Middle Eastern in that sense. And the system reflected that and worked, worked extraordinarily beautifully and well. We are arguably the only functioning Arab democracy in that sense, because we're structurally, just very deeply structured the way Arab societies are structured. And that's a weird thing to say to Anglophone Jews, because you know, you're all Westerners, but it's actually one of the deep

truths about Israel that explains a lot about how Israelis think and feel. And now it's tearing us apart. And so I think it's time has come for reform. And the reform needs to favor majority cohesion and that's a weird thing to say about democracy because democracy is usually about protecting minorities democracy has to protect minorities but when you can't defend majority cohesion you lose the capacity to defend minorities so if for example we stick to the tribalism system Netanyahu the the single biggest correlate correlated statistic for whether you voted for the opposition of the coalition in this Kness

is your level of religious observance. More than in any other government in the past, this is a government of the religious, the Likud Traditionalist are the non-religious edge of it. This is more than, I think of it as 70-30. This is the government of the religious and an opposition of the non-religious. There's a lot of non-religious in the government

and a lot of religious in the opposition, but basically it's a religious divide. If we stick to that, we're going to have very illiberal politics that will have a very hard time protecting minorities. And if we open it up to the things that the vast majority of the center agrees on, most of Likud, most of Yashatid, most of Israel-Bet-Tenu, by the way, not a small number, probably half of Shas, they agree on most of the things, and they agree on protecting each other.

And so we need a system that does away with this. One of the ways that could happen is, first of all, institute primaries. instituting primaries, real primaries, forced primaries, will weaken cabinet members and strengthen the Knesset in opposition to the executive. If the people sitting in the cabinet literally appointed the entire parliamentary majority, the parliament can't seriously check the government. You want to check executive power in Israel? I think it's the Danes do this beautifully. They have a proportional representation system like us. You vote for a party. But on election day, when you pull out the ballot for the party you want, you flip it over.

to the other side, and you rank the people actually listed on the party. And so there's a primary happening on Election Day in the voting booth by the people voting for the party. I hope I got that exactly right to the Dane system, if not somebody will write me. We could do that. That's an amazing way to do it. That means that you can't vote in the Likud primary if you're not actually a Likud voter. You can't vote in the Sederibir, if you're not Likud, right, you can have factions, but mostly you strengthen the Knesset in opposition to the cabinet. That's a check on power. We could do a thousand things like that. One of the smartest things I've heard is to lower the electoral threshold.

We kept raising it, thinking that small parties were the problem for stability. Small parties were never the problem. The problem was always medium-sized parties. The problem was the Russian party, the Qarady party, all these little tribal sectoral parties of half a million Israelis that were big enough that everybody needed them. And so they always had the wooing vote. And so policies were always radicalized to the edges where these parties existed,

and their own communities always got what they wanted, and therefore radicalized their demand. What if we lower it to a single Knesset seat? Anybody could get elected. You just need whatever the vote is for a single Knesset seat, 35, 40,000 votes, something like that. Well, then you would have not five parties in a coalition. You might have 17 parties in a coalition.

Probably you'd settle somewhere around eight or nine parties in a coalition, but no medium-sized parties would be quite powerful enough to force the big party to do its bidding because there would be a lot of little parties you could always buy off with little things. So lowering the threshold, which is the opposite logic of the last 40 years of reforms, might accomplish that. So we need a serious process of reform.

You know who's never going to do it? You'll never guess. The people elected in this system who have everything riding on this system, and because they can't lose elections under this system, or they don't think they can at least, they've allowed themselves to become venal and incompetent and corrupt. So this is something we have to fix. But once again, as with everything else, when are we going to fix it?

10 seconds after some disastrous collapse of our politics. So again, am I ending or are we going for a no round? Well, you're the main act, you decide. You guys have energy for this? I'm with you. No, everyone's like, no, no, no. I really am optimistic about this, but it'll only happen when it has to. So it has to get worse.

Okay, the final question from the gentleman in the bank. Yes. Yes, radical Islam wants to conquer the world. You'll never guess how I know. It talks about nothing else. Salafist Islam of the particular kind that we are discussing here, the Sunni Arab kind born in a particular time at a particular moment in response to European imperialism in Egypt, basically,

that begins as a reformist impulse and actually turns into this deep jihadism that produces Saeed Qutib and al-Qaeda and over in the, the Hassan al-Bana Muslim Brotherhood camp, you guys are writing all this down to look it up, right? Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, you know, regime in Qatar and the AKP party in Turkey and all of that. All of that is never going to stop until it conquers the world. And it believes that it must conquer the world because that is the redemption of the world. That is what every missionizing monotheistic religion believes. It can believe it in peaceful ways.

It can believe it in violent ways, but it believes it. Yes, but they'll always come for us. And we will never be big. We're the weird inventors of monotheism who still think they're just a tribe. Do you know why we don't convert everyone on Earth by force or by missionizing? Why don't we convert? Come on, Jews. Why don't we convert?

Not strong enough. Why don't we convert and become strong enough? The rabbis say no. Who here keeps perfectly kosher? Why don't we convert? What? It's our family. They're not the family. We're a tribe.

Why don't we convert? We have the true religion. Why don't we convert ever? By the way, there were tiny little moments where we did convert, forcibly conquer, the Hasmanians a little bit. Why don't we convert? Not strong enough. Christianity was 12 people. Why don't we convert? I'll ask a corollary.

I'll ask a corollary. What happens after you die in Judaism? What's wrong with you people? What happens after you die in Judaism? Judaism has multiple views on what happens after you die and no clear dogma. There is reincarnation in different companies. Somebody once counted 13 different perspectives in the Dalman. There had many different views.

Judaism doesn't know. You know who knows what happens after you die? God. And you know what? God loves you. It is not eternal hellfire, I promise. You know why? That's not what God is.

He wouldn't have made you to burn you forever. That's just not a thing. It's going to be okay. And we have no idea what happens after you die. And not only that, you were dead before. And you're going to be dead after. the glorious, beautiful, perfect thing is the window of light in the middle. And the window of light in the middle Judaism is absolutely obsessed with.

The mainstream Jewish view of what happens after you die is that you go to a waiting room, hang around for a little bit, and then come back here. Where's the messianic age? Here, this is the perfect thing. and that this place has suffering in it is weird and demands correction. And we are sentient because we are sparks of divine light to correct this thing. Why doesn't Judaism convert the benighted... I don't know how to call these things.

We don't have these words. Infidels? I don't know. Because we don't have to save them from anything. They are children of God, just like we are children of God. There is no hellfire. in the messianic age, everyone will know God. Will everyone become Jewish? Why the heck would you want to become Jewish?

That is literally the view of the guys of the Gamarath. I'm not talking to hear about like, this is not like my friend, you know. This is mainstream Judaism. We don't convert because we don't need to save anybody. And so we, this little tiny tribe that thinks that, you know, there is a one god, because if there isn't one God, there are no gods, two gods is limited gods and therefore just superheroes. It's not God. There's only an infinite unknowable creation because there is existence, therefore there's an infinite unknowable creator.

We cannot know it. It is the nothingness at the end of all things, and that is enough, and it is enough for everybody. And when the genocidal army of Pharaoh is drowning in the sea, and the people of Israel are singing, the middress tells us that the angels want to sing for the glory of God for this great victory, and God says to them, my children are drowning in the sea. How can you sing? The angels are forbidden from singing for the drowning of Pharaoh's genocidal army that 10 seconds earlier was trying to literally murder God's people,

but they're God's children just as much so you don't sing. Jews can sing because they just got saved, but the angels don't sing. So we are never going to be big, and we are never going to be all-powerful. And what we have discovered, and all Zionism argues, there's a lot of Zionisms, okay? the socialist Zionism and liberal Zionism and religious Zionism and a million Zionism. All of them under one idea, that idea that is the Zionism of all the rest of it, is the simple point that if we do actually stick together,

if we are actually standing shoulder to shoulder against the insanity, against the world that took our one good idea. We had one good idea. There's this God and made out of it all kinds of things that then turned on us because it took it from us. and created insane entire civilizations in which we for some reason are symbols of all that is bad, excuse me, and sometimes symbols of all that is good, which is also weird. We're just a small tribe with one big idea, and if we stand shoulder to shoulder and stop standing in judgment before anybody else, we will not just survive, we will thrive, everything is going to be okay.

We're never going to be big. We're never going to be strong. We're only going to have us. Some of them are still going to want to conquer the world. We will be equal to them if we stand shoulder to shoulder. And that's enough.