Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Antisemitism. Everywhere.

Episode Date: November 1, 2023

Next week we will release the new book by Saul Singer and me: "The Genius of Israel: The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent World", which you can order now at: www.amazon.com/Genius-Israel-Small-Nation-Teach/dp/1982115769/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3LKV3ZLWLBOL1&keywords=dan+senor&qid=1694402205&sprefix=dan+senor%2Caps%2C87&sr=8-1 OR www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-genius-of-israel-dan-senor/1143499668 The speech that I reference in today's episode -- in which I discuss the resilience of Israelis in this moment -- can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WygtNbwf-tk As for today's episode, according to the ADL, from Oct 7-23, anti-semetic incidents in the U.S. were up 388% over the same period last year. Why is it that after an attempted genocide of Jews in the Jewish State, the response by many is too target other Jews in the U.S. and around the world? To target them with violent rhetoric, vandalism, intimidation, and actual physical violence? Is this new? What are its origins? What is the difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism? And what’s with the tearing down of posters of hostage children? Our guest today is Yossi Klein Halevi who - in addition to being an important voice in our new book - is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. Together with Imam Abdullah Antepli of Duke University, he co-directs the Harmant Institute's Muslim Leadership Initiative. Yossi has written a number of books, including "Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation," and his latest, "Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor," which was a New York Times bestseller. He has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Times of Israel.

If you see power as innately evil, and then you turn Jewish power into the symbol of what you most detest, what you get are young people tearing down posters of kidnapped Israeli children. simple reason, because the cognitive dissonance between the pictures of a nine-month-old Israeli hostage and the notion of an all-devouring evil Jewish power, rather than a Jewish power that we've embraced to defend the most defenseless people, that disparity is too great, and so they need to physically remove those posters in order to continue the process of turning Jewish power into the symbol of power generally. That's what's playing out, I think, today. It's 11 p.m. in New York City on Tuesday, October 31st. It's 5 a.m. in Israel on Wednesday, November 1st. As Israelis are getting ready to start their day. It is day 25 of the war. Before we get into events in Israel, one housekeeping note. In less than a week,

Saul Singer and I will be publishing the book we've been working on, The Genius of Israel, The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent world. We write in this book about the same resilience we are seeing today in Israel, in Israeli society, across Israeli society, from Haredim to secular Israelis, from Jews from the East and Jews from the West, really all across every sector, every demographic. I gave a speech about this moment in Israeli society on Sunday, this past Sunday, at the Jewish Leadership Conference here in New York City. I'll provide a link to that speech in the show notes. It'll give you a sense of our book and how we are cautiously hopeful about Israeli society in the weeks and months and years ahead, even if we have serious concerns about Israeli institutions. We hope you'll order

the book this week. It would mean a lot to us. I'm sending the proceeds from the book to an organization in Israel working on the rebuild, working to help the hundreds of thousands of evacuees from the south and now the north too. That will have to rebuild. That will have to begin anew. Now on to today's conversation. According to the Anti-Defamation League, from October 7th, when the war began, through October 23rd, anti-Semitic incidents in the United States were up 388 percent over the same period last year. Why is it that after an attempted genocide of Jews in the Jewish state, that the response by many is to target other Jews in the United States and around the world, to target them with violent rhetoric, vandalism, intimidation, and actual physical violence? As the Wall Street Journal editorialized today, and I quote here,

this weekend, the journal writes, hundreds of rioters in Dagestan, Russia stormed an airport in search of Jewish travelers. Mobs raided hotels in other parts of the North Caucasus looking for Jews. Germany has witnessed a spate of anti-Semitic incidents, including an attack with Molotov cocktails against a synagogue in Berlin on October 18th. Some Jews found stars of David painted on their homes, an echo of the Nazi persecution. German politicians have been forceful in their denunciations, but apparently not forceful enough in their policing. The Jewish schools in London closed for a period over safety concerns, and some British Jews no longer feel safe wearing visible symbols of their faith. They're probably right to worry the state

can't protect them. Tens of thousands of protesters in London over three successive weekends called for, quote, jihad and chanted, quote, from the river to the sea, a demand for the erasure of Israel and, by extension, its citizens. A crowd in Sydney, Australia, chanted, quote, gas the Jews after the October 7th Hamas attack. And I can go on and on with more and more of these incidents. We've all seen them, like I said, all over Europe, all over the world, all over the United States, on university campuses across the United States. My question for our guest today is, what is going on here that we may or may not have seen before? Are these echoes of previous eras of violent anti-Semitism, of mob-like behavior against Jews? Also, what is the difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism? And

what's with tearing down of posters of Jewish hostage children? That seems to be a thing now. I wanted to get into some of these questions, because I've been asked this over and over and over by friends who are really, for the first time, focusing on issues of Jewish life, Jewish survival, questions about anti-Semitism, and they were trying to get to the origin of it, and we've tried to address it in a couple of the episodes on this podcast, and we're going to keep returning to it, and we try to go deep on it today with someone who I think is one of the best explainers on these issues, which is Yossi Klein-Halevi. Yossi is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, and together with Imam Abdullah

Entepli of Duke University, he co-directs the Hartman Institute's Muslim Leadership Initiative. Yossi has written a number of books, two of my favorites, Like Dreamers, and his latest, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor, which was a New York Times bestseller. Yossi has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Times of Israel. Yossi Klein-Halevi on the anti-Semitic shock. This is Call Me Back. And I am pleased to welcome back to this podcast my longtime friend, Yossi Klein-Halevi, who joins us from Jerusalem. Yossi, thanks for being here. Always good to be with you, Dan.

How are you holding up before we get into the substance? We're okay. We're holding on, we're holding in, and trying to, you know, take it an hour at a time and not think too far ahead, which is one of the ways, as you know, as someone who wrote the book on Israeli resilience, that's one of the ways Israelis cope. We deal with whatever is at hand, and we don't torment ourselves with the question, at least not too much, about where is this leading, what's going to happen. It's one step at a time. Okay. So I want to, I have gotten a number of questions, as I mentioned to you offline, about anti-Semitism. At first, the questions were based on when there was criticism of Israel's response to October 7th, and people like me, and I think you, would say this is a form of anti-Semitism. It is holding Israel to a standard one would hold no other country to, which is in itself the definition of discrimination. So the questions began then, and then it was

these questions got further amplification and sense of urgency when there seemed to be these anti-Semitic attacks and protests, not seemed to me, there were, almost like pogroms all over the world, from Russia to what's happened the last few days at Cornell University. I just got a note that a Hebrew class at Cornell is being taught now in a quote-unquote secret location. They have to teach the Hebrew class in a secret location. You saw that the Hillel, the kosher kitchen at Cornell, I don't know if it was in the Hillel, but it was some kosher dining space, had to be locked down so Jews couldn't go eat kosher food, Jewish students, in a kosher dining facility because they are targets. I mean, I'm using Cornell because it's in the news, but this is, it's all over the place. And so now people are saying, wow, forget about the debate between, about whether criticism of Israel can be anti-Semitism.

This is, now people are seeing with their own eyes, anti-Semitism, like all over the place. That was clearly sparked by a debate about Israel's response, and again, as you and I were discussing, Israel went from being on the receiving end of a quasi-genocidal attack on its homeland to now being defined everywhere, on college campuses, in protests in major cities, in the United Nations General Assembly, as the genocide or, as you put it, the genocider. So I want to get to that, but before we start, can you just provide our listeners a short history, and I know it's a big topic, but a short history of anti-Semitism. What do we know about anti-Semitism So rather than answer directly in a kind of historical chronology, let me try to offer a conceptual definition that is that my definition of anti-Semitism is it is the process by which Jews are turned into the Jew, and the Jew becomes the symbol for whatever a given society or civilization regards as its most loathsome qualities. So going back 2,000 years to the origins of Christianity, the Jew as Christ killer, which is the ultimate sin for a religion that

venerates Christ. Under Islam, the Jew became the killer of prophets, which there again, the ultimate sin for a religion that venerates the prophet. Under Marxism, the Jew was the ultimate capitalist. Under Nazism, the Jew was the great race polluter. And so the pattern that for me unites all these different stages of anti-Semitism and of course what's so remarkable here is the ability of anti-Semitism to adapt to such different ideologies and worldviews is the transformation of Jews into the Jew. It's the anti-Semitism is the symbolization of the Jews. But why? Why has it persisted so consistently going back 2,000 years?

In a way, it seems to me no other minority has been subjected to on such a consistent basis throughout history. No, you know, anti-Semitism has been called the oldest hatred, but I think even more remarkable is the fact that it's the most consistent hatred. I mean, look, you know, Dan, it depends how philosophical do you want to get here? You can look at the range of responses that have been offered about the remarkable endurance of antisemitism. And by the way, I would add that for me, in some ways, the most remarkable example of the persistence of anti-Semitism is the ability of anti-Semitism to survive the Holocaust. The Holocaust should have been the definitive repudiation of anti-Semitism.

And instead, what we have today is the globalization of anti-Semitism in dimensions that we've never seen before, of course, in large part because of social media and the globalization of culture. But the fact that anti-Semitism not only survived the Holocaust, but is thriving in a way that I don't think it ever has before, is for me in a way as remarkable as the survival of the Jews. So if you're asking why, let's look for a moment at the range of possibilities that have been suggested. So you have on one side of the spectrum, there's the answer of anti-Semites. And I've been bombarded in recent days with anti-Semitic tweets from both the far left and the far right. And what I'm getting from the

far right is the number 110. That's become a new meme. And what 110 means on the far right is that's supposedly the number of countries from which Jews have been expelled. I don't know what the historical basis of that number is, but what they're saying is that there must be a reason why the Jews have been so universally detested, and it's obviously based on Jewish behavior, which is something that we should really unpack about this moment, because that's exactly the argument that's being made. But that's on one side of the spectrum. But when you say Jewish behavior, you mean that the Jews, whatever suffering or despair they are experiencing, it is a direct result of things that the Jews bring it on themselves by their loathsome behavior. And that is exactly

what the history of anti-Semitism shows. That's the common denominator linking pre-Holocaust Christian anti-Semitism to Islamic anti-Semitism to Marxist and Nazi anti-Semitism. There's something in Jewish behavior. Now, of course, the Nazis took it one step further. It wasn't just Jewish behavior. It was Jewish being. This was the great innovation of Nazism in the history of antisemitism. It didn't matter what the Jews did, it's who the Jews were. You were innately an enemy of the Aryan race. You were a racial enemy. And because of that, there was no way out of Jewishness. In all of these previous phases of anti-Semitism, there was always a get-out-of-jail-free card. You could convert to Christianity, and presumably your problems would be over.

It didn't always work that way, but for the most part, you could disappear. In Islam as well, you could become a revolutionary Marxist, and at least in theory, become absorbed into the camaraderie of the revolution. There again, it didn't always work as promised, certainly not in the Soviet Union, but in principle, you could escape the curse of Jewish faith by changing your behavior, by changing your religion. Nazism was the great exception. What we're seeing now with anti-Zionism is a reversion to what I would call's Christianity or Marxism or Islam. And all the Jew has to do to end the persecution and hatred directed against them is change your behavior. Nazism deviated from that pattern, and anti-Zionism has restored us to traditional forms of anti-Semitism. We don't

hate the Jews innately for who you are. We just hate you for what you do. All you need to do is, quote, convert to progressive anti-Zionism, and we'll embrace you. And we see that happening on the far left. There are whole Jewish movements that have endorsed that trade-off, that bargain, which is I will give up my loathsome Jewish behavior, which is Zionism in this case, and be embraced by the latest iteration of the ideology of love, which is progressive universalism. So where does the Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran,

Troika fit into that? Is it an anti-Semitism of love or hate? It is a modern influence of Nazism. And we see this emerging in the Muslim Brotherhood in the early 20th century. We certainly see it in the ideology, the exterminationist ideology of Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran. And what we experienced on October 7th was a pre-enactment of that genocidal vision, so that for radical Islamism, there isn't a way out. The Jew is the enemy of humanity, and that's where a more benign pre-modern form of Islamic anti-Semitism meets the exterminationist modern variety of anti-Semitism. Okay, I want to read something you wrote in the Times of Israel, because I think it sets up this conversation well. You wrote, how is it possible that in much of the international community, there is, quote, understanding for the mass atrocities of October 7th, that on parts of the left, there's greater

outrage against Israel's response to the Hamas massacre than to the massacre itself, that those who feel most vulnerable on liberal American campuses are not Hamas supporters, but Jews. So these people who are protesting on campuses, these people who are protesting in major American cities, these people who are voting in the UN General Assembly, they saw the images of October 7th, right? The difference between the Nazis and Hamas is the Nazis, maybe there are many differences, but one of which is the Nazis tried to hide their atrocities,

whereas Hamas wanted to project them, broadcast them to the world. They documented everything and they broadcast it out. So we can see what they did. I'm in touch with reporters who, American reporters, who've been shown even more detailed, gruesome footage in these briefing sessions by the Israeli government. And they come out of these sessions just, it's like Hamas in their own words or Hamas in their own images and Hamas in their own videos. It's, to call it barbaric is to understate it.

So how can these people who are voting at the UN and protesting on campuses, they have to reconcile what they're saying with those images. It's not some clinical comparison. They have to look at what these people were doing on October 7th to the Jews and reconcile that with their criticism or blame of Israel. Like, how? I don't believe that all these people protesting are inherently bad people, and they look at these images and what, they're okay with them? They're okay with them? Or they say that what the Jews are responsible for is worse? Well, yes, what the Jews are responsible for is worse, but there's something

else at play here, Dan, which is another theme running through the history of anti-Semitism, which is the fear and hatred of Jewish power. Now, there's an irony here, because for 2,000 years, the Jews were the most powerless people on the planet. And yet, no people was feared more for its supposed power than the Jews. And the absurdity of fearing the power of this most powerless people came to a head in the Holocaust when the Nazis had demonized Jewish power. It was the Jews who were responsible for World War I. The Jews were responsible for manipulating nations. And yet, when the extermination process began, the Jews were completely powerless. And so the radical disparity between the fantasy of Jewish power and the reality of Jewish powerlessness is really the story of the Holocaust and, in some sense, of the last 2,000 years.

Now, something has changed, though, in our time, which is it's no longer a paranoid fantasy to talk about Jewish power. We are today a powerful people. Thank God. And if there was ever any doubt of the necessity for Jewish power, October 7 in 1945, which is to embrace Jewish sovereignty and power. And that took two expressions. The return to Jewish power as a response to the Holocaust took two forms. In Israel, it was the return of hard power, military power. And in the diaspora, but especially North America,

it was an embrace of soft power, political alliances, lobbying, philanthropy. And so when the Jews today are accused of being powerful, my response to that is that's exactly, exactly where we need to be. But what's happened here is that for progressives who view power as innately evil, the anti-Semitic move that they have made, and this goes back to what we were saying earlier about the symbolization of the Jew, is that for progressives, Jewish power has become the symbol of the evil of power generally. And so if you see power as innately evil, and then you turn Jewish power into the symbol of what you most detest, what you get are young people tearing down posters of kidnapped Israeli children, I think for a very simple reason, because the cognitive dissonance between the pictures of a nine-month-old Israeli hostage and the notion of an all-devouring evil Jewish power, rather than a Jewish power that we've embraced

to defend the most defenseless people, that disparity is too great. And so they need to physically remove those posters in order to continue the process of turning Jewish power into the symbol of power generally. That's what's playing out, I think, today. Okay, but so I agree with you about the people tearing down those posters who I assume are acting in bad faith for the reasons you're articulating, that they can't have Jews looking so vulnerable. You know, a nine-year-old kid being held hostage, or a baby being held hostage, some with serious illnesses, some still breastfeeding, like the image of them being without their parents held hostage in some tunnel in Gaza is just—they can't handle it. It jams up their

worldview of the Jews. I get that. What I don't get is these people who I think are sort of neutral, who I don't feel is inherently hostile, who aren't necessarily operating in bad faith, who are getting sucked into this. If they really believe the Jews are too powerful, how do they look at those images of October 7th? How do they look at those photos of the children being held hostage and say, huh, like, maybe the Jews aren't as powerful as I thought. Maybe they are actually vulnerable. Maybe I should learn a little bit about their predicament with a genocidal organization on their southern border and a genocidal organization on their northern border, both backed by a major regional power that has

nuclear ambitions, all these entities calling for the wiping out of the state of Israel. Like, maybe they're not as powerful as I thought, And maybe I should, maybe October 7th has changed the way I should think about the Jews in power. Yeah, I think that there were many people of goodwill who embraced us in the aftermath of October 7th, but Israel has a way of alienating those who want to embrace us as victims. The Israeli ethos is antithetical to victimhood. We see no redeeming merit in being victims. And I think that that puts us at odds with some American Jews whose identity is so deeply rooted in a kind of a perverse pride in coming from a victim people. Israelis have no such pride in our past as victims. The Israeli project is in part an attempt to erase Jewish victimhood. And that's exactly what we are no longer the victim on TV screens. And Palestinian suffering is real and of vast proportions. I don't believe that any country in our place would be behaving any differently. I think that there is no other way to destroy Hamas than to proceed the way Israel is acting. And if we don't destroy Hamas,

our deterrence will be fatally eroded. And that is a death sentence in the Middle East. And so most Israelis understand that. It's very hard to explain that to people abroad, because here we are. We immediately took the offensive after October 7th, and we've proven that we're actually not pushovers. We're quite powerful. And that's exactly the place where Israelis want to be. But it makes some people, many people, I think, uncomfortable. Here it is. We wanted to embrace you as the moral Jewish people. We wanted to re-embrace that idea. And Israel just keeps complicating that. I want to talk to you about the sense of Jewish power within the United States. We have seen in recent weeks a large number of major Jewish philanthropists,

very successful business leader in the United States, who've told their alma mater, I'm out. I'm no longer funding. I'm no longer donating. Now, when I walk around campuses, elite college campuses, it's extraordinary. Every hall, every dining hall, every lecture hall, every student meeting communal space is named after a prominent Jew. This one donated this amount. This one donated that amount. The American Jewish community, the diaspora generally, has been pouring gobs of money into these institutions.

And it's not just universities. It's universities, it's hospitals, it's museums, it's, you know, it's sad. You know, Yossi, my mother, who you know, who lives in Jerusalem, my mother, when I was growing up, she used to say to me, when I'd say, hey, have we thought about donating to this or donating to that? She didn't have a lot of money. You know, for charities, we're not talking about big sums. She says, no, I will only donate to Jewish causes. I said, why? She says, because if the Jews don't donate to Jewish causes, nobody will. And I thought a lot about that because I saw some recent studies on the minuscule, and it's embarrassing, minuscule percentage of Jewish philanthropy that goes to Jewish causes in the United States, that most of the Jewish philanthropy does not go to Jewish causes. It goes to all these other institutions.

And I think these Jewish leaders, I'm not blaming them. In many respects, I'm a product of that, at least here in New York City. They believed at a minimum, they, let me say this, I think at a maximum, they thought they would get some kind of influence expressed, however, one expresses its influence, but at a minimum, being so civically engaged and being so philanthropically engaged with these institutions would at least protect against outright anti-Jewish hostility. Pogroms, like it would at least protect against pogroms and Dayans and lockdown kosher dining halls and Hebrew classes having to meet in secret and campus police not checking the IDs of the hundreds or thousands of activists, quote unquote activists from the Students for Justice of

Palestine who storm a campus but checking every single Jewish student's ID before they come on to try to counter-protest or to do something in response, that all this Jewish philanthropy and Jewish power, as you call it, thought they were at least getting some protection against that. Yeah. I mean, look, I grew up with the same mindset as you did, that one should, in fact, even more extensively, one should only worry about fellow Jews own and also worry about others.

And there was great wisdom in the American Jewish strategy of taking one's place in the American mainstream. And that's what enabled not only the ability of Jews to enter into American society and be accepted by American society, but also to create alliances that did benefit Jewish causes and especially Israel. The fact that American Jews were so integrated into the general society, this is something Israelis don't understand. You know, they mock American Jewish assimilation, but it's precisely the fact that American Jews are so assimilated that has allowed the American Jewish community to be such an effective advocate for Israel. Now, if there is anywhere where American Jews were embraced most warmly, it was in academia. And that began in the 1960s and especially the 1970s. I went to Northwestern in the 1970s, which until the 1960s had a Jewish quota. And in my class in journalism school, there were probably 40% Jews. And something opened up in our generation, Dan,

that academia became the entry point of American Jews into full acceptance in America. I think that what's so traumatic today for American Jews is that the pushback, the repudiation of Jewish acceptance in America is now happening in academia. You're talking about all the buildings that Jews donated. So, you know, there was this incident in George Washington University the other day where these Islamist slogans, glory to our martyrs from the river to the sea, were projected on the Gelman Library, on the facade of the Gelman Library. And I looked up the Gelman Library. I wanted to know the name of the couple, the full name. And it was something like the Harry and Estelle Gelman Library. Now, there's a whole story. There's an American Jewish tale, a very moving story in that name. These were people, these were children, most likely children of immigrant parents, probably not college educated themselves, but did very well

in real estate or the schmata business. And imagine how proud they were to have their names, the Gelman Library. And now here we are two generations later with anti-Semitic slogans being projected on the facade of the Gelman Library. That for me was the metaphor of this moment. Do you think the administration's care of these university institutions? And I know we don't want to generalize, but I wonder how much they actually care. I spoke at a university, I will not mention the name, where I felt a great deal of of eagerness to have someone like me on campus. And at first I was flattered. And then I realized what was really going on was that this university had a particular Jewish problem.

And I didn't know that before I got there. And I was a kind of fig leaf. And now, obviously, it varies from campus to campus. I've spoken on some campuses where I felt the atmosphere was appalling and other campuses where I felt the old sense of welcome and embrace for Jewish sensibilities. This is an extraordinary moment for academia, for American Jews. And you mentioned earlier the growing phenomenon of Jewish donors rescinding their support for universities. And what I love about that is how in your face it is. You say that we have too much power, you progressives. Well, actually, we do have power, and we're going to use it to push back against you. Now, two or three generations ago, American Jews might not have responded in that way. So I think we need to pause for a moment and give American Jews a pat on the back, some American Jews, in any case. And I think this is an extraordinary moment, a watershed for American Jews. of the progressives, which is our generation's equivalent of repudiate Judaism, convert to

Christianity, and we'll embrace you. Repudiate Zionism, convert to anti-Zionism, and you're in. But I think that this is a moment where we're going to see, and we are seeing already, a great wave of return, of tshuva, of return in the deepest sense to Jewish pride and a reassertion of the American Jewish backbone. i'll say i i agree with you and i'm hopeful for you but pulling back the money from these institutions is to me an important extremely important step but a small step the big step is now what do these jewish philanthropists do with the money they pulled back and i think it's time to think about the helen senor uhor model of her charity when she was making $28,000 a year, which is whatever you have, make sure the Jewish community is taken care of and that you're building the Jewish community. not institutions funded by Jews, but Jewish institutions in the United States have been chronically underfunded relative to the number of Jews that could be engaged and serviced. And I think because of this moment, you're going to see a large number of Jews thinking about wanting to build their lives around Jewish life, around Jewish communal life, around Jewish learning,

around Jewish institutions, around Jewish institutions, around Jewish identity in ways that we haven't seen in the last few decades. Those institutions will need money. Yeah, okay. My only caveat is don't become totally insular. The model is not the ultra-Orthodox community. American Jews need to maintain intimate relations with their genuine allies, and there are lots of allies, lots of Americans who love Jews, literally and figuratively. And so that's something that we really need to— But I think that's different. I think that's different, though. I think you're right, and I think you're right. The American Jews should stay engaged with their natural allies.

But I think some of the institutions they were investing in, they just kind of regarded as Switzerland. No, no, this is— And it's not—these institutions are not Switzerland. Yeah, yeah, that's right. This is a moment of readjusting, readjusting priorities. And yeah, for sure. The next couple months are going to be really hard and beyond. They'll be hard in Gaza for Israel. They'll be hard if Israel decides to do something up north

or if Israel's situation on its northern border, you know, chooses—Israel's situation chooses its own timing, and Israel has to respond to Hezbollah. God knows what Israel has to deal with with Iran directly. Israel's being counseled now in its operations in Gaza and elsewhere to tone it down, to rein it in. And Israel, I think, needs to, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is reestablishing deterrence, has to win, has to demonstrate that if someone attempts to do this, Israel comes back, and it comes back hard. And in this case, hard means wiping out Hamas. Does Israel gain anything from its critics by cutting corners in its response? Will people say, well, Israel could have responded harder, but it responded hard minus, you know, it didn't go full throttle. So, so we'll give them a pass.

Look, I think that there, there is genuine concern among our friends, real friends, that we don't dig ourselves into a moral catastrophe. And I, I, I share that, but the advice to pull our punches is misplaced. It's not taking into account the enormity of the defeat that was inflicted on us. The fact that the greatest defeat—I think this is the greatest defeat we've ever suffered—was inflicted on Israel by its weakest enemy, that requires a response that is absolutely disproportionate. When our critics say that the response is not proportionate, that's the point.

Can you elaborate on that? When you say that, what do you mean by that's the point? Because I think this is a very key point you're making, and I want to put it on the side of it. If Never Again has any teeth to it, it's in the ability to destroy those who have already inflicted a kind of a mini-genocide on the Jewish people. That's what October 7th was. And it was a kind of a pre-enactment of Hamas's genocidal vision. The destruction of Hamas is a prerequisite for restoring our deterrence.

And, you know, when I read some of the columns written really by friends who truly have Israel's interest at heart, I don't see a credible alternative being offered. Given the enormity of Hamas's victory, how do you restore deterrence without actually destroying Hamas? What should have Israel learned pre-October 7th? What should have Israel learned with its history of peace processing from, call it, 1993 through 2000, through the disengagement from Gaza, through Olmert's efforts during his premiership, I think it was in 2008, through each of these phases? Well, maybe for our listeners who don't know the whole history, could you just provide a very brief history of what was happening

in terms of the Palestinian response to that general period? And should the writing have been on the wall, I guess I'm asking? Well, I'll frame my answer personally because every Israeli has a personal critique of the peace process over the years. My formative experience in relation to the conflict was serving as a soldier in the Gaza refugee camps in the late 1980s, the period we

call the First Intifada. And I came out of that experience believing that Israel needs to try to end the occupation. And so initially I supported Yitzhak Rabin when he launched the Oslo peace process with Arafat. Very quickly, I came to the conclusion, and most Israelis who supported Oslo came to a similar conclusion, that we'd been played for fools, that there was no peace process with Arafat. It was a one-way process. And when the Second Intifada officially ended the Oslo process, the Second Intifada was the period of the five years of suicide bombings in the early 2000s. That for me was the confirmation that there was really no chance of negotiating an agreement. And I held that position for many years. I began to not change my skepticism toward the Palestinian national movement in all of its forms, both the Fatah Palestinian Authority and Hamas.

But I began to feel that Israel needs to place a credible peace offer on the table and place the onus on the Palestinian leadership to reject a peace offer. And I still believe that. And this last year of Israel's most right-wing government ever only confirmed for me the necessity of being proactive on the negotiations front. Do I believe that if we had a left-wing government that we would be able to reach an agreement with the Palestinians? Absolutely not. If you ask me what I think we need to do on the Palestinian front, I'll give you the same answer today that I've been saying over the last few years, which is, on the one hand, for Israel's existential need, we have to extricate ourselves from the occupation, from ruling over another people. We need a two-state solution, and yet a two-state solution is also an existential

threat for Israel. And that's the Israeli dilemma. That's been our dilemma from the beginning. A two-state solution is an existential need, and it's also an existential threat, which is another way of saying we must have a two-state solution, and we can't have a two-state solution and we can't have a two-state solution. That position puts me in the Israeli center. And I think a very large number of Israelis are there. I think, in fact, that what we're going to see in the next election is that a majority of Israelis are centrists. But where does that put us in a practical way? For me, what it means is don't do anything that would foreclose the long-term, and I'm

emphasizing long-term, possibility of a two-state solution. And that means settlement expansion in areas outside the settlement blocks that are close to the border. It means no annexation of any part of the territories. And at the same time, resisting any pressure for a two-state solution anytime soon, which would bring Gaza to the West Bank. And so for me, it's simply a pragmatic reading of what is in Israel's existential interest. We must have a Palestinian state, and we can have a Palestinian state. All right, Yossi, those are powerful words.

We must have a Palestinian state, and we cannot have a Palestinian state. That is like this impossible conundrum. As we say, welcome to Israel. Right. There we go. Some gallows humor. All right, Yossi, thank you, as always, for illuminating for me and for for my listeners and i'll check back in with you soon thanks for having me dad that's our show for today to keep up with yossi klein

halevi you can track him down on x at y the letter Klein-Levy, and you can also find his work at hartman.org. Finally, please remember to pre-order The Genius of Israel. I think it'll help inform your thinking in this moment. It'll give you a dose of, hopefully, optimism and inspiration in what is otherwise a very dark period. Call Me Back is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.