Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Can we be optimistic about Israel? With Yossi Klein Halevi

Episode Date: September 11, 2023

Today is a special episode in which I preview some of the questions we try to answer in our new book, The Genius of Israel: The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent World.  Saul Singer and I collaborated on Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle. Our new book will be released this Fall, but you can pre-order it 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=8-1ORwww.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-genius-of-israel-dan-senor/1143499668Our 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.

I don't believe that any democracy could have survived as such in conditions that Israel has had to cope with from day one of our existence. We were created in war and we've never known a real day of peace since. And so our reality is a constant balancing act between struggles for security and for democratic norms. And sometimes we get it right and sometimes we get it wrong. But even when we get it wrong, those fault lines are instructive because they tell us what the pressure points are for democracy. How much can democracy take before it starts to crack? It's all part of this extraordinary experiment

of Israeli democracy. Today, something a little different. I've long been a chronicler of Israel's innovation economy going back to 2009 when Saul Singer and I released our book, Startup Nation. Since that time, Saul and I have watched in awe as the startup nation has flourished, as Israel's innovation economy grew and expanded into different sectors, as more and more multinationals from around the world set up operations in Israel. It's about three times and more multinationals from around the world set up operations in Israel. It's about three times as many multinationals from around the world in Israel today than when we released our book back in 2009. And as Israel normalized diplomatic and therefore economic relations with surprising regions around the world, especially Arab

countries in its own neighborhood. But today I want to talk about a different book we've been writing. It's a story that Sal and I think is as important as the Startup Nation story, maybe even more so. Our new book is focused on an aspect of Israel that is not just critical to understanding Israel's dynamism, but perhaps its greatest innovation, its resilience, the resilience of Israeli society. Now, you may have two reactions to what I'm saying here. First, what about Israel's economy? We don't get a book about that. We want an update. We want a sequel, if you will, to Startup Nation. Fear not, our new book does have a chapter dedicated to what is happening right now in Israel's economy. Teaser, we explain why we and others

we interview from inside Israel and from around the world believe Israel is going to be one of a handful of global nerve centers for the fastest growing and most transformative technology of our time. But the second and more important question you may be asking is, what? You wrote a book about Israeli society when everything we see in the news is that Israel is fractured, coming apart at the seams? That's right. This is what our book is about. It's called The Genius of Israel, The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent World. It will be published this fall, but you can pre-order it now. We chose every word in that title carefully. Israel's resilience in the face of deep divisions in its society.

This is not new. Israel is divided today. Israel has been divided in the past. Indeed, in our book, we take readers through Israel's history, and we found that in almost every decade, decade and a half, there was a societal or security crisis that seemed to tear the country apart. And yet, each time, just when Israel was on the edge, the country seemed to bounce back. It is resilient. But why? How is it so resilient? These are some of the questions we try to answer in our new book. We describe what we call Israel's societal shock absorbers. I don't have time to discuss them all today, but I promise the book has all the details. Here's just a sampling of a few statistics that perplexed us and actually inspired us to write

this book. Israelis have a lot of stress, that is no surprise, but Israelis are also living longer and healthier lives than almost anyone else around the world. According to the WHO, life expectancy in Israel is about 83 years old, placing it among the top 10 highest life expectancies anywhere. Higher than France, Sweden, the UK, Canada, New Zealand, Germany, Denmark. I can go on. More than four years higher than the United States. And 10 years higher than wealthy countries in its own region like Saudi Arabia. What are Israelis doing to live longer and healthier

lives in the face of enormous internal and external stress? Second, Israelis are not just living longer, but they have something that is increasingly rare in the world, a young population. Israel's median age is 29, while the U.S. median age is 38, almost a decade older, and Europe's is over 44. We show in our book how a young population helps explain why some countries are global innovation leaders and others are not. Third, Israel's population is not just younger, but it's also growing. While other countries are in demographic decline, some parts of the world, it's a real demographic downward spiral. Israelis are an outlier in that they are having a lot of children. And to be clear, not just religious Israelis. Secular Israelis, too, are having three, four, and in some cases, five children.

That keeps their population young and growing, a model that is the envy of most countries around the world. Fourth, tragically, most of the West is suffering from staggering rates of deaths of despair, which are deaths as a result of drug abuse, alcohol abuse, suicide. Israel has the lowest number of deaths of despair in the OECD. Same with loneliness. While reports of a loneliness epidemic are pervasive in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere around the world, the loneliness rate in Israel has been plummeting for the past couple decades. Why? Also, Israel's teen suicide rate and teen mental health crisis numbers are among the lowest in the world. Do Israeli teens experience less stress than their peers elsewhere? Some of the experts we interview

in our book argue the opposite. Israeli teens are under even more stress. So what's going on here? Again, in Israel, all these trends are moving in a different direction. Israelis are living longer, having more and more children, so the population is growing and remaining young and innovative. Very few deaths of despair or teen suicides. No loneliness epidemic. But you might say, Israel is politically polarized. We're seeing that play out every day. Like in much of

the West, Israel is not immune to political polarization. But Saul and I, having gone on this discovery process, believe that Israel will not unravel. Why? This is what we write about in our book. This is what we hope other countries that don't have Israel's societal shock absorbers might learn from our book about things they can do to inject vitality into the civic life of their own countries. We interviewed a lot of people for our book, and over the next few weeks, I'll be from time to time inviting some of them onto this podcast. Mostly, I just wanted to check in with them on whether they are optimistic or pessimistic about Israel's future. Today, we have Yossi Klein-Halevi.

Yossi and I, to be clear, we don't agree on everything, which makes his voice in this conversation and in our book all the more important. Before we get into my conversation with Yossi, I do want to encourage all of you to pre-order a copy of our book. It's available everywhere books are sold, and Saul and I would be grateful for your support, especially now, just after you listen to this conversation. It would be great. Now on to our conversation. Yossi is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. Together with Imam Abdullah and Tepli of Duke University, Yossi 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. He's written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Times of Israel. Yossi Klein-Halevi, Israeli optimist or pessimist? This is Call Me Back. And I am pleased to welcome my longtime friend. I don't say old friend because people then think I'm making a judgment about age. So I say my longtime friend, Yossi Klein-Halevi, in person. We are together in person. Now, I typically see you, Yossi, in Jerusalem.

Here we are in Hell's Kitchen in Manhattan. And I was thrilled that we had the opportunity to get together like this and have a conversation. So thanks for being here. I'm thrilled too, Dan. And I don't mind old friend. It's becoming more appropriate by the day. Fair enough. I will give that option to all my kids, that they can go with longtime friend or old friend. I suspect you may be one of the only that choose. I'm trying to own it.

Yeah, own it. Exactly. Lean in. Lean into it. Yossi, I've known you a long time. I'm a big fan of your work, of your books. Thank you. And that's mutual. And we're going to post links to your books and your pieces, a couple of which we'll talk about today. We'll post them in the show notes. But before we get started, I just a little bit of your personal journey, because as I mentioned in the introduction,

a big focus of the book that Saul and I are working on now that'll be out soon is on the societal health in Israel throughout Israel's history. We'll get to what's going on in Israel now a little later, but the societal health in Israel, which is a youthful country, a country that is young and growing at not just among the ultra-Orthodox, but also among secular Jews living in Israel. It is a country that is not dealing with crises mental health crisis, which the CDC and other public health organizations have been weighing in on and warning about that's going on, teen suicide crisis in the United States, deaths of despair. Israel's not experiencing those things. And there seems to be, based on our research for this book, something that has been going on in Israel over the last number of decades that has allowed Israel to flourish and to avoid, elude those trends. And I guess my question is, how did you wind up in Israel? How did you make the decision to move to Israel? And is the vibrancy of the data that I'm citing,

that we cite in our book, part of the story of what drew you there? So, I'll preface the personal remarks by saying that it's a mistake to attribute Israel's existence and legitimacy to the Holocaust. And I need to say that because my own personal story is inseparable from the link between the Holocaust and Israel. home in Brooklyn, in Borough Park, in the early 60s, acutely aware of the uniqueness of my generation's moment in Jewish history, aware that we were the first generation after, the first generation after the apocalypse and the first generation after the redemption. And this was a sensibility that my father inculcated in me. And it was reinforced by my first trip to Israel, which happened to be the summer of 1967. Oh, wow.

The magical summer. I was 14. When in that summer? At the beginning. Three weeks that summer? At the beginning. Three weeks after the end of the war. So for our listeners, the Six-Day War that Yossi is alluding to was in June of 1967. So you showed up in Israel. When Israel was really, after that war, experiencing a transformation, a transformation not only how it was perceived in the world, but how Israelis perceived themselves. Now, you know, in the way that the Jewish people remembers that summer was it was the

moment of ecstasy, even the moment of losing our heads. I remember it a little bit differently, that Israelis were stunned by what they had just done. And I remember a country that was suspended in the mythic and didn't quite understand how did we get from the existential threat that the whole Jewish people felt in May 1967, the weeks before the war, to those six extraordinary days. And there was this sense of having entered mythic history. And I knew that I had to be in Israel because it was possible that here you had Jews for thousands of years dreaming of this moment, and it was my moment. They were dreaming of me. And how could I not be here? Now, of course, Israel did a bit of a number on me

because the summer of 67 did not last. And when I say the sense of the mythic, there was this experience of family. Everyone was family. I remember walking on roads, country roads up in the Galilee, and cars would stop and ask, do you need a lift somewhere? Now, that has never happened since, but it did happen in the summer of 67. And I told my father, you go home. I'm staying here for high school. I had just graduated eighth grade. I said, you know, it'll work out. So your family returned to New York and...

With me. Yeah. No, he didn't go for it. No, he didn't go for it. No, he didn't go for it. But it was really indicative of the sense of being totally swept up in an event that was much greater than yourself. And if I had to sum up the Israeli experience, it's that. One of the great and emblematic Israeli songs was by the iconic singer, Arek Einstein, and it's called Shir HaKaravan, the caravan song. And it's about Jewish history culminating in the return to the land. And he has a line there saying, this is the great adventure of our lives. Now, I love that line because what he's touching on there is that what makes Israel work

is this shared sense that we're privileged to be part of something that's actually bigger than us. And this is, and to think, you know, in the West today, and you write about this beautifully in your new book, the West has lost that sense of the majestic collective. We still have that. And I hesitate to speak in past tense. I think we still have that, but maybe we'll get into it a little later.

I think that it's under tremendous strain. But certainly the Israel that I fell in love with and joined had that. Now, Dan, there's one more complication here personally, which is I encountered Israel at the peak moment of that sense of the familial. But I actually made aliyah. I became an Israeli at the low point of national unity, the summer of 1982, which was the beginning of the first Lebanon war, when Israel was tearing itself apart over war. War had always united us, and now for the first time, war was dividing us. And I joined a society that was essentially dysfunctional. And so my Israeliness

exists between these two polar opposites of euphoric unity and dysfunctional schism. And my work as an Israeli, my work as a writer, as a lecturer, has really been trying to reach a balance. And how do we recapture something of that sense of family of 67, which we seem to lose in 82. And for these last 40 years, my commitment has been to try to understand all parts of Israeli society and write with empathy for the different warring camps, political, religious, social.

So just on that theme earlier, you were part of something. You could shape something. You were part of something bigger than yourself. In our book, and I won't be quoting from the book, but you just mentioned this and I just have to read it. We have a chapter in our book called Touching History, and we quote Mika Goodman, our mutual friend, Mika, who takes us on a hike. Saul and I go to interview Mika. We show up at his door. We assume we're going to sit down with our tape, record it and all the rest. He goes, no, no, no. He says, we're going for a hike. So the interview, the audio interview is quite funny because we're trying to catch our breath while

we're trying to conduct this conversation and make out the quotes. But here's what he said, and I'll quote Mika here. He says, when you live in Israel, you feel like something big is happening all the time. Here, every Israeli feels like history is happening. And we can touch it, like we can push it a bit. Meaning comes from two aspects. One, you feel there's something bigger than you. And two, you feel you have a role in the thing, in that thing that's bigger than you. Big countries like America or China have really big stories. But they are too big to push. Small countries have really small stories.

So, and he shrugs, so what? Like they're too small to matter. He says, Israel is a small country with a big story. That's a great way to put it. So its story is big enough to give you meaning and small enough for you to have influence on it. That's wonderful, Dan. But what happens when Israel experiences

an excess of the big story? And I think we're in a moment of that now. So I want to come to that. But before we get to that, so you move to Israel and you sort of – you get moved by Israel or inspired by Israel at this high point post-67. I'm reminded, again, it's not only how Israelis felt about Israel, it was about the world looked at Israel. You know, there's a famous line by General Westmoreland, the commander of the war in Vietnam, who when he met with Moshe Dayan said, if Israel had fought the Vietnam War, it too would have been a six-day war.

You know, there was this sense that Israel was just, you know, on the map. And I think so being in Israel, you felt it. And I just think you were also aware that the world was looking at Israel. Again, we talk about just the dynamism and the youthfulness of Israeli society. This is a youth-oriented culture. We write about, you know about this notion that children in Israel have hevra. They have their brotherhood and sisterhood. There's a community of friendships from the youth movements through the army and beyond that stay with them for life.

You're quoted extensively in our book where you talk about the second intifada and how your – the ages your children were at at that time. And they had lost friends and they were working it out with each other, not with therapists, not with family, with each other. Certainly not with parents. Not with parents. And it's like a metaphor for – I mean, again, we'll talk about the current moment. But even when you watch this protest movement now, I do believe so much of the vibrancy and intensity of it comes from an energized young population. If you look at other countries in the world where there's frustrations with the political direction of the country, and I know the Israeli protest movement tends to compare what's going on in Israel to what Orban did in Hungary and in some cases what's happened in Turkey. And I don't want to start getting into these comparisons. shoulders and saying, you know, where there's not this youthful dynamism, this sense of that youth are empowered to shape the future. And you see that at the very local level,

you see at the communal level, and you see at the national level. Can you talk about your experience with that? Somebody wrote to me from Poland recently and said what you're doing with your weekly demonstrations isn't only for you it's for all of us who are fighting potential dictatorship and you're the frontline we gave up too quickly and when we see you out there week after week with thousands of Israeli flags. We just want to weep. We meaning the person watching from abroad? Yes. And there really is this sense that many of us have

that we are going to create a precedent. We are creating a precedent in Israel where we will be the first country in this period that is going to successfully push back an anti-democratic power grab. And I have no doubt- Peacefully. Peacefully. And I have no doubt that we're going to win. Peacefully. And I mean, again, here we are getting into it but we are peacefully and i must say i

have you know i have some sympathies for some aspects of the protest movement i disagree with some of the tactics but what i've always been moved by is the celebration of israel the celebration of zionism the celebration of the country's history, which you do not see in political protest movements, certainly not in the United States. This sense of, you know, as Mika Goodman say, you know, in the summer of 2020, where there's burning of American flags and an indictment of the founding impulses and the founding myth of the United States, the origin story of the United States. It's like an indictment of it. It's a rejection of it. And this is not a rejection of it. No, no. It's more an indictment of it. It's a rejection of it. And this is not a rejection. No, no. It's more than that, Dan. Our demonstrations are the antithesis of that sensibility. What we are upholding is the founding myth of the state. We are upholding

the Zionist ethos and accusing this government of betraying Zionism. So it's a celebration in that sense. Oh, it is a weekly celebration. It's an angry celebration. But I come away from those demonstrations feeling a sense of spiritual uplift and hope in the future of the country. You're surrounded by thousands of people

who you know are sharing the same trajectory as you are. They're going through sleeplessness from anxiety for the future of the country. They will do anything short of violence to try to stop this from happening. And they're doing it for the same reason that they show up for every one of Israel's wars. And one of the most moving groups is the Brothers in Arms. They're one of the leaders of the protest movement. And you see these old guys showing up with their t-shirts, veterans of the Yom Kippur War. That's one of the slogans. And you know that, and they say so, is that for them, they haven't felt this way about protecting the country since those first terrible days of Yom Kippur when they knew that there was no one to depend on but them. And that's the feeling we have now. But then back to this point about the youthfulness of the society. Because I think when I explain this to people here, they have a

hard time getting their head around that, that Israel's median, the median age of the Israeli population is about 10 years younger than most countries in the OECD, most countries in Europe, something approaching that number, that difference between Israel and the United States. That most Israelis, you know, if the replacement rate is 2.1 for every woman to have your country grow, most of the world is falling below that number. Israel is way above it. And again, it's not just ultra-Orthodox Jews, it's secular Jews who are having three, four, and five children. So I have friends of mine who are

stars in Israeli television. They have television shows on Netflix, and they're in their 40s, and they have four children. And I ask them, I say, like Lior Raz, the co-creator of Fauda, when he had his fourth kid in the middle of COVID, I said to him, how many of your peers in Hollywood, right, who have your demographic, right, we have a chapter in the book, we're not going to get into this conversation, we have a chapter in the book on Israeli television and its role in Israel and its role now globally. I said, how many of your peers in Hollywood, secular, Tel Aviv, I mean, this is his life, secular, Tel Aviv, big deal, this is his life. Secular, Tel Aviv, big deal in the Israeli and global creative art scenes, winning awards, but choose to have in your 40s, four children.

And I'd say, choose to have four children and proudly served in the army, so patriotic. The answer is precisely zero. Right. So what is it about the country where people are having so many children? Because it really does affect the composition and the feeling of the place. Right. Look, there is, and I want to believe that there still will be, a deep faith in the future. And I saw this with my daughter when she went into first grade, when the massive Russian immigration began in 1990, and suddenly the classes went from 30 kids to 45 kids. And just for people to understand, that meant, I mean, during that period, during

that decade, Israel increased its population by about a fifth. Right. Just by bringing in all these people from the former Soviet Union. What I found so moving is that all of her Russian friends were only children when they came because the Soviet Union was a failing society. And the expression of that was that people had no faith in the future. You had one symbolic child. After three or four years in the country, Moria's friends started to become older children, older siblings. And that was a pattern that was universal among Russian

immigrants. They suddenly saw that they were part of a society that believed in the future. And they entrusted the second or even in some cases a third child to that Israeli optimism. And for me, that was really one of the most telling moments in their transition from immigrant to Israeli, was the second child. Right, because you change the environment. That's right. And their attitude about bringing people into the world changes. Exactly. And then how does that, you having watched your own children grow up and the part you and I talk about, Saul and I interviewed you about for our book, where you talk about just the experience of watching what I alluded to before, watching your kids experience the second intifada, when there was just this unbelievable wave, this campaign of suicide bombings in major cities in

Israel, buses blowing up, people of all ages being killed on buses and blown up pizza restaurants and discotheques. Can you talk about how your kids were experiencing that at that time? Look, what changed for Israelis in the Second Intifada is that the home front became the actual front. Now, until then, we lived with the illusion that there was this physical separation between the home front and the actual front. Now, of course, the distance, the physical difference between the home front and the

battleground was always very small. And after we withdrew from the Sinai Desert in 1982, it became virtually overlapping. But there still was this pretense of the army is fighting at the front and we're at the home front. The Second Intifada changed the ground rules. And those who experienced the Second Intifada most intensely were the kids. They were on buses. They went on public transportation. They went downtown on Saturday nights. They went to clubs. And those were the targets. And I fought with my kids. I tried to prevent them from leaving the house on a Saturday. How old were they at the time? Well, three kids.

Our youngest was two, who also experienced a suicide bombing. He was close to it. He wasn't physically there, but it was about a block away, and he heard it. At what age? He was about two. At that time? Yeah, and his caretaker went into hysterics. And he remembers this.

He remembers. This is a seminal memory for him. Wow. And our two older kids were teenagers. They were in high school. And my wife said to me, finally, that if you're not going to let them pretend to be normal teenagers, then we have to leave this country. We can't stay. And so it's your choice. And I was, you know, in Israel, we don't use the term Jewish mother. We say ima polania, a Polish mother. We're meeting a Polish Jewish mother. So I was the Polish mother in our family.

I was the nervous, overprotective one. And I realized that Sarah was right. And if we're not going to let them be with their friends and go downtown and experience teenhood, then we can't stay. And that was a seminal moment for me in my evolution as an Israeli, becoming an Israeli parent in the full sense of the word and owning that. So I stepped back and said, okay.

And as a result of that, they were in close proximity to any number of suicide bombings. And they lost friends. They had friends wounded. One friend lost an eye. And this was their teenhood. And I still don't know what it was like. They didn't confide in me and I didn't ask because I saw them with their friends and I knew that that was their surrogate family. And that's where it played out. The Second Intifada... And those relationships, those relationships, that family, that surrogate family, the Hever, that family dynamic has endured through... Oh, it began in kindergarten, and it has endured to this day. And they're adults now. They're adults. Those are still their closest friends. There was the army.

There was this. That's the trajectory. Yeah. But there's something, Dan, that I think is really, it is a missing piece here that needs to be said. And I want to make the connection

between the guys in their Yom Kippur t-shirts and our kids. And that is that the generation gap in Israel is much smaller than in other countries, certainly than in the West. And the reason for that is that there is a continuity of experience. We experienced the army, our kids experienced the army. It gives us a shared language. And we listen to the same music. And I remember at one point when my son became interested in hip hop, Israeli hip hop. And I felt, and Israeli music is very important to me as it is to most Israelis. It is the essential art form. It is the great unifier, cultural unifier.

And learning Israeli music, no less than learning Hebrew, was my ticket into Israeliness. And so my son becomes interested sometime around age 12 in hip hop. And I said, okay, introduce me to it. And he said, there's this little store in the Dizengoff Mall in Tel Aviv, which is a studio, and they sell CDs. That's where they sell the avant-garde CDs. And he said, would you take me there? So we went. And little store, I mean, we're sitting in a studio here. It was probably smaller than this studio. And that was a combination studio store. And they had Russian immigrant hip-hop, Ethiopian hip-hop, Arab protest, Arab-Israeli hip-hop. And we bought the CDs. And I didn't understand all of it. And he kind of taught me.

And that's very typical, you know, Israel is an immigrant society where the kids teach the parents. And the music though that I loved, I taught them. And that's their music too. Mayor Ariel is their music. And Dag Nachash, the great Israeli hip hop band, became my music. So there's this constant back and forth across the generations of creating Israeliness. And so it's not only the youthfulness of Israeli society, it's the fact that people of my generation don't feel old. And young Israelis don't necessarily feel young. So we have a chapter in the book called Thanksgiving Every Week where we talk about the role that Shabbat plays in Israeli society. The reason Saul and I got so fixated on this topic, and you're touching on it now,

is one of the many problems in American society is we've lost any real sense of shared experience, shared not only with our families and communities, but a shared experience that our families and communities are having while families across the country are experiencing that same experience in their own families at the same time. So I say to American friends all the time, tell me an experience you celebrate on a regular basis with your family that often usually involves multiple generations in your family that you know that the overwhelming majority of families in the United States, no matter where they are across the country, across religious divides, across political divides, across ideological divides.

Tell me an experience that's regular, a ritual. And they always cite two. They really cite one. And then I push them. Well, we'll get to sports in a second. They always start with Thanksgiving, which is true. You go by most American homes. During Thanksgiving, you see families gathering.

They travel from across the country to get together, multiple generations. Most, really the overwhelming majority of Americans, if you look at the data, and you can pick it up anecdotally when you talk to people who experience this, I say, okay, that's good. Now tell me one more. And that's when they get stuck. And then they always say, literally, they always say, this is like as predictive as like night follows day, the Super Bowl. That's a national experience where they're usually with family or family and friends, which is both interesting, a little endearing, and quite sad. And the reason it's quite sad is we just basically came up with one event. And then when you push them- One event that's annual. That's annual. Right. Right, right, right. And when you push them, they come up with one event. And then when you push them... One event that's annual.

That's annual, right. Right, right, right. And when you push them, they come up at the second. Now, even if you strip away all the Jewish holidays, Sukkot, Shavuot, Pesach, the high holidays, just Shabbat every week, can you describe... And we have a chapter on what happens on Shabbat in Israel.

And while Shabbat in many ways speaks to the civil religion of Israel, not the religious religion of Israel, can you describe what happens on Shabbat, Friday nights, let's call it Friday nights in Israel on a regular basis through most parts of the country? There's a wide range of ritual observance from complete Orthodox observance to none. But the gathering itself is a ritual. And whether it is done intentionally as a religious experience, it has a consistency and a kind of a transcendence that is religious, even if it has nothing to do explicitly with religion. And that's part of the blurring of the mythic and the mundane in Israel. And I always feel that in Israel, we routinely scandalize the sacred through our debased religious politics. And we sanctify the secular through these civic religious moments. There really is this fascinating blur between the religious and the secular, which goes a long way to explaining the basic health of Israeli society. And again, at least until this moment where we're seeing a breakdown

of that blurring and it's becoming much more rigid. But the Shabbat, the Friday night experience is the ultimate moment of that blurring. And so the way, and everybody will answer that question differently of what is your Friday night like? My Friday night is two traditionally minded parents with three kids who are generally secular, one leaning toward tradition. It's all so fluid that I don't even want to categorize. And that's part of the beauty of the Friday night as well. I just never know which of my kids are going to be present, and I don't mean physically, but emotionally present for Shabbat. Or which will treat it as kind of an elaborate joke and then may take it seriously again. And so there's this fluidity that can be a little maddening. And when our

kids were growing up and there was this irreverence, I didn't necessarily take that as well as I do now. But everyone creates their own emotional ground rules of what this thing looks like. Yeah. But even when it's tense, and I don't want to idealize it because it's often tense, the tensions of identity play out around the Shabbat table, religious, cultural, certainly political. Yeah. That's healthy because there's a place. It creates a place for it.

Yes, yes. It's healthy. I am hearing more and more stories in the last months where it's not healthy. Shmuel Rosner and Camille Fuchs have this book called Israeli Judaism. And they see something like, according to their data, over 70 percent of Israelis, it's an astonishingly high number, over 70 percent of Israelis gather with family every Friday night for Shabbat. Now, again, the ultra-Orthodox population is, depending on how you count it, 10 to 14% of the population. You add in national religious. So you quickly realize that 70% doesn't consist of very religiously active, traditionally observant believers. It's secular Israelis that are also on this schedule. Laurie Santos, who's a Yale University professor, has one of the most

popular podcasts on happiness called The Happiness Lab, which we'll put in our show notes. I interviewed her and she said, religious people tend to be happier people. She said, all the data shows that people who lead religious lives are happier. They lead healthier lives, not just physically. So I said to her, oh, but that's interesting because a lot of people struggle with religion and religious belief and with God. And she says, no, no, no, no. I'm not talking about believers. You don't have to believe.

You can live the life without being a believer. You can struggle with your views on spirituality and religion. But you can lead. It's the lifestyle that stimulates this sense of happiness and meaning. And I think that's some of what you have going on in Israel. All right. Dad, I don't want to rain on the party. All right. But to be truthful to this moment, and everything you're saying is right. And I hope along with you that this is going to endure. It's going to – that we'll get through this moment. But what's starting to happen now is that the blurring of the divide between religious and secular, which we've seen emerge most powerfully in Israeli popular music in recent years, where God has become a major protagonist of Israeli rock music. But

interestingly, it's not the Israeli version of Christian rock. It's not this outburst of faith. Some of it is, but much of it is about struggle with faith, which is so Jewish. And it's so powerful. And it speaks to secular and religious in that way. You know, well, there's this great song by Ehud Banai, which compares prayer to speaking into a telephone that's gone dead. Hello, are you there? Is anybody listening? Am I speaking to myself? Is it something I did? Can I do something to get you back on the line?

Ishai Rebo, the very popular, what would you call him, rock? Yeah, yeah. Modern rock. And musician of the New York Times, Patrick Kingsley from the New York Times did a very interesting profile on him. He's giving these concerts, his lyrics, you know, quote from the Psalms. And yet he's and there's these kids in the audience with tattoos and earrings. And they're they're singing along to, you know, songs that are quoting scripture.

It's like, what is this? I would recommend personally Hanan Ben-Ari, who is even more popular across the board. A religious guy, grew up on a settlement. But has built an audience with people who have lived the... Absolutely. Secular, modern, right. There is no cultural definition of his audience. And it's Israeli.

And he may well be the most popular singer in Israel today. Certainly, I think,urgence of the old Israeli militant secularism of the 1950s and 60s, which was disappearing. In this much more fuzzy Israeli consensus. And I understand why that's happening. Look, I'm a religious Jew, and I feel more and more that the kippah that I wear is sitting heavy on my head. I look at the religious community in Israel today, and with some very notable exceptions, I'm ashamed. And I'll sum it up in one line. When Baruch Goldstein massacred 29 Palestinians in the cave of Machpelah in Hebron in 1994, there was virtually wall-to-wall outrage throughout

Israeli society, including, I would even say especially, the Orthodox community. If Goldstein were to do his massacre today, what you would hear instead is justification, qualification. There would still be some condemnation, but something has changed. And as a result of that, you are seeing tremendous alienation among secular Israelis who want nothing to do with religion anymore. That's starting to grow. But nothing to do with religion or nothing to do with that experience we just described on a Friday night with their family. It's different. It's different, but I would guess that certain Tel Aviv families, I'm using Tel Aviv generically

now, might be less inclined to do some symbolic ritual. You still gather Friday night, absolutely. But there's such profound anger against religion. And as a religious Jew, I understand it and to some extent share it. I want to quote from – we quote in our book from this guy, Tim Urban, who's an author and illustrator. And he wrote this book called What's Our Problem, a self-help book for societies. And he says, during my first, I'm quoting here, during my first 18 years, he's an American, during my first 18 years, I spent some time with my parents during at least 90% of my days. But since heading off to college and then later moving out of Boston, I've probably seen them an average of only five times a year each for an average of maybe two days each time, 10 days a year, about 3% of the days I spent with them each year of my childhood.

That still doesn't happen in Israel where kids go, they disappear, they don't see their parents, they don't see their grandparents. I think that is strong. There's no room. There's no room. You can't disappear. And I just want to, and then we'll get to the current moment. But I have to put a neon sign on something you said earlier, that you, as my old friend, you are an older man. We've got to be careful. It makes you feel young, this connection. Oh, absolutely. And, you know, we cite in the book a study from, I think it's the American Sociological Association, where the number of Americans who get old and they're asked, how many people under 35 have you spoken to this week?

The numbers are staggering. Oh, yeah. Now, that's totally different in Israel. Right. Totally. People go through their week leading these isolated lives and old people get older. Old people feel older. I remember Saul, you know his father, Max Singer, who's passed away, when Max first got sick and the doctor was meeting him and the doctor said to him, Saul remembers this, how old are you? However, he said how old he was. He was in his 70s or 80s. And he said, okay, how old do you? However, he said how old he was. He was in his 70s or 80s. And he said, okay, how old do you feel? And the age he gave that he felt was 10 years younger than he was.

Oh, absolutely. And I think Israelis, older Israelis, I say, my mother, she's in her mid 80s. She spends every Friday night with three generations at the Shabbat table, including my nieces and their friends who are just out of the army. And it keeps older people connected. Dan, a few weeks ago, there were demonstrations in nursing homes in solidarity with the democracy movement. And it was just this extraordinary moment of people being wheeled out. They stood in front of the building

with signs and giant Israeli flags. And that's the experience of feeling contemporaneous with whatever is happening in the society. I have a friend of mine who's 90 years old, living in an assisted living home. And sharp. One of Israel's great heroes, military heroes, Arik Achmon. We speak every Friday. We have our own, in Hebrew, it's called a parliament,

where the older people sit around and they analyze what's going on in the country. Usually you get together in a cafe. I reckon I have a parliament of two every Friday. Fortunately, you guys don't have to vote on issues. And the passion with which he analyzes what's happening, the way he takes this personally. And he says, look, there's nothing I can do about it now. He says, I'm sitting in the stands. Yeah.

But it's as if he's out on the streets every week. Right. There's no separation between the personal and the collective. And that gives you a tremendous sense of vitality. No separation between the personal and the collective. And that gives you a tremendous sense of vitality. You care passionately about something more than what your next meal is going to be. And so, yeah, that's endemic to the Israeli experience. And what I would say to connect what your book is dealing with, and as you know, I was privileged to read the manuscript. I think it's just a beautiful book, and I'm enormously grateful for it. But to connect that book to

this moment, what we're fighting for today in the streets is to keep the Israel that you describe in the book alive. And what I feel this government is threatening, leaving aside this judicial issue or that judicial issue, is the texture of Israeli life and the intangibles of Israeli life, which you've described so powerfully and have made them tangible. You know, we take it for granted. It's the oxygen that we breathe in Israel. And you read, you know, I had the experience of reading your book and saying, oh, so that's what's going on. Oh, yeah. You know, and you name it. And what I'm trying to say is that the significance, the historic significance of this moment is that we have a government that is an existential threat to that Israel. Okay. So I want to then let's go there. And I can't not say that.

No, I'm glad you're saying it and I want to, then let's go there. And I can't not say that. No, I'm glad you're saying it, and I want to go there. You gave the Baruch Goldstein experience, where the country was horrified, more or less universally horrified. The settlers' council vehemently denounced it. But let's talk about then the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. Benjamin Netanyahu is the leader of the opposition at the time. He's at the funeral. He goes to, we describe this image in our book, he goes to shake Leah Rabin, the new widow of the slain prime minister. He goes to shake her hand and she nods him, you know, she waves him off. She refuses to shake her hand. And that was symbolic of the sentiment at the time. The country was divided.

And there was this sense that even if Netanyahu and Likud and the right weren't responsible for the assassination of Rabin, they had created such division in society, political division and such polarization that the heat of the moment fomented an environment where something like this could happen. And there was a sense, I mean, I remember, I mean, you were living it. I was not there, but I remember following it closely and thinking, wow, will Israel come back from this? You talked about the Lebanon war where the country was so divided. You had soldiers coming back on Shabbat, coming back on weekends from fighting on the front lines, driving two or three hours south and taking off their uniforms and joining the protest. Protests

that got ugly and violent and an anti-government protester got killed in one of these protests by pro-government supporters. And you look at the debate. I mean, we chronicle the various events throughout Israeli history where you feel like the country is on the edge. Have we been there before? Yeah, of course we've been there before. One can go back to my mind, the most terrible moment in the history of Zionist schism was pre-state, 1944, the height of the Holocaust. Hungarian Jews are being deported to the camps in spring of summer of 1944. And what's happening in the Yishuv, in the Jewish community in the land of Israel, is that the Haganah and the Palmach, which were the left-wing militias, are kidnapping members of the Irgun, the right-wing underground,

and handing them over to the British. This is happening at the culminating moments of the Holocaust. It's a forgotten period. But for me, that is in some ways the worst moment. Look, in the Warsaw Ghetto, you had two rival Jewish undergrounds. We don't talk about it, but you had a left-wing underground and you had a right-wing.

And they were fighting next to each other, but there was no coordination between the two. So this goes very deep in us. Schism is our yetzir hara. It's our evil temptation. In some ways, it's our default position. And so, yes, we've been there before and the Rabin assassination, et cetera. But let's use the Rabin assassination as a template.

What happened in the weeks immediately after the assassination were spontaneous dialogue circles that were established all around the country. It was something so beautiful and so Israeli and hundreds of circles and settlers invited kibbutzniks for Shabbat. Kibbutzniks invited settlers. The Haredim got involved. There was this sense of horror. We're standing on the edge of the abyss. And that's not happening today. It may yet. We may—I think there is a hunger for it in large parts of Israel.

But it's not happening. And I think one of the reasons for why it's not happening is that we have a government that is actively encouraging the schism. We didn't have Netanyahu in 1996 as prime minister did not actively encourage schism. He realized the country had gone to the brink and he pulled back. He was a much more responsible leader. This version of Netanyahu is very different. And the people under Netanyahu listening to some of the other Likud ministers and MKs, to say nothing of the more extreme religious Zionism MKs, are actively feeding the schism. And that's something that, you know, at the height of the Oslo years, before the Rabin

assassination, I felt that Rabin and Paris were doing something similar. Not to this extent, but they were certainly insensitive to the trauma that half the country was going through. And using a narrow parliamentary majority. Absolutely. Absolutely. To jam through. And I felt I initially— Jam through their vision. Yes. Without building consensus. Absolutely. I initially supported Oslo along with a pretty strong majority of Israelis.

And I very quickly came to suspect that we had bet on the wrong horse and that there would not be peace with Arafat. This was a fatal illusion. And what traumatized me, and I was traumatized in those years by Oslo, was that the government was manipulating a very slender majority in order to impose a policy that half the country felt was an existential threat. And I had voted for Rabin in 1992, and I voted for Netanyahu in 1996, precisely because of that. And this is after the assassination. And so this, for me, is the right-wing equivalent of Oslo. But in some ways,

it's worse, because what this government is trying to do is not just impose a policy that half the country opposes, but it is trying to fundamentally rewrite the ground rules of Israeli identity. What do we mean by a Jewish state? What do we mean by a democratic state? There has been a consensus until now, which included the Likud until the last few years, that what we mean by democracy is not majoritarian rule, not winner-take-all, but a delicate dance between majority rights and minority rights. When we speak of liberal democracy in Israel, we don't mean liberal in a Western sense. We don't mean left-wing.

Menachem Begin was the quintessential Israeli liberal. A couple of weeks ago— That's going to be hard for people. Most people don't think of him that way. Well, a couple of weeks ago... That's going to be hard for people. Most people don't think of him that way. Well, a couple of weeks ago at one of our demonstrations, his son, Benny, spoke. And he said, there is no resemblance between this Likud party and my father's Likud. He said, my father's Likud was a liberal national party. Now, that sounds like an oxymoron to Americans, but in an Israeli context, it's totally understandable. And he said, this Likud

is a nationalist, far-right, anti-democratic party. He said, this Likud is the antithesis of my father's party. Benny Begin, who I know is not only the son of the former prime minister, he himself had served in Likud governments, including under Netanyahu. Absolutely. And so it's hard for people to realize that not only is this not the same Likud, it's not the same Netanyahu. Now I defended Netanyahu for years and valued him. I publicly supported him on the Iran deal. I thought he was heroic. Meaning coming to Washington, speaking before Congress? as that was for—there were consequences to the American-Israeli relationship, I felt Netanyahu

had to do everything possible to try to stop the Iran deal. And he was heroic. And I look at the Netanyahu today, who not coincidentally is on trial for three charges of corruption. That has changed everything. This Netanyahu bears no resemblance to the Netanyahu that I admired and defended. And this Netanyahu is destroying his legacy in every area, economic, security, the Iran deal. We're now, Iran is on the threshold. And at this moment, Netanyahu is imposing, initiating policies that threatens the cohesiveness of the Air Force to risk not having an effective Air Force while Iran approaches the nuclear threshold, it's madness.

We're going to wrap in a few minutes. I want to hit two other topics. One related to this, I listened to the conversation that you and Danny Gordas and Monty Friedman had at the Times of Israel on Labor Day, U.S. Labor Day, urging of American Jewish organizations to do more. And you struck me as more measured on that point where you encouraged organizations to do more, but you said something like there's only one AIPAC, maybe there's only one Jewish Federation, National Jewish Federation, meaning a collection of Jewish federations, that on the one hand, you want them to be more engaged and there's, but all of this is fragile. What did you mean? We need to find a balance between pushing our organizations to be more assertive, whether publicly or behind closed doors, in how they relate to this Israeli government that I consider to be legal. It is democratically legitimate, but it isn't morally legitimate.

To have a criminal far right, a literal criminal far rightist in charge of the Israeli police is not morally legitimate. And that's only one example. We could go on and on. I am pushing American Jewish organizations to break out of their business-as-usual mold and be much more assertive in dealing with the Israeli government. And I understand that AIPAC can't take a public role. I want to see AIPAC substantially raise the tone of their private meetings with Israelis. Private. Private. Private. Federation, I think, can go more public. Each organization needs to navigate the shift in its own way. But it's not binary in your mind.

It's not either you're marching in the streets with us. No, no, no, no. Or you're a co-conspirator, collaborator. No, and there's something in the Jewish persona that tends to go black or white. Right. Exactly. That's what I'm responding to. Yeah, and we need to figure out ways of dealing with complex, of embodying complexity. Now, for me in the past,

that always meant we have to listen to both sides. Right now, in this struggle, I don't believe there is a legitimate side that's supporting a government that's an existential threat to my Israel. That is not a legitimate position for me, even though some of their positions are legitimate. Of course, there needs to be some judicial reform, but to support this morally illegitimate government for me is a red line. Nevertheless, there are ways in which to express that, and we need to recognize the nuance and to make sure that the legacy organizations that we've inherited from the generation that helped the Jewish people overcome the Holocaust, that helped us create a renaissance, the Jewish renaissance after the Holocaust, which is, you know, we take it for granted, but what an extraordinary achievement. The single greatest expression of Jewish survival in 4,000 years happened in the generation

just before we were born. And so we need to honor what we've inherited and at the same time try to explain to these organizations something has shifted in the last eight months. Okay. And before we go, because I know we only have a couple of minutes, you wrote this piece in the Times of Israel, which I thought was excellent, some of which I agreed with, some of which I didn't, but overall thought it was excellent. Saul and I, we were writing our most recent author's note. We wrote an author's note for the book. And then we realized in the middle of the summer of this year that we needed to address

the judicial reform issue more head on at the beginning of the book. So we rewrote quickly the author's note and we quoted from your Times of Israel piece where you write, and I quote, Israel isn't a paragon of democracy because it cannot be. But Israel is a paragon of the struggle for democratic norms under near possible circumstances. As many episodes in Israeli history demonstrate, which we write about. And then you say Israel is a laboratory for democracy under extremity, and that is its value for the world. So can you just briefly, because we don't have much time,

Israel is a laboratory for democracy under extremity. What do you mean by that? I don't believe that any democracy could have survived as such in conditions that Israel has had to cope with from day one of our existence. We were created in war, and we've never known a real day of peace since. And so our reality is a constant balancing act between struggles for security and for democratic norms. And sometimes we get it right and sometimes we get it wrong. But even when we get it wrong, those fault lines are instructive because they tell us what the pressure points are for democracy. How much can democracy take before it starts to crack?

And so I, in a way, I cherish our failures as much as our successes. It's all part of this extraordinary experiment of Israeli democracy. And there are two groups within the Jewish people that don't appreciate this balancing act between security and democratic norms. The first is the far left, the anti-Zionist Jews who say, oh, this is all hypocrisy. Israel isn't a democracy. You've got an occupation. And there's the far right, which agrees and says, you know, we don't need democracy because it just hampers our ability to deal with all the security issues. And so there's this kind of tacit alliance, as there often is, between the far left and the far right. What I believe we need to do at this moment in Jewish history is strengthen the mainstream and uphold the integrity of the Israeli experiment

of democracy under extremity. This government is threatening to upend that experiment. And if you look at the coalition that's forming on the streets, it goes from moderate right to center to moderate left. And that's the mainstream that's going to hold the line. And I believe that there still is a majority, not only in Israel. In Israel, I know there is a centrist majority, but I believe that there still is a centrist majority among American Jews. And that's the alliance that we need to strengthen. Yossi, I'm going to leave it there with one final question that I just ask you to answer briefly. Long term, not short term, long term. Are you a pessimist about Israel or an

optimist? I'm an optimist, even middle term. And in Israel, you know, a year is middle term. Right, right. Yes, I'm an optimist, but I'm an Israeli optimist, which means we're going to be going through an enormous amount. But of course, we're going to come through. We'll come through stronger, wiser, more wounded, but also more capable of dealing with the next crisis. We could have talked for hours. I hope our listeners understand why Yossi is such an important narrator for us in our book. And I look forward to continuing the conversation in the future. I do as well, Dan.

Thanks for having me. Thank you. That's our show for today. To keep up with Yossi Klein-Halevi's work, you can follow him on the site formerly known as Twitter, at Y. Klein-Halevi. And you can also find his work at the Shalom Hartman Institute. And again, we ask you to pre-order our book,

Doing So Now will help out a lot. And you can order the book wherever you purchase books. Call Me Back is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.