Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - How do we know if a country is a success? Israel at 75, with Daniel Gordis

Episode Date: May 1, 2023

Items discussed in this episode"Impossible Takes Longer":https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/impossible-takes-longer-daniel-gordis/1141759170 "Netanyahu: The Figures Who Formed Him, and the Duties of Jewish Leadership":https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/israel-zionism/2021/12/netanyahu-the-figures-who-formed-him-and-the-duties-of-jewish-leadership/ "Israel From The Inside":https://danielgordis.substack.com/

It's a flawed country, the way the United States is flawed, the way Canada is flawed, the way France is flawed, the way every country is flawed. We have race issues, we have poverty issues, we have conflict issues. But if the goal of the country was to change the way that Jews lived in the world, not to be living on borrowed time, not to be living in a country wondering when the invitation to stay was going to run out, not to be living in somebody else's language, not to be hoping that their professions would be open to you. It's changed everything. Before we begin today, just a quick housekeeping note. The punditry we hear on the upcoming 2024 presidential primaries has taken a decidedly conventional turn.

Trump, we're told, is now the prohibitive favorite to win the GOP nomination. Ron DeSantis is the new Scott Walker. Joe Biden has a dominant hold on the Democratic nomination and so on. I'm highly skeptical of all of it. I don't believe Trump is as strong as he may appear right now. I don't believe DeSantis is anywhere near as weak as some of the rank punditry would have us believe. And we're going to have a whole conversation about these quirky, weird challenges that

President Biden is facing in his own primaries. We're going to unpack all of this in our next episode. Not today, but in our next episode with Mike Murphy. But the reason I'm giving you fair warning is because whenever Mike is on, we get a flurry of questions that we wish we had in advance to ask Mike. So if you have a question for Mike Murphy about the 2024 presidential primaries, the general election, or anything about American politics, please record a voice memo and send it to dan at unlocked.fm. That's dan at unlocked.fm. Please keep the question to under 30 seconds, and we will try to get to a few of these

in our episode with Mike Murphy, which we will be recording in the days ahead. Now on to today's episode. How do we know if a country is a success? It's a question that our guest today, Danny Gordas, has tried to answer in a new book, timed for the 75th anniversary of Israel's independence, which was just celebrated. His book is called Impossible Takes Longer. 75 years after its creation, has Israel fulfilled its founder's dreams? Provocative title and question. I enjoyed this book very much, and I enjoy every conversation I have with Danny. He's been on this podcast before. I usually visit with him when I'm in Jerusalem, where he moved in 1998, and where he has raised his three children,

all of whom who have served in the army. Danny's one of the most thoughtful observers of Israeli life and Israeli history. He's the Korot Distinguished Fellow at Shalem College, which is a liberal arts college in Israel that he co-founded. And he's the author of more than 10 books. I'm not going to rattle them all off here, but there are three that I especially recommend. His History of the State of Israel, entitled Israel, A Concise History of a Nation Reborn. His excellent biography of Prime Minister Begin, which is called Menachem Begin, The Battle for Israel's Soul. And then more recently, his book called We Stand Divided, The Rift Between American Jews and Israel. Also a pretty provocative topic. Danny also has his own podcast and blog called Israel From the Inside,

which I also highly recommend. In fact, I'm not just a subscriber, I am a paid subscriber. Danny Gordas on Israel at 75. Is it safe to call it a success? This is Call Me Back. And I'm pleased to welcome to the podcast my longtime friend, Danny Gordas, who's been on this podcast before, joins us from Jerusalem, author most recently of this excellent book called Impossible Takes Longer, 75 years after its creation, has Israel fulfilled its founder's dreams. Danny, welcome. Thanks, Dan. It's great to be back.

There's a lot I want to get into with your book, but just to set things up, I was sort of, when you first told me you were writing this book, I didn't focus on the question I want to ask you now because it didn't occur to me until I actually started reading a version of the manuscript and now the final version, which I have in my hands, which you kind of ask the question, you do ask the question. 75 years looking back, was Israel, is Israel a success? Almost as like that's a normal question to ask. And I guess this time when I was reading through the book, I was thinking, who asks that kind of question about a country? Like, is a country a success? Like, I can't imagine asking that question of any other country.

If you think about the countries that were created around the time that Israel was created. So let's just take the period between 1945 and 1960, something like three dozen new countries are created in Asia and Africa. Go through some of those countries. You know, India and Pakistan are granted independence by the UK. Indonesia, granted independence by the UK, Indonesia, granted independence by the Netherlands, Philippines, obviously given independence from the United States. And then there are all these countries that were either created during World War II or right after World War II that are neighbors of Israel, not the least of which is Syria and Lebanon become independent. Kuwait

becomes independent after 1960. And we can go through all these countries. Nobody ever asks, was India a success? Was Pakistan a success? Was Indonesia a success? Were the Philippines a success? Was Syria? I mean, why do we ask that question about Israel? It's a great question about why we ask that question. And I think there's a lot of reasons.

First of all, Israel is different from a lot of those countries in that it was founded with a specific purpose. I'm not sure Israel is different from a lot of those countries in that it was founded with a specific purpose. I'm not sure Indonesia was founded with a purpose. I'm not sure that Syria was founded with a purpose. Israel is one of those countries, and I think that the United States is the one other one that comes to mind, which is created with a very distinct purpose that is articulated by its founders. The United States is founded as a new experiment in human self-governance. Jefferson, Paine, Franklin, Madison, they all have this sense that they are creating something profoundly new that Jefferson says explicitly on

his deathbed 50 years after America's created in July 4th, he says that he hopes that it will become a model for the rest of the world. In other words, they weren't just carving out a territory and saying, okay, now we're going to be independent. They were trying to accomplish something for humanity. Israel was trying to accomplish something for the Jewish people. And the people who had envisioned the idea of a Jewish state, in other words, the Zionist leaders and thinkers starting in the late 1800s, were very articulate about what they

were trying to do. They were trying to create a place where the existential condition of the Jew would be fundamentally different. And so, I mean, we can get back to that. But one of the reasons that I think, therefore, that we ask about whether or not Israel's a success is because we set it up that way we actually said we had goals in mind that's the first thing second thing is that Israel's always been looked at in a different kind of a way for probably good ways good reasons and bad but as I noted in the book Israel ranks way low at the bottom of the list of countries

in its absolute number of citizens. It's a relatively small country of 9 million citizens. But if you look at column inches devoted to Israel, depending on whether we include Palestine or not, it's either third or fifth in the world, which is crazy. But of course, I think that, you know, you can make a negative argument. People say it's about anti-Semitism. It's about holding the Jews to a higher standard. It's about holding the Jews to an unachievable standard. There may be some truth to that. But it's also that there's something really unbelievably magical about this place. There's something

mythical about it. There's something that defies imagination that Auschwitz stops doing what it does in January 1945. And by May 1948, there's a state 19 years later, it's attacked by Syria, Egypt, and Jordan, and it triples its size in six days. In 1985, it has an annual inflation rate of 445%. And today it is a leading world economy. It's a backwards nowhere in the 1950s and the 1960s, and today it's got more companies listed on the NASDAQ than any country in the world other than America. In other words, it's an unbelievable story, which is part of the

reason that people think about it that way. So there's a whole array of reasons. We set ourselves a purpose. People look at the Jews differently sometimes. Israel has been extraordinarily accomplished in a lot of ways. But I think it's an amalgam of reasons that people ask, is it successful? But it's, you know, it's still, I mean, it's a, in a sense, it's exceptional, and yet it is extremely normal. It's a normal country where you have, as you said, some 9 million people living there, making their lives today. I'm reminded of this line that Jeff Goldberg had. He and I were doing this conversation once at some conference, and we were having a debate, a discussion about, you know, who's pro-Zionism, not between he and I who's pro-Zionism, but we were looking at different political figures and commentators about who's pro-Zionist and who's,

and he said, this whole notion of are you pro-Zionist or anti-Zionist is absurd. It's like Israel's a country. What does that mean to be like, is Zionism a good idea? You know what I mean? People are living there building the country, and the analogy he gave, which I thought was quite clever, is he said he views it like parenthood. Like a young couple before they have a kid say, do we think parenthood is a good idea?

Do we think we should have, you know, do we want to be part of parenthood? Do we want, they can have these abstract discussions. But once you have a kid, you don't have a conversation like pro-parenthood, anti-parenthood, parenthood a good idea, is parenthood a bad idea? It's like you have a kid and you have to raise this kid and all you care about is raising that kid. And that's the normal thing to do because it's no longer an abstract intellectual discussion. It is your reality. And for 9 million people, Israel is their reality. It's their country. It's not an intellectual debate. That's right. But in 1975, the United Nations votes that Zionism is racism.

I think it's hard to think of another country where the entire world, in the form of the General Assembly, voted that the ideas behind it were fundamentally appalling. Never did that about North Korea. It never did that about communist China. It never did that about the Soviet Union. It hasn't done that about Syria. It hasn't done that about South Sudan. So in a way, it's a question foisted on us by the way the world looks at Israel.

Israel did not ask the world in 1975 to go to the General Assembly and have a conversation about whether or not Zionism was a good idea. The world had that conversation and decided in a lopsided vote that Zionism was a racist idea. So, yes, it's normal for Israelis, but even Israelis, by the way, I think are busy asking themselves that question. I mean, we're having this conversation at a time which is really unprecedented in this normal country's life. I mean, it's a country that is in probably its gravest internal challenge ever.

And Israelis are asking themselves, are we going to make it? Are we not going to make it? Are we going to be proud of the kind of country this is? Are we going to be ashamed and appalled and have our children and of country this is? Are we going to be ashamed and appalled and have our children and grandchildren leave this country? There's been something very self-examining and self-critical about, first of all, I think the Jewish people for a very long time, long before there's a history of

the state of Israel. The Jewish people has been very analytic and self-analytic. But because Zionism comes out of the crucible of history that it does, and it's voted into existence by the United Nations, the very idea behind it is condemned by the United Nations. It's never been accepted by all of its neighbors immediately around it to this very day. There's something about all of these factors that comes together that makes everybody look at Israel differently. And even the 9 million people that live here, for whom you're right, it's normalcy, are at this very moment having this conversation. Are we going to make it? Are we not going to make it? Is this a success? What would it take? How much would have to go wrong for this thing not to be a success? Something very

Jewish about that, I think. So let's talk about this question, is Israel a success? So you try in the early part of the book to set up some parameters. Because you can go a million different directions, right, on whether or not Israel is a success. So can you walk us through how you define this question? What's the lens through which you try to tackle it? The first thing I wanted to do was talk about the lenses through which you try to tackle it? The first thing I wanted to do was talk about the lenses through which we should not tackle it. Specifically, North American Jewry, which is probably the primary audience of the book, and certainly North Americans, the book's in English. It's published in the United States, so it'll be read primarily by citizens of the

United States and Canada. One of the things that I wanted to do was debunk this idea that as long as Israel is in a conflict with the Palestinians, it's a failure. The United States has been at peace for very few of the years that it's been in existence since 1776, but very few people say that because 80-90% of the time that the United States has been in existence, it's been at war. It's therefore a failure. If you follow, and I know you do very carefully, you follow the discourse about Israel, especially in the American Jewish community, there is a very wide swath of that community that essentially says until Israel makes peace with the Palestinians, which I don't believe that it can at this moment, until Israel makes peace with the Palestinians, there's something fundamentally wrong with it. The person who was

one of the founders of J Street says, if Israel's going to always be in conflict with the Palestinians, maybe the country wasn't a good idea. I think I quote him in the book there. But in any event, so the first thing that I wanted to do was to debunk the notion that as long as Israel's in a conflict, it's a failure, because that's just not true. The second thing that I wanted to do was to debunk other mythologies, such as the idea that as long as Israel is not entirely embracing of North American varieties of Judaism, for example, it's by definition not pluralist and therefore a failure. I wanted to kind of clear the deck. I wanted to say, everybody, let's step away from all of that vitriol that commonly surrounds conversations about Israel. And let's ask ourselves, what was its purpose? If you want to know, is a business a success? The question is, what did you hope it would accomplish? If you thought it was supposed to make a million dollars a year and it made a thousand dollars,

then it's a failure. But if you thought it was going to make a million dollars a year and it made a thousand dollars, then it's a failure. But if you thought it was going to earn a thousand dollars a year and it made a thousand dollars a year, then it's a success. So what did we hope it would accomplish? And in order to do that, the question became, well, what would be one vision that everybody shared? Because Zionism is a raucousy kind of a debating movement between the mid-1800s and the early 1900s, when there are revisionists like Zhev Jabotinsky, who's the forefather of the Likud party.

There's Ben-Gurion and Herzl before him, who are kind of forefathers of the Israeli political left, which is all but dead today. There is a religious view. There's religious Zionism. There's religious Zionism. There's religious anti-Zionism. There's mostly socialist Zionism. There is some free market capitalism in the form of Jabotinsky and some of the revisionists.

In other words, they all have very different visions of what we're trying to accomplish here. But you can't write a book about, is it a success according to Ahad Ha'am? And is it a success according to Jabotinsky? And is it a success according to Rav Ha'am? And is it a success according to Jabotinsky? And is it a success according to Rav Kook? You can't do that. So what was one vision that everybody more or less shared? And I seized on the one document

that seems to have been a consensus document in some major way, which was the Declaration of Independence. Now, I finished the book about a year ago. Finished the book about a year ago, a little bit more, and then spent last summer. You know, you've written books. You know, you kind of just work on the, you know, dot the I's and cross the T's and make a few changes here and there. And then things got a little complicated.

And then things got a little complicated. But here's the great irony. The Declaration of Independence has become the major symbol of the protest movement. They print out these gigantic copies of it that are kind of like five feet wide and 30 feet long, and they lay them on the ground in Tel Aviv, and all the young people are lining up with sharpies. They want to add their signatures to the Declaration of Independence. So ironically, even though I picked the Declaration at a time when nobody had any idea that what we're facing now was going to be what we're facing, it actually, I think, ended up being a very fortuitous idea to use the Declaration.

And so, therefore, I actually look at the Declaration as the kind of the spine of the book and say, what's the vision of Israel that the Declaration had in mind, and to what extent have we achieved that? So that's the lens. So you go through the Declaration, analyze the Declaration quite a bit. There's a lot of great history in the book, a lot of which I didn't know about the earlier drafts of the Declaration to reflect the range of views that were expressing themselves in debates about what the Declaration should ultimately say. And I want to quote from your book here. Earlier drafts of the Declaration of Independence recounted a seemingly endless list of atrocities committed against the

Jews through thousands of years of dispersion, much like in the American Declaration with a list of grievances against the crown. But Ben-Gurion chose to shorten the list, you write, focusing more on Jewish accomplishments in the Yishuv than on the wrongs of the past. Perhaps he felt that, so soon after the Holocaust, there was little point in enumerating the centuries of hatred. Mere mention of the Holocaust was a reminder that the genocide was a culmination of all the hatred that had preceded it, and given all the doubt in the international community as to whether the Yishuv could survive the Arab onslaught that was sure to follow, Ben-Gurion wanted the declaration to focus attention not on the Jews' almost emblematic weakness in status as victims,

but on the readiness for statehood. Now, every time I travel with non-Jews to Israel who are visiting there for the first time, so many of them assume that the Holocaust and the atrocities that the Jews experienced before the founding of the state was the, if not the one, you know, the primary reason there is a state. And you're saying here Ben Green didn't want to focus on that. He wanted to focus on we're going to make it. We can make it. Look at what we did before the founding of the state.

Look, that emphasis or that analysis of that emphasis was a completely fresh insight for me. There are a bunch of reasons that Ben-Gurion, first of all, doesn't want to include the long list. First of all, why did the long list first make it in? Because the first person that wrote the draft of Israel's Declaration of Independence, this young lawyer named Mordechai Beham, whose father was one of the leading corporate lawyers

in Israel, or in the Yishuv at that time, he didn't have any idea how to write a Declaration of Independence. I mean, you think about it, people go to law school, there's a course in writing contracts, there's probably some training in writing wills, there's no course in how do you write a Declaration of Independence, but he was all of a sudden assigned to this, and he had no idea what to do, and a friend of his took out a copy of Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, and the first thing that Beham did is he wrote it down in English. He couldn't Xerox it. It was 1948. He couldn't take a picture of it with his phone. He just copied it out in longhand. And then he started

to translate pieces of it. And there was some of Jefferson's tone of this long list of grievances against the crown that first made its way into the early Hebrew drafts in the same sense. So part of it's just the historical reason of why that list was in there is kind of interesting. But what's Ben-Gurion's worry? Ben-Gurion, what's the purpose of the Declaration? The Declaration is designed to make a case for the Jewish state that will get countries around the world to recognize it. That's what he needed. He needed Truman to recognize it. He needed the rest of the world to recognize it. And one of the great debates was, can this thing survive? The State Department said to Truman, it can't.

There's the way they called it, the Jews. They said to the State Department, the Jews will be able to hold out maximum for a year. And then what's the problem? And then America is going to have to get, and the concern, at least among some in the State Department, I'm not defending their view, was that if the Jews can't hang on, if they can't hold it together, then America is going to have to get involved and America is going to get dragged into it. Correct. And it's three years after the Second World War. Nobody in America wants to go to war again. So Ben-Gurion has to convince a lot of people around the world that the country can

support that many people. The British had argued, for example, that there wasn't enough water to support millions of people in the land. And that's why one of the first major accomplishments of the country was the national water carrier to make the parts of the country that were totally arid all of a sudden habitable. So focusing on the accomplishments was a way of, first of all, making it clear to the international community, we've done this already. I mean, we're not starting from nothing. For decades already, we've been handling immigration. For decades, we've been building infrastructure. For decades, we've been taxing ourselves. For decades, we've been defending ourselves. For decades, we've been building and preparing. This is not ex nihilo. You've seen what we've done,

and you should therefore understand that we can make this happen. Therefore, you should recognize us. The second thing that Ben-Gurion's trying to do is he's part of this changing of the existential condition of the Jew, and part of what that's about is to change the Jew's image of herself and himself and the world's image of the Jew, and enough with the victimhood, Enough with the people behind barbed wire in striped clothing. Israel, as you well know, has had to this very day a very conflicted relationship with the Holocaust survivors

who came to this country. And to a certain extent, it's unforgivable the way that Israel handled it. I think it's unforgivable that a third of Holocaust survivors still alive live under the poverty line in Israel. It's a badge of shame. But one can also try to understand why did that happen. And it happened because, although nobody would say this explicitly, there was this sense. The Zionist leaders were telling you in the 1890s and 1900 and 1910 and 1920, they were telling you to get out.

Jabotinsky said it explicitly. Nordahl said it explicitly. Herzl was so desperate, he was willing to accept Sudan. It was called the Uganda Plan, but it was really Sudan as a territory for this. And so part of the Zionist sensibility was, well, you guys, I mean, we told you to get out decades ago. Why did you let this happen to yourself? Now, again, I think that you and I would agree that that's a fundamentally unfair thing to say to people who had been through the horrors that these people had been through. But Ben-Gurion is trying to change the image of the Jew. He prefers the image of the defending soldier and farmer to the victim of a pogrom or a victim of the Holocaust. And

therefore, he doesn't want the litany of atrocities. He wants the litany of accomplishments. Okay. So I want to stay on this point about what was going on in Europe. I mean, you just brought it up. What was going on in Europe before the founding of the state that led to the Zionist movement? And I just want to spend a couple minutes on it. I was struck so early in the book that you quoted from, of all people, someone who you have not been an enormous fan of these days, which is Benjamin Netanyahu. And I know the piece you quoted from, because I read the translation, the English translation of it in Mosaic, which is this interview Netanyahu did when he was

out of power, right? He was leader of the opposition in 2021, and he gave this interview with Gaudi Taub, Israeli journalist, public intellectual, and it was an interview in Hebrew about Jewish history and the Jewish historical figures that have most influenced Netanyahu's worldview

and his thinking, and then it was mosaic translated into English, which we'll post a link to in the show notes, but you quote Netanyahu talking about, and you kind of say in the book, like, yeah, he's a politician, but he also actually has interesting thoughts on Jewish history, and you kind of caveat that, you know, and I'm sort of reading between the lines, I could sense that you want to make clear you're not always a fan. But on this particular kind of tutorial on history,

he's, at least I think you say, he's quite interesting. And what he points out is he talks about Mark Twain visiting Vienna. Is this in the late 19th century? And he's very impressed by the role of Jewish life in the contributions. He meets Freud, he meets, and you know, and Twain is like, wow, I, you know, very optimistic about the Jews and the Jewish contribution and Jewish prominence and Jewish influence and the Jewish

contribution to the Western world, and then Twain meets, according to Netanyahu, then Twain meets Herzl and Theodor Herzl. And I'm going to quote from Netanyahu here. You quote Netanyahu. And he says, and Herzl was of a different view entirely. Herzl said that the prominence of the Jews was also their weakness. They were prominent and weak. They didn't have a truly independent status. They didn't have a way to fight anti-Semitism.

Their prominence invited the attacks. Here, their paths diverged, meaning Twain's and Herzl's. While Twain was optimistic about the Jews, Herzl was very pessimistic. He thought of it as a giant house of cards, this wonderful golden shining thing built by the Jews of Vienna. He said it will collapse. It was all foam that it had no meaning. I, you know, I've read The Pity of It All. I just recently saw this play Leopoldstadt in New York.

I mean, you're just constantly reminded of the prominence of the Jews during this time in Europe. And Herzl, which had a big influence on Netanyahu, said, don't be fooled by prominence and influence. What struck you about that? Well, first of all, since we both saw Leopoldstadt, I mean, I think Leopoldstadt takes the position of Herzl. The play opens up, and the Jews are feeling very self-confident. There's a Christmas tree, and they're adorning the Christmas tree in the first scene. And long before you get to the fifth scene, which is where everybody's already dead, you can gradually see the impossibility of overcoming European

anti-Semitism. And I think that's the point that Tom Steppard makes. And he makes this point, you cannot assimilate your way out of the hatred of anti-Semitism. And that's what Herzl said. He said, you can be prominent doctors or lawyers or whatever, but at the end of the day, Europe will always see you as an outsider

and Europe one day will come and it will viciously undermine and undo all the accomplishments that you've had. And Herzl proved to be right. I mean, Netanyahu, I think I give him a little bit more credit than you're implying that I give him credit for. He is a profoundly interesting thinker about Jewish history. He's the son of a Jewish historian. He is, you know, comparisons are always made, for example, between Netanyahu and Trump. And there's certain surface similarities, I suppose, but they're very silly comparisons. I mean, among many other reasons,

it's very hard to find a picture of Bibi Netanyahu on an airplane not reading a book. He's a voracious reader of history, voracious mean he reads according to ron derma he says that that nathan yeah who has has no hobbies i mean it's politics which is his profession and then reading all he does is read he says he reads at least one non-fiction book a week that's like 50 books a year right i mean it's a ton it's a ton of reading. He's deeply knowledgeable, and his father was a very, very cutting-edge, controversial, but cutting-edge Jewish historian. So I find Bibi on that stuff very interesting, and what Bibi quotes, what Bibi says, I don't think he's actually quoting anybody there, that the Jews had lost kind of their radar for danger. They had been so

allured by their success in Europe that many of them deluded themselves into thinking, oh, finally, we've come home. Germany will be our home. France will be our home. Not Eastern Europe yet, but Western Europe will be our home. But of course, even that proved not to be true. Germany, we don't have to say much about.

France, there's Vichy France. In other words, I think at the end of the day, in this debate between Herzl and Twain, which was not a direct debate, but an implicit debate, I think that Bibi is quite right, that Herzl proved to be correct, that Europe was unsustainable. And in that regard, that's why Zionism emerges not as a result of the Holocaust. And by the time the Holocaust comes around, Zionism is in high gear. The Yishuv, which you pointed to before, has already built. It's built trade unions, and it's built health care systems, and it's built school systems,

and it's a fully democratic operating governmental system under the British. And it's built the beginnings of what will become the Israel Defense Forces. By 1942, by 1939, whatever date you want to pick, the Jews in Palestine have built a state in waiting. They start doing that in 1890, even before Herzl a little bit. But Herzl writes the book, The Jewish State, in 1896. The first line is Congress is in 1897. Don't forget, in 1917 already, just 30 years after that, the Balfour Declaration, the British say, this majesty's government views with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people. That's 1917. That's 20 years at least

before Hitler comes to power or does anything remotely similar to the Holocaust. So, it's a misperception to say that the Holocaust was the impetus for the state of Israel. It's also, by the way, not only a misperception, it's gravely dangerous for Israel because the response of the Arab world has long been, yes, a terrible thing happened to the Jews in Europe, but why do we have to pay for that? In other words, because Hitler exterminated the Jews of Europe, the Palestinians had to lose their land. And that would be a fair question if that was what had happened. But that was not what had happened. The Jews had been coming for decades before, and they had been buying land. The first time the Jews captured any land in war was in 1948,

when five Arab nations attacked. Until then, every square inch of land that the Jews had in Palestine, they'd purchased. And it was important to understand that the Jews were coming to Palestine having nothing to do with the Holocaust, but having everything to do with centuries of European anti-Semitism and the instinct that many Zionist leaders had, which was this cannot survive. This has got to go south.

We have to get out now, long before Hitler, but long after European anti--semitism was part of the dna of christian europe okay so i want to fast forward but by the way parenthetically we don't need to get into this now i think about this you and i were talking before we started recording i mean i i think a lot about on the one hand there's a sense of enormous jewish influence in american life and yet this incredible sense of fragility, despite all the influence. And the difference is, today there's a state of Israel. Right. By the way, I know we don't want to get into it now, but I'll just point out that when I was watching Leopoldstadt, the play that you mentioned before,

I had this harrowing sense that right outside the theater, the same thing that he's describing is actually transpiring. In other words, that Jews are busy deluding themselves into thinking they can assimilate themselves into acceptance. And what we're tragically seeing in America the last few years is that acceptance is not nearly as airtight as it was when you and I were, let's say, in college.

It was a different world altogether. So I found Leopoldstadt a horribly painful play. I mean, really unbearably physically painful by the second half of the play, largely because of the horror of what it describes about Europe. But also, I just couldn't get out of my head what was happening in New York as I'm watching the play in New York. And in fact, we were taking the subway back from the play to the Upper West Side where I was staying. And it got very dicey in the subway car. I'll just leave out the details. It doesn't matter. But I surreptitiously put my hand on my head and slipped my kippah into my pocket, just thinking,

you know what, I don't need to be wearing a kippah at this moment in this car with these characters. And I thought, there you go go right there yeah so yeah but you know so I saw the I saw the play with Campbell and my and my cousins Annette and Jim from Boston and Campbell made the point when we left she you know we've watched you know just an endless number of Holocaust related films movies you know Schindler's List I mean you can just go through the list. And she made the point, this one was almost, this play was more difficult to watch than all the Holocaust movies, partly for the reason you're saying.

It just, it felt a little too real, a little too current. I found it agonizing. I mean, much more agonizing than all those movies that have the heart. Yes, and more than the, you know, we're so in we're so immune now to these images of the bodies and the emaciated figures and the piles that's horrifying

but there was something about this that was so accessible because they look like us you know we've never been in concentration camps and they were not in concentration camps but they were living a life of delusion and it was the perpetuation of the delusion that pained me beyond description watching the play and it was that delusion that it was the heart of zionism long before adolf hitler was in the headlines yeah okay so now i want to fast forward to November 29th, 1947, UN Resolution 181, which, well, describe, you describe what Resolution 181 was, and then I want to ask you a couple questions about it. Resolution 181, which was voted on November 29th, 1947, was what's commonly called the partition plan. It was the vote of the the un which was a squeaker it was barely passed uh but it passed 33 13 to 1 with 10 33 13 and 10 10 extensions and one

one no show right and um it needed two-thirds so if you do the math, it barely got it. It was a vote to create two states. A bunch of things have to be said about that vote. Number one is that it created two states, one Jewish, one Arab. The Jewish one came to be. The Arab one never came to be because instead of saying yes to the partition plan, the Arabs said no and attacked and they lost the war. And therefore that Arab state, which the world had voted to create, has never come to be. Had they said yes, first of all, that Arab state would probably exist. But the other point that's really important to make about

Resolution 181 is that had they said yes, you and I would probably not be having this conversation because I think the Jewish state would not have lasted. The Arab state that they were created, according to the map of the UN, would have been overwhelmingly Arab. I forget the Jewish state would not have lasted. The Arab state that they were created, according to the map of the UN, would have been overwhelmingly Arab. I forget the exact number, but something like 90% Arab. There were some Jews in it, but very minimal.

Whereas the Jewish state was about 60-40 Jewish-Arab. So given the mass flux of human beings in that part of the world, and in general post-Second World War, it's very possible that if the Arabs had just said, yeah, we don't like the maps here, we don't like the Jewish state, but just like the Jews, we're going to take a big gulp and we're going to say, okay, we're going to go for it. The Arab state would likely have survived and the Jewish state demographically

likely would not have survived. They made several strategic massive errors in that period of their history. And that was one of them. The other thing that I'll just point out is that the 181 not only said that there'd be a Jewish state and an Arab state, and it said that these were the maps, it actually gave maps.

Unlike, for example, the Balfour Declaration that had no maps attached to it. It also said that both countries had to be democratic, that both countries had to safeguard the religious sites that were in the country, and that both countries had to pass a constitution. And that's important to note because that's why Israel has this throwaway line in its Declaration of Independence that by October 1st, 1948, we're going to pass a constitution. Now that was, of course, ludicrous. We're at war. It's May 14th. There's no way in five months you're going to ratify a constitution. But people

wonder, why would you possibly say that? The reason you would say that was because the UN said you had to say that. The one thing that Israel did not do in its Declaration of Independence was say, oh, and we accept these maps. There was a huge debate among the framers of the Declaration of Independence. Do we say yes, and we also accept the maps? There were earlier drafts that said yes. And Ben-Gurion said, what are you talking about? One of two things is going to happen. Either we're going to get wiped out, in which case the maps don't matter, or we're going to win. And if we're going to win, we're not going to keep these ridiculous indefensible borders. We're going to expand our borders somewhat, which is exactly what happened.

And when you say it was a squeaker, you mean because the UN General Assembly required a two-thirds vote? Two-thirds vote. Right. So that's why 33 to 13 was a squeaker. Right. Because, yeah. By the way, what's not commonly known is that it was supposed to take place the vote before the thanksgiving weekend that by the way danny is one of my favorite little tidbits from the book which actually isn't central to your argument uh or your analysis but it's just

the book is sprinkled with these fantastic little nuggets of history that like i guess very few people knew or you know i certainly didn't know which was it because it was supposed it was supposed to be on the eve of thanksgiving right and then and then the and then they didn't have the votes the zionist delegation did the count and they realized they just didn't have the votes so who then so so it's the eve of thanksgiving the thanksgiving holiday the zionist didn't have the votes the U.S. government said we need to push the vote for Thanksgiving, or the Zionists said we'll push it off out of respect for Thanksgiving? What happened is they started to give these really long speeches, hoping to push it into the

Thanksgiving holiday, figuring that they could then use Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday to lobby delegations. And when some of the Arab delegations saw the Jews giving these really long speeches, they said, well, hold on, we're going to give long speeches too. And then they actually were the ones who pushed it over the edge. And in the end, the Zionist delegation didn't really have to filibuster all that long because the Arab parties did it for them. And they worked like dogs over those four days, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, they just worked like dogs and they picked, they got together

and they figured out which delegations were the most likely to be convinced over four days of a full court press. And by the time the vote rolled around at the beginning of the next week, barely, barely did they get it. By the way, the vote, it's really important to remember,

we think of it as such a momentous vote, right? I mean, it really changes Jewish history. It took three minutes. The vote took three minutes. And those three minutes literally changed the course of Jewish history. It's an extraordinary thing. By the way, I'm listening to you

and I'm thinking, this is like, you know, some people, conspiracy theory oriented, will listen to this conversation and say, see, the Jews are even trying to take Thanksgiving and turn it into a holiday. Well, I mean, people will say a lot of things about the Jews and people will say a lot of things about conspiracies. So I don't think we have to try to defend every shot against that. Yeah. Okay. So I want to fast forward to Israel today, and what I'm struck by today,

when I see people making the decision to make Aliyah, to move to Israel, it's not only out of a sense of fear, and not only worries about fragility of Jewish life in other parts of the world. Sure, in recent years, you hear much more French speaking on the streets of Israel, so there are many more French Jews who are worried about the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe and specifically France who make the decision to move. Which has been very good for the bakeries, by the way, I should say. Boom, boom in the bakery sector.

But I know many more Jews who make the decision to move to Israel, not because of the fear, but of the promise and the excitement of modern Israeli life. There's just incredible opportunity, not only economically, but in terms of raising a family and being part of communal life in Israel that's very exciting to many people, many Jews, particularly young Jews, I should add, living in the West. So it's not, it's out of, they're attracted to it. It's exciting.

It is, there's promise to it. It's not only a sense of peril with regard to the lives they're leading in the West. Is that your sense? I guess is my first question. If so, what happened? Why is there this transformation? Well, I think I'm part of it. I'm a little bit earlier than you're talking about.

We came to Israel 25 years ago. Our kids were very young. They were 12, 9, and 5. So they all grew up here. They all went to the army. They all went to college here. It was an amazing place to raise kids. Just, you know, it could be anecdotal or descriptive, I guess. But first of all, we never worried about where our kids were, ever. When we lived in Los

Angeles before we came here, our daughter took piano lessons two blocks away. And when she finally got to be 12, we let her walk the two blocks as long as she called us on the phone immediately as soon as she got to her piano teacher's house. Not that if, by the way, she hadn't called at that point, I would have had any idea what to do, but we were very nervous about our kids all the time. Then we moved here and she was out at her youth group, B'nai Akiva,

and she was 12. And she would come at one o'clock in the morning from whatever program they had. We'd already be fast asleep and we'd kind of vaguely hear her coming home, going in the shower because it was very often a campfire or something. So she was full of smoke.

And then she would put herself to bed. It's just unimaginable. Our kids had the range of the range, the kind of freedom that I don't think I had until I was very late in high school. That's number one. Number two, our kids all served in the military. And I think some of them had better experiences and some of them had worse experiences.

But they all, I think, are better human beings for having been taught, you give back to the country that gave you the life that you have. You owe it something. It's not all about you. It's not about where's your next degree coming from and what's your resume going to look like. You owe it something. It's not all about you. It's not about where's your next degree coming from and what's your resume going to look like. You just give. And I think that has been an extraordinarily important part of our kids' formation. Then, of course, it's a very different thing to grow up as a minority of being two or three percent or being a majority of 80 percent. There's a comfort. There's a way in which the language of your ancestors is the language of the newspaper. The holidays of the Bible are the holidays of the academic calendar.

It just feels normal. We came really for a one-year sabbatical and we're so captivated and so comfortable and so thrilled watching our kids thrive. We never went back. I mean, we went back to sell our house, obviously, and all that, but we never went back as a family to live again. And I feel very blessed that we were here. And even in these very difficult days that Israel's going through right now, which are really heartbreaking in a lot of ways,

not as heartbreaking as they were, because I'm much more convinced that we're going to be okay than I was, let's say, two months ago. I don't think we're out of the water, but I think we're getting there. Even in these heartbreaking days, I've never had a single moment where I say to myself, we shouldn't have come. It was a dumb move. I feel unbelievably blessed that we were able to raise our kids here. And I feel very blessed that, God willing, we're going to grow old here. It's a great society in which to grow old. There's a tremendous amount of respect for people who are older.

In many ways, it's a wonderful, wonderful society, far from flawless, far, far, far from flawless, but wondrous in many ways. On that note, my mother made Aliyah in 2014, in the middle of the Gaza War, and I just look at her life there as an older person, and it's dynamic, it's thriving, it's intergenerational. I mean, she spends multiple times a week with two other generations of our family, members of two other generations of our family. I can't think of another part of the world where you—and that's common. I can't think of another country in the world where anyone has that, Jews or non-Jews.

But the other thing I'm struck by is the number of Israelis who leave Israel, and they can work and be successful and thrive anywhere else in the world. And there's this fear that there's this brain drain in Israel, in the academic community, in the high-tech community. And I'm not worried about brain drain from Israel because what I see is most very successful Israelis, the ones I know more in the high-tech world, they come to the United States or they go to London or they go to Berlin and they take on their startups, either set up operations in those countries or they go work for big multinationals in those countries.

Then they have children. They could be living very cushy lives in the West, and they choose to return. And they choose to return when I ask them why they return. It's always about Israel's where they want to raise their kids. Or, even more strikingly, they want their kids to serve in the army. And I think to myself, some of these people have made enormous amounts of money and are like the elite of the elite of the elite in Tel Aviv who moved to the U.S.

and are the elite of the elite in Silicon Valley or New York. And I can't think of any of their peers in New York, American peers in New York or Silicon Valley, who would say, I'm going to pick up and uproot my family so my children can serve in the army. Right. I mean, that's just an unthinkable thing. But, of course, here, I mean, obviously there's large swaths of Israeli society that don't serve in the army. The Arabs don't serve in the army. The ultra-Orthodox don't serve in the army.

It's hardly universal. But everybody that we know. More universal than't serve in the army. The Arabs don't serve in the army. The ultra-Orthodox don't serve in the army. It's hardly universal, but everybody that we know- More universal than anywhere else in the world. Everybody that we know, literally everybody that we know practically, their kids have been in the army and have served and are better people for it. One of the things that I see, some of them come back. You're right. Not all of them do. There's about a million Israelis living outside of the country now, the vast majority of them in America, and many of them won't come back. And that's also okay. I think people have, part of it is if you're an academic, this is a very small market.

There's five universities here. There's a lot of colleges, but universities are only five. So if you are a history person or a French person or a professor of Portuguese literature, you may not actually get a job here. And I can understand why people would leave. I think that American Jews who tend to say tsk, tsk, tsk about Israelis who leave are wrong to do that.

I think everybody has a right to decide where they want to live their life. And just like a lot of American Jews choose not to live in Israel, Israelis can choose not to live in Israel for a variety of reasons. One of the things that I find that's fascinating, and I just got back from some speeches in the States because the book just came out, whenever you give a talk to a group in America, the Israelis, the ones who

have been in America now for 30 years, come up to you immediately after the talk and they tell you which battles they were in. They want to say basically, I'm part of it too. It's true. I've been living, I was in Detroit. I was in New York. I was in Houston. It's true. I live in New York or Detroit or Houston. It's true. Or Toronto in one case. But I was part of this. I was part of that. There's something about it that is so compelling that they have to actually justify to themselves that they have taken the steps that they don't even just tie it to me, but there's an allure here. There's a real allure. Okay.

Before we wrap, you address this in the book, but I want you to do it here. By the way, you answering this question is not a reason for people not to read the book. So people should read the book. Actually, people should buy the book, whether or not you read the book. So people should read the book. Actually, people should buy the book, whether or not you read the book. Was Israel, is Israel a success? Where do you land? It's overwhelmingly a success. The Jews defend themselves.

Jews are charting the course of their own future. Jews are now wrestling with what kind of a country this should be Jews have returned themselves to the marketplace of ideas and literature and music worldwide Jews are not looking over their shoulders It's a flawed country The way the United States is flawed The way Canada is flawed The way France is flawed

The way every country is flawed We have race every country is flawed. We have race issues, we have poverty issues, we have conflict issues. But if the goal of the country was to change the way that Jews lived in the world, not to be living on borrowed time, not to be living in a country wondering when the invitation to stay was going to run out, not to be living in somebody else's language, not to be hoping that their professions would be open to you. It's changed everything. It's been an overwhelming success. And part of what I wanted people to do as a result of reading the book was, again, to change the standard of measure. Yes, we're in a conflict. We're in a conflict with the Palestinians, which is grinding, which is sad, which is tragic, which takes a tremendous toll on both sides. And one has to hope and pray that

one day it's going to get resolved. But it's not going to get resolved tomorrow or in the next decade or maybe even the next two decades. But it doesn't mean this country is not a success. The country has been an overwhelming success. And my hope is that if people read the book, by the way, the book is not a whitewash. I mean, you've read it, you know. I mean, it is very upfront about enormous numbers of shortcomings, whether they're military shortcomings

or moral shortcomings or whatever. Trust me, there were parts of the book, in full disclosure, that I didn't like, but that's okay because I thought in some cases you were too tough on Israel. Well, I wanted to, yes. I mean, I think I was tough. I don't think I was unfair,

but we might disagree about that. But part of it, by the way, is that in the previous book that I wrote, which was We Stand Divided, about the relationship between American Jews and Israel, a lot of the reviews said that I wasn't hard enough on Israel. And I may have overreacted this time, but I wanted to try to dodge that bullet and have everybody, have nobody walk away and say, the guy just gave Israel a pass. I didn't want that to be said about this book. And I would rather that people said, like you, oh my God, I think you were a little bit too hard on Israel, rather than, oh, we gave Israel a pass, I'm not taking the book

seriously. And so far, none of the reviews have accused me of giving it a pass. Some of the reviews have actually said, he's a little hard on Israel about this and that, but I'd rather that critique than the other critique. But I just wanted people to be able to look at the country with fresh eyes, through a new lens, through a polished mirror, and to say, wow, I've never thought about how to assess the country in those terms before. I always looked at the conflict and thought, oh, it's horrible. I'm getting tired of it.

Or I hear what the chief rabbinate says about me as a reformed Jew. I feel dismissed. I'm done. Those are horrible things that the rabbinate says about reformed Jews. And they should definitely not say it. And we have a lot of work to do here

to clean up the mess of an anti-modern, misogynist rabbinate that has to be cleaned up in lots of ways. But I wanted people to be able to walk away and say, wow, this book gave me a new way of thinking about the country. 75 years is a pretty important milestone. What it's accomplished in 75 years is actually astonishing. And i'm interested in seeing what happens in the next quarter of a century i i will say when i go back and think about that mark twain visit to vienna and mark twain's visit with herzl and i just leave aside all these issues the messiness of jewish life and in israel and and jew-Palestinian tensions,

and we can go through it. Just on the metric of countries, coming back to my earlier question, but other countries that have been created over the last 100 years, it's unbelievable, the geopolitical and the economic accomplishments, that Israel today is not a charity case for the United States government. It's an indispensable ally, literally an indispensable ally. Like, if you actually list all the countries in the world that are the most important allies to the United States today and will be in the next 50 years, Israel is certainly on the list of the top five, and I can make the

argument, like, the top two, basically, Israel and the UK. I mean, I don't want to, we can get into the analysis of why that is, but it is, it is Israel, no one's doing a favor for Israel anymore. I mean, it's like the world needs Israel. That's, you can't say that about many of these other countries that were created. Right, the world needs Israel and the Jews need Israel. And they both have it. And I think that's worth celebrating at 75, even with all of the things that we wish were better and different. Yeah. I agree.

Danny, thanks for doing this. Impossible takes longer. 75 years after its creation, has Israel fulfilled its founder's dreams? We will post the book in the show notes. We have a lot of book buyers that listen to this podcast so you know hopefully you get a a spike here we'll call it the the senor surge in book sales uh from your you're having this conversation thanks for doing it and um i hope

to see you soon thanks Thanks for having me. That's our show for today. If you want to follow Danny Gordis' work, you can follow him on Twitter. That's at Daniel Gordis, G-O-R-D-I-S, at Daniel Gordis. And remember to subscribe to his newsletter and podcast, Israel from the Inside. You can just Google Israel from the Inside and you'll find it. It's on Substack. And remember to send questions in for Mike Murphy, who we will be having on in the days ahead.

If you have a question for Mike, please record a voice memo and send it to dan at unlocked.fm. That's dan at unlocked.fm. Remember to please keep the question to under 30 seconds. Call Me Back is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.