Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Israel’s Near Death Experience - with Micah Goodman

Episode Date: March 6, 2024

Micah Goodman is on the speed-dial of a number of Israeli political leaders – from right to left, but especially on the center-left and the center-right. He is a polymath, a podcaster and one of Israel’s most influential public intellectuals, having written books ranging from biblical lessons for the modern age to Israel’s geopolitics. One book in particular, had an outsized impact in terms of its framing of the conundrum that Israel has been in with the Palestinians since 1967. That book is called Catch-67: The Left, the Right, and the Legacy of the Six-Day War, Not only have all of his books been bestsellers in Israel, he essentially created a new genre; books that bring core texts of Jewish thought to a general, secular audience. But Micah has a new book, which he wrote in a four-month sprint following October 7. His new book is called ‘The Eighth Day’, in which Micah tries to understand the implications of the nation’s trauma and what it means for the other ‘day after’ (not the ‘day after’ in Gaza, but the ‘day after’ inside Israel). What does this moment mean for Israelis? How will 10/07 re-shape Israeli society…and its politics?This is the first interview Micah has done about his new book, which will be published (in Hebrew) at the end of March. Micah Goodman’s books: Catch-67 — https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/catch-67-micah-goodman/1128089735?ean=9780300248418 The Wondering Jew — https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-wondering-jew-micah-goodman/1136574622?ean=9780300252248

What we were seeing was impossible. It was the unimaginable. And I think that was part of the state of shock that we were at October 7th, but now we are transformed Israelis. Anyone that has visited Israel ever since October 7th has noticed and realized that Israelis post-October 7th were not the same people. Part of the transformation that we're going through is for the first time in my life, in my generation's life, we could imagine something that we couldn't ever imagine before. We can imagine a reality where Israel doesn't exist. That's what October 7th did to us. It reminded us of something that we've all forgotten, that this existence of Jewish sovereignty, of the state of Israel, is fragile. And like any

individual that went through a near death experience, and then you got your life back, you're forever transformed because you know not to take your life for granted. I think that's what we're going through as a nation. We went through a near death experience, and now we are different Israelis. Because now our sovereignty, our statehood, will not be taken for granted anymore. It's 11.30 p.m. on Tuesday, March 5th in New York City. It's 6.30 a.m. on Wednesday, March 6th in New York City. It's 6.30 a.m. on Wednesday, March 6th in Israel, as Israelis begin their day. Mika Goodman is on the speed dial of a number of Israeli political

leaders from right to left, but especially those on the center left and the center right. He is a polymath, a podcaster, and one of Israel's most influential public intellectuals, having written books ranging from biblical lessons for the modern age to Israel's geopolitics. One book in particular had an outsized impact, at least on me and I think on many others inside Israel, in terms of its framing of the conundrum that Israel has been in vis-a-vis the Palestinians since 1967. The book is called Catch 67, The Left, The Right, and the Legacy of the Six-Day War. I highly recommend it. Not only have all of his books been bestsellers in Israel, but he essentially created a new genre, books that bring core texts of Jewish thought to a general secular audience.

Mika hosts the most downloaded podcast in Israel. He's also an especially colorful and quotable character in the new book I recently wrote with Saul Singer called The Genius of Israel. But Mika has a new book, a really, really, really new book, as in he wrote it in four months in a sprint immediately following October 7th. His new book is called The Eighth Day, in which Mika tries to understand the implications of Israel's trauma, of the nation's trauma, and what it means for the other day after. We hear the term the day after all the time,

usually referred to what's Israel's plan for the day after in Gaza. But Mika writes about the day after inside Israel. What does this moment mean for Israelis? How will October 7th reshape Israeli society and its politics? This is the first interview Mika has done about his new book, which will be published in Hebrew at the end of March. Mika Goodman on Israel's near-death experience. This is Call Me Back. And I'm pleased to welcome back to this podcast my longtime friend Mika Goodman, who joins us from Israel,

who I have been in touch with since October 7th, but has not been on this podcast since October 7th because he's been fast at work on dealing with a number of issues and projects, not the least of which working on a book, which we're going to talk about. But first, Mika, how are you holding up? On a personal, individual level, this is a nice time. It's a good time. But on a national level, how are you holding up? On a personal, individual level, this is a nice time. Yeah. It's a good time. But on a national level, I'm very worried.

There's also a lot of potential at this moment. It's the most intense time of our lives. Mika, I think part of what explains some of the popularity of your Hebrew language podcast is that you're sort of Israel's national psychoanalyst. You've dedicated your academic and intellectual life to quite insightfully making sense of Israel's history, its politics, its society, and its psyche, the national psyche. And your books offer forms of, if you will, prescriptions or treatment. Your new book is called The Eighth Day, which you wrote, which you crashed on, really, during

the war. And in a sense, you psychoanalyze the post-traumatic nation in real time. You're writing it while you're processing and understanding what's going on in the country, what got them to this moment, and God willing, we'll move Israelis forward. So in this conversation, I just want to try to understand, the term the day after is thrown around a lot. What's the day after plan for Gaza? Not as much attention is focused on what's the day after state of mind be in Israel, in Israeli society, its politics, and in just the overall direction of the country. And I know that

covers a lot. And I want to do as much of it as we can today. Maybe we'll lure you into coming back to continue the conversation. We've lured you out of your writing bunker, which you've been in for four plus months. And you haven't given any interviews until now, or at least no English language interviews. So I want to start with October 7th. So I guess the first question I want to ask you is the Shabbat of October 7th, Simchat Torah, close to five months ago now. How did you experience that day? I was walking to Shul, a synagogue, and there were sirens going off.

And I take my girls, we run into a bomb shelter nearby. And somebody shows me, I try to stay away from screens in Shabbat. It's a very big thing for me, not to get close to screens in Shabbat. And somebody shows to me her screen. She shows me that there's terrorists in Sderot, on jeeps in Sderot. And everybody was around looking at it. And they were looking at me because they think I know something. And I explained to them exactly what they're saying. I told them, listen, Israel is under attack, but it's a cyber attack. What you're seeing, what you're observing is deep fake. Iran is attacking Israel.

It's deep fake. It's not real. And what they want us is to panic. And they all looked at me and they think I know something. They think I have some kind of intellectual authority. And they were all calmed. Okay, it's not real. It's a cyber attack.

It's deep fake. That's how crazy it was then. It was, I was looking at it, watching it, and it was completely unbelievable, uncredible. This isn't real. By the most logical explanation I had, it's a cyber attack. It's deepfake. They're trying to scare us. There's not a chance in the world that these terrorists managed to pass the fence of Gaza and to make it to Sderot with jeeps filled with terrorists. That wasn't a possibility. So that, I think, explains the state of mind of myself and I think most Israelis. What we were seeing was impossible.

It was something that was unimaginable. And I think that was part of the state of shock that we were in October 7. But I think we're still in a state of shock. But now we are, I think we are transformed Israelis. Anyone that has visited Israel ever since October 7th has noticed and realized that Israelis post-October 7th were not the same people. Part of the transformation that we're going through is for the first time in my life, in my generation's life, we can do something that we couldn't ever do before. We could imagine something that we couldn't ever do before. We could imagine something

that we couldn't ever imagine before. We can imagine a reality where Israel doesn't exist. That's what October 7th did to us. It reminded us of something that we've all forgotten, that this existence of the Jewish sovereignty of the state of Israel is fragile. And like any individual that went through a near-death experience, and then you got your life back, and then you're forever transformed because you know not to take your life for granted, and every moment shouldn't be trivialized. I think that's what we're going through as a nation. We went through a near-death experience. And now my generation could for its first time imagine a reality where Israel doesn't exist. And now we are different Israelis because now our sovereignty, our statehood will not be taken for granted anymore.

Mika, there's been a lot of discussion and analysis since October 7th inside Israel about how October 7th has changed Israel's view of what has been the status quo for the last several decades, the conceptia, as they call it, the concept in terms of the balance of power between Israel and its various adversaries on its borders, and its overall security doctrine that everyone places at the feet of Prime Minister Netanyahu, obviously, but there have been many leaders at various points who've also been in the top seat from Naftali Bennett to Yair Lapid. The conceptia was a consensus of you. Completely. And I have spent a lot of time in Israel over the years, and when I

meet with the officials involved with the security establishment, I never heard real concern about the possibility of something happening like what happened on October 7th. So how has this changed your thinking? I woke up in the metaphorical day after October 7th, and I realized, you see, I like to think a lot about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And as you know, I wrote a book about it, KAS 67. And in my podcast, Mifleget HaMach Shavut, we had 30 episodes about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 30 episodes.

And every episode, we try to take a different dilemma regarding the conflict and try to articulate it. Offer all the arguments for all sides. 30 episodes. And I think a few weeks after October 7th, I went back to my book, Kash 37. I saw there was not one chapter about Gaza. And in 30 episodes, in Mifleget HaMach Shavot, and me and the Fratz Apir Rozel Books podcast, there wasn't one chapter about Hamas. So this was a blind spot, a massive blind spot in my own intellectual world. And just for our listeners to understand, Catch 67, it was focused on you had come, there's this debate in Israel between the two-state solution and no solution.

And you thought either of those, basically where you came down, in the near term, near to medium term, was unsustainable. So you were trying to come up with a way to shrink the conflict, even if we couldn't, even if we couldn't solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, you were coming up with interim steps that could perhaps bring down the tension within the conflict. And what you're telling me now is even in that context, you weren't even focused on Gaza and Hamas, you were focused on the Palestinians in the West Bank. Exactly. Gaza wasn't the chapter in my book. And it wasn't the chapter in my book and it wasn't the episode in my in my podcast so i realized there's a moment where you realize oh my god the blind spot of the

entire intelligence and political and security establishment which nobody saw that coming it was also my blind spot and how embarrassing it is it is as an intellectual that you wake up one morning and you realize that you think you're an out-of-the-box thinker but your mind is inside the box of the entire system you're part of the group thinking maybe even contributed to the group thinking that was for me still is a very shaking experience i'm still asking myself am i a group think like i i don't see myself as a group thinker, but I think no group thinker thinks of himself or herself as group thinkers. So for me, that was a shaking experience. And I think I know why I didn't think about Gaza. Why did I miss Gaza?

Why wasn't Gaza interesting enough to really think hard about? The way I understood and still understand, although I have to revise my thinking, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there's two threats that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict presents on Israelis. One threat is a security threat, and the second threat is the demographic threat. And these two threats are alive when we talk about West Bank or Judea and Samaria. Because if Israel leaves the West Bank or Judea and Samaria. Because if Israel leaves the West Bank or Judea and Samaria, choose your term, so that puts Israel in a real serious security threat. But if it stays there, it creates a reality where 1.8 million Palestinians could integrate into

Israel, and then we could lose our massive Jewish majority. So if we stay there, we're risking our majority. If we leave the territories, we're risking our security. And I thought that's a very interesting and challenging dilemma. And all my focus was on that. And Gaza? Gaza doesn't contain that. Why? Because since we left Gaza in 2005, the demographic threat doesn't really exist. The two point whatever million Palestinians in Gaza can't really integrate into Israel. So there's no demographic threat. And because this was my naive thinking, Gaza geographically and topographically is not right above Tel Aviv. So Gaza is a threat to 50,000 Israelis living in the envelope of Gaza, which is a horrible

thing, but a strategic threat to 5.5 million Israelis living in the center of Israel. So it doesn't impose an existential security threat. It doesn't present an existential demographic threat. It's not existentially threatening our majority or our security. So it's a problem like car accidents and crime. It's a problem we have to think about, but it's not an existential problem. And that's why I let myself keep my eye off the ball of Gaza. The thought that Hamas could pull off what they pulled off and tried to activate the entire Iranian octopus because according to our western logic the strong activates the weak so Iran could activate Hezbollah Hezbollah could activate Hamas the strong activates the weak on October 7th Yehoshua and all his team they wanted

to reverse it instead of the strong activating weak, the weak tried to activate the strong. Hamas tried to activate Hezbollah, Tehran, the Houthi. And because they tried to do that and they almost succeeded, and to some extent they did succeed. So it turns out that Gaza is not a problem like car accidents or crime or traffic jams, it does present a strategic threat on Israel. That is what I didn't see. I'm embarrassed to say that I didn't see that, especially because you wake up in the morning and you realize that your blind spot is a blind spot of the entire system, which means your mind, your intellectual activity was somehow trapped within the Israeli system. And as an intellectual and as a thinker and as a person who's been thinking this, this is, in Hebrew we say, there's a lot I have to rethink the way I think

about things. This idea that October 7th was the first time in modern times that we're like, oh, this is what it looks like when there's not a Jewish state. Can you explain what you meant by that? The founding fathers and mothers of Israel, they were alive in two different periods of Jewish history. They were alive in a time where Jews didn't have power, didn't have estate, didn't have sovereignty. And they were alive when Jews did have power and did have estate. And they saw they were existing in both periods. And that's why they would never take Jewish sovereignty for granted because they knew two things. One, that Israel is a miracle.

And two, that Israel is a miracle. And two, that it's a fragile miracle. Because they existed in a world where Israel didn't exist, they lived in a world where Israel didn't exist, they could imagine a world where Israel can't exist. So that double awareness that Israel is a miracle and it's a fragile miracle, that created the energy that created Israel. The founding fathers and mothers knew they can't risk this and they have to risk this, and they have to make this strong and build this and strengthen this. That's the founding fathers and mothers. Generation two, the miracle is less a miracle and doesn't seem that fragile. By the time we go to generation four, Israel is taken for granted, and people that are born here feel like this is so

stable. This is here forever. Because my generation was born into Israel. And for us, the thought that Israel won't exist is unthinkable. And we lost what some philosophers call the tragic sense of reality. The idea that everything could collapse. All achievements of civilization could collapse beneath our legs at any moment. That that could happen. And we lost that. And one of the interesting paradoxes, by the way, that I think we find in our Bible,

but we could find in a very articulate way in the Tao Te Ching and the ancient Chinese philosophy, is the following paradox is that when you think that reality is stable, it starts to collapse. But when you realize that it could collapse, it could stay stable. I think what happens to Jews in the fourth generation is that you feel like it's so stable you start messing around with it and dan is exactly what we started to do in the past in 2023 we started which is what happened also in the past what we what we start entering saying it's very close to a cold civil war in israel we i think we discussed this and you discussed this many times in this podcast, including with me. And that made us weak, and our enemies saw the weakness, and they wanted to leverage it, and they attacked us. And then October 7th happened, and suddenly,

my generation has adopted the perspective of the founding fathers and mothers. Because now, just like the founding fathers, we saw 24 hours where Israel didn't exist. I'm saying in the envelope of Gaza for 24 hours, there was no real sovereignty. The intelligence community didn't create the warning. The military wasn't really there. The state of Israel for 24 hours, the black hole,

in my book I call it the black hole of Israeli history, it didn't exist. And just like the founding fathers and mothers, also we tasted a reality where Israel doesn't exist. And since now we live in a reality where Israel doesn't exist, now we could see the difference. And I think we're restoring the tragic sense of reality. We know that Israel should not be taken for granted. We know how fragile it is. And when we know when reality is fragile, that's when it becomes more stable. And that, I think, is bringing out of many Israelis the awareness that this thing is fragile, that we could imagine that this could end. That is bringing the best version

out of Israelis. In my book, I think it's creating the awareness. The fourth generation of Israelis is starting to adopt the attitude and the awareness and the perspective of the founding fathers and mothers, I think because many Israelis are starting to see themselves as the new founders of the next version of Israel. In your book, you make a distinction between political views and political identities. Yeah. And how they map over each other in Israel. I want to get to that in a moment. Before I do, can you just, with a little more granularity, describe what was happening in politics in Israel before October 7th?

Not an analysis of this party was doing that and that party was doing this, but what was it representative of? The politics of Israel pre-October 7th was representative of what? Israel pre-October 7th was, we were living in an optical illusion that Israel is divided into two political tribes, which have very radically different values, and those values are clashing. And there was one tribe that saw itself as the Jewish tribe, the tribe that's more national, more patriotic, more Jewish, more connected to tradition, more connected to the past.

And that's one tribe. And the second tribe is the liberal tribe, the more Western tribe, the tribe of human rights, the tribe of liberties, the tribe of Tel Aviv, not of Jerusalem, the tribe of secularism. And many Israelis started to believe the myth that we're divided into two, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, liberalism versus Judaism. And those tribes started clashing. And the political system reflected that optical illusion.

That's where we were living until October 7th. And we were the victims of this optical illusion. In my book, I'm trying to argue that October 7th is breaking this optical illusion because Israel is not divided into two. This illusion was bringing Israel down. Can we talk just, I want to drill down for a moment on the Khadradi, on the ultra-Orthodox, because obviously they're in the news right now because of this debate over a draft exemption. I just talked about it recently with Aviv Retikur at length, that there's all this talk, will the Israeli government fracture? Will the war cabinet fall apart? Will differences in war

planning bring down the government? And I constantly tell audiences in the West, having spent time with most, not all, but most of the members of the war cabinet or their advisors, while there's personal animus between these men, I have a hard time finding much daylight in their overall, at a high level, their overall strategy and approach to what to do about Gaza, about what to do about the actual war. There's not that much disagreement. So disagreement on what to do in Gaza is unlikely, in my view, to bring down the government. And then the sleeper issue comes up, which is the Haredi military exemption. So this is an issue that's come up before in Israel. Can you explain how it's come up in the past in terms of its role

in internal debates and how divisive it's become and then how it's playing out now? I think a way to map out the Israeli political debate is ask every generation has one debate that becomes a dominant debate. And that's the debate that divides Israelis into two. Our political debate is a biography with three episodes. Episode number one, I would say between 48 and roughly 67. It actually goes into the 70s, but the turning point is 67, is that Israel was divided between roughly socialists and capitalists. That was the main debate. The government was led by a socialist party, a moderate, pragmatic socialist party, Ben-Gurion.

And they had a vision of a very egalitarian country based on values of socialism. And these values will radiate the Israeli model of socialism to the entire world. The whole world will imitate Israel. It will be Ola going to the nations. And there was a party called the Tzionim HaKalim

and Menachem Begin's party. They didn't like that. They wanted privatization and free markets. And that was a debate. It was a classic big government, small government debate. 67 changed the debate.

It changed the debate because a new debate was born. And a new debate divided Israel into two. And it wasn't a debate about the size of the government, the size changed the debate. It changed the debate because a new debate was born. And a new debate divided Israel into two. And it wasn't a debate about the size of the government, the size of the country. Or after the Six-Day War, what do we do with all the land, Sinai, Peninsula, the Golan Heights, Judea and Samaria? That's true. What do we do with all this land? And one camp said, we should hand this and we should make a deal and trade this land for peace. And the other camp said, no, we should settle this land. should make a deal and trade this land for peace and the other camp said no we should settle this land and okay you know that that debate so we moved the

grand transformation israel went through in the 70s as a result of the six-day war is that the debate was transformed instead of arguing that the size of the government you know taxes and privatization the size of the country and are these are these territories should be an organic part of is, or should we trade them for peace? And that debate divided Israel into two again. And then something happened. Roughly entering the 21st century, that debate started dying. It's not that the conflict, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ended, but the debate over the conflict lost its energy. And the right became, I think, most parts of the right became more pragmatic. The left completely over, most of the left

completely grew out of the fantasy of the dream that peace is possible now and a two-state solution is possible in the foreseeable future. And when that happens, no real debate replaced that debate. Land and peace replaced socialism and capitalism, but no real debate replaced that debate. And there's many competitors. Some people think that the new debate is like, we're like America, conservatives versus liberals. And some people think it's the people versus the elites. And some people think it's about people versus the elites. And some people think it's about the judicial reform. But if you go into all these issues, according to polls, most Israelis agree. By the way, Dan, in the height of the judicial reform debate,

57% of Israelis agreed that we need a reform, but much more balanced and moderate. There was, I don't know, roughly 20% that wanted a radical reform and roughly the same amount of number that wanted no reform at all. So again, Israel is divided into three, but there is the optical illusion that it's divided into two. So no debate managed to replace that. Now, some Israelis think, I don't know if this is going to happen, but it might happen, that the new debate has enough energy to replace the debate of land and peace and to create new dividing lines in

Israel is the debate over the ultra-Orthodox community. And the reason why the new dividing lines in Israel won't be right-left, will be the people that are serving and the people that don't serve. So if this new policy debate gains traction, gains momentum, it seems like it will, this policy debate will transform Israeli politics, so it will actually reflect Israeli values. There is a division, they're polarized, but the division is not between right and left, but between the Israelis that serve and the Israelis that don't serve. This, I think, has two reasons. One, hybrid Israelis met each other, secular, religious, right-wingers, left-wingers, spent 120 days together with each other and were willing to die for each other.

And they bonded and they realized that they're very close to each other. Guess who wasn't there? The Old Orthodox. So they didn't go through this bonding experience. That's one aspect. And the second, that's, I would say, an emotional aspect. But now there's also an existential aspect

where we woke up one day in the morning and we realized that we don't have enough soldiers. Now this is, I think, this is a tremendous, when we talk about a conceptia, a concept that collapsed. One of the big concepts that collapsed was the idea that Israel could have a very small and technological army, a very small. I myself served in a reconnaissance unit of a brigade of tanks.

And throughout my career in the military, I always belonged to one brigade. They closed it. They shut it down. I moved to another one. After a few years, they shut it down. I moved to another brigade of things. They shut that one too. So in my career in the military, I saw how the army is shrinking. The paradigm that we don't need many tanks. We don't need many soldiers. We're the startup nation. Sorry, Dan, that illusion created the myth that without a lot of soldiers, with a lot of AI and A200 and Air Force and special units, a smart and small army can meet the threats. And now I think Israelis are realizing we actually need a lot of tanks, a lot of soldiers, and we don't have enough. And let me just share with you three conversations I had the past week. One friend of mine was in Hanunis for 120 days,

and guess what? He's called for duty in June. June! And his wife told me, I don't want him to go. He did enough. And then another guy was in the Hermon up north for 100 days, and he's just got home, and he's out of a job, by the way. I mean, this guy was a manager of storage, a lot of storage space. He's back and his boss told him, now you're the guard. Sorry, you're the guard because you're back. Why? Because he's called back to duty in two months. So what is he going to do with him in the meantime? This is a massive crisis in Israel now. And you realize we don't have enough soldiers. And now we're looking around and we see there's over 60,000 ultra-Orthodox that are in the age that can serve in the army. If a fifth of them will serve, we have many of our problems solved. So on the one hand, mainstream Israelis

have bonded, and the experience of bonding, the ultra-Orthodox weren't there. On the other hand, we're now recognizing on an intellectual level that there is a new need. We actually need them to serve. You put these two together, and you realize that it's very passable that the new dividing lines in Israel is not about big government, small government, big country, small country, but the people who serve because we need a big army and the people who don't serve. And they say that we don't need to serve because our prayers and our studying does the work. Now, here's the thing. I just want to say something. In the beginning, the 50s and 60s, it was clear we needed a big army.

Everybody thought we needed a big army, but there weren't that many ultra-Orthodox. We didn't really need them. Then the ultra-Orthodox community grew, but we were in the concept that we don't need a big army. We need a small army. So we don't need a big army. We need a small army. So we don't need them. Then only now after October 7th, we're in the moment where we realized we need a lot of soldiers and there are a lot of ultra Orthodox Israelis. So this is a moment that might transform Israeli politics and create new dividing lines between Israelis. And do you sense that there are, it's been my sense since

before October 7th, we talked a little bit about this in our book, but I think I have been struck by this even more so since October 7th. This notion that ultra-Orthodox don't want to serve is too stark an observation. It's softer than that. It's not as rigid as the political coverage of this debate would lead one to believe. Well, I think there is a very large group within the ultra-Orthodox Israel that wants to integrate into Israel. The best way to integrate into Israel is to serve in the army. But there is four groups within the ultra-Orthodox community, which are like the elite of the ultra-Orthodox community, which is the leaders of the school system, like the yeshivot, the school system,

the politicians, the rabbis, and the people that are controlling the newspapers, the internal newspapers in the ultra-Orthodox world. And they, that group, is protecting the status quo. I have a theory that the most powerful weapon they have is the Shidduch market, the dating market, where if you serve in the army, your value in a dating market goes down.

That is one hell of a way to keep people in line, right? And why does that happen? Well, if you go to the army, if you serve in the army, so they might think about you, that you are now your Yiddish kite. And you're less of a serious student. Meaning if you're not, if you're, if you're not in the seminary, if you're in the battle, if you're in the army, you're not in the seminary. If you're not in the seminary, you're not as a lead of a student. And you have best friends that are, when you're in the army, even if you're very religious, your best friend becomes a secular Israeli. And you become his best friend, and then you breathe in his values and his ideas.

And the whole idea of ultra-Orthodoxy is to preserve my identity by protecting it, by closing it off from the external world. Serving in the army means that you are in high interaction with the Western secular world. Right. You're fully integrated as opposed to living a separate, ultra-Orthodox communal life. Exactly. So if your brother went to the army, some Haredis will say, not only does his value in the Shidduch market go down, also your value is going down, because you might be influenced by him. By the way, I don't understand enough to talk about

the Shidduch market, exactly how it works, but I do want to pick up an idea here. And the idea is that one of the reasons why most Haredim, even after October 7th, are not showing up and they're not knocking on the doors of the army, not saying, I want to serve, I want to protect my country. It's not because they don't identify with Zionism and service, but because they're afraid. And I mean, some don't identify, some identify with the Horebi ideology of not serving in the arm because they're serving God through studying Torah, the alternative narrative. But many people are just afraid. And I don't think that fear is something that could keep a community going for a long time. And Israelis are now thinking if what's blocking them, critical mass of them from serving is fear, and it's not that they believe in this. I mean,

many of them stop believing in this ideology and identifying with it, but it's about fear. So there's different ideas of how can you crack fear. Now, I'm not a fan of breaking fear with alternative fear. Maybe there's other ways to do it, but that's an important Israeli debate that we used to think it's a nice to have debate. Now we realize it's an existential debate. We need these soldiers in order to survive and win this war. You have made this point to me in the past in conversation, and I've, even leaders within the Haredi community, albeit not on the record, have made this point to me, that the way the Haredi are organized and live this total separate life along the lines that

you've been describing in Israel, and the way the majority of the men do not work, and the majority of them do not serve. This is unlike any other time this community has lived in other parts of the world, in Eastern Europe before the founding of the state. This idea that everyone was a potential elite student, and therefore, everyone had a path to not working. It's just, at a practical level, it's just never existed before, that this period in Israel has been the outlier, not the other way around. Exactly. Throughout Jewish history, Jews always valued Jewish education. And by the way, this was, in Talmudic times, it was probably the first time in human history

where there was the idea of democratization of education, where it's not only an elite that learns that everyone, I mean, all males have to know how to read, how to write, and how to learn. And that is something way, way, way before modernity, the idea of democratization of education is an ancient Jewish idea. But throughout the generations, there was the idea, okay, we all have to learn how to read, but only a small part of the community will be excellent, will strive for excellence. And the ones that have the abilities to strive for intellectual Talmudic excellence, we will say, okay, you don't have to work. You don't have to do anything. We'll take care of you. We'll give you scholarships. You're taken care of. You study.

In Haredi Israel, a new invention was created, not a community that enables the elites to learn, but a community that learns. A community of learners. So it's the democratization of intellectual excellence. Now we treat you, every one of you, as we used to treat in the diaspora as an excellent intellectual. And I would say, and maybe this is to try to bring this home, one of the reasons why Israel developed this was that in the 1950s, there was a sense within Haredi Israel that the whole world,

the yeshiva world, was destroyed in the Holocaust. Because the greatest yeshivot were in Eastern Europe, in Lithuania, in Poland, it was destroyed in the Holocaust. And in the 1950s, a very, very tiny community of survivors came to Israel and said, we have one job and one job only, to rebuild everything that was destroyed. And the great rabbis of the time, the Chazonish and others said, okay, so for that, we'll change the model. It's not the model that one or two people learn and everybody works. We all learn because we have a mission. We have to rebuild what was destroyed by the Nazis. So in the 1950s, you had secular Israel trying to create the type

of Jew that never existed before. The Kibbutznik, the socialist, the secular. And that was one very passionate project of secular Israel. And ultra-Orthodox Israel had another very passionate project, but it was the opposite. Not to create the Jew that never existed before, but to create a replica, an exact replica of the Jew that existed in Eastern Europe. So they want to create a reconstruction of the past. They want to rebel against the past. And that's Israel of the 1950s. And by the way, the project of ultra-Orthodox Israel, of rebuilding the Yeshiva world that was destroyed in Eastern Europe, was so successful that today in Israel, there is more Yeshivot and more people studying the yeshivot than there ever was in Jewish history. So I would say in the 1950s, the Haredim go to this project and they are winners. They are winners. I would say they

could teach us all a lesson of to learn how to lose. They got hit in the Holocaust and they picked themselves up. It's a great lesson. That's how you deal with loss. That's how you deal when you get hit. I would say now ultra-Orthodox Israel has the alternative challenge. Now they have to understand that their challenge is the other way around. What do you do with success? What do you do after you've won? What do you do after you realize that you are victorious in your historical project? So they knew how to get hit and get themselves back up. And I think, and we all start to understand that just like it will be a tragedy if Haredi

community that knew how to lose and to pick themselves up, they don't know how to win. They don't realize, okay, the project, we've managed to rebuild everything that was destroyed, and now we have to shift, change the paradigm. Because if they don't change their paradigm, it's not that the Haredi community is in trouble, I think our entire country is in trouble. Okay, Mika, I want to just wrap here in a few minutes. But one question I have to ask you, the Israeli-Palestinian issue, which we talked about earlier, has been definitional for Israeli politics, even when it wasn't definitional.

I mean, it was definitional from basically the Intifada from 87 through the second Intifada, through the collapse of the Camp David talks between Barack and Arafat and Clinton in 2000. And ever since then, the Israeli public, most of the consensus in the Israeli public was there's nothing to be done here. These people, or at least their leaders, are not serious about a peaceful coexistence. Obviously, that has reached a whole new level since October 7th. If you remove the Israeli-Palestinian issue as a focal point in the debate in domestic Israeli politics from the national discussion. That's a pretty big void. Like, A, what does that look like with just this issue just not being addressed?

And B, what replaces it? This is the great opportunity of the future of Israel, that hybrid Israelis have always divided, retreating themselves around this issue of land and peace, two-state solution. If that issue is taken away, there is nothing that could really divide them anymore. This is the promise. There's many ways that people are thinking about this war.

And some people call it the second war of independence. Yeah, yeah. Explain. When I speak to reservists, to soldiers, so I ask them, like, do you like this term? So I get two answers. Answer number one, in the first war of independence, Israel was under existential risk. We're not under the risk of the same level.

By the way, before David Ben-Gurion declared the state of Israel, he realized that a big war will break out. And he realized that it's a very dangerous war. And he asked one of his generals, Yigal Yadin, what are our chances of winning this war? You know what Yadin told him? 50-50. And creating the state of Israel was a strategic gamble of Ben-Gurion. We're lucky we landed on the right 50. By the way, if we would have landed on the wrong 50, now we know how that could have looked like. Right, right. But we landed on the right 50. I think there is real risks here, some are existential. I wouldn't say it's 50-50. I would say it's 95-5,

okay? Sometimes when I panic, it's 90-10, okay? But it's not 50-50. I mean, there are scenarios you can imagine, but it's not 50-50. So we're not in the second war of independence because of the size of the risk, but we might be in our second war of independence because of the size of the risk. But we might be in our second war of independence because of the size of the opportunity. After the first war of independence, Israelis came home and built Israel. Many Israelis feel that when this war is over, our role of our generation is to found Israel all over again, to rebuild Israel. And in that sense, it is the second war of independence, not because of the size of the risk, because of the size of the opportunity. And the opportunity

is that hybrid Israelis, they used to have all these optical illusions, all these false dichotomies, like the illusion that we actually have an argument about a two-state solution that might appear tomorrow morning in a euphoric or against it okay when that issue is removed and other issues are removed and we found each other when we were in reserves and this is a moment where hybrid israelis which are very patriotic and very liberal and they feel comfortable with these two with living within like living in this tension they might feel comfortable also different tribes secular and religious but people soft right soft left to build the new coalition that could rebuild israel that is the promise of this moment that

that's this is i mean this moment is pregnant with so much and maybe possibly very bad scenarios but it's also pregnant with a real promise of the rebirth of israel by hybrid israelis all right miko we will leave it there that is certainly certainly a high note to leave this discussion on, and otherwise, at least from here, seem like very dark times. But I am grateful, as always, for your voice. And for those who are Hebrew readers, I highly encourage you getting your hands on this book. And for those who are not Hebrew readers, we'll try to figure out a way to get this.

Mika doesn't believe, by the way, that there'll be an audience for this book outside of Israel. I was just telling him I think there will be. There is many people interested in the conversation with Israel over here abroad. And your book is the pointy end of the spear on that on that debate so thank you for the book and thank you for the time and I will see you soon all right see you soon bye-bye that's our show for today if you want to keep up with Mika the best thing to do is read his books and we'll link to his books in the show notes. I highly recommend all of them, especially Catch 67 and obviously The Eighth Day. Call Me

Back is produced and edited by Ilan Benatar. Our media manager is Rebecca Strom. Additional editing by Martin Huergo. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.