Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Who by Fire - With Matti Friedman

Episode Date: August 18, 2022

Matti Friedman is one of the most thoughtful writers when it comes to all matters related to Israel, on the broader Middle East, and also on trends in the world of journalism. He is a monthly writer for Tablet Magazine and a regular contributor to The Atlantic. His newest book is called “Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai.” Before that he published "Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel," and before that "Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story of a Forgotten War," which was chosen as a New York Times’ Notable Book and as one of Amazon’s 10 best books of the year, and was selected as one of the year’s best by Foreign Affairs Magazine. Matti’s army service included tours in Lebanon. His work as a reporter has taken him from Israel to Lebanon, Morocco, Moscow, the Caucasus, and Washington, DC. He is a former Associated Press correspondent and essayist for the New York Times opinion section. We cover a lot of topics in this podcast, including how to make sense of the recent Israel-Gaza flare-up, how to view it in the frame of the broader Middle East, the state of journalism and how it covers geopolitical events and wars, and we also dive into his newest book, “Who By Fire." Matti Friedman's published works that we discuss in this episode: "There Is No 'Israeli-Palestinian Conflict'" -- The New York Times -- https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/16/opinion/israeli-palestinian-conflict-matti-friedman.htm" "An Insider’s Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth" -- Tablet Magazine -- https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/israel-insider-guide "What The Media Gets Wrong About Israel" -- The Atlantic -- https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/how-the-media-makes-the-israel-story/383262/ "The New Kibbutz" -- Tablet Magazine -- https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/kibbutz-matti-friedman "Who By Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai" -- https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/who-by-fire-matti-friedman/1140395710?ean=9781954118072

I think that one thing that Leonard Cohen is doing here is escaping his own crisis through our crisis. So he needs to go somewhere that is completely different than what he's used to, and he needs to have some other kind of experience, and he hopes to have it in this war. So it's not all altruism and, you know, Zionism and the love of the Jewish people, even though I think that's a lot of what it is. He feels deeply connected to Jews and he needs for some time, but wanted to wait until I could do it in person here in Israel. So for this episode, I sit down with Mati Friedman, one of the most thoughtful writers I know when it comes to all matters related to Israel and the broader Middle East, and also broader trends going on in the world of journalism.

Mati is a monthly writer for Tablet Magazine and a regular contributor to The Atlantic Magazine. His newest book, which is just terrific, is called Who By Fire? Leonard Cohen in the Sinai. Now, typically I would summarize the book here in this intro, but it's so unusual and rich that I'm not even going to bother. I won't be able to do it justice.

So you just got to trust me and listen to my conversation with Mati. The book he wrote before Who By Fire was called Spies of No Country, Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel, also superb. And before that, Pumpkin Flowers, A Soldier's Story of a Forgotten War, which was chosen as a New York Times notable book and as one of Amazon's 10 best books of the year. Mati's army service included a lot of

time in Lebanon. Mati's work as a reporter has taken him from Israel to Lebanon, Morocco, Moscow, the Caucasus, and Washington, D.C. He's a former Associated Press correspondent and an essayist for the New York Times opinion section. Now, we cover a lot of topics in this podcast, including how to make sense of the recent Israel-Gaza flare-up, how to view it in the frame of larger trends going on in the Middle East, and also the state of journalism and how the media covers geopolitical events and wars. And, of course, we also dive into his newest book, Who By Fire?

Here is Mati Friedman. This is Call Me Back. And I'm pleased to welcome my friend Mati Friedman, who writes regularly for Tablet and whose work also appears frequently with The Atlantic. Here we are in Jerusalem. Mati, it is good to be with you in person. It's great to be here. Yeah, I mean, we could have done this by Zoom in two different locations, but I figured, you know, given the content we're covering, better to be here in person on Deruch B'Elechem, you know, in the heart of Israel's capital.

Always best to do it in Jerusalem. Yes. Okay, so before—there's a lot I want to cover. Before we do, just to, I described your bio in the introduction, but I just want you to just spend a couple minutes on your story in Israel. So you immigrated to Israel from Canada. What year? 1995. And you were what?

17. 17 years old. Okay. And you joined the IDF first I spent a year working on a kibbutz milking cows one of the greatest years I ever had and then I decided to stay and after that I got drafted which happens here after high school and served for three years in the in the military went off to college then became a journalist where did you serve in the IDF I served in an infantry brigade called the Nahal Brigade.

At the time, the army was engaged in this strange guerrilla conflict with Hezbollah in South Lebanon. This is the late 90s, so the most significant chunks of my service were spent there. In northern Israel, southern Lebanon? In southern Lebanon, what we called the security zone. Yeah, right. And that was before Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon.

That's right. I got out of the army about the same time the army blew up all the bases inside Lebanon and pulled out in the spring of 2000. Okay. And you've made your life here. You've started a family here. And you worked in journalism here. You worked for the Associated Press in their Israel bureau?

That's right. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. So before we get to the book, Who By Fire, I want to just spend a few minutes on events of the last couple weeks here in Israel. So I've been here a little over a week. I was greeted by rockets and sirens and spending a couple nights in stairwells, which is novel for someone like me visiting from New York City but not novel for someone like you who's made your life here and I don't want to get into

all the details of what actually happened they're important but for purposes of this discussion I mean it sounds like Israel had some intelligence about Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, which is one of the two main groups that operate in Gaza. And there was intelligence about potential operations that would put Israeli lives in harm's way. Israel took action to take out a couple of commanders of Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Palestinian Islamic Jihad responded by shooting hundreds of rockets into Israel.

These flare-ups happen a lot, and we could dedicate entire podcasts to each one of them. But what I want to do with you is you wrote this piece in January 2019 for the New York Times, which I send to people all the time. So if you start getting views like into 21, 22, 23, and you're wondering, why are people still sharing it now? It's me. Okay. And you try to give people a framework for how to view these flare-ups because there's a tendency when these flare-ups happen for the whole debate about Israel to be about like who one thinks are like the participants in the flare-up, and you're trying to say, that's easy for an outsider, but not so easy for an Israeli. And I think the framework is extremely important for people to think about when events like

the last couple weeks happen or other events happen. I want a quote from the piece, and then I want you to react to it. So you wrote, if you are reading this, you've most likely seen much about the quote-unquote Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the pages of this newspaper, the New York Times, and every other important newspaper in the West. That phrase contains a few important assumptions, that the conflict is between two actors, Israelis and Palestinians, that it could be resolved by those two actors, and particularly by the stronger side, Israel, that it's taking place in the corner of the Middle East under Israeli rule.

In the Israeli view, no peacemaker can bring the two sides together because there aren't just two sides. There are many, many sides. Abandoning the pleasures of the simple story of the confusing realities of the bigger picture is emotionally satisfying. An observer is denied a clear villain or an ideal solution, but it does make events here comprehensible, and it will encourage Western policymakers to abandon fantastic visions in favor of a more reasonable grasp of what's possible.

So what do you then go on to try to explain here in terms of how to make events here, like this past week, more comprehensible? When journalists seek to explain complicated events on planet Earth, what we often do is simplify. What we always do is simplify because the actual complexities of life on Earth can't actually be shoehorned into a 600-word news story a 280 character tweet or a 90 second TV spot. The stories that work best, the blockbuster news stories tend to be stories that involve two actors, if possible, a princess and a dragon, kind of like a really good bedtime story. So to give an example from recent months, the biggest news story internationally is Russia, Ukraine. Why is that such a gripping news story? I mean, there are many other conflicts going on in the world. That's a gripping news story in part because

the people involved look like people in the West, which is a key part of all of this. And another important part of it is that it's a story with two actors, with a princess and a dragon, right? You can kind of identify with one side and work up a really good hatred of the other side, and that makes it a good news story, just as a bedtime story about an evil dragon and a beautiful princess. Those are the bedtime stories that work. So when looking at this place, journalists have cropped out most of the context that you need in order to understand it in favor of a story with two actors, a princess and a dragon, more or less. If you look at Israel's history, most of our wars haven't been fought against Palestinians. We fought wars, unfortunately, against Egyptians and Jordanians and Iraqis and Lebanese.

And Israel's most potent enemy at the moment is Iran. I just came back. So Israel's major wars, the War of Independence in 1948, the 1956 war, the 1967-1968 war, the 1973 Yom Kippur war, which we'll talk about. All these wars were not about Palestinians. They're about the broader region. Right. Going up to 2006, the war with Hezbollah in the summer of 2006, the major flare-ups here have been with actors who are not Palestinian. And the mover on the side of Israel's enemies over the past few decades has been Iran. The Iranians are not only not Palestinian, they're not Arab. They're Muslim, of course, but they're Persian. They're not Arab. So clearly there's a broader regional conflict going on here that is not Israeli-Palestinian.

That's not a controversial statement, but it doesn't work for a news story. So the news has kind of created a highly simplified story that edits out all of the regional context in favor of a story that has just two actors and the story is going on on a piece of the middle east that's about one-fifth of one percent of the landmass of the arab world right israel is 0.2 percent of the landmass of the arab world and for israelis this is regional conflict so if you meet an average israeli and say what's your? What's your family's story? They'll probably say something like, my father fought against the Syrians in 1973. My grandfather fought against the Jordanians in 1948. My grandmother is a Jew from Baghdad who had to leave Baghdad in a hurry when the Muslim majority in Iraq ran

out all the Jews in the early 50s. That's a pretty standard Israeli story, and it has nothing to do with Palestinians. And Israelis kind of assume that everyone gets that, that theestinians are of course an important part of the conflict that we face an important part of the dilemmas that we deal with but by no means are they the only uh dilemma that we deal with and of course there are 300 million people in the arab world only a very small number of whom are palestinian that's maybe the most important part of context that's missing for many westerners trying to understand what the hell's going on over here. And so when you take events like from the last couple weeks where there's a flare-up between Israel and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, it's not obvious to outsiders that Palestinian Islamic Jihad is an organ, effectively, in terms of arming and financing of Iran's. So

it's like Iran has this proxy war against Israel, and it has this organ right in Gaza, at Israel's southern border. So when Israel is fighting with Palestinian Islamic Jihad, they're not just thinking about Palestinian Islamic Jihad, they're thinking about the broader geopolitical context. That's right, and chiefly about the other Iranian proxy, the more powerful Iranian proxy on our northern border, which is Hezbollah, which answers more or less directly to the Iranians and is a creature of Iranian money and Iranian influence. So the conflict can really only be understood in regional terms, which is not to say that there aren't local actors

and that people here aren't suffering and that there isn't a real conflict, but you're not going to get anywhere trying to understand this conflict as an Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And the example that I gave in that op-ed was the America-Italy war of 1943, right? You have American GIs dying in Italy in 1943, but you've never heard of the America-Italy war because it's World War II, right? And if you don't understand Japan and Germany and Russia and Britain, you have no idea what the Americans are doing in Italy. And it's the same here. If you think that the two main actors in this conflict are Israelis and Palestinians, you won't

be able to understand the behavior of the sides, and the events in Gaza in the past week are a good example of that. Does that also help explain why... There's also this perception about Israeli politics and different players in Israeli politics, and there's Bibi and the right who are according to the caricature against any real resolution with the Palestinians and then there's you know call it you know Lapid Gantz et al center to the left who are for some accommodation and the reality is there's big

divisions and debates here about personalities in politics Bibi's a Benjamin Netanyahu's a polarizing figure but in terms of the actual policies of these parties from left to right on this particular issue, on the Palestinian issue, there's not that much disagreement for the reasons you're saying. That's right. I mean, that really changes in the year 2000. In the 90s, Israelis really are split about how to handle the conflict and whether territorial concessions on our part will end the conflict. And the left side of the political spectrum, with whom I've always been affiliated, said that, yes, if we only pull out of this territory and

turn it over to Palestinian control, what will happen is we'll have an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord that will enable a broader regional peace accord, first with the Syrians, and that was on the table, and with Israel's other enemies across the Middle East. And that really seemed to be happening in the 1990s. And what happened was that the most left-wing government we'd ever elected, which was the government elected in 1999, that government was on the receiving end of the worst wave of terrorism that we'd ever seen. And buses start blowing up and cafes start blowing up. I was a student of Islamic studies at Hebrew University when Palestinians blew up the cafeteria on our campus. At Hebrew U.

And that's right. I remember. At Hebrew U 20 years ago and killed nine people. And the Israeli consensus really changes. And people understood that there are 6 million Jews here. We can't make peace in the Middle East. We can put our soldiers here or pull them back and put them somewhere else.

But we're not going to be able to bring peace to a region that's at war with itself, right? There's a war across the Middle East. You can look at a map from North Africa, right, from Libya, going east through Iraq and Syria and going as far east as Afghanistan, and you'll see a region that's at war with itself. And the Jewish component of the war is very, very small. Israel could blink out of existence tonight, and it would have very little impact on the broader war in the Middle East. So this isn't the Middle East conflict. And Israelis and Palestinians are two relatively minor players caught up in a much broader regional conflict. And that's why it's so hard to solve, not because Israelis don't have the moral fiber or the foresight to solve it,

but because we're minor actors, like Italy in World War II, right? The Italians can't end World War II. They can maneuver in their small corner of Europe, and it's not going to have that much effect on the broader picture, and the same is true of Israel. You wrote a piece for Tablet, which is probably one of, if not one of your most widely read pieces, if not the most.

I mean, it's been sent to me by some people. I send it out to a lot of people. I think it was in 2014. It was after, so this was after you had left working for the AP, right? And you, it sort of relates to what we're talking about. explain why conventional journalism gets this story wrong and is often played by various actors in this story. Can you just, and I'll post it in the show notes, but can you just summarize what you talked about in that piece? Sure. At the end of the round of fighting that we saw in Gaza in the summer of 2014,

I published two pieces. One was for Tablet, the one you're mentioning, and there was a follow-up piece that appeared in The Atlantic. And together, they're a description of my own experience on one of the most important desks in the international press scene here. I was a reporter and editor for the AP, which is the big American news agency and the world's biggest news organization, at least according to the AP. And the essays looked at what went wrong with press coverage and why it was so hard for foreign observers and foreign readers to understand what was actually happening here. And it's hard to summarize 8,000 words.

Each piece was about 4,000 words. And it's hard to summarize them very briefly, but basically it looks at the move of much of the journalism world into activism into a kind of ideological activism in 2014 i thought that that was primarily a problem affecting israel and from 2022 it's clear that something much bigger was going on it was like coming attractions that's right it was kind of a preview and i just saw one small slice of the story i didn't see the broader sweep of what was about to happen. And it really gets turbocharged with everything that happens afterward and Trump and COVID.

And now we're looking at a media world, which is incredibly polarized. And if you want a right-wing fantasy, you can find that on Fox News. And if you want a left-wing fantasy, you can find that. But there are fewer and fewer places in the journalism world you can actually go to to get an expert factual analysis of what's going on. So what I saw in my time at the AP was an early iteration of that, a news story that had become almost completely disconnected from reality and had become a kind of political fantasy that was being curated by activists. And, but, but you talk in, in, I can't remember in which piece, cause you're right. There were the two pieces. I forgot to mention the tap, the Atlantic piece. You talk about how those journalists operating in Gaza are really, um, serving, if you will, at the pleasure, uh,

implicitly of the Hamas government. And they're very dependent on in terms of their ability to do the reporting on the Hamas government. And they're very dependent on, in terms of their ability to do the reporting on the Hamas government, and that inevitably shapes the coverage. Sure, and it's not just a problem in Gaza. Western journalists operating in repressive regimes always have to play ball with the restrictions of these regimes and are very rarely honest

about those restrictions. So they're reporting with their hands tied, but they often don't tell the readers that their hands are tied or in what way their hands are tied. And what you're actually getting from places like North Korea, places like Iran, and places like Gaza is a kind of a simulation of press coverage. It seems like press coverage, but you're actually seeing 20%, 30% of reality, and you're not seeing many parts of reality that the people in charge don't want you to see. In the case of Gaza, the tension, I think, is reduced by the fact that what the Hamas regime doesn't want reporters to report are largely things that the reporters don't want to report anyway. Because if what you're looking for is a simple story about a princess and a dragon, right, with the Israelis and the role of the dragon, what you're trying to do is create a story about Israelis victimizing Palestinian civilians. So if you're not allowed

to film rocket launches from settled areas, if you're not allowed to film military personnel, Hamas military personnel, and those are real examples that I detail in the essays, that doesn't hurt the reporters too much because those are extraneous details anyway. What you're really looking for are civilian casualties because you want to show this grave injustice being done, and you want to separate it as much as possible from the context, from the actual context of what's going on, which is why you hear very little about the quite impressive military landscape that Hamas has constructed underneath the civilian landscape in Gaza. The press pays almost no attention to that. And you read very little about the connections between Islamic Jihad in Iran and Hamas in Iran. And it's simplified as much as possible to provide that gut

punch of, you know, of a kid who's been killed. And, you know, those pictures are heartbreaking and those stories are heartbreaking. Do they explain what's going on? No, of course not. But press coverage has become less and less about what's going on and more and more a kind of symbolic, almost a sermon about how to think and how to see the world in black and white terms and how to know who the good guys are and who the bad guys are.

Okay, so now a topic completely disconnected from what's furnishing the daily headlines. Your most recent book, Who By Fire, which I devoured, and the last book of yours, Spies of No Country, I also devoured. But we're going to focus on Who By Fire now, and I'm going to encourage all our readers to read it. We're going to have a link to it um and then maybe we'll have you come on another time talk about spies of no country but okay who by fire so is this a book it's a book about leonard cohn it's also a book about israel and the yom kippur war so it's a book about like this pop culture figure going through a sort of midlife crisis just just shy of midlife, I guess, and then a country going through a crisis. Like, what drew you to this story? The pop culture Leonard Cohen, personal drama, or your obviously career-long interest in history, military history, geopolitical events in Israel?

How did you arrive at this thing? The meeting of those two things struck me as being very rich. I remember Cohen coming to Israel in 2009 to give this concert when he's already an elderly guy, and he's doing this incredible tour where he kind of gets resurrected, and he goes across the world and fills stadiums when he's in his mid-70s. And he arrives in Israel in the fall of 2009, and I just noticed that Israelis were going crazy for him and I'm Canadian so I grew up with Leonard Cohen and he's from Montreal he's from Montreal from Toronto I didn't literally grow up with him right there's a small age difference I lived in Toronto for years too I I get the identifications Leonard Cohen Mordecai Richler you know we can come up with that we have very few cultural icons um but Leonard Cohen is one of them and and I just noticed the excitement

that greeted his arrival here and I couldn't quite figure out what it was about. And I saw an article in one of the Israeli papers that described this tour in 1973, and I'd never heard of it, but it seemed that at the kind of darkest moment of the Yom Kippur War, which was perhaps the darkest moment in Israel's history after 1948, this Canadian poet, this kind of Greenwich Village figure, the 60s icon kind of shows up amid the smoke of battle in Sinai and gives one of the weirdest concert tours in rock and roll history. And there seemed to be very little

information about it and no one had ever written anything serious about it. And I kind of filed it away at the back of my mind and noted to myself that someone should probably do something with it. And because I'm Canadian and Israeli, I thought at some point that it might as well be me. There aren't that many people. There aren't that many other people that are going to do it. Right. Okay.

So Leonard Cohen, 1973. Where is he in 1973? Where is he right before you? I think you wrote that he was in Greece. So talk about where he is physically, where he is in life before he makes this decision, I'm going to throw myself into the middle of a major war that has global implications. I mean, so where's Leonard Cohen in life? Leonard Cohen is a major star, and he has kind of hit a brick wall. So he has really important hits, and he's a major figure from that 60s folk rock scene.

And he has Suzanne and So Long Marianne and Sisters of Mercy and a whole list of songs that are considered to be among the classics of what might be the greatest period in popular music ever. And by 73, he's kind kind of he's lost his way and he's he's 39 years old which is much older than everyone else in in the scene and he's living on this greek island called hedra by the way for most rock stars that's still 39 is pretty good some of these you've managed to to get to 39 that's great i mean in those days the fashion was to die at age 27 right that happens to hendrix and jim morrison and jim morrison right so 39 is like he's a senior citizen right so you think he'd be hanging up his spurs but right but he feels like he has nothing left to say and he kind of loses his faith in his art

and that year 1973 he announces that he's retiring he tells reporters that he's done and he goes off to this little fisherman's cottage that he has on the greek island of hedra where he lives with a woman named suzanne who's not the suzanne from the song suzanne this is a different suzanne with whom he has a long serious relationship and ultimately two children they have a one-year-old leonard cohen's first child adam and leonard cohen as you mentioned is having a kind of a midlife crisis although leon Cohen had many crises, not always timed precisely to midlife, but he was having a pretty severe loss of faith. And amid all of this, the Omkipur War breaks out

in the fall of 1973, and he hears about it on the radio. And I think in many ways- And he's like deeply depressed, right? I would say that, yeah. I hesitate to make a uh you need to make a medical diagnosis but yes i think that leonard cohen spends much of his life at least until his 60s you know being depressed and being in a kind of dark state of mind and that is definitely the situation in the fall of 73 okay so all right so then continue so he right so the you know the

radio is reporting this war in the Middle East, and he decides to go, and he kind of surprises everyone, and I think he surprises himself. He walks out of this cottage on Hydra. He walks down the stairs from the cottage to the docks. There are no cars on Hydra to this day, and he boards a ferry to Athens, and in Athens he finds a flight to Tel Aviv,

and that's how he ends up in the middle of the war with no idea of what he's going to do. So he doesn't bring a guitar. So just for context, this is not like some USO tour where the American military lines up performers and they promote it to all the troops in the war theater. No warning.

He just shows up in Israel in the the middle of a war no one knew leonard khan was coming and he comes by himself there's no entourage again he doesn't even bring an instrument and he's already announced that he's retiring from music so so it's quite clear that he doesn't plan to play he just wants to be in israel and he meets some people how do you know we know all this because I found an incredible Leonard Cohen manuscript that was unpublished that he wrote immediately after the war, which really illustrates his state of mind. Which for our Canadian listeners, you found at McMaster University. That is correct. In Hamilton, Ontario. Why on earth was it in McMaster University?

Because it seems that Cohen sent this manuscript to his publisher, which is McClellan and Stewart, a great Canadian publisher. And the McClellan-Stewart archive is at McMaster. And that's how the manuscript ended up in Hamilton and was kind of, you know, lost to Cohen aficionados. And it tells us the story in a very weird Leonard Cohen-esque way. So it's not a diary and he's kind of maddeningly elusive about dates and things like that, but it seems pretty clearly a very raw and faithful account of what had just happened. It's written immediately after the war. So he shows up in Israel, and he has a kind of crazy couple days meeting people around Israel, and he tells people that he wants to volunteer on a kibbutz, and he wants to pick grapefruit,

and he wants to help out, you know, the guys have been called up to fight in the war. Do people recognize him? I mean... So there are people who do. He's famous in Israel. He played in Israel a year before, and he gave two very strange concerts in Israel in 1972. Each one was pretty disastrous, each for its own reasons. And there's a documentary shot during that tour,

and you can actually see these concerts go south, one in Tel Aviv and one in Jerusalem. And so there are a lot of Israelis who know who Leonard Cohen isonard cohen is but he's not the mega star that he would eventually become you know by 2009 when he comes to israel leonard cohen is a music god and everyone in the country loves him in 2000 in 1973 people knew him and indeed he's sitting in a cafe in tel aviv at the time there are two bohemian cafes in all of israel and they're both in tel aviv and And Tel Aviv of 1973 is not Tel Aviv of today, right? Right. It's just starting to be a bit cool in certain places. I mean, Israel is 25 years old, and the people here are refugees.

There's only three populations, 3 million people. Barely 3 million people, and it's a really kind of battered, very rough place. It's not Tel Aviv of today with really high real estate prices and lots of skyscrapers and great sushi. startups and art galleries it was a place that was barely getting by and there was this really interesting bohemian scene that was starting to take shape and there are two cafes affiliated with that scene one was called casita and one was called pinati and cohen goes to pinati and he's sitting in a corner when a few israeli musicians recognized him and

these happened to be among the best musicians in is, although Leonard Cohen had no idea who they were. And they recognized him. One of them says, that's Leonard Cohen. And the other singer, who is a famous singer and actress named Ilana Rovina, doesn't believe it. She says, that's not Leonard Cohen. Like, why would Leonard Cohen be here in the middle of the Yom Kippur War? And the first singer is Oshik Levy, who was a major star at that time, says, no, that's Leonard Cohen.

And he goes over to Leonard Cohen's table and ascertains that it is, in fact, Leonard Cohen. And they talk him out of this kibbutz plan, you know, the idea that he's going to pick grapefruit. And they say, no, you have to come with us. We're going to play for troops. And you're coming. And he says, okay.

All right. So we're going to come back to Leonard Cohen in a second. But I just, I want you to describe where Israel is at this point. So October 6, 1973, it's Yom Kippur. So it's the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, the Hebrew calendar. Now, for those in the West, in the diaspora, they have a sense for how serious and somber a holiday Yom Kippur is. But I don't think you really understand what that means unless you experience Yom Kippur in Israel. So before we get to tanks and artillery and soldiers crossing borders on Yom Kippur,

which is, I just describe what Yom Kippur is like here before we get to the war. So on Yom Kippur, the whole country shuts down. It's quite something if you've never seen it. I mean, the roads empty out. Even people who aren't religious don't drive. Many people fast, even if they don't keep Jewish law for most of the year. Many people will go to synagogue, even if it's the only day of the year when they go to synagogue.

There are no radio broadcasts. The TV stations shut down. The airport shuts down. I mean, everything shuts down. And it's quite remarkable. You can walk down the middle of the busiest highway in Israel on Yom Kippur, and that is the situation on Yom Kippur. In 1973, you've got this incredibly solemn day. Much of the country is in synagogue. No one has an inkling that anything is going to happen. The country is still very much influenced by the euphoria of 1967, this incredible victory in the Six-Day War six years earlier.

And most Israelis believed that that war had been so conclusive that there was not going to be a war in the near future. And, you know, as far as the public knew, there was no danger on the horizon. And that's one reason that when the sirens go off that afternoon at 2 p.m. People are shocked. Okay, so everyone is dealing, you know, effectively winding down, dealing with the second half of the day part of Yom Kippur, and the sirens go off. So describe that. What does that look like? So at the center of the Yom Kippur service is this prayer called Unetaneh Tokef, which includes these famous lines. It's a prayer that describes God sitting on his throne and deciding what's going to happen in the coming year, who will live and who will die, who by water and who by fire, who by sword, who by wild beast. It's a pretty wild,

wild prayer. And it's really the center of the Yom Kippur liturgy. And not long after that peak of the prayers on Yom Kippur the the sirens go off across the country and uh the Israelis know the sound of the siren and they know the sound of the siren because the sirens roar on for for moment moments of silence during Israel's memorial day during his holocaust remembrance day but then also like they're used to it from these rocket attacks like we were talking about at the beginning of this conversation. It's a regular... Right, I mean, literally a week ago, the sirens went off.

So people know the sound of the siren. It's this really kind of dramatic sound that kind of stops you in your tracks and tells you that something scary is going on. And that happens across the country. And people are called out of synagogue. The radios come back on. Call-up orders are read over the radio.

Men are instructed to join their units, and the whole country is thrown into this frenzy of activity. And when you say men are called, so these are, so huge swaths of the Israeli population are in what they call Miluim, Israeli reserves. So it's not just active duty. It's reserves are listening to the radio and saying, oh, my gosh, I'm in my 30s and 40s, however old I am,

and my unit is being called up the reserve so i gotta i gotta throw my uniform and go report somewhere traditionally most of israel's military forces has been reserve forces so you have a small standing army which consists mainly of 18 to 21 year olds and the rest of the military is reserved so it's guys who are accountants or computer programmers or store owners in their day-to-day life. And suddenly they're being called up. So they grab the uniform and report to the call-up centers

and are kitted out and sent off. And the country mobilizes in this kind of frenzy of activity beginning on the afternoon of Yom Kippur. But it's too late to fend off the surprise attack, which happened on two fronts, the Egyptian front in the south and the Syrian front in the north, where enemy forces overrun the very scant Israeli forces that were guiding those two borders and really pushed very deep into Israel. And the first week or so of the war is quite disastrous for the Israeli army, which, again, had been completely unprepared for the attack. Okay.

And, okay, so that's October 673. And when does Leonard Cohen show up in Israel? So that's a good question. Because Leonard Cohen is so sketchy about dates and because no one kept track of this tour, there's no written record of this tour in the Israeli military archives. There are a few photographs

that a military photographer took at the front. And I ultimately found a lot of photographs that existed in the private photo albums of soldiers. But no one considered this to be important at the time, and the country was literally fighting for its life as far as people were concerned, and a concert tour by Leonard Cohen was considered, you know, not high on the priority list, so no one was keeping track, so we have no list of concerts, and we have no concrete dates, with a few exceptions, one from a postcard from a young woman serving in Sinai that I found.

She mentions a Leonard Cohen concert on October 22nd, 1973, but for the most part, we're guessing. So based on everything that I know and based on what I can tell about, you know, where and when these concerts happen, Cohen shows up in Israel within about, within a few days, maybe a week of the outbreak of war and spends the duration of the war here. Yeah. And for our listeners, just to get a sense

for how chaotic that period was, I recommend Rabinovich's book on the Yom Kippur War, which is excellent. We'll put in the show notes, but also Valley of Tears. I don't know if you saw that. It was an Israeli television series and then on HBO about, and really captures the chaos. It's a very powerful TV series. Okay. So Leonard Cohen shows up to that, Israel in that crisis, kind of demoralized, fighting for its life, as close as it's had to an existential war where it really was on a knife's edge. Could have gone either way. And these musicians spot him in this bar in Tel Aviv and say you got to come with us and what happens so they pile into this ford falcon which is owned by oshik levy that the singer one of the main movers in this small kind of ad hoc band that gathers around Cohen. And they collect a few other people on the way.

So it's Ilana Rovina, famous actress and singer at that time. Oshik, who's really at the top of his fame in 1973. They pick up a comic singer named Pupik Arnon, who's also very well known at that time. And they pick up Mati Caspi. Mati Caspi is 23 years old at that time. Today, he's considered one of Israel's great musical geniuses. He's kind of on a level with Leonard Cohen as far as Israelis are concerned at the time. He's very, very young. So that's the band, as it were, and they start the war tour at an Air Force base

called Hatzor, which is in central Israel. Someone finds Leonard Cohen a guitar, so they call the Air Force, and they say, Leonard Cohen is with us, but he doesn't have a guitar So they call the Air Force and they say Leonard Cohen is with us, but he doesn't have a guitar. And the Israeli Air Force is being decimated at the beginning of the Yom Kippur War. I mean, it's the worst time in the history of the Israeli Air Force and losses are so bad that the Israeli public isn't being told how bad they are. The Arab armies have been equipped with these new Soviet missiles called SAMs and the Israeli Air Force is not

expecting them and is being shredded at the beginning of the war, and yet some officer in the Israeli Air Force takes the time to find Leonard Cohen a guitar, and they show up at this base, Hatzor, and they give one concert, which is so successful that the officers at the base beg the band to play another concert. So they do two concerts for air crew at Hatzor, and that's how the whole thing starts.

And does word start traveling? Like, there's a situation where different units in different parts of the country are hearing about it, and they want to get Leonard Cohen to perform for their troops? Sure. I spoke to a guy who was a navigator on F-4 Phantom, and he was based in the north of Israel. And he remembers hearing over the Air Force internal radio network that Leonard Cohen had just played at this other

Air Force base. And he remembers being jealous. And a lot of the best musical acts in Israel were touring bases and playing for soldiers, which is part of what you're supposed to do as an Israeli musician in a war. But Leonard Cohen was another level. I mean, he was an international star. So to get Leonard Cohen playing at your base was really something. But as I said before, people were very preoccupied with other matters, like not dying and not losing the country. And ultimately, 2,600 Israelis die in that war in three weeks.

And it's a country of barely 3 million people. It's quite unimaginable. Yeah, it's unimaginable. The proportions are, I mean, just take that. Population of 3 million people, 2,500 people killed. So if you just do the math, that would be like, in a country like the United States, you're talking about a quarter of a million Americans dying in a war on their home front. This is not a war abroad.

So this is a war at home. That's right. It's all going on a few hours away from Israeli cities. So the presence of Leonard Cohen in the war today is considered, you know, interesting and significant. But at the time, it was not of great interest to most people. Yeah. And what effect does all this have on Leonard Cohen? I mean, you talk about this in the book, but I want you to, where does he come out of this experience? Because it's like a detour. I mean, it's beyond a detour.

Even if you say there was a logic to him showing up in Israel, you could have even argued there was a logic to him going to work on a kibbutz or something. But this is like a real detour. How's he transformed? I think that one thing that Leonard Cohen is doing here is escaping his own crisis through our crisis. So he's having this personal kind of breakdown. He's really kind of, he doesn't know how to sing anymore, and he's very unhappy in his personal life. And that's clear from this manuscript that he leaves us and he needs to get out somehow. He needs to go somewhere else and experience something crazy that will somehow

reset his brain and help him sing again. And he writes that explicitly in the manuscript. So I think that's part of what's going on. He needs to go somewhere that is completely different than what he's used to. And he needs to have some other kind of experience. And he hopes to have it in this war. So it's not all altruism and Zionism and a love of the Jewish people, even though I think that's a lot of what it is. He feels deeply connected to Jews, and he needs to be here when the Jewish people is in a moment of crisis. So that's part of what's going on. He gets kind of caught up in the thing very quickly, and you can see in the photographs that he's wearing something

that looks like a uniform he sleeps on the ground with the soldiers he requests no special treatment he asks the other musicians to call him by his hebrew name he's not traveling with like an entourage there's no there's no there's no entourage he's alone right there's no handlers there's no handlers there's no film crew we have no video of this tour because no one filmed it. We have a few scraps of audio, but no one recorded it in a systematic way. He was here by himself. There was no exploitation in it.

It was authentic. And that's one reason that it works so well and is so memorable. He asks people to call him not Leonard, which is a hard name for Israelis to pronounce. He says, call me Eliezer, which is his Hebrew name. So he kind of goes native at the beginning of the war. He really kind of feels the excitement of the moment

and the danger of the moment. And he wants to be one of the soldiers. I mean, Eliezer Cohen is a very standard Israeli name. It's like Joe Smith for Israelis. So he really wants to be part of this. And that takes him through the be part of this and that takes him through the first part of the war and we have these incredible pictures of cohen playing for soldiers where he seems transported and the soldiers seem transported and these were really

special concerts right no one's buying tickets and no one's selling records and no one's smoking weed and no one's you know drunk everyone's completely sober and it's a matter of life and death i mean he plays for them and he knows this might be the last thing these guys hear so it's incredibly potent and something in that mix restores cohen's faith in his art i don't know exactly how it happened and he's but what happens after though i mean how do you right so we know you know he's before the war he's talking about retirement and after the war within a few months he puts out one of the best albums which is called new skin for the old Ceremony. And it includes Who By Fire, which is a song that directly or indirectly comes out of the war. It includes Lover, Lover, Lover, which is one of his most beloved songs, which directly comes out of the war.

It's written at that first Air Force base, Hatzor. It includes Chelsea Hotel. So we're talking about, you know, an amazing Leonard Cohen album that is, you know, a few months removed from these announcements that he was done and that he was retiring. And what happens in the middle is the Yom Kippur War. So something happens in this war that shakes Leonard Cohen up and disturbs him, but also energizes him and, you know, gets him back on stage. And do we sense any deeper connection to his Judaism or to Israel or to the broader Jewish people in this post-Joan Kippur stage of his life? It's hard to say because Cohen is always deeply connected to his Judaism. I mean, Cohen never leaves Judaism. He's the product of a serious Jewish family. The Cohens of Westmount in Montreal,

he comes out of a very serious synagogue called Shara Shomayim, which still exists to this day. And his family is one of the central families in the synagogue. And his grandfather was the president of the synagogue. And he comes from a family that's steeped in Jewish tradition. His maternal grandfather is a very learned rabbi from Kovno in Lithuania, and he never leaves it, right?

He never changes his name. Other performers of the 60s changed their name to something less Jewish, which is their way into the broader culture. The classic example is Robert Zimmerman, who changes his name to Bob Dylan, but Leonard Cohen never changes his name. He remains Leonard Cohen. So,

I don't want to say that he comes back to his Judaism because he's always there and he never, you know, he doesn't stay in Montreal and he doesn't, you know, regularly attend synagogue at that time. And he's living in Greece and he has this kind of bohemian 60s kind of life, but he's always very upfront about the fact that he's a Jew from Montreal and you can't really understand his music without understanding that's the central part of his of his brain but certainly something about the experience in the war brings out this very kind of primal connection with what's going on here and with the people here certainly in the first part of the war but it changes it changes

as the war goes on and as things become more complicated and there's really a moment in the manuscript where you see Cohen flip like you see that it's kind of a breaking point that changes his take on on the events and the moment happens at an air force base close to the end of the war and Cohen sees a helicopter landing at this base they're they're on Egyptian territory on the far side of the Suez Canal which by the way is remarkable in itself I mean Cohen crosses the Suez Canal with with the Israeli army maybe a day or two behind the troops. So, he's really at the tip of the front. This is not a USO tour. He's not in the rear. He sees a helicopter land, and the helicopter's full of wounded soldiers.

And these guys are really badly wounded and probably dying, and he's really upset by it. And someone notices that he's upset, and someone says, Leonard or Eliezer, don't worry, these aren't Israelis, these are Egyptians. And he's relieved. And then he catches himself and he says, and this is a quote from his manuscript, he says, I hate this relief.

This is blood on your hands. That sense that it's okay that these are Egyptian soldiers and not Jewish soldiers, I mean, that goes against everything that Leonard Cohen believes as a universal poet. And he catches himself at that moment, and I think that's when he starts stepping back. He realizes that he's gone too far with his tribal allegiance and with his Jewish sympathies, and he starts removing himself from the events. And I think that's one reason that he barely talks about this afterward. I mean, he gives a few interviews immediately after the war,

and then basically never says another word about it until the end of his life. And it's one reason that this experience remains mysterious, even for people who are avid Leonard Cohen fans. You said something in passing, and I want to put a pin on it because I think it's important. You said that during Israeli wars, it's understood that Israeli musicians, creative artists, are supposed to, and they want to, travel around and perform for Israeli soldiers on the front lines.

I just want you to spend a minute on that, because I think in the U.S., there's this incredible disconnect between American military life and so many other parts of American life, but especially between American military life and the creative arts. And I mean, when I worked, I'll never forget, when I worked in Iraq in 2003 and 2004, when I was as a civilian working for the Pentagon. I remember flying. We had to fly back to Washington for meetings at the White House, and we shared a C-130 out of Baghdad with wrestlers, WWE professional wrestlers, and Vince McMahon, who interestingly has been in the news. Because Vince McMahon and WWE had brought these wrestlers over to perform to do

wrestling perform you know wrestling matches for the troops it was like a but they that particular create those creative artists they are creative artists of professional wrestling their market like they felt that the military was very much their demographic the idea that like musicians across the board I don't want to make up a blanket judgment. There are plenty of musicians who do step up and performers, but by and large, there's no sense in Hollywood and in the various corners of the American creative arts scene that all these performers are expected to step up and be there for the troops in the theater of operations. That's not what it's like here.

And it says a lot about Israel. So can you- Sure. sure first of all i'd love to read the book written about those wrestlers in iraq who buy dropkick right dropkick that'll be that'll be my my version yeah i think that's true i mean it's something that we israelis take for granted which is that the military is part of the society and we have a draft and and you're expected to serve and if you're not able to serve if you and we have a draft and you're expected to serve. And if you're not able to serve, if you're a musician, you know, maybe you're too old or not assigned to a combat unit, then you're expected to take your guitar and go out and

entertain the troops. And certainly that was true. And they're proud to do it. I mean, it's their form of their service. Right. It's the kind of, it's a kind of patriotic duty and it's, it's expected. And it certainly was in the early decades of the state. It's a kind of patriotic duty and it's expected and it certainly was in the early decades of the state.

It's a bit less so now and thank God we haven't had wars like the Yom Kippur War since then. But you'll still see Israeli performers performing for troops. You'll see young pop stars who are the age of military duty doing their military service as performers.

And a good example is Noah Kirill, who's the biggest. She's like the pop queen of Israel right now. she she must be in her early 20s now and so she just finished her military service which she did as a pop singer in uniform and that's... meaning she was in uniform performing? performing that's right and and that's not that's not uncommon it happens here it's... no people like people don't realize Gal Gadot is very you know she served in the military she's very proud of her military.

I mean, you talk to a lot of these actors and musicians. It's very, very different. And I find the divide in the United States, not just in the United States, in the West, to be quite disturbing. That divide between the guys who are actually doing, the men and women, I should say, who are actually doing the dirty work of exercising power and everyone else. It's very weird that the people making decisions about life and death in the government are by and large people who've never worn a uniform. And that affects decision-making. And not everything is great in Israel.

Much about the society could be dramatically improved, but that is something we get, right? And it makes the society healthier, in my opinion. Yeah, before we wrap, I find in your writing, this being a perfect example, Who By Fire, but also in Spies of No Country and other pieces, you've written this piece that's up in Tablet right now about this kibbutz you found that is focused on a neurodiverse community, which is amazing. We'll post that piece too. I think you're, I feel like, and I want to speak for you,

one of the benefits of having you here is you can speak for you, but my sense from reading your writing is that you're drawn to these extraordinary stories of Israeli life, like these really bizarre, almost otherworldly stories. And yet I also get the sense that you're frustrated that people don't get outsiders, as it relates in part to our earlier conversation, don't get that Israel's just like a normal country. And like, let us just be a normal country

and don't come here with all your mishigas and all your fantasies or all your dystopian, you know, theories of global politics. Like, we're just trying to be a normal country. So what is it? What are you drawn to more in your writing? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I want people to treat Israel like a normal country,

but I also want everyone to buy many copies of my books. So there might be a tension there. But I think that people come in here with a lot of pre-existing ideas, most of which are wrong and many of which are ludicrous. And it interferes with an understanding of the actual place. And that's true of people who love Israel. And it's true of people who hate Israel. I mean, people who love Israel often love an imaginary country

that doesn't really exist. And the people who hate Israel hate an imaginary country that doesn't really exist. And there's so much noise around it that it's kind of hard to see the actual place that exists which is after all a very small place on planet earth that can't possibly be as important as anyone as everyone you know seems to seems to think um it's a it's a you know very complicated remarkably successful in many ways um frustrating and amazing little corner of the world and it needs to be understood like any other country which means if you're trying to understand that

you need to be here you need to speak the language you need to you know be open to the complexities of the place you can't be trying to use it in pursuit of some political campaign that's unrelated to this to this place and there's so much of that that for western observers it's almost impossible to understand the actual country. And if you want a fantasy about Israel, you can find it in many flavors, but there are very few people who are out to explain the real place and what makes it tick.

Can you just briefly, just those characterizations, people who love it come here with a fantasy and people who hate it come here with a fantasy or with an abstract scenario. Right. I mean, Israel ends up being kind of a blank screen onto which you project certain ideas you have about yourself. So, you know, if you grew up in a Jewish summer camp and you learned about the kibbutz and the pioneers and the campfire and that Israel, and you come here expecting to find that, you're going to be pretty shocked by the actual country, which is a Middle Eastern country that has very little to do with pioneers or the kibbutz

or the West, really. And... Right. Majority of the population are from, not from Europe and the West. At least 90% of Jews in North America come from Europe, mainly Eastern Europe. And at least half of the Jews in Israel come from the Middle East and North Africa, and that makes this place very, very different. And it's one reason that, for example, if you come here looking for Jewish food because you think it's a Jewish country,

I'm going to find some Jewish food. There is no Jewish food here, as a North American would understand Jewish food. I mean, there's no deli in Israel. And that's because this is largely a Middle Eastern Jewish society, which is something completely different. And that's often very hard for people who love Israel to swallow.

They just don't know exactly what to make of it. Increasingly on the left, you'll see these dark fantasies about Israel, which seems to people to be a kind of illustration of the ills of the West. Racism and colonialism and militarism and uh they're not part height you know to give like the most extreme so far iteration of that fantasy what people hate about their own societies they'll project onto this country and pretend that this you know somehow embodies those things and of course that's fantasy just like the pioneer and kibbutz fantasy and we need to drop all of that to the extent possible and just understand what the society is it's a deeply flawed place of course like any other human society but it's a society with remarkable accomplishments and it just needs to be understood on its own terms like and it's a mill in the military here which obviously those

on the left focus on it's a military that makes mistakes like any military but it's basically military that exists to make sure people can live semi-normal lives here right i mean there's there are a lot of mistakes that are made here, but there isn't a lot of malevolence. And I'm saying that as someone who's seen this country from many different angles, and I don't have my rose-tinted glasses on, and I have a lot to say about the society and the ways that we failed and that we demonstrate moral blindness on important topics. But even the people who I consider to be deeply mistaken about policy are generally driven by a real concern for the fate of this country. And that's easy to see if you're here, and it's almost impossible to understand if you're consuming Western press coverage.

I remember Jeff Goldberg, who runs The Atlantic, who you work with at The Atlantic, he and I were once having a conversation at some event. And I was asking him about the debate now there seems you know there's like the increasing this debate about zionism you know people say do you are you are you a zionist are you not a zionist and he had this fantastic formulation where he says i'm always struck people say like do you believe in zionism he says i feel the same way that like parents with a new baby would never be asked what are your views views on parenthood? Do you believe in parenthood? It's like, I don't have the luxury of believing or not believing in parenthood.

I'm a parent. I have a baby, and I've got to be a parent. And Israel is a country. So he's like, I don't particularly care if people believe in Zionism or not. It's an academic debate. It's a country, and the country has to exist and build itself and defend itself and function.

And that's what the people living here are doing. So much of the Western debate is from the real world, not just about Israel, by the way, but increasingly intellectual discourse is removed from the real world. And that's going to make it very difficult to run countries in the real world. All right. Mati, thanks for doing this. And the book is Who By Fire. Again, we will have a link to it in the show notes. I highly encourage listeners to purchase it, not to borrow it, not to take it out from the library, but to purchase the book and Mati's other books, and we will have you back

on again. But until then, thanks for taking the time. Great spending an afternoon here with you in Jerusalem. It was a real pleasure. Great. That's our show for today. To keep up with Mati, you can follow him on Twitter. He's at Mati Friedman, M-A-T-T-I and then Friedman, F-R-I-E-D-M-A-N.

You can track his work down at Tablet Magazine and The Atlantic. And of course, you can buy all of his books at barnesandnoble.com or your favorite independent bookstore or, of course, that e-commerce site some people are calling Amazon. Call Me Back is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.