The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Dialogue with Matti Friedman: Israel’s new political coalition and the return of Benjamin Netanyahu

Episode Date: January 3, 2023

Israel - a country founded on secular, European principles - just voted into power the most right wing, religious government in its history. How does Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest serving Prime Minister, keep getting elected? Will this new right-wing religious coalition affect Israeli pluralism and uphold its commitment to democratic principles? And how might this incoming government change the nature of the Israeli-Palestianian conflict? Canadian-Israeli journalist, author, and op-ed contributor for the New York Times Matti Friedman joins us for an in-depth discussion about the Middle East’s only democracy - and why western assumptions about Israel are nearly always wrong.   The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths - @rudyardg.   Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].   To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ Senior Producer: Ricki Gurwitz Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

These statues have to come down. It's always been a pandemic of the unvaccinated. The problem now is it's a pandemic of the willfully unvaccinated. Falling birth rates are good. They're good for our planet. They're good for our societies. We're not responsible for the escalation with Russia. We're not the ones who invaded Ukraine.

I don't think it's fair to portray people of color as victims. It is a very dangerous time in American politics. Hello, Monk listeners. here, your host and moderator, welcome to this, our continuing conversations called the Monk Dialogues. These are in-depth Q&As with some of the world's sharpest minds and brightest thinkers. On each and every monk dialogue, we go deep into the big issues that are transforming our world and shaping our future. On this episode, we take an in-depth look into the state of Israel. How is this country founded on secular democratic principles doing in an age of increasing polarizing

religiousity and political turmoil. Well, for answers, we're going to Canadian-Israeli journalist, author and op-ed contributor for The New York Times, Maddie Friedman. Maddie joins us from Jerusalem. Maddie, welcome to the Mug Dialogs. It's great to be here. Let's start in broad terms. For someone who is not up to speed on the convulsions of Israeli politics and

culture and society over the last, you know, period of time. What's the one thing that you think they should know about the state of Israel now in this moment? It's a great question. I'd like to say that everything is great and our politics are in fantastic shape and there's absolutely no reason for concern. Unfortunately, that would be completely inaccurate. We've had a real political convulsion here over the past few years with multiple elections in the last round, ended recently with a good result for the Israeli right and the formation, as we're recording this interview, the formation of a pretty right-wing government, which is quite a depressing moment for Israelis of liberal sympathies, and there are many of those, including me. I guess the one thing that I would

say that it's important to know about Israel is that the old European lens that we've always used to understand this country is is less and less useful and Israel needs to be understood as a country in the Middle East, a country responding to pressures in the Middle East, a country's population is pretty solidly Middle Eastern and North African. And that's quite different from the way a lot of Westerners imagine the state of Israel. But it's crucial to an understanding of the state of Israel in 2022, whether we're looking at our politics, at our music, at our cuisine, or at our culture. Israel's really a Middle Eastern country, and it needs to be understood in those terms for better or worse? Let's go a bit deeper on that. So what would it mean to understand Israel as a

Middle Eastern country? Because I think you're right to bring that up. You know, here in North America, where the majority of our audiences in the United States and Canada, we experience Israel through our news and through our media and through, you know, vibrant Jewish communities diaspora in both countries. So it's always something very removed from us and it's also something that is very filtered to us. If in fact, I would say I might have a bias that would be that Israel is the exception. It's not a Middle Eastern country.

I think if you grow up in a North American Jewish community, as I did, I'm from Toronto. And even if you grew up knowing something about Israel outside of the Jewish community, what you get is a very European story about this country. So you'll hear a lot about Theodore Herzl and Vienna and the birth of Zionism as a response to anti-Semitism in Europe and pogroms in Eastern Europe. And you'll learn about the labor Zionist idea, the Kibbutz idea. And of course, the Holocaust looms very large in that story about Israel. And then you get the founding of Israel and the heroes of the founding of Israel, people like David bin Gurion and. and Mosheh Dayaan and Goulda Meir, and all of that is a very European story about what this country is.

But I moved here in 1995 from Toronto when I was 17 and figured out pretty quickly that those stories don't really explain the country. And there are a few reasons for that, but one of the main reasons is that if we look at the Jewish population of Israel, so Israel has a one-fifth Arab Muslim minority. But if we just take the Jewish majority here, at least half of the Jews in Israel, have roots in the Islamic world.

They come from places like Yemen or Syria or Tunisia or Morocco. They don't come from Europe. So we have this very European story about a country that is in fact not all that European. And that explains the jarring experience that many people have coming here with European expectations. For example, if often Jewish visitors will come here from the United States or from Canada

expecting to find Jewish food. right it's a Jewish state there must be Jewish food but there isn't any Jewish food in Israel there's no Delhi in Israel the cuisine here the Jewish cuisine here is the cuisine of the Levant and North Africa which is where a pretty solid part of the population comes from so if you go into a supermarket what you're going to find is kuskos and homo sem the you know the local the local cuisine and it's reflected in the kind of music people listen to here which is pretty Middle Eastern and it's also reflected in our in our politics which really can only be understood in in Middle Eastern terms. So Israel at this moment has a lot more to do with Beirut and Aleppo than it does with Warsaw or Vienna.

And that requires quite a mental leap for observers of this country looking at it from the West and trying to force it into Western frameworks. It doesn't really work that way. I'm not sure it ever did, but certainly in 2022, after almost 75 years of existence in the Middle East, even the Jews who came here from Eastern Europe have been Middle Easternized and our lives are defined again for better or worse by our contact with the Islamic world around us and that's where we are and that's the way the country needs to be understood. Fascinating, Maddie. So let's jump to politics because that's the majority of what I wanted to spend our time with you focused on. And I like this idea of maybe walking our way. into that conversation by thinking about this lens that you're drawing, this kind of lens of Middle Eastern culture of a Middle Eastern diaspora, Jewish diaspora that is modern day Israel, that's shaping your politics and driving your culture. So what would that mean to, in basic terms,

what would that mean if we cast that lens over the current Israeli political situation? What kind of insight would a lens of understanding Israel, first and foremost, as a Middle Eastern country, reveal about its politics today? So I guess the first thing to understand is that Israelis see themselves or we see ourselves as a very small Jewish minority inside the Islamic world. And often when people read news stories about this country in the West, what they're reading about is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which sets Israel's dilemma up as if it were limited to a conflict with the Palestinians, who are, of course, a very small part of the Arab world.

But for Israelis, the conflict is viewed in Middle Eastern terms. So there are six million Jews in one corner of the Arab world. Those are Israelis, and there are 300 million people in the Arab world. And if you zoom out beyond that, there are one and a half billion people in the Islamic world, maybe two billion, depending on who you ask. So that's the basic understanding that people have here of their situation, which is different, I think, in a very real way than the news narrative that's presented about the state of Israel. This is a very small place that feels embattled, and that's often not the way it's portrayed. So that's an important kind of underlying foundation of the way people here view their politics. Zooming in a bit closer, we can see that

the founders of Israel came to Israel from Eastern Europe, and they came with European expectations, about the way this was going to play out. And what happened was, after the founding of the state, there was a wave of immigration of Jews from the Islamic world, mainly from the Arab world, from across North Africa and the Middle East. And they came with very different expectations and a very different style of Judaism. And the fault lines that were created at the founding of the state

between the founders who were East European and the masses of immigrants who came from the Islamic world, those fault lines are key to understanding our policy. politics up to the present time. The founders of the country were aggressively secular. They saw Jewish practice as primitive and something that was due for the garbage bin of history. They were socialists, of course. And the Jews who came from places like Morocco or places like Libya or Egypt were traditional. They weren't secular. They weren't interested in abandoning their religion. They weren't particularly interested in socialism. And they had a very different

set of expectations about Jewish fate in the Middle East because the existence of Jews as a minority among Muslims, of course, did not start in 1948 for these people or for most of the Jewish population of Israel. This is the story of their families over many, many centuries. They came from the Islamic world. They'd always been a minority among Muslims. And at the founding of the state, the party that controlled Israel, the labor party, treated these people with with disdain in many cases. and the right side of the Israeli political spectrum, which eventually became known as the Likud Party,

treated them more respectfully and had a pessimistic attitude about the possibilities of peace with the Arab world that more closely tracked the expectations of Jews who came here from the Arab world, and voting patterns were established at the founding of the state that persist to this day. So if you look at the right-left divide in Israel, often people in the West understand right and left

to mean something similar to what it would mean in a country like the United States, for example. But the issues that make you right or left in Israel are a completely different set of issues. And if you look at the warring political camps inside Israel, what you'll see is that the voting base of the Israeli left has traditionally been Jews who came from Eastern Europe or Jews who have family roots in Europe. And the voting base of Likud, which is the bulk of the right, the voters of Likud mainly come from the Islamic world or have family roots in the Islamic world. So underlying the right-left debate in Israel is actually a set of expectations that have a lot to do with where you're from or where your family came from. And that's necessary to understanding the political divides in Israel, including the most recent election, which really can't be understood if we see the Israeli right as a version of the American right or the Canadian right. the Israeli right rests on a solid bedrock of votes from people whose memories of living in the Islamic world ended with their expulsion in the late 40s and early 50s and have a kind of darker view of what the possibilities really are for a small Jewish minority in this region.

Fascinating stuff, Maddie. So what does this mean in terms of people's attitudes about institutions, about democracy, about democracy, about, many of these, you know, assumptions that I think those of us who are external observers of Israel somehow seem to us as like steadfast, enduring, inevitable that Israel can, should, and always will be a kind of democratic polity that like all society struggles with pluralism. But again, maybe the external perception is that these things aren't being challenged by by cultures and ideas and histories that in much of the rest of the Levant and the Islamic world, less democratic, different ideas of how and why society should be organized and the purposes to which it should be dedicated.

Right. I mean, I think it's important to remember that even the Jews who came here from Europe came from really kind of rough parts of Europe, but very few people. people came here from democratic societies. I mean, the Jews who came from from Eastern Europe, like to save it, the families came from Europe, but of course it's not like people took the baguette and the, you know, and the a cup of coffee and walked over from the Chanceselise to the Middle East. And my grandparents came like most people's grandparents from, you know, pretty nasty villages and in Ukraine. Some of them are now in the news. So the country is really a refugee. camp in a war zone. That's how it's set up in the late 40s and the people who come here are either

traumatized survivors of the genocide in Europe or traumatized people who were expelled amid some pretty serious violence in the Islamic world. And they show up here and very few people here had any kind of democratic tradition. And yet they managed to set up a pretty remarkable democratic country in a region where that is very rare. And it involves institutions that have proven remarkably sturdy over the past 75 years and are now under, you know, under serious pressure. And, you know, we have people in the government, in the new government who are expected to hold pretty prominent roles in the government who are explicitly, you know, hostile to democracy, as many Western people would understand it. And it's, you know, it's a sobering moment for

for those of us who are kind of complacent about the direction of human affairs and about the durability of democracy. And I think many people, not just in Israel, over the past five or ten years, have realized that democratic institutions are really fragile and that democracy is a kind of shared hallucination. I mean, that's basically what it is. You know, you have a vote and the 51% of the people vote for the guy you don't like, then you accept that. And you let the people you don't like govern the country for a couple years. And then you have another vote. And, you know, in most of the world, it doesn't work like that. If someone else gets 51% of the vote, then you can just take all of your guns and, you know, kill the people who got 51% of the vote.

So, you know, the idea of democracy is really this fragile and, you know, very highly developed idea that takes hold in certain societies, in certain places. And even in the places where it seemed remarkably solid. It's under extreme pressures, and it's not just Israel, but it's certainly a sobering moment for many of us and a reason, I think, for real concern. Hey, Monk podcast listeners, I wanted to let you know about our other weekly audio program. It's called Friday Focus. And hey, guess what? It comes out each and every Friday. It's half an hour long, and it provides you with a masterclass on international events, all the big issues and ideas shaping our world.

We've got that for you each and every Friday here at the Monk Debates. Simply access via our website, triple W monkdebates.com. Click on Friday Focus in the top right navigation. You'll get all the details or check out a sample of the program in the same podcast feed as the main monk debates podcast. I hope you'll join us for the next edition of the Friday Focus podcast. Now back to our program.

Let's go to the politics of the moment. The return of Benjamin Netanyahu, a surprise to many. Let's explain that through the thesis that you've just laid out for us, this idea that, yes, Israel has a proud democratic history and tradition, but it also has within it cultures and experiences and, you know, peoples, including Jewish peoples, whose commitment maybe to those institutions

and traditions are either different. They experience them in terms of their own unique religious community or their ethnic community. And these forces are responsible for a of continuing reshaping of Israeli political culture along lines that, I guess, lead to this surprise re-election of Netanyahu as the head of Israel's government after already being your longest serving prime minister. Rets, you can never count Netanyahu out. He's an incredibly tenacious politician. He's, in terms of political maneuvering, he's a genius.

And he has at least nine lives. I don't want to be too determinist about how ethnicity shapes the vote, although that certainly plays into it. But in Israel, you have a society that's been under intense pressure from the world around it for all of its existence. And there's been wars and persistent terrorism and rockets. And it's hard to maintain, you know, a Canadian-style democracy in those circumstances.

And I'm not sure that if, you know, if Canadians were subject to the environment that Israelis have had to deal with. I'm not sure that the results would be better, but I think we certainly need to strive to do better. And I think Israel's success, which is really remarkable if you think about where it is and who founded it, the success has a lot to do with being a democracy and having really highly functional institutions.

And if we allow our commitment to those institutions to slide and if we allow our democracy to fray, I think we're going to see a country that's a lot less successful than the one we live in right now. Only democracy can really harness the forces of all parts of the society to work together toward a common goal. And that political atmosphere has been replaced by a political atmosphere in which different segments of the society are being set against each other,

are being pitted against each other, as if our fellow citizens were our enemies. And we have parts of the government portraying other. parts of the government as being hostile, right? You have people in parliament who believe that the judiciary is a hostile entity, or you have people in parliament who believe that the police are a hostile entity, and you have a society at war with itself in a way that's, that is reminiscent to some extent of what we saw in, in the U.S. a couple years ago. That's a political style that we're seeing more and more in the world, and it's one that's not going to

It's not going to take us anywhere good. So talk to us a little bit more about this coalition that Netanyu, who is now leading. What are its kind of key characteristics? And does it give us any clues as to what the future of Israeli politics is going to look like? And is there a way back? Is there a path back for progressive forces in the country? Or is the return of Netanyahu is something more? substantive in terms of a signal that the right, the Orthodox, the religious right, the Orthodox

community now are able to assemble coalitions that will give them a ongoing political advantage in terms of the formation of governments and over time the reshaping of Israeli society. I mean, one thing we have to understand is that there's not going to be a return to the left of the 1990s where we had the Labor Party running the country and pursuing peace agreements with the Arab world, Israelis put their eggs in that basket in the 1990s and elected a few governments that pursued, in retrospect, some risky moves in order to achieve a peace agreement, not just with the Palestinians, but with the Syrians as well. And the result of that in the year 2000, when we had the most left-wing government that we'd ever elected, was the worst wave of terrorism

that we'd ever seen. And I was a college student in Jerusalem at that time, and buses were blowing up and cafes were blowing up. And eventually the cafeteria at the university where I was studying was blown up by Palestinian bombers. And that just shattered the left. And it's never recovered. So, you know, for the past 20 years or so,

the old left has really fallen on hard times. And we have a liberal center, but it's careful not to call itself the left because that label has been really discredited. So now a guy like I, Ayr-Lapid, who is the outgoing prime minister, he calls himself a centrist. He doesn't call himself a leftist. Very few people want to be leftists anymore.

But there's still a very strong progressive tradition here. And if you look at polling information, even many of the voters who supported Netanyahu in the last election do not support the legislation that is now being proposed by his coalition partners. Most voters for the couped are not religious fundamentalists or extremists. They're people who have a right-wing orientation and support Netanyahu. personally as a very capable leader, someone who can play in the same league as Putin and Trump and Biden and Assad and everyone else that Israel has to deal with. And there are other reasons to vote for Netanyahu and many, many seem quite put off actually by the atmosphere that we're getting

from this incoming coalition. So I don't think at all that, you know, that it's a lost cause. There are, you know, there are demographic trends here that are clear, right? The ultra-Orthodox are growing because they have many children. But people's politics change. I don't think the fact that someone is born ultra-Orthodox in 2022 means that they will necessarily vote a certain way in 2042 or 2052. Things are very dynamic for better, whereas, right, the chaos that surrounds Israel is, is, you know, negative in many ways. And I wish we could have some, you know, Ontario-style stability. But on the other hand, this is a very dynamic place and things change very quickly. And it would have been hard or impossible 20 or 30 years ago to predict this political reality.

and I think it's impossible to predict where we're going to be 20 or 30 years down the road. And I have a lot of confidence, actually, in the energies of Israeli society. This is a very, a very energetic place, a very dynamic and kind of electric place. And not all the energies here are good. But it's a society that can really hold its own. And that's why it has been able to take these body blows repeatedly over the past 75 years and keep going. I mean, just last year, Israel was hit by a couple thousand rockets fired from Gaza and the real estate prices here went up. So it's a place that doesn't work according to the

normal laws that you'd expect to govern human societies. And I think that we're definitely at a dark moment. But, you know, I think being an optimist at heart that there are later moments ahead. And Maddie, are you optimistic? Because just picking on your answer there, this idea of kind of assimilation that, you know, democracies and societies like Israel work over time generally because people, enough people will shed, you know, zero-sum identities and really acute polarization for some sense of civic belonging that trumps a narrower, or a narrower kind of sectarian interest of religion or ethnicity. So do you feel that impulse in Israeli society is still alive and still capable of maybe not right now,

maybe not in the pressure cooker of this particular political moment? But over time, assimilation will continue. and the state of Israel will continue to have some kind of paramount identity in the hearts and minds of Israelis. Yes, I mean, in many ways, that's happening. So outside of the political system, the society is in many ways becoming more integrated. So you see it with Arab Israelis, for example, who are increasingly integrated into the workforce and into the life of the country. Even the ultra-Orthodox of 2020 are very different from the ultra-Orthodox of 1982, or 1992 in terms of their Israeliness.

I mean, they speak Hebrew like Israelis. Many of them consume media like Israelis. And there are definitely players in the Israeli system as Israelis. So the country has these really different, kind of radically different constituent parts that come together here in the late 40s and the early 50s. People who come here speaking Arabic, people who come here speaking Yiddish,

people who come here speaking Persian or Kurdish, people who have nothing to do with each other beyond the fact that they're Jews. And in 2022, these people are actually pretty similar. They speak the same language, quite literally, and they're part of the same society. And that's reason for hope. At the same time, this increasingly integrated society

seems to be generating these kind of really disparate political outcomes. So it's kind of a, there's a confusing contradiction there, where it looks like people, as they become more and more similar, or to each other, they express their difference in who they vote for. And that's not a solid political theory that I've tested. And I've never done polling information. But I have a sense that that's part of it. When you sit down with most people in Israel, they agree on most things.

I think that you could have one political party here that included maybe 60% of the public, maybe even more. And yet our political system is incredibly frank. and cannot seem to produce outcomes that are good for the majority of Israelis. So there is a really interesting, and I guess depressing, contradiction between a society that's increasingly integrated, which is very vital and really creative, and a political system that is fractured and increasingly dysfunctional.

But this seems like a weird thing to hope for, and I don't really hope for it, but what has always helped Israeli society cohere our external crises. right? Nothing focuses your attention like a war or like rockets fired, you know, by Hamas and Gaza. And unfortunately, our history teaches that such crises are never far off. And we live in a region that's, you know, incredibly unstable in which delivers unpleasant surprises on a regular basis. And a crisis could remind Israelis of what they have in common and remind us that we're in We're in the same boat. And I'm not, I'm certainly not hoping for a crisis like that as someone who lives in Jerusalem

and it will be acutely affected by any crisis. But I do think that the pressures on Israel from our enemies in the Arab world and in the broader Islamic world, unfortunately remind people here that they need to work together if they have any hope of survival. Yeah. One might hope for it. But as you say, the history would suggest. that it is likely inevitable, whether it's a confrontation with Iran, whether it's the continuing

instability of Gaza and the West Bank. You're right to point out that in interesting ways that are the kind of antithesis of Canada, where you spent much of your life with very few, if any, externalities pressing down on our country and shaping a sense of urgency or consensus, Canada is kind of at the other end of the spectrum. So it's interesting to compare that to the experience in Israel. So if you were to look forward to, let's say the state of Israel in 2050, what do you think we would see? Would we see a society that's very much like it is today that, you know, has these, as you say, these kind of intense cleavages of ethnicity, religion, history, but still works and works remarkably in terms of its, it's the vibrancy of its culture, the dynamism of its economy.

In other words, is Israel 2050 a kind of an extension, a continuation of a continuation of Israel today? Or do you see a different society, something that's reshaped, reformed around, you know, new principles? new ideas, a different civic culture. That's a great question. And I really don't know. I mean, anyone who ventures a prophecy here will be proven, not just wrong, but ridiculous with it. Come on, you come from the land of prophecy.

Yeah. And if you look at the prophetic books, you know, not everything was ultimately proven right. Although I guess you can always claim that the prophecy was proven right in some way. So I guess I could make a prediction now. And we can talk again in 20 years. And even if it was wildly inaccurate, I could explain to you why I was actually

right. There's a great, yeah, that's a great prophetic tradition in itself. But I think that if we look at what has been achieved here over the past 75 years, you know, despite greater crises than the one we're in right now, I think there's, you know, there's reason for optimism about, about the society and about its ability to overcome, you know, some challenges that would seem insurmountable. I mean, if you look at this place in 1948 and then look ahead to 2022, the achievements are are really remarkable. And Israelis live through the 1948 war, which kills a whole percentage

of the Jewish population. And they lived through a war in 1973 that I recently wrote a book about, which kills more than 2,500 soldiers in a country of barely 3 million people. And, you know, these challenges with the challenges that are related

to setting up a Jewish state in the Middle East. And they've been, insurmounted. And that's a reason for optimism. And I think what we need to see is the emergence of a political force that works towards synthesis and tries to free everything that Israelis have in common rather than gaining political capital from the divisions. I mean, if you're a leader hoping to leave, then you can do one of two things. You can try to unify the greatest amount of people, the greatest number of people behind your vision and have them march forward toward a better future.

you can trigger a war inside your society and convince your voters that other citizens are the enemy and then generate political heat from the civil strife in your society. And we've seen those tactics employed in the United States and then elsewhere, and we're seeing them employed here. And I think a political force that tries to synthesize those disparate parts of Israeli society, the Jews who came here from Eastern Europe, the Jews who came here from the Islamic world. many Israelis have one parent that came from one place and another parent who came from somewhere else. And you know, you can build on that.

Israelis always had the idea that you were either secular or religious, which is a very European idea. In fact, most Israelis are traditional. They're not really secular or really religious. They exist on a spectrum of tradition. And that's also a potential point of meeting. So I think smart politicians who would like to march this country in the right direction will build on that. And unfortunately what we're seeing right now is that our political system is rewarding the opposite kind of behavior. But I don't think we're going to have a choice.

We're going to have to figure out some way to live together and work together. The forces exist in the society. The material that you have to work with exists. And now what we need are political players who see that as valuable. Some do exist in our political system. But they're not the ones in power at present. And it might take a crisis to shake. shake Israelis out of their complacency and kind of force them to realize that we need a more

constructive form of politics. I think what's depressing about the current crisis here is that it's self-inflicted and it's not a war. It's not being imposed on us by outside forces. It's something we're doing to ourselves and that makes it more more depressing and kind of more worrisome because it's it's not necessary. It's a luxury that we really can't afford. forward and yeah, and I hope that we, I hope that we learn that lesson without learning it the hard way. Final question, Maddie. You know, we think of the future and we often obviously return to the past to try to understand

what will happen next. We have seen in the last year or two, I don't know how you characterize it, but a seeming beginnings of a kind of detente between Israel and many areas. States, normalization of relations, the growth of kind of trade and exchange, in a sense, the the legitimization of Israel by many Arab leaders and countries that you simply couldn't fathom, let's say five years ago, this happening, but it is happening. So what do you think that does for the future? Because we've talked a lot about, you know, how Israel is defined today by many people who who left those other Arab cultures and societies to seek refuge in a future in Israel.

We've talked about how Israel is often defined itself in opposition or under threat from the times very dangerous neighborhood that it's found itself in. Is there another reason maybe to be hopeful that there could be some substantive reworking of Israeli culture and society and politics based on the fact that Israel's own position, a role in the Middle East, at least seems to be on a trajectory now that's very different than what went before. I'm very glad you asked that question, also because it allows us to end on a happier note, and the normalization agreements that we've seen over the past, I'm going back right here, the normalization agreements that we've seen over the past few years are definitely a reason for

optimism. I've been to the United Arab Emirates twice in the past year and a half. which was something that was impossible for Israelis to imagine two or three years ago. I mean, I just went to the airport outside Tel Aviv and got a low-cost flight to Dubai. And this was just a few weeks after the normalization agreement had been signed, and the airplane takes off. And we fly over Saudi Arabia, which had been impossible two weeks before this flight. And we flew right over Riyadh. So we're looking at the flight map as we went.

Riyadh for Israelis is an enemy capital, the capital of Saudi Arabia, which for Israelis has always been an enemy country, and we bank over Riyadh and the guy next to me and the seat elbows me in the ribs and says, Historia, which in Hebrew means history. And it's true we were watching history being made. We landed in Dubai and were greeted in the friendliest way possible. And since then have also been in Abu Dhabi,

which is another city in the UAE. And there's been a normalization agreement with Morocco and their direct flights from Israel, to Morocco and of course many Israelis are Moroccan in in descent and that's very significant for many people here so that that suggests a different kind of future and looking at this place always requires you to hold different and contradictory ideas in your head at the same time so you know we have this intense hostility that we still face unfortunately from hundreds of millions of people in the Islamic world led today by the Iranians or by the Iranian regime and and and at the same time we have

these glimmers of acceptance coming from the Sunni world. At the same time, you know, we look at Israeli society, and I can give you a lot of reasons to be, you know, pessimistic about the possibilities of the integration of our Arab citizens, which is one of our great challenges. And at the same time, I can look at the last Israeli government, the one that's leaving power now and point out that for the first time in Israel's history, an Arab party was a member of the governing coalition, not just an Arab party, but an exceptional. explicitly Islamic party. And they played an active role in governing the country in the term of the last

government and suggested a different way forward for Jews and Arabs here. So that's one reason that I'm very cautious about making any kind of prediction. The unpredictable nature of this region is a reason for pessimism, but it's equally a reason for optimism, right? Anything can happen here. And it could be something really terrible and it could be something great. And, you know, of course, I'm hoping that the latter option is. is the one that ends up playing out.

Oh, we're hoping, too, Maddie. Monk Debates, big fan of you and a big fan of thinking, big thoughts about the Middle East, about Israel's role in it, and the future of the world's only Zionist state. So thank you so much, Maddie, for coming on the Monk Dialogues today, sharing your analysis and insights. It's been a privilege indeed. Thank you so much for having me.

Well, that wraps up our dialogue today. I want to thank our guest, Maddie Freeman, for a thoughtful and in-depth conversation. If you have feedback or reflections on what you've just heard or on any of our other podcast, please send us an email to podcast at monkdebates.com. That's MUNK DebateswithanS.com. A reminder that our weekly current affairs podcast Friday Focus that comes out, guess what, every Friday, features me in conversation with Janice Gross Stein as we delve into the big issues and ideas

that have shaped the news in the last seven days. You can access a complimentary sample of the Friday Focus podcast right now on our website, Triple W, Moncdebates.com, or on this podcast feed. Thanks again for your time and attention to our efforts to bring back the art of public conversation one podcast at a time. I'm your host and moderator, Rudyard Griffiths. The Monk debates are a project of the Aurea and Peter and Melanie Monk Charitable Foundations. Rudyard Griffiths and Ricky Gerwitz are the producers. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

And if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating. Thank you again for listening.