Noam: Haviv, I think it’s really important for people to remember that the PLO was created in 1964, three years before there was the quadrupling of the state of Israel. I think that really matters. Also looking at the, Fanon would write about this, also about Algeria and throwing off the colonialists from France.
Because the argument I think was that France doesn’t have a multi-thousand year history of praying towards this place. You know, it’s a bit different. It doesn’t have thousands of years of law about how to think about Algerian land. It’s obviously quite different. But I’m wondering if on the Palestinian side of things here, or let’s call it those who side with the Palestinians, there are many Palestinians, I deeply believe that work with Israel that think that the future is together. I’ve met many of them and I want to always platform them because even though they are opposed to Israeli policy, they strongly really identify with the Palestinian national cause and they should be platformed more.
But I’m wondering if even they are, do they disagree with your assessment about the relationship between Jews and the British and Western colonialist and imperialist, or do they view it as a misdiagnosis? Meaning, do they see the Zionists living in Israel as an extension of Western imperialists and they disagree with you? Or if they were just told and explained, no, no, no, we have a totally different history from them. We have no interest in extending their hegemony. We have no interest in extending their power. It’s a misdiagnosis. Which one is it?
Haviv: There are a lot of honest people on the other side. And when they say things like the Zionist project is an extension, the arm of British imperialism in the Middle East.
The fact is the British Empire was deeply Zionist in official policy from Balfour through San Remo in 1920, which gave the Jews the land. The Arabs were not invited to the conference. People can look that up, but not on Wikipedia.
Noam: Go to the Unpacked YouTube channel, and Unpacking Israel history.
Haviv: Yeah, exactly. You know, through the arming of the Jews in the 30s. That’s all British. That’s British policy. And so their great grandparents who came up with this idea that Zionism was the outstretched arm of British imperialism, they weren’t stupid.
And even today, if I look back, I have to say, well, Zionism sure as heck used British imperialism every chance it got. Herzl tried to meet the sultan of the Ottoman Empire to get the land from him. He tried to use Ottoman policy and to convince the sultanates in the Ottoman interest. He tried to meet with the government of the Russian Empire. Zionism always used the powers that be and therefore always looked a little bit like when Arab politicians were arguing that Israel was the, in 48-49, that Israel was the vanguard of world communism, Israel was being armed by Stalin through the Czechs. It was and they’re all a bunch of commies, right? Ben Gurion, the kibbutzim, right? I mean, it was never stupid and honest people can look at us and say, know what you are. You’re what you look like, which is all these things.
But always, always, always it’s missing the one big fact. And it’s the big fact, there’s a sunk cost problem, you have to come to grips with just how disastrous your own policy has been. You can’t miss the millions of refugees. You just can’t miss them. So nobody here is an idiot. And a lot of honest people came to believe that Zionism is colonialism and imperialism and all these other things. But they just missed the millions of refugees and they missed all the, the quotas and the closed doors that didn’t allow the refugees to go anywhere else.
Noam: You mean the Jewish refugees? Right.
Haviv: I mean, the Jewish refugees, the DPs of Europe after the war, a quarter million of them, they’re still in Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald and Dachau three years after the war.
When do they leave? When does anyone on earth give them a place to go? When Israel’s founded. How can you miss that and still think you understand Zionism? If every single Jew in Iraq is an Israeli, that’s not Zionism. Zionism is not capable of emptying New York of every single Jew. Why am I saying New York City? Because Baghdad was a quarter Jewish in the 30s. Something pushed them out. Zionism is incapable of pulling at that level. And that’s what happened in the Arab world. And how do you miss that? How do you miss the emptying of 99 % of Moroccan Jewry? How do you miss it? And they miss it.
And so, A, none of the arguments about us are stupid. None of them are without footnotes or without a case. But it’s about what they ignore. History throws at you 500 million facts. You can only really grapple with a thousand. And you take the thousand that tell the story you think is the best approximation of the truth. And they choose a thousand that is a, it’s like a gerrymandering a district in America where you create these weird oddball shapes trying to work around a population you don’t want to vote for that congressional seat. That is how they talk about Zionism, by missing the big giant elephant in the room of history.
Look, colonialism, you said it exactly right. Name another colonialist movement where every single religious institution faces the land that they’re colonializing. Name another colonialist movement made up of refugees. Name another colonialist movement with nowhere to return to.
The word is meant as an epithet. The word is meant as a strategic argument that we are removable by anti-colonialist means. And the Palestinians were then allowed themselves to be hoodwinked by their leadership, to be convinced that the anti-colonialist means, this terrorism that kicked out the French, that kicked out the British, that it would kick us out and it hasn’t.
And by the way, those Palestinians that you’re talking about, they’re the redemption of us all. They do know and they are willing to be critical and they are willing to live with us in this land. Some of them want one state, I think most of them still want two states. I don’t know who really believes two states are possible and I happen to, I’m the idiot, nobody listens to me. But I think that they do exist. They are serious, they are good people, they are honest people.
Noam The Jordanian foreign minister agrees with you. He just got out there and said…
Haviv: There you go, I can’t be wrong then, how could I possibly be wrong? So they do exist. And I have to tell you, I have taken my spiel, talking about these mistakes that Palestinians have made in their interpretation of us over the decades and over the generations, to them, to serious people there, historians and thinkers and sociologists and activists.
Now it’s a self-selecting group, it’s the ones who’ll talk to me, so it’s not a whole lot of Hamas guys. But I have yet to meet someone who says to me, nope, you’re totally wrong, that’s crazy. They say to me, you have a real good point and we really have to deal with this and you’re right. And then they have certain concerns, but they get it and they know it.
Another question is, what do we do with the fact that they misinterpreted us in certain ways? And that created a bad strategy. And if they had a better strategy, they could actually influence us in ways that are helpful, and not just tell us all day long, we’re going to murder you, and then you’re all going to leave, which is a great way to keep the Israeli left out of power for a generation. So yes, this is the fundamental question, and they do exist. We need to have this serious, honest historical conversation.
And the Wikipedia thing isn’t small, because it tells us that the pro-Palestinian campaign abroad doesn’t want them to wake up from these mistakes. And so they are enemies of this Palestinian future that we could have.
Noam: I think it’s such an important point, Haviv. It really is so important to think about how if you’re trying to eliminate the Zionist project, then that will just further entrench the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s so unwise and will lead to so many more deaths. you know, like I just been thinking a lot more throughout this conversation, how dangerous, just how dangerous it is for Wikipedia. We’re picking on Wikipedia, but many others who just define Zionism in a way: Zionism is colonialism. Zionism is imperialism. Zionism is the negation of the other. Doing that sort of thing, I think has this ironic entrenchment of Zionists across the world, who will say, go harder, do more, entrench deeper.
And it’s a misdiagnosis of what design this project has been for, I was gonna say either hundreds of years or thousands of years, depending on how, again, how we go through the history. But I wanna ask you about this now, which is, Israel Zangwill declared, I think, that the land of Israel is a land without a people for people without a land. Again, very poetic. but I read you the statistics of how many Jews were there and how many Muslims were there and how many Christians were there.
Haviv: Yeah.
Noam: Like when Palestinian intellectuals hear a comment like that from Israel Zangwill and they read the numbers of the Muslims who were there, they have the same smirk as you, have the same like, all right, that’s quite the propagandistic line. That’s quite the negation of my identity.
Haviv: I urge people to look up Israel Zangwill because not only did he said it, he did say it, he was not a mainstream centrist Zionist figure who drove the movement, he was a marginal figure, but more importantly than that, he grew very skeptical about Zionism because he very quickly realized that was a silly thing to say and he himself said that is simply not true. And we all do it all of us. I was on Twitter today. I think it was Ralph Nader, he tweeted something about how, Look, here’s a general in 1973 who said we attack civilians, don’t ever forget that an Israeli general in 1973 said, Israeli generals is a group of many, many thousands of people over the course of multiple generations, you know, all the Israeli generals, all the major peace moves, all the major withdrawals were carried out by also Israeli generals also some of the biggest lefties in this country are the generals also, there are radical right wingers who talked about forcing the Palestinians out in one massive act of ethnic cleansing. Generals, like the Rehavam Ze’evi. So you have, you know, the idea that you could find someone and then quote mine them and then say, aha, a general said this, this is Zionism. And when Ralph Nader does it, you can sort of shrug and you can say, you know, just a little ideologue and liar, that’s okay. But my point was also look at what happens when I do it to Palestinians because On October 26, just before the Israeli ground invasion in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh said, we need the women, children and elderly to die to awaken our revolutionary spirit. his whole vision is and redeem Islam on the altar of this destruction of Gaza that Hamas engineered. Well, why can’t I quote mine that? Why can’t I pull that out and say, hey, look at that? That’s not even quote mining. That’s his fundamental vision.
Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, the driving force of the great revolt of the 30s, spent the war years in Berlin and raised battalions among Muslims in the Balkans for the Nazi war effort and desperately hoped that the Nazis would win at El Alamein against the British, make it to Palestine and kill every last Jew. Can we talk about the Nazism of the Palestinian National Movement or can’t we? Is that quote-mining or isn’t?
It’s these ideological baubles. This popularity contest that we’re all engaged in, in which we try and prove to the world that we’re more or less moral, usually that the other side is so horrific you can ignore my mistakes, is usually how it goes, it’s also silly and meaningless.
I have met Palestinians all my life. I grew up in Jerusalem. You can’t avoid Palestinians in Jerusalem, and they can’t avoid Jews in Jerusalem. And I have never met a Palestinian as stupid as the depiction of Palestinians by pro-Palestinian people in the West. For example, I have often asked Palestinians during the Second Intifada when I was a soldier and my literally I was at a checkpoint where a car with five kilos of TNT blew up and the car itself was destroyed. And wounded guy from my company. I kept a little bag of the shrapnel. We were supposed to gather all the shrapnel and also little bits of body parts of the bomber for the CSI, you know, the crime scene investigators who would rebuild the bomb and build intelligence out of that bomb. And for few years I kept a little bag of that shrapnel, which I probably shouldn’t have kept until my wife one day threw it out and didn’t tell me. That experience of being that soldier, stopping bombings into Jerusalem, sitting with my Druze platoon commander on the mountain sides of the West Bank trying to catch suicide bombers as they sneak through the dark valleys in the night.
That experience, I would take it to Palestinians and I would say to them, how do you countenance this immorality? Here we are, you, me, we’re sitting, I was a guy who was, as a student involved in all kinds of think tank projects of national narrative conversations between Jews and Palestinians. How can you justify the morality?
And do know what Palestinians said to me when I said to them, how can you justify the morality of another bus bombing in Jerusalem in the morning where school kids were killed? Do you know what they said to me? They said to me, every single thing is at stake. Everything our life our land our future our kids lives. Everything’s at stake. You think I give a shit about morality?
That’s what they say when they’re being honest and you know what? That’s a moral point. That’s a good moral argument and when I heard it from Palestinians I went to Jews and I started hearing it from Jews. Jews had always been saying it, I had always been feeling it.
But when a Palestinian articulated it, I realized I think it as well. You think, I, as an Israeli Jew, they’re coming for my kids. Everywhere I withdraw from, Hamas will use to murder my kids. They say it, they want it, they hunger for it. They think the redemption of the world depends on it. You think you’re going to tell me something about morality that I’m going to care when I think my kids are in danger? What the hell is this moral popularity contest? Neither Israelis nor Palestinians think morality matters. Why? Because there’s one great overarching morality and that is the other side wants to murder me.
We have a poll out just this month. Wonderful poll by the Palestinian pollster Khalid Shikaki and an Israeli pollster Dalia Scheindlin from Tel Aviv University. And they asked Israelis and Palestinians both, do you think the other side wants to kill us all? 90% of both sides said yes. And so there is no moral popularity contest. I don’t want to talk to Palestinians about their morality and I don’t want to talk about my morality because nobody gives a shit. None of the people who actually live here and for whom it matters and whose lives will be shaped by it.
This is a conversation happening in the Western moral imagination of a bunch of people who think that their moral emotions are the story of the world and they’re not the story of the world. That’s dehumanizing and racist and Western mental imperialism, if not actual. I want to counter Palestinians and say, need to learn this about me so that the war ends because you will continue to fail if you don’t. That’s my only justification. That’s the only thing that matters.
Noam: And what do you need to learn about them? We spent a lot of time going through the history of these tremendous moments that the Palestinians as a group, as a leadership, and probably maybe it comes from the West, have been utilized by the West in order to propagate a myth that is destructive towards Israel and Zionism to follow in the footsteps of Algeria to really shrink the point. But are there mistakes that the Zionists have made throughout history? When you go through the history of Israel and Zionism, are there mistakes that you’re like, this is something that we could have done different, that we could have done better over the last hundred years, let’s say?
Haviv: Huge mistakes. Huge mistakes. I would say that, for example, the idea that settlements have to be placed around the mountains of Jerusalem to protect Jerusalem, an idea born in the experience of 49, of trying to hold that road open to Jerusalem. The idea that settlements have to push us back from the coastal plain where we’re nine miles wide, right in the middle of the country, till we hold the highlands. That I find completely reasonable. Again, I don’t care about lines, don’t care about borders, I don’t care about anything except my own children’s safety.
I find that completely reasonable. The idea that we need to place small ideologically intense settlements of people who are capable, not all of them, not most of them, but some of them, and they’re not reined in by their own leadership. And so the leadership is culpable, even if it doesn’t agree, place them between major Palestinian population centers on the watershed of the West Bank, right that big line of mountaintops that goes north-south, right down the middle of the West Bank in which most of the Palestinian population actually lives. This is a population, this is the watershed line is the cities of Nablus, it’s the cities of Jenin, of Hebron, of Bethlehem, basically East Jerusalem.
The idea that we need East Jerusalem is different. It’s profoundly different for important reasons. It doesn’t need to be somehow shared, but it is nevertheless different from the West. To place small settlements in places adjacent to them so that they cannot have any kind of territorial contiguity is a mistake. It’s something most people don’t want. It’s something that drives Palestinians who don’t believe in the ideologies of the major Palestinian ideological elites and factions like Hamas to the arms of those factions because they look at the Israelis and say, they’re just going to take everything and take me.
And so those are two, for me, morally very different things and historically very different things. We need to hold the highlands for the same reason we hold a third of the Golan Plateau right now, because otherwise they would shell us and kill us and murder us. But that doesn’t mean we need to hold Shechem, or Nablus, the Arabic name, or doesn’t mean we need to hold Ramallah. And so that is a big point.
There have been war crimes in the history of Israel, outright war crimes. They went to the Israeli court system. The Israeli court system ruled them war crimes. We learned about them in basic training in the Israeli army.
Noam: Which ones?
Haviv: The Kfar Qassem massacre, I learned in my first week as an infantryman. I wasn’t even an infantryman. That was my first week in basic training. I only got my rifle my second week. Before I got my rifle, they taught me about an Israeli massacre of civilian Palestinian, Israeli citizen civilians.
And we read or we learned, went through part of the Supreme Court decision that beautifully just lays out what it means because the order was technically a legal order and yet it’s not a legal order and the Supreme Court explains why. And they want all the soldiers to know that, the idea that the Israelis made mistakes, huge mistakes.
Noam: So those are two settlements that are not strategic. War crimes such as Kfar Qassem, we have a podcast on that. I did a 30 minute articulation exploration of that moment, that tragic moment. Anything else, like policy wise, when you look at the history of Zionism? The history of state creation? Was there something that should have been done differently? And I’m not trying to lead you, I’m wondering, in 1948, prior to the Israeli Arab War of 1948, but the Civil War within Israel, is there something that could have been done differently for the Palestinian Arabs? Is there something that throw and you look at the history in 67 that Israel could have done differently after quadrupling in size? Is there something different in Zionist history that could have been done differently with Oslo in the mid early to mid nineties? Is, is you know, anything there? Something that stands out. I’m really not looking to lead you in it.
Haviv: I mean, my day job is reporting Israel on Israeli politics and analyzing Israeli politics. And so, when you drill down into the weeds in that way and you get into the minutia of the day-to-day handling of a war, the day-to-day handling of a political policy or diplomatic negotiation, then the answer is millions of mistakes at every level and at all, and in every period and in every incident. It’s not, but that doesn’t mean that the whole is a mistake.
There are, events in, the 48 ward that are just absolutely wrong. the founding of Israel is not wrong and the Jews had no choice. And I don’t, I, and I refuse to be asked to re-litigate it by people who want to destroy me. You’re asking for me to dismantle and leave. And you’re starting it by saying in this war where we were willing to exterminate you, you pushed 700,000 of us out. I refuse to play that morality game.: Does that mean that Yigal Allon, when he surrounded Tzfat and told the Arab community were coming in in the morning and by morning they had all fled, does that mean that he behaved right or well? I don’t have to accept that. I don’t have to look at Israeli history and say everything’s perfect. So the idea that we don’t make mistakes is very silly, obviously. And nevertheless, I refuse to play this game where we’re going to walk this path of Israeli mistakes down into the questioning of Israeli existence. If I did that with Palestinians, they would come out really bad. And if I did that with any nation on earth, they would come out really bad.
Noam: Great points. got it. I’m transitioning us talking. We went through the history. We went through different moments in Zionism. We got you to laugh about, Berdichevsky’s poetic flourish and Rav Kook’s, equally poetic flourish. I love, by the way, could you imagine this? The two of them were in Yeshiva together in Volozhin, which is unbelievable to think about the two of them being together. That’s unbelievable.
Haviv: It tells you how elite they are.
Noam: Yeah. That’s how elite they are. Right.
Haviv: But also it is unbelievable. Yeah.
Noam: It’s pretty cool. But now we start talking about something else. We start talking about educationally, how to talk about Israel. And I want to frame this in a very specific way.
Haviv, I think a lot of people think about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Israel-Palestine story as a team game of baseball, basketball, football, whatever you want. And so what ends up happening is in a time of war, goes the argument, you can’t possibly move an inch. You know, one side is very clear, says the other side. One side is so good at their propaganda, so good at their hasbara, as it’s called in Hebrew. So good at dispelling myths about the other side.
So the other side then has to do exactly that, but on the other side. And if Israel is at war with Palestinians and with Hezbollah in the North and with Houthis in the Southeast, I guess, and with Iran in the East and the Mediterranean Sea’s on the West. and Hamas obviously in the Southwest, you know, it’s not time to do anything other than defend Israel’s moves to defend Israel’s history. And the supporters of the Palestinian cause do the exact same thing. In this game of Israel versus Palestine, Israelis versus Palestinians, I’m not willing to move an inch and I’m going to tell you why every single thing that Israel has done has been terrible or everything the Palestinians have done has been terrible. And that is why it’s so different than talking about other issues. Again, it’s not exactly like Western civilization is so good at being nonpartisan and so good at seeing different sides and colors and textures of issues, whether it’s, you know, gun control or whether it’s questions around gender identity and those sorts of things. It’s not like we’re so phenomenal at these conversations.
One of the goals of this podcast is to actually get a little bit better at these conversations. But that’s what’s going on here. It turns into a sport of sorts. So how do we talk? I get it. If I’m a Jew in America, you’ve said in the past, you said this to me, you said, no, you’re jealous of me. This isn’t the first time you told me you’re jealous of me for being this Jew and this American, a Jewish American, a Jew who has all the positive things and I could shed my identity when it comes to the terrible things of what sometimes the United States of America does. But it’s also true that what happens in Israel is very much so felt by me. And it’s also true that people just call me Israeli and call me and assume that every single thing that Israel does is identified with me and vice versa, even though I’m a Jew living in South Florida, living outside of Israel.And then there comes this huge problem of, if that’s the case, then it’s my job to go out there, go out to the world and defend Israel and I’m like, I’m not the press secretary. But on the other hand, there’s that defensiveness of the Jewish people who are going through a war of annihilation from the south, from the north, from the east. And then again, the Palestinians feeling very much so like they have this war of extermination against them. And so they are there. So they therefore have such an inability to do anything other than fantasize and propagandize. What do we do about this?
Haviv: Yeah, first of all, I share your frustration. It’s so, it’s so difficult. And it’s so let me start by the two sides are not equal in that particular regard. When you say we feel defensive, and therefore we have to defend the other side. What it argues about us and about our story, it’s attempt to rob us of our story, it’s attempt to to define for us our story is what it is. The fundamental point is that we should not exist and it’s a shame that we do. How do we talk about this? I think we humanize. We stop letting elites talk to us about themselves because that’s what they do. And we start going to the lived human experience. You want to understand Israelis in 48. You can’t go to ideologues writing silly ideological things in 1948. You have to go to the ordinary people, the more ordinary the better, and you have to get their life story, and then you’ll understand big things. When I tell people the story of 48, I don’t start 48 in the first battle between Arabs and Jews and the land. But if you want to understand the Israeli experience of that war, I started in a letter in an entry in a memoir actually by a woman named Hadassah Rosenshaft who survived Bergen-Belsen and was liberated by the British army when it took Bergen-Belsen. And she writes in her memoir:
On May 8th, that’s Victory in Europe Day, she’s writing a few years later, the war in Europe ended. I’ve often been asked how we felt on that day. Of course, we were glad to hear the news of the Allied victory, but we in Belsen did not celebrate on that day. For years, I’ve seen a film on television showing the world’s reaction to the end of the war. In Times Square, New York, in the streets of London and Paris, people were dancing, singing, crying, embracing each other.
They were filled with joy that their dear ones would soon come home. Whenever I see that film, I cry. We in Belsen did not dance on that day. We had nothing to be hopeful for. Nobody was waiting for us anywhere. We were alone and abandoned.
The survivors are still stuck in Belsen three years later when the state of Israel is declared and they finally have somewhere to go. The ’48 wars experienced there are quarter of the IDF in that war. It’s experienced by the Israeli Jews, in the brand new Israel as the first time they could defend themselves. And if you don’t understand that, you will not understand why they could stick it out for 76 more years. And if you do understand it, you won’t waste blood and treasure and generations trying to destroy them in ways that you just cannot possibly threaten them because they already know what awaits them if they don’t have this place. And so that’s social history.
By the way, it does work in the other direction. You can’t read the memoirs, the diaries of families of Palestinians from villages or from big cities, as very different. It’s a very stratified society. It’s a very different lived experiences, but you can’t read them and not understand that there was a people and there was a displacement. And it’s true that the northern Palestinian culture is very similar to Syrian and southern Palestinian culture is very similar to Egyptian. That doesn’t mean they’re not a people. That doesn’t mean they didn’t come to define themselves and experience themselves as a people and history made them feel like a collective and that’s how the German people came to be. It’s not an argument they don’t exist, argue that they formed as a national identity at one point in history. That’s exactly what happened to European nations as well. They’re still a people and they exist and they went through deep experiences and painful experiences and a lot of them caused by the encounter with us.
And when you go back to the debates among Palestinians back in 1910, you go back to the debates in Palestinians in 1908, there’s this Young Turk revolution in Turkey and the Ottoman Empire and suddenly the censorship is lifted, and you start to get this rich press that starts writing and talking and discussing. And you have a lot of Zionist agents, a lot of them Jews from the Arab world, from places like Damascus who are fluent in the Arabic and are walking around either buying land or talking to the people or writing basically intelligence reports from the Zionist office in Jaffa. So that the movement understands what’s happening on the ground as it plans, as it prepares, as it starts to build, as it fundraises.
And you read their encounters and their writings about what the Arab, even just peasantry, illiterate peasants are saying. And then you read the diaries and letters of the urban elites who are anything but illiterate. These are people who know seven languages. And there’s a people there. There is a people there. And that people had an experience and a history and we have to see it and we have to acknowledge it.
I feel, I have to say, you I’m an Israeli Jew, I feel like we have done a lot more work seeing them than they have ever done on seeing us. And never mind the moral claim, understanding us in a way that would actually give them options rather than destroy everything they ever wanted. So I think we’ve done a lot more work. I think their elites have proven to be a catastrophe for them and refuse to do that work and mainly just destroy. But that’s my perspective as an Israeli Jew. Obviously, I’m probably missing a few things. But nevertheless, yes, it’s on both sides.
And if we humanize, if we go to that human experience of the lived experience of millions of people and we shy away from elites, we shy away from asshole ideologues who scream and shout and vent and when people start dying all they can see is their superstructures of ideology. If we can escape the grip of these awful, evil, stupid elites, especially the intellectual ones, and just look at the lived experience of millions of people, there’s no such thing as an anti-Zionist and there’s no way to avoid deep empathy with the Palestinians.
Noam: So for you, it’s very much so about humanizing. And you said that as an Israeli Jew, you think that Israelis have done a bit more of that than perhaps Palestinians. I’m going to be the American now, not the Jewish. I’m shedding my Jewish part of my identity in honor of you, Haviv, and just being the American.
Haviv: I do that to a lot of Jews.
Noam: And I want to talk about where we’ve failed and where we go because I actually am not sure that I see it the exact same way as you but it’s because we we we I think in many ways it’s because we situate ourselves a bit differently. So I was just in Israel a couple weeks ago and I was in Jerusalem and on Shabbat afternoon I said to my wife who was with me who is a proud Jewish American. I said to Raizie, why don’t we do something different in Jerusalem? I have a buddy named Ittay Flescher, I don’t see eye to eye with him on everything. But why don’t we just go on a walk with him? We went to East Jerusalem. So we went to East Jerusalem, middle of the day, Shabbat afternoon. And we went a half a block past the Jaffa Gate and we were in a very Christian part of Jerusalem. And it was open on Shabbat and it was lively and it was happening. A block past that we saw different buses that were in East Jerusalem. Different buses than the Egged buses. Then we went to Damascus Gate.
And we hung out there for a little bit, just a block away. And then we went to Salah al-Din Street. And Salah al-Din Street was so interesting because we saw them. We saw the Palestinians living there. There’s no Hebrew there. It’s all in Palestinian Arab. And we went down the street. We spoke to a few Palestinians, got to know a restaurant owner, a book shop.
And then we went back towards where we were staying, a block west, and we were in, we were shipped to Poland, we were shipped to Lithuania. And there was the ultra-Orthodox Jews, the Haredi Jews, and it was a block away from each other. And then another block away from there was a more western part of Jerusalem, where the Sbarro used to be.
And it’s just another block away and where there was a suicide bombing right there on Jaffa Street. And then we walked back to our hotel. And it was as simple as seeing each other. I said to my wife, what did you do? Like I said, and then, whatever. Then we partied Saturday night in the Shuk in Machane Yehuda. But I said, you know,
What was that like? And she used the imagery of what you just said. She just said, I saw them. I saw them. I’ve spent years coming to Israel and Jerusalem and I was always never moved past that one block. And so when I look at the history of education about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I think there is a lot that we aren’t seeing. I’m being literal here.
There’s also a line from the great medieval commentator. It’s one of my favorite line in medieval commentary about the story of the Exodus where Moses is described as seeing the Jewish people and Rashi who is Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki in the 11th century says about Moses, a lot of people saw the Jews, they saw the slavery, but in Hebrew it says, what does it mean to see? It means to give your eyes and your heart and to feel with you, to feel the empathy with you, to, like, be part of. There is an intransigence to see each other. And do I think it is incredibly problematic and provocative within the Palestinian world? my God, so much so.
In 2006, let’s do Unpacking Israeli History this way, in 2006, I was a Hebrew U student and I wrote a paper on the Palestinian Miseducation in the PA system as Hamas was coming into power and as PA was fighting against the Hamas and the PA was the the PA not the Hamas but the PA the education that was in there was antagonistic towards the Jewish people was indoctrinating about the lack of the Jewish connection to the land of Israel like just not there the desire to reclaim the entire land of Israel and that is an act of not seeing.
That is an act of not seeing. So when I look back at the history of Israel and we talk about how to talk about the failures of everything, it’s just about, we willing? Are we willing to see each other more? And, and I, I, think that that will radically change everything. I think it would, I really do. think it will radically change everything for us to see each other more. and we’ll see what happens from that.
Haviv: Yeah, but I also think it’s okay to, you know, to respect each other enough to bang down that door.
Noam: What does mean to bang down the door?
Haviv: In other words, to force the other side to see you to yell at it in its own terms to come at it with a demand, and to come at it on on on its terms, in other words, to come to the other side and to say, you’re screwing up for yourself. And you’re screwing up for me. Look, the, the refusal to see on the Palestinian side is profound and active. And what do I mean by that?
Professor Muhammad Dajani, someone I think you know, a professor at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem taught his kids, his students, about the Jewish experience of the 20th century. For a Palestinian historian, scholar, thinker to teach his students about the Jewish experience of the 20th century is for him to teach them about their own history and about its complexity and about its causes. And he took them on a trip to Auschwitz. And he was fired from Al-Quds University for taking them on a trip to Auschwitz.
He didn’t turn Zionist. He didn’t turn pro-Israel. He didn’t turn centrist. He’s very much on the Palestinian nationalist side and in the Palestinian nationalist story. But you’re not going to get anywhere if you don’t know the story of the Jews. And so you should know the story of the Jews. And for that he was fired from Al-Quds University. His car was blown up and he was forced basically into exile.
Now there are sections of Israeli society that will go violent rather than have a conversation about, but they are exceedingly small. There are very few people. I have gone on podcasts to talk about Palestinian, Israeli mistakes and Palestinian rights. And what do we do about the future of the West Bank? We just have gone in front of religious Zionist audiences. I have gone in front of religious Zionist audiences in settlements. And there were some people who were a little bit perturbed and some people who ask questions and interrogated very strongly and I would tell them about these Palestinian debates about Jews in 1910s and my point was they’re not understanding that they’re refugees but also here they are talking about them and afraid. There are people talking about the Zionist trickle, it’s a thousand people a year in the first 40 years of Zionist immigration, the Zionist trickle that’s going to turn into a river and overwhelm us and we are a nation going to its death.
And you read that in a diary from 1912 and you’re like, wait a second, they are human beings, three dimensional, as clever as you. And they know exactly what’s happening to them. And they have the sense of self. They have the sense of peoplehood that a nation has and all of it. And right wing religious Zionist Israeli audiences hear that and A, can handle it. Some of them will challenge you, but they will not then say, you made it up, you lied. You could show it to them.
And their world expands. There isn’t that active resistance to the other side having a story that there is on the Palestinian side. And I think that the gap, if I’m being very, benefit of the doubt, sort of empathetic as much as I can, and we are in a war and I’m having a little trouble when Hamas is the number one political faction in Palestine by every poll.
But nevertheless, when they look at that, there’s a gap in power and a sense of vulnerability on their side in which they believe that if they give any room to the Jewish story, then the Jewish story is empowered and can destroy them. And so they cannot give that room, that space to the Jewish story. And I think that drives some of it among ordinary people, not among intellectuals where you have all this intellectual gobbledygook, but among ordinary people. There’s a resistance to the Jewish story.
We don’t even tell our own story to ourselves.
We have ideological elites who are committed absolutely to telling Israeli young people that the story of Zionism is that there was a great awakening of national feeling and that awakening drove people to suddenly, finally, after 2000 years of what? Confusion, drunken stupor, whatever it was that kept us from coming, just like you said at the beginning, what kept us from coming? Suddenly they awoke and they came and they, right? That’s not what happened, but that’s what we tell our kids. There’s that old song,One morning a man stood up, felt he was a nation and began to walk. It’s the sense of like the sudden ideological awakening. That’s not what happened. What happened was that millions of refugees had no other choice. They would never have arrived at that ideological redemptive experience without the desperate need. And so if we need to teach that to Israelis so that Israelis start talking about it amongst themselves, so that Palestinians start hearing it from them, so that it enters the zeitgeist, so that it’s not a new thing that some wackadoodle Israelis trying to tell Palestinians so that it’s part of the story and the discussion.
Noam: I want to do this. This is my last and most important question. I really think it’s the most important question. This podcast Unpacking Israeli History is all about the history of Israel, the nuance, different perspectives, making sure that we teach the, the heroic moments of the modern Jewish story, the salty moments, the problematic moments of modern Israeli history, trying to really figure out how to understand today. Like that’s the goal of it. And not doing it in a Hasbara way, you know, the same day I got to criticism, it was awesome. I got an email saying, dear Noam, you have become an Arabist. You become an apologist for the Arab people and shame on you. Next email, dear Noam, it’s sad to see that you claim to be an educator, but really you are a wolf in sheep’s clothes. And really what you are is a Hasbaraz for Israel, not an educator. So the same day, a lot of fun. I didn’t go to my wife crying. Don’t worry. It was all good.
The real question that I have, the most important question that is, that’s how we got to the present. But is Zionism over? Like, is it over? If it’s the great rescue project of the Jewish people, then well, I have two comments on that. One is in modern liberal Western countries, whether it’s Australia or the UK or Canada.
Not to mention the United States of America, broadly speaking, it’s probably the best time ever to be Jew living across the world. So.
Is it the case that Zionism is over? Because this is where I will challenge your earlier point about what is the goal of Zionism. I read this in a book called Adjust Zionism by Chaim Gans in a footnote. That’s how good this is. It’s in a footnote. He says, it’s the best, it’s the best stuff. He says the following, maybe I’m going to misquote this. I hope not. But basically he argues, here it is.
Haviv: That’s always the best stuff.
Noam: He argues that the role of Zionism was either to solve the problem of Jews or is it to solve the problem of Judaism? That’s what he says. Meaning is the goal of Zionism to solve the problem of Jews, economic, social hardships, antisemitism, or is it to solve the problem of Judaism? Meaning that Jewish identity and the continued existence of the Jews as a people. It’s not going to just happen in these other countries without the land of Israel, without Israel. So what is the goal? And maybe you’ll, you’ll say, Noam, stop with your flowery intellectual elitism stuff, what is the goal of Zionism now? If it’s the rescue project, well, good job, Israel. You did it. You did it in 48. You did it in 67. You did it in 76. With Entebbe, you did it. You did it. it’s over. over. It’s over. It’s done. What would you say?
Haviv: Well, you said it’s now safe to be a Jew in the world. Of course, you’re referring to your world. It’s safe to be a Jew in the English speaking world that didn’t actually impose on its Jews the 20th century that the rest of the Jews of the world experienced. And that’s a great and immense and profound compliment to the English speaking world and English speaking civilization. Not all Jews come from there. Not all Jews went there. it is extraordinarily unsafe to be a Jew, in the Arab world, in quite a few parts of the Muslim world writ large. And there was a 400 % increase this year in opening files for Aliyah among French Jews. Four times as many this year are exploring having actually gotten in touch with the Israeli bureaucracy to talk about immigrating to Israel from France than last year. And that has a lot to do with the fact that there is a massive campaign of Islamist terrorism against French Jews that the French authorities are doing everything they can to pretend isn’t happening.
But there’s terror attack after terror attack after terror attack, a stabbing, a rape, a murder, a shooting. It’s already more than a dozen incidents that I know of.
No, my Zionism is very simple. My Zionism is not some imposition of my problem with all these intellectual versions of Zionism and with this question of is it a problem of Judaism? You’re exactly right to hear me to predict that I’ll have a problem with it. Zionism’s job is not to build a particular cultural content Zionism’s job is not to say this is what Jews are and there shouldn’t be any other kinds of Jews. That is a stupid elitist Silly shallow empty Zionism Zionism is a rescue project and Jews will then having been rescued build Jewish life and cultures all over the place and all of their diversity. That’s the vision. That’s the only thing that really matters. It’s what actually is happening. It’s what actually did happen in the past. Zionism accidentally saved Haredism. And now look at Haredism. It’s gone off and flourished and built a thousand different kinds of Haredi Judaism. Maybe that’s hard for people to see from the outside who don’t know it, but within it’s an incredibly diverse world. So is Zionism relevant? As long as Jews need to be protected. Zionism is relevant. The very fact that Jews are so safe now has a lot to do with Zionism. French Jews are safer in France, facing a Muslim community, some of which is incredibly integrated and incredibly liberal and modern, and a lot of which isn’t. And they face an onslaught of Islamist hate, and they face just regular old European far right antisemitism and they face it with the knowledge that there’s in Israel. And that’s a whole different kind of facing it.
And so I submit to you that without Israel, your life in America would be 10 % more wary, 10 % more worried about the nature of America and the promise of liberalism and whether it’s being kept and whether it’s collapsing and what every single political movement means.
You’re never going to become Israeli. You’re not going to move to Israel. 99.8% of American Jews don’t. But you know that there aren’t the bad endings there once were for Jews because of Zionism. So no, Zionism is as relevant, real Zionism, actual Zionism, rescue Zionism. It’s as relevant as it ever was. Zionism will remain relevant as long as humans are human. Zionism solved the great problem of the antisemite, of the antisemite’s imagination, of the antisemite’s belief that, that we, our rightful place is to serve as characters in the melodrama going on in their own heads. Now our rightful place is to live on our own cognizance and self-reliant and masters of our own fate. And until that is no longer relevant or useful, Zionism will be relevant and useful.
Noam: That was a sweeping few hours going through the history of Zionism, going through the different flavors of adjective Zionism, to an extent lamenting the flavors of Zionism. And then going through, I think pedagogically and educationally, what we can be doing a bit differently when we’re talking about Israel, when we’re talking about Zionism, or talking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, when we’re talking about the modern Israel story.
So thank you. Thank you. I don’t know, is there one book, I believe, that you recommend? there, besides this podcast, I’m talking about the history, but is there another book that you recommend that like…
Haviv: Well, there’s some classic histories of Zionism. There’s–
Noam: Walter Laqueur, is that a good one? It’s old school.
Haviv: Yeah, Walter Laqueur is great. The History of Zionism where you were just, you’ll meet the characters, you’ll meet the history, you’ll meet the basic. There’s the Zionist idea, which is just a great sort of exploration of Zionism from the intellectual side of things. Again.
Noam: And Gil Troy did an additional volume on that.
Haviv: Right, the Zionist ideas, which is the next volume, where 50 years later he really tries to tackle the very big diversity of Zionist ideas. And that’s really the intellectual world of Zionism.
Noam: Right. But here’s what I was going to say. I thought I was teeing you up for this.
Haviv: It’s been a long conversation.
Noam: but Haviv, you failed. I thought you were going to say, if you want to understand the Zionism, it’s not through reading books, but it’s about seeing the social experience of Israel.
Haviv: Yes, you could also read about the social lived, there’s just the lived experience of the past that created the Zionism. Wonderful book by a non-Jewish historian named Gotz Aly, G-O-T-Z is his first name, last name A-L-Y, called Europe Against the Jews. And it is a history of the emptying of Europe of Jews before the Holocaust. And it’ll break your heart and it will make you understand.
And if you then think Israel behaved wrongly and there’s something wrong and we need to have a one state future, you will be a serious person who understands the lived social history of the millions of people when you make that argument and not an unserious person talking about your own morality. There’s a thousand books, Anita Shapira, her sort of fundamental history of Israel is also a history in the early part of Zionism.
Noam: I it right here. Gotta, it’s a must.
Haviv: Yeah. Yeah. And again, there are hundreds. There are hundreds.
Noam: Yeah, they’re a lot. Yeah.
Haviv: Do me a favor. Don’t just read anti-Zionist histories of Zionism because they will intentionally miss the elephant in favor of the mouse. In favor of a whole bunch of mice. Some of which look, make Zionism look very bad. Some of which are very bad. Not everything. Zionist has always been great. We’re talking about millions upon millions of people over the course of 140 years. It’s not all great and people who cherry pick only the bad stuff aren’t teaching you history, they’re teaching you ideology. So just you know read a Zionist history of Zionism among among the others.
Noam: Thank you so much. Thanks for joining Unpacking Israeli History. Unpacking Israeli history is part of Unpacked, which is a division of OpenDor Media. I want to thank Haviv for joining us. I want to thank our producer, Rivky Stern. I want to thank our editor, Rob Pera. And I want to thank our researcher for this episode, Alex Harris. Thank you all for joining and see you next week.
Haviv: Thank you, Noam.