This is a really long interview, but a really interesting read so I recommend investing the time. It fleshes out a lot of my own impressions of Israel's pre- and post- October 7 mindset, as well as the historical context from an Israeli point of view. (Courtesy of my journalism student son who has a subscription to the New York Times.)
EZRA KLEIN: From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”
This week on the show, we wanted to put a Palestinian narrative and perspective on this moment, on how we got to this moment, on what is happening here, alongside an Israeli one. We had Amjad Iraqi, the Palestinian writer and policy analyst on the show on Tuesday. If you haven’t listened to that episode, I really urge you to do so. And today, we have Yossi Klein Halevi for an Israeli perspective, for a Zionist perspective.
Halevi is a Senior Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. He’s the author of, among other books, “Letters to my Palestinian Neighbor.” He’s somebody who spent quite a lot of his life trying to make the Israeli narrative understood to others, a narrative he feels, and has lived very deeply.
He is somebody who believes that narratives that are contradictory, narratives that even oppose each other will have to be held at the same time, that reconciliation, if it ever comes, is not going to come because one story gets judged true and the other false, but because both stories and the many more can be held at the same time, respected, without asking one to triumph over all the others.
At the same time, I want to recognize that this is not just a moment of stories. This is a moment when real people have died and are dying, when real people have been driven from their homes, when bombs are dropping, there was a real massacre in Israel, not just a story, there’s a real invasion of Gaza.
And something else I wanted to talk to Halevi about, as somebody who has covered quite a bit of Israeli security, who has written a book on the Israeli military at one point, or at least a story of the Israeli paratroopers, is, how Israel is thinking about this moment and what it is trying to achieve in the invasion of Gaza. What does it mean to destroy Hamas? What if it cannot do that? What is the acceptable cost? Is there a cost in civilians that is too much?
So we talked through that. As with the previous conversation, not everything in this episode is easy to hear for everyone. Not everything in this episode is something I agree with. But I think it is important to hear. I think it is important to understand what these two societies see right now, the way they understand their interests, the way they understand their past and the way they understand what could potentially be in their future. As always, my email, ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
Yossi Klein Halevi, welcome to the show.
YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI: Great to be with you, Ezra. Thank you.
EZRA KLEIN: I want to start with a little bit of your history. You talk about being a soldier, patrolling Gaza, when you were younger, being part of that occupation and learning things on both sides from it. What did you learn from it? What did it change in your thinking?
YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI: So I was drafted into the Israeli army in the late 1980s, which was the period that we call the first intifada. It’s like the first Lebanon war. We didn’t know there was going to be a second or maybe a third. We just called it the intifada then.
And my unit served in the Gaza refugee camps. We also served in the West Bank. And I came out of that experience learning two things. The first is that the rule over another people is untenable, in the long term, for a country that wants to be both a democracy and maintain its Jewish majority. And that was a lesson that I learned viscerally. I learned that every day. And it was an overwhelming experience.
The second experience was a direct encounter with the depth, not only of Palestinian rage, and in many cases, hatred, but with the negation of any legitimacy to a Jewish state in any borders.
Just before our unit had gotten to Gaza, an Israeli reservist, driving through Gaza, had made a wrong turn, and ended up in a refugee camp, and was surrounded and burned alive. And we used to get taunted every day that Amnon — that was his name, Amnon. Amnon sends you regards.
So my education was the futility of occupation, on the one hand, and on the other, deep questions about whether we could really negotiate a two-state solution with the Palestinian national movement that would be ready to accept the legitimacy of Israel in whatever borders. And that education has shaped my thinking to this day.
And the way that I would put it, Ezra, is that on the one hand, I believe that a Palestinian state is an existential need for Israel. And I also believe it’s an existential threat, especially given what we’ve just experienced on Oct. 7.
The possibility of taking the risk of withdrawing from the West Bank any time soon, and bringing Hamas to within literally five minutes of Tel Aviv, is simply inconceivable for Israelis today, I would say virtually across the political spectrum.
But the one thing that I will say, just to counter that a little bit, is that I’ve learned, in Israel, really never to make definitive statements about the future, even the near future, because it’s so unpredictable. This is such a radically fluid reality.
A month ago, I was standing in the streets, literally every week, with hundreds of thousands of Israelis, demonstrating against the Netanyahu government. Today, this is suddenly the most unified country that we’ve been for decades. And we keep going from one contradictory reality to the next. And that’s so built into the Israeli experience.
And in a paradoxical way, that gives me some hope for the future because those who say a two-state solution is over, it’s dead, it’s finished, so how do know? Look at what just happened in Israel in the last five weeks. How can you make any definitive statement about this crazy place?
EZRA KLEIN: You mentioned the first intifada. And I want to talk about how both intifadas changed Israeli politics. And so beginning with what, as you put it, nobody knew was the first one at the time, what was the first intifada? And how did Israel react to it? How did it change Israeli politics?
YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI: Well, the first intifada broke out in 1987. And it lasted more or less until the first Gulf War, 1991. It was basically riots. It was young people — large, very large numbers, hundreds, thousands of young people, throwing stones, sometimes Molotov cocktails, every so often, a terror attack. But primarily, it was — the Palestinians call it the intifada of stones. And that’s how I personally experienced it.
I got a stone thrown to my head. And I was briefly hospitalized for that. Luckily, I had a helmet on. And I still blacked out. And there was something visceral about experiencing a rock in your head because a rock is a symbol of powerlessness — I mean, David and Goliath. And it was this encounter with Gaza’s rage.
And I also had a very complicated experience. I came to respect these Palestinian teenagers who were throwing rocks at my friends and me. We were armed. And there was a great deal of courage. And I recognized, myself, as a teenager, in their rage. I was a very strong participant in Jewish activism when I was a teenager in the late ’60s, early ’70s, in the Soviet Jewry Movement, in the violent wing of the Soviet Jewry Movement, fighting police at the Soviet Mission.
And I identified, to some extent, with these kids. And I felt this grudging respect for them. And so it was a very complicated dynamic. And I came out of that experience saying, there’s no way to suppress this. We’re going to have to come to terms with Palestinian nationalism.
And this was true for a very large number of Israelis. I saw it happening in the Army. And every night we would have arguments in our tent camp in Gaza. And you saw even people on the right saying, something has to give here. This isn’t working.
And the political consequence of the first intifada was the election of Yitzhak Rabin in 1992. Rabin ran on the slogan, “Take Gaza out of Tel Aviv.” That was the winning post-intifada slogan of Israeli politics — separation. Let — whatever they want to do. A state? Give them a state.
There was something of that mood in Israeli society, a realization that we can’t swallow another people, a people that doesn’t want to be part of us and whom we don’t see as part of the identity we were trying to create in Israel.
So it was a moment of possibility. A year later, the Oslo peace process. And that again, a direct outgrowth of the first intifada. Technically, Israel won the first intifada. We suppressed the riots. It took four or five years. But the riots stopped. But we lost. And we all knew we lost the first intifada because you can’t win that kind of conflict.
And the ’90s, at least the early ’90s, was the time where people like me, who had experienced the intifada literally in our being, felt we needed to try a different way.
EZRA KLEIN: So then let me ask the same question of the second intifada. What was it? What were the tactics of it? And how did it change Israeli politics and society?
YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI: So the second intifada broke out in the year 2000, September 2000. And the second intifada was the intifada of suicide bombings. And that went on for five years. And those were the longest five years of my life. And I was raising two teenagers in Jerusalem at the time. Jerusalem was one of the main center points of the suicide bombings. And my kids had numerous close encounters. And they both lost friends. Friends were wounded.
That intifada changed Israeli politics in the opposite way of the first intifada. It brought the right to power pretty much permanently over the last 20 plus years. And it wasn’t only the intensity of the terrorism. It was the fact that it happened after Israel had said yes to two peace offers.
Now, the Palestinians have a very different version of what I’m about to tell you. I’m going to give you the Israeli narrative of what happened. Almost all Israelis deeply believe this, as do I. This is my narrative of what happened, as well. And that is that at Camp David, in July 2000, Israel put an offer on the table of an Israeli withdrawal, a Palestinian state.
It would have involved uprooting dozens of settlements, redefining Jerusalem. And on the Palestinian side, it would have expected the Palestinians to contract the right of return, not to the literal lost homes of the 1948 War, in what is now the state of Israel, but to a part of the Palestinian homeland that would be a Palestinian state, which is to say the West Bank and Gaza.
And Arafat walked away from that offer. Six months later, President Clinton put on the table what he called the Clinton Proposals, which essentially changed the territorial withdrawal to the equivalent of 100 percent.
And I say equivalent because Israel would have kept about 4 percent to 5 percent of the West Bank, that’s closest to the border, in exchange for territory within pre-1967 sovereign Israel. And Clinton adopted the Israeli position that the Palestinians have to confine the right of return to a Palestinian state, and not to the state of Israel. And the Palestinians claim that Arafat did not reject it. The Israelis claim that Arafat did reject it.
This is all by way of trying to explain what the second intifada did to the Israeli psyche. If you believe that your side genuinely tried to make peace, and received, in return, the worst wave of terrorism in Israel’s history, then your first conclusion is going to be that the Israeli left, which promised us peace now, are simply fools.
And that’s exactly what happened. The Israeli left collapsed immediately after the second intifada began. And it never recovered.
The Labor Party today is the smallest party in Parliament, four seats. The Zionist party to the left of Labor, called Meretz, isn’t even in Parliament. That was the shift of the second intifada.
EZRA KLEIN: There are a lot of claims and counterclaims about the offers made and who rejected them and whether or not the state would have been a viable entity in the way it was offered. And to be honest, I don’t, myself, have a very strong opinion on this.
But you can believe of any number of things about how good the offers were and whether or not the Palestinians should have taken them. And that can be separate from your belief about what follows — a multiyear terrorism campaign targeting civilians in the most crowded public spaces that the attackers can find.
And so I just wanted to spend a moment on that. I think metaphors and comparisons to the Holocaust and to 9/11 are very dominant right now in the Western conversation. But when I talk to Israelis, what I hear as being the most dominant near experience, or maybe one, the Yom Kippur War, but very much two, the second intifada, which shapes, I think, all thinking about, what are the terms under which security can and cannot be attained?
YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI: Yeah, it’s interesting because my father raised me with the consciousness that the non-Jewish world is divided into two kinds of people. There are those who actively want to kill us and there are those who are glad that someone else is doing the job. And my maturation process was learning to break from that survivor mind-set that my father really tried to impose on me. And I understand why, given his experience.
But in the 1990s, parts of Israeli society were beginning to distance ourselves — and I was certainly very much part of that — from an excessive dependence on the Holocaust as a framing for Israeli and Jewish identity. And there was a very positive, a really healthy conversation that was beginning.
And then the second intifada happens. And all of the trauma returns. And the Jewish survival button was pushed. And that’s a very dangerous thing for the enemies of Israel to do because when that button is pushed, you can’t win.
EZRA KLEIN: So I think this gets at this important — sometimes this disconnect, I think, between how Israel sees itself and how it’s seen by the world. In its early decades, Israel saw itself — and I think was, and was seen this way — as a fairly weak country that was really threatened with eradication.
By the second intifada, and certainly today, Israel is a strong country. It has a powerful military. It is a big economy. So could you talk about that shift, and the way that the external perception of Israel and its strength is not always mirrored in the Israeli psyche, in the way Israel understands itself?
YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI: I think you’re pointing to one of the seminal disconnects between how Israelis view their situation and how outsiders perceive Israel. Israelis are certainly aware of the power they have, both economic and military. But we experience our existence in the Middle East as vulnerable.
And being vulnerable is not the same as being a victim. Israelis don’t consider themselves victims, even after the massacre of Oct. 7. It’s not in the Israeli mind-set to see ourselves as victims. Victimhood isn’t considered noble at all in Israel, where the Israeli ethos is a response to victimhood. It’s an attempt to erase the victimhood of the Jewish people.
But we do feel acutely vulnerable. And the reason for that is that people abroad tend to think of the Middle East conflict as Israel versus the Palestinians. And through that lens, Israel is Goliath and the Palestinians are David.
But if you widen the map, if you look at Israel in the region, we experience the Middle East conflict as literally that — the Middle East, or much of the Middle East, against the Jewish state. That’s been the reality.
And so Israelis have a split screen in our heads when we think of the conflict. One side is mighty Israel against the powerless Palestinians. And the other side is vulnerable Israel against a vast Arab and Muslim world. And the more vulnerable you make us, the more traumatized we become, the more we feel we’re in a survival mode, the harder we push back.
And when Israelis break — and we really broke on Oct. 7 — we don’t break in the way that Hamas and its allies anticipated. We don’t fall apart. We come together.
And look at how we came together on Oct. 8. Literally, on Oct. 6, we were at each other’s throats. I was really worried about Civil War in Israel. And then Oct. 7 happens, the single greatest trauma in Israel’s history. I look back on the second intifada now.
In the second intifada, for five years of suicide bombings, a thousand Israelis were killed. We lost 1,400 people the first day of this war, on Oct. 7. So the dimensions are something that we’ve never experienced before.
And the fatal mistake — and I believe it is a fatal mistake — of Hamas. And it will be a fatal mistake of Hezbollah if they join the war — is that you cannot defeat this people from that place, that mind-set, of existential threat.
And what’s so astonishing — and this is also part of this deep disconnect between the Israeli psyche and so much of the outside world — is the outside world sees a war between Israel and Hamas. And we see this as an existential war for salvaging our credibility as a country able to defend itself. And that really will have long-term consequences.
EZRA KLEIN: I want to hold on the pre-Oct. 7 equilibrium for one more question, before we move fully into it, which is, as somebody who — I’ve been to Israel a number of times. I care about Israel. I used to be more involved on the peace side in this issue.
In between the second intifada and Oct. 7, one thing that had become very unclear to me, depressingly, frighteningly unclear, was what the implicit theory was, of both long-term Israeli security, but also justice. So you had a blockade on Gaza and a sort of immiseration of the Gazan people, which Hamas bears quite a bit of responsibility for, but was also enforced, in part, by Israel.
You had a lot of settlement activity in the West Bank. You had Israeli politics moving further and further right. You had no real effort to negotiate with Abbas. And Netanyahu says, in closed-door Likud meetings, that it’s a strategy to keep the Palestinians divided. And there was a security, right? There was a wall. There had been the withdrawal from Gaza.
It seemed that the theory was, to me, that you could keep this stable and keep a lid on the dangers with anti-rocket systems, with a wall, with surveillance, with intelligence. But there’s no longer a sense that there was or could be or was really a need for any kind of political solution. So how would you describe what people in Israel thought the long term of this looked like on 10/1.
YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI: We were living with several illusions of these last two decades. One illusion was that we can maintain the status quo indefinitely. When you have a status quo, you create a vacuum in which the most determined part of Israeli society can take advantage. And that happened to be the settlers.
They know exactly where they want to bring us. The rest of us don’t really know. We’re confused. It wasn’t that we don’t need a solution. It’s that a solution is impossible. It’s unattainable. That was the imprint of the second intifada, the combined Israeli reading of, we offered the Palestinian leadership peace, we got back the second intifada in return. The result of that was, there’s no point. There’s no one to make peace with.
Now it’s true that for most of the last two decades, we didn’t offer a credible vision of peace, with one major exception, which was Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, effectively a total Israeli withdrawal. And it’s true that Olmert was already a lame duck. And his days as prime minister were numbered when he made that offer.
But if you’re the head of a people that’s under occupation and your goal is a two-state solution, and the Israeli prime minister has just offered you a credible vision of a Palestinian state, do you just walk away? Or do you pocket that offer and then say, well, the previous prime minister made this offer. And you present this to the following prime minister.
In other words, there is such a fundamental lack of seriousness on the part of the Palestinian leadership toward extracting their people from occupation, that my conclusion, as somebody who desperately believes that we need a long-term, two-state solution — I’m emphasizing right now, in the middle of this war, long term — that I don’t believe that, even if you had the most left-wing government in power in Israel today, that we’d be able to reach an agreement with the Palestinian National Movement in any of its factions.
And if I believe that, I think it’s fair to say that most Israeli Jews believe that, as well. I see it as a tragedy. The Settlement Movement and its supporters see that as a victory.
But I think that a majority of Israelis don’t know what to think anymore. And I’m there too right now, Ezra. I don’t know what to think right now.
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EZRA KLEIN: One thing I’ve heard from Palestinians I’ve spoken to, without justifying what Hamas did, is a sense that Palestinians had tried many nonviolent efforts to move the Israeli state to change perception towards them. What they could do in the first intifada, given the integration of the societies, was no longer true, now that the fence was up, now that the separations are what they are.
And so there are things like the Boycott Movement, which think Israel treated as a quite profound threat, and got criminalized in many places. There was the March of Return, that ended up having a number of Palestinians killed during it.
And they felt — stymied is too soft a word. But from your perspective, what is it that Palestinians could have or should have done in this period that would have worked to open up a different set of possibilities here?
YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI: Two things. The first is an acceptance of the Indigenousness of the Jewish people in this land. No Palestinian leader that I know has said that.
The second is the practical application of acceptance of a Jewish majority state, which is not to make a peace agreement contingent on Israel accepting vast numbers of the descendants of refugees back into the 1967 state, which would destroy the Jewish majority. In other words, from the perspective of an overwhelming majority of Israeli Jews, the key is the legitimacy of a Jewish majority state.
Now you mentioned B.D.S. You mentioned the March of Return. The B.D.S. movement is committed to what Palestinians call the Right of Return. The March of Return was literally that.
We are going to inundate Israel with the descendants of Palestinian refugees. B.D.S. and the March of Return were both, we can say, technically peaceful. B.D.S. was peaceful. March of Return was accompanied by a great deal of violence. But the March of Return and B.D.S. have, as their goal, the destruction of Israel.
Now I don’t care if you destroy Israel through Oct. 7 or through a March of Return, because in the end, the result will be the unbearable vulnerability of Israeli Jews, who will no longer be able to defend themselves. And in that sense, there’s no difference between that and the goal of Oct. 7. There’s a difference in tactic.
But what I’m looking for is not a change in tactic. I’m looking for a change in goal. Are you still committed to the destruction of a Jewish state through peaceful means? Thank you very much. That’s a non-starter for me. You are trying to destroy the last, best hope of the Jewish people.
And I don’t care if it’s technically anti-Semitic or not. I actually don’t care if the motive is anti-Semitic. The intent here doesn’t matter. The consequence will be the effective destruction of the Jewish people. We will not survive as a people without the state of Israel.
EZRA KLEIN: In your heart of hearts, how do you think the average Palestinian sees you and sees Israel? At your most honest, what do you think they really think of you?
YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI: I would say that until Oct. 7 — and I’ll explain why in a moment — your average Palestinian thought two things about Israel. One is it has no legitimacy. It is a country that’s based on theft and lies.
There was no ancient Jewish presence in this land. It’s all a Zionist myth. The Holocaust is probably either an exaggeration or an outright lie. And that’s what Palestinian society hears routinely from its media from its leaders.
And on the other hand, I sense that the average Palestinian had a certain admiration for Israel — an admiration for Israel’s success, for the fact that we’ve proven that we’re ready to sacrifice ourselves for this country, the deep love and attachment that we have, in a way, proves that we’re an indigenous people, in the same way — and that’s what I respect about Palestinians, that deep attachment to the land and the willingness to sacrifice for the land.
And I think that the paradox here is that on the one hand, they see us as a colonialist intrusion, and on the other hand, they see Israelis as behaving exactly as they do, which is, this is how an indigenous people fights for its land.
EZRA KLEIN: Let’s talk about Oct. 7 and its aftermath now. You said something in a conversation with Rabbi David Wolpe that I found very important, which was that even beyond the murders, even beyond the hostages, that a core trauma here was that Israel had become the most dangerous country in the world for Jews, that the fundamental contract of the Israeli state had been broken —
YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI: With the Jewish people.
EZRA KLEIN: — with the Jewish people.
YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI: Yes.
EZRA KLEIN: Can you talk about that dimension of it, the cracking of the Israeli narrative about itself?
YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI: When Israelis used to say “never again,” we didn’t mean that never again would there be an existential threat to the Jewish people because that’s out of our control. What we did mean is that never again would Jews die in a state of helplessness.
The lasting trauma, the greatest trauma, that’s going to be with us, I would say, for generations, is that a thousand Israeli civilians — there were 1,400 hundreds killed altogether. About 400 were soldiers. But a thousand Israeli civilians died with their hands bound behind their backs, in the most horrific ways that Jews have ever been murdered. And it happened within the borders of a sovereign Jewish state, with the Israeli army seemingly incapacitated for hours.
That is a historic — it’s not just a failure. It’s a collapse of the Israeli ethos. It’s a collapse of our most basic sense of ourselves, of what this country is about.
And that’s also what we’re fighting for today. And a lot of well-intentioned people who tell us cease-fire don’t understand what’s at stake here, for Israel. I think there’s a big question mark all over the Arab and Muslim worlds about whether Israel is really viable in the long term.
The defeat, the humiliation of Oct. 7 was so profound, the fact that we were beaten by the weakest of our enemies — which is how we always related to Hamas. Hamas is the least of our problems. We’ve got Hezbollah. We’ve got Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Syria and Iran, of course, hovering in the background.
And to be defeated so totally by Hamas means that we don’t have deterrence anymore. And that, by the way, is what this war is about most of all for Israel. And we all know it here. This is the war to restore the credibility of Israeli deterrence.
EZRA KLEIN: I want to quote something you said on that because I found it very important. You said in recent days, I’ve received messages from friends abroad, warning me that Israel is about to repeat the mistakes America made in Afghanistan and Iraq. You’re walking into a trap, they say. There is no quick fix. Hamas is an idea, not just a movement.
And you go on to say that, “I fear they may be right. But those concerns are irrelevant to Israel’s most urgent need, which is the immediate restoration of our shattered deterrence.” What is deterrence? And what is the way in which what Israel is now doing, its current strategy, restores deterrence?
YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI: So I think there are two aspects. There is an external deterrence toward the enemies on our borders. And there’s an internal reassurance to Israeli citizens that we’re still capable of protecting ourselves. In some ways, the internal deterrence is more important. If we stop believing that this country can fulfill its historic role of being a safe refuge for the Jewish people, many Israelis will leave.
Israelis, like Jews all around the world, have a very healthy personal sense of survival. We don’t only have a collective sense of survival here. We also know, it might be time to leave. Jews in France have that sense.
And antisemitism is now rising phenomenally in Europe, especially in France and England. And until Oct. 7, many French Jews, in response to what’s happening there, would have immediately applied for immigration to Israel. I don’t know if that’s going to happen now. And so the long-term consequences of Oct. 7 are core to what this country is about.
And in terms of the external deterrents, I think that our enemies need to know that we’re not afraid to die in war.
And there’s the sense — and you hear it from Hamas. You hear it from Hezbollah. You hear it from the Iranian regime — that Muslims don’t fear death, we embrace death. We’re fearless. The Jews are cowards. They cling to life.
And yes, the Jews certainly cling to life. And that’s, I think, one of the most beautiful aspects of Judaism. But there are moments where you’re ready to sacrifice your life. And this is one of those defining moments.
EZRA KLEIN: I have a couple questions about that. So one, what makes you think, or what makes Israelis think, that Hamas or Israel’s enemies in the region had ceased to believe that about Israel? The one thing that I feel like everybody said universally, as soon as this happened, was that of course, this would create an overwhelming Israeli response, that there would be a huge, huge, huge attack on Gaza, that that was part of the calculus of the conflict, in a way.
YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI: Well, Israel hasn’t won a war since 1973. And every war since was an asymmetrical conflict. And you can’t win an asymmetrical war unless you’re ready to go all the way. And Israel was not ready to go all the way. It is now. But our track record of the last 50 years has by no means been definitive and frankly, not necessarily impressive.
And that’s one aspect of this. The other is that the more that Israel has become economically successful, the more we’ve come to resemble a consumerist Western society, the more the perception has grown that we’re soft. And many Israelis felt that way as well.
The head of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, gave a famous speech, I don’t know, 15 years ago, where he compared Israel to a spider. Web and he said that just as a spider web appears to be impenetrable from the outside, and then when you swipe it, it disintegrates, that’s Israel.
And the Ayatollah Khomeini famously said, I think it was in 2015 or ’16, that Israel has 25 years until its destruction. And there are doomsday clocks on street corners in Iranian cities that are marking time to the demise of Israel.
And my sense is that Hamas expected another round of fighting, maybe more intense than the last 15 years. But I think that they believed we would be deterred for two reasons.
First of all, the fact that they now have Israeli hostages. This is an unprecedented situation. They’re holding 240-plus hostages.
And the second is I think that they were depending on world opinion, that at some point, world opinion will conclude that this has gone too far and Israel is out of control and the price is too high and innocent Palestinians are paying a price for Hamas did, all the scenarios that are playing out now.
EZRA KLEIN: You said a few minutes ago that Israel not won a war outright since the ’70s because it’s not been willing to go all the way. What does it mean to go all the way?
YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI: Well, I think that we’re seeing that in Gaza now. So going all the way means continuing this war with all of the horrific consequences, and even endangering large numbers of Israeli civilians. Now how that’s actually going to play out, will Israelis have the stomach for staring down Hamas over the hostages? I don’t know. I really don’t know.
EZRA KLEIN: So I’ve had two thoughts through a lot of this. One is that the Israeli determination to destroy Hamas is almost the basic function of a state right now, that there is no state in the world that would absorb the kind of attack Hamas conducted and not do everything in its power to rip it out, root and branch.
And also, that sometimes where I would expect to hear a description of how Israel is going to do the thing that it is promising to do at acceptable cost — and I am somebody who believes there are unacceptable costs that end up backfiring against the very things you’re trying to preserve — I’ve not heard much.
And I think one of the things that has unnerved me more is that the truth is — and I don’t think this is all that unusual, even within Israel — I don’t have very much faith in the Israeli government. Netanyahu has been a disaster. But also, the Israeli Defense Forces were able to see a huge amount of open-air training and what they thought were war games, and there was intelligence coming up through their people, and still couldn’t see what was about to happen.
And so then the idea that they have the level of intelligence needed to know if the 7,000 targets they bombed are the right targets, or when they invade Gaza, which houses to go into, that’s been a real question for me, that it seems that Hamas might want to lure Israel into this.
And it’s not a 100 percent clear that Israel knows what it is in, that right now, just having Netanyahu or the I.D.F. say, trust us, we have the knowledge here, the intelligence, a sense of Palestinian informers and psychology needed to conduct this such that we achieve our goals, beyond just showing that we are willing to go to all-out war, that’s been a point of real concern. And I’m curious how you think about that.
YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI: Yeah, well first, I would just quibble with you about one point. You said you don’t have a whole lot of faith in Netanyahu. I have less than zero faith in Netanyahu. I think he is an unqualified historic disaster for Israel, and especially over the last year. The fact that he’s technically the prime minister at this moment — and I say technically because for a vast number of Israelis, he has no authority anymore. He has no moral legitimacy.
What does give me some confidence is that we have Benny Gantz, the head of one of the opposition parties, and a former I.D.F. chief of staff, now sitting in government, together with his party. And there are any number of serious military people who’ve joined the government with Benny Gantz. And Benny Gantz is also running in the polls as far and away the most popular choice for next prime minister. And in all likelihood, he will be the next prime minister.
In terms of the army, it’s hard to know what’s worse, if you have the intelligence and you fundamentally misread it, or you don’t have the intelligence. In this case, the army did have intelligence. And they misread it. They misread it because of a doctrine which Netanyahu promoted all these years, and the army adopted. The army is certainly not free of blame here.
And the doctrine was that Hamas is too weak to attack us. I feel, and the polls show, that this is true for a strong majority of Israelis, that the people running the army are still trustworthy.
Look, when this war ends, they will all have to resign, along with the government. This generation of leaders, both politically and militarily, are finished.
But I believe that they are able to fight this war in the same way that the IDF command, in 1973, was able to very effectively fight the Yom Kippur War, even though they had failed to anticipate it.
And so I have trust in the current leadership. I think it’s a tragedy that we’re going to lose them because as I say, every one of them is going to have to resign. We’re going to see a total turnover of generations, certainly militarily and hopefully politically. But I do believe that they’re capable of reading the map now.
And look, I only have one I.D.F.. The Jewish people only has one I.D.F. And in Hebrew we say, [SPEAKING HEBREW], that’s what we’ve got. And so for lack of an alternative, I trust — I trust the I.D.F.
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EZRA KLEIN: You described earlier feeling, for many, many years — and I thought it was, frankly, the correct feeling — genuinely confused about what the right path forward was, that there was a kind of status quo, and the status quo was unsatisfying. But there wasn’t an obvious answer here. And I’ve felt that then. But I also feel that now.
One of the particular ways in which I feel that, I take seriously the importance of deterrence. I also take seriously, and something that you gestured at, the idea that Hamas and things like Hamas are an idea as much as an organization, and that the rage that Israelis feel when their countrymen, when their brothers and sisters are killed, is also shared by Palestinians when their brothers and sisters and fathers and mothers and children are killed, and that if 15 or 20,000 Gazans die, that is a rage that will find its way to being answered.
I’m not convinced you can destroy Hamas. I’ve talked to terrorism experts and people who study counterterrorism. And this kind of asymmetric thing, I’m not sure you can go so far such that things like Hamas do not emerge.
How do you think about that side of it, again, recognizing that you have to do something to degrade Hamas, and also, that many more grieving people is its own kind of powder keg. When you think of not just the day after, but the 20 years after, how do you balance those considerations?
YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI: Look, it’s a really important question. I would just pick up, for a moment, on the word “degrade,” that you used. That’s the dividing line between the normative Israeli position, the position on the street, the position in the Army, in government, and probably the position in the West, even among many of our supporters, which is, maybe it’s enough to just degrade Hamas.
And the position here is that if the Hamas leadership remains in Gaza, and they emerge from the ruins of this war with the V-sign, then Oct. 7 stands. And this is a war against Oct. 7. And it’s not enough to degrade Hamas.
Now I take very seriously what you’re saying. This could poison any possibility for reconciliation for, God knows, the next generation. That’s one possibility.
There’s another option. And this has also happened in the Middle East. And that is that after the Yom Kippur War, Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin made peace. And nobody saw that coming until Sadat got off a plane at Ben Gurion Airport.
Now this is different. That was a war between armies. And this war is a war of one home front against the other. This is a civilian war as much as anything else. Those are much more bitter conflicts.
So do I really think that the Sadat-Begin scenario is what’s going to come out of this? I don’t. But I’m not sure. And I think a lot depends on what happens in the wider Arab and Muslim worlds on the morning after, if there is a willingness to sit down with Israel and say, OK, it can’t go on this way, here’s what we need, what do you need, before we even bring in the Palestinians. And then if that dynamic begins, then you turn to the Palestinian question.
Now obviously, that can’t happen with this Israeli government. But I believe that there will be enormous political changes in Israel when this is over. And before we really can think about questions in the region and relations, certainly with the Palestinians, there’s going to need to be a political upheaval in this country the likes of which we’ve never seen before. And that’s coming.
EZRA KLEIN: I want to pick up on something you said there, about this question of normative goals and then what I would call this question of maybe limits, because I wouldn’t frame degrading Hamas, using that language around it, as a normative goal. I would like to see Hamas eradicated. I’m not sure that eradication is possible.
And I think for people in America, certainly, and people more on the left in America, the absolutely dominant experience here is 9/11, and after 9/11, actually, there being a very similar dynamic in the conversation here, that America has lost its deterrence, that it needs to show resolve, that people are with us or against us, and a feeling, including from those of us like me, who made mistakes in what they supported or didn’t support then, that our friends who stood with us, like Tony Blair, actually enabled us in doing something terrible for us — for others too.
But in many ways, I would say the US is still deformed by the mistakes we made in 9/11 and the sense that we have limits that we didn’t take seriously before. That’s why I sometimes switch between this question of destroying Hamas and degrading it, because I understand destroying it as a goal. I understand, in some ways, degrading it as more of a possibility. And I guess I would ask this, and maybe to frame it as an actual question, what do you take from the 9/11 experience.
YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI: Well, it’s interesting. I actually was in Manhattan. I was visiting the states on 9/11. And I was standing on Fifth Avenue, looking at the towers burning. And I was there in the aftermath.
And I don’t like to make these comparisons. But what didn’t happen on 9/11, and what did happen here, was an intimate mass murder. The Israelis who were killed were tortured, were dismembered, were burned. It was an intimate encounter. And the horror of that, especially when you’re dealing with the Jewish psyche, is simply overwhelming.
And the other piece, of course, is that Al Qaeda wasn’t sitting in New Jersey. It’s also the geographical intimacy of Oct. 7.
So I do take the 9/11 precedent and the American failure seriously. I think that Israel needs to listen to those warnings. But also, those who admonish us also need to understand the limits of historical relevance here. And I don’t quite know what to compare this to. And an unprecedented attack requires an unprecedented response.
And you’re right, Hamas is an idea. We won’t uproot Hamas. But ISIS is also an idea. ISIS wasn’t destroyed. But I would say that it wasn’t simply degraded either. In other words, maybe there’s some point between degraded and destroyed that we need to take more seriously.
EZRA KLEIN: Right after the attacks, there was a lot of global support. There was also very terrible things said in protests and on social media. But there was a lot of global support. Since, I would say, we’ve also seen true surging antisemitism all over the world. There are stories about antisemitism on the Chinese internet. And there was the mob that was roaming the airport in Dagestan, trying to find a rumored flight from Tel Aviv. And you just feel it. I live in Brooklyn. You feel it here.
And I’m curious how that rise in antisemitism right now is being experienced in Israel and what it does to Israeli politics. I see it acting very powerfully on just my own Jewish community here. So I imagine it is not something — and when I read the Israeli press, it is certainly not something that is being missed. What role is that having now?
YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI: Yeah, Israelis are very keenly following the outbreak of really, what is global antisemitism. And because of social media, we’ve never experienced antisemitism to this extent. We’ve experienced much deeper — obviously much deeper forms of antisemitism, more lethal. But there’s something about the globalization of antisemitism that’s new.
What has this has done, I think, for my kid’s generation — I see it with my kids — is they always — my kids always felt that I was a paranoid Jew. Guilty as charged. And they felt — and I was very proud of them for this — they felt that they were free. They were free of those traumas.
And I saw that as a tremendous success as an Israeli parent, that I’d raised Jews who were psychologically free of that trauma.
And what I see with all three of them now is that it’s back. And it’s not back. It’s something they never had before. And they’re discovering vulnerability.
I have two kids now living abroad. And they’re feeling this very intensely. And their generation here — this is what I’m feeling, certainly here — is that for the first time, they really understand why this place matters.
And there’s a new sobriety among Israelis. And one of the things that moves me so much about what’s happening to American Jews, and certainly not all, but many, many more than I thought, is how American Jews have realized the extent to which Israel matters to them.
And Oct. 7 was a glimpse that we all had into what the end of a Jewish state would look like. That’s how it ends. And suddenly, there was this sense of panic. What would happen to the Jewish people if we lost Israel?
And so there’s an opportunity here. I hate to use that word in connection to this time. But this is a moment where we need to start fundamentally rethinking the dysfunctional relationship between Israel and American Jewry. We need to start taking American Jewish concerns, moral concerns, seriously. We need to consider, what does it mean — what is the impact of Israeli policies on Diaspora security?
That should be an issue for us. And in turn, Diaspora Jews should be asking themselves a very hard question right now, which is, how did we allow ourselves to get to the point where we could imagine that we were ready to give up on the gift of a Jewish state?
And so I think that both sides in this relationship have some really deep thinking to do. Obviously, no one is in a position to do that now. But this is a moment that I feel could be an historic turnaround finally, after 75 years, for American Jews and Israelis to start treating each other as equal Jewish grown ups who are both responsible for the future of the Jewish people.
EZRA KLEIN: I think that’s a good place to end. So this is always our final question. What are three books that you would recommend to the audience?
YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI: The first is, I think, the best book ever written about Israel, which is “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” by Amos Oz, which is autobiographical. But it’s really the biography of the state, as he experienced it growing up.
The second book I love, by Matti Friedman, “Who by Fire,” which tells the story of Leonard Cohen’s tour of the front during the Yom Kippur War. And I think anything that Matti Friedman writes, I recommend.
And finally, a book called “The War of Return” by Einat Wilf and Adi Schwartz, which makes a very strong case for why the key to peace is confining the Palestinian demand for refugee return to a Palestinian state. And it lays out the history of the demand for the right of return the legal aspects. I think it’s a very important book.
EZRA KLEIN: Yossi Klein Halevi, you have many great books. But one that I read in anticipation of this, and that I would really recommend to people in this moment, is “Letters to my Palestinian Neighbor,” which is excellent. Thank you very much.
YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI: Well, thank you, Ezra. I really enjoyed talking to you.
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