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Ask Haviv Anything
106: After October 7, can Israeli politics be rebuilt? A conversation with Dr. Einat Wilf
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Foreign.
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Thanks for joining me. Welcome to a new episode of Ask Khabiv Anything. Our topic today is the upcoming Israeli elections. I know there's a lot on our plate, but Israel will have momentous elections. If everything stays the same, that will be momentous. If everything changes, that will be very dramatic as well. The elections have to be held by law by October. And so we're going to do a few episodes, probably very a great many episodes on this subject. There's so many fundamental issues about Israel's future, about Israel's society that are right now on the agenda of this election that we're going to have a lot of conversations about it. We wanted to start today with a friend of mine, Dr. Inat Wilf, a leading thinker on Israel, on Zionism, on foreign policy, on education policy. Dr. Wilf is the author of several books that explore key issues in Israeli society, and not just the famous ones. How Israeli society organizes its education system, Haredi education and Arab education, and secular education and religious education. These are fundamental questions about our future, about the next generation, about the character of our society. Nat was a member of the Israeli Parliament. She served as chair of the Education Committee, the Foreign affairs and Defense Committee, and she is now running in this election at the head of a brand new party, a brand new party called the Oz Party. Now, I'm going to get emails. Why didn't you interview from my party? Why didn't you interview this person or that person? Folks, it's the beginning of a large conversation and Ennat is an extraordinary analyst as well as someone who is now asking Israelis for their votes. So this is a beginning. And also I'm really curious, I really want to ask her what this election is about, how it's going to play out, all of those things. But first, I want to tell you that this episode is sponsored anonymously in memory of Jack Rose and his son Paul Lawrence Rose, and is dedicated to the themes of Jewish survival, renewal and education that permeate their lives and their work. Jack Rose's parents and siblings were guests in Nazi death camps. After serving with the Allies, he rebuilt his life in the uk, becoming principal of Blackburn College of Technology and Design, a robotics pioneer, and publishing many books honored by the Queen and UNESCO. Jack eventually reconnected to Israel, traveling often to the Jewish homeland. His son Paul transformed that legacy into scholarship as a leading historian of German culture and antisemitism. Before his 2014 death, Paul was editing a definitive manuscript tracing the evolution of antisemitism. Both men were known for their warmth, generosity and marvelous humor in the spirit of renewal through education. The sponsors of this episode would also like to invite you to learn about Gan Condesa. I hope I'm pronouncing that right. In Mexico City, after decades of Jewish life migrating to the gated suburbs, Gan Condesa is reclaiming a presence in the city's walkable cultural heart. Through its thriving Montessori and expanding community center, it is reconnecting unaffiliated families to their Jewish heritage. Visit ganmexico.com g a n mexico.com to donate or invest in this permanent Jewish home in North America's largest city. Thank you so much for that absolutely marvelous and poignant sponsorship and dedication. I also would like to invite everybody to join our Patreon. For one thing, it helps us keep the lights on and keep doing what we're doing. But for another, it's where we get a lot of the topics and issues and questions that this podcast tackles. And including now people asking to focus a little bit on elections and what it all means and what this year will mean for Israel's future. If you want to ask those questions, guide the topics we choose to talk about. Join us. You also get to be part of the monthly live streams where I answer your questions live. The link is in the show Notes. The link is www.patreon.com Ask Anything. Anat, how are you?
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I'm good, thank you.
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Khabiv all right, so let's get right into it. The elephant in the room. I mean, it's Israeli politics. Let's start with the first of the 11 elephants in the room. You have launched a new party. You were once part of the Israeli political establishment on the political left. Does that mean that you don't see your view, what you think in the current constellation of parties, what does that tell us? What's missing in all the other parties? How do you think about that?
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That is precisely what it means. The reason that I even did something like that, which is again, not a simple step, is I've noticed that the way the Jews tell their story in the last two and a half years, it goes like this. If you ask Jews, for example, what are you doing? What's your profession? They will say things like, I used to do this, this, this and that, and then October 7th, and it's almost a universal Jewish phenomena. It is a moment after which many Jewish lives I'm not talking about those that were taken, but just everywhere took a different direction. And in that sense, I'm no different. A few things happened to me after October 7th, the first is, I realized, I think, like many Israelis, that the notion that we can outsource our politics, we can outsource our public service, that, you know, we can have great lives and politics will be the playground of, shall we say, mediocrities that collapsed entirely. So that was one realization, that at the end of the day, this is ours. And if we do not take ownership of it, if we don't have the best of us going into politics and public service, then the very thing that we've created is in existential danger. That was one aspect. The other is that I realized that many, many more people. This is also, I know your experience, have been willing to listen to what I've been writing and saying for many years, what the conflict is actually about, what we need to look for, how do we need to stop running away from problems, how do we actually address the core of the conflict rather than looking for shortcuts and Band Aids? And I also realized, one more thing, is that I remember it as a very odd feeling of day by day, I realized that it was very clear to me what needed to be done. I realized that it was not just that my analysis in the last 20 years became incredibly relevant. Obviously, I thought it was always relevant. That's why I devoted so much time to it. But I realized that it gave me the insight to policymaking, that I actually knew what I would do every single moment from October 7th on if I were in a position of power. And here I will say something that might sound a bit odd. At one point, it actually felt as if it was no longer a choice. It was just the thing that I had to do. I had to go back in there, and it had to be as the chair of a new party, because after October 7, something else was needed, and it wasn't even. It wasn't even to be very specific, but that from that disaster, from that whole bun, we had to emerge as a different people. We had to go through a transformation process. You know, I talk a lot about the Palestinian Arabs needing to go through a transformation of their entire identity and ideology for there to be peace. And sometimes people tell me, einat, you talk about what they need to go through. Aren't you asking anything of us? And I remember thinking, I'm asking of us the hardest possible thing, because people used to. When people say, are you asking nothing of us? They mean, you're not asking us to end the occupation or remove settlements or get rid of Bibi. And I'm like, I'm asking something much Harder. I'm asking us to go through a transformation that for a very long time we were running away from. And then as a result, we had the leaders that fitted who we were, people who ran away from problems. You know, people talk about, oh, October 7th happened because we were divided. I was like, if anything, it happened because we were too united and too unified. And in our refusal to address problems directly, in our addiction to the possibility that you can buy another minute of calm by pushing money to the Palestinians, to Israel's Arabs, to the Haredis. And I'd like to believe, and I think it's true, that at least a share of the Israeli public, a substantial share, is fed up with that and wants as much as it's hard. I understand the appeal of running away from problems, but enough of us, I think, understand the need to become the people who don't run away from problems.
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Do you think that the Israeli leadership, on all sides of the aisle, you're critiquing everybody from Yair Golan to Lapid to Lieberman to Netanyahu to Smolich. I mean, this is your view of. You called them mediocrities. Do you think they don't understand that? Why don't you trust them? I mean, yes, they're the same people, right? It's the same Netanyahu, it's the same Lapid. But why don't you trust them to be aware that transformation is necessary, that we can't just keep doing what we were doing before?
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What I'm seeing, and this is also backed up increasingly by numbers. You know, if you read Israeli polls in Israel and you see all these nice bars organized, you actually get the bizarre impression that everyone already knows who they're voting for. They've decided, and the only thing that remains is to optimize the votes of each camp. But I don't know why it is, but I think it was explained to me by someone that it's very expensive to do it. But. But in Israel, unlike, for example, in American elections, if people say, I don't know who I'm voting for, I haven't decided. It's none of the parties you gave me. All that goes into the garbage. And then the polls that you see in the papers on television every week basically give you a false image that everyone has decided. I compare it to looking at Instagram and seeing everyone living their best lives with bikinis at Bora Bora, and you're like, I guess I'm the only person with a super dull life. So you look at the Polls, and you're like, I guess I'm the only person who hasn't decided it. Everyone's already kind of found their political help.
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B
So I want to tackle this directly. Yes, famously, at least famously among us Israeli political pundits, I don't knows are thrown out of the poll. The assumption being if you really don't know, you're not coming to the polls. And that's silly because there are quite a few elections where the pollsters are very surprised, and that's the mechanism by which they're surprised. And often, and often there's a party that catches the protest vote, most famously the Pensioner's party, comes out of nowhere to get what, seven seats, eight seats, some astonishing number out of just 120. We have a small parliament. Eight seats is a significant number. But. So I have to ask this as bluntly as possible. Do you have a chance, do you, do you really think you're position to collect out of people who don't know, but you think will nevertheless show up on election day? Enough of these voters, where do you think you're going to draw them from? And you need three and a quarter percent, you need almost four Knesset seats just to have a single Knesset seat. I mean, you go from 0 to 4 according to Israeli, according to the electoral threshold rules, can you pull together three and a quarter percent of the population, of the voters?
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The short answer is yes, and I'll explain by what logic? So one of the things that we explain to people, and you also alluded to, that we're definitely startups, so we're not denying that we're a startup, but we're a startup with the potential to be a unicorn. And the unicorn is indeed, most polls put it at 20%, which you know, is a very high number, some 10%, some 30%. It's not just haven't decided, it's people who deeply don't know. And the reason that they don't know who they're going to vote for is not that they're some clueless people, it's that they can't bridge this vast gap between the visceral sense that after October 7th, it can't be that we'll carry on as we did, that everything remains the same, that it's the same people, the same conversation. So the gap between the senses, something profound has to change. But it hasn't gotten political expression. That's the opportunity. Why do I think that specifically Oath Party can give the response is because it's not just the ideas that we bring to the table. It's the fact that those ideas reflect a certain attitude. They reflect an attitude that says we can be so much better and in many ways we have to be so much better. That this moment of Khorban means that a world is gone and never will be the same. And can we meet that moment rather than blindly trying to stay in a world that no longer exists? Do we understand that we can't run away from problems anymore? Anyone who lived on this earth a few years knows problems have a bizarre tendency that if you run away from them, they don't disappear. And especially if you throw more money at them, they just grow. And that we want hope. A lot of people have a sense of despair, but it comes from the desire to have hope. But they want hope that is no longer based on delusions and lies. So I think we are uniquely positioned to respond to this moment. And as I said, I would have never done it under any other conditions. I mean, as I said, it didn't feel like a choice. It felt like almost like this Hineni moment. There's a moment, there's a calling, and I respond to it. So I think there's an opportunity. I think the ideas I bring to the table, the attitude that I bring to the table are such that are uniquely positioned to answer this moment. Is it guaranteed? Of course not. Is it a massive challenge? Of course. But I have to share with you, Haviv. Every day I'm in hugebayt. Every single day, every day I'm in home parlor meetings, which I love. They're like the backbone of Israeli politics. I love it. It's like old school politics. I say that I'm AI proofing my political campaign. I'm actually meeting people directly at homes, I'm talking at podcasts, I'm doing the things that actually meet people and speak to people and doing it brick by brick, stone by stone. Because again, I also think this is the attitude we have to adopt with the Palestinians, with the haredis domestically in isra, this willingness to have a long term vision, but then to address it day by day, hard work by hard work. And I'm seeing the desire, I'm seeing the thirst every single day. So I say that it's the only thing worth doing. Could it fail? Of course. But if it succeeds, it's so worth doing.
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Who is your voter in your imagination? And I ask that in a very specific context. Yet your lapid's voters are overrepresented in the Tel Aviv secular. In fact, the single biggest correlator for whether you voted for a current opposition party or a current coalition party, is your religious observance level as a Jew, Obviously, ram, the very conservative, religious Muslim party in the opposition, a little bit of throws that out of. Out of whack. But other than ram the level of religious observance, you're more observant. You vote for the coalition. You're less observant. You vote for the opposition. Yeshatid is heavily Ashkenazi. Likud's base is heavily Mizrahi. Shas is a Mizrachi Haredi party. UTJ is an Ashkenazi party. These are tribes. These are ethnic, religious, you know, cultural tribes. And Israelis vote very tribally. And you're coming in with almost a cultural message, a policy message. Can you break the tribalism? Or maybe your campaign is, look, Yair Lapid is polling at, I don't know, five to ten seats less than he currently has in the Knesset. There's some wandering Yair Lapid voters that are headed over to Bennett potentially. Are you looking to make headway in that space as a centrist? What is your sense of who that voter is?
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You teed it up beautifully because you remember the 1984, I think, Apple commercial where, you know, they were throwing kind of the. This big thing at Big Brother, which was Microsoft.
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Yeah. What was that? An ax or a hammer or something?
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Exactly it. And in many ways, you're right. What I realized at one point that what I'm trying to do, and our lovely growing team of volunteers is we are really trying to do something that is not just get a few seats. We're trying to do something that is very different. And part of it is, if I were to recreate that commercialized, I would put all the identity politics that you just described, all these kind of tribes, and just throw an ax into it. Because that's what we're doing. We're doing and saying, actually, it's already broken. One of my favorite visions of what change leadership and visionary leadership is all about is not that a visionary leader comes along and says, ha, this is my vision. Follow me. One of the theories I like most is actually says that the people that we call change leaders or visionary leaders, they don't change anything. They merely see and recognize that the change has already happened. And they give it words and they give it language and they give it shape and vision, but the change has already happened. They just see it. And I think what you just described already broke. And it already broke for enough people, clearly not for everybody. But it already broke for enough people. That creates a soil for something else to grow. And it means that with the Oath Party we can actually create a new political home that doesn't fall into these places that actually allows people to go to a new political home when they've already left. What I've noticed is a lot of people who come to these home parlor meetings, they've already left their previous political homes. They're already done. They're sick and tired of the gushim. They don't want the blocks. Yeah, they don't want to talk about, yes, Netanyahu, no Netanyahu. This is also why a lot of the people I speak to skew younger. They come from a desert of ideas and they're destined done. They are the generation that had to fight for the country. They want to know what they're fighting for. And it can't be leaders who tell them you're fighting for this identity or this identity. They want to know that they're fighting for the best that Israel can be. Remember that military ad? I'm going back to ads from the 80s and 90s, you know, be all you can be. Right. They want to fight for. They saw even though with a moment of terrible loss and Chubban, they saw Israel at its best. And they know that when Israel is at its best and you know that Khaviv, there's no other place like it and they want that. And when all they hear is him that we need to join together so that we can beat him and like, they're like, no, we want someone who will give language and vision to the best that Israel can be. Because we already saw it. And these tribes have already been broken because as you know, wars change societies and once war changed and broke something, there's no going back. I like, you know, half lightedly to say, you know, after World War I they had to give women the vote. That was it. They couldn't, you know, there was only so much they could do to stop it at that moment. Something broke in that war. Something tribal broke in that war. People who saw it, I think a bit like. And it's weird to talk about how terrible war is as a moment where people saw something beautiful. But what they saw is what Israel can be at its best. And they want to capture it into the future. And again, I think what you described is exactly the world that is no longer. It's the World of Yesterday, our favorite book, it's the World of Yesterday. And yes, a lot of people still cling to it and try to speak the language of yesterday, but enough people are no longer there that this is what we're giving shape and language to.
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B
Okay, so you're focusing me in a way that I wasn't focused on young voters, voters who served in this war in Lebanon or Gaza or flew over Iran or wherever they were. I personally have talked to countless, countless soldiers coming back home who are disgusted by the politics. And those young people probably are to some extent. We don't yet know how a movable demographic. And at the undecideds, we don't know what October 7th did. We don't know scientifically. We don't know in hard polling what October 7 did. So if someone says, I'm undecided now, we literally don't know what that means. Maybe they're definitely coming to vote. Maybe a third of the electorate of the voters that will actually be there on election day are the undecided. All right, so let's get into specific issues. Let's get into how you think they're going to play out and what you think actually needs to happen and what can happen. A major, major question that has the possibility of the potential to decide this coalition, excuse me, to decide this election is the Haredi draft. The ultra orthodox draft is something that we know for a fact mobilizes opposition voters. We know for a fact is something that deeply divides, not just Likud voters among Likud voters. In the inner soul of an individual Likud voter, there is this divide. For quite a few of them, there is a serious questioning of Likud itself. And we also know that a lot of what's happening now with this debate of will we pass an ultra orthodox draft or will we not pass? It is gamesmanship ahead of the elections. The ultra Orthodox parties can't afford to sit in a coalition that passes a draft law that forces a draft, so they're going to have to leave beforehand, and that might topple the coalition and call early elections. On the other hand, that might be a great way for Netanyahu to go to early elections while giving the ultra Orthodox parties the chance to stand their ground and risk it all on the question that might mobilize their own base and because their base is mobilized theoretically against Netanyahu, but nevertheless, we give Netanyahu a larger Haredi base after the election with which to build an coalition with the Haredi base. Right. Can a draft law pass ahead of time? Is it, if one passes, is it better for the opposition, better for the coalition? How do you see that all Playing out what should happen. And finally, is it literally physically possible to draft the tens of thousands of actual young men that the army says it needs?
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A
So let's start from the end. I talked about wars changing societies, that wars accelerate processes, expose situations, that, again, you can't continue to pretend as if it didn't happen. The Haredi issue is clearly key. It's important to mention here, especially your listeners know that the Israeli Haredi way of life has nothing to do with God, Torah, Mitzvot. It is literally a way of life that has been created since the 80s, the 1980s, based on, I would say, an entirely perverse incentive system that uses yeshiva as ways to dodge drafts, that incentivizes people not to work, that funds a way of life that is inherently unproductive for the state of Israel. These are all things that people knew, spoke about, knew that at one point we'd have to deal with them. They knew that it is theoretically unsustainable. But again, there's something about how humans address problems that, yeah, they can know that it's a problem, but until it, like, literally explodes in your face, you're not going to deal with it. And what happened on October 7, I personally did not have any illusions, but a lot of people, you mentioned the Likud voters, you mentioned the Tziyounut voters, they truly believed that the ultra Orthodox, the Israeli Haredis, if it will be existential for Israel, they will mobilize. They were our brothers. That was the vision, that was the sense of that. You know, they're behaving that way. As long as it's not existential. But if it's existential, the Haredi men will go under the stretcher. They'll help carry the weight of the existence of the state of Israel. And it didn't happen. Yes, there were a few individuals, but by and large, not only that, it didn't happen. And I'm not talking just about going to the military front, going to the hospitals, working with those who were injured, like some other way of mobilizing for Israel. And you remember, Israel was mobilized. I mean, there was no state, there was no government, there was no leadership. But there was a people, there was the mobilization from the ground. And in that, the haredis were absent. And not only were they absent, what followed was a continuous process in which their leaders and their people, you can't just put it on the leaders, their political leaders, while sitting in government that sends other people's children to death, were busy securing the privileges of their children to not fight once you see that you don't unsee it. Yes, there are a lot of people trying to make people to forget it and unsee it. But again, wars accelerate, processes expose divisions. That is something that you can no longer understand.
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B
What can you do? I mean, the Haredi welfare state is very simple. Once the Haredi parties are. I mean, the extra welfare state. The fact that a Haredi household in the same situation threw all kinds of clever tricks because Haredi parties in the coalition, like funding for local city municipalities through various Interior Ministry or Ministry of Negevan Galilee, or all these other ways, the ordinary Haredi family at the same socioeconomic level as a poorer, let's say Arab family or non Haredi Jewish family, gets much, much more from the state. That is a documented fact. It's in the data of the Finance Ministry and every think tank that deals with this issue. You can cut that, you can simply cut that. You can equalize, you can bring it down. You can demand work in exchange for negative income tax instead of just a welfare payment, which means the person has to work in order to get the extra grant. You can do all kinds of things that have been done in the past in the Haredi community that drove a significant uptick of work of just rates of participation in the workforce. But draft, how do you physically draft people who have built out. Yeah, okay, I agree with you, by the way, sort of in the Jewish sources. In the Jewish sources, there's not only nothing that says you don't serve. If it's a defensive war, a mandatory war of pikuach nefesh, of saving lives, you're required by Jewish law from the Torah itself, pre Talmudic, the highest level of law possible in the Jewish legal system, to serve. And it's a whole new. By the way, and Haredim served in the 40s and 50s and 60s and 70s. Haredi soldiers died in the 48 war for the founding of the State of Israel. And nobody questioned it. And so, yes, I completely agree with you. But their entire culture is now built against it. They have built out vast religious explanations for it. And I don't think they're gonna just show up at the draft office, are they?
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A
So what? The second of the three principles of US Party is called public services to those who serve the public. And it's exactly what you talked about. One of the arguments we say is that just discussing the drafting of Haredi is too small. We are basically saying this is an opportunity to discuss the connection between the Israeli welfare state and what it means for us to have the solidarity and common values that underpin every. The whole idea of a welfare state, as you know very well, as we move from family to tribe to the national welfare state, is that underpinning it is a sense of trust, solidarity and common values. Everywhere in the world where common values and a sense of trust and solidarity begin to erode, so follows the erosion of the welfare state. So this is the moment to say quite simply, everyone in Israel, and when I say everyone, I mean everyone, women, men, Jews of all kinds and Arabs receive a draft notice. Everything civic, we need teachers, we need zaka, we need paramedics, goes under the military draft. People go to the Bakum, the Bakum tells them we need you to.
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B
You're on the induction base.
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A
Yes, sorry, the induction base. You go there, you take military uniform. The English word is instructive. And everyone is in uniform. Even if you go to be a teacher or zaka, or police or hospitals, you're all in uniform. Your length of service is the same. You're all subject to military, judicial kind of areas. So the idea is that everything goes under military service. People have charged me and I accept the charge happily, that I'm trying to revive the Ben Gurion idea of the military, not just as machine of war, but as a nation builder. I absolutely agree. I think we need to be there once more, just broader. And the thing is this, if you refuse to serve your country, I compare you to the wicked son of the Haggadah. You're basically saying, this is yours, I have nothing to do with it, this is not mine. And then you remove yourself completely from the entire mechanism of the welfare state and any service from healthcare to the university to public transportation, you will have to pay full, full, full, full price for it.
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B
I'm sorry to interrupt, just Israeli university educations are 2/3 subsidized in the public universities. You just said that a person actually will lose significant subsidies across the field of things that currently exist in the Israeli economy. Just so people understand we're talking about a lot of money that you would no longer be pard. Be eligible for because you didn't do this military service.
- [35:09]
A
Precisely. And this is where this actually reduces the opposition. Because I recently was in a talk very interesting by Yosef Haddad, people know him, he's considering establishing a party and I sincerely hope he will. And really to have an Arab party in Israel that is clear Zionist and serves the country. And he talked about his choice to volunteer for Golani to actually be a fighter in the Israeli military. And he talks about how when he made that decision, because in Israel the Arabs are a priori told, you don't have to serve, but you can then volunteer. So he decided to volunteer and everyone asked him every single day, are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? And every time he was like 100%, a thousand percent, a million percent. But think about how much this requires from the individual. Now imagine that the state is saying, and by the way, a lot of haredis actually tell me, Einat, this will never go through negotiations, understanding only if you actually draw the line will anything ever change. Just as the Zionist state enabled it actually needs to withdraw this perverse incentive system. So once you, you don't make it up to the individual, it's not that the individual Khalidi or the individual Arab citizen has to volunteer against the kind of the values and ethos of his society. But basically you tell him you're drafted and if you refuse to arrive at the Bakum, you will pay throughout your life a very, very high price. This actually removes the burden from the individual, allowing them to go to the Rabi and say, look, if I don't serve, I won't be able to like hold a family, I won't have a shidduch. Right now it's the opposite. And that is how you force change. Now I have no doubt that some of the Haradis will raise the walls even higher and they will say, like the Idah Radit, the small section, we're gonna take nothing from the Zionist state and we're gonna give nothing. I will say that this I can respect. There's a reason that the Idah Radit is so small, because there's only so large a community you can sustain when it's dependent on the donations of three wealthy Jews from America, when it's dependent on the wealth and beneficence of the Zionist welfare state. Sure, you can have a million people have that way of life, but if it's not, and you even have to pay the services at the very full unsubsidized price, yes, there will be a few fanatic true believers, but the vast majority will revert back to being Israelis. Khaledis? Some not. But you serve, you work, you have general education, and you pay taxes, as we say in Hebrew. The technology exists.
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B
I have to say that even the ones who take nothing and give nothing still take a tremendous amount. They're still safe because there's an army and police and they still, when they get sick, go to a doctor, funded by the rest of the taxpayers and the rest of the system. Let me just ask, why does it have to be the army? And this is specifically a place where I personally have been making a point for a long time that it doesn't have to be the army. In other words, my argument against the Haredi claim that there's a religious need to exempt themselves from military service is that they could be doing massive national service of people who are not seriously studying in yeshiva. And the national service could be in the framework of national, civilian, national service, something that, for example, the religious Zionist community, which is way over represented in the death toll in this war, it's young men mostly and it's young women. Many of them have a religious problem serving in the military. So what they do is they volunteer en masse, many thousands each cohort to be national service teachers in disadvantaged schools in poor towns. Now, to me, that model is extraordinary, marvelous, amazing. I'm a big fan of it. And if the Haredim were serious that they have a religious problem serving in the military, they would turn the fact that they have built some of the finest and largest medical charities in Israel, rescue charities in Israel like Zakah, like Yad Sarah, into a national service organization that's totally Haredian lifestyle. And doesn't. The fact that they won't even do that tells me they're not looking for solutions, tells me it's not a serious debate about being part of the country. It's something else. It's something a lot more sort of petty. And it's just welfare. It's the way that your psychology is warped under a welfare system and welfare incentives. And so that's been my argument. And now you're saying no uniforms, everybody's in uniform, everybody's part of this symbolic thing. Everybody strips their regular clothes, their religious attire, and puts on the Israeli state symbolic uniform. And I'll just extend that to the Arab community. Depending on the news cycle, between 20 and 40% of Arab Israelis say that their number one identity is Israeli. Many of them say their number one identity is Palestinian or Muslim or different things. But there's a significant portion, a quarter to a third, roughly that say, no, we're Israeli first before we're anything else. They would probably be comfortable with that. And in fact, the fact that they're forced to do it would make it easier to do it and they want you to force them to do it. But Yosef Haddad represents more than just himself, I think. And I don't just think we have good polling on this over many, many years. But what about the ones who are the opposite. What about the ones who are deeply Palestinian in their own self, nationalist Palestinian, the ballot voters in their own self, that you're going to force them into an Israeli military uniform?
- [41:11]
A
I'm definitely going to force the choice. And yes, that's exactly the idea. The reason that I've gone against the idea of a national service, which is not under military jurisdiction, not in uniform, as a separate element, that is the exclusive kind of priority of certain sectors, because as a member of Knesset, I saw it up close. I saw the lies. And in the spirit of no longer running away from problems, no longer telling lies, what I saw first of all is the whole lie of, you know, the military a la carte, to fit the Haredi. You know, you enter Haredi, you come out Haredi. What a bizarre promise made by the military. They can't even promise people that they enter alive and come out alive. What does it mean for an organization of the state to promise people that they will remain unchanged at the most transformative moment in their lives? In the military. And I saw how so many lies were told. Like people who no longer wanted to be Haredi were forced to remain because the military, military made a promise to the yeshiva, like, it is so insane. And I saw, I learned, again, I'm not excluding, that a lot of people, especially religious women, had valuable and meaningful national service, but I saw how as an institution, it was again hijacked by so many to again just take money for the state in order to continue to not give.
- [42:49]
B
What's fake about. I know that there's a real program. I know that there are real ones doing real things. And you've said that, that what's the fake part? And also on the Haredi military draft, we know that it's very small, it's not succeeding in terms of growth. But is the thing itself also not real in some way?
- [43:05]
A
Yes. So first, on the Haredi thing, what you described is a part of all the lies, because a lot of these young men already didn't want to be in the Haredi world. But this was a way for everyone to tell a lie. Israel could say, we drafted Haredi and force them to remain Haredi in certain clothing and habits, even though they were personally already out the door. And then the Yeshiva could say, look, Israel's drafting. And it was just a lie that led nowhere. And by now, again, we have enough data to know that it changed nothing. You know, it didn't grow. People said, we'll start, and it grew. But if you build something on lies, nothing valuable can grow in terms of the national service for women. As a woman here, I will say I find it preposterous that it is assumed, you know, there's this. They compare often levels of service in groups. And I'm like, if you include women, there's only one group that actually fully serves in the military, and that is Israel's Masoreti and Chinoni people. And like, as a woman, traditional and
- [44:19]
B
secular, more modern Israelis, non religious Israelis.
- [44:22]
A
I'm sorry, I find it preposterous and unacceptable that it is understood that some women are just drafted, no questions asked, and some have a choice. You know, we just had here a little thing. When Smotrich said that if his daughter wanted to volunteer to draft, he would recommend or try to convince her not to. And Danny Buller, who's very good, kind of the social media commentator in Israel, said, I will actually definitely support my daughter in her being drafted. And then he gave it a great twist and he said, but if I even wanted to convince her not to, nobody's asking me because she will be drafted. She's not one of the people who gets to choose. So the notion that based on we go back to like throwing an accident, identity politics, the notion that certain sectors and certain VAD secure privileges to like decide yes or not to serve, that's the thing that I find preposterous. And also the notion, yes, Israel needs teachers a lot. Why is it therefore that the teachers will come from a particular sector? Let's do the opposite. Everyone gets drafted. The military can certainly be considerate and some people invest on risk portfolio and personal needs. They are sent to be teachers, but it's not based on your specific sector and identity, it's based on how much you fit and what's the right thing. And then you become, as my mother was, a teacher, a soldier teacher. And that was a great way for Israel to have a great cohort of teachers who just remain teachers after the military. So for me, it's very clear that this has to be for everyone. And also bringing all these hospital teaching zaka under the military removes it from the notion of identity politics, removes it from sectorial divisions, really creates the notion that this is the Israel Defense Forces, this is the service of the state of Israel, everyone is a citizen, everyone serves. And again, you might end up having a more civilian type of service, but your level of service, your length of service will be equal for all. You will be subject to the military rules, you will be in uniform. Yes, I actually think it matters greatly that your family Will see you put on the uniform. Your village, your town will see you put on the uniform. Yes. Part of how I started. We need that, the notion of nation building. We are now at this moment once more. And that's how you do it.
- [47:21]
B
Let's close out with two political questions. One, nobody has a victory. We don't know about the. As we talked about, the undecided. The people say don't know. But nevertheless, it looks like a hung parliament. So you're going to have a Jewish majority opposition, what is currently opposition that will pull about 54, give or take, according to polls right now, a Jewish majority, what is today, coalition parties that will, that will probably pull 52, 53 at the moment, as we record. And a middle ground of Arab parties that will probably be that entire middle ground. First of all, I gotta throw it out there. Where would you be if you had to be put in, if the media had to put you in one of those two boxes?
- [48:13]
A
That's exactly it. Neither. And I think that's also. We're not have. We're having yesterday's discussion. The blocs, this bloc, this block, I think this has fundamentally broken. So I actually don't think. Yes, there are.
- [48:33]
B
But can the block system change as long as Netanyahu is still there? As long as Lapid is still there, Yes, a lot of voters are. The fundamental question they're asking a lot of Bennett's polls, bold voters, not yet voting voters, but the polling, the people who say in the polls they'll vote for him. A lot of them are looking for a credible right wing, hawkish alternative to Netanyahu. It's about not voting for Netanyahu. As long as the same people are there, how can it not be the same block sort of culture, theory, mindset.
- [49:03]
A
So first the question is, will it be the same people? I don't think that will be the case precisely because everything we talked about in the beginning, I think something foundational has shifted. And you're right, sometimes things don't get immediate political expression. Sometimes it takes another election. But something has fundamentally shifted. I will say even more than that. The notion of politically organizing our politics, our media, our campaigns, I would say our brain cells around these blocks, around yes or no, Netanyahu. Again, what I see is a deep, deep, deep exhaustion with that conversation. So I don't know, you're right. That it remains for 70, 80% of the population, still a very powerful motivator. But in elections you only need 20% of the voters to substantially change how they think about the issues about what they care about and their priorities for things to shift completely.
- [50:11]
B
And so you already touched on my last question. 73, the 73 war and had a shock through the system. It was an incredible shock to the system. But the very same Prime Minister who oversaw that war and who was blamed by much of the public for the failures of that war won re election in the aftermath of that war. And it took another election, a second election, another four year cycle for a fundamental political shift to come into being. Partly as an aftershock of that war, there was a different way of building the coalition on the opposition side. But 77 election. The real revolution in Israeli politics when the Mapai Party lost for the first time in 29 years as partly as significantly an outgrowth of the 73 war. Took two elections to express itself after the second intifada. You know, yes, the Labour Party collapsed in 2001, but what took over the Likud that took over wasn't yet. It was just literally the last people standing. Because the second Intifada scrambled everybody's brains and everybody's votes. And it wasn't yet a new political order. It took a couple of elections to get to a new understanding to the unilateral withdrawal paradigm, to Sharon, to Olmert, to that right. And I would argue that Netanyahu's return to politics to the prime minister's office in 2009 was a function of the Second Lebanon War. So again, it took a few years. If this isn't the moment of expression, we don't know what those young people who just went through these wars, who just came out of Gaza, watching the Knesset members bickering over the same old stupid things while they served and put their lives on the line. We don't yet know what their significance will be in the political system. It's completely reasonable to assume as you do that it'll be very significant that they're genuinely disgusted. We know they're disgusted, but we don't know what that means actionably. What if it takes another election or two more elections to actually express itself? Are you, if you don't get in this time, are you continuing to run, are you still going to be there?
- [52:17]
A
So first of all, one of the things that's special about because a lot of time was essentially stretched, we don't have a situation of like the immediate snap elections after 73 at 74 and then another three years. We actually had three. We're gonna have three, three years after October 7th by the election. So in many ways you could argue that that's already in many ways the second elections. But as I said, none of what I'm doing right now has been by planning, by design. It's been me responding to a moment, responding to a sense of having something to offer at a particular moment. And if I still feel that I have something to offer going forward, I will continue to offer it. And if I feel that no, then no. But I am. For me, it's about responding to the needs of the moment and doing my best to kind of give it my all.
- [53:23]
B
Hey, Nat, thank you for joining me.
- [53:26]
A
Thank you.
- [53:27]
B
It's going to be a rocky road this year in this election. It's going to be poignant and powerful and incredibly painful. Expect a very difficult election campaign and we're going to be talking about fundamental things and maybe just that. That alone is the silver lining of this moment. Thank you for joining me and launching our political coverage with this conversation.
- [53:50]
A
Thank you for the honor.