← Ask Haviv Anything
Ask Haviv Anything
Episode 39: Fear and loathing in the diaspora, live in Oslo with Bjørn Gabrielsen.
01:59:04
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- [00:05]
Khabib Haviv
Hi, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Ask Khabiv Anything. This episode was recorded live in oslo, Norway on August 21st at an event hosted by Kosenkaos, the Nordic Jewish Network. I sure hope I pronounced that correctly. Founded in Oslo in 2016, Kosenkaos has become a unique platform where Jewish voices and friends and allies of the Jewish community across Scandinavia come together for dialogue, for culture, for critical conversations, by the way, across a surprising spectrum, just a real wide spectrum of Norwegian politics, Jewish politics, of the Jewish world generally. It was a pleasure to be their guest last weekend in Oslo. The conversation you will hear is a discussion between myself and Bjorn Gabrielsson, a Norwegian writer, journalist, literary critic. He brought a unique voice and tempo to the conversation. Bjorn, I think really appreciated how you ran everything, including the humor. I discovered a non Jewish man who has a tremendous knowledge of his country's Jews and also concern for his country's Jews. And I am grateful he was my interviewer and appreciate that. We met. There was a loud protest outside. I don't think it'll come through the microphones. It added some excitement to the proceedings. We couldn't help but reference it a little bit in the conversation, so just be aware of that. Thank you so much to Luisa and all the team at Kos and Chaos. Thank you to Bjorn. It was a pleasure. It was an honor to be part of your conversations up there in the cold north, which in August was not a terrible place to be. Before we start, also, I am very happy to tell you that this episode of Ask Khaliv Anything was sponsored by the children of Naomi Pinchuk from Chicago in honor of her 78th birthday on August 30th. Happy birthday, Naomi. Till 120. And now our conversation in Oslo.
- [02:11]
Bjorn Gabrielsson
Wow, this is very exciting. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Khabib came all the way from Bergam, including the Arndal circuit, which was pretty exotic, I believe.
- [02:25]
Moderator/Host
Yeah.
- [02:25]
Bjorn Gabrielsson
Yes. And thank you so much to you, Bjorn. That came all the way from Grindeloko.
- [02:30]
Khabib Haviv
Or something like that.
- [02:33]
Bjorn Gabrielsson
We're really excited to have you here at KUS and kaos. As you know, we try to foster some sort of healthy debate climate and be curious and listen to each other. And tonight we are really excited to hear some insights. So knock yourself.
- [03:06]
Moderator/Host
I should also point out that this is being recorded for the quite marvelous podcast Ask Her Anything. Could I see a show of hands? How many of you listen to it? That's more than half.
- [03:20]
Khabib Haviv
How many join the Patreon.
- [03:26]
Moderator/Host
That's where you pay for the privilege of getting episodes beforehand, which I recommend you all do. So if Houston calls are slightly more democratically inclined than I am, they, they're into people from the audience asking questions. So if this happens, know that you will be recorded. And another thing to know is, you know, there's a special genre of person who stands up and says, this isn't.
- [03:59]
Khabib Haviv
Really a question, it's more of a comment.
- [04:04]
Moderator/Host
And you should know I am a school teacher now and there's police on the outside. So without further ado, when it comes to this topic, I think quite a few of us in this room experience we never really get started in talking with people who disagree seriously because they have a question which they need to be answered before they can go anywhere, before they can talk at all about the issue. And when I try, I get so triggered by this demand and I turn into a Douglas Murray one man tribute band and nobody's happy. And so as quite often when I have problems of this kind, I ask myself, what would Javier do? So I'll try to steel man the arguments I meet from the people who might be outside and I'll try to be as eloquent and as honest as I can because this is what I feel they're asking me, they're saying, Bjorn Havib, how can you discuss the finer points of development of anti Semitism or wreath Ansayed Kut, the development of Muslim Brotherhood? These are all details, this is all commentary. There's a crisis, the dam is being breached, the house is on fire, all hands on deck. And this is what they will always say, children are being slaughtered. So how can we talk about anything else but stopping this? And when I don't give them an answer, the conversation stops. What would you say?
- [06:11]
Khabib Haviv
First of all, thousands of children have died in this war. If you strip away everything, the explanation for what Hamas is, what Israelis think is happening to them, how, how Israelis understand the nature of the enemy, how Palestinians understand their history. And therefore so many Palestinians follow Hamas, you strip all of it away. There's that basic human reality and there are many human realities, but there is this massive and vital human reality that thousands of children have died. So the question is utterly legitimate and real and true. And if it comes from a raging anti Semite, then everything else about that person is terrible. That question is legitimate and true. And so first of all, take it very seriously. The second point I would say is in as much as this is concern for the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, for the people dying, the people suffering in war, it is a Legitimate movement. It is a legitimate. And not just legitimate. I am absolutely sure Israelis are more careful at war because the world is watching. Now, I know commanders in the army, including people who have been in Gaza. I have a friend who is a battalion commander in Gaza. I think that means he commanded something like 400 infantry in the Gaza war. The understanding among the lieutenant colonels and above, that the world is watching, he tells me, shapes the battlefield. So that's great. That's fantastic. What I find disgusting about these people is that the only war that they will do this with is the Gaza war. They don't care about other wars, including wars fought by Western allies with Western weapons like Yemen. But that's not. That's not. That doesn't mean they should stop with Gaza. If their bigotry brings them to an obsessive focus on Gaza, and therefore the Gaza war is slightly more morally prosecuted, then their bigotry has done one good thing. Now we should expand their bigotry so that it then focuses on many conflicts and makes many more conflicts slightly less deadly, slightly less harmful. I don't mind saying that the IDF is a bunch of human beings, and in as much as you can create. And by the way, this is the point of international law. What international law tries to say is the world is watching. We have set standards and we will know if you break them meet these standards. The world is watching. Great. Fantastic. Every brigadier general in the IDF that I've ever met, and I haven't met any American ones, but I've met a couple generals as a journalist just sort of sitting in the room, they want international law. They want to know that there are guardrails, that they know if they're inside or outside of them. So I don't mind that. Not just they don't mind it. The specific question of the civilian harm in Gaza is a good question. The person out here in Norway, in Canada, in South Africa, screaming at the local Jewish community about it is a flaming raging bigot. And the one there was once a. I once read a book about the organized organized crime in the United States, and a lot of organized crime in the United states in the 20s and 30s was from Catholic immigrants, by the way, a lot of it from Jewish immigrants as well. But that's not part of this story. So. And the Archbishop of Chicago once accepted an enormous cash gift to the church in Chicago from basically a crime boss. And he was asked, how could you accept, you know, a donation to the church from this, from this evil person? And he said every single thing this person does is evil. Except that gift that's going to feed hungry children, that's the one good thing. That's the money that's laundered. You want to truly launder bad money? Feed children with it. That was his answer. So, yes, absolutely, Absolutely. It might nevertheless be useful to know something about the conflict, to understand Hamas, where it comes from, because that will tell you where Hamas wants to go, and that will tell you what the options are that the Palestinians have and that the Israelis have. And so if, for example, you're concerned not just about the children in Gaza in danger now, but the children in Gaza in danger three months from now, or the children in Gaza in danger 10 years from now, then we have to talk about Hamas. So, yes, the emergency, scream and shout, make sure the Israelis are as focused as possible. You want a ceasefire that leaves Hamas in place. Just know that if Hamas is in place, this war never ends. Hamas won't let it end. Hamas has already made that decision and already announces that all the time. So your ceasefire is just a temporary respite before the war is renewed anyway. So you want to actually bring those children out into a new day from this very dark tunnel to do that? The only way to do that is to have that conversation about what Hamas is and how your. And how your activism isn't just raging at the Jews, raging at the Israelis, raging at all the evils of the west that you see incarnated in this one Jewish state, but actually dig seriously, deeply into what Hamas is, respects Hamas. They're not brown people oppressed by white people. They have agency. They have thought. They have two centuries of theological debate that they are expressing and discussing and living out. And if we don't understand that, we're not going to end the war. So, yes, focus on the kids. It's an emergency. And by the way, thank you for that part of what you do. Maybe we should talk about how we actually end this thing, which is going to require a slightly larger frame.
- [12:21]
Moderator/Host
It is habibism, which I've heard you say several times, which is there's nothing you can do that Hamas can't undo.
- [12:32]
Khabib Haviv
Yeah, there is nothing anybody can do for Gaza. If there's a protester in this room waiting for the moment to jump up and scream, this is the moment. It'll help my dramatic buildup. I would stay and hear what we have to say, because then you'll know more. And by the way, opposition research is part of a campaign. You should actually learn what we think so that you can oppose Us better. But if you don't want to do that because you're not a very good protester, go for it. But there is absolutely nothing that you can do. You cannot. If you. I'll put it real simple. Hamas. Al hey himself, I mean, he's one of the heads of Hamas now. There's not that many left. He's one of the living ones. Said, I believe it's two weeks ago I saw the video. So I don't know exactly when it was. It was, I think, two weeks ago. He said, you know, we're still proud of October 7th. October 7th was important. Thank God we did it. And obviously we're going to do it again. And not just that, but Hamas has actually put out a pamphlet, a fascinating pamphlet in Gaza that I have. I have in PDF, in Arabic. ChatGPT will translate it for you. Don't Work Hard, where it tries to explain to Palestinians, by the way, well crafted on the page and, you know, with some beautiful artwork. It tries to explain to Palestinians why October 7th was not, in fact, a catastrophic disaster for Gaza. And it has a whole theory of Israelis, of the enemy, of how the enemy thinks, and a whole theory of the strategy. And they really lay it out in a clear and serious and interesting way. And the bottom line is that Hamas thinks that this war can never end. Because for Hamas, this war is a war for the redemption of Islam itself, for their surge back into history of a powerful, assertive, conquering, redeeming world. Redeeming Islam. And the Palestinian cause is just a small battlefield, maybe the most important at the moment, but nevertheless a small battlefield in the awakening of Muslim consciousness. And Hamas has this game that it plays. It's a little Palestinian nationalist. Sometimes it's more pan Islamist, other times. There's the charter from 88. There's the charter from 2017, without canceling the charter from 88. That tries to play this game, depending on who the audience is, but they believe that the war on Zionism, the war on the Jews, if you read their original founding charter, there is an eternal war between Muslims and Jews. They don't talk there about Israelis or Zionists. It's about Jews. And they quote the Koran and the Hadith to explain it. This war can never end, folks. One of the great waves of criminality that Hamas has ever engaged in was during the second intifada, which was 140 suicide bombings, a mass war on Israeli civilians, on Israeli children, at what was supposed to be the height of the peace process. It was to destroy the peace process. And so Hamas is not at war with occupation. It doesn't want an end to Israeli military rule in the west bank while Israel still stands. That's not worth it. It in fact wants to maintain Israeli military rule in the west bank as long as it's useful for the war to destroy all of Israel entirely. All of that basically means that if you don't understand the difference between Palestinian interests and Hamas's interests, Hamas wants a war and is willing to sacrifice all Palestinians, literally all of Palestine, all of Palestinian society, on the altar of the destruction of Israel. They say it, they explain it, they talk about it, they're proud of it. Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas, he was killed in Tehran in an Israeli strike. I believe Israel took credit. I don't know. If it didn't, then according to foreign sources, I think I'm supposed to say Ismail Haniyeh lost two sons in this war, or I think maybe even three sons, and was proud of it. In other words, when they talk about sacrifice, they include themselves. They're not just willing to sacrifice every other Palestinian. What does that mean? If Hamas remains in charge in Gaza, it doesn't matter how much money you send to rebuild Gaza, it'll rebuild tunnels. If Hamas remains in charge in Gaza, it doesn't matter how much concrete you send to rebuild Gaza, it'll only go down into the tunnels. There have been millions upon millions of cubic meters of concrete, vast oceans of concrete sent into Gaza over the course of Hamas's 17 years of ruling Gaza. And they didn't build anything in Gaza except almost entirely those tunnels. You will only supply another round of war as long as Hamas remains. So this is my message to the anti Israel protester. Hating Israel is not enough. You want to hate Israel, Hate Israel. You want to hate Jews, hate Jews. If it makes you happy, that's fine. I'm a Zionist. I'm not waiting around to find out your opinion of me before I can go about my day. I truly don't care what the anti Semite believes, and I frankly don't care what the anti Zionist believes, except in that it's an interesting conversation. But if you think that's enough and you leave Hamas in power and you support Hamas remaining in power, there's literally no way to rebuild Gaza. There's literally no way to end the war. For the sake of Palestinians, pressure Hamas, let's get the hell rid of Hamas. And by the way, when Hamas is gone, when the people now telling Israelis this is an eternal war for all time, stop telling Israelis that your campaign to pressure Israelis to change policy toward Palestinians might actually work. You won't be competing with Hamas in that effort to pressure Israelis.
- [18:27]
Moderator/Host
This explorationist mindset, it's sort of similar to Osama bin Laden. Sometimes Westerners will say, well, he was against this and that policy. But one way of seeing work was. Was just to create enough of a pain for the west so the west would react and greater conflict. But to me, it seems that the normal Western response is to believe that not doing anything is better than doing something. Which we saw in Iran when the United States and Israel bombed Iran, where there were so many opinions and views that it would be better to do nothing. They were three years away. They weren't three weeks away. So maybe they should. Do you recognize this? An impulse to always say status quo is better than doing anything. Building checkpoints after 140 suicide attacks is worse than doing nothing. Doing something is worse than doing.
- [19:41]
Khabib Haviv
Yeah, frankly, I hear that constantly from Europeans, and I. Okay, so let me finish before you get angry. Okay. I want to say something about Europe. Europe lives in an illusion, and it's a tragic illusion because Europe could be an enormous force for good in the world. But this illusion creates a fog that prevents it from seeing the world and acting. And I once called the Europeans hobbits. What I mean by that, specifically, I got a lot of Europeans wrote me and said, yes, you're right. And I think that's how I know they vote. Right? I think in European political. But what I mean by hobbits is that at the beginning of the Lord of the Rings, when you meet the hobbits, Tolkien writes that the hobbits had been protected for so long, for literally generations, by the Rangers. Don't worry about it. I mean, read it. If you haven't read it, read it. Don't watch the movie. Watch the movies. They're masterpieces, but the books are truly masterpieces. And this is the part is not in the movies, so you'll get so much more. But he says the hobbits were protected for so long that they forgot they were protected. They were just convinced the world was the Shire. Everybody going about their day, shaking everybody's hands and frowning at each other because you got to judge your neighbors and everything. And the food always comes in the harvest time, and everything's perfect and idyllic. And they didn't know that there was an evil, bad world out there and someone was patrolling the boundary between them and that bad world. And then you meet those people, and they are hardened people suffering Difficult lives in order that the rest, the hobbits and many others live safely. Europe doesn't have armies. Okay, I'm sorry. I saw a naval ship in Bergen. It was very impressive. You do not currently have the ability to go to war and you do not have the ability to defend Finland if Putin learns the wrong lesson from Ukraine and you simply don't. And nevertheless, the Soviet Union and then Russia have not decided to invade Europe en masse. Now, it could be that that's because they are just much more kind and hearted and warm and happy people than we all learn in our history books. Or it could be that there was some other massive, powerful force in this world spending and bleeding and willing to carry that burden for Europe, specifically the United States. I mean, I'm not saying Israel, I'm not taking any credit here. And Europe never really came to terms with that fact. How dare, okay, the French intellectual class, almost, to a person, be anti American after the Cold War. How dare they? And, you know, I don't want to bring it too close to home, so I'm not going to say anything about Norway, but also Norway. And so this sense that, look, you don't need to actually do much in this world, things are okay. And by the way, Westerners are bad at it. You'll try to intervene in the Yemen war because 85,000 children starve to death, and you'll only make it worse. Why? Westerners. Westerners are colonialists and imperialists and Nazis and every bad thing, excuse me, especially white Westerners. And that sense of self, okay, is limiting. And, and the democracies, the best nations in the world, the ones least likely to go to war with each other. I don't think there's ever been a war between two democracies. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm missing, like that one Taiwanese, South Korean skirmish that somebody can point out. But I don't think there's ever been one. Those countries, countries that don't want to go to war, by the way, even the Americans, when they go to bad wars, stupid wars, poorly conceived wars that don't go well, they do it because of the lesson of having saved the world in other wars. Now, you shouldn't necessarily go to a war because the last war, you were the redemptive force in the world. That doesn't mean you'll be that this time. Okay, so you can also make the mistake the other way. But this, yes, this motionlessness of Europeans, this sense that you don't step out into the world and shape it and Build it and influence it. You don't build real power as well as soft power alongside soft power. You. It's a real problem. Imagine if Europe was scary, but still democratic and liberal and demanded things of the world. There would be a force for good for the next hundred years of world history. We live today in the most. I know it doesn't look that way because of how information flows today, but it's true. One of the, maybe the most peaceful, healthiest, happiest periods in the history of humanity. And that's a function of the power of America and not anything else. That's the power that held back evil, tyrannical, vile forces that would have destroyed the world and sent the world into anarchy and despair. And Europe should not start wars, okay, don't go to Vietnam and like start a war. But Europe should be willing and able to understand that actually it has been protected by somebody else's actions and should be capable of doing actions. I'll just say one other point. You know, all of this energy, all of this cultural energy around the Palestinians, what has Europe actually done for Palestinians? Actually you send money into Gaza. Well, who handled that money? Who took over that money? What did that money actually buy in Gaza that wasn't useful? Pressure Hamas, Come down on Hamas, and if Qatar is a patron of Hamas, exact costs from Qatar. You can't exact costs from Qatar because they own half the economies of Europe. I'm exaggerating a little, but Europe, it could be, it could stand up and it could be assertive. The Israelis are watching all of this whirlwind of hatred of them that is unique. There's no other conflict, that no other nothing. Europe never goes out for anybody else, never goes to bat. And they're first of all concluding that Europe is anti Semitic, which is maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong. Can you get into that? But they're also concluding that Europe is useless. How much do you need to care about something for you to actually accomplish anything in that department? It turns out even now, even for Palestinians, you're not all that useful. So, yes, I would actually like to see a Europe that wakes up from the sleepiness from the shire and understands that the world is full of evil and is willing to face down the Iranians aggressively and the Chinese aggressively and build out economic power and cohesion and a united defense policy. Why not? I don't know if you can, but why not? I know Norway is not in the euro and all. I know I'm sibling, but I'm just saying, as A culture you've just accepted that the world is pretty and beautiful and you all live in the shire. And therefore anybody who thinks you have to bomb anything ever is a fascist. But that's because somebody else was doing it for you. And I think it is time to wake up from that. And Europe could be a tremendous force for good. You're still the good guys, even if you're asleep.
- [27:21]
Moderator/Host
It's very, very difficult to be grateful for something you receive. It generates resentment, which is why you get the French anti Americans and the belief that, well, this is the way nature says it should be.
- [27:39]
Khabib Haviv
Which is.
- [27:40]
Moderator/Host
Why any action is interpreted as evil. The French director Francois Touvroy said all Frenchmen have two jobs, the one they're paid for and their film acrylics. And you see where I'm going with this probably because in Norway, 5,000 kilometers from the epicenter, everybody's a Middle east expert.
- [28:08]
Khabib Haviv
Well, I'm a Norway expert, so that's okay.
- [28:16]
Moderator/Host
But you know, you go to Israel and most people are hospital clowns and yoga instructors and she root drivers. Why did you choose this? Why don't you write about something nice? What made you choose this? Can you remember when you decided this is going to be my life?
- [28:43]
Khabib Haviv
I remember very clearly. It's funny, I don't think anyone's ever asked me about. Okay, so I'll cut this from the podcast, but I did not know anything about journalism. Didn't want to go into journalism. I was interested in going into politics because I have strong opinions and I think everybody else is wrong. And I finished the army and went into. Got a security job while I was a student in college, because that was basically what you can do after the army. That's your one sellable skill. And I was actually the bodyguard of a housing minister, Nathan Sharansky. If anybody knows that name, there's a Jewish community here, so you'll know that name. And then later I would become his spokesman. He didn't remember that one of the bodyguards around him was also me. But. But he was a sweet guy to his bodyguards. That is a. To people who have to stand there quietly while he does whatever he needs to do. So that was it. And then I got sick of guarding because it's very boring. And I answered a job ad at the Jerusalem Post, this English language paper in Israel and Jerusalem. And I had very good spelling. I went to about 40%. Something like that of my childhood was in the States. And I was always a very, very good speller. I mean, three years into America I still had an Israeli accent. I was second place in my school spelling bee, which I don't know if that translates into Norwegian, but that's impressive, I just want you to know. And so I was basically, I became an editor in the junior version of spell checking in my newspaper in English, and that was it. And then I discovered that you could write stuff, and it's Israel, so you could just write. You know, they didn't require a degree in journalism or anything, so you could just. If you're good, you're good. And if you're not good, nobody cares. They'll throw you out no matter how many PhDs you have. So it's very much. I think it's more meritocratic just because there's a lot less respect for symbols and elites and all that stuff in Israeli culture. And I started writing about all kinds of things. I was education reporter. I knew nothing about education. And I learned something really profound about journalism that made me fall madly in love with it very early on. One of my very first articles as education reporter 19 years ago was I had to go to the Knesset where the Minister of Education with a couple of PhDs from Harvard, was arguing with the Minister of Finance, also who came with his couple of PhDs from Harvard, about whether you normalize the. You normalize the spending on the education system by GDP per capita or by purchasing power parity. Raise your hand if you're following me. Okay. Okay, there's a couple. So now I have to get it right. And depending on how you understand what it is you're actually spending on in an education system, you can figure out whether you're spending enough or not enough in international comparison. Right. And because education Systems are over 90% salaries, you build a building once and then you have to staff it for generations because of that. The correct normalization is purchasing power parity. But if you do it with GDP per capita, it turns out that there's far too much money in the system. And the system's producing the outcomes that in standardized testing of Romania. And if you do it by the other way, then it turns out there's not enough money. And the problem is you're not spending enough. And we're talking about billions difference for the education of our kids. It's a really fundamental debate. And you know, when I learned the topic six months after sitting there and realizing I knew nothing and I'm the guy who has to tell the story to the world, everybody in the room at that Knesset committee knew what they were talking about except the Journalist, who's the. I was the only journalist who showed up, by the way, who is supposed to explain to the world what's happening. And that's when I learned what journalism really is. And if you're a journalist in the room or you want to be a journalist in the room, I have to tell you, journalism is not a profession. I consider a profession something that has a body of knowledge like medicine. Medicine is a profession. Journalism is something much cooler than a profession. It's a trade, it's a set of skills. And you take that set of skills and you learn how to learn and quickly and seriously and self critically. And then you take that over to the topic, over to the public debate, over to the storytelling part of journalism, which is the other major set of skills. And you piece that together and you're a journalist. It's a trade that when it's done well, is an art form. And so I have just been madly in love with journalism. I can't believe there's such a profession. And I mean trade. And it's way better than politics. No politician has as much fun as fascinated by the things they do as me. And the only reason I deal with this stuff, all the hard things, only the hard things, I only ever have to am asked to comment on the really hard things is, is. Is just because I, I think I've tried to, I've tried to walk that thin line where you can hear everybody and you can try to understand the different sides on judicial reform in Israel. It tore the country apart. There's a civil war over it basically. And the ability to understand that there is a case against the strength of the Israeli Supreme Court. It's unbelievably strong. But also there's a case that actually there's very few other checks and balances in our system for various historical and reasons and cultural reasons. And the ability to then bring that conversation into a single article, I think that's journalism. And everybody who doesn't do that is not doing journalism. And so also the person screaming at the anti Israel things, the ability to parse out from what they're screaming the actual moral concern about the images of dead children they saw on their phone from the sort of architecture of anti Jewishness and projecting onto Jews Western evils and all that other stuff, but the ability to sift that out because there's a human being there and that human being is not innately hateful, but that human being is struggling themselves in this world of ideas that is journalism. And I'll just say One last thing, I think that that ability for me, and everybody can pick it up, where they pick it up comes from religion. It comes from Judaism. My dad's a rabbi, and my father in law, my wife's dad's also a rabbi, got rabbis all around. And one of the things I learned was that a human stands before you always. And there's nothing more important than that about the person standing before you. And this is something that the Talmud says probably 10,000 times in different ways. And they're going through mental imagined journeys, and you have to see that journey to be a good rabbi. And so the Talmud, for example, says to rabbis, you can't give an answer, the person can't hear. It's talking about whether the chicken is kosher. But it's true of every single question in life. You cannot give an answer the person will be unable to hear. And so that pedagogic sense of the world is, I think, fundamental to journalism. And it's not all the stuff that I've said. I've never gone to journalism school. I learned history and Jewish philosophy at Hebrew University, but I have had interns from journalism schools, and they did not know any of this. And so I don't know what they teach at journalism schools, but they don't teach journalism. That's all I have to say.
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Moderator/Host
I was a journalist for 25 years.
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Khabib Haviv
And an excellent one, I should say.
- [36:28]
Moderator/Host
But one sort of occupational hazard, I guess, when I read other journalists, I can tell quite precisely, I think, how close they were to the deadline when they started. Right. It's very transparent. Yes, it is. You didn't have time to read. You wanted to read, you just didn't. I need to get this out because you mentioned gangsters. This is just a smaller side. I can tell you all. If you have a question, I'm going to tell a small anecdote now which will give you time to think if you're brave enough. But since you mentioned gangsters, and there was for 20 or 30 years, there was one generation of Jewish gangsters in the United States, none before, none after. There's a book written about them and you know the name of the book.
- [37:29]
Khabib Haviv
He Was Good to His Mother. I love that book. Robert Rockaway, professor at Tel Aviv University, wrote a book about Jewish gangsters. And I think the book's title is But He Was Good to His Mother. Yeah, but one of my. One of my takeaways from that book was why did the Jewish Mafia Die? It was extraordinarily powerful and quite evil. Quite evil. And it died because of essentially social shame. The other immigrant groups, almost every immigrant group created the Irish and the Italians are famous mostly because of Hollywood. They were big and significant, but there was a Greek and an Albanian and many other immigrant groups created these organized crime networks. Among the Jewish community, the social shaming was such that the gangsters didn't want the kids. Their kids all went to medical school. In other words, they did not want the kids rising up in the business. So the thing just. Just died and the business got. Social shaming works okay. It keeps the community strong and moral, I think, is the lesson.
- [38:35]
Moderator/Host
Very undervalued. And one thing I find interesting when listening to you is the way you present Israel, which is quite different from the Rah Rah startup nation or the Holy Land version. Here's how I perceive. Havil describes Israel, and you can tell me if I'm wrong, which is very provincial. It's the Middle Eastern Nebraska, not Central. Most people who came there wanted to go somewhere else. So in a sense, there's a sadness about it and there's just this disbelief that people are so much against that this Zionism anywhere else, because they would go somewhere else if they could. Is this.
- [39:30]
Khabib Haviv
Yeah. Yes and no. Yes, absolutely. Most. Look, if you've heard my podcast episodes about this or lectures about this, or read the books of the historians I use. Right. I'm just a teacher. I'm not a historian. I'm not a scholar. I would say very much that, yes, when the doors to America were opened, when the doors to Canada, when the doors to Norway were open from 1890 to 1921, most of the Jews of Norway, your great grandparents, came in that period fleeing the same pogroms that the American Jews were fleeing. And Norway then closed its doors, I think, in 1920, 25, I don't know exactly, but there was a period where Norway, by the way, like America, like Canada, like everybody else, shut their doors. And that's when the Jews all started turning Zionist and going to the land of Israel. They very much was. Now, I don't think that they didn't want to go to the land of Israel or didn't think the land of Israel was what it was. But there wasn't the economy there. There wasn't the stability there. They were basically looking to feed their kids. They were in a world where they were displaced by mass violence and oppressive legislation, by these empires and by these new nationalisms, and they just needed safety, stability. I understand them. I love them. They're my grandparents and great grandparents and they were making the best decisions. And that's probably the decision I would make if I lived in their world. And then when they got to Israel, when they got to Palestine, either in Ottoman times or British times, and then, or when they got to Israel, once Israel was founded, they interpreted it as redemption. It felt like redemption. A, because every synagogue in 2000 years prays to Jerusalem. I mean, you can't get away from that. B, suddenly all the Jews around them, they're surrounded by Jews who would die for them. And everywhere else they were, not because other Jews couldn't if they wanted to, or because they were surrounded by people telling them to leave or killing them until they understood the point. And so it felt very much profoundly like redemption. And not in the sense of an abstract sort of religious ideology, but as a lived experience of just breathing the air of this earth and it finally being yours. And so, yes, absolutely, they would have gone somewhere else for good reason. And going there was redemption also for good reason. And those two things are in the same person's head. So absolutely it is something very sad. The fact that Zionism succeeded so wildly was a direct function of the collapse of the capacity of modernity. Europe, but not just Europe, the entirety of Western civilization to contain minorities. And let me just say that because it isn't just a Jewish story, Europe has been, I'm sorry to really harp on Europe. I come to Norway to tell Europeans they're bad people. You're not. That I wish you'd realize how good you are is the story. But Europe has not had genocides and brutalities. There was Bosnia, which is really a very different cultural world. Western Europe, certainly Central Europe, certainly have not had these evil kinds of things since the war. And Europeans tell themselves that that's because they learned the lesson in the war. But I'm a Jew raised in Zionism. I can't help but notice that you also have no minorities for the vast majority of the time when you got really nice to the non existent minorities among you. Now that Europe has imported into itself significant minorities, everything's changing again. Your, your politics have gone in terms of 20 years ago, Haywire Le Pen will win 40% of the French vote, which is something nobody could imagine 30 years ago. So I don't think Europe gets to, you know, credit for being liberal and modern and magnanimous and humanitarian when it literally homogenized itself through genocide and mass expulsions, including of Germans, you know, so now Europe is kind of testing itself now that it has these questions to ask again, now that There are differences in Europe now that there are strangers. I don't mean that I'm calling them strangers. I mean that Europe experiences these migrations as strangers. And there's the question of what is European, what is it to be French, what is it to be British. The story is always more complicated when you try and actually get into the lived the experience of the actual people.
- [44:11]
Moderator/Host
The thing is, you said what I knew it was true beforehand because I knew the numbers. But you pointed it out in a different way where you said Israelis are not that concerned about the diasporas because most Israelis come from diasporas that no longer exist. There are no Jews in Libya, none in Algeria, none in Afghanistan, almost none in Iran, certainly none in Iraq. And the place where there are diasporas, they haven't fed a lot of immigrants into Israel like United States, which makes I think maybe Europeans exaggerate the Europeanness of Israel. I think there's a connection which isn't really, it's not quite there. If you travel to Europe and you, and you read about Jewish communities in different countries. I don't know if you notice this, but there's a law that says they always have to be described as vibrant. Have you seen this? Every Jewish community is always vibrant.
- [45:22]
Khabib Haviv
Yeah, I actually once met a non vibrant Jewish community. It was not great, it was not good. It didn't even meet the bare minimum standard of my. No, you're right. It's one of those words that are thrown out as if I don't know what. Everyone's getting together and dancing all the time. I don't know what, I don't know what it means. Yeah, but it.
- [45:45]
Moderator/Host
I once went to, to synagogue in a place called Nutshipping where it's not used for, for services anymore. There's an erdamid which is on and there are two old guys running the synagogue. And they're just like those two guys in the bullets. Those old men.
- [46:09]
Khabib Haviv
You mean they're fighting?
- [46:10]
Moderator/Host
Yes, but they love each other. So there's Alexander, who's very stylish, an artist. And there's Pavel, who's a working class Pole and always big one. And their job, or the job they put on themselves is.
- [46:27]
Khabib Haviv
They.
- [46:30]
Moderator/Host
Make sure the synagogue is tidied up after rentals. So that's the other synagogue that does nothing except get spray painted. And these two guys, they get up in the morning, they made fun of each other. Tahir.
- [46:51]
Khabib Haviv
I think it's a public service that they're doing to the anti Semites to give them something to do to Spray paint to do. You're describing, look, I mean you're describing, to quote Professor Dara Horne, who you have also cited, the Nazis won the war. If you're a Jew. European Jewry is a dead world trying to find ways to rekindle pockets. But the culture creating heart of the Jewish people, the Jews of the Muslim world were small. It was maybe a million out of 13 million. And the Jews of Zionism, of the project in the land of Israel were tens of thousands. They had reached hundreds of thousands. But I think 300,000 or something like that in 39 or 400,000 maybe, I have to check. And the Jews of America were two and a half million. There was an enormous thing, but they had almost no serious learning and institutions and education and they weren't writing serious Jewish books. And I know everyone's going to get angry at me for saying that. Those literature professors are going to say there's this book published in New York by this guy. But they're almost all European Jews who came over to America to publish in America. And, and people like Sholem Aleichem hated America because he said it's a wasteland of Jewish culture. The peasants moved to America fleeing pogroms. All the elite stayed in Europe. And Europe was producing the great learning and the great literature and the great religions. The Jewish religions meaning the haregism and the Reformism and all these different options and all this flourishing and insane just cultural creation. One of the things the Nazis did was kill Jewish bodies. But the other thing they did was kill the culture creating harm to, of the Jewish world at its most serious and profound. And so we are living in a dead world that has to be brought back to life. And the Nazis, you know, the Nazis won. And now the question is, what is European Jewry? And the funniest thing is sitting in on German officials having these conversations about the vibrancy of German jewelry today. And you're like, what is, what are we even, what are we even talking about? The vast majority of German Jews, by the way, are Russians besides who are assimilating.
- [49:15]
Moderator/Host
Yeah, but I'd still say there's, you know, despite the, the, there's often a transient nature in European Jewish communities because there'll be expats who come and then leave and then there's somebody's daughter marries an Israel. So you won't have the same people there who were there 50 years ago. I still think there's almost, as far as European countries are concerned, there's almost a binary thing where yes, yes, the Communities are destroyed. But if you have a functioning synagogue in a country, there's a big difference between that and just having a guy from Chabad rent a room at a hotel twice a year. I think for Europeans, this matters. If you can take your kids past the synagogue and say, there's a synagogue, where do you. Or if there's nothing, I think it matters.
- [50:23]
Khabib Haviv
I'm a Zionist. I'm an Israeli. That's the worst kind of Zionist. I have a hard time connecting to any of this, being having a synagogue that the world around the Jews can look at and say, look, there's a synagogue. Isn't the Judaism, okay, The Jewish people or whatever the hell Jews are and whatever the hell Jews are doing? And it's a little bit the way I think about my kids, okay? I try to teach my kids certain things, to be certain kinds of people. Ultimately, my kids are going to teach me who they are and I'm going to love them, even if they're the wrong kind of thing or vote the wrong way, God forbid. And I will learn from them who it is that they are as person. I don't mean specific. That sounded almost like gender talk or political talk. I don't mean that. I mean just literally, what kind of person are you? You're going to teach me. I'm not going to teach you what kind of person you are. Israel is vibrant in the sense that it's a whole bunch of Jews doing a whole bunch of contradictory things, screaming at each other, fighting each other, creating constantly new Jewish experiences, new kinds of Jewishness. That's what it is. So it's the very freezing in place of that synagogue that you describe of those two people.
- [51:46]
Moderator/Host
The.
- [51:46]
Khabib Haviv
That's a frozen thing and therefore not a living thing. And so if you find a Jewish community that managed to freeze in place, that's a problem. It's possible that what I just said is incredibly patronizing and ignorant. It really is very possible because I come from Israel where, you know, it's easy, and it's not easy to be in the Diaspora. I tell Israelis the world hates us. We have terrible information. War management in this war also. It's an actual terrible war. But also we're not saying anything when the latest libel goes out. That's not true. And the Israelis say, screw them, they hate us. So what? And then the best answer I give Israelis to make them pay attention is, yeah, you don't have to live with them. The Jews of the world have to live with these people. They're suffering. When Israel looks Bad you in Norway suffer. And that sense that I don't live your experience and so I can come here and tell you, you know, here's the real Jewish and here's Lester. Here's a live Jewish and here's frozen Jewish. I realize how that sounds, but that's kind of just my lived experience. My lived experience is when Jews are so smushed up together that they're just constantly arguing and creating. That's a Jewish community. And if you don't have that, build it by the way, 25 people can do it. They just have to be arguing all the time. So that's my feeling. Europe is far too much of Europe is in that sense a dense world. When you have large strong Jewish communities big enough London, Paris, they have, you know, six figure digit numbers of Jews, that happens anyway. Even if 10% of them are in a room arguing, it's happening. So you know, that's the future. By the way, if European Jewry has a future, that future is in getting into a room and friction each other.
- [53:27]
Moderator/Host
And you can often tell if the size is satisfactory based on how people describe their dating lives. Do I have a choice? What do you think the choice is?
- [53:40]
Khabib Haviv
I'm sorry, you're not Jewish? No, I think you hacked the Jews. I think you've understood exactly how it works.
- [53:52]
Moderator/Host
Really wonderful. I still don't have to get involved in community politics.
- [53:58]
Khabib Haviv
That's amazing. That's ideal. All the fun without all the.
- [54:02]
Moderator/Host
So I know you hope it's fine for me. Don't care. I think I keep getting back to theory of mind of how, how people think, how Palestinians. Palestinians are not winning. One reason scientific view is that they have not left the Israeli mind. They did not know they've misunderstood something partly because the Jews have described their arrival to the country in a way which is not entirely correct since half of the people are dauntless. Could you just go through that quick?
- [54:53]
Khabib Haviv
Yeah, this is my great theory, so be kind. No, I'm just kidding. Don't be kind. I try to. When I was once a soldier in the IDF, in the infantry at checkpoint in the northern west bank and a suicide bomber driving a sedan, a car with I think 50 kilos of TNT in it, probably enough for 10 suicide. Excuse me, something like five suicide belts of one kind or another blew up at the checkpoint and on soldiers from my platoon. And I remember being, you know, a medic who rushes to the place and we have one guy who's wounded and everybody did everything right and so nobody is dead except the suicide barber obviously. And his body was, you know, he was wearing a belt and also the car blew up so he flew through the windshield and the belt went off probably while he was airborne and his body split in two and his legs are in one place and his upper torso is in another. And all of us 19 year old soldiers arrive at this scene of his essentially body parts, innards strewn across the road. And this is. I voted left. I was really eagerly left. I really loved being left. My dad was left wing all his life and I was following his footsteps and he's the smartest guy I know. And I remember thinking, I remember being angry at the guy, at the suicide bomber for being such a. Can we curse? For being such a fucking idiot. Because the Israelis were engaged in an immensely powerful, painful, difficult generational civil war amongst themselves on the question of is it safe to pull out? Is it legitimate to pull out? Will we end up being massacred or will we end up stronger and more moral? And this guy decided that he was going to strap on himself bombs and build bombs or carry bomb making supplies to build more bombs to blow up on buses that carried children to school at 7:30 in the morning, city buses in Jerusalem. And this guy decided that he was going to settle the civil war among the Jews for the future of the Palestinians. He was going to settle it for the Jews on the side of the people who said we can never afford to pull out. How dumb do you get? Why would you condemn Palestinians to the destruction of the Israeli left? And I felt it and it was me, it was my story. And I didn't understand that experience of that suicide bombing. You can look it up. I think it was in 2001 in was the specific location that suicide bombing sent me on a journey. And I started asking Palestinians, are you stupid? The good thing in Israel is that you can have real frank conversations. But what I mean is, seriously, what are you thinking? Why does this make sense to you? Why do you think a suicide bombing would work? And I began to hear about anti colonial violence, about Algeria, about how when you terrorize the colonialists, they leave, about how we are artificial, we're going to leave now. This was new to me and Palestinians explained this to me and I now teach this story and I bring as many sources as I can from the other side because you don't want to hear an Israeli Jew talking about it. And what's been amazing over the last year, some of these lectures on this specific topic, how Palestinians think of the Israelis, of the Jews, of the Zionists from 1881 till today, from the beginning of the Zionist political movement, immigration till today, I would give these lectures and they went insanely viral. And I would get letters from Palestinians who said, that's exactly what they taught us. But I didn't understand what it meant that they were teaching us that, because I didn't understand that they were trying to frame you in a certain way, but you're actually a little bit different. My basic argument is very simple. For 140 years, Palestinian political elites, ideologues, ideological factions have been telling Palestinians that we are one kind of thing, we Israelis, we Zionists. We are a European colonialist project, a European imperialist project. The language changes at different times. 1914 is very different from 1934 in the newspapers, in Arabic language newspapers of Palestinians, but nevertheless that we are something artificial, something European, something that can be crowbarred out of the land, kicked out of the land through the same means and methods used to kick the British out of Kenya and the French out of Algeria. And that is terrorism and that is violence and brutality. And this is long before the example of Kenya and Algeria. This is a conversation that happens in the Jerusalem city council in 1908 when the. The father of the. Of Hajamin Al Husseini Abdullah, actually suggests that we brutalize the Jews, we massacre the Jews. He says, look, why are they coming here? Because the Romanians are massacring them. He's referring to the Southern Russian Empire. It's a compl. It wasn't today's Romania. Exactly. And so if we treat them the way the Romanians treat them, they'll all get on a boat and leave again. By the way, that might have actually happened had they done that. The Ottomans won't allow it because they look bad. They're Russian subjects. Their Western European empire is keeping track. The Ottoman Empire is very weak. The Ottomans don't want the problem. But there's this discourse that if you brutalize them, they'll leave as though they have options, as though they're the French colonialists in Algeria who can all just go back to France and they've thought about us one way or another, reinterpreting this one way or another since then. And everything they've ever called us, whether it's imperialist or colonialist or apartheid or Nazi. One of the points that I keep trying to make to people is that it's not an analytical statement. You don't hear Nazis so much. You'll hear it from the more radical activists, but in Arabic, it is constant. It is more common than colonialist or imperialist or any of the rest. And what they're talking about is not specifically, look, the Jews are Nazi. The Jews are apartheid. Specifically, explicitly apartheid folks in South Africa was interracial. Sex was a felony. That's not what's happening now. You could say, oh, no, we've reinterpreted it to be something much narrower and it's inequality. But we already have a word for inequality. Systemic. We already have a word for that, too. What they're trying to do with the words, first of all is borrow the moral cache of the word. But the second thing they're trying to do is that all these things share one characteristic, whether it's imperialism, colonialism, apartheid, Nazism and all the rest. There are a few others I keep forgetting, and that is that you can peel off apartheid from South Africa, you can peel Nazism off of Germany, and you can peel imperialism off of India, and you can peel colonialism off of Algeria, and Israel can be peeled off. That's the argument. And it's an argument they've been making for 140 years. I have a talk online called the Great Misinterpretation. That's what I call it. It's not so sexy. But I'm open to branding advice. But I make there two points. One, the point I just made to you, they misunderstand us. Now, if you think we are removable, you will launch suicide bombings at the height of the peace process because we're removable. Why do we go to a peace process? Because we're scared of you. So you make us more scared. We're not going to go to a peace process. We're not going to pull out of a West Bank. We're going to pull out of Tel Aviv. That, by the way, was true of a lot of the colonialist projects that were kicked out by terrorism. It wasn't true. It was never true of us. With us, it had the opposite effect. Because we have no France to go to, because we're the grandchildren of refugees, because this is the first time we breathe the air of this earth safe and free. Because all those other options that the other Jews had to go to the west to go to America, we didn't have. The second point I make, and this is really, really important, and this is why I think I have hundreds of emails from Palestinians, from Muslims, around the Muslim world, and I think it's because of the second point. And the second point is they were never stupid. If I say to you, eight years of fln, murder of French civilians in Algeria. Kick the French out of Algeria, and it never kicked the Jews out of Israel. And the reason is we have no friends, right? We have nowhere to go. That seems to you very obvious and very simple. And so you'll come to the conclusion maybe, that Palestinian strategists are dumb. They don't realize we have nowhere to go, so we're not going to leave. And one of the things I need to explain is that, no, they're not dumb. They had good reason to think that we were imperialist. The British supported Zionism for decades, and the British actually promised the land to the Zionists at San Remo. One of the conferences after World War I that sort of divvied up the world between the winning powers. And the Arabs weren't even invited into the room. If you're Palestinian, you think, wait a second, Zionism is just the spearhead of British imperialism, because that's how the British thought of it. I'll give an example where they decided that we are Communism. We are in 1948, in the Egyptian declaration of war. I love this. The Egyptian parliament is asked by the Egyptian prime Minister to issue a declaration of war so Egypt can enter the 48 war. And when he explains what they're declaring war on, he says Zionism, nihilism, and atheism. Because he thinks Israel is communist. Why does he think Israel is communist? Because it was super communist. Right? Mapai, the ruling party, mapam, the Palmach Party, the party of the most elite forces, they're all very socialist parties, deep socialists, and some of them were even pretty communist. And the kibbutz movement was the elite of the Yeshua and the elite of the fighting forces of the Yeshuv. And also, who's arming the Jews? The Americans recognize Israeli independence in 11 minutes. Truman makes a big show of it. And for the entirety of this catastrophically existential emergency, places on Israel an arms embargo. America placed an arms embargo on Israel at the moment when Israel was most likely to be destroyed. So did Britain. Who supplied the arms? The Czechs, at the direct order of Comrade Stalin. Why did Stalin give the order to give arms to the Jews? Because he thought they were the vanguard of world communism. Ben Gurion would turn pro American. We were kind of super socialist, pro American. And by 56, Stalin had handed the Egyptians a whole new army. But in 48, the Egyptian theory of us that we're some foreign patriot, you know, spearhead of some foreign empire, in this case was perfectly rational. They were literally arming us And Stalin thought the same thing. And so this theory that we have a patron and it's the only reason we survive, this theory that we are something external that's fragile and even though it looks strong, can actually be felled by anti colonial means, it's never stupid, it always makes sense. And my only argument is it's nevertheless incorrect. And if you genuinely think, for example, the campaign in the United States focuses on detaching American support from Israel, because if America stops supporting Israel, so goes the theory of the entire anti Israeli campaign in America, what happens to Israel? It falls. My argument to these people is if America stops supporting Israel, Israel will be a little bit weaker. And Israel that's a little bit weaker, which its enemies see as weaker and therefore ramp up their attacks on it, will be an Israel that fights an order of magnitude more ferociously. You are bringing upon yourself in Israel that will defeat you even faster and more brutally and worse. Dear Iran, dear Lebanon, dear anybody, Hezbollah. I wish Lebanon was as good a friend as can be you're bringing about in Israel. You misunderstand us if you think that just because we have a patron and a helper, an ally, that we would not stand without it, that we would fall. So this is my, my view. My view is that the Palestinian movement and the Palestinian cause has been sold, sold by certain ideologues and certain ideologies. And some of them are Western and some of them are Muslim. A terrible, terrible misunderstanding of us. And I want them to wake up from it. And I want them so badly to wake up from it, to understand that we're a tribe in the Middle east that's not going anywhere. And you have to start planning for that because then they'll do good things, they'll have good strategies, they'll engage Israeli society. We had 30 years of peace processing where no Palestinian leader ever spoke to the Israeli public because the Israeli people doesn't really exist. It's an illusion, a fiction, an imperialist, colonialist thing that if you just terrorize it, it leaves, it evaporates. No, we are a tribe. We're not going anywhere. And you need to be assuming that and proceeding with that strategic understanding. So much so that sometimes I secretly hope that the boycott movement and the sanctions movement and the anti Israel movement and the detach America from Israel movement, I hope it succeeds. And I hope it succeeds for one reason. I don't actually hope it succeeds. But if it does succeed, here's the huge silver. They won't have an excuse when we win again and they'll wake up and they'll finally see us for what we really are, which is a people living in its land that has nowhere to go and if it had anywhere else to go, wouldn't go there anyway. And then we can start actually making peace. That's my hope.
- [69:53]
Moderator/Host
This, I think is quite classic where it's a very audacious belief that by knowing the history of someone else, you can criticize them correctly and achieve something. And it's I find it very interesting that your approach to solving the Middle east is so much like couples therapy. It's the exact same methods which would work, but the so here's one thing the conflicting parties don't understand about each about each other. This I think you've mentioned sometimes, which is when it comes to making a deal now, which is that the Israelis believe that if Hamas has its way, it will kill everyone. And you say that the Gazans too believe this about the Israelis. And now I've just to do they really believe it? Is that what they've been told? And is that what they believe? And if so, yeah, take it from there.
- [71:10]
Khabib Haviv
Yes, they really believe it. Ordinary people, ordinary people walking in the street, not sense making elites, academics, journalists, people trained on the talking points, trained to resist talking points, which is just another kind of talking points. Ordinary people in their secret heart of hearts, totally anonymous, telling us things anonymously tell us that if the other side had its way, we would disappear. And that's 90% of Israelis and 90% of Palestinians. That's one particular poll, but a very big significant poll a few months ago of Gazans and of Israelis. And so that by the way, if you believe that you have a very high tolerance for the suffering on the other side. If you believe the other side wants your extermination and would do it in a blink of an eye. And you have to actually defeat their leadership, even if it's engaged in a guerrilla war that is extraordinarily costly to their civilian population to go after. In other words, if the activists here are concerned about the civilians suffering in Gaza, believe that if Hamas remains in Gaza, Hamas will continue forever to try and murder you until you're all dead, you activist in Norway the activist in Norway might go home and would have a higher tolerance for so there are two interesting questions. One is do they actually believe it? Every data point we have, every poll where you ask it in a different way, all ultimately says basically a similar thing. It's incredibly hard to empathize, incredibly hard to empathize if that's what you believe across that divide, that's the first thing. And the second thing, ask Palestinians how much they empathize with the suffering of Israelis on October 7th, and you'll find almost none. Just literally almost none, including humanitarian aid workers who are genuinely humanitarian. Not Hamas sort of using humanitarian aid as a salary, you know, fraud, but genuine Palestinian liberals, humanitarians who want good for Israelis and Palestinians and all humanity. They will still emotionally tell you, and I've done this and they've said this. I'm having a hard time empathizing, I gotta say. Not even sympathizing, which is actually feeling your pain, but even just acknowledging or understanding your pain. I really have a hard time. If you all could, you Israelis, you would wipe us all out. So, yes, that does exist on both sides, and that drives a lot of this. And by the way, it also means that we're very immune to international pressure. Okay, if you think the other side would exterminate you, how much do you care what Norwegians think about you? I mean, if every Norwegian concluded that Israel is right, how much would Palestinian behavior change in any way? And ditto the other way. So it's something that, if the world understood, I think it would be a lot smarter in how it ends, how it deals with all of us, how it talks to us. So that's one thing. The second thing is, are they right? Are they right? Hamas would absolutely exterminate every last Jew. It's literally the promise of the redemption of Islam. They say it every day. I have never seen a data point that suggested that they don't simply believe.
- [74:33]
Moderator/Host
It and would do it.
- [74:34]
Khabib Haviv
I mean, just literally read Hamas literature. It's all there. What about ordinary Gazans? And when you get into ordinary Gazans, it gets complicated. And I'll explain why it gets complicated. Ordinary Gazans still think October 7th was glorious. And part of what they think was glorious about it wasn't bursting out of the concentration camp, as an activist in Norway would put it, or a Palestinian elite translating to English the talking points they're selling would put it. What was glorious was the humiliation of the Jews. That's how it's talked about in Arabic. You mentioned bin Laden explaining that he opposed certain policies in Arabic. Bin Laden doesn't care about American policies in Arabic. Bin Laden talks about Islam in English. He's a polemicist. He explains that in English, that he's, you know, oh, if only America hadn't, you know, driven Saddam out of Kuwait and put soldiers in Saudi Arabia to do so, we'd have no problem With America, ordinary Gazans is a complicated story, and here's why it's a complicated story. The humiliation of the Jews is part of the way that Palestinians understand their own story and their own place in a much larger Islamic world. One of the great problems of being under Israeli rule for Palestinians, and this is true of certain religious elites, but it's also true of the people who listen to those religious elites and grow up listening to those religious elites, is the humiliation of Islam itself. And if you yourself are the weak.
- [76:13]
Moderator/Host
Muslim.
- [76:15]
Khabib Haviv
That is under the thumb of the weakest thing that has ever pushed Islam back, which is the Jew, the Zionist Jew. This is not the Byzantine Empire. This is not modern, the British Empire. This is the Jew, for God's sake, the Jew. Come on, don't ever get pushed back by the Jew. If you're that part of Islam, you yourself are the shame of Islam. You yourself are the weakest thing in that world of Islam. That has to justify itself, too. Islam. Al Aqsa is such a central anchor of Palestinian identity. In part, in part, it's bigger, it's complex, because it is an anchor of dignity in a larger Islamic world and discourse and sense of self. And so the humiliation of the Jews is really important as a response to the sense of being humiliated and therefore being a humiliation not just internally between Israelis and Palestinians, but to a larger Muslim and Arab world. And at the same time, Gazans also tell us that they absolutely don't want Hamas to rule afterwards, they want them gone. Gazans will tell us they're proud of October 7th and don't want Hamas in Gaza in the same breath, in the same person, in the same poll, sometimes depending on how it's asked. And when you read that, you understand that they also kind of understand that Hamas destroyed them and that there's no future with Hamas because they'll keep doing this one thing. They're a one trick pony. And therefore that they also blame Hamas. I'm hearing the protesters. Isn't that fun? Don't you feel important and also, therefore, that they should blame. Right, they blame Hamas for some significant portion of what's happening to them because they know that if Hamas sticks around, it'll continue happening to them. And all of those things are all happening at once inside people's minds. I am of the opinion that ordinary people are profoundly deep. And if you think you understand the ordinary person, then you are being shallow, because ordinary people think six things at once. They are coherent things. They fit together, even if they're complete paradoxes. Jonathan Hank wrote this wonderful book, the Righteous Mind, where he tries to trace out how people think about politics, about morality, about religion. And he talks about how we don't actually rationalize our way through much because if we were to rationalize through everything, we'd never get to breakfast. You just can't. What we do is we take these mental shortcuts. We have certain experiences, they create certain intuitions about those experiences. And we leap into those intuitions born in those experiences. Or in other words, prejudice. Prejudice is an extremely useful tool. Humans desperately need it. Try not to apply it to human beings. But you are prejudiced toward a certain kind of food, a certain kind of politics, a certain kind of culture, a certain kind of. And that prejudice is a mental shortcut because you can't rationalize your way through everything. Ordinary people have very deep intuitions born in deep experiences. The experiences are sometimes contradictory. So the intuitions are. You can't look at Gazans and say they love Hamas. You also can't look at Gazans and say they're not Hamas. They both are Hamas and hate Hamas and wish Hamas was gone all at the same time. Because they're human beings. And so the answer is complicated. If Israelis could, they would live in a world where nobody hates them, wants to kill them, and they would have a land that's defensible, meaning the West Bank. But if Israelis thought that there was a way to be in peace without all of it, they still today, I think, would majority pick it. They just don't believe that that's possible. And so Israelis themselves can think six things at once. And if you want to poll them, depending on how you phrase the question, you'll discover that they're extremely right wing or surprisingly left wing. And it'll be based on your poll, it won't actually tell you anything about that.
- [80:09]
Moderator/Host
There's still things that crop up where I keep. They sort of accept it as if they're true. And I keep asking myself, well, it's really me, right? Here's another one which is after October 7th, we thought the world would understand. Did anybody really think that?
- [80:30]
Khabib Haviv
I have mostly heard that from diaspora Jews. I have not heard from Israelis. I thought that the elites of the west had a better sense of what was broken in parts of the Muslim world, had a better sense of what Islamism and Salafist ideas really were, had a better sense of what they meant. Noticed that these are ideas and ideologies, the animating ideas of Hamas that drove Hamas to do what it did and be what it is. The Hamas that wanted this war and wants this war to continue and wants this war for all time. The Hamas that is willing to sacrifice Gaza on the altar of the destruction of Israel, the Hamas that even now won't return the hostages, why are they holding the hostages now, knowing Gaza City is about to happen? The only reason that they're still holding them is that he doesn't want this war to end. This is the war. It has built those 500 kilometers of tunnels, unprecedented in the history of war. Tunnel entrances in every neighborhood and street in Gaza. The only way to destroy that system is the destruction of the urban landscape. That's what you saw in those pictures of the destruction of the urban landscape. You could say you must not do it. You could say, the price is too high. But if you need to get Hamas out and destroy its infrastructure and remove its war fighting ability, that's what it takes. Hamas made sure that's what it would take. Thoughtfully, carefully invent Gaza's entire economy to building that project. Gaza did almost nothing else. It's the single biggest thing Gazans have ever built by far. That tunnel system.
- [82:20]
Moderator/Host
Our brothers and sisters outside, they would immediately revert to a numbers game. They'd take a few hostages, it would work itself out. That's what they'll say just to stop the killing.
- [82:36]
Khabib Haviv
No, I'd love to hear how it would work itself out. And I'd love for the killing to stop. I would love everything they're asking for. None of it's available to us until Hamas is gone. Hamas won't end this war. If we achieve a ceasefire in which Hamas retakes Gaza, every dollar, every euro, every Norwegian kroner that goes into Gaza will be spent on the next round of war. And if you don't understand that, you don't understand what's going on. And if you understand it and want an Israeli withdrawal and ceasefire that gives Hamas control of Gaza again anyway, you're just Hamas. You are gladly sacrificing the Palestinians on the altar of the destruction of Israel because you have this vision, this ideology, this hatred of the West. You project out these areas, whatever it is, whatever kooky, weird, nutty abstraction. You live in a world that is an ideological simulation of the world instead of the world itself. And real human beings don't actually register in your mental landscape. Whatever it is. In other words, you're a sociopath. Whatever it is, that's all you're doing. So I don't know how to do this. Now. If Hamas were to say, okay, look, we screwed up this was wrong. I mean, strategically wrong, never mind morally wrong. We think all the Jews should die, but. But fine, we lost. This was a bad calculation. So we're going to leave and we're going to disarm. And here's your hostages. And now Israel. Good luck living with in a world in which everyone hates you. That would be a move that you could argue would be good for Palestinian strategy, but they won't do it because it's not about being good for Palestinians. It is only about the destruction of Israel, even at the cost of every last Palestinian. And if you don't know why, if you don't know what the Muslim Brothers are, if you don't know the ideologies, if you don't know the sense of shame in Islam, if you don't know these questions that Hamas tries to answer. How does Islam rise up from centuries of weakness and redeem itself? It begins by pushing back the weakest thing that ever pushed Islam back, which is Zionism. If you don't understand why they're willing to sacrifice their own society in the altar of the destruction of Israel, and you don't know it empathetically, seriously, knowledgeably, as if it's like, in a way that you would believe that you could be swept up in this idea, you don't understand what's happening. So, you know, you could argue the Israelis have been totally wrong. The strategy has been terrible. I have to say. Don't tell anybody. Let's keep it in this room. I have argued multiple times that the Israeli strategy is mistaken in some significant ways, including coming out very strongly on the question of hunger now, which was something just disastrous for Israel, but obviously mostly for the people who are going hungry in Gaza. You don't have to like Israel or you don't have to like the Israeli strategy. You certainly don't have to like a war, any war. But if Hamas remains in Gaza, nothing changes.
- [85:36]
Moderator/Host
Luis is going to walk around with the. With the microphone. People have that. That's what you said you were going to do.
- [85:46]
Bjorn Gabrielsson
You feel like taking some questions?
- [85:48]
Moderator/Host
My experience is people will need some minutes. You said you wanted questions.
- [85:56]
Khabib Haviv
I'm up for it. Whatever. Yeah, let's do it. Can you yell your question and we'll repeat it? It's just probably faster work.
- [86:06]
Bjorn Gabrielsson
Thank you very much. It's been a hell of a ride through many topics and. Yeah, so we can take some questions. Wow.
- [86:16]
Khabib Haviv
Let's start here and do make them.
- [86:20]
Moderator/Host
Short so several people can ask.
- [86:22]
Bjorn Gabrielsson
Yeah, make them short. We have a lot on our Hearts. Okay. No dissertation.
- [86:27]
Khabib Haviv
Yeah, yeah. First question. Before Oslo, even Israeli left never negotiated with terrorists in Shimon Peres and Rabin. When they started talking with Arafat was under table. Everyone was against negotiating with terrorists. Given that fact, and given the fact that we know that Sinwar was given in the hostage deal in 2011 for Kilachalit and October, October 7 was a direct result of that. And it also incentivized Hamas to take more hostages. How can we just justify another hostage deal where we may release another single one? Thank you. How do we justify another hostage deal given Sino are given. Look, I'll put it real simple. We taught our enemies that hostages are a strategic liability of ours, that you can take our people and we will fall, we will collapse. And we need to teach our enemies the opposite. And obviously the enemy, the nature of an enemy is to find that weakness and drill into it as hard as they can. And they've done it. And they fundamentally changed the rules of the game because of it. The Israelis attitude on the question of hostages will be very different from now on. And one of the things that you see that in is. How shall I put this? Nobody in the NHBA force who isn't in an Israeli jail is going to survive the next decade no matter what country they hide in. And the Israelis will hunt them down for all time. And we're going to be a lot more circumspect. I don't know that anyone looking at Gaza says today, yes, hostages is their strategic liability, we should take more of their hostages. And that's not what the logic of Gaza has been. But it's not entirely not there in the many pieces of the logic of how the Gaza war has been fought. Suddenly from Hamas to extract from them vast massive costs they can't endure is part of it. So yes, they have taught us that we have to exact cost that they cannot endure that it's seen in the region as unendurable from Hamas. We also, we also have to make sure that hostages aren't taken again. I have all of this. I'm beating around the bush to not say I'm opposed to hostage exchanges in the future. And that means you don't start with the next one because nobody believes you. So maybe you start with this one. And that's a catastrophic violation of everything it means to be Israeli. And we should take out the rage of that kind of thinking on the people who forced us into that kind of thinking on everything that is Hamas on this earth. I don't know why they're Hamas leaders still alive in Doha, I don't give a shit what Qatar is or how much money it's spent on which Israeli officials. I don't understand why Hamas is still alive anywhere in any way. And also I don't know how we get out the last ones. In other words, Hamas is holding them for a reason. The last leverage continuation of how would they ever give up the last hostage being given Gaza back. Well, we can't give Gaza back. So if the last ones aren't coming out, declare it. What I wish Benjamin Netanyahu would do, and in fact I wish he had done it a year and a half ago, was get up in front of Israelis and say the era of negotiating for hostages is over and that means Israelis are going to die and I'm the Prime Minister. And woe to me for being the prime Minister in these dark days. But nevertheless, that is the thing I can contribute to my people. I will make this terrible, evil, bad decision that must be made for a better future. I will destroy Hamas, we will never negotiate again, and I will resign at the end of the war. That would be what I wish he had done. And pussyfooting around on that question has essentially let Hamas believe that he can still play the game. Now I have just said that I kind of wish our prime minister had condemned Israelis to die. And I get that. And I get that. And that's one of the reasons there's no future for Gaza with Hamas in it. So if you care for Palestinians, you also should have wished that Netanyahu had done that. In my view.
- [91:06]
Bjorn Gabrielsson
As a journalist, we're experiencing here in Norway and I think throughout Europe as well, the BBC journalists that take the point of view and the numbers Hamas are giving as a kind of truce and always put in doubt the version of the Israelis on whatever thing that is coming out from the situation. This makes us here in Norway. Jews here in Norway live in a world where things do not at all align. We don't understand. And how come the versions are so decisive from the world of media on the point of taking the point of view and the pictures and the narrative of the Hamas. I was wondering if you have any kind of expression, explanation for exactly that when the Hamas is not mentioned at all and the hostages are not mentioned, it is only a blatant and legitimized hate of Israel.
- [92:27]
Khabib Haviv
Yeah, there are a few points to be raised here. One of those points is that most journalists are bad at their job and partly that's structural. I described to you being the guy in the room supposed to explain to the country what's happening in the room, and is structurally inherently the least qualified person in the room to explain what's happening in the room. A journalist does not learn the thing that they learn the skills to tell stories, but they don't learn the subject matter, which can be infinitely complex. And so journalists are inherently at a disadvantage. And that's just what journalism is almost. In other words, before I even come to blame them for anything, they are in this massive disadvantage. They don't know enough to know how little they know. And because they have all the gaps in their knowledge filled by a doctrine in America, in the American right, they sometimes sort of lump this, all these doctrines with wokeness. They call it woke. I don't know what you would call it, but it's a kind of sense of what the world order is and it fills every gap. And so there's no doubts, there's no questions. We all know how things proceeded, where they come from, what's happening. Whatever the heck is happening in Norwegian culture is probably what's secretly happening in the. In the Middle east as well, because why would it be any different? And therefore all the holes are filled in. And so journalists have to. They're not taught in journalism schools, and frankly, in the professions, never mind the schools, at the newspapers, they're not taught to search for the inexplicable things, for the questions that don't quite fit the things that don't. I'll give you an example. I had a conversation, I thought it was a conversation. He thought I was yelling at him with an American journalist in Israel once, where I said, I don't mind that you're anti Israel. I don't. Because there's real suffering in Gaza and Israel is vastly more powerful than Hamas. And you come to this conflict and you say to yourself, you know what? I'm going to demand answers first and more aggressively from the powerful son, and the other side is suffering much more. That's journalism that's totally kosher. Come here with an anti Israel prejudice is not at all necessarily actually a bigotry. It might be a completely reasonable starting point for journalism. My complaint about you is that you're totally uncurious. You're an uncurious person. You're a person who thinks they know all the answers before having asked the questions to the point where you don't even know what the questions are. For example, why does Iran want to destroy Israel? Iran has no border with Israel, has no interest in Israel, and yet has spent some significant portion of its GDP on the destruction of Israel across two generations. Why? Are they stupid?
- [95:36]
Moderator/Host
Yes.
- [95:38]
Khabib Haviv
Is it for Palestinian rights? Does the Ayatollah regime that doesn't give Iranians rights care about Palestinian rights? Why? Actually, explain to me why so I can understand it. Because I'll tell you a secret. They're not stupid. Nobody's stupid. Why? And if you don't know why, you have no idea what they're going to do. You have no way of knowing whether the smarmy geopolitical think tanks in London who all say that they'll never use the bomb, you don't even know what to ask them. You don't even know how to challenge them. Most elites rest on their laurels without checking themselves. They don't know as much as they think they know. That should be tattooed in backwards letters on the forehead of every journalist. Your job is to walk up to the elite and say, you're probably wrong. And then learn the subject just well enough to start to sniff out what the elite is missing. Every elite of every kind. So you have no idea about the Israel, Iran war? Nothing. And you're not curious to find out. That is a breakdown of journalism. That is why you're useless. And that is why the west is stupid. That is why the west can't achieve what it wants in this world. It can barely understand the world. It doesn't have a debate about the world that has any connection to reality. You can look at the Israeli Palestinian conflict and friends. I have good Israeli friends who know more than me about Israel and know more than me about Palestinians, and they come to very different conclusions from me. Agreeing with me is not a sign of wisdom. The Western journalists don't even understand the debate between us. They're just ignorant. And that ignorance is almost the entirety of your debate. By the way, people who appreciate Israel, like Israel here in Norway, it's an intuition. You kind of have a sense of who the enemy is. How many people in the room can find their way around Muslim texts? How many people in this room know Netanyahu's coalition math? I mean, there might be three or four of you, and you're being modest, but my point is you're you. You yourselves. Right, and. And I appreciate that you think that our enemies are evil and we're generally trying to do the right thing. I think that's generally true of us, minus all the problems and mistakes that we do make along the way, sometimes bad ones. But the debate is just empty. And so these journalists, they don't respect themselves enough and their craft enough to understand that they are the prophets standing outside the monarchy, telling the monarchy that God will judge them. And they don't understand that that is their task. And so they're not journalists. If you agree with the prevailing wisdom, you're useless and nobody needs to read you or know what you say. And if journalists were taught that in journalism school, even for exactly one hour, that one hour would be would validate the entire project of a journalism school. That's my opinion.
- [98:44]
Moderator/Host
I just need to check to see if I'm right or wrong. But Hamas released pictures of hostage called Eliatan David who is pictured digging his own grave. Has anyone seen those pictures in Norwegian media?
- [99:03]
Khabib Haviv
No, and here's why that's a problem. Not because I need you to know my story, I don't care. But if you have opinions about us and you don't understand that we saw those pictures, not only did we see those pictures while the whole world was raging about hunger in Gaza, the Israeli press was talking at the top of the hour in every news broadcast about hunger in Gaza. And the needle was moving on the question of hunger in Gaza. That's when Hamas releases pictures of starved Israelis. And Israelis went around noticing that the only people who are physically emaciated at Holocaust level imagery that they have ever seen come out of Gaza, including online, minus children who look that way, not because of hunger, were actually the Israeli hostages. You know what those pictures did? They knocked the hunger in Gaza story off the top of the Israeli news cycle. Now, if you don't understand that Israelis saw that because your journalists are playing propagandist, because they think the war is about their emotions, then you don't understand what's happening. Those journalists did not strike a blow for Palestinians. Those journalists made you more ignorant of what's actually going on and what will come going forward. You know less because they think they're campaigning instead of challenging. You can challenge and come at the Israelis as aggressively as you want, but actually challenge everyone. Challenge. That's the only thing a journalist is. And there are very few journalists left in the west that are like that. What Israelis think will have more effect on the future of Palestinians than what Norwegians think. And if Norwegians cannot see Israelis anyway, they can't understand anything about what they see because they're literally not being shown anything that Israelis are seeing. It's happening, but they can't see it. Norwegians are not capable, therefore, because they literally don't have the facts of distinguishing between Gazans and Hamas, of understanding the catastrophe that Hamas represents in the future, not now, in the future, for Gaza, in understanding the division of interest between Palestinians and Hamas itself and how you build out a new Israeli conversation on Palestinians that makes that distinction so that there can be a future. You are useless as you. I keep saying this. There's nothing you can do for Gaza the Hamas won't undo. You think that for Gaza you're going to hide what Israelis see from your regions. And you've done something for Gaza, you haven't done something for Gaza, you've done something for Hamas and therefore you've done something against Gaza. Now everyone and its grandchild is recognizing Palestine for whatever reason. What is your take on that? What will happen? How's this going to play out? And in what way will this affect Israel in any way, shape or form, or the Palestinians? Part of the Palestinian argument is that the only reason the Jews have a state is that the world gave it to them. The empires, the patrons, the UN, the British Empire, etc. We can replicate that. The world will give it to us and then we'll have it. That is not why the Jews have a state. That was a kind of diplomatic acceptance, a diplomatic validation. But hundreds of thousands of Jews capable of fighting for themselves and defending themselves and winning wars against invading armies, built themselves and used the empires of the day every chance they got. Obviously, so did Palestinians. That's why the Palestinians teamed up with the Nazis quite so assiduously. There weren't a whole lot of options, and they needed an empire and a backer and a thunder and an armor and. And a trainer. That's how the Jews use the British. And that's absolutely true. But that doesn't mean the Jews could have been just wiped away had they not had international recognition. The Palestinian story that we are fake, that we are a construct imposed on the land from the outside, like colonialism, like imperialism, that Palestinian narrative is the narrative that says if the whole world recognizes Palestine, Palestine is. 140 countries recognize Palestine today. How's that going for them? That is not enough. As long as you tell Israelis we are your death for all time, which is what Hamas tells Israelis every damn day, then it doesn't matter that France and Britain will recognize a Palestine. And I'll say more than that, if they recognize a Palestine in a way, in a timing, in a discourse that explicitly makes it about Hamas, I know Keir Starmer tried to correct and say, I don't like Hamas. I hope Hamas is gone, but I'm definitely going to recognize Palestine as a direct result of Hamas strategy, then you have hurt the ability of the Palestinians to establish a serious polity that can stand on its own two feet when Hamas is gone. Hamas, the organization, Hamas, the story, and I don't mean the story of the Palestinian experience, I mean the story of the Jews that Hamas tells Palestinians. When that story no longer makes sense to Palestinians because it has been proven to be a catastrophic failure because the Jews cannot be crowbar out of the place when that story is gone, then all the pressure will finally work. If there's no death coming from every corner and inch that I pull out of, if my children aren't in danger from a withdrawal, then the world has a moral case to make to end military rule over Palestinians, then the Israeli left might have a chance to come back to life after being destroyed in the second intifada 25 years ago. I mean, I'm coming out as a secret lefty here. Don't tell anybody. I would love to live in a world where it makes sense to once again hope for those kinds of outcomes. But it depends on the death of the story that that suicide bomber al Qaot in 2001 was carrying when he blew up on us, which was a great tragedy from his perspective because he was hoping to blow up on the children of Jerusalem. And so everything that strengthens Hamas is the demolition of the Palestinian cause. And everything that weakens Hamas strengthens the Palestinian movement and the Palestinian cause, the one that doesn't want to just destroy Israel, the one that actually wants to build a Palestine. And every idiot outside this hall is working just hand in hand with everyone who hopes for the worst for the Palestinians. Obviously they're too ignorant, stupid and self important to understand that which I respect. They're young, but that's actually what they are. No, obviously they're too stupid to understand that they're old. But that's. That's what. So let the British recognize the state of Palestine. Who cares? Let the French recognize it. Who cares? Let the Security Council recognize it. And sanction Israel and boycott Israel and throw us all to the dogs and let all our enemies gather because they think we're weak and come at us. And when they've lost that next round, then we'll have this conversation again. Let it all. I don't understand it, folks. I don't. I'm an idiot, okay? Every day I wake up, I look in the mirror and I say, I'm an idiot. I don't understand anything that's happening. What do they think they're going to accomplish. You have to actually build the polity. You have to destroy the thing that tells the Israelis that building a Palestinian state is massively, catastrophically dangerous for you. Because that thing, Hamas, the ideology, not just the organization, that thing makes it impossible to establish a Palestine. Even if God on high comes down and says to us with. How does the Talmud say? With the voice of a thin silence, yea, verily, establish a state of Palestine. Not if it kills my kids. Not if it kills my kids. What do the rabbis say to God's own voice? It isn't in the heavens. Shut up. Not if it kills my kids. Until Hamas is gone, none of it matters. It is Westerners talking to themselves about their own self righteousness.
- [107:30]
Moderator/Host
And that's it. Yeah, two more. And then the rest of you will have to do what I've been doing all the time, which is speak to a bit inside my head.
- [107:45]
Audience Member
I come from the political left and for me it was obvious from the first day what the disaster Hamas was. I still want to invite you to think loud. What would have happened? What would in this situation if the government of Netanyahu had delivered a historical speech saying something like, we need to take out Hamas. They are the most calculating, evil planning force as possible. We need to take them away. We cannot do it alone. Because if we go into Gaza, they hide between behind the civil and they hide in the hospitals and they hide everywhere. There's no option. We can do it because they just. This is a drug for us. What if they had delivered a speech saying so we invite the rest of the world to solve this bloody problem because we cannot do it alone?
- [108:57]
Bjorn Gabrielsson
Good question.
- [108:58]
Audience Member
And I mean and between the lines, of course, saying that we hide between the. But we go now into the bombing shelter, we leave our soldiers to protect us, but we not go into Gaza because we cannot do it alone. You, the rest of the world have to understand what monster Hamas is. And we need to take them out from all political, from all military, from all social influence. Why didn't they deliver such a speech?
- [109:36]
Khabib Haviv
The simple answer is that his government would have fallen instantly if he had said that, that he's not going after Hamas in Gaza, but asking the world to come do it. That's a violation. The kind of the basic Israeli ethos, that we don't need everybody else. But let me. But your question is power. First of all, you come from the political left. Yes. And you came here. I broke out to listen on October 7th on these issues.
- [110:04]
Audience Member
I broke out as a protest against.
- [110:07]
Khabib Haviv
The civil on the left.
- [110:08]
Audience Member
So I'm not part of it anymore.
- [110:10]
Khabib Haviv
Just. Well, so thank you for being here. Let me strengthen the question, even let me double down on the question. What if Netanyahu had gotten up and said, we're going into Gaza, It's a whole new kind of war. I'll be frank. All our plans don't mean anything anymore. We have to now fight inside tunnels. No army's done that in that scale. There's no way to get to Hamas without going through the cities. And there's no way to go through the cities without demolishing everything above the tunnels. And so much of the cities are, you know, Israel tells everybody where it's going in before it goes in. So everything is also booby trapped when it finally goes in. So it's safer to destroy the building than to send soldiers in to risk their lives in the building. All of that's true. Gaza's about to suffer disastrously, and you're about to see it. And Al Jazeera and all the state entities that are making sure that on TikTok, every child in the west is being fed images of horrific trauma from war. I've spoken, by the way, with young people in the west who are deeply anti Israel protesters. It took 15 minutes of back and forth for them to calm down and want to talk. And by the time they want to talk, I've discovered kids who are traumatized. They are traumatized because their source of information, but also social experience, which is that phone, that TikTok feed, has been algorithmically fed massively horrific images for months and months and months and almost two years. And there isn't an image that doesn't get fed that. And there are studies that it's 10 times as much Gaza on TikTok than on Instagram. The difference being the influence of China versus the influence of a company in America that has no algorithmic requirements set by government policy. And so it's a foreign influence operation, which, if it happened for every war everywhere, would be a wonderful thing because it'd be harder to make war because everybody would feel the war war. But it's not. It's only for the one war, because that's an ideologically convenient war, and that's what makes it bigotry. But that doesn't, you know, exonerate Israel from anything you got. But the point is these kids are actually traumatized. They're in post trauma. They come out of these images and months and months of these images knowing that not all of it is real. Okay, but enough of it is real for it basically to be real, that they actually are traumatized. And so I. Nathaniel, in this imaginary speech, I'm going to tell you, this is. You know, this is, as they say in English, the excrement is going to hit the fan and it's going to spread everywhere, and it's going to be horrifying, and we're going to do it because Hamas can't survive this. And nobody has an idea of how to get them out. You all have all these clever ceasefire ideas, but that's not how this works. They die, Hamas goes. Hamas does not survive this and ever, forever, for all time. We're going to hunt them everywhere. And I want you to know, if Netanyahu only said, and I want you to know that then Gaza will be rebuilt and it will remain Gaza and Palestinian, and it will be a beautiful emirate. And we were about to build a great regional alliance of Arabs and Jews, and that regional alliance is what will build it. And this attempt to destroy it is what will fix it. In other words, we will do what we have to do. You can love us, you can hate us, you're probably going to hate us afterwards. But I promise you, as with denazification in Germany, this is about rebuilding a better place for Gazans. Now, he didn't say that, okay, until Israel had utterly, catastrophically lost the information war among its best friends. And he didn't say it because of Ben Ver and Smotorch, because of politics. And I still blame him for it because soldiers died in Gaza, friends of mine died in Gaza, and their death was less useful because of his politicking. And so I do not come here, you know, free of anger at my government at all. And if he had said that, you would have had an easier 22 months. And the argument about genocide and Israeli intent in Gaza would not have become. Because Smotrich got to decide what the Israeli intent was, because he's the only voice speaking. And all of that is absolutely true. If he had just given that speech, I frankly think we could have held on to parts of the left, never mind the right. Now, maybe I'm naive, but we certainly would have held on to some of our best friends.
- [114:36]
Audience Member
They could have delivered a speech such as a mirror to show the rest.
- [114:40]
Khabib Haviv
Of the world how weak the rest.
- [114:42]
Audience Member
Of the world is.
- [114:43]
Khabib Haviv
So let me just finish with this. We would not give a speech asking the rest of the world to fix something and then show the rest of the world that they're not going to fix it. And the reason we're not going to do that is because there isn't really such a thing as the rest of the world. I don't know if, you know, the international community is kind of there only when it wants to feel good about itself, but not actually there when anybody needs them. Ask the Sudanese, ask the Yemenis, ask the Syrians, ask the Bosnians. Bosnia bled for four years until Bill Clinton decided to bomb Serbia for two weeks and it was all over. The world doesn't come in. The world doesn't save you. The world doesn't rescue you. You. If you plan for the world to be there for you, you will be disappointed, and sometimes catastrophically so. So he would not have given a speech that asked the world for anything. Israelis mostly ignore you, the rest of the world, by the way. That's healthy. You ignore most of the rest of the world as well, because you're regular, ordinary people living real lives. But. But Israel will do what it needs to do. And I wish we had a leadership that at least said, you know, that since, and then also acted in ways that guaranteed that after what we have to do happens and we have to do it. You can't rebuild Gaza until we do what we have to do. Even if you try, it doesn't matter what you think of Israel, it literally can't happen. Then Gaza has a new day. It's weird because I come to you here not to tell you Israel's right. I come to you here to tell you Gaza will have a better future. And if people stop supporting Hamas and start supporting Gaza, it'll come sooner. And the Israelis will sacrifice for their own interests. But those interests do correspond, if Hamas can be removed, to Gazan's interest in the long term. So there's no reason not to be hopeful that there's a better day at the end of all this tragedy. But it depends on wisdom and wisdom on the part of the Israelis, wisdom on the part of the world, and ultimately wisdom on the part of the Arab world that can actually conduct the Dina Denzification of Gaza that we all desperately need.
- [116:53]
Bjorn Gabrielsson
I think that pretty much ended it on an optimistic note. Not too optimistic, but at least we can imagine that future, future of a Gaza that will be rebuilt, of finding the voices that actually imagine this. And maybe we should now, when we have to leave here, on a practical note, we have to just spread out, don't engage with what's going on outside. And maybe it's time for us to take home from this conversation those things like, let's talk about the future. Let's talk about how this is actually, how this is actually going to look like, how we're going to envision this new Middle East. And there are voices out there, but they're not standing right outside here with Greta, who came with her boat. But they are out there in the Norwegian society. And I really believe that all of us should go home and do the jobs that the journalists are not doing. Be curious, ask the right question, lay the foundation for a better tomorrow. Really lay down all the cards. No demonization of anybody on any side. And let's just have the conversation. So.
- [118:03]
Moderator/Host
And I'd also like to add, I've done some of these things on this topic and you are an extraordinarily beautiful audience. Great question.
- [118:21]
Bjorn Gabrielsson
Join our journey for some, Russ, some rational rationality in all of this. You can join K and calls. You should definitely listen to Khabiv's podcast, Ask Khabib anything. Anything. With this conversation of about a lot of things. It was great. And I think this is what we need to do these days to keep ourselves afloat. Thank you so much for being here.
- [118:46]
Khabib Haviv
Thank you so much.
- [118:47]
Bjorn Gabrielsson
There.