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Ask Haviv Anything
Episode 53: Telling the Jewish story to the Arab world, with Elhanan Miller
01:02:44
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign welcome to Ask Aviv Anything. I'm really glad for the episode we're about to record. My friend Elhanan is here. He is a rabbi with hundreds of thousands of subscribers throughout the Arab world. I'll just dangle that as I tell you that this episode was sponsored by Tali Rice as a tribute to her sister who's currently serving in the idf and to everyone who's doing their part to keep Israel safe. And the episode is also co sponsored by an anonymous sponsor who dedicated it to the lone soldiers in the IDF from Newton, Massachusetts for their bravery and for their safety. As hard as the situation is for their families here in the US it is also a source of deep pride. Thank you to our sponsors. Also, I would like to invite everyone listening to this to join our Patreon. Everything we do is outside the paywall. Everything is free. Everybody can have everything. The goal is to educate and ed. But if you're interested in asking us the questions that guide the history, the politics, the current events that we talk about, join the Patreon. That's where we pick up a lot of the ideas for our episodes. You also get a discussion forum where we, Rachel and I, take part in and you get a monthly livestream where I answer to the best of my ability, every question you can raise. So that is actually the one thing that livestream that is inside the paywall. Everything else is outside. There's quite a few subscribers. We have a great time. I hope to see you there. Rabbi Elhanan Miller is the founding director of People of the Book, an educational nonprofit that teaches Jewish faith. Jewish culture teaches about it to Muslim audiences throughout the Arab world. He's been surprisingly viral in disseminating this on social media. You find it on Facebook, you'll find it on YouTube. The initiative has roughly half a million subscribers, many millions of monthly hits across the different platforms. Mostly all the ones I've seen. When I go through the videos and I look at the comments in the Arab Middle east, the YouTube channel alone is like 200,000 subscribers. Elhanan is a research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. He served as the Arab affairs correspondent for the Times of Israel. That's where I met him years ago, back when we were both young and handsome and had no white hair. And he was the rabbi of the Jewish community in Canberra, Australia. He was born and raised in Jerusalem. He started studying Arabic at 13. I assume it's school I'm about to ask him. And so he is now fluent and as you'll hear Very fluent in English, in Hebrew, in Arabic, in French, and in Yiddish. I know. I have that feeling when I meet people who can speak five languages as well. Elhanan, how are you?
- [02:45]
B
I'm great. Thanks so much, Kavi, for having me on. It's really nice. I really enjoy your podcast and I'm glad to be part of it.
- [02:52]
A
All right, so let's get started with a joke in Yiddish. Tell us something funny and. No, no, I'm just kidding. So, first of all, I just, you know, you have such a. Such a unique, a downright strange position as a Jewish rabbi, and I've watched your videos, and I've been watching your videos for years, because the Arab world comments on your videos are such a more interesting window into the Arab street than a lot of other ways that I personally have from Israel to interact with the Arab world. And what's fascinating is, first of all, your videos are a very, very traditional Judaism. You cite the Talmud, you give in. You know, your video for Rosh Hashanah, for example. Here are the five ways that the Talmud says that we can change our faith between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur as we confess our sins and try and repair ourselves for the new year. And you literally just give the verses cited by now, that video has every response under the sun, the vast majority deeply appreciative from people saying, hey, you know, watching you from Morocco, thank you so much for this. This is deep stuff. Judaism is so great. Every once in a while you get there's only Islam, nothing but Islam. But mostly you don't. At least that's on YouTube. I don't know if you know, it's different on different platforms. How did you get into this? Now extraordinarily successful Jewish rabbi speaking Arabic, accented Arabic. Even I can hear the accent. You're very clearly an Israeli Jew teaching just Judaism. You're not talking about the war. You're not trying to explain why the Emiratis are good for doing business with us and the Qataris are bad for funding Al Jazeera against it. None of that. Just literally, hello, Muslim world. Hello, Arab world, which is not all Muslim. Here's what Judaism is. Because you don't actually have Jews anymore. Here's what Judaism is. How did you get into that?
- [04:53]
B
Well, I don't know how far back you want me to go. Like, should I start at age 13 when I started learning Arabic in my religious primary school in a neighborhood of Jerusalem called Ramos?
- [05:03]
A
Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Okay, so this is something you've been doing for a long. Even your Times of Israel reporting as an Arab affairs reporter was very much about getting into the kishkis, as we would say in Yiddish, the guts, meaning the meat and potatoes of the Arab world and how the Arab world thinks about us.
- [05:22]
B
Okay, so, yeah, great. So let's start at 13. And the irony is that from seventh grade to the end of my master's degree at Hebrew U, all of my teachers, except for one, both in Arabic and in Islamic studies, were all Jews, all Israeli Jews. And my first Arabic teacher was an ultra Orthodox woman, like many of the primary school teachers that I had. And that's interesting. It's also, you know, a testament to how siloed our lives are where Arabs aren't usually teaching Jews about their own faith. But we. We can go into that later. But I made a series of choices that led to me graduating high school with majoring in Arabic. You can major in a subject in Israel. Very few Israeli Jews decide to major in Arabic as their subject because, simply put, Arabic is not seen as necessary to get along in Israel. You can get along very well in Hebrew. Arabs, mostly Palestinian Israelis need Arabic. Sorry, need Hebrew to get along in Israeli life. But the opposite, the reverse isn't true. But for me, Arabic was kind of love at first sight. In some ways. It was the first foreign language I'd studied because I grew up pretty much bilingual with English at home. My parents immigrated from Canada in the 70s, Hebrew in school, on the street with my friends. And Arabic at 13 was the first foreign language. And I immediately noticed that I have a knack for languages, but also that I love learning Arabic specifically. Maybe it's the fact that I grew up in a city that has almost 40% Arabs, that they're all around. And there was some this immediate sense of, I don't know, affinity, I guess, between the languages. So I took it in high school. I went to a high school that's now become famous Himmelfarb in tragic circumstances, unfortunately. I think it had the highest rate of fallen soldiers in this war. But I had a fantastic Arabic teacher and a great Arabic class. And when you do that in Israeli schools, typically you get recruited to the intelligence or you get vetted for the intelligence to be an Arabic linguist. And I went through the most advanced training course in Arabic at the time that I could have done and became an Arabic linguist in unit 8200 in military intelligence. And that was probably my real signals.
- [07:43]
A
Intelligence unit of the IDF that outstrips all signals intelligence units on Earth that. That We've heard about, at least. And yes, that's very prestigious. Yes.
- [07:52]
B
And that was my. That was my real school, I guess, in Arabic. That was my immersion. It's hard to be really immersed in Arabic growing up, you know, in Jewish Israel. But when you, you know, deal with Arabic at the intensity that I did during the three plus years that I served in the army, then you become pretty, pretty, pretty fluent. And I loved it. I had a fantastic military service, very fulfilling. It corresponded completely to the second Intifada. So there was a lot of interesting things happening, a lot of tragic things, but also a lot of interesting work. And then I came out of the army thinking, what should I study? Should I go for the practical route, which for me would probably be law, because I'm not in sciences at all, or would I go for my passion and continue studying Middle east history and Islamic studies? And I took a year off to think about it in Yeshiva. And then after that I went to Hebrew U and did 2 degrees. And then I had to think about my career and did I want to go to the main employers of my skill set, which is the Mossad, the Shabak Foreign Ministry, you know, police, the army. I felt like I wanted to be a little bit more independent and not beholden to a big government bureaucracy. I did do some vetting for some of these agencies, but nothing really took. And I became a journalist. And that's where I met you eventually, in 2012, became one of the founding staff of Times of Israel and the Arab affairs reporter, which was also a fantastic opportunity to be exposed more to the Arab world, to report on both the Arab Spring, which was unfolding at the time, but also Palestinian politics. There was a stabbing intifada happening in and around Jerusalem and Hebron and places like that, and just meet excellent colleagues and be in a great work atmosphere. But around 2016, I was kind of getting burnt out a little bit from the daily grind of journalism. I had done some freelance work, and then I heard about this new program opening up in Jerusalem called Beit Midrash Harel, a modern Orthodox rabbinic seminary that also trains women. So it's very unique in the landscape of Orthodox seminaries or, you know, ordination programs. And in 2019, I was ordained as a rabbi along with eight other people. And then I went to Australia and became a rabbi there. During the first year of COVID came back and started working mostly in education at the Pardes Institute, which is a higher education institute for Torah learning in Jerusalem, and at the Hartman Institute, also in Jerusalem. But during My studies. And this goes back to the question. I started this project called People of the Book as sort of a hobby. I was teaching some Palestinians in a field outside of Jerusalem. Some people know about Roots Sholashim. It's a sort of very unique interfaith Palestinians and settlers meeting in the Etzion block south of Jerusalem. I was commissioned to teach some, like basically Judaism 101 to Palestinians. And the theology and philosophy that I brought to the table was of no interest to the three and a half, four Palestinians who showed up to the classes. But the questions that they did ask me, like, what is this? For example, what is kosher food?
- [11:18]
A
Just for people listening on audio. You raised your kippah.
- [11:21]
B
Yeah, I just showed my headgear here. What is kosher food? What. How do Jews pray? Like, what's the choreography of the prayer? Because we pray. So how do you pray? What does fast mean to you? And I said, okay, we need to start with the basics. And if these are the questions that our neighbors, the Palestinians, many of whom speak Hebrew and work with Israelis and no Jews have, then there's probably a potential of half a million Arabic speakers out there. And if we expand that to the Muslim world and we have 2 billion plus Muslims internationally from Indonesia to, you know, Senegal. And I saw huge potential. There was nothing online exposing Arabs and Muslims to Judaism in their own language or in Arabic principally. And I said, okay, there's a, there's a potential here. That's actually why I joined the rabbinic program to begin with. I wanted to do, I wanted to do interfaith on a high level and have the qualifications to do that. And social media was the platform that I identified as the most promising for that. And here we are eight years later, as you said, with a following of half a million and a lot of interaction and going to places, to paraphrase Star Trek, where no Jewish Israeli has gone before. It's not the low hanging fruit or the, the ones who are convinced we're talking about Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Egypt, very mainstream, classic Sunni countries that are quite hostile to us, generally speaking. So to see those figures, to see the statistics of where these videos are being shown is very heartening and encouraging.
- [13:02]
A
It is. Egypt has a grand sort of national museum where the display on Judaism includes the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or did a couple years back when I read about that and discovered it and was shocked by it. The framing of Jews, the framing of Israel. I have a book on my bookshelf called Israelism, which is an Arab scholar analyzing Israel Studies in academia in the Arab world. And his basic argument is there is no actual Israel studies. It's the studies of the Arab ideological framing of Israel that everybody has to adhere to and no, and not actually studying Israel. So any fact about Israeli society, any complexity, any layer that doesn't fit the Arab political narrative doesn't exist in Arab academia. And so there is, it's missing. I mean, that's an incredible point that you just made that I want to dig more into that there's nothing online like what you do. And just parenthetically in my totally different world, which I guess would count as teaching Jewish history to Jews, I don't know what I do exactly, but what I do, I've discovered that identical point that when I come in with the most basic outline of the Jewish 20th century, of the millions of Jews who fled before Holocaust, of the, you know, the refugee ness of most Israeli Jews, the sheer number, the percentage, if it's 80% or 90% of Jews at the founding of Israel who are refugees. And if you don't understand that, none of the rest makes sense, not their military prowess, willingness to sacrifice, not how the 48 war actually went down. Now you can criticize anything you want to criticize, but just to have the sense of the social history of that moment and nobody knows it and nobody says it, nobody talks about it, nobody teaches it. The only version in Western academia of the Israeli or Jewish story that you get is also framed in these larger ideological constructs. And so to just talk about the basics is missing out there. And I kind of my question to you, it's all coming together, I promise. My question to you is we live in an age where all the things are there to just reach out and take. It has never been easier to be deeply knowledgeable. And it feels like it's never been harder. You know, I bring a very simple, straightforward, you fact check me, it'll work into the discourse. And nobody had it. Why is it? And that's true in the Arab world. Nobody in the Arab world just reaches out and first I'm accusing Jews so that you understand that when I'm accusing Arabs of this, I think it's structural in our times. I don't think it's specific to Arabs. Nobody reaches out and just grabs this knowledge. Why is there nobody? Why did you step into it? Jews not telling what and who they are to the Arab world anywhere in any way is weird, right?
- [15:53]
B
Definitely. I mean, I think we reacted to the shunning and, you know, the shutting off of Israel from The Middle east in kind. I mean, the fact that there was a boycot essentially not just a financial, economic boycott of Israel, but also a cultural boycott, a complete shutting down, which was possible during the time of controlled media. Right. When Syria can control what their people listen to or were exposed to, or Egypt could control, then you could shut off Israel. By the way, one of the people who complained most about that is Mahmoud Abbas. He actually writes a lot about how devastating that was to the Palestinian cause or to the Arab cause. But that's not possible anymore in the age of social media. And you see that the countries that were most closed down to Israel. I'm talking about Saudi Arabia, which for years was the number one country of viewership for me. 25% of my viewers for years on YouTube were from Saudi Arabia. It's still, I think, the number one country. Syria, Yemen, Iraq. Countries where in some of them, Jews had existed. So I should mention also that my project has evolved from just being about Jewish faith, which is what you saw in the. In the last video, to also dealing with Jewish peoplehood. And for the last probably five or six years, I've been interviewing consistently Jews from the Middle east and North Africa interviews.
- [17:19]
A
People have to go see them.
- [17:20]
B
Yeah. And those are going viral probably much more at this point than the religious videos. The religious videos, some of them get more, some get less. But interviewing a Syrian Jew or a Lebanese Jew or Iraqi Jewish. And what's fascinating is that the algorithms on social media send these videos or get them watched in those countries. I can actually see province by Province on YouTube. If I'm interviewing a Syrian, it gets watched in Damascus, Homs, Aleppo, Baden Wurtenberg trip like, I don't know, Istanbul. It's like a map of where Syrians are living now in the diaspora and in Syria. It's fascinating.
- [17:59]
A
And what do they respond? What do they respond when they. It's an old man who tells about his life. There's a lot of good there. There's. There. There's, you know, centuries and millennia of history and a tremendously deep memory. And also it all fell apart. And also they all fled. And also they're all Israelis and they don't want Israel to disappear because it's their great refuge from an Arab world that, that as empires fell and as nationalism took over, and a lot of the nationalisms in World War II turned to the Nazis, if only to be anti British. Sometimes out of all this very. Iraq was not Syria, Syria was not Yemen. It's all complex, but nevertheless, they're Israelis. And they have nowhere else to go. How did the Arab world respond to these kinds of interviews?
- [18:41]
B
Right. They're almost all Israelis. I've also filmed people in the US and in Australia and in Europe, but most of them are Israelis. It's to create cognitive dissonance. That's, I'd say, the over overarching kind of goal of my project. It started as trying to confuse what Arabs typically think about Jews and Israelis specifically. And as you pointed out, not in a political way, because I felt like if it's perceived immediately as propaganda or as some form of hasbara, then people shut down and it's categorized. There's also enough of that. Even in Arabic, there's hasbara being done. I felt like a more promising way of getting reaching to people's hearts and minds would be through the culture and the history and the religion. We live in a very religious area. But again, it evolved from just religion into peoplehood. And here again, the cognitive dissonance, meaning the confusion and the psychological impact that it has in creating this sense of uncertainty or angst, is extremely important, I think, for the development. Because what happens is that in the Arab world there's sort of a predominant paradigm or thought that is Israel is essentially a Western European colonialist project. And insofar as people from the Middle east came to Israel, they were enticed or duped by the empires or by Ashkenazi Jews to come here. They were tricked and then they were kind of, you know, oppressed. And here you have consistently an audience seeing Jews from Libya to Morocco to, to Egypt to Iraq telling very similar stories, which is, we got along pretty well with our neighbors. We had always Muslims or Arabs who protected us. But at some point the government turned against us and it was no longer possible for us to live here. Usually Israel was the instigator of that, the creation of Israel. But across the board you have this sense that Jews could no longer live in the Middle East. And we're living in a turning point now in history where the Middle east and North Africa are completely emptying of their final Jews. And it breaks something in the misperception in the perception of, I guess, the Arab world of Jews, which is that everything was idyllic. Jews were suffered terribly in Europe, but their experience in the Middle east and North Africa was predominantly positive. So it breaks that down. On the other hand, it also fosters this great nostalgia because these Jews often talk with fondness about their communities, their neighborhoods, their neighbors. So there's this mix of difficulty and nostalgia, bitter and sweet which is, I think fascinating to hear. It's important also for us for Jews to preserve these memories and stories. Just like the Spielberg, you know, project preserves Holocaust stories. It's not comparable, but the end of the Jewish communities, the end of their languages, their children, their grandchildren don't speak Arabic anymore. So it's preservation for us as Jews. But it's also very important for the outside world to see it.
- [21:58]
A
I, you know, sometimes it's all true all at once, right? In Europe too, there was not a little bit, there was vast, there was a millennium of, of good, of extraordinary, wonderful culture creation and not a little bit of integration. There was a lot of good. And then there was a collapse and there were many, many small collapses. And then in the 20th century there was a very big collapse. So those are all, you know, those are the same what strikes me. And when I talk to Arabs, when they blame the founding of Israel, you think, but like if all of New York City turns anti Zionist, which is imaginable in a way, it wouldn't have been ten years ago, right. Would every last Jew have to flee? Would, would the Green Party Jew have to flee with the Socialist Democratic Socialist of America Jew have to flee with the Hasidic anti Zionist Jew have to flee? Would every single kind of Jew have to flee? You then discover that it isn't really about Israel. Something was happening in, you know, in our analogy in New York City, if every Jew flees, if the Iraqi nationalist Jew has to flee Iraq, then something's wrong with Iraq and it's got nothing to do with Zionism. Zionism is the, and there's no, there's no grappling with that. There's no serious anywhere in the Arab world. It's all very self serving. It's all very, you know, and Mahmoud Abbas, Abu Mazen, one of the things he wrote also is if you hadn't mistreated your Jews to the point where they flee to the last man, woman and child, Zionism probably wouldn't have been viable. He writes that, yeah, he writes that. So there is no grappling with even the problem they created now is their own abuse of their own minorities. And after the Arab world has done that to so many other minorities, Christians and Yazidis and Kurds and you name it. Where is that grappling? As someone who talks about Judaism to the Arab world, do you ever encounter we need to do a serious reckoning with our own history in the 20th century because we collapsed on all of our minorities everywhere and the Jews all fled because they had somewhere to flee. But even those who didn't flee just stuck around and died.
- [24:03]
B
Yeah, I think there is that. Few go as far as to say what you just said, meaning that we did this to other minorities. But I think the experience of Arabs today, especially in countries like Syria and Iraq, where the refugee experience has now become that of the mainstream, the Muslims, right. Not just the minorities, and especially in Syria, I see comments sometimes on my pages of, you know, it's not just the Jews who suffered, but now, you know, but everyone suffered, or today we're suffering what you suffered back then. And I think that's a way that they understand how dynamics of dictatorships work. In other words, it starts with the minorities. It never ends there. At the end, there's a dynamic that expands it to the mainstream. You know, this is an educational process. It'll take a very long time. It'll take decades. I don't see this as hasbara. I see this as education. But the education isn't just for the sake of educating people academically about Judaism or about Jews. It's about. There is a political end there, right? The political end is to understand Israel in a much more nuanced and complex way than that Arabs understood it up until now. And to identify with us in some way, right? To humanize Jews to Arabs. And I think one of the ways, one of the vehicles of humanizing us to the Arabs is, number one, by religion, religious discourse, which was really absent in the peace discourse up until very recently. And secondly, by speaking the language. So the language element is very important in all the dialogue groups that I've ever participated in in college. And, you know, later on, I was usually the odd man out in two senses. I was usually the only religious person in the room. Most of the people on the Jewish side are secular, and I was the only Arabic speaker in the room. And those experiences and the immediate sort of connection that I had with the Arab participants, not that we, you know, always reached understandings, but. But there was this kind of immediate, I don't know, communication that didn't have these barriers that other people had. And so there's also modeling from my own side here, and I've been doing more and more of that. I've been translating more and more of my videos into Hebrew to kind of like reflect this back to my own Jewish society, my own Israeli society, to show, look at the connections that can be made and look at the potential of pursuing this, rather than just the classic, I don't know, elites or secular elite peace initiatives that haven't really led us to any of that. It's just an experiment. It's kind of a work in progress, I guess.
- [26:49]
A
Okay, so on October 7th, the great massacre, the war begins. The next two years are the disaster that we all know about and have been talking about endlessly. And you have gone on every Arabic language channel I know about, at least Western Arabic language channel. So France 24, BBC Sky News in Arabic. I haven't seen you in English, I haven't seen you in Hebrew. But you've been hundreds of times in the major broadcasts into the Arab world in Arabic. I don't know that your politics and my politics are the same. I don't hear a lot of your politics and what you talk about, but you try to not culture, not history, but convey what it is that Israelis think and feel and are going through right now on those channels. Tell us about that, about sort of updating that story in these two years.
- [27:46]
B
So on October 7, my phone starts ringing. I don't answer it. I was trying to observe the holiday as best I could that day with all the craziness and the sirens, but I saw on my screen, on my mobile phone screen, that the calls were coming in from the Emirates and from Berlin and from Paris. And they were all channels that I had known from my journalism days. And I kind of got dragged in almost against my will back to being sort of a journalist. I wasn't doing journalism, but sort of doing this punditry. They had my number in their Excel sheets, I guess, from my journalism days, and they just wanted to know what was going on. And here we are two years later and the phone hasn't stopped ringing. In other words, this is a story, right? It's a developing story. And it's not one war. It's multiple wars that were fought in parallel. Right? But I don't know of any other story. Russia, Ukraine hasn't, you know, been in the headlines like this at all. No other war even comes close. And I've done, I think, over a thousand, I've lost count. But in the first few months of the war, it was four to five interviews a day sometimes on these channels, because there's a very small pool of Israeli Arabic speakers, meaning Standard Arabic, modern Standard Arabic, who can give an interview in Arabic. So there's me and a bunch of, you know, Olim immigrants from Israel who worked in Israel's broadcaster in the 70s and 80s and are now also in their 70s and 80s. So there's a very small pool of people speaking, you know, about Israel. And basically this was my miluim in some way. All right, I haven't been drafted, but I saw this very much as my own national service. And one of it was informing the Arab world about the, you know, the anxieties, the fears, and I'd say, by and large, a large Israeli perspective. And in the earlier days of the war, that was easier because I think most Israeli Jews were exactly on the same page, at least in the first few months. I certainly supported the war and, you know, justified the war in every interview I gave. The one channel that had not called me since the beginning of the war was Al Jazeera, which was a channel that I had given into that. I was a regular commentator on Al Jazeera Arabic. They had a program called Mira at Al Sahafa, a mirror to Israeli newspapers. I was there almost every week, sort of deciphering Israeli headlines, Israeli newspaper headlines. And Al Jazeera flipped even before this war, I think. So Al Jazeera stopped calling me and stopped calling, I think, most Israeli Jewish commentators. But other than that, BBC and Sky News and France 24, a lot of European channels, a few in the. In the Gulf. And you're right, I mean, I don't know if my politics and yours are the same. I think I have listened to what you said about this war and, you know, your last episode about analyzing the deal. I think we're basically on the same page. I have very few disagreements about analyzing the moment, but one of the things that I that. That is very important for me is to allow myself to criticize the government and its policies the way you do, actually, in front of an Arab audience, which is generally and basically hostile. I know that I'm the enemy, right? I'm representing the enemy side. So why do I do this? Number one, because I believe in honesty. And if I'm actually going to be a credible pundit, I should say what I think if asked directly about a certain policy that the government is pursuing. But secondly, I think it's actually much wiser and more sophisticated way of explaining Israel and of actually justifying Israel in some way, because in doing so in Arabic, with this kippah again on my head, usually in a visible way on tv, as much as it's possible on tv, I'm doing something, I'm modeling something that for Arab viewers is impossible if they're in the Middle east, which is to sit in their capitals or in their cities and criticize their government without consequence. So you know how in writing they say, show, don't tell Right. So you can, you can shout till tomorrow. Israel is the only democracy in the Middle east. Okay? Either they believe it or they don't. Most won't believe that. But if you demonstrate to them that here I am sitting in Jerusalem and I'm saying things about my government that are very critical. I'm wishing for there to be elections. I'm wishing for there to be a change of policy. There's. I'm expressing empathy to the Palestinian side when empathy, in my opinion, is due. I'm admitting certain mistakes. You know, maybe some people will cap, you know, will, will pocket that and sort of use it against us. That's possible. But I'm hoping that the more intelligent viewers and the more sensitive viewers among them, and if I'm, you know, speaking over time to hundreds and thousands or millions of viewers, will be sensitive to the fact that I'm doing something that they can't do. And what does that mean about Israel? I think that's a much better way of presenting Israel to the Arab world than just defending it blanketly or defending everything it does. And doing this in Arabic is specifically important. So that's kind of where my mind is when I'm doing these interviews. That's why I'm still doing them, even in channels that are very hostile. Yeah, it's gratifying, but it's also masochism at the same time. It's sometimes very frustrating. At the beginning of the war, I would sometimes go to bed reeling. I wouldn't be able to fall asleep. I was so sort of worked up by these interviews. But with time you kind of get used to them, I guess.
- [33:15]
A
Yeah, I, I feel very free to criticize and constantly criticize. And in fact, at some points the, what the world needs to know is why Israelis are united. And at some points what I think is the only important thing to talk about is the screw up of the Israeli government or of Israeli policy that sometimes have terrible costs for Palestinians and also for Israelis. I also feel we are free from even imagining we should try to win a propaganda war by the simple fact that there's not a lot of us in the world. And so we're going to lose the propaganda war and so ignore the propaganda war. There's only your own truth. And I agree with you. People respond to it. You know, I find that in the Israeli government, after I've criticized the Israeli government, there's some people, once in a while, maybe it makes it all the way to the top, but there's some people who are in the policy making room, who then have carried that critique into the policy making room. And if they thought that it was wanton criticism because it was partisan, that would not happen. And if they also thought that I can't criticize because I'm a gung ho supporter because I don't know what Israel can do no wrong, or some other obviously idiotic statement that people pretend to feel or pretend that their opponent thinks, or nobody I've ever met thinks that, then also I would be useless to them. A supporter is useless and an opponent is useless, but an analyst is actually quite useful. And so that's the only thing we have to offer. Okay, so let me take this in a different direction. I have a sense that the, the big question that I, that I have been asking, and I don't have the tools you have to answer this question is which way is the Arab world going? Which way is the Muslim world going? And specifically because you have interactions one way or another, hundreds of thousands of them, with Arabs, with Muslims, on issues of Israel, on issues of their understanding of Jews and of Israelis. Is the Arab world turning Muslim Brotherhood, Is it radicalizing? Is it actually despite the defeat of Hamas, despite the defeat of the resistance axis, most of which is Shia, at the end of the day, is it actually joining because the Gaza war was radicalizing or maybe pre Gaza war and it actually just brought it out into the open but didn't actually create it, joining the Hamas narrative of us and we're in for another 30 years of war? Or is what the Saudis and Emiratis are doing trying to create a Middle east that doesn't have these insanities, isn't fallen into these never ending constant religious wars that end up destroying Arab societies. Is that having an effect in your sense of the Arab world? And here you're a guy who talks to them, but you're also just literally an analyst, an Arabic speaking analyst, an intelligence guy and analysis guy who knows the Arab world. Which way are they going? What does our future look like in this region?
- [36:06]
B
Wow, that's a huge question, Khaviv. And I don't think that there's an easy answer. I think the Arab world, the one short thing I can say is that it's completely broken. And the Arab world has come out of the Arab Spring, what was called the Arab Spring in a, in many cases in a worse state than it was going into it before. It had authoritarian or dictatorial regimes, especially in the republics. Right. The countries that called themselves republics and those countries are today in chaos from Libya To Yemen, to Syria. Well, Syria now maybe finally is starting to turn around, but we don't know yet. And that's why the promise of democracy that these revolutions brought with them and even the successful countries like Tunisia, it's catastrophic the situation politically. So the promise of democracy and liberalization that a lot of the people were on the streets fighting for did not materialize. And in many cases, what replaced the dictatorships is anarchy, violence. Yemen is still divided between the Houthis and a legitimate government that is dysfunctional. In Egypt, we have Sisi, who in many ways is more authoritarian, I think in every significant way is more authoritarian and clamps down even more than Mubarak. So the promise of liberalization and of taking to the streets has not delivered, I think, the results that they had hoped for. And the countries that survived and where the Arab Spring sort of virus almost didn't infect were the monarchies in the Emirates. Right. For whatever reason, some of it has to do with the fact that they managed to, that they're rich, that they managed to buy off the loyalty of groups with money, with public spending. But even in countries that are not resource wealthy, like Jordan or Morocco, there was this idea of, I think, loyalty, and there's a different social contract. There's no pretense of democracy or of representation for the public there. You're, you're, you're a, you're a subject. You're not a citizen. And I think when you come into, when you're in the mindset of a subject and all you need is the king to take care of you, you don't expect ever to be represented. I think that's part of. I think that's part of it. It's not that Jordan didn't have upheavals in Morocco, and they did make adjustments. I don't think that the Muslim Brotherhood model has succeeded to convince people that that's the right way. I think with Hamas, it's maybe still open. It's still an open question. I think hamas acted on October 7 based on a set of incentives that Israel helped set up, which helped incentivize violence, kidnappings, targeted roadside bombings, rocket launches in order to get gains that were important for the Palestinians. And as long as there's no credible, convincing alternative to that, the Muslim Brotherhood may be still the most convincing alternative for Palestinians. And that's what's more interesting to me. Whether it takes root in Syria or Yemen or Iraq is of less consequence to me than whether it's convincing to Palestinians. And I think the jury's still out on that one.
- [39:23]
A
I take your point. What Palestinians think will deeply affect the future of our children and what Moroccans think, less so. Jordan nevertheless faces a serious Muslim Brotherhood threat. Iran has because it's angry at Jordan for not helping it fight Israel over the last two years began to massively fund the Muslim Brothers. Qatar funds the Muslim Brothers or whatever offshoots and pieces there are. Turkey is a party, is ruled by the AKP party which is not, you know, card carrying members of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, but the ideological foundations at the start of the party and the way the party talks now about Muslim piety and its importance in creating a stronger Islam and Turkey's I think geopolitical aspirations in the region to lead Sunni Islam to take that leadership away from the Saudis. This neo Ottomanism as some people call it, all these things are a religious framing of Muslim return to power that always, always, always looks at Israel, looks at the Jews in the Middle east and says they are the thing that is most out of sync with Islamic strength and confidence and a return to the world stage. And so the Jews have to be put back in their place. And that means overcoming Israel and defeating Israel. And so everywhere the Muslim Brotherhood goes, you end up with this deep anti Israel, even Egypt now flexing its muscles and occasionally some officials saying, hey, war with Israel is a possibility. Egypt, Egypt itself is a sop to deep seated, you know, the spread of Muslim Brotherhood version of Islam in Egyptian society. And so we're going into Gaza in 10 seconds. Is it reasonable to think that the Arab world is, you know, with all due respect to the Emiratis and the Saudis and the people who see this as the constant Arab self destruction of their own societies and this Islam that will only ever bleed us and make us poor and make us ridiculous and dysfunctional, nevertheless, it feels on the march all over.
- [41:22]
B
Yeah. So I've started actually committing, I've started like looking into some of these ideas and writing them down for a book that if I ever manage to find a publisher, I hope to write to publish. Especially Hamas's thinking about Jews in Israel. You know, I've read Sinwar's novel. I've read Maqadme who was a senior hamas person. The M70 rocket is named after him. Hussam Bajran, who I interviewed myself in 2018. He was one of the Hamas leaders who was in that room or safe house in Qatar that we bombed. I interviewed him for tablet in 2018. All of these people wrote down their thoughts and having read all of that. I think it's impossible to minimize the impact of Islam and Islamic thinking on the conflict. So maybe, like unlike many people on the left, which I think I largely belong to, I don't minimize or marginalize the impact that the Quran and Islamic thinking on Jews has on the conflict. I think it's a serious, serious barrier impediment. And the form of Muslim Brotherhood thinking, as long as it exists, is probably an insurmountable obstacle to peace.
- [42:36]
A
That's why Hamas, but Hamas itself is heir to these ideas coming in from Egypt in the 1930s all the way to the 1980s. You know what? You'll do it better than I ever have. What are those ideas? Can you do the reverse of what you usually do, which is tell us now, this is not Islam. This is a particular strain that had profound influence on how the Arab nations around us look at us, see us, understand us, and decide whether or not we deserve to live or die. What are these ideas?
- [43:11]
B
Well, largely speaking, political Islam says that previous models of Arab governance or subordinates to empires didn't work. And that Islam itself contains all of the features and tools to govern societies. And that as the motto of the Muslim Brotherhood is, Islam is the solution. So unlike Judaism, which didn't really have in the last two millennia very many opportunities to show governance or to prove how it creates a theology of governance, Islam did govern as a caliphate, and then as you know, the Turkish, the Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years, it has a model of how Islam, at least nominally, you know, can, can govern societies. And the fact that they lost World War I and, and that the caliphate collapsed is a, is a wound that's still open. Right. It's just the sort of final stage of deterioration of the prestige of Arab governance. The Abbasid Caliphate and later on, the other dynasties that ruled the Middle East. But the idea is that Islam, that the Quran gives you a toolbox to govern societies, that any ruler that doesn't adhere to Sharia law is kind of betraying his purpose. And what it means for minorities, like Jews used to be in the Middle east, is that they're protected by a system called dhimma, or, you know, they're, they're under the protection of the Muslim benevolent rulers, Christians and Jews and other minorities. And that's the model that Hamas envisions, I think, or that other Muslim, you know, Islamist rulers envision. They don't see themselves as particularly oppressive. They actually see themselves as benevolent, kind, you know, and merciful. Given the Jews subversive character, their Nefarious character as presented in the Quran and in the stories of the Prophet, the Hadith.
- [45:27]
A
So but as long as the foundation stone, the cornerstone of it all is Islam is on top, and then everybody gets to have Islamic mercy beneath Islam, right? That's, I mean, that is, that's the hierarchy ordained by God in the cosmos and, and that's the precondition. So where does Israel fit into that?
- [45:48]
B
It doesn't really. I mean, I get this so much in the comments also on my pages. I get, you know, the sense of betrayal. It's an authentic sense, the sense that the Jews betrayed their Muslim patrons. Right. We protected you. We brought you in after you were expelled from El Andalus, from Spanish Catholic Spain. Right. We brought you into the Ottoman Empire and there you went and backstabbed us, even though you had it great and formed your own country. Why did you need to do that? It just caused all the problems in the world. Everything was fantastic before that.
- [46:20]
A
400 years later, right? 400 years later, we backstabbed them.
- [46:23]
B
Yeah, right. Something happened suddenly and because of the European sins, we decided to turn against our. Now I think this is the strand. There is a pragmatic Palestinian camp. There is a pragmatic Arab world out there. Maybe the most, the best example is the Emirati and, you know, Bahraini and Moroccan regents, Right. The leaders who are like, yes, Israel is there to stay. We have just what to benefit from relations with Israel and then by extension with the us. But this wasn't just the thinking of those regions like, you know, the Hashemite family that became the kings of Iraq and Jordan, Right. Faisal and Abdullah, they cooperated with Zionism on a pragmatic basis. For 100 years there was a correspondence between Faisal and our first president, Chaim Weizmann. Right. So there was always a strand of pragmatists. But I would say that in the large scheme of things, they always lost out to the ideologues and to the maximalists and to the Islamists, essentially, basically, in the struggle in Palestine, it was the Husseinis and Hajamin Husseini especially who won out over the more pragmatic Nashashibis and other families who were more amenable to cooperating with Zionism. And now that's, basically, that's the battle that is being fought between, I think, Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas. Now, I know we have a lot of things to say about Abbas people. I'm one of the, at least up until a few years ago, one of the pro Abbas is, I think Abbas is different than Yasser Arafat, I think he did, went a very long way to suppressing the second intifada. I think he continues to collaborate with Israel and that's why he's seen as a sellout by many Palestinians and he helped with Israel to end the second intifada. But there's no. I often tell Palestinians, you need your Altalena moment. What is the Altalena moment that we had? It's the moment where the militias, the pre state militias, had to give up their arms and basically submit to the one decision, to the sovereign decision. There's no contiguity, territorial contiguity between Gaza and the West Bank. So even physically it's very difficult for them to settle this debate, I think between pragmatism and maximalism or radicalism. But they need this discussion to be settled because it's destroying them, it's destroying their national project. And I don't know how we in Israel can enable that to be decided. But I just know that up until now we supported a divide and conquer policy that blew up in our faces on October 7. Now, I know it's not just our fault. They don't need our help necessarily to hate each other and to prefer sectarian or factional considerations over their national cause. But I think we need to help reverse that trend and help the moderates win. And I think we need to put a lot of thinking into how we're doing that if there's going to be a peaceful solution.
- [49:29]
A
Israel's trying for two years to defeat Hamas. The skeptics among Israelis never mind the international discourse, which really matters far less than Israeli and Palestinian discourse. But the skeptics say Netanyahu has not really been trying enough or doesn't wants the war to continue because of political considerations. But let's imagine that that's not true of the chief of staff of the IDF and of the Shabak and of the vast majority of Israeli soldiers and of the vast majority of the Israeli hierarchy. And I happen to also think Netanyahu really, really does actually want to defeat Hamas. And my criticism of him is the failures in that regard, trying to achieve that goal. Not. Not that he's not trying. Is it doable? How does Israel defeat Hamas? Is Hamas undefeatable? Is Hamas so deeply integrated into Palestinian society, the Palestinian sense of self, the narrative of ordinary Palestinians about their historical experience, that there is no removing Hamas? You know, even if Hamas, because it, I don't know what, the last Hamas snake is killed in Gaza, changes its name to a new organization with exactly the same ideology, which is a very widespread ideology in the Middle east, including about Israel, the Muslim Brotherhood, etc. That whole world of discourse that we're never ridding Palestinian society of Hamas. You're saying now Palestinians have to make a choice to turn away from that. Can they, Can Israel do something that'll make them do that?
- [50:56]
B
I definitely think Israel can help, yes. Just as Israel helped the divine, Israel can help the healing. I think that in order for there to be a future, Hamas has to be eliminated and be removed. Now, how that happens is very complicated. I'm not sure we have easy answers, but it has to be something along the lines of the Marshall Plan. You mentioned Nazi Germany, I think in your last episode. Of course, Nazism hasn't been completely eradicated from Germany, but it's not the governing power because an alternative was brought forward. Right? There was a new, There was denazification, then there was a new constitution, and there was a huge amount of funds meant to rebuild. Okay, I see the funds coming in in Gaza, right. In the Trump Plan, I see perhaps the Dhammacization. But where is the alternative ideology and how do we help that alternative ideology come up? I think we can because it is there. It is there in the west bank. And I think that's why I really believe. I know it's so unpopular, people pooh, pooh it. But I think the model that Oslo gave, maybe not with Arafat as the leader, but where Gaza and the west bank need to be one territory that's controlled by the same government and connected physically and then rehabilitated with conditions that Hamas's ideology can't reemerge. Now, we need to discuss the details of how to implement that, but that's a way forward. There were other experiments that didn't work. There were very noble ideas of curtailing communism. That's what led the US To Vietnam. Okay? And then so many years later and so many tens of thousands of American soldiers later. Vietnam today is still communist, right? Same thing with, with the Taliban in Afghanistan, with, with, with the Ba'ath in Iraq. It's not enough to do de Baathification. You need to find an alternative and safeguards also to make sure that Iran doesn't intervene. But I think that the international constellations right now are such that with Iran depleted, with some Arab Sunni countries on the ascendancy, like the Emirates, like Saudi Arabia, we have the ability to introduce a form of government that would be more amenable to living with Israel. I don't think that this would cause, you know, Palestinians or Arabs to accept Zionism. I've given up on that dream. I don't think I wish them to understand Zionism better, you know, where we're coming from. But I don't think they'll ever accept Zionism. There'll always be a tension and animosity between the Arab world and Israel. But I think we can find an alternative scheme to replace Hamas. But for that, we need to drop the mindset of divide and conquer. So, yes, I believe, like you, that Netanyahu wants to defeat Hamas. I just don't think that the alternative that he wants is not divide and conquer. I think he's looking for another pawn to fight the PA and continue the same policies, whether this be gangs like Abu Shabaab or other families or clans in Gaza. I think he's not convinced that part of the problem was weakening the Palestinian body and not strengthening it. So I think in this, I'm 180 degrees opposed to Netanyahu. I think Netanyahu's speech two weeks before October 7th at the UN exactly two years ago, where he said the Palestinians are only 2% of the Arab world, they're going to have to jump on the bandwagon of normalization or just be irrelevant and therefore they're going to capitulate. That was immensely, incredibly short sighted, naive and dumb. Honestly, like that. That was not possible. That was not what Palestinians were going to do given the normalization. I'm not saying that the attack on October 7, as it took place was the inevitable way, but there was going to be some sort of backlash. So we need a reversal of policy. We need to find a partner who is capable of working with us and allowing him to control the entire Palestinian population. Even if there's a transitional period now in Gaza of a few years or five years, that has to be the strategy. We have to have a strategy. That has to be it.
- [55:10]
A
I want to end. I'm always optimistic. I've been optimistic for two years, if only because I've had an argument about Israeli strength and about how Israeli strength is sustainable over the long term. And I wish the region would understand it, and I wish our enemies would understand it and our allies, and I wish Israelis would understand it because it would reconfigure a lot of the attempts to destroy us, a lot of theories about our fragility. But that makes me very deeply optimistic over the long term. We're an incredibly strong people, and it doesn't come from the clever strategizing of one prime minister or another. Olmert had this strength available to him. And Rabin did, and Barak did, and Sharon did, and Bibi does. But I'm ending this pessimistic because I deeply believe that people live in stories, and the Muslim Brotherhood story of Israel is the only story out there. What's the religious story that I have met, I have talked to sometimes online Palestinians, Gazans who are horrified by Hamas, sick and tired of Hamas's brand of Islamic indoctrination. They ran the schools for a generation of Gazans, and Gazans were already primed to think the way they think. But Gazans have learned nothing else for the 17 years Hamas ruled Gaza. And they're horrified by where that has taken Gaza and where that took Hamas. They know Hamas wanted this war, still wants this war, and a lot of Palestinians are enraged and hate Hamas for that. And my question is, so when you reach out, what other Muslim story of Israel is there for you to hold on to? I mean, the Muslim Brotherhood, among other things, is a revolutionary rebellion against the staid and standing sort of Muslim authorities of the 19th century that just kind of kowtowed to the British when they showed up, kowtowed to the French when they showed up. And so it's this, you know, Islam is a religion of order. Islam, just like we described with where the Jews belong and the Islamic sense of where, you know, of how society should be organized. Islam's on top. Jews, Christians beneath them or monotheists beneath them, and then. And then non monotheists beneath them. Right. And this sense of social absolute, it's true of gender, it's true of many things in Islam. Islam is a religion, they often talk about it as a religion of peace. It's actually a religion of order. And that very, very clear social order brings, you know, Islamic thinkers say, brings peace, brings safety, brings prosperity, brings all the good things. The Muslim Brotherhood, in that sense, is a statement that all the order that had been brought about in the decaying Ottoman Empire and in the imperialists who showed up, all of that left us weak and shattered and broken. And we have to now revolutionarily demolish all of it, destroy all of it, overthrow all of it, and re establish the first generations of Islamic order, the first generations closest to Muhammad, the holy generations who first built out this great sacred order. But they did it as a conquering revolution. And so we restore that conquering revolution. Now that's powerful. And it recasts the Palestinian story of weakness as a story of the vanguard of a resurgent, confident Islam out to redeem the world again, rather than Just decaying in the face of Western strength. Now, what other possible narrative as evocative and powerful and dignifying does a Palestinian who hates Hamas have to latch onto? And I don't. I've never heard of one. And I. What are the Emiratis saying? They're too powerful. So we're going to make peace with them. The west backs them. I don't know what they have high tech. So, you know, we're not going to destroy everything. By the way, eventually they'll all convert to Islam anyway. We have to have faith in God that everything's going to be okay. Let's end the war. Is there an alternative?
- [59:12]
B
Well, it's certainly not for me to create. I can't create an alternative Islam, and I'm not convinced that there is a convincing alternative Islam in this point. But I'm going to now undermine what I've told you this whole last hour and say that it's not all about religion also. We also, as Jews, have a religious narrative, right? And the representatives of our religion today are pulling Israel in a very, very specific direction. Right? So if I were to rely only on religious narratives on the Jewish side, and I'm trying to fight the battle also on my side, Right. But I'm not sure I would win that battle. Okay. I'm not sure that my narrative would be more convincing to my fellow Jews than the narrative of Smotrich Ben gvir, Orit Struk and others. I'm kind of pessimistic on my side as well if I need to be pessimistic about something. And I think Hamas will probably, at the end of the day, not be undermined by an alternative Islamic narrative, if I'm honest, but with a narrative more like the Emirati pragmatic narrative that you just put forward. Imagine Khaviv, if we gave 10, 27 captives or whatever, prisoners, Palestinian prisoners, to Mahmoud Abbas or to a pragmatic leader that's better than Mahmoud Abbas. And given the 78 I think we gave to Abu Mazen. I was covering this as a journalist during the 2013, 2014 negotiations as an incentive, right? So for good behavior, that Abbas, right, went back to negotiations, he got 78. He never got the last tranche of prisoners because Netanyahu basically shut down those negotiations. Or if we gave the entire territory, let's say Area C or Area B or Area A, to the pragmatic leader who actually helps our security forces crush radicalism, and not to the Islamic Jihad and Hamas like we did in 2005, when we withdrew to the international recognized borders in direct response to violence. That could help create a different narrative. Yes, it's not a religious narrative, it's a pragmatic narrative, but let's start with that and see where that takes us. I know it means taking risks. We'll have to take risks as Israel. I believe we're strong enough to take those military risks because the alternative really is catastrophic for Israel. I think. I don't think we can, say, sustain the direction we're going in. I don't think we can manage anyone without. We could still manage the conflict. I don't think we can manage the conflict anymore, if anything, if the last two years taught us anything. So I don't think we really have much of a choice in the matter. We can't just wait for another narrative to emerge. If it does, we have to start being Zionist again and acting and putting forward a plan, which is something that Zionists used to do in the past and have stopped doing. So let's start thinking of a plan and maybe not letting other people impose plans on us whether they take place or not, but actually thinking of what we want Israel to be like in 20 years.
- [62:16]
A
Elhanan, thank you for joining me. The people of the book people should look it up on social media, on YouTube. It's absolutely astonishing and beautiful and well done being in a space that nobody else is in. Thanks so much.
- [62:33]
B
Thanks. Thank you.