← Ask Haviv Anything
Ask Haviv Anything
Episode 60: Does it matter what the world thinks? A conversation with Dr. Talk Becker
00:48:09
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- [00:05]
A
Hello everybody. Welcome to a new episode of Ask Khalif Anything. I'm very excited to have with me Dr. Tal Becker, who is the Vice President of the Shalom Hartman Institute. He previously served as legal advisor of Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He is an Israeli negotiator in successive rounds of peace negotiations. But a great many people know him out there in the Jewish world as just a very wise thinker and analyst who has taught me a very great deal over the years. We're going to be diving into what this moment means in a little bit of a larger picture, a kind of conversation you can really have with Talon digging in to this moment of anti Semitism, of war of Israel in the region of Israel, in the world, what it all means in the larger context of Israeli history, Zionist history, Jewish history. So I'm very excited to get into it. But first I want to just tell you one minute for our sponsors. This episode is co sponsored by Sue Levin in honor of her father, Frank Levin, who passed away on January 23, 2025 at the age of 98. Frank, a World War II veteran, spent his entire life in Buffalo, New York, devoted to his family, his local community and his religion. He would be shocked and thrilled to know that his daughter Sue, a terrible Hebrew school student growing up. Sue wrote this. Okay, I just don't get me in trouble. Sue is now finally diving in and learning so much about history and current events from Khabiv's tremendous podcast. Sue, I cannot tell you how wonderful that is to read. Truly. Thank you and thank you for the sponsorship. The episode is also co sponsored by an anonymous sponsor in honor of the memory of William Isidore Iceberg, who, along with the sponsor's father, enlisted in the US Navy after Pearl harbor and was killed in action during World War II in the battle of Tassafaranga, a major naval battle fought in 1942 in the waters off Guadalcanal near the Solomon Islands. In addition to William Iceberg, this episode is dedicated to all the Jewish soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines, past and present, who are serving in the US Central Command and alongside Israel, are protecting our most basic freedoms. Thank you so much to that anonymous sponsor. I love the sponsorships as much as the episodes. Folks, you come here and you tell us your stories and that is a big part of this community. So thank you very much. And speaking of community, I want to invite you to join our Patreon. If you're interested in asking the questions that guide the topics we choose to talk about, that's where Those questions come up, that's where we discuss them. There's great discussion forums there where I and listeners discuss the episodes, general news resources that we share throughout the day. You also get to take part in a monthly live stream where I answer all of your questions live. So join us there. Www.patreon.com AskHaviv Anything. The link obviously is also in the show Notes. Thank you so much. Tal, how are you?
- [03:00]
B
I'm okay, thank you. Nice to be with you. Khaviv, I really love your podcast.
- [03:05]
A
Thank you. I wasn't being polite. I genuinely have learned from you a tremendous amount. And I want to talk to you now about my own cynicism and frustration because you are completely, wantonly, ridiculously optimistic and look at the world as a basically decent place that Zionism can engage in fruitful conversations. And I keep telling people we're a bunch of refugees. Nothing else matters. Okay, so we what sparked this? First of all, what sparked this is that, you know, you can't not have Tal Becker on your podcast. But also what sparked this is you had a conversation with Abby Pogrebin in Sources, a magazine of the Hartman Institute where you're the vice president. And it was a conversation about Zionism. And it was a conversation about the tension in Zionism between engagement with the world, making the Jews normal, creating a Jewish polity that normalizes the situation of Jews that has never been normal because of what Jews represent in Christian thought, because of what Jews represent as the permanent other. What did Herzl call it? Speaking in the Jewish state about the Jews of Hungary, he pointed out that the Jews had been in Hungary for longer, or at least as long as Hungarians had been in Hungary. But Hungarians are the majority, and the majority gets to decide who the stranger is. And so the Jews are the stranger in a place they had lived for years, know, a millennium. The Jews condition was never normal and therefore this would normalize the Jews and then we would all be friends in this great international community of nations. And there's another element of Zionism which says actually there's a catastrophe coming and the Jews had better get the hell out or they're all going to die. Herzl himself used the word catastrophe, Pinsker and many others. Everyone who listens to this podcast has heard multiple episodes on these issues. And I am firmly in that camp. I love the world. Some of my There was an old cartoon called the Tick, a comedy cartoon where the Tick is this is this sort of mocking parody of a superhero. And the bad guy says, I'm going to destroy the world. And the tick says, the world, that's where I keep all my stuff. So, you know, I'm not opposed to the world. That's where I keep all my stuff. But a Jewish strategy for survival and thriving is a strategy that should look at the world with tremendous and deep suspicion. That is where I fall on Zionism. So I want to get into it, and I want to start where the wise Abigail Pogrebin started, which is to ask you, and I will put, by the way, this interview in the show notes, which is to ask you a question about your own view. You have said many times, Israel is a country established by people who were abandoned by the world. It is a almost perfect distillation of the actual foundational story, a story that people don't tell for some reason, as if you can understand Israel without understanding that. And yet you are an international law expert, one of the preeminent ones in Israel, who's genuinely committed to international institutions and to Israel, joining in conversations. You worked in the Foreign Ministry. You were a diplomat, international lawyer. You represented Israel both at the peace talks and also in the, in the icj, in the genocide case and all these other issues. You believe in the world. You believe in the international community and international institutions. So my question to start this off is going to be basically taken from things you have said as well. This is a very strange moment. We are a regional power unlike anything that we have ever been. We have not only defeated the Iranian proxy system, we defeated it easily, pathetically easily, embarrassingly easily. The strength of Israel is extraordinary. And at the same time, at that very moment, we find ourselves in the middle of a whirlwind of antisemitism unlike anything we've seen since World War II. And so we are a regional power. We are also somehow more vulnerable. How do you make sense of this moment? What do you think is actually Israel's situation in this moment? Is it good? Is it bad? Is it declining? Is it becoming better?
- [07:28]
B
Well, Khalif, so there's a lot to unpack there. I don't really know where to start. Maybe start by saying that I agree with this strange moment of feeling both like a regional power and unbelievably vulnerable and under assault at the same time. And one of the ways I think about this in terms of the war in general is that we have had phenomenal success in taking away the capabilities of our enemies to harm us. But let's put it this way, we haven't yet had phenomenal success in taking away the appeal of the story that Israel is somehow an illegitimate entity, that our acceptance is not yet something that is taken for granted or self evident. And so in a way, almost it feels like we are more challenged in the west right now than we are in the Middle East. I don't know how long that dynamic is going to last, but it's a kind of crazy moment when we looked traditionally to the west as support for the legitimacy of our story, and also to some support in other ways. And we felt very, very physically vulnerable in the Middle East. And it seems that the calibration of that has shifted, that we now feel physically strong in the Middle east, but vulnerable in terms of our story, particularly in the west, to some extent in the Middle east as well. That's the first thing. The second thing to your introduction is the way I see it, and maybe here, you and I, Giffer, you've done a great job of really emphasizing Zionism as story of refugees and that identity story of people, in the language that I used, of people abandoned by the world. But Zionism is a very diverse story with lots of different emphases in it and lots of contradictions in it. And you listen to the old Zionists and the new ones and the way that they tell the story has this tension, for example, between wanting to do something new and wanting to revert to something old, between wanting to be normal Jews finally wanting to be able to just exhale and wanting to be exceptional and a light unto the nations. And some kind of amazing story, right? And then that core tension which you mentioned, that tension, I think, between Zionism being a way for Jews to return to the world, right, which is sometimes explained or given voice. In the 1897 Basel, the first Zionist contract, where we said the goal was to establish a Jewish homeland secured by public law, as if it mattered. It mattered somehow whether we were recognized, how we were engaging with the world. So there's that story of Zionism. It's the way for us to return to the world. And then the other story of Zionism which has felt really powerful, I think, in the last two years, which is this is a way for us to shield ourselves from the world. And there is that element of Zionism which is hard to avoid, which has in it a kind of basic pessimism about the world. I mean, Herzl, when he made his case for the Jewish state in his first like one of the most foundational ways he describes it, is in vain. Are we loyal citizens, he says, in the Jewish state, right? In vain do we try to contribute to the societies in which we live. Eventually antisemitism is coming for us, says Herzl.
- [10:35]
A
Right?
- [10:36]
B
And in a way, and he even says it stronger in those societies that are most cultured, in those societies where Jews feel that they belong the most, that is where antisemitism will come, come in its fiercest form. And it's very depressing to see how right he was about that. And I think to some extent Herzl bought into the idea that yes, Jews, in order to be able to survive, simply need to retreat from the world. But he added a bit to it which was, I think, mistaken. And that was the idea that somehow Israel would cure antisemitism. If Jews were not just a minority in other societies, but were back on the world stage, returned to history, were part of the family of nations, antisemitism would subside. And that part of Herzl's story, I think sadly proved to be pretty wrong. But overall, I would say the fact that right now Khaviv has an emphasis, like most Israelis on that version of Zionism, which is the story that the, the world can't be trusted. We have to kind of disconnect from the world. Our stuff is in it, as you say, but we have to basically be very hard nosed about it. Doesn't mean that that's the only version of Zionism or that's the only possible story. These things fluctuate, I think, over time.
- [11:59]
A
You brought something that Herzl said that I thought was very interesting. Herzl said in the most civilized, by which he meant the most liberal civilizations, countries, cultures. In other words, it's one thing, you know, the Russian peasant, okay, only recently freed from literal serfdom, from feudal serfdom in the 1860s. That that person should, should harbor, you know, violent pogromist tendencies toward minorities in their midst is less surprising to Herzl, the Viennese intellectual, than that it should be happening in Vienna among the intellectual class and in Berlin among the intellectual class. And then Herzl concludes that actually it's probably even worse among the great intellectuals and liberals. And he has this whole explanation that's in the Jewish state where he says, he says in these words, emancipation created the insane kind of antisemitism we know today. How did emancipation, this French revolutionary idea that Jews just need individual rights, everybody needs individual rights in the modern day democratic, revolutionary French state. And so I give. What was the French philosopher who said I give to the Jews nothing as a collective or as a people, but everything as individuals, in other words, they would become Frenchmen of the Mosaic persuasion. That Jew who is just a Frenchman individual who cares what church he prays in. His church happens to be a funny looking church which is called the synagogue. But he's a Frenchman and that is all he is. And that is what he is under law. And the French brought this emancipation to German speaking lands by force of arms. Napoleon's conquest is what brought it to German speaking lands. And the Jews begin to undergo this emancipation. People don't remember today, but what does emancipation actually mean? Jews are legally limited in the jobs they could hold. Jews are legally limited in the places they could live or the universities they could study at. And, and those laws, the laws of the ghetto that keep them in certain places and keep them down, those laws are thrown out with emancipation. And the Jews can suddenly swarm the universities, live in any neighborhood of Vienna they want, do any job they want, sit in Parliament for God's sake. Can you imagine? And that Herzl says drove the insane anti Semitism of his period. And the reason that did was that Jews used to legally be under the Christian. The Christian was here, the Jew was legally down here in the Russian Empire, it was the Pale of Settlement in the German Empire there multiple layers. There were actually three different levels of legal status a Jew could be given under Prussian law. And once all that was gone, the Christian didn't know his position because knowing that you were above the Jew was foundational to Christian society. It's in St. Augustine, being above the Jew is how I know I'm a Christian. And when being above the Jew was no longer a legal truth, it had to become a social truth. And so societies organized because emancipation was letting the Jews out of the ghetto to push the Jew back into the ghetto once again. But this was a worse ghetto because this was a social ghetto, not a legal ghetto, not an ancient ghetto, but a new socially enforced brutality and abuse. And Herzl wrote a play called the New Ghetto about how this hatred is trying to push us back into the ghetto. So liberalism did it. Emancipation. Herzl wouldn't have put it this way because he didn't know the future created Nazism, that Nazi antisemitism. And so I give up. Where does the anti Semitism in the west come from today? Yeah, now we have a bunch of Nick Fuentes being platformed by the Tucker Carlson's. Okay, they're making a new campaign. It's a war over the soul of American Christianity. And the ones who need American Christianity to be anti Jewish. Are the ones guaranteeing that American Christianity will look like Islam looks like today in Egypt, because it's basically a kind of Christian Muslim brotherhood. But the anti Semitic rage, the willingness to see millions of Jews hurt and destroy, the support for October 7th, you know what the Christian anti Semites usually don't celebrate Oct. 7, or Hamas on the left, where in the name of full and pure equality for everybody, we have to push aside the great enemy of equality. Just as they were the great enemy of the folk, and just as they were the great enemy of the proletariat, and just as they were the great enemy of Christendom, they found the enemy again. I give up.
- [16:37]
B
Emancipation, in a way, especially in Europe, first of all, brought the lines that differentiated people down a little bit below the surface. They weren't drawn legally. They were cultural and political, and it was more blurred. And that actually created a wellspring of antisemitism in a very different and more dangerous form. So I hear that. And there was also this basic conditionality of Jewish identity, which this idea that you can be part of our community, as you described in that famous kind of Napoleonic trade, as long as you diminish your Jewish identity, as long as you hide you kind of diluted. And that has really been a big feature of, I think, the experience of many European Jews. And I want to say about that, first of all, that what the Jews have represented for so much of their history is the question about whether societies can deal with difference, whether they can cope with difference. In a way, what Israel represents in the Arab and Muslim world is whether the Arab and Muslim world can cope with difference. And what Jews have represented throughout history is that same question. I kind of have this image in my mind of a Jewish minority in, let's say, France, I don't know, 14th century or something like that. And the people of France, generally speaking, they know that Jesus is the Savior. They know what the truth is. They know the way they want to live their lives. And they see a Jewish minority that lives a different way, and they basically say, we better really go tell these people what the right way to live is and what the right things to believe are. And when they come to the Jews and tell them that, and parts of the Jewish community say, thanks, we're okay as we are at that moment, that society is tested as to whether it can cope with difference. And there's a real risk in those kind of societies that what they call liberalism is in effect demanding conformity and the rejection of anyone who is different. But what I want to say to you, and I think there is a possibility, a version of liberalism that is more honest to liberalism is not this kind of conditional acceptance. I think at the better periods of American liberalism, for example, we may be at a phase where America's story of itself is being deeply contested. But America, differently to Europe, I think, made a celebration of difference rather than a toleration of difference. And there was a capacity for American Jews to feel like, at least in principle, they could be different and accepted. They didn't have to be the same in order to be accepted. They didn't have to dilute their Jewish identity. We can talk a little bit about whether American Jews made that choice, because you could make the argument that American Jews nevertheless made the choice to kind of at least some of them, at least a significant number, to diminish the strength, their difference in order to make sure that they belonged. And there was a defensiveness about that. But fundamentally, the problem isn't liberalism, in my view. The problem is the way liberalism has been interpreted and in the current day and age, the way liberalism has been hijacked by this kind of version of progressivism. If I had to describe at a very fundamental level what the challenge of of Jews today from the left and from the right, we're desperately trying to save liberalism from progressivism and save nationalism from ultra nationalism. Because the sweet spot for Jews is, okay, liberal is great, because then in true liberalism, you celebrate difference, you express different identity, and then it shifts into this very illiberal kind of progressivism that we're seeing today. And nationalism is also great. It is an exception of collective identity as something that is important and to be valued. And Jewish collective identity is something important to be valued. But then it morphs into ultra nationalism. And then you see the enemy within, and you are always looking for those who are challenging. And you really have this kind of preoccupation with that enemy. So in my view, it isn't. My first point to you, Khaviv, is that it isn't liberalism per se, and it's not nationalism per se. It's the moment we are in. And it may be a long moment and a dangerous moment. The second thing, and I get this from you, Khaviv, and a lot of people do, it is the definitiveness, right? I don't know how else to describe it. It's either this or that, right? You give up. You've decided, you give up. We don't get to give up. It's always about making things better or worse, improving our situation or making it worse. Does it mean that Israel needs to be strong and able to defend itself? Absolutely. But does it mean we just reach a conclusion? As I saw once on Eretz Nedert, the Israeli satirical show, this kindergarten teacher has a globe of the world and she asks the students, points to Israel, asks the students what's this? They all say Israel. And then she spins the globe and says, and what's this? And all the students say in unison anti Shemia. It's just anti Semitism all over the globe. That's not the reality either. And I think we condemn ourselves and take away some of the agency that was embedded in Zionism. When we tell ourselves a story, it's just about giving up. There are we have friends, we have allies, we have relationships, we have power, we have voice, we have resources, we have societies that are in different phases of their battle with liberalism, progressivism and nationalism and ultranationalism. And I don't think it would be true to Judaism or to Zionism to simply give up on all of that.
- [22:16]
A
Here's why I think we might have lost that fight already. And yeah, there's always a new day and a new sun rises and you, you go back to the fight. But why, why do I have to constantly fight? What am I actually fighting about? Whether I deserve to exist? Why do I, why can't I stand there and say to the world fuck you? The protests for Gaza have are totally unprecedented, Totally unprecedented. There was a Vietnam War protest back in the Vietnam War. They were not this regular, they were not this long lasting, they were not this big, they were not this diverse. The there's no protest whatsoever to any kind of massive, horrific genocidal war anywhere in the ever in the west ever on any war like this. Nothing a tenth the size of this protest movement. And when it's very, it's literally genocidal and declared as genocidal by the genocide and when the west could have a can make a difference. The Yemen war was fought with Western weapons. I don't like what you know what I mean. Nothing has ever compared to the regularity, to the duration, to the coherence. The very fact that you'll have a protest in New York and a protest in Berlin and a protest in Madrid grid and they will all speak English. It is organized together with the same vocabulary and signs that has never existed before. There is currently at this moment a war in Sudan. Some allies of Western countries are part of that war. That war has seen 150,000 deaths, probably much more than that literal actual genocide. Literal, actual mass starvation. Two things that do not exist in Gaza. I've done podcast episodes about the hunger crisis. It was real. It never reached the of starvation, certainly not mass starvation. But in Sudan it did, and nobody gives a shit. And so I'm asking this purposefully with cursing mainly to up the rating on YouTube, but also say it it. Even those who are not anti Israel, there are two options for this protest movement. Either these people have been radicalized by images of war. And it's true. This is the first time they've seen, literally day after day, for two years, victims of war in visceral, immediate ways on their own phones. That's new. That's new in the world. And maybe that's radicalizing people against war. Wouldn't that be amazing? Wouldn't it be amazing if we take on the chin the very first time that the whole world mobilizes against war? But forevermore, it'll be very hard to fight wars because this is the world's response to war. Wouldn't that be unbelievably wonderful? I'll take that. I'll absolutely take that. But what if it never happens again? Or what if the only time it ever happens again is another war Israel's involved in? What if it's not about war at all? What if the algorithm itself, okay, social media algorithms are not an overturning of the old structures of power, as all the optimists said, but actually servants of power and the forces. We have this data on TikTok way, way overplaying Gaza posts than Instagram. That has something to do with the Chinese Communist Party, obviously. What if actually, only on Israel does war become visceral and injected into the bloodstream of the West. Only on Israel can you have a protest movement like this. Only in a campaign for Israel's destruction. You now have protests. Now this week, continuing violent protests in Toronto. There was just a violent protest interrupting an event of the Jewish community that cannot possibly happen with any other group in any other place at any other time. It's pure antisemitism. A decent person being radicalized by images of war is absolutely an honest, decent person. And that's most of the people marching. And yet the march itself is pure anti Semitism because it can only ever happen with Jews.
- [25:54]
B
So, Khaviv, first, let's take a breath. Okay? I share with you, I share with you the horrific nature of the antisemitism that has exploded. I share with you the unbelievable selective outrage, the unbelievable frustration, I should say, at the selective outrage directed to Israel, when far worse atrocities are happening in different places and we can be preoccupied about that. What I think is different, and this might be because I spent 30 years of my life in foreign policy and one of the things that I came away with that is that countries are not math problems, they don't have solutions. It's kind of like life. Life doesn't have a solution, except maybe the grave at the end. What you're basically doing in foreign policy, what you're basically doing as a people is trying to be stronger, safer, more dignified, more prosperous, more stable, pursuing peace, having less wars. And you could do that more or you can do that less. And what Zionism offers the Jewish people at a basic level in a strange kind of way, is not to speak definitively. It doesn't offer the Messiah or total catastrophe. It's all about the space in between. It is about the effort that we make to make things better. Now you said, why don't we just say to the world, screw you, we're not interested in you. So there are two big reasons why not. First of all, because we would be worse off if we did. We have the kinds of challenges where dealing with those challenges, both in terms of our enemies and in terms of economy and in terms of prosperity and legitimacy and all friends help, they are absolutely critical. The support of the US is very important. Relationships with other countries, it isn't a black and white situation. And so as a sheer imperative of operating in the world, the idea of well, forget everybody, we wipe our hands of it is not a good strategy. That's the first thing. You find your friends where you can. You delegitimize and marginalize your enemies and you do not give up because that is not something that is a good way of advancing the interests of your people. That's number one. But number two, in my mind there is something non Zionistic about giving up in that way. The essence of Zionism is that the Jewish people have agency. And their agency is not just about. It's not just about creating this kind of shtetl that is very well armed. That was not the aspiration of the Zionist story of well, Armstettel that rather than we be in Lodz, we're now in Jerusalem, but we have an F35. And Zionism had a much bigger aspiration. And we cannot let our enemies define their aspirations for us. Doesn't mean if it's a long horizon and a big effort and never to be naive and to be hard nosed about it and to see our enemies for what they are and their genocidal intent. I give you all of that. But what I'm not willing to do is abandon the aspiration and allow them to define the outer limits of our aspirations. Because in doing so, we undermine a little bit of our own soul and we undermine Zionism as well. I want to say one more thing, Khaviv. In this general sense, when I think about the Jewish people's story, certainly since the Enlightenment, but even before then, it seems like we have always been trying to answer three basic questions. The first question is, how will we be safe? How will we be secure? The second question is, how will we be accepted? How will we be normal? How will we be seen as being just part of the world? How will we be able to exhale as a people? And the third is, how will we be exceptional? How can we build an exemplary society? How can we be agents for the betterment of humanity? How can we model the relationship between power and morality in a way that justifies our tradition and our values? Those three aspects of our story. How do we safe? How are we normal? How are we exceptional? I find every Jew I meet has one, has a different calibration of those three. They're looking to answer those three in different ways. And one of the ways that I think especially Zionism at its beginning and the miracle of Israel's establishment at the beginning created this moment especially because of the miraculous nature after the Holocaust of Israel's establishment, where we thought we had the answer to all three questions. Israel was going to make sure Jews were safe, Jews were accepted, and that we built an exemplary society. And I think later generations, and especially after October 7th, there's this feeling of shattering, this kind of feeling. The noise you can hear of, oh my God. Is a little bit a feeling of, wait a second, we're not all that safe. We're not as safe as we thought we were. We're certainly not accepted. Look at this wave of delegitimization and a huge argument around our exceptionalism. And I think the problem, and I hear it in your questions a bit Haviv, and I kind of want to push you on this is the idea. The problem isn't that we have. We fell short on those three. The problem is that we thought that Israel was the solution to all these problems. Israel is not the solution to the Jewish people's problems. It is the place where the Jewish people are best equipped to deal with those problems. They will not go away. They are not meant to go away. Antisemitism, Herzl was wrong. Antisemitism will not disappear. The struggle for the legitimization of the Jewish people in the world. Given antisemitism and the history of the difficulty with difference and the ultra nationalism and progressives and so on, it will also not go away. And the work of being an exceptional society is a never ending job. And we're struggling with that within our society as well. But if we have a mindset in our minds that this is the therapy we're in, where we do the work on the Jewish people's perennial problems, it is not the place where we solve them, then we can be a little less fatalistic about this moment or that moment. We can be in a moment where we have the tools to marginalize antisemitism better, where we are able to empower and engage with our friends. We have an unbelievable. This I think I've heard on your podcast too. I think you'll agree with me. We have an unbelievable opportunity in the region at the moment to enhance Israel's legitimacy, to enhance the acceptance of the Jewish people in the Arab and Muslim world, even if it's threatened in the West. How that will play out, none of us know. So I'm kind of offering you a Zionism that is a struggle rather than a solution. And once you have that mindset, you can be a little bit less inclined to give up.
- [32:39]
A
So you're arguing it is a surrendering to antisemitism to almost accept my status as the untouchable outsider to world affairs. Those protesters want to make me evil and untouchable. My task is to let them do their thing, but I do not accept that status in the world. Is that right? As a.
- [33:00]
B
That's right. I think it's also to see the world as a more complex place. Those protesters are noisy and dangerous and provocative and in some places growing. But they don't represent the entirety of those societies. And it's our job always. This is the gift of Zionism, in a way. It is the insistence on optimism as a practice of Jews. Right. It on the one hand said, well, this is a dangerous world. You better get a state of your own. You better understand that power is really important. But it is also a statement saying there is. With your agency comes your promise and your potential, and don't give up on your agency. Don't let your enemies define the outer limits of your possibilities. And Herzl was right in saying the world would be astonished at what we accomplish. I think that does speak to a significant part of the world that is Astonished at the Jewish story, at this people who. One way to tell the story of the Jewish people is not enemy after enemy tried to destroy us, but that we are an indestructible people. That's another version of the Jewish story, a much more hopeful version of saying it. Not that the enemies aren't there, but that our invincibility gives us agency never to give up. And I think we're at a moment, Khaviv, where quite a few people have spoken about the eighth front of this war being essentially the struggle for our own soul, our own spirit as a society. Are we going to emerge from this war essentially disempowered? The highest thing we can hope for is to be able to defend ourselves. Now, that's a very important need. My friend Yossi Kleiner Levi says for Jews, there's no such thing as mere survival. Survival itself is a massive goal worthy of elevating right. It is a moral imperative, no question about it. But I think we would be really diminishing who we are and who we can be if we define that as the objective. The Jewish people. Another way to think about this, and I say this often in my talks, the Jewish people are about 3,500 years old. For most of that history, they have not had the capacity to defend themselves. They have not had the capacity to really be the ultimate arbiters of their future. Now, we can't determine our future completely like no people can. There are other forces that will play a role. But Zionism has given us the gift of being able to imagine who we want to be and then act towards it using the resources. Why let our enemies diminish that imagination? And maybe the last way I'll put this, because I often find myself, and I'm sure you do too, Haviv, we tend to talk to similar audiences, one after the other. Either I'm before you or you're before me. I often hear that they've spoken to you. And so often you meet especially Jewish audiences who want you to end on a note of optimism. Like it's a hidden rule of a speaker that they have to tell a talk with an optimistic end. I remember I once gave a talk in Miami and this woman put her hand up at the end and she said, excuse me, sir, but you haven't given me hope, as if that was in the contract, right? And we Israelis really love giving talks that just tell people how complicated everything is and how you thought it was bad. But let me explain to you that it's a little bit Worse than you thought it is. That's a very common way of doing it. Right. But fundamentally, Zionism might be pessimistic about the world, but it's optimistic about Jews, and it's optimistic about what Jews can do in the world to improve the world. And it's a different kind of optimism that is typical, particularly in the West. There's that version of optimism which is kind of saccharine type of optimism. The glass is half full. One of my favorites is all we need is political will, which is basically like saying, all you need is everything. Right. That version of optimism is dangerous, in my view. In the Middle east, there are irreconcilable forces. There is antisemitism that is not going away. It's like the zombie apocalypse. Right? It's very difficult to destroy. It won't. Unlikely to be destroyed. But there is a different version of optimism which is much more Jewish. And that is the optimism that Zionism offers. And that's the optimism not of saying that the glass is half full, but of saying that we live at a time when there are opportunities to put water in the glass. We live at a time in Jewish history that pretty much any generation of Jews would trade with ours even today. And that is because we have the capacity to put water in the glass. And the idea that we would intellectualize ourselves out of the thought that we could make things better and just give up is a denial of the gift we have been given. It's not a recipe, it's not a prescription for naivety given the forces we are facing. But it is an insistence on a kind of Judaism and Zionism which is always about hope. I think Zionism would never have happened if it wasn't for hope. Yes, it needed the antisemitism. And your lines throughout your podcasts about Zionism being created by refugees and pogroms and persecution in the Middle east is absolutely true. But Zionism is also about hope. Zionism is also about doing the impossible. And I think if you look at the story of our people and the story of Israel, that kind of feels kind of right. And if we come to this moment after, as you rightly acknowledge, the really almost miraculous military successes we've had, and yet also the severe challenges we face, especially with antisemitism, and then we take this kind of view, well, nothing you can do about it. We're kind of rejecting a gift that we've been given.
- [38:50]
A
So the very fact that we are, as I keep telling people when they ask me for that optimistic ending, the strongest Jews who ever lived. This is the strongest generation of Jews there has ever been. Other Jews have faced these problems and a hundredfold scale of these problems, and none have ever been as strong as we are. So we have absolutely no right to complain. That is my optimistic line and I firmly believe it. But that also gives us the luxury of why the heck not engage the world and find allies and build a better, you know, future. And goodness knows, in the Middle Eastern alliance matrix, a lot of people would really like our, our us to be on their side and our help and to connect. So it's not serious to write everybody off.
- [39:38]
B
It's not serious to write everybody off. It's also, I think it doesn't speak enough to the way in which the Jewish tradition itself, at least a lot of our texts, have a universal aspiration, right? Yes, it's true that our tradition has a big wearer of people and we have a strong particularist agenda, you could say. But part of our particularism is universalism. Right? We do have an image for the improving humanity, and that's part of our tradition, and we shouldn't give up on that either. But at the same time, we have to be very realistic about the threats we face. International institutions, for example, many of them are morally bankrupt. Many of them are. The way I describe it is the mafia writing the criminal code, and then the criminal code gets kind of elevated. Despite that, there are lots of trends in societies that we need to be worried about, but our role in that is to be the fighters for the kind of society that is good for us, but also good for what we think is good for the world, good for our neighbors, and committed to, you know, we're a tradition that said everybody is created in the image of God. We're a tradition in which Hillel said, what's hateful unto you, don't do other. Others don't do unto others. And those traditions, I think, need to also be embodied in the way we embrace our foreign policy. Not Pollyannish, completely committed to our security, completely committed to the relentless confrontation with those who want to destroy us, but never giving up that spark of wanting to build a better world.
- [41:12]
A
Are you. I can't tell if you're an optimist or not, honestly, because Dan Shiftan would say, you know, and I would say to him, what's the solution to Gaza? I don't remember exactly what words he used last heard him say this, but he says something like, only a special kind of idiot asks for solutions. Countries don't have solutions. Problems don't have solutions. Married men know this. He says there are no solutions, but there's trudging and there's trudging well and there's trudging poorly and there's sinking and there's slow rising and you, you, you can slightly improve things. That's the. Or. How did he define optimism? A dumb optimist is someone who thinks the glass is half full or that things will be better. A smart optimist is someone who thinks we will get stronger faster than things get worse. Does that count as.
- [42:07]
B
Yeah. I mean, Dan Shiftan has a really definitive and harsh way of articulating ideas that I think can sometimes be expressed a little in a softer way. But I don't disagree with that sentiment. Absolutely. And this idea that, you know, I think it was Thomas Sowell who said there are no solutions, there are only trade offs. Right. That in life you're always choosing what to emphasize at what cost. Right. What to. And I look at that as, in a way, basically the gift of Zionism. So I agree with that sentiment.
- [42:43]
A
Can we push back this anti Zionist moment and this anti Semitic moment and somehow fundamentally change our relationship with the Palestinians in ways that could be constructive in the future and somehow push back? I mean, there are all kinds of indicators that there's part of the Muslim Arab world that wants to engage us, the Abraham Accords, etc. And there's many indicators that that's an elite project and that public opinion, ordinary public opinion, isn't just anti Israel from the Gaza war. Muslim Brotherhood versions of Sunni Islam are spreading in the population and they actually hate us and want to destroy us more than ever before. All of these arenas, I forgive myself for despairing, telling it all to go writing the whole world off. And even if I completely agree with you and take your point and you're obviously absolutely correct, you called it in the interview with Abby, the permanent possibility of the presently unimaginable. There could even be peace because half of the things happening today nobody imagined 10 years ago. So what right do you have to pretend like. Nevertheless, the forces arrayed against us are deep and embedded and not going anywhere and structural to the societies in which they exist.
- [43:59]
B
Just a conceptual point to make. And that is that, you know, I pretty much remember every mean thing a teacher said to me when I was at school about me. And I don't remember the praise.
- [44:11]
A
Right.
- [44:12]
B
We have a tendency to remember and internalize the negative possibilities and negative things. We have a harder time when things are uncertain, for example, imagining that they might go in A positive direction. And that's partly Jewish, it's partly human. But we are at a moment where so much is volatile and so much is uncertain, and we've been surprised so often in multiple directions that to have the arrogance to say that because of this certainty it's necessarily going to go in a negative direction and not a positive direction is not a certainty that we can have the luxury to share. Now, you mentioned a whole set of problems and a whole set of challenges. We could have added to it a year or so ago. The Hezbollah challenge, which is very different to it, is today, the Iranian challenge, that is very different to it today. The question about the resilience of a younger generation of Israelis, that we thought one thing and were surprised and found another thing. So I don't disagree with all your descriptions of the difficulties, but I also, I can envisage in my mind a kind of positive scenario on any number of these issues. Trends that, you know, I'll give you one. I'll say something silly that has been maybe a little too fantastical that has been occurring to me the last few days. Anti Zionism is so trendy at the moment in parts of the West, I've begun to wonder whether it's about to be uncool because it's a bit too trendy. And maybe the people who will reject anti Zionism, that'll become the trendy thing because everybody's doing that. It's become a little bit old. Is that a possible thing? How do you encourage it when you think about antisemitism itself? I mentioned the zombie apocalypse, fighting antisemitism. It's not really about convincing Nick Fuentes not to be anti Semitic. It's much more about creating societies that are inoculated from antisemitism as best as possible and investing a kind of Jewish identity that has a resilience in the face of that. I think post October 7th, we have a huge opportunity to double down on a Jewish identity and Jewish literacy and Jewish resilience within our communities that maybe will be robust enough to withstand that and maybe create partnerships to push in a different direction. And in the region, I think we have a tremendous opportunity to advance normalization. And what is normalization? Normalization at its heart is the articulation of an Islamic idea that is in competition with Iran, in competition with Hamas and Hezbollah, essentially saying that Jews and Muslims are not in a zero sum contest. And I don't rule out the possibility. It's not an inevitability, but I don't rule out the possibility that in an atmosphere of increasing normalization, the nature of the Israeli Palestinian relationship has the potential to improve for the better. Let me just put it that way. It can get worse and it can get better. And the minute you accept that something can be worse or better, the only thing you have to do is get to work. I think I mentioned this, I can't remember where, but I once spoke to a previous head of the Mossad, Mehru Dagan, and I asked him, he has passed away since, but he was a legendary head of the Mossad. And I asked him, on whose side is time? And he gave a very Mossad like answer, which is, time is on the side of those who use time well. That's it. Time is on the side of those who use time well. So just get to work. That's what Zionism gave us, the ability to get to work. Do we know the outcome? Nobody knows the outcome. But I find tremendous strength and optimism in the practice of being able to get to work.
- [47:56]
A
I think I'm going to title this episode Zionist therapy session with Dr. Talbeck. Thank you very much for joining me.
- [48:03]
B
Thanks a lot.