← Ask Haviv Anything
Ask Haviv Anything
Episode 62: Hard times make strong Jews. Live in London with Daniel Schwammenthal.
01:48:59
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- [00:06]
Aviv
Hi, everybody. Welcome to a new episode of Ask Aviv Anything.
- [00:09]
Host/Moderator
This one is a special live recording of an event I was at a talk. I gave our Q and A that I gave at Finchley United Synagogue in London. It was part of the community's Centenary Kinloss 100, which is going to be this coming year. They are 100 years old. The Kinlaw Synagogue in 2026. And I had the distinct pleasure of sharing the stage with Daniel Schwaminthal, a man I respect highly and have known for many, many years. It drew a crowd of nearly 400 people.
- [00:46]
Aviv
It was a lot of fun.
- [00:48]
Host/Moderator
There were some serious big questions. Fast forward to the very last one. You won't be disappointed. I think I am very proud of the conversation that we had there. I want to thank Jonathan and Deborah Field, who have been longtime supporters of this podcast, for sponsoring the event, for bringing me to London. And of course, I want to thank Rabbi Dr. Yoni Birnbaum, the senior Rabbi of Finchley United Synagogue, for welcoming me. We had some conversation ahead of time. Rabbi, you were very tolerant, including when I uttered a curse on stage. You took it better than I did. It was a warm and interesting conversation and community, and I'm really glad to have experienced it. We talked about the anti Semitism of this moment, when it isn't anti Semitism. We talked about elections potentially coming up in Israel. We talked about the challenges Israel faces today. We talked about the war. We talked about social media. We talked about Britain and multiculturalism. We talked about all kinds of things that interested the community. I hope you learn from it, enjoy it. You know, I hope it makes you think. Some of it will make you nervous and anxious and sad. It was a wonderful conversation and I'm very grateful to the community. Before we get into the show, I want to invite everyone to join our Patreon. If you're interested in asking the questions that we deal with in the on this podcast that comes from our Patreon subscribers. It is a marvelous form of discussion where people share comments, but they share resources, they share knowledge in ways that I have benefited from tremendously. I am there answering questions, dealing with issues. And you also get to take part in our monthly livestream where I answer your questions live for as long as you ask them. Last one, I think, went on for two and a half hours, so.
- [02:41]
Aviv
And most people stayed throughout.
- [02:42]
Host/Moderator
So it's interesting and wonderful little community that we've built here on with the show. I hope you enjoy it.
- [02:50]
Event Moderator
Thank you very much, Rabbi. Thank you so much for being here. This evening, for me, this is a real delight. My claim to fame is that I didn't discover Khaviv, but I noticed him much, much earlier than most people. When I was working in Brussels, part of my job was to try to explain Israel to diplomats. And about 12, 13 years ago, I brought Khabiv to Brussels, and we had about 15, 20 diplomats from across Europe. And I think there was definitely also at the time, somebody from the UK and these guys don't do necessarily very productive work, but they do work a lot. It's, you know, they. They have to go to meetings, write reports, send them back to capitals to get them for more than 45 minutes in the room to listen to. To somebody is. Is a big deal. After two and a half hours, the restaurant where we had booked, they kicked us out because they were hanging at every word she was saying. This was the most. And so for me, this is a real, real treat to be the one asking Habib anything. But I will not exploit this opportunity and be assured that you will also have the opportunity to ask your questions. Let's start with the Trump deal. Very, very briefly. I heard you several times saying, now that the war is over. Is it?
- [04:26]
Aviv
Yeah.
- [04:27]
Host/Moderator
No.
- [04:28]
Aviv
Thank you first of all, so much. The problem with compliments at the beginning is that now I can only fail. So it's an honor to be here. Thank you for the invitation and for bringing me and to be here today with you. Is the war over? There are two forces in this world that wants this war to be over. One is the Trump administration, which is a significant element in the world. But there's an even more powerful one when it comes to the question of the war being over in the narrow context of Israelis and Palestinians, which is that all Israelis want it to be over. And that's, I think, the reason that I actually think the war probably is over now. What do I mean by the war? The war is the kinetic maneuvering war in Gaza that's over. Gaza has already. The half of Gaza has already been retaken by Hamas, functionally, de facto, in the sense that Hezbollah controlled Lebanon, in the sense that they can kill anybody they want to kill. So everybody is doing what they say. And in that sense, the Israeli Hamas contest over the future of Gaza, whether it is a future that Israel can live next to, or it is a future that Hamas insists on making, a future Israel literally cannot live next to, in every version that that grammar of that sentence allows, that contest remains. And the comparison that people often make is Lebanon. In other words, in Lebanon, Hezbollah ruled without responsibility because there was this Lebanese state. And Hamas would like to rule Gaza without being responsible for Gaza, because then it can blame every problem. For example, the fact that it's very hard to send in, I don't know what, hundreds of thousands of tons of concrete into Gaza, billions and billions of dollars into Gaza. The rebuilding of Gaza is something very nearly everyone on earth wants, and Hamas is demanding to control it to the point where the Trump administration has discovered that they can't actually force their hand on the ground in Gaza. Nobody on this earth will die for Gaza. Nobody. Israeli soldiers are willing to go into fire to save Israel from Hamas, to protect Israel, and so they will fight Hamas even at the cost of their deaths. There's nobody on this earth who will fight Hamas for Gaza itself, not any of its allies, supporters, lovers, protesters, marchers, not any regime and government in the Middle east that spends basically validates its own dictatorship by claiming to be the vanguard of the war against it. Nobody will actually fight for Gaza. And so Hamas really kind of controls the ground uncontested. Trump said, if Hamas doesn't release the last bodies at one point a couple weeks ago, then we're going to do terrible harm to Hamas. And the White House spokesperson was asked by a journalist, what is Trump talking about? Is America going to enter the Gaza war? And she said, no, no, Trump means that somebody else is going to go into Gaza and do this terrible war against, okay, the contest over the future of Gaza. Hamas would like to be the rulers of Gaza without being the government of Gaza. And they have already insinuated themselves into the ruling authority being built out under the Trump plan by simply winning an agreement, an implicit, quiet, but reported agreement of the Americans, of the Egyptian, Saudis, Qataris, et cetera, that they can veto people who will be part of that transition government. Veto of who can serve in the transition government is ruling Gaza. The reason UNRWA was totally infiltrated by Hamas wasn't that unrwa, literally, institutionally in Geneva, where do they sit, was actually Hamas.
- [08:30]
Co-speaker/Panelist
It was that if Hamas didn't want.
- [08:32]
Aviv
You to get one of the 13,000 UNRWA salaries paid out in Gaza, mostly.
- [08:37]
Co-speaker/Panelist
To teachers, you couldn't get it.
- [08:40]
Aviv
So you didn't need to be Hamas to be an UNRWA employee, but you.
- [08:43]
Co-speaker/Panelist
Needed to be someone.
- [08:44]
Aviv
Hamas wasn't opposed to being an UNRWA employee. And if they needed one of their people to receive that salary, then you.
- [08:50]
Co-speaker/Panelist
Didn'T get that job because one of.
- [08:51]
Aviv
Their people needed that salary.
- [08:52]
Event Moderator
And.
- [08:53]
Aviv
And in that sense, it was totally under the control of Hamas, even if it wasn't officially under the control of Hamas. So the war over the future of Gaza, a war in which Israel would like Gaza to be an emirate, with natural gas fully developed in its territorial waters and a beautiful, happy place. And Hamas, the great and glorious resistance, would like it to look like it looks now for all time. If it means the ultimate destruction of Israel, that war continues. But it will continue roughly the way Lebanon is going. I don't know if you've noticed or if one of you heard my podcast episode a couple episodes ago where this was mentioned by the expert I was interviewing. In the roughly year since the ceasefire with Hezbollah, Israel has killed an average of one Hezbollah fighter a day. Well, that's an excellent ceasefire for Israel, and that's come with almost zero harm to Lebanon's civilians or infrastructure. That would be a fantastic situation for Israel in Gaza. It would be a terrible situation for Gaza. Not because Gazans care if Hamas lives or dies so much. Turns out they don't actually want to be ruled by Hamas, but because it prevents a serious rebuilding. And so we're in a very weird situation in which it is more in the Israeli interest to rebuild Gaza at this moment than it is in Hamas's interest to allow that process to move forward if they can't control it.
- [10:16]
Event Moderator
So you're saying when the time comes when Hamas, in theory, would have to disarm, when that next stage comes, and it's fairly unlikely this will happen, it will not trigger a real relaunch of the war. It will more resemble the Lebanon scenario.
- [10:36]
Co-speaker/Panelist
Yeah, with a caveat that three people.
- [10:39]
Aviv
Will be making that decision. And it's very hard to predict what three people will decide. It's fairly easy to predict what a million people want to do, polling, et cetera, but it's hard to predict what three people want to do. So if Netanyahu thinks this is make or break, he has to. He has no choice. For some reason, he thinks this. I should just tell you, I don't think Netanyahu is going to do it both, because I think he achieved the fundamental war goal, which was not the war goal he declared absolute total victory, which was, I don't know, an Israeli who didn't roll their eyes when he said that. But his actual war goal was to transform Hamas from a strategic liability for Israel to a strategic liability only for themselves or arguably for Gaza. Hamas now can prevent the rebuilding of Gaza. It cannot hurt Israel, and that's a victory. It's a tragic victory. It's not a fun victory. It's not like the enemy is defeated and surrendered in the. I don't know what Iran model or Hezbollah model, but nevertheless, it is. It is in military terms of victory. So Netanyahu now has that victory. I should also say we have polls from the week before the ceasefire or two weeks before the ceasefire. 70% of Israelis wanted the war to end. And when Netanyahu ended it, his polling rose. Depending on the poll, it rose different amounts, but there were people in the center willing to support him, but sick of the war that they attached to him. So I don't think politically he can go back to war.
- [12:09]
Event Moderator
So from your analysis, the result of it's not peace, but this deal where, first of all, we got all the living hostages back. We got at this stage, even most of those that had been murdered and taken, the bodies taken hostage, and Israel still controls a majority of the Strip. So as a security insurance, that is, in your analysis, a relatively good outcome from Israel's perspective, even though it doesn't quite fulfill what Netanyahu claimed he would have wanted. Now, there were a lot of people, I don't know a lot, but certainly a lot of people who made a lot of noise in Israel who wanted the war to have ended a year ago under very, very different circumstances. There are a lot of people in this country, including in the Jewish community, that wanted it for understandable reasons. Where would we be now if that had happened, if a deal, the deal, a much less favorable deal that was on the table a year ago had been accepted by Israel?
- [13:28]
Aviv
So I'll just say, you know, this isn't a good end to the war, okay? This is the worst imaginable kind of war. It's a war of maneuver inside civilian populations. The moral horror at images of dead children is absolutely the correct, decent reaction to a war like that. The profound and ridiculous and deeply undermining manipulation lies in the fact that that is the only war anyone will ever see images of and that these marches for Gaza, which are absolutely the correct reaction to a terrible war, will never happen again unless Israel is once again involved. And that they're totally unprecedented in the history of Britain and also in the history of, like, France and Holland and New York. So both are true at once. In other words, we are seeing a deeply manipulative. It is about the Jews, but it is about the Jews. At the origin point, at the end point, decent people are radicalized by images of the broken bodies of children. That is the correct response in Other words, to take this. It's not just to the point that I don't say, oh, look, great, yay, Gaza's.
- [14:46]
Co-speaker/Panelist
We've won.
- [14:47]
Aviv
That's not what we should feel or understand about the Gaza war, but it is a militarily successful war. The way it ended. If it had ended a year ago and this was a big debate. You're exactly right, by very serious people in Israel. There were offers in the past, ceasefire offers that Netanyahu turned down. If any of you have heard the podcast or heard me generally in the last two years, Nick Netanyahu has made not every mistake in the book, but every odd numbered page mistake in that book of mistake. I really think there had been a series of serious problematic errors of judgment by the Israeli government, some of which have had terrible costs for Palestinians and for Israelis. But this was not on offer then. There was never on offer. All the hostages come out at the beginning, front loaded. All the living hostages, all the dead hostages as well come out. Hadar Goldin, held by Hamas since 2014. They knew exactly where he was.
- [15:46]
Co-speaker/Panelist
They knew where they all were.
- [15:48]
Aviv
We caught them on video. You guys, I'm sure, have seen this burying a body so it can be found just as the Red Cross shows up. They weren't looking.
- [15:56]
Co-speaker/Panelist
They kept it in storage. They knew exactly where everybody was.
- [15:58]
Aviv
It's all only ever a game and they know everything and they know everywhere and don't ever believe them. And none of that was on offer. And the idea that this, you know, I've even, I've been harassed by some. You're going to be shocked to hear this. Some anti Israel activists on Twitter who have claimed for forever that Hamas offered to return all the hostages, like on October 8th. But you guys wanted to destroy Gaza. A. No, Hamas's condition was to rule Gaza. Hamas can't rule Gaza, by the way. There has never been on paper Hamas not ruling Gaza, agreed to by the Arab world, not agreed to by Hamas, but agreed to by the Arab world and by the American administration. And yeah, of course they're going to fail. Everything in the Middle east fails.
- [16:53]
Co-speaker/Panelist
But that's not the point.
- [16:54]
Aviv
The point is that's the condition Israel agreed to and that's what Israel has committed to. And it doesn't have to be committed to anything else that was never on paper. And also getting everybody back in a serious way with Gaza's future delineated, defined by the Qataris, the Qataris signed on to Trump's plan as a future that isn't Hamas, that is Demilitarized and that. I don't know, I don't know how to put this. Imagine if you in this room, okay, were the governor of Gaza. I know a British person should not imagine themselves governing the Middle east, but I'm just saying I know their sensitivities. I'm just saying imagine you govern Gaza and imagine some energy companies from, I believe Holland and the United States come to you and say, hey, there are huge gas reserves in Egypt's territorial waters.
- [17:42]
Co-speaker/Panelist
And enormous gas reserves in Israel's territorial waters. Why don't we look in Gaza and.
- [17:47]
Aviv
Lo and behold, there's gas in Gaza's territorial waters.
- [17:51]
Co-speaker/Panelist
Now again, you are the governor of Gaza. What would you do? Wouldn't you make use of that gap? Wouldn't you pump a quarter trillion dollars into Gaza in 10 years? Wouldn't that be like your. Wouldn't you put on hold permanent, forever wars you might have with your neighbors.
- [18:11]
Aviv
Because of your particular strain of religion.
- [18:14]
Co-speaker/Panelist
And just get the money out? You guys with me? Who here likes money? This is my point.
- [18:23]
Aviv
So this plan envisages a genuinely different future for Gaza. Hamas, of course, are totally opposed to it because that's what Hamas is and will always and forever be. And that was not on offer. So there wasn't an agreement with the world. There wasn't a front loading of the release of the hostages. There wasn't a disarmament of Gaza as something the world said should happen. None of that was there. And by the way, this deal the Israeli government committed publicly that the Smotrich and Ben GVIR vision, for example, annexation, settlement, expulsion of Gazans, is not the future of Gaza.
- [19:05]
Co-speaker/Panelist
In order to get the rest of it, the Israelis really wanted this deal for Gaza to the point where Netanyahu finally stood his ground against that part of his coalition.
- [19:16]
Aviv
So none of that was on offer. And almost nothing said about this Israeli government, which I have criticized constantly, but almost nothing said about it by these pundits and by these activists in this mass libel campaign has been true. And if it has been true, nobody can explain what just happened.
- [19:36]
Event Moderator
In your assessment, what is the most profound way that this war the last two years has, has changed Israeli society.
- [19:52]
Co-speaker/Panelist
I think.
- [19:55]
Aviv
Reminded us that we are still tremendously vulnerable, which we'd forgotten because we were so powerful and our enemies so cowed by our great firepower, we thought. And it also reminded us that we are immensely strong because we could rise to meet enemies who had built out a campaign and a strategy to defeat us for decades. That had been their number one priority. The tunnel project of Hamas is by far the biggest thing Palestinians have ever built. All of Gaza's economy was bent to it. It is immense. It is extraordinary. It is a genuinely extraordinary achievement. Few people, nobody has ever built anything like it, even remotely like it. And it was the investment almost of the totality of Gaza's economy in building this war. And Hamas had been doing it for 12 to 15 years. I mean, Gilad Shalin in 2006 was kidnapped in one of the very first tunnel operations. So what is that, 20 years almost? And then you have Iran. Iran. Imagine being an Iranian. You have a regime that sits on top of some of the wealthiest areas on this earth in terms of energy. Iran should be one of the richest countries in the world. But they're so unbelievably extreme and radicalized and also just incompetent and stupid. I mean, it's got to be embarrassing to be an Iranian general right now.
- [21:42]
Co-speaker/Panelist
Literally, to walk in the street, you.
- [21:43]
Aviv
Feel like you have. You should feel like you have to apologize to everybody.
- [21:47]
Co-speaker/Panelist
Not for oppressing them all, for failing. Your excuse for oppressing Iran, your excuse for wasting the economy of Iran all those decades on an insane regional adventure, was that you were going to defeat the Zionist entity, prove that the Shia can do what the Sunni couldn't for a hundred years, and begin the new and great Islamic return into history as a great, conquering, confident power instead of the last couple centuries of Islam, which feels like weakness and retreat. You were that. That's what you were. The revolutionary regime of Iran was going to defeat Israel and it spent a lot everything. It built armies only tailored to that. The proxy system was so expensive, Iran never bothered to build an air force. Please go home and Google the Iranian air force.
- [22:37]
Aviv
I am not exaggerating.
- [22:38]
Co-speaker/Panelist
It is an air force that can do anything except fly. And there's a reason for it. Because it had spent the entirety of its efforts on the proxy strategy. Because the destruction of Israel was a cornerstone of its theology, not strategy. Israel has zero relevance to Iran strategically. Literally no relevance of any kind. There's no border there. There's no interests in Israel, nothing. If anything, there's some Persians, Jews in Israel who would love to visit Iran and spend some shekels in Iran, which, given the state of Iran's currency, they could use. The point is.
- [23:15]
Aviv
All these enemies had spent a generation preparing our destruction and they fell like dominoes the second we stood up. We learned that too. So we learned that you can never underestimate the enemy. They will actually come for You Hamas was willing to have this war. It would not have built 500km of tunnels under Gaza if it didn't expect this exact kind of war. And it would not have kept every one of Gaza's children out of those tunnels by force for the two years that have just passed. If it did not expect this exact kind of war, it built this exact war. It was willing to destroy God's on the altar of destroying Israel. Iran was willing to sacrifice Iran's economy for two generations on the altar of destroying Israel. And still we toppled them as soon as we understood that. So I think we discovered that we are vulnerable. And that, by the way, probably is the reason we also then discovered, remembered that we are strong.
- [24:15]
Event Moderator
Now. We are basically in an election year.
- [24:21]
Aviv
In Israel or here in Israel.
- [24:26]
Event Moderator
So it will have to have. It will have to happen within a year. But you may inform us, it may happen even earlier. What is your best guess? Who will be the. The next prime minister?
- [24:43]
Aviv
I hate this question because if I get it right, okay, he was the expert, he came in from Israel, he got it right. If I get it wrong, you'll start wondering if I understand Israeli politics.
- [24:54]
Event Moderator
Nobody remember the year.
- [24:55]
Aviv
Nobody remember what I said. It's going on on my own podcast. How are people not going to. I'll put it this way, there is good reason to think that elections are coming sooner rather than later. The Netanyahu, as I said, his poles are doing better after the ceasefire and also he is really, really in a pickle with the draft law. Aria Dairy trying to help Netanyahu out by having Shah support the Bismuth version of the draft law. If it's all Chinese, don't worry about it. The more pro Haredi version of the draft law has actually massively led to a rebellion within Shas among many Shas rabbis against Arya Dairy. So there's the tension between Likud and the Haredi parties and the Haredi community and Likud's actual voters. I'm talking about ordinary people. Never mind. It's a derry. They could agree on anything. But Likud voters are overrepresented in the soldiers who have served in the last two years. And ultra Orthodox voters, I would say less so Shas, although also Shas obviously is less represented. But more Shas voters go to the army than on the Ashkenazi Haredi side. It's so great to be in a room and I could just throw these words around. You can't do that in like, you know, NBC. So there they really that gap is huge. It's deep, it's painful. And if Netanyahu passes any kind of draft law that his people can live with, he has probably lost a significant number of Haredi votes. I mean, he'll lose the rabbis. It doesn't matter. If UTJ desperately wants to send the coalition, if the Gerar Rebbe doesn't let them, they won't. And so they have real, genuine problem with the draft law. We're just talking politics here, right? Not what I think should happen as a voter, as an Israeli, so just the politics of it. So Netanyahu will probably need to go to an election before passing a draft law. And then his excuse to the Supreme Court that it isn't advancing is that we're in an election. And so it's probably going to be sooner rather than later. That's my guess. And if it's sooner, if Netanyahu does do that, which is the politically wise thing to do, by the way, the other side is already setting up an election on the draft law. I don't know. If you saw Yair Lapid's speech two weeks ago, raise your hand if you know what I'm talking about. Okay, so the people raising their hands, you remember it because it shocked you and your socks came off, you were so shocked. What did Lapid say? He said, if you don't serve, you don't vote. What? No.
- [27:40]
Co-speaker/Panelist
What?
- [27:41]
Aviv
Don't serve, you don't vote. We have exemptions for artists, extraordinary athletes. We have exemptions for pacifists.
- [27:53]
Co-speaker/Panelist
We don't have a lot of pacifists because we're in the Middle east, but we have exemptions for them.
- [27:58]
Aviv
You don't serve, you don't vote. Lapid himself is a liberal, deep liberal. All his life he's been a liberal. Why is he suddenly staking out this amazingly anti liberal, rather extraordinary, shocking position? Because he wants a clear cut election that is only a referendum on the draft law. Do the Haredim need to serve? That's it. He wants the election to be about nothing else, because he's not sure he can win any other election. And he is sure that he can divide Likud if that's what the election is about. And Netanyahu therefore must avoid that being the topic of the election at all costs. He wants to run on Iran because he did a great job in Iran. So that's what he wants to run on. So I suspect, because I'm already having these conversations and because Yair Lapid is already staking out insane positions, he doesn't believe in. And because Benjamin Netanyahu has to pass a real breaking point with the Haredi parties, he can't afford going into an election that the election is coming sooner if it is sooner. Netanyahu's path. So in a parliamentary system, it's not about who wins. There's no race for prime minister, there's race for coalitions. And when you have a lot of parties like us, unlike you, we have a lot of parties. So it becomes this complicated question of the mathematical path. Netanyahu's path is shorter in every poll, by the way, every poll. In two years he's lost. Most Israelis don't want him as prime minister. But everyone else would have a harder time putting together a coalition, which is why his inner right wing religious coalition has to be splintered for anyone else to have a chance. That's Lapid's calculation. And the one thing it can be splintered on is the draft.
- [29:43]
Event Moderator
And you assume that the sort of anti baby bloc will remain firm, that nobody will after the elections when we get again the sort of neither side is really able to build a coalition. If we get that kind of result again, you think they will remain.
- [30:04]
Aviv
Benny Gantz is now trying, has been trying to stake out a middle ground to be the kingmaker, so to speak, as Bennett was in the Bennett lapid government. In the Bennett. Yeah, the Bennett lapid government. And because Benny Gantz is trying to stake out that middle ground, Benny Gantz is polling below the electoral threshold. There's very little appetite today for people crossing sides that way. In other words, taking the votes of one side and moving to the other. There's very little appetite today. Israelis are. How should I put this? This is a really corrupt government and it is a really pathetic political class. I'm in a shoe wearing a keeper talking politics. I apologize, but it's his fault. If you followed all the different sagas. Netanyahu trying to appoint his son to a senior position. His son who spent the entirety of this war in a Miami hotel to a senior World Zionist Organization position through Likud and Duduum Salim, a senior Likud guy and a minister in this government who's literally decided to appoint all of his friends to all the government corporations that his technical ministerial post allows him to do. And just one, you know, there's another minister who has a corruption scandal and the he said root corruption scandal that just broke. And the unbelievable point of the military advocate general turning out to have lied to the Supreme Court. There's a very serious legal question about what happened at Svetiman. But the top lawyer of the army lying to the Supreme Court is a fundamental breaking of everything. The army's top lawyer is the last lawyer who should ever be allowed to lie to the Supreme Court. That's the most dangerous breakdown of that particular hierarchy you can imagine. And so we are ruled by an elite that every single Israeli went through October 7th. Every single Israeli, every single one Haredi Israelis mobilized every medical charity they control and run and built. And Haredim in Israel built the biggest and most extraordinary medical charities in the country that aren't billion dollar hospitals. Everybody mobilized, everybody unified. Except the political class, except that elite that never stopped fighting its petty little wars. And there is a desire first of all, to start to get to serious about some of the problems that have to be fixed. The draft law is a real problem. If you've done 150 days a year in two years, that's a problem. Your family life is collapsing, your business is collapsing. And entire sections of the country, mainly because of political reasons, thinks that they don't have to serve while they do have to be protected. And so a lot of that stuff's breaking down. A lot of the willingness to tolerate that kind of politics is breaking down. I think this is a good thing. I think that this generation of venal, by the way we have, it's just, it's a historic thing. If you know the story of Israeli generations. Ben Gurion, I don't want to talk too much on this. I apologize. Okay. Ben Gurion was like massively corrupt. The state owned all the businesses. I guess that's Marxism, that's not corruption.
- [33:34]
Co-speaker/Panelist
But he would appoint party officials, party.
- [33:37]
Aviv
Apparatchiks, to run all the major industries. But he was never personally corrupt. It was corruption for the party. He actually ended his extraordinary political career.
- [33:49]
Co-speaker/Panelist
Amazing, like historic political career as like a working class, like a poor guy.
- [33:55]
Aviv
Without a, without any money in his bank account. Menachem Begin from that generation, ends his prime ministership and retires to a rented apartment in a working class neighborhood of Jerusalem.
- [34:09]
Co-speaker/Panelist
He doesn't even own his apartment. And Likud was not corrupt under beginning.
- [34:15]
Aviv
But it was for the party, it was not for the man. And the next generation is Barack Olmert Bibi.
- [34:24]
Co-speaker/Panelist
There, there's nothing they've ever seen that.
- [34:27]
Aviv
They haven't tried to grab.
- [34:29]
Co-speaker/Panelist
It's like the culture and there's constant.
- [34:31]
Aviv
Scandals and you know, my only Bibi's.
- [34:34]
Co-speaker/Panelist
Been in it longer. So like there's a lot more scandals, but it's the culture of that entire.
- [34:37]
Aviv
Generation, this generation of Israelis, the 30 year olds, the 40 year olds, the kids who went into Gaza and the kids who overflew Iran, they know that they are better people, more extraordinary people, more giving people than the generation that makes the decisions today in Israel. And when they're swept away, you will see a better Israel, a less corrupt Israel, an Israel that learned a lot of those lessons. So I forget what the question was, but I wanted to tell you that.
- [35:09]
Event Moderator
It was a very good answer, much better than the question. Last question for me. So are there new people coming from a new generation? Will we see some of them in the next election, or will we still have to live with this generation and maybe the next time around?
- [35:26]
Aviv
We don't really have party systems open to new people. So most of the parties in the Knesset are internally dictatorships. I mean, Yair Lapid decides who's on the list. Victor Lieberman decides who's on the list. Aria Derry pretends to ask the rabbis who's on the list, but actually decides who's on the list. And there are places where there are primaries. On the far left, there are real primaries, because, you know, on the far left, people of principle, we make fun of them, but they're the only people.
- [35:56]
Co-speaker/Panelist
Who will actually have real primaries, even.
- [35:58]
Aviv
If it means they lose.
- [35:59]
Co-speaker/Panelist
That's more important, the principle.
- [36:02]
Event Moderator
Likud has primaries.
- [36:03]
Co-speaker/Panelist
Likud has primaries.
- [36:04]
Aviv
It's the biggest party with primaries, but not really.
- [36:08]
Co-speaker/Panelist
And the reason I say not really.
- [36:10]
Aviv
Is that 15 years ago, Likud had these immensely strong institutions, real debates at.
- [36:17]
Co-speaker/Panelist
The Likud Central Committee, there would be.
- [36:19]
Aviv
A debate about, for example, when Sharon was head of Likud going to the disengagement. There were debates in the Central Committee of Likud, the 3,000 people in the Likud Central Committee, who at different points in time either said the Knesset list or other things. And they had real debates about the disengagement.
- [36:34]
Co-speaker/Panelist
And Sharon was losing ground to Netanyahu's faction in the debates.
- [36:38]
Aviv
In the actual. Can you imagine a debate today within Likud? There are no debates today within Likud. Everything is what Netanyahu needs. The Secretariat, Israel Katz, the current Defense Minister, one of the most important things he did at one point in his political career was demand to become the head of the Secretariat. They ran the entire Likud election ground game. Likud no longer really has activists standing at, what do they call them? The circles? Roundabout, thank you.
- [37:10]
Co-speaker/Panelist
Standing at every roundabout in Israel, holding.
- [37:11]
Aviv
Up signs like they used to 15 years ago. Likud today is basically a Twitter campaign. Likud's political campaigns today are basically more social media than anything else, run very, very centrally from Netanyahu. And by the way, that weakening of those institutions within Likud, and just to clarify, almost every other party in the Knesset is worse. Okay? I mean that very seriously. I come at Likud just to show you that even Likud, with that old tradition instituted by Begin himself, there's this complete loyalty, complete unity, no real debates, no real serious institutions. And so where would the new critic, young person who wants to rebuild things differently, run things differently, throw out the corruption, throw out the ministers who think they're in politics to appoint their friends to government companies? Where would such a person even begin in Likud politics? You used to rise up the Likud list from chapters. Yariv Levine, the Justice Minister, he begins his career as the Tel Aviv chapter of Likud and rises up through the chapter and then rises up to the national list and rises up, et cetera. Many of Likud's people rose up through the chapters. There are almost no chapters anymore. It's just this centralized, basically, PR campaign now, the Likud infrastructure. And so young people can't really come in, not on the left, not on the right. And I think that therefore we're going to see them kept out just long enough for them to get very, very angry. In 20 years, you're going to hear about how Israeli politics is really destabilizing because of a mass movement to throw out the corrupt morons who run the place. And everything's going to be shocking, and you're going to be startled, and there's going to be mass protests and prime ministers will resign, and there'll be a new politics with new political parties, and everybody's going to be surprised. And then I'm going to pull this little recording out and I'm going to say, yeah, so it's not a politics that can absorb new people, unfortunately. But, you know, these new people, this new generation, they're Israelis. They're going to find a way.
- [39:09]
Event Moderator
All right, now it's up to you to ask Khabib anything. Let's collect maybe three, four questions and make it questions. And not too long statements. Young men here from.
- [39:22]
Aviv
Okay, easy questions. All right. There's a debate about Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority. There's a debate happening in the Western press that is incomprehensible to me. It's a debate about whether the Israelis are willing to have The Palestinian Authority come into Gaza as part of the Gaza governance. And there is this assumption. I heard some pundits say this, maybe to Piers Morgan, I don't know, whatever. Yeah, guys, don't take this as racist, but all Western pundits look the same to me. I don't. I don't. I have trouble distinguishing between them.
- [40:02]
Co-speaker/Panelist
But the point is that this discussion.
- [40:05]
Aviv
About will Netanyahu let them or not, because they want to divide Gaza. And. And to me, that's all ridiculous. The only thing the PA could give us, Israelis, Palestinians, everyone on earth who wants a better future for Gaza, the only thing it could give is a replacement for Hamas. And the only thing it can never be is a replacement for Hamas. And it has nothing to do with us Israelis suspecting that they actually kind of agree with Hamas on every single thing except whether to fight a war now, like that's the only issue they disagree with him on. It has nothing to do with that. Palestinians deeply, profoundly, viscerally despise the pa. They hate the pa.
- [40:54]
Co-speaker/Panelist
They, by the way, think Hamas created.
- [40:57]
Aviv
A disaster and has no future other than disaster. But it's a disaster born of dignity.
- [41:03]
Co-speaker/Panelist
Of the dignity of never cowing, never falling, never failing, always standing for the.
- [41:08]
Aviv
Idea that the Jews can all be kicked out eventually. That's at least a dignified disaster. What the PA offers is an undignified, petty kleptocracy disaster. The PA decided to be, instead of being what everybody wishes a Palestinian potential state would be, which is any kind of success story. Any kind of success story, okay, doesn't have to be Switzerland. It could be Tunisia. Refuse to be anything like it. And so if Mahmoud Abbas is polling among Palestinians in the single digits, how.
- [41:46]
Co-speaker/Panelist
The hell is he going to take over Gaza?
- [41:48]
Aviv
How's he actually going to do that if he comes and takes over Gaza? Because you need a Palestinian governor of Gaza. It shouldn't be Tony Blair. I don't know if it should be or not, but I could see a Palestinian feeling that way. He would actually create more opposition to him than Tony Blair would at this point in Gaza. And because Tony Blair would at least be seen as an outsider bringing in a lot of money, whereas Mahmoud Abbas would be seen as an insider stealing all the money. And, and so there is simply. It has not like, yes, if you then get to the Israeli government, you will encounter a lot of Likud, certainly smallridge in Ben vere saying the PAs cannot possibly rule. But you're never even going to get to the point where the Israelis have A say because Palestinians will reject him outright. So everyone who pins their hopes on him is wishcasting. They're just. They're hoping against hope. You know, that feeling that if they just hope enough, this might be the heart of prayer. So I don't want to say too much bad against wish casting. I'm just saying that was a joke. I'm allowed to make jokes like that. My dad's a rabbi. Okay, moving on. It's a disaster and it can't possibly work. And it has nothing to do with Israelis. Once Israelis are in the picture once again, it can't possibly work. But just.
- [43:04]
Co-speaker/Panelist
You don't even have to adopt the.
- [43:06]
Aviv
Israeli government's position whatsoever. You'll never get there. Palestinians will convince you he can't do it. What do I see when I look at Britain? He can get me in trouble. I'm going to lose friends over this. But it's what I see when I look at Britain is that Israel's GDP per capita has surpassed Britain's because Britain is in decline, and it's a managed decline. You're doing it very well. But there simply isn't any serious measure in which this country isn't poorer than it was and going to get poorer still. And it has something to do. You know, you're having such a fascinating and intense debate about identity and immigration, and I really am just too ignorant to show up and tell you anything about that debate. I really just don't know enough. But I have to say that there is something I do see here which I see everywhere else. So I'm going to allow myself to talk about it. Every time I hear Britain's debate between English identity or British identity and multiculturalism, I am deeply confused. And sometimes I'm confused because I generally don't understand. And sometimes if we're confused when we look at something, it's because the thing itself is confused about what it is. I think your debate about multiculturalism is confused. What does multiculturalism mean? It means that Englishness, if you will, or Britishness, is an empty vessel in which cultures live together. Some tension, some cooperation, whatever. But the vessel of being a country, that vessel is neutral, is empty of content. I'm an Israeli Jew. One of the most precious things you could give your children is a thousand years of culture. It's who you are and who you have been. Now, I'm an Israeli Jew who firmly believes that a nation can be multiracial. I'm a little worried about multicultural. I'm a little worried about multicultural because culture is the single most important decision decider of human behavior. It's the single most important thing to having a cohesive country. No culture is better than other cultures. I don't know if you know the reason we Israelis are so happy in the international happiness indices and secular Israelis have higher birth rates than any developed nation in the world. Has a lot to do with us.
- [45:45]
Co-speaker/Panelist
Being kind of quite Middle Eastern Mizrahi culture.
- [45:50]
Aviv
Arab culture in Israel is one of our superpowers. It's not that other cultures are bad, it's that not having your own, not believing it. There has been an elite project.
- [46:01]
Co-speaker/Panelist
I told you I'm going to lose.
- [46:02]
Aviv
Friends, but I'll just lose them now and do it fast. Pull off the band aid. There has been an elite project in Britain, in America, in Canada generally in the English speaking world, and also France and Germany and other places in the west. To empty cult, empty identity of distinctiveness and culture. And into that empty vessel pour any old random thing. And I'm not talking about human beings, I'm talking about literally any idea unexamined. And so you now have, in Britain you have a very small minority of radical Islamists. They are tiny.
- [46:41]
Co-speaker/Panelist
They're not. Most Muslims are not. They're tiny and they can run your streets because everybody else is an empty vessel. You look at an idea and you say that's not me, that's not us. And you spit it out. But if you don't know what me and us is, you can't look at.
- [47:03]
Aviv
An idea and say that.
- [47:05]
Co-speaker/Panelist
I sometimes think that the tension between.
- [47:07]
Aviv
Israeli Jews and the rest of the west is that we know exactly who we are. And to Westerners who have been trained by generations of elites to not know who you are because of a misunderstanding of what happened in the 20th century and because of a misunderstanding of where colonialism comes from or where World War II came from as thinking too much about your own culture or thinking your culture was too good. Chauvinism, loving your own culture too much is what caused the Holocaust. Chauvinism is not what caused the Holocaust. Very specific mental models of othering, of very specific communities and groups that are based in an ancient tradition of how exactly you understand yourself in relation to those groups caused the Holocaust. Germanness did not cause the Holocaust. There's a beautiful book, the Pity of it all by Amos Alone, Israeli historian turned anti Zionist, but nevertheless a smart guy. That was a joke. Don't worry about it.
- [48:09]
Co-speaker/Panelist
They don't all land.
- [48:12]
Aviv
Amos Alone in the pity of it All. Basically, it's A beautiful history, first of all. But he basically tries to argue that it could have ended differently. I agree with him, by the way. That's a stupid argument for anti Zionism because it didn't end differently.
- [48:28]
Co-speaker/Panelist
It ended exactly the way it ended.
- [48:31]
Aviv
But it could have ended differently.
- [48:32]
Co-speaker/Panelist
It isn't inherently biologically German to commit a holocaust.
- [48:38]
Aviv
And the idea that you would then no longer have Germanness as the answer to World War II or to the 20th century is itself fraught with all the problems that frankly, Europe faces today. And I want to say one last thing. You are not as moral and kind and gentle as you believe. And there is real danger in what is happening now in the West. And what do I mean by that? When Europe turned Nice after World War II, as a lesson of the terrible, terrible tumultuousness and massacres and genocides of World War II, Europe decided, from now on, we're going to be nice. You know why they turned nice? Do you know why they suddenly had tolerance for their minorities? Because there were no minorities left. That's when Europe turned Nice.
- [49:25]
Co-speaker/Panelist
There's nothing special about post war Europe except that they had succeeded in the destruction of minorities, sometimes by drawing borders. That's the good way. And sometimes by mass expulsions, slightly less good way. And sometimes by mass genocide. Europe did not ever get tested. Europe has spent 80 years thinking it's now the most moral place in the world without ever actually testing itself. And now suddenly Europe has large minorities. What's happening to European politics? They're radicalizing. Le pen can win 40% of an election in France, something nobody could imagine 25 years ago. Now we're testing.
- [50:05]
Aviv
Europe needs confidence. The west needs to know who it is, what it is.
- [50:08]
Co-speaker/Panelist
Anybody can come in.
- [50:10]
Aviv
Sure.
- [50:11]
Co-speaker/Panelist
Let them in, know who you are, and they become part of you. You know that Hindus in America are now socioeconomically higher than Jews in America.
- [50:23]
Aviv
It's a selection thing. They're taking Silicon Valley is salaries.
- [50:27]
Co-speaker/Panelist
They're just drawing all of the brains out of India.
- [50:29]
Aviv
Not all the brains. There's a lot of brains left in India.
- [50:31]
Co-speaker/Panelist
I'm just saying it's this. But they're coming in and they're becoming Americans. Profoundly conservative Indian American politicians. They're joining deeply the culture. They want to be that don't forget.
- [50:45]
Aviv
Who you are and immigration is safe. Forget who you are. And you are literally asking not for the immigrant to be the problem.
- [50:52]
Co-speaker/Panelist
You will be the problem in 20 years. You will be the thing turning on.
- [50:57]
Aviv
The minorities in 20 years. If you really continue with this project of not knowing who you are. Nobody's ever going to talk to me again. Thank you. Yossi Coin is a handsome spy. I have never seen him do anything else. I cannot testify to whether he'll be a good politician.
- [51:20]
Co-speaker/Panelist
His book is a book. I know nothing bad about him. There's apparently some, some Qatar connection, but.
- [51:30]
Aviv
So many people have a Qatar connection.
- [51:32]
Co-speaker/Panelist
Now, I barely know whether to hold it against him.
- [51:35]
Aviv
So, yeah, I don't know much about Yossi Cohen. I'm not sure Yossi Cohen knows exactly what he wants to be.
- [51:43]
Co-speaker/Panelist
He wants to be Prime Minister.
- [51:44]
Aviv
He doesn't quite have that path. He isn't building a campaign ground game in Likud, so he's not actually. He doesn't want to get dirty in politics, but he wants to win the political game. So many talented politicians are willing to get their hands dirty that I don't know if that's a winning strategy. Haredim and the future of Israeli society this is the painful one. It's really easy to tell you about the breakdown of your society. It's a. This, this hurts. I, I'm going to put it real simple. I am very optimistic and confident that it's going to be okay. And here's why. Because I am completely convinced that it is going to completely collapse. And that's not a bad thing. Anybody here who's ever tried to raise kids knows that sometimes you just got to let them fall. Most of the time you just got to let them fall. They really need it. They deeply need it. They need to find out they can stand back up. Here's the thing about Israeli society. We have only ever fixed anything when we catastrophically failed and collapsed. So my favorite example on this is the inflation of the 1970s and 80s. Between 77 and 85, we had eight years of triple digit inflation, triple digit per year, meaning everybody's life savings were wiped out by year two. But they still weren't earning enough to feed themselves in year 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. And three years into this horrific fiscal crisis mainly caused monetary crisis, mainly caused by the politicization of monetary policy. The bank of Israel was forced by law, had to set monetary policy by what the politicians wanted. Okay, you guys should be laughing because of course the bank of England was established in 1688 and the Americans did this with Alexander Hamilton. And the Israelis in the 80s still have a Bank of Israel subject to politicians because Jews are good with money apparently and the SD root controlled industries still. It was still very much the Mapai economy that the Ben Gurion, Mapai had built and the economy was in free fall. And in 1980 they threw out the lira and issued the shekel to try and stem the bleeding. And it didn't work. And the shekel basically continued to. It was literally 250% inflation the next year, if memory serves. And so five years later, it's such a bad emergency because we're eight years.
- [54:21]
Co-speaker/Panelist
Into triple digit inflation.
- [54:22]
Aviv
They finally get around to a national unity government, an emergency government that brings in some experts from America, including a guy named Stanley Fisher, an important economist who would later be the bank of Israel governor, many, many years later of an economy he basically saved. And they enacted drastic reforms, including limiting the power of istadroop, including that's the big labor union. For the one person in the room who came with a friend who doesn't know who that is, that's the big Israeli sort of umbrella labor union, including the bank of Israel law which was passed in 1985 which made the bank of Israel independent of the government, including many, many of these reforms. And inflation was finally. And by the way, they threw out the shekel and issued the new shekel.
- [55:07]
Co-speaker/Panelist
They didn't give it a new name because they weren't sure this new currency.
- [55:10]
Aviv
Would last a year.
- [55:11]
Co-speaker/Panelist
It wasn't worth setting up a committee to find a name. And that's how bad things were.
- [55:17]
Aviv
And so the Israeli economy's bottom completely. I mean it's hard to imagine the.
- [55:23]
Co-speaker/Panelist
Competent Israel we have today, one of the most fiscally responsible countries in the world. Our debt to GDP is like 60%.
- [55:30]
Aviv
That's almost German levels of responsibility. They wish this was like 10 years ago.
- [55:38]
Co-speaker/Panelist
We're an incredibly fiscally responsible country to.
- [55:41]
Aviv
The point where in the 2009 fiscal collapse around the world, Israel's economy didn't shrink. It stopped growing for one year and then kept growing. And one of the reasons was we weren't leveraged. Everybody has to put 30% down on a mortgage, so we didn't have mortgages like 98.5% leverage. And all these many, many reasons. Israel's economy, Israel's fiscal laws, everybody's falling asleep. This is the important thing. Israel's fiscal laws are very conservative and very responsible. That's not because Jews are good with money. That's because we're post traumatic from complete collapse. When did we build the astonishing intelligence system that we have? World leading, world leading. The Iran war was what you can do with human intelligence. MI6, MI5 barely touch human intelligence anymore. The CIA is almost entirely invested in signals intelligence and cyber and AI and all that. Israel still believes in spies.
- [56:34]
Co-speaker/Panelist
Deeply believes in it. And the Iran war is what you.
- [56:36]
Aviv
Can do if you have real spies. Seriously, and you've invested in and thought about it carefully for 50 years, what built that intelligence system? The utter and total and existentially dangerous collapse of 73. So Israel builds world leading astonishing things.
- [56:53]
Co-speaker/Panelist
Only after, okay, we go off the cliff.
- [56:57]
Aviv
We're nearing the cliff, nearing the cliff.
- [56:59]
Co-speaker/Panelist
Go over the cliff. We're falling, we're falling. We're still bickering about whose fault it is. We're falling, we're falling a centimeter and a half above ground. Well, who am I kidding? We smash into the ground, look around and say, well, that hurt, and pick.
- [57:15]
Aviv
Up the pieces and build the best things in the world. So that's our system. The Haredi economy cannot survive. They cannot survive. They literally cannot feed themselves. They have to work. Half of them work.
- [57:27]
Co-speaker/Panelist
Half of them work. Half of them work.
- [57:30]
Aviv
You don't get to not say that. I'm talking about the men, like 80% of the women work. But that hides that.
- [57:37]
Co-speaker/Panelist
A lot of them work in the.
- [57:38]
Aviv
Community, in very low paying, basically teaching jobs in their own schools. And so even that's not very productive work. And it's not well trained work. And they don't have the 10%, 20% that you need for a successful productive economy that go off to learning university and work in high tech. There are some inroads into high tech by the Haredim, but because the population's growing so fast, they're actually shrinking as a percentage, even though they're growing in real numbers. And so this is a community that simply cannot feed itself and demands the right to take everybody else's money so that it can choose not to work in mass numbers as a cultural choice. Guess what?
- [58:12]
Co-speaker/Panelist
That's going to fail as soon as Bibi's gone.
- [58:14]
Aviv
As soon as Likut's coalition breaks up, and it might even be before Bibi's.
- [58:18]
Co-speaker/Panelist
Gone, and it might even be literally the next coalition with Likud in charge.
- [58:22]
Aviv
Because Likud might choose a centrist party because its own voters might say, look, we're not so scared of the left anymore. The Haredim didn't stand with us in the war, and all of that's all true all at once. It's going to collapse on them. They are building something they know is going to collapse because their own politics are so used to other people protecting them, other people paying for them. It's not Their fault. Any group of people on this earth, if you pay for them the way we have paid for Haredim in Israel, you will ruin them in exactly this way. There isn't even the gratitude. One of the greatest Mitzvot is Hakarat Hatov. Recognition of the good. There isn't gratitude. There was this big ethos at the birth of the state of the Haredi community that was 3% of the country at the time that they had to rebuild everything that was shattered and lost in the Holocaust. Most of the Jews killed in the Holocaust spoke Yiddish. Most of the Jews killed in the Holocaust were traditional Jews. They were not Anne Frank, as Professor Darahorn puts it very poignantly. They were not like Westerners, they looked like Haredim. And this idea that they have to rebuild. But folks, in the last 77 years, they have rebuilt the Mir Yeshiva. Today in Jerusalem is 5,000 students. The Mir Yeshiva in miracles and Its height was 400.
- [59:41]
Co-speaker/Panelist
They have rebuilt tenfold. And it's gorgeous and it's breathtaking and Zionism gave them that gift. And they should work, pay taxes, serve. If you come to me as a.
- [59:55]
Aviv
Community and you say to me, I can't serve in the military for religious reasons, I believe you.
- [59:59]
Co-speaker/Panelist
I don't even need to know your religion. I believe you.
- [60:03]
Aviv
But then you run massive medical charities. Haredim can be medics. We know it because they run the second biggest medical service in Israel, Zaka. And it's extraordinary. Why can't you then come and say any kid, any 19 year old who isn't studying full time in Yeshiva has to volunteer in a national service, civilian, non military component of the medical corps of the idf. That doesn't at all work with the military, coordinates with the military, but isn't military.
- [60:34]
Co-speaker/Panelist
And literally just spend the two years that an infantry kid from Tel Aviv.
- [60:38]
Aviv
Is in the infantry, this kid will.
- [60:40]
Co-speaker/Panelist
Spend as a medic, taking care of soldiers, taking care of car accidents, whatever, a national service. If the Haredi leadership came to me.
- [60:47]
Aviv
And said we can't do military, we can't religiously, so we will find ways to serve as meaningfully as the military. Like, for example, religious Zionist girls usually don't serve, but they are thousands of teachers in underprivileged schools.
- [61:06]
Co-speaker/Panelist
They volunteer as teachers for the same period of time that secular girls serve.
- [61:10]
Aviv
In the military, I think that would be extraordinary. But they're not doing that. They're not looking for solutions. They're looking to close ranks. They're looking to not serve. They're doing exactly what happens when you give your kids everything and they hate you for it, and that's the problem. And it's going to break down their literal economy. They're 13% of the country. We literally can't afford it anymore. It will crash, it will collapse, it will be horrifying, it'll be awful. And then we will build something great and beautiful. It's very easy to fix this, but all the politics have to crash and burn for it to happen. So I'm extremely optimistic that a catastrophe is ahead of us and then we're going to do the right thing.
- [61:58]
Event Moderator
Let me just follow up on this. But the statistics that you just rattled off, the labor participation rate, isn't that already a sign that they have already somewhat crashed and are already, at least in some aspects, have changed their lives? Okay, these are low paid jobs, but they are working. This is. There's a tremendous development compared to 20 years ago.
- [62:23]
Aviv
I think, actually I have to check that. I think the numbers are in retreat in part because the numbers going to work are growing, but the numbers not going to work are growing faster. And it's about, I mean it's about per capita, like my tax burden to pay for their non work is growing even if more Haredim are working. So I'm a big fan of them having, you know, six kids on average. There's some towns in Israel, Haredi towns like Beitar Elite. I think the median age is 11 and a half. That's a town where the average family is nine children. It just makes me tired to say that and just I really truly am a big fan of that. But really I actually believe that that is one of the. My wife is the oldest of eight and her family is always around and it's great.
- [63:24]
Event Moderator
That's why we got them here.
- [63:26]
Aviv
This is all going to be broadcast. She's going to edit this episode. No, but I think that the really important point is you need to have a sustainable economic model and they refuse to have a sustainable, sustainable economic model. And they're going to have to. I mean, I don't know how to.
- [63:42]
Co-speaker/Panelist
Reality matters, reality, by the way, Jews.
- [63:45]
Aviv
Know that reality matters. In the end, if it's not sustainable.
- [63:47]
Co-speaker/Panelist
It'S going to crash.
- [63:49]
Event Moderator
All right, let's do at least one more round gentleman here.
- [63:56]
Aviv
Okay. Yeah, let's do an episode on Anglo Jewry. But I don't know if you're going to like it. I think Britain is less. You will like it. The Jews. I think Britain is less the hero in the story of the Jewish arrival than it pretends to itself. And I think that Britain's story of World War II, when it comes to standing Churchill, standing his ground on Hitler, he absolutely saved Europe.
- [64:34]
Host/Moderator
I don't think there's a question.
- [64:35]
Aviv
That moment when Stalin was on Hitler's side, when the Americans were off doing their thing, he saved Europe. When it comes to the Jews. Britain did everything possible to herd the Jews into the gas chambers, and they continued to do them when they found out there were gas chambers involved. And even that beautiful moment I saw last the last. You have an annual celebration of the Kindertransport. The Kindertransport were 15,000 kids saved by Britain and orphaned, in fact, in the war. Why were they orphaned? Who decided that they would be orphaned? The British saved the kids on the condition that they would be. They literally took 15,000 kids out of the control of the Nazis to save their lives. That's how they framed it to themselves, but wouldn't allow the parents to come with them because that counted as Jewish migration. The British, to save those children, orphaned those children. And the British count that to this day as their great act of charity. I have never heard a greater defense of Zionism in the history of the world than defining that as kindness. And so there's. I would be honored and delighted. And by the way, I'll get it wrong and you'll send me emails correcting me, and that'll be part of the conversation, and that'll be magnificent. Absolutely. Saudi joining the Abraham Accords. Yeah, the Saudis really kind of want to take Israel off the table. Israel is a radicalizing element in Islam. The Saudis are sick of radical Islam because radical Islam burns everything to the ground that it touches. It is unbelievably stupid and incompetent. If you had an ideology that fought a war against a few million Jews, like, 11 times in a century and lost every time, at some point, you got to say it's not a competent ideology. And that's kind of what you hear when you go to the Gulf. You don't hear from the Gulf states. There's a theological debate. There's all this. You know, it's a Salafist kind of Muslim Brotherhood line that created Hamas and Qatar with Yusuf Al Qaradawi, who. It's really adopted this particular kind of ideology. And I always tell people on the podcast, read Rashid, read the theologian in Cairo. And. And it's important and it's a. But the actual debate is, come on, like, how?
- [67:03]
Co-speaker/Panelist
Like, we would like a competent Arab.
- [67:05]
Aviv
Country in the Arab world. Muslim Societies are basically failed one version or another, have failed apologies to like Morocco, really apologies, because it's different. But by and large, that's the story. And they're sick and tired of it. And so they want competence.
- [67:20]
Co-speaker/Panelist
And one of the signals, correlators, correlates.
- [67:25]
Aviv
Slash causes maybe of failure, is obsession with Jews. And what's interesting, hearing a Saudi or an Emirati talk that way, is that you. That's Ruth Weiss talks that way. Professor Ruth Weiss, one of the great American Jewish intellectuals who is a great scholar of Yiddish literature and Hebrew literature, but also a great scholar of anti Semitism. And she says, you know, in 1948, the Arab countries, they had all just been de. Imperialized, decolonized in the case of North Africa, de this, de that. And they were suddenly independent and they had choices. And they could have chosen to do the smart thing, which is take the enormous resources given to them by God and build a marvelous extraordinary civilization, or they could obsess about Jews for 70.
- [68:15]
Co-speaker/Panelist
Years and ruin everything and just use.
- [68:17]
Aviv
It as a justification for terrible dictatorships and horrific wars and fail at everything. And they chose the second. And so the people going to the Abraham Accords are really keen on choosing the first.
- [68:30]
Co-speaker/Panelist
But my point is it's not about Jews for them. It's about how talking about Jews is coded in Muslim Arab societies as failure, as a thing that will ultimately lead us to failure.
- [68:41]
Aviv
And so they're absolutely coming to the Abraham Accords. They need a political window to do it. And it's hard after the Gaza war to find that political window. And that's completely understandable. And of course, we know from Sinwar's own letters that one of the triggers for the timing of October 7 was that it was imminent in his view. And I have no reason to suspect that's not true. Is what happens on X real? That's a great question for those of us spending an unhealthy amount of time.
- [69:10]
Host/Moderator
On X.
- [69:12]
Aviv
I think what's happening on X is real. If you learn, if you. I kind. I grew up on Herzl.
- [69:23]
Event Moderator
Which gives.
- [69:23]
Aviv
Me tremendous advantages and maybe some disadvantages in thinking about Jewish questions. Herzl looked around at a society that was electing anti Semitic mayors like Carl Luger, a society that was organizing itself around the. Around ideas about Jews. And he was astonished. He was astonished at the sheer raw boredom of people to organize their lives around the Jew next door. Like, why would Viennese society, when they're still in Austro Hungarian Empire, care about Jews? Like who you guys know Jews, right? They're not that interesting. Like why? Like, imagine organizing around the Dutch. The Dutch are really getting a hammering today.
- [70:07]
Co-speaker/Panelist
Like, why would you organize your society.
- [70:09]
Aviv
Around hatred of the Dutch? It doesn't make sense. And Herzl begins to analyze it, and he talks about how Christians in European Christian societies understood their position based on the legal, you know, the legal suppression of Jews. Jews are at the bottom, so they're at the top. And when that's washed away in emancip, the Christians need to bring to Christian societies, need to then bring in social and cultural ways of pushing the Jews back down to the bottom because they no longer have the legal structures. And so it's about what the Christian is as he defines himself, not about the Jew. He's talking about 19th century Vienna. Okay? He's not talking about today. Antisemitism is about me, the anti Semite, and my own story of myself. It always is. It's never about the Jew. And therefore also Herzl says there's nothing the Jew can do about it. So you leave because you can't. And it's going to end in a catastrophe. Because one of Herzl's arguments is that these psychological things, these subtle, vague, kind of fuzzy things, they build up a kind of potential energy, a kind of a cloud with tremendous electrical energy that just needs to find that spot that it can hit that triggers the outflow and the whole thing erupts. And so he says you can begin to, I'm paraphrasing obviously, because he said it in High German, but he says you can begin to see, sense the immense power building up in this psychological cloud, and it's going to end very badly. And what happens on X, what happens on Instagram, what happens on TikTok, what happens at Tucker Carlson's show, what happens when Charlie Kirk is assassinated, what happens in the marches in London. These are. On the one hand, the situation of Jews legally has never been better. On the other hand, formally on paper, on the other hand, there is a psychological energy. And when the energy erupts. And it always erupts, it always erupts. Okay, there's this idea, I forget where I learned it, of the moral entrepreneur. The moral entrepreneur is when you have a certain state of everybody morally agreeing on something, a certain sense of what the moral way of things is, the order of things is, and the reality, people's beliefs about their reality, people's actual lived experiences, slowly drift away because everything changes all the time from this accepted understanding. And pretty soon you have a disparity between what everybody knows to be true and what everybody's allowed to say or how they say or the vocabulary they have to talk about what's happening to them. And when that disparity builds, there is always the moral entrepreneur. That one person who walks over here, sometimes from the elite, sometimes from the bottom up and says, hey, none of that stuff we thought was the moral order of things is true anymore. Or maybe it never was true, this is now true. And you all know it, you all feel it. That person can be a good person or a bad person. It could be a Hitler, for example. Hitler did that. That's what Hitler did. And it can also be. Societies can also cultures can also correct to the more moral. I think Martin Luther King was that as well and created a new black middle class consciousness that profoundly changed the black American experience in a very positive way. But that moral entrepreneur corrects for that gap. There's a gap building. There's a gap. There's a gap between the reality and the vocabulary and certainly the elite vocabulary. And there will be moral entrepreneurs. And they might be evil and they might be good. And if we don't understand it, we don't see it, we don't see around corners the way Herzl saw around corners, we will be shocked when it erupts. And so we need to do that now. We need to understand what is happening to us and we need to see it and we need to prepare for it and by the way, affect it profoundly. This is the most powerful generation of Jews that has ever lived in every possible sense. The Israelis in all the sense of Israel, that Israel is powerful. And you, you in Britain, there's never been a generation of British Jews more able to affect their own fate. If you haven't yet woken up to that, it's because it's not bad enough yet. May it never be bad enough and may you all stay asleep. But if it does get bad enough, you will wake up and you need to understand and see what is happening. X is a great way to track. You'll get swept into silliness and there's a lot of bubbles. But there's a cohesive also trend and shift that we see in polls. Young people in America today, half of them, their number one source of news is TikTok according to polls and they have radicalized to the left and they have also. And nobody pays attention to this and I don't know why radicalized to the right. And so the basic truth is they've radicalized. Good luck America in 40. Like, everybody's like, aha.
- [75:00]
Co-speaker/Panelist
They're not going to love Israel anymore in 20 years. Your time is up.
- [75:03]
Aviv
Like, guys, America is headed for some really bad times that have nothing to do with, like, Israel's your smallest problem if you take seriously the polls of kids who are getting their news from it. Takedown.
- [75:13]
Co-speaker/Panelist
What happens if Israel loses America?
- [75:15]
Aviv
Was your next question. Look, I'm Israeli. I can only answer this one way. I apologize. It's going to be okay. Okay, I want to tell you a dark secret about America's relationship with Israel. Please don't tell anybody outside this room. This stays with us. When Truman recognized Israel in 1948, within 11 minutes of Israel's founding, he then said, but don't give them any guns and put us under an arms embargo in a war where the State Department's actual belief, including literally said, I think by George Marshall to Moshe Charette, was that we would lose the war and that would be an extermination war if we lost that war. And they decided to nevertheless place us under an arms embargo. And so did the British. And I don't. I don't know what to tell you. They love us enough to recognize us immediately, but then don't give us guns for that existential moment. When did America begin to deal with Israel at a strategic level, in a relationship, in an alliance level? Kennedy in the 1960s is the first president to sell U.S. missiles. And one of the reasons he's selling us these missiles is that he begins to suspect that we might be building nukes. Don't tell anybody. This is just us here. And the solution that the Kennedy administration develops to this problem of a nuclearizing Israel in the Middle East. The Arab countries have gone totally into the Soviet camp. Israel is the only country there available to the Americans. Egypt is playing both fields, but basically the Americans can't trust them. Israel is the American ally, but they don't want nukes in the Middle East. The Kennedy administration. So how do we prevent Israel from introducing nukes into the Middle East? They actually sent nuclear inspectors and the Israelis took them around on some fake visits. It was adorable. But what actually happened was Kennedy. Basically, the Kennedy administration came up with the idea of the bear hug. We don't want Israel to ever feel endangered enough to ever use a nuke. And how do we do that? We hold them close and we tell them we're protecting them. That's how it began. And it has never not been a strategic decision by America. One of the most interesting things about this theory developing on the American right as the American right radicalizes that Israel somehow controls America through aipac is that it assumes that all American administrations in about 70 years have been morons. And that's the assumption. And I don't think Americans are as dumb as conservative American patriots think America is. So that was the relationship. It was useful to America when we're not useful to America. Eisenhower didn't think we were useful to America. Eisenhower didn't like us. Eisenhower turned against us. America will turn on us. America will protect us. We don't depend on America. America only ever came to our side when we were already a major power in the region. That was useful to America. And as long as we remain a serious power, that is useful. By the way, forget the love of Americans to Israel. Israelis love for America is the permanent thing because the Israelis know something that Europeans have allowed themselves to forget. Less so Britons, but certainly continental Europeans, which is that the American led world order is the best world there has ever been. And so the Israelis love America in a way that is deep and visceral and born of the Jewish experience. In a way that America just sees Israel as just a thing that, you know, is either useful or not useful. If we lose America, it's not a disaster. It means we lose the F35s. That's an expensive thing to lose. I've lost iPads. I've never lost an F35. It's an expensive thing to lose. But then we fight harder and more fiercely. What we have actually done in the last two years, what we've done with Iran, what we've done in every war we've ever fought, basically since 73 was only used tiny fractions of our power calibrated to particular environments. We have unimaginable firepower. And if our enemies push us to the brink and we are literally against the wall and it's actually existential, we can burn the entire Middle east down without nukes. Now, we probably shouldn't. That would be a bad thing to do. But what I'm saying is that our immense firepower and also the deep friendship we have had with the west has not so much protected us as it has protected our enemies. And if America abandons us and Britain abandons us, by the way, you need us more than we need you for intelligence, for missiles. You're trying to build an iron beam. Now, ours is already deployed. Welcome to the party. But if the west abandons us, we should be more worried about our enemies than us, because they will see it as A moment of opportunity. They will do the stupid thing they always do and they will be crushed worse because we will be more desperate. So that's what I think will happen. If in other words, it's going to be okay. Israelis have a very different sense of what okay means, but it's going to be okay.
- [80:15]
Co-speaker/Panelist
There's so much here.
- [80:15]
Aviv
Consequences of a genocide campaign. The consequences of the genocide libels and the campaign. And look, the problem isn't literally the word genocide.
- [80:26]
Co-speaker/Panelist
It's that it's all the words. All the words. There's not a single word that hasn't been deployed in Israel. It's not one. Name it. You did imperialism. We're imperialists. You did colonial. France did colonialism. We're colonialists. There's not a word that we are not. And that's amazing. Think of the achievement of doing all the things, all of them. France didn't do all the things, it just did like two, we did all the things at some point.
- [80:56]
Aviv
It's ridiculous. And the tragedy of it, of course, is that it overwhelms not us, but the words like there are genocides, they're happening, they're out there. And rarely has the genocidaire been eager to get their hostages back to end the war. That is not a common feature of genocides. And rarely have the genocidaires elected three times governments to retreat and hand territory and independence to the genocide in democratic election. Like these are rare occurrences and meaning they've never happened in context of genocide.
- [81:42]
Co-speaker/Panelist
And by the way, I do not.
- [81:44]
Aviv
Tell people not to criticize Israel. I don't tell people not to be deeply set against Israel.
- [81:50]
Co-speaker/Panelist
I don't tell people not to be horrified at the Gaza war. All war is horrific. This is a kind of war that's especially horrific and you should be horrified. And there's all kinds of politics around it. Hamas wanted this war. They want to do it to my kids. They radicalize me every day. Maybe you should look at that. Maybe you should while criticizing, look at that point. That might be a significant point. But don't look away from the Gaza war. Don't think Israel's okay.
- [82:14]
Aviv
Obviously it's not okay.
- [82:15]
Co-speaker/Panelist
It's a country, it's made every mistake in the book.
- [82:19]
Aviv
But to just throw every word. There's literally academics now working in little like email groups. I mean, this is literally happening now trying to figure out if it's reasonable to accuse us of ecocide. And there's another group of academics trying to figure out if it's reasonable if they can make it stick to accuse.
- [82:40]
Co-speaker/Panelist
There'S like 11 sides now that have all been thrown at it.
- [82:44]
Aviv
How do you recover from it? This actually connects to the next question and I want to answer them together. The post World War II Golden Age for Jews is over because Israel's a global pariah. Fuck them.
- [83:08]
Co-speaker/Panelist
What?
- [83:10]
Event Moderator
What?
- [83:13]
Aviv
What did you just. What did you just say? What did you just say? You just said in your question, which is a totally reasonable. That was you, right? Totally reasonable question. Except for the premise, which we accept, which is that if Israel is evil. Let's imagine for a moment Israel is led by an evil government doing evil things. By the way, in slightly different context, I think Israel is led by a vaguely incompetent, corrupt, not always doing the right thing, government occasionally doing terrible things. I mean, I have written 1500 essays in the last 20 years. Take a look at them.
- [83:49]
Co-speaker/Panelist
They're mostly complaining.
- [83:51]
Aviv
Okay.
- [83:52]
Co-speaker/Panelist
I sometimes write essays about what we're.
- [83:54]
Aviv
Doing right, and nobody reads them. So I just.
- [83:58]
Co-speaker/Panelist
That's your fault.
- [83:59]
Aviv
The readers. But what you're saying is that if Israel is doing wrong, then it is expected, reasonable, a natural reaction to turn on the Jews in Britain. Now let's do this exercise for Muslims. What? Obviously that is a horrific thing to say.
- [84:29]
Co-speaker/Panelist
There are actual genocides by regimes in the Muslim world in the name of Islam. That's what the regimes claim. Anybody beating down the doors of the Muslim community, marching in their hands, demanding that Muslims answer for it ever. And if you suggested such a thing, they would call you a bigot. You know why? Because you'd be a horrific bigot. But guys, we can't be expected to not turn on our Jews. Look at what Israel's doing. Fuck you.
- [85:03]
Aviv
I wish I knew another answer, especially now that I realize the rabbi is sitting right.
- [85:11]
Co-speaker/Panelist
I apologize.
- [85:16]
Event Moderator
Let me intervene here just for one moment. Not for the rabbi or not just for him, but there is a special deviousness here. Because it's a lie. And because it is a lie, we Jews, those who are Zionists, stand with Israel. So what if you're a normal person? You don't know nothing about the Middle East. You hear every day, Israel is committing the most horrendous war crime. He's committing genocide. And you believe it. And I must say, at this point, I am astonished that there is still a single person out there who doesn't believe. Shows how little trust people have in the media that not everybody has been brainwashed. But if you are really convinced that Israel is committing genocide and there is a Jew over there who holds the Israeli flag up high and says, I stand with that country, then in a way it is justified, quote unquote, to be angry at that Jewish, because a Muslim here doesn't go around and say, I am. I mean, there are the extremists, Islamists who stand with Al Qaeda or whatever you want to use as the example. And that's the deviousness. And that's where the danger lies. Because if you really convince people with domestic genocide, we are guilty by association.
- [86:56]
Aviv
The people who turned on Jews don't look for the ones holding flags. Was the Manchester synagogue flying an Israeli flag? They don't look for flags and the Jewish attachment to Israel. I'll do it real simple. Raise your hand if you think Israel is doing anything wrong of any kind. Okay? 90% of you think it is and 10% of you don't raise hands. Raise your hand if the war made you uncomfortable. Not because of what other people say, because of the actual war. Raise your hand if you're not 100% sure. Bibi's decisions at every turn was the moral decision. More of you think there's a lot of hands up here, by the way, right down here. Jews have every opinion under the sun. No Jew thinks that supporting Israel means believing and agreeing with everything an Israeli government does. No Jew has ever uttered that opinion. That is a fantasy Jew that only exists in the anti Semite's imagination. Every single person in this room, because you know a lot about Israel, has a long list of complaints about Israel. And I'll tell you a secret.
- [88:07]
Co-speaker/Panelist
Every Muslim I've ever met has a.
- [88:08]
Aviv
Long list of complaints about Muslim countries and the countries they're from. Muslim countries is bigger than, you know, we're not a. We're not a missionizing religion. So the Christians and the Muslims get to have 2 billion and we get to have, you know, 10 million, 15 million. So it's a little bit of a different context, but even. But at those two different scales, the relationship is identical. Nobody thinks their side is perfect. There's never been such a person who thinks their side is perfect. And the turning on Jews, that is absolutely bigotry.
- [88:37]
Co-speaker/Panelist
By the way, if you see somebody.
- [88:40]
Aviv
Flying a Palestinian flag and you assume that they want a genocide of Jews.
- [88:48]
Co-speaker/Panelist
You might be also a bigot. It is possible to believe in the Palestinian, in Palestinian national identity without wanting.
- [88:56]
Aviv
A genocide of Jews.
- [88:58]
Co-speaker/Panelist
I know too many such Palestinians.
- [89:00]
Aviv
I grew up in Jerusalem. You can't avoid them. We can't avoid each other.
- [89:04]
Co-speaker/Panelist
To ever think that you Can't. So the person who turns on the.
- [89:09]
Aviv
Jew flying the flag, and they're not turning on the Jews flying the flag. There isn't a synagogue on earth that doesn't have guards outside. That wasn't true 15 years ago.
- [89:19]
Co-speaker/Panelist
Not one on Earth. And that was not true 15 years ago. It used to be a crazy thing. The president of Yemen used to have his special guard. Today, the Moroccan king's guard protects the tiny little leftover Jewish community that still remains in Morocco. That used to be a weird thing in the Arab world. Now it's every synagogue in New York has to have security, has to have doors that lock, has to have a.
- [89:43]
Aviv
Guard outside on Shaban.
- [89:45]
Co-speaker/Panelist
That's new.
- [89:47]
Aviv
And the libel campaign is structured for it. And I'll tell you another thing. You are a tiny people. You are 15 million on this Earth. You can't win a Twitter debate about anything. You don't have the numbers to drive the algorithm. So we don't have the numbers to drive the algorithm. We're never going to win the debate.
- [90:07]
Co-speaker/Panelist
The campaign against us is a construct that is built to explain the entirety of the world. If I'm Western academia and I'm looking at this world today, is Zionism really the number one enemy of humanity? One of the most amazing artifacts of this moment that in the future, intellectual historians and cultural historians of this moment will start books with, I promise you, is Greta Thunberg. Because 10 minutes ago, Greta Thunberg was explaining to us that we are in an existential crisis of climate change that is going to kill all of us. And then Gaza happened, and then we just. I don't know what happened to the climate. It fixed itself. This is a serious question. A serious question. Are there other problems or is there only. And then people challenge her. And apparently she said something like, israel.
- [90:58]
Aviv
Is the spearhead, the vanguard of global capitalism.
- [91:02]
Co-speaker/Panelist
So if she defeats Israel, then she defeats capitalism, and then the climate sorts itself out. What? You don't know what you're saying, you don't know things. That is not a thing. The Jews are part of a vocabulary of organizing the world into particular ways.
- [91:20]
Aviv
And categories and ways of understanding things. And I have podcast episodes about this, but I'll just send you to books by smarter people than me, and then you'll see it. And once you see it, you can't unsee it. This is foundationally antisemitism. The fact that the only war they will ever see on their phones, that a person. Again, that a person saw dead children on their phone and came out to march is the right answer to seeing those dead kids. That is decency.
- [91:49]
Co-speaker/Panelist
That the only kids they will ever see is Gaza. That some of the kids they saw were from Syria, repurposed for Gaza. And when people found out it wasn't a kid from Gaza, it was actually a kid from Syria, the image disappeared from the algorithm because it didn't matter anymore that this child was killed in the Arab world.
- [92:10]
Aviv
It only mattered if Jews did it. That is the manipulation. What should Jews do to it? You cannot stand before it, you cannot defeat it, you cannot win. It is organized. It is society organizing. On the progressive left, being anti Zionist is a pillar of identity because Zionism is police brutality. Zoran Mamdani taught us that Zionism is imperialism.
- [92:36]
Co-speaker/Panelist
Zionism is colonialism.
- [92:38]
Aviv
Zionism is settler colonialism, which is the worst kind.
- [92:41]
Co-speaker/Panelist
Zionism is genocide.
- [92:43]
Aviv
There isn't a word that Zionism isn't.
- [92:45]
Co-speaker/Panelist
And so to stand against Zionism is to stand against all evil.
- [92:49]
Aviv
How is that possible? How could a nation of refugees. Refugees be all the evil of the world? And we know how. It's exactly the same old thing. And one last point. Every racist there has ever been thought they were right. And every anti Semite in the history of Jews thought they were righteous. So the fact that they think they're right and righteous is no evidence at all. The Jews stand in the way of the redemption of the world is core dogma of early Christianity and early Islam. And it's a core dogma of Marx. And it's a core dogma of Nazism.
- [93:26]
Co-speaker/Panelist
And it's a core dogma of the progressive left today.
- [93:29]
Aviv
Some reason only Israel. Why can't, for example, the illiberalism of the Muslim world be standing in the way of the redemption of the world?
- [93:36]
Co-speaker/Panelist
Isn't that a thing? Why can't the failed states of Africa? Some states in Africa, by the way, are halfway to Norway. There's an extraordinary good story happening in Africa. Africa is a big place that only Westerners use one little word for Ghana.
- [93:51]
Aviv
Is a radically different place from Zambia. But why can't the bottom billion at the un Human Development Reports.
- [93:57]
Co-speaker/Panelist
That's what they call the really deeply.
- [94:00]
Aviv
Failed states in societies and economies. Why can't they be the problem? Why can't they be the thing we all obsess about? It's an old thing recast. And if we understand it and see it by the way, we know that we can respond to it the way the Zionists responded to it. The Zionists told us maybe they were wrong. But so Far. They're the only success story we have facing this, they told us, you cannot penetrate the fog the anti Semite builds around themselves, a fog of a story about themselves. You cannot convince them through that fog that they're wrong. They're not talking to you. They're not talking about you. The Jew in this imagination, in this imaginary that they've created is not literally a living person that you are. It's a character. They need to exist so they know who they are. And you will not convince them otherwise. So you leave and you don't stand before them for judgment. So what do we now? Just last point. I get to go back to Israel and not have to live with these people. I apologize, I truly do. You have to stay here and live with them. So that's the best advice you're going to get from me. Finally, reforms of Israeli politics. We're really, I want to tell you real quick, reforms of Israeli politics. I've written so much. I mean, I spent a decade asking these questions of professors. This is the thing I actually know about. All the rest is just kind of Wikipedia. No, just not. Don't ever read Wikipedia on anything. Israel's system has served it very well. It gets a bad rap. We have that national party list system where you vote for a party, you don't vote for a candidate. We don't have direct election of MPs. It served us extraordinarily well because Israel was a society fractured into many, many tribes. And the national proportional representation party list system that we have basically expressed those tribes and allowed them to come to a parliament and organize our lives together at parliament. And even though there was always coalition and opposition, and some parties, like the vast majority of the Arab parties, have always been outside the coalition. Some sat in Ram famously recently, but there were others earlier in past decades, small ones. But Arabs were always in the parliament voting, and many, many factions needed their votes. And they always campaigned and negotiated very well. If you follow the career of Ahmad Tibi, an important Israeli member of Knesset, Arab Israeli member of Knesset. He was one of the major wheelers and dealers in the Knesset and did a lot of good things for his community, even though he never signed a coalition. And so there's always these tribes that would go into the Parliament, and in the Parliament they would organize our lives. The fracturedness of us, the tribalism of us that this system expressed, but it also ended up reinforcing. It's very Middle Eastern, okay? In Lebanon, kids learn in school systems that belong to their millet, their confessionary Faith, their community. In Israel, you learn in a system built to your identity. Arab kids learn in Arabic schools, Jewish kids learn in Hebrew schools. Religious learn with the religious schools and secular, secular schools. What we express on the election day by voting for those parties, we also express in our education system. We live in these tribes that deeply, just like the Lebanese, just like the Syrians, just like the Iraqis. We are very Middle Eastern in that sense. And the system reflected that and worked, worked extraordinarily beautifully and well. We are arguably the only functioning Arab democracy in that sense because we're structurally just very deeply structured the way Arab societies are structured. And that's a weird thing to say to Anglophone Jews because, you know, you're all Westerners. But it's actually one of the deep truths about Israel that explains a lot about how Israelis think and feel. And now it's tearing us apart. And so I think it's time has come for reform. And the reform needs to favor majority cohesion. And that's a weird thing to say about democracy because democracy is usually about protecting minorities. Democracy has to protect minorities. But when you can't defend majority cohesion, you lose the capacity to defend minorities. So if, for example, we stick to the tribalism system. NETANYAHU the single biggest correlated statistic for whether you voted for the opposition of the coalition in this Knesset is your level of religious observance. More than in any other government in the past, this is a government of the religious. The Likud traditionalists are the non religious edge of it. This is more than it's, you know, I think of it as 70, 30. This is the government of the religious and an opposition of the non religious. There's a lot of non religious in the government and a lot of religious in the opposition. But basically it's a religious divide. If we stick to that, we're going to have very illiberal politics that will have a very hard time protecting minorities. And if we open it up to the things that the vast majority of the center agrees on, most of Likud, most of Yeshatid, most of Yisrael Beitanu, by the way, not a small number, probably half of Shas, they agree on most of the things and they agree on protecting each other. And so we need a system that does away with this. One of the ways that could happen is first of all institute primaries, instituting primaries, real primaries, forced primaries will weaken cabinet members and strengthened the Knesset in opposition to the executive. If the people sitting in the cabinet literally appointed the entire parliamentary majority, the parliament can't seriously check the government. You want to check executive power in Israel, I think it's the Danes do this beautifully. They have a proportional representation system, like us. You vote for a party, but on election day, when you pull out the ballot for the party you want, you flip it over to the other side and you rank the people actually listed on the party. And so there's a primary happening on election day in the voting booth by the people voting for the party. I hope I got that exactly right. To the danger system. If not, somebody will write me. We could do that. That's an amazing way to do it. That means that you can't vote in the Likud primary if you're not actually a Likud voter. You can't vote in the ESD Barra if you're not Likud. You can have factions, but mostly you strengthen the Knesset in opposition to the Cabinet. That's a check on power. We could do a thousand things like that. One of the smartest things I've heard is to lower the electoral threshold. We kept raising it, thinking that small parties were the problem for stability. Small parties were never the problem. The problem was always medium sized parties. The problem was the Russian party, the Haredi Party, all these little tribal sectoral parties of half a million Israelis that were big enough that everybody needed them. And so they always had the wooing vote. And so policies were always radicalized to the edges where these parties existed and their own communities always got what they wanted and therefore radicalized their demands. What if we lower it to a single Knesset seat?
- [100:55]
Co-speaker/Panelist
Anybody could get elected.
- [100:56]
Aviv
You just need whatever the vote is for a single Knesset seat, 35, 40,000 votes, something like that. Well, then you would have not five parties in a coalition. You might have 17 parties in a coalition. Probably you'd settle somewhere around eight or nine parties in a coalition. But no medium sized parties would be quite powerful enough to force the big party to do its bidding. Because there'd be a lot of little parties you could always buy off with little things. So lowering the threshold, which is the opposite logic of the last 40 years of reforms, might accomplish that. So we need a serious process of reform.
- [101:30]
Co-speaker/Panelist
You know who's never going to do it?
- [101:33]
Aviv
You'll never guess the people elected in this system who have everything riding on this system. And because they can't lose elections under this system, or they don't think they can at least have allowed themselves to become venal and incompetent and corrupt. So this is something we have to fix. But Once again, as with everything else, when are we going to fix it? 10 seconds after some disastrous collapse of our politics. So again.
- [101:58]
Co-speaker/Panelist
Am I ending or are.
- [101:59]
Aviv
We going for a new round?
- [102:01]
Event Moderator
Well, you're the main act. You decide.
- [102:03]
Aviv
You guys have energy for this.
- [102:04]
Co-speaker/Panelist
I'm with you. No.
- [102:06]
Aviv
Everyone's like, no, no, no. I really am optimistic about this, but it'll only happen when it has to, so it has to get worse.
- [102:18]
Event Moderator
Okay, the final question from the gentleman in the back.
- [102:22]
Aviv
Yes. Radical Islam wants to conquer the world. You'll never guess how I know. It talks about nothing else. Salafist Islam of the particular kind that we are discussing here, the Sunni Arab kind, born in a particular time, at a particular moment, in response to European imperialism in Egypt. Basically, that begins as a reformist impulse and actually turns into this deep jihadism that produces Sayyid Qutb and Al Qaeda. And over in the Hassan Al Bana Muslim Brotherhood camp, you guys are writing all this down to look it up, right? Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood regime in Qatar and the AKP party in Turkey. And all of that, all of that is never going to stop until it conquers the world. And it believes that it must conquer the world because that is the redemption of the world. That is what every missionizing monotheistic religion believes. It can believe it in peaceful ways, it can believe it in violent ways, but it believes it. Yes, but they'll always come for us. And we will never be big. We're the weird inventors of monotheism who still think they're just a tribe. Do you know why we don't convert everyone on earth by force or by missionizing? Why don't we convert? Come on, Jews. Why don't we convert? Not strong enough. Why don't we convert and become strong enough? The rabbis say no. Who here keeps perfectly kosher?
- [104:00]
Co-speaker/Panelist
Why don't we convert?
- [104:03]
Host/Moderator
What?
- [104:05]
Co-speaker/Panelist
It's our family.
- [104:06]
Aviv
They're not the family.
- [104:07]
Co-speaker/Panelist
We're a tribe. Why don't we convert? We have the true religion. Why don't we convert? Ever? By the way, there were tiny little moments where we did convert. Forcibly conquered the Hasmoneans a little bit. Why don't we convert?
- [104:20]
Aviv
Not.
- [104:20]
Co-speaker/Panelist
Not strong enough. Christianity was 12 people. Why don't we con. I'll ask a corollary.
- [104:29]
Aviv
I'll ask a corollary. What happens after you die in Judaism?
- [104:38]
Co-speaker/Panelist
What's wrong with you people? What happens after you die in Judaism? Judaism has multiple views on what happens.
- [104:50]
Aviv
After you die and no clear dogma. There is reincarnation in different. Somebody once counted 13 different perspectives in the Talmud. There are many different views Judaism doesn't know.
- [105:02]
Co-speaker/Panelist
You know, who knows what happens after you die?
- [105:04]
Aviv
God.
- [105:05]
Co-speaker/Panelist
And you know what? God loves you. It is not eternal hellfire, I promise. You know why that's not what God is? He wouldn't have made you to burn you forever. That's just not a thing. It's going to be okay. And we have no idea what happens after you die. And not only that, you were dead before and you're going to be dead after. The glorious, beautiful, perfect thing is the.
- [105:28]
Aviv
Window of light in the middle and.
- [105:30]
Co-speaker/Panelist
The window of light in the middle. Judaism is absolutely obsessed with the mainstream Jewish view of what happens after you die is that you go to a waiting room, hang around for a little bit, and then come back here. Where's the Messianic age here? This is the perfect thing. And that this place has suffering in it, is weird and demands correction. And we are sentient because we are.
- [105:59]
Aviv
Sparks of divine light to correct this thing.
- [106:03]
Co-speaker/Panelist
Why doesn't Judaism convert the benighted?
- [106:07]
Aviv
I don't know how to call these things.
- [106:09]
Co-speaker/Panelist
We don't have these words, infidels, I don't know. Because we don't have to save them from anything. They are children of God, just like we are children of God. There is no hellfire in the Messianic age. Everyone will know God. Will everyone become Jewish? Why the heck would you want to become Jewish? That is literally the view of the guys of the Gemara. I'm not talking here about like, this is not like my friend, you know, this is mainstream Judaism.
- [106:37]
Aviv
We don't convert because we don't need to save anybody.
- [106:41]
Co-speaker/Panelist
And so we, this little tiny tribe.
- [106:44]
Aviv
That thinks that, you know, there is a one God because if there isn't one God, there are no gods. Two gods is limited gods and therefore just superheroes. It's not God. There's only an infinite unknowable creation because there is existence, therefore there's an infinite unknowable creator. We cannot know it. It is the nothingness at the end of all things. And that is enough. And it is enough for everybody. And when the genocidal army of Pharaoh is drowning in the sea and the people of Israel are singing, the midrash tells us that the angels want to sing for the glory of God, for this great victory. And God says to them, my children are drowning in the sea. How can you sing? The angels are forbidden from singing for the drowning of Pharaoh's genocidal army that.
- [107:24]
Co-speaker/Panelist
10 seconds earlier was trying to literally murder God's people.
- [107:29]
Aviv
But they're God's children just as much. So you don't sing.
- [107:31]
Co-speaker/Panelist
Jews can sing because they just got.
- [107:33]
Aviv
Saved, but the angels don't sing.
- [107:35]
Co-speaker/Panelist
So we are never going to be big and we are never going to be all powerful. And what we have discovered and all Zionism argues.
- [107:44]
Aviv
There's a lot of Zionisms, okay? The socialist Zionism and liberal Zionism and religious Zionism and a million Zionisms, all of them under one idea. That idea, that is the Zionism of all the rest of it is the simple point that if we do actually stick together, if we are actually standing shoulder to shoulder against the insanity, against.
- [108:07]
Co-speaker/Panelist
A world that took our one good idea, we had one good idea, there's this God and made out of it, all kinds of things that then turned on us because it took it from us and created insane entire civilizations in which we for some reason are symbols of all that is bad. Excuse me. And sometimes symbols of all that is.
- [108:26]
Aviv
Good, which is also weird. We're just a small tribe with one big idea. And if we stand shoulder to shoulder and stop standing in judgment before anybody else, we will not just survive, we will thrive. Everything is going to be okay. We're never going to be big, we're never going to be strong. We're only going to have us. Some of them are still going to want to conquer the world. We will be equal to them if we stand shoulder to shoulder. And that's enough.