← Ask Haviv Anything
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Welcome to a new episode of askabee of anything. Dr. Micha Goodman is here, a good friend, one of Israel's preeminent public intellectuals, the author of seven best selling books on politics, on religion, and a host himself of a podcast, an amazing podcast. I haven't just listened to many of the episodes. I've actually starred them in pocket cast so that I can keep them with me in case I have to refer to them again. Put out by Beit Avichai in Jerusalem. Micha is a teacher of a great many Israelis, including myself. I don't know if you remember this, Micha, but you are my Rambam professor, my professor of maimonides at Hebrew University. And so it's exciting and thrilling to have you. We're in the middle of a great war. We've actually our recording was delayed a little bit because missile sirens went off. Very excited to get into the conversation about what this moment means. And because this is Miha's great expertise, which he does better than just about any Israeli I've ever met, we're going to talk about the big ideas behind the events that are happening here right now. I want to tell you first, this episode was sponsored by Glenn Bergenfield. Thank you so much, Glenn, for this sponsorship. He has to dedicate the episode, in his words, to my quirky and loving wife, Sarah, who has studied our past, considered the present, met my family and is converting. Anyway, welcome, Sarah. Mazel tovin. Welcome home. And Glenn also asked me to read. And I'm grateful to you, Khaviv, for your clarity, your relentless curiosity and your generosity of spirit in these hard times. Glenn, thank you. It is an honor to have a dedication like that. I also want to invite you all to join our Patreon. It's how we keep the lights on. You get involved in our community. It's become this incredible community of discussions. The questions asked there guide the topics we talk about on the podcast. And you get to join our monthly live streams where I answer your questions live for as long as it takes. The last one was three and a half hours and we had a great time. That's at www.patreon.com askhaviv. Anything. The link is in the show notes. Micha, how are you?
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B
I'm very excited, very interested, very worried.
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A
This is a very strange time. We have family members who came in from Tel Aviv to live with us for a little bit because they don't have a proper bomb shelter. And in Beit Shemesh yesterday, a missile penetrated the bomb shelter, a Ballistic missile sent from Iran detonated. We don't quite yet know who died, how they died, some inside, some outside, but at least nine dead, many wounded. Everybody is scared, and also everybody is together. There is the same togetherness, the same that we felt for two and a half years now, the last Iran war. It's a strange time to be Israeli. We are at war.
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B
Khavi, what you say is different than the togetherness we had on October 8th. We were very much together in October 8th, but it was together that came from understanding how much the great failure and that we got hit. And now there's a sentiment in Israel that we're together, but not because of our failure, because of our success, not because we got hit. It's just because we are now we are truly hitting back. We're hitting back. The source of October7, I think it's a different sense of togetherness. What did you say?
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A
It's a transformed Israel. On October 8, we learned how much we misunderstood our environment, our enemy, the nature of the enemy. I remember thinking that. I remember thinking on top of all the other thoughts and all the other feelings, and we knew people who were taken hostage on October 7, but I remember thinking, what the hell is wrong with them as a civilization, as a society? Why are they doing this? And then beginning to sort of really try to map out, you know, Hamas is willing to have Gaza destroyed. It's willing to have. And Hezbollah, therefore, we have to assume, is willing to have Lebanon destroyed. That makes them vastly dangerous because that makes them undeterrable. This war is driven by the realization not that Hamas would kill all of us, we already knew that, but that Hamas would kill all of its own, and that makes them undeterrable and therefore massively more dangerous. We didn't know any of that today. I completely agree with you. We're two and a half years in now. We know our strength. We. Or maybe it's more accurate to say we know just how pathetically weak and incompetent the Muqalama, the great resistance front, really is. It can never really build anything. So I want to just get into this, launch this by asking. I guess what I would like is to know why. There's something deeper here. And I want to say it as bluntly and crudely and rudely as possible so that we get to the core of it. What the hell is going on in the Muslim world? I don't mean Indonesia. The Muslim world is a big place. It's a word that describes vastly, radically different societies. The Muslim world that we Interact with and know and recognize. Some of it is an absolute jewel of a society. The Emiratis are no longer merely an extraction economy. They're massively invested in AI and technology and in fact shot down like 140 Iranian missiles, something no other Middle Eastern country can do except Israel. There are differences. There are vast differences. But so much of it is broken, so much of it is failed. What is going on? Why do we face enemies? Put it this way. Who collapsed, who have so little to their names, who can show no accomplishment? This regime has done nothing for Iran except demolish it from within. And it can't even. And all of that in order to one day destroy the great affront to Islam called Zionism. Well, it can't hold a candle to Zionism. Their air force didn't even take off against our air force. They're pathetic, they're losers. They're the most demolished, weak thing that we've ever encountered. And all it took was for us to touch them. This is something Nasrela always said about us. We are the spider's web. You just touch it and it collapses. Well, now we touch them and they fell apart completely. There's no there there. How could these societies. Iran is a deeply competent society for centuries. How did these societies fall so far?
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B
Remember the days where we used to learn Maimonides in Hebrew University? You refer to that.
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A
I distinctly remember. I remember specific lessons people don't know. But you're also a very fun, exciting, charismatic teacher. I also learned about teaching from you.
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B
Thank you. So we were learning Rambam back then. You must have heard me mentioning Rambam's teachers who are Muslim. They were all Muslim. Arab speaking Muslims. You know why they were Arab speaking Muslims? Because Islam was the most advanced civilization in the Middle Ages. Abu Nazar, Al Farabi, Ibn Sina, these great titans of. They were interpreters of Greek philosophy and they were innovators in philosophy. And then. And you had. In the. And you had Ibn Baja and these were all. And Rambam, when he writes the Guide to the Perplexed in Arabic, you know why he writes it in Arabic? It was intended for a Jewish crowd. But he thought there isn't any real serious Jew that can understand his book, that doesn't understand Arabic because that's the language of the best intellectuals. When we're in the 12th century. That was Muslim Arabs back then. And they were the best in philosophy, in poetry, in science, in math. They were the great civilization. When you were looking at Europe, at the barbarians, the Christians in Europe they saw nothing. Nothing is going to happen from, from that, from what later will be called Western civilization. Nothing will happen from there. And then something happened. The Muslim world starts going down. The Western world starts going up. And this reaches its peak, obviously, in World War I. World War I was the moment where Western forces, the French, the British, put an end to the Ottoman emp, made it clear history has dramatically changed and this advanced civilization went into a process of deterioration and decline. And many asked, what happened? What went wrong? Now, Khavib, what's interesting is if you ask this incompetent Islam that we're fighting with today, where was this born? It was born out of an attempt to give an answer, what went wrong? So after World War I, there were actually two powerful answers to this question. It was given by Mustafa Kamal, by Atatur, by the founding father of modern Turkey. And he said, you know what went wrong? You know what put us down. You know why we're weak, you know why we're not martyred and powerful, why we were defeated. We were weak because of Islam. Islam is the problem. Now, when he said Islam is the problem, he doesn't mean that worshipping Allah is a problem. He means making Islam political makes a society weak. And by the way, he's right. The Ottoman Empire was very weakened because of the power of some of Muslim practices. Like they shut themselves down from the Gutenberg revolution. For a while, they stayed behind and the Europeans that were advanced by bought them down. But there was another answer given in the 1920s and that was the answer of Hassan Al Bana the founding father of the Muslim Brotherhood, of the Ikhwan, and Hasan El Bana. His answer is, you know why we lost? You know why we're weak? It's not because that we are so politically Muslim. It's because we are not Muslim. It's because we're too Western. We got weak. Ever since we disconnected ourselves from Islam, that made us weak. So you have two answers to the question, what went wrong? Mustafa Faqamal, we have to become modern, Western and secular. And Hassan Al Bana, we have to reject the west and go back to our origins. Now, Hassan Al Bana, later on, Sayyid Qutb and these founding thinkers of the Muslim Brotherhood, they have a theory, and here's their theory in a nutshell. What made Muslim countries weak? When they're saying they weren't Muslim enough, their thought is like this. Real Islam, original Islam is political. Islam, meaning Islam is not a religion that regulates your relationship with God. You pray five times a Day, you fast one month a year, you go to Hajj, you know, to your pilgrimage once a lifetime. It's not just about. It's not an individual relationship between a person and God. It's not the Protestant religion. That's not what it is. Islam. If it's not political, it's not Islam at all. It's the system that you govern society with. That is pshat Quran. That is the most basic understanding of the Quran. So Hassan Albana says, what happened to us and Sayyid Qutb later on that Islam was distorted and it became an individualistic religion. Well, we know whose religion. Individualism is the religion of the West. That's the big idea that the best the west bought to the world, individualism. And the west infected our minds with this gene of individualism and distorted Islam from a collective understanding of Islam to a private understanding Islam leading us to separate cynic, not church from state, mosque from state, and Islam being shrunk to the size of the mosque. But when it comes to legislation, Islam has nothing to say. So in very, very broad strokes, I think this is what Islamism is. It's trying to say that Islam is the answer. Islam is not the problem. Islam is the solution. Just like you have communism, fascism, capitalism, liberalism, you have Islamism. This is how we're going to solve society's problems. And then they have to ask, hey, if Islam is a collective religion, why is it that we're experiencing it as an individual religion? Because the west distorted Islam. Why did the west distort Islam? Because the west understands the power of Islam and it knows that when Islam, like in Muhammad's times, is a collective religion, it could conquer the world like it did actually in the past. So here's. So it's kind of like a conspiracy theory. The west distorted Islam in order to protect itself from Islam. What today is the main vehicle of the West? To contaminate Islam and to weaken Islam.
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A
America, America.
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America leads the West. And the tool they use in the Middle east to push a distorted understanding of reality, to push individualism, to push all these ideas that are distorting Islam. It's Israel. Oh, and by the way, how did
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A
they make that case? I'm sorry? How did they make the case that it's Israel? We talked on this podcast about some thinkers who said Israel is Zionism is the weakest thing that pushed Islam back. The most urgent and immediate demonstration of Islamic weakness and therefore the first signal of Islam returning to itself is the defeat of Israel. And that's what places Israel Front and center. But this thing about America being the Great Satan because its culture is dominant, because of globalization, because it threatens Islamic morality, because America's culture is so frickin loud, nobody can ignore it. Every culture on earth responds to American culture. What are you gonna do? And Americans, by the way, are totally unaware of this. Like they don't know they're producing all of this. They invent the Internet, the airplane, the car. And they don't realize that the whole world is being shaped in their image without anybody really having a say. Because it's all happening by Mark. How is Israel an enemy? And the Muslim Brothers talk about Israel constantly as the little Satan. Iran specifically talks about Israel as the little Satan. We didn't do that. Most of the Jews who came to Israel, 95% of the Jews who founded Israel, live in Israel, are specifically not the Jews who made it into America in the 20th century. They're the Jews who couldn't make it in. They're the desperate refugees. How is Yemeni Jews and Polish Jews responsible for America's cultural infiltration that brought Islam low as a cultural force?
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B
Well, for three reasons. One, in the Muslim Brotherhood rhetoric, there's a lot of anti Semitism. Actually the full narrative actually is that the west distorted Islam, but the Jews are hypnotizing the west. So the Jews control the west that uses Israel to contaminate Islam. So there's the anti. There's a very powerful, especially in Sayyid Qutb, by the way, Ali Khamenei translated Sayyid Qutb into Persian. Like this is all one ecosystem. So I think that makes Israel a little bit more. It makes, it makes the argument that it's the. Israel is the. There's a name for like a small knife in Arabic. It's the knife that the west uses in order to destroy. In order to destroy this version of Islam. But also it's Israel in the Middle East. It blocks the ability of creating one Khalif, one caliphate, just by its very existence. Just the fact that the. That the Jews are controlling Waqf sacred Muslim lands and Haram al Sharif, El Aqsa, sacred Muslim sites, temple mounts. Just the fact that the Jews are in control of that which is itself, like you mentioned before, a historic humiliation that the humiliating, humiliated people like that's how they're described, are now in control of sacred Muslim land. All that is turning. All that is the vehicle that the west is using in order to inject and it's to contaminate the Middle east with this, with These ideas, then the end, distort Islam. Now, this is cyclical, which means we have to be powerful again. To be powerful again, we have to see Islam as something political. We have to collectivize Islam. And when we do that, it'll be powerful. And we could destroy the west, it could destroy Israel and destroy the West. But until we don't destroy Israel and destroy the west will always be under their influence and won't be able to collectivize Islam. So it's like the cyclical, I think so they're always moving between what happens first, do we restore original Islam in order to fight the west, or we destroy the west and Israel in order to restore original Islam. I think this is a tension we have within the ecosystem of the Ikhwn of the Muslim Brotherhood.
- [16:52]
A
So, yeah, two options, two answers to this question. What happened to us? Answer one. In Muslim Brotherhood, we have to return to the purity of Islam, to the original Islam, the Islam of the conquering generations after Muhammad, when we were all unified as this collective the Ummah, the great nation of Islam. Answer two. And that's fundamentally a political Islam. Answer two, Secular, modern, democratic Turkey. The answer two seems to have failed. And answer one seems to be on the warpath, taking over everything in the Middle east. And I should just say, not demonstrating the capacity to build coherent, competent societies. Witness Iran, witness Egypt, witness every place the Muslim Brotherhood ever touches, or these ideas, even in their Shia version, what Hezbollah has done to Lebanon, et cetera. So the Ikhwan won the culture war of the last century, and the Ikhwan also destroyed the Middle East.
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B
Well, let's see, let's see. History still has a story to tell. Let's see where this is taking us. Because the Ikhwn, where did the Ikhwan take us? Ikhwan is. It's a very specific political instinct. And it sounds like all our problems are because of someone else. All our problems are because of the west and Israel. And in 1979, when Ayatollah Khomeini takes over Iran, that's his narrative. All our problems are because of the great Satan, the small Satan, and therefore all our problems, our internal division because of America and Israel, our economic problems, America and Israel, people are frustrated in Iran, it's because of America and Israel, which this is. This is, as Ruth Rice puts this version, this is the politics of blame. It's a very specific version of politics. Now, this helped them out very much at the beginning. If we see how this way of thinking played out in the foundational years of The Islamic Republic in Iran, this was it actually, it actually gave them something very powerful. And that is the narrative for the revolution. It wasn't that we're against the Shah, the Shah is just a representation of America. This is a war against the Satan, against America. Which means that even after we overthrew the Shah, the revolution is not over because the Shah is one representative of America contaminating the region. Israel is the second one. So as long as Israel is alive and kicking, the revolution isn't over. Which means that the destruction of Israel is not a policy, it's an identity. It's not what they do, it's who they are. It's the core of the revolution. Now this narrative gives him a lot of energy. Because you know what the greatest problem for any revolution is? Khaviv Success. The worst thing that can happen to revolution. It's successful and then you lose all the energy of the revolution. Now you have to start, you know, taking out the garbage. Now you have to start running a country. Boring. And for many revolutionaries movement, it's very hard. That transition is very hard. Thank God we had the, we had David Ben Gurion that managed to manage that transition from being the revolution to start managing the country and laundry, you know, and taking out the guard and dealing with the routine. But the Iranians don't have to make that transition because the revolution is not over, because even after its success, we still didn't succeed. There's still Israel. So Israel is guarding by its very existence the spirit of, of the revolution. So it gave. So Israel's giving a lot of energy to the Islamic Republic. So part so. And when every time you have a problem, it's not an internal problem, it's an external problem, it's Israel and America, It's. And therefore the solution is. That's the solution.
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A
How do you solve death to death to America? Death to America.
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That's a policy. That's how you solve your. If they're the sources of all your
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problems, it's a solution to not having to then adopt domestic policies that are functioning now what's.
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So what's the now what? When we see that you ask how is that? You touch it and it collapses. Because what we're seeing in front of our eyes is the product of the politics of blame. Because when you blame everyone else for your problems, you look like Iran today. But they don't have enough energy, water, I don't know, how many rates of inflation do they have? So you ask, okay, what happened to Iran? And I think this Is a very important lesson because the politics of blame is seductive today in the west also. We just blame each other for our problems. But the seduction. There was this great book that everybody used to read once from Good to Great by something Collins, Remember that book?
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A
I heard about it. Yeah, it's a business book.
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B
Yeah, it's a business book. It's a business book. So a good friend of mine, Rabbi Wesley Gardenshwartz, always was teaching me like this is a very good book. And it's a book about different companies that managed to go from good to great. I think they became like one of the 500 most powerful companies and then stayed there for 10 years. It's one thing to make it up and then go down. It's another thing to make it up to the top 500, whatever, and stay there for 10 years. So the book examines what are the qualities of the leadership of people that manage to carry companies up there and stay there. And one of the qualities is that they own their problems. Now this is very deep because it's very hard for us to be honest enough to own our own problems. Because if I have any problem, an emotional problem, a problem in my family, in my society and my country, our immediate instincts is to deny them or to downplay them, or to delay to procrastinate. That's the best technique, to delay dealing with them. But the worst form of not dealing with your problems is blaming someone else for your problems. And every time and the greatest. Now what happens now what happens when you own your problems? Then you start winning because then you start developing problem solving mentality. That's when you become creative. That's when the best comes out of people. When you don't own your problems, that starts brings out the worst. But blaming someone else for your problems, that's a guarantee that you're in decline. Ruth Weiss observed once, Ruth Weiss, that she writes a lot of anti Semitism that every time a society become becomes anti Semitic, you know that society is going down. Do you know why? Because it's a politics of blame. It's a society that's losing its winner's instinct. It's not owning its problems anymore. Now in the middle now we know that historically that societies that became anti Semitic stopped owning their problems and they started deteriorating. And in the Middle east we see that societies that are not owning their problems because they're blaming Israel for all their problems become very, very weak societies. By the way, I know MBS is a thing and it's an enigma and you probably understand, I don't know where he's going. And you probably have a lot of theories about this. But there's one good thing I want to say about this guy. He's owning Saudi Arabia's problems. He wants to make Saudi Arabia great. He has a plan. Will it work or not work? And how do you know that he's owning Saudi Arabia's problems? He's a leader that doesn't blame Israel for Saudi's problems. They have their own problems. He's not in that narrative. And that's why he has at least the potential to succeed. The Emiratis are not playing that game. And that's why they have. They actually are succeeding. And who is obsessive, playing the politics of blame?
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Iran.
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And this is where Iran today, it's a testimony, this is a lesson. Because by the way, I just want to make a very short footnote. The mind virus of political polarization where people in Argentina and Brazil and in Israel and America and in different countries in Europe believe that their country is divided into two camps. And every camp has a narrative that all our problems are because of the other side. This is how the mind virus of politics of blame is infecting our societies. Not by blaming people outside our societies, but by blaming people within our societies. And this is something. And when we're looking at Iran, we should see, this is how this ends. This is how thinking that when you blame someone for your problems, you're understanding your problems and believing your solution to your problems is weakening the people on the other side. This is how it ends. It doesn't look good. Politics of blame weaken society. And this is an unintended consequence of an attempt to give an answer to what went wrong. Why did we lose World War I? Why was Islam that was on the top is now on the bottom? Oh, I know it went wrong. It's not. Any cultural problems within Islam, within our Arab culture? No, no, we're not going to even investigate. No. The problem is the West. The west distorted Islam and that is why Islam, if we'll defeat the West, Islam will be strong. It became. And so this whole Muslim Brotherhood narrative, adopting a theologian version of the politics of blame had made Islam and made these societies very weak.
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A
What happens now? We've shown the weakness. You can't avoid the weakness and the devastation in Gaza. What did Hamas do? What was Hamas willing to tolerate? Hamas said in. In 600km of underground tunnels, the most comprehensive bomb shelter system in the history of war, and didn't let a single Gazan child into it for two and a half years. What do these groups wreak on their own societies?
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B
Hamas is unfixable.
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Hamas is unfixable. Is unfixable in Iran. But the thing is Hezbollah is unfixable, is unfixable. Erdogan is part of a party, the AKP party that is Muslim Brotherhood in its origins, in its ideological origins, at the very least. And you follow the theologians who literally go from Arab world, who belong to the Muslim Brotherhood world, to Turkey and begin to have these conversations with Turkish Islamist organizations. It's a big complicated history, but it's basically ideologically Muslim Brotherhood. Is Turkey on its way down? Is this great?
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I don't know if Turkey competent. I don't know if Turkey is. I don't know if Turkey is completely all bought into Muslim Brotherhood. I think they're. But my tell is interesting about Turkey because Turkey came from Mustafa Kemal.
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It came from a common.
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Yeah, it came from the alternative answer. It came from what went wrong was political Islam. We have to make Islam individual, personal, every personal, individually could worship God, but as a collective, we're going secular and Western. And here's the interesting thing. The history of Iran is a display of both answers. This is how the history of Iran plays out in the 1920s, Reza Khan Reza Shah takes over Iran in 1925. He places the Qajari dynasty and he founds the Pahavi dynasty and Reza Shah and then his son Mohammad Reza Shah. They're together reforming Iran in the exact same way that Ataturk was reforming Turkey. Was reforming Turkey. Not as radical, but he was their inspiration. And the industrialization, the Westernization, the taking the hijab off women, all this, what all this was Turkey was. Or Turkey was imitated by Iran. And when Iran was going through that process of separation of mosque from state in different levels, Iran was really becoming a powerful country. Iran under the White Revolution led by Mohammad Reza Shah was an attempt to westernize and industrialize Iran. It was a very successful revolution. They were at their economically, they were at their peak by 1977. And here's the interesting thing in the narrative of Muhammad Reza Shah. By making Iran Western, they're not turning their backs to their roots. They had this territory.
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A
The opposite. The opposite keep coming into Hebrew.
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B
And they have this narrative that their past of the Persian Empire, the Persian Empire is the source of all. Everything that's great in Western civilization. Human rights comes from Koresh, from Cyrus, from Kur. Different ideas we have in Christianity come from the Zoroastrian religion. They have this Idea that all the, they were the original Aryans. And now in Europe, everybody thinks in the 1930s people were excited that they are Aryans. They had this idea that they are the source of civilization, they are the source of Western civilization. Which means that when they become Western, they're not turning their back to themselves, they're returning to themselves, to the best, greatest version of themselves, the pre Islamic version of Iran, the Persian Empire. So that was a powerful narrative that they had going for them. And then Khomeini comes around and he breaks that down and replaces it with Islam is not the problem, Islam is the solution. The west is not the solution, the west is the problem. He reverses it and brings Iran down. So we have here, Iran is actually a laboratory of two ideas. The Mustafa Kamal idea and the Hassan Al Bana idea. Both played out in Iran between 1925 and 2026, exactly a century of this experiment. Roughly 50, 52 experiments and two ideas. The tragedy of Iran, by the way, is that they've never learned how do you make something hybrid. They always play the either or game. Either you're secular or you're religious. Either you are connected to the pre Muslim civilization. Yes. Or anything that's before Muhammad is Jahaliya is arrogance is, ignorance is we're rejecting it and our life begins from Mukhamat. They couldn't combine these two foundational ideas.
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A
I want to get into the combination question, the hybrid question. It's absolutely fascinating, but just looking at the map of the Middle east and taking your framing of it, which makes a lot, a lot of sense to me, the Mustafa Kemal answer is the only path to prosperity, strength, competence as a society, happiness. But the Muslim Brotherhood will win every battle, every culture war because they have going for them a call for authenticity, a rejection of Westernism, a romanticized past, whatever it is. They have the power in the culture war, but they will only destroy because they're revolutionaries at all times, permanently and forever. Are we doomed to never ending cycles of self destruction through the adoption of this radicalized political Islam? Or is there a path. Bernard Lewis once spoke to exactly this, where he said Iran and Turkey are going in opposite directions. He said this 20 years ago. I mean it was unbelievable. But he's. Or even more, Turkey is Islamizing. Iran is secularizing, liberalizing, opening up. And it's going to take a long time, but you will see them pass each other. Is that the story? Is the. Is the, I don't know, Islamic Republic showing itself to be destructive and therefore
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B
nobody's going to Choose. At the time, the Middle east had one powerful charismatic organizing idea was pan Arabism led by Jamal Abdel Natzel. And that was an exciting idea that it's going to unite the Middle East. And it was an idea that was supposed to eradicate Israel. It's blocking the Middle east from uniting under. And what will unite the Middle east is not a shared religion, but a shared language, culture, Arabism. And that idea gave a lot of charisma to the Arab countries and, and led in the end to the Six Day War. Tagi Purka is a, is the, is a teacher that teaches the theology of Islamism to the Israeli secret forces. He's a very, and he's a, he's a very interesting, he's a very interesting thinker on these issues. And he said that in the Six Day War, Israel didn't only defeat three armies. That's the kinetic victory where we destroyed the Egyptian army's air force in two or three hours. That's the kinetic victory. It also defeated an idea. The idea of pan Arabism lost its charisma after the Six Day War. This idea was defeated. And then the Arab world had two options. Either we go on the idea that, okay, every Arab nation state needs to succeed and prosper on its own, no more pan Arabism. And that is the root of Egypt. Because 1979 wasn't just that we're going with America, with Israel, it's also doing it on our own. A separate peace treaty with Israel, that was the end of pan Arabism. But 79 is not only the end of pan Arabism from one side. 79 is also the Islamic revolution in Iran saying there is another alternative to pan Arabism and that is pan Islamism. Now here's a big, big question in the history of ideas. This is a great question to ask. We don't know.
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I'll answer it whether I know or not. Yes.
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B
Okay, well, we don't know. While we're recording this, we don't know how this war ends. But if this war ends like we want it and need it to end, will. Will it. So will this war do to pan Islamism what the Six Day War did to pan Arabism? That is an open question. Meaning is this war not only a story in the history of armies and power, but also an event in the history of ideas? Will it pave room and will that pave the way for like the type of Islam promoting by the Emiratis by mbs? Will that happen?
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I have to think that, yes. This particular idea that we're at war with is an idea with very specific political predictions and consequences. And if it crashes and burns, if it does the opposite of what it claims that it will do, which is lead the great Muslim vanguard and return into history of a great and conquering Islam, if it literally can't defeat the Jews, never mind the great Satan that's three orders of magnitude more powerful than the Jews, then it, then it's wrong. Doesn't it contain within itself its own disproof? Are the politics of blame capable? Is the human capacity for excuse making capable of weathering the unbelievable failure of the Iranian regime? Not in war with Israel, but not just in war with Israel. I mean, even to deliver water to Iranians, I mean, can they weather this? How could this not be the fall of this idea?
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B
Now this, now the leadership of this idea made a prediction that. See, in the Shiite, in the Shiite world, there's this idea, by the way, also in the Jewish tradition is that every sacred text has the external meaning and the internal secret meaning. We have that also right. There is the pshat and then there is the deeper hidden layers of the text. Also the Shias do that. There is the zahir. The Zahr is like the external meaning of things. And there is the batin, the internal, the secretive. And never let the illusion of externalities seduce your mind. So when chasa Nasrala in May 2000 gave a famous speech in Binjbid and
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he said that it's a village in south Lebanon. Yeah.
- [37:49]
B
And this was after the army or the IDF left South Lebanon. He offers a theological interpretation of the withdrawal of IDF in south Lebanon. And he says that Israel has the strongest army in the Middle east, but it's weaker than cobwebs. What does he mean? He means that on the level of zahir, on the external, explicit level, we have the air force and we have nuclear bombs. Verso. But in the Batin, the Israeli society is weak, the culture is weak, Western individualism makes societies weak and vice versa. It seems like militarily, kinetically, they're not that strong, but their spirit is strong. So that double layer through theory is what is what enabled them to make the prediction that Israel is. They're going up and Israel is going down. October 7th, put this whole theory to test and you ask, okay, we understand that they thought that their religion is making them strong. Their religion, that narrative that blames the west and Israel for their problems is actually what makes them weak. But I think it's fair to ask Khalifa. I don't know if we have time for this is to ask, okay, they misunderstood their own power. They thought Islam is their solution. Thinking of Islam politically and blaming others for their problems is their problem. Is what made them. What they thought will make them strong is making them weak. But I think there's room maybe to ask the alternate, what did they get wrong about? They thought Israel is so weak. They thought that this society is going to break down once we. How did you say they'll touch it and Israel will collapse.
- [39:36]
A
That's right. And all their allies in the west keep saying, that's it, Israel is done. You're looking around and you're like, israel is less done than it used to be. I'm not sure you dash and pshat. And the secret meanings of things is a wonderful way to attack a text, because the text is never going to attack you back. I'm not sure if it's a great way to deal with history, because in the grand strategic map, I mean, Israel is so much more powerful. I want to say a reason. I think Israel is so much more powerful in precisely the ways that Nasrallah thought it wasn't. And then send the ball back to your court. Why have they failed, never mind to misunderstand themselves, never mind to create an Islam that can only this version of Islam undermine themselves and weaken themselves and turn them into what Iran has become. Israel's democracy, okay? Individualism, we'll call it, is the great source of its military power. I don't know why this is hard to get through the thick skull of the Islamist theologian. The fact that an Israeli brigadier general must sit down with the mothers of the soldiers who died under his command means that he arms those soldiers better, trains those soldiers better, and cares more. The fact that I will send my kids to a military where they will probably have to fight a war. This is not the Belgian military. Why am I willing to send my kids to a military that's going into a war? And the answer is because everyone else's kids are now in that military protecting my kids. It's a circle of solidarity. Well, you know what? You need to have a circle of solidarity in which everyone's kids protect everyone. And therefore, that's the only legitimate reason to actually send your kids into harm's way. Because you don't send your kids to defend a state. The state exists to defend the kids. The only way it's legitimate for everyone to be rowing in the same direction and sending kids into harm's way is if every single person in the country is rowing and the only way you get that solidarity is democracy. The fact that we know that the country is together, the fact that we know that this war is real, the fact that we know that it isn't a dictator's whim, and Israelis know it. And you can see every opposition leader in Israel today is talking about how there's only one Israel at this moment. There'll be 15 Israels 10 minutes from now. But right now there's only one that is democracy. All the liberal stuff that they think is our weakness, oh, look at them, they care so much for. We love death, they love life. So they're going to fall at the first, first sign of trouble. That is our power. Lebanon hates Hezbollah today and Israelis love their armed forces. And that's the difference of democracy. So I think they might have miscalculated on this one. Why don't they understand?
- [42:07]
B
I don't want to understand the miscalculation because they're not dumb. These are very serious people. Qasem Soleimani was very serious. Qasem Nasal was Ali Khaminai. They were, but they had an understanding of reality that was based on something a philosopher of history named Ibn Khaldun from the 14th century, where he thought that history. There's a few forces that are pushing history forward. And one is, I'll say, what gives societies, armies, countries, power. So first you have their military capabilities, you know, their technologies, their weapons. And the second thing is the will of the fighters. Now, what happens if you're.
- [42:54]
A
Now.
- [42:54]
B
But what's more important, the strength of your capabilities? Of your capabilities or of your willpower? What's more important? So Ibn Khadun says, will always defeats capability. If you have a battle between one society that's asymmetry is they're high in will and low on capability versus another society that's high in capability but low on will, who will win the society that's high on will and low on capability? You speak a lot about the battle against the French in Algeria. Who had the capabilities?
- [43:30]
A
The French won every battle and lost the war.
- [43:32]
B
Exactly. Why? Because will defeats capability. Because the French killed like, I don't know, a million Algerians. You know the number.
- [43:40]
A
And 500,000. At least.
- [43:42]
B
At least five. And they stayed fighting. The FLN killed how many French? 20,000. And the same thing, America and Vietnam, the same thing. Soviet Union in Algeria. And this is Ibn Khadun, the 14th century says Asabiyya, whoever has Asabiyya, unity, will, strength, will defeat the people, that their advantage is capability. And Khaviv that is what Ali Khamenei thought to himself in 2015 when he said that Zionism has 25 more years maximum. That is what Hassan Asraba said that we have the strongest army but weaker than cobwebs. Strong meaning we're strong in a capability, cobwebs being weak in will. Why? Because liberalism, democracy, materialism weakens your will to fight.
- [44:30]
A
So why aren't we weak? Why do we go to fight?
- [44:33]
B
Okay, so actually Israel is a very unique country because in some sense Nasrala and Khamenei were right with true societies which are individualistic societies. Individualism creates abundance and wealth and innovation. All this creates high tech armies. But the same individualism that makes you high on capabilities. Usually individualism means we're all in this for ourselves. So you're low on will, you're not
- [45:02]
A
willing to sacrifice, you're low on tolerance for soldiers dying, you're low on tolerance for damage to your economy in this
- [45:09]
B
war we've seen in this. So you would think that there's like a law of history, but there's a zero sum game between will and capability. Because if you're high in will, it means you're materialistic, capitalistic, sorry, high on capability. It means you have an individualistic society that you know, there's careerism and ambition and innovation. It creates the best weapons but no one's willing to fight. Or you're a Middle Eastern Hamula, you're a Middle Eastern clan clan. And you're very high on will but very low on capability. You know what Israel Sodomus swore that we broke that historic zero sum game, that we were very, I mean to say that we were high on will. We know all our close friends sacrificed everything in this war from day one until today, the heroic fighting of Israelis, the altruism of the Israeli civilians. We saw a society very high on will. And when it comes to capabilities, we see mind blowing capabilities. Israel broke the zero sum game between William. Capability. Do you know why?
- [46:14]
A
Why Michael? This would be the secret to everything. This is what Europe is suffering from. Never mind.
- [46:20]
B
Capability comes from individualism. Individualism leads to ambition and innovation and that leads to abundance and high capabilities that comes from individualism. Will, willingness to sacrifice comes from collectivism, the sense that you belong to something greater than yourself. Usually countries which are very collectivists like in the Middle east are not, do not promote individualism. And in the west we promote individualism. People don't have that same sense of belonging to a collective. Israel manages to do both. And that's why Israel was so successful throughout this war. We had the sacrifice of our soldiers and the high tech of our weapons and it was amazing. This is what happens when you combine collectivism and individualism. If this ends the way we need it and want it to end, we will ask, what won this war? It was the Israeli formula that won this war. If we get to that moment. It's that hybrid idea that you're a Jewish democracy. Jewish means you belong to a grand story that gives you meaning. And democracy means that every individual has its rights and with everything that comes and the culture that comes with democracy. Israel at its best is hybrid. Israel at its best is a Western country, but with the will of a Middle Eastern clan. It's because we're not really Western and we're not Middle Eastern. We're hybrid. We're not. We are, and most Israelis are highly patriotic and highly liberal simultaneously.
- [47:53]
A
This hybridity, let's assume that it isn't absolutely totally unique to Israeli cultural DNA or to Jewish cultural DNA. What is it? Where does it come from? How do you turn this unbelievable superpower that seems to solve a great many of the problems of the West? Israelis are happy according to all kinds of weird international polling on happiness around the world. Way beyond their GDP per capita, way beyond their right. They have more kids than anybody else in the developed world. They're deeply tribal, deeply collectivist and yet also deeply liberal and can have all this high tech innovation and can incentivize all that stuff. What is that secret sauce? And how do you turn it into a best practice that frankly I would like to export to the Arab world real quick because the Arab world doesn't want give up its collectivism. I don't want it to. If it turns from in the Arab world into the social and psychological and emotional and identitarian wasteland, frankly, of so much of the West. I'm sorry for saying it's so mean. I apologize to Westerners, but you can handle it. This is a discussion between Middle Easterners. You can handle the insults. How do they adopt the other side? How does each side take on this weird syncretism that Israel has found?
- [49:04]
B
Let's take Iran as a test case. They tried both. They tried Kamalism under the Pahavi dynasty and they tried the politics of blame under Khomeini and Khamenei, like in Islamism. And what they couldn't do is combine the two. And by the way, there were thoughts of how you combine the two. The idea of the Islamic Republic is trying to be Hybrid. The Islamic means a theocracy republic. Republic is like a Western idea. It relates with democracy, but it never worked. They never managed to become like.
- [49:44]
A
Because one of those was a lie. Republic was always a lie.
- [49:46]
B
The republic was the mask. Now, here's a theory I have. For 1,300 years, Persians were Zoroastrian. Now, as Max Weber taught us, religion has a tendency to shape the way you think even after you stop believing in it. Naxerber has a theory that capitalism, the spirit of capitalism, comes from a certain branch of Protestantism. If you understand religion, you understand society. Iranians were 1,300 years Zoroastrian before they became Muslim. The Zoroastrian religion is a religion that tells you a story, that the world is a battlefield between two gods. Ahura Mazda, the God of light, the God of goodness, the God of harmony. And Angra Manyu or another name, he has his Ahariman. It's the God of darkness, the God of evil, the God of disharmony. And they created this world as a battlefield between these two gods. And guess what our role is to join the good God in the battle against the bad God. And redemption is when the bad God evaporates and Ahura Mazda governs the world. What does it do to you to live in such a binary religion for 1,300 years? It's good versus evil, right versus wrong. It's a religion that trains our minds to the habit of binary thinking. So there's a prophecy within the book of Isaiah that addresses this theology. Now, this is a prophet within the book of Isaiah that was living in the time of Cyrus and he admires Cyrus. He calls Cyrus Meshiachem Kamara, Adonai le meshi chole. Koresh. Koresh is a messiah. The founding father of the Achaemenian dynasty of the Persian kingdom is a messiah in difficult terms because he was the one that enabled the people of Israel to return to Zion and to build the second Temple.
- [51:45]
A
And in the prophets, it's a term of kingship. But he is the king rather than the king.
- [51:49]
B
He is the king and he's admired. But the Bible has the ability to admire a person while rejecting his theology. Something many of us lost to like the person, even though you don't like his ideology. And so the Bible admires Cyrus whilst rejecting his dualism. And this is how it rejects his dualism. There is one God. Not to, not referring obviously to the Demaratim religion. He says,
- [52:27]
A
Give us the translation. Just for listeners who don't know the
- [52:29]
B
Hebrew God Is the creator of light and the creator of darkness. Darkness, the creator of peace and the creator of evil. This is what it says here. God is the creator of evil. God made all of that. So this prophet is standing in front of Cyrus and saying, you believe in a good God that is fighting the bad God. We believe in one God that is the God of the good and the God of the bad. You become what you admire. Right. People that admire athletes, there's high. There's high chances that they go jogging at night. People that admire intellectuals, they probably read books. People that grudge.
- [53:15]
A
I've been admiring the wrong people. Yes.
- [53:18]
B
People that admire people just for the sake that they're famous, they might become narcissistic. Right. You know, when you admire the God that's fighting evil, you become binary. You become as either good or bad. But if you admire the God as the God of good and evil, maybe that trains your mind to be more holistic. The monotheistic religion at its best is supposed to train your mind to seek not to play the either or game. And this is the challenge. That Israel somehow, somehow managed doesn't mean will continue to manage not to play the either or game. You ask, are you collectivists or individualists? Well, we're trying to be both. Is it easy? No. Are you a Jewish country or a Democratic party? Well, we're trying to be both. Is it easy? God knows that so many people say it's so hard. Let's be only a democracy or only a Jewish country. But because we see that combining opposite elements is so challenging, they want to give up. But when we look at the benefits of this combination, they're game changing. They're game changing. Maybe it's worthwhile managing this impossible tension because it could mean. Yes, because individualism and collectivism is this combination. Is what's missing in the Middle East. Not enough individualism, and it's what's missing in the West. Not enough collectivism, not enough community, family and meaning.
- [54:53]
A
Let me. Let me suggest one way that could be part of our path to this strange syncretism that gives us this strange superpower. We Jews are not quite a religion. We're not quite an idea. We don't have an ism. It's called Judaism. Just because that's English, that's not because of Jews.
- [55:17]
B
We are invented. That word was invented in the 19th century, right?
- [55:22]
A
The word Judaism.
- [55:24]
B
Rambam wasn't. Didn't believe in Judaism.
- [55:26]
A
Right? We are a people. And if I came to Rambam and I said to him, I don't believe in God. He would say to me, oh my God, a Jew doesn't believe in God. How could you not believe in God? You're a Jew. I don't know why he would speak in Mel Brooks English, but I'm saying he would say, of course you're a Jew, which is why it's bad that you don't believe in God. Because you're not believing in God doesn't remove your Jewishness. Because Jewishness is not the religion according to the halacha itself. According to the religion, you are not a religion. According to the religion, you are a people. The content of being part of this thing called Jew is a peoplehood is a nation, ethnicity. These are very recent words. Even if nation is a very old recent word, it's much more recent than whatever the heck a Jew is. And so because we are also another kind of syncretism, which is this religion and this tribe, because we combine both of those. We don't, we're not trapped in either. So you can join Jewishness and you can convert, but then your, your blood also begin to look at Judaism and you begin to notice it in Christian terms or in Muslim terms, and you begin to realize it's pretty short on dogmas. It's pretty short on dogmas. And you know, I say this a lot because this is a real difference between Judaism and the other monotheistic religions. What happens after you die in Judaism, not some very vague metaphor. Nobody ever wants to get into. What actually happens after you die. You'd think that's a big deal. And it turns out it's not a big deal. There's at least 13 different options in the Talmud. They never really seal the deal. They never actually tell us. And there's six kinds of mystical reincarnation ideas still in the traditional bookshelf, not modern day California, just in like Zohar Kabbalah. There's all these things, there's all this stuff all over the place. And in the end the answer is the Talmud doesn't decide. The Talmud doesn't care. It deeply cares how you lay your Tefillin. It deeply cares how you give to the poor. It tells you answers to the great debates on those questions. It doesn't give us answers on the great dogmatic debates about God, about afterlife, about stuff like that. That's just not what Judaism is about. It doesn't think it's about that. There are no socialists in Israel. There were 60 years ago. They very quickly stopped being anything ideological and just started running the place. Maybe Jews don't have ideologies. They. They go off to communism, they go off to whatever the heck Judith Butler thinks she is today. They go off to these places, but they don't bring them in. What is the ideology underlying Haredi Judaism?
- [57:53]
B
Sort of theological argument. So what you're saying, Khaviv, is that the ability of Israelis, the elasticity of Israelis to be very individualistic and the start of a nation and the ambition and innovation and very collectivist, and we're all fighters and willing to sacrifice. I mean, and all that, that ability comes from the fact that they never turned individualism into a rigid identity you're trapped in, or collectivism was never turned into communism, fascism. It was never turned into something rigid. The fact that we are. Are weak in ideologies enables us not to become what we think, not we. Humble. Yeah, humble. And therefore we could do these type of combinations.
- [58:39]
A
Now, is it fair to say, Judaism tells us, teaches us, it is not for you to know what happens after you die. That's not your place. Calm down.
- [58:48]
B
The interesting thing is there is no life after death.
- [58:53]
A
There's no life after death.
- [58:54]
B
I'm not saying that it says that there's no life after death, but the
- [58:58]
A
Tanakh is uninterested in it.
- [58:59]
B
Besides one verse in Daniye, which is in one story with Shaul, the Tanakh, I mean, as opposed to, like Egyptian ancient texts to describe exactly what happens after death and the voyage after death. The Tanakh is like, we want to tell a story. What happens after death is beyond the curiosity of this book.
- [59:19]
A
Epistemological humility. Okay, so. And the Talmud preserves the losing argument in every debate across dozens and dozens of tractates, 60,000 pages. It preserves the losing side of every debate. You know what that is? Intellectual humility. And Rambam saying, I'm gonna now write the Mishnah Torah, this codex of the answers to all the great questions of Jewish law was castigated, was criticized massively for doing.
- [59:51]
B
Don't speak that way about the Rambam, okay?
- [59:54]
A
No, I'm speaking because you're here. I'm saying something. You're meant to correct me. I'm joking. I'm joking. But the idea being. The idea of being. Where do you come off now? This is the Nesha Regadol, the great eagle, the Rambam, the greatest rabbi. From Moses to Moses, there arose no rabbi like Moses, this Moses, Maimonides the great, thinker and scholar and philosopher of the Jewish bookshelf, the Great. Everybody responds to him and has to live in the world that he created. This man, Jews at the time said, where do you come off thinking you can seal the gates of interpretation of Jewish law and tell us what the answers are? That is a culture that is only about epistemological humility. We don't know God's mind, we don't know God's.
- [60:38]
B
I think what you're doing here, Khabiv, is that you're connecting between the hubris
- [60:43]
A
of understanding and therefore there's no isms in Israel.
- [60:46]
B
And that and the incapability of and being trapped in binary thinking. If you are an ism, I'm a socialist, I'm a individualist, I have answers. And then my mind is trapped in one identity, right? And then I'm forced. Okay, if I'm an individualist, so collectivism is bad. If I'm a collectivist, individualism is bad. Israelis do not turn ideas into identities because we're skeptical about ideas to belong to begin with. And that you're saying comes from our Jewish tradition training our mind never to take any idea way to seek because no ism is sacred, because God is one. So nothing, no idea is sacred, we can't know it.
- [61:31]
A
And if there's no absolute truth of
- [61:33]
B
accessible to us, we don't fall into binary at our or Israel is a laboratory. We see what happens when people don't fall into binary thinking. They could be collectivist like a clan in the Middle east and hyper individualist startup nation like a Silicon Valley. But in Silicon Valley people don't do meluim.
- [61:53]
A
No.
- [61:55]
B
And in Middle Eastern clans they don't do startups.
- [61:58]
A
Every campus professor in the west who knows exactly what history is, its perfect total teleological arc is an idiot who is doing anti Judaism.
- [62:06]
B
That's very interesting.
- [62:08]
A
So, and therefore we don't have humble
- [62:11]
B
epistemology enables you not to fall into binary thinking. And that, and that could, and that could lead to the environment that creates that rare messy combination of individualism and collectivism. Which is exactly what Khamenei and Nasrallah couldn't understand. They thought, oh, they're Western, which means they're individualistic, which means that they're weak on will, which means we'll hit them and they'll collapse. They don't realize that we're more collectivist than they are, that they're willing to fight. And the fact that we're so individualist doesn't mean that we're weak on collectivism. We manage to Israeli, manage to put this thing together.
- [62:51]
A
We're deeply Religious, more religious according to polls than Iranians. Deeply religious, deeply westernized, deeply collectivist, profoundly liberal. The conservative right wing Likud, former security officer in the defense services, speaker of the Knesset, is a married gay man. I don't know what the hell that is. But that is Israeli, by the way. No Israeli thinks that's weird. I mean that's just what. That's him. I don't know what you're talking to me.
- [63:21]
B
Talk to him.
- [63:21]
A
I'm not governed by isms. And I can walk into your ism, look at it and say maybe, maybe not, maybe not. And by the way, if not, you're setting yourself up for disappointment. I can say to every ism in Christendom and in Islam and in communism and in secularism. Jews don't have isms. They have problem solving. Because this world was made by a God and we put us in here to figure it out and fix it and defend it. Judaism was never an ism in a Jewish polity, in a Jewish society. And a Jewish political community is humble intellectually. Just because you know where the Persians have that dichotomy vision of the universe built into their cultural DNA, we have the. I have no idea what the truth is. I can't know what the truth is. That's what God means. Therefore problem solving is all that's left. Maybe that's the answer. That's the best practice. Every time somebody says an ism, shut the door on them. Don't let that ism into your house, it'll break your house. Because no ism can encapsulate the complexity
- [64:15]
B
of reality or within that ism there's a spark of truth. Don't be trapped in the ism, but take from the ism the spark of truth. Collectivism. When you're trapped in it, it brings the worst out of you. You. But if you take from collectivism that the sense of belonging to a story greater than you. Individualism, when you're individualism leads to egoism, leads to loneliness, leads to breakdown of families. But the fact that individualism leads, leads to where the west is today doesn't mean we can't be hyper individualist. We don't, we're not trapped in ideas. We take from ideas, we take from ideas. And I think and that's the idea of not being trapped in. Now Iranian thinking is binary thinking. I like this. When I, in this war, when I had the opportunity to speak to a reservist and everything I said that we will win Iran if we won't become, if we won't become Iran. Thinking like Iran is being either your Islamiyat or Iraniyat. Either you are. You are the Turkish model or the.
- [65:12]
A
Or the.
- [65:12]
B
Or the Ikhwan model. Either or playing the either or game. And they have a hard time putting things together. Managed to put this together. And this is why Israel's now on top of Iran and not the other way around.
- [65:26]
A
Micha, in your classes, you would always tell a student who is brave enough to answer a question or ask a question, keep going, keep going. I think it's also what just happened here. Micha, one of my great teachers, thank you so much for joining me. We reached absolutely no conclusion except that we have some better questions to ask of Iranian society. And maybe tiniest little bit, the whole point here is intellectual humility. We have a little bit of advice from this unbelievable success story for anybody interested in hearing it.
- [66:00]
B
Khaviv I had so much time. What we did here together was fun and interesting and let's do this more.
- [66:09]
A
Yeah. Thank you for joining me.
- [66:11]
B
Thank you.