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- [00:04]
Narrator/Host
You are listening to an art media podcast.
- [00:10]
Yossi Klein Halevi
The sensibility of the center was that you need to pay attention to the arguments of both the left and the right. The left is correct that long term occupation of another people is untenable. The right is correct that it's an illusion to imagine that the Palestinian national movement is ready to accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state. And so the argument of the center was if you can't occupy for the soul of Israel and you can't make peace for pragmatic reasons, you need to think of a third way.
- [00:48]
Daniil Hartman
There is something that we could do. It's not that the Palestinians alone are going to determine the arena and we're just spectators in a story over which we have no control. We're just going to have much more realistic expectations.
- [01:14]
Hi friends, this is Daniil Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevi from the Sholem Hartman Institute. And this is our podcast, for heaven's sake, in cooperation with ARC Media. Last week our theme was the state of the Israeli right. And in a year of upcoming elections, it's now at the most 10 months away. We have to understand what are the choices and what's the nature of Israeli discourse around its political future. And so today we want to concentrate on the opposite camp, and that is the state of the Israeli center. And there's an asymmetry there. Because we spoke about the state of the Israeli right, you would naturally think that we would speak about the state of the Israeli left. But part of current reality of Israel is that the left has just about disappeared and its closest or its approximate identification would be center left. So we're going to talk about the center, but that's the story we want to talk about. But before we do that, let me just roughly break down for you the state of the Israeli population and their political divides. 40% of Israeli society identify themselves either politically or nationally, or their group identity, their tribal identity, is either Haredi, national, religious or Israeli Arab, Palestinian. With all the complexity that that three tiered name implies. That's about 40%. That leaves about 60% of the Israeli Jewish population who are more or less evenly divided between right, center, right on the one hand and center, center, left, left. The center, center, left, left, especially the center left, are carried by politicians such as Lapid, Golan, Eisenkot, who in every poll together get about 20% over the 25 seats. And there's about another 10% who vote for Lieberman or for Bennett who define themselves as center, center, left. They won't be left, but they define themselves as center, center left. So we're more or less divided. And the right wing has a natural advantage because they have the Haredi and the National Orthodox as potential political partners. Where as we discussed previously, the center center left doesn't have the Israeli Arab Palestinians as natural partners, whose fault that is. That's not our conversation today. And the question is, who's going to shift and which center, center right, center left leader could reach across these political divides which more or less divide Israeli society. So here we have this category, the center, center, left, left. And these categories have gone through a very significant transformation over the years where today is not the way it was at the founding of the country. Yossi, do you want to maybe before we even get to the center, could you tell the story what was the right left divide in Israel as you understand it?
- [04:25]
Yossi Klein Halevi
Well, to briefly take that story to its origin point and we touched on this last week. The real debate between the left and the right in the pre state Zionist movement was, I'd say, fundamentally over two issues. One was borders, territory. The right under Jabotinsky believed in maximalist borders. We spoke about this last week, including Transjordan. And the left under Ben Gurion was ready to make territorial compromises and in fact did accept that the UN partition plan and before that in 1937 accepted an even less generous map under the Peel Commission plan. And the pattern from the very beginning was that the Zionists left, not completely, actually, not in its more. I mean, this is getting very esoteric. Not in its more hardcore Marxist factions. They were more territorially maximalist. It's kind of counterintuitive. But the majority of the Zionist left was always for partition and the Zionist right was always opposed. And the second major issue that divided them was economic. The Zionist left was committed to economic egalitarianism in its earlier years, to a quite radical vision of economic equality. And the right was from the beginning very much committed to an Israel based on free enterprise, on the market. And once the state was established and the borders of the state were set, seemingly set along the lines of the 1948 Armistice, the Territorial issue faded as a major defining issue between the two blocks. And the issues instead became, I'd say, primarily economic. There were other issues that were socially related, but personal, I think. 1967. Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Ben Gurion hated Menachem Begin. Hated him and wouldn't sit with him and called him a fascist.
- [06:44]
Daniil Hartman
And some people loved him. It was a personal issue.
- [06:46]
Yossi Klein Halevi
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And on the right people regarded Ben Gurion as a traitor. That's how I was raised. On the right, Ben Gurion is the one who opened fire on the Irgun ship Altalena and killed 16 Irgunis, many of them Holocaust survivors. So there were these deep grudges. And you're right, in some way, the personal side of this, the personal animus, determined the relationship between the two blocs until 1967. 1967, suddenly, territory becomes crucial again and the divide is redefined, ironically along the lines of the pre state debate. Except now, obviously the territorial issue isn't both banks of the Jordan, it's only one bank and that's the West Bank. And so this becomes the defining issue between the two camps. And gradually you can see a convergence on economic positions. And certainly the right won this argument hands down. The left almost completely capitulated, abandoned socialism, so that by the 1980s you were able to have, in 1985 you had a national unity government between the Likud and Labor, Yitzhak Shamir and Shimon Peres, based on the need to extract Israel from hyperinflation and on the need to shift the Israeli economy from this hybrid of capitalism and socialism to a strictly capitalist basis. And that really was the vindication of the right. So that's where things stood. The main divide was territories.
- [08:36]
Daniil Hartman
And so by the midday, I remember around Lebanon and the demonstrations around the war, there's a new term, and that was the term peace now, which began to define a central part of, of the left. They converged economically and then the need to begin to pursue peace, to not to continue this militaristic or this. The war in Lebanon had a major shift. It was like it was a step too far. It was Israel embarking on war as a means of politics to redefine the political order in Lebanon. And that gave birth to an anti war movement. And then the left became the very strong in its pursuit of peace, which ultimately led to the Oslo Accords or to the Oslo conversations. And the right left wing divide started to be around peace, around the possibility of peace.
- [09:32]
Yossi Klein Halevi
And not only that, Daniil, but the Labour Party adopts the peace now position. By the 1990s, by the Oslo years, there's no distinction between labor and peace now.
- [09:46]
Daniil Hartman
The labor which you started economically left, moved to the centerish center left and the far left, they all converged together. And the issue was very much peace. But there was one other dimension that I want to add to this. And then I want you to continue your story with the fall of Oslo and the second Intifada. What it did and that is that you can't understand the state of contemporary Israeli discords unless you understand that Peace now was not just a movement for peace over land. It also was accompanied by a certain moral conversation. Part of it was Am Yisrael over Eretz Yisrael, the safety and well being of the Jewish people over the wholeness and safety and well being of the land, which was the more right wing, especially settler ideology. And the second part of it is I Remember in the 90s around Oslo, conversations about peace weren't just about the safety for Israelis. It was also about human rights, about doing the right thing. Peace had both a political agenda and it had a moral agenda. A very profound, profound moral agenda. And the reason why this is important, it's important for many reasons and we'll get into that in a few moments. But when it came to issues of security, when you presented the foundations of the right in our last podcast, you spoke about land and security. The left were the generals of the country. There was no space on issues of security. The issue was whether I'm willing to do territorial compromise for the sake of international acceptance and the cessation of war. But security. The left was as concerned about issues of security, they were as committed and devoted to issues of security. The military leaders all came from the center, center left. As we move to a moral agenda, there was a sense in which morality also has to weigh on our it's not just security, it's we don't want to continue to fight, but moral issues. Palestinian rights are part of our overall calculation. We worry about security and we worry about the democracy of Israel and we worry about the moral principles of Israel. What does it mean to occupy another people? And the left right wing divide had many of these subtle distinctions in them. And now we come to second Intifada. Where does that lead us? Yossi?
- [12:30]
Yossi Klein Halevi
So I'll speak personally now as someone who initially supported the Oslo process and gradually began to feel that we'd been played, that Arafat and the Palestinian leadership never intended to actually make peace with us. So by the end of the Oslo process, we're speaking about the year 2000, a majority of the Israeli public had soured on peace. Now no longer believed that the Palestinian leadership was offering peace in exchange for territory. And the second intifada, coming immediately after Israel made the most far reaching offer that had ever been put on the table since the UN partition plan for creating two states, redividing Jerusalem, uprooting dozens of settlements, and the counteroffer, and this is the way I'd say most Israelis experienced it. And I'm speaking sarcastically, the Palestinian counteroffer was four years of suicide bombings that effectively buried the Israeli left. And if you look at what happened to the left, the tragedy of the left is first it lost its socialism, then it embraced peace as its new vision for Israel. And it poured all of its hope, it invested all of its cachet in peace. Now peace is imminent. We only have to have the will, and we're going to achieve it. Then comes the second intifada, and now the left loses peace as well, or it loses the slogan of peace. Now that becomes completely discredited. And more deeply, the notion of land for peace becomes profoundly unpopular and suspect among Israelis. And what happens at this crucial moment is the emergence of the Israeli center. Now, the center had been there all along. And I know this because I defined myself as a centrist. And I would look for these small, insignificant parties that would pop up. First there was Mehmod, which was a beautiful little religious, Zionist, moderate party. And I, along with five other people, voted for them. And then Mehmed, of course, disappears. And then after Mehmad comes the third way, Haderekh Hashlishit, which was also a beautiful party, completely ignored. And the sensibility of the center, and this is really important to understand Israeli politics today. The sensibility of the center that appealed to me already in the 1980s was that you need to pay attention to the arguments of both the left and the right. The left is correct that long term occupation of another people is untenable. The right is correct that it's an illusion to imagine that the Palestinian national movement is ready to accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state. And so the argument of the center was, if you can't occupy for the soul of Israel and you can't make peace for pragmatic reasons, you need to think of a third way. Ariel Sharon comes along as the least likely leader of this new emerging center, and he redefines himself in his old age. He's elected Prime Minister in early 2002. And in 2004, he announces what he calls the policy of disengagement, which was unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. And it might have been the first step toward a unilateral withdrawal on the west bank as well. We'll never know, because Sharon got a stroke almost immediately after the withdrawal from Gaza. But what appealed to me, to my centrist sensibility in the unilateral withdrawal plan, was that what Sharon was basically telling us is, look, we can't make peace with the Palestinian Leadership. We can sit at the table, we can present all the plans we want. There's nobody there. On the other hand, we can't live with Gaza inside the state of Israel. And so if we can't make peace and we can't permanently occupy, let's unilaterally determine our borders. And so for me, the center, and this is what's relevant for me today as a centrist voter. It's not so much a particular position as it is a sensibility. The center is looking for balance. The center is that place.
- [17:29]
Daniil Hartman
Yossi, before we get to the center today, I want to add one other feature, and you mentioned it as you were talking about the move from peace now to let's determine our borders. On the one hand, that's the greatest strength of the center. We don't want to live with fantasies. We don't want to delude ourselves in this sense that we know right now peace is not possible. But that doesn't mean that the status quo has to be permanent. There is something that we could do. It's not that the Palestinians alone are going to determine the arena, and we're just spectators in a story over which we have no control. We're just going to have much more realistic expectations in which peace now, especially the now, became. It became almost pasnisht. That's that Yiddish term. It's like, it's just, how dare you, after a second Intifada, still speak about now have peace? And the notion of peace now is the notion, and this is really what defined the old left in Israel, was the notion that if we just did what we had to do, everything would be possible. There's no onus, there's no responsibility on the Palestinian side. It's just us. We're the powerful ones. We're the occupiers. If we just stop, everything will be fine. And that was encapsulated in the term now.
- [18:55]
Yossi Klein Halevi
It's interesting, Daniil, because that idea that everything is on us has very deep Zionist roots, right? Herzl said it, if you will it, it is no dream. And this notion of self determination is really what the Israeli left was saying. It doesn't matter whether they want peace. It matters what we do. Now it turns out that there are actually limits to what we want and what we can do. The other side does have a say.
- [19:26]
Daniil Hartman
It's like, welcome to the neighborhood, right? Stop being so paternalistic. And in many ways, Herzl was. He said, everybody's going to love us because we're going to bring economic growth, enlightenment, we're going to bring all of modernity to this Middle east and all of a sudden we have to figure out we're living in a Middle east and there is actually partners who aren't fools and they're not insignificant. And if they have a different agenda, that's going to shape our agenda too. So the now, which encapsulated the notion that it's all on us comes to an end in the second Intifada. But as we are moving to a Sharon universe of center in which let's define our own borders, something very, very critical changes in Israeli society. And that is we stop speaking about Palestinian rights.
- [20:17]
The issue of our borders, it's clearly the holiness of the land is not important. The well being of the Jewish people is important. And conversations about demographics, numbers, what are the numbers that Israel needs to have in order to still be a Jewish democracy. But the Palestinians more or less become transparent. It had a similar dimension to the now story, Yossi, that you were just articulating where we didn't. It was just on us. Now it's just on us to determine our borders. It's just on us to determine our fate as a Jewish democracy. And. But the other side now disappears. If beforehand we could bring peace, now we could just bring Jewish demography and a ceasefire and safe borders for Israel on our own. But that involved the other side becoming morally transparent. And from the second intifada, and I think October 7th accelerated this on steroids beyond anything we could imagine. When in response to our peace, we got four years of suicide bombing. As you said, people stopped caring about Palestinian rights. They don't want peace, they want to kill me. Don't talk to me about my moral responsibility to them. The center becomes a movement as distinct from the left, which started to be uncomfortable with moral conversation and with moral imperatives. Don't give me more. If there is a moral imperative, it's just Israel has to remain a democracy. And a democracy requires a Jewish majority. So in many ways separation was for the Jews. It wasn't a peace movement where two people come together. It was a separation of me separating myself, going into my own separate space so that I could be me. And what you're going to do just frankly doesn't bother me anymore. And as a result, the policies in Judea and Samaria, the west bank, we just just doesn't interest us. You could have more settlements, you could have less settlements. What the army does, what the army doesn't do, it's just not on my radar screen. Because when you responded to my offer of peace with death. You ceased to be morally responsible to me. And that also becomes a very integral part of the center to this very day. That even as we move now to the current reality where we're looking at people like the most left. He's center, left is Golan, center, center left. Ish is Lapid and Eisenkot in a similar place. No one talks about Gantz anymore because he's more or less disappeared. You have a community that to this very day speaks about the need for separation. But Palestinian rights, that type of conversation, that inheritance of the left was destroyed in the second intifada. And while I celebrate the balance that you said celebrate the balance of it's not peace now, I do mourn the moral shift that has occurred from moving from left to center.
- [23:30]
Yossi Klein Halevi
Do you see that same shift happening on what's left of the left? Do you see a reluctance or even a disinterest in. In the moral conversation on what is left left?
- [23:45]
Daniil Hartman
It's very small. There is a left wing in Israel who does have that moral conversation. And paradoxically, it's the Israeli, Arab, Palestinian. They'll talk about morality. The far, far left will. But these politicians want to get elected.
- [23:59]
Yossi Klein Halevi
The far, far left doesn't matter.
- [24:00]
Daniil Hartman
They don't matter. They just don't matter. And as a result, you can't get anybody. This moral conversation is very, very limiting. And then you add to the second intifada, October 7.
- [24:13]
It'S a kind of a death blow. Palestinians, the notion that I have moral responsibility to you. When you, 80% of you, and I'm not talking about the Israeli, Arab, Palestinian citizen, 80% of you say you supported October 7, supported it. It's like, just don't talk to me about my moral responsibility to you. And then it cascades in many, many ways, the challenge of how we conduct this war. Humanitarian aid, civilian casualty, just if I want, I want a separation, but don't talk to me about morality. And in many ways, Netanyahu used to be very much a part of this center. So what are the challenges of this center right now? Because this is where they are. And we gave a. It was a historical journey, but it's critical to understand where we are right now. So now you have this ex Ganzia, Lapid, Eisenkut, Lieberman, Golan, a little bit of Bennett. Their voters are center, center, left. What is the major challenge of this.
- [25:13]
Yossi Klein Halevi
Community right now politically, in terms of staking its place in the Israeli consciousness? The center needs to explain how it is not the Old left. And what Netanyahu is going to try to do in the coming campaign is portray the center, center left, as the Oslo left, as the peace now left. And the center needs to make clear that it no longer believes in the formula of land for peace, but it still very much opposes annexation and it still opposes permanent rule over another people. Not for moral reasons, because that is not part of the post 10-7-Israeli discourse, as you correctly noted, but for our own self interest. Ruling over another people as a permanent condition is a long term disaster for Israel diplomatically, demographically, in so many ways. And so that's the argument that the center needs to make. It needs to separate itself on the one hand from the old left, the old land for peace left. And on the other hand, it needs to draw a clear line between itself and the right, which has really come to terms with the permanent rule over the Palestinians. And so in a way, even though the reasons have changed, the premises have changed, the divide remains the same as it's been since the 1930s within the Zionist movement. Are you ready for territorial compromise, not for peace now, but for the sake of Israel's most basic interests? And that's an argument that I think still resonates for many Israelis. But it's complicated because Netanyahu is going to continue to try to stigmatize the center with that naivete of peace now.
- [27:30]
Daniil Hartman
You know, it'll be interesting to see whether it works, because if part of this center, center, left, is now Bennett and Lieberman, Bennett doesn't know how to say in one sentence the terms Palestinian state. The two words can't be connected. It just doesn't work for him either. So his attempt to portray them as the Oslo left, and it's true, in Netanyahu's universe, anybody who's not me is a Smolani. You're left.
- [27:58]
Yossi Klein Halevi
So he's going to try quasi traitor. You're a quasi traitor.
- [28:02]
Daniil Hartman
Yeah. And everybody's now traitors. You use this word, you know, you remember Robin was called Boged. And that was like, oh, that was the red line you can cross everybody now, anybody who doesn't agree is called a traitor, an anti Zionist. All these terms, the people who serve, it doesn't matter what you are, you're now Yair Golan, the former deputy chief of staff, military hero. He's of everybody. It's so you try to simplify it, but the next elections in many ways are going to be on an attempt not to simplify, because you can't simplify. This center is not as easily defined in those terms because they're not morally wishy. They're not like, you know, oh, I want to love. No, no, it's nothing to do with that. And unfortunately, they don't speak about Palestinian rights, which is something that I think as a people, we have to include as part of our discourse in why occupying another people is not tenable. It can't just be a status quo economic world position.
- [29:01]
Yossi Klein Halevi
So, Danil, you need to make a distinction between a moral discourse in Israeli society, and you're speaking as an educator, and I respect that, and the suicidal adoption of a moral discourse by the center in the political realm. That's correct. That is a sure prescription for the right winning the next election. But I appreciate that. And Yair Lapid and even Yair Golan, they have to be very careful about not feeding into the Netanyahu narrative of far left naivety.
- [29:38]
Daniil Hartman
But that goes back, Yossi, into what we talked about last week, in which morality and security are perceived to be opposites and contradictory. And part of the challenge, I believe, of the center left less than the center, is to make sure that that distinction is overcome, because it's just false in Israel. Nobody in Israel is for peace now. Palestinian state now, the greatest danger we're going to face is if the international community decides that a horizon to a Palestinian state actually requires us to do something before Palestinian society is ready to do so. And then they're going to impose on us a reality which could be profoundly dangerous. But nobody is. It's the issue of security is not an issue that divides the center left, the center, the center right, it's just not. It's just holding on to the land of Israel is not a value. But security is a moral responsibility. But part of what's defining the center today is there's two other issues, and that is judicial reform and a commission of inquiry. In many ways, the center has to define what is its vision, because just not Netanyahu. Just like what we said last week, that part of the right is just Netanyahu, part of this center is just Netanyahu. And that could work in the short run. It's wearing thin. It's like, especially as things are moving, there's still a small group in that camp and judicial reform, commission of inquiry over what happened on October 7 actually are together a moral conversation as well. It's not a moral conversation about Palestinian rights. It is a moral conversation about the rule of law, responsibility, honesty, accountability. There is a moral conversation. And the challenge of the center is to move from just not Netanyahu to presenting various visions about Israeli society which have a passion. Yes, because just not Netanyahu is not a passion. And when Bennett says, I just want to heal the country. So maybe the question is whether healing is enough of a passion, whether it has an ideological energy to it. But Yossi, as we're coming to final thoughts, let's try to bring this all together where we are today.
- [32:04]
Yossi Klein Halevi
Yeah, I think that what once defined the center broadly, and by that I mean center left, center center right, and I would have once included the Likud in that formulation, was a commitment to Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, and that these were the two entwined identities, inseparable identities of Israel. What Netanyahu did was tear apart these two identities and in the process destroy the intactness of the mainstream. The vision of the center is to reconstruct this broad center left, center center right coalition around the shared commitment of a liberal understanding of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. And by liberal, again, we've spoken about this in the past. I mean a traditional liberal understanding of pluralism, democracy, individual rights and minority rights. And this was a consensus that, well, included the Likud. And so the challenge for Bennett, who is, I would define him as center right from Bennett through Lieberman, Lapid and Golan, is to reestablish the commonality of the mainstream and then to invite those parts of the right that have been co opted by Netanyahu's skewed agenda back into a national consensus. That's the most, I think, compelling immediate political vision for this election.
- [33:49]
Daniil Hartman
You know, one of my colleagues shared with me that there's a national unity government is one term and there's another term called a national responsibility government. And I think one of the challenges of the center, center left, even center right, but this, I'll go center, center left, is that it can't just be about national unity, because it's about national unity. You're not going to move ideologues who are going to prefer to vote for Netanyahu. We have to offer some vision of responsibility. And responsibility breaks the dichotomy between just Netanyahu and just not Netanyahu to some vision. And echoing your terms, what does a Jewish democracy mean? We don't compromise on security. We don't take chances which will threaten our moral right to exist. We're not going to have peace now. But we look at the future, whatever it might be, whether it's policies instituted by us or whether it's opportunities offered by the world and say, how does a Jewish democracy respond? Not in a sense of being pushed and kicked and bullied into a position, but where you lead with a vision. And to the extent that the center, center left could offer that vision will determine, I believe, the next election, or maybe even more than the next election, the future of Zionism in a very profound way. Yossi, it was a pleasure to be with you always.
- [35:21]
Danielle
Danielle Here are some other things that are happening at the Shalom Hartman Institute this week. The newest issue of Sources, the journal you turn to, for informed conversations and thoughtful disagreement about the issues that matter to our Jewish communities, launches online this week. This issue features analyses of and visions for the Post October 7th world read, share and subscribe to our print edition at the link in the show Notes. Subscribers can expect copies to hit their mailboxes in the coming weeks. We are deeply saddened by the passing of longtime board member and dear friend Dan Rubin Zichron Olivracha. Just before his passing, we dedicated the media studio in our New York office to Dan. The Institute is deeply grateful to Dan for his leadership, generosity and guidance that have helped us create better conversations for the Jewish people. May his memory be a blessing.
- [36:11]
Rachel Rabbi Jessica Fisher
What if prayer doesn't work? This question strikes us as a distinctly modern one, an outgrowth of the slow disenchantment of the world. But in truth, the question is an old one and one given space to.
- [36:24]
Narrator/Host
Breathe Here from the Shalom Hartman Institute, Thoughts and Prayers is a new podcast that explores what Jewish prayer means and why it still matters. Join host Rachel Rabbi Jessica Fisher as she weaves together stories, classic texts and conversations with leading rabbis and thinkers like Yossi Klein.
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Yossi Klein Halevi
Halevi Judaism is about the democratization of the spiritual of revelation.
- [36:46]
Narrator/Host
Rabbi Lauren Holtzblatt I was representing Second Gentleman Emhoff as his rabbi on that stage. What you had in that moment was the pluralism of America and Rabbi Josh Warshavski.
- [36:57]
Daniil Hartman
Prayer helps me be the best version of myself. It helps me figure out what do I need in my spiritual backpack.
- [37:03]
Narrator/Host
Thoughts and prayers inspiring new connections to Jewish prayer in a changing world. Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts.
- [37:12]
Daniel Goodman
For Heaven's Sake is a product of the Shalom Hartman Institute and ARC Media. It is produced by me, Daniel Goodman with help from Miriam Jacobs, Adar Taylor Schechter and Aviva Katmanoor and studio support from from Go Live Media. Our episode was edited by Seth Stein. Maital Friedman is our executive producer and our music was composed by Yuval Sama. Past episodes can be found@arcmedia.org where you can explore more of Arc Media's podcasts. You can watch the video versions of our episodes on our YouTube channel. Follow the YouTube link in the Show Notes. Also, to receive updates on new episodes, please follow the link to arcmedia.org and subscribe to Arc Media's weekly newsletter. For more ideas from the Shalom Hartman Institute, visit our website@shalomhartman.org.