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The Atlantic Interview: Yossi Klein Halevi
00:33:52
An Israeli author writes a letter to his Palestinian neighbors.
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Welcome to the Atlantic Interview. I'm Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of the Atlantic. And this week we have Israeli author and journalist Yossi Klein Halevi, who who joined me in the Atlantic's D.C. headquarters. Yossi has a new book coming out called Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor. It's really quite a moving and interesting book. It's one of the best one volume introductions to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. We discuss everything in this conversation. The two state solution or non solution, the Iran deal or non deal. And we roam freely around the Middle East. Yossi is a guy I've known for many, many years. He's one of the most interesting voices and in the Middle East. One note. Yossi and I spoke a couple of weeks ago before the situation on the Gaza Israel border heated up and before the Iran situation heated up. Everything's very, very hot right now, which is another reason to listen to this conversation. But just wanted to note all of that. And before we go to the interview, I just want to make a quick announcement. The Atlantic interview is taking a short break after this episode. We're working on some new podcasts here and we'll have more to share on that front soon. But this will be the last episode in this feed for a bit to be notified for when we're back. Just stay subscribed. Now with all of that business out of the way, here's Yossi Klein Halevi. Yossi Klein Halevi, thanks very much for being here on the Atlantic interview.
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A
Great to be with you, Jeff.
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B
Nice to see you in the diaspora.
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A
Have you been here before in the Diaspora? Yeah, Yeah, I was born here.
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B
Born and raised. Good, good. Yeah. Now I. So just in the interest of time.
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A
I left my heart in Brookly.
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I think it's your liver. I left my liver in Brooklyn. Just so in the interest of full disclosure, I've known Yossi for a long time. I'm not sure how we know each other, but we've known each other for a long time. Big fan of his work. He wrote one of the best books about It's a six day war book, but it's more than a six day war book. It's one of the best books about the Israeli soul, if you will. And you have a new book coming Out Letters to my Palestinian Neighbor, which is interesting because it's not only to your Palestinian neighbor. As I read it, I realized that this book is directed at a particular kind of Jew in America who might not understand the story of Israel as you understand it. Is that a fair statement?
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Yeah. I think that the book really combines two commitments that I've had over the years in my work life, in my Jewish life. The first is to write about the Israeli narrative, to try to understand the narrative and explain it. And that's been my work. Those are the books I've written. And the second is outreach to the Muslim world. And I feel an urgency to try to do whatever I can to try to help heal the Muslim Jewish wound, partly because of where I live in Jerusalem, and partly because I think that the quality, maybe even the fate, of Jewish life around the world in the 21st century will be largely determined by our relationship with 1.7 billion Muslims.
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B
Talk a little bit about the exact place you live in Jerusalem, in a.
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Neighborhood called French Hill, which is at the very edge of Jerusalem. And I live in the last row of houses in French Hill, which is to say I live in literally the last row of houses in Jerusalem. The view from my porch is dramatic, complicated. I can see the desert, the Dead Sea, the hills of Jordan. But right up against my porch is. Is the separation barrier. And in Jerusalem, it is a physical wall. So I'm looking out at Palestinian villages on the hill across from my porch, but we're separated by the wall. And that's the view that I wake up to, that I go to sleep to. And what happens when you live with that kind of horrific intrusion, that that physical barrier is that your eye really learns not to see. And so I find that over the years, I'm looking at this very beautiful, dramatic view over the wall, and my apartment is high enough that I can see over the wall. And in the last couple of years, I've tried to teach myself how to see again and to see this whole landscape in all of its complexity and pain.
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B
You call the wall horrific. You say it's a horrific view, but you're for the wall.
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Well, this is it. I mean, what I write in the book to my neighbor is that, in a way, what sums up my moral dilemma as an Israeli is that I'm horrified by the wall that keeps my children safe. And so the wall that I supported, as did the overwhelming majority of Israel, except for the settlers, by the way, the settlers opposed building the wall.
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Well, they're on the far side of the wall. That means something.
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A
Exactly. And they understood that the wall is potentially a future border. Right.
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B
How far is the wall actually from your porch?
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It's a few hundred meters.
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B
Right. I mean, so it's right there in your face.
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Right there.
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What was it like before the wall was there?
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Well, there was a sense of. Of expansiveness, I think, on both sides. There was this feeling that the Palestinians on the next hill, first of all, didn't need a permit to come into Jerusalem. So there was this sense of even though the occupation was in place and there was all of that complexity, but still there was a sense of openness. On the other hand, during the second intifada, that openness became a source of profound trauma for Israelis, for me, for my family, because it meant that suicide bombers could just saunter across the unmarked border and blow themselves up in Jerusalem. And so that wall was, to my mind, a necessary, an essential response to the second intifada. At the same time, it's left this scar, a permanent scar that's a reminder of our failure, of the failure of both sides to try to heal this wound. And it's a reminder for me as an Israeli, of how isolated we are from the Middle East. And I have deeply believed that the Jewish homecoming needs to be a homecoming not only to our ancestral land, but it needs to be a homecoming to the Middle East. And that wall is the most tangible expression of the exile of the State of Israel from the Middle East.
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Right. Go to the nature of the tragedy, if you will. Sorry to just go burrow all the way in, but this is. This is an idea that's shot through this book, all of your work, which is that there's enough tragedy to go around. But the root of this tragedy is not necessarily the settlements, though I don't think you're a particular fan of the settlements. The root of the tragedy is the inability of Muslims, many Muslims, many Palestinians, to understand the Jews as indigenous to the Middle East.
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Yeah.
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Is that fair?
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Yeah. Look, I think that if we were to uproot every settlement tomorrow and pull back to the 67 lines, it would not change the nature of the conflict.
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Well, there's an argument that says it would make it worse because it's like it's. To borrow from T.S. eliot, the giving famish is the craving in the sense that if you thought. If there's a school of thought that says Palestinians would see that as, ah, they're folding their tents. So now let's.
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Well, that's what happened. That's certainly what happened. In Gaza, we uprooted every settlement, every army base in Gaza and pulled back to the international border. And then thousands of rockets followed us.
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Do you regret the pullout from Gaza?
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No, no. I was a passionate supporter, a public supporter, and I am deeply relieved that we're not sitting in the middle of Gaza. I was drafted into the Israeli army at the beginning of the first Intifada and sent straight to the Gaza refugee camps. And that's my trauma. That's where I learned what an occupation is. And you learn that the only way you can suppress a popular uprising is through a series of petty humiliations. You create a system of control. And I came out of that experience as I think a majority of, of our generation of Israelis came out of that experience saying something has to change. And the election of Yitzhak Rabin in 92 was the political, the tangible expression of that change of consciousness among Israelis. I mean, I remember seeing these 16 year old kids throwing rocks at us. We had guns. One reason I remember is because one of those rocks landed on my head. And what my conclusion from that experience was, I get it. You know.
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Ehud Barak, the former prime minister, former defense minister, once got into trouble in Israeli politics for saying that if he had been a Palestinian, he would have been throwing rocks or whatever.
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No, he said it was. He would have been a terrorist.
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Oh, right. You know, thank you for the correction.
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That's already taking it a step too far.
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It's another level.
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And it's another level. Maybe Barack would have been a terrorist, but I certainly would have.
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You would have been throwing rocks at yourself.
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I would have been throwing rocks, absolutely.
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So let me just drill down on the settler question, because yes, you're not a fan of the settlements. You do express a kind of poetic, elegiac response to them. They are fulfilling a Zionist dream in a certain way and it's sad that they won't be able to do it in the event of a two state solution. But isn't there a little bit too much poetry in your view of the settlers? I mean, you don't know for sure that had they not settled the land the way they did, that a two state solution could have been found already. Maybe it wouldn't have made the Palestinians particularly happy and maybe they would have kept the dream alive of seizing all of Israel and turning it into Palestine. But how do we know? How do we know that the tipping point wasn't reached years ago and that it didn't have to have been reached?
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Look, to some extent I agree with you that we have to be very careful about the pull of romantic history. Romantic history is very dangerous when it's welded to power. My argument that I tried to make in the book is that the settler movement is the Jewish equivalent of the Palestinian demand for the right of return to the State of Israel for the descendants of Palestinian refugees. That there are really two rights of return because there are two indigenous peoples that are competing over the same little land between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean Sea. And I'm sympathetic in principle to both demands for return. And I accept, again, in principle, as a starting point, the maximalist Palestinian claim to all of the land, because my inclination, my emotional inclination is the same. I believe deeply that this is my land between the river and the sea. This is the heartland of the Jewish people, what's called the west bank, what Jews have called Judea and Samaria for thousands of years. I don't come from the left. I grew up on the right. And so that's very deeply in me emotionally. But my wake up call came during the first intifada of the late 1980s, and I realized that the price that we would have to pay for enforcing our legitimate right to the whole of the land is too high. It's too high for us. It's too high, obviously.
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And pullback to you is not an option. There's a wall. Israel can hold onto the Jordan Valley.
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You mean unilateral pullback like Gaza, which.
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You still support, despite all of the roughness.
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Look, I debate with myself about that. I have mornings, you can have your.
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Own podcast where you yell at yourself.
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Look, you know, I have mornings when I wake up and it's a left wing morning, you know, and really, and I tell myself, whatever we have to do, just get out, cut it. God forbid, another 50 years of ruling over another people. But I have other mornings when I wake up and I say to myself, are you out of your mind? What do you think is going to happen if we unilaterally pull back without even a semblance of an agreement? And everyone knows what's going to happen. Hamas will take over. And so we'll have Hamas five minutes away from Tel Aviv in Jerusalem. So I don't see unilateral withdrawal at this moment as an option. Although if five or ten years from now there's still no chance for an agreement and the only two alternatives are unilateral withdrawal or continuing occupying the Palestinians, then I see a unilateral withdrawal as our last desperate pullback option.
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B
What don't you come out of the American Jewish right, albeit 30 years ago or more. What don't right wing Jewish American supporters of Israel understand about the conflict?
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A
The first thing they don't understand is that there really is a Palestinian people. And I discovered the reality and the power of Palestinian identity by getting a rock thrown at my head by an. I was carrying an M16. And I looked at these kids, I said, they are ready to do what I was ready to do as a teenage Jewish militant defender of the Jews.
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They were the defenders of the Palestinians.
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A
Absolutely.
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And they were putting their blood.
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Thousands or tens of thousands of young Palestinians saw the inside of an Israeli prison, as you and I both know, because we were both soldiers guarding prisons at different points. And so that was a really powerful experience for me, seeing these kids coming in and out of prison and I was in and out of American jails.
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B
I remember what they called it. Jamathoriya Liberation University.
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Yeah, that's right. And when I was a teenager, it.
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Seemed like a particularly stupid thing to do for on the part of Israel to sort of build these finishing schools for Palestinian, maybe not yet radicals who became more radical.
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But we did. And so the right has not yet come to terms with the fact that Palestinian national identity and the willingness to sacrifice is a reflection of their own sensibility.
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You have a line in the book that's interesting. You say, are the Palestinians a contrived people? Yes. Are Israelis a contrived people? Yeah, all peoples are contrived.
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That's all. A decision, that's the definition of peoplehood, is that you're contrived.
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Right, right. You've decided collectively with a bunch of other people that you're the same people.
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Exactly.
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And then you move through history together.
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A
So that's what the Israeli and Jewish right haven't internalized.
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B
But have they internalized lessons about Jewish moral law and what Jews, because of Judaism, owe the stranger or owe the weaker party? Or is that a more difficult one for you?
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A
Look, I think that Jewish history speaks to our generation of Jews with two commanding voices. And these voices have analogues in biblical verses. The first is, remember you were strangers in the land of Egypt. And the lesson there is, don't be brutal. Don't do to others what was done to you. The second voice is, remember what the tribe of Amalek did to you when you were leaving Egypt and you were attacked without provocation. And the message there is, don't be naive. Remember that you live in a world where genocide against the Jewish people is possible. Part of the tragedy of the left Right. Jewish discourse today is that each of these camps has appropriated another one of these commanding lessons. You know, so it's. Yeah, okay, so the left has done a really great job in remembering that we shouldn't be brutal. The Jewish left has done a far less good job in not being naive.
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B
Let's expand on this because my next question was obviously, what doesn't the Jewish left in America understand about the conflict?
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I think that.
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And that could be that you can answer that historically, morally, however, I think.
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That there's a certain, Let me be really offensive here. There's a certain kind of, I would say, almost emotional Holocaust denial in parts of the Jewish left.
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Meaning.
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Meaning that if you're a post Holocaust Jewish, and the only takeaway you have from the Holocaust is that we have to be nice to other people, there's something missing.
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Not the main lesson for you.
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I won't. No, it's one of the two main lessons. It absolutely is one of the main lessons, but it's certainly not the only. The other main essential lesson is you better take care of yourselves. You better value your sovereignty. You better value the fact that you now have a Jewish army that can protect the Jewish people.
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B
So the right has convinced himself that the Palestinians don't actually exist, and the left has convinced themselves that the Palestinians are entirely benign as a political movement.
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Yeah, I wouldn't, you know, I wouldn't go so far as to say entirely benign, but I think it depends on.
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Where you are in the left.
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It depends on where you are. Right. I'd say that the fatal mistake on the Jewish left is not to take Israel's vulnerability seriously enough and not to take Palestinian rejectionism of Israel's legitimacy and indigenousness seriously.
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This goes to a fight that we've had in the past about the Iran deal. I think I was not enthusiastic, but I was a.55,45,60,40 sort of. You know what? This might actually keep Iran from developing a nuclear weapon for 10 years. You are in the position that Iran wants to kill you. Any money, any recognition, any kind of recognition of their inherent right or latent right to, quote, unquote, defend themselves, that was actually going to redound to Israel's disfavor. I mean, where are you on this question now? And I ask it against the backdrop of something that's fairly obviously happening, which is an Iranian push, aggressive push, right up against the borders of Israel, which could lead to a war sooner or later, God forbid.
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A
Yeah. I think that just about everything that the opponents of the Iran deal warned against is coming to pass. Iran today effectively controls four Arab countries. And the impingement on Israel's border, which is really, I'd say, unprecedented. We haven't experienced anything quite like this since 1973, since the Yom Kippur War or maybe since 1967. This sense of the war coming in, which, by the way, is one of the reasons why Israel is so adamant about not allowing Hamas demonstrators to get close to the fence. We're looking at the implications of that on all of our borders. And so what the Iran deal did was leave Iran on the nuclear threshold with a sunset clause down the line, meaning that Iran at some point would be able to cross the nuclear threshold. And the concession of the trade off for Iran postponing its nuclear ambitions was the empowerment of Iran as the regional Muslim conventional power. And we're seeing that playing out now. And it's the reason why the Sunni world is seeking out a strategic alliance with Israel right now. What I will give you, Jeff, is, is. And only grudgingly, because this was.
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B
I was gonna take it anyway, but go on.
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A
The unintended consequence of this deal, of the nuclear deal, is that it has created a Sunni Israeli alliance against the deal.
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But let me just push on you a little bit here. There is an intended consequence, which is, let's say, God forbid, that there is an Iranian aggressive attack on, on Israel from Syria and Lebanon. At some point in the near term, Iran will be doing this entirely conventionally because it does not have a nuclear capability, because they have actually frozen their nuclear program in place. Now, that doesn't. If you're Israeli thinking about five or 10 years ahead, it doesn't give you that much comfort, but right now it should give you some comfort, no?
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Well, right now, yes.
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Right now is when there might be a war and it's going to be an entirely conventional war because of that.
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True. But five or ten years from now is really not a very long time. And given that this deal left the door open, left the door, I would say, fairly wide open for a nuclear Iran. The question that we're facing now and that we're going to face imminently is to what extent is this war going to be fought? In other words, should the Israeli air force bomb Iranian nuclear facilities if we find ourselves in a war with Iran?
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You mean now now, huh? What do you say?
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I think that that's a real option. I'm terrified of it because those facilities are frozen. You have to acknowledge that those facilities are frozen, but they're frozen on the nuclear threshold. So the fact that they're frozen from a strategic point of view is irrelevant.
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B
Do you think Israel would be in a better position to argue for its existence in a conflict with Iran if it had done more to ameliorate the political situation of the Palestinians?
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Look, I.
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It's a very American political question.
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No, but it's a fair question. And I wrote at the time urging the Israeli government to do exactly that, that we needed to have credibility on one front, on the reconciliation front, or at least try to reach some kind of agreement with the Palestinians in order to have credibility on a potential military confrontation with Iran. And I fault my government not for its tough stand on our neighbors. I don't fault the Israeli government for taking a hard line on Iran, on Hezbollah, Hamas. This is really an alliance that is passionately committed to Israel's destruction. Where I do fault my government is in not showing flexibility and goodwill, where the issues are not existential. For example, on the African asylum issue.
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B
On issue of African refugees crossing the Egyptian Israeli border, settling in Israel. And a lot of people in Israel want Israel to be kinder to those refugees. It's not a unique situation, obviously in the world.
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A
No. But you know what, to take this back to the metaphor we were using earlier in dealing with Iran, I want our primary sensibility to be the commanding voice of remember that you live in a world where genocide is possible. In dealing with the African asylum seekers, I want our policy to be shaped by the commanding voice of remember that you were strangers in the land of Egypt. And if you don't have both of those sensibilities, then you are a one dimensional Jew. And the right and the left, to my mind really belong to the same camp. And that's the camp of the one dimensional Jews, the simple Jews, the simplistic.
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Jews, the simplistic Jews. It's interesting argument. Go do one more turn on this before we finish up. I said at the beginning that the purpose of the book is also to convince liberal American Jews or suggested that one of the purposes is to remind people of the righteousness of the cause of Israel. Do you think that should you find Palestinian readers that they will say, you know what, Yossi, you're right, you are from here too. The Temple Mount is real. The Western Wall is real.
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A
Israel is real.
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Israel is real. I mean, it seems pretty late in the game to believe that a hardened narrative can be shifted. That hardened narrative being obviously that the Jews represent not a people, but a faith, a people that is an inter. And that group of people who are interlopers in native Arab land. I mean, it's a good book, but really, how much lifting can you do?
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A
I've already begun showing the book to some Palestinians I know, and I've actually begun getting some letters in response. Some of the letters are conciliatory, some are hard. But I'm really grateful for all the letters that I'm getting. The book is going to be translated into Arabic. It basically has already been translated into Arabic and it will be offered for free downloading only in Arabic. The English readers are going to have to pay for the book.
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B
Well, they're less important than the mission.
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A
Yeah. But I wanted really to address your question, which is that or two questions really. So in terms of trying to redress the, the deep narrative which is widespread throughout the Muslim world, by the way, it's not only in Palestinian society by any means, that the Jews are not indigenous to this land, that we don't have a history in the land. We've lied about our identity. We're just a faith, we're not a people. I'm a writer, that's all. I'm not a politician. All I can do is write. And so I'm writing. I'm writing to my Palestinian neighbor and I'm trying to explain who I am. And this is really a sequel in a way to an earlier book that I wrote called at the Entrance to the Garden of Eden, which was the story of a journey that I took into Palestinian society in the late 1990s. Going as a religious Jew into mosques and praying, in some cases, being invited into the Muslim prayer line and writing about my experiences in Palestinian society. And that journey really was a journey of learning and listening. I call this a sequel because this is now my attempt to explain to my Palestinian neighbors who I am, what my story is as a Jew, what my people's story is, why we came home. If American Jews will find this interesting and eavesdropping onto this conversation with my neighbors, that is clearly another hope of mine, not just American Jews. I mean, this book is coming out in Arabic, it's coming out in English, it's coming out in Hebrew. I also have a conversation with my fellow Israelis about the Palestinians and the future of a two state solution. And my question to my fellow Israelis is, look, I get it. I understand why we have dug in, why we have frozen, why we're terrified of a Palestinian state on our borders. I get it. But let's not forget the other great fear, which is the fear that we're going to become permanent rulers over another.
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B
People, Is there any solution other than the two state solution?
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A
I ask myself that a lot. And obviously the two state solution isn't sacred. It's not sacred for either side. There is some whisperings or there's a movement, a new movement in Israel to envision a kind of confederation. Two states, one homeland is the slogan. And it's an interesting movement because it was founded by an alliance of left wingers and settlers. And the idea of this movement is that nobody will be moved from their home. Settlers stay where they are. Just as Israel has one and a half million Palestinian citizens, there will be settlers on the other side. I think it's a charming idea in principle. I don't see how this is workable in practice. You can come back at me and say, well, is a two state solution still workable? My answer is I don't know, but we've never tried it. And this is the solution that's been on the table almost since the beginning of the conflict going back to the 1930s. Partition, which is the unloved solution to my mind, still has no alternative.
- [32:31]
B
Yossi, thanks very much for talking to me.
- [32:33]
A
Pleasure. Thank you, Jeff.
- [32:51]
B
That's our show for this week. My thanks again to Yossi Klein Halevi. His book is called Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor. This episode was produced and edited by Kevin Townsend. The executive producer of Atlantic Podcast is Katherine Wells. If you like the show, please rate it and share it with friends. Again, we'll be going on a short break, but just stay subscribed and that way you find out when we're back. Thank you very much for listening and we'll see you again soon.