Alison Kaplan Sommer (3:58)

Well, yeah, I'm no longer fearfully hunkering down in the suburbs. And I decided that I was gonna spend the night in the big city, in the center of the action, just a few blocks from IDF headquarters.

Noah Efron (4:10)

Yes, you are really close. When we had our briefing at city council, they said that one of the rockets had landed just to the east of the kiriya of the IDF headquarters, and one of the rockets had landed just to the west. Each time they exploded on the wall of the IDF headquarters, but they did not hit the wall. Which is to say that the next time. Which side are you on? I think you're on the north side of you're on the south side. Excuse me. So. So it's next time it'll be in your direction.

Alison Kaplan Sommer (4:40)

But I got the biggest I told you so ever because when I was looking for apartment in this area to, to sublet in my big city adventure, the. The apartment that I first looked at that I thought would have been the ideal one to rent was on the 29th floor of the building that indeed got hit. And at the time, my husband said, oh my, I don't want to live in a building that close to the kiriat, and kind of ruled it out as a place for us to rent. But it was exactly, exactly in that.

Noah Efron (5:13)

Oh my, talk about his prescience. From now on, for the rest of his life, you have to wake up every single morning and say, I salute you for your prescience.

Alison Kaplan Sommer (5:23)

Yep, I told you so. The words that we love to hear in a marriage.

Noah Efron (5:28)

Now, as for me, my name is Noah Efron, and I don't mean to boast, but the first night that I went to the shelter, I got there late, after all the good spots were all taken, and a young person from our building saw me and she immediately carried over the chair that she had been sitting on. And she gave it to me, you know, because she was being nice to her elder who needed help. And at first I did not quite get why she gave me the chair. Because it was the middle of the night and I was dazed and confused. And then I realized, oh, it is because I am very old. You know, in the eyes of a 20something woman who gave up her chair, I must be somewhere between 50 and say what? 100, 120, who can tell? But the funny thing is I walk around and feel like I look like I still got it. But a I never really had it and b whatever I did have it is definitely gone. Now. Sarah was going to be with us, but she has to attend to some big bugs in her shelter Related issues. So Alison and I are going alone, taking on two topics of importance so grand you may find yourself fighting an impulse to salute or to curtsy. But first, we have this matter that we are following with alert, interest and great concern as part of an occasional series that we like to call the Promise Podcast ponders the peculiar promise of Persian proximity and propinquity and pursuant fantasias of peace.

Noah Efron (6:50)

It may be that the most ecstatic show I've ever been to was a show I never expected to be ecstatic at all. It was four years ago at the Dall center for Dance and Theater in Tel Aviv, one of the first shows that I saw after the pandemic eased up enough for shows to go on and the singer was a then 44 year old woman, a paithanit, a singer of liturgical poems who plays the kamancha, the satar, the tanbor, the tar and other Persian instruments. Her name is Maureen Nehedar, Nehedar meaning wondrous or magnificent in Hebrew. I loved a record that she'd made a few years before called Gole Gandom of Farsi folk songs. I heard Maureen Nehadar on the radio just before the ecstatic show and she told this story. She said she was born in Isfan in central Iran, and she was only two and a half when her family moved to Israel in 1979, not long after the Islamic revolution there. Marine Nadar said, at home in Israel, I would listen to Persian music. At the age of 12 or 13 I had a ritual when no one was at home. I would listen to some old cassettes that we brought with us from Iran that I found in a box on the shelf and my soul would just cry out. I had an uncontrollable desire to hear this emotional weeping singing, but as a kid I was embarrassed by this need. Today I know, of course, that this was the direct communication of my soul and that I missed how natural a role this music had occupied through my earliest life. End quote. These old cassettes were tapes her mother made right off the radio in Isfaan, and the music on them was not Persian Jewish music, it was just Persian music. These were the cassettes that her mother used to listen to while she was cooking, doing the laundry and the floors. When Marie Nedar was just a baby and a todd, she said that this was her girsa de Yankuta, the words the Babylonian Talmud uses to describe those things we get with our mother's milk, things that are learned before we know what learning is, those things that just go in us and shape us and are never fully forgotten. Marine Nedar's mother, after a while, stopped listening to that music. Like most immigrants, especially immigrants with kids, she tried to listen to what the people around her listened to in the streets and in the markets, what they liked to hear. And she tried to watch what they watched and to read what they read. But the pull of Persian culture, well, the love she had for Persian culture, her girsa de yankuta, it never went away, really. Maureen Nedar's mother was not like most other immigrants in that she moved from Iran to Israel twice, the first time with her parents, with Marine Neder's grandparents, sometime in the 1960s. But by the early 1970s, she got married to Maureen Nehdar's father and the two of them moved back to Iran, to Isfar, where Maureen Nehdar was born. And it was only years later that the family moved to Israel. And sometime after that that Marie Nedar's father, he felt that he had fallen, as Marie Neder put it again in the language of the Bavli of the Babylonian Talmud, Miikur Rama lebira amikta, from a high roof into a deep well. When he came to Israel, and he left Israel again and went back to the Iran of the ayatollahs, which he missed terribly and where he knew how to make a living, something he never all the way got in Jerusalem. So it may be fair to assume that whatever it was that Marie Nedar felt when she was alone at home at 12 or 13, she took her mother's cassettes of old Farsi pop music out of the box on the shelf where they were stowed and played them to herself, weeping, singing. It was complicated, whatever it was, that she felt, her own longing for a place for which she had only the phantasmic memories of a two year old, surely mixed with the longings of her mother and with her own longings for her father and who knows what else besides. After that, Marie Nedar went down a path before she found the tape. Starting when she was 10, she soloed for the Angkor Children's Choir at the Jerusalem Conservatory, where the repertoire was high Europe Hochkultur, a record Angkor put out when Marie Nedar was in the choir, includes verses by Bach.

Noah Efron (12:07)

And on that record Miriam Nadar also sings Laudate Domino by Mozart and La Daute Pueri by Mendelssohn and Gott ISS mein Hurt by Schubert, though it also that record had on it Yerushalayim, Sheol Zahav, Jerusalem of Gold.

Noah Efron (12:48)

Having that song alongside so much music with Latin and German names was a sort of synthesis, a sort of bringing together, but it was not the sort of bringing together that Maureen Nehdar, even as a kid, wanted. When she was 17, Maureen Nehdar joined the Isfan Ensemble, which did classical and folk Persian music, and before long she started her own ensemble with the aim of performing and thereby preserving Persian piyutim, or liturgical songs. After that, Marie Nedar got a degree and a second degree in music and started a doctorate at the Hebrew University in Persian music, which in time she left to devote herself to what she called her living doctorate, learning the songs and performing them. Marie Nedar said that giving herself back over to Persian music, it was like when God told Abraham, go you from your country, from your homeland, from the home of your father to the land I will show you the place. She was now being Bach, Mozart and Mendelssohn, though hers was a return to the home of her father. Still, her mother's tapes taken from the radio, that was a second go you from your country, from your homeland, from the home of your father, this one maybe to the home of her mother. And that night in the Dallas center was to celebrate Marie Nedar's then about to be released new record of those songs from her mother, mother's cassettes, Talu Aman, the record is called Songs that Were Not Jewish, but that were still hers and her mother's, because the songs were Persian and the Nehedar's, they are Persian too, songs like Murgi Sacher, the Nightingale.

Alison Kaplan Sommer (14:37)

Foreign.

Noah Efron (15:00)

So much about that night at the Dall center surprised me first, that by the time we got there in plenty of time, the auditorium was filled. We did not even try to get to the good seats in the middle we paid for, which in any case were already occupied by other people, and instead we took seats in the back row, which is fine, it's a small auditorium, maybe 300 people, and every single seat was filled, and the stairways and the aisles too, they were filled with people. And after my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I could see that not entirely, but pretty much the crowd is people in their 60s and 70s and 80s and when each song starts, it seems like every one of them is singing along. They know the words, all the words. And when one song ends, they shout out requests for another of Persian Iranian pop songs. And they joke with Nedar, you're not loud enough. They say, you need to learn this song. They say it's like she's their daughter and this is their living room. And people are screaming to her in Farsi, and she is answering softly, with a smile like they are her parents and this is her living room. And with each song, a few more people get up to dance. But I see that once someone is up, they almost never go back and sit down, until by the end, two of every three people in the hall are standing up and dancing, some down in front, some standing at their seats. And Susan says to me, you know, when we left America, we did not really leave, not like these people left. They left places and things behind that they never saw again. And you could feel both sides of what Susan said, how like I still meet up with my friends early in the morning to watch the super bowl, because there are things in America we never really left behind. And you can feel it in Suzanne Dalal, how these people, they never really left these songs behind. But at the same time, for more than 40 years, it hasn't really been possible for these people to visit the place where they were born, to breathe that air, to turn on the radio and just listen to that music. And you could feel it, how much that air was their air and how much that music was their music. All of this is easy to overlook, and often we do. Eleven years ago, the Knesset passed a law setting November 30th as the day marking the departure and expulsion of Jews from Arab countries and Iran. Nissim Ze', Ev, the shah member of Knesset behind the bill, whose parents moved to Jerusalem from Iraq, said that the law, quote, commemorates the suffering our forefathers and their forefathers endured when they were expelled from the Arab countries until they came to the land of Israel, end quote. Which may be right for people who came from many Arab countries, but it is not right for Jews who came from Iran, who were never expelled from Iran. Tens of thousands stayed. The ones who left, most of them never stopped seeing Iran as a homeland and themselves as Iranian. The great historian Salo Baron, in probably his most famous essay, ghetto and Emancipation it's called, he called out what he called the lachrymose or teary eyed view of Jewish history that saw Jewish history as a series of pogroms and expulsions, basically and though he was talking about the history of Jews in Europe, the same thing is true for the history we tell of Jews everywhere, including, maybe more than most, for the Jews of Iran. But that is not how the Jews of Iran see their history, which is as a 2,700year history of relations that are more complicated than that. There was discrimination and persecution, sure, but there were also great periods when Jews flourished in Iran. And the history of Jews in Iran in modern times, that is altogether different, exquisitely complex, as tens of thousands of Jews from Poland settled in Iran during World War II and thousands of Jews from Iraq, many fleeing from the Farhud. And there were minorities within minorities within minorities. And in the 20th century, the imaginations of some Jews in Iran were captured by Zionism, but the imaginations of many, many more were taken by other utopian philosophies that thrived then and there. One Iraqi Jew named Pinchas, born in 1931, told this story of his life after dropping out from his Jewish school after the sixth grade. Quote, I left school because we were many children in the house and one income was not enough. I had to get out and earn some money. I had a cart from which I sold anything I could find, and a regular spot on the street. Across from where I was standing, there was a building with a sign, he's the Communist Party. So one day after work, I walked in. Inside there were many people, young and adult, and there was a table tennis table. They invited me in and I played for a while. After I finished, they invited me to stay for a lecture. I started to go there on a regular basis to play ping pong and to listen to lectures. They talked about equality and basic economy and they taught us all the Marxist and leftist ideals. Up to this day, almost 70 years later, I still play ping pong and I still believe in all those ideals. In the years right after the war, Jews were everywhere in radical politics in Iran. And as the Allianz schools that lots of them sent their kids to produced young adults with a mastery of Persian, Arabic, French and English, often other languages as well. They were soon prominent among doctors and journalists and businessmen, a liberal elite with a tendency towards politics more radical than bourgeoisie, a state of affairs that brought many to see Israel after it was established in an ambivalent way. It was, after all, a socialist country, but it was also nationalist. And frankly, what it wanted could be confusing. Six weeks after the Rosenbergs were executed in the United States for spying for the Soviets, the Cultural and Social society of Iranian Jews held a memorial service in Tehran for the Jewish couple and more than 500 Jews from the community turned up. Around this time, a Jewish communist journal called B' Nai Adam started up writing about issues of the day, as it did in a 1952 essay called Israel and the Movements of Liberation in the Middle east and North Africa that ended with this. Israel is a country that is part of the Middle east and cannot remain neutral because our fate and their fate depend on one another. If Israel will support those anti imperialist freedom movements in their fight for independence and liberty for the peoples of the Middle east and will solve its minor differences with the Arab world, it will gain the respect of the Arab masses. Israel should not let the enemies of the Middle east abuse the situation and introduce it as an enemy of the Arabs. End quote. In the event, when a year later the CIA and the MI6 orchestrated one coup and then another against Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, who had brought democratic reforms to Iran and nationalized the Anglo Iranian oil company Israel with realpolitik ambivalence fel into line. Though Mosaddegh's trial was covered with sympathy on the front pages of some of Israel's leftist newspapers, it is true that it was after the Shah was reinstated as the leader of Iran, not just a figurehead, as he had become under Mohammad Mosaddegh, that the Jewish community of Iran thrived most under the Shah and that relations between Iran and Israel flourished most, with Israelis playing a big part in planning and carrying out big development projects and in modernizing the army. All this, despite what everyone saw, was the Shah's repression of critical voices and the rise of the SAVAK Bureau of Intelligence and Security of the State, a brutal secret police force that answered only to the Shah's men. And pretending not to see the repression was something many justified at the time by celebrating the continued secularization of Iranian culture, the growth of universities there where women studied in numbers that approached the numbers of men, and the growth of science and of Western theater and music and poetry, creating an odd dialectic of a society that seemed more free because it was more European, Western even as it was at the same time really less free. Here in Israel, there's a sort of tradition of radicals from Iran who never gave up the ping pong and Karl Marx ideals of their parents and grandparents. ABHI Natan grew up in Abadan. His parents left Iran for India in 1939 at 16. Abhi Natan lied about his age and joined the Royal Indo British Air. For just as the war wound down at 21, he volunteered to fly in Israel's war of independence, taking most of the aerial photos of Arab positions, but near the end of the war, also bombing Palestinian villages to make the villagers flee before a ceasefire fixed who controlled what land. ABHI Nathan wrote in his memoir years later, in the Arab village of Sassa, there were no anti aircraft guns. We bombed the village from a height of 3,000ft while feeling completely safe. End quote. Two days after that, Nathan went to Sasa. I wandered through the ruins and burned bodies were scattered everywhere. I was faced with the consequence of destruction, wreckage and death carried out by a pilot bombing from the air. Now that I saw with my own eyes what I had done, I was seized with a deep depression.

Noah Efron (24:28)

Each summer, when the kids were small, we vacationed for a week with our best friends and their kids at Sassa, which was then a thriving Hashomeraza ir Kibbutz, founded in 1949, mostly by Americans on what Wikipedia calls the land of the depopulated Palestinian village of Sassa. Some of my happiest memories are there, but I digress. After that, Abinatan devoted himself to seeking peace with Palestinians, Egyptians, Syrians, Jordanians, Iranians, with everyone in the region, which peace he never believed would elude us for long. In 1965, he ran for Knesset in a party he started called Ness or Miracle. Taking advice from a friend in pr, he pledged that if he was elected, he would fly to Egypt to meet with Nasser to seek peace. He did not win a seat in Parliament, but he Anyway bought a 1927 Stearman biplane that he named Peace One. On February 28, 1966, he took off and, flying low to avoid Israeli radars, landed in Port Said. The Egyptians sent him back the next day. Nasser refused to meet with him, but on the other hand, the Egyptian soldiers into whose hands he fell woke up a Port Said shopkeep who opened a store so Abinatan could pick out a pair of pajamas for the night. But back home, a retired Ben Gurion called his trip an event of moral and political importance. Pope Pius gave him a Medal of Peace, and such luminaries as Robert Kennedy and Bertrand Russell sought out his company. Four months after that, in June 1966, Abinatan launched a peace march from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, arriving at the Knesset with more than 1,000 Arabs and Jews singing Hevenu Shalom Aleichem and bearing letters for the Prime Minister and the speaker of the Knesset and one for King Hussein of Jordan that he entrusted to Palestinian community leaders to somehow deliver Quote it is easier to fly to Port Said than to walk 80 km in the sun from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. In October 1966, Abhinathan rented trucks in India and gave out 10 tons of corn to the people of 35 villages in drought stricken Bihar. In December he set up his Peace Foundation. In 1968 he raised one and a half million dollars filling a quote unquote Christmas ship with 3,000 tons of food and medicine for starving kids in Biafra. Not long after that, Ebnatan got it in his head that music held the key to changing Israeli society and Israeli attitudes and the societies and attitudes of Palestinians, Egyptians, Jordanians, Syrians, Lebanese, Iranians and all the rest. And it was then that he started what became his five year project to raise money for a ship that would lay anchor in international waters in the Mediterranean and broadcast peace to Israelis, Egyptians and anyone else who would listen to. And people joked that Abinatan had already tried to bring peace by air and over land. All that was left was the sea. And on the first night of broadcast from off the shore of Tel Aviv, Abinatan promised listeners that quote. I will stay on this peace ship and I will not leave it until there is peace. He said in his deep, even voice. Quote it is dark outside. It is lonely here on deck. I am sitting by myself near the transmitter. I have no speech prepared. I don't know what to say. For six years I have dreamed of this moment. Six years I've worked over what I would say. And now I do not know. It was a long time filled with loneliness, despair, disappointments. But I knew this day would come. If a person does not give up always he gets there. I do not know what to say. I have nothing to gain or lose, save for the future. Maybe the voice of reason will win out over the sound of cannons. Aren't people tired of the years of fear, worry, suspicion? I want to stay here day and night, day and night to try. End quote. Abi Natan did leave the ship. Over the 20 years of broadcast, there was money to raise to keep it going. And there were volunteer DJs to recruit and record companies to keep in touch with. And there was land loving politics to be done abroad and at home. In 1976, Abhi Natan organized humanitarian aid. After an earthquake in Guatemala. In 1989, he brought tons of food to families starving in Cambodia. In 1985 he built a humanitarian aid tent camp in Ethiopia. Later there would be trips to Somalia, to Sidon, to Darfur, to Colombia, to Kurds in northern Iraq to Rwanda, to Kenya. At home too, there was lots to be done. In May 1978, Abhi Natan launched a hunger strike he pledged to end only after the Begin government officially adopted a policy of building no new settlements in the occupied territories. 45 days later, he was brought to the Knesset in an ambulance to hear the legislature adopt a bill proposed by the Minister of Health calling upon Abinatan to stop his strike, which he did. The Voice of Peace continued to broadcast until 1993, and in 2009, the year after Abinah died, the Voice of Peace was restarted as a web radio station, quote so the message of peace could be spread again through the music, end quote which you can listen to today. Another Israeli in the radical Persian tradition is Orli Noy, a journalist and activist. She is the chairwoman of the B'Tselem Anti Occupation Group who was born Mujan Ab Ginezaz in Tehran, where she lived until she was nine, though her folks were first from Isfan and she described her childhood like this quote we were a middle class family. Our lives were comfortable. My father was the manager of a branch of Bank Saderat and my mother was a housewife. There was a Jewish quarter in Tehran, but we lived in another neighborhood. We were surrounded by Muslims, Baha' I and Armenian neighbors. My brother and I attended the Kourush school, a school of Jewish children. We had Hebrew and Torah lessons, but non Jewish children from Christian and Zoroastrian minorities also went to our school. My closest friend as a child in Tehran were an Armenian girl and a Zarawasta. I also had a Muslim friend. She was a neighbor and a classmate. My friend's mother would not offer me bread or sweets when I went to their house during the Pesach holiday. When we don't eat bread, that is how well her family knew us. A close relative of my mother married a Muslim man. The groom was close friends with my father. They lived in Bandur Abbas and I visited them many times with my family. Our family did not reject our relative because she married a Muslim and the Muslim family did not try to change the bride's opinions or to make her cut off her relationship with her family. End quote. These days Orli Noye is probably known as much as anything for the poetry and novels she translates from Farsi, the Hebrew they win awards and people read them. Orli Noye has made this her life's work, or part of it anyway. She says to help Israelis to get to know Iran as a country with a history and culture and rich civilization. End quote. Just the other day, three days into the bombing, a dancer named Inat Gans posted to Facebook Orli Noy's translation of an old 1955 poem by Ahmed Chalu, probably the most important poet of modern Iran. It is called Bright Horizon, and it goes in my translation of a translation. The day will come and we will find the doves we lost and grace will take its place alongside beauty. The day when a kiss will be the most common anthem and everyone will be a brother to everyone else. The day when we will no longer lock the doors of our houses, Locks will become like myths and a heart will be all you need to live. That day when our words will talk love and you won't need to search for last words. That day when life will be the melody of every word and I won't agonize over the right rhyme for the last of my poems. That day when words will be a poem and the anthems will all be kisses. That day when you come, when you'll come forever and grace and beauty will become one. That day when we toss seeds as feed to our doves and I wait for that day, even if by that day I myself will no longer be here.

Noah Efron (32:48)

What I get from all these Persians, from Orli Noi and ABHI Nathan and Marine Edar, and the hundreds and hundreds of women and men dancing that night in Suzanne Dalal. And of course, there are many, many more. Think of Liraz Charhi, who plays the Mossad agent in Tehran, Yael Qadosh, on the TV show Tehran, and who on the side makes Persian music with women musicians in Iran, who record their voices Samistat and send them to Liraz Charkhi on encrypted apps for her to make into songs. What all these people know that I could not know without them them is that this moment of people in Tel Aviv and Tehran, in Jerusalem and Isfar spending our nights in shelters, it is not some inevitable result of some inevitable currents of history, an enmity with origins that go back millennia or that spring forth from our DNA, but rather this moment. It is a break. It is an anomaly. I saw not long ago, an interview with Moshe Zonder, the man who wrote the TV show Tehran, and he said, really what it is is a story of an immigrant finally getting to go back to the place she grew up, that is still somehow home to her, that she left, but then again, she never really did leave. It is a story of how close things are, not how far. What these people know that I could not know without them is that the cassette tapes are in a box on a back shelf, and our kids, they will find them. What these people know that I could not know without them is that the bombs will stop and that we will toss seeds to our doves. And I wait for that day, even if until that day, some of the time I wait in a shelter meters underground, under rock and rebar. A few years ago Maureen Nedar sang the prayer for peace that we sing in Yom Kippur. The words of the prayer go our God in heaven, see the press of this hour. Our God in heaven, hear our cry, Set peace among us, set tranquility within our palaces. Our God in heaven, grant peace upon earth, grant abundance to the world, grant peace to the nations. And she sings the prayer after the fashion it was sung in Isfar, though if you listen closely you can hear the abundance of it. Also the synagogues, mosques and churches of Isfar, the alleys of Jerusalem, the voices of women sent in files over WhatsApp, the boxes of cassettes and also Bach, Mozart and Mendelssohn. You can hear it all, you can hear all of this and you can feel how the day will come and the prayer will be answered.

Noah Efron (35:39)

Shama.

Alison Kaplan Sommer (35:45)

10 shalom.

Alison Kaplan Sommer (36:02)

Ten shalom.

Noah Efron (36:06)

O.

Alison Kaplan Sommer (36:35)

10 shalom.

Alison Kaplan Sommer (37:04)

Ten Shalom.

Noah Efron (37:24)

Today 2 discussions Discussion 1 Bibi's Big Adventure with apologies to Paul Rubin as now that Israel is pounding to scrap and rubble at least some of Iran's centrifuges, enrichment plants, uranium conversion facilities, uranium mines and mills, heavy water reactors, plutonium reprocessing facilities, neutron initiators, Chabab 3 ballistic missiles, factories and stockpiles and such, the question arises whether this past week's war in Iran might not cast a new light, a new perspective, the miserable More than 600 days of war in Gaza and Lebanon that came before it will history. And should we now see all that has happened as part of a single very big war? That in retrospect it is possible to see that maybe Prime Minister Netanyahu has been planning since retaking the Prime Ministership 15 long years ago and discussion 2. Goodbye to all that as journalist Isaac Sahl writes a moving essay called I think I'm Leaving Zionism or Zionism is Leaving Me, in which he explains how though Zionism was at the heart of his identity for all of his adult life, and very much so on October 7, 622 days ago now Isaac Sahl has come to see that he is no longer a Zionist at all. Like Ezra Fuhrman, we will wonder, well what can you say to that? And for our most unreasonably generous Patreon supporters, in our extra special, special extra discussion, the link to which you can find in our show Notes on your podcast app or at patreon.com promisepodcast on the world Wide Web, Alison and I will talk about what it is like to be in Israel right now, racing to shelters and also acutely aware that all the passenger planes in the country have been relocated to safety in Europe. But we, well, we are here, here, here, here, here. And for our non Patreon supporter listeners, you will hear a snippet a bit, a little beginning part of that discussion after this podcast. So stay tuned to hear what that that sounds like. But before we get to any of that, listen to this.

Alison Kaplan Sommer (40:31)

Baby.

Noah Efron (41:06)

That song is Moledit Homeland New by Maureen Nehedar, who is, as I just said, one of our Persians. We will listen to music by our Persians over the course of the show, most of them singing in Farsi. And now it is time for our first discussion. So Alison, sometimes the present casts the past in a whole new light, making it clear that what was actually happening was not exactly what we thought was happening at the time. Has that been the case even a little bit over the past 622 days?

Alison Kaplan Sommer (41:43)

It could be, because it's possible, though it may or may not be accurate, to view Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's aims over the past 622 days days in a different light, by which perhaps the war in Gaza too is illuminated in a new way. It was the Stanford economist Paul Romer who first said 21 years ago that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. And it may be that Prime Minister Netanyahu saw in the tragedy and savagery of October 7th a crisis that if he responded to it in a certain way and had a lot of luck on his side, and he generally seems to have a lot of luck on his side, could make good use of it. In 2010, only months after he was elected prime minister for the second time, Netanyahu argued in the most rarefied rooms where it happens that Israel should attack Iran full force to prevent the Islamic State from making nuclear bombs that could kill hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of Israelis at a time. This opinion of the then newly returned to office prime minister was seconded by his minister of defense, defense one time prime minister, one time IDF chief of Staff Ehud Barak. The plan was forcefully opposed by the current then IDF chief of staff, Gabi Ashkenazi, and the then head of Mossad Mayor Dagan, who in the meeting gave this warning to the Prime Minister, you are likely to make an illegal decision to go to war. Only the cabinet is authorized to decide this. In the end, and with ambivalence, Prime Minister Netanyahu decided not to give the order to attack Iran, though he asked his security forces to devise and keep current a plan to do so when the right moment came. Benjamin Netanyahu was not the first prime minister to consider attacking Iran to prevent it from going nuclear. Already in 2002, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had his security people prepare a plan to attack. His Minister of Defense, Shalom Al Faz, all but said that such a plan existed. And Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who was prime minister between Sharon and Netanyahu, also entertains such plans, as IDF Chief of staff then Dan Khalutz all but said on Olmert's watch. And Olmert authorized the assassination in Iran of some of the country's leading physicists working to produce a bomb. And for the past 15 years, Prime Minister Netanyahu has been doggedly trying to curtail Iran's nuclear program. He insisted hundreds of times, to the iron scorn of a lot of the world that Israel would bomb the program out of existence if America and the world could not come up with a better way of limiting it. The problem with all these threats and plans has always been that because Iran has built a good deal of its uranium enrichment operations far, far, far underground, sometimes, as in the Fordo facility, underground under mountains, and Israel does not have in its arsenal's bombs that can destroy them, them only the United States does. The new way that this week's bombing of Iran suggests, we might look at our past 622 days of war is this. It may be that from the beginning, Prime Minister Netanyahu saw in the war in Gaza a chance to finally neutralize, for a time anyway, the threat that Iran poses to lives of hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of Israelis. By allowing Israel to attack and destroy some or much of Iran's nuclear program program, the path to weakening Iran passed through weakening all of Iran's supporters, supportees and proxies on Israel's borders. Of course, Hamas and Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Assad regime in Syria and the Houthis in Yemen. Of course, this is not the first time when it has been hard to ignore that our miserable little war in Gaza is not just our miserable little war in Gaza, but rather something bigger than that. That after Hezbollah was defeated up north, much was made about the broader geopolitical Context of the Gaza war. Same with the fall of the Baathists in Syria. But Prime Minister Netanyahu's decision to do what he has in the past considered over and over again and over and over, decided not to for various reasons to attack Iran, makes it seem that much more likely. Netanyahu has long been seeing Gaza as part of something bigger trigger. And if this is true, then maybe it goes some way to explaining why the Prime Minister has been so reticent to end the war in Gaza, even if ending the war would bring home the remaining hostages. Because in this scenario, he needed to keep the war going to ever get to his moment to bomb Iran's nuclear program out of existence, or at least out of becoming an immediate threat. Noah, I think I know what your take is, but what do you think of all this? Do these events of the past week make you see the events of the past almost 89 weeks in a different light?

Noah Efron (46:41)

It does. I mean, none of this is entirely new. It's stuff that I've heard you, Allison, say in the past that Netanyahu had in mind always this bigger thing, even all through Gaza. But it does, it does suggest that there might have been yet another perverse reason, and one that we did not see, for the Prime Minister to refuse to end the war in Gaza in ways that at the time seemed to a lot of people to be mysterious and to some people to be mysterious and evil. One of the reasons, because it might have seemed to Prime Minister Netanyahu as worthwhile, even possibly at the expense of the lives, certainly at the expense of the present health of the hostages, to keep the war going, is because he might have thought that while the war is going, it would be easier to make the decision and to mount a war against Iran. And if he felt that way, and I think he did, then he was right about that. I mean, the perverse thing about this is you didn't need to have the war in Gaza going on. You didn't need to have thousands more Palestinians than were already killed, killed, and you didn't need to further endanger the lives of the hostages in order to attack Iran, especially after the point where Hezbollah was toppled, which by now is some time ago.

Noah Efron (48:25)

You could possibly have ended the war in Gaza and then at any moment decided to attack Iran. But the perverse thing is it seems to be that at this moment, when so much of the world is so entirely full, throatedly anti Israel, when so many diplomatic bridges lie in rubble, this is a moment when it's easier to attack Iran. And if Israel had already gone some of the way towards fixing some of those diplomatic bridges, had stopped the war in Gaza before attacking Iran, it would have been diplomatically harder for Israel to attack. And this is a decision that the Prime Minister has, as we said, as you said, has put off. Now, for 15 years, and for 15 years he's believed, I think, that it is basically the right thing to do and that it is inevitable. And he has always sought the right moment. And I think that he saw in Gaza a way to create precisely the right moment when by virtue of diplomatic opposition to Israel being almost univocal and almost total, almost around the world, this is actually a moment when Israel has a freer hand than it does in the past. Add to that Donald Trump and the mysteries of what's going on in that guy's mind and Prime Minister Netanyahu's continuing belief that ultimately he can be persuasive to Donald Trump in a way that many other people cannot. I think that you add that all together and he said, yes, this is the moment that I can create. And I think that in part, he created this moment by keeping our miserable and, you know, I think now no longer intelligible, much less justifiable war in Gaza going on. What do you think?

Alison Kaplan Sommer (50:19)

Well, you know, I'm on the record for a long time and we're on the record as disagreeing is that, you know, I completely don't think that that's the reason for continuing the war in Gaza. Said it before, said it again. He can't keep his coalition together with.

Alison Kaplan Sommer (50:36)

Ending the war in Gaza. He certainly can't keep his coalition together with creating any kind of diplomatic endgame in Gaza, for ruling it with the participation of the Palestinian Authority and wider Arab world. So, in my opinion, you know, that that is, was a political game of survival, not ending the war in Gaza and not getting our hostages back.

Noah Efron (50:58)

Do you think that part of his, of the motivation to go to war against Iran has to do with keeping his coalition together?

Alison Kaplan Sommer (51:07)

No, I'm talking about the reasons for continuing the, the war in Gaza. Not. No, absolutely. I don't think that, that there was political reasons for, for, for the war in Iran. I think there are legacy reasons, but I'll, I'll get to those. I think, as you know, I said in the introduction that he's had this, this plan in the drawer for a long time, as have other prime ministers. When the time is right, when I am able to.

Alison Kaplan Sommer (51:33)

You know, attacking Iran and, you know, directly ridding ourselves of this Nuclear threat is the right thing to do, and we need the right time to do it. I think the real spur for the decision to move forward with this was, you know, he certainly didn't plan October 7th and the beginning of the Gaza war, but the destruction of the proxies. First Hamas, but much more significantly, you know, getting rid of these Hezbollah capabilities to threatening us with these, with these missiles. I think, you know, that was the, the biggest argument that many of these, you know, military chiefs had for not attacking Iran because they were not necessarily worried about the retaliation coming from Iran directly. They were worried about the, the thousands of missiles that Hezbollah had pointed at us that could retaliate in that moment. So when this whole Hezbollah collapse happened, that is probably what spurred, you know, a real motivation to try to do something about Iran. Now, in order to do that, you needed an American president who would offer tacit, if not active support in doing it. I don't think he could have predicted after October 7th or, you know, through most of the war that Trump was going to win, he's going to get Trump back, and that things would play out the way that they've just played out. He expected Donald Trump maybe to be very supportive of attacking Iran. He was surprised when at first Donald Trump was like, no, I want to have an agreement. I want to be the big deal maker. Iran come to the table. Let's have these talks. But, you know, he did get luck in the fact that the Iranians seemed unwilling, intransient, whatever, kind of, you know, not very cooperative to Trump. And Trump being Trump, he kind of said, you know, oh, you guys don't want to make a deal. Israel, you know, do what you want. And that, you know, that opened the door to it. So, you know, I see much of it as a, A, a procession of circumstances, the way that things played out. I don't think it was some sort of, you know, grand plan, let's keep this war going in order so we can attack, attack Iran. I think that things fell into place. And you asked if I thought that he.

Alison Kaplan Sommer (53:42)

Continued the war and, and attacked Iran because of political survival reasons. No. I think first of all, he probably, you know, truly feels like he's doing something to protect the country long term, which he is. But he also is thinking about his legacy. Think of it without this. What's his legacy? Legacy of the October 7 failures, legacy of his increasing, you know, unpopularity among the people, of his ongoing criminal trials, a negative legacy. You know, despite his long and storied career as a leader of the country. I think in addition to the practical and operative reasons that he wanted to accomplish this, that he wanted, wants to be the guy who, you know, saved Israel from, from destruction by nuclear weapons or long term threat by nuclear weapons. And, you know, you have to hand it to him, it appears that that's what he's on the road to doing, even though, you know, we don't know how events are going to play out from now.

Noah Efron (54:41)

One of the reasons why what you're saying seems pretty compelling, seems pretty persuasive to me, is that we, you and I probably have, have pretty different evaluations of Prime Minister Netanyahu, though there are whole big areas about which we, I think, agree about his sort of rapaciousness and his love of luxury and his feeling that rules don't apply to him. We all, we agree about that. But another thing, more important thing that we, I think that we agree on is that Netanyahu is one of the great opportunists that I've ever seen on this stage of history where I don't mean opportunism opportunist as a, as a pejorative necessarily. He is basically brilliantly reactive. As soon as situations develop in a way that he can use to his advantage, or his advantage is sometimes his personal advantage, but his advantage can be the advantage of the country that he's leading as its prime minister, then he takes, he finds a way quickly to take advantage of them, having very, very quickly analyzed what is going on and that that is, I think, his greatest genius.

Alison Kaplan Sommer (55:56)

And what puts, sorry to interrupt, I just want to.

Alison Kaplan Sommer (56:00)

But what puts me off is in the, in the situations that we've seen, when it's his advantage versus the country's advantage, in my opinion, he always defaults to his own advantage.

Noah Efron (56:11)

And that's one thing that's something that we disagree about. But basically what you said before is that what's happening in Iran now is a result of Netanyahu being usefully opportunistic. And there's a lot of chaos that has unfolded over the last couple of years and that he now is taking advantage of some of that chaos and doing something that, that.

Noah Efron (56:41)

A lot of people believe is very, very important to safeguard the future of Israel. And so I find what you're saying, your description of it, pretty compelling. All of which brings me to another question, maybe a question that I think about because I'm a historian in my day job, but.

Noah Efron (57:02)

I now wonder, we don't know, like you just said, how this is going to play out. And it could go wrong in many, many ways and it could fizzle out in many, many ways. And Iran in three years might be very similar to Iran of three years ago. We don't know. But it seems to me possible that apropos what you said about legacy, that we will someday, we, the broad we a hundred years from now in the history books or the history, whatever they are, the history holograms, then we will look at the, the miserable war in Gaza the way that people now look at the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria as the thing that brought about the real thing that matters. And the real thing that matters may be what's going on in Iran now. Of course, if 50 or 60,000 Palestinians died and 2,000 some odd Israelis died, then that tragedy obviously stands on its own. I'm not trying to minimize it, but I wonder if this whole, all of what happened in the middle of the 2020s will not one day be seen as the Israel Iran war.

Alison Kaplan Sommer (58:21)

I guess so, you know, and in the history books you don't I think, feel the immediacy of the humanity and the human loss as we are feeling in real time time. But you know what? I have an issue of standing back and looking at the history books and this will all have been, you know, whatever this grand procession of events. And it's my issue with, with Netanyahu is he doesn't seem to feel the loss of the 50, 60,000 human lives in Gaza and the starving children and the, the, the horrible, horrible human suffering there as a factor in his, his calculations. He is able to again, the, the human price of, of the hostages, you know, remaining there and those that have, have died there. And, and now, you know, my, my blood boiled again. This isn't a great historic argument or something when, when he comes out triumphantly about our achievements in Iran and doesn't mention the 23 of his citizens who have died in the buildings of the, of the ballistic missile attacks. Like any acknowledgment of the tragedy and human loss of his achievements, of something good that he does, you know, can't even be acknowledged, admitted and he can't even comfort people because that would somehow be reducing the, the level of, of, of achievement or, or strength that, that he has. Again, no, it's, that's not one for the history books, but that's something that just, you know, I can't see him as some sort of great hero because of what appears to be his incredible callousness to human life.

Noah Efron (60:02)

What is really fascinating to me about what you just said, which seems to me to be moving and true, is that it raises a new way of thinking about a criticism of of our Prime Minister that he really does seem to think in the grand lines of history, son of historian that he is. And that is completely inseparable from his seeming inability to look at the lives of people living in a different frame of time. We all live in a different frame of time, which is a human frame, not a grand historical march of history frame. And maybe one of the things that we agree about that's so grating and ultimately just insufferable about our Prime Minister is that it seems to come so easily to him to ignore the suffering of people here now. Anyway, now listen to this.

Noah Efron (61:35)

Me.

Noah Efron (62:46)

That song is Nifarhan by Mor Karbasi More Persian Israeli music and now it is time for our second discussion which we are calling Goodbye to All that. And here is why there is a sort of essay that is sometimes called Goodbye to All that because in the event, that was the name given to some of our very best examples of it almost 100 years ago. English poet, critic and novelist Robert Graves he wrote I, Claudius wrote his memoir about giving up on old Oxbridge, England after the disillusionments of the first World War and what he saw his childhood home to be on his return in 1968, Joan Didion wrote her own goodbye to all that about abandoning New York for sun drenched weirdness in la. A couple of years after that, feminist theorist Robin Morgan had a goodbye to all that. This was the first one that I ever read, a manifesto against the sexist quote, counterfeit left, counter left, male domination, cracked glass mirror reflection of the American nightmare American there spelled with a K that Robin Morgan was leaving behind in favor of women. Quote, rising powerful bright, glowing mad, wild hair flying, wild eyes staring wild voices keening, end quote. A decade and some after that. In 1989, Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawn wrote for Marxism Today a goodbye to all that at the final collapse of Soviet Marxism after 72 years, quote, those of us who believe that the October Revolution was the gate to the future of world history have been shown to be wrong. End quote. The aging historian wrote, sober and sad. Lately a quite wonderful 35 year old journalist and public intellectual named Isaac Saul wrote an essay rooted deep in the goodbye to all that tradition, though he called his I think I am leaving Zionism or Zionism is leaving me. Isaac sahl wrote for CNN, Time and the Daily Mail, HuffPo and other well known magazines before starting his own subscription based politics newsletter blog Newspaper now called Tangle that has a third of a million subscribers spread over 55 countries, who together fork over almost a quarter of a million dollars a year in subscription fees. People listen to Isaac Sahl. Isaac Sahl has won all sorts of awards, and he's known for being thoughtful and measured, the Leo Strauss of journalists writing today I think I am leaving. Zionism starts with the description of how and why Isaac Sahl came to Zionism in the first place. Isaac Sahl grew up reform, not especially religious, and with vague appreciation for Israel, about which he never thought very much one way or the other. In college, he went on birthright and fell in love. He felt at home. He felt part of something bigger. He vibed with the place. After graduation, he spent six months at a BAAL Teshuva yeshiva in Jerusalem, and he got some religion by the end of the trip. Isaac Saul writes, quote, I was two things I wasn't when I arrived, an observant Jew and a committed Zionist after that. Over time, Isaac Saul learned about the suffering of Palestinians in Akba and all that, and he took these things seriously, settling on the view that, quote, to me, being a Zionist is to know that Israel is far from perfect, but to believe that criticizing the obvious flaws of Israel's government is worth it, to push the country toward something better, toward the values and its ideals and the vision of a Jewish state, end quote. This is more or less what Isaac sahl believed on October 7th, and for the first months that followed October 7th. Since then, though, he's followed the war in Gaza closely, as anyone who cares about Israel, like Isaac Sahl, would do, and he has found his old Zionism harder and harder to hold. By way of explanation, he writes, quote, I'd like you to imagine for a moment that today is October 8, 2023, and I make the following prediction. In May of 2025, approaching two years into the war sparked by Hamas, brutal terrorist attack and hostage taking, 100,000 Gazans would be dead. Most of Gaza would be flattened. Hamas would still be in power. A quarter of the Israeli hostages would be. Two dozen would still be in captivity. Iran, Hezbollah and the Houthis would be firing rockets into Israel. Trump would be president and proposing relocating millions of Gazans out of the Strip. Netanyahu would still be prime minister and aligned on Trump's vision. Israel would be accused of genocide by multiple human rights organizations, and the Israeli military would be preparing to reoccupy Gaza indefinitely. Would anyone have argued that that was a success? End quote. You could argue with some of Isaac Sahl's numbers. But you get his point, which is solid. Isaac Sahl then considers what Israel has done and continues to do in Gaza and comes to the conclusion that we are witnessing something between an ethnic cleansing and a genocide and the country I have supported is conducting those actions. The essay is more than 7,000 words long and I can't include everything, so I will just say again how mild and judicious, if still powerful and emotional Isaacs hall is in all he writes here. If a lot of anti Zionists these days sound gleeful in their condemnation of Israel, Isaac Sahl is sad and distressed to reach the conclusions he reaches. He has sympathy for Israelis and others who say that their first responsibility is to take care of our own, even if other innocent people pay a price for that. Given Jewish history, it is an attitude that makes sense. But Isaac's alright. It leads Israel to be, quote unquote, a kind of ethnostate, one defined by prioritizing the population of a particular ethnicity, in this case, Jews, end quote. Isaac Sahl can understand this, but ultimately he can't accept it, at least not for himself. He ends his essay with My vision for a Jewish homeland doesn't look a lot like the one that exists in Israel today. My vision is not a government that diminishes the value of non Jewish life. It is not a place with so little imagination it cannot envision a future where Palestinians and Israelis live together as equals in peace. In the end, my desires for what I want Zionism to be are distinct from what Zionism is. And that reality is now so obvious and so clear that I've begun to suspect my harshest critics are right. I may just not be a Zionist at all. End quote. So Alison, what do you make of the fact that 622 days ago Isaacs hall was a Zionist and today, 622 days later, he is not? What about his essay? His argument moves you and makes sense to you and what, if anything, does not?

Alison Kaplan Sommer (69:52)

I mean, it completely makes sense to me, given that he is a Diaspora Jew, a US Jewish. It's a theme that we hear over and over again. I mean, of course, duh, Israel is an ethnostate, you know, that's what it is. But that is the inherent divide between Israel slash Zionism and American Jewry. It is universalist values versus, you know, ethnocentric values slash priorities. And it is very impossible for them to live perfectly one besides the other. I never coming from my point of view and Noah, your point of view is Going to be very different. I never identified as an ideological Zionist. I grew up as an American Jew with a fully diasporic identity. You know, Israel was there, I learned about it, I was interested in it, it was a point of pride. I ended up moving here out of, you know, a personal decision, a personal choice to live here. Before that, people presented me with oh well, a Jews should live here. And I never, I never accepted that. But because I live in the real Israel as it exists, I'm very much compartmentalized and separate. This vision concept of Zionism as the Jews have a right to deserve, slash need a Jewish state that is, you know, it's, it's shelter that's, it's inherent and the realities of modern Israel today, which is just a fact on the ground. I really think a lot of these conversations about Zionism as an ideology are, you know, seem irrelevant and, and off the table to me. But I can fully understand how a modern liberal, universalist American Jew with a Jewish identity.

Alison Kaplan Sommer (71:49)

Grounded in, in the religion and in the life that they have can look at Zionism today and say, yeah, it's, it's not worth it, it's not worth the cost and that it's, it's warping my, my, my Judaism. So no, I'm really interested in hearing what you come from, but I have sort of, I guess trouble completely relating, you know, on a gut level to this because I never felt, felt Zionism in my bones the way it appears that he has and that you do.

Noah Efron (72:20)

Well, I don't know exactly what he ever did feel in his bones and I would be really interested in understanding it more deeply. I, by the way, I really loved this essay. I love this essay because it's so open hearted and it's so. I, you know, we, you said that it was, I said that it was Straussian. It was so measured and balanced and thoughtful and humane in its outlook. So I fell in love with Isaac Sahl, who I frankly had never read before. And this essay. But it also left me a little bit mystified about what the Zionism that he no longer. What the Zionism that he is leaving or maybe it has left him ever was. And I find that I feel this over and over again these days when I come across people speaking about Zionism, their ambivalence towards Zionism, they're leaving Zionism. It always seems to me like the most superficial version of, of what used to be a hundred years ago called political Zionism, like Herzl's Zionism, that what we want is a place that's just like Europe, only Jews can run there from anywhere in the world when people are beating them up and they'll have a really strong army so they won't seem like weak Jews anymore. That seems to me to be the vision of Zionism that people are now completely disillusioned about because. Because now they're feeling like, oh gee, when what my Zionism is, is a place that has a strong army where Jews can run to. Sometimes a strong army does things that I don't agree with, as all armies do everywhere. What's completely absent from the view of Zionism that he, Isaac Sahl describes in this article, though I would bet you it is not absent from the Zionism that he feels or felt in his heart, is a Zionism that is about all the things that have been done here in Israel as a Jewish state. Which is to say, I would bet that one of the things that moved Isaac Sahl when he was here is how on Friday afternoon the whole country grows kind of quiet.

Alison Kaplan Sommer (74:53)

It.

Noah Efron (74:53)

Because there's this thing called Shabbat that's coming and most of the people will never keep Shabbat in the way that, you know, Yeshivish people keep Shabbat. Most of the people are, you know, many of the people are getting ready to go have dinner at their folks house and then go out to some club where they'll take Mali. That's that, you know, that it's not like a religious thing. But there is this thing here that is, that is profound, that is shared by so many people that is unquestionably Jewish, but it's sort of Jewish in a new way. But it's in a new way that corresponds with that vibes, with the old way. And there are a million things about that. I would bet that Isaac Sahl was moved by Hebrew, by the Hebrew language, by seeing those letters on those signs describing the things that they described. I bet that Isaac Sahl is moved by reading, reading the poetry that people produce here and listening to the music that people produce here. This like the greatest, the, the greatest outpouring of, of new Jewish culture probably in the history of the world. Maybe there was something similar as recently as125 years ago in Europe when, you know, during the, just after the emancipation was when there was this incredible flowering of all sorts of new Jewish culture and socialist and Marxist and Bundest and Yiddishist Jewish culture. Maybe that was similar. But it's one of these moments of which there are very few in history where there's this incredible, incredible flowering of this beautiful, profound, moving culture that makes Judaism feel like a living thing and not like something from the past that was a lie for our grandparents. And I bet that that's why Isaac Saul ever loved Israel. But the reason why he's rejecting it is because this vision of like.

Noah Efron (76:58)

Zionism being just a place where you have a strong army that you're supposed to feel proud of, turns out to be bullshit. Well, yes, of course, it was always bullshit. That was never a serious thing. The 12 year old me read those things and said this is ridiculous. If Herzl is what Zionism is, then I want. No, but there was immediately a khadaam that the 13 year old me got into his hands and immediately there were a whole new world of people doing different things in Zionism. And I don't know why suddenly that's disappeared entirely from every discourse. The American probably never knew about it. Probably we learn now that everything that was taught to us and everything that we taught about Zionism was poorly taught in the past because we never got to the heart of anything. But beyond that, even here in Israel, we're not talking about it, we're all talking about Zionism as though Zionism is just about the structure of a state government and army. And that was never what it was about. So I find this heartbreaking because I love this guy. If we lose this guy, then it's a sign that, that something is terribly, terribly wrong and we have a lot to worry about, about our future. But I don't know why this guy, I don't know why at this moment he does not continue to see what Friday afternoon is like here. I don't know why he does not continue to feel the frisson of kind.

Alison Kaplan Sommer (78:30)

Of because he's not here. He's not feeling it. He's also not feeling the solidarity and what's going on in our society and our community, you know, in a positive way. And you know, the.

Alison Kaplan Sommer (78:42)

He, he doesn't feel it, he's not here. It's still an ideological argument for him and it's based on the pictures that he's, that he's watching off of his television and on the Internet.

Noah Efron (78:55)

Yeah, yeah, I guess, I guess you're right. And, and we've never managed really to translate those things in a way that, that one could get from far, I think.

Alison Kaplan Sommer (79:10)

I mean I, I now sound hardcore super Zionist. But you know, once you've made the decision to live outside the country and be outside the country, Zionism is just a, a weird construct, to continue to live abroad and to say, I'm a Zionist, it's fine to say I'm pro Israel, I support it, I think it's a wonderful place. You know, I like this. But to, to sort of embrace the, you know, on a, on a large scale or on a micro personal scale of, you know, the Jewish people belong in Israel and then not to, to be in Israel. So then your, your, your Zionist identity, it, it's a problem, it's a problem to try to square the circle with, with this ideology that you absorbed in your formative years. And Noah, we clearly spent our teenage years very differently. If you were 12 and 13 and reading Herzl and.

Alison Kaplan Sommer (79:59)

And the realities of the modern state of Israel, because we're living it every day, we can kind of work on the processing of the two of, of both of it, of the re. Of the, the ideology and the beliefs and the reality. But when you're so far away and the reality that you're getting is so one dimensional and stark, I can understand that it seems completely contradictory to those ideals that you absorbed at a younger age and when you were actually here.

Noah Efron (80:29)

Yeah, yeah, I, yes, it sounds, I think that you're, you're right though. Part of what I don't understand, like I have, I have such deep attachments to, I don't know, Vilna of a hundred years ago. You know, it was a hundred years ago now that, that in Vilna and Berlin they founded Yivo. And there was this, like, I read the poetry of that time. I read the stories that people wrote, I read the diaries. I'm so moved by this incredible Jewish culture. And so I don't know exactly what I feel like. If I was in America, I would look at poetry being written in, you know, in Jerusalem and in Beersheba and in Ramla, and I would say, my God, my God. So.

Noah Efron (81:27)

I feel like part of it is just that we just taught everyone to look at Israel in, like you were saying, in these abstract ways. In a way it goes back to what we were talking about the last time about Netanyahu, looking at things in big, broad terms, big broadcast historical terms. It's like when, when Zionism made sense to Americans and others. Maybe it made sense in big, big broad terms like pride, like strength, like independence, like whatever, you know, windswept hair of someone like Yitzhak Rabin standing on the back of a Jeep. Maybe, maybe that's like the thing, the stuff that we said, oh, this is Zionism. And so, and now, now I Understand why that vision is not compelling to anybody. Because when you look, when you broaden the frame, what's a little beyond the jeep is, you know, Palestinians cowering.

Noah Efron (82:32)

But I don't understand why the other things are so hard to see.

Alison Kaplan Sommer (82:37)

Neither do I.

Noah Efron (82:39)

Now listen to this.

Noah Efron (82:42)

Sa.

Noah Efron (83:07)

Okay.

Noah Efron (83:33)

It.

Noah Efron (84:22)

That song is Zen by Liraz Charhi, another classic Iranian song sung by a Persian Israeli where you can feel both sides of that hyphen. You can find the music you heard on the show today in all the usual places. And now it is time for our Vod a Country segment. This is the part of the show in which each of us describes something that maybe brought us solace as we wended our way through our worlds or ran our way to our safe rooms or bomb shelters over the last little while. Or possibly something that just surprised and amused, delighted and enchanted in source old or maybe even fluged us old school style as we did that self same wending Alison, what is your Voda country?

Alison Kaplan Sommer (85:04)

So last night was the first night that I decided to spend the night in our Tel Aviv apartment which I've only sublet for the last, for the last month and a half or so and not be out in the suburbs of Ranana in our relatively old house which has an old fashioned mi clat. It's basically a storeroom which is, has steel reinforced. It's a classic bomb shelter, a steel door that you close. It's, it's right behind our kitchen. For the uninitiated, we have all of these levels of protection in Israel. The lowest level is sorry Noah, not having a shelter in the basement of your building nor in your private house, but having to leave your house and go to a public shelter. But the, the apartment that, that I've rented in Tel Aviv is a step up from, from what I've got in Renana. It has what is known as a mammad. It's a room in your house which is a reinforced room. But it's not, you know, any kind of like sort of special place where you have to store room like the one we have in Ranano or you know, basement. It's a real room. People turn it usually into a baby's room or into some kind of a smaller, lesser used room in, in your house. The people we sublet for, they have actually two children living in it. But it's wow, it's like become now the luxury item of Israel. There is a pull out cushiony sofa bed there. So last night pulled out the cushions, you know, set it up like a Bed, closed it all up, went to sleep. And basically when the, the warning siren goes off, the warning for a warning siren goes off, and then the warning siren goes off and then the actual siren goes off. You know what I did every single time now, I rolled over. Theoretically, I guess if you want to turn off all the alerts on your phone and just be completely oblivious, you can sleep the whole night there. So that was crazy. My other experiences from, from not being kind of like isolated in my house in Rana and being here amongst people in this big set of towers in the middle of Tel Aviv, all of the children living here first thing in the morning, parents, grandparents, taking the kids down to the playground to get their energy out.

Noah Efron (87:19)

Out.

Alison Kaplan Sommer (87:21)

Would you believe the, the project of washing the windows in the building continues. And in, in the, in the risk of siren alerts, we've got these guys, like, hanging from the sides of the windows by cables. I don't know what's going to happen. If there's an alert, they, like, let them, they'll let themselves down from the, the pulley really, really quickly. So there's that. So I'm, you know, getting a really interesting, interesting perspective on, on life. Sort of just like rolling, rolling along in, in Tel Aviv in, in wartime. In the category of what's fluged and moved me is what I'm seeing on television last night we had several direct hits in the, in the center of the country and really sadly and devastatingly in the Soroka Hospital in the south. But, but you see, like, immediately seconds after it happens, not only do you have the rescue teams out, but you have all of these hordes of volunteers, these people who are set up to just like, like race out, help people, you know, calm them down, give them a place to stay, help them deal with the situation. The, you know, and it was the same as the October 7th spirit, you know, Israelis, when the chips are down, when the situation is really bad, wow, they are really out there and they're really there for each other. And I have to say, it's extremely moving and encouraging to see.

Noah Efron (88:43)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree. So obviously, for obvious reasons, I have some of the same ground to cover. Sort of. The time was way back on Sunday that when things were working like they're supposed to work, you got with a squeal, a notice on your phone saying sometime in the next half an hour, you can expect to get a louder squeal of a notice saying that sometime in the next 10 minutes you can expect the sirens to go off indicating that you've got up to 90 seconds to be in your safe space. Now, like Allison was saying, in descending order of desirability, you have your mamad, your merchav, Mugan Dirati, your apartmental fortified area. That's what Allison was just describing. That's the best thing that you could have. Under that, you have your mamak, which is your merchavian of Mugan Komati, your floor wide fortified area. And so a lot of apartment buildings have that one room on each floor. A lot of hotels have that. Under that you have your miklat or your shelter, which is those big bomb shelters built with stone and rebar under the ground in every street corner. In the old neighborhoods of Tel Aviv and old neighborhoods of every town, there are fewer in the newer neighborhoods because everyone has a place to go in their own house. And if you don't have a shelter that's close enough to get to in time, then you're supposed to go to your stairwell. Now, when the whole system of cascading notices the half hour and then the 10 minutes and then the 90 seconds, when it works well, it's very civilized. When you got a half hour announcement, assuming that your go bag is already ready to go, then you can put the dishes in the sink and you can use the bathroom, you can leash up the dog and you can say as you do, shall we repair to the shelter? Or if Susan or the girl says at first, you can reply, yes, I think we shall repair to the shelter. Now, that most civilized system only worked by the book a few times. Altogether, it turns out that it's really hard to say with confidence that the Iranians are gonna fire a missile in half an hour. And after just a day or two of being pretty hit or miss, the army announced that they were going down to just the 10 minute warning in the 90 second siren. Though these two, those two things were also ideal types. 10 minutes could be 4 minutes, and 90 seconds could be less than a minute. And it takes just one time. When you're outside running to a shelter and you start to see those streaks of light in the sky overhead and you start to hear explosions, it takes only one time for you to become pretty eager to get to the shelter. As soon as you get any word that anytime, anytime, anywhere soon, you're supposed to be in a shelter. So then you just go. Now, for the first days of the thing, we went to the shelter in the sweet pocket park behind where Miriam and Jonathan used to live. They lived on Nordau, but the park and shelter are on Motzkin Boulevard, which is that lovely shady street where Jaron London, the great Culturati television host, grew up and where his family rented out their empty room to Igal Mosensen, that novelist, inventor who wrote the country's most famous series of kids books, Khasamba, it's called. He also wrote the play and the movie Casablan. Anyway, the shelter at the end of Motzkin is just one big room. That's what it is. And what's great about the shelter is that within the limits of the thing set by the fact that Tel Aviv is an expensive place to live, the shelter has what seems like, with some important exceptions, almost everybody. There are lots of young people who live in roommate apartments on the big noisy streets nearby, like Ben Yehuda, noisy apartments being that much cheaper. So the young people go there and there are a lot of couples with babies and there are maybe five dogs in there, if you count Lucy, and why wouldn't you count Lucy? And there's a couple that brings two cats on a double leash, and they are sphinx cats, those hairless gray cats that look so alien and excruciable and just weird. And there are religious folks, including in the daytime the guys who run the kosher falafel stand at the spot that used to belong to David, Ben Gurion's brother on the corner of Ben Yehuda and Nordau. And there are a lot of old folks and there are Mizrahim and. And there are lots of 20 somethings, including lots of 20 something Americans there. And it gets pretty crowded. Maybe there are 80, 90 people in a not too big room. And the people are mostly very kind to each other, like I said before, they bring chairs to the people who need chairs and they comment with enthusiasm on each other's noteworthy pajamas when somebody's wearing noteworthy pajamas. And as soon as we're settled, like the second we're all settled, there's like a very happy din to the thing. It sounds like this.

Noah Efron (93:54)

Now, in my go to bag there are. There are Snyder's Sourdough Hard pretzels and a big bag of AM PM popcorn and chocolate bars and toilet paper and a book light. And I went back and forth about what books to bring. So I brought both the new Beatles book that Marshall gave me, John and Paul a Love Story and songs, and also Ezra Fuhrman's book about Lou Reed and Transformer. The idea being sometimes you want a sunny book and sometimes you want a book that says screw sunny and the Beatles book. It's very sunny. And Lou Reed, well, Lou Reed, the girl who a week ago came to Israel for just three days to go to Jonathan and Miriam's boy's wedding and then got stuck here. She also brings two books because it's hard to know in advance what your mood is going to be in the shelter. For me, for us, of course, the girl's unlucky timing is what has turned this whole experience into something it never would have been without her. A couple of days ago she tabled the notion that we started start to sleep preemptively in the shelter at the Gordon School. Her case was one, we got friends who started doing this and they report that it is Sababa. Two, instead of getting woken up by alarms and sirens twice a night, sometimes three, and pulling on clothes and racing through the streets with the dog and then going home all alert and sleepless after it's all over. If you sleep in the shelter, you hardly hear the alarms. It's like we're all living with you hardly hear the alarms and when the thing's over you're already in bed so you just roll over and boom, you're back asleep. And three, she said it would be fun. All of which was very persuasive, especially the part about the fun. So a few nights ago we carried all of our stuff and three camping ish mattresses and sheets and pillowcases to the Gordon School. And outside the shelter we met Lisa Fleigle, who I've known since Yangchidea. She's a close friend and we were on Eurocourse together and we lived on Cotura together and now she lives in Boston but she was here for that same wedding and so she stuck too. And so the whole thing is like camp. It's like summer camp. Last night we played rounds of Flux before we went to sleep. And when the alarms went off in the middle of the night it was like 12:15 and people rushed in breathing heavy from the outside. We just sat up in our beds and the sirens went off and we heard the explosions outside. And in time there was an all clear that came and we just rolled over and went back to sleep. Sleep safe and sound. And that brings us to the end of our show. Thanks to Itai Shalem, our station manager, without whom there would be none of this. Thanks to Achibo Lim, my favorite band from Kibbutz Geva. They give us the music at the start and the end of our show. Thank you Alice and thank you Natalie. We'd like to thank all of our Patreon supporters for your generosity and support. It keeps the show going and the station going and it keeps us very moved and grateful and in your debt. And we'd like to thank all of you out there for taking the time to listen and ask you to like us on Facebook and drop us a line are eventually going to answer. After you do that, go to Apple Podcasts and give us a five star review. Maybe one that starts with this. The Promise podcast is probably one of the last podcasts that would ever make it onto an official playlist of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Listening to it avidly may be just the political statement you want to make at this tense moment. Finish that any way you want. But before you do that, remember that today, as we record we celebrate International Corrugated Box Day, a patent for what we today know as corrugated cardboard was applied for on June 15, 1874, 151 years and four days ago by Oliver Long. Building on the prior 1871 patent of Albert Jones for single sided corrugated paper, Long's corrugated cardboard was, quote, a packing made of sheets of paper and other equivalent material, fluted, crimped or embossed to give it body and elasticity and formed into envelopes, pads or cells. Sixteen years would pass before a Scotsman working in Brooklyn named Robert Ger fashioned Long's cardboard into a pre cut box. Robert Ger, of course, patented as well the paper doily, though that was not until 1915. But it was in 1898 that he filed a patent for his corrugated cardboard box, calling his invention simply paper box. And I am sure that I do not need to spell out how the corrugated cardboard box changed practically everything about everything. University of Pennsylvania Professor Shannon Matern has written what may be a definitive social history of the cardboard box, in which one sees how all of capitalism can be found in the lowly cardboard box and how the quote, abstract design of the cardboard box conceals the violence of colonial extraction and uneven development. End quote. At the heart of so much we have done in modern times and so much that has undone us. Yowza. And I guess I don't need to tell you that I adore International Corrugated Cardboard Box Day. For the patents, obviously, and for the many videos that are posted on the day of cats going in and coming out of boxes. And for the scholars saying that without the corrugated cardboard box we would live in in an entirely different world. Sure, for all these things, but also, and I think mostly for the inherent joy of the thing itself, for the charisma of the corrugated cardboard box so well captured, I think by this bit of documentary audio. Interesting and important things have been put into boxes over the years. Textiles, other boxes, even children's candy.

Alison Kaplan Sommer (99:28)

Do any of these boxes have candy in them?

Noah Efron (99:30)

No. Will they ever? No. We only make boxes the ship nails. Any other questions?

Alison Kaplan Sommer (99:36)

When will we be able to see a finished box, Sir?

Noah Efron (99:39)

We don't assemble them here. That's done in Flint, Michigan.

Alison Kaplan Sommer (99:42)

Have any of our workers ever had their hands cut off by the machinery?

Noah Efron (99:45)

No.

Alison Kaplan Sommer (99:45)

And then the hands started crawling around.

Noah Efron (99:47)

And tried to strangle everybody. No, that has never happened.

Alison Kaplan Sommer (99:49)

And he popped eyeballs.

Noah Efron (99:51)

I'm not sure what kind of factory you're thinking of. We just make boxes here.

Alison Kaplan Sommer (99:56)

What's that building over there?

Noah Efron (99:58)

That's just a TV studio where they film Crusty the Clown and other non box related programs. Since it has nothing to do with boxes, I'll just shut these blinds.

Noah Efron (100:10)

And even though International Box Day is not even halfway over yet, as I speak these words still already I begin to feel it closing up as if some great being were shutting the inner flaps on the top of the day day, eyeing the outer flaps with a roll of packing tape at the ready, prepared to send it off, not to return, if at all, for a long, long time. Not so the Promised Podcast. We will be back for you next week and every week, reminding you that sometimes even the most seemingly modest conveyance holds wonders and joys and artifacts and knowledge from faraway lands. While other times, though, you wait excitedly for it each week, thinking maybe this time it will have something in it that won't disappoint me. Maybe this time you find yet again a thing to be filled with fluff and styrofoam, sterile and devoid of all value. On this the Promise podcast.

Noah Efron (101:21)

Welcome gentle and generous Patreon supporters. We hope that you and yours are well in this tumultuous time. Some of you I know are in Israel. Some of you live in Israel all the time. Some of you are stuck visiting in Israel. I know because you wrote to me and I'm sure most of you are abroad. But even still, for all of us, I know that this is a worrying and tough time because of what's going on in Israel and because of what's going on on everywhere else in the world. Probably there are upsetting things going on in space, but I haven't been following that. Anyway, we hope that you and yours are well and we want to begin, as we always begin, by thanking you for the support that keeps this show going. Without your support, the show would be defunct. It would not exist right now. And it keeps the station going. And that practical aid is of the first importance to us, so we thank you for that. But also, I just wanted to add that there is an emotional side to it as well. And we know that there are so many demands on your generosity, and we know that you give to many, many other things that are obviously, obviously much more important than this podcast is or could ever be, or any podcast could be, for that matter. But the fact that then you then include us on that list of important things.

Noah Efron (102:42)

It means something to us. And so. So.

Noah Efron (102:47)

Last night, what with the sirens, and then this morning, I got up at 5 in the morning to come back to finish preparing for the podcast, and then there was another siren at 7 in the morning, right when I was in the middle. Anyway, we're exhausted and all that. It really means something, so thank you for that. And we thought that this time we would just tell a little more. We told some about it on the show, of what it is like, not just for us, but what it feels like and what it is like and what life is like. The country at this very, very strange moment, which I believe is gonna be over by. I'm saying it's gonna be over by next Monday, I think. Next Monday.

Alison Kaplan Sommer (103:24)

Oh, please. Two two, two, two.

Noah Efron (103:26)

That's what I think. But it feels like a moment that we will long remember.

Alison Kaplan Sommer (103:31)

It's not the topic, but I'm dying to know why you think that, Noah.

Noah Efron (103:34)

Why I think that? Oh, I think that because, first of all, a couple of days ago, the IDF said that they believed that they would be done in a week, which seemed like.

Noah Efron (103:47)

A significant thing for them to say. They were signaling something to someone, not to me, but I think that probably there's some weight to what they're saying. I think that one way or another, either the Americans get involved, in which case they can make, I think, pretty quick work of this thing bombing out of existence the centrifuges in Fordo and others, and then there would be no reason to continue or if the Americans don't get involved. I don't think that Donald Trump has the patience for this to go on very long. And I think that the returns are already diminishing from Israel's attack. I think that the things that Israel can destroy, Israel has destroyed, the things that remain undestroyed, are things that Israel does not have the technology to destroy. So all of that suggests to me that it's going to end soon. But I register your belief that that Might well not be true. And obviously it's not a belief.

Alison Kaplan Sommer (104:55)

I just hope you're right.

Noah Efron (104:57)

So it's a weird moment. I just yesterday got my notice from Elal that my trip that was planned for the middle of next week has been cancelled. My flight has been canceled.

Noah Efron (105:11)

They wrote this uncharacteristic for a big company, very direct email saying, your flight is canceled. We're not going to reschedule you do not call us. We have no interest in hearing from you.

Noah Efron (105:24)

I think that implied between the lines is don't ever expect to see your money again. But I'm not sure about that. They did not say that, but. But they were very direct. So it's weird. It's weird with like this weird moment of all the planes, all the passenger planes in Israel are not in Israel anymore. They're all parked in Europe somewhere. So you feel like, oh my God, we're really stuck here. Because even if somebody decided that we could fly out or just they'd have to bring the planes back anyway. Alison, what do you make of. You're so good at like, looking around and, and describing the world that we live in. What do you make of the city and the country and the world that we're living in at this moment?

Alison Kaplan Sommer (106:06)

In particular, I think a lot about the word hossen, which is called resilience, which, you know, is sort of like become this catchword, you know, around here. You know, we're resilient. We're resilient. I'm personally looking around, I'm seeing everyone looking very resilient. Resilient. I'm feeling very resilient. I don't get scared, you know, going back between the Ranana place and the Tel Aviv place or to Haaretz and, you know, being scared to, to ride. I'm, you know, I haven't been. Been spending nights alone, but I don't think I would be afraid if I, I'm feeling very tough and I think, you know, a lot of other people are too. But I worry that, like the flip side to that is how numb work getting, you know, I worry about being, you know, and maybe this is an extension about, you know, my, my feelings about the, the Gazan civilian population. And we're looking at them and we're not feeling and, or, or, you know, all of these people, 23 so far have died as a result of the, the ballistic missile attacks. Like, are we really feeling that if we're, if we're able to just sort of like, you know, keep calm and carry on, you Know, are we, you know, are we numbing ourselves out? Is it, is it a good thing that we're. That we're managing so well and that we're being so strong in this, or are we just becoming, I don't know, robotic, inhuman?

Noah Efron (107:28)

You know, has that been your experience, talking to people, hanging out with people?

Alison Kaplan Sommer (107:36)

I mean, that's, that's, that's more of my internal experience, I guess. You know, the people there are people who are very stressed out and panicked and worried and freaking out, and I don't think that's good either. Right. And there are definitely people like that.

Noah Efron (107:47)

Sure.

Alison Kaplan Sommer (107:47)

Who are, who are, who are really, really scared. And so being. Feeling myself being at the other end of the spectrum of that. It is, It's a spectrum of how people are. Are feeling and behaving. The, the people that. I just can't even imagine what it's like are the ones who have children at home who have to explain this to. To young children. And, you know, I'm very worried, I guess, about the old people who live in the older building buildings who can't get down to shelter. And I feel like we should be doing more for them. Like, I kind of feel. I don't know. Noah, you're the Tel Aviv. I feel like there should be like, a survey of everybody I don't know over the age of 75 or 80 who's living in a place without immediately available shelter and try to help them or relocate them or do something like that. So I worry about that, you know. I guess. Yeah. I worry about people's ability to. To. To, I guess, remain sensitive to themselves, to others.

Alison Kaplan Sommer (108:51)

I feel it's. It's this mixed bag. I feel, you know, I feel pride that we're being so strong. But then I also, you know, I worry some of the things that we were discussing in the, in, in the, in the content of the, the podcast and the Zionist conversation, you know, how much are we turning into one of those countries, you know, one of those kind of regimes that. That doesn't see the nuance that, you know, maybe I'm influenced by these Netanyahu videos that look like it. We're in North Korea or something like that, where we're sort of just, you know, you know, mindlessly marching along, knowing that we're in the right. I don't know this. I'm sleep deprived. This sounds like a jumble, probably.

Noah Efron (109:30)

Well, well, I think that the thing that you're describing is a real concern about losing the ability just to fully feel the stuff that we felt before.

Alison Kaplan Sommer (109:47)

And feeling like this is normal like you know people you know when it becomes normal life just like whatever the COVID routine became normal life like you have to shake yourself. You're like no this isn't normal. This isn't how people are supposed to.

Noah Efron (109:58)

But I'm not sure that I feel like this newest stage with the shelters and Iran is a big part of that. This seems to me feels to me to be something that is.

Noah Efron (110:12)

Quite separate weird will end up being sort of bracketed off or parentheses off from a lot of the rest of our experience as and I mean the question of what empathy one does or doesn't feel for all the suffering in Gaza for instance is a really really, really, really important question and I'm not sure that what's happening now.

Noah Efron (110:41)

Makes it more extreme or more worrisome Maybe it does but.

Alison Kaplan Sommer (110:48)

I mean do you really feel the Deaths of these 23 people whose missiles hit their houses? I don't feel like we're feeling that.