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This is TLV1. This episode may contain explicit language. Welcome to the Promise podcast, brought to you on TLV1, the voice of the city that found itself this week embroiled in controversy over its decision to break with its 50 year old tradition of giving every kid who finishes high school in the city. The past two weeks have been a fortnight of commencement ceremonies giving every kid who finishes high school in the city a Tanakh, a Bible in place of the traditional Tanakh. This year the city is giving each graduate one or several of the following three good books. The first being the Jewish State Der Judenstadt by Binyamin Zev Theodor Herzl. The second being how to Cure a Fanatic by Amos Oz. It's called Neged Hakanaut Against Fanaticism in the Original Hebrew. And the third being an edited volume by writer, television host and Jewish philosopher Dov Elboim called the Declaration of an Israeli Talmud Sources and Midrashim Literature and Research. Which decision to replace the Tanakh with these three books was, as you might imagine, applauded by many. But also, as you might expect, it made some people mad. Like one mother who stayed anonymous when, when she said to a journalist, quote, the educational establishment sanctifies mathematics, but throws into the trash the roots and traditions of the Jewish people just moments before our children enlist in the army, end quote. To which the spokesperson's office of the city of Tel Aviv Yaffo responded laconically, that after all, the city does give a Tanakh to every kid after the sixth grade when they finish grade school, which answer seemed to imply that what was behind the decision was simply parsimony. After all, how many Bibles does a kid need? And that is before taking into account that combat soldiers anyway are going to get still another Tanakh at their Tekkesh Hashba', a, their swearing in ceremony at the end of their basic training. But surely there is something more to the decision of the city to swap out the Tanakh first for the famous book by the famous father of Zionism, setting out his vision for, well, a Jewish state, the most famous passage of which goes, quote, we shall know how to keep our clerics in their temples, just as we shall know how to keep our professional army in a barracks, end quote. And next for a book of lectures by a famous novelist peace activist who writes, quote, the Palestinians are in Palestine because Palestine is the homeland and the only homeland of the Palestinian people. The Israeli Jews are in Israel because there is no other country in the world that the Jews as a people as a nation could ever call home. Not as a people, not as a nation. End quote. And finally, for a book which takes the Declaration of Independence and. And lays out its text like pages of the Talmud, with commentaries all around, by some of the greatest, mostly secular rabbis of our age, like Muki Tsur, the enchanting one time head of the kibbutz movement and writer and interpreter of kibbutz history, who starts his commentary with the words, quote, the strength of the Declaration of Independence is found, among other things, in the fact that it contains matters that were not clear even to the people who signed it. End quote. Meaning that like the sacred texts that the Rab of the Talmud debated and argued about and subverted. So in our day we have a sacred text, the Declaration of Independence, to debate, argue over and subvert and to appreciate. Like the passage that goes, quote, the state of Israel will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all of its inhabitants. It will be based on freedom, justice and peace, as envisaged by the prophets of Israel. It will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all of its inhabitants, irrespective of religion, race or sex. It will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture. It will safeguard the holy places of all religions. End quote. And together, these three books maybe make a sort of ethical will that we give to each kid as they finish learning whatever it was we had to teach them over 12 years. And nine times out of 10, probably more, these books at the end of the ceremony end up in the hands of the proud parents to whom the kids say something like, ima, will you take these for me? My friends and I are going out. To which, nine times out of ten may maybe more, the parents will say, of course, Mituka, sweetheart, you have fun. And the books will no doubt soon find themselves on a shelf alongside that Tanakh from the sixth grade. Nine times out of ten, surely more. All four books, the Bible, the Herzl, the Oz, and the Declaration of Independence, remaining uncracked and unread. And yet the message will have gotten across that all of it, all of it, the harsh austerity of the Tanakh, the high modernist certainty that rabbis and generals will know their places, the novelist's careful Balanc of us and them and that oh so Jewish midrashic cycle of sanctification and subversion, all of it is your inheritance, a gift you got from this city at a moment when all of this is probably the last thing on your mind, but equally a gift that, whenever the time is right, will be there for you and for all the rest of us too. With us Today, speaking from TLV1's flagship satellite studio in Jerusalem, is a woman who knows and lives in her day to day life the cycle of sanctification and subversion, the dialectics of them. How loving the people around her, loving the folks across the border, loving the language, loving traditions, and loving that surprising new wine from that surprising new place. These things are somehow deeply connected in ways you could hardly put in words, but you can weave together into an astonishing life. Aside from that, she writes real good. Obviously, the woman I am describing could only be Linda Gradstein. Linda Gradstein has long covered Israel, first for NPR and most recently for the Voice of America. Of blessed memory. Linda is also a lecturer in journalism at NYU Tel Aviv and the Hebrew University. And not so long ago at NYU Abu Dhabi, Linda has won an Overseas Press Club Award and an Alfred I. Dupont Award for excellence in Broadcast journalism. Linda, how you doing?
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I'm okay. You know, it's a difficult week, but I don't know if you know, Noah, there's actually a Japanese concept of owning books that you haven't read and that you perhaps never will read, but that still sort of benefit you in some way. So I'm sure that was the goal of the people in Tel Aviv.
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Yes. I always thought it was fetishistic to believe that you had to have read all of the books that you have on your shelf or indeed that you have to plan to read every book that you buy. There is something about them just being there. So I didn't realize that I'm Japanese. It's like the Voidoids said back in the late 70s. I think I'm turning Japanese. Also with us in the newest of the worldwide network of TLV1 studios, this one in the lovely Northernish hamlet of Zichron. Yaakov is a twice lionized man, no doubt because of his courage, strength, leadership, nobility, majesty, authority, sense of justice, magnanimity, charisma, and fearlessness. Obviously, that man could only be Judah or Lion Ari or Lion Gross. Judah Ari Gross is managing editor of E. Jewish Philanthropy, a daily news publication covering the world of Jewish philanthropy, the aim of which is, quote, to capture, convene and drive the daily conversation in the Jewish philanthropic sector each day via original news reporting and thought pieces on the pressing issues. End quote. I prefer thought pieces to the other kind. Before taking the helm at ejp, Judah Ari Gross was a correspondent for the Times of Israel, reporting first on the military and then on Israel Diaspora affairs and Religion. He has lately been an inaugural Elson Fellow at the Jewish Federation of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Judah, I am so glad that you're back with us. If the Promise Podcast is a jungle, and in a way it is, isn't it, then you are surely our king. How are you doing?
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Doing very well, thank you. Glad to be back.
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That was very pithy. You just. I'm doing good. Why do you ask? Now, as for me, my name is.
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C
We're going to get into. Why. It's a rough day all over.
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It is a rough day. A rough day and a rough week and a rough month, et cetera, et cetera. Now, as for me, apropos roughness, my name is Noah Efron, and I do not mean to boast, but what with all the interruptions and cancellations at the airport that have forced all of us, when the airport wasn't just closed outright, to fly, when we fly higgledy piggledy on airlines we've barely heard of via cities we've barely heard of, which improvisational booking has led to. Well, there is no way to sugarcoat this. Dramatic demotions in my frequent flyer statuses on United, which stopped flying to Israel altogether in February, and also on El Al, where my status tumbled from platinum last December to now, I am pretty sure my official status is untouchable. And when I took off this week to visit my parents, I did not know that boarding zones even go as high as mine was. But after I went through the second security check, that one at the gate where they ask if you have any liquids in your bag, and went past those new machines that check your passport to let you onto the jet bridge. It's no longer done by a human being. The machine dispensed a little square of paper and that said seat change 14, a premium upgrade. And just like that, I was a somebody again. And please believe me when I say I'm not bragging. God knows my folks raised me better than that. But while I have never really been that much in human society, I feel like the machines get me a little better. And I, for one, salute our new AI overlords. Today we got two topics so important that when they become public, we expect the value of the shekel to climb still further against the dollar. But first, we have this matter that we're following with alert, interest and great concern as part of an occasional series we like to call the Promise Podcast ponders what we now see clearly on the jubilee of Flight 193. There is a T shirt you can still Buy in any of those stores in any city in Israel that sell printed T shirts with a picture of fighter planes and underneath it it says Kola Kavodlatzah. All respect to the IDF or bravo to the IDF. The slogan Kolakavodlizahal got its start after the Six Day War in 1967. Someone paid to have it pasted on billboards around the country. But the slogan reached its greatest popularity after the successful rescue from Entebbe on July 4, 1976 of more than 100 hostages hijacked on Air France Flight 100. It was then that the T shirts were everywhere and there were posters and billboards. And the Israel Air Force sent planes equipped with paraffin based smoke generators and a pump and control system over the coast and over Jerusalem, where they wrote Kola Kavodlatzahal in white against the cloudless telet blue summer sky between the two kola kavodlatzahal moments. The short, successful war in 1967, in which Israeli jets destroyed most all the planes in Egypt's air force on the ground before their pilots could whir their engines into life. And this short successful rescue mission in Uganda. Israel had had the miserable Yom Kippur war when Israel was invaded by Egypt and Syria, surprised to see foreign soldiers on lands Israel had until then controlled. And by the time the IDF pushed the Syrians and the Egyptians back across the border, 2,656 soldiers were dead and more than 7,000 were hur of them badly. And the pain of that and the feeling that we're not as safe as we maybe let ourselves think, and I guess the humiliation of it too, it made what happened at Entebbe seem that much more important and served to revive some sort of pride of the short, successful war nine years before. It is maybe the nature of triumphs like Israel's triumph in Uganda that they produced triumphalism. And what happened at Entebbe did just that. Listen to the account of the thing in Time magazine that appeared not long after the Hercules transport planes that took back the hostages arrived safely in Israel. Published under the headline the Rescue, we do the Impossible, the account starts. It was one of the most daring, spectacular rescues of modern times. For nearly a week, pro Palestinian skyjackers had held 105 hostages, mostly Israelis, at Uganda's Entebbe airport. Now, with time rapidly slipping away and the deadline merely hours off, death seemed ever more certain for the terrified captives. Then suddenly, in what in a different age would have been called an act of a deus ex machina, three Israeli C130 Hercules transports, guns flaring, appeared in the d dark sky over the airport. Soon they touched down, disgorging about 100 paratroopers and infantrymen and powerful armored personnel carriers. As the engines of the Hercules were kept racing, the commando units in civilian dress fanned out across the airfield and headed for the old terminal with its welcome to Uganda sign where the skyjackers were guarding the hostages. After a 15 minute blaze of gunfire, it was all over. The terrorists, according to Israeli reports, were dead and the hostages were on the planes. It had taken less than half an hour and the transports were back in the air. Before they left, the Israelis badly damaged or destroyed the Soviet made ugandan Air Force MIGs that were parked on the field, thus eliminating any danger of being pursued. As Israelis awakened to the news of the rescues, excitement and pride rippled through the country. Gone was the humiliating feeling of helplessness with which they lived through most of the week. As it increased, increasingly appeared that the skyjackers would get their way. Clearly exultant was Minister without portfolio Gidon Hausner, who declared, quote, we have again provided the whole world with an example of how terrorism could be resisted and should be resisted, exclaimed the Minister of Tourism, Moshe Cole. We have to do the impossible, end quote. The article ends with, as Israeli Defense Minister Shimon Peres explained, just after the rescue mission returned to Israel, we had more than a feeling that even if we decided to accept all the demands of the terrorists, we would have no insurance that our people would be allowed to return home. I'm proud of what we did and happy that we have an army units and officers like these, but I hope we never have to repeat it. It Less restrained was the Israeli radio announcer who first broadcast a hint of what was underway. Hallelujah. He exclaimed, to which the rest of the civilized world can now only say Amen. As one of the most brazen terrorist acts in recent years has come to a surprising and welcome resolution, end quote. On the day the operation in Entebbe came to its successful conclusion, July 4, 1976, U.S. president Gerald Ford took time off from celebrating his nation's bicentennial to write a note to Yitzhak Rabin expressing the, quote, unquote, great satisfaction, Americans felt that Israel had thwarted, quote, unquote, a senseless act of terrorism. In August, Congress approved House of Congress Resolution 702, quote, expressing commendation of the government of Israel for its Entebbe Air Force rescue mission, end quote. That, according to Congressman Jack Kemp, who wrote the bill, showed the world how to deal with terrorism by refusing to deal with terrorists. Soon after the raid on Entebbe, Israel's Ambassador to the United Nations, Chaim Herzog, who five odd years later would become President of Israel and who 45 years later would become the father of the President of Israel, Yitzhak Buzi Herzog. Though Chaim Herzog did not live to see this, he Chaim Herzog owned Israel's contribution to the worldwide struggle against terror, saying at Dag Hammerskold Plaza in New York that at Antebbe Israel had shown the world that, quote, there is an alternative to surrender to terrorism and to blackmail, end quote. This idea that we showed the world how best to beat terrorism. It became a sort of commonplace notion around the world. And here the famous Georgetown professor of government and advisor to presidents William V. O' Brien published a canonical essay in the journal strategic review in 1985 called Counterterrorism Lessons from Israel in which he argued that Entebbe presented a model for the United States and for all the world about how best to address terror. Not long after that, Benjamin Netanyahu edited a book called how the West Can Win, with essays by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Jean Kirkpatrick, Bernard Lewis and then United States Secretary of State George Shultz, who set out what became known as the Shultz Doctrine, which in insisting that quote unquote active means must always be considered in response to terrorist hostage situations, grew a great deal knowingly from Israel's response to Entebbes. The facts of what happened at Entebbe are well known. On June 27, 1976, an Air France Airbus A300 jet Flight 139 from Tel Aviv to Paris with an interim stop in Athens was hijacked on the second leg of its trip with 248 passengers aboard. There were four hijackers, two members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine or the pflp, Fayez Abdul Rahim Al Jabbar and Jael Naji Al Arya and two members of the German RZ or Revolutionary Cell group who were also a couple, Wilfried Bose and Brigid Kuhlmann, together recent graduates of a Soviet funded Palestinian managed training program in South Yemen. On Wilfrid Boza's bucket list, though it never managed to be ticked off, was a plan to assassinate Simon Wiesenthal, the famous Nazi hunter. Flight 139 had taken off from Ben Gurion Airport at one minute to nine in the morning, landing in Athens at 11:30 to take on 58 more passengers as planes used to do, including in the event, the four hijackers who, seven minutes after wheels off in Greece, revealed the guns and grenades they'd taken in their carry on bags and instructed the pilot to take the plane to Benghazi in Libya for refueling. At 10 of 10 that night, the plane took off again now for Entebbe, Uganda, arriving a bit after three in the morning. It was noon on June 28th when the passengers and crew of Flight 139 were taken to the old no longer in service terminal at Entebbe airport, where in the interim another six PLFP members had joined to serve as guards. And Ugandan President Idi Amin sent 100 odd soldiers from the Ugandan army army to guard the whole affair as well. Soon after the hostages were settled in the old terminal room, the hijackers issued their demands. The release of 53 prisoners, 40 from Israel and six from Germany, five from Kenya and one each from France and Switzerland. They also demanded $5 million. They gave a deadline of July 1, after which they would begin to murder hostages. This deadline was eventually extended to the Fourth of July. On June 29, the hostages were separated into two groups. One group included Israelis and, as best the hijackers could determine, Jews. The other group included everyone else. The second group was told that they would be released as soon as arrangements could be made. And on July 1st they were herded onto a plane provided by the French government and flown to Orly airport in Paris. Vachel Bakos, the Air France pilot of Flight 139, and his crew were allowed to leave, but they chose to stay with the Israelis. I told my crew that we must stay until the end. All my crew agreed without exception, Michel Bakos said after the ordeal was over. It was on the night between July 3rd and July 4th that the lumbering huge Israeli C130 Hercules transport planes landed at the Entebbe airport. The first plane carried the main assault force led by Yoni Netanyahu of the Sayeret Matal commando unit. They drove off the plane in a black Mercedes quickly painted by hand the night before, and black Land Rovers together meant to be a simulacrum of IDI Amin's motorcade, and they drove to the old terminal. Israel had studied the plans of the airport that had been built by the Israeli construction company Solel Bonehead some years before. So they knew what was where and they rushed into the building shouting in Hebrew and English, stay down. We are IDF soldiers. The commandos killed all the hijackers. Three hostages were killed, one by A hijacker, two by the commandos in crossfire, Yoni Netanyahu was shot by a Ugandan soldier from the direction of the control tower. While the commandos affected the rescue, other teams kept the Ugandan soldiers at bay and destroyed the Ugandan fighter planes on the tarmac. Soon, 102 hostages were hustled to the transport planes and they were on their way to Nairobi for refueling and after that back to Israel. We have known these details about what happened on the ground in Entebbe almost since the planes landed safely at the Telnof Air Force base just south of Rehovot, near Kibbutz Chafetz Chaim. What we did not really know until just this week when after 50 years of being classified and unavailable for review the government files, Entebbe were finally made public. What we did not really know was what really happened here in Jerusalem in the rooms where the people making fateful decisions were making fateful decisions during the week between when the hostages walked up the boarding stairs of Flight 139 at Ben Gurion Airport and when they stumbled down the cargo ramp of the C130s at Telneuf. From the documents we have just seen for the first time alongside documents that were already in the public record record, we get this story. When the plane was first taken midday on June 27, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was leading his weekly Sunday cabinet meeting. He was taken aside and briefed, after which he told his ministers what he just learned. After the cabinet meeting, Rabin put together a security cabinet, though he called it his special ministerial staff. It included Defense Minister Shimon Peres, Foreign Minister Yigal Alon and several others. The group would meet 18 times over the next week. After the demands came from the terrorists, Yitzhak Rabin tried to find international leaders willing to take a lead in negotiating with the French President. Valerie Giscard d', Estaing, Kurt Waldheim, Pope Paul vi, Henry Kissinger. But none of these people seemed likely to do the thing. This was a Jewish thing. Rabin and his cabinet concluded. One couldn't expect much of world leaders. Some of them worried that they might be targeted next, others just sure that the thing would end in a bloodbath. And who wanted their good name forever associated with that? In the end, Rabin, Peres and Alon decided that they'd have to rely on IDI Amin, even though they knew that he was protecting the hijackers and that he had allowed other terrorists into the airport as reinforcements. Rabin asked his friend Baruch Bar Lev, who had been military attache in Uganda and was friendly with IDI Amin. And the two men had a weird cordial call. The transcript of it was just released this week with IDI Amin insisting that Barlev come to speak with him in person, insisting that he would do anything he can to help, although also warning that, quote, if the Israeli government does not respond to their demands, the terrorists will blow up the French plane and all the hostages at noon tomorrow. And Baruch Barlev is flattering, quote, I see an opportunity for you to be in the news as a great man, a man of sanctity. This is a big opportunity for you. But the call ended with nothing really in public. The government insisted that it does not give in to extortion. As one Foreign Ministry cable put it, There was great pressure to hold this line. Yitzhak Shamir, who seven years later would himself become Prime Minister of Israel, demanded from the floor of the Knesset that we understand that, quote, the drama underway in Entebbe these very hours, demands today of the State of Israel, via extortion, the release of men who came to murder and exterminate men, women and children in cold blood. The time has come that we reach the necessary conclusion and do away with the regulations that prevent us from enacting the death penalty for cruel murderers, human monsters when they are on trial, end quote. In private, Yitzhak Rabin was trying desperately to find a way anyway to negotiate with with the terrorists. Speaking at the Knesset Foreign affairs and Defense Committee, former Foreign Minister Abba Eben said, this committee needs to determine which is our highest value. Is the highest value to save lives, or is it not to give in, not to give terrorists any accomplishments? In my opinion, the highest value is to save lives. If one Jewish life is an entire world as a chunk, Talmud says tens of lives are that much more, end quote. Released this week with other documents is a short telegram dated June 29, 1976, that was delivered to Prime Minister Rabin. It read, quote, we freed terrorists in exchange for dead bodies. Better to do so in exchange for the living. Human life outweighs principle. There are other ways to fight and prevent terror. And it was signed, the hostage families Stop, end quote. The reference to the dead bodies was the exchange with Egypt of living prisoners for soldiers killed in the Yom Kippur War. Yitzhak Rabin's response to the telegram, according to the newly available documents was, quote, they are family members. You cannot expect them to act differently, end quote. Still, Yitzhak Rabin met with the editors of Israel's major newspapers and asked them, in the name of national security and national morale, not to print anything about the family members of the hostages demanding that the government negotiate to save the lives of their loved ones. He explained why he did in a cabinet meeting saying, quote, there is going to be an assembly today of all the family members demanding that the government begin negotiations. I've asked the radio and television stations and the newspapers not to interview them and not to publish this story. I think the extremists among them wished to protest, protest near my house and outside the Prime Minister's building. One thing that will be very terrible is if the world finds out that our government is being pressured to surrender, end quote. The papers and the radio complied, save for the socialist daily Alhamishmar, which on the front page of its July 2nd edition carried an article headlined, Relatives Break into the Kirya Army Headquarters. Rabin meets with their Representative. In fact, Yitak Rabin was doing everything in his power to do what the families wanted to negotiate the safe release of their people. He was not alone in wanting this. The new documents include a note that Motagor, the IDF Chief of Staff, wrote to the Prime Minister. It said, the IDF must protect every Israeli, whomever he is. If the IDF is unable to do this, we must still save the Israelis. So if all of the efforts and approaches do not succeed, the chief of staff recommends giving in to the terrorists demands, end quote. It was around this time that the Prime Minister called Israel's Sephardi Chief Rabbi, the great Halakha Sist Rav Ovady Yosef, and told him where matters stood in Entebbe, state secrets and all. Rabin said that he needed from Rav Ovada Yosef a halachic decision about whether whether or not it is okay to negotiate with terrorists and to free terrorists in order to bring home hostages. It was his hope that the decision would be to authorize these negotiations with the full weight of halacha. Ravo Vadya Yousef went to work and in just a few days produced a long, fascinating and beautiful religious decision, which I've mentioned before on this podcast and which I come to through the remarkable writing of Rabbi EL Fisher, who has written profoundly about this religious ruling and whose translation I use here. The Decision begins on the 29th of Sivan 5736, an Air France airplane on its way from Paris to Israel was hijacked by terrorists. The hijacked plane contained many passengers, including 104 Jews on their way from Israel. The plane landed in uganda, which is 4,000 km from Israel, in Uganda, the terrorists were aided by the Ugandan authorities, who are Jew haters. There. All passengers were released except for the Jews among them. The hijackers presented an ultimatum demanding that their comrades, 40 terrorists imprisoned in Israel, be released within 48 hours or else they would harm the hostages they were holding. The question arose, according to Halacha, should the terrorists imprisoned in Israel be released as the hijackers demand to save the lives of the abducted Jews? Jews. Or perhaps we should say that aside from inviting further abductions to extort the release of more terrorists, once this plot succeeds, there is also concern that the terrorists released from prison will almost certainly attempt to infiltrate the State of Israel again to kill and murder men, women and children. Thus, to save the abducted Jews from certain danger, we place the entire Jewish population of Israel, and especially of border cities, cities in circumstances of real potential danger. In the end, it was Rav Yosef's decision that negotiations could go forward and murderers could be released from prison to save the lives of the hostages in Uganda. Rav Yosef wrote, when the choice is given to decide between two one who is in a state of possible danger and the second in a state of certain danger danger, the possibility of danger does not supersede certain danger and the rescue of the one in certain danger is given precedence. It seems that we really must be much more concerned about the immediate danger to the hundred abducted Jews as the cruel terrorist hijackers brandish the sword blade at their head, threatening to execute them by Thursday the 3rd of Tammuz at 2pm and these evildoers, they do not make empty threats threats. But the future risk that the release of 40 imprisoned terrorists is likely to pose is not our immediate concern. It is rather a future long term concern. End quote. Rava Vady Yousef finished his response on July 4, only a short while before Yitzhak Rabin called him to say that a rescue mission had been undertaken and that it had succeeded. An explanation for just why Prime Minister Rabin had changed his mind and authorized the mission, filled with peril as it was, emerges from the newly released documents. Just after the hijacking, there was no military option that made any damn sense. But over the next days, a military option emerged. Through luck and genius and perseverance and astonishing human creativity, the old plans of the Entebbe airport were discovered. Brainstorming sessions led to all night exercises that led back to more brainstorming sessions. And as each day gave way to night and even each night gave way today, ideas that seemed at first crazy came to seem like they just might work. And there was more to it than that. Yitzhak Rabin was a worldly man. He had seen a lot. But even he was surprised at how little help world leaders were willing to give to save the lives of 104 Jews. There was also the fact that it was hard not to register echoes of the Holocaust and so much that was happening. The German terrorists carrying out a selection, dividing not Israelis from everyone else, but Jews from everyone else. Yitzhak Rabin could not know then, as we know today, that a hostage named Yitzhak David, a survivor of Auschwitz and deputy mayor of Kiriat Bialik, he rolled up his sleeve and showed Wilfred Bose the number tattooed on his arm, telling him in German that he, Bose, should be ashamed. To which Bose responded in German with insult, saying that he shared nothing with the Nazis, nothing at all. But it was not lost on Yitzhak Rabin when he sought the advice of his minister, Gidon Hausner, that just a dozen years before, it had been Hausner who led the prosecution of Adolf Eichmann. The selection at Entebbe, it said something to Yitzhak Rabin. Still, what we learned this week is that Entebbe could have gone differently and that Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres and Nigalon and Motagore and most of the others making the decision wanted it to go differently than it went. They wanted to get the hostages home right away, even if it meant freeing men who had murdered people who had done nothing other than be Israelis and Jews. They wanted to do what the families wanted them to do. They set out to do this, hoping that the Pope or that the American Secretary of State or the Secretary General of the United nations would help them them only to find that they were alone and that all they could rely upon were those things that they could do by themselves, with planes and cars and guns. So the Entebbe we have today, as we mark the 50th anniversary of the Thing, is a different Entebbe than we had when the thing was done 50 years ago. And in its delirious aftermath of celebration, of guts and power, the Entebbe we have now is the Entebbe of an IDF chief of staff recommending giving in to the terrorists demand, and an Entebbe of a prime minister asking a great rabbi to produce a Talmudic justification for freeing killers to save innocent lives. And the Entebbe not of heedless men in the thralls of power, but rather of thoughtful men haunted by the limits of power clear that every one of the 104 lives in their hands was a world unto itself and seeking nothing so much as a way to get each of those 104 souls back to their homes and families, whatever it required. Negotiations with terrorists, freeing of terrorists, if that is what it took. Today, two discussions. Our first discussion being 1,000 days as today, as we record on July 2nd, we mark 1,000 days since October 7th. 7th. A grim milestone that will be memorialized with the march of the 1,000th day this evening in Tel Aviv, followed by a 1,000 day vigil at Hostage Square in front of the museum. 1,000 days being almost half as long as World War II and more than one and a half times as long as the 1948 bruising, bloody war of Independence. And we will try not for the first time, and surely not for the last last to make sense of what these most eventful, most awful 1000 days of our lives have been. And our second discussion being somewhere a Place for us as the very successful, I think it's safe to say, joint Jewish Arab activist group Standing Together spins off a new young hip joint Arab Jewish political party called A Place for Us all that promises to fight for a 50 shekel minimum wage, free early childhood education for all. And doing what? Whatever can be done to get us closer to a two state solution and peace with Palestinians, which unapologetically leftist agenda has earned the New Party mostly silence on the right and a lot of angry attacks from the left, including what seems to be a weirdly intense vendetta on the part of Haaretz, which, and this is true, this morning published an article accusing the New Party of kidnapping the Lindbergh baby. That's absolutely true. Now that is a reference that will be of full meaning to all of our listeners who are old enough to have read the newspapers back in March 1932 when the papers were sold by boys in eight panel caps yelling extry. Extri. Read all about it. But I digress. The point being Haaretz really does not like a place for us all, and we will ask, first and majorly, what should we make of the New Party? And second and minorly, what is the B in the bonnet of Haaretz and the Haaretzi left that makes him think that a place for us all is the worst thing to happen since the Beatles broke up, which is a reference from as recently as 1970. So I think that you, like me, can feel the progress 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. We will talk about what to make of a chilling, moving, unnerving and for me, a little confusing thing that happened at the wedding this week of a young woman named Nitsan Gabai and her chosen one, her bashert Maor, when an AI generated toast by her sister Shani, who was murdered at the Nova Festival, said to her, among other things, Nitsan, my little sister, yes, yes, you're still the little sister. Don't think you're so big. Age is just a number. You remember to bow your head to me. It's been three years since we lit up a joint together like we should be doing. And it is important to me that you know that I am always here. My body maybe not, but me. I haven't left you for a minute. I see you, laugh with you, cry with you when the things are hard for you. I watch over you. And most of all I am proud for you of who you are, of how you've blossomed and the fucking woman you became. Remember always that my love for you did not go anywhere. It just these days has wings. I am with you always and forever. And there is more. We will try together to understand this sad, fragile, beautiful, strange and worrying thing. And for now, now please listen to this. That song is Amartito Da by Easy and Doron Talmon. Brand new music of these units. Unsettled times. And now it is time for our first discussion. So Linda, 1000 days is such a long time.
- [42:14]
B
Isn't is a long time. And I think we're all kind of feeling just the heaviness. We stopped for a moment of silence at 10am which is one of the things that these organizations had asked for. And it all just came flooding back from me, you know, just an hour ago before we record. But as you said, it's 1,000 days since October 7th. And to put that in perspective, 1,000 days is just under half as long as World War II, which lasted for 2,193 days. And it's also 60% longer than the War of Independence, which dragged on for 599 days, 125 times as long as the 1956 war in Sinai, 167 times as long as the Six Day War, twice as long as the War of Attrition, which went on for 518 days, 30 times as long as the Second Lebanon War, which lasted for 34 days and 45 times as long as the 2008 war in Gaza. It's also 125 times as long as the 2012 war, 20 times as long as the 2014 Gaza war, and 90 times as long as the 2021 war in Gaz. It is more or less the same number of days that the first war in Lebanon dragged on miserably, producing one casualty here, another there, an excruciating drip, drip, drip of dead young men. Our own more recent paroxysm then drip, drip, drip of death started of course, on October 7, when mostly Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters broke down the border fortifications around Gaza, spilled into the nearby towns Kibbutzim and Moshavim, killing more than 1200, transporting 251 people back into Gaza as hostages and causing all sorts of injuries, some terrible to hundreds or thousands more after that. On October 8, Hezbollah began missile and mortar attacks on the towns and settlements near the northern border. On October 13, Israel ordered everyone in northern Gaza to move to the city south, starting massive displacements of people in Gaza. On October 18, Houthis in Yemen began firing missiles into central and Southern Israel. On October 27, Israel started its ground attack into Gaza. On November 15, IDF soldiers took over the Shifa hospital in Gaza City, speeding the collapse of Gaza's hospital system. From November 24 to December 1, a temporary truce led to the release of 105 hostages, mostly women, children and nuns, Israelis in exchange for 240 Palestinian prisoners. In December 2023, Israel's attacks on Khan Yunis in southern Gaza started. On February 29, 2024, more than 100 Palestinians were shot and killed when flower distribution turned into a melee or riot. On April 1, 2024, Israel attacked Iran's embassy in Damascus, killing Iranian intelligence officers. Over the next two weeks, Iran attacked Israel with missiles and drones, while Israel bombed Iran. Around that time, an IAF strike killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers. In May 2024, Israel began to attack and raze Rafah. In June 2024, Israel rescued four hostages, Noah Argamani, Almog Meir, John, Andre Koslov and Shlomi Z, during which operation more than 100 Gazans were killed. In July 2024, Hezbollah rockets killed 12 Druze kids in Majd al Shams. Israel killed Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. In August, Israel killed Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif near Khan Younis on August 29, 2024. Hirsch Goldberg Poland Carmel Ghat, Eden Yerushalmi Ori Danino, Alex Lobanov and Al Mug Sarousi were murdered by shots in the head in a tunnel in Rafah. In September, the pagers of hundreds of Hezbollah officers and fighters exploded, leaving some dead and many maimed. Soon after that, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed in Beirut. In October 2024, the IDF launched ground attacks against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Iran launched major missile attacks in Israel. And Israel began a new wave of attacks in northern Gaza around Jabal. On October 16, Hamas's supreme leader, Yahya Sinwar was killed in Rafah after being located by a drone, alone, weak and exhausted. In November 2024, a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah was enacted. In January 2025, a ceasefire and prisoner exchange deal was reached between Hamas and Israel just ahead of Donald Trump's inauguration as US president. 38 hostages, 30 living, eight dead were returned to Israel as part of this ceasefire fire. From June 13th to 24th, 2025, Israel and Iran fought what was known as the 12 Day War. In October 2025, the last 20 living hostages were returned to Israel. And by January 26th, 2026, Ron Gvili, the last of the murdered hostages, was sent back home for burial. Starting on February 28, 2026, the US and Israel again battled Iran for 40 days, ending in an April 8 ceasefire. All of which, taken together, is only a tiny, if important, portion of the stuff we have witnessed over the past 1,000 days. The full list would be enormous, practically endless, and it would include the Bibas boys and Hindra Job dying in that car, and it would have on it all the homes and schools and mosques reduced to rubble in Gaza and the rapes and burnings and torture and, well, all the things we've seen and read and heard and absorbed over these 1000 days. Days. Which leads to the question, Noah, what are these 1000 days? How do you understand them? You're a historian. How do you think that history will understand them?
- [48:24]
A
I really, really don't know. I mean, it's. As you were going through that list of things, and you were right to add that for all that, they were probably, I guess, the things that had the biggest banner headlines over the last, last thousand days. They're just a teeny, teeny bit of the infinite number of lists that could be made up. And like you said, imagine what that list would look like written by a Gazan. On this day, this mosque was destroyed. On this way, on this day, these people died. Just to hear you say it is all sort of so overwhelming and it's Very, very hard to know what the historians will say when it's hard to know what I think and what we think. Just yesterday or maybe the day before, Major General Nitan alone said at the Hertalia conference. Nitan alone was one of the point people for the hostage negotiations. And he said flat out that the active part of the war in Gaza could have ended a year before it did, with all the hostages coming back and more of them alive than what ultimately happened, and that there was no reason and no gain from the extra year that it dragged on, which he intimated happened for purely political reasons. I think that he implied that the right wing party, the religious Zionist party in particular, was so insistent. Botsalo Smotrich, the head of that party earlier in the week said lamentably on a podcast that he had in fact stopped the war from ending something of which he was proud, though he had also been the one responsible for bringing home all the hostages, something that inspired a great deal of anger in many, many quarters around Israel. So you live with this list of impossible things. I feel, and I think that a lot of us feel, maybe all of us feel just like overwhelmingly shell shocked by all of the misery and all of the horror. It's hard to even remember the, the points where it seemed as though something had happened that had changed the face of international politics forever for the good. When, you know, when Hezbollah seemed as though they might be on the verge of being destroyed after the, the pager bombs and, and after their leadership was all destroyed and it seemed as though, oh well, at least, at least when history is written, it will say that Israel's, Israel's relationship with Lebanon and Iran's proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah changed irrevocably and for the better at that moment. But now, now all of those ostensible gains seem to have been wiped out. Israel, it controls 54%, I believe, of Gaza, something like that, certainly, and Hamas controls the other. So that seems like a terrible outcome on both sides. And it just feels as though, as though the claim that the Middle east has the map of the Middle east, the diplomatic map of the Middle east and military map of the Middle east has been rewritten for the better and that we have fought a war for a thousand days against Iran and its proxies and Hamas and we have changed things for the better, or as the prime minister seemed to claim this past week, we prevented them from using the bomb that they seemed magically to have in fact created, even though nobody knew about it. All of that is at. On this day, all of that seems really hard to take seriously, though, really hard to believe, even though I do think that there's some truth to that. Judah, what do you think?
- [52:37]
C
So I also add that today's a fast day. Shivas are betamus, which also kind of adds a weight to the day as we're thinking about catastrophes that have befallen the Jewish people. There's a weird quality to this in thinking about sort of where we are a thousand days later, that on the one hand, things are so different from how they were before, and yet so many things are still sort of exactly the same as they were before in terms of Israel's current political leadership, in terms of a lot of the things that we're fighting about. Like, I literally today got a Facebook reminder, a Facebook memory from 14 years ago of some political cartoon that I thought was funny about Shiv yon ba Netel, about haredim not serving in the military from 14 years ago. And so the fact that that sort of these things don't change and now they have a particular, a different valence, I think that argument has, because of the price that has been paid in, in blood from people who, you know, from the, from the men that have been, that have mostly men that have been killed over the past 1000 days of war and also, you know, the price that families have been paying. You know, we. I recently had an article about a new study that the Taube center, this social policy institute, released looking at the children of reservists and how their readiness for elementary school has just kind of fallen off a cliff and their emotional and behavioral issues have just gone up incredibly compared to their peers who don't have a parent in the reserves and were we're coming after 1,000 days of this. There's so much that we are, that we've experienced that is going to be carrying with us forward politically, socially, educationally. We're moving in different ways than we did before, and yet we're also still kind of stuck in a lot of the same arguments and political fights that we were in before. And so it's a very odd place to mark work and to think about sort of where we are. And also, you know, we're talking specifically sort of within Israel. But obviously a lot of things have happened in the Jewish, you know, over the past 1,000 days for the Jewish world politically in the United States, you know, there's been a bunch of Democratic primaries that have been taken by, you know, a lot of the activists that were leading the anti Israel demonstrations. After October 7th, it's a, you know, we're in a very weird place to be understated about it.
- [55:34]
B
I think first of all, that there's still been no commission of inquiry. It's just kind of unbelievable. And I think we're all still kind of living with that trauma, even if you don't feel it every day. But the trauma of October 7th, and I think that the situation in Gaza is just terrible. I mean, it's like frozen. Israel's controlling more than 60% of Gaza now and still the number. Yeah, it's actually closer to 70, Noah. So I don't know if I meant to interrupt you, but, you know, since the sea, it's officially the yellow line is 52%. But Israel has actually expanded control past the yellow line since the ceasefire. 10:53 Palestinians as of yesterday have been killed since the last few months of the ceasefire. And A total since October 2nd 7th, over 73,000 Palestinians have been killed. And basically more than a million people are still living in tents. Schools aren't functioning, hospitals aren't functioning. You know, we're approaching the three year anniversary of October 7th, and as we said, today's a thousand days and yet, you know, there are millions of people on both sides of this whose lives have basically been frozen.
- [56:51]
A
Judah, do you have any feelings about how this will be seen in the fullness of time?
- [56:59]
C
It's very clear that this was a turning point and I think it sort of still remains to be seen, you know, what it's a turning point of and where things go from here. You know, I think one thing to me that's very clear is that we are. Israeli society is going to be more militaristic than it had been before. You know, I think that's something that's going to be very strong because of the past. I mean, because of Israel's history in general. You know, having a very strong ties to the military, considering there's, you know, army radio and a lot of the biggest hits were written by army bands. You know, that's something that kind of carries through, but I think a deference to those who serve is something that's going to be very, very strong for us. And I'm not saying that's inherently a bad thing by any stretch of the imagination. But, you know, the power of the military and soldiers and those who serve is going to be something that's going to be with Israeli society for a long time to come. I think grievances large and small from, you know, all different parts of society are going to be with us. I mean, they were there before too, but there's going to be new ones and with new arguments to back them up up. And you know, we're going to talk about this in our, in our next segment. But you know, almost any talk about a two state solution is, is not part of the conversation. And I don't, here's where, you know, I don't know that that disappears. I think, you know, it's hard to really be super definitive about that considering, you know, I think I haven't looked through, I've searched for it and haven't found particularly good public polling about what Israelis felt about Egypt in the couple years before the, in the wake of 1973, in 1976, what Israelis felt about Egypt, I can't imagine.
- [58:56]
A
I happen to have researched that and I think that the week before Sadat announced that he was willing to come to Jerusalem, something like 90% of Israelis believed that peace with Egypt was not possible in our lifetime time. And I think that two weeks after that, something like 90% of the people supported peace with Egypt.
- [59:17]
B
Not only that, when his Sorry to interrupt you, Judah, but when Sadat's plane landed, it was surrounded by Israeli sharpshooters because they thought it was like a trick and there was going to be some sort of Trojan horse thing. And so I think I agree with you that the two state solution is not part of the discussion at this point and Israelis have certainly moved to the right. But at the same time I think that attitudes can change and that's something, something that we did see with Egypt.
- [59:43]
C
Yeah, so that's something that, you know, it's not in the conversation today. Does that mean it's completely off the table, it's never going to happen? I, I don't, you know, that's where I say I don't know. There's very strong arguments that it won't be and there's certain arguments, you know, there's been polls that show that it's still kind of the least bad option. You know, it's not to say that a lot of people support it, but they just, you know, oppose all the alternatives even more. Okay. I don't know how that goes forward, if it goes forward. But you know, there, there's arguments, arguments this way and that obviously there's interest for some, you know, for some people in Israel a little bit less so, more so from its supporters outside. But you know, that's a big question that I don't know how, how this falls into that in Terms of looking forward.
- [60:33]
A
Now listen to this. That song is Amen. Amen. Amen by Tamar Riley. And now it is time for our second discussion. So, Judah, a new party on the left's gotta be good news for everyone, right?
- [62:17]
C
The polls last week held some surprises. Two of them had the new Yashar Party, headed by former IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot, in a tie with Prime Minister Netanyahu's Couparty for the support that each party would win if the elections were held. Now. One of them in Ma', Riv, gave both parties 21 seats and the other in Zman Yisrael, the Times of Israel's Hebrew sister site gave both parties 23. In both polls and all the other polls too, the present coalition got trounced, winning between 49 and 51 of the 120 Knesset seats. Though only one poll, the one in Ma', Riv, predicted that the present opposition would get enough seats to form a government without inviting Arab parties to join whatever coalition they make, a prospect that some anti Netanyahu parties refuse to embrace. So despite Gotti Eisenkot's rise in popularity, and despite the decline in popularity of Benjamin Netanyahu and his right wing partners, just what the next government will look like is, as the Magic 8 Ball might say, hazy. Try again later. Last week also saw the surprise announcement of the establishment of a new joint Jewish Arab party named in Hebrew Maqom Le Kulch in Arabic. A place for us all. I'm sorry about my Arabic. It's.
- [63:32]
B
It's not fine.
- [63:35]
C
The new part. Yeah, yeah. The new party pledges that among its candidates, half will be women and half will be men and half will be Jewish and half will be Arab. Its main political demands will be that Israel's government work towards a peace agreement with Palestinians that will result in a Palestinian state or equality for Palestinians living alongside Jews in a single binational state, raising the minimum wage to 50 shekels, or about $17 these days an hour doing whatever needs to be done to bust the organized crime syndicates that have visited death and other miseries on Arab Israeli cities, towns and villages. The new party is headed by Rula Daoud and Alon Lee Green, whose last gig, which was their job until last week, was leading the joint Jewish Arab ngo Standing Together Together, a movement that in the dozen years since it was established, has brought together tens of thousands of activists to work on labor campaigns and to fight violence against women and to increase economic equality and lots of other things that reflect the shared interests of Palestinians and Jews in Israel since October 7, standing together has been the most audible voice of Jewish Palestinian cooperation at a time when such cooperation was hard for most everyone to maintain. Standing Together at first devoted itself, like so many other others, to helping the mostly but not only Jewish victims of Hamas violence, and then, with the start of Israel's war on Gaza, raised money among Israeli Jews and Palestinians for humanitarian aid, that is Food, medicine, tents, blankets and all the rest for Gazans. Representatives of Standing Together fanned out throughout Europe and North America speaking their message of Palestinian Jewish cooperation and dialogue and saying that the future for Palestinians and Jews from the river to the sea can only be a future of sharing and cooperation. In many places around the world, they were met with boycotts everywhere they went. However, they found people who were eager to hear what they had to say and at the end of the night, often enough to write them a check. The connections between Standing Together and Place for Us all are many and they are undeniable, even as their leaders have made some half hearted attempts to deny them. The two initiatives used the same block fonts in white against the same purple background, which it must be said, was an end any case borrowed from the populist left wing Podemos movement in Spain, which was founded a year before. Standing Together Purple, as all kindergarteners know, combines the red of communism with the blue of the Israeli flag. So there's that too. And if you look at the top six Place for Us all candidates on their website, you'll notice that five of them, including the two leaders, cut their teeth as Standing Together activist leaders, including Sally Abed, a one time regular on this podcast, at least until she moved to Haifa, went off and got married, had a baby and got herself bit a little elected to the city Council, about which we say, come on, priorities people. The sixth candidate, by the way, is Yonatan Zeigin, the pacifist son of pacifist Canadian Israeli activist Vivian Silver, who was murdered by Hamas terrorists on October 7. It may or may not be worth noting that of the top six candidates on the website, two are gay and one is a lesbian, which maybe says something about the complicated sort of intersectional politics Placed for all of Us represents. The announcement of the founding of Place for All of Us was cheered in some circles with all sorts of peace activists posting on social media that finally they had a party to vote for with a clear conscience. Former speaker of the Knesset Avram Berg wrote that the new party offers us the vision of a society with, quote, equal citizenship for everyone who lives here what he sees is a radical idea for Israelis. But it must be said, a great deal of the reaction to the party, especially on the left as the right wing has so far mostly ignored its existence, has been critical and angry. The leftist outlet Sichamet Omid, its English version is called 972 Magazine, ran an essay by Jaffa poet and activist Ayat Abou Schmaiss headlined even under the leadership of women, Palestinian liberation will not come via the Knesset, in which she writes that the question is not who will represent us in the Kentucky Knesset, but rather whether this institution that supports genocide, that is to say the Israeli political system, is the right avenue for action. This sort of overall rejectionism is a common trait in the radical left and was perhaps to be expected. But what was maybe a bigger surprise was how vigorously the ostensibly left leaning newspaper Haaretz attacked the new party, running more than an article a day in the week after the party rose, with all but one lambasting Place for Us All. Columnist and editor Anat Khan, who some may remember was convicted 15 years ago of espionage and spent 26 months in jail after she leaked damning army documents, mainly about the military's conduct in the West Bank. That was a misguided or heroic act, depending on how you chose to see the thing. She wrote a column called Standing Together Party, excuse me, the Place for All of Us Party. You are the last thing that the left needs. Exclamation point. A human rights activist named Mary Jiris wrote an essay in Haaretz titled Place for Us all wants the votes of women like me, but it does not speak for me or about me. Columnist Ori Miskav wrote a piece called Alon Lee Green, your party is a blessing for Netanyahu and his facilitators. Some of the critics are angry because some months ago Standing Together said that it was started as an NGO and it would stay an ngo, never becoming a political party, which promised it, at least technically kept as there is no formal or fiscal link between Standing Together in Place for Us All. In a rebuttal piece in Haaretz, co chair Rula Daoud noted that when Standing Together said that it wouldn't form a political party, it also added, obviously it's legitimate if activists choose to get involved on the political playing field and we welcome every activist who also chooses to be part of the decision making centers. All of the critics are angry because they argue that Place for Us all is is too boutique a party to ever pass the 3.25% minimum election threshold. So however many Votes they get will be wasted. To which Alon Lee Green responded in an essay in Haaretz headlined We the Place for Us all party, promise that we will not waste votes, insisting that if polls show the party not passing the minimum threshold by a serious margin, they will either merge with another party or withdraw their candidacy. Still, the criticism rolls rolls in most viciously from the left, which Linda raises two questions of very different sorts. First, what should we think of Place for Us All? Should the party be a welcome addition to left of center Israeli politics? And second, whatever the answer to the first question, how should we understand the pitchfork and Torch's response to Place for Us all? Of the established left in Israel, and especially at Haaretz, Place for Us all is clearly Irish step dancing on some sort of nerve over there at Haaretz headquarters on Shokan Avenue in Touch Tel Aviv. But what nerve is it the sciatic nerve, the phrenic nerve with its focus on gender equity? Perhaps the pudendal nerve?
- [70:26]
B
Well, this is way, way above my pay grade in terms of my medical knowledge, but I think there's a few things going on here. First of all, I think there's a fear of what happened in 2022 when labor and Merits did not. When the labor candidate, Merav Michaeli, did not agree to merge with Merits, and then anyone who and Merits fell just short of that 3.25 level. And so anyone who voted for Merits, basically their vote was lost and Merits was not part of that of the current Knesset. And so I think that there's this real fear of that happening again. I also think that once you become a political party, you kind of lose something that was special. In other words, what was special about Standing Together was that it was a movement and not a party. I actually spoke to a friend of mine who asked me not to quote her by name, so of course I won't. Late last night, who's an activist in Standing Together, and she said that this all kind of came at the last minute out of nowhere. And while while theoretically she thinks she certainly supports everything that they stand for, and that's why she's been an activist with the movement, she says it's kind of leaving them in the lurch because a lot of these people have now left. And so the movement is trying to figure out where it belongs. And so I think on one hand, a lot of what they stand for, some of these, they're really good people, Alonely Green and Roula Daoud, and they have a lot of energy and. But I think that they might lose something. Once you run for Knesset and become a political party, you lose kind of that grassroots what makes you a movement. And I think that some of the most important movements in history, whether it's the civil rights movement or in South Africa, the movement for equality, maybe they could be more effective from outside. Now why Haaretz and others are being so, you know, attacking. I think maybe there's a fear, you know, the Democrat Party is still a Zionist party and it believes in, you know, the state of Israel and a Jewish and Zionist state of Israel. As far as I know, standing together as a movement does not define itself as Zionist. And maybe there's a little bit of fear, fear that people will begin to see the Democrats as non Zionist. I mean, I think there's already people on the right who would say that. Yet you're Golan and other people are certainly not worthy of the term Zionist, but at least that's how they describe themselves. So maybe there's a fear that it will alienate people who might have been willing to vote for the Democrats.
- [73:28]
A
Wouldn't it most likely have the opposite effect of allowing the Democrats to position themselves surely in contrast, contrast to this new party as a Zionist party?
- [73:39]
B
Maybe, but I understand what you're saying, but I think at the same time there's this sense of people being tarred as a leftist is one of the biggest insults that you can now call somebody in Israeli politics. And I think that they will certainly try to do what you just suggested, Noah, but I'm just not sure if they'll be able to see succeed.
- [74:04]
A
I, I think that this new party is really important and really valuable. I have a long and slightly complicated relationship with Standing Together. Not, not so complicated, I guess, but I was one of the, the founders of Standing Together in the sense that I was elected to the, to the leadership the very first time that they elected their leadership and then so many meetings. They had so many meetings. But I did not stand to run the second time or ever thereafter actually. To be the thing about there being so many meetings like three or four nights a week is a true thing. And it was difficult for me. But that's really not the reason why I sort of evaporated from the leadership of Standing Together. The real reason was because for me it was very, very difficult to be in so obviously non Zionist political movement. Non Zionist, to the point that I think that a fair number of the leaders were in some way anti Zionist, though they were always very, very careful to have room for, for Zionists and to say that they were really interested in, in as broad a coalition as possible. But, but, but a lot of them were. I, I think their analysis was that the ideology of Israel was ultimately irredeemable in some way, though they had great faith in the people of Israel. I, I, for all that, it was difficult for me sometimes just to be in the room and to find a way to speak that language. And I never did find that way. I love standing together. I love what they are trying to do and I love the way in which they are trying to do it. Which is to say they really sought and found issues that are basic issues that are really shared by people all over Israel, including Palestinians and Jews and, and leftists and people who are not leftists. So they did a lot of labor organizing and labor working. They ran campaigns, for instance, a campaign of bus drivers in Haifa of whom I think some very large percentage, maybe half or maybe more than half are Arab and half or less than half are Jewish, seeking and finding common ground between these people who then spend three nights of their week, every day, every week talking to one another in someone's living room, which can be a powerful experience and life changing and it can change politics. And they were very involved in women's issues. And as you, and as you, you hear from, from the introduction where you know, three of the six candidates that you will find on the website of Standing Together is the leading, I'm sorry of the New Party. As the leading members of the New Party Party are queer in some way and that's a radical thing. To have a lesbian Palestinian woman standing at the head of a political party in Israel is unheard of. It's just incredible that this is true. So here's what I think is so important about this New Party is first of all that they exist at all and that they are deeply committed to putting the Palestinian, Israeli conflict at the front of political discourse again at a time when it, when it's just common knowledge that you can't even talk about it. But it turns out that they're proving that you can at least talk about it. That's one thing. Another thing is their internal polls show that they, they stand to gain as much as one full Knesset seat, which is something like 80,000 votes for, from disaffected young Palestinians who have grown tired of their political leadership, the average age of which among the Arab parties, the average age is well into their 50s or approaching their 60s. And there are a lot of young Palestinians who grew up at a time when there was opportunity for Palestinians in Israel that their parents had never known. So you. There's a new young Palestinian middle class, and they're interested in people who look like them, representing them, who are alive to the issues that young people around the world care about, including queer rights, including equality, all sorts of things. And finally, these people have some kind of representation. And it's astonishing that the degree to which young Palestinians are responding to this new party. That is an amazing thing. So there's the new. Talking about the old issue of peace in a new way, with new voices that look different, that sound different, and the deep commitment to real Palestinian Jewish cooperation. Hadash, the other joint Jewish.
- [79:35]
C
Yeah, I was gonna say to me, like, the. Where a lot of this has been discussed and a lot of the, like, media debates is about sort of the Democrat team and standing together. But to me, sort of, I don't see huge substantive differences between standing together and Hadash like that. I don't know that they're calling themselves Communist in the same way, but they are certainly looking for a lot of the similar sort of socialist goals in terms of terms of raising the minimum wage, improving things for workers, improving things for the lower class. Like, I think there's a lot of similarities there. And is it just that, first that Hadash is now part of this joint list which includes, you know, religious Arab parties that they would be opposed to and. Or is it that Hadash just has a lot of baggage because it's. Because of its history and that this is offering something new that's a little bit different than what existed before on that front. But I don't really see, like, such huge differences between the two.
- [80:33]
A
You're right to point out that Hadash are. They're. They're the people who are most upset about this new party because there seem to be so many similarities between them. But the differences are. And Hadash, like you said, is a Communist party, ostensibly joint Palestinian Jewish party has been. It has one slot that's always set aside for a Jew in an electable position. So there's always one Jew, and the rest are. Are Palestinians. They also have one slot set aside for a woman. And so there's always exactly one woman who's elected. Well, actually, sometimes there's zero women, but there's either zero or one woman who's elected in Khadash. And that's a little bit the key to the difference between the two parties. Ayman Oda, who is the head of Hadash, is somebody whom I'm friendly with and I admire very, very much, much. I have nothing bad to say about him or the agenda of the party. That does look like the agenda of this new party, like you said. But Hadash is a party of older men. And it is a party that, where the Jewish Palestinian cooperation is something about which to which people are committed in principle and in fact about which people have largely taken hired a long time ago. This new party is really 50, 50 Jewish Palestinian, and it is deeply committed to having women. I mean, in fact, half the people will be women. The leadership of the party will always have one woman and one man, like the Green parties in some countries in Europe. And they are young and they are alive to very, very different issues than Khadash. So there's a little bit of patricide in this that like Khadash has grown old and has grown tired. And this is a young party, but the youth of it and the fact that, you know, you cannot talk about queer issues in Khadash, that is unmentionable. But here it's right. It's like the biggest subtext of this new party is the fact that half of the leadership, leadership is, is LGBTQ in some way. And what does that mean to get young Palestinian voters to vote for a lesbian as their representative in Knesset? It's very, it's, it's very powerful.
- [83:03]
B
I think it's also. I agree with you and I, I, I Rula, in her piece, you know, said I think the, the Arab voting rights of people planning to vote in the upcoming election were something like 50% and even less among young people. And did I get it right? Exactly. So I do think that if you are, you know, if, as she says, it's going to bring in a lot of people who are not voting. Now, I think that's really important because I think that one of the big, very big issue that we have is that many Arab citizens of Israel just are so feel disenfranchised even though they're not, and feel that, you know, they, there's no reason to vote because, you know, it's all the same and doesn't appeal to them. So if you get a situation where people who weren't voting are voting and becoming part of the political process, that is something that, I think that that is very important.
- [84:00]
A
Absolutely. And the end result of this party is that they are almost certainly not going to still be running on election day, it seems very unlikely that we will be able to vote for them because getting to the point of half having not just 3.25% support, they'd have to have A good deal more than that. To be confident in the polls and to continue.
- [84:21]
C
Yeah, they said it included the margin of error, so.
- [84:24]
A
Right. So the margin of error pushes them to over 4%. The likelihood of them reaching that is very slight. So then they say, well, there are two options. One of them is that we will simply pull out once the polls show that we will not pass this minimum threshold because we are unwilling to be part of a story that gets Benjamin Netanyahu re elected. And the other possibility is that they say is that they will join together with another party, which raises a question, who will that be? Will it be Hadash, which is part of the joint list? Probably not, in large part because of the vast ideological differences between this mostly secular young party and the old Islamicist parties that are part of the joint list. And then possibly with Ra', Am, which is also an Islamicist party, but which is one that has proved to be much more pragmatic. And they could form some joint list that runs for the Knesset and then separates much in the way that Benvir did from the religious Zionists and Smotrich right after the election. So that's a possibility. But. But we probably will not have the opportunity to vote for this party. But I am so delighted that this party is going to be in the elections that we will see their commercials, that we will hear them in our living rooms talking about peace, because it is at least a reminder that this issue is really an issue that is of life and death importance for all of us. And pretending that it doesn't exist is not going to help anyone. And also, I have to say, just knowing the people who are in this new party, go to their website and look and you'll see the six faces of the people. And so there's Zeigen, whose mother, Vivian Silver, is such a figure for all of us. And then Itamar Avneri is one of the leaders and he just finished a doctorate that I super supervised about de extinction, by the way, about bringing dead, you know, long expired, long extinct species back to life. He's incredibly wonderful. He also sits on city council and the two of us run the environment committee together in Tel Aviv. And Sally, I know there are listeners of this podcast that have ambivalent or worse feelings about Sally. I adore her even as I disagree with her politics. Politics in a big way. You go down the list. Alon Lee, who was one of the leaders of the social protests in 2011 and who personally, I think, revived the labor movement in Israel when he was 17 and ran a strike of people running coffee carts around the country. They're incredible, incredible young people. They are not people that I agree with entirely ideologically, but they are so much people that I would like to have have in the Knesset making the arguments, bringing up the issue, partly setting the agenda. So I, I think that it's a beautiful thing. And with that, listen to this. That song is Lev Lavan new by Miri Masika. You can find all the music you heard on the show this week in all the usual places. And now it is time for our Vada country segment. This is the part of the show in which each of us describes something that maybe surprised or amused, delighted or intense, enchanted, ensorcelled or possibly even fluged us as we wended our way through our worlds over the last little while. So, Linda, what is your what a country.
- [89:44]
B
Okay, so for my what a country, I'd like to talk about a young man, Captain Eitan Shkenazi and his mother Sonia. Eitan started the army with my son Nitan El, and they started their army service at the end of March 2020. So right at the beginning of COVID And they were in a unit called egos, which is a special forces unit. And in actually a very funny thing, they had their swearing in ceremony, which parents were not allowed to go to, but they're also not allowed to show their faces on social media. So they broadcast it live on Facebook, but only the camera was pointed at their ankles. So we got up at five o' clock in the morning to watch this and I'm like, are those his ankles? Are those his ankles? And this was at the height of COVID and there was a period of a year and a half of training. It's a very long training period. And then Eitan went right to officers training and he became an officer in the Nahal Reconnaissance Unit. And he, of course, on October 7, got to Gaza as quickly as he could. And during that period of time, he also got married. He was religious. And Nitanel says that he was always smiling and he loved candy. He was always eating as much candy as he could, especially kinder Bueno. And Sonia said to me, his mother, that even after he was married, whenever he got out of Gaza for a short time, he and his wife Hillah would go all the way to Hazorah Ghlilit, where the family lived, to spend Shabbat together. And he always bought his mother flowers. And he was just this really, really lovely guy. And Eitan was Unfortunately killed on January 6, 2025 at the age of 24 in a battle in Beit Hanun in the northern Gaza Strip. And he was actually killed on his brother Yonatan's body. Birthday. And my son Nathanael went to the Shiva and said to his younger brother, he said to his younger brother, who was 16 at the time, he said, I'm your brother now, and anything you need, just turn to me. And he said that because one of the last things that Eitan did was send flowers to his wife and to his mother. So the unit tries to send flowers to both his wife and his mother as often as the they can now. And Eitan also had a twin brother, Rotem. And this week, Yonatan, the oldest brother, got married. And they were trying to figure out, how do you. You know, it happened a year and a half ago that Eitan was killed? How do you have the joy of a wedding with the ongoing sorrow of losing a child? And they made a balloon with Eitan's face on it that was under the chuppah with them. And Sonia told me that every time the balloon, they kept trying to turn it around to be facing outwards so that the video and the photographer could get the family with the balloon of Eitan. And the balloon kept turning around towards her, and she felt that it was Eitan saying to her that I'm here with you. And the family is very religious and has an incredible amount of emunah in Hashem and in God. And that with all of their pain, they feel. She told me that they were sure that Eitan was going to be killed on October 7th. And the fact that he wasn't killed for another year and a half, they said every day was like a gift that we had him for that extra year and a half. And I was just thinking of so many people who have, you know, have this deep, deep sorrow that we can only imagine and yet also are able to find joy in weddings. When we see some of the widows whose husbands have been killed fighting and they're getting remarried, some of them with a whole bunch of kids. And I just think it says something about the resilience of people and that Israelis have. And I just. I'm really in awe of Sonia, who is an immigrant from France, by the way, that she can hold both the sorrow of losing her son and the joy of marrying off another son at the same time.
- [94:40]
A
Oh, boy. Yes. He's horror. Judah, what is your water country?
- [94:47]
C
So I am not a particularly athletic person. I generally like to think that I'm good enough at most sports to not entirely embarrass myself, but that's about my limit. I'm also not that big of a sports fan. You know, I love a cold beer at a minor league baseball game as much as the next guy, but I'm not the stay up until 3am to watch an NFL game sort of dude. And yet last night I found myself moved, genuinely moved by the power of sport, specifically Jewish sport, by what Zionist leader Max Nordau dubbed in the Second Zionist Congress, quote unquote muscular Jewish Judaism. In Jerusalem's Teddy Stadium, I and thousands of other people gathered for the launch of this year's Maccabiyah Games, a normally quadrennial event whose schedule has been thrown off first by the COVID 19 pandemic, which forced the game scheduled for 2021 to take place in 2022, and then by the 12 day war with Iran last summer, which pushed off the 2025 games until this year. Our latest bout with Iran almost forced another delay, but the organizers were adamant about pressing ahead. Delaying the Games also would have been prohibitively expensive. The roughly 3,000 athletes who came in for the Games came from 40 countries across five continents, from Argentina to Zimbabwe. The largest delegation, some 900 athletes, came from my native United States. USA. USA. USA. For the next 10 days or so, they'll compete against each other in the more than 2,000 Israeli athletes who are taking part in the Games in events that'll be held throughout the country, but mostly in Tel Aviv, with a few events in Jerusalem and Netanyahu's Wingate Institute. There's also a bike race through the Western Negev and an open water swim that will be held in honor of Captain Edda Nimri, an IDF officer and swimmer who is killed by terrorists while protecting fellow soldiers on the nahal Oz base 1000 days ago. Today, of course, as the swim in honor of Nimri and the other events that will be held in honor of other fallen athletes are who shows this year is different. The opening ceremony for the Games, which are being held under the banner more than ever, highlighted how much things have changed. There was a recitation by Nimri's parents of the Iskor Prayer. Special attention was also paid during the ceremony to the Paralympians, many of whom were injured in the October 7 attacks or the wars that followed, who'll be competing in this year's Games. But there was also fun in cheering social media influencer Montana Tucker performed a new song wearing a spandex outfit covered in the flags of all the participating countries about how we're not really strangers after all. Neta Barzilai channeled Freddie Mercury as she belted Don't Stop Me Now. The kids from Brazil and Germany were swapping shirts and other gear with the kids from Israel and France. I have to imagine that the single athlete who came from Finland, his T shirt is going to be in high demand. And thousands of us stood together to recite the Israeli national anthem, Hatikva. The hope ending like this, To be a free people in our land, the land of Zion and Jerusalem. And we cheered and we cheered because you have to cheer for that as you're standing there surrounded by thousands and thousands of Jews from Israel and around the world, being a free people in Japan, Jerusalem. This is my second time covering the Maccabiyah games and I just love it. I love that at the end we can assign superlatives to people like Strongest Jew and Strongest Jewess, Fastest Jew and Fastest Jewess and best chess playing Jew and best Pickleball playing Jew. That's a really important title this year. I love that Maccabiev is often the only way that Jewish kids engage with the wider Jewish community. I love the Jewish peoplehood of it, the connections between Jews from Slovakia to Jews from Chile, between Jews from India to Jews from Uruguay. But this year I also love the games of it. It's been a tough thousand days and a particularly tough thousand days for kids and teenagers. The weight of the past thousand days and the uncertainty of the of the next will also hang over the event. But for the next week and a half or so there will also be fun and bonus Hummy. Let the games begin.
- [99:09]
A
Ah, that's fantastic. Wow. I love the fact that chess is one of the musk, you know, this is.
- [99:16]
C
These are the Jewish Olympics.
- [99:22]
A
So unusually for me, I had a thing on this past Shabbat afternoon. It was in a hotel down south from us on the beach and I hadn't noticed until I was out and I about that it was the first Shabbat of summer and the tayelet, the boardwalk was crowded with people, volleyball and boisterous under the bright sun. And the beach, it was crowded too. There were kids with shovels and pails and there were old folks, mostly covered up from sandals to hat, lying on chaise loungers. And I walked by a group of guys in bathing suits on the bottom anyway and tzitzit or you know, a talit katan over a tank, tank top and these guys, there was a group of four of them, they were arguing in a very lively way apparently about a sugiya of The Talmud. And there were all the young people, out being young and so beautiful, walking on the tayalit or out splooting on towels on the beach. And there was a guy pushing a shopping cart up the boardwalk selling cold drinks. And just under the tayelet at the top of the beach, there were tough guys my age, thwack, thwack, thwack. Walking Motco back and forth and on the shaded bleachers that they built in the renovation a few years ago, going down from the boardwalk to the beach down near Frischman, there was a couple, a man with his head in the lap of the woman, each of them reading a book. And the scene was at once so lively and also so serene. And everywhere I looked it looked like it was everyone. There were Jews and Palestinians and stuff, straight and queer and really, really young and really old and everyone in between. And there were people who have got God and people who the last thing they'd ever want to have in their life is God. And it says in the Talmud in Brachot, I think that Shabbat is one part in 60 of the world to come. And I guess especially after the thousand days that we were just talking about, I could see that everything most all of us could ever want was right there on that beach on the first Shabbat of summer. All the people doing all the things with one another, happy just under the sun. And I am not even a beach person. And that brings us to the end of our show. Thanks to Itai Shillim, our station manager, without whom there would be none of this. Thanks to Ashiboleem, my favorite band from Kibbutz Geba. They give us some music at the start and the end of our show. Thank you Lucky Linda. Thank you Natalie. Thank you Judah Ari Lieb, the Lion Hearted Gross. 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 moved and grateful and very much in your debt. And we'd like to thank all of you out there for taking the time, your very valuable time to listen. We'd like to ask you to like us on Facebook. I would like to ask you that. Itay would rather if I didn't ask you that. And also to drop us a line@patreon.com, we are going to answer. After you do that, go to Apple Podcasts and give us a five star review. Maybe one that starts with this quote. It is a sobering thought as we get ready to celebrate in just two days the semi quincentennial of the United States of America that that grand experiment in representative government is fully 15 times as old as the Promise Podcast which celebrated its quindecennial or 15th anniversary just last year. It really makes you think. Finish that any way you want. But before you do that, remember that today as we record on July 2, we celebrate international Synesthesia Awareness Day. So stipulated way back in 2024 by Stephen Melton, who as one learns from the website thestephenmelton.com is a quote, motion designer, adaptive technologist, author, independent researcher, composer, voiceover artist, musician and activist, singer synesthete with the aims of quote unquote celebrating and bringing synesthesia to the world's attention. As for instance with this educational thing that one finds at the website synesthesia awarenessday.com July 2 is synesthesia awareness Day.
- [103:29]
D
Synesthesia, it's a neurological condition that allows the various sensory areas of your brain to communicate when they ordinarily don't. Which means you can do some pretty unusual things like see musical notes or chords, automatically perceive every letter and number as a specific color, see days, months and years form patterns in the space around you, taste words or shapes, feel somebody else's shoulder being tapped, and dozens of other rare sensory phenomena. Synesthesia is not an illness and it's definitely not a disease. It's just a trait. Even some of the greatest artists, authors, entertainers and intellectuals in history were synesthetes like Vincent Van Gogh, Nikola Tesla, Marilyn Monroe, Frank Lloyd Wright, Billie Eilish, Beyonce, even Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman, just to name a few. Yet synesthesia remains unique, unknown to most of the world. Synesthesia Awareness Day is here to change all of that. That's where you come in. Quiz yourself to see if you have synesthesia and just never realized. It happens all the time. Ask your friends and family if they experience synesthesia, do a synesthesia book report, write a blog or article about it, share one of our posts on social media using Synesthesia Awareness Day to help get the word out. Because it's time that the world finds out about synesthesia.
- [104:58]
A
And I am pretty sure I do not need to tell you how much I love International Synesthesia Awareness Day. It's probably my favorite day of the entire year. It is so much better than World synesthesia day on May 11, also started just last year by a consortium of the official synesthesia associations of Canada, the United States, the uk, China, Russia, Africa, Germany and Spain, along with the International association of Synesthetes artists and scientists or the Iasas who think they're so big. But May 11 is a blue day, while July 2 is a bright purple day. And those world Synesthesia people didn't come up with the idea of writing a book report. Mine will be about Vladimir Nabokov's Speak Memory, where he writes about his quote, fine case of colored hearing and where he writes that A in English is the color of weathered wood while A in French is polished. The ebony, X, Z and K are all blue, N, L and O are white. It's amazing. And even though International Synesthesia Awareness Day has, as I record at just about 5am at my parents place, really just only begun, already I can feel it fading, fading, fading like life itself. In Vladimir Nabokov's opening line in Speak Memory quote, the cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Surely not to return for a long, long time, if ever not. So the Promise Podcast we will be back for you next week and most every week, reminding you that While only between 1 and 4% of all us humans are blessed with synesthesia, the percentage of listeners to our show who have the condition is apparently orders of magnitude higher, as we learn from the vast number of people who report that they see themselves surrounded in a migration miasma of fog and darkness while feeling an overwhelming sense of nausea and disgust. All this from simply listening to our words on this the Promised podcast.