Loading summary
Transcript118 lines
- [00:01]
A
A reminder that the body of Ron Gvili is still being held in Gaza today, 789 days after he was taken there on October 7th. We hope that by the time you hear this, Ron Gvili will have been returned for burial to his loved ones and to all of us.
- [00:22]
This is TLV1. This episode may contain explicit language.
- [00:41]
Welcome to the Promise Podcast brought to you on TLV1, the voice of the City which we learned from an investigation our crack team of researchers undertook after learning this week after the application of Jerusalem based NGO Matnat Chaim the Gift of Life's petition for for recognition by the August Guinness Book of Worlds records operation for the biggest ever gathering in one place of kidney donors. 2000 donors in the event was rejected this application on the grounds that after October 7th the Guinness people stopped accrediting new world records from Israel and or Palestine which crack research team's investigations turned up that despite the accreditation hiatus, Tel Aviv Yafo presently holds 25 count em 25 world records. This despite the more than 2 year accreditation hiatus which 25 world's records include first 3D printed heart using human tissue which is an odd kind of record. I guess nobody can beat having been the first largest animal rights march largest collection of owl related items with 19,100 in the collection owned by Yaakov Kai here in Tel Aviv. Largest steel spoon that one in the event outside the Uri Geller Museum and designed or something like that by our friend Charlie Yowitz. Biggest gathering of people with monkey tail beards, whatever they are. Most awards won by a short student film 23 awards in the event farthest 12 hour ultra distance run largest dance class with 9,223 participants tallest drag performer, largest Lego brick menorah, longest career as a theatrical actress, largest chemistry lesson with 4,207 participants longest serving guide dog and oldest leftovers being 420,000 year old deer bones in the Qasem cave. And there are more. I should add that not that many years ago Tel Aviv also held the record for the largest Shabbat dinner. But as of the Shabbat before last that record is now held by the Big Shabbat at the Javits center in New York with 2,761 people, one of whom was my beloved sister, which mention I feel is if not Tel Aviv still honorable. And arguably nothing captures the spirit of this ever so spirited city and the indomitability of this indomitable city that we love so well. Tel Avivo a city always striving to distant horizons, always casting out bridges to unknown shores. A city that knows as well as any other.
- [03:32]
The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.
- [03:41]
The human drama of competition.
- [03:46]
Arguably nothing captures the spirit of spiritedness of this city we love so well better than still holding what I think anyone would agree are probably the most important records. Biggest seal spoon, most monkey tail beards and such. And this more than two years after losing the ability for a time to make new records. But and mark my words, there will be new records. Who knows, big forks and knives maybe. Largest Lego brick kiddush cup maybe. Oh yeah, mark my words, there will be new records. Now with us today in TLV1's newest satellite studio in the Bitsaron neighborhood of the city, the streets of which are named after famous writer of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, like famous poet, essayist, critic and writer of short stories Avraham BER Gottlober, who went by the pen name Aleph bet Gimel Avraham Ber Gottlober and who put out in 1952 a book of poems and other stuff called Hanitzanim the Buds that include this poem in my lousy translation called El Hanitzanim. To the buds. To the buds. O buds. A swarm of bees will circle round you. Do not fear their anger, for although they will sting you so long as they do not spurn you altogether, it is a sign for you that honey will yet be drawn from you too. And in this neighborhood of great poets lives a woman who, if we were still allowed officially to register official world records, would surely hold the records for, and this is a partial list I am sure, most brilliant headlines ever written, most friends collected randomly off the street one day who then visit her on Shabbat for decades thereafter. Most complicated and charming mix of profound human warmth and appreciation on the one hand, and weary awareness of human fallibility and foibles on the other hand. Biggest spirit of generosity, most generosity of spirit and finally and probably most importantly, largest collection of owl related items. At least if we can bump off Yaakov Chai. Which brings me to my plan. But I digress, obviously, and I think you know this, that most record worthy woman could only be Miriam Hershel. Miriam Herslag is the OPS and blogs editor of the Times of Israel, creating and presiding over the biggest and most profound forum of Jewish discourse and debate since the Talmud was codified. Dam, that's another record too. Biggest forum since the Talmud. Miriam was in the past the anchor of the Israel Broadcast Authority English Language Television news and an editor and anchor for the Israel Broadcast Authority English Language Radio News. Miriam, how are you doing?
- [06:25]
B
I'm fine. I'm sorry to say I donated my owl collection to the Owl Museum, But I was hoping that I was going to make the record for oldest leftovers, which I thought were in my refrigerator right now, but now I'm going to.
- [06:39]
A
Give it 4,200 years. Yeah.
- [06:40]
B
I have to say about the Shabbat thing, I love this stuff. My favorite detail is, so if you have. So Guinness has to set, what is the requirement? How does it count as a Shabbat meal? And one of the requirements was that every single person had to receive a piece of fish within the first five minutes of the meal.
- [07:06]
A
Fish, Kama gefilte.
- [07:08]
B
Any fish. Any piece of fish. So I. I don't know what they served until we all know.
- [07:13]
A
It's not Shabbat if you're not eating fish.
- [07:15]
B
Apparently it's not. It. It's just very funn. It didn't matter if people were vegan. It didn't matter. They had to get this fish and it had to happen in five minutes, and that would be the only way, which they did achieve. And the woman who headed helmed that Guinness record setting now beat record in Tel Aviv wrote a piece in jta, kind of grudgingly crediting the new winners, but also noting that it's a doggy.
- [07:45]
A
Dog world in the competitive world of Shabbat dinner.
- [07:49]
B
This was not a gracious. She was not gracious in defeat. It was amusing. And she said, well, one big difference was we had to keep people in seats without the benefit of music playing, which the new record had at the Javits Center. They had, like, bands playing and they had, you know, top celebrities there, and people could maybe could sit in their seats longer as a result. And so somehow her achievement.
- [08:20]
Has a qualitative edge, if not a quantitative one.
- [08:23]
A
I understood from my sister that you needed to be in your seat, to remain in your seat for some period, I think, of 45 minutes, beginning at one particular time. And if you got up even to go to the bathroom, then you were no longer counted. So it was a little like those old EST seminars they used to have in the 70s as well. You weren't allowed to go to the bathroom.
- [08:42]
B
No. You must sit here and enjoy your meal.
- [08:46]
A
I'm sorry about your owl collection, though, which I really loved. And also owl is my favorite owl in Ginsburg.
- [08:52]
B
You realize I have no idea what you're talking about, but okay, there you go.
- [08:56]
A
Now, as for me. My name is Noah Ephron, and I do not mean to boast, but. And this is true, a student in the core course I teached the first years came up to me before class this past Sunday and told me that he had an appointment. He had to leave at 5, half an hour before the class ended. And he just wanted to let me know and apologize in advance. And I told him I was glad. He told me it was thoughtful because otherwise I'd wonder if something had happened. And then I said, the only thing I ask is that as you're walking out of the room, I would like you to turn around and scream, oh my God, I cannot take another minute of this crap. I've got to get out of here right now. And then slam the door after you leave. And the student said, I don't think I can do that. And I said, I think you can do it, but if, when the moment comes you don't want to, then just don't do it. And he said, okay. And the class went on. And at five o', clock, the guy gets up and he walks to the door and he turns around and he screams pretty convincingly. I thought, oh my God, I cannot take another minute of this crap. I've got to get right out of here. And he walks out and he slams the door. And then there is this moment of complete silence in the class. And it was then that I realized that I had no plan for what to do next. So I smiled sheepishly and I said, well, you gotta appreciate his honesty. And please, please believe me when I say I'm not bragging. My folks raised me better than that. I like to think. But I have a great capacity. I mean, like a Guinness Book of World's Records capacity to think things without really thinking them through. I think it has something to do with having dented my prefrontal cortex in an eight year old bike accident on Shabbat, which my grandmother, when she learned I had a concussion, said, this is God's way of saying, you should not be riding your bike on Shabbat. Today we got two topics of such incomparable importance. Years from now, you will still remember where you were when you heard our discussions of them. And when your kids say, tell me, my beloved parent who gave me life, where. Where were you when they had those important discussions on the Promise Podcast, you will sigh and say, ah, mein kind. I will never forget that day. But first, we have this matter in memoriam.
- [11:04]
I learned last week that retired General Elie Zaira died from a tweet by UR Heller, who covers the military beat for Channel 13 News. It said, just quote, the family of the head of Aman, the IDF Intelligence Directorate, Eliza Ira, may his memory be for a blessing, has announced to the IDF that they will give him a private civilian funeral and not an IDF military funeral. End quote. The tweet got just four comments. One an ad for something called Noob cloud, high performance, VPs, whatever that is. And one that said, quote, does every general get a military funeral, even if he dies at a ripe old age? And another said, quote, after his failure, it had better be private. And the last one said, that is what he wanted and that is what will be. You can understand why I searched the Internet and asked everyone who I thought might know when and where the funeral was. I learned too late that it was in Zichron Yaakov Cemetery. And I asked about the Shiva too, which I learned too late was in Eliezer's home, H.A. parsah Street 44, in a neighborhood called Sahala in Tel Aviv. But when I asked around, no one knew the details. Something that I'd never seen before, I think by Private Elie Zaire's daughters, Adi Rot and Sigal Zaira. Hagar Zaira died a couple of years ago, and all the grandkids, Shir Matan, Gal, Sahar, Moti Yahel and Nahar, and there were three great grandkids, Gaya Yarden and Neta. I think by private the family meant really private, just family and a few close friends. Elie Zaire was 97 years old when he died, and his life divides into very nearly two equal halves. He spent most of his first six 16,801 days going toward one point, and then he spent his last 18,858 days moving decidedly away from that point. On day 16,802, the day after his 47th birthday, Elie Zaire resigned his post as the head of military intelligence and started making arrangements to move with Eti, his wife. Eti is short for Etika, or ethics. She died in 2002 and the kid to Palo Alto, where the army had got him a place in a one year executive graduate program in management. A quick escape from the idf, from Sahala and from the country. Elie Zaire's father, Shlomo Grossman, was born on the border between Russia and Poland, and when he reached 18, he went to Germany to study electrical engineering. And after that, in 1924, he moved to Palestine. His two brothers did too, and the three of them, Hebraicized their names charmingly going from Grossman or Big or Great man, though Grossman could also mean someone who works in wholesale, to Zaira or one who is small or humble. Aniha Katan is how we sometimes capture the spirit of the thing these days. By the mid-1930s, the Zaire brothers had convinced their entire family back in Poland to move to Palestine, and none of the Grossmans come. Zairas died in the Holocaust. It was soon after he arrived in Palestine that Shlomo, now Zaira, met Ada Halperin, who moved here not long before. Ada Halpern was the daughter of Reb Moshe Eliyahu Halpern, the head rabbi of Lodz in Poland. Eliezer Ira is Eliyahu. His grandfather's middle name was given to him. Moshe Eliyahu Halpern was an Eloi, a child prodigy. The story goes that as a little kid he had the Tanakh, the entire Bible, committed to memory. By the age of 10, he'd mastered everything the cheder had to offer, and he was studying with Rav Schnier, Zalman Friedkin on the side, picking up five European languages and learning science and history from books. He cadged from Maskilim, passing through. Rav Moshe Eliyahu Halpern was a member of Aguda Yisrael, and when the first free elections in Poland's history were held in 1919, elections for the First Sejem of the Second Polish Republic. Rav Moshe Eliyahu Halperin won a seat representing the Aguda in something called the Jewish National Council Party, which together won 11 of the 394 seats in the parliam. It was around this time that Rav Moshe Eliahu Halpern was offered the job of Chief Rabbi of London, which he might have accepted, but he fell sick with typhus and in 1921 he died. After she settled in Palestine, Ada Halpern tried to persuade her family to follow her. But no one did, and 20 years later they were all dead. Ada Halpern and Shlomo Zahra fell in love in Tel Aviv and married, and in 1928 their first boy was born, and he was eliezer Zaire. In 1930, representatives of the British Mandate asked Shlomo Zaire to oversee the planning and construction of a newfangled automatic telephone exchange in Haifa. It would be the telephone exchange of the entire Middle east, at least that part controlled by the Brits, and they asked him to manage it after he built it. Eliezer Ira was 2 when the family moved to Haifa to take up this job. And it was there that he grew up. In the summer of 1935, the family took a trip to visit his mother's people back home, the Halperens. They took a boat called the Jerusalem to Trieste in Italy, and from there trains to Lodz. And from there they motored to a resort area outside the city where Elizaira, seven years old, met his cousins for the very first time. It would also be the last. And though they had no language that they shared, Elisaira had no Yiddish and no Polish. They went outside to play, which 80 years later, Elizaira remembered like this.
- [17:23]
We went out to an orchard. We started to play. All of a sudden I see two boys about 8 or 9 years old coming towards me with clubs. I'm an idiot and I do not understand that a Jew is supposed to run away. I stay there. All the people, my cousins are gone. The two Poles come up to me. Now imagine I was seven, they were maybe eight. I grabbed their clubs and apparently there was a serious fight. They were beaten up like they deserve. For me, that was normal and bloodied. They ran away. Up to this point, this is all normal. It's kids. The story starts here. The cousins who saw it were overwhelmed by fear and went back to their parents to tell them what happened. The parents were panic stricken. The parents of the goyim will come straight away and start a pogrom. They all packed their bags and fled. That is the first thing I remember from Poland. Meeting my Polish family.
- [18:15]
Back in Haifa, Elisa Ira went to the famous Beetzeffer Reali, a school in the German Realschule tradition, a place to get real knowledge, meaning math and science and modern languages, stuff you can use. It was a revolt against the classical education of the gymnasium. And Elie Zaire excelled at school. But he was a child of his time and he would soon leave all that behind. And when he was 18, in 1946, he joined the Palmach, literally the strike force companies, one of the militias Jews put together. As the idea that a Jewish state might take shape came to seem more realistic. And the idea that Jews in Palestine needed to protect themselves and whatever state might come came to seem more pressing. And Elie Zaire moved forward fast becoming a platoon commander and then a company commander in the War of Independence. And when that war was over, he was the first IDF officer sent to the United States Army Command and General Staff College. At least I think that that is where he studied with the US Army. And then his career in the IDF was off and running, though he did manage on the side to a degree from the Hebrew University in Economics and Statistics. Very reali. Still, his rise in the army looked like this. 1949-1950 Commander of the Non Commissioned Officer School in the Southern Command, 1952 Instructor at the Battalion Commander School, 1953-1954 Department head in the Planning Department of the General Staff, 1954-1955 First Advisor and Chief Aide to Chief of the General Staff, Lt. Gen. Moshe Dayan, 1956 commander of the 1st Breakthrough Battalion of the Givati Brigade, 1956 to 1957 head of the Operations Branch in the Operations Directorate, 1960 to 1962 commander of the Paratroopers Brigade, 1962 to 1963 head of the Operations Department and the Operations Directorate, 1963 to 1968 head of the Intelligence Collection in the Intelligence Directorate, 1968 to 1970 assistant head of the Intelligence Directorate, 1970 to 1972 IDF military attache in Washington, 1972 to 1974 head of the Intelligence Directorate of the IDF Zaire's promotions from job to job made his the very model of a successful military career. Moshe Dayan went in time from being IDF Chief of Staff to being Minister of Defense, a legend after the Six Day War. And he was Elie Zaire's friend and patron. And after Elie Zaira became the head of IDF Intelligence, few doubted that he would next be appointed as IDF Chief of Staff, an appointment Moshe Dayan would make. Why this did not happen was the Yom Kippur War. Or, depending on how you look at it, what came right after the Yom Kippur War. The Yom Kippur war lasted for 19 days altogether, from October 6 to October 25, 1973. And in those 19 days, 2,691 Israeli soldiers died, many of them right at the beginning, when the standing forces at the border with Egypt in the south and with Syria in the north were overwhelmed and overrun. There'd never been anything like it before or since until October 7th, two years ago. And things would have been different if the reserves had been called up before the attacks. But they weren't. And part of the reason they weren't, though there is no agreement about exactly how big a part was that Elie Zaire, in his capacity as the Head of Army Intelligence, had told Prime Minister Golda Meir and Defense Minister Moshe Arendt and many other members of the Cabinet as late as the morning of Erev Yom Kippur the day before that no attack was coming, at least not soon. This was his professional opinion. And his professional opinion was tragically wrong. Just how Elie Zaira, who was a brilliant and altogether serious man, came to hold his tragically wrong opinion can be explained, at least in part, like this. For one thing, Elie Zaira knew, he just knew that it made no sense for the Egyptians and Syrians to attack. He said as much to the Cabinet on May 24, 1973, four and a half months before the Egyptians and Syrians did what Elie Zaire knew would make no sense for them to do. He said, as long as logic, even with the limitations of it being Arab logic, has any purchase for them. I think that the Arabs, at least in the coming years, do not maintain that they can beat Israel. And when they talk about opening fire, they do not mean conquering Sinai or vanquishing Israel, but rather just creating a situation in which the world has no choice but to address the issue politically. End quote. This idea that the Egyptians and the Syrians did not have the planes and rockets and troops and talent and guts to beat Israel, but they did have the common sense, albeit limited Arab common sense, to know that because of all they lacked, it would be a mistake to attack Israel. This idea became known after the war as ha conceptzia, the conception. And it led Elie Zaire to misinterpret things his people saw and otherwise should have seen as evidence that war was coming. Among the sorts of evidence that Ali Zaira did not give proper weight to was the fact that both the Egyptian and Syrian armies were deployed, beefed up on the border. Other evidence was that on October 4th and 5th, 1973, two days and one day before the war, the families of Russian military advisors in Cairo and Damascus were making a rushed, alarmed exit on planes, landing one after another from Odessa and then going back to Odessa or Moscow. Another piece of evidence was the fact that Ashraf Marwan, a son in law of the late Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and the close advisor of the then current Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat. Ashraf Marwan, who was spying for Israel, warned that war was coming and soon. But Eli Zaira got it in his head that Ashraf Marwan was flat out wrong. Thirty years later, Zaira claimed that Marwan had been a double agent, though historians say there's nothing to this. More evidence that Elie Zaira underestimated or misunderstood was the warning that King Hussein of Jordan flew by helicopter to Mossad headquarters near Gilot Junction to deliver directly to Prime Minister Golda Meir that an attack was coming from both Syria and Egypt, which warning Eliezer Ira interpreted as something more about politics that King Hussein was pursuing than about the possibility of an actual war. And it was not just about interpreting evidence to fit the view that Eli Zaire already had of Israel's then enemies. Eli Zaire, brilliant as he was, also wore down the people who worked under him, pressing them in a way to go along in order to get along. One of his high up intelligence officers told the journalist later that every meeting with him was a test of the professional he was meeting with. He would say, what you are telling me, do you know it or do you just think it? End quote. And when you think hard about what you think you know, you always come to think that what you think you know, you only think you know, you never know that you know it. Elie Zaire always said, I do not want your opinions, I just want facts, just facts. Among some of the officers working under him, there was a feeling that he was arrogant and cutting in a way that made it almost impossible to share hunches. And it turns out that in good intelligence work there is place for hunches. Avraham Digley, his nickname was Digley, who was the head of the Amman IDF Intelligence Research Department's Egypt desk in 1973, told how he called Eliza Iran the intercom on October 2nd or 3rd, a few days before the war, and asked if he, Eliezaira, had seen the two reports just in. One from the Southern Command saying that the Egyptians were moving heavy arms to the border, and one from the Northern Command saying that the Syrians were throwing back the coverings from their artillery. Elie Zaire said he had seen the reports and Digley said, maybe those two reports are connected. And Eliezer Ira's answer was, Digley, you collect data, do not do research for me. Digley fell silent, and that was the end of the matter. When the war broke out, barely a day after, Elie Zaira told Golda Meir and her cabinet that the likelihood of war was extremely low, an evaluation he repeated on the next day too, maybe two hours before the Egyptians and Syrians started shelling and flying sorties. Elie Zaire was straightaway sidelined after the war began, taken out of the loop. After the war, when protests started, a national committee of inquiry was set up, headed by the Chief justice of the Supreme Court, Louis Vauborn, Shlomo Agranath. Interviewing dozens of witnesses in 140 sessions held over four months and a week. The commission put out an interim report on April 1, 1974, finding that of the Very many people who ought to have done better anticipating and fighting the war. There was only one man who had so much responsibility and guilt for what happened that the committee recommended he be removed from his position immediately. And that man obviously was Eliza Ira. The commission found that the head of military intelligence failed to give sufficient warning to the IDF on the matter of the start of the war and likewise failed in their prediction and evaluation of the time the battles would begin. Their stubborn adherence to what they call the conception which may have been accurate for a time but was not re evaluated properly in light of changing diplomatic circumstances and especially in light of additional information that IDF intelligence received about the strengthening of the enemy, which disproved the conception. The head of IDF intelligence promised the IDF warning about the intentions of the enemy to open a full scale war. We find that there was no basis to give so absolute a promise as that the head of IDF intelligence wrongly evaluated the warning indications that were supplied in the days leading up to Yom Kippur by the research arm of IDF intelligence. Even when it received notice on 5 October, which was hard to fit into the conception, the conclusion of IDF intelligence remained that there was a low chance and even lower than low chance that the enemy will start a war. The head of IDF intelligence was revealed to us to be an officer of marked intellectual ability, with great authority, who was well respected by those to whom he reported both in the army and high level diplomats. He served in his position for only a year before the war broke out and found before him patterns of thought that were set in place in IDF intelligence before he occupied the position. But he adopted the conception that in its rigidity killed off the openness needed and the willingness to consider anew the information that flowed into IDF intelligence. Especially salient for us was the commander's tendency toward dogmatic decisiveness, which was a product of his great self confidence and his willingness to make himself final arbiter in matters of state intelligence. Our opinion is in light of his severe failure, General Zaira cannot continue in his post. End quote. That interim report came out on April 1, 1974. Eli Zaire submitted his resignation on April 5, 1974. The report of the Agronat commission infuriated Eliezer Ira. He agreed that there was a conception and that it blinkered him like it had blinkered so many others. And he saw why people thought he ought to resign. But what the Agrenat committee did, he thought was whitewash all the bad decisions the ministers made and all the damage those decisions had caused, shifting all the Blame from the politicians to the generals and especially to him. Elie Zaire was shocked to learn that Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan hid from Shlomo Agranath and his committee how King Hussein had come to warn them personally. He was shocked that the committee ignored the fact that Henry Kissinger had told Golda Meir that Anwar Sadat said flat out, negotiate the return of Sinai to me in exchange for peace or I will launch a war to get Sinai back. And that Golda Meir had told Kissinger that she could not enter negotiations with Anwar Sadat until she and the Labour Party were safely reelected in elections scheduled for October. Eliezer was shocked that the Agronat committee seemed to ignore the evidence that Moshe Dayan had concluded days before the war that that war was about to come. But he did not call up the reserves because he thought that America would be quicker to send Israel boatloads of weapons if it was attacked. And seemingly surprised Eliezer Ira said, Dayan.
- [31:35]
B
V Golda is still Kamadvarin.
- [32:03]
A
Dayan and Golda hid many things from the Agronat Commission. It is very possible that if the Agranath Commission knew from Golda or from Dayan or from both of them about all the ties there were and all the opportunities to enter negotiations that were missed, maybe their attitudes towards Dayan and Golda would have been different despite their well known efforts to exonerate them. End quote. There were so many things Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan hid from the Agranah Commission and so many things the Agunat Commission knew, but seemed to ignore in a taste to construct what Elie Zaira saw as a great myth that he and just a few other arrogant generals lulled themselves into a stuporous self satisfaction that cost the lives of 2,691 Israeli soldiers. Elie Zaire did not think he was faultless, but he did think that he was now a ritual scapegoat. One thing that happened after the Agranah Commission report came out is that the Foreign Ministry created something they called the center for Research and Political Planning Recruiting Daniel Kahneman, who years later won a Nobel Prize for his work on how lousy people can be at making decisions, especially people arrogant enough to believe that they're good at making decisions. And Daniel Kahneman and his research partner Amos Tversky, they were chilled by how many Elisa Iras they found when they started to check people hobbled by their confidence, by their arrogance, by their heedlessness, by their sureties. Resigning was hard for Elie Zaire and what happened next made everything that much worse. For one thing, back in Sahala, his neighborhood in Tel Aviv, people started to turn on him. Tsahala. The word means a jubilant cry or a whoop of joy or an exultation, but the name is a pun because the neighborhood was built with big houses sold at deep discounts to IDF or Tsahal officers. And even before the war ended, and all the more so after it did, the officers and their families in Sahala started to shun Elisa Ira and his family. There were threats, there were accusations of corruption. A neighbor suddenly remembered seeing soldiers doing construction work on the Zaire's already big home, adding two rooms with brick and cement delivered in IDF trucks. Another neighbor saw soldiers ferrying his wife and girls here and there around the city in IDF cars. Someone in the neighborhood saw soldiers planting and tending the lush garden in his yard. Another neighbor said that he stopped Elie Zaire's driver to ask him to pass on to the general that a tree in his yard looked dangerously close to toppling over. And next thing he saw, there were soldiers pulling down the tree. Uri Avneri's clever, iconoclastic, semi pornographic leftist tabloid Haolamazeh ran a feature headlined Tsahala Place. The reference was to Peyton Place, a popular bodice ripping American soap opera back then. And the sub headline was A New Sort of Justice System is Now Born in Israel. Trial by Neighbor. And the article listed allegation after allegation, which allegations, when they were investigated by the army, all turned out to be pretty much just made up. Maybe even worse for Elie Zaire was this, which happened soon after he resigned as head of IDF intelligence, when one of the heads of the Labour Party, worried about what an angry and bitter Elisa Era might say and do, called him into his office and said.
- [35:53]
If you're already leaving the army, we've already set up a job. You will be nominated to become the director of a bank. We have a bank. It is ours. It is called the Mercantile Bank. It is part of Bangka Paulim. And you will be the bank director, and from that you can develop and you will go far. And I say to him, eliza Ira says, I'm not going to take the job. I don't want the job. I didn't ask for it and I don't want it. And he was shocked. But for Eliezaira, it all seemed so corrupt. So go along to get along. So ugly. So instead, when Moshe Dayan offered the year in Stanford, he took that. And he never Worked in Israel again. When he got back, he was 48 years old. He still had a lot of life and a lot of career left and he had talents, but he was hated here and disparaged and he hated a lot of what there was here and he disparaged it. So he took a job advising the RAND Corporation in America and started working as an advisor for military contractors in America with big Pentagon contracts. And he got a big consulting job with Northrop Grumman. And he spent most of every year abroad for tax reasons if nothing else, though he still had lots here. His wife eti, sometimes traveled with him, but sometimes didn't. And there were the kids and then there were, in time, grandkids. And he had some close friends from the Pamach he met with every few weeks. And he said in time, some of the people he commanded in the army who never abandoned him, they became his friends too, people 15, 20 years younger than he was. And for decades he never gave an interview until 30 years after the war. After his wife died, he decided he should let people see his side of things. And he wrote a book he called Myth versus Reality. The Yom Kippur War Failures and Lessons. The dedication reads, to my partner, Etika of blessed memory, who stood with me like a steady rock against all the tempest swirls of life. The 21st of AV 5764, 2004. And in the book, which is more than 350 pages long, he put things in his perspective, explaining how he was wronged by the Agranath Commission and how he was wronged by Golda Meir, and how he was wronged by Moshe Dayan, people he trusted. And saying it just like that maybe makes it sound like I'm saying he was wrong. He was complaining. But I don't think he was exactly wrong, though I also don't think he was. He was exactly right. Over the past few years, in his late 90s, Elie Zaire sat for dozens and dozens of hours of interviews with a man named Aviram Barkai, who writes respected books about military things. And Aviram Barkay was a 20 year old company commander in the tank corps in the Yom Kippur War. And like many people who went through what he went through, Aviram Barkai hated Eli Zah Ira. People he loved died, he thought, because of Elie Zaire. But over a couple of years and up until this past summer, he sat with Elie Zaira over and over and came to feel a kind of ambivalent warmth towards him. And a great respect for his intelligence and his candor. And just a few weeks before Eliezer died, he put out a book called lightning strikes, October 1973 and October 2023, of interviews with Elie Zaira. And Elie Zaira says, as the war in Gaza drags on and on and on, that of course there are similarities between the two. Our war in Gaza just now and the Yom Kippur War, both had a conceptia and both had arrogant and lying politicians who care only about their own reputations and careers. And in one of the very last conversations between Aviram Barkay and Aliza Ira, Aviram Barkay asks If, more than 50 years later, quote, are there any things you would like to say to this nation that you have not yet said? End quote. And Elie Zaira says, like what? And Aviram Barkay says, like I ask for your forgiveness. And Eliezer goes on a tear and he says, quote, this thing that your generation has, always seeking apologies, always boiling with rage, that's your privilege. I want to tell you something. You fought for three weeks, four weeks in the Yom Kippur War. My generation fought almost a year and a half in the War of Independence. Compared to the size of the population and in general, a hundred times as many of ours died as yours. Commanders make mistakes from here to Tel Aviv. And we never pointed at them with rage. We were never angry at them. We never asked for an apology. But you, you are like little spoiled kids. Our war was much bigger. Our sacrifices were much bigger. Our commanders made 10 times as many mistakes. But we knew that our commanders did their best. And no one from my generation ever considered saying to the head of this brigade or that, ask forgiveness from us. You are simply a society of spoiled people who make laughable demands of me. We lost 1% of the population in the War of Independence. Compared to today, it would be like losing 70,000 people in the Yom Kippur War. 2,200 people were killed. I am not making light of this. Each of the 2,200 was a whole world. But to come and say you are mad at me and you want me to apologize. You are simply a society of spoiled children. End quote. And you hear there some of the pridefulness, the arrogance that has been a part of Elizair, as far as I can tell, for as long as I can tell, I find myself thinking about his cousins from Lodz, watching in horror as their 7 year old cousin from Haifa beats with a club two Polish kids and then smirks at Their fear that maybe it really isn't a good idea for Jewish kids to bloody Polish kids in an orchard in the hills outside Lodz, because maybe even if they make their ways safe back to the city, the thing will come back twofold or tenfold against the next Jews, the Polish kids or their Polish parents come across.
- [41:44]
And this pridefulness, this arrogance, you can see it too, in Moshe Dayan, and you can see it in Golda Meir, and you can see it in so many of the people who were part of what Elizaire called my generation. It was a prideful arrogance so many of the people of that generation were proud of. It was part of what made up that great mythological thing, the Tzabar, in those days. And it is not that it is not still part of how we are. Those commanders who ignored with don't trouble yourself with such things, Medulla condescension, all the warnings that the Ta Ta Niyot gave those young women in front of computer screens who said Hamas and Islamic Jihad, we can feel that they're planning something. We know that they are planning something big. And who are these men up the chain of command who ignored them, if not Eliezer Iris, for our own time. But still you can feel the change. Eliezer was right about Aviram Barkai's generation when he berated them for caring too much about contrition and caring too much about humility and caring too much about responsibility and caring too much about decency. And since Aviram Barkay's generation, too, there have been other generations that have come. Sigal Zaira was six when the Yom Kippur broke out and when her father's life was changed forever and he was all of a sudden out of the army, out of polite Sahala society, out of favor, as he would remain to his last day, just six weeks before he died, Haaretz had an article called all of Elizaira's Lies, as if the Agrenat committee had just wrapped up its deliberations this fall and not 51 years ago. Today, Sigal Zaire is a therapist who teaches yoga and meditation as paths to compass. And among the things that matter to her most are the things that her father, whom she loved until she laid him into the ground just last week. Disparaged contrition, humility, responsibility, each of us for the other, and decency. In his last interviews, in his last days, Elie Zaira saw that the country had left him and many others who fought with him in the Pamach, the Tsabarim, that the sociologist Oz Al Mog said were, quote, tough, daring, direct, unpretentious, and who despised excessive politeness and valued physical courage and emotional restraint, end quote. And who maybe thought that the time had come for Jewish kids to wrest the sticks from the hands of the goyim and give them what they deserve. He was right that the society of which he had risen to the top had gone soft on him. He was right that lots of things in Israel had fallen into the hands of the Daniel Kahnemans bookish ironists who no longer saw striding self confidence as aversion. He was right that Israelis, hearing now of his childhood adventures in the orchard outside of Lodz might have more sympathy for his cousins than they would have admiration for him. Though our capacity for arrogance remains great, we did leave Elie Zaira behind, just as he thought we did. And though Elie Zaira is to be praised for his brilliance and his commitment and for his only partially fulfilled wish to keep us safe, and also, no doubt for countless private virtues, no doubt recounted in family eulogies at his private funeral, we are a better place for having left him behind. Yehi Zichro Baruch.
- [45:11]
Today two topics up for discussion. The first we are calling Pardon me, as the Prime Minister's lawyers send to the President a 111 page email attachment asking for the President to pardon the Prime Minister for crimes he says he did not do and for which he has not been convicted yet anyway, this on the grounds that the ongoing trial is divisive and a kind of national downer, and we will try to understand the Ask and figure out what sort of answer the Ask deserves. And our second discussion, the Sea, which is the name also of a new movie about a kid from a village near Ramallah who sneaks across the Green Line into Israel to try to make his way to the sea, which he has never seen in his 12 years, allowing us to see ourselves a bit for a while through the eyes of a kid from the territories on an Odyssean journey to and through Tel Aviv. The movie won most all the awards of the Israel Film Academy and Israel at the Oscars, and it has cheesed off the Minister of Culture and it has cheesed off the Commissars of bds. And we saw the movie and we'll try to make sense of what we learned from it, about ourselves, about Palestinians, about the occupation, about art, about politics. And Miriam will no doubt bring it around to the owl ephemera for which we all know she has such a passion. 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@patreon.com PrimePodcast on the world Wide Web. Ignoring the first dictum they teach you at journalism school, which is that life is too short to talk more than you already have About Peter Beinart we will discuss the latest La Fere de Beinart, in which he came this week to Tel Aviv University as he tweeted before his lecture on account of, quote, I believe there is value in speaking to Israelis about Israeli crimes. End quote. After the lecture, Peter Beinart tweeted that he let his wish, quote, to explain why I believe Israel has committed genocide in Gaza and why I believe Jewish supremacy is fundamentally wrong override my solidarity with Palestinians who in the face of ethnic cleansing, apartheid and genocide have asked the world to boycott Israeli institutions that are complicit in their oppression. It is embarrassing to admit such a serious mistake. I dearly wish I had not made this one, which has caused particular harm because international pressure is crucial to ensuring Palestinian freedom. This was a failure of judgment. I am sorry. We will try to make sense of this complicated and sad thing where my own personal goal will be to not be a snide jerk, which, though it should be an easy goal, I have almost not managed to meet even in this short description here.
- [48:05]
I should add that first of all, I am so grateful to the, I don't know, hundreds of people who wrote in response to me saying I'm thinking of taking a couple of months hiatus from the podcast to try to underwrote my sense of overwroughtness to get my ROT levels just right. It was so beautiful to hear from you. I felt like Tom Sawyer seeing his own funeral where everyone agreed he, quote, had always been such a bright, brave, noble boy, so unselfish and so kind and quite. And I am not making light of it at all. It was so moving and so comforting to me and it made me think why would I want to take time off from this when the people at the other side of the earbuds are you people? But I do think I will clear my head and my schedule for a month or two, maybe starting around Christmas when I'll be off traveling anyway, though maybe after New Year's. We will let you know soon. But for now I just wanted to say how really, really deep my gratitude is and how much it means to me. But before I start to get too maudlin, or maybe Just after I've started to get too maudlin, listen to this.
- [50:19]
B
Satishkara song is Al Tishkach Lazet Mina.
- [50:47]
A
Bayt brand new by Sherry Melamed. Still more music of these weird and unsettled times. And now it's time for our first discussion. So, Miriam, Benjamin Netanyahu gives so much and asks for so little in return. A little appreciation, a few $2,000 bottles of champagne maybe. And now a little clemency. Isn't it churlish not to just chuck him on the cheek and give him a damn parchment?
- [51:11]
B
So, yeah, the other shoe has fallen. It's the pardon request we've all been waiting for. On Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's team of attorneys headed by Amit Haddad sent President Isaac Herzog a 13 page letter that starts with the riveting words pursuant to the letter of the American President and subsequent developments that will be detailed below. We turn to His Honor in the name of our client, Prime Minister and Member of Knesset Benjamin Netanyahu, to request that you use your authority according to to Article 11 of the Basic Law concerning the powers of the President of the State, out of a feeling of national responsibility and a view for the good of the nation and the country, to pardon the Prime Minister and declare the end of the criminal process underway in his matter. And we're off and running. To their 13 page letter, the lawyers appended a short half page letter from the Prime Minister and threw in the 93 page criminal indictment of the Prime Minister. Also included a two page judicial decision from a couple of years ago asking the prosecution to drop some of its cigars, champagne, jewelry and other such bribery charges against Benjamin Netanyahu because of, quote, difficulties in establishing the crime of bribery in the first indictment of the three active indictments against the Prime Minister. All told, the document the President got on Sunday was 111 pages which taken together added up to a simple message which was maybe best expressed by US President Donald Trump. Trump in the letter that, according to the lawyers, set the whole thing in motion. Let Bibi unite Israel by pardoning him and ending that lawfare once and for all. So here's a letter the lawyers forwarded to the President from the Prime Minister. I'll read the whole thing. It's short, distinguished sir, in the past years, tensions and divisions have grown between the different parts of the nation and between the different branches of government. I am aware that the process proceeding concerning me has become the focus of greatly contentious disputes. I bear broad public and ethical responsibility out of an understanding of the implications of all the events owing to this, and despite my personal interest in continuing my trial to prove my innocence until my complete exoneration, I am persuaded that the public interest instructs me to do otherwise out of public responsibility as the Prime Minister to try to bring reconciliation between the different parts of the nation. I have no doubt that the end of the trial will help to reduce the force of the flames that were created around us. Facing the security and diplomatic challenges and opportunities that stand these days before the State of Israel, I am committed to do everything in my power to mend the rifts, to achieve national solidarity, and to return trust to the institutions of state. And this is what I expect the heads of all the branches of the state to do. With best wishes, Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister so pretty, short and sweet the 89 numbered sections in the lawyers letters divide into five roughly equal parts. The first explains that the Prime Minister is busy trying to steer the ship of state through rocky shoals and having to appear in court all the time is making it harder for him to captain us to safe and peaceful shores. The second argues that the prosecution is in any case failing to make its case. So there is good reason to conclude already that the trial will eventually end in acquittal. The third part of the lawyer's brief argues that the President has the right to grant a pardon even though the relevant basic law says he can only pardon criminals and the Prime Minister has not been convicted of anything. The fourth part explains how the Prime Minister is a stand up guy who has given lots to the country. Section 51 reads, for instance, the image of the Prime Minister was greatly shaped during his army service as well as in the days of his youth alongside his beloved parents and brothers. The part of the lawyer's letter sets out how a pardon is needed to defend the broad public interests. In a video statement put out the day after he got the email from the Prime Minister's lawyers, President Herzog invited citizens to chime in on what he should do on his official Facebook page. He also promised that the Prime Minister's request will be handled in the most proper and precise way. I will consider only the good of the country and Israeli society. Noah, I'm really interested in your take on this. In the past you've been more open to the idea of a pardon for Bibi than one might expect. Would it be good for the nation if the President pardoned the Prime Minister?
- [55:59]
A
I have for a long time and since the beginning of his trial felt as though maybe it would be better if he had a pardon. I don't think that it's healthy for anyone that this trial is proceeding while he is Prime Minister and elected by a fair margin over the next possible candidate. And yet.
- [56:24]
This letter, which, and I read it all, this letter is not the path to go forward toward a pardon. I don't see how the President could possibly respond to this letter in particular with a pardon. There's this concept in long Jewish intellectual history and very much in the country of something being lahakis, like you do something with the intention of making someone mad. And it seems to me that this letter is Lahakis. It was intended somehow just to make the situation more acute and more difficult and more problematic than it was before. Before, not to diffuse the tensions that exist.
- [57:17]
B
In what ways?
- [57:18]
A
In particular, the factual claim that they put at the center of this letter, and that does most of the heavy lifting in this letter, is that there is grave tension in the country and that therefore, you need now to pardon the Prime Minister in order to reduce the tension of when, obviously, under these circumstances, with this letter, were the president to produce a pardon, it would make the tension in the country so much worse. There is a circumstance in which a pardon could lead, I think, to a different path that leads ultimately to a kind of calming of the very, very fierce political winds that blow around us now. But that would involve the Prime Minister taking some responsibility. It probably would involve the Prime Minister agreeing to step away from politics either forever or for a relatively long period of time, for four years or five years or seven years. Those numbers are thrown about. It would require him acknowledging the sensitivities and the anger of. Of people who do not agree with him.
- [58:41]
This letter only serves to reinforce, I think, what everyone who is critical of the Prime Minister, and I'm critical of the Prime Minister, but there are people who are much, much more critical of his, you know, of his character, of his values, of his honesty than I am. It just seems to confirm that. And also it does have, as many people have claimed, and I'm interested in hearing what you have to say, so I'll stop soon. But as many people have claimed, it does have this feeling of containing an implicit threat. One of the things that Netanyahu mentions in his final paragraph, and then the lawyers mention several times, is that if Prime Minister Netanyahu is prevented by law at the moment from being personally involved with. With the judicial reform, that was one of the things he agreed to in an agreement that he signed with the attorney General before the trial began.
- [59:44]
And one of the things he says now is, look, you seem to be a little bit worried about your court system. And if you want me to step in and take care of your court system, then you really have to pardon me. And there's enough of a non mafioso logic to that that he could allow himself to say it. But if comes off feeling, even to me, like entirely like a.
- [60:10]
B
Nice little court system you have here, and here's.
- [60:12]
A
Your way around it, just pay me this pardon and I will see to it that. And also because Netanyahu has proven himself to be so unreliable, there is no reason to believe that anything he says now is true. But he says so little of value, he offers so little. What did you think of it?
- [60:31]
B
So we've been, as I mentioned above, we've been expecting this for a while. I just want on your point, I thought the line where Netanyahu said, I have no doubt that the end of the trial will help to reduce the force of the flames that were created around us. A couple of commentators made the same sort of quip that it was like the, the pyromaniac asking to lower the flames. What are these flames of which we speak?
- [61:02]
He's a wedge, strategically a wedge politician. I mean, he works very much on actually a message of.
- [61:13]
Division, sometimes cloaked in messages of unity. But that's how he's worked. And I think it's also built into the structure of Israeli politics. But, but he's refined it into an art. And so to say that this could unify the country.
- [61:29]
At this deeply troubled time, it's cynical. Look, I think this is the opening shot in what's going to be a long process.
- [61:42]
Yitzhak Buci Herzog said, you know, he's going to wait for the justice, the experts to weigh in before he does, starts to do anything on this. And there's pretty much, it's very hard to see how legal experts could say that there's any basis in Israeli law for this.
- [62:06]
The clause that allows the president to pardon people is very simple, it's very brief in the, the basic law. And it does say it can pardon criminals or reduce their sentence. And the one exception in some ways proves the rule that, well, how so?
- [62:26]
A
I thought the exception disproves that rule.
- [62:28]
B
They admitted guilt. They did all of the things that Netanyahu is precisely not doing.
- [62:33]
A
It's, we don't entirely know what they told the president back then, who was the father of the president, President right now. I don't know that they admitted Guilt. It was the. This is something called the Line 300 case where there were terrorists who were captured alive after attacking a bus and killing people on the bus. And then two members of the security services murdered them, executed them. And before they could be almost immediately before they could be be tried then President Herzog, Chaim Herzog, the father of Yitzhak Herzog our president now immediately pardoned the head of the security services who we know from the historians now but I guess we knew from the fact that he needed to be pardoned, had authorized over the telephone this execution. But and then after the fact it was justified by. Well, they, they admitted that they were guilty to me on the phone. But we don't. That was never officially the case.
- [63:40]
B
Certainly the discourse around this over the past week has focused on the assumption that they did admit guilt. And so even if they historically, whatever exactly happened isn't true, the legal framing of this still brings that as a critical factor in Herzog in Senior Herzog Sr's decision to pardon them. But you know, even in the most. I think, you know, what this threatens very much is exactly the sort of the justice system it says it holds his I'm being.
- [64:26]
Victimized this sort of martyr approach that he's taken all along, that he's an innocent man who's being tortured by this drawn out trial which he himself has worked very hard to draw out as long as possible.
- [64:42]
And when he goes into office this last time and a case is brought in the court to say how can he possibly function as a Prime Minister when he's going through this? He's says I can do this because I have, you know, very special abilities. And he gets us through.
- [65:00]
A
He said I can do more in an hour than other people can do in a month.
- [65:04]
B
Right. And so what are we meant to understand from this claim that he's no longer, you know, as up to the task as he used to be. What do we understand from that? But I think more.
- [65:17]
A
Well, the argument that the lawyers put out is that because one of the. Because no, because one the of the judges in the case is now approaching retirement.
- [65:29]
They have increased.
- [65:32]
The number of hours a week substantially that the trial meets. And that they claim is the difference. It's not the Prime Minister's fault, but it does take too much of his time.
- [65:41]
B
First of all, because this is just so dramatic and we're all talking about it, there's always a little bit of me that thinks that this is misdirection and we are going through one of the really sort of most divisive possible processes in legislation regarding the draft of haredi yeshiva students and haredi young men, which the government is putting forward as a. In a bill that nobody likes, including their own people. And I think there is going to be some misdirection there. And I am trying to understand Trump's role in this, but I think he's.
- [66:28]
A
Probably thinking of Trump. He's thinking metaphorically Lawfare, but I don't know if I would call it misdirection, though I think that I agree with what you're saying. To me, this seems partly because it is framed in a way that makes it so unlikely to produce a pardon. It seems like a political act that I don't fully understand. But I have a feeling that, like, to me, it seemed like this is part of what it takes to get ready for the election. So he's running yet again while his trial is still going on. And now he wants to say, now he's able to say, I passed. You know, I asked for a pardon, I deserve a pardon. But the same system that is persecuting me is the, you know, kept me from getting the pardon that I so well deserve. And I think that that's gonna be part of the election campaign that's on its way.
- [67:17]
B
Right? And obviously, if it gets the pardon, that's a win. So it is very bbsque in the sense that it's a win, win situation.
- [67:27]
A
Can I ask you this? One of the results that we've heard in the endless hours of radio talk about this is a lot of people saying, well, here are the things that the President must demand in his negotiations with the Prime Minister'. He must demand that Netanyahu walk away from politics. He must demand that Netanyahu admit that he was guilty of at least some of the crimes of which he's accused. He must demand that new elections take place by March or April. Anyway. There was this list of things that. And people, you know, different people have different things that they put on this list. But to me, the idea of the president negotiating with the Prime Minister, these things, including that he must resign and that there must be elections in this and this. This date, that really frightens me. It just seems so undemocratic to have these two men who go back together 50 years sitting in a room figuring out what Israeli politics over the next 12 months ought to look like, which, of course, will lead to the next 12 years as well.
- [68:35]
I think he should just say, no pardon, let's continue the way we are, or send me a different letter with a more serious, you know, a more serious letter than you have and then I'll consider it.
- [68:47]
B
I think anything that falls into the category of public policy or public acts, you know, like there have to be elections or there has to be a commission of inquiry which was raised.
- [68:57]
A
Right.
- [68:58]
B
That would, would be a tremendous, a tremendous mistake, a historic mistake. Obviously these things have to happen. Certainly the commission of inquiry has to happen because it has to happen and that may become also, it's also an opportunity to make that an election issue. If that is taken away from the public, that's also anti democratic. It does make sense for the president or the president's legal opinion that he receives via the Justice Ministry to say that you have to admit guilt because.
- [69:33]
That'S within the defense definition. I really don't understand how this, I mean it's like on one hand it's sort of a non starter. On the other hand it's just a starter. It's the beginning of a process. It's going to evolve. We're at early stages and it's thrown into the public sphere right now kind of like a three way volleyball game. Bouncing from the Prime Minister's office to the President's office to the justice establishment judgment and I guess to the media. All the while we are in a critical legislative moment where some pretty heavy and unpopular decisions are being made, including ones that affect the justice system and ones that affect the media because they're about to, you know, in this context so much of this trial, the, you know, the two of the three trials are about about Netanyahu's alleged attempts to control the media through in one case bribery.
- [70:38]
In the case 4000 and in one case both cases sort of some sort of quid pro quo influence threats in Ynet and Walla.
- [70:50]
And at this moment we've been introduced this very, very rocky and full of holes kind of process which the end goal is to reduce.
- [71:03]
The freedom of the media and to get rid of a major media outlet, the Israel Army Radio. And you know, so it's very cynical.
- [71:14]
A
Yeah, I don't think there's any reason to think that any of those laws are actually going to pass. But that will be for another day. Now listen to the this.
- [72:12]
B
Name.
- [73:04]
A
That song is Yad Alalev by Maya Pioressa. And now it is time for discussion. We are on the nosedly calling the C and here's why. Khalid is 12 and lives along with his kid brother and two sisters with his grandmother in a village outside of Ramallah. Cancer took the kids mother and their father, a gentleman named Ribhi, is an undocumented construction worker in Israel who sleeps mostly nights on or near his work site when his class takes a field trip to the sea. Khalid, who has never seen open waters, is beside himself with excitement. At the border crossing, a soldier discovers an irregularity with Khalid's security permit and he's forced off the bus and taken alone back to his village. That night, Khalid runs away from home, sneaking across the border with laborers and though he has no Hebrew, trying to make his way to the beaches of Tunnel Tel Aviv. That is the basic plot of the Sea, a movie that this year won five Ophir Awards, Israel's Oscars, baftas, Golden Globes, Palme d', Ors, Golden Lions and Golden Bears. The prizes the Israeli Film Society gave to the Sea are Best Original Music, Best Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor for Khalifa Natur, who played Rivkhi, Best Actor for Muhammad Ghazawi, who plays 12 year old Khalid and Baby, Best Feature Length Film. This last prize means that the Sea is automatically Israel's entry into the Academy Awards Best Foreign Film competition, which is a very big thing here, as it ought to be. The auteur of the film is a Jewish Israeli film and television director and political activist named Chai Karmeli Pollack. The movie's producer is Bacher Akbaria, a Palestinian Israeli filmmaker from Haifa. The movie is mostly in Arabic, though it is also what people in seminar rooms called diegetically multilingual, which means the characters speak the languages that the characters would speak in the circumstances they find themselves. Another phrase that people in seminar rooms use is dialectical hermeneutics, which is why a phrase that people not in seminar rooms use is pretentious jerkwad. But I digress. The movie was made with a low budget 2 million shekel of which came from the government funded Israel Film Fund and the Mephala Pais National Lottery, which is also a government operation. The fact that a good part of the funding for the movie came directly or indirectly from the Israeli government played a big part in two controversies that came with the film. The first was here in Israel two and a half months ago after the C won all those Ophir awards. Minister of Culture and Sports Mickey Zohar of the Likud condemned the film saying that it reflected a solely Palestinian Palestinian perspective, that it disparaged IDF soldiers and the State of Israel. Mickey Zoar said, quote, there is no greater slap in the face of Israeli citizens than the embarrassing and detached annual Ophir Awards ceremony. The fact that the Winning film depicts our heroic soldiers in a defamatory and false light while they are fighting and risking their lives to protect us, is sadly no longer surprising. This absurdity, in which Israeli citizens are still paying from their own pockets for the disgraceful Ophir Awards that represent less than 1% of the people of Israel, will come to an end because I have decided to stop it. Starting with the 2026 budget. This pathetic ceremony will no longer be funded by taxpayers money under my watch. Israeli citizens will not pay from their pocket for a ceremony that spits in the face of our heroic soldiers. No more. End quote. It is unclear whether Mickey Zoar will or even can defund the Ophir Award ceremony. The Israeli Oscars, when all the brightest stars come shine. But it is clear that the film which he did not see, made him mad. The second controversy over the Sea was mostly abroad. A group called Film Workers for Palestine have since September collected the signatures of more than 5,000 actors, directors, producers, screenwriters and other film sorts, all pledging to boycott Israeli films, quote, implicated in genocide and apartheid against the Palestinian people and end quote, as Gershom Gorenberg wrote in an article in the Atlantic called the reason not to boycott Israeli films, the Sea may not get the worst of the boycott because it has a Palestinian producer, Palestinian actors. It is mostly in Arabic and it is about how lousy the occupation is. But then again it may. And Bakher Akbaria, the movie's producer, has said he feels that he and his film are victims of collective punishment at the hands of bds, sorts of. But a movie is first and most of all a movie. Miriam, what did you think of the Sea as a movie? And after that, what did you think of it as like the people in the seminar room put it, a semiotic artifact in an agonistic sociopolitical field, meaning as something that means something, the exact meaning of which people fight about.
- [78:18]
B
I really like the film in the way that I like good literature, which is the very, very granular detail orientation of it, so that you get.
- [78:31]
A real sense of people, of people's humanities and individual quirks and personalities. Almost everybody in the film is more than a cartoon, more than a cardboard character. The frame is a really this sort of journey. I don't think it's a spoiler to say that he. I think we've already said he goes on his own, this child.
- [78:57]
And all along the way encounters and sort of bumps up against.
- [79:03]
Other people, Israelis and Jewish Israelis, Arab Israelis, the Palestinian.
- [79:12]
It's the whole gamut. And so that Already says something special, which is that we're going to see a very diverse population of Israelis, religious, non religious. And in the way that you sort of can chance encounter or if you need something particularly. He's in distress, right? He has a problem, but he's not, you know, it's not hospital level distress. He's not lying in the street waiting for someone to help him. He's making his way. He's an intelligent kid with zero.
- [79:43]
And along the way he gets different responses. So that right there is just great. It gives the filmmakers or the storytellers a chance to sort of put in this parade of different characters that they want you to see, they want you to relate to. And so I think in that sense it's quite subversive, obviously. Subversive from both angles. Right from the direction towards the.
- [80:12]
Towards the sort of, I guess, hardcore, right. With the assumption that Palestinians are not viewed as.
- [80:23]
Good people or as complex, nuanced humans. It sort of challenges that perspective. And obviously it also challenges the perspective that I guess you would say the left or the anti Israel left has about Israelis, which is another cardboard cartoonish.
- [80:42]
Sort of sense of.
- [80:47]
Who Israeli Jews are and a sort of absent the absence of even acknowledging that there are non Jews living in Israel with their own worlds. So right there, I love that kind of stuff. I was worried about watching it because just say to me, you know, this is about a child who gets lost is so triggering for me. Just, you know, forget put all the politics sided on a human level. I just. You just. That sentence, the child is lost. And. And luckily it was. That part of it was obviously sad and worrying, but it wasn't, you know, I didn't want to start sobbing. He's got a lot of agency in this. And yeah, we see also, I think choosing that age, that particular age where you're. Where you can look at him and see a child and a, you know, a potentially threatening teenager. There's one few seconds in the movie where you see the beginnings of him as.
- [81:45]
A person, as a kid who's gonna potentially adopt violence.
- [81:51]
As a path. And it's all in there. It's all in that moment and that transitional moment of adolescence. So that was really beautiful. I want to talk with you down the line or now, I don't know about what you thought about the portrayal of the soul, which is a little bit different. And that is the big complaint.
- [82:10]
That was made against the movie by our dear Mickey Zohar, Minister of Culture and Sports. But I think all told, you get real Full, rich, human texture. Also, you get. The built environment is quite wonderful in this movie as well.
- [82:29]
A
Yeah, that was all very wonderful. I also felt a lot of the things that you described, though I wouldn't have put them in words as well as you did.
- [82:42]
It was a really sad movie. And I saw it yesterday as we recorded with Susan. And at the end, like, when the lights went up, then she was sniffling, and it was really, really sad. But. But it also. There was something about it that made me feel a little bit hopeful as well, because.
- [83:08]
All of the characters are so human. I mean, some of the Israeli characters are stereotypes that are passing. This is the Odyssey. It's on the model of the Odyssey. It's a kid's journey through this. Through this place. And so, you know, at a bus stop, he can meet someone passing by, somebody who, you know, there was a guy who was just covered with piercings and tattoos and that he seemed like a type more than a real human being. But most of the. All the human beings that you. That you tarry with, even for just a little while, are so human and so specific and so. And there. And for me, I was so identified through the whole movie with Ripri, with the father who learns that his kid has done this thing that is almost. He almost can't imagine how it could possibly happen that this kid could sneak himself in over the border as he himself does, in order to work and earn enough money for the family. And you. You just feel the concern, and then he goes out into the world. And this is part of the sad thing about the crushing nature of the occupation in general. Like, everything for him as an adult, everything is just danger. It's like pure danger. And one of his fellow Palestinian workers gives him a yarmulke, a kippah to put on his head so that he can pass better as a Jew. But then he wonders, is having a kippah in my pocket, if I'm calling thought gonna make me seem as though I'm trying to pretend to be a Jew. And hence they'll worry that I'm a terrorist and maybe shoot me. I don't know. So, like, you feel. You feel the crushing weight of the occupation, but you also feel like. Like you can just imagine how if. If we can get past this huge thing, which will be so hard to get past. How. Like, just how. How there's so much humanity everywhere you look. And there was something that was warming to me about that. And so the whole thing was like. Felt like I sort of felt at war with Myself through the whole thing of feeling depressing but uplifting at the same time about the soldiers, I did not share Mickey Zohar, who did not see the movie's criticism.
- [85:34]
I thought that the soldiers were, were really representatives of the situation that we're in. They were also sort of, sort of types. They didn't go way out of their way to presenting their humanity, but they weren't at all monsters. They were just like, this is what happens. This is what happens when you live in a world where it's not insane to think that maybe a 12 year old kid has suicide bomb strapped around his, his tummy. I mean, it's terrible and it leads you to do terrible things. But.
- [86:13]
I sort of felt like it was actually in the scheme of things, a more decent and more true representative, at least at the level of theory of what these soldiers were. Did you feel differently?
- [86:29]
B
At first I was right there with you on the that. And then I thought, okay, I think that this is sort of the banality of evil kind of.
- [86:40]
Representation where I don't know that a naive viewer or someone with, without some other sensibilities than I have would say, oh, I get it. Like for example, right now, just the other day there was video of two soldiers talking to a Palestinian.
- [87:01]
Standing unfortunately close to him as it emerged that he pulled. You're actually seeing in the security video.
- [87:09]
That he's reaching behind to get the knife that he then attacks them with and he swipes around and then you see the struggle and he ends up dead. And the soldiers had light wounds, but like a millimeter this way and a slightly different scenario that way was the difference between him killing one and then getting killed by the other, or tremendous damage. So if you don't know that that's what the soldiers have in their mind as they're standing at the checkpoints, or if you don't at least add that into the mix of what's happening, then you might see it differently. And it may just seem that these people are, they look bored more than anything, which is very accurate because it's incredibly boring, while also being sort of suspicious. It's not one of those moments which do exist where a soldier looks at someone and says, oh, you're thirsty, here's some water. There's nothing like that, even though there are those moments, because we're in a large event and a large structure in which people are who they are.
- [88:21]
And so that's what you get. And I think that actually was a wise choice to not try too hard to do much More with a soldier, you see other security personnel sweeping, doing a sort of security sweep of a public space to make sure there's nothing suspicious or no explosives. It's just very. It's shown that it's very much, you know, as we know, woven into the daily experience of obviously of Palestinians, but also of, you know, all the residents of Israel. So I thought that was. I think they did a good job with it. You know, it would have been interesting to see something else happen.
- [89:02]
I had a million other, like, on my grocery list of all the people I'd love them to have, you know, displayed. I would have loved to see their brainstorm on this, by the way. But bringing him to, like.
- [89:14]
I think it's okay. It's not a spoiler to say that he, at one stage of the movie he's in actually sort of Bnei Brak Petahr Tikva in a very. Right. In a religious space. And, you know, you're just seeing people and you're seeing that they, you know, live a pretty simple, you know, life. And I will point out one little character who just really jumped out at me, which was on a bus, an Arab woman traveling with her daughter who's on the flight phone, and she's trying to explain to her perhaps irritated husband that the daughter has celiac. And it's just like. It's so specific and it's so sort of run of the mill. Someone dealing with whatever crisis they've got in their life and the fact that Palestinians are also in the health system and she is, you know, she just is who she is. And I think right there, there's something so subversive about showing us that.
- [90:20]
A
Yeah, yeah, I'm happy that I live in a country where this movie is made. And.
- [90:31]
It'S so, you know, it's one of the funny things about the, like, the people who would refuse, who are boycotting it for BDS ish sort of reasons, is I understand.
- [90:45]
Why they would boycott it because it is utterly incompatible with the worldview that they describe. Like, their understanding of Israel could not produce a movie like this, much less have a movie like this win its biggest prize or, you know, five times over.
- [91:03]
And. But. But we know that we live in a place where, of course, this movie could be made.
- [91:09]
B
Do you know who. Do you know Mo Husseini or are you familiar with him? He's a Palestinian American writer and he's also worked in film. And he just published on his Facebook page a speech he gave introducing the singer Noah. And he said that. But he decried what he called the binary story, the one that says there are only two kinds of people, victims and monsters, us and them, the righteous and the damned. And he said that the problem with that story is that it's a lie. It deletes the nuance. It edits out the inconvenient humanity of the other side. It demands that I, as a Palestinian, look at Israeli and see only an occupier, not a human. It demands that they look at me and see only a terrorist, not a man. It was really as if you. He had. That's the quote that I took. It's really as if he had either watched or almost written that movie, because that's exactly what the movie does. It humanizes everybody.
- [92:10]
A
Okay, people, I think that if you have a chance to see it, both Miriam and I think that it would be wise for you to see it. And now listen to this.
- [92:20]
B
Ayala.
- [92:22]
Eshal chot?
- [93:15]
A
E.
- [94:04]
That song is Ayala la Eshlachotach by Efrat Zur. You can find all the new music you heard on the show today in all the usual places. And now it is time for our Vada country segment, which is the part of the show in which each of us described something that maybe brought us solace over the last little while as we wended our way through our world, or possibly surprised and amused, delighted and enchanted and sorceled, or could be even fluged us as we did all that wending through our world. Miriam, what is your van?
- [94:32]
B
Country so my fella and I have been kicking around this idea to ride the shiny new light rail red line to every stop, or at least all the way to each end. And we finally got started on Friday. We biked over to the Yehudit station on Begin across from Sirona and hopped on the line heading south. Our destination was Batyam, the southern end of the line, though we didn't go all the way to the very end. From Yehudi, the line heading west, or I guess southwest towards the shoreline, is underground until the truly glorious Eliflet station, where the old train tracks, which are now converted into a glorious park, get within seagull distance to the sea and from there you're above ground, heading south on Jerusalem Boulevard, watching the street flow by. It's a terrific view that feeds you a sort of visual history of Jaffa and really the region. Jerusalem Boulevard in Jaffa has a crazy mix of buildings. There are dilapidated or sometimes renovated Ottoman structures. These have decorative stonework and balconies and distinctive arched windows and doors and there's also the dilapidated public housing covered with electric cables and water pipes and rusty satellite dishes. And of course, gentrification is in evidence. I admit I had a few. I wouldn't mind living here as we went by. If you crack open the history of that street, you learn that before it was Jerusalem Boulevard, it was Jamal Pasha street, named for the Ottoman military general and statesman who was one of a triumvirate of pashas who ruled the empire after 1913. Jamal was also known as the Butcher of Syria. He seems to have played a significant role in the Armenian genocide, and getting rid of the name seemed like a pretty un obvious step. Which step was taken by the new Israeli authorities when the state was less than a year old. And if you want to get political about it, well, Cemal Pasha street is a pretty solid reminder that before there was Zionist settler colonialism, there was the brutal Ottoman Empire. But who needs politics? On a short Friday in late October, you go through Yafo's Ajami neighborhood and then you're in Bat Yam, which is an unpretentious, contentious, low income city in this central region, only Bnei Brak is poorer. It's got a large population of immigrants from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia. The prohibitive cost of living in Tel Aviv, together with the light rail, are upping Batyam's attraction as an affordable Tel Aviv suburb. So lots of new high rise buildings going up. And no matter what, Batyam's got the coastline, the Yam and Batman, which was really our ultimate destination. We hopped off at Balfour Station and meandered towards the beach. Bat Yam's coastal promenade is pretty nice. The portion we reached was high above the beach. Kind of similar topography to your neighborhood, Noah. And along the railing, at least at this portion of the promenade, there are stools spaced and designed to allow an individual to look out over the sea in private contemplation, each with its own tiny tabletop. And when we got there, each stool in the row was occupied by a woman with a head covering sitting and reciting what looked like Tehillim, you know, psalms. I imagined it as a kind of open air synagogue for women who are giving themselves a moment after they have pretty much finished the Shabbat, cooking and cleaning. It's all cafes on the east side of the street, so brunch was shakshuka that couldn't be beat. Not to mention the view. And then a fast trip home. All in all, maybe a three and a half hour jaunt. And all in all, I really like the light Rail. At least what's built of it so far.
- [98:16]
A
Oh yeah, and BAAM is really happening. I like that place. Great museums and. Yeah, it's great. So it feels like a long time ago already, but it was only last Thursday night that we had our big Thanksgiving thing, which has a real problem, though in the scheme of problems, it is one of the good ones, which is we've been having our Thanksgiving thing for a, I don't know, 20 something years. And at the start of it, our kids were all little. Some of them were born into it, but now they've gotten big and some of them are married and some of them have kids of their own and some of them have girlfriends and boyfriends. So there's been a kind of natural demographic explosion to the thing. And this year most everyone came except for our girl and boy, who are like bums getting degrees overseas. But even without them and their people, we. We had pretty much as many people as our dining room slash living room can hold. In fact, Susan set up the very long table so that it extended out onto the porch. And some people on the young people's end of the table were sitting literally outside. And there are all sorts of people we love and want to invite, but there's like no room. And now there's talk of renting a tent or something like that for the coming years. But there's something about seeing everyone and maybe especially those kids who are not really kids. Miriam, yours were there and they used to be little and now they are big. And there's something about seeing them with the people that they've picked and they're all sitting at the same end of the table where they sat when they used to talk about Hashmini A and Washi tape and things they did together in the youth movement. And now they've got degrees and lives and they're masters of this or that art, of video art or tattoo art or film art or opera. Accomplished. Astonishing. And there they are talking, laughing, making the same sort of din that they always. And the theme we picked for the night was New York because some people oy oi yoi these days about New York, which I get. But New York, man, New York is everything, especially to Jews in America. So people told New York stories, the adults about what they loved in the city or their first impressions of the city. Susan talked about her first walk around Knockabout around New York with you, Miriam and Adi, who's one of the young people. She told how after she'd spent a bunch of time in the city with her folks and her someone on the street came and asked her for directions and she knew how to tell them how to get to where they needed to go, which was a thing. And my favorite moment of the night it would be anyway. But it is especially so because I know that it's Susan's favorite moment of the night was when we were talking about this or that on our end of the table and from the kids end a song rose and it was hard to hear at the beginning and then it wasn't and we all joined in.
- [101:05]
B
Sam.
- [101:31]
A
And this is the part of the show when we talk about things we love about here that are part of the reason why living here means so much to me and to us. And you could wonder how a table full of young, beautiful, happy, successful people lean in on one another singing Woody Guthrie on Thanksgiving is something about here at all. But I tell you it is because these young people leaving aside their jobs or school or whatever they had going that night to come celebrate a holiday that isn't really a holiday for them with their parents and their parents friends who are also really their friends, that is about here, though I am sure it happens in other places. And these serious young people being part of each other's lives because they grew up together in living rooms like ours and so many others. That is about here, though I'm sure it happens in a other places. And these sunny joyful young people breaking into song, banging on the table I think like they learned in the youth movement and in school and around the Shabbat dinner table. That is about here though I'm sure it happens in other places. And these open hearted young people, most of them have gone all over, everywhere around the world, one with the other. They are so alive to the world somehow that that is about here too, though I'm sure it happens in other places. It was Balaam who Balak sent to curse the Israelites who ended up instead blessing them. And this evening was all blessings, start to finish. There was never going to be anything different. But it started with the idea of blessing America and New York. My story that I never told was about living in summer break in college in the city, taking bass lessons from a guy who played bass for either the Dead Kennedys or the Dead Boys, I now forget which. And he had a fifth floor walk up in the East Village a few doors down from CBGB's and I got his number from an ad in the Village Voice. And when I rang his bell, he hung out of the window and he tossed the keys down the five flights and when I caught them, thwop. It was one of the happiest moments of my life in this city where everything I hoped was possible seemed to be possible. The point being we came to praise America. And we did. But what What I was left with most looking at Miriam's kids and all the rest of them was how very good my very good luck has been to live in this place where things I did not even know to hope were possible turn out to be just the way that things turned out to be.
- [103:59]
And that brings us to the end of our show. Thanks to Itai Shalem, our station manager, without whom there would be none of this. Thanks to Achibo Lim, my favorite band from Kibutz guests. They give us the music at the start and the end of our show. Thank you Miriam. Thank you Natalie. We'd like to thank all of our Patreon supporters for your generosity and for your support. It keeps the show going, it keeps the station going, 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 to listen and to ask you to like us on Facebook and drop us a line. We are going to answer eventually. If we haven't, drop us a line again. We really will. After you do that, go to Apple Podcasts and give us a five star review. Maybe one that starts with this. If the Guinness people had not stopped accrediting records from Tel Aviv, the Promise Podcast would be a shoo in. If not for longest podcast, then surely for most overly long podcast. There's a distinction that matters there. Da da da. Finish that any way you want. But before you do that, remember that today, as we record on December 4, we mark international Cookie Day. So stipulated way back in 1992, 1987 by Matt Nadir of the Blue Chip Cookie Company. Before this. It is true. Way back in 1980, the Sesame Street Dictionary had playfully listed International cookie day as November 26th. But like everything the unprofit minded saps on public broadcasting do, this Ostensible Cookie Day was just a wan copy of what the private sector is capable of. And Matt Nadir, who by the way is generally credited with popularizing the white choc at Macadamia Nut Cookie, said of his day, quote, it is just like having National Secretary's Day. It will be a fun thing to do. End quote. Now it's worth noting that International Cookie Day has no affiliation with International Chocolate Chip Cookie Day, which we marked on August 4th, of course, four months ago. And it has nothing to do with International Homemade Cookie Day, which falls on October 1st. And it is fully independent of International Oreo cookie day on March 6, and it has no affiliation with International Sugar cookie day on July 9th. All those days are great, sure, and highly important, but if you ask me, they are each one adjective too specific, at least for my taste. No, the Best Cookie Day is the most inclusive of all cookie days having under its purview your oatmeal raisin cookies, your snickerdoodle cookies, your gingerbread cookies, your molasses cookies, your Funfetti cookies, but by no means including Madeleine's Witch people, with all due respect to Marcel Proust, are simply not cookies. And obviously, obviously, obviously I adore International Cookie Day, because who doesn't love cookies? And also there's the fact that all day one song has been running through my mind over and over again. And now I think it will be running over and over again through your mind as well. C is for cookie, that's good enough for me.
- [107:05]
B
Yeah.
- [107:06]
A
C is for cookie, that's good enough for me. C is for cookie, that's good enough for me. Oh, cookie, cookie, cookie, start with C. Yeah. Cookie, cookie, cookie, start with C. Oh boy. Cookie, cookie, cookie, start with C.
- [107:28]
B
Cookie.
- [107:28]
A
Cookie, cookie starts with C. You are welcome for that. But even though International Cookie Day is not yet halfway over over, and dozens of cookies still await me over what remains of the day, still I have that same sinking feeling you get when the plate that used to be full of cookies now has just that one left, and you wonder if it would be polite for you to take that cookie. And either way, you know that soon all the cookies will be gone. Not to be back for too long. Not so the Promise Podcast. We will be back for you next week, and aside from the matter of a short couple of months hiatus, we will back for you every week, probably until we draw our last breath and shuffle off this mortal coil, microphone in hand, reminding you that while some things like cookies are like joy made material or love made corporeal with flour, sugar and shortening, a sort of reification of human warmth and kindness, other more luftmenscish things like voices and microphones can become reifications of just angst and worry and ennui on this. The Promised Podcast.
- [108:35]
Sam.