← The Promised Podcast
The Promised Podcast
The “Stability?” Edition
01:27:45
Sara Yael Hirschhorn, Noah Efron and beloved prodigal podcaster Ilene Prusher talk about (1) The vote to disperse the Knesset that looked like it would succeed, until it failed and (2) Prime Minister Netanyahu’s decision to give guns to a Gaza...
Loading summary
Transcript77 lines
- [00:02]
A
Today is day 614.
- [00:06]
Which are 87 weeks and five days of the captivity of now 53 hostages, living and dead in Gaza.
- [00:18]
This is TLV1. This episode may contain explicit language.
- [00:26]
Foreign.
- [00:38]
Brought to you on TLV1. The voice of the city where right now checked into the Presidential Suite of the Tony David Intercontinental Hotel is none other than Caitlyn Jenner, who tweeted and posted to her Instagram just a few days ago quote I am excited to share that I will be be in Israel this week. I'm visiting the resilient people of Israel as the nation continues to recover and restore its place in the Middle East. Stay tuned. What Caitlyn Jenner modestly did not write is that she is visiting the resilient people of the country and the city because she was invited to be the special guest, the Grand Marshal of the big Pride Parade and gaggle of galas marking the zenith, the apex, the acme, the capstone, the climax, the peak, the culmination of Pride Month. Which big Pride Parade will be tomorrow as we record, and which gaggle of galas started last week and is going strong now? I got one tonight myself and will go on for weeks to come because we are committed not just to the Pride part of Pride Month, but also to the month part of Pride Month. But I digress. In no time, Caitlyn Jenner's posts had tens of thousands of likes and thousands and thousands of comments, including some from Israeli celebrities like actress activist Noah Tishbi, who wrote thank you Caitlin, Thrilled to have you for exclamation points. And alongside words of welcome from such celebs, were also a great many enthusiastic comments from people just like you and me who I noticed often expressed the power of their emotion through heart emojis, of which, carrying out a small bit of pilot research, I determined that there were 65 of which heart emojis in just the first 20 comments that I canvassed, for an average of 3.25 heart emojis per comment, of which, if you are interested in a deeper dive into the statistics statistical analysis that I obviously carried out, because how could I not 46.15% of the heart emojis were red, 18.46% were white, 24.62% were blue, and 10.77% were pink. Presumably, the relatively high percentage of blue and white heart emojis owed to the commentator's wish to convey the blue and white of the Israeli flag through heart emojis, but at this point that is just a conjecture and obviously further research is needed. In small numbers. One found crown emojis, Israeli flag emojis, clasped hands, namaste emojis, and cone shaped emojis overflowing with confetti which seem to denote exploding cannolis for some reason. But once again further research is indicated. Interpolated between all these festive comments were, as you would obviously expect, more critical comments such as one under Noah Tishby's upbeat welcome that said, maybe referring to Noah Tishby, or maybe to Caitlyn Jenner, or maybe to both pause settler and then had a word beginning with a C used to refer in a vulgar way to a vulva, which word you cannot say in the United States, but for some reason it is just fine in the uk. But again, I digress. There were also posts about pink washing and such as one might expect, and there were some apparently chronically based criticisms of Caitlyn Jenner's transsexuality. But remarkably, the overall feel of the post and all the comments is flush with warmth and love and lots and lots of appreciation. Like this comment by Tel Aviv personal trainer, Pilates instructor and influencer, influencer Shiraz Shemesh, who wrote in English, welcome Kapara Shali. Kapara Shali translating to my darling, though it is in fact better than that in the not fully translatable Hebrew with Shiraz Shemesh spelling welcome with four E's at the end for extremely emphatic extra emphasis. And arguably nothing captures the we love to be loved spirit and the we appreciate those who appreciate us spirit of this city we love so well Tel Avivo better than pulling out the stops for special guests of honor. Not mostly because she is an Olympic gold medal winner, though there's that. And not mostly because she is a pioneering trans activist, though she is that. And not mostly because she is the stepmother of maybe the most famous hot siblings in human history, but rather because she is here with us at this moment, when being here with us means a lot. Now, also here with us, not just in the city, but more specifically in the beautiful and enchanting Serenity Studio at number 12 Lesser Horry street, is a woman who is if you wanted to describe her in just emojis, you would post brain emoji, pen emoji, microphone emoji, globe emoji, dove emoji, woman professor emoji, books emoji, compass emoji, quill emoji, sparkle emoji, brick emoji, headphones, emoji, plant emoji, thereby conveying her Brilliance, that's the brain writing genius, that's the pen. Compelling voice microphone, her global mindedness and cosmopolitanism globe emoji, her seeking of peace dove emoji, the commitment she shows to her students, professor emoji, her love of literature books emoji, her moral sense compass emoji, her poetical nature, quill emoji, her inspirational karma sparkle emoji, her bridge building brick emoji, her skill at listening headphones emoji, and the fact that she is ever and always growing plant emoji. Qed. Obviously that woman could only be and set your faces to stunned Eileen Prusher, who I think was last on the podcast in season five, which is to say more than nine years ago. Eileen Pressure has been a professor of journalism at Florida Atlantic University and will, starting in the fall, move her profession to the University of Miami, where her brief will be, quote, professional practice, digital journalism and local news collaborations. Yowza. Eileen was, in her accomplished and peripatetic past, the Jerusalem correspondent for Time magazine, the program director here at TLV1. Before that, she was a foreign correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, for which she covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and served as the newspaper's bureau chief in Jerusalem, Istanbul and Tokyo. And sometime in that period she was nominated for a goddamn Pulitzer Prize. She has taught journalism at NYU Tel Aviv and the Interdisciplinary center in Herzliya. Her work has been published in the New York Times, the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, the Miami Herald, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Guardian, the Financial Times, to name just a few of many. You will have seen her and heard her on cnn, the BBC, cctv, msnbc, C Span, npr, and other of your finest anagrams. If you haven't read her wonderful novel Baghdad Fixer, then you are just not living your best life. Eileen, I assume that now that you're back, you will never leave again.
- [07:27]
B
Oh, how could I leave after that introduction? Noah, I have to say, be still my heart. What an honor it is to be back with you in the studio and back at TLV1.
- [07:37]
A
Thank you for having me to express true love. You gotta go with emojis. You as a journalist, as a journalist, and as a journalism professor, surely know that now. Also with us today from TLV1's satellite studio in Jerusalem is a woman who I guess you might best describe like this also brain emoji for her intellectual rigor, open book emoji for how deeply engaged she is with texts and ideas, a dedicated scholar and writer and an Open minded. One Synagogue Emoji for her expertise in Jewish history, religion, identity and Zionism. Talking Head Emoji for her ability powerfully to communicate as a public intellectual, engage wide audiences through teaching, lectures, and of course, the media. DNA emoji for her remarkable ability to get at the roots of identity, lineage and the narratives that shape Jewish peoplehood and belonging and collision. Emoji because she is intrepid in confronting harsh truths, exploring points of tension and conflict with courage and insight and finally, smiley face with smiling eyes. Emoji on account of her warmth, approachability and charm. I think you already know that this particular mix of emojis could only refer to Sara Hirshhorn. Sarah Hirshhorn is a senior researcher at the Kaeper center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism and Racism, and she is an instructor at the Ruderman Program for American Jewish Studies at Haifa University. She is also a fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute in Jerusalem. The Promise Podcast Preferred People Policy Institute As I have intimated, Sarah has professed at the finest universities on three continents, in the Old country, the New World, and our historical homeland. Her book City on a Hilltop, American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement won prestigious prizes and it is great she's got a new book underway about Zionism, Jewish power and identity politics. Sarah is of course all over the news, in print, on radio, on podcasts and on television. You gotta follow her on Twitter, you just gotta Sarah, how you doing?
- [09:35]
C
First of all, I think I'm going to print up business cards that are just now a series of emojis and I need to.
- [09:39]
A
We don't need anything more than emojis. I think that this podcast would be better if we were just speaking in emojis.
- [09:45]
C
I. I think so too. Well, you know, inshallah, one day we will. One day we will get there. But I have to say you also need to add the Calamity Jane emoji, which I don't know exactly what that is, but I am very accident prone so that very least needs to go. At the end of the string of.
- [09:59]
A
Long emojis, I will look at the list of emojis and figure out what the right one for that is and clearly I will add it to your bio. Now as for me, my name is Noah Ephron. I don't mean to boast, but chatgpt wrote to me this week that the amount of memory that they allot to each user just went up by a lot and that the thing from now on will remember more about me based on what I have asked it to do, and it will grow more and more familiar with my likes and dislikes as the days and weeks go by. You probably got the same message if you use ChatGPT. Then the thing asked if I wanted to see what it already knows about me now based on the past few weeks and I'm not made of stone, so I said sure. And it gave me these 150 words. Quote. You're a civic minded, sharp witted scholar activist, effortlessly blending city hall with the seminar room. By day, you're a Tel Aviv City Council member shaping environmental policy and planting the seeds literally of a greener future. By night, you're a doctoral researcher peeling back the layers of MOOCs, sociotechnical imaginaries and justice in education. You speak in cadences of both academia and satire, slipping between curatorial parody and climate policy with enviable ease. You care deeply about trees, about sacredness, about language, and about making obscure ideas both legible and funny. You craft speeches by the sea and grant proposals that span from rabbis to cultured meat startups. You balance public service with intellectual mischief. And your radar is always tuned to the poetic, the political and the absurd. So here is a fitting tagline. Sustainability with style, scholarship with bite. From council chambers to conference podiums, you make ideas grow. End quote. And I am not joking. When I read these words, I felt immediately and strongly like I was going to throw up. I'm not entirely sure why, but it had something to do with it being sort of a plausible description, but also like very, very shallow. And the shallowness, it could come from the technology. But what I think is it's more just me. So the thing is, it made me think, what if that is what I am? I mean, clearly the AI was putting the most complimentary face on things. AI is Eddie Haskell, basically. And then, well, if this is true, what am I? And I started to think about that scene in Manhattan when Ike Davis is standing in front of a skeleton in at Columbia arguing with his professor friend Yale Pollock, and he says, what are future generations going to say about us? My God, you know, someday we're going to be like him. I mean, you know, he was probably one of the beautiful people.
- [12:39]
C
He was probably dancing and playing tennis and everything.
- [12:42]
A
And now look, this is what happens to us. You know, it's very important to have.
- [12:46]
B
Some kind of personal integrity.
- [12:48]
C
You know, I'll be hanging in a classroom one day and I want to.
- [12:51]
A
Make sure when I thin out that I'm well thought of and then I think so that's your moral guide, Mr. Advanced Degrees in Philosophy. Your ethical touchstone is Woody fucking Allen. And I'm not trying to brag. God knows my parents brought me up better than that. But one day my grandkids will say, saba, what were you like back in the day? And I will say, well, mein kind, I am not boasting because I do not like to boast, but I was sustainability with style, scholarship with bite. From council chambers to conference podiums, I made ideas grow and their faces will light up and they will smile at me and say to one another, senility is a sad thing. It is a sad, sad thing. I must add that visiting the studio today, this studio with a no visitor policy that we had to break for him, which turns out to be, you know, in the end, we made it into a no visitors, save for visitors who are married to a Eileen policy is Rav Nachshon David Carmi, who has such good. I wish you could all be here in the Serenity studio to feel it. You feel it over the social media. Look for the guy, it's unbelievable. And his smichah is from Aleph, Jewish Renewal, which, if you know what it is, then you know what it is and it says something. He's a teacher, an artist, a therapist who for years had a practice in Jerusalem, and he is soon to be the associate rabbi at the center for Jewish Life at. At Beth David in Miami. And we are so, so, so, so happy that you are here. I have always said that any husband of Eileen is a husband of mine, and now I've had the chance to prove it. Today we got two topics of importance so elevated that you'll probably want to listen standing up. But first, we have this matter that we are following with alert, interest and great concern as part of an occasional series we like to call the Promise Podcast ponders fights and slights over Yiddishkeit villains and fill in. There was a fight the other day in the Knesset Subcommittee on Jewish Thought in the Educational System. That's what it's called, a fuss of the kind that you just hate to see one person shouting down the next with insults and incivilities, leading in the end to the chair of the committee, a woman from the coalition, expelling from the room a member of Knesset from the opposition, the member of the Knesset from the opposition who was in the end thrown out of the room is Rav Gilad Kariv, a member of the Labour Party, lately renamed the Democrats Party, who was for time, the head of the Reform movement here in Israel, and before that, the head of the Religious Action center, the legal and lobbying organization of the Reform movement. And he's got two law degrees and a degree in Jewish Studies and of course, a rabbinical degree. Rav Gilad Kariv is a friend of mine, though more in the way that politicians use the word friend than in the way that poets use the word friend. He was a leader of my Green Party for a time before he joined labor, and even back then I could see, anyone could see the guy is spectacular and going places. And just last week we got on our calendar a meeting for him to give me advice about plural in Tel Aviv, where he grew up and which he knows very, very well. And Rav Gilad Kariv was talking in the subcommittee criticizing the Minister of Education, Yoav Kish's proposal for beefing up what kids get in schools about Jewish culture, which proposal the Minister of Education had presented to the committee that morning. But before Rav Gilad Kariv got there, there was a scheduling conflict, and Rav Gilad Kariv apologized for having missed the presentation and having missed the minister, who had since gone back to his office in the ministry. But Rav Gilad Kariv said what in any obvious that he had scrutinized the minister's PowerPoint presentation and that he has criticisms of the proposal, the first being that it ignores what Rav Gilad Kariv calls the elephant in the room, which is that there are so few teachers of Judaism as culture, and for that matter, of any of the humanities, so few that no fancy new plan is going to work without first fixing that problem, which Minister Yoav Kish's proposal does not do. And then Rav Gilad Kariv goes on. There is the problem that the proposal itself is nothing more than a badly camouflaged plan to Orthodox up the teaching of Jewish culture, which is the opposite of what we need. And I myself have not seen the PowerPoints, and I have not read the plan, so I don't know. But it's like that time when they asked Elsa Einstein if she understands the theory of relativity, and she said, no, not really, but I know Albert, and if he says it is so, then I'm sure it is. And in the same way, I don't know the plan, but I know Rav Gilad Kariv, and if he says it's got problems, then I'm sure he's right. But either way, that's not really my point. The whole time Rav Gilad Kariv was talking, people around the table were saying at intervals, things. But if you had been here for the minister's presentation, you would see that he answered that point. People were saying stuff like that the whole time Rav Gilad Kariv was talking. And the person who was probably saying it the most was the chairwoman of the subcommittee, a Likud MK named Galit Distel Atbaryan, who you can see when you watch the video she's getting more and more upset as Rav Gilad Kariv goes on saying, why weren't you here to hear Minister Yoav Kish? Or how can you criticize Kish when you don't even know what he said? And after Rav Gilad Karif had spoken for maybe three minutes, she tells him he needs to start to sum up. And then she says it again after three and a half minutes, and she says it again after four minutes. But as anyone who's ever seen a Knesset committee or plenum at work, those kinds of proddings to give up the microphone are almost always ignored at first. And Rav Gilad Kariv is ignoring Galit Distel Atbarian's increasingly forceful efforts to get him to let someone else speak. And as Rav Gilad Karif continues to make his point, you can feel Galit Distel Atbarian, who was already quite agitated, grow more so and then even more so. Now it helps to know a thing or two about Galit Distel Akbaryan. First, that she is an impressive woman. She grew up in Jerusalem, the kid of immigrants from Iran who came just a few years before she was born in 1972. She's got two degrees in philosophy, and after she divorced her husband maybe 20 years ago, she started raising her two kids on her own. She opened a clothes store in Modi' in with her sister, Irith de Vere. They designed the clothes, which were a hit, and they called the store Ahouti My Sister. And while they were making a success of that, Galit Distel Atbaryan started writing novels. And she wrote two terrific ones. The second of which, A Peacock in the Stairwell, it is called, was shortlisted for the Sapir Prize, the Sapir Prize being our Booker Prize. It is for serious, fine literature. And the novel tells the story of three adult siblings, Yves Sans and Laurent, whose abusive father kills himself. And the book basically starts at his Shiva. And Haaretz at the time called the book brilliant, fascinating and important, and said that it was required reading for anyone who has ever been sexually abused or abused in any other way, for that matter. And around this time, Galit Distel Atbaryan also started writing for magazines and papers. And then she had a weekly show on the radio. And then she was a panelist on a show called the Patriots on tv. And it was only then that it became easy to see, or impossible not to see, that she had become pretty right wing, seemingly growing more right wing all the time. In fact, she became pugilistic on the radio and television in the Fox News mode. And because her mind and her tongue are so sharp, she became a scorched earth voice of the right here, mocking their trashing. All of which was a change for her, as she once explained, like this quote. I come from the flaming left. I have renounced everything I was taught to believe. At 17 I wore Doc Martens, I listened to Nick Cave. I was dark and complicated. I told everyone that God did not create man, man created God. So then I said, maybe I should study philosophy. Six years studying philosophy and all at once I had the insight that atheism and theism are equally rational. All at once belief sneaked in from the side. When I started to think, that's when God came back to me. Today I am a sortie traditional. I keep meat and milk separate. I keep Passover like a Nazi. End quote. It was around this time too that Galit Distel Atbarian fell in love with her partner to this day an ex Haridi man who was born Shmuel but now calls himself Samuel and who votes in the Knesset elections for the mostly Palestinian joint list. The friend who fixed them up told Galit Distel Atbarian of Samuel, he's left leftist, secular atheist joint list. I think you will get along. End quote. And Galit Distel Atbaryan says, quote, she was right, we have fights. And anyone watching from the side would not believe that it is possible to come back from them to anything like human civilization. But a minute later it is, honey, can I fix you coffee? End quote. In 2020, Prime Minister Netanyahu recruited Galit Distel at Barian. He liked her intelligence and her genius for trolling the left. And he gave her the 10th spot on the Likud list assured thing. And after that she became a minister and a reliably headline grabbing bulldog for the Likud and for the Netanyahu's, a role she is good at and seems to enjoy. Rav Gilad Kariv told the Knesset subcommittee on Jewish Thought in the educational system that he had just one more point to make. And then this followed.
- [22:14]
By.
- [22:35]
I was happy to hear that the minister intends to straighten out the issue of tefillin ritual phylacteries in a ministry memo, because one of my two daughters is careful to lay tefillin. So I am sure that there will be a paragraph in the memorandum that clarifies that every student, boys and girls who are also allowed by Jewish law to lay in fillin, will be allowed to do so. And I hope that in at least one school in the country there'll be a place where there is a tefillin stand for girls, end quote. And you could hear that people around the table were rattled by this. And then Galit Distel Atbarian says, I got no patience anymore for these provocations. And now the thing is off, off.
- [23:40]
And it is hard to parse with precision just what is said in this exchange. After Galit Distel Akbarian says, I got no patience anymore for these provocations, Rav Gilad Kariv says, what provocations? And Galit Distil Akbaryan says with sarcasm, sure, it is not a provocation in any way. And if you make a bar mitzvah for your dog, I will come. And people around the table, they clap and laugh. And Rav Gilad Kariv says, that's your level. Apparently you don't know a thing about halacha, about Jewish law, about tradition. And they are shouting back and forth. And Rav Gilad Kariv says, you know nothing about tradition, about being civil, about respecting other people. This is the face of Jewish tradition according to Galit Distel. And as Rav Gilad Kariv is shouting these things, Galit Distel Akbaryan is non stop shouting him down until finally she has had enough, and she uses her authority as subcommittee chair and calls for the Knesset guards to throw Rav Kariv out of the meeting while saying, please take out the enlightened reforming the Jews here want to go on. And Rav Gilad Kariv was led out of the committee room after this. As you might guess, it was as though the whole country had stepped on the third rail. The Reform movement and Conservative movement put out statements demanding that the Minister of Education do all that Rav Gilad Kariv demanded he do, ensuring that girls could put on tefillin just like boys, and getting more better teachers for Judaism as cultural classes. And the statements also called for quick repudiation of what Galit Istel Atbarian had said and how she implied that reformed Jews are not Jews at all. Rav Gilad Kariv published a pointed op ed. In Haaretz, printed under the headline the antisemitic show Distel Atbarian put on is not without precedent. Here is how we need to react to it, in which Rav Gilad Kariv, among many other things, said that Galit Distil Akbaran's disdainful and disrespectful dismissal of Reform Judaism is inseparable from the disdain and disrespect that many Palestinians are subject to every day, and that the issue of religious pluralism cannot be split from the issue of democracy, and they're both part of a single great battle of our time for a decent humanist government and country. And there were dozens of other essays and hundreds of posts on social media, mostly critical of what Galit Distil Akbaryan said, though on social media she had her supporters too. Of course, the best response to all of this came early the next morning on the Wake Up News radio show on Reced Bet of the Khan broadcast network, when aryeh Golan, who at 77 is the grand Old man of Israeli News Radio and who has won all the prizes and been everywhere and talked on MIC with everyone, he is by far my favorite broadcaster of all time. He started the 7am News hour with this.
- [27:07]
Good morning to the Jewish member of Knesset Galit Distel at Barian. I hereby present you with this essential information that was unknown to you when you ejected member of Knesset Rav Gilad Kariv, because he said in the Education Committee that his daughter puts on tefillin. A hasty examination of Jewish sources will easily show you that the Talmud tells of women who put on tefillin, for example Michal Bachaul, or the wife of Yonah. Yes, yes. And in the Middle Ages, Rabbein Ultam and Rabbi Yitzhak of Dompierre allowed righteous and pure women to put on tefillin and to wear tzitzit. Also the great Ramah, Rabbi Moshe Isserlich, did not forbid women from putting on tefillin. So too Rabbi Meir ben Baruch, the Maharam of Rothenberg, who wrote in the 13th century that one should not prevent women from putting on fillin. Also the author of the tour, or Turkish Rabbi Yaakov Ben Harosh, and also Magen Avraham, Rabbi Abraham Gombiner, and if all of those are not enough, the Rambam Maimonides, the giant of human spirit, believe that we do not prevent women from putting on tefillin, even though they are officially not obliged to fulfill that mitzvah. There were of course great rabbis who objected, like Rabbi Ovada Yosef. But overall it seems that even in the dark Middle Ages there were no Jews who would have thrown Rav Kariv out of any room or committee because his daughter.
- [28:31]
The truth is, a talented writer could write a good book about these progressive women who put on Tefillin and the enlightened rabbis who supported them, and she might even win the Sapir Prize for her efforts. Who knows? End quote. And I got no wish to make light of the insult and anger of people over Galit Distel Atbarian's dumb condescension, or to argue with anyone who thinks that it's part of something bigger and upsetting about the country, though it is also the case, and worth remembering, that Israel is now undeniably more open, not less, to more sorts of Judaism that enjoy more appreciation and more participation and more creativity and even more government funding now than ever before in the 150 years of Zionism. But none of that means that the insult and anger are not justified and important, because of course they are. All I want to say, really, is that alongside the insult and anger and disappointment and impatience over what this country still is not, not even after all these years, it may be worth remembering that what this country very much is already today is a country where the Morning drive news guy enlists in his response to the news of the day, the Rambam and Mahram of Rothenberg and Rabbeinu Tam and Rav Yitzhak of Dompierre and BAAL Hattorim and the Ramah and Magen Avraham and of course Michal Bachaul and the wife of Yonah, as though this is the most natural thing in the world, because here it is the most natural thing in the world. Lately, with all the shouting and with all the shooting, it is possible to forget that what's Jewish about a Jewish state is not really about borders and about armies at all. It is more about a Polish born son of survivors secular radio guy evoking great rabbis to challenge the disrespect shown by the novelist daughter of Iranian immigrants who found God through Plato and Aristotle and lives with and love an ex Haridi Ahmed Tibi voter. The disrespect this novelist politician shows to a kid who grew up secular in Tel Aviv only to grow up there to become a learned rabbi and politician leader of the Reform movement who sees his movement success as necessary to fulfill his vision of this being a place where Palestinians live the lives they want to live in the way that they want to live them secure and at peace here in Israel and across a border in some future Palestine that will one day rise. A vision that, as the radio guy will tell you, you, the Rambam would surely see as the only way for a Jewish state to be Sometimes it takes an ugly fight in the Knesset Subcommittee on Jewish Thought in the Education System to remind you that this is what it is like to live in a Jewish state, and to remind us all how lucky we are to be in a time and a place when these are the fights that we have today. Two topics Topic 1 Summer's fall as Just hours ago, after a very tense few days of ups and downs, the Knesset finally votes down in its preliminary reading a bill to disperse itself and go to new elections, which bill seemed for a time to have a chance of passing owing to ultra Orthodox disgruntlement over the government's failure to anchor their exemptions from army service into law. Perchance to dream. Aye, there's the rub. End Topic 2 Enemy of my Enemies as we learned this week that Israel is transferring weapons to a drug dealer militia head in Rafah named Yasir Abu Shabaab on the plausible theory that a stronger Shabaab means a weaker Hamas. Is that true? We will wonder. And even if it is, we will ask, is giving Shabaab guns good statecraft or bad dumbassery? And for our most unreasonably generous Patreon supporters in our extra special special extra discussion, the link to which you can find in our show notes on your podcast app or at patreon.com promisepodcast on the world Wide Web, we will take advantage of the high pressure situation we find ourselves in and probe with Eileen what it is like to be on campus these months and what it is like to raise Israeli born kids in the United States of America. In these days of anger, angst, rage, fear and in Florida sunshine and whimsy. But before we get to any of that, listen to this.
- [33:16]
C
Wow.
- [33:42]
B
Wow.
- [34:10]
Call Me.
- [34:12]
A
That song is Ze Wow by Asulin, who is J. Lamota and Forever Tel Aviv, one of the several songs claiming this week to be the official song of Pride Month. Ahead of tomorrow's huge Pride Parade, we will listen to some of this year's Pride songs over the course of the show. And now it is time for our first discussion. So Eileen, why did the government honor almost start to fall and then not fall at all, making all the will they? Won't they in retrospect seem rather banal?
- [34:43]
B
Yeah, well, there are several ways to topple the government in Israel. If the Knesset does not approve a budget, then the government falls and we go to new elections. Though the Knesset can pass a continuing resolution to extend the deadline for a new budget, thereby avoiding the fall. So there is a vote of no confidence, which, as you know, if 61 or more of the 120 members of the Knesset support it, it leads to new elections. And finally, the Knesset can also pass a law to disperse the Knesset, also with the support of at least 61 mks, which sets in motion a process by which the dissenting Mks propose one of their own to replace the sitting Prime Minister, and he or she has a shot at forming a new government with the current mks. But if he or she fails, then we have new elections. So the budget vote also comes once a year, and sometimes after the Knesset has approved a two year budget, it can be once every two years. A vote of no confidence can be brought whenever the opposition cares to bring it, and there are typically dozens and dozens of these in every Knesset term of office. That said, only one government in Israel has ever fallen owing to a no confidence vote, and that was the government of Yitzhak Shamir 33 years ago in 1992. And I age myself by saying I remember that well. But the laws to disperse the Knesset have a much more successful career than than that. 14 out of 24 governments have ruled Israel since the country was established and have been undone early by such laws. It's perhaps because such laws have proven to be the most potent way to bring down a government that they can only be proposed six months after the last time such a law was voted on. What's more, because motions to disperse the Knesset are taken so seriously, the law demands that they be tabled 45 days before they can be discussed. A provision intended to let tempers cool in trying times. Imagine that. Which provision is habitually sidestepped by the head of the opposition proposing a new law to disperse the Knesset every week, withdrawing the proposal when the 45 day waiting period lapses, sure in the knowledge that another proposal will fill the required waiting period within the week. This workaround is meant to keep tempers from cooling and trying times so the opposition can take advantage of moments of anger and disarray within the coalition to topple the government. Still, because a failed vote to disperse the Knesset means that a new vote can't happen for half a year, the opposition is traditionally pretty careful to bring up any vote for a proposed law to disperse the Knesset only when it thinks that the vote has a really Good chance to pass. So last week, four parties proposed votes of no confidence in the government. There was Yeshatid, mostly on the grounds that the government has failed to draft the ultra orthodox the National Union, mostly on the grounds that the government has failed to bring back the hostages is the three Arab parties, mostly on the grounds that the government is destroying Bedouin villages in the country and of course Palestinian towns and villages in the west bank and Gaza and fourthly, Israel Beitinu, mostly on the grounds that the government has flubbed the war. None of these proposed votes of no confidence got the 61 votes they would have needed to pass, and no one much expected that they would. But the day after all these votes of no confidence, the head of the opposition, Yair Lapid, called for a vote a week hence to disperse the Knesset. The grounds for the vote, as Lapid and others explained, were basically all the complaints that had been aired in the no confidence votes. But the reason why this time Lapid and others believe the vote had a chance of passing is because of discord in the coalition that seems to be getting worse and worse and might, in the estimation of Lapid and others, bring part of the coalition to vote in favor of dispersing this coalition government. The vote was scheduled for yesterday and overnight it failed essentially Thursday morning. So in case you're hearing of this news, first from us, which I hope you are, the bill to dissolve the Knesset was defeated sometime in the wee hours of Thursday morning. Now, it is important to point out that any bill has a long way to go before it becomes a law in Israel, as we learn from this seminal piece of investigatory research. It's not easy to become a law, is it?
- [39:00]
C
No.
- [39:00]
A
But how I hope and pray that I will. But today I am still just a bill.
- [39:07]
B
Specifically, here in Israel, it's not easy for a bill to become a law because a bill has to go through four readings, a preliminary reading, and then a first, second and third, the last two of which often happen one right after the other. Because between the preliminary reading and the first and between the first and second and third readings, there is time for discussions and deliberations and negotiations and amendations. Yesterday's bill to disperse the Knesset was up for a preliminary reading vote. And in this sense, the importance of yesterday's vote was always going to be limited. And even if it had passed, it could easily have been changed or have died in future readings. One practical reason why it mattered, and maybe the only one, was because once a bill to disperse the Knesset is in process, that is after it has been approved in a preliminary reading. There are certain limitations on what the government is and is not allowed to do. Cannot adopt policy leading to what is sometimes called an election economy, meaning populist moves to make voters feel better off so they'll be more likely to vote for the present government. There are also certain limits on whom the government can hire and fire again on the theory that you want to stop the government from using its present powers to manipulate the outcome and maybe forthcoming elections. What led Yair Lapid and other leaders of the opposition to think that this time the vote to disperse the government might pass is a rolling crisis in the coalition over drafting the ultra Orthodox into the army. And we have talked about this issue a million times since the podcast started in the Pleistocene epoch. I know I've talked about it before with you, Noah, and I haven't been here in about 10 years. But where it stands now is that the Supreme Court ruled that the general draft law saying that every 18 year old boy and every 18 year old girl not prevented from doing so by his or her religious beliefs, well, that applies to everyone, including the ultra Orthodox in Harid. If the present government wants to change this policy, the Supreme Court said it needs to pass a new law. Ultra Orthodox leaders insist that ultra Orthodox teens not be drafted, save for maybe a symbolic view. Prime Minister Netanyahu promised the Haredi parties in their coalition agreements that he would pass a new law to that effect. Maybe in the past he could have accomplished this, though a law like that would never have been popular among most Israel Israelis who think Kharidim should serve. But since October 7, of course, with many reservists spending hundreds and hundreds of days fighting in Gaza and Lebanon, and with the mandatory service requirement of enlisted soldiers being extended by months, and with hundreds of these soldiers dying, it has become politically impossible, many would say morally impossible too, to pass such a law. But the Haridi parties joined the coalition because the Prime Minister promised them that such a law would be passed. Lately they have said that if it is not, they will quit the government. This is what Yair Lapid and the others now believe, that this was the moment to disperse the Knesset on the thought that the ultra Orthodox parties are sufficiently fed up enough to vote for it. What happened in the event, though, is this. All day yesterday, people from all sides conferenced and negotiated the opposition, trying to convince the Haredim to vote to disband. The Knight and the coalition doing just the opposite. Among the three factions of Haredim, which are Shas, of course, the Sephardic Ultra Orthodox Party Degalatorah, the banner of Torah faction representing the Mitnage Litvak and Ashkenazi Jews, and Aghudat Yisrael representing Hasidic Ashkenazi Jews. These three were in negotiations with Shafts, trying to convince the others not to support the law to bring down the Knesset. Though everyone knew the vote was about just the preliminary reading of the the bill, even if it passed, there were plenty of ways to kill it down the line. All of this conferring and negotiating was done with existential gravity. Finally, at two something in the morning, only hours ago, as we record, it was announced that agreements had been reached between two of the three Heredi factions and Yuli Ederstein, the Likud head of the Knesset Foreign affairs and Defense Committee who is wrangling with the HERE draft bill. We don't know just what these agreements even say, but they seem to call for 10,000 ultra orthodox young men to be drafted into active IDF service over the next two years. With the pace of the draft increasing after that, people who ignore their induction orders won't be thrown in jail, but they will lose their government subsidies, their driver's licenses and their passports, which are pretty stiff sanctions. With that, the representatives from Shas and De Gala Tora announced that they'd vote to preserve the coalition, while the two members of Agudat Ye Soel said they'd still vote to topple the country coalition. The vote was taken in the middle of the night and as noted, the motion to disperse The Knesset failed 61 to 53. Only 53 votes to disperse the Knesset. So I'm going to throw this mic to Sarah and ask was this all much ado about nothing? Was it, as Macbeth said, a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, is all the world a stage, and all the men and women of the Knesset merely plain players? Sarah, what do you think all this amounts to?
- [44:24]
C
Yes, yes. If you thought this was an educational civics lesson in how how a bill becomes a law, then you've been hoodwinked, my friends, both here in Israel and in the Diaspora. Because this was just another classic case of Israeli extortion and we don't even know the details of what's actually gone on. How I would like to be the fly on the wall either at 2:53 this morning or wherever else this took place, to find out what kind of deal was cut between Yuli Edelsteid and the two Haredi parties beyond what we've heard in public, which we you know, have seen before and will see again and is rarely, if ever actually enforced in practice. So somebody got a good deal here and it wasn't the Israeli public.
- [45:11]
And two more things that I'd like to note that I guess.
- [45:16]
Are, are relevant to this conversation. The first is that this is just another international embarrassment for the state of Israel, which already is known to have one of the most unstable ruling coalitions in, I guess we can say, the famous political science literature that no one reads. But this, you know, cast out on our continued ability to govern this place. And people, including our creditors, have taken notice of this instability. And this doesn't bode well, I think, for the future, especially because we don't know what the payout is going to be behind the scenes. It isn't going to be recorded in the official budget, my friends, to keep this coalition together. The other more important policy outcome of this, which may lend some credence to the idea that maybe this isn't much ado about nothing, but actually this is much ado about everything, is that I think Netanyahu and his partners are really at a kind of fork in the road here about the two major issues going on, the war and the Haredi draft, which are not actually separate issues. But the hand is now going to be forced. And thanks for letting me mix all my metaphors there. But essentially Netanyahu has a problem. He has a manpower problem. He can either continue to conduct this war until ultimate victory, which is his stated goal, or he can draft the Haridim, but he can't really do both. So I think we're going to see some resolution of that issue down the road. As a consequence of this, essentially what seems behind the scenes continued draft deferral and some kind of extortionary payout to the Haredim to keep them, to keep them in the coalition and make sure nothing really changes as a result of this. You can't have it both situation where you can't have it both ways. So I think it's mostly a lot of hype and drama where essentially the Israeli people always come out the losers and also some very significant geopolitics that may result from this.
- [47:15]
A
It's remarkable that I think that I disagree with absolutely every point that you just made, Sarah, which is going to allow you, Eileen, to be in the position of you can be the Hegelian synthesis or something, or maybe just the judge to decide who's right for first of all, about your point about the instability, I think that what we learned is that.
- [47:39]
Almost inexplicably this government is really quite stable. I mean, in fact, you can get into it and come to understand why. It's not a mystery, it's not magic. But this government is not going to be toppled.
- [47:57]
It will end, I think, when the coalition decides that, that it is the optimal time for them to hold elections and not before. Because.
- [48:07]
I think that the coalition between the ultra orthodox and the right wing is something that, even though there are vast and important disagreements between those two parties in the coalition, it's something that is going to, that is in the interest of both sides in a dramatic way. So I disagree with that point about the instability, but that's not the most important thing. Think that this is a classic case of extortion. I think that the lead that is being buried in most of the reporting of this is that it is a remarkably large step towards a solution of a problem that has bedeviled Israeli society for 30 years. That we saw get its best expression last night. Now again, we have not seen what deals have been signed, but we have heard a good deal about them. We heard a good deal about what was on the table being discussed. And mostly what we've heard over the last days is how far the ultra orthodox leadership has come in agreeing to let a significant number of young ultra Orthodox men be drafted. I mean this deal calls there are now 70,000, 75,000, I think 74 something thousand ultra orthodox men of draft age. So that's what's at stake. And this deal reportedly includes seeing 10,000, which is only one in seven, a relatively small number I admit be drafted in just the next two years. But after that the numbers are supposed to rise soon. And the big thing that happened is ultra orthodox leadership basically agreed that there would be very significant sanctions for people who don't agree to go into the army because losing your ability to get a driver's license and losing your ability to get a passport, which is to say to, to travel anywhere from this country and losing all government support for your family and for your studies. These are really, really big things. And you have, we have heard now for the first time over the past days, full throatedly some ultra orthodox leaders say, we understand after the war, after watching all these secular and non ultra orthodox religious soldiers being killed around us and, and spending half of their days in the army over the course of almost two years, having watched this from the side, we realize that we can't go on this way. So it's this really, to me it seems like this huge step towards what we're beginning to see as a solution that can actually work. And people on both sides will oppose it. There'll be many, many ultra Orthodox, Orthodox rabbis, including leaders who say, no, this is completely unacceptable. And there'll be many, many secular people, especially advocates of reservists who have given so much, who say that is not enough. But what we see is around the center, the Likud, and specifically Yuli Edelstein have managed to create where we thought it was impossible, something that we will end up being reasonable in the eyes of 75% of the people in the country. And that's astonishing. So that's how I disagree with you. But Eileen, of course you will decide what is true and what is not.
- [51:42]
B
Well, I wish I had that power in the universe. But I will say, I mean, something that Sarah said that spoke to me is sort of something along the lines of that, you know, in the end, the Israeli public loses. And what I find really fascinating, as I've sort of delved back into Israeli politics being here for a few weeks, but I now live in the States, is sort of, I feel like we're going around and around with the same debate. It's taken so long to try to solve this issue. And you do give me hope, Noah, and that's why I've liked you and followed you as a student and friend and co podcaster for so many years, is like you're able to see that light at the end of the tunnel and we need that and we need to hold onto that. But you know, I have some sense of, oh my gosh, you know, we're still talking about the same issue we were talking about 10 years ago and 20 years ago. And meanwhile a lot of people are being killed. We just had dinner last night with people who said, you know, we spent last summer with them at, at a camp in the Poconos, Camprema. And he said, I spent 150 days in Miluim this year and this guy's like 40 with four kids at home. So the disruption to lives. And I actually happened to drop by the AP offices in Jerusalem yesterday. I ran into my friend Tia Goldenberg, who has a great piece on AP just now that I was just reading. And she reminds me, and this is one thing that I also liked about Sarah that reminded me about this. Nearly 870 Israeli soldiers have been killed in this fighting. And sometimes I feel like, of course we need to solve this issue. Issue of haredim solving. Right? But isn't there enough of a groundswell right now? To say, where is the end in sight of this war? What is the end game of the war in Gaza? Do we agree with the direction that the government has headed in? It seems like there's a lot of critique around that, a lot of protests around that, but it feels like it's dragging out for so long. I've heard Ehud Olmert speak about it should have ended a year ago. So all of this, I think we kind of got stuck in this moment of thinking, hey, maybe the government gonna fall. Okay, so it didn't, they didn't have the votes for that. But I guess I'd kind of like, I don't know if I'm answering the Peel pool or the maklaka between the two of you, but I wonder, you know, okay, so what now, right? What happens now that we know, okay, we are more or less stuck with this government. If I should put in stuck at least for a little while longer. But you know, I know that you go out to protest a lot, Noah, you know, I mean, where is it leading? Or do you feel that there's some sense of progress, of shifting where this government is going or at least getting them to understand, commit to, you know, an end to this war?
- [54:10]
A
No, I think that, I think there's not and that it's really, it's really terribly depressing and I think this war should never have started, that we should never have started this war. So. And I very much think that it should, should end. And I think that everyone that hoped that the, that somehow our salvation would come from the ultra orthodox dissatisfaction about the issue of the drama graft now learn that it's not going to come from there. It's going to come from.
- [54:38]
Politics, from continuing to protest and it's going to come from international politics and pressure from other places. But I do think that.
- [54:52]
One of the we will, looking back years hence at this miserable, miserable war and all the terrible things that it brought us, we will be able to, to say the one good thing that it brought us was a solution to this problem that has just completely obsessed and bedeviled us for 35 or 40 years of the ultra orthodox and the draft. Sarah, what do you think?
- [55:17]
C
Halibi? I just don't have the same confidence in optimism and that may be a personality trait as much as a policy analysis that two weeks from now the Haridim are not going to say. Well, that was just, you know, that was just talking points for the, you know, for the process that we had on the table and you know, and all Bets are off now. We didn't agree to any of that and you know, and frankly that's entirely unacceptable to us. And also, you know, we have to see what the kind of enforcement of that is going to be. It's one thing to say go ahead and put the draft notices in the mail, it's another thing to actually see people showing up and what I can imagine, especially living here in training Jerusalem, the you know, mass chaos of protests and may in fact even turn violent when those, when those draft notices arrived. So I, I, I guess I'm not as certain that we've found the solution. I mean we may have a really great solution on paper, but I'm not sure it's actually going to be implemented in practice.
- [56:15]
A
Yeah, yeah, it's true though. I think that this is what a step towards a solution looks like. Where, exactly where it will lead us. I guess we'll to have to wait and see. Now listen to this.
- [56:50]
La.
- [57:58]
That song is Ga' Eb at Me by Moshe Dayan who I am pretty sure it's not that Moshe Dayan. It is another song claiming to be the the official Pride song of 2025. And now it is time for our second discussion. So Sarah, nothing bad has ever come of giving guns to drug dealing militia heads, am I right?
- [58:17]
C
What could possibly go wrong here? So former Defense minister, Foreign minister, Finance minister and Deputy Prime Minister Avigdor Lieberman of the right leaning Israel B Party raised both eyebrows and quite a ruckus when he said in an interview the other day that Israel has been arming a small tribal militia of about 250 fighters in east eastern Gaza with the hope that the group would help topple or at least weaken Hamas. Avigdor Lieberman said the government of Israel is transferring weapons to a group of criminals and outlaws who identify with ISIS on the orders of the Prime Minister. This matter did not receive the approval of the Cabinet. The head of the Shabak, the general security services knew about it, but I do not know how much the IDF chief of Staff was in lieu loop this was, as it were, a bombshell of bombshells. Well to be precise, a bombshell about semi automatic attack rifles. Or so everyone thought until the Prime Minister himself tweeted a video in which he owned up to transferring the arms to a Gazan clan as if it was the most obvious thing in the world for Israel to do.
- [59:44]
So as Netanyahu said. What did Lieberman leak? That on the advice of our security apparatus, we pressed into service Gazan clans that oppose Hamas? What's wrong with that? It's only good. It only saved the lives of IDF soldiers. But the publication of it, the publication of it does good for Hamas alone. Believerman doesn't care. The clans or quote unquote clans that Israel has been transferring weapons to, apparently things found in abandoned and captured Hamas weapon caches that are being reused seem to be followers of a 31 year old Bedouin militia leader in Rafa in southern Gaza named Yasser Abu Shabab. Yasu Shabab cut his teeth as a smuggler of drugs and cigarettes from Egypt. The kind of activity which landed him in a Gazan jail from which Hamas released him after October 7th when their need for young fighters was great. Over the next months, Yasab ascended a game about a hundred strong, mostly former Palestinian Authority security force types that reportedly supported themselves by attacking commandeering humanitarian aid trucks coming into Gaza before Hamas could also attack and comm commandeer them. Just over a year into the war, Yasser Abu Shabaab reportedly survived a Hamas assassination attempt in Khan Yunis, after which the Edmundy between his group, which then grew to about 250 and took to calling itself the Popular Forces and Hamas, grew strong. Over the past two years, Yasser Abu Shabab has alternately claimed to be linked to ISIS on the one hand and the Palestinian Authority on hand the other other hand. But mostly the sort of wolf he seems to be is the lone one. So, Eileen, this is the guy we've been giving guns and ammo to, which leads back to Prime Minister Netanyahu's question, what's wrong with that?
- [61:36]
B
Well, I guess, you know, if you take a longer view of, you know, the last few decades of Middle east history, I could find a lot that's wrong with that. I mean, I think the American example, I mean, American America supported and armed the Mujahideen in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets for a long time. And then what did we end up with? You know, the leftover Mujahideen had, you know, sprung into Al Qaeda, right, with help from Bin Laden, et cetera. And we could think of a few other examples of that. You know, it's the classic my enemy of my enemy is my friend. You know, big question mark after that.
- [62:14]
You know, I think the question, you know, there's plenty that's wrong with it. And yet, you know, as I was just kind of getting read in over the last few days, I actually saw this was interesting. The Mahmoud Abbas Abu Mazen went and wrote in a letter in which he condemned the attack of October 7 and said that Hamas should be disarmed. So, you know, if you could imagine that in the mind of Netanyahu or anyone who's supporting that viewpoint that, you know, this is an effort to weaken Hamas. You know, I'm certainly not against that. You know, I think, you know, we all know, you know, the evil, destruction, violence that they've, you know, perpetrated on Israel and on their own people. But I guess my question is, does it work? You know, my personal experience, when I was a younger reporter and I went in and out of Gaza, there are these smaller military.
- [63:11]
You know, of varying degrees of power, weaponry, et cetera. And, you know, maybe they can make some dents in Hamas, but I'm a little skeptical that they could take on Hamas, which of course, you know, is not just, you know, its existence goes beyond Gaza. You know, it's got, you know, fingers in Iran, Qatar, or maybe I should say those countries have fingers in Gaza with Hamas. So the question is, you know, is that really going to work or are you just, you know, giving arms that, you know, some critics of this have said, you know, and they'll eventually turn those arms on Israeli soldiers. So I don't know, I'm a little skeptical of its efficacy, but I, in some ways I think it shows maybe some desperation, like how do we deal with Hamas at this point? You know, we've said, we've, we've heard Netanyahu talk about, you know, we're not ending this war until, you know, until complete victory. But is it realistic and what does it look like? I don't know. What do you think, Noah?
- [64:07]
A
Well, I definitely don't think that there's any such thing as complete victory after, you know, in such a miserable situation. But one thing this seems to me to definitely be is a further sign, as if we needed one of Prime Minister Netanyahu's really advanced cynicism because, like, the idea of, of that the future of Gaza will somehow be made better by supporting a drug dealing mafia boss sort reflects his deep belief, I think, that what you ain't never going to get in Gaza is a government of Palestinians supported by the international community that's going to be decent and work the way a government is, should really work. And in calling him cynicism, it sounds as though, you know, I'm using that as an insult. I'm not. I think that that's a precise description of his view about this. And I'm not sure that I can say that he's wrong to be cynical about that. Maybe, maybe he's right. And so the way that I feel about all this is if all the security people say that this is a good idea and like the people who know so much more than me, then maybe, maybe it's fine.
- [65:33]
But it's sad to me and it's depressing to me that this seems as though it's the right, best thing that we can be doing at this moment because it reflects the fact that the people in our leadership do not at all believe that there's any way to create a future in God Gaza that is peaceful. That is basically peaceful. That is peaceful and has people of integrity running it who care about the future of their people. It's all like, would we rather have this mafia murderer running it or that mafia murderer? Maybe if we get enough mafia murderers to kill each other, then that will be the best circumstance for Israel. How does this look to you, Sarah?
- [66:17]
C
Well, I mean, you know, what could possibly go wrong here? I mean, first of all, I think it's peak cynicism on a second level for Netanyahu have just said for the last 18 months that our goal is to, you know, disarm Gaza while at the same time, you know, obviously talking and acting out of the other side of his mouth by handing out, you know, Kalashnikovs to some other group there. As long as it isn't Hamas. Now, have we seen this, you know, movie before? Yes. Actually, as an historian, I seem to recall that Hamas was actually created in very much the same way that Israel and other parties thought it'd be a great idea to create some kind of counterbalance to, to what was then, you know, a very strong Palestinian liberation organization. Or we've seen this movie before in Lebanon when Israel was funding and arming the Fange and oops, by the way, they committed a massive war crime in Sara and Chatila under our watch with, you know, with the aid that aid and support that we gave them. And we could, you know, United States has tried doing this as, as Eileen has mentioned, and this is generally a kind of field strategy. Now, on the other hand, I don't know whether our input meaning r being the state of Israel or further, you know, any, I guess, counterbalance that the west has been interested because I also heard off the record from, you know, some of my friends in the United States that this was a policy that the US Government was also considering. I don't know how, how, how much they've been in the picture with this particular move that has come to light due to the Liberman Leak, but it seems like the US was also had this, had this same thought. But I, I also wonder whether, you know, intervention or interference by the Western powers is going to make any difference. And just as a kind of illustration of this, or at least a fictional illustration of this, I copped the idea that I was reading a detective novel over the weekend or over last weekend by a former, you know, very serious reporter here in the Middle east named Matt Rees, who's pivoted from being a foreign affairs correspondent to, to fiction and other and other projects. And he wrote a detective novel based in Gaza and the book was published in 2008. So really right as the, you know, transition was happening in Gaza with Hamas taking over. And he depicts essentially a murder mystery where all these different factions in Gaza were killing each other and it really had nothing to do with Israel or Israel was only, you know, sort of behind the scenes as the enemy. The only thing that they could all agree on is that they would also like to kill Israelis when, when and where possible. But there were restrictions on that too, because sometimes that, that troubled their own internal politics. So it seems to be that unfortunately, Gaza is a violent, poverty stricken and desperate kind of place. And that, and that may go on with or without.
- [69:12]
Armaments that, that are provided by Israel. And I, I don't know whether ultimately our putting our thumb on the scale will make very much of a difference here.
- [69:23]
B
I'm kind of curious what his real last name is because I'm a little suspicious of the last name Abu Shabaab because Shabab is kind of like in Arabic, it's sort of like the riffraff, you know. So, you know, so I'd like to do a deeper dive to figure out, you know, more about, you know, who he is and what his attraction is, because I think there are people, people in Gaza who are attracted to Hamas of this idea that it was a counter, as Sarah mentioned, you know, historically to the plo, which, you know, you know, was willing to make peace with Israel theoretically anyway, but was quite corrupt and Hamas was supposed to be clean hands. Obviously they're not, you know, but, you know, what's, what's the drawing point? Are they just a mercenary group or are they just kind of hoping they're going to, you know, pick off Hamas members in order to, you know, how are they going to overtake Hamas if they're 250 people? That's no, nowhere near the size of a force that you need to defeat Hamas. Am I right, Noah?
- [70:16]
C
I also have to say, I think I saw on Twitter yesterday that Hamas is kind of onto this and has, you know, been either murdering or torturing some of Al Shabab's followers. So I. That might be added into this conversation.
- [70:30]
A
I. I know that the. That at least in its English pronunciation, Yasir Abu Shabab, it scans. It's very. And I think that that could be a source of some of his power. In addition to being willing to ruthlessly murder people and sell drugs and steal international aid as it comes into the country. All of those together, the scamming, the stealing and the murdering, I think together make a very persuasive package.
- [70:56]
B
Yeah, a grim one at that. But indeed.
- [70:58]
A
Now listen to.
- [72:20]
B
My name is juliet.
- [72:32]
A
That song is Meet a Negate by Dorby and Julieta, who is also Maor Maya. You can find all the songs you heard today on the YouTube and sometime soon, no doubt, they will be in all the usual streaming places as well. Right now, it is time for our Vada country segment. This is the part of the show in which each of us describes something that maybe brought us solace as we wended our way through our world over the last little while. Or possibly surprised and amused, delighted and enchanted, ensorceled, or maybe even fluged us as we did that self, same wending through that self, same world. Eileen, what is your Voda Country?
- [73:09]
B
So here's an interesting story. Um, Saturday night, my husband lost what my kids and I call his man bag. It has his wallet in it. It had a big chunk of change, a wad of shekels, many credit cards, his U.S. driver's license.
- [73:26]
A
Oh, no.
- [73:27]
B
And he was letting my son play in a soccer field, you know, next to where we're staying in Jerusalem. They were staying laid. And our theory is. And also in it was the key to the place where we were staying, too. So a lot of valuables in there.
- [73:41]
C
He.
- [73:41]
B
He came home and then said, where's my bag? And he went looking for it the next day, put up a sign, and I said, forget it, it's gone. He said, oh, I think it will come back to me. I said, you've got to be kidding me. And you left a wad of shekels in there, and why are you carrying around a wad of cash? My parents raised me not to do that. But as you said in the beginning, my wonderful husband, Nachshand David Carmi, is a special and spiritual soul. And he said, no, I think people are good and it will come back. And I was kind of like laughing it off. And Days went by and we just. It was a little bit of a sore point. And then two nights ago, right, Tuesday night, he gets an email. It's actually, it's a WhatsApp message, not even an email saying, please call Tommy, who is the head of the Gamach Hashevat Aveda. So for any listeners who don't know those terms, a gamach is like a sort of place where you could go to get free things. Usually, like people say, when I was getting married, they were like, oh, you could check out a wedding gamach if you want to just, like, pick up a wedding dress instead of buying yourself a new one. Or there's ones for baby clothes or furniture. Like, people who lost their home in a disaster, they can go to a gamach and pick up free furniture. So this happens to be a haredi run organization in Jerusalem, and it turns out that the police are constantly picking up lost or stolen items. And if they're from, you know, they open it and it looks like it's from someone from abroad. And lots of, you know, Nachshon's identity stuff, because we're living in the US is there that they can't be bothered and they don't know how to find them. So this organization goes about its ways of finding people.
- [75:21]
A
It's fantastic.
- [75:22]
B
It's fantastic. We don't even know how. From his name and driver's license, they found his cell phone number, but they whatsapped him and said, you can find it. And the brachot that came out of Nachshon's mouth when he spoke to this woman to say, wow, you should be blessed. And she was so appreciative of it. And he went and found it. And we found out that, oh, just last month we returned 250 of these.
- [75:45]
A
Oh, my God.
- [75:46]
B
And it was a kind of discussion. The family was like, it'd be just enough to have your driver's license and the credit cards and the key to the house. Forget it, the money's gone. And you know what? Every shekel was there, and it was a whole big wad of it. And it restored my faith a little bit in humanity. And I was just inspired by that. Something like a Gamach Hashavat avida. I hope I'm saying it correctly, even exists. And I think it's one of those kind of like unsung hero stories of Israel. Nachshon got everything back.
- [76:17]
And I was reminded that there are good people out there doing good things. And we just had a conversation about haredim who don't serve in the military. But there are a lot of haredim and a lot of chinulim, a lot of religious and secular people serving in all kinds of ways, big and small. And we had an experience this week that just blew us away and warmed our hearts and we got our lost items back.
- [76:41]
A
That is fantastic.
- [76:42]
B
And.
- [76:42]
A
But then, did I hear correctly that you just always believed you were gonna get this back? That is an astonishing thing. That is a beautiful thing. I love that. Sarah, what is your word of country?
- [76:53]
C
How could I possibly top that?
- [76:55]
A
You can't. You can't. Don't even try.
- [76:57]
C
So I'm sorry to disappoint our listeners, but those who know me know that, and I think I've spoken about this on the podcast before, that I have an enduring fascination here in Jerusalem with men and women of the clothes. I'm always kind of following them around, you know, trying to see how they live between the, you know, the, the holy and the profane here in our, in our sometimes less than holy city of Jerusalem. So, you know, I, I love walking around and seeing these, you know, seeing the justice positions, the Jesuit, the Jesuit priest taking his cell phone out of some hidden pocket in his, you know, brown, his brown sackcloth robe. The time that I was in a homegood store in the shook and found, like, five friars all sitting there, you know, meriting the debate, dates of some frying pan that was on sale with the owner of the shop. And most recently, trying to always catch a glimpse because I, I don't think that we have the same program as Noah's spoken about in Tel Aviv, being able to actually go in and see what is behind the doors of all these monasteries and convents that take up a huge amount of real estate. And obviously, at least in my mind, or, you know, living rent free in my head with a huge amount of fascination of what's really going behind, going on behind the closed doors. Doors. Now, I was out for my walk the other day, and I come across a nun in full habit putting this guy who looks about her age but is dressed in, you know, jeans and a T shirt and, you know, flashy, flashy sneakers into a taxi cab and waving and blowing kisses and sending him off on his way. Now, obviously this was some sibling or friend of this, of this woman, of this nun who had come to visit, visit, and apparently they must have had a nice time together. And now he was going off in his direction and she was going to go sneak behind the closing door of, of the convent, which I managed to peek around before that happened as we went on her way. And I just found that, like another one of these charming, interesting moments where, you know, you see two different worlds colliding and you just wonder about the stories that are happening there. So I guess that's my. What a country. And, you know, what's really going on behind those doors is. Is what I'm always curious about.
- [79:05]
A
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So after we finish making this podcast, I am going to bike over to the train station to meet Susan, to take the train to the airport to pick up the girl who is coming from her field work in America for three days to be at Ishai and Nomi's wedding. Ishai being Miriam's oldest. And if you set it out on a spreadsheet, this is. This trip of hers would make no sense as the girl was just here a few weeks ago for work. You know how the anthropology business goes. And in a few weeks she's gonna come again. And it's kind of the worst time for her to be away from what she needs to be doing for her research in America. And it is crazy expensive to fly these days. And graduate students make what graduate students make. And money aside, making the trip or making any trip these days jangles your nerves because the airlines keep stopping and starting the routes to Israel, and until you're up in the air, you don't know if you'll actually end up up in the air. And if they cancel, it's not always so easy to get your money back. In short, it's just a mess. And still, when we finish making this podcast, we will be on the train to Ben Gurion Airport because she is coming here for three days with all those challenges of the thing and what delights and enchants and sorcerers and flutes me about the thing. Aside from the obvious that that person turns out to be the most delightful person to be with that I could even ever imagine, not that I am going to see her very much during those three days that she shared. There is something about a yurt and the bride and the groom and all their people staying in a yurt on the honeymoon night. My point is not so much about the girl, but more about all their people who will end up in the yurt and others as well. Our girl has known Yihai since forever, since right when she was born. They were in in the same daycare center in Boston when their parents were there on grants and postdocs and doing residencies. And mostly they grew up together in our chavurah And I know that I've talked about this before, how There is a WhatsApp group called the Aldea Chavurah, the children of the Chavurah, the oldest of which is by now in her mid-30s, living with her husband and baby girl in Berlin. And the rest of them are all over the country and all over. Over the world, but they are still a thing. And when one of them has got a thing or needs a thing, then others of them will get on the phone, or they'll get on a bus, or they'll get on a plane and they will show up. They'll be there. So last Shabbat at the Uprof, where Miriam had the most moving, perfect Dvar Torah, by the way, at the end of the Uprof, the kids of the Chavorah crowded into a a corner to sing a song for the betrothed that Ayelet wrote. And the kids of the Chavorah has grown to become a very odd group because it goes from toddlers to people who got toddlers of their own. And they're all there, this big group of people who grew up in our Chavurah, singing and making Nomi the bride, one of their. Their own. And I can't help but to think about that other Nomi and of Root, who says to Nomi, wherever you go, I will go. Wherever you sleep, I will sleep. Your people are my people and your God is my God. Wherever you go, I will go. Even if it takes a day on a plane and money that I don't got. And wherever you sleep, I will will sleep. Even if it is in a yurt. And that brings us to the end of our show, thanks to Itai Shellam, our station manager, without whom we would have none of this. Thanks to Achibo Lim, my favorite band from Kibbutz Geva. They give us some music at the start and the end of our show. Thank you, Sarah. Thank you, Natalie. Thank you, Eileen. Come back. All is forgiven. Thank you, Nachshon, for joining us. It is so wonderful to have you in the room. And a very special thanks to you, Nancy Connor, our beloved friend and great patron. You are our Lorenzo de Medici, our Solomon Guggenheim, our Baron Edmond de Rothschild. And not a day goes by when we don't ponder that fact with wonder and great appreciation. We'd like to thank all of our Patreon supporters for your generosity and support. It keeps the show going and it keeps the station going, and it keeps us moved and grateful and in your debt. And we'd like to thank all of you out there for taking the time to listen and ask you to like us on Facebook and drop us a line. We are eventually going to answer. After you do that, go to Apple Podcasts and give us a five star review. Maybe one that starts with this put in emojis. You might say that the Promise podcast is microphone emoji talking head emoji Yawning face emoji yawning face emoji yawning face emoji melting face emoji. Finish that any way you want. But before you do that, remember that today as we record, we celebrate and this is true International Falafel Day so stipulated way back in 2010 by then 18 year old immigrant to Israel and IDF soldier Ben Lang, following his success just weeks before that creating International Hummus Day, which I know I don't need to tell you, was celebrated on May 13 every year to this day. The Israeli provenance of both days is something that no one is much talking about these days on the Internet and social media. Indeed, the enthusiastic coverage of the day of International Falafel Day in the Iran Press newspaper paper is doth protest too much when it writes, quote, the origins and creator of International Falafel Day are unknown in bold end quote. Indeed, when the US Embassy in Amman, Jordan organized to celebrate the day the Falafel off contest to see who can make the most falafel balls in 60 seconds, for some reason there was no mention whatsoever of Israel in the ads or the videos. By the way, a man named Hisham the quote unquote falafel master of Al Quds Falafel in Amman makes more than 80 falafel balls a minute, a staggering number making him the falafel master in the contest to beat. At the Facebook homepage of Falafel Day, one finds an easily downloadable meme that reads keep calm and eat falafels, but one finds no mention of Israel. Interestingly, the discussion behind the Wikipedia entry for falafel has pages and pages and pages. This is in the discussion tab of arguments about whether or not the entry should acknowledge that falafel is even eaten in Israel at all, and if so, whether that mention should come in the context of an explanation of how Israeli falafel amounts to cultural appropriation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the entry makes no reference whatsoever to International Falafel Day being the invention of a Jewish kid living in Tel Aviv. Still, International Falafel Day was never about the credit, and it was never about the glory man. It's always been about the falafel. Indeed, the Internet offers many suggestions on how to keep the focus of the day on falafel. Well, specifically three suggestions on how to keep the focus of the day on falafel. The one being going out to eat falafel at a falafel place, the second being making your own falafel at home, and the third being reading fun facts about falafel. Like the fact that falafel may have started as a meat substitute for Egyptian Coptic Christians during Lent. This ancient tradition aligns with fasting practices where meat and dairy were avoided. The use of falafal fava beans made falafel a protein rich alternative. End quote. That is a fun fact. And I guess I don't need to tell you that I adore international falafel dates. Probably my favorite day of the whole year. On account of the falafel place caddy corner from my home that used to belong to David Ben Gurion's brother. And on account of the fun facts about Lent and fava beans. And on account of all the Wikipedia editors arguing so earnestly about the thing. Still, even though the day is not yet half over all already, I know that soon it will be gone. Like when you virtuously order a half pita of falafel and all that it's got in it is just three falafel balls and soon you're hitting your forehead with the butt of your oily hands, saying, why didn't I get the whole pita of falafel? But by then it's too late and your falafel is gone. Really, if you think about it, never ever, ever to return. Not so the promised podcast. We will vac for you next week and every week, reminding you that a thing doesn't have to be made of chickpeas to be greasy, controversial, and frankly, a little nauseating. On this the Promise podcast.