Ezra Klein (101:34)
Yeah. There is a tension between my work and my personhood in this. And I try to let one inform the other. Let me try to not be too abstract about it. Although I do find this, like, you know how open I want to go about it. Always tricky. I am, like, horrified. I was in. We were talking about Tokyo. I was in Tokyo on October 7th. I was taking a week off of my book leave, and I just arrived, and I just knew by the end of that day that my book leave was over. Like, this was the worst attack on Jewish people. Right. It was genuine savagery and butchery. And you could also sense what was going to come after. It was going to reshape everything. And if you're Jewish or you know Israel well, one thing it's worth knowing about Jewish people is when someone says, we're going to kill all of you, Jewish people believe them. Like, that's the thing ingrained. Israel is a very strange place. It's a place that has a very profound sense of its vulnerability and its weakness and has also become incredibly strong. And it has never resolved that tension. And Hamas understood that about Israel. It executed. It didn't think it was going to destroy Israel in this attack. Right. It's people on mopeds and paragliders and. But it wanted to create a massive reaction that either would bring in other regional players or trigger such an unfathomably violent response from Israel that the world would begin to see Israel the way Palestinians see Israel. And in that, they succeeded. And people can argue about at what point this was true, at what point we moved from the kind of response that any country would have done after an attack like that. Although I put out, the first piece I did back was a piece saying because they had not invaded Gaza yet. Like, don't do this. Do counterterrorism operations, try to destroy the leadership of Hamas. But they obviously want you to reinvade and occupy and create a horrendous death toll. Like, do not give Hamas what it wants. Israel did what it did. And it. I mean, at some point. And again, people can debate when exactly this was. Like, this moved into something indefensible. The level of truly unfathomable devastation of Gaza, the death toll, the induced starvation and constantly tweaking the dial, where it's just above the line. Until a couple weeks ago, where the international community would be like, where the headlines would become something Israel couldn't bear. But they've kept the Gazans in a state of hunger. They've used food as a weapon of war. At the same time, the acceleration of settlement building in the west bank, acceleration of violence in the west bank, like, the first and current reality is like, Israel's not under real threat any longer. This is just punishment of people, right? Punishment of the Palestinians. And, you know, Judaism has been defined in many ways in its historical trajectory. Like, when I grew up in my Reform synagogue, it's like both things were there. The lessons of having been driven from place to place, made a refugee over and over and over again. I think of Spencer Ackerman, who's a national security journalist, but an old friend who's on my show early in all this, and I always think of him saying, I cannot think of a less Jewish thing than to make another human being into a refugee. Like, that line has stayed with me. You know, it's a religion of strangers, right? You sure remember what it was like, be a stranger in the land of Egypt. And so on the one hand, you have that sort of lesson, the Diaspora, everywhere Jews go, that they have been able to thrive. It has to be a place of equal rights for minorities. And then you have the creation of Israel, which also at the same time is like. It's understood as the shelter, it's understood as the last place Jews can be. And because of that, it creates this other. This other strain of Judaism, which is a strain of strength, right? We need dominance. We need full control. We need, and understandably need security. And, you know, I remember being in my own synagogue growing up, and I was in, like, you know, as a teenager, after your bar mitzvah. I don't think confirmation class is usually a thing for Jewish people, but it was somehow in my synagogue, I remember my rabbi saying that Israel, the Israeli Jews, would be in the Right. To expel all Palestinians from the land, like in this shouting match from him and then like stalking out of the synagogue and like not going back. Like that was there then.
