Watching the Protests From Israel

Ultimately, the Gaza war protests sweeping campuses are about influencing Israeli politics. The protesters want to use economic divestment, American pressure and policy, and a broad sense of international outrage to change the decisions being made by Israeli leaders. So I wanted to know what it’s like to watch these protests from Israel. What are Israelis seeing? What do they make of them? Ari Shavit is an Israeli journalist and the author of “My Promised Land,” the best book I’ve read about Israeli identity and history. “Israelis are seeing a different war than the one that Americans see,” he tells me. “You see one war film, horror film, and we see at home another war film.” This is a conversation about trying to push divergent perspectives into relationship with each other: On the protests, on Israel, on Gaza, on Benjamin Netanyahu, on what it means to take societal trauma and fear seriously, on Jewish values, and more. Mentioned: “Building the Palestinian State with Salam Fayyad” by The Ezra Klein Show “To Save the Jewish Homeland” by Hannah Arendt Book Recommendations: Truman by David McCullough Parting the Waters by Taylor Branch Rosalind Franklin by Brenda Maddox Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Claire Gordon and Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Kristin Lin. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin and Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Lydia Polgreen, Dalit Shalom and Sonia Herrero.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Ezra Klein?

  From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:23Ezra Klein?

  I've been watching, as I imagine so many of you have, as the campus protests over Israel, over what's happening in Gaza, have exploded across the news.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  Clashes and arrests at colleges across the country. Demonstrations are now coming to a head.

• 0:39Speaker 02

  Tonight at University of Texas Austin, police, one by one, detaining pro-Palestinian protesters.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  In Oregon, at Portland State University. Atlanta's Emory University.

• 0:48Speaker 03

  University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  Fordham University's Manhattan campus. Texas State University. And the University of Washington. And on Long Island, students and police clashed at a protest at Stony Brook University today. An encampment was set up.

• 1:02Ezra Klein?

  I've been watching police go in and clear encampments in the place I went to college, at UCLA.

• 1:12Ezra Klein?

  I'm here in New York. What is happening in Columbia has been all over the news.

• 1:16Speaker 03

  More than 100 people were arrested after the school asked police to remove student protesters.

• 1:22Ezra Klein?

  And I found it hard, myself, to know what to think. One reason is that protests of this size are never one thing. On the one hand, you really do hear, at them, people just shouting anti-Semitic poison.

• 1:40Ezra Klein?

  And on the other hand, you can go to one of them and attend a beautiful Passover Seder inside the Columbia encampment.

• 1:56Ezra Klein?

  And trying to think about what to make of it. Whether this is a thing to cover, whether it is a distraction from the thing to cover. And I think the place I came to is that I wanted to keep an eye on power here. Who has the power to change the reality in Israel and in Gaza right now? I think there's an implicit default in people's thinking to some Deus ex machina, some outside player, maybe America or the UN, who can come impose some new reality. It's not how this works though. Really, it's Israel and it's Hamas. Hamas could release hostages. Israel could end its war or change its policies. And I think if you are listening to the protesters, the students, the idea that they

• 2:40Ezra Klein?

  really have is they're going to influence Israel. They want their universities to divest from Israel. They're using media coverage to try to push Joe Biden to change his policies towards Israel. But what that means then is that the effectiveness of these protests in the end relies on some engagement, some sense of Israeli politics and culture. And so I wondered, how are these campus protests being received in Israel? What are Israelis seeing? What do they make of it? When I think about Israel, I always think about this book written in 2013 by Ari Shavit, who's a longtime political reporter there, called My Promise Land. And I recommend this book to everybody. I think it is the single best book on what Israel is because it is a book that is better

• 3:25Ezra Klein?

  able than any other to hold both the idealism and violence at its heart, to take seriously both the way it was a miracle for some and a tragedy for others, to make you feel the work that went into it, this was not just given to the Israelis, and on the other hand, the dispossession that was required by it. It's a book that does something that not that much on this subject does, which is hold contradiction without trying to resolve it. And so I wanted to talk to Shavit, a somebody who understands Israel very deeply, about the protest movement, about the increasing tensions with Jews in the diaspora and Jews

• 4:05Ezra Klein?

  in Israel, and about Israeli politics itself and where it goes from here and what happens if it actually doesn't really go anywhere from here. As always, my email, [email protected].

• 4:24Ezra Klein?

  Ari Shavit, welcome to the show.

• 4:26Speaker 04

  So good to be with you. Thank you.

• 4:29Ezra Klein?

  So when you look at the campus protests sweeping America about Israel, what do you see?

• 4:37Speaker 04

  I'm deeply saddened. I'll tell you what I don't see. I don't see Gandhi-like marches. I don't see Martin Luther King kind of demonstrations. I don't see an understanding of the profound tragedy that we are trapped in.

• 4:58Speaker 04

  So if people were there marching, talking about the hostages, and talking about the 1,200 people who were slaughtered on October 7th, then I would deeply, deeply respect their anger. But when you see that it's all one-sided, and when you see that it goes from legitimate criticism of Israel to a kind of obsession with hating it, then I wonder, it makes me, beyond the sadness, it scares me. I think there is justified criticism, there is understandable criticism,

• 5:42Speaker 04

  and then there is vicious criticism bordering on antisemitism. When America was in Vietnam, there were justified anti-war marches all over. They never doubted the legitimacy of America, of the United States of America. When France was in Algeria and Indochina, there was criticism of the entire global left. No one said that the French Republic is illegitimate.

• 6:15Ezra Klein?

  In a way, I'm glad you brought up the Vietnam marches, because I think the thing you just said there is flatly wrong. The Vietnam marches, which were right in their moral direction, were full of people who questioned the fundamental legitimacy of America, full of people who were calling for victory over and the deaths of our soldiers, full of people who did not march with love, who were not Gandhi, who were not Martin Luther King Jr. Of course, they also had marches where there literally was Martin Luther King Jr. One of the difficult things about reading a mass protest movement is that it is never one thing. It is never, or very rarely, perfectly on message, perfectly respectable, perfectly managed.

• 7:00Ezra Klein?

  If it were, it often would not get very much coverage. And so let me agree with you that there are things at these marches that are repugnant. And I frankly have very little patience myself for the way this conversation ends up endlessly circling this question of, does Israel have the right to exist? Israel exists, but many of the people of these marches do not hate Israel for being Israel. They certainly do not hate Jewish people for being Jewish. These Jewish students, as I understand them, and I've spoken to some of them, they feel they have to choose between their political values and any kind of solidarity with the

• 7:43Ezra Klein?

  state of Israel. What do you say to them?

• 7:47Speaker 04

  I would ask them, and ask even you, to make a distinction between the Israeli government, between the Israeli prime minister, and between the Israeli people and the Israeli project. I am as angry at Prime Minister Netanyahu as you are, or as the young demonstrators are, because Mr. Netanyahu is endangering the lives of my children. I'm angry at the Israeli extreme right, just as you are, or the young demonstrators are,

• 8:26Speaker 04

  because they are tainting and threatening the dream that my grandparents dreamt, and my grandparents and parents fulfilled in the most miraculous way.

• 8:40Speaker 04

  But there is a distinction between that and the Israeli project, the Israeli state. Because at the end, look, when I listened to some of this discourse, people are talking that Israel is a colonizing nation. We are, have been the ultimate other of white Europe for fifteen hundred years. We never knew where we'll sleep next year. We will never know what will happen to us. And then we became white Europe's ultimate victim, ultimate victim. So we ran away from white Europe. We were not sent by white Europe. How can you totally attack the right of a homeless people to have a home?

• 9:26Speaker 04

  We are not part of imperialism. We are a small persecuted people that somehow saved itself at the last moment. And in order to prevent the death of a people, they transfer them from one continent and several continents. They revive the language, they build a society, created a state, a nation. It's an incredible, incredible human endeavor. You don't have to be Jewish or pro-Israeli to see that.

• 9:58Speaker 04

  And you know, when I look around, where are we compared to Australia, Canada, New Zealand, or you folks? When I see that distortion, I find it difficult to deal with, difficult, because the distortion is so extreme, so true. And I wrote about it and I'm willing to talk about it. We've sinned, we made mistakes, we are in a tragedy. But to totally overlook the justice at the heart of this project and to just see the flaws and the problems, I find that a distortion.

• 10:34Ezra Klein?

  It was interesting to me that you kept coming back to the word distortion here. Because the word you used in your book is contradiction. I was looking at my notes from My Promised Land. I have, and you should take this as a compliment, 188 highlights in that book. It's a lot of highlights.

• 10:50Speaker 04

  Thank you very much.

• 10:51Ezra Klein?

  I want to read you one of them, and I want to hear how it sounds to you right now. You write, "Zionism skated on thin ice. On the one hand, it was a national liberation movement, but on the other, it was a colonialist enterprise. It intended to save the lives of one people by the dispossession of another. In its first 50 years, Zionism was aware of its complexity and acted accordingly. It was very careful not to be associated with colonialism and tried not to cause unnecessary hardship. It made sure it was a democratic, progressive, and enlightened movement, collaborating with the world's forces of progress. With great sophistication, Zionism handled the contradiction at its core."

• 11:36Ezra Klein?

  I'm curious how that paragraph that you wrote sounds to you now, because the thing that people are picking up on, what you're calling the distortion, is they're seeing one side of it has now taken over, and maybe they're right.

• 11:51Speaker 04

  It's a wonderful question. When my great-grandparents came to Palestine, to Eretz Yisrael, they understood that we have to make it clear to ourselves and to others that we are not another colonial project, that we are not like others. And they understood that while they have a particular mission, saving the Jewish people from death, not just oppression, they have a universal mission. You know, the idea of the kibbutz, for example, was this combination, that on the one hand, you want to settle the land, you want to build a national project, but simultaneously,

• 12:35Speaker 04

  you want to contribute to the world. You have a message. By the way, that's my understanding of Judaism. It's not just about national entity, national existence, and definitely not about power. You need the inspirational part, you need the moral dimension. David Ben-Gurion and these people understood that. Now, we had the right to try to throw a nuclear bomb over Germany. We did exactly opposite. We signed agreements with Germany in 1952 to help us build the country. They were so much into this balance that we experience what we experience, but we will build. Our revenge will be to live, to bring children, to bring life.

• 13:19Speaker 04

  We came to death, we are surrounded by death, but we choose life. That's the Israel I love and admire. Sadly, decades later, we surrendered to the victimhood ethos, and we used the Holocaust, which is a horrible event, and we became more and more... We lost that balance of fighting for ourselves while seeing the others. And then we find ourselves in a place where extreme right-wing Israelis help extreme left people in America lead us all into this kind of distortion.

• 13:59Ezra Klein?

  There is a separation that gets made there in your answer, but here constantly, when I heard Chuck Schumer, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer's speech about Israel, he was making the separation between the government and the people. And I wonder about this because Netanyahu has won again and again and again and again. If you are 18 and you are in college right now, he has been Prime Minister of Israel for almost your entire life, the vast majority of it. He has been chosen. His coalitions have been chosen. The movement right has been chosen. And so I wonder whether there is this separation. Because when I even think of Donald Trump, he represents something.

• 14:44Ezra Klein?

  He did not just take over in a hostile boardroom maneuver. He appealed to people and they wanted him, and they want him again, many of them. And there is something in Netanyahu that is wanted. Now, maybe he is seen as incompetent, maybe he is seen as a failure, but it is not clear that what is current Israelis against him is the right-wing project so much and the callousness of it so much as a fact that he did a terrible job managing security. Defend this cut to me.

• 15:13Speaker 04

  So let's make a distinction here, if I may, between previous years and October 7th and afterwards. So if you look at the last few years or the Netanyahu decade, what you've seen is a terrible failure of the center-left, and by the way, of the international community as well. Because basically, what happened,

• 15:36Speaker 04

  we asked our people, I as an active in the peace movement at the time, we asked our people to accept the two-state solution idea, the peace idea. Time after time, they voted for it. They voted for Rabin, they voted for Barak. We went to the David P summit in 2000, it failed. We went to the Annapolis summit in 2007, it failed. We even had the process under President Barak and John Kerry in 2014, and it failed. We never came back to our people, saying, “True, the old peace process failed. We've learned from the mistakes, and therefore, we offer something new and realistic that addresses the harsh realities of the Middle East.” I'll say here in brackets,

• 16:21Speaker 04

  “My life has been, my public life, has been about the struggle between liberal and moral values and the brutality of the historic reality I live in.” So the center-left and the international community have not delivered anything to deal with the legitimate fears and concerns of Israelis, who tried the two-state solution so many times, and it failed. It caused terrible suffering for the Palestinians, which called terrible suffering for Israelis. And then comes Netanyahu and uses these fears. So historically, in a sense, I would say Netanyahu is not only the sin, he's the punishment for the failure of the center-left to bring a realistic vision.

• 17:05Speaker 04

  Israelis have not become evil and crazy and racist. We have that minority in us, but it's not the majority. The main problem is fear that was not addressed and the failure of the old peace process. Now, let's talk about after October 7th. I want you to understand, and I think it's so important, Israelis are seeing a different war than the one that Americans see.

• 17:32Speaker 04

  You see one war film, horror film, and we see at home another war film, horror film. Israelis are stuck in October 7th, while the world has forgot October 7th, nearly forgot October 7th. So Israelis are totally traumatized, are totally traumatized. Each one of us knows someone who was murdered, who was kidnapped, who was terribly wounded. My wife sees terrorists coming into our garden, and it's all over. We, we experience real fear. Now, it's not just Jewish neurosis. It's not just in our minds.

• 18:16Speaker 04

  I want to compare it to 9/11. What we experience is, number-wise, it's like 10 times or 15 times worse than 9/11. But it's an ongoing 9/11. Imagine a 9/11 where afterwards Al Qaeda keeps 133, 250 at the beginning hostages, but combine the Iran hostages crisis of 79 with Al Qaeda of 2001. And think of the fact that the ongoing 9/11, you would have had Al Qaeda in Mexico and Iran in Canada. It's a nightmare. It's surreal. So if you want Israelis to replace Netanyahu,

• 19:00Speaker 04

  to move away from the extreme right, you have to address their fears, their legitimate fears. Once we address this, we can demand of Israelis to have much more empathy and generosity and really try peace in a new way, in a realistic way, to, to stop this terrible tragedy.

• 19:18Ezra Klein?

  Let me say first that I agree with everything you just said about both the psychology and the geography of this. I often try to say to people who see it as obvious that Israel's response has gone way too far, which I do believe, by the way, it has gone way too far. I do say, look, imagine that 9/11 was conducted by an Al Qaeda that ruled Canada and what we would have done in response. There is, I said this over and over and over again in the podcast I did after 10/7, there is no country that would permit that kind

• 19:57Ezra Klein?

  of incursion and massacre and not respond with overwhelming force. At the same time, I want to connect this back to what you were just saying about the peace process because one thing that I think Israelis completely disregard now is that in the background, long before 10/7, they had let themselves become the villains. When you say that Israelis feel we tried peace and it was not responded to, I think there's a lot of truth to that. How much everybody tried, that there are contested narratives of these peace processes, that's all true as well, but I do think that there were honest attempts to try to find

• 20:36Ezra Klein?

  some equilibrium that was not this. I would say that went until about 2008. And then what happened, and I think this is the much more dominant narrative for people who have followed this and are younger here, is peace was abandoned and the settlements kept getting built. And so it wasn't just that the peace process failed and then went into a state of dormancy. It was that the peace process failed and then it was made more and more impossible year by year, that there was an active effort, the laying down of concrete, the paving of roads, the erection of buildings, to make it impossible to imagine that trade of land. And so there's both the genuine problem you are pointing to, the question

• 21:21Ezra Klein?

  of how can anyone in Israel feel safe if Hamas exists in Gaza? But there's also this other question, which is, how can Israel be safe? How can it exist? How can people here support it if it allows itself to settle into this role?

• 21:37Ezra Klein?

  As the occupier.

• 21:39Speaker 04

  So first of all, the short answer is if you want Israelis to change, and I think they should, or we should, the first thing is not to hold maps of the entire land between the river and the sea, all Palestinian, and basically say that I and my daughter and my wife and my two sons have to leave and go back to Poland, because this is right now what is said in campuses. So if you want Israelis to take the risk again, and I think we must, and I'll get into it, the international community led by America has to hug and support democratic Israel.

• 22:22Speaker 04

  Beyond that, I agree, I wouldn't say, use the word villain the way you use, but with everything else you said, I agree. So I wouldn't say Israel is a villain, but obviously there are Israeli villains, just like there are American villains and European villains, there are Israeli villains.

• 22:36Ezra Klein?

  I think it is too compli-- I just want to say that I think this is way too compli-- to say anybody is a villain. I'm saying that for many people, Israel came to appear the villain.

• 22:44Speaker 04

  Oh, okay.

• 22:45Ezra Klein?

  They were the stronger player.

• 22:46Speaker 04

  Oh, well, the strong, we'll get into the strong. So, so you know what, let's get to the stronger. First of all, talking of distortions, one of the great distortions here that has, it's not only about Israel, is that you assume that the weak is just and the strong is wrong. That's a profoundly morally flawed statement. Because if I'll parachute you into Europe of 1944 and early 1945, the Germans were very weak and the Allies were bombing them in Dresden and other places. So if you follow that logic, that distorted logic, you'll be pro-Nazi. So I ask everybody to get out of this.

• 23:29Speaker 04

  This is something that happened in our intellectual world in the last 20, 30 years, and it's a distortion not only regarding Israel. Point number two, Israel is not that strong. The flaw of Israel itself that became arrogant and cocky, people did not understand how vulnerable Israel is. Regarding the Palestinians, we are stronger. But there is a larger context here. What is threatened now is the entire free world and world order. You have a Chinese, Russian, Iranian axis attacking everything we believe in, everything we believe in. We have to see the larger context. We cannot be blind.

• 24:14Speaker 04

  Ezra, this is the most intimidating Jewish moment in our lifetime. It's the most, one of the most painful Palestinian moments in our lifetime. And it's one of the most dangerous global moments in our lifetime. We have to wake up. This is a mega, mega, mega event. What happened on October 7th was an attack on the Jewish state, on a democratic state, on the Jewish people, and in many ways, on the post-war world order.

• 25:21Ezra Klein?

  There is much, I think, that people outside Israel do not see clearly about Israel. There are things people inside Israel think do not see clearly about Israel. And one of them is strength. And so the thing that I see again and again is this effort to then create a much larger set of enemies to justify a deep and very understandable, I come from Jewish history too, a deep and understandable feeling of vulnerability, of weakness, of always being on the precipice. But I'm in America. And so what I understand, I think, better than Israelis do is what the American politics are, at least right now. Iran was never going to be a threat to Israel in this war because as soon as it began,

• 26:02Ezra Klein?

  America moved battleships into place to make very clear that if Iran joined, it would be annihilated. When there was an attack that led to the killing of a major Iranian commander, Iran launched a drone strike that it understood, everybody understood, back and forth, this was well calibrated to be shot down. Israel did a calibrated response. Israel and Iran have been in a very calibrated series of just enough, in a way, to maintain their domestic politics on both sides. The danger for Israel, which is much stronger than I think you give it credit for, in part because it is backed by the strongest military the world has ever known. It is using American bombs now.

• 26:46Ezra Klein?

  It is backed by American warships now. And when you say that the world needs to hug Israel, it is true that protesters on college campuses are unfurling maps in which Israel does not exist. It is also true, the actual president of the United States of America has wrapped Israel in a very, very, very tight hug. He's then been spat on again and again and again by Benjamin Netanyahu, which I think we probably share a view on how that's gone. But what would make Israel weak is the loss of that support. What would make Israel actually vulnerable is if the politics that is emerging now among young Americans becomes the dominant politics of America when they move into power, which is how things typically work.

• 27:30Ezra Klein?

  There is this paradoxical way in which the insistence upon vulnerability and what vulnerability makes possible, practical, or necessary is, in the long run, it seems to me, the thing that could create real vulnerability, a sort of unwillingness to recognize like how much support for Israel in the long run and the strength will depend on whether it is seen as a moral nation by the generation that is going to take power here and that when they look at it, do not see that anymore and also do not see anybody trying to prove that to them.

• 28:05Speaker 04

  So I, you're preaching to the converted. But let me try to explain. First of all, let's begin with President Biden. Because, you know, not enough Israelis express enough gratitude to the United States generally and specifically to President Biden. So let me try to do my bit. I think that what President Biden did in the first three days, in the first three weeks, in the first three months of this war was incredible.

• 28:39Speaker 04

  It was a heroic, realistic act of leadership. Not in spite of his age, but because of his age. Because he has the World War II at his background and he has the Cold War in his bones. Now, I totally agree. And look, Ezra, I've been reading you. You've been reading me, I've been reading you. What you write about the three generations and their attitude to Israel is totally, totally true. I was speaking to some, in some lecture I gave in Cambridge, to some young students who were, you know, confused about Israel and the conflict. And the older one among them came to me and she said to me,

• 29:24Speaker 04

  Ari, listen, I had Rabin. I had the Oslo process. I had an Israel I could identify with and look up to. What the younger Jewish kids in the diaspora have been experiencing in the last 20 years, that they are asked to defend a nation with whose values they cannot identify.

• 29:47Speaker 04

  I'm not one who using the external threats, the Chinese, Russian and Iranian dimension in order to run away from the Palestinian issue, not at all. Israel has to deal in a much more courageous and generous way with a Palestinian issue. And Israel is guilty of the fact that in the last 15 years, we ignored it and it became like the elephant in the room and then we saw what happened. But while we, our commitment, our responsibility, our mission is to deal with the Palestinian issue, you have to remember that Israel is not France, not America, and not China. Israel is a small intimidated nation.

• 30:28Speaker 04

  So I ask all people of good faith and decency to look at the larger picture. I'm not asking it as an excuse to ignore the Palestinian issue, in no way.

• 30:38Ezra Klein?

  There's this language you hear that you're using. I'm starting, I've used it, it's not a criticism, the Palestinian issue. But I want to make this more direct. Palestinians, right? I mean, we talk about a battle for Israel's soul, but the battle happening right now is in Gaza. The question right now is whether or not Israel will enter Rafa. And one of the things that makes it hard to support what Israel is doing, for me, is I don't believe the war aims. If you could prove to me that if you went into Rafa, this place where more than half of Gazans are now huddled, you would somehow, with the same intelligence community that could not predict 10-7, figure out exactly who is a Hamas fighter and who is a Hamas

• 31:21Ezra Klein?

  commander, and remove them, kill them, imprison them, whatever it is. And as such, then Hamas or something like it could not reconstitute itself, and some other more moderate leadership would emerge, and negotiations for some kind of stabilization could begin, fine. But I genuinely do not understand what the theory of this is. You talk about how traumatized Israelis are, and they are, and every single person here who forgets that or does not take it seriously has walled themselves off from understanding the issue. Everything you say about that is right, and it actually infuriates me. But do Palestinians not feel this grief?

• 32:02Ezra Klein?

  Are they not being traumatized right now, not just the loss of life and the loss of children in particular, but the loss of homes, of livelihoods? How do Israelis imagine a people as traumatized now as the Palestinians are? Not them as an issue, but them as people? What security emerges from this?

• 32:26Speaker 04

  So, again, whether it's good or bad, I actually agree with you. Mr. Sinwar is an evil genius. And Israel walked right into his trap. The head of Hamas. Exactly. What's the Sinwar genius? He put Israel in a kind of lose-lose situation. Mr. Sinwar is not only willing, but he wants to sacrifice the civilian population of Gaza in order to change the minds and hearts of the civilian population of the United States of America and turn it against Israel. And he's using the hostages in order to break the spirit of Israeli society.

• 33:10Speaker 04

  So Mr. Sinwar understands what sadly our generals did not understand, which is war is not only a military operation. It's not only about tanks and planes. That if you win the war in Khan Yunis, but you lose it in Harvard Square, you lost the war. You lost the war. This is exactly what Sinwar wanted. And sadly, the way the war was waged on our side, and I think we had to do it, and we had to defend ourselves, and we had the right to defend ourselves, but we should have been much more sophisticated. It should have been clear to any person watching television, or TikTok, or whatever in the United States, that we are fighting Hamas, we are not fighting the Palestinians.

• 33:55Speaker 04

  And right now, the opposite has happened. So definitely, I oppose the Rafa. Going into Rafa is exactly what Sinwar wants. If Israel will make that mistake, it will be a decisive, tragic mistake. Mr. Netanyahu, all his life, was a Churchill wannabe. He wanted to be Churchill. Here, he has an amazing tragic opportunity to be Churchill. But what did Churchill do? Basically, two things. One, national unity. And two, he went to America, he went to Washington, he talked to FDR, he convinced FDR to stand by Britain. This is what we should have done. So I'm totally with you. We should not go into Rafa.

• 34:38Speaker 04

  We should find a way to end the Gaza War. Once all the hostages are back, we have to prevent a regional war, and we have to understand what kind of danger we all face.

• 34:49Ezra Klein?

  Here I'm going to ask you not to speak as you, but as a reporter and as somebody who knows the Israeli political and military establishments, because this is a place where putting it all on Netanyahu is simply not true. Benny Gantz, who is the likeliest next leader of Israel, he agrees that somehow this war is going to achieve the goals. He agrees that they should go into Rafa. If you look at the interview that Yair Lapid, the opposition leader, just gave to one of my colleagues, he agrees this war needs to be continued. Benny Morris, the revisionist historian who has done so much to increase our understanding of the expulsion of Arabs during Israel's war that created the state, he agrees they need to go into Rafa.

• 35:31Ezra Klein?

  So there is a wide agreement over anything you might call, from the right to the center-left, that they need to go into Rafa, that somehow this will make Israel safer, that Hamas can be sufficiently degraded. Why do they think, something so many of us seem to think is not true, which is that what Hamas is, is not an idea, not an expression of rage that will find its way out, but a military unit?

• 35:58Speaker 04

  So, the good news is that quite a number of leading Israeli strategists, ex-generals, serious people have been saying in the last week or two what I just told you. They said going into Rafa would be to walk into a Sinwar trap. It's a strategic trap, and we should not go into it. So, on this issue, I'm not totally lonely. I think there are other people who think, don't get me wrong, I think that eventually Hamas has to be crushed. Look, Hamas is threatening the lives of Israelis and the liberty of Palestinians, and we all have to unite in eradicating Hamas and liberate the Palestinians.

• 36:43Speaker 04

  I want Gaza to be Dubai by 2040, 2050. That's the future of Gaza. We need to bring in a coalition of moderate Arabs and moderate Palestinians. We need a Marshall Plan for Gaza. We need to turn it to something that every-- Young person in Gaza who's suffering so much today will have a future, will have hope, definitely food and water, but much more than that. Gaza has to be an amazing project of the international community led by the moderate and rich Arabs who have the resources, the capability, and who know how to deal with radical religious sentiments. So we have to do that, but we'll have to defeat Hamas. But I'm saying right now, this thing is in went so wrong.

• 37:28Speaker 04

  There is so much suffering, there is no hope, there is no breakthrough. We have to find a way to stop the fighting again. Once all the hostages are back, all the hostages have to be back. I want every Palestinian to feel that he has more freedom, more prosperity, more hope every year, while Israel's security is not in danger.

• 37:52Ezra Klein?

  But this gets to something that you said a few minutes ago, which is the world cannot understand what Israel will or will not do. It cannot influence what Israel will or will not do until the trauma and the fear and the grief of Israelis is taken seriously. And that if you want to be a protest movement, if you want to be a politician, if you want to be a stakeholder that is somehow influencing Israel, you have to start there. And I believe you are right, but that is also true for Palestinians. And what I hear is a sort of jumping right to this sort of world where there's nothing like Hamas, there's an international coalition, somehow so much money's been poured into Gaza

• 38:35Ezra Klein?

  that maybe Israel allowed this may, which seems unlikely to me, but that it now looks like Dubai. But before you get to any of that, you have somehow done something to take seriously the trauma, the grief, the anger, the fury, the loss of Palestinians. I mean, one thing your book does very well. Is, I think, force people to reckon, not with 1967 and the Six Day War, but 1948, and the violence and the loss and the expulsions of that war, how they still shape the region, how they still shape how everybody sees each other. This one is fresher, right? This is happening right now.

• 39:18Ezra Klein?

  You are right to demand the world take your grief seriously. You are right to demand they take your fear seriously. But what does it mean to take the grief and fear of Palestinians seriously? Because that is not something, not just something I don't see Israelis doing, but I don't see anybody even discussing that it needs to happen. And if it doesn't happen, then I don't understand how you think you will ever live in peace or even live in security.

• 39:44Speaker 04

  Once again, I totally agree. And I really, you know, sorry for using psychological terms or emotional terms.

• 39:52Ezra Klein?

  No, I think we need those here.

• 39:54Speaker 04

  Exactly. I think, I think the conflict, this conflict is about history, identity, and soul, and feelings, and humiliation, and anger, and fear. This is about, if you, and again, part of the failure of previous peace processes, that they had the economic dimension, strategic dimension, they never dealt with the deeper identity issues, and you have to deal with them. Look, I understand why Palestinians would hate me because of the conflict, the tragedy of the conflict. But Palestinian leadership, Yasser Arafat and such people, the moderates, did not care enough about Palestinians. You know, there was the old, almost ancient stink song,

• 40:37Speaker 04

  "I hope the Russians love their children too." And the Russians did love their children too, and that's why the Cold, the First Cold War ended the way it ended. But the problem that we don't have enough constructive forces in the Palestinian leadership who would care about their own people. There are two terrible metaphors in the tragedy of the conflict in recent years. One was suicide bombing. What was suicide bombing, which were horrible 20 years ago, 25 years ago?

• 41:08Speaker 04

  Suicide bombing is when your hate for your enemy is stronger than your love for yourself. And now we have the tunnels. Now we have the tunnels. Rather than build skyscrapers of hope in Gaza, everything went into these dark, evil tunnels. Each one of us has to cure his own society from the poison and all the toxic materials of the conflict that has had poisoned all of us. We're all poisoned, okay? We're all poisoned. We need now a process of detox that helps both Israelis and Palestinians at the same time to move forward to something that is more constructive, which you now see in the Middle East, which was not the case before.

• 41:51Speaker 04

  My Palestinian hero is Salam Fayyad. Salam Fayyad is the one Palestinian leader who really tried to do nation building. So obviously, he had these grievances regarding us, and I understand it. But he tried to build something. We need, out of this chaos and mess and tragedy, we need Salam Fayyad attitude combined with an MBZ attitude. Look, the good news in the Middle East is that the first time in a century, we have Arab modernity that works and is successful. And the Emirates are like the symbol and the example for that. Because what's the United Emirates all about?

• 42:33Speaker 04

  It's about moving forward, solution, not going back to the past, not getting into victimhood, but building things. So if we will have MBZ-like forces, supporting Salam Fayyad-like Palestinians, I think we can begin to move forward from the agony and suffering into something that is more promising.

• 42:56Ezra Klein?

  You say if there was something like Salam Fayyad, who was a former prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, you would see a willing Israeli partner. But I had Salam Fayyad on this show a couple of months back, and people should go listen to it. And here was somebody who is doing everything you're saying should be done. And frankly, he had a better time in Israeli politics than this one. And he had built up a lot more economic capacity within the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank where he was governing. He had built up profound security cooperation. He had exiled and expelled much of Hamas. He had made the West Bank far safer.

• 43:36Ezra Klein?

  And what he says happened is he could not get the Israelis to work with him, that they would not stop their incursions, they would not loosen the restrictions, they would not make it easier for him to build. Salam Fayyad had all kinds of problems, but he will tell you, he told me that really his biggest one was that Israel wouldn't hold up its end of the bargain. And so there is this truth that at many points, Israel's not had a partner who could deliver peace, or even maybe wanted to deliver peace. It is also true that there have been points when the Palestinians, or at least some Palestinians, have not had an Israeli partner to deliver peace because some Israelis don't want it, because they want the West Bank, because they want control, because they want Hamas

• 44:20Ezra Klein?

  and the Palestinian Authority split, because they don't want international support shifting to the Palestinians. So there is this tension between the call for someone like Salam Fayyad and in the actual historical experience of the actual living Salam Fayyad.

• 44:35Speaker 04

  So after expressing my admiration for Salam Fayyad, I don't want to do polemics regarding him. I really admire him and I really want him back. I really think that he and people like him are an essential part of the solution. But I'll say two things. One, Salam Fayyad had terrible problems with corruption in the Palestinian Authority, including by Mr. Abbas, who's leading it. They wanted him out. The second element that I want to remind you, that while Salam Fayyad was in power, we had a prime minister in Israel by the name of Yitzhak Rabin, who went to the Annapolis Peace Summit with George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice and offered 100% of the territory, but with some territorial exchange.

• 45:20Speaker 04

  Yitzhak Rabin made the most generous, some Israelis feel reckless, offer to the Palestinians. And it was rejected. So after it was rejected, Netanyahu was elected. Israelis became...

• 45:36Speaker 04

  Again, they are not profoundly more right-wing, but they are more skeptical, more fearful, more, it's more difficult to bring them. We need to find a way to get out of this vicious circle. And again, don't get me wrong, in the last 10 years, extreme right-wing Israeli governments, and with a lot of influence of the settler parties and the extreme right, Israel was not there. But the reason they were elected was the failure of, over 15 years, we tried the old peace and it failed.

• 46:05Ezra Klein?

  One thing threaded through your book is an appreciation of tragedy and a willingness to see your own story, Israel's story, the story of the Palestinians as a story of tragedy. And part of tragedy is timing, that there are moments where an opening exists for something else and they're missed. And then there's a moment on the other side and it's missed. And something I think that that history should teach us, or force us to reckon with, is that there's not going to be perfection here. There are not going to be perfect leaders on either side. There's not a Palestinian Authority free of corruption. Frankly, there's not even right now a Palestinian Authority with legitimacy.

• 46:47Ezra Klein?

  There is not going to be an Israeli polity that moves from where it is now, all the way to where you are or farther than that. And so there is this question, to me, of what happens if this is where we are? If the Palestinians hate Israelis even more than ever after this, whenever the after this is? If Israelis are even more terrified of the security risk of what would happen to them if you had a Palestinian state that had sufficient self-determination to become strong? Because the stronger and richer and freer such a state became, the more it could one day exact revenge. I think that is how a lot of people think.

• 47:33Ezra Klein?

  So what if we don't get perfect leaders? What if we don't even get very good leaders? Which is, I think, the recent history of this conflict. What then?

• 47:40Speaker 04

  Look, we are all fearful now.

• 47:43Speaker 04

  The worst can happen. Ezra, remember my words. The worst may happen. What October 7th and whatever happened since taught us is that it's a make or break moment. If we will let things just deteriorate, horrible, horrible, horrible things might happen in the Middle East within a few years. So it's a more responsibility upon all of us to get to work and to create a different path and find a different path so we can prevent catastrophe and actually bring back some hope. Look, human life is a tragedy. We all die. We all die.

• 48:28Speaker 04

  We forget it some of the time, but we all die. And you make the most of the path of the road that you have on this good earth. So we have to take this tragedy and act in a sensible, rational, pragmatic manner in order to bring it to a better place.

• 49:11Ezra Klein?

  You know, there's this 1948 essay by the philosopher Hannah Rent called "To Save the Jewish Homeland." And the thing she's describing, I've been thinking about this essay, which people can can and should read online. And there's a lot in here, but the thing she's discussing is that there had been a cacophony of views about Israel, about Zionism in the Jewish community.

• 49:34Ezra Klein?

  And then came the war, the fighting, the founding, and that collapsed into unanimity. And she thought that the unanimity was very dangerous because what was needed at the founding of Israel was to take seriously the insights of the people who thought this could go very, very badly. And she says later in that essay that if you get the Israel of pure Zionism, the Israel of pure confidence, that what you will end up getting is an Israel that ends up diverging from the interests of the Jewish diaspora. The Jewish diaspora is deeply liberal. The Jewish diaspora is exilic Judaism, as people say it. It is the Judaism of being the stranger,

• 50:18Ezra Klein?

  the Judaism of being a refugee. My friend Spencer Ackerman, the National Security reporter, said at the beginning of this war, something I keep thinking about, that he cannot think of less Jewish thing than to make another person a refugee. And then there is what Israel is as a state, which it has made many people refugees, but it also has the interests of a state. And states change everybody, not just Jewish people. They make you very quickly forget the lessons of being a refugee. And that wedge of values, that is the thing that I think people are beginning to recognize and people in Israel are underemphasizing how dangerous it is for them.

• 50:57Speaker 04

  I couldn't agree more. So if I may, I'll tell you now, when I wrote My Promised Land, the chapter I loved writing most was the chapter about the 1950s. Because what Israel did in its first decade of existence is the most heroic and breathtaking enterprise one can imagine. 650,000 Jews absorbed 1 million refugees, no, 1 million, 1 million immigrants, of which half were, or many of them were Holocaust survivors and other refugees from our Arab world. Now, it's as if America today would absorb 500 million immigrants.

• 51:40Speaker 04

  I understand you have a slight problem with 7 million. So it was an incredible, incredible achievement. But what's so impressive about it? That those people who came out of Auschwitz with numbers on their arms, with nightmares at night, they never surrendered to victimhood. They never saw themselves as victims. They didn't hate. And for me, the beauty of being Jewish, of the Jewish tradition, you know, I'm a non-observant Jew, but I'm a very passionate Jew. The beauty is that we are a universal tribe. We are a tribe, but with a universal mission and a universal commitment.

• 52:23Speaker 04

  And what happened in recent decades, that Israel went into the tribal, the particular. While diaspora Jews, non-orthodox, went into the universal. And again, I think we should meet again at this universal tribalism. At this, this beauty of a tribe being proud of our heritage, of who we are. We have rights like any, any others and we are, we should not be ashamed of ourselves. We should be proud of ourselves, but at the same time, having universal values at the core of our existence, whether in Israel or in the diaspora.

• 52:59Ezra Klein?

  But do people in the other political movements in Israel, I understand that they think that outside Israel, we're naive. That outside Israel, we don't understand, and this is probably true, what it feels like to live inside this kind of danger. But do they actually understand that if they demand that the price of supporting Israel is to give up on universalism, to give up on all these other commitments that are core to the values of at least most Western Jews? I mean, you can see what our politics are. Some people will choose Israel. I mean, there is some evidence, in fact, post-10/7. And I understand this myself, like it has forced me to deeply reengage with Israel. There is some people who will choose Israel.

• 53:44Ezra Klein?

  They will say, push comes to shove, the particularism is dominant in me. There are many who who won't. And you can say a lot about what is happening on campuses and you can say a lot about what is happening at the protests. I got an email the other day from a grad student at Columbia. And he said something to me that I've been hearing from a lot of students, which is that he doesn't feel the protests are anti-Semitic, though they do attract antisemites. What he does feel is that he is being asked to choose between a kind of thoroughgoing anti-Zionism, right? A Zionism that believes Israel to be a stain that must be erased and being a sort of social progressive on his campus in in good standing.

• 54:29Ezra Klein?

  And I don't know what choice he'll make. I don't know what choice a lot of people make. But do people in Israel? This is my question, as a Jew living in America. Do people in Israel, the kind of people in leadership in Israel, the Benny Gantz's of the world, do they understand that if that is the choice ultimately, that a lot of people are going to choose their politics over a country they don't live in? That they don't have this memory of it as a refuge or a miracle? They have a memory of it as something that makes their day to day defense of who they are difficult? Because that seems to me to be what's happening to a lot of college students right now. I don't know what they will choose, but it appears to me to be a more significant threat to the relationship between the diaspora in Israel than people in Israel really seem

• 55:14Ezra Klein?

  to realize.

• 55:16Speaker 04

  I said before, and I'll repeat it for once. You have justified criticism of Israel because there is wrongdoing. You have understandable criticism of Israel because some things that are actually justified, but it's difficult to understand when you don't get the complexity. There is the vicious criticism of Israel and there's antisemitism. And I'll tell you where I see the line crossed. When people deny the Jewish people's right for self-determination, and when people deny the Jewish people's right for self-defense,

• 55:56Speaker 04

  that's when vicious criticism becomes antisemitism. That's the new antisemitism. Just the way that my great-great-great-grandfather was treated in his shtetl in Eastern Europe as the odd person, as the other, as the one who is not like the others. This is the way the Jewish people is treated now by many, not all, but it was treated by many. And I say, you know, when you come to judge Israel, you should criticize many things, but take a universal standard. You want to criticize the way we wage war?

• 56:38Speaker 04

  Compare it to the way America waged war in Iraq and Afghanistan and in other places.

• 56:44Ezra Klein?

  Look, I want to say I agree with you. I agree with you, and I think this point is fair. But the wedge being driven, the thing I want to push you to answer to, or at least think about here, the wedge being driven between Jewish students in Israel is not, should Israel exist? Do the Jewish people have a right to self-determination? But if Israel exists like this, if it is this Israel, if it keeps going down this path, is it really consistent with who you believe yourself to be to support it? That there could be a self-determining Israel that you could support? Yes, absolutely. But for a lot of us, frankly, for me, that's not been around for 15 years. It's easy to rebut the antisemite.

• 57:29Ezra Klein?

  But that's not the thing that is going to wedge these Jews, these young Jews from Israel. The thing that is going to wedge them from Israel is actual things happening in Israel, the things that Smotrich and Ben Gavir and frankly Netanyahu actually say. And so, I don't know, I worry sometimes people are... They have managed to convince themselves that if they can argue down the antisemites, they have solved the problem. But I think they are distracting themselves from the problem with the antisemites.

• 57:55Speaker 04

  I don't want this situation where it seems that Israel is in conflict with liberal America. This is unbearable for me. This is unbearable. So I think that the extreme right in Israel...

• 58:13Speaker 04

  That speaks in the names of nationalism is destroying the nation-state of the Jewish people. I think that some in the extreme right who speak in the name of Zionism endanger the Zionist project. And some in the extreme right who speak in the name of Judaism are betraying half the Jewish people. How can extreme right and extreme orthodox people speak in the name of Judaism and actually send away half or more than half of the Jewish people? We live in a free world, thank God.

• 58:55Speaker 04

  Still, I cannot expect any Jewish youngster, any young man or young girl, to stick to their Judaism and stick to their commitment to a Jewish state when that state turns its back on their values altogether. That doesn't fly. It doesn't work. And I say, it's not only non-democratic and non-liberal, it's non-Jewish. Look, talking about the Jewish mission of this time, we need to build a non-extremist Jewish coalition in the diaspora in Israel to fight the dark forces. Look, we are having a fight for, it's a battle for Israel's soul. It's a real battle for Israel's soul.

• 59:40Speaker 04

  We have dark forces. They are not the majority, they took over the government, they are not the majority, but they are there. And in order to fight them, we all have to be much better than we were. We have to be much more courageous and smart politically, but we need, we need a kind of great Jewish coalition for that. So let's take this grave danger that we are now all aware of. And deal with it, again, in my admiration to the Herzels and Weizmanns and the Ben-Gurions, is when they thought a terrible threat, they rose to the challenge. And they changed reality in a, in an amazing way. You know, Heinz Weizmann, one of the Zionist leaders, you used to say, "You don't have to be crazy to be a Zionist, but it helps."

• 1:00:25Speaker 04

  They were a bunch of dreamers. They, they, they dealt with an impossible reality. Today, there is so much more that we have in Israel and you have in the diaspora. We still have more resources, more power, more energy. But we have to address this danger. And it's a double danger. It's the danger from without, the attacks of the antisemites in America and Europe and elsewhere, and the dangers of the radicals in the Middle East, and the danger from within of losing our soul. We must not lose our soul. We have to win the battle for Israel's soul.

• 1:01:02Ezra Klein?

  I think that's the place to end. Always our final question. What are three books you would recommend to the audience?

• 1:01:09Speaker 04

  One of the things we need today is, you know, not only victims, but heroes, democratic heroes. So the, the, the three books about heroes that I, that I appreciate, one is about Rosalind Franklin. And Rosalind Franklin was a scientist, happened to be a Jewish, British scientist. She contributed dramatically to the discovery of the DNA code. And she was intellectually dispossessed. They took away her life's work. And she died brokenhearted at the age of thirty-eight.

• 1:01:50Speaker 04

  And what I see in her is scientific heroism, feminist heroism. She is also family. She was my mother's second cousin. And that, a book, a biography, actually brought her resurrection in a way. And today, she's so appreciated. So I find an element of hope in that. The second book that I really have been reading in the year before October 7th, when we had all this internal struggle in Israel, was Taylor Branch's Parting the Waters about Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement. The book is beautifully written and very comprehensive.

• 1:02:34Speaker 04

  But what Martin Luther King brings us is the best of what happened in the post-war era. I think that all oppressed people in the Middle East or elsewhere, I think it's an inspiration to fight for their rights, but within the context of universal values and the peaceful struggle. And my third one is Truman. Truman is so dear to my heart because, first of all, he was like the unlikely hero, the surprising hero. The fact that you come from the people and you serve the people and you don't forget that you're one of them, I find endearing.

• 1:03:16Speaker 04

  You know, he enabled the world of Rosalind Franklin and the world of Martin Luther King. Because he created the post-war World War II order that gave humanity its best 70, 80 years. And I really, really hope we will find the Harry Truman of our time, who will deal with the amazing challenges we'll face and lead us to a hopeful future.

• 1:03:45Ezra Klein?

  Aray Shavit, thank you very much.

• 1:03:47Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 1:03:59Ezra Klein?

  This episode of The Ezra Klans Show was produced by Claire Gordon and Roland Hu. Fact checking by Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Kristin Lynn. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld with additional mixing by Hafim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Sami-Luski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Andy Roestrauser, and special thanks to Sonia Herrera.