You may have heard about this amazing journal called SUPIR.
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Every single issue of SUPIR explores a theme that makes me think and it shows different perspectives on that theme,
whether it's activism or diversity or faith or Zionism.
And it's featured incredibly thoughtful writers from A Not Wilf to Tobar Hellerstein to Roya Hakaaki and to Michael Cobblow.
And I've even written for SUPIR and I quote SUPIR often in this podcast because of the different thinkers that they highlight.
So if you appreciate this podcast and you've learned from this podcast, then SUPIR might be for you.
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S-A-P-I-R-J-O-U-R-N-A-L.org/noam-N-O-A-M.
I thought you would know how to spell that.
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Anyway, click the link in the episode notes or just go to SUPIRjournal.org/noam.
It's all there, and I think you'll find it incredibly insightful.
Is the West Bank reality apartheid?
Are Palestinians defined only by their opposition to Israel?
What is the future of Judaism?
What's Israel's relationship with its Arab neighbors?
Amir Miao, host of the new podcast from Unpacked, Borderlines with That Semied.
These are the kinds of questions that end friendships and dinner parties.
The ones most people won't touch.
On Borderlines with That Semied, I walk straight through the minefield.
Every episode I start on the street, asking regular people what they really think about
the question everyone's arguing over.
And then I sit down with an expert or insider who lives it, often someone who sees it completely
differently than I do.
And instead of scoring points, we actually talk.
A Palestinian political leader, and Ethiopian Israeli scholar, a rabbi rethinking what Judaism
is becoming.
I bring strong convictions.
So today, we leave behind the talking points and have real conversations that most people
are afraid to have.
Come for the questions you've been scared to ask.
Stay for the honest answers.
Search Borderlines with That Semied on YouTube, or wherever you're listening right now.
New episodes?
Weekly.
Hey, I'm Norm Weissman, and this is Unpacking Israeli History, the podcast that takes a deep
dive into some of the most intense, historically fascinating, and often misunderstood events
and stories linked to Israeli history.
Okay, Yala, let's do this.
Some people think there is one correct way to be a Zionist, one definition of Zionism.
But there have actually been many, often in open conflict with each other, sometimes within
the same person, different ways to view Zionism.
I view the man I've been speaking with today as someone who's been somewhat of an intellectual
mentor for a while now, someone who I've looked up to in many ways.
Not only because he's wise and thoughtful and genuine, but also because he's been so
many different things at different times and so willing to be introspective and learn and
change.
At different points, he's been a militant loyal to the Jabotinsky, Kahana line of Jewish
power.
A young, idyllist pulled toward the settler movement and then pushed away by his own doubts.
A centrist convinced that almost everyone in this conflict is right about something, and
now a wartime defender of the Jewish story itself.
Say man, several sincerely held Zionisms.
Yasi Klanolavi, thank you so much for speaking with me.
Yasi, awesome to be in conversation with you.
It's great to be with you, Mom.
Yasi, you're somebody who is a mentor to many people, who you're somebody who a lot of
people consider their mentors, even if you don't even know you're their mentors.
And so for years, before I even started this work on the story of Israel, the history
of Israel, I've been following your work, and your work has been a tremendous inspiration
to me.
So I'm thinking.
That means a lot to me.
Thank you, Norm, and the amazing work that you and your team do, and to think that if
I had any indirect impact on you, that's really, really means a lot.
It's been a huge impact.
And I want to talk about these barriers with you.
Your life, in the earlier part of your life, you were very attracted to two different types
of Zionism, a revision of Zionism of a Jobotinsky, to an extent maybe, and an attraction to
Betar and attraction to a certain aspect of Kahana as well, referring to Mary Kahana.
I want you to tell me what was so attractive to you about those types of Zionism growing
up.
Well, you know, it's strange because I was out of sync with the unfolding Israeli story.
I joined the Israeli right when we were so beyond the pale that we were barely considered
a part of the mainstream, and I'm speaking now, first of all, of Betar.
Betar was the youth movement.
I guess it still exists in some bare form, but this was the youth movement of Jobotinsky
Menachembegin.
And so we're talking about Brooklyn of the 1960s, early '70s, and there were a few dozen
of us.
And we used to march in the Israel Day parade with all the other Zionist youth movements.
And we marched in military formation.
We were kind of a power military-minded organization, and almost all the other Zionist movements
were left.
Even Benakiva, the religious Zionist movement, which today is quite right-wing, was a socialist
Zionist group in those years.
I'm talking about 1966, '67.
There was the Sixth Day War that started to change religious Zionism, but in its earlier
incarnation, religious Zionism was socialist.
It's so strange to think.
And if you look at the Benakiva emblem, I don't know whether it's still true today, but
the emblem was the Ten Commandments and a Sheep of Wheat.
And the Sheep of Wheat was borrowed as well from the socialist youth movements.
And so we were the black sheep of Zionism.
And we were also the losers of the Zionist story.
Menachembegin was in seemingly permanent opposition.
He could not win an election for 30 years.
The first three decades of Israel's history was labor, labor, labor.
And so what drew me to the, what were then the fringes, and of course today Israel is
mostly politically right-wing, I miss my moment.
What drew me to the right was definitely a soft spot for losing causes, which is what
it seemed to be then, and also the feeling that they had been right in the years leading
up to the Holocaust.
And all the other Zionist movements had been wrong.
That it was only Jabotinsky, and I still believe this, who clearly saw the coming storm
and tried actively to warn the Jews of Europe to flee.
And the other Zionist movements, they were doing sacred work in preparing the ground for
the future state.
They were building the state, but they weren't actively engaged in preemptive rescue in
the way that Jabotinsky and Batar were.
So I felt a kind of a retroactive loyalty to the thwarted rescuers.
They had tried, and it was all very personal.
They had tried to save my family.
That's why I felt.
And so I felt this loyalty to Jabotinsky and Begging and Batar, plus they had great uniforms.
They had the best uniforms.
And that's how a young boy makes it.
It helped.
And there was a kid in my class, I went to Yashiva Day School.
And he was in Batar, and every independence, Israel independence, they would come to
school in this really great uniform with epilots and dark blue, like a police shirt, blue
pockets.
I said, I got to be part of this.
I want that.
So that's part of it.
The other part, though, like you said, is different as Marikahana.
And one of the things that you said about Marikahana is you said, you saw Kahana as the
Jewish Malcolm X.
Right.
So if you say more about that, yeah, I mean, it's interesting because Marikahana as a boy
had been in a batari, now he was actually in the radical wing of Batar, Batar itself
wasn't militant enough.
He needed to go an extra step and the way that played out for Kahana in the 1940s, which
is when he was. in Beitar was supporting the etsyl, the Irgun,
Manachum Begins underground.
And Kahana was supporting the Leche, the Stern group,
which was more extreme.
So you could see already then
that where this guy was going to end up.
But when Kahana started the Jewish defense league,
this was in 1968,
and the year is very important,
until I'll come to that in a moment.
And he was really drawing very, very overtly
from Beitar and the Jabotinsky movement.
He called himself a Jabotinsky Zionist
and the texts that JDL, the Jewish defense league,
was promoting in those years,
were classic revisionist Zionist right wing texts.
And it was only later when Kahana moves to Israel
that he found a whole new stream of right wing ideology,
which we today call Kahanaism.
But that's maybe we'll get to that a little later.
But the significance of the Jewish defense league emerging in 1968
was that you had a convergence of once-in-a-lifetime historic events.
So first of all, there was the Sixth Day War in 1967,
which had an enormous galvanizing impact on the whole Jewish world.
It changed Soviet jewelry.
The Soviet Jewish Renaissance, the Zionist revolt
against the enforced assimilation policy of the Kremlin,
begins, is triggered by the pride
that Soviet Jews felt with the Israeli victory.
And in America, it also had a galvanizing impact on us.
And one of the main expressions of that
was the emergence of the JDL,
because what we felt was why are we still getting beaten up
in Brooklyn when Jewish reality
has been fundamentally changed in the Middle East.
We wanted in, we wanted part of--
So do you, just I'm going all the way to the present right now,
with the anti-Semitism that exists in the world today?
Can you imagine a Jewish defense league emerging
with the same sort of passion?
So I think that we need to really look a little more deeply
at the conditions that created the JDL.
So one of them was the Sixth Day War,
this tremendous pride in Israel
and the Zionization of a whole generation of American Jews.
My generation of American Jews drew its Jewish identity
primarily from Israel, which seems so counterintuitive today.
But that's--
Why?
Because of the growing alienation from Israel
on the part of young American Jews.
Meaning Israel used to give you a Jewish identity.
Now it's-- and now for many young American Jews,
it's undermining their Jewishness.
So there was the Sixth Day War.
There was this deep pride in Israel.
It was also the time when the second generation,
the children of Holocaust survivors,
were starting to come of age.
We were-- and I come from a survivor family.
And many, not all, but many of the activists in JDL
were from survivor families.
And Kahana gave voice to the rage of the second generation.
And the third tremendous event--
I mentioned it very briefly a moment ago--
was the rise-- the revolt of Soviet Jewry
against the Kremlin,
where you had Soviet Jews risking their lives
to demand an exit visa to Israel.
And that really radicalized a lot of us.
I had been active in the Soviet Jewry movement,
starting basically a year after it was founded.
I joined the 1965, I was 12.
And it was peaceful.
It was the most peaceful movement.
The student struggle for Soviet Jewry
was the founder, really, of the movement.
And then Kahana came along and said,
this isn't good enough.
We need to adopt the tactics of the Black Power movement
of the new left, which was the kind of precursor
of today's progressive woke movement.
And we borrowed the rhetoric.
We borrowed their tactics.
We drew our inspiration
from the violence that was happening in America at the time.
And that's the other factor that you have to consider,
which is the '60s.
It was the '60s.
And when you're kind of stuck as I was,
in a remote corner of Orthodox Jewish Brooklyn,
growing up in Borough Park,
and you see this unbelievable excitement,
the music, the music coming from San Francisco.
And I was a vicarious hippie.
I just desperately wanted to go to Woodstock.
I was 15 or 16.
And of course, my parents didn't let me.
But the '60s had a major impact on everyone I knew in J.D.L.
And in fact, my closest friend in the J.D.L.
had come from SDS,
the students for a democratic society,
and just said, "Ah, this is the Jewish version."
And so, and Kahana himself was deeply influenced by the '60s.
Now, he was on the right,
but it's hard to explain
because the '60s were just a political experience.
It were a cultural phenomenon.
And okay, Kahana was right-wing,
but he was still part of the '60s.
And so, there was really,
there was this kind of a seamless,
which in retrospect seems ridiculous.
But there was this seamless continuity
from Haydashbury and the Berkeley free speech movement
and the Black Panthers and the J.D.L.
It all somehow made sense.
So does it make sense right now?
Like looking at it, like to imagine
someone wearing Birkenstocks, smoking weed,
listening to the Grateful Dead.
No, no, totally, totally, but it's. I know Grateful Dead is a little sad for us.
Because it was all, but you have to understand it was all. It worked.
Yeah, all right.
But no, everything was still in its embryonic form.
Yeah.
And so, you know,
you could have these kind of hybrid experiences.
I'll give you an example.
You know, while I was being drawn to the J.D.L.
I was also very interested in the radical Zionists on the left.
There was this whole flowering,
it's an organization called the Jewish Liberation Project.
There were all of these college Zionist newspapers
coming really from the left,
advocating a two-state solution,
which nobody. In the early 70s.
And I'm talking about 1969-1970.
And I was reading these papers
because I was publishing a high school newspaper
at the time called Achtut, which means unity.
That was a pro J.D.L. newspaper.
And we distributed it in Jewish high schools
in the New York area.
And so, I was part of an organization
called the Jewish Student Press Service,
which was overwhelmingly left-wing Zionist.
They were all very Zionist, but very left-wing.
And I was right-wing, but I was part of it.
And the only other newspaper that was right-wing
that was part of the Jewish Student Press Service
was the newspaper called Never Again,
which was the official paper of the J.D.L.
And we were kind of an unofficial J.D.L. paper.
Fascinating.
I want to just tell you something that you heard
in Murzky, who wrote a remarkable biography
on Rift Cook said about your book memoirs
of a Jewish extremist.
He said to me that all young people
who are incredibly passionate about their ideas
should read, you know, it's a kind of labeled memoirs
of a Jewish extremist, because you're somebody
who you went through this experience
of seeing something that is right-wing,
that is strongly right-wing.
And it's not that you said, "Hey,
I don't want to be part of Zionism at all."
You said, "I don't want to be part of for you
this type of Zionism."
And you ended up moving to Israel.
You go into the army.
I'm going to era two now.
And you're in, it's in the early 1980s, I believe.
1982.
1982.
And you are pioneering
and you have this, I would call it,
a land-centered religious Zionism.
And you were, I don't know if this is true,
but you'll be in 2018 in letters
to my policy neighbors.
You said, I'm visiting everyone.
You said, "If we didn't belong here,
we didn't belong anywhere."
There's something about the land
that spoke a lot to you.
The pro is that it makes the settler movements argument for itself as continuous with not
a betrayal of classical Zionist pioneering, and the con is what was the argument that
I wanted to ask you is what's the argument that finally ended this romance, this land
that you care so deeply about, and is it a moral thing for you, is it a strategic thing
for you?
What was it then?
Yeah, great question.
The romance isn't over.
The romance is there?
Of course it is.
For Gavron?
Absolutely.
I think that I still believe that on one level, if we don't belong in Gavron, we don't
belong anywhere.
Gavron is the oldest Jewish community in the world.
Goes back to Abraham and Sarah, it's 4,000 years old.
It's the first Jewish cemetery is Gavron, and my experience in Gavron, which might frame
our part of our conversation, is that there's no place in the world that I feel that I belong
more to than Gavron, and no place that I feel more disoriented in Gavron.
And the two are inseparable parts of that experience.
So you're saying that your romance, I believe in letters, you wrote that the romance with
the settlement movement, maybe that's something that you had, that's something that ended.
Yeah, yeah.
The truth is, the land, the romance for land stays with the community.
I mean, the truth is, I always had an ambivalent relationship with the settlement movement,
and by ambivalent, I mean ambivalent in its old meaning, which means that you're conflicted.
I was conflicted.
Part of me was very drawn, and in fact when Sarah, my wife and I first moved here, we very
briefly, like I mean, for two days, considered joining one of the groups that founded a new
settlement, and we dropped out very quickly.
We realized that we didn't, for various reasons, we couldn't discuss it now, why we didn't
belong there.
Why didn't you belong there?
We felt culturally alienated.
We felt that it was too closed in, physically, the settlements were surrounded by barbed
wire, and that was a kind of a metaphor.
I felt that I didn't come to Israel to live in a self enclosed kind of a ghetto.
And so it was initially, I would say, almost an aesthetic aversion, and even as I had great
respect and still do for those of my friends who moved the settlements, who helped found
settlements, I have friends who founded, helped found Tekoa, Shiloh, these are foundational
places on the map.
And so there's nothing extraneous for me in this story.
The other thing that I've always felt about settlers and still feel this way very strongly
is that, if anything, the settlers prove that we really are indigenous to the entirety
of this land, because only an indigenous people would be crazy enough to defy the whole
world and to take all of the enormous risks that the settlement movement has brought to
us.
There's no analog for any other people.
I mean, I see so much of the settlement movement in political terms, that's problematic,
which is the segue that we can come to now, in terms of threatening Israel as a Jewish
majority state, as a democratic state, I see so much of what's gone wrong in Israel.
The assault on democracy as coming from the settlement movement, coming from Rabbi
Tsvehuda Kuk, who was the spiritual father of the settlement movement, the son of Ravkuk,
who immediately after the Sixth Day War issued his famous pronouncement, saying no government
of Israel has the right to withdraw from any of the God-given lands.
Now what he's saying is that he is putting his authority above the democratically elected
government, which is exactly the crisis we're in now where we have an assault against the
institutions of democracy, coming from an illiberal right, which was not the right that
I was part of.
I think people are confused by the word "illiberal" right, "illiberal" right.
Anachombagan son, Betty Bacon, who for many years was a lekuld Knesset member, was
a cabinet minister, defined his father's lekuld as a liberal national party.
Liberal in the sense that it believes in pluralism, in democracy, in the rule of law, in the
primacy of law, that not only majorities have rights but also minorities, this is classic
Bacon and classic Jabotinsky, that's what I was raised on, and Netanyahu himself was
once a liberal national Zionist, but because of his legal complications he turned against
liberal democracy.
He's out of pure suffrage.
He thinks pure.
Pure suffrage.
Is that a statement or an opinion?
That's a statement.
But you know, in Israel, all opinions are statement, so this is another statement.
But anyway, in terms of what you were asking about the settlements, my break with supporting
even emotionally, I wasn't really a political supporter except for those two days when I
almost joined the settlement group.
But the feeling that the weariness that I had toward the settlement movement was the
dogmatism, that was always there, and the fact that there was never a serious internal
conversation, and I've studied this, I've written about the settlement movement, and there
was never a serious conversation convened by the leaders of the settlement movement to
discuss what actually are we going to do with all these Palestinians who we are forcibly
absorbing into the Jewish state, whom we don't want in our society, and they themselves
don't want to be part of our society, how is this going to work?
So the religious Zionist rabbis never. There was never a serious conversation, Maulath, and from like Ravaron Lichtenstein.
Yesha Council, well Ravaron Lichtenstein and that circle made their break with the settlement
movement.
Yeah.
Sure.
For exactly the reasons that I'm saying, they. You're saying they wouldn't consider themselves part of the settlement movement?
They would consider themselves. Even though the reason of. Right.
To explain this to everyone.
Are they were leaders of the Isheva in the settlements?
And it was the first military Isheva in the settlements.
Yeah.
And certainly in the early years, I think, Ravon Mital, I don't know about Rav Lichtenstein,
but certainly Ravon Mital would have considered himself very much part of it, although there
was always a kind of a subtle edginess between him and Hanan Porato was the head of. Who's Hanan Porato?
Hanan Porato was basically the de facto head of the settlement movement.
And the Gushemonium Project, he was the main face behind that, and he would have debates
with Ravon Mital.
Yeah.
And they were very close, personally.
Wasn't he technically a student of Ravon Mital?
He was a student.
Yes.
But he would really push back.
He did.
He did.
And Ravon Mital always gave him respect, but he didn't. Ravon Mital didn't sign up on the Gushemonium Project.
There was always a part of him that held back, and then after 1982 and the Lebanon War,
he broke publicly with the settlement movement and came out for territorial compromise.
And what happened to me when I moved to Israel, I came as a journalist, as a working journalist.
I was already a journalist in New York.
I came, I was almost 30 when I moved here.
And so I didn't start a career.
I just really continued it.
And I'm saying that because being able to land in Israel and immediately start working
as a journalist was a tremendous gift, because being a working journalist in Israel was
a kind of a way of studying the society that I had just joined from within.
And I would be able to go in and out of all of the different Israel's.
One week I'd be writing about a settlement, the next week I'd be writing about peace now
on the left, and then I'd go into the Haredi, the ultra-orthodox community at Arab Israelis,
and going in and out of all of these different worlds and listening, because that's what a journalist
has to do.
I don't know if that's if they do that anymore.
But at least that's how I was taught journal.
are supposed to practice their craft, you listen, and you try to understand all of the different
ways that these different Israel's understand this place. And what their vision is, what their fears
are. And so I did a lot of listening. And I came to the conclusion that everybody here is right.
Everybody's right. Everybody here's right about something. And nobody is right about everything.
And let's look at the settlements as an example. The Palestinian Western more broadly.
I would speak to people on the left and they would say, well, okay, what happens the day after
we annex? Are we a Jewish state? Not if we give everybody citizenship, they'll outvote us.
Well, then if we don't give them citizenship, are we a democratic state? Not if we don't give
them citizenship. And I listened and I said, well, well, yeah, you're right. And then I would speak
to my friends on the who are still on the right. And they would say, okay, who do you make peace with?
You're going to make peace with our fought? Listen, listen to what they say. They don't accept
our legitimacy here. They don't accept our indigenousness. There's no part of the Palestinian
national movement that accepts our right to be here. So who do you make peace with? And I said,
well, that's right. You're right too. You know, the old Jewish joke, right? How can you both be
right? And you're right too. And that was, and the person who said, you're right too, that's the
centrist. And I can ask you to define what does it mean to be a centrist? So for me, specifically on
this issue, although I think it's broader than the Palestinian issue, the centrist or the center
is that place that tries to hold the essential insights from across the political spectrum.
And so I have a left wing side. And that left wing side says, nothing good is going to come for
Israel if we become the permanent rulers over and other people. This is a catastrophe for us.
And then I have a right wing side that says, oh, yeah, okay. So what are you going to do about it?
Who are you going to make peace with? And so for many years, my position was, well, we can
occupy the Palestinians. And we can't make peace with the Palestinians. And so what do we do?
That's not, but that was my starting point. And where that led me, the operative policy
was unilateral withdrawal. And what was so strange is that Ariel Sharon, who had been the stalwart
of the settlement movement, really in some ways, the master builder, he built the settlements.
He built the settlements in Gaza. And then he dismantled them. Sharon Giveth,
Sharon takers away. He's even in East Jerusalem. He's got his own
he born. He born. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Over one of the arches in the Muslim quarter. And so
Sharon, in nobody could have predicted this, was elected as Prime Minister in his elder years
in 2002. And he comes in rather than the old Sharon, he comes in as a centrist. And he tells
the Israeli public, yes, I built those settlements. But it didn't work. We can't 8,000 Jews in Gaza
can't hold on to a million and a half Palestinians. But he also says something very subtly, which
I think most people missed, which is that the reason I believe we need to unilaterally
with the draw without seeking an agreement with the Palestinians is A, because we can occupy them
and B, we can't make peace with them. I'm not going to sit and try to do with Arafat or Arafat
successor what the labor party tried to do and failed in the 1990s. There's no peace to be made
with the Palestinians. But we also can't continue occupying them. So let's unilaterally draw
whatever border we determine is necessary for our defense. And in Gaza, Gaza is so small there's
no room to draw a border except you go back to the international border. And so that's why I supported
unilaterally with the draw because I felt here finally is a centrist position that's not just
the centrist sensibility. Retroactively if you could go back 21 years would you still support
unilaterally? Yeah, I would, but I would say we would have to do it in a different way.
In two ways. First is you make sure that when you uproot Jews from their homes, you have
decent alternatives from them. You don't put them in trailer parks. You don't let them sit for
years on unemployment lines. You think that radical lives? Oh, absolutely, a radicalized smotherch.
Absolutely, absolutely. And we're still paying the price for the way it was done.
Smotherch is wrong when he says this was done undemocratically. There was a clear majority
for this. Was there a national referendum? No, and I think there should have been.
Right. That's another way, which I would have done this differently. The final way
that I think should, so three points. The final point is really. Maybe I was leading them,
maybe that was my perspective. Right. But I think that's right. There should, when you,
when you impose on yourself a Corban, a destruction, and there's no more terrible word in
Hebrew than destruction, and you cause the destruction on yourself. You could only do that when there's
a very clear national consensus. So what's the third? The third is that, and here, Sharon deeply
disappointed me. I expected that with the first rocket that would fly over the international
border, we would hit back hard, even if it fell in a cow patch. Nothing happens. Nothing happens.
Doesn't matter. You violate that border, we're going back in. Not to occupy, but we're going,
we're going to hit strong, and we didn't do it. And we allowed, we allowed the other side
to get used to a situation where it became normalized to fire rockets and to Israeli neighborhoods,
because there were only, in those years, there were primitive rockets and they didn't do
great damage. Those rockets were intended to terrorize, not necessarily to kill,
and they terrorized the entire South. And we allowed that to have Sharon allowed that to have.
So that's the, those are the mistakes, I think. You used a couple words as someone who hosts
unpacking Israeli history. I teach the history of Israel. It's what I do. And naturally, as you can
imagine, people have different perspectives about words that I choose to use. So, Yasi,
one of the things that you have been famous for, at least in my head, is you coined this phrase,
which is, it's not the case that the Israelis are occupying land, but they are occupying a people.
What does that mean? A Jew is not a stranger in Judea. And the settlers are
absolutely right. I am not a stranger in Hebron. If I'm a stranger in Hebron, I'm a stranger
in Tel Aviv. And so I'm not occupying any part of the land between the river and the sea. But I am
occupying another people that shares this land, however, uneasily and unhappily with me.
And first of all, for my own self-interest, I need to free myself from the untenable situation,
untenable from the perspective of Jewish history, Jewish identity, who we always thought of
ourselves as people, are placed in the world before we even get to the demographics and the
question of the future of Israeli identities, Jewish democratic, just from the perspective,
the spiritual perspective. I can't celebrate my wholeness, the wholeness of the land on the back
of a broken people. I can't do that. And if there's any chance of reconciling with that people,
even if it means giving up part of the land that belongs by right to me, then I need to do that.
Between the river and the sea, you have two peoples, each of whom have the same slogan
from the river to the sea, as to quote the language of the mission acoolashially, to online.
It was like that. Both peoples. I said that you said that of course, most Israelis believe that.
I went to the Shukha Karmel in Tel Aviv and I said, "Do you have any necklaces that show
the state of Israel with like Dada lines in different places?" The guy looks at me and goes,
"The hell's wrong with you?" "Yeah!" "Are you kidding me?"
I was like, "Aza and the West Bank and today?" So I was like, I was like, "It's a different
journalist." I was interested. Look, if you look at the pre-67 map of Israel, it looks like
like somebody took a big bite out of it. And it was drawn by an arthritic
can't, you know, and then you look at the post 67 map, and wow, it's like this diamond.
Beautiful. It's, it's litter, you know, it's like a diamond, it's diamond shake. And it looks
whole rather than ragged. And so, of course, it's my land, but this other people believes
it's their land. Now, when I, when I favor, in principle, I'm not talking about the practicalities
of a two-state solution, because I don't see that. I'll get to that in one minute. I'll
talk on to that. But, but the principle of it is that I am not, if there ever will be some form
of a political arrangement between us and the Palestinians, I will not be giving back land.
I'm giving up land. It's a really important distinction. Giving back land means it's not mine.
I'm giving back stolen land. Giving up land means I'm giving up something that belongs to me.
In the same way that if Palestinians ever make that compromise, they will be giving up
part of the land that they believe belongs to them. So that's, that's the, that's the distinction.
You use another word. This is the second word I want to talk about is Palestinian identity. I had
a guy named Naz daily, and if you heard of him, Nusai Yassin. Right guy. Had him on my podcast.
Oh, I'm such a fan. And one of the things that he said, he would send him a fan note.
I will. I will. And he was talking about Palestinian identity that he identifies as Palestinian.
And then I got so many comments on Instagram saying, there's no such thing as a Palestinian.
There's no such thing as a Palestinian. And so I want to know your take.
Is it, should we be using the term Arab or Palestinian? Is there such a thing as a Palestinian?
I believe in respecting a person's right to self, to self identity. Let's not talk about self
determination of a people. Not every people deserve state. You have to prove that you can
manage a state from what I've seen of the Palestinian national movement over the last 30 years.
They have blown every opportunity. So this notion that the Palestinian people deserve a state.
You have to earn a state. We, we're not given a state. We created a state before the state
was officially born. And when the UN recognized two states, it was recognizing a Jewish state
that was already in existence. Israel was not created by the UN. It was, it was recognized.
That's an enormous difference. Now, but, but every people have the right to define themselves
in whatever way they want. If there is now a Palestinian people, a hundred years ago,
there was not a Palestinian people. People have different trajectories.
People are born through, through, through different processes. Yes, it's true. The Palestinian
people were born largely in conflict with another national identity. You know, there was an old
bidder Israeli joke that Zionism is the most successful national liberation movement in history
because it created two national movements. And it kind of did. And there's something so vulgar
about saying there's no such thing as a Palestinian identity. You want our identity to be recognized.
And look what's happened to us since October 7th. We are the target of a global movement
to deny our right to define ourselves as a people. What does Mamdani say? You're a religion.
Thank you very much, but I actually have a different understanding of who I am. You know,
I think I'm a doc, but you know better. You know that I'm actually a goose. But no, I just feel
I'm a doc. And it actually matters more who I think I am than who you think I am. And that's
what I say to the anti Zionists. And that's what I say to Jews on the right. Don't erase another
people's right to their identity no matter how angry. And I understand the anger at the Palestinian
national movement. I'm exploding with anger since October 7th. But I you are forbidden to do
on to others what you don't want done to yourself. And that means you have you must respect the right
of another people to define itself as a people. Last question. The last question you'll see is
what message do you have for all young people right now who are exploring their a Jewish identity
exploring Zionism as non-Jewish people who want to understand what this whole Jewish Zionist project
is about. Is it something to to test? Is it something to be to explore more? What do you
mean? I think that that I'll say two things. One is that my generation had it much easier
because we grew up with in the immediate aftermath of the Shoah, the Holocaust when it was obvious
that the Jews needed home. We grew up with an Israel that was socialist that was that
set all the right things in the world that and the Arab world was led by dictators and
and and autocrats and kings. And it's always easy. It was easy to be Zionist. Today it's
much more difficult for all kinds of obvious reasons. But I think that that young Jews need
an historical perspective. We need to be able to step out of this moment and think how will
Jewish history look back at this time? We are still in the first steps of working out the
fulfillment of the greatest Jewish dream which seemed so far fetched for 2000 years that Jews
believed that only the Messiah could actually gather the Jews back here. And and so we are in the
messy process. And sometimes it's brutal. Sometimes it's a really discouraging process that I'm
speaking as someone who has been in the active opposition to the Netanyahu government for uh well
for a long time and and sees this government as antithetical to my vision of of a Jewish and
democratic state. But there needs to be some sense of historical consciousness, some sense of
historical depth. And I think that this is the most thrilling moment since Mount Sinai to be a Jew.
That's a very big statement. But I really believe that because what we're doing today is trying
to figure out what 4000 years of Jewish history means. And if God forbid this place, the state of
Israel fails in whatever way for whatever reason, it will be a devastating retroactive judgment
on all of Jewish history. All of Jewish history was wrong. It was a mistake. It was based on so much
of Jewish identity of Judaism of Jewish religion of hope was based on on this return. And I'm not
ready after 80 years of statehood to pronounce this a failure. And even if God forbid this government
somehow gets reelected, I don't believe it will. But even if that happens, I'll just redouble
my efforts to fight for the Israel that I believe in. And so the idea that Jews could walk away
from this story, I understand if you don't have a strong Jewish identity. Jews have always walked away
from Judaism. And I have no argument with that. If this story doesn't feel compelling enough to
you, doesn't feel worth it to you to carry. And carrying the story, as we know since October 7th,
carries really serious consequences. You can walk away from that story. But if you still identify
as a Jew and being Jewish is important to you. And here I'm thinking of the growing rise of Jewish
anti-Zionism, the return of leftwing Jewish anti-Zionism. How can you excise the heart of the Jewish
experience for thousands of years, or for that matter, the practical center point of Jewish life
today? How do you walk away from this story? And if you do walk away, you're going to leave this
story to whom, to those who are going to distort it in a way that you feel is the opposite of what
Judaism means to you. You are, by default, you're handing the core of the Jewish story to that
camp. And I can't do that. This is my story as much as it is Ben Greer's and Smutsages. And I'm
going to fight them. Y'all see, thank you so much for joining unpacking this story. You are a
national treasure. You are a teacher of this generation. You are a mentor to so many. I'm going to be
thinking about and reflecting on your ideas for a long time. Thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you, Norm. And thanks for everything you do. Thank you. Thank you.
I'm packing
Everything Israeli history is a production of Unpacked and Open Door Media brand.
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This episode was produced by Rifki Stern.
Our team for this episode includes Paula Queskin, Jenny Falcon, Andrew Miller, Rob Perra,
and Ari Schlacht.
Post, Noam Weissman.
Thanks for being here.
See you next week.
Amir Miyaw, host of the new podcast from Unpacked, Borderlines with That Semied.
A Palestinian political leader, an Ethiopian Israeli scholar, a rabbi rethinking what Judaism
is becoming.
Some for the questions you've been scared to ask, stay for the honest answers.
Search Borderlines with That Semied on YouTube or wherever you're listening right now.
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