The Echoes of Israel’s Founding Fathers - with Yossi Klein Halevi
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If you're moved to help, please click the link in our show notes. Your gift, big or small, can help someone find their way back. And now on to today's episode. You are listening to an ARC Media Podcast. What we proved to ourselves on October 8th was that we haven't lost the instincts of peoplehood, of national solidarity.

And when this war is over, Israeli society is going to be faced with a very stark choice: October 6th or October 8th. Do we go back to the profound schisms of October 6th, where Israelis were beginning to feel that we have nothing in common with each other? And that's the beginning of the end, when people start feeling that we don't really belong to the same national project in any minimal way.

Or, as our model, October 8th, every Israeli poll that I see points to the direction that there is a majority, even a strong majority, that wants healing and not schism.

It's 9.30 a.m. on Thursday, May 1st here in New York City. It's 4.30 p.m. on Thursday, May 1st in Israel on Israel's Independence Day. As one of the largest fires in Israel's history blazes on the outskirts of Jerusalem, some 5,000 acres were burned, forcing the evacuation of whole towns and the closure of the road to Tel Aviv.

Channel 12, Israel's leading TV news channel, announced mid-broadcast for the first time in its history that it was evacuating its studio in Neve Elan, which is just on the outskirts of Jerusalem. The underlying cause of the fires was not immediately clear, but at least some of the fires were suspected arson attacks. IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir ordered the military to assist in battling the flames, and Israel's foreign ministry said

has said that it has reached out to Greece, Cyprus, Croatia, Italy and Bulgaria for assistance. In response, Italy and Croatia have sent three firefighting planes. Romania, Spain, France and Cyprus will also dispatch firefighting planes and additional support. As a result of the fires, dozens of Independence Day ceremonies were canceled, including the official torch lighting ceremony in Jerusalem.

Now, Israelis need something to watch. There is a national communal event typically during these ceremonies. So what the government did is it just aired the rehearsal footage of the ceremony that had been recorded, I think, the day before. It is hard on this Israeli Independence Day to avoid reflecting on the internal rifts in the country that have been widening and that we have been discussing on this podcast in recent weeks, including with Ari Shavit.

It's hard to avoid reflecting on the sense of solidarity that typically characterizes this day and how that sense of solidarity seems scarce. At the same time, this year, Israel's population has grown past 10 million people. And if you dive into the data of Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics, you'll know that 45% of all the world's Jews have made Israel their home.

And while there are reasons for concern, there are also many reasons for hope. With me today is Yossi Klein-Halevi of the Shalom Hartman Institute and the author of a number of books, which we will post in the show notes. Yossi is going to join me to discuss the debt we have to Israel's founders and to the soldiers who have fallen in its defense.

Yossi, welcome back. Great to be with you, Dan, as always. Yossi, before we get into the focus of today's conversation, I want to ask you about these fires that I spoke about in the introduction that are affecting people in large parts of Israel, including in Jerusalem, where you live and where my sister and her family and my mother live. How are the fires affecting people in Jerusalem during these Memorial and Independence Days? Fair enough.

There's this sense that there's something biblical about this moment. And these are not just ordinary fires. The country is on fire.

On Independence Day, on Memorial Day, these are the two, in some ways, the two most sacred days of our national secular calendar. And these days really reflect the ambiguity between the sacred and the secular that's at the heart of Israeliness. We really go in and out of the sacred and the secular, and they tend to blur on these days. People I speak to say, you know, this is biblical, this is mythic.

It's not even a metaphor anymore. You know, for the last few years, we've been saying the country's on fire. And on these of all days, to see our main road burning, to have the...

to be even more almost surrealistically symbolic, to have our torchlight ceremony that marks the beginning of Independence Day canceled. Whether you relate to this in a poetic sensibility or a literal religious sensibility, God is not happy with us. However one wants to interpret this, there really is a feeling among many people that this tells us in the most stark way that something's wrong in the country.

If it is, in fact, arson in a coordinated way, organized and catalyzed by people who live in Israel or live near Israel, you're just unless you've been there, you don't realize how these threats around Israel internally, externally surrounding Israel, multiple fronts are just always present.

And there's this very deep sense of the fragileness of our ecosystem. Every tree in Israel has been consciously planted. And these trees, you know, you look at an Israeli forest and the trees in comparison to forests in America and Europe, the trees look like twigs. And we cherish our fragile trees. We have a holiday of trees, Tu B'Shvat.

And the trees in some ways, again, I come back to a metaphor. The trees for me represent the Jewish people clinging to the land and the love with which we've nurtured the land. So this is a wound on multiple levels. And yes, you're right. Of course, it points out to the fragileness of our security. But, you know, this is actually a very old and deep Israeli fear. The Israeli novelist, Aleph Beiti-Oshua,

wrote a short story in the 1960s about an Arab forest keeper who decides to get his revenge on the state by burning down the forest that he's entrusted to protect. And so this fear is so deep in us. And what we've seen the last year and a half is the fulfillment of our nightmares. And in some ways, this is one of the deepest.

And, Yossi, if in fact it is what there's speculation about, which was either some kind of rogue arson or some kind of coordinated effort, I mean, again, we don't know. We're going to learn a lot in the days ahead. The only comparison I could think of is, do you remember what they called the stabbing, the knife intifada?

Which was what? No, but it reminded me of that. I remember. I remember. First, can you describe what that was? And then I'll bring in the comparison. Well, it starts with one guy yelling, allow Akbar and randomly stabbing Jews in Israel. And then you've got the copycat syndrome and it becomes a movement.

And that's how pathological crime very often works, whether political or apolitical. And so this could have been a copycat syndrome. It could have, for all we know, the first fire might have begun through carelessness and then someone picked up on it as a deliberate act and then stopped.

so to speak, it spread like wildfire. And yeah, that's very often how, in fact, that's how previous acts of mass arson have played out. The reason I mentioned the stabbing in Tefada is because like many of Israel's wars,

Even the second Intifada, you could build a strategy around a national security strategy around how to defeat it, prevent it, deter it, whatever the approach is. And what was so unnerving, I think, about the stabbing Intifada is how do you develop a strategy about some random person deciding just to walk in the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and go stab someone? Yeah, you can't fully insulate anyone.

yourself from this kind of terror, you can drastically minimize it. And the fact that the Shabak, the Shin Bet, moved so quickly and within one day or less had arrested 18 suspects, I think really tells us that while there's no absolute security, we're still on top of the game. Okay. I want to turn to Israel's 77th year of independence.

And before we talk about some of the characters I want to talk about, I want to ask you first to just describe this transition in the Israeli calendar between Yom Hazikaron and Yom Ha'atzmuth, between Israel's Memorial Day and Israel's Independence Day. It is a unique feature. I don't know any other country that does this. I've long felt that the U.S. should do something like this. Can you explain what happens within those two days?

Well, first you have to understand the trajectory of this last week. We call this week the secular or modern high holidays of the Jewish experience. It begins on Holocaust Memorial Day, which was last week. It segues a few days later to Memorial Day for the fallen in Israel's war.

And then it culminates in what is supposed to be the unequivocal joy of Independence Day. And the sequence of these three holidays tells a story, tells the trajectory of the modern Jewish experience. So on Holocaust Memorial Day, we mourn the consequences of Jewish powerlessness. On Memorial Day for the Fallen Soldiers, we mourn the consequences of Jewish power, our reclamation of power.

And then we're supposed to instantly leave all of that enormous weight behind and embrace the joy, the uncomplicated joy of our national sovereignty. Now, under the best of circumstances, that's a very demanding emotional transition to move literally from the most difficult day of the year, which is in Israel is actually not Holocaust Day.

The most difficult day is the Memorial Day for the Fallen Soldiers because the Holocaust is transitioning into history. Memorial Day for the Soldiers is happening every day. Just this week, we've added more families to the circle of bereavement. So the Memorial Day for the Fallen Soldiers, it's not like it is in the West where there's something abstract about it. There's no more open wound in

in Israel than this day. And the only thing that separates the hardest day of the year from the most joyful day of the year is a siren. There's a siren that's the demarcation between the end of Memorial Day for the soldiers and the beginning of Independence Day. And so we go from this extraordinary solemnity where all you hear on the radio are these heartbreaking Hebrew songs for 24 hours, and the story is on TV.

The entire media is taken up by collective mourning. And I don't know of any other society that quite does this. And then you immediately segue into fireworks and celebration.

And there's something almost cruel about it, but there's also wisdom in it because it forces us to make that transition from mourning to celebration. And that's a very Jewish move. We see that. And I think that this model is really taken from traditional Judaism. For example, we move from the fast day of Esther, which commemorates the threat to the Jews'

in ancient Persia, to literally that evening celebrate the redemption of the Jews, which is the festival of Purim.

And so this dichotomy that's built into the Jewish experience, 1945, the end of the Holocaust, the lowest point in Jewish history. Three years later, we're celebrating the return of Jewish sovereignty after 2,000 years. So there's this extreme dichotomy in the Jewish experience, which is condensed into this transition from Memorial Day to Independence Day. But this year, Dan, I have to tell you,

I think that Israeli society as a whole has not been able to make that transition. The fires are only, in some way, the most visible expression of what most of us are feeling inside. And that is, how do you make this unequivocal celebration, this transition from Memorial Day to Independence Day, when soldiers are falling every day and when our hostages are dying in the Hamas tunnels?

For the hostages and their families, it's still October 7th. They're still stuck in October 7th. And the rest of us, to some extent, are too. I feel this especially strongly this year. You say soldiers are still falling literally this week. And yet you have spoken about, and I too have spoken about, just how we shouldn't take for granted how inspiring and how moving these soldiers are and what it has told us.

about young Israelis and the next generation, God willing, of leadership of Israel. We've learned a lot about Israelis over this past year and a half, young Israelis. We've learned that we underestimated the intensity of their commitment and their deep identity and their sense of belonging to the Jewish and Israeli stories. You know, in every generation in Israel,

has the anxiety. And maybe this is true for Jewish history generally. Maybe every generation of Jews has the anxiety of, are we really going to be able to pass on the intensity of this story and the commitment? And in Israel, we've certainly felt that. And you see it from the founding generation, which really in some ways saw itself as the peak of our national commitment. And yet each generation in Israel has stepped up to the challenge.

And there was a special anxiety on the part of my generation toward what we disparagingly called the Israeli TikTok generation. And yet, what this TikTok generation has proven is that they are no less heroic than the generation of 67 and 73. And in some ways, Dan, I have even greater respect for them because this is Israel's most thankless war.

This is the longest war we have fought since 1948. No war that we have fought has been more disparaged around the world. In no other war have our soldiers been so cavalierly compared to Nazis. There's no glory in this war. This isn't 1967. In some ways, this is the anti-Six-Day War. You know, this is a war without end.

and the horrific casualties, the civilian casualties, the devastation. I don't think we have a choice but to fight the war in the way that we have. Nevertheless, the consequences are so devastating that whatever glory there is attached to war has really been denied this generation.

And yet they keep showing up. They're fighting with extraordinary heroism under conditions that no other army has ever had to fight, including previous generations of Israeli soldiers. They're fighting in hundreds of kilometers of tunnels. Thousands of homes in Gaza are booby-trapped. There's never been warfare quite like this. And yet there they are and doing the job.

And I was just listening to a song by Idan Reifel, the great Israeli musician. It's a letter from a soldier to his parents.

And he's saying, our work is black and we're not heroes. Don't call us heroes. Our work is black. Our work is grim, is dirty in some ways, which of course is true. That's the nature of any military. And I was listening to that yesterday and thinking, that's it. You know, we all have these soundtracks on Spotify of the sad songs that we listened to on Memorial Day.

And I was listening to that song and thinking, that's exactly right in describing the nature of this war, but exactly wrong in denying the heroism. It's precisely because this war is so awful that the heroism of those who are fighting it is all the more extraordinary.

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If you're moved to help, please click the link in our show notes. Your gift, big or small, can help someone find their way back. Now back to today's conversation. You see, I want to go back and do a little bit of history, given that it's Independence Day and we're celebrating Israel's founding, however difficult the circumstances in which we are honoring Israel's founding are. And I want to talk about David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, and Zev Jabotinsky.

were bitter rivals, but they also obviously played a significant founding role in their own way in what is today modern Israel.

And I also want to think about what their vision would have been today, given the twists and turns Israel has taken. First of all, how would you define each of their visions, Jabotinsky and Ben-Gurion? The two of them, you know, Jabotinsky represents the Zionist right, Ben-Gurion represents the mainstream Zionist left. And the two of them were divided on multiple issues.

from what the economic structure of a future Jewish state would be. Jabotinsky was a deeply committed capitalist, which came out of his traditional liberalism, his strong belief in honoring the integrity and freedom of the individual.

And Ben-Gurion was a passionate socialist. He began in his early years as being, I'd say, something quite close to Bolshevism and then quickly became disillusioned with Bolshevism and moved to what we would call today social democracy, but very strongly socialist. There was nothing socialist-lite about him.

Ben-Gurion was himself a kibbutznik. He lived communally, and he believed that Israel would be a laboratory for a new way of communal living for humanity. So they disagreed profoundly on economics.

They disagreed even more bitterly on the borders of the state. Jabotinsky was a maximalist. He believed that Zionism had already made its historic compromise when it lost what today is the Kingdom of Jordan, which had traditionally been part of the British mandate under the League of Nations and had been lobbed off to award that territory to Britain's World War I allies. And so Jabotinsky fought every partition plan because...

beginning in 1937, the Peel Commission. Well, he was no longer alive by 1947, but his ideological descendants, Menachem Begin especially, continued his tradition of opposing partition. And Ben-Gurion was, I would say, more pragmatic. When you're in a weak position, you take what you can get. And so he supported every partition plan that was on the table.

And this was a source of deep bitterness between the two movements. They also fought strongly over how to free the land of Israel from British rule. Ben-Gurion was more of a gradualist, believed in cooperating with Britain where possible, resisting where necessary. And Jabotinsky and especially his descendants became more and more committed to an armed struggle against the British colonialists.

But I would say, Dan, that the deepest divide between these two men was over their vision of what Zionism needed to do to change the Jewish character that had developed or been deformed by 2,000 years of exile and helplessness.

So Ben-Gurion had a whole long list of aspects of the Jewish character that he believed Zionism needed to change. The new Jew, according to Ben-Gurion, that Zionism was forming would be either a worker or a farmer. So Ben-Gurion wanted to change the economic character of the ghetto Jew. The new Jew would be secular, quote, enlightened, quote, open-minded, as opposed to religious, right?

And of course, the new Jew would be a socialist. And so Ben-Gurion had a very ambitious program of social engineering, of remaking the Jewish character. Jabotinsky's idea of remaking the Jewish character was very limited.

And I should add, by the way, that what all the Zionists had in common was that they all agreed that the Jewish character that had been formed in 2,000 years of exile needed to be changed. The question was what. And Jabotinsky's idea of changing the Jewish character was limited to one idea, basically, which was teaching the Jew how to defend themselves.

And if you arm the Jews and the Jews know how to protect themselves and the Jews are imbued with a military culture of dignity, dignity was crucial. And it's funny when I, as soon as I said this, I found myself sitting up straight because I grew up in the Jabotinsky movement. And what we were taught was posture.

I was 13 years old going to Camp Etar, founded by the Jabotinsky movement. The youth movement. Yes. And we used to line up military style. And I developed my posture as a 13-year-old in Camp Etar. And Jabotinsky's insight was that the ghetto Jews stoops.

And when you look at Haredim, look at ultra-Orthodox Jews, and you see the ghetto stoop. Jabotinsky hated the ghetto posture. And he spoke about the dignity of the Jew. He said, a Jew, you are the progeny of Hebrew princes of Eretz,

ancient biblical princes. It was a very powerful message for ghetto Jews in Eastern Europe, for Jews who are doomed, actually, who are on their way, whether they intuited it or not, were on their way to destruction. And Jabotinsky sensed that the Jews were sitting on a volcano more than any other Zionist leader. And so his whole emphasis was, arm yourselves and rescue.

move the Jews en masse out of Eastern Europe to the land of Israel. Ben-Gurion, in this sense, I believe, failed. Ben-Gurion was much more gradual, as we have to build up the land of Israel slowly, carefully. Jabotinsky said, we don't have time. And bear in mind, this argument is happening between them in the 1920s and 1930s. And we know who turned out to be right.

Right. And can you spend a moment on that in terms of which vision and which of the leaders was validated and just flesh that out? I think that each of them was validated in a different way. Jabotinsky wrote a famous essay in, I think, 1923 called The Iron Wall, in which he said the only way that we're going to establish a Jewish state is by surrounding ourselves with a metaphorical iron wall.

And by that, he meant teaching the Jews to defend themselves and deterring any Arab attempt to undo the Jewish return home. And it was a very powerful essay. And one of the most interesting aspects of the essay is how deeply Jabotinsky respected Arab nationalism. He said, let's not deceive ourselves. Arabs are proud people.

And they don't welcome what the Zionist left was saying. You know, we're bringing progress to the Middle East. And Jabotinsky said nonsense. We're bringing a counter-national movement to the Middle East.

and they will not welcome us with open arms. So Jabotinsky got that right. And that they would be implacable. Yes, and that we would have to resort to arms. Now, one of the ironies of Zionist history is that the leader who ended up implementing Jabotinsky's iron wall was none other than Ben-Gurion. Ben-Gurion built the IDF. Ben-Gurion really built Israel's military capacity. Ben-Gurion built the atomic reactor, our nuclear force, which is the ultimate weapon

iron wall envisioned by chabotinsky

And so Jabotinsky won the argument over the Iron Wall, over the preeminent need, the overwhelming need to arm the Jews. And if you look at the Israeli character today, who won? Yes, we have farmers, we have workers, but I think that the deepest change that the state of Israel has made in the Jewish character is in our ability to defend ourselves. And here Jabotinsky won the argument.

Where Ben-Gurion won the argument was over partition. If we hadn't accepted partition all the way along, I don't think we would have had a state. And it was Ben-Gurion's pragmatism that made it possible for us to win UN support and to declare a state in 1948. I would fast forward to the Camp David, Clinton, Ehud Barak, Yasser Arafat negotiations, and

And when President Clinton put his proposal on the table for a two-state solution and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak said yes and Arafat said no, that bought us 20 years of reprieve from world pressure, at least among our friends, because we had once again said yes

And it's so interesting to me how when we defend Israel against all of the accusations, the crucial points that we'll say is, look at the history of peace offers. And the Zionist movement and then the State of Israel always said yes, and the Palestinian national movement always said no. But what that argument is really affirming is that Ben-Gurion was right.

And you can't have it both ways. You can't use that argument to prove that Israel is right and then oppose partition, which, of course, is the sleight of hand that we see on parts of the Jewish right, which is, oh, look, we've always been for every peace agreement, but we're not really. Right.

Earlier this week, we had Yonatan Adiri and Mikhail Levram on this podcast who are launching their own podcast right now called What's Your Number? I spoke with them about the present moment is Israel's third founding moment.

And that the first founding moment, the first founding fathers was 1947. The second was their children in 1985 when Israel was going through a major, you know, experiencing a major inflection point, inflection moment, unity government between Shamir and Perez, economic crisis, Israel really on the brink.

And that they argued that we're now in this third founding moment, which was in the making, I guess, for some time, but obviously accelerated by October 7th. You talked earlier about why you've been so impressed and remain hopeful in part because of these young Israelis that are on the front lines of this war and what they have demonstrated.

Israel is deeply divided today. We don't need to rehash that. You and I have discussed this many times, including on this podcast and offline, and a number of our recent guests have talked about it. I guess my question is the way out. Do you see these young Israelis, the ones, as I mentioned, the front lines, those serving in Miluim who are leaving jobs and families and fighting three, four, 500 days and still staying in it?

Are these the next leaders of Israel? I mean, because listen to Yonatan. He sees, you know, he's spending time with these people. It's something I've been talking a lot with Saul recently about these different groups that are being formed. There's sort of quasi political groups in Israel that are being formed, I guess, leading up to the next election, which will be sometime between fall of 2026, that there's stuff happening. And in a sense, it's being populated and led by.

a third way, if you will, in Israeli politics by these young people who have been turned on and found inspiration from such a, to come back to the song you referenced earlier, an otherwise very black period. So there's an insight that I heard recently from our friend Michael Oren, which is that the generation that emerged from the 1973 Yom Kippur War defined the Israeli schism.

Peace Now and the settlement movement Gush Amonim were both born after the Yom Kippur War and in large part in response to the deep disillusionment that Israeli society felt. What was the hard left and the hard right? Yeah, but the Zionist left. But I just wanted to, Gush Amonim, I don't know if I can, I just wanted to establish what it is. Right, the Gush Amonim settlement movement. Right, right.

and Peace Now. Both emerged after 1973 when there was this deep disillusionment in Israeli society that the army had failed to protect us in the early days. We'd been caught unawares. The government had failed us. Very interesting echoes to this moment. And in some ways, I think that 1973 was this moment of shattering, very similar to this time

Except I would argue this time is far more intense because October 7th was a much more devastating blow. But what Michael says is that just as the generation after 1973 shaped the Israeli schism, which culminated in the year leading up to October 7th, the bitter debate over the judicial assaults,

This new generation of young people coming back from the front will be the generation of healing.

And what gives me hope, Dan, about Israel, you didn't ask, but I'm going to offer some hope anyway. Hey, when I can get hope out of you, Yossi, there needs to be no throat clearing. Just come right in. So the extraordinary transition that we made as a society from the lowest point of our schism in Israel's history, which is the year leading up to October 7th,

to literally pivoting overnight from October 6th to October 8th to one of the peak moments of Israeli unity is, I think, the single most impressive expression of Israeli solidarity in our history. And the reason that I say that...

is because we have had other moments, tremendous moments of national unity. The weeks before and after the Six-Day War in 1967, the celebration over the Entebbe rescue in 1976,

never were we coming from such a low point of schism and instantly moving to unity. And so what we proved to ourselves on October 8th was that we haven't lost the instincts of peoplehood, of national solidarity.

And when this war is over, Israeli society is going to be faced with a very stark choice: October 6th or October 8th? Do we go back to the profound schisms of October 6th, where Israelis were beginning to feel that we have nothing in common with each other? And that's the beginning of the end, when people start feeling that we don't really belong to the same national project in any minimal way.

Or is our model October 8th? Every Israeli poll that I see points to the direction that there is a majority, even a strong majority, that wants healing and not schism. So Yossi, I guess on that note, I'll just wrap by asking you, what do you say during this week of holidays and remembrance today?

What do you say we owe Israel's founding fathers, both Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky? What do we owe these men and to the soldiers that have fallen in defense of Israel since the founding of the state? Besides the obvious gratitude that we owe both of these men, these formative figures, and I should add, by the way, that Jabotinsky's tragedy and more broadly the Jewish people's tragedy was that he died in 1940.

and that the man who really saw the Holocaust approaching more clearly than any Jewish leader, any Zionist leader, didn't live to try to help us through and didn't live to see the state that he devoted his life to emerge. But what we owe both of these men in some way is

is to make peace between them and to celebrate both of them, celebrate the vision, acknowledge the failures. In some ways, the failures of each of them were monumental, but I think that the insights and the achievements were far greater. And we live in the combined imagination of these two worlds.

rivals. In some way, the state of Israel, the reality that we're living in, is a result of what each of these men envisioned. And the insights of each has really helped shape our reality. And where that brings us to in the post-October 7th reality is, I think, in some way to remember that rivalries that appear at the time are

to be irreconcilable. An abyss seemed to separate Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky. In retrospect, seem really serious arguments, profound arguments, well within the same consensus. And what's been so painful over these last couple of years is a feeling that something profound, that the trust, something in the trust has been broken.

And I don't expect this government, this generation of leaders who gave us this schism to heal the schism. It's not going to come from them. It will come from the generation that has really paid the price of the schism.

And that rose to the occasion. And from their ranks, I believe, will emerge new leaders and new visions for beginning the process of healing Israel. All right, Yossi, we will leave it there. And I look forward to being with you, seeing you soon in better days ahead. Great to be with you. That's our show for today. If you or your organization are interested in sponsoring Call Me Back, we'd love to hear from you.

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