The Sobering of the Israeli Left - with Dr. Einat Wilf
Since October 7, we have heard from more and more friends in Israel who came of age -- politically -- in the 1990s. Some of these friends were key political figures on the Israeli Left and were committed to working on a two-state solution as the final resolution to achieve regional peace.
Dr. Einat Wilf joins us to discuss the sobering of many of these figures and what it means for Israel's future. Einat also discusses an essay she penned for Sapir journal about the tendency of activists in other countries to project their political debates on Israel -- something happening today -- however disconnected from Israel those debates may be. Her essay is called "How Not to Think About the Conflict" and it can be found here.
Einat was born and raised in Israel. She was an Intelligence Officer in the IDF. She has worked for McKinsey. She was Foreign Policy Advisor to Vice Prime Minister Shimon Peres and an advisor to Yossi Beilin, who was Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs.
Dr. Wilf was a member of the Israeli Parliament (the Knesset) in the early 2010s, where she served as Chair of the Education Committee and Member of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.
She has a BA from Harvard, an MBA from INSEAD in France, and a PhD in Political Science from the University of Cambridge. She was a Visiting Professor at Georgetown University and is a lecturer at Reichman University in Israel.
Einat is the author of seven books that explore key issues in Israeli society. “We Should All Be Zionists“, published in 2022, brings together her essays from the past four years on Israel, Zionism and the path to peace; and she co-authored “The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace”, which was published in 2020.
Transcript
DISCLAIMER: THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CREATED USING AI TECHNOLOGY AND MAY NOT REFLECT 100% ACCURACY.
[00:00:00] A fundamental notion of the Israeli left is that there is a difference to the outside world. And to the Palestinians, between Israel and its sovereign territory, so within the pre 1967 ceasefire lines, and between the territories, the settlers. One is legitimate, one is illegitimate. And the only thing we need to do is to go back to those legitimate borders because there is no question about the legitimacy of that part of Israel.
And the understanding that both on the Palestinian side and in the rising anti Zionist left, there is no legitimacy for a Jewish state in any borders. That is something that for a lot of people on the left, they came to terms with after October 7th.[00:01:00]
It's 6 p. m. on Thursday, March 14th here in New York City. It's midnight in Israel as Israelis turn to March 15th. Since October 7th, I have been hearing from more and more of my friends in Israel who came of age politically and ideologically in the 1990s. People who have always been active on the Israeli left and were committed to a two state solution as the permanent resolution to achieve peace for Israel and Israel's Palestinian neighbors.
For more UN videos visit www. un. org The dialogue among many of these Israelis is how October 7th has, among other things, sobered them up to a new reality. To help us understand what's happening in this intra left conversation, Dr. Einat Wilf joins us. She was born and raised in Israel, in Jerusalem. She now lives in Tel Aviv.
She was an intelligence officer in the IDF. In [00:02:00] addition to working in the private sector for McKinsey, Einat was a foreign policy advisor to Vice Prime Minister at the time, Shimon Peres, and she was an advisor to Yossi Balin, who at the time was Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs and was the architect of the Oslo Accords that was supposed to be the framework for a permanent two state solution.
Dr. Einat Wolff was also a member of the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset, in the early 2010s. She served as the chair of the Education Committee. And a member of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. And now has a B. A. from Harvard, an M. B. A. from INSEAD in France, and a Ph. D. in political science from the University of Cambridge.
She's been a visiting professor at Georgetown University and a lecturer at Rechman University in Israel. She's also a prolific writer. We've talked with Aenad in the past about her most recent book called The War of Return, which we will post in the show notes. Before we turn to Aenad, one housekeeping note.
[00:03:00] Since my last conversation slash soft debate, respectful disagreement with Haviv Retikur over the U. S. Israel relationship and where it stands, it seems to have deteriorated somewhat further. over the last few days. And in our next episode, which will drop on Sunday night slash Monday morning, we will pick up that conversation given recent developments.
But now our conversation with a not wealth on the sobering of the Israeli left. This is call me back.
And I'm pleased to welcome back to this podcast, my longtime friend, a not wealth who joins us from Tel Aviv in the same studio where I was with A not a few weeks ago in Tel Aviv. Still here. Still there. You haven't left. You haven't left. You've just been sitting there. I sadly had to return to New York City, but I will be back there in a few weeks.
But until then, [00:04:00] due to the miracles of modern technology, we can still have a virtual conversation. And in that, I gotta tell you, when I was in Israel, among the many things I was struck by, some dispiriting, some uplifting, but just as a sort of general observational point, is I have many friends on the political left in Israel.
They're people like you, similar demographic, you know, come from center left political roots. You yourself work for policymakers and political leaders like Yossi Balin and Shimon Peres. You served in the Knesset in a center left party in the labor parties, a member of Knesset. You are a graduate of elite Western educational institutions.
You live in Tel Aviv. You're a Tel Avivian. So many people I know who are in your circles have gone through this sobering experience. There's this term, you know, roiling around Israel is the sobering of the Israeli left since October 7th. So there's this like pre October 7th Israeli left and their mindset and then almost like an awakening.
[00:05:00] post October 7th. Interestingly, something similar has been going on in the U. S. among American Jews, but I want to talk about what's happening in Israel. We've talked a lot on this podcast about what's happening in the U. S. I want to talk about what's happening in Israel. Can you describe where you and people like you, I guess for you the process started before October 7th, but you're pretty dialed into a number of people who've gone through a similar sobering post October 7th.
Can you describe the pre October 7th and the post October 7th center left in Israel and just that dichotomy? Certainly, as you mentioned, my process began more in the first decade of this century with the collapse of the Camp David Accord, the campaign of massacres that was misnamed the Second Intifada, but to the extent that there was still in that process, by the way, already decimated.
Much of the Israeli left, certainly the confident left of the nineties, that was absolutely certain that there's a path to peace that was based on the very [00:06:00] simple formula of land for peace that made the assumption that Palestinians only want to stay in the West Bank and Gaza that the obstacles to peace or the occupation settlements that left was already decimated by the collapse of the Camp David negotiations and the second intifada.
But there was still those on the Israeli left who essentially thought that fundamentally the Palestinians want a state in the West Bank and Gaza to the extent that Hamas governs Gaza. The general sense was that Hamas hijacked the will of the Palestinian people, that it doesn't represent them. There are interviews today with members of the Kibbutzim, places around Gaza, who say, we assume that Hamas was separate from the Palestinian people.
That's true. The Palestinians wanted just a better life. And just so people understand, these kibbutzim you're citing in the South, [00:07:00] those are generally understood to have been left leaning political cultures, those kibbutzim in the South that were attacked. Certainly. They were, in many cases, the last bastions of the votes for declining Israeli left for parties like Meretz and Labor.
Many of them were very anti Israel. active peace activist. I mean, in that sense, really, the brutalizing of the people on October 7th was directed consciously. It's not that Hamas attackers and the civilians that came after them accidentally happened on these people. They knew exactly who they were attacking.
They knew exactly what they were doing. What their political opinions were, because these were people who were involved in numerous kind of activities that were to bring peace. They would drive people from Gaza to get various forms of healthcare in Israel. They were various forms of cooperation. So Hamas and the people of Gaza knew exactly who they were attacking.
And they were, [00:08:00] Brutalizing the kindest, most peace seeking, nicest people, really the last bastion of the declining Israeli left. And with that kind of attack, that kind of intimate brutality, the fact that in the second and third wave, the attackers were the civilians of Gaza, not the trained murderers of Holocaust.
Hamas, when the people around Gaza from the kibbutzim realized that their attackers were not Hamas. They were the people of Gaza. They were the civilians, the people whom they for so long said, okay, they are separate. They want something else. They had to confront the fact that essentially Hamas speaks for the people of Gaza, that Hamas represents the deep ethos, the deep will of the people of Gaza, and I will say the Palestinian people more broadly.
So the left thought the [00:09:00] problem was rooted in 1967, the conquest of the territories from the Six Day War, and October 7th revealed that it was the 1948 borders. From the river to the sea, that if you were lived in Southern Israel and you weren't interested in occupying the West Bank or Gaza, if you lived in one of these people, it seemed it didn't matter to Hamas.
Exactly. So first of all, from the perspective of whatever remained of the Israeli left after the second intifada, the thinking was that still the reason that we don't have peace, they kept holding on to the idea that the reason is that Israel didn't try hard enough. that Israel didn't offer enough.
Essentially that it was Israeli actions that continue to be the obstacle to peace. So Israel occupying the West Bank, Israel expanding settlements in the West Bank, Israel having a naval blockade on Gaza. So I think what defined the left was not so much even the question of the pre 1967 borders. It was the notion that still Israel [00:10:00] bears the bigger share of responsibility for why we have peace.
Maybe they were not as certain of it as they were in the nineties, but they still felt that, you know, the onus is on Israel. Those were kind of the elements that came to define the Israeli left. Some people define it like you say, okay, between those who thought that the problem was just getting out of the West Bank and Gaza, not settling there.
I mean, we did get out of Gaza, uh, and those who realized that the problem was the very existence of a Jewish state. But it was not just about those borders and those wars. It was also about just an attitude, whether you think that at the end of the day, if Israel behaved better, we will have peace and between, I think the dawning realization, that's the one that I had to come to terms with, that the problem with Israel was never fundamentally what it did, but [00:11:00] what it was.
Which was the sovereign state of the Jewish people. And that you could have a right wing government or a left wing government. You can offer peace the way that Barack did and Olmert did. And you can have people who don't offer it. And you can have settlements, or you can remove settlements, or you can be in Gaza, or you can get out of Gaza.
And all these things as variables in an equation all equal a big fat zero. Because from the perspective of the Palestinians, the problem was never what Israel did, but always, always what Israel was, which was daring, having the gall to be the sovereign state of the Jewish people. You know, the irony is the whole, this big push right now by the UN and others to recognize a Palestinian state, this idea is rejected by the Palestinians in that they don't want to recognize the 67 borders.
So there's this. built in contradiction. I think it [00:12:00] also applies to, I can't speak to all of them, but I gotta believe some set of the young people who were at the Nova Music Festival. Oh, certainly. Yes. So who were they? Yeah, the people in the Nova Music Festival, they actually were there in order to celebrate a vision of freedom.
And some of them were going to participate on October 7th. What was planned was a big display of kites. This was something that existed for several years already to kind of a display of kites so that the people on the other side of the border pre 1967, not a border, but a ceasefire line. That those people will see that on the other side, there are Israelis seeking peace.
So even the Nova music festival was itself about a message of peace and celebrating peace. This was an act deliberately taken by trained murderers and then followed by civilians [00:13:00] against communities who let it be known. Every day through their actions, through their displays, that they seek nothing more than peace with the Palestinians, peace with Gaza, that they have no territorial ambitions.
They're living within the sovereign state. state of Israel in its recognized pre 1967 ceasefire lines. The fact that they were so brutally and deliberately attacked left no room for excuses for those who wanted to say, Oh, it's because they're settlers or there was no room to maneuver. And I think that forced.
Whatever was left of the decimated Israeli left that continued to say, okay, it's because of Israeli actions that we don't have peace to come to terms with the fact that they want it all. As you're speaking, I'm thinking of the story of [00:14:00] Ayel Waldman, who was the founder of Mellanox, which was a very successful high tech company that was acquired for many billions of dollars by Nvidia, the multinational company.
Company that's so much in the news these days and his daughter Danielle was at the Nova music festival I would say A. L. Waldman and Mellanox, which has built R& D centers in the West Bank and in Gaza was working to train Palestinians in Gaza to work in tech and his daughter was at Nova and slaughtered I mean there's just story after story like this where People who were as committed as one could possibly be to peaceful coexistence were the most tragic You Victims of October 7th, and not before October 7th, if I were to ask most Israelis of the left and the center, and even some actually on the center right, what their defining issue was, it was the judicial reform fight.
It was the fight for Israeli democracy, and that that issue had almost, I don't want to say replaced, [00:15:00] but it subordinated the two state solution issue for a variety of reasons, not the least of which you described, the post Camp David, Second Intifada experience and that the central organizing issue was strengthening, as they would say, it's strengthening Israeli democracy and beating back at least parts of the religious right within Israel, limiting their political reach.
Where does that issue now stand post October 7th? Because that dynamic was in the works pre October 7th. So given that I think that that issue was always just a proxy issue, I can say this, the official issue. It's really not a central issue right now, judicial reform and all that. I mean, very few people still talk about it, but I actually never thought that that in itself is a real issue.
And I just thought that the intensity of feelings that we saw around it was not about how to nominate judges. The intensity of feelings I thought had to do with who [00:16:00] governs Israel. And who gets to govern Israel and my analysis during that whole period was that the judicial reform was really a proxy issue for who gets to govern Israel and that those who were in the streets calling for, you know, democracy and defending the Israeli Supreme Court were actually there for a far deeper reason.
Which I do think borne itself out that an extreme right wing government just cannot govern the state of Israel, period. And that those are people who are just not legit. I mean, they may have official democratic legitimacy. They might have the numbers, they might have won the elections, but they don't have deep legitimacy.
And I think that issue continues to be in many ways the central issue. Like, Who really has the legitimacy to govern Israel? Now we see it on the question of, you know, whether the ultra Orthodox Haredi Jews will be drafted. And, you know, they're in government trying to pass a law [00:17:00] that will grant them the permanent, essentially exemption from defending a country that needs defending, and that raises a major question, what kind of legitimacy?
You cannot be legitimate governors of a country that needs to defend itself when you literally don't have skin in the game. Skin in the game defined as? Their children, their sons, their daughters are not serving in Israeli militaries. And this issue has become heightened now because There's actually real need for manpower.
There's real need for them to serve. Exactly. So they're all facets of the same issue of who essentially governs the country. And before October 7th, I was in a panel in the UK and it was about British politics. And I heard a phrase there that I never heard before, but apparently it's very well known in the UK, that is in the UK.
The Tories are the natural party of governance. And I was told that for the last 120 years, for 90 of them, the Tories were in power. And [00:18:00] even for the 30 years when labor was in power, 10 of them were, for example, with Tony Blair, so kind of almost Tory. And when I heard that phrase, I instinctively thought, Actually, Israel has a natural party of governance as well, and that is what is known as Mapai, or basically old labor, the kind of Ben Gurion, gold, eshkol labor that governed the country in the pre state years and in the first 25 years of the state.
They're the natural party of governance. They're the ones that have a sense of responsibility, of the fragility of the entire project, and And the Likud, even when they're in power, they're the natural party of opposition. Even when they're in power, they behave as if they have no responsibility. Well, they also view themselves as the outsiders because they would argue they're not represented in the media, they're not represented in The academy, you know, they're not in the academic institutions.
They're not represented in popular culture. So they, even when they're in government sort of culturally and intellectually, they still [00:19:00] feel like a minority. Precisely. And they always channel that sense, even when they're in government of being the opposition. And I joked actually, that if you look historically, Israel had.
Only twice, pure right wing governments, the second Begin government of 81, for which we're still paying. This is the government of the runaway inflation, the releasing all of guardrails on settlements, on Haredi exemption of the first Lebanon war, and this government. Was the second Begin government viewed as more hardline right wing than the first Begin government?
Well, the first Begin government had DASH in it, which was essentially this, uh, new centrist party that was created. So you actually only have two right wing governments in Israeli history, and they're both a colossal disaster. And in many ways, even when Likud was in power, you always had what I call a labor babysitter.[00:20:00]
So, essentially, someone from the natural party of governance who came to babysit those who could not be trusted to govern. And during, uh, judicial reform, I think this is what basically happened, that the people in the streets calling for democracy, they were not really calling for democracy, at least that was my interpretation.
My interpretation, they were basically saying that, with all due respect, you, this, this Right wing government, this coalition of extreme right wingers and settlers and Haredis who don't have a skin in the game, you do not get to govern the Jewish state because you don't actually get what it means to govern it.
And I think they were right. Yeah, even in all of Netanyahu's governments, even if there wasn't someone from Labor, there were always moderating forces. You had Tzipi Livni. You had Yair Lapid, um, Kahlon, yeah, always. Always a babysitter. Yair Lapid, right. And now in this government, Netanyahu's [00:21:00] the most left wing member of this government, ironically.
And, by the way, the reason that Gantz rushed into the government after October 7th is the understanding that they cannot be left to govern. It's just irresponsible. So Netanyahu's a polarizing figure and I think everyone outside of the right Regardless of their politics, you know, yearns for a post Natan Yahu political universe, and yet, as it relates specifically to Israel's response to October 7th, you mentioned Gantz joining the war cabinet, joining the government.
If you look specifically at what Natan Yahu is advocating, Even this week, Gantz is in Washington, and the Vice President of the United States is meeting with Gantz, and the press is building this up, it's aha, like there's daylight between Gantz and Netanyahu, and obviously there's personal animus, there's personal, there's personal dislike and political tensions between Gantz and Netanyahu, between [00:22:00] Gallant and Netanyahu, there's plenty of daylight, but on the substance of what to do post October 7th, in Gaza, I do not sense that there's much disagreement.
So Bibi is polarizing as an individual, he's almost as a political leader. But the Israeli government's policy, his policy in Gaza is not so polarizing. It seems to me like the broad consensus of Israelis, a broad consensus of Israelis, from right to left, are supportive of what this war cabinet is doing in Gaza.
That was actually always the key to Netanyahu's political survival. He always knew where the center Israeli sentiment is. That's why he always made sure to have governments where he would be the center. Even now, he feels more comfortable in a government where he can position himself between Gantz and Gallant and Smotrych and Ben Gvir, so from between the right and the more moderating forces on the other side, in many ways.
The government [00:23:00] before that, the extreme right wing government that went for judicial reform was very uncharacteristic of how he manages typically his political survival, but also with respect to the war specifically, you know, sometimes people in the foreign media, they say, Oh, uh, Netanyahu is not popular, or there's tremendous criticism of Netanyahu, and they assume that this means that Israelis are critical of the way in which the war is waged.
And I always have to tell them that those are two very separate things. And if anything, a lot of the criticism of Netanyahu right now comes from the right for fear. People fear that he will not prosecute this war to the end, that he will cave into his tendency to, which brought us to this point, to constantly purchase quiet, to never actually resolve anything to always reach a kind of muddly, mushy situations.
So to the extent that he's being criticized, very [00:24:00] little of it is the kind that the Western media imagines that Israelis are against the war. Israelis are not. Israelis, more than anyone, understand that we cannot allow a situation where Hamas is left standing, where Hamas can claim victory, where Hamas continues to hold the hostages.
None of these things will be acceptable to the Israeli public. Okay. I want to ask a separate issue. When I was in Israel and I was speaking to many of my friends from the center left and the left, and I also experienced this post October 7th, before I was there on the ground, there was a sense of shock among them, not only in response to what we're talking about now, which was they had this view of what most Palestinians wanted, and that view, or that understanding, has been shattered.
They also had a sense for what their ideological allies in the West aspired for Israel, that their sense was, hey, our Western allies in Israel, you, like [00:25:00] us, like us, meaning the left in Israel, want peaceful coexistence. with the Palestinians. And as long as we're pursuing that, we're all good. And then suddenly, Israelis were massacred on October 7th, and more and more left of center Israelis take the position that you represent and that you're describing here.
But they were looking at their ideological brothers and sisters in the United States and were shocked. They're like, we were all in this together, right? We wanted peaceful coexistence, but we're alone. We're being massacred, and your outrage, instead of being directed at the people who massacred us, your outrage is directed at us.
Yeah, absolutely. What's your reaction to that? So I've seen that building up for a really long time. First of all, I had the experience myself. I remember the first time that I began to realize that those whom I think are the allies in the West are actually not. I was asked to give a talk to the socialist [00:26:00] members of the European Parliament at the time they were the majority.
I was from the Israeli Labor Party. Socialists, they're socialists. We are together. We're all together. We are allies. We are allies. And I very casually and normally kept on referring to the Labour Party as Labour Zionism and, and talking about the ideology of Labour Zionism. And I remember noticing that every time that I said Zionism, the audience would cringe.
And I mean, we're talking about 20 years ago. I began to get a sense that from their perspective, merely by being a Zionist, I might as well have placed myself on the extreme right of the European Parliament, rather than as their ally, as a fellow socialist member of a Labour Party. So I remember actually beginning to notice that, and I remember that as I would write and speak more about the rise of anti Zionism and what it means for the left, People in Israel from the left kept on being very suspicious.
And people would ask me, I remember once in a [00:27:00] cab, a very prominent Israeli left member of Knesset from merits, he said to me, but seriously enough, this whole idea that anti Zionism is the new mask for antisemitism, this is just something that the settlers are saying in order to paint it all the same, you know, it's just right wing tactic.
So, even within the Israeli left, there was this notion, whenever they would get these intimations of the rising anti Zionism, they refused to accept them as something sinister or troubling. And they again thought that this was a right wing ploy, a settler ploy, and a Netanyahu ploy to silence Israel.
Israeli left wing voices, and I would answer and say, no, this is serious. This is happening. The rise of anti Zionism is serious, is sinister, and they actually don't care about the settlements. They actually don't have a vision of [00:28:00] two states living side by side when one of those states is Jewish. It is truly a total ideology that believes that there should be no Jewish state, and for them, the question of The occupation is indeed one from the river to the sea, not one of the West Bank and Gaza.
But it's something again, a fundamental notion of the Israeli left is that there is a difference to the outside world. And to the Palestinians, between Israel in its sovereign territory, so within the pre 1967 ceasefire lines, and between the territories, the settlers. One is legitimate, one is illegitimate.
And the only thing we need to do is to go back to those legitimate borders, because there is no question about the legitimacy of that part of Israel. And the understanding that both on the Palestinian side and in the [00:29:00] rising anti Zionist left, there is no legitimacy for a Jewish state in any borders.
That is something that for a lot of people on the left, they came to terms with after October 7th. Okay, so I want to now, related to this, go to an essay you wrote in the spring of 2021. So you wrote an essay for Sapir, for the journal Sapir, which we've had Brett Stevens on this podcast a number of times to talk about different essays featured in Sapir, and this is an essay you wrote titled, How Not to Think About the Conflict.
Now, again, 2021, so we had just come out of a flare up on the Israel Gaza border, obviously nothing comparable to October 7th when you wrote this essay, and it's a version of what we're talking about here, how there's this tendency among, How the left in the West to project onto Israel, its own issues, its own debates.
There's Western debates, domestic debates within the US and [00:30:00] the UK and other European and North American countries. And there's a tendency to take that frame and apply that frame to Israel. So, can you explain the conceit of the essay and why you felt compelled to write it? Certainly. So, one of the benefits of the fact that I give a lot of talks to student groups that come to Israel is that I'm on the front lines of whatever insane new ideas, uh, kind of take over American campuses.
So, I was never surprised by what emerged in American campuses because I always see it brewing. So, I remember a few years ago, I gave a talk to students who came to Israel, and these are mostly non Jewish students. And one of the students asked me about the role of colorism in the conflict. It's the first time I heard that word.
I understood that it was the new word to replace the idea of racism. And a part of me kind of thought, okay. Maybe they finally realized that the notion of race, to the extent that it means anything, literally [00:31:00] means nothing in the context of our conflict. So maybe they tried to replace it with something that maybe would make more sense, such as colorism.
Now the talk took place in Jaffa. So I told the student, I was like, you know what? Be my guest. Go out here. Tell me if you can tell the difference between Jews and Arabs by skin tone. And, well, she didn't go out, but she said that she doesn't think she'd be able to do it. And I said, look, there are numerous prisms from which to look at the conflict.
We discussed some of them last time. Declining empires, nation states. The role of Jews in Islam, the history, theology, religion. There's a lot of relevant prisms from which to analyze the conflict. Skin tone is literally not one of them. And I remember that I began to notice quite a few years now the whole bizarre discussion of Jews as white and Arabs as [00:32:00] people of color, and again thinking, okay, this makes exactly zero sense.
And it kind of began to be part of a series of experiences that already I began to have, where I would visit different cultures. I have an experience in South Africa, in Northern Ireland, in Ireland, and in the United States. And I would see how they would project their own issues onto our conflict in a way that literally made no sense.
Just so you get a sense of it from a different culture, and then Maybe from that you can see how weird it is coming from the American one. I visited Northern Ireland and for some bizarre reason, the Irish decided that the Catholics are the Palestinians and that the Protestants are Israelis and, and you begin to see Palestinian flags on the Catholic side.
So Protestants, Northern Irish, the Brits, they're the Jews. Yeah, they're Israel. They're the Israelis. In their drama. In their [00:33:00] drama, exactly. And the Irish Catholics are the Palestinians. Exactly. And I would see them being very emotional about it, like very intense and very emotional and take very strong views.
And at one point, as I was discussing this with them, I was like, but you literally don't have a clue, right? Like you, Actually don't know what's going on. It was very clear that they were completely and utterly ignorant of anything that was happening in Israel or in the conflict. And I kind of realized, I said, you're just kind of working out your issues by play acting the sides in a conflict.
I'm guessing the good Friday agreement. Didn't really end the conflict. It may be ended the hot part of the conflict, the violent part, but you still hate each other. So the best way for you to channel those feelings is to pretend that you're Israel and the Palestinians, but you actually don't really know what's going on.
A colleague of mine by the name [00:34:00] of Yigal Ram, he gave it a great phrase. He called it a Disneyland of hate because he said what the conflict allows for other cultures and other peoples is to experience an emotion that in other contexts is no longer legitimate. The motion of hate and especially hate towards collectives.
And there's a lot of satisfaction in feeling that emotion, but it's no longer legitimate in many circles. So like Disneyland, right? When you go to Disneyland, you experience emotions like fear, but you know, you're safe. So you can experience those emotions in a safe environment. So the same way with the conflict here, whether it's a Northern Ireland or South Africa or the United States, people can experience those intense emotions.
in a way that is legitimate, that is safe. And so they begin to use Israel and Palestinians as props in their own drama, but in a way [00:35:00] that literally has no connection to what's actually happening. And just to put a fine point on what you said earlier, but if you walk out the streets outside of that talk you're giving in Jaffa, you couldn't tell the difference between Arabs and Jews.
It's, I mean, there's over 70 nationalities represented in Israel. So I would say a large, if not majority, of the population is from North Africa and from the Arab world. Jews! from Morocco, from Yemen, from Egypt, from Iraq. So, are they white? Are they the non Are they the whites in the drama? Are they the non whites?
Or, even if you look, I see images today in the war in Gaza, you see Ethiopian Israelis who moved to Israel either in the 80s or the early 90s and they're now serving. They had, you know, these are people who've had children who've grown up in Israel and they're serving in the army and their reservists are serving in the regular service.
And they're fighting against Hamas in Gaza. So who are those Ethiopian Israelis? Are they the whites in this drama? Are they the non whites? Are they the persecuted non whites? There's no way to map [00:36:00] this from a Western sensibility. Of course. And it's all nonsensical. I have this talk that I give is about what it means to be a Jewish state.
I take people through 4, 000 years of Israelite, Hebrew, Judean, Jewish history. I look through the various elements. So for example, it drives me crazy when people try to defend Israel by saying that half of the Jews living in Israel come from essentially North African and Middle Eastern countries, some Arab and Muslim countries, and somehow therefore claim that Israel is a nation of people of color.
And I'm like, seriously, when the Jews were expelled from Spain and Portugal. In the 15th century, some of them went to Morocco, some of them went to Italy, some of them went to Holland. How did one branch suddenly become white and one branch that went to Morocco become people of color? Like, my sense is like, stop, stop, stop.
None of this [00:37:00] is relevant to the Jewish people. Don't play into it. I even argue with many well meaning Jewish friends of mine in the U. S. who talk about white Jews or And I'm like, you are not helping any case by playing into that issue. Generally, Jews were never called a race by anyone who wanted their benefit.
Nothing good ever came out of calling the Jews a race. And I've been saying that for years and we see it now. When Jews were beginning to be called white, it was exactly like Jews being called Semitic in Europe. There were never any good intentions in racializing Jews, and we should never ever agree to play any part in anyone else's drama because it's not going to turn out well for us.
Okay, and I guess I have two questions. One is, do you think the Israeli left feels lonely now? Or, lonely, isolated, embattled, or do they feel, like, empowered, like, this is crazy, [00:38:00] these myths have been punctured, we know that we're alone, and we have to carve out our own path, is what it means to be the left in Israel.
Where do they go from here? And I know it's a hard question to ask, because Israel's still in the middle of fighting this war, and so, where the political chips land and how people organize politically is difficult to project. But just generally speaking, what's the sense? So my sense is that the small minority is trying to double down on being left, essentially with the notion That the onus is on Israel.
You're saying maybe just general efforts to create alliances with Israeli Arabs who have certainly staked their claim with Israel by and large after October 7th. So maybe define the left more about a Jewish Arab alliance. Among Israel's citizens. So there's things around that generally the left for the last 20 years, whenever it [00:39:00] crashed with reality, tended to look inside.
So to focus on anything from. Judicial reform to social issues to Jewish Arab alliance within the state of Israel. So you're going to see some of that, but I think the vast majority are basically joining what for some time now is what I called a massive Israeli center. I think this is where 80, 90 percent of Israel citizens, Jewish and Arab are basically saying, okay.
As long as the Arab Palestinian position is from the river to the sea, anti Zionist, no Jewish state, well then, there's not much we can do. So it's not, you know, we're going to focus on other things, but it's not that we need to do something. It's actually the Arab Palestinian position that needs to change before any kind of agreement needs to happen.
And the [00:40:00] same vast Israeli majority of 80 90 percent of Israel's citizens is also of the view that should the Arab Palestinian vision change, should they really forgo their century long war against Zionism? Should they really decide that they want to live next to a Jewish state rather than instead of it?
Should they finally accept all the implications that they're not multi generational refugees, they possess no right of return into the state of Israel? Should the Palestinian people essentially be a transformed people that have a different goal and ethos for themselves, then they will meet a massive Israeli majority that wants to make peace with them.
That's all we've ever wanted. We just want to make sure that it's real peace and not some of the pretend things that we agreed to over the decades because we were so desperate for peace. One final question. I hear [00:41:00] from a lot of friends of mine in the U S. liberal Jews who have been woken up along the lines that you're describing, who still cling to this idea that some members of this government, of the Netanyahu led government, leave an odious taste in the mouths of many Israeli supporters over in the West.
I'm thinking of the Ben Gvirs and the Smoltriches. And I just had a conversation a few days ago with a friend of mine saying, yes, I'm with this government. I support what they're doing in Gaza. It's been a wake up call. There's no winning over the majority of Palestinians. This is hopeless, but, but if only these controversial divisive figures within the government, only if they exited the stage, Israel and Israel supporters would be perceived differently in the West.
Do you agree with that? I have to say that I'm torn, because over the years, I've seen so many excuses, you know, if only Netanyahu did this or said that. And then we do it. We get out of Gaza, Israel doesn't annex the West [00:42:00] Bank and actually normalizes relations with the Abraham Accords countries. Can you just explain that real quick?
That's important because for listeners who don't have the context for that, the Netanyahu government back in 2020, I guess it was. Okay, exactly. Exactly. So there was all this talk that this government annexed the West Bank, or at least a large share of it. And I remember participating in a lot of panels at the time, like, big, bad, evil Israel is going to annex the West Bank.
And I kept saying, look, I cannot convey to you the extent to which most Israelis could care less. Meaning they don't want it, when you say care less, about taking over the West Bank. They just don't care. It's not on the agenda. They don't care about it. It's not a priority. And then the Emirati ambassador to the United States wrote an op ed in an Israeli paper, essentially saying, guys, what about dropping annexation and getting direct flights to Dubai?
How does that sound? And Israelis were like, heck yeah. And again and again, the revealed preferences of Israelis. are to just let [00:43:00] us be, and we're happy to make peace. And we want normalization. When Yusuf al Khattab, the ambassador, wrote that piece, by the way, it was an amazing thing, it was an Emirati diplomat writing an op ed in an Israeli newspaper, basically offering normalization with the UAE.
And most Israelis wanted that, that was the goal. Of course, that was always the goal. Acceptance, peace, we talked about it last time. At the end of the day, the Jews are a tiny, tiny minority in an Arab and Muslim Middle East. We want to be accepted. We just want the world around us to let us be. I don't know if I mentioned it last time that I gave a talk in LA and there were a lot of people there from the entertainment industry.
And one of them came up to me at the end and he said, look, The Palestinians in their marches in the streets, they have really cool slogans. You know, there is only one solution, intifada revolution, from the river to the sea, [00:44:00] free, free Palestine, all very catchy, very musical. We got nothing. We're sitting in those vigils saying, I'm Israel, hi.
He's like, you know what? I have a slogan for us. I'm like, sure, go ahead. He's like, leave us alone. And I thought that there's actually a lot to it. We just want to be left alone. Somebody recently joked about it in the Super Bowl ads. They said, look at the Super Bowl ads. Scientology, come join us.
Christianity, come join us. Jews, leave us alone. So yes, Israel's revealed preferences have always been, we'll settle for a smaller state if you leave us alone. We just want to be sovereign. To be masters of our fate, smaller state, bigger state is secondary to the question of being sovereign in our own state, in our ancestral homeland.
And beyond that, we're willing to share, we're willing to make peace. Right [00:45:00] wing governments, left wing governments, they're all governments of a small people. So always, you know, sometimes people ask me, A, not, is there anything that Israel could do, which would make you think that Israel made peace impossible?
I said, if we have a billion Jews, you know, I'll agree that we're a problem here. But as long as we're a few million people, Surrounded by half a billion Arabs, nearly two billion Muslims, broadly still opposed to our very existence. The question again, are not our actions. We will always be willing to compromise in order to achieve peace and to be left alone, and even much less on that.
By the way, in the Gaza flare up of 2022, when it was the Bennett Lapid government, I'm reminded that A, people were hysterical, critics of Israel were hysterical, maybe not as Hysterical as they are now, but it was pretty bad. That was a government that was created in part by a kingmaker who was the leader of an [00:46:00] Arab party.
So you literally had the Rom Party, Mansur Abbas, a key architect, a kingmaker in the creation of this government. So here was an Israeli Arab party. So there was no Ben Gurion or Smoltrich. It was literally a Muslim Arab party in this government that was fighting a war in Gaza. And this crazy criticisms, the unhinged criticisms of Israel were still there.
I agree with you. It's always like, if just this or just that, and then when Israel has just this or just that, somehow there's a new just this and just that. And let me be clear. I want this government gone. I think it's a terrible, terrible government for Israel. But I separate that from the question of whether when people say, Oh.
There, the problem is that really the case and not we will leave it there. Thank you again for an illuminating and wide ranging conversation. And I will look forward to having you back on or being together and doing an in person conversation in the near future. Thank you.[00:47:00]
That's our show for today. To keep up with Einat Wilf, you can find her on X at Einat Wilf, E I N A T W I L F. And of course, I highly recommend her books, especially her most recent book called The War of Return, which we will link to in the show notes. Call Me Back is produced and edited by Ilan Benatar.
Our media manager is Rebecca Strom. Additional editing by Martin Huergo. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.