Robert Silverman: You are an American Jew who moved to Israel, with your wife, as a young couple shortly after the Six-Day War. Then you wrote a book in the 1970s that influenced a whole generation of American Jews. It was called Letters to an American Jewish Friend. And you were talking to your counterparts in the United States who are committed Jews about the future of the Jewish people. Looking forward 40-plus years, how would you write this book now if you were sitting down to do so?
Hillel Halkin: I wouldn’t write it, not because I don’t think that what I wrote was correct or true. I would still stand by 90 percent of it, maybe more. But I wouldn’t have the incentive to write it.
I think I wrote it partly in the main belief that it could have even more of an effect than it did. It affected individuals. I really thought, and I say this was very naïve of me, that it could help start some kind of real Zionist discourse or dialogue in the United States among American Jews. And it never did, of course.
It strikes me how ironic it is that in 2024, when American Jews are for the first time, certainly the first time since the 1930s, living in fear to an extent, living with a president that most of them detest, living with great worry about their future, personal future and the future of the American Jewish community, that the subject of Israel, moving to Israel is just not part of it. They’ll move to Argentina before they’ll move to Israel, many of them, most of them. And that’s how much Zionism has failed to be part of the American Jewish intellectual scene and has failed to have an impact.
Robert Silverman: I want to read from Letters to an American Jewish Friend, a statement of classical Zionism. You wrote this in 2013, for the second edition of the book. Your argument was not with the millions of American Jews for whom Judaism and Jewishness is not a top priority. You were talking to really committed American Jews. You asked them “to be honest in the face an historical situation and to draw the right conclusions that the State of Israel was the only meaningful future of the Jewish people. That this state’s existence could only be assured by Jews living in it, and therefore, the most meaningful place for a Jewish life to be lived is in Israel.” Do you still believe that?
Hillel Halkin: Yes, absolutely. We live in a time that on the one hand you have a Jewish state, with all its faults and weaknesses. On the other hand, you have a diaspora that, I think, is fading away. The only people in the diaspora who are really holding their own and are going to be able to, are Orthodox or semi-Orthodox Jews. They would also be the ones who would be most comfortable settling in Israel.
It just makes no sense for somebody who says being Jewish is terribly important to me, or is one of my first priorities, to be living there and not here. It’s an evasion of historical responsibility if you want to put it that way.
Should all Jews come to live in Israel? Well no. Obviously for many of them, this would not be the right country. But I don’t think that it’s a viable argument to say that if all American Jews go to Israel, we will lose support Israel. First of all, they’re not going to come. Second of all, I doubt whether Jewish support for Israel is all that important anymore. It’s getting less and less important I think, partly because of demographics, the Jews are losing their centrality. Partly because the Jewish community now is itself more split than ever. You can’t really speak of any kind of monolithic Jewish support for Israel.
Robert Silverman: One of the major differences from nearly 50 years ago when you wrote this book is the presence today of a large, let’s call it anti-Zionist element in the Jewish community that certainly gets a lot of press in the US. That didn’t exist in the mid-’70s.
Hillel Halkin: It didn’t exist in the mid-’70s. It existed in the 1910s and 1920s, and the 1890s, and so on. I think a lot of it is a reincarnation of communist or left socialist, Bundist. opposition to Zionism that was very strong all along, then went underground or was temporarily silenced with the foundation of Israel. Somehow it was always waiting for an opportunity to revive, and all of Israel’s failings now have enabled it to revive.
Robert Silverman: So the anti-Zionist critics have a point?
Hillel Halkin: You can have correct criticism coming from the incorrect person. Sure, much of the criticism is correct. The people making it are often scoundrels and hypocrites and liars, but it doesn’t make some of their criticism any less valid. It’s just I would rather hear that criticism coming from people who love Israel rather than from people who hate it.
Ksenia Svetlova: Challenging times for liberals both in the US and also in Israel, for people who want to see more freedom of speech, freedom of expression. What do you think the day brings for Israel now with a new American administration and how will it reflect on our politics.
Hillel Halkin: Israel has a short-term problem and a long-term problem. About the short-term problem, I’m perhaps more optimistic than many people. About the long-term problem, I think I’m much more pessimistic. There are going to be elections here in two years. You tell that to many Israelis on the left and they say, “You’re kidding yourself. What kind of elections? There won’t be any elections. They’ll stage a coup long before that or they’ll find a way to call off the elections.” I don’t really believe that’s going to happen. I don’t think it’s possible.
Now in those elections, by all indications, Netanyahu and the Likud and his coalition will lose. I think we can hold out another two years. More damage will be inflicted in the course of those two years, but I think this country can hold out another two years until elections. If by any chance Netanyahu should win the 2026 election, then I think all bets are off.
Ksenia Svetlova: Don’t you think irreversible changes can happen over the course of these two years and involve legislation that damages the fabric of the state, that represses votes…?
Hillel Halkin: I think tremendous damage can be done. But I think if you look around you at the world you see how countries can recover from maybe even worse damage than we envision in Israel. as opposed to the rhetoric. [The Israeli government] has done a lot, but it does it all on a semi-clandestine or on a paralegal basis. It doesn’t legally annex anything hardly. It annexed Jerusalem in 1967 and annexed the Golan in 1981, and it stopped there. A, because it knows it can’t get away with it, and B, because, while I don’t know what [far-right Finance Minister] Smotrich thinks (and I don’t think he’s probably very smart) but if he does think, he’d realize that from his point of view the worst thing he can do is annex [the West Bank]. The minute he annexes, he’s got millions and millions of Palestinians and he’s got to decide what he’s going to do about their citizenship. Either he denies them citizenship and then we become officially an apartheid state, which in many ways unofficially we’re becoming anyway, or he gives them citizenship and then we’re living in a full binational state.
I was always more or less pro-settlement. It always seemed to me that Jews not only should have the right, but should implement the right to live in Eretz Yisrael [the land of Israel, historically includes today’s West Bank]. And it always seemed outrageous to me that anyone would deny them that right. And it always seemed to me, and I was wrong, that the point would be reached at which it would be possible to create two states – a Palestinian and a Jewish state – the Jewish state with many Palestinian Arabs and the Palestinian state with many Jews living in it. And it seemed to me that was inevitably going to be the only rational solution and the only moral solution to the problem.
But even if it was ever possible, and it probably wasn’t, we’ve missed that train. It’s no longer possible because you could not muster the support for it in Israel and probably couldn’t muster support among Palestinians. The hatred between the two people is so great now.
October 7th made me say to myself, this just can’t go on like this any more. It can’t go on like this. Any illusion that we could contain this thing or that we could manage it, to use a much-used word, I think was foolish even before October 7th. In my opinion, it just totally exploded by October 7th. And it became, it was just clear to me that if we’re going to live by our swords, we’ll die in the end by our swords. We cannot hold out forever in this part of the world against a hundred million or whatever Arabs and the billion or two billion Muslims. We can’t. We can do it for a decade. We can do it for five decades or even ten. We can’t do it indefinitely. We’ll go under partly because our own population will not be able to take it anymore.
Robert Silverman: You write a column on language under the name Philologos [for the online publication Mosaic.] The first question: There’s a huge literature that you’ve helped raise up again from over a hundred years ago of early Zionist literature. Who’s your favorite of that period? Who would you recommend for someone to pick up and read now that’s still relevant to all these problems we’ve discussed?
Hillel Halkin: I don’t know if I have any one favorite. All of the authors I discuss in my book, The Lady of Hebrew and The Lovers of Zion, they’re all authors I love. I think if you really want to know where we’ve come from and where Zionism has come from, you have to know these authors. It’s the literature of a people that tells you the most about it, much more than its politics ultimately.
Robert Silverman: You refer to the debate between the followers of Ahad Ha’am and Berdichevsky, between Ahad Ha’am and Herzl, cultural Zionism versus political Zionism.
Hillel Halkin: You said that many people can’t agree on what Zionism is. Zionists can’t agree on what Zionism is about. Zionism was never an ideology in the sense of Marxism as an ideology. It was more of a sentiment. To me, I would say Zionism was more the Jewish will to live than anything else. The will to live expressed itself in many different forms. The Zionist I most admire to this day, partly because I wrote a biography of him, was Jabotinsky. He was an extraordinary figure, intellectually stands head and shoulders above all his colleagues and some of those stood high themselves.
Robert Silverman: Here’s a language question. I asked you this in your role as Philologos and I got a partial answer. I’ll ask it more precisely. Going back to the Bible, there’s a famous saying, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Who is “your neighbor”? Are they only Jews or does the Hebrew term “ra’icha” [translated as “your neighbor”] include non-Jews, is it more of a universalistic statement?
Hillel Halkin: There’s a debate about that within Judaism itself.
Robert Silverman: Where do you land on it?
Hillel Halkin: Personally, I’m on the universalistic side. Part of my quarrel with Judaism is the universalistic has not been able to carry the day in the Jewish world, in the Jewish tradition, which is another subject in its own right. Partly what’s happened with me is that I have become more in recent years, since the current government took power, I’ve become more and more – anti-Jewish isn’t quite the word for it. I’ve become, my feelings about Judaism, which is the religion I grew up in. I grew up in an Orthodox home. I know my Judaism very well. There’s much that I love about it. But it’s a religion I’m feeling angrier about.
Robert Silverman: Going back to “Love your neighbor as yourself,” we can interpret it in modern times. How was it seen originally?
Hillel Halkin: First of all, at the time “Love your neighbor as yourself” was stated [he uses the Hebrew from Leviticus], I think there were probably not yet Jews and non-Jews. The whole thing was more amorphous than that. There were Israelites. You could become an Israelite if like Naomi you settle in Bethlehem and your children are Israelites. You didn’t have to sit before a board of rabbis. I think “ra’icha” has that sense, it’s your neighbor. It’s the person who’s next to you, close to you, the person you deal with in your everyday life. It’s not an ethnic category.
