Yossi Klein Halevi: In terms of my personal journey, it’s framed by my evolving, understanding of the Holocaust, my relationship to the Holocaust and my generation’s experience as opposed to my father’s experience. My father was a survivor from Hungary.
I grew up in a very charged Holocaust environment in Brooklyn, in the 1960s, which is to say that the Holocaust was still a raw and living experience. It was not yet history. The way that I was raised was to look at the entire non-Jewish world as hostile. My father used to say that the non-Jewish world is divided into two categories: those who actively wanted to destroy the Jewish people and those who are tacitly pleased that others are doing the dirty work. And that was a fairly representative attitude and understandable attitude for the survivor generation.
I grew up in America, in the 1960s, the most expansive time in history, in any culture, where the whole world was opening and everything was changing, and I was very interested in what was happening outside of Brooklyn [laughs]. But I lived this kind of schizophrenic life where part of me belonged to the 1960s and part of me belonged to my father’s traumatized worldview. Eventually I came to realize that my generation’s experience was so radically different from my father’s that the distance between us should have been measured by centuries and not decades. My father’s generation was the unluckiest generation in Jewish history and mine was the luckiest.
Eventually I moved to Israel. And I told my kids, who are dual American-Israeli citizens, you have to dream past parts of Jewish history. Even with all the changes that have happened since October 7, 2023, that’s still true. So my evolution was becoming part of the far right Jewish political world. Growing up, Meir Kahane [founder of the Jewish Defense League] was my hero, my leader when I was a teenager. That was an attempt to come to terms with my father’s identity, which I thought I needed to inhabit. Eventually I came to realize that way of living my Jewish identity through rage, suspicion, fear was faithful to my father’s experience, but a betrayal of my experience.
This is really just shorthand for a very long and difficult spiritual journey that began in a very narrow place, the farthest extreme on the Jewish map and gradually working my way toward the center of the Jewish map, of the Israeli map.
Robert Silverman: After October 7, 2023, did your map change again?
Yossi Klein Halevi: I can’t say that my illusions were shattered. I don’t think I really had too many illusions. A lot has happened over the years. But October 7th really in some ways magnified the fear that Israelis rightly have toward a West Bank Palestinian state. The problem is that it’s more complicated. It’s always more complicated.
For me, and I think for other Israelis, there were two takeaways from October 7th. The first is: You have to be kidding me to ask me to consider a Palestinian state on our most sensitive border. The second takeaway is that Ariel Sharon was right. We can’t live in one political entity between the river and the sea with these two peoples together. We can’t live with Gaza as part of our society and part of our state. Sharon was vindicated by October 7th.
So what do you do with that? On the one hand, you can’t have a Palestinian state, on the other hand, you can share a state together. For me, the dilemma of October 7th just magnified what has been clear all along: that we must have a two-state solution and we can’t have a two-state solution. I don’t know how to navigate that. If you push me to the wall and say, what’s your greater fear? Is it a Palestinian state or the absence of a Palestinian state. My greater fear is the absence of a Palestinian state, but just barely.
The crime that the anti-Zionist progressives are committing against American Jews is that they are returning the conditionality of Jewish acceptance [in America]. The way that that plays out, on campuses especially, is: “We’ll accept you. We’re not antisemitic, but you have to give up this part [Zionism] of your Jewish identity.”
In the past, America always accepted its Jews, with a certain amount of conditionality. “Don’t talk with your hands. Don’t be too Jewish. To be too overtly Jewish. Maybe it’s a good idea to change your family name to fit in. And of course, this is America, we’ll accept you.”
But there was this conditionality and anti-Zionists have restored conditionality to Jewish acceptance. And the fact that it’s happening on campus is an even greater shock for American Jews because it was on campus where American Jews first experienced complete and unconditional acceptance. And I experienced that. I went to Northwestern.
Robert Silverman: One of the centers of the pro-Hamas movement in the US.
Yossi Klein Halevi: Now, yes. I went there shortly after Northwestern gave up its Jewish quotas. My class was one of the first. I went to Northwestern in the 1970s. Northwestern was infamous for its Jewish quotas, through the 1960s. My experience there was unconditional acceptance. I was a very Jewish Jew at Northwestern and it was so liberating for me. That was, by the way, part of my own evolution, breaking away from Jewish extremism. I thought, you know, maybe my father didn’t quite have this right. Maybe it was true for his experience in Europe, in Hungary, but it’s not necessarily true for my experience in America.
I went back to Northwestern a few months ago to speak and it was a profoundly depressing experience because I met Jewish kids there whose experience of Northwestern is 1950s and 1960s, not my experience. They feel isolated, socially ostracized. That’s not true for all Jewish students, but it is true for those who are pro-Israel. So they’re congregating among themselves, exactly the opposite experience of my generation and vindicating my father’s worldview.
Robert Silverman: Let’s talk about the other side of this equation. You mentioned the progressive left. You and I both worked for years on outreach to the American Muslim community. Isn’t that community the center of gravity for what is happening on American campuses?
Yossi Klein Halevi: Absolutely.
Robert Silverman: So it’s not necessarily the progressive left. It’s some American Muslims who have allied with parts of the progressive left.
Yossi Klein Halevi: I think they’re setting the tone for the progressive left. Certainly, on campus the progressives are realigning with the Muslim students. This is, for me personally, and I would guess for you too, a deep shattering of years of work. I’m not ready to eulogize that work, but it certainly requires some readjustment.
Robert Silverman: What are those readjustments looking like for you?
Yossi Klein Halevi: The program that I was involved with at the Hartman Institute was called the Muslim Leadership Initiative [MLI].
Robert Silverman: When I started [outreach to the American Muslim community] in 2016, and thereafter, it was the premier outreach initiative.
Yossi Klein Halevi: What made MLI unique is that we placed Israel at the center of the program. We’re not going to do polite dialogue. We’re going to confront the hard issues up front. So it’s not as if we tried to prettify or avoid the hard work. We put it front and center. But what really, for me, needs to change is that we need to be clear about what our mutual expectations are.
My expectation of any Muslim that I’m in a relationship with is that you don’t immediately resort to “Israel as Nazi, Israel as genocide” rhetoric. That’s not your default position when things go bad in the Middle East. Criticize Israel, demonstrate against Israel, but be very careful about what you say and how you say it, and don’t join in the movement to turn Israel into the world’s criminal state. I’m out of that relationship.
I think it’s premature to really speculate on long-term transformations [in the American Jewish community.] But what I see happening now is really three simultaneous trends. The first is the mainstream pro-Israel Jewish community has been substantially strengthened. Second, all kinds of people who were really outside the orbit of organized Jewish life, whether Hillel [on campus] or Jewish organizations, are being pulled in. In synagogues, it’s happening. For example, I was speaking with a friend of mine, a rabbi in Vancouver recently, and he said that Israelis who live in Vancouver are joining synagogues, for the first time.
Robert Silverman: That means something serious is happening.
Yossi Klein Halevi: What I think it says is that those who already had a positive Jewish identity, but hadn’t really activated it, now feel the need to be affiliated. The mainstream the core, the pro-Israel core of the Jewish community, has been strengthened and Hillels have seen a tremendous increase in attendance. That’s the good news.
The opposite extreme is a rise in organized forms of Jewish anti-Zionism and that’s happening certainly on campus. There we see the opposite, which is people who were already wavering, who were already having deep feelings of alienation toward Israel, are now also expressing it in an organized way. It’s a much smaller group. There is no comparison. The problem is that the media treats them with outsized importance. Magnifying that also has its own self-fulfilling momentum. You increase their ranks.
What we’ve been experiencing certainly before October 7th, mostly in the American Jewish community, is a return of pre-Holocaust organized forms of Jewish anti-Zionism.
What will be the postwar emotional state of Israelis? Will we be a society that’s going to revert to pre-October 7th schisms? And part of me is already there. I’m so profoundly disgusted with this government and having this government lead us through the most difficult period in Israel’s history. We have the worst government at our most desperate time, and I don’t know what to do with that.
I feel as a liberal Zionist that I’m fighting up three fronts. I’m fighting on our borders against the Iranian axis. I’m fighting for Israel’s legitimacy around the world. And I’m fighting to save Israeli democracy – and Israeli decency, deeper than democracy – it’s the decency of this society that this government has violated.
I feel torn between these three fronts and they’re entwined, because what happens on one front will affect the others. If this government is allowed to destroy Israeli democracy, God forbid, it will have an impact on Israel’s legitimacy around the world. It will impact our ability to fight this war effectively.
Each part of Israeli society needs to ask itself hard questions. The pro-government camp needs to ask itself: “Was it [the judicial reform proposal of January 2023] worth it? Was it really the most pressing issue on the Israeli agenda to strip the Supreme Court of its power? Was that really our biggest problem?” And no acknowledgement of the fact that the Supreme Court actually is far more diverse than the right claims it is. The Supreme Court has gone through evolutions since the days of Chief Justice Aharon Barak [1995-2006]. No sense of regret for what you did to this society.
The Orthodox community needs to ask itself some very hard questions. This is Israel’s first de facto Orthodox government, not in name, not officially, but a majority of the coalition government’s Knesset members are Orthodox. The political agenda of this government is Orthodox.
You, the Orthodox community, believe that you should be leading the Jewish people. Well, you’ve led us over the last two years. Look where you’ve led us to. We’ve never been in a deeper abyss than we are now. That’s you. That’s this government. That’s the Orthodox community.
So every part of Israeli society needs to ask itself some hard questions in order for a process of national healing to begin. I think we do have leadership, political leadership, for that process and they’re waiting in the wings. And we will need some form of unity government to replace this government, which is the most homogenous in Israel’s history. It is a coalition government, but it’s a coalition of the right and the farther right.
Just compare it with previous Israeli governments, and one doesn’t even have to go to the government of Prime Minister Bennett [2021-2022], which was maybe the most heterogeneous government in Israel’s history.
