Peter Beinart & Daniel Gordis on Israel (Hoffman Lecture)

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so I'd like to start you guys off you know softball two-state solution is it dead or alive and if dead what now the two-state solution I think if the two-state solution is a bit like democracy it's it's the worst answer to the israeli-palestinian conflict except for all the other answers Jesus Rayleigh Palestinian conflict and it's dead and impractical and unrealistic except in relation to all the other potential solutions which are more impractical and unrealistic as my friend Gerson gorenberg once put it he said saying that we can't we can't achieve the two-state solution so we have to embrace a one state solution is like someone saying they've drifted too far off from shore and they can't swim back so they're gonna fly the basic logic of the two-state solution is the logical partition the logic that was embraced by the peel Commission 1937 and and by the UN in 1947 and it's based on a fundamental reality which is that there are two nations in this land there are two peoples that both desire self-determination and that you can if you if you have a one state solution in which Israel maintains control of millions of Palestinians who lack basic rights as exists in the West Bank today where Palestinians live under Israeli control but cannot become citizens of Israel cannot vote for the government that controls their lives live under military law even as their Jewish neighbors enjoy due process you are you are creating a situation you are creating a situation of endless war Palestinians will simply not forever accept living under those conditions they will permanently Rebell against Israel again and on the other hand if you try to create a one-state solution in which everybody has equal rights an idea which is growing in popularity on the left and in theory has a certain appeal to liberals like myself what you ignore is that these is that there is not there is not the national identities to sustain one state their people in the United States consider themselves Americans Israelis and Palestinians do not share a national identity even if you were to create a country called Israel sign right there would be both Jewish and Palestinian the problem would be that you would not have a population of people who were loyal to his resign you would have a population of Jews who are loyal to their allegiance to the Jewish people and Palestinians who are loyal to their allegiance to the Palestinian people you would not have a real army you would have essentially a Jewish and Palestinian militia under a common flat so that's why I think the two-state solution remains the best solution it maintains the possibility of having one Jewish state in the world a state which has a special obligation for the protection of Jewish life which is something that in a post-holocaust world I still think I think we still need but also allows Israel to not desecrate its founding ideal Israel's Declaration of Independence says this will be a Jewish state that offers complete equality of social and political rights irrespective of race religion and sex that's in Israel's Declaration of Independence if Israel Israel can have accept a group of Arab Israeli citizens inside of Israel who would can give citizenship to and it can try to move closer to that ideal but if it holds millions of Palestinians in one state in which millions of Palestinians lack basic rights it will be violating not the ideals that were created by some left-winger in Norway or on the Upper West Side of Manhattan or at the UN but its own founding ideals founding ideals which I think are have served it well and are central to the Jew tradition itself so that's why I believe despite all its difficulties that the two-state solution is the best of our of the potential solutions that we have I agree but we'll add a few thoughts in all seriousness I Peter and I completely agree on the issue of the two-state solution the two-state solution is long term the only viable the only viable arrangement in the Middle East that will put any of this conflict to bed so what I want to focus on is the areas in which we might actually disagree a little bit and we can explore it over the course of the evening a Peter said something like well if you don't if you don't have a two-state solution you are going to have endless war so I just want to point out that the prospect of endless war predates the Palestinian problem when the War of Independence was over in 1949 every single Arab country who'd been at war with Israel refused to sign a peace deal we have armistice lines of 1949 not borders of 1949 the 1967 Green Line the pre-1967 borders which are now so Sanctus sacrosanct right those were the borders that the Arabs refused to acknowledge as borders in 1949 so Israel fights itself in the rather peculiar position of the Arabs refusing to accept those borders when 49 and now claiming of course the Israel has to go back to those borders even though the borders aren't really borders the PLO is created to destroy the State of Israel and to recognize the end and to liberate the Palestinian people before there is an occupation the occupation begins in 1967 the PLO is formed on stages in the beginning of the 1960s and specifically in 1964 now you either had to be a great prophet or the reason for deciding to destroy the State of Israel and liberate the Palestinian people has nothing to do with the Palestinians or the Greenline or occupation and everything to do with the existence of a Jewish state anywhere in the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River and one of the areas in which I think Peter and I disagree is that I would argue that the fundamental Arab drive to destroy the Jewish state which has morphed and is expressed perhaps differently that it might have been expressed in 1947 or a 1948 or in 1949 or in 1967 that fundamental drive still exists and I would argue for you that the reason that there is no two-state solution to thus far though the Israelis have plenty of things that they've done that are we're not smart there's no question about that but where we disagree I think is that I would argue that the basic reason that there's not a two-state solution is because the Palestinians have not accepted the various Israeli offers that have been put on the table there were also Arab offers that Israel did not respond to I think rice they're not wisely those were not the main ones if anybody that's one issue I also want to just for the sake of exploring a larger issue tonight Peter said something about well there is a Jewish state the obligation of which is to protect the Jewish people and and that's true but I think that we often talk about Israel like that you know you sort of wake somebody up wake all of us up in the middle of the night why do you need a Jewish state and our answer is oh because you know somebody's got to protect the Jewish people if anything bad happens that's a very narrow conception of what the Jewish state is all about because the premise of that is if you could be guaranteed that some other country would take the Jews then they'd really be no point in having a Jewish state we basically need all of this stuff to happen all of the economy and all of the army and all of the culture and all of this and all of that so that if one day Buenos Aires goes south or if Paris gets worse or the United States goes to a bad direction then there's a place for the Jews to go and I want to suggest to you that my son who the year before last got out of the army at the age of 26 after eight years in the Army which is a pretty big percentage of your life when you're 26 years old did not do that so that people in Paris have a place to run if things ever go bad in France and you didn't do that so people in Buenos Aires have a place to go if things go bad in Argentina I think that he and the many thousands of kids who do what they do do what they do because they actually believe that Israel is a fundamentally different bet on the Jewish future it's an argument about Jewish life as a majority and not a minority it's an argument for Jewish life not being contingent on the hospitality of a host community as opposed to believing that there could be a host community that would be very different as the United States thus far has clearly been for the last couple hundred years it is an argument that what the Jews should do in the 21st century is not to transplant the fundamental Dyess diaspora diasporic model from let's say Europe to a much healthier much more accepting much more embracing environment in the United States but it's a say it's about saying let's try something entirely different let's speak our own language and our own ancestral homeland let's be the ones who are responsible for our own destiny let's be the ones who are responsible for the education system and the borders and the hospital system and let's see if we can create a country in which our sense of self actually permeates everything that we're doing I think it's a much richer conception of what Israel's all about and I think it's a much more accurate conception of what Israel's about so when we think about whether Israel should or should not be or does or not make a difference or it's necessary or is not it's not because it's a place for Jews to run in a case of need it's a place where the Jewish people are trying an entirely different way of thinking about how to bet on the Jewish future and one of the ways of thinking which I'm sure we'll get to tonight about the differences between Israeli jewelry and American jewelry is not only do we disagree about certain policy issues and it's not only that there are certain things that Israel does that makes American Jews crazy often by the way quite rightly to be infuriated but that they're fundamentally different takes on how the Jews ought to bet on their future and they're so opposite fakes on how the Jews a lot have bet on their future that at a certain point that triggers whether it's the Kotel the Western Wall or whether its conversion or whether it's the Palestinians those are actually just things that trigger a much deeper sense of unease which has to do with what's the business of the Jews ought to be in in the 21st century so I think we disagree a little perhaps about why Israel matters we certainly disagree about why Israel and the Palestinians did not have a state now but what we don't disagree about is that yeah the two-state solution is the only thing at the end of the day that is going to guarantee forget peace it's the only thing that's going to guarantee the survival of the Jewish state because if the Jews end up controlling those millions of people on the West Bank the international community will make today's relationship look like a lovefest compared to what it will be down the road I think Israelis will despair Palestinians will despair so yes I think we all where we do agree is because where we do agree is we is that the two-state solution is the critical and ideal way to go we probably also disagree about how likely we are had ever lived to see that but that's another question so let me respond mostly to the first part and specifically for this claim aha you see the PLO was created in 1964 before the Israel took over the West Bank the Palestinians rejected partition in 37 and 47 before there was Israeli Israel construct to control the West Bank so you see the issue is simply Palestine he's never been willing to accept that Israel there's no question that the israeli-palestinian struggle the Jewish Palestinian struggle was historically not about a state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip who was about control over this entire territory right that's what the struggle was about and and Palestinians wanted did not want to do a state within any border saying he's absolutely absolutely correct about that but it's also important to understand that the Palestinian that things happened in the interim that what happened between 1964 and 1993 when the PLO accepted Israel's right to exist at the Oslo Accords actually accepted it in 1988 first and then in the eye in front of the world in 1993 was that the Palestinians lost and lost and lost the Palestinian desire to destroy Israel very deep desire right Palestinians would tell you of course we didn't want to do a state to begin to be here we were the vast majority of the people on this territory in the late 19th century we had no interest in Jews coming from Europe and from the Middle East in creating a Jewish state in our mitt and we fought it with everything we had what happened to the Palestinians however is that that fight didn't go very well for them they lost and lost and lost and so a group of Palestinian started to emerge in the seventies and then particularly in the 1980s who said you know what fighting for a hundred or a thousand years to destroy the State of Israel his is not working as not it's not gonna work out very well for us it hasn't worked out for us in the past the lives of our children are getting worse and worse and worse so we're gonna make the very very bitter decision to in a sense accept a kind of a defeat the defeat will be that there will be a Jewish state on 78% of British mandatory Palestine and that there will be a Palestinian state on 22% which is the West Bank and Gaza it's certainly not all Palestinians agree with that many Palestinians said no way we're never going to accept that kind of historical surrender we're gonna keep fighting forever but but a group of Palestinians who are able to get the PLO in 1993 to accept Israel's right to exist actually bet on that idea and in fact all of the Arab countries in 2002 say that they would accept Israel's right to exist if Israel returned to the 1967 lines with and then they added with land swaps and if there was what they called adjust and agreed-upon resolution to the refugee question which would have had to be dealt with in negotiations the point I'm making is that at a certain point a divide emerged in the palate among Palestinians not a divide between Palestinians who like Israel and Palestinians you didn't like Israel none of the Palestinians liked Israel not a desire between policies you were happy that Israel was created in Palestine so were unhappy they were all unhappy not a desire between Palestinians who in their deepest hearts and desires would have liked Israel ttan not exist in those who didn't all of them and their deepest hardened desires would have liked the Jewish state to pack up and go home but a very practical difference about whether it mates for Palestinians to take what they could get even though it was much less than what they wanted or whether Palestinians should continue to fight that you can say that divide runs between the PLO and Hamas it's actually more complicated than that but that's been the nature of the debate of within Palestinian politics in recent decades the problem is that as Israel has built more and more settlements in the West Bank not just allowed Israeli Jews to move into the West Bank but hey it Israeli Jews to move into the West Bank because there's a whole series of subsidies that make it cheaper to live in the West Bank than to live inside pre-1967 Israel Israel has essentially said to the Palestinians you know this 22 percent that you were gonna get for your state actually you're only going to get part of that because we're gonna need to take all of these about that about 10 percent near the Green Line where we've built these settlements that we believe we can never uproot and oh by the way also we're gonna need to control the Jordan Valley which is about another 25% and you're not going to get a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem lease Benjamin Netanyahu says that will never happen which is essentially equivalent be kind of the equivalent of saying you can have a state in Stamford Connecticut but you can't get to New York City right because East Jerusalem is the cultural and commercial and religious kind of capital of the West Bank so what you do when you do all those things is you essentially empower those Palestinians to say who you strengthen the very Palestinians who were never willing to accept the bargain in the first place said you know what we're not even to get the 22 percent so we have no choice essentially but to resume the struggle for all of it and that I think is what's so dangerous about Israel's policies of basically continuing to build to to make the possibility of a viable Palestinian state on almost all of the West Bank harder and harder and harder and if you look at the peace offers that Israeli prime ministers have made they have the would the offers they've been able to that may have been limited by their need to maintain control of settlement blocs because they don't believe that actually they can survive politically unless they demand that the Palestinians accept these settlements as part of Israel my point is that if you that not that the Palestinians are blameless we could go chapter and verse through the negotiations and I could talk about where I think both Israel and the Palestinians failed my point is that there was a recognition and has been a recognition among some Palestinian leaders that a two-state solution is best for them because their option number one the one state solution was simply not possible but when you essentially tell them that that Palestinian state is actually not even going to be nearly what they thought it would be you won't even be twenty two percent there will only be a fraction of that twenty-two percent what you're essentially doing is you're encouraging them those most hardline Palestinians to basically resume the struggle to destroy the Jewish state because Palestinians feel like they have no compromise that they can that they can make that gives them anything and that I think is what's dangerous about what the current Israeli government is doing very quickly first of all it's true that the Palestinians would be getting less land than they originally had hoped that they were going to get I want to also point out that we're a hundred years and five days or something like that since the Balfour Declaration so it's important to remember what the Balfour Declaration apparently was referring to even though there were no Maps provided with the Balfour Declaration subsequent negotiations with the British and the wire and the the Royal Commission on Palestine in 1937 specifically said that the intent of the Balfour Declaration was that the Jewish home they didn't call it a state the Jewish home would encompass what's now Israel the West Bank and Jordan and then Winston Churchill when he was far and secretary decided to lop off everything to the east of the Jordan River and give it to the Hashemite kingdom in the create what was then called Transjordan is now called Jordan everybody in this picture is getting a lot less than they thought they were gonna get the Jews got less than they thought they were gonna get the palestinians got less than they thought they were going to get which does not put although all the justice and all the way one side or the other is matter of saying they're not the only ones who are licking wounds and feeling that they didn't get what was coming to them the Jews also felt that in 1947 they thought it felt in 1937 they felt it when Churchill gave away Transjordan and so on and so forth that's point number one point number two I think it's very important to recognize is where we're gonna talk probably later in the evening about more about territories and occupation and so forth and we tend to talk about the settlers you know they're out there be careful settlers are coming I just went and you know we're paying them to go there we create subsidies in all governments and in all societies to encourage people to move to places where we want them to move or certain places are just cheaper most of the settlers who moved out there by the way at the beginning in the 60s in the 70s moved out to places where there was no electrical grid they moved out to places where there was no water flowing you had a given subsidies because they simply couldn't afford to live there and so on it's over that they didn't have certain accommodations made am i in favor of those subsidies now I'm not I'm not in favor of those subsidies but I just want to say that it's not part of an evil Devils plot to lure people out there now why would people go there because they hate Palestinians because they think that God gave us this land and we have to capture every square inch of it so they don't get anything not really how did the Jews get a state the Jews got a state at the beginning by buying land from Arabs in the 1910s 20s 30s whatever and building on it in 1948 49 when the war of independence died down at the beginning of 49 Israel had captured more land in the middle of the Galilee that had not been given to it in the partition plan what it is rayul do it built on that land and the international community has never ever suggested for example that karmiel which is in the middle of the Galilee has to go back because its own man that was not given to Israel in the partition plan if you are part of Israeli society what you understand is that Zionism and I'm not by the way I'm not a huge advocate of the settlements as Peter well knows I don't live in the settlements etc etc but I also think it's important to try to see the world through the eyes of other people from their perspective the people that moved out there in the 1960s and the 70s and the 80s they were doing exactly what their grandparents had done they didn't abled the Jews to build a state and when people began to say what in the world are you doing Israelis they said I don't understand our grandparents who did exactly the same thing our heroes we actually have songs about them we sing about planting this and building that and going here and having a little campfire and dancing around and we're doing exactly the same thing and all of a sudden we're doing something wrong part of what the settler community doesn't understand is why the rules got changed under you and I understand because of international diplomacy and the rise of the Palestinian national movement I get all of that but I just think it's important for us when we're talking about this to try to get into the heads of other people to understand the world as they see it the last point that I've simply want to make is we are having a conversation tonight that I never hear happen in the State of Israel we talk about settlements and occupation outside Israel much more than we talk about settlements and occupation in Israel doesn't mean that Israelis aren't aware that there's an occupation word has reached them does it mean that Israelis think that this is all going to go away they're not naive but part of the reason that Israelis simply don't talk about it very much is a there are existential threats that are now much more pressing than the Palestinians they're called Iran they're called Hezbollah they're called Russia flying MiG's just over Israel's border with Syria there's a lot of things going on in the region that unfortunately for the Palestinians make them an annoyance rather than a real problem which is a bad thing for the Palestinians by the way cuz it and it's bad for Israel because it means that for the Palestinians to get noticed they probably need to use violence once again to get on the front page of the paper but part of the reason that Israelis don't talk about this is not because they're oblivious to it or don't care about it or in many cases don't want to end it it's simply because as Raley's don't see any way of ending it now and I would simply argue perhaps by way of wrapping up this first part I don't know we'll see what the rabbi says but I would simply argue that Israel's most important step at this point is not to do anything that would make the ultimate creation of a Palestinian state impossible not to create a Palestinian state now because I don't think for a whole array of reasons it can happen now but if you look for example at a group called commanders for Israel's security CIS org or CIS org dot il I forget which one it is these are a former very very upper level commanders and the IDF we're now pushing they're considered left-wing people their argument is not to create a Palestinian state their argument is not to do anything now that'll preclude the creation of a Palestinian state down the road and if that's where left-wing Israelis are it seems to me it behooves those of us who live on the other side of the Atlantic or to be less diplomatic those of you who live on the other side of the Atlantic to not want to rush things more than even Israel's responsible left thinks it can be rushed the Palestinian state can't be created now and a pressure on Israel to do something that it can't do can only lead to one place and that's American frustration with and fury at a Jewish state that's not healthy for Israel it's not healthy for American Jewish life and it's an important direction not to go in oh maybe I'll just say III just quickly I don't want to uh I think what what Danny said at the end is very important but I want to frame it differently what Danny said is if commanders for his real security believe that you need to preserve a Palestinian state which means you need to stop settlement growth because the settlement growth is eating away at the possibility of a Palestinian of a viable Palestinian state and if you want to do that you are going to have to take on the institutions of over the organized American Jewish community which fight bitterly have fought bitterly against Barack Obama for instance when he tried to push for a settlement free so what Danny's saying may sound kind of mild and moderate I'm actually I am in complete agreement with it but but that is actually a position which is deeply deeply antithetical to the position that the organized American Jewish community groups like AIPAC cake which is that the Israeli government should be entirely free with full American backing to destroy the two-state solution by moving the settler population from 500,000 to a million the the other thing I want to say just kind of briefly is that while it's true what I think the reason that Israelis are not paying attention to the Palestinians my interpretation is a little bit different than Danny Danny lives there so maybe it's close the dick of me to contradict him on this point but I think that Israelis are able Israeli Jews are able to ignore the Palestinian question because despite these these terrible outbreaks of knifings that have taken place the West Bank is relatively quiet which is just saying you can go into cafes in Tel Aviv thank God today you don't even see security guards it's nothing like it was during the Second Intifada and why is the West Bank quiet but the West thing is not only it's not only just in the West Bank's quieting that there's not mass suicide bombings but Israelis don't have to directly patrol every Palestinian village and town in the West Bank because they have a subcontractor in the West Bank which is called the Palestinian Authority which does a lot of their dirty work for him and in fact the Palestine Authority is largely subsidized paid for by the Europeans that's why Israelis can afford often to pretend that the West Bank is very very far away I don't think that's gonna last forever the Palestinian Authority is not going to continue to be Israel's subcontractor keeping the West Bank quiet on Israel's behalf forever and ever the reason the Israel was forced to move toward the Oslo Accords was because the First Intifada showed that actually the cost of controlling millions of people who lacked basic rights was actually much higher than Israelis recognized and I fear that one way or another Israel is going to realize that the cost of controlling millions of people under your control who lack basic rights is actually will go up that if the Palestinians will not continue to basically run the occupation on Israel's behalf and then if Israel's are Aliza Israelis are forced to deal with the possibility of chaos in the West Bank and a return to large-scale terrorism or sending Israeli 89 year-olds to directly patrol every Palestinian village in town I think Israelis will start talking about the Palestinian question a lot more one sentence and then else it's really one sentence without sound you know why because I want to whether BDS or Iran or neither would be great essential threat facing BDS is I think at the end of the day probably a passing fad it was dangerous it still is dangerous but I think it is being shown to be what it is which is fundamentally an organization or a movement opposed to Israel's existence and the reason you can say that not neither words not to the occupation but the Israel's fundamental existence and the reason that is you can go on to BBS on the BDS website or the various websites of Saudi it would be is yes and you'll see that they say that the movement to boycott and divestment in you until Israel gets out of all of the territories and the refugees are returned to the refugees and their descendants are returned back into their former homes that's clearly impossible and it's also by the way even if it were possible geographically demographically it would put an end to a Jewish majority basically overnight which means destroying the State of Israel I think they're seeing legislation across this country that is directed at trying to show BDS for what it is Peter and I disagree a little bit about the BDS though neither I mean he's throwing on a fan of it and I'm desperately opposed to it but my own sense is that the fires of BDS are beginning to and I think that that's a good thing there have been victories on many campuses not to divest it's still an issue and it's still hard for Jewish students out on college campuses I think it's a passing fad hope Iran is a different story altogether Iran is dead set on destroying the Jewish state and without even getting into the question of whether the Iran deal was a good deal or a bad deal and Israeli military officials are split on that there are some who think it was a terrible deal there's some thing it was a good deal it doesn't make any difference one thing that Iran acknowledges is at least when a ten-year moratorium is over even if they let's say followed what they're supposed to do under the agreement they have every intention of building a nuclear weapon and every intention of destroying the Jewish state that's just what they say and I think that one of the things that Jews learned in history from the 20th century is what a friend of mine who sits next to me in shul his father who was a survivor of Auschwitz told him is Bobby when your enemy tells you he's gonna destroy you believe him Hitler told everybody in the 1920s what he was gonna do he said it explicitly in two volumes of mine Kampf and some 1012 years later the Germans elected him there was no secret mine Kampf was actually a pretty well well the first volume was a best-seller Hitler was fairly rich when he was elected from royalties in other words it was no surprise it may have been a surprise sort of how it unfolded Iran is a similar thing arañas telling you they're gonna destroy the Jewish state Iran is telling you they plan to get the technology to do that I don't think there's any reason to think that that's bravado or or winking or anything of the sort I think they plan to do it and I think it's a it's a serious existential threat so if you ask me at the end of the day what do I worry about more BDS or Iran I worry much more about Iran what do I worry about more than Iran I worry about Lebanon because the war with Lebanon is gonna happen before the war with Iran the war with Lebanon is not going to destroy the Jewish state but I think it's important for us to understand what the war with Lebanon is going to look like now Lebanon Hezbollah effectively the same thing right now and by the way even the Saudis said that the other day when they said that they were gonna treat Lebanon as if it had declared war on Saudi Arabia cause Hezbollah is an arm of Iran the Saudis hate Iran so they're treating Lebanon is equivalent to Hezbollah they're not entirely wrong the Saudis about that at least under UN eyes in front of the whole world Hezbollah has rearmed - far beyond its levels of armaments in 2006 a war which was not pretty now in 2006 what happened was many israelis fled south and in fact there were these very quick websites that got put up or people could sign up and even in our neighborhood people did it you know our dress is so and so we have two empty bedrooms that have you know four beds the key is going to be under the potted plant in whatever if you need that space just sign up here so I have some but other people know not to come it was an amazing thing these websites went up in just a matter of days and people from the north fled South and stayed for a number of days until the war calm down typically one person from the families stayed up at home in case the house caught fire there'd be no looting whatever and people took their children and fled south nobody is gonna flee South during the next war because Hezbollah can hit a lot there's nowhere to flee to and Hezbollah now has much more pinpoint accurate missiles so when the war starts because of a mistake this one plants that one thoughts the other whatever or Iran feeling the lessening of its influence in Lebanon says that Hezbollah now or whatever the case may be they're not simply gonna lob rockets at the direction of Tel Aviv and Haifa like they did and see what Israel can shoot down they're going to hit the power grid they're gonna hit the hospitals they're gonna hit the bridges they're gonna hit the airport now we will relatively quickly destroy Lebanon completely and it'll take Lebanon probably Dec to restore to any form of function but Israel will wipe Lebanon out but not until Fez Bella has done a tremendous amount of damage and there's going to be nowhere to run and there's there will be no way to get out and we are all eight million of us six million Jews and two million non-jews are going to be trapped in a relatively small country where we're gonna do what we did a few summers ago which is sit with our kids and our safe room hope it's strong enough hope iron dome works knowing that it can't possibly shoot down all those missiles and wait and see what's left when we get out so I'm not terribly worried about BDS though I think it's a pernicious movement designed to destroy Israel I'm more worried about Iran but long before we have to deal with Iran the likely it is we're gonna have to deal with a war from Lebanon and possibly Gaza at the same time and that's gonna be a very scary period I agree with Danny about Hezbollah I do think that's the greatest threat so let me talk about the other two I disagree with him about Iran I don't think and I think at least from what I've read I think this is the view of the vast majority of the Israeli top military in defense and intelligence officials Iran is not an existential threat though even if Iran were to develop a nuclear weapon 15 or 20 years or whatever in the future yeah Israel has nuclear weapons Israel is just bought more nuclear submarines right Israel didn't buy those develop those nuclear weapons developers LICO submarines for no reason it did so so it has the power of deterrence so that the lead leaders of Iran know that were they - were they to threaten Israel Iran would be destroyed and their regime would be destroyed it's the logic of nuclear deterrence it's the logic that sustains United States through the Cold War now one might say oh but the Iranians are completely different they're not like those nice guys like Stalin and Mao who we managed to deter during the Cold War they're really suicide they're willing to destroy their country and destroy the regime and die themselves in order to destroy Israel in a blaze of glory the reason I think that's wrong is that the Iranian regime has been power since 1979 almost 40 years so we actually have quite a long track record of its behavior we have decades and decades of its chain blood-curdling things about how Israel must be destroyed although I would just note paradoxically that Israel and Iran as Danny knows were essentially de-facto allies in the 1980s after while the Hyatt I love how meny was the leader of Iran people forget that but Israel was essentially on Iran's side in the iran-iraq war right the iran-contra deal if you remember Dallas was largely was broken in part by Israel because Israel was more sympathetic if Saudis saw Saddam Hussein and Iraq as the greater threat back then so at a very time in the 1980s when Iran's rhetoric against Israel was even more bloodthirsty than it is now Israel was actually sending Iran arms right which gives you a sense of how genuinely existential Israeli military leaders thought the Iranian threat was and I think they were right back then which is to say that Iran has horrific a regime as it is has actually not acted in a suicidal fashion Saddam Hussein has actually been much more reckless in his foreign policy than ironic Iran have had access to chemical and biological weapons have they used them against Israel have they given them against Hezbollah even if you look at the way that Iran has dealt with Hezbollah which is its clients Iran has actually a repeatedly it's at times wanted to use Hezbollah to as a form of deterrence against Israel but it is actually also restrained Hezbollah at key moment because it was afraid that Hezbollah was going to provoke Israel into actually threatening the wrong Iran is not the equivalent of Nazi Germany the Iranian regime has been in power for almost four decades there are still 10 or 20 20 10 or 20,000 Jews living in Iran they're not equal citizens they certainly face discrimination I'm not trying to trying to claim to you that their lives are good but if Iran was so desperate to kill Jews that they were willing to threaten the exist of their own regime to do so in 40 years don't you think they would have started with the 10 or 20,000 Jews who live in Iran who they could kill tomorrow with no without actually it is they want an Israeli nuclear retaliation so I think that the Netanyahu Benjamin Netanyahu has been has a certain 1938 style rhetoric that he has been deploying since he entered politics in the late 1980s he talked about Saddam Hussein that way he's always talked about the Palestinians that way more recently he's talked about Iran that way but at least from what I read very feely in the Israeli security establishment actually do talk about that way I think BDS is more of a threat than Danny does and less of a passing fad or to put a different way I don't think I think Danny is right that the BDS movement is generally aspires not towards a two-state solution I mean it's leadership does not does not aspire towards a two-state solution a Palestinian state alongside the Jewish state it aspires towards a world in which there is no Jewish state either in which there's some kind of secular binational state or maybe a Palestinian state next to a secular binational state it's fundamentally an anti Zionist movement that believes that the Jewish Zionist projects illegitimate the danger I think is that if the two-state solution becomes harder and harder to imagine and the world people around the world are basically given the choice the choice that neither and Danny and I like we both think are disastrous between two versions of one state solutions right the version number one is the kind of one state solution that exists today which is the Israel controls the West Bank and Jews in the West Bank are citizens of Israel who can vote for the government that controls their lives live under civil law have free movement have citizenship and Palestinians are essentially colonial subject when I say colonial subjects what it means to be a colonial subject if the you are under the control of a government of a country that you cannot become a citizen of that's the situation for Palestinians in the West Bank if that's a and option number two is what the leaders of the BDS movement want which is they say we just want it to be like America no Muslim country no Jewish country equal rights for everybody people live together under the same law right I actually don't as I said the beginning I don't think that's a practical alternative for in Israel and Palestine and I also think I am I I care about the existence of a Jewish state but you tell me if those are really the two options on offer in the two-state solution is no longer possible and you go to liberal Americans and liberal Europeans and say you have to choose between these two which one you think they're gonna choose not talking about conservative evangelicals and Texas I'm talking about your non-jewish friends and their children and maybe even your children you ask them you want door number one or door number two how come a lot of them are gonna choose door number two and there will be an anti Zionism a movement for one state that does not in which there is no more Jewish state will become a much more powerful and mainstream proposition in the United States in Europe than it is today that's what I think represents a threat to Israel the fact that there's a there's a fundamental flaw in the logic here it seems to me the fact that Iran is not chewing its Jews says absolutely nothing about its intent with regard to the State of Israel because Iran's Jews are a diaspora community and Iran has no problem with jewish diaspora communities they say in a certain way exactly what many Europeans say what many Arabs say which is Jews go back to the place that you came from go back to Poland go back to Russia just get out of the spot that we used to inhabit in the Middle East almost puts it better than anybody else he talks about how when his father was growing up in Europe his father grew up with all of these signs that said Jews go to Palestine and when his father got the Palestine there were signs that said Jews get out of Palestine and that you know those two signs that I Moses father saw or are actually kind of a very very pithy way of looking at the existential problem that some of the Jews have which is nobody really wants us and by the way for a very very very long time certainly when I was growing up in this country it was pretty obvious that this country was an exception to that rule but if you had told me when I was in my 20s or my 30s that I was going to turn on CNN one day and I was gonna watch a parade in Virginia and have people say Jews will not replace us and that the leadership of this country would then equivocate about how horrible that is I would have told you you're just you're out of your mind but that's where we are so who knows what's gonna be but I don't have the confidence of saying about any Jewish community anywhere in the Diaspora that it's as guaranteed as anybody thought the Jews in Cordova in 1490 thought they were in very good shape the Jews of Berlin in 1930 thought they were in very good shape the Jews in England in 1918 twelve eighty thought they were in a very good shape Iran has no problem with Jews who live in a diaspora community Iran has a problem with the existence of a Jewish state and if they don't have any intention of destroying Israel somebody needs to explain to me what all of those billions of dollars of being spent on centrifuges are really for why would you say a new census I mean countries including very evil regimes like North Korea's also developed nuclear weapons for deterrence persons North Korea is not developing nuclear weapons for deterrence purpose of course of course they are I mean the North Koreans the North Koreans and the Iranians have noted something which is that if you're at Everest if you're an adversary of the United States like Saddam Hussein or Muammar Qaddafi and you don't have a nuclear weapon you end up dead if you have a nuclear weapon you have the possibility to deter an American and/or an Israeli attack it's self protection for your gene that's not to say these regimes are not horrific I would love to see both their North Korean regime and the Iranian regime end up in at The Hague but from their perspective as countries that have whose have been threatened with destruction by the United States and indication of Iran also Israel actually I mean Benjamin Netanyahu let's remember talking if we want to talk about theologically frightening language emanating Benjamin Netanyahu compared the Iranian regime to amma lake and hamas actually has done it many times right night and and i don't need to tell you what the bottom what what what Tanakh tells us to do to Tehama lake and hamas right so so for the in terms of present preservation of their regime North Korea and Iran have good reasons to want nuclear weapons I don't want them to get new for their weapons but it is entirely possible from their perspective to understand why they want nuclear weapons because it preserves their ability to remain in power [Music] what are you does s is what we talked about this morning that's one of the things we talked about this morning close with my age I can't remember what the five subjects were but I remembered that one very very quickly both democracies are facing some pretty serious threats there are attacks in both democracies on the institution of the press which is very dangerous for any functioning democracy there are attacks in both democracies on the institution of the judiciary which is very dangerous for any democracy there are attacks in both the Maat well there are attempts in both democracies for the head of state to put himself beyond the reach of law whether it's firing the FBI director or interfering in the case of a special prosecutor on one side of the ocean or promoting what was called in Israel the French bill and Phil not long ago which was a bill that just this didn't get passed but it was very very hot for a while which would have made it illegal to investigate a sitting Prime Minister for most crimes there were a few extreme cases where you could still investigate the Prime Minister but mostly not there are a whole array of very very worrisome things going on on both sides and amazingly enough by the way they're very similar they're so similar as I point that an argue in an article that came out in Bloomberg this morning that both both prime ministers have sons who are making them pull out in one case there are in chair and in the other case the little hair they have left you know Donald Trump jr. is I don't think a source of great novice to his father but neither is neither is your Netanyahu who said in one of his social media utterances a few weeks ago that liberal Jews are just as bad as Nazis and then as if to sort of point out what an idiot he himself is then put up a neo-nazi meme on one of his Facebook postings Sahra and BB when they did get into bed at the end of the day I don't think have pillow talk that says oh yeah ear he's such as isse they may they may see eye ear he's such a but I think that this is not what follows so there's a kind of a peculiar even Bibi by the way is using the word fake news which is very worrisome actually because fake news is associated with the worldview of one person it's not an ideology and it's not a movement it's a person if I say to you you know nothing to fear but you know who I'm talking about and if I say I have a dream you know who I'm talking about and if I say ask not what your country can do you know who I'm talking about and if I say fake news you know who I'm talking about and I'm serious and therefore the idea that Bibi would somehow see it as a good idea to imitate that phrase is really very disconcerting it to me a little bit incomprehensible the question is which democracy is more resilient and I'm going to give you a case for each one being more resilient the argument for America being more resilient is the argument and I know this to be correct because I said in our statistics course that Shelley in college not that long ago that 241 is greater than 70 which means that this country has been around for a very long time in this country could get pretty banged up over the course of eight years let's say of fake news and attacks in the judiciary and all of that but at the end of the day it's not impossible that no matter what damage it suffers somebody else could come into the office at a certain point in time and begin to do the healing of civility of not attacking the judiciary of speaking publicly about the importance of a free press in which different ideas are exchanged and so forth I could see that happening very easily I can see the damage and I can see the recovery from the damage whereas if you're only 70 years old and you have lots of populations like the Jews from North Africa and the Jews from the Soviet Union and so on and so forth who've come from places where there is no tradition of democracy you could say that that democracy doesn't have the same safety net or the same history that's going to give it that resilience on the other hand there is nothing to make a society as resilient as facing daily existential threat and while nobody in this country loves kim-jong on most people here are not going to bed nervous at night how Moses realize don't go to bed nervous at night either but the danger that we face from Hezbollah is much more immediate than the danger America faces from Kim jong-un and Israelis it's not only that when there's a war god forbid people all buying together that's true but Israelis understand fundamentally that we are in a very very critical shared enterprise Israelis who know a modicum of Jewish history know that the first time there was a sovereign Jewish state which was more or less from the time that King David declared Jerusalem is capital until the time that his grandchildren ripped the country in two because they couldn't agree about a whole array of issues was basically about 75 years the second time that there was a sovereign state from Yohanan the Kohen Gadol under the hash mana aim until the end of that rate regime was about 66 years so you have three instances of Jewish sovereignty in the last three thousand five hundred years one lasted 75 years one lasted 66 years one so far has lasted 70 years there's been about a hundred and forty-one there was a hundred and forty-one years of Jewish sovereignty between the beginning of history more or less and 1948 4% of the time the default Jewish position is not sovereign the default Jewish position is not is the opposite of what sovereign is and it's not living most of the Jews in the Land of Israel on a deep level I think Israelis understand that they may not do the 70 to the 65 or 75 plus 66 calculation they may not do the 4% calculation but they have a deep-seated sense that this is very fragile and this is very sacred and my own sense that there is a limit to which Israelis are going to allow the shape of this democracy to get banged up before there's a very strong pushback so I think there are threats to both I think there's resiliency to both I live in one so I worry about one more than the other though I don't delude myself this democracy and its resilience is critical to the resilience and the survivability of any democracy and they where in the world we're in this together and maybe the important question is not which one's a greater risk but what do we all do to preserve both the the lack of faith that Americans have in institutions I think makes Americans that we some Americans prone to demagogues like Donald Trump who don't respect the norms of those institutions and are willing to threaten this institution and I think what we see in the Trump ear is that also America is undergoing an experiment in in whether it can kind of what its politics are like as it undoes a whole series of hierarchies that were kind of taken for granted in the middle 20th century when Donald Trump was young when Donald Trump was young the hierarchy of men be more powerful than women and whites be more powerful than african-americans and straight people be you know more powerful than gay people and there was very little immigration in the middle of the 20th century those were all very stable hierarchies people knew who was in charge and what we saw starting in the 1960 is challenges I think wonderful liberating challenges to all of these hierarchies right the feminist movement the civil rights movement gay rights movement also a huge amount of immigration which is changing demographically the face of the United States and destabilizing a lot of those hierarchies and it turns out that a lot of Americans who were very deeply invested in those hierarchies right are actually deeply threatened by that and they're essentially willing to support even someone who is ignorant and hostile to liberal democracy into basic decency as Donald Trump in order to try to reassert those hierarchies and kind of reestablish the America that was great that they kind of remember in their minds eye of the America the 1950s and that process is very very threatened we don't know what the new equilibrium might look like but all that said I I still tend to think of Israel's challenges are more fundamental than America even though America is certainly in worse shape than I thought I would have imagined politically a couple years ago and it's for this reason Americans still share the common identity of American even as divided as we feel to one another and we all believe in those we say we believe in the Constitution as the kind of founding document which controls the way our country is organized politically Israelis don't actually have that same degree of unity right so first of all as I said Israel controls millions of Palestinians who were not citizens of the state and can't vote and if they were to become citizens and they weren't able to vote they would not want this state to exist right they would not want to do a State of Israel to exist and even if you put them aside and just deal with the 20% of Israelis who are quote unquote Arab Israelis I prefer the term Palestinian citizens of Israel most of them also don't want a Jewish state to exist right they would rather live under some kind of where they call state for all its citizens so you have a pretty significant chunk of the population that it's some sense that doesn't stand you know it's a hugely controversial thing United States when some African American football players don't stand for the national anthem but simply as a matter of course twenty percent of Israel's population the Palestinian citizens living inside the Green Line do not stand for the national anthem in the flag some do but the Israel's own supreme ezel Israel's own Arab Supreme Court justice member does not stand for Israel's national anthem the 36th and he stands silently and very respectfully it's just simply factually wrong thing oh okay okay I might have that wrong then I say that I apologize but it is also true right that large percentage of Palestinian citizens of Israel right see Israeli Independence Day as the day that they think of as Wanaka right the day of the catastrophe that led seven or eight hundred thousand Palestinians to be dispossessed right and that the major intellectuals of Palestinian society and the Palestinian political parties is expressed in the joint list have a vision of a State of Israel or have of a country that they want to live in which would not be a Jewish state and whether this the Supreme Court justice stand gentlemen never stands and does not sing the point is that he does not feel represented by a national anthem that speaks about the Jewish soul and a flag that has a mugging dummy on it and is designed to look like a Tallis and why would this bring these are Jewish in a country inside the Greenline 20% of the population are not Jewish so that's a kind of fundamental question in terms of your ability to relate to the state relate to the country feel like you are part of it that I think is deeper than exists in the United States and it's an and in addition to the to the Palestinian citizens to the Arab Israelis you also have the Haredi right who in a certain sense also are not loyal to the state in the sense that they believe that Jewish law that halaqa supersedes Israeli law right so the reason it isn't Israel does not have a constitution like the United States does in large measure because there are very very fundamental questions about what the nature of this state is what law what its identity is what its law what law it would be under that I think are more fundamental than the questions that exist in the United States even though I agree with Danny that I think Israel also has certain advantages I think it has a more vibrant and active citizenry as relates to the political process and we do people vote at higher rates I think the political media is better and more engaged and then the American political media so there is a vibrancy of citizenship in Israel I agree that I think gives Israel a strength and a resiliency but I also think that the fundamental questions about Israeli knit and maybe that is because Israel's only 70 years old after all America had to fight a civil war to resolve a lot of these very basic questions like are you first a citizen of the state of it in which you live or are you citizens of the United States and can African Americans actually even be citizens the United States right so maybe this is just part of the process that Israel on and it hasn't gotten there yet let me just say one good thing I don't think we really disagree that much but I think that it's interesting you're much more you have a lot to say about the the fabric the social fabric of Israel and the way in which you know a lot of different groups don't fit in the Sahara team the Palestinians the other side Greenline we're not really part of this conversation I don't think at all but that's another conversation altogether I would just simply say that I actually think that America is much more divided than you do as somebody who doesn't live here anymore but who comes back 1012 times a year and who certainly even in my study at home you know flips between Fox and CNN you're actually watching the story of two different countries you watch Fox for 10-15 minutes and then you know you sort of have some other physical reaction so you flip to CNN and you watch that for 10 or 15 minutes have a different physical reaction but luckily for us we also get French news and Jordanian news and polish news so we can sort of escape to that but when you watch Fox and CNN it's not sort of like watching ABC CBS and NBC the nightly news in the 1970s when Walter Cronkite was holding forth and Tom Brokaw was holding forth they each had their own little spin but the facts were basically the facts and the country was basically the country that's long since gone I don't mean free it's gone and if you look at but one of the recent Pew studies that showed for example that members of one political party would oppose their child marrying somebody from the other political party in unbelievably high numbers the numbers were in the 60s and 70s how many Republicans would vote super ously oppose their kid bearing and Democrat and the other way around as well I mean that's unbelievable that does not suggest one people sort of with a little blip about African American football players taking the knee it suggests to me something much deeper and you know when you said in this country we sort of needed the civil war to resolve some of the basic fundamental questions here's the deal the Civil War resolved nothing the Civil War resolved that you can't secede well and slavery and slavery but slavery has been over for a hundred and fifty years it's been a hundred and fifty years since African Americans were liberated in this country and the things that are going on in this country very often with African Americans and to African Americans are sort of astonishing given the fact that a century and a half has passed so I I don't say this till that Israel off the hook I worry about Israel day in and day out both personally but it's also kind of what I write about for a living I care about it deeply but I say when I look at this country from afar as a person who loves this country who was raised in this country who believes that this is still the greatest democracy on planet Earth this is a country very much at pain this is a country where blue and red I think have very different narratives this is a country where black and white have very different narratives this is a country by the way that for all we're talking about Stinney in America Palestinian or Palestinian Israelis nobody's talking about Native Americans this country the young Jews in this country who are Jewish Americans or American Jews we had a long conversation about that this morning call them whatever you want who are deeply worried about Palestinians in Israel can somebody explain to me why they never ever ever say a word about Native Americans in this country because this country has managed to wipe that issue off the face of discussion they're still around and the highest cause of death the leading cause of death among male Native Americans between the ages of 15 and 35 is suicide seriously ice in 2017 in the United States of America which is all about way of saying partly but this conversation also for Mastro's is that Israel is examined much more microscopically both by people who love it and by people who hate it then is this country far better or worse each country faces its own challenges it's only their own very serious existential threats but I am actually much less sanguine than you are about the fundamental unity of this country this notion of the American people is a pretty iffy notion it seems to me and in times of trouble that seems to me that even the pretense of American people miss is beginning to give way which I say with great sadness just very very brief I just would say it's partly one of the roles that Danny and I play is is that I kind of tend to defend American Jewish Millennials a little bit more I think Danny takes a little bit more or less that's a low bar defending him more than me but okay yes I was gonna say it's not hard but I would there's certainly no question that America committed genocide against Native Americans and that part of the reason American that that most people that they're not a major political issue is that Native Americans were so largely wiped out but I just would just as a point of fact I would notice that the the protests over the last couple years at at standing wrong in the Dakotas are actually the most significant important Native American political activism that we see since the 1960s and actually attracted a lot of support from let from progressive Millennials significant numbers of actually journey to North Dakota to stamped into the Dakotas to stand to be to oppose the the pipelines there including not surprisingly some some of whom who were Jewish so I actually think that again I think it's not entirely fair there there actually we are in a we're in an age of political activism in the United States and black lives matter to the dreamers to guess not now there is a significant Native American component to that just as there was in the 60s and it actually has a lot of support from progressive millennial turkey wedded by the magic so let's stay with the American Jews and the Diaspora is real relations just talk about for a couple minutes maybe bringing in although the hotel issue is not [Music] so here's what I learned from the kotel issue never ever ever click send before you have either slept on it or showed it to your life because you are bound to make a very bad mistake I wrote one of the stupidest things I've ever written and that's saying a lot after the hotel thing and I only raised it to say that I was infuriated infuriated by B B's unwillingness to stand for what he shook shakin on and I thought it was just revolting and just I say that by way of now as a kind of a preface but I'm going to say the cold tail issue is not it's it's it's unimportant to Israelis because they don't understand American Judaism they really don't any more than American Jews really understand Israel you don't know Israel by knowing the israeli-arab conflict and you don't know Israel by knowing that how idiom don't go to the army and you don't know Israel by knowing I don't know that the Kotel doesn't have a mixed section what it's a pretty complicated place and it's a pretty nuanced place and to know Israel you actually have to read the novels that Israelis we're reading and watch the TV that Israelis we're watching and listen to the conversations that Israelis are having and read not translated American press Times of Israel I think it's a fantastic website but it's still not the Israeli press you need to read what's going on in the op-ed page of the get your note and Haaretz and and you know whatever marieve and whatever else this was a pretty complicated place israelis don't understand this place american jews don't understand that place let me tell you first why so I think personally the Chief Rabbinate stranglehold on religion in Israel is a disaster it's a disaster for Israelis it's a disaster for Judaism and it's a disaster for the relationship between American Jews and Israel the idea that a modern Western state is controlled by a chief rabbinate which is a non Zionist and be they never got a BA I actually think that's that's an embarrassment for Israel and it's a system that ultimately has to change that's number one number two do I think that there should be a place for a conservative and reformed Jews to have a gala tere I mean then he made the Kotel a hundred percent do I also think that the cult Hill was not the right fight to pick I think it was not the right fight to pick I think the fight to pick was about government funding of non-orthodox schools government funding of non Orthodox rabbis government forcing local religious council to allow women to be on those councils number six seven or eight would have been the Kotel but the Kotel is purely symbolic it's not substantive and I would have picked the fight on substance rather than symbol but okay once you pick the fight you got to fight it and I actually think that Israelis are very annoyed at the Ravinder but not nearly as much as American Jews are and understandably you have every right to be annoyed and you should be more than right to be outraged having said that here's what I think the really deeper issue is and I'm not making light of any of the other issues they are really really problematic and American Jews are not happy with the israeli-palestinian thing or the palestinian-israeli thing whatever you want to call it all that's real but here's the real issue the real issue is the United States and Israel are - I said this before our dramatically different bets on the Jewish future majority-minority Judaism as a religion Judaism as a people think about it if we're talking about American Jews we say Jews and Gentiles Christians whatever we're talking about Israel we say Jews and Arabs in other words Jews in America have reconstituted themselves mostly not as a people but mostly as a religion and Jews in Israel have reconstituted themselves mostly as a people with a lot of religion implied but not for everybody those are two radically different takes even on what Jewishness is also I'm remind you about a shifting balance of power in 1948 five percent of the world's Jews lived in the State of Israel in 2017 something like forty five percent of the world's Jews live in Israel and something like forty two forty three ish percent of the world's Jews live in the United States so they are those two greatest Jewish communities put together they account for something under a little bit under 90 percent of the world's Jews but Israel was a small tiny fraction in 1948 and it's now the world's largest Jewish community there is a gradual shifting of power here so when you have minority versus majority sovereignty versus diaspora model peoplehood versus religion what was once a small minority now becoming the largest Jewish community whatever these are two different Jewish communities trying very hard to figure out how to live with each other it's like you know one spouse goes through this dramatic change in life and then the couple has to kind of reconfigure things have changed and that's the underlying tension the underlying tension is we are just completely different we like to think the Jews in Israel just like us only they eat falafel and speak Hebrew but they're just like us we have 800 numbers they have 800 members we have elections they have elections we like Kentucky Fried Chicken Bay like Kentucky Fried Chicken all of those are true but they're irrelevant the countries are completely different and they stand for different things and they have different goals and remember that people that look like most of us not all of us but like most of us in this sanctuary who are the descendants of European Jews who are therefore Ashkenazim we are a minority of the Jews in Israel the story that we tell about Israel is very European centric starts with Herzl stroking his beard on a bridge in Basel right and the various photographs disagree was he facing right or facing left but he wasn't Basel he did have a beer and he was deeply stroking it that's true and job at Penske was from Odessa and Haim Nachman Bialik was from Eastern Europe and yes but the vast majority of not the best right the majority of Jewish Israelis in Israel I was sorry the last majority of Jews in Israel do not come from those communities they come from North Africa from Yemen from Iraq and from Iran it's a different kind of Judaism it's a Judaism in which loyalty is much more important than obedience and the Orthodox community here you are expected to obey your rabbi your rabbi says you can't do that you don't do that your rabbi in Israel in a Sephardic congregation says you don't drive to the shul you show I mean you don't drive to the beach after shul you show your rabbi tremendous deference and then you drive to the beach after Seoul no but don't make fun of it it's actually much more honest in a lot of ways it's about saying we don't think that obedience is the ultimate religious value we think that reverence is the ultimate religious value it's a very different way of construing things most Jewish Israelis who are of Mizrahi descent are not observant many of them are but most are not you ask them are you observant they say no do you believe that the Torah believes in divine reward and punishment and do you believe in that system yes okay do you believe that you do you follow all the meats vote no do you believe that God command you to follow all the meats vote yes okay it's a very different way of construing things it's also a community in which the public square is meant as they understand it to be completely filled with religion why have a Jewish state if the public square can't be filled with religion whereas in this country we actually think the Jews are better off if the public square is devoid of religion do the Jewish thing in your house make the public square be American and the void of religion fundamentally the two countries are unbelievably different and we make light of it we say what all those Israelis don't know how to stand in line so well those as Raley's are fundamentally not European they're fundamentally middle-eastern and we are uncomfortable and enthrall uncomfortable with and enthralled by Jewish power right we don't like it when we see Jewish soldiers chasing Palestinian kids down the streets we have m16s and they only have rocks and it's not fair and it's da-da-da-dah and then if we go on a trip to Israel and we're with a really wealth of group of Americans we get to go to an army base and if we're the really really well through group of Americans we get to fire m16s seriously I think it's an abomination by the way I think it's an abomination what anybody who wanted to show off America take anybody to Fort Bragg no no I'm serious think about it you want to show what makes America great Wall Street the National Archives the Smithsonian the White House Congress Silicon Valley Niagara Falls the Grand Canyon a hundred percent and 50 things more if I asked you to pick out an index card remember index cards back in the day but if I say enlist 50 things they ought to see none of you would list the military base because you're attended a military base just what you have to have so you can have the rest whereas ironically when we think about Israel we actually do a lot of us want to go to military school think it's really cool why because the jurors aren't powerless anymore but you can't have the Jews both be not powerless and sugar and spice and all things nice at the same time if the whole idea of the Jew is taking power back in their own hands powers ugly power suddenly whether it's American soldiers or Russian soldiers or Jewish soldiers don't make any difference power is ugly so we're very conflicted as American Jews about what Israel is and I suggest you that as important as the Kotel is that I think Bibi was a thousand percent wrong to do what he did and I was a thousand percent wrong to click send before I show it to my wife who could say seriously that's our normal conversation this is when I show her something that I'm gonna publicly go seriously well we have four friends left you don't want those either so I was wrong to publish the article that I published after the after the baby thing the Kotel matters a lot and the Orthodox rabbinate is offensive and the Palestinian issue was obviously hypersensitive and it should be but I would suggest to you that the fundamental discomfort between American Jews in Israel is not policy but it's the very existential essence of what the Jewish state is well that's hard to follow but um I wanted to say one thing about the question of power I agree with any that I think American Jews are both fascinated by Jewish power in Israel and also maybe frightened by it or condemnatory I thought I would just say I think the more power you have the more sense of moral responsibility you have that's the what's so terrifying about Donald Trump right he exalts in this power very little sense of moral responsibility so I'm not against Jewish power I'm just against Jewish power which is which what I what frightens me is when Jews have power but think of themselves still create a discourse about themselves as if they're still the world's permanent victim as if they're still living in 1938 which therefore liberates them from having to take more responsibility for their own power I think part of what Dame is getting at is that the things that bind Israeli and American Jews have become attenuated so when Livius Kohl was the Prime Minister of Israel and American Jewish leaders used to come and visit him they would talk together in Yiddish so right now neither community even the Ashkenazi inmates like speak Yiddish anymore both people's both American Jews and Israeli Jews have moved further away from the European experience even those who actually have roots in Europe and another way in which that manifest has manifests itself is that the Commons high of socialism has also diminished and attenuated right so there was a time when lots of American Jewish kids would go to work on kibbutz is in Israel right kibbutz is and the socialist ethic was stronger in Israel and the you know the work these were people who had whose family histories in the United States had a connection to this kind of left-wing socialist politics coming from Europe and they connected to the Israeli equivalent that through youth group like Hassan now it's a year or Hibernia or whatever Bernie Sanders still has a bit of that there's not a lot of Jewish content in it but you can still see that he's part of that tradition but in general that kind of connection which was a connection between secular American Jews and secular Israeli has also grown much thinner because socialism is much less important culturally I think in both groups and so you see that the group I think of American Israeli Jews you have the strongest thickest connection to one another are the Orthodox both Modern Orthodox and ultra-orthodox right because they have Orthodox Judaism connecting one another right so the Carradine obviously are a deeply transnational population right they can go from Vinay Brock to Brooklyn and their lives don't necessarily change that much because they're living in worlds in self-enclosed worlds which are car 80 which are also Orthodox which can reproduce themselves and create a lot of the same things no matter where in the world they are and so those connections remain very very very strong right up a cur ad Jew who's a member of a certain specific you know the group in in Bonet Brock will have a heck of a lot of comment a heck of a lot in common with less acidic Jew who's a member of the team Annabel's Placid in Brooklyn and a Belle's Closet in Israel right and similarly among Modern Orthodox Jews where there's a tradition where it's very common for kids to go spend a year Sheen a year studying Achieva between high school and college you have this and a strong connection to religious Zionism and you have a very you have a strong thick connection between Israeli Jews and American Jews you can even see that in a way that thing's liturgically that start in Israel end up getting transplanted into modern orthodox american jewish life and it's not uncommon in modern orthodox jewish families to have a family member who's maybe alia or at least to have family members who are thinking about making a liao so that connection is pretty strong and pretty thick it's when move one moves away out of the Orthodox world to into the world are more secular Israeli Jews and more secular American Jews that you find that the connection becomes very very thin and I think becoming even thinner in some ways because the Jewish content of non-orthodox American Jewish life as we pass from generation to generation is becoming thinner and thinner to say that Dan and I had this discussion earlier but one of the points that I made is that I actually think that outside of the Orthodox community it's really a misnomer generally to call people American Jews because Americans you suggest that Jew has been noun it's the more fundamental identity an American is the adjectives that modifies it but I actually think that that most American Jews are Jewish America say the American is the noun that's the more primary identity which Jewish Jewish is secondary and modifies it so you asked for thoughts to you to say here's your choice you could be an American Christian or you could be an Australian June they'll say all right now I'm on the next plane next plane to Melbourne no problem right I think outside the Orthodox community especially among younger people you say okay do you want to be an Australian Jew or do you want to be an American Gentile you'd probably say I feel more comfortable as an American Gentile because my American this is more primary right so as as Jewish Americans have become ever more American and less Jewish it's not surprising that Israeli Jews would be more and more distant and of course Israel is now had events at 70 years to develop a Jew of Israeli identity with all kinds of things associated with Israeli nests that are very very distinct from any from from the Jewish experience that preceded or Jewish Diaspora life I don't know how to solve that problem and I and I actually think that it speaks to it speaks to how much we lose when we and in this case I mean both is railey Jews and American Jews or Jewish Americans as we lose connection to Judaism as we lose Jewish literacy and we lose familiarity with Jewish religious tradition because I think it was you it is the language of Judaism Jewish sects Jewish Jewish religious life that I think the most successful thing in connecting Jews around the world and when you lose that and Jews become more simply representative of the nations in which they live even the Jewish nation of Israel it becomes harder for us to feel connected to one another we do have gotten close that much Sharon unfortunately we won't have time for audience questions this was just so amazing [Applause] [Music] what you're doing here in our culture it [Music] just made me walk away feeling better that to people who see the world and certainly similar ways in a lot of ways but also see the world differently in other ways can just sit and have a civil conversation with each other and in the world in which we live that and of itself is a source of certain amount of inspiration or calming the community the composition with Danny for me allows me to kind of model and make mistakes and get corrected and try to figure out how to find that balance which I find like is always could be for me a perilous one and I'm grateful to have someone who's willing to let me do that in a in a spirit of tolerance and acceptance and in even humor as you can see and so it's something that enriches my life [Music] we would be pleased to send a complimentary DVD of this program to anyone who wishes to support jbs the Jewish Broadcasting Service with a tax-deductible gift of $36 double hi or more to the nonprofit organization Jewish education in media simply visit the jbs homepage and click on the donate button to make a donation by paypal or your credit card and please indicate the program for which you would like a DVD or you can send your tax-deductible check made out to Jim - Jim post office box 180 Riverdale station Bronx New York 1 0 4 7 1 and again please remember to indicate which program you would like to receive with our compliments and we thank you for your kind support

Channel: JBS

Views: 4,841

Rating: 4.4042554 out of 5

Keywords: jbs, daniel gordis, peter beinart, israel, antisemitism, two-state solution, middle east, conflict, peace, israeli, arab, palestinian, violence, iran, lebanon, terrorism, netanyahu

Id: U3Cdnvqm_dM

Length: 87min 13sec (5233 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 08 2018