The Honest Take

speaker-0: How can I complain about some kid in the Midwest who puts on a keffiyeh and doesn't know which river and which sea? We're clinical students. We know about Deir Yassin and don't know about the Hadassah convoy. Now, why is that?

speaker-1: Welcome to The Honest Take, Honest Reporting's long-form interview series, bringing together leading experts, journalists, and researchers to examine how Israel and the Middle East are covered, and what goes into creating and feeding the narratives that target Israel. I'm Ben Chertoff, and today, writer Yossi Klein-Halevi takes us back to 1948, the Nakba, the war, and what honest history actually looks like. As Nakba Day approaches, the settler colonial framing of Israel's founding is essentially hegemonic on college campuses, in newsrooms, and now in international courtrooms. The word genocide appears in headlines without quotation marks, and the Nakba, a genuine, complicated history, has been compressed into a single story of unbroken dispossession. In this conversation, we're going to try to do something that almost nobody does anymore. We're going to tell the real story of 1948, both sides. The Arab armies that invaded the day after Israel declared independence, the 700,000 Palestinians who fled or were expelled, the 850,000 Jews who were expelled from Arab countries in the same period, a refugee crisis the world forgot. Plan Dalit, Darya Seen. as in Pasha's promise of a war of extermination. Our guest today is Yossi Klein Halevi. He grew up in Brooklyn, joined the Jewish Defense League as a teenager, then moved to Israel, broke with extremism, and wrote a best-selling book called Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor, released it free in Arabic, asking Palestinians to see Jews as an indigenous people returning home, not as colonizers. We're going to ask him what he thinks about all of after October 7th, and how a legitimate history got turned into a weapon. Yossi Klein-Halevi, welcome to The Honest Take. We'll start off with a little bit about you. You grew up in Brooklyn, son of Holocaust survivors, and you found your way into Meyer Kahane's JDL as a teenager. What pulled you into that?

speaker-0: Well, first of all, being a teenager, you know, the other options were sex, drugs and rock and roll. And it was the 60s. It was the late 60s. I'm saying that only half sarcastically, because what's very often forgotten is the climbing of the emergence of the JDL. And it's not a coincidence that it happened in the late 1960s when American youth culture turned violent and American politics turned anarchic. And Kahane came along and was the effectively the as strange as this sounds today ⁓ for for young Jews in Brooklyn. He was the Jewish face of the 60s, even though, course, he was radical right, but he was really coming from a ⁓ place where he was drawing on the rhetoric of the 60s. Instead of black is beautiful. was Jewish is beautiful. Instead of black power was Jewish power. And, you know, every aggrieved minority seemed to have its own violent wing or street gang. and Kahane provided the Jewish equivalent.

speaker-1: but then you broke with Kahana, you moved to Israel. The most recent book you have has an olive branch on the cover as, it just seems, especially these days, like such an unlikely shift since everything seems to be radicalizing. What changed?

speaker-0: ⁓ Those of us who joined the JDL didn't sign up for an explicitly ⁓ racist, anti-Arab, ⁓ religiously apocalyptic ideology. We had signed up to protect Jews with the motto of Never Again as our response to the Holocaust. so, Kahana really, in that sense, at least ideologically, ⁓ went in a direction that his earlier followers, most of us, felt we couldn't follow. And so the break happened really very soon after he moved to Israel, which was 1971, 72. And by 1973, most of his American followers had left.

speaker-1: You moved to Israel. You ⁓ live in Jerusalem, and you have written about how you can see the partition wall from your apartment. And you said that that proximity changed you. How?

speaker-0: Well, you know, living with the intimacy of the conflict. where you can pretend that it's happening somewhere else. The settlement movement had this very powerful sticker, Yesha Zakan. Yesha is the acronym of Judea Samaria in Gat. And the argument was that ⁓ the territories aren't far away, they're right here. So I took that one step further. Yesha is here, but so is the West Bank. Now, they happen to be the same place geographically, but they're very different places, conception. And I'm comfortable using both terms. For me, ⁓ the territories are Judea and Samaria. I have this deep attachment to them. But I understand that there's another people there that also has a deep attachment to a place called the West Bank. That's not my term. It's their term. But the tragedy of this conflict is that you have two conflicting, overlapping geographies that are really happening physically in the same place. Between the river and the sea, are two lands. There's the land of Israel and the land of Palestine. so living with the wall was a daily, even hourly reminder. that this is a divided land and it's to to regard this land as one as one political entity. It certainly, I do regard the land of Israel as one spiritual entity, but to regard it as one political entity is to ignore the wall that's cutting through and that wall is both literal and metaphorical. Or was they a It was—the wall forced me to face the reality of this country in a way that many Israelis are more comfortable evading and not thinking about the Palestinians on the other side.

speaker-1: Let's talk about that reality and get into it. November 1947, the UN votes to partition Palestine. The Jews accept it. The Arabs reject it. Why? What was the Arab position? Was the Arab position reasonable from their perspective?

speaker-0: Well, everyone's perspective is reasonable from their perspective. My take on the first Arab refusals, and I say in plural because the first refusal was in 1937, which was the British Peel Commission, which offered to partition the land and offered the Palestinians a state on much more territory than the UN partition of 1947 offered. And if you look at the pattern of peace offers, beginning with 1937 through 1947, the two offers in the year 2000, and we can unpack this if you like, and then Egon Olmert's offer in 2009 to Mahmoud Abbas, and all of these were offers that the Jewish, the Zionist, the Israeli side either initiated or said yes to and each one of these offers or offers that the Palestinian leadership either categorically reject it or effectively reject it by not responding, walking away from. And the pattern there is that each time there's a proposal that's been rejected and then another proposal 10 years, 15 years, whatever it is later, is put on the table. The map of the possible Palestinian state gets small. And the reason for that is reality. real. If you keep rejecting offers. History doesn't stand still. It's a dynamic. And the Palestinians will find themselves continually confronting a smaller and smaller map. Now I say that because The initial Palestinian rejection had a certain logic to it. Certainly from their point of view, was ⁓ framed in the following way. Well, you're telling me that the UN offered us a generous deal. They offered to create two states in a land that's entirely ours, and we're supposed to say thank you. We're supposed to be grateful. I mean, the metaphor that Palestinians use to this day when speaking about partition is, so the UN ⁓ offered to give us two and a half rooms in our own home and two and a half rooms or three rooms to a stranger, and you can't understand why we rejected that. So my response to that is, of course, that's from your perspective. Well, and I understand that. But do you understand that I have a different perspective, that I'm not a stranger in that apartment, that apartment was never owned by any other people ⁓ as an entity except the Jewish people. There never was a Palestinian state. And the UN, with the support of the Zionist mainstream, said, okay, let's divide this home. You said, no, it's all mine. And you tried to throw us out. You lost. And instead you ended up in the situation that you intended to do to us. And for the last 80 years, ever since that failed attempt to create a Jewish Nakba, which ended up in the Palestinian Nakba, you've been saying, Not fair. Not fair. Now, it's not fair that we didn't allow you to destroy us. It's not fair that we did to you what you intended to do to us. Now, in the real world, in the world of ⁓ actual politics and diplomacy ⁓ and military realities, that goes for fan. That's as most affairs as we get in the hard real world. And so the Palestinians are living in this kind of abstract idea of absolute justice, which they've never let go of. And the tragedy since October 7th is that this movement, anti-Zionist movement around the world, is reinforcing first tendencies. within the Palestinian National Movement for maximalism, for denying the complexity of this conflict, denying that there is a competing merit. And friends of the Palestinian people should be out there chanting for two states for two people demanding that Israel not foreclose the option of a two-state solution. And we are getting closer to that option of being foreclosed because, again, reality underground doesn't stand still. And there are strong forces in Israeli society that believe about the land between the river and the sea, exactly what the Palestinians believe. It's all one. And so if you don't try to engage Israel, you don't try to stop the forces of annexation, you're going to end up with nothing between the river and the sea. And that, think, is where we're headed.

speaker-1: Yeah, you, ⁓ it reminds me of a part of the book, ⁓ I think towards the beginning, where you quote somebody who says to you, why are we arguing about who owns the land when the land will own us both? And, you know, talking also about the maximalism there. I mean, at some point, where does this stop being about land and start being about existence?

speaker-0: Well, look, that was the argument of those on both sides who have wanted a two-state solution. I've been part of that camp, loosely, and I say loosely because I personally don't identify with the Israeli left. don't vote left. My camp is the center, and the center is that part of the Israeli map. that wants to be left but fears that the right is reading the map more realistically. And so there's a pole between the head and the heart. The heart pole is left and the head pole is right. And that's the center. That's the dilemma of the century. Centrist Israelis would argue that there must be a Palestinian state for for our ⁓ interests more than anything else, to save Israel from being a permanent ruler over another people, to save Israel from having to make an impossible choice between being a Jewish state or a democratic state, to save Israel's international standing, to preserve the relationship between Israel and the diaspora. There are so many compelling reasons why it's in Israel's interests to create a Palestinian state. There's only one countervailing reason for not having a Palestinian state. And today it is a decisive reason. That is that we cannot create a Sepin Gaza in the West Bank, because that's what would most likely happen if we were to create a Palestinian state today, five minutes from Tel Aviv and inside Jerusalem. It's inconceivable. After October 7, there are very, very few Israelis, including Israelis on the left, who seriously believe that a two-state solution is viable anytime soon.

speaker-1: Let's get into the meat between the partition vote and the actual war. There's six months of escalating civil conflict. seems like the narrative skips that and straight into the Nakba. What was actually going on on the ground during that time?

speaker-0: So the UN partition vote happens, I think it's November 29, 1947. And the mainstreaming of the Yishuv, the pre-state Jewish community, reacts with the Jewati, even though the state that the UN offers to Jews is, it's frankly ludicrous. It's truncated. mostly desert. The Palestinians say that the UN offered the Jews more land than they were offered. And that's true, but you have to look at what the land that the Jews offered was. The Palestinians were offered the most fertile land. The Jews were offered mostly deserts with a very narrow coastal strip. And so the Jews nevertheless respond to the first promise of statehood with rejoicing and dancing in the streets of Israel city to see. the Palestinian National Movement declares war. This is before the creation of the state, as you put it, six months before the state is created, May 14, 1948. The Palestinian National Movement opens with a civil war. It begins by massacring Jews, randomly, on the roads. Buses are stopped and Jews are slaughtered. And so you have a very bitter house to house, village to village conflict, which is a zero sum game. Ethnic cleansing for both sides. And we won. We won that civil war. And the beginning of the Palestinian refugee tragedy begins with our ability to prevent a far greater Jewish tragedy would have been a mass slaughter, because we had nowhere to go. Palestinians went 10 kilometers away to other Arab populations. They went to Arab countries. We only had to see. That's why we won. We won because of desperation. We had no other option. And then in the Palestinian refugee tragedy is a combination of expulsion and flight. the arguments will be made into return about how many were expelled, how many fled, and the reason for the confusion This is something that the historian Benny Morris notes. It's very hard to draw a clear line between flight and expulsion. If you're in the middle of a battleground, it can look like flight. Flight can seem to be expulsion. Expulsion can look like flight. It's very hard to make those clear distinctions. Nevertheless, 700,000, 750,000 Palestinians ⁓ are now refugees as a result of the six-month civil war. And then five Arab countries invade Israel in a day on its creation. And we have the longest war in Israel's history until the October 7th, which is the war.

speaker-1: Yeah. Talking about the difference between flight and expulsion, 850,000 Jews are expelled or forced to flee Arab countries at the same time. Communities 2,500 years old, destroyed, and the population exchange is invisible in the current mainstream narrative. Why is that? Why does...

speaker-0: We're partly responsible for that because we didn't promote the site. We didn't see the Jews from our countries as refugees. We saw them as olim, as Jews returning home. That was part of Zionist ideology. In retrospect, of course, we made a major strategic mistake in not placing this at the center of how we speak about the conflict to the world. It's very late now, ⁓ all these years later, we're playing catch-up. we made another mistake, I think, in terms of the knockback. ⁓ which is we didn't challenge the term. The term means catastrophe. And recent research by my friend, the late journalist, Saul Stern, did terrific work, wrote a ⁓ really important piece shortly before he died about the origins of the term knock-a-book. And what he found was that the ways in which Nakba was used in the Arab world had nothing to do with the tragedy of Palestinian uprooting. The tragedy that they were referring to was the failure of the Arab world to destroy Israel. That was the tragedy. This foreign body in the Middle East that had no place because you can't have a minority ⁓ that has lived under Muslim domination for centuries, becoming sovereign. And Israel is the only example of a Middle Eastern minority achieving sovereignty. The Christians almost succeeded in Lebanon, but failed. Kurds certainly never succeeded, and on and on. We're the only Middle Eastern minority and I say Middle Eastern minority because as you noted At least half of Israel's population and has its origins from Jews who? left one part of the Middle East and resettled in another and and very often, know when I'm speaking with Palestinians or anti-zionists generally and they'll say why don't you all go back to where you came from and Where is that? And then they'll list, you know, go back to Poland, go back to Russia, in my case, go back to America. They will never say where a majority of Israelis actually come from, because those are Middle Eastern countries. And that's too uncomfortable. It complicates the narrative. So it's always go back to Poland and never go back to

speaker-1: You know, also you mentioned a key point that ⁓ that Israel treated all those Jews coming in and escaping the Arab countries as olim, as citizens, whereas that wasn't the case for Arab countries accepting Palestinian refugees. there's a Paul Johnson wrote a ⁓ large tome on the history of the Jews, and he talks about how that was an intentional move by the Arab bloc to perpetuate this forever war. ⁓ Do you think that that is the case? Was that strategic?

speaker-0: I think it was a combination of strategy and just mean-spiritedness. We hear so much about Arab hospitality. Neither the Jews nor the Palestinians have been recipients of Arab hospitality. think that's one of the tragedies of this conflict. There's been so much legitimate focused on the failures, especially in the crucial early decade in Israel's history, to treat the Jews from our countries with respect, to treat them as equal citizens. That was a struggle that took many decades. And it's difficult for many liberal Jews in the diaspora to accept the fact that it was actually the Likud. I'm not speaking about the Tadial Likud, I'm speaking about the old Likud, the Begid and Shavir, that really empowered the Mizrahi and the Jerusalemite countries. But we spent so much time focused on the wrongs that Israeli society committed that And we've given tremendous ammunition to the anti-Zionists with those stories. But we haven't challenged them on their side's historic failure to grant the most basic rights to the Palestinian refugees. So yes, Israeli society failed to live up to its promise in those early years. I think Israel has done. increasingly better. There's still a way to go, but there's no comparison to where we are today in many places, to where Mizrahi were even a generation ago. ⁓ But the Arab world that treated their Palestinian brothers and sisters in ways that were inconceivable for Israel to treat. immigrants, even when we treated our immigrants shabbily. There is just simply no comparison. yet here again, we've given ⁓ the anti-Zionist camp ⁓ a de facto pass by not challenging them on their record. And you know, it's very similar to what's happened with the accusations that we hear from the anti-Zionist about how ⁓ elements within the Zionist movement either collaborated with the Nazis or tried to collaborate. So for example, ⁓ the Lechie, which was the smallest of the anti-British Zionist underbranungs in the 1940s, the Stern Group, as it's known in English, the British call it Stern Den, ⁓ did try to create an alliance with Nazi Germany in 1941 before they understood the final solution, before the Jewish people understood what this was coming. And the rationale was we want to create a united front against the British and shared interests. Now it was madness. But the Lehi represented all of 80 to 100 people. Right. That was the left. And at the same time, you had the leader, the official leader of the Palestinian National Movement, Hashemina al-Husseini, sitting in Berlin as Hitler's personal guest, creating a ⁓ unit for the SS, a Muslim unit. you dare come to us and accuse us of collaborating with the Nazis. And so there's this projection, this inversion, which is really in some ways culminated with the accusation of genocide. The last commits a mini pre-enactment of its genocidal plot. We respond. and we go after Falas, we are guilty of genocide. So this inversion is ⁓ deep part of the story of anti-Sinism, of how anti-Sinism works by projecting its crimes, the crimes of the Palestinian National Movement.

speaker-1: Speaking of inversion, ⁓ Plan D, Plan Dalit ⁓ from March 1948, Elan Papé has called that the blueprint for ethnic cleansing. Benny Morris says it was a defensive plan. What does the, what did the documents actually say about that? Because that's used as proof.

speaker-0: Yeah, I think that there is really a direct line in some some way between the war of October 7th and 1948 in this specifically in this sense as well. We did not have the intention of committing genocide in Gaza. You can cherry pick quotes. You can quote President Herzog and then leave out crucial parts of his speech or for that matter. who ⁓ you can quote, speaking about, ⁓ we're at war with the Amalek, which in traditional Jewish mythos is the archetype of the enemy that seeks the destruction of the Jews on whom we are commanded to destroy. And so it seems as if Netanyahu is referring to Hamas as so on, as Amalek. But then if you listen to the rest of his speech, he explicitly says, I'm not speaking about the Palestinians. ⁓ I'm speaking about Hamas, and not, course, as a race. And I think something very similar was at work with the understanding of Plan D, Tukhmetan. Plan D was a ⁓ military blueprint for dealing with the projected invasion of the future Jewish state. And it emerged during the Civil War phase of the war, of the 1948 war. And there is no smoking gun. There is no ⁓ order to destroy our villages. Now that happened. the course of the war. So there's a kind of a retroactive reading of Plan D. Well, there's this language, and that may be interpreted this way, and look what happened. Well, look what happened as a result of six months ⁓ of a war to prevent the destruction of the Jewish community. ⁓ And the dynamic on the ground was very fluid. It was up to, very often, up to the discretion of each local commander. We have one or two examples where Bangurian gave a verbal instruction to throw them out, specifically from Ludhravele, and maybe one can say one or two other places. But those are isolated examples, which are then… turned into the norm by anti-scientists to start his life.

speaker-1: Dair Yassin in April 9th, 1948 happens. Four days later, Arab forces attack a Hadassah medical convoy, kill 78 Jewish doctors and nurses. Why does only one survive in the global narrative?

speaker-0: Yeah, you know, I was speaking a couple years ago at a liberal Jewish seminary, a rabbinical seminary. I won't mention which one. And I asked the rabbinical students, I said, by a show of hands, how many of you can identify by name a massacre committed by Zionists against Palestinians in 1948, every hand in the room. They'd all read Ari Shalut Speak. They all knew about the Luke Massive. And then I said, by a show of hands, how many of you could name a massacre committed by Palestinians against Jews in 1948? One or two hands tentatively went up. And one person asked, Did the Maalot massacre happen in 1948? The Maalot massacre happened in 1973. And that was it. That was it. And so how can I complain about some kid in the Midwest who puts on a kaffir and doesn't know which river and which sea? We're clinical students. All we know about Deir Yassin and don't know about the Hadassah convoy. Now, why is that? I think that that's a rhetorical question. We'll leave it at that. Why? is that? Good question,

speaker-1: Fair. That is fair. You have criticized Israeli education for refusing to teach the Palestinian side of the Nakba. Where is the line between acknowledgement and weaponization?

speaker-0: That's a great question. I think that we need to acknowledge—without apologizing. Acknowledgement is not apology. No, not necessarily. And Israel is not going to apologize for 1948. We will not, we should not apologize for not allowing ourselves to be massacred three years after the Holocaust. That's not something that the Jewish people needs to apologize for. We do have a need to acknowledge the tragedy of a people that was simultaneously formed by this conflict and broken by the couple. I don't know of any other example like it. It's very strange dynamic. The Palestinian people really emerge in either in opposition to Zionism, partly being inspired by Zionism. There is no real coherent national Palestinian movement, certainly before the end of World War I. And even that is, I think, stretching it. And yet the tragedy of the Palestinian people is to be shattered in multiple ways. After 1948, one part of the Palestinian people found itself ⁓ living in a Jewish state with very uneasy citizenship in those years. ⁓ Most Arab ⁓ citizens of Israel until 1966 were living under martial law. That ended in 1966. But then you have the occupation. starting in 1967 of the West Bank, you'd be in Samaria, Gaza. Another part of the Palestinian people lived as refugees in other countries. Yet another part lives in the wider diaspora around the world. And even the division between Gaza and the West Bank is a very complicated picture. Gaza was quasi- independent, even though there was a siege in response to Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel. We did impose a siege. Nevertheless, you had Gaza ⁓ free of an Israeli presence within that territory. That's no longer the case, of course. And so the picture that I'm trying to penning is of a people that's been It's like a ⁓ shattered mirror. And there are so many different pieces to this people, so many different kinds of circumstances. And I think we need to understand. We need to understand the lived reality of the people with whom we share this life, one way or the other. Whether it will be in two sovereign states, increasingly unlifely or some other arrangement, we are destined, fated, call it what you will, to share this land with another people. And we need to understand that, not agree with them. That was not my intention in writing the book that I wrote about reaching out to the Palestinians. starting a conversation with them. My intention was helping them understand who we are and enabling them to help us understand who they are. And that's a very basic. I am not asking for either side to sign on to the other side's narrative. I don't think that that's going to happen. But at the very least, I think we need to understand certainly the grievances, the claims on both sides, the legitimacy on both sides, without, again, drawing a kind of symmetry between the two claims. I do believe that Jewish historical claims is incomparably strong. But that doesn't negate the Palestinians.

speaker-1: into the larger media coverage of this and how this stuff has been ⁓ seeped in. ⁓ Al Jazeera, ⁓ recent headline refers openly to settler colonial genocide in the headline, Jacobin, Zionist settler colonialism ⁓ as established fact. and then No Other Land wins the Oscar, it was two years ago or a year ago. so when did this framework go from academic journals into mainstream?

speaker-0: Well, it went from academic journals into the classrooms simultaneously. wasn't people writing in academic journals or teaching in the classroom. so this has been incubating for, well, probably since the 1990s, when settler colonialism began to take hold of the discourse on much of the left. The innovation of settler colonialism as opposed to ordinary colonialism was to define the move of the mother country not only exploiting its colonies but demographically changing them by sending its colonists to live in those... in those territories, that becomes the great crime of colonialism, greater than mere exploitation. And the move here is really a profoundly anti-Western. It's a move primarily against America, but also against the whole English-speaking, ⁓ what we would in Israel for the Anglo-Saxon world. It's Australia, it's South Africa, not most of all United States, and most, most, most of all Israel. And so Israel becomes the poster of settler colonialism for all kinds of reasons. One is because it's the most vulnerable. Now you had South Africa in the previous generation, and South Africa was very vulnerable because everybody hated South Africa. And now Israel, they have marked Israel as the next in line to dismantle. But it's not going to end with Israel. It will continue. The challenges will continue to the legitimacy of all of these other settler colonial nations that have no legitimacy. And again, most of all, the United States. And we see that. We saw it with the 1619 project. it's to rewrite American history as beginning with the arrival of a first slave ship. So that's the 1619 date. And what does that mean? It means that the entwined sins of the founding of America are colonialists coming from England and importing slaves from Africa. And so this is This is the real goal of anti-Zionism. It's far more far-reaching than just sold on Israel. And again, you need to see it in this wider context. Epidemic South Africa, Israel is next, and so on. Now, in the case of South Africa, it was certainly a morally righteous cause. no opposition, there was no pushback to dismantling the South African apartheid regime. The attempt to impose that model on Israel is really what this next phase of the settler colonial mission is all about. And this is where it has to be stopped, because Israel is not South Africa. Israel is, if anything, If you look at all of the settler colonial countries, Israel is the only one in which we didn't settle, we returned. And that's the crucial word. That's the crucial difference. We re-indigenized ourselves back into the realm of Israel. Now, that's a very strange concept, to re-indigenize. There's no other example in history of a people re-indigenizing itself in its own way. And so the anti-Zionists take that anomaly and flatten it, erase the extraordinary complexity, the power of that move, of re-indigenization, and put us in the framework of the settler colonial world beginning with South Africa and the States. So that's the larger framing with the sword.

speaker-1: Yeah, but it's all ironic because Israel, of course, is the least settler colonial. It doesn't fit in that model. Jews are indigenous. There's no metropole. Half of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi already. You know, why isn't that landing?

speaker-0: I would also add that Israel was founded by utopian socialists.

speaker-1: Right. Much to the chagrin of the progressive left.

speaker-0: Yes, who if anything were what the progressive left claims to be. They actually were. ⁓ Yeah, again, know, Ben, that's another rhetorical question. I think we could do whole episode of the rhetorical questions of this. Really, in some ways, our pushback to the anti-Sinitis is just a series of rhetorical questions.

speaker-1: Yeah. Well, it seems, you you wrote in Moment Magazine about the linguistic wars, ⁓ you know, words like genocide, apartheid, settler, colonialism, that they're deployed as weapons these days. And the Nakba itself is, you know, reframes a war of five armies invading this tiny colony of Holocaust survivors ⁓ into something that was done to Palestinians. It's like we're... Where does this no longer a language war and becomes just a war of facts? Like, these are just facts. I guess it's the same thing. I mean, I don't know. Maybe that is another rhetorical question.

speaker-0: Yeah, I think that part of the problem with facts is that we in the Jewish community are still fighting this war in 20th century terms. You know, when I was growing up, there was this series of books that were published every year. It might have been by AIPAC or some other Jewish organization called Myths and Facts. And ⁓ and it was great, you know, you open it up refugees there it is There's the myths and there's the facts doesn't work anymore because it's not about that it's about narrative and we and not telling a compelling story, which is Extraordinary to me because we have the most compelling national story out there and it's it it is one of the, one of history's, not just Jewish history, one of history's greatest stories. And we're not telling it, right? And I feel this frustration as a writer, as a writer of the Jewish story. You know, I've seen my purpose as someone who writes the narrative, who's one of the people trying to turn this story into a narrative. And, you know, I don't know. I don't know really at this. I'm in my 70s now, and I don't know how to do this any other way. But it's working. I, apparently none of us have found a way of telling this story that is strong enough, that's worthy of the story itself. And I don't know what to do about it. It's something It's something that I live with in a permanent state of frustration and failure. ⁓

speaker-1: I mean, I have my personal ideas on that. One of them is that Israel is a liberal democracy and liberal democracies, ⁓ you know, both their strength is that the openness of society and the willingness to look at failures, but that is also a weakness for those who are creating these monolithic narratives because it's used against us. you know, Exodus was at one point a best seller.

speaker-0: It was. was. But the narrative in those years just told itself. The Holocaust told the not it. Exodus is a Holocaust story, really. so ⁓ you can't write a book like that. Leon Eurus could write it in the 1950s. It doesn't work. If anything, the Holocaust is now one of the weapons, principal weapon, used against. That's part of the integration. yeah, I think it's really important to talk about this, to really lay this out, to lay out the dilemmas. And at the same time, we need writers. I hope there'll be a new generation of writers, and I suspect they're beginning to emerge, who will take this job on. of telling the story or stories because there is no one story. But that's what we need. And we're losing the war of stories which, you know, the Jewish people, we're one of those ancient peoples that invented the story. Certainly that invented the written story. And we should be able to do better than we're in telling our story.

speaker-1: Rereading letters to my Palestinian neighbor now, it feels different in a post-October 7th world. ⁓ Has your faith in the possibility of dialogue survived October 7th, or are we in a different world in terms of the possibility of coexistence?

speaker-0: Like I've lost a lot of my dialogue partners on the other side because I've been vocal in supporting the October 7th war. And I've had my criticisms of certain aspects of the war. But I believe, along with I'd say almost every Israeli Jew, that this war had to be fought. This was Israel's most brutal war and one of Israel's most necessary and just wars. And both of those statements are paradoxical truth. And so I've lost a lot of friends, people who felt betrayed by me. We thought you for peace. Well, I am for peace. ⁓ But I'm not going to pretend. I'm not going to allow my longing for peace to prevent me from fighting evil. That's not peace. That's not how peace works. That's in my mind at the end, that's really an abuse of peace. But there's still some relationship stops or gone, some. And the possibility of dialogue is built in through human existence. There will always be people ready for a conversation, ready to try to understand the other side, either because you're curious. And for me, frankly, that's how it began, it began with curiosity. And I was a journalist for many years. the principal motive, I think, for journalists is curiosity. You really want to understand how things work. You want to understand how people think. And by extension, if you're in a conflict, you want to understand the other side. And so that's how my dialogue work began. It began as a journalist going out and just asking questions and trying to, well, how did actually, how do you see that? Because the way that I see it, it's so, it's so obvious to me, but obviously it's not obvious to you in the same way you have a different obvious. So what's, what's yours? How do you see this? And so, um, that, you know, that So there will always be people on both sides curious about the other side, and there will always be people of goodwill, and there will always be people who care more about the future than about the past, and who placed their grandchildren before their grandparents. And that's a very complicated move, as we're dealing with two traditional peoples, Jews, the Palestinians, the Arabs. love and venerate our ancestors. But the question is, how do you maintain that respect for the past while prioritizing the future? So those relationships are always there. And you can go into social media and you'll see all kinds of voices ⁓ in the Arab world, certainly, but even with among the Palestinians, even post-October 7, post-Gaza, who are still committed to dialogue. And so, you know, when I wrote the letters book, my intention was just to find a few people on the other side with whom I could have this conversation of mutual legitimacy, of honoring each other's stories. And to create a kind of model, which my book tried to do, it has voices explaining their narrative and I try to explain the Jewish narrative. And that was all I was hoping for. And I did find people, extraordinary people, who stepped up and responded. Now, if I were to write that book today, I think I would get much fewer responses, but there would still be those. who would respond. of course, the book would have to deal with what happened on October 7th and what happened in Gaza and how each side perceives or misperceives what happened. But the letters to my Palestinian neighbor is coming out in, ⁓ next month, in German, in a German. German edition and the publisher asked me to write a new introduction and I struggled with it because at first I started writing about the war and how the war looks from an Israeli perspective and then we just cut it out. Said you know, the purpose of this book was to go to the foundations of each people's and however powerfully October 7th and the Gaza War have influenced the way the world looks at this conflict. That wasn't my purpose. My purpose was really to go to the origins of the Jewish connection to the land and to understand why Israel exists and why someone like me who didn't need a safe refuge, I was coming from—I mean, I— I lived in the East Village in New York in the early 80s. I kind of did, but I didn't have to go to the Middle East to find the safe refuge. I could have moved to St. Louis. So, you know, that's what the book is really about. And I hope in that sense that the book isn't bound by ⁓ current events.

speaker-1: to say.

speaker-0: as overwhelming as they are. So in the end, I wrote a very straightforward introduction, basically saying that and saying that I wrote letters without hope or despair. I wrote it really as an exercise in self-empowerment, as someone who is fought in this seemingly hopeless conflict. And I'm a writer, and I use my tools to give me maybe the illusion of empowerment, that I'm not just ⁓ a recipient of this conflict. I can also push back. I can also take some kind of public position. And there were Palestinians who I think had the same impulse, which is why they wrote The Indian Response. And so I don't think that the book would be fundamentally different on second thought if I were writing it today.

speaker-1: Yossi Klain, Halevi, thank you so much for your time. Hopefully we can do this again soon.

speaker-0: I would be delighted. Thank you for all.

speaker-1: Thank you. Yossi said something near the end that stuck with me. We are losing the war of stories and the Jewish people, the people who invented the written story should be able to do better. He's right. And that's exactly why we're here. If you're not already, subscribe and hit the notification bell so you never miss an episode and follow us at Honest Reporting on Instagram, X, TikTok and Facebook. For Honest Reporting, I'm Ben Chertoff and this has been the honest take. Thanks for listening.