Opinion | Watching the Protests From Israel (2024)

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From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

I’ve been watching, as I imagine so many of you have, as the campus protests over Israel over what’s happening in Gaza have exploded across the news.

I’ve been watching police go in and clear encampments in the place I went to college at UCLA.

I’m here in New York. What is happening at Columbia has been all over the news.

And I found it hard myself to know what to think. One reason is that protests of this size are never one thing. On the one hand, you really do hear at them people just shouting antisemitic poison.

And on the other hand, you can go to one of them and attend a beautiful Passover seder inside the Columbian encampment.

And trying to think about what to make of it, whether this is a thing to cover, whether it is a distraction from the thing to cover, and I think the place I came to is that I wanted to keep an eye on power here. Who has the power to change the reality in Israel and in Gaza right now? I think there’s an implicit default in people’s thinking to some deus ex machina, some outside player, maybe America or the U.N., who can come impose some new reality.

That’s not how this works, though. Really, it’s Israel and it’s Hamas. Hamas could release the hostages. Israel could end its war or change its policies. And I think if you are listening to the protesters, the students, the idea that they really have is they’re going to influence Israel.

They want their universities to divest from Israel. They’re using media coverage to try to push Joe Biden to change his policies towards Israel. But what that means, then, is that the effectiveness of these protests in the end relies on some engagement, some sense of Israeli politics and culture.

And so I wondered, how are these campus protests being received in Israel? What are Israelis seeing? What do they make of it? When I think about Israel, I always think about this book written in 2013 by Ari Shavit, who’s a longtime political reporter there, called “My Promised Land.”

And I recommend this book to everybody. I think it is the single best book on what Israel is because it is a book that is better able than any other to hold both the idealism and violence at its heart, to take seriously both the way it was a miracle for some and a tragedy for others, to make you feel the work that went into it— this was not just given to the Israelis— and on the other hand, the dispossession that was required by it.

It’s a book that does something that not that much on this subject does, which is hold contradiction without trying to resolve it. And so I wanted to talk to Shavit, as somebody who understands Israel very deeply, about the protest movement, about the increasing tensions with Jews in the diaspora and Jews in Israel, and about Israeli politics itself, and where it goes from here, and what happens if it actually doesn’t really go anywhere from here. As always, my email, ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

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Ari Shavit, welcome to the show.

So good to be with you. Thank you.

So when you look at the campus protests sweeping America about Israel, what do you see?

I am deeply saddened. I’ll tell you what I don’t see. I don’t see Gandhi-like marches. I don’t see Martin Luther King kind of demonstrations. I don’t see an understanding of the profound tragedy that we are trapped in.

So if people were there marching, talking about the hostages, and talking about the 1,200 people who were slaughtered on Oct. 7, then I would deeply, deeply respect their anger, but when you see that it’s all one-sided, and when you see that it goes from legitimate criticism of Israel to a kind of obsession with hating it, then I wonder. It makes me — beyond the sadness, it scares me.

I think there is justified criticism. There is understandable criticism. And then there is vicious criticism bordering on anti-Semitism. When America was in Vietnam, there were justified anti-war marches all over. They never doubted the legitimacy of America, of the United States of America. When France was in Algeria, in Indochina, there was criticism of the entire global left. No one said that the French Republic is illegitimate.

In a way, I’m glad you brought up the Vietnam marches because I think the thing you just said there is flatly wrong. The Vietnam marches, which were right in their moral direction, were full of people who questioned the fundamental legitimacy of America, full of people who were calling for victory over and the deaths of our soldiers, full of people who did not march with love, who were not Gandhi, who were not Martin Luther King Jr. Of course, they also had marches where there literally was Martin Luther King Jr.

One of the difficult things about reading a mass protest movement is that it is never one thing. It is never, or very rarely, perfectly on message, perfectly respectable, perfectly managed. If it were, it often would not get very much coverage. And so let me agree with you that there are things at these marches that are repugnant.

And I, frankly, have very little patience myself for the way this conversation ends up endlessly circling this question of, does Israel have the right to exist? Israel exists, but many of the people at these marches do not hate Israel for being Israel. They certainly do not hate Jewish people for being Jewish. These Jewish students, as I understand them— and I’ve spoken to some of them— they feel they have to choose between their political values and any kind of solidarity with the state of Israel. What do you say to them?

I would ask them, and ask even you, to make a distinction between the Israeli government, between the Israeli prime minister, and between the Israeli people and the Israeli project. I am as angry at Prime Minister Netanyahu as you are or as the young demonstrators are because Mr. Netanyahu is endangering the lives of my children.

I’m angry at the Israeli extreme right, just as you are or the young demonstrators are, because they are tainting and threatening the dream that my grand-grandparents dreamt and my grandparents and parents fulfilled in the most miraculous way.

But there is a distinction between that and the Israeli project, the Israeli state, because at the end, look, when I listened to some of this discourse, people are talking that Israel is a colonizing nation. We have been the ultimate other of white Europe for 1,500 years. We never knew where we’ll sleep next year. We will never know what will happen to us. And then we became white Europe’s ultimate victim.

So we ran away from white Europe. We were not sent by white Europe. How can you totally attack the right of a homeless people to have a home? We are not part of imperialism. We are a small persecuted people that somehow saved itself at the last moment.

And in order to prevent the death of a people, they transferred them from one continent and several continents. They revived the language. They built a society, created a state, a nation. It’s an incredible, incredible human endeavor. You don’t have to be Jewish or pro-Israeli to see that.

And when I look around, where are we compared to Australia, Canada, New Zealand — or you folks? When I see that distortion, I find it difficult to deal with, difficult, because the distortion is so extreme.

So, true— and I wrote about it, and I’m willing to talk about it— we have sinned. We made mistakes. We are in a tragedy. But to totally overlook the justice at the heart of this project and to just see the flaws and the problems, I find that a distortion.

It was interesting to me that you kept coming back to the word “distortion” here, because the word you used in your book is “contradiction.” I was looking at my notes from “My Promised Land.” I have— and you should take this as a compliment— 188 highlights in that book. It’s a lot of highlights.

Thank you very much.

I want to read you one of them, and I want to hear how it sounds to you right now. You write, “Zionism skated on thin ice. On the one hand, it was a national liberation movement, but on the other, it was a colonialist enterprise. It intended to save the lives of one people by the dispossession of another. In its first 50 years, Zionism was aware of this complexity and acted accordingly.

It was very careful not to be associated with colonialism and tried not to cause unnecessary hardship. It made sure it was a democratic, progressive, and enlightened movement, collaborating with the world’s forces of progress. With great sophistication, Zionism handled the contradiction at its core.”

I’m curious how that paragraph that you wrote sounds to you now because the thing that people are picking up on, what you’re calling the distortion, is they’re seeing one side of it has now taken over. And maybe they’re right.

It’s a wonderful question. When my great-grandparents came to Palestine, to Eretz Yisrael, they understood that we have to make it clear to ourselves and to others that we are not another colonial project, that we are not like others. And they understood that while they have a particular mission, saving the Jewish people from death, not just oppression, they have a universal mission.

The idea of the kibbutz, for example, was this combination, that on the one hand, you want to settle the land. You want to build a national project, but simultaneously, you want to contribute to the world. You have a message. By the way, that’s my understanding of Judaism. It’s not just about national entity and national existence and definitely not about power. You need the inspirational part. You need the moral dimension.

David Ben-Gurion and these people understood that. Now, we had the right to try to throw a nuclear bomb over Germany. We did exactly opposite. We signed agreements with Germany in 1952 to help us build the country. They were so much into this balance that we experienced what we experienced, but we will build. Our revenge will be to live, to bring children, to bring life. We came to death, we are surrounded by death, but we choose life. That’s the Israel I love and admire.

Sadly, decades later, we surrendered to the victimhood ethos, and we used the Holocaust, which is a horrible event, and we became more and more— we lost that balance of fighting for ourselves while seeing the others. And then we find ourselves in a place where extreme right-wing Israelis help extreme left people in America lead us all into this kind of distortion.

There is a separation that gets made there in your answer, but here, constantly, when I heard Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer’s speech about Israel, he was making the separation between the government and the people.

And I wonder about this, because Netanyahu has won again and again and again and again. If you are 18 and you are in college right now, he has been prime minister of Israel for almost your entire life, the vast majority of it. He has been chosen. His coalitions have been chosen. The movement right has been chosen.

And so I wonder whether there is this separation. Because when I even think of Donald Trump, he represents something. He did not just take over in a hostile boardroom maneuver. He appealed to people, and they wanted him, and they want him again, many of them.

And there is something in Netanyahu that is wanted. Now, maybe he is seen as incompetent. Maybe he is seen as a failure. But it is not clear that what has turned Israelis against him is the right-wing project so much and the callousness of it, so much as the fact that he did a terrible job managing security. Defend this cut to me.

So let’s make a distinction here, if I may, between previous years and Oct. 7 and afterwards. So if you look at the last few years or the Netanyahu decade, what you’ve seen is a terrible failure of the center left— and by the way, of the international community as well.

Because basically what happened, we asked our people— I as an active in the peace movement at the time, we asked our people to accept the two-state solution idea, the peace idea. Time after time, they voted for it. They voted for Rabin. They voted for Barack. We went to the Camp David Peace Summit in 2000— it failed. We went to the Annapolis summit in 2007— it failed. We even had a process under President Barack and John Kerry in 2014, and it failed.

We never came back to our people, saying, true, the old peace process failed. We’ve learned from the mistakes, and therefore, we offer something new and realistic that addresses the harsh realities of the Middle East. I’ll say here in brackets, my life has been— my public life— has been about the struggle between liberal and moral values and the brutality of the historic reality I live in.

So the center-left and the international community have not delivered anything to deal with the legitimate fears and concerns of Israelis, who tried the two-state solution so many times, and it failed. It caused terrible suffering for the Palestinians, it caused terrible suffering for Israelis. And then comes Netanyahu and uses these fears. So historically, in a sense, I would say, Netanyahu is not only the sin, he’s the punishment, for the failure of the center-left to bring a realistic vision.

Israelis have not become evil and crazy and racist. We have that minority in us, but it’s not the majority. The main problem is fear that was not addressed and the failure of the old peace process.

Now let’s talk about after Oct. 7. I want you to understand— and I think it’s so important— Israelis are seeing a different war than the one that Americans see. You see one war film, horror film, and we see, at home, another war film, horror film. Israelis are stuck in Oct. 7 while the world has forgot Oct. 7, nearly forgot Oct. 7.

So Israelis are totally traumatized, are totally traumatized. Each one of us knows someone who was murdered, who was kidnapped, who was terribly wounded. My wife sees terrorists coming into our garden, and it’s all over. We experienced real fear.

Now, it’s not just Jewish neurosis. It’s not just in our minds. I want to compare it to 9/11. What we experienced, number wise, it’s like 10 times or 15 times worse than 9/11. But it’s an ongoing 9/11. Imagine a 9/11 where, afterwards, Al Qaeda keeps 133— 250 at the beginning— hostages, a bit combined the Iran hostage crisis of ‘79 with Al Qaeda of 2001.

And think of the fact that the ongoing 9/11, you would have had Al Qaeda in Mexico and Iran in Canada. It’s a nightmare. It’s surreal. So if you want Israelis to replace Netanyahu, to move away from the extreme right, you have to address their fears and their legitimate fears. Once we address this, we can demand of Israelis to have much more empathy and generosity and really try peace in a new way, in a realistic way, to stop this terrible tragedy.

Let me say first that I agree with everything you just said about both the psychology and the geography of this. I often try to say to people who see it as obvious that Israel’s response has gone way too far, which I do believe, by the way, it has gone way too far, I do say, look, imagine that 9/11 was conducted by an Al Qaeda that ruled Canada and what we would have done in response. I said this over and over and over again in the podcast I did after 10/7— there is no country that would permit that kind of incursion and massacre and not respond with overwhelming force.

At the same time, I want to connect this back to what you were just saying about the peace process because one thing that I think Israelis completely disregard now is that in the background, long before 10/7, they had let themselves become the villains.

When you say that Israelis feel we tried peace, and it was not responded to, I think there’s a lot of truth to that. How much everybody tried, that there are contested narratives of these peace processes, that’s all true as well. But I do think that there were honest attempts to try to find some equilibrium that was not this. I would say that went until about 2008.

And then what happened— and I think this is the much more dominant narrative for people who have followed this and are younger here— is peace was abandoned, and the settlements kept getting built. And so it wasn’t just that the peace process failed, and then went into a state of dormancy— it was that the peace process failed, and then it was made more and more impossible year by year, that there was an active effort, the laying down of concrete, the paving of roads, the erection of buildings, to make it impossible to imagine that trade of land.

And so there’s both the genuine problem you are pointing to, the question of how can anyone in Israel feel safe if Hamas exists in Gaza, but there’s also this other question, which is, how can Israel be safe? How can it exist? How can people here support it if it allows itself to settle into this role as the occupier?

So first of all, the short answer is, if you want the Israelis to change— and I think they should— or we should— the first thing is not to hold maps of the entire land between the river and the sea, all Palestinian, and basically say that I and my daughter and my wife and my two sons have to leave and go back to Poland because this is right now what is said in campuses.

So if you want Israelis to take the risk again— and I think we must and I’ll get into that— the international community, led by America, has to hug and support democratic Israel. Beyond that, I agree. I wouldn’t use the word “villain” the way you use. But with everything else you said, I agree. So I wouldn’t say Israel is a villain, but obviously, there are Israeli villains. Just like there are American villains and European villains, there are Israeli villains.

I think it is too complex— I just want to say that I think this is a way too complex to say anybody is a villain. I’m saying that for many people, Israel came to appear the villain.

Oh, OK.

They were the stronger player.

Oh, well. The strong, we’ll get into the strong. So you know what? Let’s get to the stronger. First of all, talking of distortions, one of the great distortions here that it’s not only about Israel, is that you assume that the weak is just, and the strong is wrong.

That’s a profoundly morally flawed statement because if I’ll parachute to you into Europe of 1944 and early 1945, the Germans were very weak, and the Allies were bombing them in Dresden and other places. So if you follow that logic, that distorted logic, you’ll be pro-Nazi. So I ask everybody to get out of this. This is something that happened in our intellectual world in the last 20, 30 years. And it’s a distortion not only regarding Israel.

Point number two, Israel is not that strong. The flaw of Israel itself, they became arrogant and co*cky. People did not understand how vulnerable Israel is. Regarding the Palestinians, we are stronger. But there is a larger context here. What is threatened now is the entire free world and world order. You have a Chinese, Russian, Iranian axis attacking everything we believe in, everything we believe in. We have to see the larger context. We cannot be blind.

Ezra, this is the most intimidating Jewish moment in our lifetime. It’s one of the most painful Palestinian moments in our lifetime. And it’s one of the most dangerous global moments in our lifetime. We have to wake up. This is a mega, mega, mega event. What happened on Oct. 7 was an attack on the Jewish state and the democratic state, on the Jewish people, and in many ways, on the postwar world order.

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There is much, I think, that people outside Israel do not see clearly about Israel. There are things people inside Israel, I think, do not see clearly about Israel, and one of them is strength. And so one of the things that I see again and again is this effort to, then, create a much larger set of enemies to justify a deep and very understandable— I come from Jewish history, too— a deep and understandable feeling of vulnerability, of weakness, of always being on the precipice.

But I’m in America, and so what I understand, I think, better than Israelis do is what the American politics are at least right now. Iran was never going to be a threat to Israel in this war, because as soon as it began, America moved battleships into place to make very clear that if Iran joined, it would be annihilated.

When there was an attack that led to the killing of a major Iranian commander, Iran launched a drone strike that it understood— everybody understood— back and forth, this was well calibrated to be shot down. Israel did a calibrated response. Israel and Iran have been in a very calibrated series of just enough in a way to maintain their domestic politics on both sides.

The danger for Israel, which is much stronger than I think you give it credit for, in part because it is backed by the strongest military the world has ever known— it is using American bombs now. It is backed by American warships now.

And when you say that the world needs to hug Israel, it is true that protesters on college campuses are unfurling maps in which Israel does not exist. It is also true the actual president of the United States of America has wrapped Israel in a very, very, very tight hug. He has then been spat on again and again and again by Benjamin Netanyahu, which I think we probably share a view on how that’s gone.

But what would make Israel weak is the loss of that support. What would make Israel actually vulnerable is if the politics that is emerging now among young Americans becomes a dominant politics of America when they move into power, which is how things typically work.

There is this paradoxical way in which the insistence upon vulnerability and what vulnerability makes possible practical or necessary is, in the long run, it seems to me, the thing that could create real vulnerability, a sort of unwillingness to recognize how much support for Israel in the long run and the strength will depend on whether it is seen as a moral nation by the generation that is going to take power here, and that when they look at it, do not see that anymore and also do not see anybody trying to prove that to them.

So you’re preaching to the converted, but let me try to explain. First of all, let’s begin with President Biden because not enough Israelis express enough gratitude to the United States generally and specifically to President Biden.

So let me try to do my bit. I think that what President Biden did in the first three days, in the first three weeks, in the first three months of this war, was incredible. It was a heroic, realistic act of leadership, not in spite of his age, but because of his age, because he has the World War II at his background and he has the Cold War in his bones.

Now, I totally agree. And look, Ezra, I’ve been reading you. You’ve been reading me, I’ve been reading you. What you write about the three generations and their attitude to Israel is totally, totally true. I was speaking to some, in some lecture I gave in Cambridge, to some young students who were confused about Israel and the conflict.

And the older one among them came to me, and she said to me, Ari, listen, I had Rabin. I had the Oslo process. I had an Israel I could identify with and look up to. What the younger Jewish kids in the diaspora have been experiencing in the last 20 years that they are asked to defend a nation with whose values they cannot identify.

I’m not one who’s using the external threats, the Chinese, Russian and Iranian dimension, in order to run away from the Palestinian issue, not at all. Israel has to deal in a much more courageous and generous way with the Palestinian issue. And Israel is guilty of the fact that in the last 15 years, we ignored it, and it became like the elephant in the room. And then we saw what happened.

But while our commitment, our responsibility, our mission is to deal with the Palestinian issue, you have to remember that Israel is not France, not America, and not China. Israel is a small, intimidated nation. So I ask all people of good faith and decency to look at the larger picture. I’m not asking it as an excuse to ignore the Palestinian issue, in no way.

There’s this language you hear that you’re using— I’m certain I’ve used it. It’s not a criticism of the Palestinian issue. But I want to make this more direct. Palestinians, right? I mean, we talk about a battle for Israel’s soul, but the battle happening right now is in Gaza. The question right now is whether or not Israel will enter Rafah.

And one of the things that makes it hard to support what Israel is doing for me, is, I don’t believe the war aims. If you could prove to me that if you went into Rafah, this place where more than half of Gazans are now huddled, you would somehow, with the same intelligence community that could not predict 10/7, figure out exactly who is a Hamas fighter and who is a Hamas commander, and remove them, kill them, imprison them, whatever it is. And as such, then, Hamas or something like it could not reconstitute itself, and some other more moderate leadership would emerge, and negotiations for some kind of stabilization could begin— fine.

But I genuinely do not understand what the theory of this is. You talked about how traumatized Israelis are. And they are. And every single person here who forgets that or does not take it seriously has walled themselves off from understanding the issue. Everything you say about that is right, and it actually infuriates me.

But do Palestinians not feel this grief? Are they not being traumatized right now? Not just the loss of life and the loss of children in particular, but the loss of homes of livelihoods. How do Israelis imagine a people as traumatized now as the Palestinians are, not them as an issue, but them as people? What security emerges from this?

So, again, whether it’s good or bad, I actually agree with you. Mr. Sinwar is an evil genius. And Israel walked right into his trap.

The head of Hamas.

Exactly. What’s the Sinwar genius? He put Israel in a kind of lose-lose situation. Mr. Sinwar is not only willing, but he wants to sacrifice the civilian population of Gaza in order to change the minds of the hearts of the civilian population of the United States of America and turn it against Israel. And he’s using the hostages in order to break the spirit of Israeli society.

So Mr. Sinwar understands what, sadly, our generals did not understand, which is war is not only a military operation, it’s not only about tanks and planes, that if you win the war in Khan Younis, but you lose it in Harvard Square, you lost the war. You lost the war. This is exactly what Sinwar wanted.

And sadly, the way the war was waged on our side— and I think we had to do it, and we had to defend ourselves, and we had the right to defend ourselves. But we should have been much more sophisticated. It should have been clear to any person watching television or TikTok or whatever in the United States that we are fighting Hamas, we are not fighting the Palestinians. And right now, the opposite has happened.

So definitely, I oppose the Rafah. Going into Rafah is exactly what Sinwar wants. If Israel will make that mistake, it will be a decisive, tragic mistake. Mr. Netanyahu, all his life, was a Churchill wannabe. He wanted to be Churchill. Here, he has an amazing tragic opportunity to be Churchill.

But what did Churchill do? Basically, two things. One, national unity, and two, he went to America. He went to Washington. He talked to F.D.R. He convinced F.D.R. to stand by Britain. This is what we should have done.

So I’m totally with you. We should not go into Rafah. We should find a way to end the Gaza war once all the hostages are back. We have to prevent a regional war, and we have to understand what kind of danger we all face.

Here, I’m going to ask you not to speak as you, but as a reporter and as somebody who knows the Israeli political and military establishments, because this is a place where putting it all on Netanyahu is simply not true. Benny Gantz, who is the likeliest next leader of Israel, he agrees that somehow, this war is going to achieve the goals. He agrees that they should go into Rafah.

If you look at the interview that Yair Lapid, the opposition leader, just gave to one of my colleagues, he agrees this war needs to be continued. Benny Morris, the revisionist historian who has done so much to increase our understanding of the expulsion of Arabs during Israel’s war that created the state, he agrees they need to go into Rafah.

So there is a wide agreement over anything you might call, from the right to the center-left, that they need to go in Rafah, that somehow this will make Israel safer, that Hamas can be sufficiently degraded. Why do they think something so many of us seem to think is not true, which is that what Hamas is, is not an idea, not an expression of rage that will find its way out, but a military unit?

So the good news is that quite a number of leading Israeli strategists, ex-generals, serious people have been saying in the last week or two what I just told you. They said going into Rafah would be to walk into a Sinwar trap. It’s a strategic trap, and we should not go into it. So on this issue, I’m not totally lonely. I think there are other people who think— look, don’t get me wrong. I think that eventually, Hamas has to be crushed.

Look, Hamas is threatening the lives of Israelis and the liberty of Palestinians. And we all have to unite in eradicating Hamas and liberate the Palestinians. I want Gaza to be Dubai by 2040, 2050. That’s the future of Gaza. We need to bring in a coalition of moderate Arabs and moderate Palestinians. We need a Marshall Plan for Gaza.

We need to turn it to something that every young person in Gaza who is suffering so much today will have a future, will have hope, definitely food and water. But much more than that, Gaza has to be an amazing project of the international community led by the moderate and rich Arabs, who have the resources, the capability, and who know how to deal with radical religious sentiments.

So we have to do that. But we’ll have to defeat Hamas. But I’m saying right now, this thing went so wrong. There is so much suffering. There is no hope. There is no breakthrough. We have to find a way to stop the fighting, again, once all the hostages are back. All the hostages have to be back. I want every Palestinian to feel that he has more freedom, more prosperity, more hope every year while Israel’s security is not in danger.

But this gets to something that you said a few minutes ago, which is the world cannot understand what Israel will or will not do. It cannot influence what Israel will or will not do until the trauma and the fear and the grief of Israelis is taken seriously, and that if you want to be a protest movement, if you want to be a politician, if you want to be a stakeholder that is somehow influencing Israel, you have to start there. And I believe you are right, but that is also true for Palestinians.

And what I hear is this sort of jumping, right, to this sort of world where there’s nothing like Hamas. There’s an international coalition. Somehow, so much money has been poured into Gaza that maybe Israel allowed this, which seems unlikely to me, but that it now looks like Dubai.

But before you get to any of that, you have somehow done something to take seriously the trauma, the grief, the anger, the fury, the loss of Palestinians. I mean, one thing your book does very well, is, I think force people to reckon, not with 1967 and the Six-Day War, but 1948 and the violence and the loss and the expulsions of that war, how they still shape the region, how they still shape how everybody sees each other. This one is fresher, right? This is happening right now.

You are right to demand the world take your grief seriously. You are right to demand they take your fear seriously. But what does it mean to take the grief and fear of Palestinians seriously? Because that is not something not just something I don’t see Israelis doing, but I don’t see anybody even discussing that it needs to happen. And if it doesn’t happen, then I don’t understand how you think you will ever live in peace or even live in security.

Once again, I totally agree. And I really— sorry for using psychological terms or emotional terms—

No, I think we need those here.

I think the conflict, this conflict, is about history, identity, and soul and feelings and humiliation and anger and fear. This is about if you— and again, part of the failure of previous peace processes, that they had an economic dimension, strategic dimension— they never dealt with the deeper identity issues, and you have to deal with them.

Look, I understand why Palestinians would hate me because of the conflict, the tragedy of the conflict. But Palestinian leadership, Yasir Arafat, and such people, the moderates, did not care enough about Palestinians. There was the old, almost ancient stink song, I hope the Russians love their children, too. And the Russians did love their children, too. And that’s why the first Cold War ended the way it ended.

But the problem that we don’t have enough constructive forces in the Palestinian leadership who would care about their own people. There are two terrible metaphors in the tragedy of the conflict in recent years. One was suicide bombing. What was suicide bombing, which were horrible 20 years ago, 25 years ago? Suicide bombing is when your hate for your enemy is stronger than your love for yourself.

And now we have the tunnels. Now we have the tunnels. Rather than build skyscrapers of hope in Gaza, everything went into these dark, evil tunnels. Each one of us has to cure his own society from the poison and all the toxic materials of the conflict that had poisoned all of us. We’re all poisoned, OK? We’re all poisoned. We need now a process of detox that helps both Israelis and Palestinians at the same time to move forward to something that is more constructive, which you now see in the Middle East, which was not the case before.

My Palestinian hero is Salam Fayyad. Salam Fayyad is the one Palestinian leader who really tried to do nation building. So, obviously, had his grievances regarding us, and I understand it, but he tried to build something. We need out of this chaos and mess and tragedy. We need Salam Fayyad attitude combined with an MBZ attitude.

Look, the good news in the Middle East is that the first time in a century, we have Arab modernity that works and is successful. And the Emirates are like the symbol and the example for that. Because what the United Emirates are all about, it’s about moving forward, solution, not going back to the past, not getting into victimhood, but building things. So if we will have M.B.Z.-like forces, supporting Salam Fayyad-like Palestinians, I think we can begin to move forward from the agony and suffering into something that is more promising.

You say if there was something like Salam Fayyad, who was a former prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, you would see a willing Israeli partner, but I had Salam Fayyad on this show a couple of months back, and people should go listen to it. And here was somebody who was doing everything you’re saying should be done, and frankly, at a better time in Israeli politics than this one.

And he had built up a lot more economic capacity within the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, where he was governing. He had built up profound security cooperation. He had exiled and expelled much of Hamas. He had made the West Bank far safer. And what he says happened is he could not get the Israelis to work with him, that they would not stop their incursions. They would not loosen the restrictions. They would not make it easier for him to build.

Salam Fayyad had all kinds of problems, but he will tell you— he told me— that, really, his biggest one was that Israel wouldn’t hold up its end of the bargain. And so there is this truth that at many points, Israel has not had a partner who could deliver peace or even maybe wanted to deliver peace.

It is also true that there have been points when the Palestinians, or at least some Palestinians, have not had an Israeli partner to deliver peace because some Israelis don’t want it. Because they want the West Bank. Because they want control. Because they want Hamas and the Palestinian Authority split because they don’t want international support shifting to the Palestinians. So there is this tension between the call for someone like Salam Fayyad and then the actual historical experience of the actual living Salam Fayyad.

So after expressing my admiration for Salam Fayyad, I don’t want to do polemics regarding him. I really admire him, and I really want him back. I really think that he and people like him are an essential part of the solution, but I’ll say two things. One, Salam Fayyad had terrible problems with corruption in the Palestinian Authority, including by Mr. Abbas, who’s leading it. They wanted him out.

The second element that I want to remind you that while Salam Fayyad was in power, we had the prime minister in Israel by the name of Ehud Olmert, who went to the Annapolis Peace Summit with George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice and offered 100% of the territory back with some territorial exchange. Ehud Olmert made the most generous, some Israelis feel, reckless offer to the Palestinians, and it was rejected.

So after it was rejected, Netanyahu was elected. Israelis became— again, they are not profoundly more right-wing, but they are more skeptical, more fearful, more— it’s more difficult to bring them. We need to find a way to get out of this vicious circle. And again, don’t get me wrong— in the last 10 years, extreme right-wing Israeli governments and with a lot of influence of the settler parties and the extreme right, Israel was not there. But the reason they were elected was the failure of over 15 years, we tried the old peace, and it failed.

One thing threaded through your book is an appreciation of tragedy and a willingness to cede your own story, Israel’s story, the story of the Palestinians is a story of tragedy. And part of tragedy is timing, that there are moments where an opening exists for something else, and they’re missed. And then there’s a moment on the other side, and it’s missed.

And something I think that that history should teach us, or force us to reckon with, is that there’s not going to be perfection here. There are not going to be perfect leaders on either side. There’s not a Palestinian Authority free of corruption. Frankly, there’s not even right now a Palestinian Authority with legitimacy. There is not going to be an Israeli polity that moves from where it is now all the way to where you are or farther than that.

And so there is this question to me of what happens if this is where we are, if the Palestinians hate Israelis even more than ever after this, whenever the after this is, if Israelis are even more terrified of the security risk of what would happen to them if you had a Palestinian state that had sufficient self-determination to become strong, because a stronger and richer and freer such a state became, the more could one day exact revenge. I think that is how a lot of people think. So what if we don’t get perfect leaders? What if we don’t even get very good leaders, which is, I think, the recent history of this conflict? What then?

Look, we are all fearful now. The worst can happen. Ezra, remember my words. The worst may happen. What Oct. 7 and whatever happened since taught us is that it’s a make or break moment. If we will let things just deteriorated, horrible, horrible, horrible things might happen in the Middle East within a few years. So it’s a moral responsibility upon all of us to get to work and to create a different path and find a different path, so we can prevent catastrophe and actually bring back some hope.

Look, human life is a tragedy. We all die. We all die. We forget that some of the time, but we all die. And you make the most of the path of the road that you have on this good Earth. So we have to take this tragedy and act in a sensible, rational, pragmatic manner in order to bring it to a better place.

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There’s this 1948 essay by the philosopher Hannah Arendt called “To Save the Jewish Homeland.” And the thing she’s describing — I’ve been thinking about this essay, which people can and should read online. And there’s a lot in here. But the thing she’s discussing is that there had been a cacophony of views about Israel, about Zionism, in the Jewish community. And then came the war, the fighting, the founding. And that collapsed into unanimity.

And she thought that the unanimity was very dangerous because what was needed at the founding of Israel was to take seriously the insights of the people who thought this could go very, very badly. And she says later in that essay that if you get the Israel of pure Zionism, the Israel pure confidence, that what you will end up getting is an Israel that ends up diverging from the interests of the Jewish diaspora.

The Jewish diaspora is deeply liberal. The Jewish diaspora is exilic Judaism, as people say it. It is the Judaism of being the stranger, the Judaism of being a refugee. My friend, Spencer Ackerman, the national security reporter, said at the beginning of this war something that I keep thinking about, that he cannot think of a less Jewish thing than to make another person a refugee.

And then there is what Israel is as a state, which it has made many people refugees, but it also has the interests of a state, and states change everybody, not just Jewish people. They make you very quickly forget the lessons of being a refugee. And that wedge of values, that is the thing that I think people are beginning to recognize and people in Israel are underemphasizing how dangerous it is for them.

I couldn’t agree more. So if I may, I’ll tell you, when I wrote “My Promised Land,” the chapter I loved writing most was the chapter about the 1950s because what Israel did in its first decade of existence is the most heroic and breathtaking enterprise one can imagine. 650,000 Jews absorbed one million refugees— no, one million immigrants, of which half were, or many of them were, Holocaust survivors and other refugees from the Arab world. It’s as if America today would absorb 500 million immigrants. I understand you have a slight problem with 7 million.

So it was an incredible, incredible achievement, but what’s so impressive about it that those people who came out of Auschwitz with numbers on their arms, with nightmares at night, they never surrendered to victimhood. They never saw themselves as victims. They didn’t hate. And for me, the beauty of being Jewish, of the Jewish tradition— I’m a non-observant Jew, but I’m a very passionate Jew. The beauty is that we are a universal tribe. We are a tribe, but with a universal mission and universal commitment.

And what happened in recent decades that Israel went into the tribal, the particular, while diaspora Jews, non-orthodox, went into the universal. And again, I think we should meet again at this universal tribalism, at this beauty of a tribe being proud of our heritage, of who we are. We have rights like any others, and we should not be ashamed of ourselves. We should be proud of ourselves, but at the same time, having universal values at the core of our existence, whether in Israel or in the diaspora.

But do people in the other political movements in Israel— I understand that they think that outside Israel, we’re naive; that outside Israel, we don’t understand— and this is probably true— what it feels like to live inside this kind of danger.

But do they actually understand that if they demand that the price of supporting Israel is to give up on universalism, to give up on all these other commitments that are core to the values of at least most Western Jews— I mean, you can see what our politics are. Some people will choose Israel. I mean, there is some evidence in fact. Post 10/7— and I understand this myself— like, it has forced me to deeply reengage with Israel. There is some people who will choose Israel.

They will say, push comes to shove, the particularism is dominant in me. There are many who won’t. And you can say a lot about what is happening on campuses, and you can say a lot about what is happening at the protests.

I got an email the other day from a grad student at Columbia, and he said something to me that I’ve been hearing from a lot of students, which is that he doesn’t feel the protests are antisemitic, though they do attract anti-Semites. What he does feel is that he is being asked to choose between a kind of thoroughgoing anti-Zionism, right? A Zionism that believes Israel to be a stain that must be erased, and being a sort of social progressive on his campus in good standing. And I don’t know what choice he’ll make. I don’t know what choice a lot of people make. But do people in Israel— this is my question as a Jew living in America. Do people in Israel, the kind of people in leadership in Israel, the Benny Gantz’s of the world, do they understand that if that is the choice ultimately, that a lot of people are going to choose their politics over a country they don’t live in?

That they don’t have this memory of it as a refuge or a miracle— they have a memory of it as something that makes their day-to-day defense of who they are difficult. Because that seems to me to be what’s happening to a lot of college students right now. I don’t know what they will choose, but it appears to me to be a more significant threat to the relationship between the diaspora and Israel than people in Israel really seem to realize.

I said before, and I’ll repeat it for once, you have justified criticism of Israel because there is wrongdoing. You have understandable criticism of Israel because some things that are actually justified, but it’s difficult to understand when you don’t get the complexity. There is the vicious criticism of Israel, and there’s anti-Semitism.

And I’ll tell you where I see the line crossed. When people deny the Jewish people’s right for self-determination and when people deny the Jewish people’s right for self-defense, that’s when vicious criticism becomes anti-Semitism. That’s the new anti-Semitism. Just the way that my great, great, great grandfather was treated in his shtetl in Eastern Europe as the odd person, as the other, as the one who is not like the others, this is the way the Jewish people is treated now by many— not all, but was treated by many.

And I say no. When you come to judge Israel, you should criticize many things, but take a universal standard. You want to criticize the way we wage war? Compare it to the way America waged war in Iraq and Afghanistan and in other places.

Look, I want to say I agree with you. I agree with you. And I think this point is fair. But the wedge being driven, the thing I want to push you to answer to, or at least think about here, the wedge being driven between Jewish students in Israel is not should Israel exist, do the Jewish people have a right to self-determination, but if Israel exists like this, if it is this Israel, if it keeps going down this path, is it really consistent with who you believe yourself to be to support it?

That there could be a self-determining Israel that you could support, yes, absolutely, but for a lot of us, frankly, for me, that’s not been around for 15 years. It’s easy to rebut the anti-Semite, but that’s not the thing that is going to wedge these Jews, these young Jews from Israel. The thing that is going to wedge them from Israel is actual things happening in Israel, the things that Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, and, frankly, Netanyahu actually say.

And so I don’t know. I worry sometimes people are— they have managed to convince themselves that if they can argue down the anti-Semites, they have solved the problem. But I think they are distracting themselves from the problem with the anti-Semites.

I don’t want this situation where it seems that Israel is in conflict with liberal America. This is unbearable for me. This is unbearable. So I think that the extreme right in Israel that speaks in the names of nationalism is destroying the nation state of the Jewish people. I think that some in the extreme right who speak in the name of Zionism endanger the Zionist project. And some in the extreme right who speak in the name of Judaism are betraying half the Jewish people.

How can extreme right and extreme Orthodox people speak in the name of Judaism and actually send away half or more than half of the Jewish people? We live in a free world, thank God. Still, I cannot expect any Jewish youngster, any young man or young girl, to stick to their Judaism and stick to their commitment to a Jewish state when that state turns its back on their values altogether. That doesn’t fly. It doesn’t work.

And I say it’s not only non-democratic and non-liberal— it’s non-Jewish. Look, talking about the Jewish mission of this time, we need to build a non-extremist Jewish coalition in the diaspora and Israel to fight the dark forces. Look, we are having a fight for— it’s a battle for Israel’s soul. It’s a real battle for Israel’s soul. We have dark forces. They are not the majority. They took over the government. They are not the majority, but they are there.

And in order to fight them, we all have to be much better than we were. We have to be much more courageous and smart politically. But we need a kind of great Jewish coalition for that. So let’s take this grave danger that we are now all aware of and deal with it.

Again, in my admiration to the Herzls and the Weizmanns and the Ben-Gurions, is, when they thought a terrible threat, they rose to the challenge. And they changed reality in an amazing way. Chaim Weizmann, one of the Zionist leaders, used to say, you don’t have to be crazy to be a Zionist, but it helps. They were a bunch of dreamers. They dealt with an impossible reality.

Today, there is so much more that we have in Israel, and you have in the diaspora. We still have more resources, more power, more energy. But we have to address this danger. And it’s a double danger. It’s a danger from without, the attacks of the anti-Semites in America and Europe and elsewhere, and the dangers of the radicals in the Middle East, and the danger from within, of losing our soul. We must not lose our soul. We have to win the battle for Israel’s soul.

I think that’s the place to end. Always our final question— what are three books you would recommend to the audience?

One of the things we need today is not only victims, but heroes, democratic heroes. So the three books about heroes that I appreciate, one is about Rosalind Franklin. And Rosalind Franklin was a scientist, happened to be a Jewish British scientist. She contributed dramatically to the discovery of the D.N.A. code. And she was intellectually dispossessed. They took away her life’s work, and she died brokenhearted at the age of 38.

And what I see in her is scientific heroism, feminist heroism. She is also family. She was my mother’s second cousin. And then a book, a biography, actually brought her resurrection, in a way. And today, she is so appreciated. So I find an element of hope in that.

The second book that I really have been reading in the year before Oct. 7 when we had all this internal struggle in Israel was Taylor Branch’s “Parting the Waters” about Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement. The book is beautifully written and very comprehensive, but what Martin Luther King brings us is the best of what happened in the postwar era. I think that all oppressed people in the Middle East or elsewhere, I think it’s an inspiration to fight for their rights, but within the context of universal values and the peaceful struggle.

And my third one is Truman. Truman is so dear to my heart because first of all, he was like the unlikely hero, the surprising hero. The fact that you come from the people and you serve the people, and you don’t forget that you are one of them, I find endearing.

He enabled the world of Rosalind Franklin and the world of Martin Luther King because he created the postwar, World War II order, that gave humanity its best 70, 80 years. And I really, really hope we will find the Harry Truman of our time who will deal with the amazing challenges we will face and lead us to a hopeful future.

Ari Shavit, thank you very much.

Thank you.

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This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Claire Gordon and Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Kristin Lin. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon.

The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Sonia Herrero.