The following is a transcript of Episode 128 of the For Heaven’s Sake Podcast. Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Donniel: Hi, this is Donniel Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevi from the Shalom Hartman Institute. And this is our podcast For Heaven’s Sake, Israel at War, Day 248. You know, part of me, every time I mentioned the number, 

Yossi: It’s funny, when you say, it hit me right now, you said, I said, oh no, 248, 

Donniel: I saw it today on our friend, Eliot Goldstein, he has a piece of scotch tape for hostages where every it’s, it’s a tradition here in Israel, who wear a piece of masking tape with the number and you look at it, and that leads us to today’s topic: four are free. 

This week, our life was turned over. Four hostages came home. Not all of them. There’s still hostages there, but there was this remarkable moment. And I heard about it, I was walking home from my mother-in-law’s, with my wife Adina and my daughter and grandson and son-in-law, and we walked through a park, and a lady just sitting at the park, she looked at us, she said, “shamatem,” did you hear? She said, did you hear? Four hostages, it was just, she needed to share, it was, it’s such an Israeli moment.

Yossi: I read that secular neighbors, this happened on Shabbat, so presumably religious Jews didn’t know, and so secular neighbors left notes at the doorstep of their religious neighbors. 

Donniel: She told me, part of it because she saw my kippah. She saw my kippah. And it was just, we needed this day. But it’s a complicated day because it’s not the end of anything. 120 are still left, but this was a very, very special moving day. Arnon Zmora, zichrono l’vracha Holev Racha, gave his life. A hero of unique proportions.

Yossi: We keep discovering unique heroes in this war. 

Donniel: And he was a hero. Thousands of people lined the streets at his funeral. Thousands of people lined the streets as his, as his coffin lay. It was just, and unfortunately, it seems like we never get the happy day. We never get just, they’re all free, there’s no ending. It’s a middle though, but you and I felt that we want to stop on this day. Stop. 

And the issue that we want to talk about is, what does this mean in Israel? And also, the significant disparity between the way we felt and the relative simplicity and joy which we experienced, and the way this was very often reported. Even when this was reported positively, there was an issue that just didn’t exist in Israel. And that is the casualties which resulted in Nuseirat when the Israeli army had to bomb. 

And the technical reason, one of the trucks that was carrying the hostages to freedom, malfunctioned. And it was surrounded, and this is the nightmare scenario, and hundreds of terrorists, immediately, hundreds of Hamas, and the fact that there are hundreds of Hamas in Nuseirat, which we’ve captured so many times already, just came out and surfaced, and were basically protecting these hostages, or ensuring that they don’t get out, started to fire RPGs, and the force was in tremendous danger. And when this happened, the Air Force job is to create a wall of fire, a wall of fire to protect until the paratroopers came in. There were various circles of troops. 

And we’re all experts now because every detail of this story was like, almost like the exodus from Egypt, we’re telling everybody in Israel knows every stage of what occurred. And until the protective detail of the paratroopers could get there, there were 15 minutes, there was a wall of fire. To keep the terrorists from killing the soldiers, the special forces. 

And for us, you know, when you and I talked about it, this was, like, wasn’t even an issue. And I want to talk about that a little bit, whether we’re right or wrong. But there’s a disparity that for some, this was the lead story, the casualties, hostages freed, casualties. Is the world understanding something that we’re not understanding? Is the world working on a different system? What are their calculations? 

Yossi: Or are we understanding something that they’re not understanding?

Donniel: Or what is it that we’re understanding? So that’s what we want to talk about today. So Yossi, where do you want to start? 

Yossi: First with the joy of the moment, before we start deconstructing. When you and I spoke, immediately after Shabbat, there was unequivocal joy. And I think that what we were responding to was not only the joy of the families, but this sense of relief that we’re still ready to fight and die for each other.

Last week and the last podcast, you and I spoke about how the hostages have become a politicized issue. And this week, it’s as if none of that ugliness was there. And we were reminded of the love. And I’m sure none of these soldiers hesitated for a moment to walk into the lion’s den. And knowing something of how things work here, I’m sure that soldiers, commanders, were fighting for the right to go in. And that, for me, that’s what this moment ultimately was about. After all these months of confusion and who are we as a society and the last year and a half of divisiveness, suddenly we had a moment of clarity.

Donniel: Interesting. For me it was joy. It wasn’t clarity. It wasn’t political. And it was joy. Afterwards, very quickly, it became very political, this too. As people wondered, Netanyahu came to visit this family and not that family, and he comes to visit, 

Yossi: Oh, I hated that. I hated the way he, 

Donniel: And he comes to visit the families, like, he takes responsibility for the success and not for the, it’s just, so, we, we, we didn’t let it last. Don’t worry. We Like, we’re not, don’t worry. It’s like, this, this, but, I just felt, you, I was just, when this, I remember literally on my body, it had nothing to do for me with a larger question of the, just this pure, simple joy. 

Cause as you know, for me, so much of my Jewish identity is a feeling of family and also so much of my Israeliness, to be an Israeli is to be, you’re part of a family. You know, I said this before, when you tell your children, when you’re in danger, find a stranger. I know it’s a romanticization or something like that of Israeli society. There’s something, it’s family. 

Yossi: But you see, that’s exactly what I was responding to, was the reaffirmation of our family-ness. 

Donniel: Very much. We felt it. And also, Arnon Zmora, it was part of the story. He wasn’t an unknown. It wasn’t, and we, he had a name. And we spoke about him. And in a beautiful part of the funeral yesterday, his mother and his wife, after all of his colleagues in the army spoke about this remarkable special forces hero who saved maybe thousands of lives on October 7th and throughout his career. He’s 36. This is like a, he is in the most elite anti-terrorist group in the Israeli army and one of the most elite in the world and they said, please don’t just remember Arnon for the soldier he was. Please remember him for the human being he was. And just, like, it’s almost too much. 

So, I don’t want to keep on romanticizing, but for me, there was, it was a healing, not because it healed doubt, it was just the best of Israeli society that I experienced. Now, we shared that, and we had that, and in that context, the casualties in Nuseirat weren’t even an issue. 

Yossi: When you and I spoke, immediately after Shabbat, we didn’t mention it. 

Donniel: It was just a nonissue. And I think the bottom line, it’s not that we’re not aware. It’s just to save our hostages. In this context, we have to be able to fight to bring our hostages home. 

Yossi: So Donniel, make the moral argument. 

Donniel: The moral argument is that the presence of civilians cannot render a military action, a legitimate military action inoperable. The fact that you are hiding behind civilians or you’re placing our hostages in people’s homes in the midst of a densely populated area that’s not on the operating force, that’s on the person who puts them there and because, otherwise, the ability of a heinous enemy to undermine your ability to fight a just war. So here it is, doesn’t matter. If I hide behind, so there’s, there’s parts to it. The first part is I have a right to bring my people home, to bring my family home, to bring my citizens home. I have a right to protect.

And it’s not simply that civilian casualties are a fact of war. That’s almost trivial. And that’s silly to some extent. It’s the fact that they are embedded in the midst of a civilian population, not by choice. This is your decision. There’s a deep sense that it’s not on us, but it’s on the people who made that decision to put them there. 

But the second stage is the issue of proportionality, and here that’s a critical feature of morality of war in general and of the Israeli military ethos, that you can’t harm civilians, even if they’re used as a shield, unless the benefit that you’re going to accrue is proportionately greater in that moment than the casualties to civilian life, this issue of proportionality. 

And here, I think the reason why we didn’t talk about it is that I want my people home. What do you mean? This is exactly what we have the principle of proportionality for. This is not just, I’m taking out or I’m killing the spokesperson of Hamas because he’s a strategic target. No. I’m bringing my people home to save one of my people, to save four of them, to save hostages, to save people who for 240 days, so there was a sense for us that this was proportionate, Yossi. 

Even if, not to speak of the fact that, again, leave aside the counting of the numbers, who was hurt, how many of them were Hamas terrorists, who was coming close. They were bombing and creating a wall of fire around this disabled car, who was showing up there. So whatever the number is, we already know that there’s this false numbers game being represented. It’s like this constant accusation. So there’s a sense that it is a just war, but also that for us was proportionate.

Yossi: So I think there were two points here that you’re raising. The first is in this war, we made a strategic decision not to allow Hamas immunity behind their civilians. In other words, you can’t cross the border, massacre our civilians, and then kidnap them, cross back on your side, and then hide behind your civilians. That game is over. 

And this rescue operation, in some way, the second is the total entwinement of the Hamas infrastructure with civilian Gaza. You can’t separate one from the other because Hamas has made sure that you can’t separate them. So, for example, and this is something that has not been highlighted at all abroad, the hostages were being held by families in neighborhoods, which means everyone knew. Now, that’s not to say everyone is guilty. But it’s also not to say that everyone is innocent. 

And I think I mentioned this, Donniel, on one of our previous podcasts, when I was trying to unpack the difference insensibility between the Israeli discourse and the discourse abroad, how here, when we speak about the war in Gaza, it’s as if there are no civilians, and abroad, it’s as if there are only civilians. And we’ve declared war against the Palestinian people, and there’s no Hamas. And this, in some ways, really was a kind of a summation of the very different, really opposite approaches in our reaction to the rescue, the question of civilians didn’t come up. Abroad, the question of the civilian casualties overshadowed the rescue. 

Donniel: So let’s dig down a moment because, you know, I have been critical of some of the actions that Israel has taken, not on whether this is a just war, but whether we are always as careful as we should have been, and whether all of the civilian casualties were proportionate. And the issue of, that was really the issue of Rafah. 

But in this case, it’s not. Our core instinct of our family, just like we never argued if you want to protect a soldier, nobody was ever micromanaging the army’s choice to bomb or to do A or B or C in order to limit army casualties. That’s one of my rights as a people, I don’t have to apologize for it. I have a right to be, I have a right to live, I have a right to fight a just war, and I have a right to minimize my casualties on the side of my soldiers. That was never our issue. 

But here this was a very similar, for us this was our simple Israeli sensibility. Simple. Clear. Doesn’t mean that we’ve always done it right, and it doesn’t mean we haven’t made mistakes, and when we do we’re supposed to own them and do better. 

But here, that was gone. But in the world, it wasn’t. So thank God most Israelis don’t follow world opinion. You and I do. But it was a lonely moment in that sense for you and for I, or we, we noticed the difference between our feelings. How do you understand, you know, beyond the fact that, you know, it’s an interesting way of saying it, we, in Israel, it’s as if there’s only Hamas and outside we’re only fighting Palestinian civilians, but it has to be deeper than that. You know, okay, we can go to anti-Semitism again, and I don’t want to take that away from you ever. And even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t be able to. 

Yossi: That’s for sure. 

Donniel: So, so, but how do you understand reasonable people, intelligent people, you know, like, are we just so completely wired differently?

Yossi: What’s happened in the last eight months and, and again, I’m really, I’m taking up your challenge to focus on reasonable people, which means, I’m not going to include the BBC anchor who interviewed an Israeli spokesperson. 

Donniel: Could you tell that story because it was truly, it was extraordinary.

Yossi: It was extraordinary. I think my mouth literally dropped open.

Donniel: Take time and tell them the whole story, please. 

Yossi: So Conricus, the former IDF spokesman, was on the BBC. And he’s explaining about how exactly what you just said, that any country has the right to rescue its civilians, and the moral burden is on the other side for risking civilians, their own civilians.

The interviewer turns to him and says, well, shouldn’t you have warned the Palestinians before you went in? And there was just a flicker of a smile in his response. And you could see him debating, should I tell her how ludicrous she is or should I answer seriously? And he composed himself and then answered, well, you know, we would have lost the element of surprise and when you try, and you realize that was a precious moment for Israelis, because it reminded us how much of this criticism truly is disconnected from reality. 

And, okay, I accept your challenge. Let’s leave out the animus. This comes from, 

Donniel: And the idiots. 

Yossi: Well, okay, but the idiocy comes in part from a profound disconnect among most people in the West of what it means to be fighting a war, let alone an existential war. And that’s where that question came from, of people who don’t have a clue. And so we’re trying to explain ourselves to societies that can’t begin to imagine what it’s like to be in our shoes. And that’s part of the disconnect. That’s part of the loneliness. And so you’re right. We don’t even need anti-Semitism or anti-Zionism to explain the sheer ignorance, the disconnect in how we experienced a seminal moment like the rescue of our hostages, and how so much of the West just didn’t have a clue.

Donniel: And those who do have a clue. So we’ve explained those who don’t know. But those who do know, is there some sense that you could give, why would, look, I don’t want to dump on the New York Times, it wasn’t just the New York Times. 

Yossi: Oh, I do want to dump on the New York Times, but we’ll leave that. Look, I think that you can’t remove the reaction, 

Donniel: Because you can’t say these aren’t intelligent people. 

Yossi: Okay, so you can’t remove the, that reaction from the wider context of the war, the judgment that much of the world has now come to on the continued legitimacy of the war. And that includes many people who initially, at least, were prepared to give us the benefit of the doubt. And I think that’s what you’re asking about. How do we speak to those people? And this is part of the disconnect. We in Israel, we may have gone through a process of questioning the goals of the war, the strategy, the morning after, but those are political and military questions.

We haven’t had a real moral crisis here, and I certainly include myself there, the overwhelming majority of Israeli Jews continue to believe, to uphold the moral order legitimacy of this war, and at least in principle, the necessity of continuing to fight. So if you put that in the context of a wider disconnect, then I think really we can begin to understand what is otherwise truthfully incomprehensible.

You and I are old enough to remember the Entebbe rescue, and it’s true there weren’t massive numbers of civilian casualties, nevertheless, there was uncomplicated joy all around the world. Total admiration. Now, we experienced this rescue as a kind of mini Entebbe, the Entebbe rescue of 1976, just to fill in for those who are not 70 years old, the rescue of a hundred Israeli hostages from Entebbe airport in Uganda. And I think that so much of that instinctive joy was an Entebbe reaction, but that’s not what we experienced this time. 

Donniel: It was interesting on Sunday, there was a group of senior or very senior, age-wise, Israelis who were very senior in their positions in the past, who, who are now looking to try to shape Israeli society, and they came to spend a day at the Institute to learn about what we’re doing. And one of the people was Matan Vilnai, who was Yoni’s assistant. 

Yossi: Yoni Netanyahu, Bibi’s brother. 

Donniel: He was there, and he said, you know, he was comparing, and it was just the next day, this was Sunday, comparing these two moments, and you’re sitting next to somebody who was in Entebbe, only in Israel, you know, these are, but I’ve been thinking a lot about it. And you know I have a natural desire to assume that I’m living in a rational, moral universe. 

Yossi: Well, Donniel, you have just defined the precise divide between us. It’s like, I like, 

Donniel: You know, that’s my myth. You know, I, I, that’s, I, for me, I know it’s a choice, you see. And that’s the world I want to live in. And I’m going to stick with that, right or wrong. And some people, you know, think I’m crazy. Okay, you know. It’s just my thing. 

Yossi: It’s one the things I love about you. No, I mean that. I mean that. And that’s, that’s where you challenge me. 

Donniel: Or, and maybe we balance each other out that way, because otherwise I would just be too much, even for, for anybody. But I’m thinking about it. And again, leaving aside the idiots and the anti-Semites, if you realize, for someone who, who, it’s not their family. It’s already eight months since October 7th. For a large part of the world, this is just, it’s abstract, it’s just person against person. So you got four and you killed 200, there’s no victim, there’s no aggressor anymore. After time, and I think part of what we have to understand is that this is a profound challenge that we have as Israelis. We could fight six day wars, three week wars. We can do operations. We’re one of the three countries in the world who regularly use hard power. Russia, the United States, and Israel. We’re the hard power people. Soft power people are the people who peddle influence, the Chinese, and they use soft power to influence. We are regularly using hard power in order to survive. 

Yossi: In asymmetrical warfare, which is the most complicated morally. 

Donniel: And so, unlike Russia and the United States, we don’t have a veto. We actually count on world opinion, like we can’t veto at all and it, it has a profound influence on us and we’re actually not powerful enough to function independent from the world. And so world opinion is part of our strategic or needs to be part of our strategic calculations. 

And by the way, that’s not just for Israel, that’s also Jews around the world. Jews around the world also. The success of what we’re doing now in so many parts of the world, because October 7th is personal for people. There’s, the Jewish people, we’re together. We care about each other. And so for us, this is very, these are our, for our children came, all of us, Jews around the world. This is the way we’re taught to think as Jews. All of Israel are responsible for each other. You’re just there for people. And that came out. And we’re still very deeply there. It doesn’t mean that people always support Israel, it doesn’t mean that we’re not critical of Israel, but that’s a very deep sense of what it means to be a Jew.

But you can’t expect the world to think that way. For them now, it’s eight months already. You know, you didn’t win the war, it’s like I hear Trump saying, you know, you got to finish your business, you know, like you got to win or something. The moral urgency of the war is no longer significant, and the hostage is no longer personal. It’s not personal. And so it’s a numbers game. And that is, we almost have to accept that maybe that’s, it’s not the lonely story of the Jew. It’s the lonely story of somebody who’s fighting an eight-month war, and nobody cares anymore. And what strategic significance this has is something else. But we have to recognize that it’s going to be lonely.

Now, that loneliness is also dangerous. That loneliness is precarious in a world that day after day someone else is deciding, you know, Israel’s now persona non grata. But in the story itself, it’s just said, the hostages don’t matter anymore. It’s just, it’s a conflict. There’s no more October 7th. We have to realize we’re living in, the war is now literally a post-October 7th war.

Yossi: Yeah. You know, it’s an interesting moment for diaspora Jews, how connected they feel to the family. And I think that most diaspora Jews reacted similarly to Israelis. But there were some who reacted without that instinctive family sense. And that’s a question. That’s a question for the future of our relationship with the entirety of diaspora Jewry. And it’s a question really for, 

Donniel: But isn’t it very small? 

Yossi: I, I hope so. I hope so. It’s small but vocal. 

Donniel: It’s vocal. But by the way, even amongst anti-Zionists, they’re not anti-Jewish people. In other words, it’s, there are a small subsection of it. So we don’t know where this is going to go. 

Yossi: I’m not prepared to give the Jewish anti-Zionists the same benefit of the doubt, but we’ll leave that.

Donniel: We’ll leave that. Let’s, as we bring this podcast to a close on day 248, on 249, we in the Jewish world are going to celebrate Shavuot, the holiday of our receiving of the Torah, or literally, Matan Torah, the giving of the Torah, or the present of the Torah, depends. What is Shavuot in the midst of a war? We could talk about Shavuot, and God willing, next year, this won’t be Israel at war anymore. And we could talk about Shavuot in a larger way, and what it means for us as Jews and Israelis and for the future of Jewish life. 

But this year on what will be 248, 249, 250, and if you’re in the diaspora, it’ll be 251 also, that’s our punishment for living outside of Israel. Shavuot, does it have any special meaning for you or significance actually this year?

Yossi: Well, we’ve been speaking now about the emotional significance of peoplehood, and this Shavuot I’m going to be focused on the spiritual significance of peoplehood.

Because Shavuot is the moment when we were really born as a people. The Exodus was the prelude, and then the journey to the mountain, the journey to Sinai, which we mark between Pesach, Passover, and Shavuot, is the journey of maturation to that moment when we were shaped in a collective act of divine revelation.

And it’s the collectiveness of the Sinai revelation that I think is especially significant for the meaning of peoplehood. Judaism is, I hate what I’m about to say, which is Judaism is the only religion that, you know, I hate this, you know, the one-upmanship. But, you know, in terms of understanding the essence of Judaism, Judaism is the only religion that experienced revelation not to a single saintly individual, but to a whole people. Good, bad, indifferent, the entire people stood at Sinai and experienced something, some form of revelation. And what that means to me is that there is no Judaism, there is no Jewish spiritual goal, mission, without the people. It can’t be carried without the people. And so we’re formed in an act of collective revelation. You know, the Torah could have just been given to Moshe, to Moses. But the inner logic of Judaism is that the entire people has to be there. 

Donniel: For me, Shavuot is a little different. What you’re describing, and I love it, it’s good, it’s strong, is very much my Pesach experience. I feel that in Pesach. For me, Shavuot is a celebration of Jewish identity. It’s where the Jewish people take ownership of our identity. We receive the Torah. But how do we celebrate Shavuot? We study. Shavuot is the only holiday that doesn’t really have great rituals. You know, eating milchigs is not exactly that exciting. 

Yossi: Milk products. 

Donniel: Milk products. It’s like, oh, okay. It’s nice.

But, you know, Pesach is so rich, and Sukkos is so rich, not to speak of Purim. What are you supposed to do on Shavuot? And this tradition of staying up in the nighttime or learning the Torah is an experience in which the Jewish people don’t see or don’t embrace our Jewish identity as a yoke, as God’s agenda.

Like, here it is, the Torah is given, and we celebrate it. Really, Shavuot is the day in which we celebrate not the giving of the Torah, but the receiving of the Torah. And it’s ours. And we celebrate our identity. And this year, I so much feel the profound need to reconnect to who we want to be as a people.

This, I want to celebrate my identity, in the midst of war, I want to have a spiritual agenda, a moral agenda. I want that. For me, this is the balance that we need to have and that for me is the future of Israel, and in many ways I experience that future of Israel. 

Today, on day 248, 200 of the top military doctors in the Israeli army are spending a day here at the Institute studying values and morality in the times of war. They came, they left, they’re at war. And they said, no, we have to talk about a whole bunch of value issues about, and there’s fascinating critical questions about who you help, how you help, what resources you use between Gazans, Hamas, Israeli soldiers. 

And I was sitting in the midst of this unbelievably intelligent group of people who said, in the midst of the war, who we want to be is a question that for us is critical to who we are. And for me, that’s Shavuot. And so I’m looking forward to letting go of the existential question for a day. If our enemies will let us, they probably won’t. And my telephone will ring the whole day with the Tzofar app telling me where something has fallen. For you, peoplehood, For me, a celebration of our Jewish identity. 

Yossi: I loved what you said about the emphasis not on the Torah being given, but on who receives the Torah. And so, I would adjust what I said to emphasize really the spiritual significance of peoplehood, that in Judaism, peoplehood is not a secular concept. It’s a religious value, and it’s central to who we are. And so this Shavuot, I will be celebrating the ongoing vitality of our people. 

Donniel: With that, Yossi, pleasure to be with you. 

Yossi: Always. 

Donniel: I wanna wish all of our audience a chag sameach, happy holiday, meaningful holiday, and let’s hold the fact that four, four, it’s not everybody, but four our home. This is For Heaven’s Sake, Israel at War, Day 248.

Louis: This episode was sponsored by Amy and Ted Khan. You, too, can sponsor an episode of For Heaven’s Sake. The link to donate can be found in the show notes or at shalomhartman.org/forheavenssake. We will acknowledge your gift on a future episode. 

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