Interview with Yossi Klein Halevi by Robert Silverman

25/10/2024 | Na stronie od 02/04/2025

Sorce: The Jerusalem Strategic Tribune Talks

The Jerusalem Strategic Tribune Talks - Yossi Klein Halevi

I grew up in a very charged Holocaust environment in Brooklyn, in the 1960s, which is to say that the Holocaust was still a raw and living experience. It was not yet history. The way that I was raised was to look at the entire non-Jewish world as hostile. My father used to say that the non-Jewish world is divided into two categories: those who actively wanted to destroy the Jewish people and those who are tacitly pleased that others are doing the dirty work. And that was a fairly representative attitude and understandable attitude for the survivor generation.

I grew up in America, in the 1960s, the most expansive time in history, in any culture, where the whole world was opening and everything was changing, and I was very interested in what was happening outside of Brooklyn [laughs]. But I lived this kind of schizophrenic life where part of me belonged to the 1960s and part of me belonged to my father’s traumatized worldview. Eventually I came to realize that my generation’s experience was so radically different from my father’s that the distance between us should have been measured by centuries and not decades. My father’s generation was the unluckiest generation in Jewish history and mine was the luckiest.

Eventually I moved to Israel. And I told my kids, who are dual American-Israeli citizens, you have the two dream passports of Jewish history. Even with all the changes that have happened since October 7, 2023, that’s still true. So my evolution was becoming part of the far right Jewish political world. Growing up, Meir Kahane [founder of the Jewish Defense League] was my hero, my leader when I was a teenager. That was an attempt to come to terms with my father’s identity, which I thought I needed to inhabit. Eventually I came to realize that way of living my Jewish identity through rage, suspicion, fear was faithful to my father’s experience, but a betrayal of my experience.

This is really just shorthand for a very long and difficult spiritual journey that began in a very narrow place, the farthest extreme on the Jewish map and gradually working my way toward the center of the Jewish map, of the Israeli map.

Robert Silverman: After October 7, 2023, did your map change again?

Yossi Klein Halevi: I can’t say that my illusions were shattered. I don’t think I really had too many illusions. A lot has happened over the years. But October 7th really in some ways magnified the fear that Israelis rightly have toward a West Bank Palestinian state. The problem is that it’s more complicated. It’s always more complicated.

For me, and I think for other Israelis, there were two takeaways from October 7th. The first is: You have to be kidding me to ask me to consider a Palestinian state on our most sensitive border. The second takeaway is that Ariel Sharon was right. We can’t live in one political entity between the river and the sea with these two peoples together. We can’t live with Gaza as part of our society and part of our state. Sharon was vindicated by October 7th.

So what do you do with that? On the one hand, you can’t have a Palestinian state, on the other hand, you can share a state together. For me, the dilemma of October 7th just magnified what has been clear all along: that we must have a two-state solution and we can’t have a two-state solution. I don’t know how to navigate that. If you push me to the wall and say, what’s your greater fear? Is it a Palestinian state or the absence of a Palestinian state. My greater fear is the absence of a Palestinian state, but just barely.

The crime that the anti-Zionist progressives are committing against American Jews is that they are returning the conditionality of Jewish acceptance [in America]. The way that that plays out, on campuses especially, is: “We’ll accept you. We’re not antisemitic, but you have to give up this part [Zionism] of your Jewish identity.”

In the past, America always accepted its Jews, with a certain amount of conditionality. “Don’t talk with your hands. Don’t be too Jewish. To be too overtly Jewish. Maybe it’s a good idea to change your family name to fit in. And of course, this is America, we’ll accept you.”

But there was this conditionality and anti-Zionists have restored conditionality to Jewish acceptance. And the fact that it’s happening on campus is an even greater shock for American Jews because it was on campus where American Jews first experienced complete and unconditional acceptance. And I experienced that. I went to Northwestern.

Robert Silverman: One of the centers of the pro-Hamas movement in the US.

More: The Jerusalem Strategic Tribune Talks