Over the past year or so, I’ve been listening to an English language podcast by Sruli Fruchter (formerly the editor of The Commentator at Yeshiva University, now a rabbinical student in Jerusalem) as part of an educational platform called the 18Forty Project, which asks the same 18 questions (basically) of forty diverse Israeli thinkers. The goal of the podcast is to give the English-speaking world a wide and thorough understanding of where different groups in Israel stand on the issues of the day (politically, ethically, religiously), and it is a potent reminder that Israel is a democracy, rather than an autocracy; which means that all of the people have a voice, as opposed to most countries in the Middle East, where the leadership of a country (like, say, Iran) can be laser focused on one goal for 40 years (like, say, destroying Israel). These interviews also make it clear that democracy is messy, and full of compromises and disagreement, and it isn’t always rational, or linear, as we have clearly experienced in America’s democracy as well.
The first few interviews I watched/listened to on YouTube were with Israeli journalists I knew from other venues (Haviv Rettig Gur and Yossi Klein Halevi), and I found the questions interesting, even if the answers were familiar, so I decided to look for more interviews with less well-known (to me) figures. The interviews don’t exist in a time vacuum, so an interview that took place early in the war with Hamas will have a different vibe than one that happened after the 12-day war with Iran, but because of the consistent format (those eighteen questions) you can get a pretty solid idea of where each of these thinkers would land, independent of when you meet them. Some of the 18 questions include: Is Zionism still necessary now that the state of Israel exists? Which is more important for Israel: Judaism or democracy? And, how have your views on politics and religion changed, if at all, since October 7th?
What happened for me, over time, was that I came to trust the format, and the interviewer, despite the fact that he looks a lot like my oldest nephew (aka very young), or maybe because he seemed so familiar, which allowed me to go with him in his curiosity as he interviewed Israeli voices further and further from the center. There was one interview that stood out for me, with Rabbanit Shani Taragin, who is part of the settler movement. This woman, voicing her sincere hope that as a result of the current war she and her family will be able to return to Gaza, is far outside my comfort zone as a progressive American Jew. She and her family lived in Gaza before the disengagement in 2005, when the prime minister at that time, Ariel Sharon, following the advice of Israel’s international friends (especially The United States) ordered the Israeli army to remove all Jewish presence from Gaza, from the Israeli army bases down to the Jewish bodies buried in the ground. The goal of the disengagement was to hand over control of the Gaza strip to the Palestinians, in the hope that creating distance between the two communities would lead to peace. Unfortunately, Hamas quickly took over (through a combination of elections and killing of the opposition) which has led, clearly, to the opposite of peace.
It is practically dogma that the biggest obstacle to a two-state solution, and therefore to peace between Israel and the Palestinians, is the Jewish settlements in the occupied territories (in Gaza, before 2005, and in the West Bank/Judea and Samaria still today). This has been accepted wisdom for a very long time, even though the first small settlements only started after Israel won the 1967 war and the hoped-for land for peace deals with the surrounding Arab countries failed to take place (the answer from every Arab country at that time was a firm no, to any deal, of any kind). Because of the lack of a peace deal, Israel remained in control of the land, and allowed some Jewish people to settle there; some wanted to return to the property they owned before the 1948 war, and some wanted to create settlements to reinforce security for the borders of official Israel, and some saw the land as an essential part of greater Israel as described in the Hebrew Bible and believed that it was God’s will that they should live there.
Eventually, after the peace deal with Egypt, which traded the Sinai desert for peace (and specifically did not include the Gaza strip, at Egypt’s request, even though Gaza had been under Egyptian control from 1948 to 1967), when negotiations began with the Palestinians themselves (rather than with the surrounding Arab countries), the Jewish settlements in the territories became a sticking point, among others, in the discussions of a two-state solution. The other big obstacle to peace was the fact that Hamas, and other Palestinian groups, refused any offer of peace that allowed Israel to continue to exist, and used terrorism to disrupt the attempts of more moderate Palestinians to make peace with Israel. Hamas is not alone in its belief that Israel shouldn’t exist, and that the land from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean Sea belongs to the Arabs; it’s one of the slogans repeated often at pro-Palestinian demonstrations, though when translated into English it changes to “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
So, is it terrorism, or is it the settlements that prevented peace? Or something else? There is so much history here, and so much dogma, and so much misinformation and confusion, that it is all very difficult to untangle and absorb. And given all of the bad feelings about the role of the settlements in preventing peace, the idea that I would have been willing to sit down and listen to someone from the settler movement, for more than an hour, with an open mind and even compassion, was hard to imagine. But Sruli Fruchter’s gentle style, and his patience and respect, in this interview as with all of the others, allowed me to hear this woman’s often thoughtful and surprising answers. And listening to her opened a door for me, to read more articles and listen to more interviews, from Israel Unpacked and The Times of Israel and Haviv Rettig Gur, that went into more depth on the settlements and helped me to understand that there are many different groups under the umbrella of “settlers,” most of whom are non-violent, and many of whom are left wing and even secular, often living in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) because property is more affordable there than elsewhere in Israel. The more violent segment of the settler movement, sometimes known as The Hilltop Youth, many of whom are part of the community that was forcibly removed from Gaza by Israeli soldiers 20 years ago, aim their anger and violence not only at the Palestinians but also at the Israeli soldiers who come to intervene. It gets even more complicated, because sometimes the settlers are responding to genuine acts of terror by Hamas or Islamic Jihad, and sometimes they are punishing whole villages for the acts of a few, and sometimes they are just attacking for what looks like no good reason (I’m sure they have their own reasons for who they target, but it looks chaotic from the outside). And, some Israeli soldiers sympathize with the Hilltop Youth and take the side of the settlers instead of protecting the Palestinian civilians, even when the settlers are clearly in the wrong.
Suffice it to say, the gap between the Hilltop Youth and this woman being interviewed by Sruli Fruchter, is vast, and yet, before listening to her, I would have assumed they were one and the same. And even though listening to her didn’t change my opinion about the danger of allowing Jews to resettle in Gaza, it helped me to have more compassion for the people who hope for that with all their hearts, and to have more understanding of why this conflict is as complicated and intractable as it has become.
These interviews also allowed me to hear from Arab Israeli thinkers and activists, and far left Jewish voices, and right-wing rabbis, and historians, and former peaceniks who are now hawks, all of whom disagree with each other, vehemently, about what constitutes reality and what Israel needs to do to reach peace. I think these voices were chosen because they could do the best job of advocating (in English) for their particular points of view, so that we could have a better idea of what the war of ideas in Israel actually looks like, rather than hearing from people who just scream epithets at each other (which is as large a feature of Israeli politics as it is in America), which would set up each argument as a straw man that could easily be knocked down.
I am still confused, for myself, about what’s true, and what will or won’t work, and what’s fair, but I feel like I have a much better grasp on the range of opinions involved, and the actions that have been tried and have failed, and the hopes and prejudices that keep people engaged in the fight, than I ever had before.
I’m not imagining that many people who read this blog post are going to watch or listen to all forty hour-plus-long interviews, but maybe one or two of them could spark someone’s curiosity and create a little more bandwidth for the understanding that this conflict cannot be solved, or judged, in a hashtag.
I’m also hoping that the 18Forty Project decides to keep going with these interviews, maybe reaching even farther afield to the non-Israeli figures who are intimately involved in the discussions and would play a role in any potential resolution of the conflict (though I feel pretty protective of this nephew-look-a-like, so I don’t want anyone sending him to places where his safety would be at risk). For now, since the forty planned interviews have been completed, Sruli and his team have been creating something like mixtapes, a collection of a tapas platters of different voices on specific questions, cut and pasted from the already existing interviews. It’s yet another way of opening a door, so that if you watch one of the collections and hear a voice that captures your attention, you can then go and watch the whole interview and learn more.
There are a bunch of interviews that I want to go back and listen to again myself, either because I fell asleep halfway through (don’t judge, I usually listen to these at bedtime when I can’t keep my eyes open but still need something to crowd out the silence), or because there was so much to take in that I couldn’t absorb it all in one session. There were also a few interviews that I gave up on halfway through, for any number of reasons, and I may have to push myself to sit through those again as well, just to be fair. We’ll see.
Some links from the series, if you’re interested in dipping a toe in:
5 Israeli Thinkers on the divides in Israeli society: https://youtu.be/_oLPQJSl49k?si=lr08TMqjvvHtEOGJ
5 Israeli thinkers on the current Israeli government: https://youtu.be/Fti-Ld6ejy4?si=QTkBHJ3n1lOlL5sL
Rabbanit Shani Taragin: https://youtu.be/p6EA8pGK3EI?si=fZbCGfR-KPX9dn7e
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
rachelmankowitz 