Sao Paulo
Yossi Halevi, 70, can see the West Bank from the office window in which he is giving this interview. A few minutes from the house where the Americanborn journalist lives and who made his “aliyah” (return) in the 1980s is the wall that separates Israel from the occupied Palestinian territories.
Here Halevi also wrote “Letters to my Palestinian Neighbor” (ed. Contexto), a book in which he writes an ode to dialogue: he asks Palestinians to understand that Israel is an existential matter for Jews. Just as he advocates that Jews understand that Palestine is a matter of the same kind for Palestinians.
The AmericanIsraeli author, one of the leading voices of pacifism in the region, uncompromisingly shows the turning point that the Hamas terrorist attacks on October 7th represented. Halevi defends the offensive against Gaza and sees it as a necessity to “purify humanity of profound evil.” On the other hand, it proposes an ArabIsraeli alliance to administer the Palestinian territory.
He now considers the dialogue that he preached in his bestseller to be impossible until the terrorist group is eliminated. Halevi says that, as at so many other times in history, Jews feel “increasingly alone.” When asked about the speeches of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT), who described Tel Aviv’s reaction as “as serious” as the Hamas attacks, he pointed to a “moral failure.”
In an article in the Times of Israel, Mr. said this was a pivotal moment in Jewish history. Could you develop the idea further?
The October 7 massacre was a fatal blow to two elements of the Israeli ethos. First, the credibility of our defense forces. Without a strong military deterrent, we will have no longterm future in the Middle East. About 15 years ago, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said that Israel was like a spider’s web it looks scary from the outside, but as soon as you touch it, it disintegrates. On October 7, Israel proved that it was a spider web.
The second blow was against the state’s promise that this would be the only place where Jews would never die in large numbers in a state of powerlessness. But today Israel is the most dangerous country in the world for a Jew. If Israel does not defeat Hamas, we will not disappear tomorrow. But this is a longterm existential war.
If we fail to restore our military credibility and Israel’s credibility as a haven for the Jewish people, then Israel is on its way to becoming a failed, failed state.
Mister. I also said that this global antiSemitic wave is bringing to light the Jewish trauma of isolation…
The impression abroad is that Israel is fighting Hamas. And that is incomplete. Israel is fighting against Iran, against Iran’s proxies Hamas on the southern border and Hezbollah on the northern border. This is a regional conflict. The Arab and Muslim world against Israel.
It’s one of those moments in Jewish history when Jews feel increasingly alone. That what is obvious to us is ignored by many good people. We seem to speak different moral languages. For the Jews, what happened on October 7th was an outbreak of pure evil. Yet much of the world considers Israel’s response to be as bad as the massacre itself or worse. This is the biggest Jewish nightmare: being massacred and then accused of being the aggressor.
It is deeply painful that so many people cannot distinguish between an army trying to minimize civilian casualties and a terrorist group trying to maximize them. Every war is a tragedy. What separates war as tragedy from war as barbarism is intent. If your intention is to save lives, you are waging a tragic war. If you kill innocent people, you are waging a barbaric war.
Mister. is critical of the Netanyahu government. How do you rate his reaction? War?
I have spent the last year protesting against this government every week. Netanyahu is a corrupt man and this is a terrible government of religious fundamentalists and political extremists. But those of us who did everything to overthrow this government now agree that we must unite to defeat Hamas. The day after the war ends we will be back on the streets. There is a greater threat at the moment.
I know that it is difficult and unbearable to watch the terrible scenes in Gaza. But I hope people understand that sometimes there is no choice but to do terrible things to free humanity from deep evil.
O Mister. Have you followed President Lula’s statements about the war?
Anyone who responds to Israel’s response to the massacre with greater outrage than to the massacre itself is morally flawed. I don’t feel obligated to listen to or respect these voices. I view these voices with contempt. The people who treat me as if I were committing genocide rather than someone trying to defend themselves against a genocidal threat have no moral claim on my conscience. And if the president of Brazil fits into that category, if the hat fits, then so be it.
Your book is an ode to dialogue. Mister. still see Dialogue possible?
Not at this moment. And I don’t pray for peace or dialogue. I pray for victory. However, the morning after this war, we will all wake up in the same Middle East. And we have to solve this.
The only way to resolve the Palestinian tragedy is a regional agreement. I hope that Israel, together with Arab partners, will create an economic basis for the reconstruction of Gaza and investment in the West Bank and that we can gradually move to a different agreement.
Does it mean a Palestinian state? This is now unimaginable for the Israelis. Now, if you talk to the Israelis about a Palestinian state in the West Bank, will they quite reasonably tell you that after what just happened in Gaza, we could risk duplicating Gaza in the West Bank? The West Bank is five minutes from Tel Aviv. It’s literally two minutes from where I’m sitting in my house right now, in the back row in Jerusalem.
We must be very careful when monitoring Palestinian selfdetermination. We must ensure that we have strong security guarantees. But we have to start this process.
What do you think about a possible Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip?
What I would like to see in the early stages is a multinational ArabIsraeli force. The Gulf states, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Israel are ensuring that Hamas does not return. Let us consider Gaza as the first project of the Abraham Accords.
War must radicalize citizens?
It will inevitably radicalize part of Israeli society. It is the formative experience for the young generation. But I also sense that an opposite process is taking place: Most people long for stability.
We just had the worst year in Israel’s history. When this ends, and I don’t think it will end soon, it will have a traumatic impact on the Israeli psyche. I believe that the majority of Israelis will move to the center. Probably in the middle right.
Many people plan Compare with the Holocaust. Will October 7th be part of national identity?
Secure. I don’t like comparisons to the Holocaust because we are not the Jews of the Holocaust. We can defend ourselves. October 7th felt like the Holocaust because we didn’t fight back. But I see it as an aberration, a temporary failure.
If you asked Israelis, “Would you rather be pitied or condemned by the world?” they would say “condemned.” We are not a country that wants to see itself as a victim. In the progressive West, victimhood has become noble, while the Israeli ethos is the rejection of victimhood. We see nothing noble in being a victim.
If this war ends with Hamas coming to power, we will consider Israel a failed project. If we defeat Hamas, we will view October 7 as a warning, not a defining event.
Xray | Yossi Klein Halevi, 70
He was born in Brooklyn, USA, moved to Israel in 1982 and lives in Jerusalem. He is a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute and codirector of the Muslim Leadership Initiative, which educates young American and Muslim leaders about Judaism, the Jewish people and Israeli identity. Among other things, he is the author of the bestseller “Letters to my Palestine Neighbor,” originally published in 2018 and translated into Portuguese by Contexto in 2022.