Few Jewish liberal intellectuals who criticize Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government have the street cred of Yossi Klein Halevi.
As a former (albeit teenage) follower of Rabbi Meir Kahane — a right-wing extremist who advocated the expulsion of Israel’s Arab population — Halevi has seen this rodeo before. And, he said, it ain’t pretty.
“We are seeing the Kahane-ization of Netanyahu,” the author, journalist and senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem told some 200 people at San Francisco’s Congregation Emanu-El on May 21.
Halevi, 71, who was born in Brooklyn and moved to Israel in 1982, was speaking in a conversation with Emanu-El Senior Rabbi Ryan Bauer at an event kicking off a new collaboration between the Reform synagogue and the Hartman Institute, a prestigious Jewish think tank headquartered in Jerusalem with a branch in the Bay Area. Synagogue clergy and staff will spend a week at the Jerusalem institute in July, and Bauer hopes to schedule Hartman speakers at Emanu-El about every six weeks.
Halevi, for his part, is among the best-regarded thinkers about Israel and Jewish identity today. He is the author of several books, including “At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden,” which announced his embrace of interfaith work, and “Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor,” which cemented his nuanced position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He also co-hosts the Hartman-sponsored podcast “For Heaven’s Sake.”
His talk at Emanu-El was cautionary, yet not without hope.
Referring to a press conference the previous day where Netanyahu announced that the goal of the war against Hamas is now the complete control of Gaza, Halevi said this new ambition threatens to tear Israeli society apart.
Immediately after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas massacre, Halevi said, there was “complete consensus” among Jewish Israelis that the Gaza invasion was necessary and “morally just.”
That doesn’t mean there weren’t individual acts of injustice committed by Israeli soldiers, he said. But the twin aims of the war — releasing the hostages and bringing down Hamas — had the support of the Israeli public.
The tremendous unity demonstrated by Israelis following Oct. 7 came after a year of internal unrest, both social and political.
“For me, the worst year of my life as an Israeli was the year leading up to Oct. 7,” he said, referring to the massive, weekly anti-government protests in 2023 that revealed a deepening rift within Israeli society. “This feeling that everything was unraveling, that our government is assaulting our basic sense of humanity. I’ve never felt that way in any of the schisms we’d been through before. This wasn’t ideological — it was about corruption, and basic decency.”
“Then Oct. 7 happened, and Israeli society responded in a way I didn’t think possible anymore,” he continued. “Oct. 8 was a peak moment of national unity, maybe our greatest moment, because we were coming from the abyss. It proved we still had the instincts of peoplehood.”
After the war ends, he said, “Israeli society will be faced with a choice between Oct. 6 and Oct. 8,” between division or unity. Pointing to recent polls showing that 70% of Jewish Israelis want to end the war as soon as all of the 58 hostages are home, he said, “Israelis want Oct. 8. But we have a government of Oct. 6 that feeds off schisms and hatred of the opposition.”
“I think we will have a process of healing,” he added, “but not until we get rid of this government.”
Given the precarious position that Jews currently face worldwide, Halevi emphasized that interfaith work, particularly with the Muslim world, is critical both for the physical safety of Israel and diaspora Jewry, and also on a moral and spiritual level.
Currently co-director of Hartman’s Muslim Leadership Initiative, which teaches emerging young Muslim American leaders about Judaism and Israel, he noted his personal sadness that none of his many Muslim friends “showed up” after Oct. 7, when they always had in previous crises.
But that only means Jews must double down on their interfaith efforts, he urged.
“It would really be in our best interest to find partners in the Muslim world. Right now we couldn’t be farther from that,” he said. “But the safety of the Jewish people depends in no small part on the quality of our relationship with the Muslim community.”
It’s way past the time, he said, for Jews to abandon their sense of victimhood. Israel and diaspora Jewry are vulnerable given their small numbers, he said, but with the State of Israel firmly planted in the Middle East, it is disingenuous to pretend Jews cannot protect themselves.
Rather, he said, power comes with responsibility. The excesses and mistakes of the Israeli government show Jews “our historic negative traits,” including internal hatreds, which are enumerated in Biblical stories.
“Some of these traits were hidden during exile,” he said. “Now we have to own them. This government is not extraneous to me — it is part of me, part of us. A fundamental flaw of the Jewish right is to try to hold onto a sense of victimhood when it makes no sense. Power combined with victimhood is very dangerous.”
Speaking to J. the morning after his Emanu-El talk, Halevi referenced the previous night’s killing of two Israeli Embassy staffers outside an American Jewish Committee event in Washington, D.C.
Coming after more than 19 months of rising antisemitic and anti-Israeli sentiment, he said, “We’re at a time where anything could happen to Jews anywhere. No place is entirely safe, and we saw that in Washington.”
“We all know that we’re in a new era of Jewish history,” he said. “It’s not the 1930s” when Jews faced physical destruction in Nazi-occupied Europe, “and it’s not the golden age of post-Holocaust America either. But between the 1930s and the golden age is a wide spectrum of possibilities.”