Joe vs. The Volcano - with Ezra Klein

Democrats in the US still in turmoil we will speak to New York Times Colonist and podcast host Ezra kleene Israeli politics machinations prompt the weekly question will netanyahu's Coalition survive there's a new government in the UK boy do those guys move fast it's Unholy I'm un Levy of Channel 12 in Tel Aviv and I'm Jonathan Friedland of the guardian in London [Music] it's Unholy two Jews on the news it's lots of news here I've got to say we're sometimes a bit deprived in the news Department compared to everywhere else in the world but we are really bringing it we're bringing our aame it's coming home I would say with the news nice reference previous guest David bedil who wrote that song it's uh football's coming home look early to say because the final is on Sunday uh so we don't yet know but amazingly England got through they I know this very stuttering start at the beginning of the tournament you know they couldn't Z couldn't really fire and they came from behind three times some of us might be thinking is there a column to be done on Lessons Learned From the football that read across to the politics because both have come together in quite a major way all I will say is this when you ask K starma Britain's new prime minister who his favorite labor leader is he always said says Harold Wilson often forgotten figure very pro- Israel leader of the British labor party prime minister in the 60s and 70s key fact about him he was the Prime Minister the last time England won at any International Tournament the reason why people talk about you know it it's coming home is England have not won anything since 1966 so all the other major teams you know the Germany's the France the Spain they win all the time but England haven't done it and so the pressure is enormous and the symbolism will be very very big if one week into a new government the big trophy does come home of winning the European championships currently in Germany we will know this on Sunday as you say not that I'm not fascinated by football but could we go back just a little bit to the politics of this I mean as an Israeli watching there's a British new prime minister appointed the elections are on Thursday there's a new government on Friday to us it kind of seems like you guys are cheating right it's a three or four week election cycle just to give you the perspective on this netan won an election November 1st 2022 homogenous simple Coalition it took him two months the the government was sworn on December 29th this is how long if you sum up all the Coalition negotiations in Israel in 75 years it will be two years so the fact that you guys did it in 24 hours is just uh it's pretty remarkable I no it is one of the virtues of a first pass the post system um rather than PR and also parliamentary system so the Americans have first pass the post but presidential we know the problems there and a three-month transition in Israel obviously PR and that can there's always horse trading it's very very clean clinical almost brutal actually that the it happens in a matter of hours so in the early hours a Friday morning I was up along with everyone else who does uh the kind of jobs you and I do y uh watching these returns coming in watching Tory members of parliament conservative members of parliament and government ministers falling like nine pins including with huge symbolism nearly at 7 o'cl in the morning former prime minister Liz truss losing in her own Rock Solid seat in the English Countryside uh I'd actually been there reporting just on the off chance that that would be an earthquake event and it so proved to be um and then yeah by 10 : in the morning I was down in Downing Street U watching Rishi sunak first come out and make a very gracious speech actually and here's a key Point what I think that other countries might envy is not just the speed but the peaceful uncontested transfer of power which would once have seemed very routine and we did definitely did take it for granted now seems something to be cherished because there was Rishi sunk he comes to the outside Downing Street to the Le turn and says says pays Tri tribute to kist he said I know him to be a public-spirited good man and then says his successes will be our successes he goes to the Palace an hour later meets the king says I'm resigning about an hour later kmer appears before the very same lecturn as now the Prime Minister that's it by Friday morning no one's had even a night's sleep and the speed of it is obviously very EnV enviable but I think just that the uncontested seamless nature of it be uh and ministers paying tribute to other ministers the outgoing Finance Minister the chancellor said you know he told his kids don't be disappointed give him the full title Please the chancellor of the exer Jeremy Hunt outgoing Chancellor of the exer did This brilliant speech actually where at his count where uh where you know he was reelected as an MP but knew he was losing the election and would no longer be in government and he said to his children addressing his children don't be upset by this this is the magic of democracy and I thought that was rather wonderful so we're all in in in feeling pretty good at the moment because obviously it's it's looking awful everywhere else but here Britain just pulled off a very good election and a government that you know I for one I'm very glad to see in place yeah yeah not exactly the Donald Trump transferral of power uh what you described right now um you know I think another thing and I was really thinking about this a lot as I I saw and and you said the word enviable it really is I I envied all of the sort of Elegance and and the swiftness of how the way that that this happened look at the end of the day I think the difference between our systems is that English democracy is a lot about governability right and stability and and that is what you described in Israel the fact the representivity the fact that everyone has to be represented right that is something that benorian wanted our founding father so you're you're going to look at the legislator and you're going to have you know two parties for the ultra Orthodox two different parties for the religious Zionist four different parties for the Arabs because they everyone needs to be represented it's very difficult to have Universal representativity and that kind of stability I think we might be the PE the the the nation that proves that but I did have an interesting and you know I talked to you uh last week about uh the the UK elections in Israel and you rightfully pointed out that maybe that's not the most important thing on the agenda but actually there were a few Independence running solely on this story of Gaza and challenging the big parties and some places having you know quite succeeding in this so I'm I'm wondering about that you know and and obviously generally we're all already hearing us kind of Chang tone uh in the labor government Vis Israel but all that is to me really interesting yeah so we'll come to the government Point um on those individual contests it's quite true there are now five members of parliament out of 650 right so you know five in Israel would be that be the king maker you know 120 seats five out of 650 seats who were elected give starm a headache well his majority is so enormous I mean his majority is 172 depending on exactly how you count it I don't mean he's got 172 seats he has 411 seats in a 650 Parliament it just means he has got if all the other parties combin which they wouldn't but if they all combined against him he still beats them in a vote by 172 votes so he can really do pretty much what he wants but the significance of these four or five or five really seats is as a warning of what could be in down the road in the future a challenge particularly from and the Shand has become the sort of pro Gaza left so one of those five was Jeremy Corbin the former leader of the labor party who stood as an independent K had kicked him out of the labor party over allegations of anti-Semitism we should say that's what it was about there was a statutory body and did an inquiry found the party had fallen down on the issue of dealing with anti-Semitism Corbin by then the former leader rejected the findings of that commission and K booted him out the party he ran as an independent he won his own seat Gaza was part of that but it was also partly he'd been there 41 years had a huge local following in four other places Muslim candidates in very largely Muslim Community areas ran uh against labor and one and there the message was absolutely centrally about Gaza but what the conversations I've had this week have said to have been on these lines saying don't make the mistake a lot of people are making which is thinking that once Gaza is in the rearview mirror and is not an issue in say the 2029 election they're making that assumption don't assume this goes away not because they they'll oppress other forms of the Palestine issue rather there is a whole cluster of issues in the Muslim communities of Britain in which they feel taken for granted for years that they they don't feel they get a fair shake and that this was building up for a long time waiting for an outlet and they now have it in the form of those independent candidacies there were some pretty ugly scenes bullying intimidation on the campaign Trail in a lot of places couple of women who did who did win labor women who were particularly targeted uh so it was not you know there are people warning could this be the beginning of a kind of communalist or sectarian Politics the most likely thing I think is you will see labor quietly trying to rebuild Bridges and repair relationships with Muslim communities perhaps in other areas not just uh focusing on Gaza but to your point about the government's changing retor it's true there's been a a few nods about you know David Lamy the new uh labor foreign secretary saying that reiterating his calls for an immediate ceasefire there is you know talk of there as there was going into the campaign about British recognition of a Palestinian State I would say what I was sort of saying last time we talked about this which is some of the emphases may be different in here and there but overall you are looking at a government whose position would be no different from a mainstream sort of Chuck Schumer Democrat it's a two-state position that's absolutely clear on Israel's need for security and stability and yes does want to see eventually two states side by side but I think that's the international consensus I think the the wing of Labor that would have wanted a much uh firmer stance is going to be quieter one thing that maybe some people will not be be happy about is signals from Britain that it will drop the previous government's opposition to arrest warrants from the international criminal court issued against Benjamin netan and others some signals that Britain will not stand in the way of that and uh the previous government under Rishi sunak had suggested it it would that would be a change again I would say this position is anchored in difference in emphasis but it's it's it's still absolutely on the sort of State point and it's not anything you could call meaningfully anti-israel we we want to also say something about the uh elections in France which we left off uh last time um we talked to rutf who's a you know prominent fixture of of French television uh also as she described came out as a Jew and we talked about that choice between the far right and the far left we thought we were talking about uh what we were looking at was a a a Triumph of the far right and of course the other uh scenario happened with this upset I mean this is just for the Jewish Community to think of walking between this one party that has candidates and supporters who think the Holocaust didn't exist and the other party that has candidates and supporters think that Israel shouldn't exist just that kind of choice is a very complicated a very complicated one yeah know we heard it didn't we from Ruth last week that sense of being between a rock and a hard place in the end from the Jewish community's point of you in France their worst nightmares weren't realized they aren't looking at an outright landslide win for the right or an outright Landslide win for the farle instead the Centrist party where a lot of Jewish votes I suspect went did better than they than had been anticipated and for now there is a lack of clarity there is confusion but there is no overall majority of either one of the two sides that they perhaps feared and so there again the question becomes okay did the French Republic just have a very close shave well yes clearly but is is thatan does that mean that this has been the peak of those extreme parties and things will go back to some kind of normal or and I think this is probably more likely is does it really take just one more heave for some of those forces I mean Marine Le Pen yes she didn't get it this time but you look at the graph of the number of seats since about 2007 they they go up at every single election cycle they're knocking on the door and you know it could be the presidential election next time where you know it won't be macron uh on the ballot and uh Marine Leen wins it that is talked about seriously so I think they're out of it for now but they're they're not out of the woods [Music] yet so we made the point of the contrast certainly between what goes on in Britain and what happens in Israel nothing quick yet but you did y tell us that July is the key month and it's just this matter of running down the clock of getting to that crucial day towards the end of July if he gets there then the knesset breaks up and he's sort of in the clear for the summer so where does that stand I mean the interesting thing that came out I mean from the political perspective this week is that there were reports actually uh on our channel channel 12 that uh n is yet again considering uh firing defense minister uh Galant um you know we should remind our listeners he's running very independently from this uh government uh definitely like a free agent who's challenging netan in the open something you don't do in the liud of this uh era and it was interesting to see if what this leak was about either kind of an attempt to Reign Galant in which obviously is not going to be very successful or sort of a a a kind of trial balloon to see what the response is but interestingly enough what the leak was was about timing uh more than anything else and N plans to do this during the recess remember there's as you mentioned a session a Kessa recess between the end of July and the end of October thus thinking that at that that time the sort of political system is dormant and won't you know wake up due to this we can also remind our listeners what happened last time netan tried to fire Galant March of last year during the judicial overhaul that didn't go down well with the Israeli public who took to the streets I think the atmosphere is very much of a of a government unraveling and every sort of political pendit you would talk to would either say to you even if Netanyahu survives this session in July the huge problem this government has um namely the issue of the ultra Orthodox and the draft bill is coming back in October and if the parts of the Coalition will feel particularly the it malville the far writes will feel that they have more power you know stepping out of the government and going to elections that's what you're going to see so it's still a very unstable government at this point again this week was dominated by the news of perhaps a uh a hostage deal we've been talking about this for a few weeks 7 and a half months after the last hostage deal or 120 Israeli hostages still held Israel thinks that at least half of them are still uh alive this week Nano issued his red lines um and by the way in his name not uh sources around the Prime Minister but actually nany himself in some quarters this was seen as an attempt to torpedo the TS and more and more the sort of focus on Netanyahu himself as being the person responsible and having to make this decision uh we talked about this a lot right how this this might topple his his government government on the other side so much public pressure inside Israel and outside Israel to just get this deal done and take these people who were you know civilians did nothing wrong kidna from their own house and bring them back home I mean that point about torpedoing um the hostage negotiations and what you were saying before about the election time they are of course linked um and it's an awful thing to contemplate but the that was very striking that just before another round of negotiations or talks begin to sabotage them by issuing a series of red lines you know internally security officials on the Israeli side saying you know we are being sabotaged by the Prime Minister as you say in his own name part of the motivation as we've been saying before is because he knows that if there is a big return of hostages that will symbolically at least make people feel okay now that's done we need to have a new government and that's a Day of Reckoning that has been brilliantly um but I in my view appallingly putting off since October the 7th which is twofold one actually the The Ballot Box the national election but also a proper inquiry into what happened on October 7th that's the can he needs to keep kicking down the road and if he if it takes torpedoing sabotaging talks to bring them home he'll do it and I think that's you know shocking but true and so these two sto is this weight that we have for some kind of breakthrough and hostage hostage deal and his need to survive through July they are appallingly and tragically linked and if you're talking about the link there's a direct threat right by his right far- right members of Coalition Ben and smti saying if you go to this deal and this deal stops the war we're not in this government like it's it's a direct threat so it's not even it's not guesswork here but you mentioned the the commission of inquiry and I think it's a good moment to mention uh we're talking on Thursday afternoon tonight the first sort of substantial investigation internal investigation uh by the military uh of what happened on October 7th will be published to the public it has to do with uh the tragedy of kibutz beri and from what has been first of all this is still nine months later the biggest question of all right okay obviously Israeli intelligence failed uh but why did the Israeli military fail and why wasn't the Israeli military there to protect Israeli citizens that is a black hole of a question that we still don't know the answer to or the clear answer to so this will be a piece of the puzzle and from what has been leaked remember kibuts about a thousand people one out of 10 were murdered uh on October 7th 101 uh residents of Barry were murdered 29 were abducted into Gaza 11 are still there and what essentially uh is clear right that the Army failed there was an elite unit that did arrive at the scene 9:30 right remember this whole thing started at 6:30 a.m. was there but more protecting the parameters and not actually enter the kibuts but then sort of uh retreated and that means that for 3 hours the residents of B were left unprotected it's heartbreaking and it's frustrating and it's enraging to to to go through what is and as I said The more details will come out later today but just thinking of what what happened on that day and again just the beginnings of these pieces of of a whole puzzle the important difference of course is that the Israeli military from the top have said from the beginning we take responsibility for this terrible thing and we will be held accountable uh that speech those words have never come out of netanyahu's mouth and that is a difference between the civilian and and military branch the other thing we of course should say is the war itself in Gaza is not we're not talking in the past tth uh there were 29 Palestinians killed in a strike on a tent camp east of KH Yunis the IDF says it's investigating what happened there meanwhile yet another one of those uh orders those in you know guidance issued to civilians to leave Gaza City the important point about both those places are these are places where according to the logic of the campaign those places have been sort of cleared out of Hamas and yet here the IDF is obviously still thinks there is military action that has to be taken in this these places and it makes me think something I've thought for you know obviously from the start really the notion of the total victory that the entire the eradication of hamus as a fighting force I have you know long thought it's illusory but I think we're seeing it the proof there that areas and it's happened in other uh parts of Gaza too areas that were officially sort of ticked off as in right we've got rid of it props back up again and this is makes me feel on some level this is going to be an attritional war that will go on and on and on I mean not not measured weeks and months but why would this ever stop unless you believe that somehow the idea of can pull out of a place and Hamas won't go back they will go back and they have been doing that and so the deadline that um prime minister Netanyahu sets himself which is the war will be over once we've completely eradicated Hamas I think it's a mirage it's an illusion well remember what Daniel hagari IDF spokesperson said a few weeks ago right he said anyone saying Hamas is an idea whoever thinks it's possible to make it disappear is mistaken I think Israel if had framed it uh the right way right this is for a longer conversation but said look the war against Terror in the West Bank uh took three years but we managed to eradicate that this is going to be a long operation this is what we plan to do at the end we are going to transfer power to whatever Palestinian uh uh you know group that we decide should take the power and the Reigns in in Gaza I think it would have been a different kind of story we're now nine months into this by the way official uh statements by n himself saying we are going to end the Intensive part of the campaign but it's very clear that the whole discussion of the day after is is not is not formalized in in Israel's mindset yet no and you made the crucial point about who we would hand power to the parallel that you make about the West Bank in the 2003 period is there was a Palestinian Authority there there was a plausible structure where you could imagine Israel doing what it had to do then pulling out and there's an authority there that's an I is exactly what's missing in the Gaza case so that is the situation uh in Israel and Gaza as we've been noting it does go on and on but throughout all of it the importance uh of the relationship um with Israel of the United States the support it has been getting from the Biden Administration has been a key part of the story and that story has itself changed in the last two or three weeks not in terms of his support but in terms of the precariousness of the position of the incumbent president he did that TV debate you and I both covered it as it happened we talked about it on here and his position politically has been fragile ever since which is one reason particularly uh why we wanted to talk to this week's guest because this is something he's not just been following but he was very very early onto this topic and so many others [Music] Ezra Klein is a New York Times columnist a political commentator and host of the Ezra Klein Show podcast he's been in media for a very long time Vox and blogs and the Washington Post but he's only just turned 40 or in the words of Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman Ezra is very very good and very very young end quote um be fair you said that when I was much younger not much by the way but it's still a very good quote I'm running with it what do you care we're really glad to have you feel a lot older these days by the day here anyway I'm keeping that quote I'm gonna use you can use it did I remind you of that or did you remember that quote very well uh I I I I remember a quote like that but it's funny to be reminded that I was once young for my for my job and now uh feel feel the weight of both my age and a series of crushing political disappointments that the car that follow me wherever I go disappointments are life um so anyway really glad to have you on and we want to start if we may with the debate night when we were all scrolling our social media posts I think one of the funniest things I read was someone saying I think we all owe as recline an apology and the reason for that is that about four months ago you wrote a column saying that Democrats have a better option than Biden claiming essentially that he is too old you like him he's a good president but enough is enough um and you got a lot of I assume uh criticism Fury in the Democratic party I wonder by the way if any of them apologized uh there there was a fair amount of I'll call it inbox traffic to not reveal any private conversations what I will say is the reaction to that piece in February which was as you as you suggest uh more explosive than my average piece because I both did this sort of Big Audio essay then because what I was really saying was not just that Biden shouldn't run again but that an open Convention as unusual as that sounded to Democrats at the time was both a viable and preferable option I then did uh a long interview with Lan kmar who's an expert on Democratic party rules about what an open convention would look like I just re-released that if people want to listen to it on my show and then I did a a sort of you know listener questions hour about it so I I pushed it pretty hard at that moment and what I saw in response is interesting given the arguments Joe Biden President Biden is making this week which is Normie Democrats and this was reflect in the polling at that time too we're like thank God somebody is saying this thank you for saying this how do we make this happen who do I call whereas Democratic Elites those very Elites that Joe Biden is currently blaming for his troubles uh were very resistant in public a lot of them shouted me down you know called me a you know bed weter and panicking um in private they were often more thoughtful than that but they were you know too afraid of doing anything you know can kamla Harris do it it's too soon we don't have the muscles a party to do something like this so the voters have been here for a long time I mean months before the debate 70% of Voters in the time Santa polls said that Joe Biden was too old to Be an Effective president it's been Democratic Elites who've been trying to ignore the voters on this one so one of my columns post debate has simply been that the debate really didn't change what voters thought of Joe Biden it is change ability of the democratic party to continue ignoring what voters thought of of Joe Biden and I I think that's still the thing that the party is is wrestling with this you know this gap between where the electorate is and how hard it is to do anything about where the elector is so where where do you what's your read now of where that wrestling ends does it end with lots of grumbling lots of mumbling and in fact Biden almost fatally wounded as a candidate but still not forced out or is your read that in the end those shy Democrats who are saying to you and other people privately what they think but aren't acting on it in the end they do come out and say enough's enough what's your read of where this lands let me uh say as a caveat and a warning to to the two of you as people to your listeners I'm just an incredibly annoying person to talk to and this answer is going to be incredibly annoying to hear which is this is all probabilistic and it always has been and I think the huge mistake the party's been making is thinking in binaries right the argument I made back in February was a probabilistic argument that if you were watching Joe Biden what you were seeing um was he had skipped the Super Bowl interview as he did the year before very unusual for candidate behind in the polls to do he was doing very few interviews very few press conferences the interviews he was doing were very tightly scripted and controlled very friendly places to go um then at the press conference he held in an impromptu way to rebut the special counsil report that questioned his memory he had a memory lapse right not a huge one nothing crazy mixing up Egypt Mexico isn't the end of the world but even there where all he had to do was validate for the electorate that he was still cognitively capable of the job he wasn't able to do that and so my my basic argument then was that you shouldn't look at what he is doing right now and think that he can sustain what you need to do any campaign day after day after day that the probability of him having bad days between February and November was simply too high now that's basically exactly what has been happening they've been keeping him on a very tightly scripted campaign the moment he went unscripted at the debate he fell apart so right now I also think what's happening in the Democratic party is very uncertain you're dealing with again it could break out lots of ways I'm not going to tell you where it's going to end up because it also depends what happens with Joe Biden I don't know when this will release but he's about to give a press conference after the NATO Summit he's giving an interview to Lester H I don't know if those will be long or they'll be short he has done a very limited number of uh unscripted events since the debate which you might have expected otherwise given the fears he had to laay so he did a an interview with George Stephanopoulos that they wanted to keep to 15 minutes it ran to about 22 minutes but he did a a frankly terrible job in that interview it wasn't as catastrophic as a debate but it was a terrible job um for such a high stakes thing um that was so prepare where you could do so much preparation right um he did two very friendly radio shows where the host would accept pre-submitted questions by his campaign and he also didn't perform that well in the interviews and then he did a call in for about 18 minutes to Morning Joe which has been a very friendly place so we are not seeing uh a Biden who is able to perform effectively at the moment there's a question of how few performances his team can get away with in order to limit the possibility of him having a like a like a bad performance um and still elay Democratic fears Democrats are themselves now going through this process of on the one hand they do not feel he has answered their questions they do not feel in Congress that he has uh proven that he is a strong candidate but he has done just enough and his Fury has been significant enough to stay their hand on trying to challenge him a lot of them are in a position of of resignation and fatalism they believe he should step aside they have no uh lever they can pull or push to make him step aside and so they're kind of resigned to falling in line behind a potentially fatally flawed candidate I just consider the situation very unstable right right if you were making me bet odds are he's probably the nominee but I wouldn't give it very strong odds Nancy py given this sort of very ambiguous statement suggesting that well we should take he should take longer to decide maybe um the fact that the bleeding hasn't stopped uh that Michael Bennett came out for the col the senator from Colorado on CNN said he doesn't think Joe Biden can win the election what you're seeing here is a party that is not gotten enough information to do something very difficult which is try to push Joe Biden aside to defect from him and knowing that those defections will weaken him if he decides to stay in the race um but at the same time the part's knock on the information to unite again behind him so it's all very you know it's very very uh fragile because one of the things you also did recently was a column in a podcast episode about kamla Harris and if you try to distill the reason why she hasn't managed to win Americans over um you know there are all kinds of reasons in that episode I just I'm curious what you think and if do you think there's still time to change that I think Harris is interesting I think she's underrated I don't know how underrated the the very quick loss i' give of her career is and I'm California and I'm talking to you from San Francisco which is where her political career begins she is a Law and Order Democrat a a moderate Black Law and Order Democrat in California she releases his books smart on crime right the point is she's sort of compassionate but she is also a serious prosecutor who you know understands her job job in the way that you know that that sort of class of politicians and prosecutors understood their their job at that in that era which is dealing with crime trying to make crime less frequent trying to address the root causes of crime what then happens is she's sort of rocketed into Political stardom uh this is a sort of Post Obama era she is elected in 2016 as Hillary Clinton loses she is a black woman Democrat with a lot of star power there's a real hope she can be the future of the party so the expectations for her are very High she runs in 2020 but she runs at a time in this post Ferguson this black lives matter moment when the Democratic party does not want a tough on crime procop uh candidate so she sort of abandons the only political identity she has really known and what she's not able to do in that campaign is come up with a new one who is comma Harris if she's not the prosecutor the district attorney the person she's been for her whole career she doesn't really figure that out and so she performs fine she has some good moments in the debates some not so good moments uh but she performs well enough that then in the post George Floyd moment Joe Biden picks her as vice president now the vice presidency is also a position that is death to somebody's political identity right you are subsumed to the identity of the president the views of the president the words of the president your goal in life is to not make the president look bad it is not to make yourself look good in fact to make yourself look too good will be frowned upon and seen as stepping out in front of the president particularly an older president of the way Joe Biden is so you you basically have a politician whose political identity has been muddied profoundly muddied two times over first in this 2020 pivot then in this um vice presidential role we don't really know who KLA Harris would run as who she would be in 2024 frankly moderate tough on crime uh black Democrat against Donald Trump isn't the craziest profile right if she were not vice president she'd not run in 2020 you can imagine a lot of people in the Democratic party being like Oh if only we had kamla Harris she's I think a more talented politician than people think she nevertheless has um real weaknesses as a politician she has not proven herself able to win in places like Pennsylvania so we don't know um but I would say at this moment a lot of people in the party believe that her upside is more significant than Joe Biden's upside she polls about the same as him and cases maybe a little bit better than him and there's reason to believe that she could be introduced to the public with a good vice presidential pick in a way that would improve her numbers quite a bit whereas Biden is very stuck because people have had a long time to form quite uh concrete impressions of him so I I take your earlier point about probabilities that we're talking about only about probabilities one hunch I have is that if the Democrats allow themselves to go through what for them would feel like the trauma of deposing an incumbent president as nominee their appetite for upheaval will be so diminished that they'll then just cling to Kam Harris because they couldn't bear the prospect of a contested convention and and an open contest that's my hunch that they'll feel as if we've had enough drama now let's just go for something solid just on that point do you what what measure do you have for the appetite there would be should Biden be edged aside for an actual contest or is it just a ation of Comm Harris I've I've written about this I've talked to people in the party on this I think the most interesting thing here that happened was that Jim kurn who's a co-chair of Joe Biden's campaign was asked in the hypothetical um that Joe Biden steps aside you know if there should be basically a coronation or contest and he says oh I mean if we did that we should have a mini primary I don't think the Democratic party has enough confidence in kamla Harris to Simply coronate Her um I think they be right not to coronate her as I argued in in a column on this uh what the Democratic party has allowed Joe Biden to deny them what they've denied themselves and not having a primary to test where Joe Biden was as a campaigner given his age what they denied themselves and not demanding to see more of him out in unscripted situations was information they have been operating with a tremendous absence of information this whole time then the debate offered a lot of information all of a sudden and people are freaking out in the aftermath of it uh they will need more information to get to a point where where Biden's actually stepping aside but if they get to that point I don't think they're going to want to make the same mistake twice I think there is a feeling that among many that it' be good for the party even exciting to see its bench of younger Talent out there making the case against Donald Trump making the case for themselves you imagine kamla Harris and Pete Budaj Edge and Gavin Nome and if she you know she said she wouldn't run so maybe notr and Whitmer but Josh Shapiro and Corey Booker and Amy kachar and all these people who are very very strong politicians um Gina Rondo from within the administration the Commerce Secretary out there doing CNN and MSNBC Town Halls you know going on podcast presumably this podcast you know going to um you know every like big YouTube show you can imagine being on the late night shows right doing debates with each other and I think a lot of people in the party think oh that would actually be really exciting that' be a really remarkable way to carry the Democratic message forward so if they get to the point you're talking about where they've already gone through the as you put it the trauma of pushing Biden aside which you know depending on how goes may not be that traumatic but could be I think at that point they have cracked open right like I think at that point there is like well we're in this now and we may as well see it through it's a little harder for me to believe now I think the other version is Joe Joe Biden could come in and say I am stepping down but I'm really asking all my delegates to to to back Harris if he did that I think he could push this towards a coronation but that would be a decision he would be making not that the party would be making but that this kind of I don't know primaries open convention that kind is that realistic in the time frame that's left for this election it it's getting Tighter and Tighter so we are on the eve of the Republican convention um it would not be crazy to have you know you'd have about uh like imagine a world where Joe Biden jums out at the end of the Republic convention which I think is not super likely but who knows uh if you had about a month you could do a lot in a month um if you wanted to right these are not Aries right these are people going like do you think CNN would not happily give over its programming for a couple weeks so people can see these see these candidates in action I think they would so it could be a real Blitz but as you say every day and this is really Joe Biden's strategy for keeping the nomination every day that goes by it gets harder right every day that goes by the time gets shorter is something happen where we had to drop out right before the convention I think a kamla Harris coronation becomes much likelier it's a very frust in situation for those of us who thought that that Biden wasn't up to the job I mean there's a reason I was trying to make this argument around the the turn of the year um you need time to do something like this well Biden is potentially going to put the Democrats no matter what he does at this point in a very difficult situation and hasn't isn't the drawback of all this as well that it means people haven't focused there's been almost no scrutiny of the much Graver issue for the Republic which is Donald Trump and that is Graver still still in these days after the Supreme Court ruling in the case of presidential immunity meaning since we're using the language of Coronation and crowning they are poised to make the him have the powers of a king um but a real king rather than the one we have here um and meanwhile the Democrats are talking about themselves I mean that's I I think I can see it's essential but this is also the downside of this moment isn't it that it's that that he's going by unscrutinized I don't believe this to be true I think this is a thing that liberals have been telling themselves in a very weird way Donald Trump say what you will about the guy he is anything but unscrutinized he is almost unbelievably scrutinized he has been the single main character of American politics day in day out including during Joe Biden's presidency since 2015 this idea Democrats have that there is some sort of new twist in the Donald Trump story that if only they could get people to focus in on it's like you're going to tell people that Donald Trump is a Republican and they're all finally going to turn against him there's been this argument among liberals that every you know column inch every tweet any bit of energy going against Biden as a party standard Bearer is energy that is not being spent making the case against Donald Trump Democrats have not failed to make the case against Donald Trump what they have failed to do is make the case for themselves and the reason they are failing to make the case for themselves is they are running a profoundly flawed candidate whom a super majority of the electorate has lost faith the single best thing Democrats could do is offer a product people liked more than Donald Trump because right now you have convinced most Americans who are going to be convinced in this way that Donald Trump is toxic that he is toxic right if somebody has watched the last eight years or more and not come to the conclusion that Donald Trump is beyond the pale it's like they saw January 6 they know about the criminal convictions right like these are not small news events this idea that like the mainstream media just hasn't it enough one of my favorite polls the cycle is from NBC News where they broke down voter preferences by media source and what they find is that if you uh read traditional Media newspapers things like that you are absolutely highly likely to vote for Joe Biden the further you get down this down the line you know cable news where Fox News is more dominant social media YouTube do not follow the news you become much more kind of trump friendly so there there just is not this mechanism we know in the Battleground States Democrats have been spending tens of Millions on ads Those ads have not heard Donald Trump standing Those ads are not working at this point there is a Delta between who Democrats have convinced Donald Trump is bad and how many voters Democrats need and you see this because in polls the Senate candidates are running way ahead of Joe Biden so there are a lot of Voters who are willing to vote for a Democrat um Tammy Baldwin was just running 10 points ahead of Joe Biden in Wisconsin in her polls uh in a Wisconsin poll rather um we've seen the same thing in other swing States so I think Democrats have really talked themselves into a kind of insanity here there it is fine it is good I have written more columns and done more podcasts on how bad Donald Trump is than like I like can like even want to remember but they cannot win this election by convincing yet more people Donald Trump is bad they have to actually convince people that their candidate is good and this is a thing they have not wanted to do and this has like been the Biden's Administration strategy and it has been failing this was the whole idea of the early June debate put Biden and Trump on a stage and people are going to finally remember what Donald Trump is it did the opposite at some point Democrats have to stop doing the same thing over and over again here only to be like oh my God it's not working I mean we're here on this podcast just telling Israelis that Benjamin Netanyahu is bad like has that like worked out in Israeli politics for them um has the boomerang effect yes this just you have to give people something they want to vote for you can't just tell them how much you will hold them in contempt if they don't vote against the person you don't like I'm all for making the case against Donald Trump but it is not going to work if you do not give the electorate a candidate they want to vote for you have spent uh recently uh about eight days in Israel I think you were there when Benny Ganson got eisenkot left the Coalition there were other things going on I kind of Wonder because obviously on our podcast uh talking about Israel from the inside out and the Jewish Community we have been seeing the war and seeing October 7th sometimes in similar ways and sometimes uh in in very different ones and I kind of wonder if as an Israeli I think the one thing that happened to us was our lives were upended right so many things that we believed about who we are just sort of shifted changed crashed and I wonder if for you when you look at what you thought about Israel what you thought about the Palestinians what you thought about the conflict has any of that shifted or just coalesced for you I'd say it has coest more than shifted um I mean the fundamental tragedy of it is I can feel it all more seriously than I could before and more intensely than I could before I I went I had intended by now to release like a Big Show and essay on this and the Biden news has has made that fall down the down the schedule I always describe my trip to Israel to people as Prismatic that uh every day I was with people with whom I was fully sympathetic and whose needs and whose stories were completely contradictory and irreconcilable with the people I saw the day before um I go to this with certain biases and I go to this with certain um affinities right I'm a Jewish American my first trip out of the country after going to Brazil where my family is from was to Israel uh I've been to Israel before right um so so there's certain things that are easier for me to see and and certain people it's like more um intuitive for me to to sympathize with but even given that I will say that um I think the one of the profound challenges israelies now face is that if you are an outside Observer and you walk into the situation in the West Bank you are visibly shocked by it it looks like and feels like the uh American South in the 50s in the Jim Crow era the just visible differences in INF structure the water tanks on Palestinian homes but not in Israeli settlements I knew all this and yet I was not actually prepared for how visible it was before me at the same time I think something that um people here do not appreciate is what it feels like up on the northern border of Israel with Lebanon right going there seeing these um burnt out Villages I was up in uh kirona um when the fires were raging talking to the firefighters up there the other thing that struck me though like struck me quite profoundly was how conflicted Israeli Society feels to me about security um you know if you think about the security risks that that people are are facing there you could imagine a set of policies that that would uh address it one of the things that I think people um elsewhere who think of Israel primarily in terms of Israelis and Palestinians don't appreciate is how much Israelis understand the profound threat to be from Iran but of course if you do think the profound threat is from a legacy imperialistic country with um patient strategic hegemonic regionally hegemonic Ambitions um that is actually a serious um player what you would want is very strong International alliances I kept hearing from people there oh it's like this Iranian Chinese Russian axis which like whether or not I fully buy that if you do believe you're facing an Iranian Russian Chinese access how strong your relationship is with um the Europe America access would really matter but of course um Israeli leadership is not making decisions to strengthen that relationship right now um I also felt very strongly when I was in the West Bank that um things like the cutting off of of tax revenues to the PA were just obviously making some kind of Uprising or violence much likelier and you can just feel that with people not being paid there um on the on the Palestinian side so there is this confus like this the security situation is very threatening and real and on the other hand it is not a in my view polity making like the difficult strategic decisions you would make on on those counts there other agendas being pursued amidst all of these dangers and it felt very I mean in that way it felt very fractured right you you expect in a way to find coherence and like the last thing I found across the entire trip no matter where I was which side I was talking to there is not coherence there is not Unity there is not leadership with clear plans right it's a it's a genuine situation of of of of fog and Fracture I think that chimes with a lot of what we've been hearing on the podcast ourselves over the last nine months I I want to pick up a on a conversation you had on on the Ezra Klein show with uh y nits colleague Amit seel famously sort of leading voice of the Israeli right that's how you build him and he more or less said the ideas that I would you know venture to say that you or someone like me would hold about Israel and how it should oper uh are discredited and he went through very methodically saying how those ideas have been discredited whether that's a bilateral Accord between Israelis and Palestinians discredited by the Oslo experience a unilateral withdrawal by Israel like the disengagement from Gaza discredited and he more or less s said everything that people like you Ezra and I would include myself in that Bel that's all been discredited we're the people with the energy now I'm just wondering whether any of it shift you know it's Echoes a bit what y need was asking before whether that in any way persuaded you or shifted you made you think yeah actually the ideas that I still like have been discredited people like me need to think again I'd say two things so one I I would slightly frame my read of what Amit said although I don't want to speak for him differently which is that I also felt he kind of admitted that his ideas were also discredited that there was no idea left that is how I read that description right that on the one hand um yes bilateral chords people lost have lost faith in that right the the Israeli narrative is we tried a peace process and we got the second into F then there's the withdrawal idea right that has been discredited whether you really believe that Gaza was a kind of you know self-governing entity that Israel did not have control over which I think is more arguable than than he would like to admit um nevertheless like it is completely clear to me in Israeli Society the idea that you're just going to withdraw and allow you know these Palestinian states to arise that is discredited on the other hand as I said to himam like are you just saying and L occupation that's not going to work either nobody believes you can do that nobody's actually arguing for that in public but nobody's arguing for anything right I mean I think a a I mean I did sometimes find it almost refreshing to talk to like the people who are a little bit closer to people like smotrich because yeah I mean at least like they have a plan that describes something like the reality I am seeing that they are that they are trying to enact right they're at least willing to describe to be like this is what we're doing and this is how we're doing it but nobody really seems to think their plan is going to succeed so it yeah like I did not come thinking that anybody's got an idea what I came thinking was that every idea has currently been discredited and um as is often the case when that happens something is going to have to change either through events or through time but I wouldn't venture to guess what that will be I'm interested in this because I mean you've been doing a lot of conversations um about Israel and about what has been going on here about Hamas you know since October 7th um you care about Israel you care about the region you care what happens to its people Israeli Palestinians how worried should we be as Israelis or should I be as an Israeli that the other young Jewish Americans will care less and less because they just don't want to be bothered by this mess yeah I think this is happening um or at least we could say it is bifurcating right there are young Jews in America who face with Rising semitism which really is a thing um and also faed with the the SS of threat for Israel have become more Embrace of it and there many who feel that to support Israel is to be asked to choose between their political values and this country that they do not actually live in um and they do not actually have any power over they do not actually have a vote in and they are going to choose you know in the old exit voice and loyalty framework they're going to choose when they are choosing exit um it is uncomfortable to be a supporter of Israel on an American college campus now not impossible it's not like you run out of there with pitchforks but Zionist has become a kind of slur right and the thing that's sustained and remember like American I mean you know this very well but like American Jews are extremely liberal and still are the thing that sustained that connection for so long the sort of compatibility between the the diasporic you know liberal American Jewish identity and and Israel was that there you know was this liberal Israeli Society you could latch on to maybe it wasn't always the one in charge or winning but it was there I mean I remember it used to be said all the time in American politics like oh like the you know the range of debate in Israel is wider you know than it is in in America even over Israel right like karats could say things that like you know the New York Times would never say uh and that's not true anymore and the sense that there're you know I think there are people who would really welcome other kinds of leaders they felt very different but I also think that Benny G is not exactly you know um or at least his Coalition is not going to prove exactly what liberal Jews are are hoping to see but um the possibility of of schism of of sort of diaspora and and Zionist identities becoming irreconcilable where you know people in Israel are like like you you know as I often hear right you don't know what it's like to live here like easy for easy for you to say from a podcast Studio like I have a joke that every merits voter in Israel has emailed me and it's always the same email it's like look I voted for merits but um and but in the long run if you think about these questions like Iran the sort of international allegiances like would Israel have under a younger Democratic president um the access to arms and weaponry that it has had under this Democratic president in seven years under similar conditions I think not um and so like there's a real question here of like how this plays out and by the way even on the right I mean if you look at people who are a little bit younger there like Viv ramaswami and also to say nothing of like the growing isolationist dimensions of the right there's also more skepticism among young people on the right about Israel so I mean Israel right now is drafting off of like a generational politics in in America where the president happens to be of the generation that is most pro-israeli but you know the situation uh that younger people see who have only know netanyahu's Israel is very very different and you can't rely on younger people never getting power positions of authority in America no I think all of that makes very good sense I I want to ask you about two things which I think might be linked but it's up to you whether you want to see a link between them I mean the first one is in terms of that disenchantment of liberal opinion I would I would say it's not just America it's around the world from Israel I have sensed a a an acceleration of that since the icj case and the normalization of the word genocide being attached to Israel and that word on every placard or all the university protest and everything has accelerated that kind of decoupling or distancing of liberal sentiment from Israel and I would also say from Jews because Jews are somehow seen as being Defenders or apologists or advocates for this regime which has now got this Mark of cane on it of genocide with this is CJ stamp that's one piece the other piece is this trauma would be perhaps putting it too strong but this shock that was felt by a lot of liberal Jews around the world after October the 7th when there wasn't that much sympathy from other liberals and leftists for the Jewish pain at that moment and you mentioned this rise in anti-Semitism which is real and we're very used to chanting that on the right but people have seen something of that on the left as well and I will just keep to know first this thing this new mood about Israel does how does that affect you because I feel it affects me very much but also what does it felt like for you as a kind of somebody who is you know totemic figure on the American liberal left conversation when your own side as it were your own political family now has room for views which could be described as anti-jewish anti-semitic a lot in there um let me start with the second piece of I but I think are sort of like four pieces in there um which is the the question of what happened right after October 7th I think that Israelis many Jews have done themselves a terrible disservice by seeing like the dumbest person on Colombia's campus as more reflective of political opinion than like the entirety of the American political establishment media uh um like frankly any establishment or anyone with power at all like it right after October 7th I do not agree that there was not profound sympathy for for Israel I think it was profound sympathy for Israel um I think that uh it was meaningful how rapidly Joe Biden went to Israel right that America moved warships to make sure that Iran would not threaten Israel right most countries that suffer even terribly violent tragedies do not get this kind of support from America but again as you said before that was that was Biden rather than young liberal see that part I don't agree I think right then and like I was covering the politics of this right then the B what Biden was doing was completely within the center of the politics it was over time Israel to change the subject from October 7th to what was happening after October 7th right uh like many people myself not that I matter in this Tom fredman others said don't do what we did after 911 don't engage in such an overwhelming response that you immediately lose control of The Narrative of the story don't become the aggressor when you're the victim like don't do it too fast think very hard about how you do this use limited counterterrorism strategies right that was not done I think there yeah I can understand why within the context of Israeli politics and even Israeli strategy it was not done um but nevertheless the what happened then was not just predictable it was predicted right which is at a certain point um I mean it it took longer uh but you know at some point like people were not like oh America suffered 91 it's like why the hell are you in Iraq what are you doing like what are you going to gain from this it accelerated and I do think there's a thing where social media accelerates these Dynamics now I've wondered many times what would have been the politics of the American response after 911 if it had been the social media era but I don't agree that there was no sympathy to draft off of that the only immediate thing was anti-Semitism there was anti-Semitism but there was profound sympathy and solidarity that was then slowly degraded wrecked um and by the way Netanyahu Bears a tremendous amount of blame here too um the things he said the things people in his cabinet said the way he treated Biden right um frankly by the way the way he treated Obama years ago which had done a lot to sever the connection between the Democratic party and Israel okay uh you asked me a more personal question um and I'll I'll I'll I'll try to not Dodge it which is how has this felt to me I mean one is that it's felt extraordinarily painful it's painful inside of me right I have very conflicted feelings around my own Judaism around Israel right around what like if you're if we're asking the spirit like what is this religion for if you have a religion that is fundamentally exilic right it has been so much about being a stranger and what it means to be a stranger and is so um unable to wield power more responsibly when it does get a home right like what where was our protection right ethically and I don't mean here in response to October 7th I mean here in what I see in the West Bank I mean here in smotrich and benier and people who have real power right for all the talk of protesters on campus like Ben gavier is actually a member of the cabinet and really do really did have a picture of a a genuine terrorist up in his home like it it chills me and also like I fear that we like you know like I lived in an area where there were times when I had to change where I was walking because of the anti-israeli protests the synagogue I take my children to for Tat Shabad was defaced I don't know what to say about this because I don't think that um Israel like like any country could make all of its decisions based on you know like what happens in terms of like currents of anti-Semitism elsewhere in the world but there's definitely a connection it's part of why I feel connected to Israel it's in somebody like whether whether you want to be connected to it or not as a Jew of the diaspora you are um and also I am right it's where you know a huge percentage of worldwide Jew he resides it's a country I feel a deep personal connection to and um and it's a genuine tragedy I'm deeply sympathetic look like is I I will say this and I keep saying it what America did after 911 was worse and it was dumber and it was bigger right an attack like that and were there still attacks it's not like we had somebody lobbing missiles at us from Canada during you know the eight months later like you're not going to have a polity making these kinds of restrained decisions under those conditions um at this point you know in our post 911 Evolution we had not yet invaded Iraq like our worst mistakes were yet to come we were still like in a kind of derangement um you know we were still I think not yet naming renaming french fries in the cafeteria of Congress Freedom fries because we were so mad the French had not supported like the dumbest thing we had ever done or would ever do so I think there's a real question of where things are in 5 years right where they are in 10 years you know if you're you know um on the Northern you live on the northern border or you live in Gaza you don't have the luxury of thinking in these long time frames but politically I think that where things are now is unsustainable so the question of where they will go is also unknowable but it's going to go somewhere um not necessar toward solution it could get worse but I don't think this is a stable equilibrium that's about you know Israel and what is going on there and you touched a little bit about you know anti-Semitism at home and what it what you think about it what you feel about that do you think that there will be some sort of that will subside somehow or is what we saw erupting in the US is is there to stay this is hard to say because it depends what we are talking about um and here I think people I mean are we talking about anti-semitic violence I think that um that is not going to I don't believe that is going to erupt into some sort of fullblown set of pilgrims or uh I do not feel endangered um I feel a little bit endangered sometimes just being you know when some of the emails I get Etc just being a very prominent Jewish person talking about Israel a lot in the media but I don't feel nature walking around um that's not my experience of it I think there's been too much focus on campus protests just one full stop but also there tends to be a focus on like the worst people you could find at a protest were always quite bad whereas like the bulk of these protests are in my view anti-israel but not anti-Semitic um I do think that there's like a very dangerous game that has been played for a long time which is to try to rule a lot of criticism of Israel as anti-semitic in an effort to suppress it um dynamics of suppression are a major topic of like my first book why we're polarized and it's of often a very very effective strategy is what Democrats are doing in Joe Biden's age um you can take something where people have um you know opinions are very worried about and you can suppress those opinions and it might work for some period of time but eventually when suppression breaks um when it's no longer sustainable it breaks very badly and My worry is that like there's still a real effort to suppress what has happened um among basically younger people which is that there's been a collapse in support for Israel because the only Israel they have known is not from a liberal perspective a supportable Israel and here I mean like a fundamental liberal perspective like Israel is at this moment illiberal um it is has an illiberal government it has many many people who live under fundamentally its control who do not have a vote in it um it is not uh defensible as a liberal project right now and there's been a lot of well if you don't support it as this you're anti-semitic and a lot of people okay okay I'm not anti-semitic I'm not going to talk about this I don't want to be involved in this and then October 7th and this was hamas's um horrific genius created a huge salience in the Israeli Palestinian conflict and what Hamas has done is go to Israel into an overwhelming attack that has raised the salience of the underlying conflict and a lot of people have looked at and said I don't support what's there and if you if you give me the choice if you keep telling me that to fundamentally disbelieve in what Israel is now is to be anti-semitic some percentage of people are going to be like okay I take the choice I take the the the bargain you're offering that scares me it scares me for Israel it scares me for my family it scares me for what Judaism is in America because Judaism in America has been very built around Zionism for a long time what is its spiritual um structure if if it if it loses that connection so this feels very dangerous tender the work that is going to have to be done politically um and culturally is is is really profound I don't know where it goes but that feels to me like what it is so we've covered a lot of difficult stuff in this conversation you always close out by asking your guest to pick three books we're going to do something a little different if we could which is to ask you for three things that are to quote the oldan jury song reasons to be cheerful but three things that may give you some grounds if any for optimism about it can be about America it can be about Jews it can be the human race but all there three things that at least give you some heart and you can do one if that's too far no I I I can do three I'm not that uh I I consider myself neither optimistic or pessimistic but but I don't I don't see the world as merely you know an endless procession of grim news stories uh you know my first would be technological progress the uh particularly The Unbelievable advances in clean energy over the past two decades have made it not easy to do something uh to amarate the worst of climate change but has made it possible without the only answer being endless sacrifice um and also to shown that even with a a quite lackluster policy response in many ways we can harness human genius in the direction of our worst problems and we should take some real lessons from that you saw a similar thing happening with warp speed in the vaccines um it turns out that actually if we want to mobilize technology in the direction of our hardest problems we really can um if we had not seen solar battery and wind power cost falling in the exponential ways they have been falling over the past 15 years the path forward on climate change would be flatly impossible and we'd be facing down the worst of it uh worldwide there continues to be uh continuing drops in extreme poverty like this is a big deal it matters that people are getting richer I worry about the slow down in China but you've you know continued seeing important movement in India in Bangladesh and places like that um so that is you know always encouraging to me and yeah I think most human beings are fundamentally good um and even when I was you know Tor in terrible conflicts like in in Israel recently most of the people you meet I think want decent lives to live in peace um we get Warped the worst Among Us have outsized power um there's a real veto that can be exercised by murderers by by even political spoilers but I think human beings are complicated and there's a lot of goodness in them too and so you know I do I do try to hold that fairly close like that's a little bit cliche and and trly and it doesn't take away from how hard problems are to solve as you heard me say earlier I do not believe there's somehow Solutions next to us but I also don't believe that the fundamental nature of human beings is uh such that Solutions cannot eventually um be found in even really an even really difficult conflict uh so I don't move through the world in an endless fog of pessimism or at least I hope I don't and you left us with some reasons to be optimistic uh at the very least as a reclin thank you so much for talking to us thank you I really appreciated it thank you [Music] eer he's a very interesting man and thinker and I found him very persuasive on the Biden question because some of the concerns that I've picked up you know around what comes next I think it deals with those he's obviously thought about it and deals with those very well I mean you know this notion particularly of you know there being a contest that's something that he I think makes a good case that Democrats don't need to fear that actually in some ways it could be I've been thinking myself it could be very energized and getting a lot of attention and similarly this point about which the Biden White House is pushing strongly every day you're attacking me you're not attacking Trump and his observation well look we've been doing that for years and Trump was ahead in the polls anyway so let's get our own positive thing right that was the case he was making in February it's not enough to say Trump is awful people know that you've got to give them something to say yes to as well as something to say no to I found him very persuasive on that yes I think also on the issue of you know anti-Semitism I he I rarely heard him talk this personal it was interesting to me because he was asked in 2011 by moment magazine what does it mean to be Jewish today and he talks and he says you know there have been times when the Jewish experience was unified usually in tragic ways and presenting oneself as Jewish required more of a choice but in my generation Jews are all over and doing far too much um I can simply be Jewish I have the luxury of refusing to answer for the rest of my tribe you know these are more Carefree words I think he talked very differently in the conversation that we had with him uh now one more point you know it is difficult for Israeli ears to hear that comparison you know going through the West Bank and saying this is the Jim Crow laws and the the first thing that an Israeli you know in in their mind and I was definitely thinking this in in during the interview want you to say it's not our fault like we tried to solve this all the usual Israeli explanations we tried to solve this we went to peace process the Palestinians didn't show up you know all of that fine I think what's important here is for us to realize this is the view held by Jewish American liberal prominent you know figures so that is something uh to note as well I couldn't think of a better person to have on uh viav uh uh the Biden turmoil and also you know his visit to Israel uh which I think brought up a lot of interesting points in our conversation yeah and he speaks doesn't he partly generationally I mean he's younger and he he was the way he put it uh maybe at the milder end of what a lot of people like him and his you know generation would think so we have some Awards to give out we do and I think the first mench nominee of the week will be noga Vis uh noga was kidnapped uh from kibuts Berry on October 7th she was in captivity with her mother for 50 days her father Elon was murdered and she uh came back all this did not prevent her from enlisting in the military she could have uh said she because of her situation that she doesn't want to but she did um the same military that you know disappointed her and her family but it's still the backbone of Israeli Society in every way uh and yesterday a picture of her graduating uh with honors from a military course was published she's smiling she's among her friends and it's something you know whatever happened to these Israelis in captivity is something that will always live in them and always live in this Society but the fact that she you know she's 18 she's young she's living her life she's managed to get up and and continue and this picture made Israelis of of all walks of life um I think smile it now that's a very um good nomination I was going to also chip in with Yehuda F who stepped down as a senior IDF Commander this week for the speech he made in stepping down in which he talked about because he his last post was as commander in the West Bank and he took on the settlers in particular he said to my great disappointment nationalist crime has reared its head and under the desire for Revenge it has sown chaos and fear in Palestinian residents who did not pose any threats he was attacking those particularly sort of militant settlers who have resorted to violence but then what was important was he then turned to what he go the local and spiritual leadership meaning some of those right-wing politicians and rabbis who as as far as he concerned have encouraged or allowed this to happen who either remained silent or sort of nurtur this and he said that the these this is not Judaism to me at least not the one I grew up with in my father and mother's house this is not the way of the Torah it is about adopting the enemy's tactics and walking in their rules in other words he's accusing some of those violent mil militant settlers and the people behind them rabbis and politicians of sinking to the level of some of the very people who would be constitute Israel's enemies I thought it was a very you know Brave thing for him to say he got attacked from all the very predictably from the far right who called him you know say one of them saying goodbye and see you never um but you know and the criticism would also be you know bit late to say this now but obviously he wasn't free to talk politically when he was in post and is now and I think at least somebody is making some of those arguments that people that are uncomfortable to hear but people need to hear incredibly serious um General and remember this is one of the more the commander of the Central Command in Israel one of the more complicated uh jobs in the military remind you he's UDA fuk is the same man who talked after Kara when there were extreme settlers attacking Palestinians he called it a pogram again stretching the lines of what uniform wearing military General can or can't say um and this I would also add to what he said in the speech and although this is not at all the Gaza command is not uh his responsibility he also said uh apologized he's part of the military top Rass he apologized for H what happened on October 7th I wonder if he'll be one of those former generals who we see again in politics in the country you never know but um and you're absolutely right to highlight that use by him of the word pogram which went round the world and was again very important uh moment so so two uh nominees there in our mench category uh for hutzpah I thought we would highlight the uh Ultra Orthodox rabbis who this week issued letter against the military draft against the compulsory conscription which I say again we say it so many times here is imposed on every other Jewish Israeli but which for historic reasons the ultra Orthodox uh have been exempt they've um issued a letter because they fear that this conscription could be coming for them and the language of it is very interesting it talks about destruction it talks about young men sort of falling talks about people being displaced but does not use that language to talk about the war in which young men young women have been were killed in uniform it does not use that um language to talk about those people gazans who were displaced in their thousands uh from the war and I it just struck me that I know we talked about it at the time a lot of people took great exception when we had as our guest on the podcast rifa ravitz sort of Leading Light of the ultra Orthodox community who said to us look of course we can't let our young men go and serve I know of people cousins in my own family went and served and they came back secular they didn't wear a kipar anymore and a lot of listeners were outraged because they wanted to shout at their phone or however they're listening to say well our cousins came back dead in a coffin the biggest problem was not that they did not have a kipa they were killed in the line of protecting everyone including you they would say to the ALR and so here again is that sort of tin ear on the part of the ultra Orthodox not listen not even realizing how it sounds to use the language of Destruction and and people falling and and people being displaced when there is a real war going on that they are very adamant that they have to be remain protected from uh so I think a Hut's reward to the ultra Orthodox authors of that letter 681 soldiers men and women uh were killed on October 7th and since in the gazen war and the more this number tragically gets higher this argument within Israeli Society is going to grow deeper and that is connects to our conversation earlier on the show of of netanyahu's the fate of nany's government I'm just going to add if I may as an addendum to the huto award this week Jonathan himself who is going to be leaving us uh for a few weeks um as we said we did uh talk about this a while back that you will be going on book Hiatus but leaving me I'm just I'm that it's only two weeks not a few okay it's two well I don't know it sounds like a lot to me so I'm going to say a few okay and uh I'm the one staying so I'm going to do what I want and uh to say that I will be left in the very capable safe fantastic hands of uh two glorious co-hosts that will be um stepping up to the plate from next week do you want to say who they are yes I don't we need to be quiet I mean Friends of the podcast extraordinaire David remnick editorinchief of the new yor magazine and bana gria Anor on CNN uh both uh good good friends of this podcast brilliant uh thinkers and broadcasters writers and they will be in my chair not literally because that could be awkward if I'm trying to write the book I'm hosting people who've flown in to host on holy so there that W but they'll be in the metaphorical share and I think I could not feel like I'm leaving my half of the hosting responsibilities in more capable hands what I didn't hear in this conversation is I'm sorry yit but I'll wait it's fine I can wait two weeks for that um I'm grateful certainly that uh that you allowing me some time to get write write write on this book but I am now also grateful to you and to them for holding the fort so we're really looking forward uh to uh B and dve David coming on and we shall say our thank yous first of all big mazalov to Omar Prima to uh our team our staff member who got married this week still showed up to for recording that's pretty amazing and then thank you a big thank you to gazer and Yin and Barak and Jonathan I'll see you in August what can I say yeah I'm just checking out right now um yeah see you then it won't be long [Music]