So

you were interested in the Jordanian military as a civil institution?

As a state institution. The evolution of the Jordanian military from a war institution, to a state institution, to a civilian institution, vocational institution, its relations with society on the one hand and with the regime on the other hand. It was a fascinating journey for me. But then, you know, at the age of 30, after this long service and starting learning Arab-Israeli conflict in academia and focusing on one state as an academic and never. It became clear to me that I have to challenge my political convictions. Because of the fact that I now visit a lot in Jordan and meet Jordanian friends and talk to them in Arabic and learning how they view the world, how was obviously that, yeah, you know, we Jordanians, Bedouins, whatever, they like Israelis and they like and they hate Palestinians and we are the same side and stuff. it wasn't like this it was really different and they had very very conflicting views of Israel and of Palestinians and obviously they were Mostly interested in Jordanian national interests interests and it wasn't really in tandem with with Israeli national interests And especially not of the right-wing national interests. So it was an eye-opening experience for me just to learn to see the world in their eyes, and then moving more towards the Palestinian side. So maybe if I was told something that's different from reality on the Jordanian front, maybe on the Palestinian front, it's also something different. It wasn't connected to the injury, but later it became connected because I'm a true believer of the fact that we're doing things for a reason. And reason that I'm doing what I'm doing right now with Israel as a Middle Eastern country, Israeli-Palestinian cooperation and power sharing, is not because, you know, it's just interesting. It's because many things happened to me, and these were my life experiences. And obviously the injury in the suicide attack was part of it. And the fact that I'm of a Yemenite origin is part of it. And the fact that I grew up in the West Bank as a religious Zionist is part of it. I mean, they're all stations. And later I became to think of this person who committed the suicide attack. I mean, not from a military point of view, you know, as we used, we were used to doing in the army. Like, what was the motivation of a suicide bomber? But from a civilian point of view, what was the motivation of a Palestinian, young Palestinian from the West Bank to take this explosive belt, put it around his body and go on a bus and explode with women, children, civilians? The very basic notion of trying to understand, which again, I think that throughout the years, and especially now after the 7th of October, people misunderstand and conflate between understanding and justifying. justification and I'm always saying it to Lectures and even in writing. I mean when you try to understand something that's not that You're justifying it. You're really trying to understand. What was the motivation behind something? behind a political movement behind an active of an individual of and Always going back to the Holocaust, you know the most terrible historic incident that happened to Jews and saying that when you try to understand Nazi Germany or to understand what got people to support Nazi Germany from the Weimar Republic to Nazi Germany. And was this the secret behind the support, the popular support for Nazi Germany? It's not that you and you give, you know, different explanations, economic explanations, social explanations, the humiliation after the first World War. It's not that you're justifying the show, the Holocaust, right? You're just trying to understand what the hell went there. And the same thing that when you're trying to understand Palestinian terrorism, whether it's a phenomena, or in my case, also as something that was that I'm its victim. So what is the reason or the motivation of a Palestinian individual to do something like this? This means that you have to go deeper and deeper into Palestinian life experience, of individual, of a collective, of a dispossession, of settlements, of Jewish supremacy in Israel and so forth. Again, it doesn't mean that you're justifying what happens to the Palestinians in terms of armed struggle or in terms of terrorism against civilians, but it means that you're trying to understand what makes

them go from point A to point B. Did you go through that path of going deeper? Did you start asking yourselves questions about living in a settlement surrounded by Palestinians? What are their lives as opposed to your lives as settlers?

Certainly. Yeah. And it was through, again, through my PhD studies, I dealt with Jordanian affairs, so I didn't learn or read much about Palestinian politics and society, which is again very ironic, you know, because we are Jews, Israelis living here. about the Palestinians and here even myself dealing with an Arab country and know nothing about, really nothing about my Palestinian neighbors. And I was a PhD student at an Israeli university. Think about all the Israeli students or non-students that know nothing about the Palestinians, although they live side by side with them, work with them, study with them, and so on and so forth. But yeah, after I finished my dissertation and I got my PhD, I started to work on issues more related to Palestinian society and politics, initiatives, academic initiatives, intellectual initiatives. During

your time in the ECF as kind of like a research assistant with the projects with Jordan, you became accustomed to these peace initiatives or regional cooperation initiatives that were very much based on Ashkenazi middle-class men who don't necessarily speak Arabic. What was your experience in those kinds of circles? As someone who does speak Arabic and is connected to that side?

for me to see real peace nicks. People are part of the peace environment, peace NGOs, who didn't know any Arabic, who didn't know much about Palestinians, apart from basically Zionist worldview. Not so much about Palestinians as they see themselves, as they see Israel. They couldn't read or discuss things in Arabic with Palestinians or Arabs, and were blind to the fact that it's mostly about Jewish men of Ashkenazi origin, white people.

So you're saying it's not only the fact that it was like that, but it also created the oblivion to that. And you were kind of like different in that sphere and you were pointing it out to them. Yeah.

And at first I was stunned by the fact that I am with people who were part of decision making circles, part of the political and military elite of the state of Israel. And I learned a lot from them about the history about the politics, about actual politics in Israel. But then I started to realize that these most of them are white Israeli Jews, men who don't read or speak Arabic. All of them are Zionists, which is, I mean, restricting your own ability to discuss with Palestinians and Arabs and to understand them. Can

you say something about that? Why is being a Zionist restricting someone when speaking to Palestinians or to Arabs? You

should at least try to be non-Zionists or to be able to understand the point of view as of a non-Zionist or even anti-Zionist Arab or Palestinian when having conversations with them because otherwise you're trapped in the circle of justifying your own worldview and your own country and your own state and what it does. So

you're saying basically it restricts you in being able to put yourself in their shoes. Right. Because there's this like wall. Right,

because otherwise, you're always arguing with them, whether you're arguing in words with them or arguing in your mind with them. And I really believe that when you try to understand someone, whether it's a person or a collective or a people, you shouldn't argue, at least for the time span of the conversation. Don't argue, just listen. Just listen and try to put yourself in their shoes. I

think that I just understood something after what you said. If you want to listen, really listen to people, you need to let go of ideologies. And Zionism is an ideology, and I think that as Israelis, part of the problem is that we're raised to see Zionism as a given, as the default, as the water that we're swimming in, as fish. And we don't see it as a political ideology that has implications. Once you don't see it as an ideology, you can't let it go as you would for any other ideology for the purpose of listening.

think in academic terminology it's called methodological nationalism. And most, if not all, of Israeli academia is centered around this methodological nationalism, and especially Israel studies and Middle East studies. I mean, Zionism is a given. And from the point of view of Zionism, you can, you know, research, study, analyze, explore, whatever you want. But you should be a Zionist. And that's why, I mean, this is what I do for a living, or part of what I do for a living is understand how Israeli Middle East scholars and the Israeli Middle East as a discipline understand, explore, see the world around us that Zionism is a given basically. And that's why there is so much criticism about Islam and about Arabs and about Muslims and about Palestinians and so very little criticism, so little criticism about us, about Jews, about Israel, Zionism, so on and so forth. And that's something that's very clear when you see Israeli Middle East studies versus Western Middle East studies, let's say, for example. So back to how you understand the other, I always thought that when I talk with my Jordanian friends or Palestinian friends and colleagues in Arabic, it gives me this edge that if I talk to them in English, I wouldn't understand. of extra meaning of undertones that you wouldn't understand. And it's strange that when I talk about this I go back to my upbringing and training as a military intelligence guy because that's basically what you're supposed to do as an intelligence gatherer. You understand your enemy in their own words, in their own worldview, and you do not judge. You can't judge. I mean, we weren't supposed to judge the other, the enemy for what they do. And sometimes, even today, I'm struggling with this, I mean, for example, this is what Khaled Mishal, Hamas leader, or Salah al-Arohri, Hamas leader, or Hassan, Nasrallah, Hezbollah leader, see us. And people would attack me and argue with me. You're justifying them, you take their lies fact and so on and so forth. Whatever you think about what they say, this is what they say. They may lie, they may tell the truth, but this is what they say and you should listen. And it's interesting because there's such a huge difference between being a military intelligence officer or whatever, and being an activist working for peace. What

are the differences? What are you thinking of?

When you work for your own country, in the military intelligence, for example, you don't really care about the other. You care about your own country and the interests of your own country and you give your own country the information that it needs to win the other side, to win the fight, to win the war. But when you're an advocate for peace, you basically have to work with the other side in order to defeat the bad guys in your own society and their own society. That's a very, very different activity and understanding. But still at the heart, at the core of understanding of analyzing the other is that you have to listen and you have to listen and you have to not judge. You shouldn't judge, you can't judge the other side, because that's their worldview, and you have to listen. And this is something that, again, especially today after the 7th of October, if you're citing anything, any sentence even, that your enemy is saying, you're justifying him. That's the sentiment here. That's the sentiment here in Israel today. Yeah. I remember that three days after the 7th of October, there was this interview in El Jazira with Salah al-Arori. That was very interesting for me to hear. And I wrote a short piece about it. This is what he says about the events of 7th of October. They meant to do A, another thing happened. They didn't mean to attack civilians, but whatever, you know, this is basically what he said and I was attacked for airing a propaganda of Hamas and I said what happened to you people? Are you crazy? I'm just saying this is how he sees it and I'm offering it as You know a window to understand the other side to understand Hamas, to understand Hamas leaders, to understand their motivations, to understand their maybe PR, to understand, for example, in this specific case, how we could do better in order to retrieve or to bring back our abductees and kidnapped people, and people wouldn't listen. Basically,

you're like, we need to understand reality to do the best we can. And everyone else is like, no, we don't want to understand reality, we just want to judge, and we just want to say that the other side is barbaric. We don't want to see things for what they are if it's not exactly that. Yeah,

I mean even their own logic, the other side's own logic. I mean settlements, normalization with Saudi Arabia, rise of right-wing nationalism in Israel, the Smothrich, Ben-Griir, and so on and so forth, these were the reasons behind the Hamas attack, for example. Not the specifics of what they did, but the basic reason for why they operated. And people do not want to hear it. What happened was really and we don't want to understand or the logic behind it. We don't even want to accept the fact that there is logic behind it, right? They're just Nazis, and that's it. But we know that

even the Nazis had logic, right? Yeah, that was researched pretty thoroughly, of course. So we went really fast forward to today, but still some things that I wanted to talk about was the establishment of the Forum for Regional Thinking, which is an organization that I highly appreciate personally, and I know that other people do as well. But I think that anyone listening who hasn't heard of it, maybe would want to hear about what made you establish it and what is it today? Okay,

so when I was still a PhD student, I thought that what we're doing in the professional community, I was the secretary of the Israeli Oriented Society back then. The Israeli Oriented Society has really nothing to do with the Orient of Mizal Ha'im. It has to do with the discipline of Middle East Studies in Israel. It was established in 1949, just a year after the establishment of the State of Israel. And this is basically an academic society of scholars and professionals dealing with Middle East and Islam. And I thought that, as a secretary of the society, I thought that we should talk to society. We should talk to Israeli society. We have a lot of information, a lot of knowledge about Islam, about the Middle East, about whatever. That

the Israeli society

doesn't have. And we're the professionals and we should reach out to them. Academics operate in English, they write papers in English, they give talks in English, and they're westbound. Yeah,

and it's also not very accessible to anyone who's not an academic. Right.

But

can I just backtrack? Why is it important for Israeli society to know about Arab culture, about the Middle East, about Islam? I mean, there are people who are experts on this, but they do it to serve Israel's security. Not

even from security reasons, only just because you're an Israeli. And half of your own Jewish citizens of Israel are of Arab origin, and their families are of Arab origin. Some of us speak Arabic with our families, we're grandparents, with Palestinians, we work with Palestinians, and we're again in the Middle East. So, however you look at it, you have to know Arabic and you have to know what's going on in your neighborhood. And you cannot be isolated from your neighborhood.

seems like Israel's policy is to keep the society in an isolated state of mind, in an isolated psyche, and not to feel like they're part of this place, but more to feel like they're a branch of Europe or the US. Right.

A villa in the jungle like Eudwur Barak, the

Prime Minister and former Chief of Staff said. Can you explain this to people who haven't heard this term? What does villa in the jungle mean? Villa in the jungle means right

and wrong, means good and bad. People

of the light, people of darkness. We're seeing a comeback of that. Yeah, they kind of mean this mani-keik

worldview of black and white, which means that Israel is a villa, and all the rest in this region are the jungle. And in the jungle, obviously the dwellers of the jungle are beasts, and the dwellers of the villa are human beings, are civil.

And there's chaos in

the jungle. And there's chaos. And you don't want chaos to penetrate your own villa. So you have to build this fortress, who's impenetrable, and beware, beware of the bad guys, beware of the beasts in the jungle around you. Do

you see this in Israeli academia as well, even the people researching the Middle East see this place?

So, you know, I wouldn't say that in Israeli academia, which is more subtle, most people, most scholars think or talk or teach Israel as a villa in the jungle. But when you take a good look at the topics of research and teaching at the Israeli universities, when you talk about the fact that 95% or so of Israeli regular tenured staff at the universities Jews in a discipline that cherishes the knowing of Arabic as a language and as a culture. That's mind-blowing. I mean, why won't Palestinian Israelis be part of Israeli Middle East studies and teach Arabic and teach Middle East Studies and teach about the Arabs, about the Palestinians. Maybe, you know, refresh a little bit this methodological nationalism, for example, not take Zionism for granted or as a point of departure of your research of your analysis. Then it becomes clear that the notion of villa in the jungle, not as a phrase or as a credo, but as an operating device for Israeli Middle East studies, is there. Which is, I think, it's a shame. It's a shame because people won't say, you know, I'm right-wing, or I teach Arabs as enemy studies or whatever. No, they won't say that. But if you exclude Israel in your Middle East studies discipline, exclude Judaism, and if you exclude Jews of Arab origin, you deem Al-Vim. And if you exclude criticism of Israel, and especially of the occupation, when you talk about Israeli-Palestinian relations, then you're part of the system. Right? You're really part of the system. of villa in the jungle, of we are right and they're wrong, we're in the light and they're in the darkness. And it's really a shame, I think. Because I think we have, as professionals, as intellectuals, we have responsibility towards the Israeli society. We have a responsibility that's both political and moral and intellectual to shake beliefs and to shake the social-called righteousness of our wrongdoings or our doings. And we have responsibility for building a strong, peaceful society that lives in peace with its neighbors. And if we end up in bolstering this world view of Villa in the Jungle, of war, of Islam, of political Islam, of jihadist Islam as givens, not as something that also depended on what we do and do not do, then we're part of the system. Then we're of no use to the Israeli society.