Matti Friedman joins host Rebecca Burgess to discuss Israeli culture and identity, immigration trends, religious and linguistic divisions, and his latest book, Who by Fire.
Rebecca Burgess:
Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. My name is Rebecca Burgess. I’m a contributing editor with Law & Liberty, and joining me today is Canadian Israeli journalist Matti Friedman. His work graces the pages of The New York Times, The Atlantic, Tablet, Mosaic, several other organizations. He’s also a prolific author of a rich diversity of topics and books from everything about spies to the Dead Sea Scrolls to, most recently, Leonard Cohen’s concert tour to the front lines during the Yom Kippur War. That’s Who by Fire. And I’m sure, Matti, you had a lot of fun listening to a lot of music while you were writing that book.
Matti Friedman:
I sure did, although Leonard Cohen’s music, if you know it, can be a bit of a downer. So if you listen to five hours straight of Cohen, it doesn’t mean that your mood is going to be great necessarily. But I did have a good time.
Rebecca Burgess:
Wonderful. Well thank you so much for joining us today, coming from Israel.
Matti Friedman:
It’s a real pleasure to be here.
Rebecca Burgess:
Great. So Israel is frequently in the news for about three things: Gaza, violence, and rocket barrages. Most recently, of course, it’s been in the news for questions about its judiciary and its politics, in particular its election travails: five elections in four years, and at the end of it we have Netanyahu back in power. But I’m hoping that today we can talk about something that you focus on in your longer-form essays, which is the social, cultural, and demographic change of Israel that helps us understand what is actually going on in the country as a country beyond or above those headlines. And most recently you had a wonderful essay in which you noticed that there are many French in Jerusalem now and that there is a almost war of baguette shops. So what are the French restaurant wars in Jerusalem? Tell us about what’s happening in terms of the population shifts.
Matti Friedman:
It’s rare when you can see a social shift manifest itself physically just in store signs when you walk down the street. But over the past couple of years in my neighborhood and elsewhere in Jerusalem, you just can’t avoid realizing that there are more and more French people in Jerusalem. You can go to a bakery downtown called Gagou de Paris, and if you don’t like their croissants you can go across the street to another one called L’Artisan. And there are other options these days in Jerusalem. French is just one of the languages you hear. And there are other cities in Israel where it’s even more prevalent, particularly one called Netanya, which is a city on the coast with a particularly large French population. So clearly something is going on in France.
One of the interesting things about Israel is that it ends up being a barometer for the situation of Jews in other countries. So we’ve had an influx of people from Ukraine and Russia recently. So even if you knew nothing about the war in Ukraine or what was going on in Russia, just by looking at the new arrivals around my neighborhood you would understand that something is clearly going on there because we’re hearing more and more Russian and Ukrainian in the street. And in the case of the French, it’s not a wave of immigration exactly. It’s not millions of people moving, but tens of thousands have moved in the past decade and more than 100,000 Jews have come from France to Israel since the early seventies, and about half of them have come in the past decade. So clearly there’s something going on. People are being drawn to Israel, people are feeling a bit uncomfortable at home in France, and that’s manifesting itself in the superior quality of our pastries here in Jerusalem and elsewhere.
Rebecca Burgess:
Is it, do you think, related at all to some of the violence that has been perpetuated against Jews in France? So there were of course several famous [incidents], the Bataclan Theater, Charlie Hebdo and others, and it would seem natural if in the wake of those types of violent occurrences in France that there would be a sudden influx in Israel. Is it that that’s driving it, or is there this other, and it’s almost a third rail I know to talk about when you’re talking about France, but the influx of Arab immigration within France, which seems to be driving others out of France.
Matti Friedman:
So there are pull factors and push factors as in any immigration wave. So the pull factor is the draw of the Jewish state, which for a certain number of Jews in every country is enough of a pull without any push factor: the desire to live in a place where your culture is the culture of the majority. And for some people it’s a religious impulse to return to the land of Israel, which some interpret as a biblical commandment. So that’s going on. But of course there are also push factors, and the violence that you mentioned is certainly one of the push factors. And you can see that after spectacular instances of violence against Jews, and unfortunately there have been several, there’s a spike of immigration. So there was a big one after the murder of a young Jewish guy, he was 23, named Ilan Halimi in 2006, and he was murdered by a group of Muslim French citizens.
They called themselves the Gang of Barbarians, and they kidnapped him and then tortured him to death. Immigration went up after that and then kind of subsided. And then there was an attack on the Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012. Another French Muslim murdered a few kids. And that was also a shock to the community, and there was another wave of immigration. So yes, there’s something going on in France. There’s something kind of bubbling under the surface and the Jews are feeling it, and that is triggering immigration. Although, again, it’s not like all the Jews in France are leaving in panic, but that is driving the numbers up. And every time there’s an instance like that, you see the graph go up and then, if things get quiet again in France, the graph kind of subsides. But the trend is toward increased immigration from France. And part of it is definitely that many Jews in France feel less and less comfortable at home.
Rebecca Burgess:
Is there also that aspect of the secularism in France in which it is a hot point of wearing religious clothing and religious symbolisms in France? And in the public school system this is a huge fight. My sister is in fact a Dominican nun, and it’s a French congregation, and they have, every day almost, to struggle with some of these questions, especially themselves. They’re wearing a habit which doesn’t look that unlike how some Middle Eastern women cover themselves. Is it some of the more orthodox or observant Jews who are tending to go to Israel from France, or does that seem to be not really part of the equation?
Matti Friedman:
I think it is part of the equation. I’d actually love to hear more about your sister. That sounds fascinating. Often Americans have a bit of trouble understanding the French system, which is different than the system in the United States. In America, there’s separation of church and state and you’re allowed to do whatever you want. In France, the culture is kind of aggressively secular or at least the official culture. And they have an idea called laïcité which basically is a kind of antagonism toward expressions of religious observance in the public sphere or open expressions of religious observance. And that could cause problems for a Muslim woman who wants to cover her hair with a hijab, or a Jewish man who wants to wear a kippah, or even openly displayed crosses in some cases. Many French people interpret that as a violation of laïcité, the idea that the public’s sphere must be secular.
For observant Jews that can be a problem. And I spoke to one young French woman who’s actually now in Israel, who’s interviewed in this story that we’re talking about, which came out in Tablet, who remembers that in her childhood they served kosher food at public school. And then that was considered to be a violation of laïcité, so you can no longer get kosher food at the public schools. They used to give Jewish students exemptions or postponements of exams if the exams fell on Jewish holidays, and now that’s also a bit tense because that’s also considered to be special pleading if you ask to have your exam administered on a different day.
So that makes life a bit fraught for people of religious observance, not just Jews but for everyone. And certainly Jews do feel it. And if you look at the profile of the average immigrant to Israel in the past decade, you’ll see that it tends to be people who are traditional in their observance. It tends to be people who are of North African descent. So there’s a huge Jewish population in North Africa up to the forties and fifties, mainly in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. And after the independence movements in these countries succeed and the French colonists are kicked out, the Jewish population either moves to Israel or goes to France.
So most of the Jews in France are actually not the original French Jewish population, which was European in origin, but North African in origin. And it’s those Jews who tend to be moving to Israel. So they often find Israel quite familiar, I think in many ways because they’re coming two or three generations back from Mediterranean Jewish societies in places like Morocco and Tunisia and then ending up in Israel, which is also a Mediterranean Jewish society. So the social leap for many of these people is not as dramatic and difficult as it would be for an American Jew moving to Israel, for example.
Rebecca Burgess:
I think I was reading that about a third are single young people coming, and a third are about young families, and then a third are retirees. So it almost makes me think about, and I know this is really probably not the best analogy, but in the States right now, we’re seeing a lot of people leave from blue states and go towards red states where they feel that they are more free or less hampered in types of schooling choices and other ways of living. I don’t know if that’s in any way similar, but that tradition of going where you feel more welcome and feel like you have some roots and some familiarity with a system.
Matti Friedman:
No, it’s an interesting analogy and definitely people want to feel at home. And part of being a minority and part of being Jewish is always a sense that you’re not quite at home, that you’re dependent on the acceptance of others, that you need to play an identity game where you’re open to the mainstream and capable of playing ball with the mainstream, but also maintaining your own personal traditions and keeping your own identity, which makes you different from the mainstream and which the mainstream, in some cases, does not like and is hostile to. So for many people, going to Israel is a way of solving that problem. It creates numerous other problems, as I found having moved to Israel myself, of course, from Canada when I was 17. So it doesn’t make your life problem-free, but it does replace that problem of being a minority. It replaces that problem with other problems. And yes, I think people want to feel at home and they would like to be surrounded by people who, they might not be exactly like them, but who are at least open and welcoming to who they are.
Rebecca Burgess:
Have their croissants.
Matti Friedman:
And also they can move to Israel without any compromise on the quality of the baguettes. Although I guess I shouldn’t say that in their name. They might think that the Israeli baguettes are not quite up to par. But definitely these days you can get excellent food in Israel. It certainly wasn’t the case when I moved here in 1995. I don’t think it was really even the case 10 years ago, but definitely the French have brought many good things and cuisine is one of them.
Rebecca Burgess:
The summer when I was there on a national security trip, sponsored by Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where I met you, I had that privilege, I was rather blown away by the wonderful extent of Israeli cuisine. And thinking about adding French on top of that, I thought that’s just not fair.
Matti Friedman:
We have the best food in the world, in my opinion. And I’ve been around the Israeli cuisine. Because it’s made up of so many different groups that have come over many, many years, it is spectacular.
Rebecca Burgess:
So it seemed like you started noticing the French immigration wave to Israel through the proliferation almost of the restaurants, the French restaurants. But also I thought that your observation about the bookstores was interesting, that some of these French bookstores, they’re not what you might think they are, they’re not all super orthodox or religious in content. Many of them are just simply French bookstores, which kind of show that shift towards those who are moving to Israel. It’s not necessarily a religious only question, but maybe more broadly cultural.
The North Africa element reminded me that several years ago you had this very fascinating article in which you asked whether Israel is eastern or whether it’s European, meaning is it Middle Eastern or is it western? And in the West, in America, we tend to tell the Israel story as though it is a byproduct of the West only. But that in fact, if you look at the population, the current population of Israel, it’s very much a Middle Eastern story. And that to me was the first time, in reading your articles, that I had ever thought about that and what that might mean and the differences. And that article, I think you’d called it Mizrahi Nation, where you invited us to think about all the different ramifications of Israel being a Middle Eastern state and country, population.
Matti Friedman:
So I think that is the key to understanding Israel. And I, like many other people who grew up in North American Jewish communities, always learned about a very European country with Herzl, and the kibbutz, and the Holocaust, and the Jews from the Middle East were very much on the margins of what I knew about Israel. But if you look at the Israeli Jewish population, we have a one-fifth Arab Muslim minority. So if we just set them aside for a second and look at that 80% Jewish majority, at least half of the Jews in Israel do not come from Europe. They come from the Islamic world, they come from places like Morocco, they come from Syria, they come from Yemen, Kurdistan, Iran. And you can’t understand the country without understanding that.
And even the Jews who came here from Eastern Europe, over three or four generations in Israel they’ve been Middle Easternized. And that expresses itself in the cuisine and expresses itself in the kind of music people listen to. And it expresses itself in our politics, which are incomprehensible without understanding the ethnic origins of Israeli voters, because often issues that we describe or arguments that we describe as being about policies are actually about identity. And that often has to do with whether your family came from the Christian world or from the Muslim world. So this is all very important to an understanding of the country, and yet it remains kind of marginal. People don’t really think about it, they don’t think it’s central, but it is the central fact of Israel.
I wrote a book trying to explain it, which is a book called Spies of No Country, which ostensibly is a book about Israel’s first spies, the guys who created the Mossad in many ways. But Israel’s first spies were the only people in the country who could walk across the street into the Arab world and disappear, and those people were Jews who’d come from the Arab world. A year or two before they were natives of the Arab world, they were native Arabic speakers. And if we understand that at least half of the Jews in Israel are the children or grandchildren of those people, then we understand something really important about the country that is otherwise missed.
Rebecca Burgess:
Is that reflected in any of the public education, in terms of the languages that students are being encouraged to learn?
Matti Friedman:
I wish I could say yes, because it would be amazing if Israeli kids could actually speak Arabic, not only to interact with our Arab surroundings. There are 6 million Jews here and 300 million people in the Arab world. So it would be nice to have more people speaking fluent Arabic, but also Arabic is a Jewish language. Jews always spoke Arabic, and there are great works of Jewish thought that were written in Arabic. A good example is the philosophical writings of Moses Maimonides, who’s an incredibly important philosopher from Cairo about a thousand years ago. His philosophical words are written in Arabic. So Arabic is really a Jewish language and many of the people who came to Israel after the state was founded spoke Arabic. That was their language.
But what happened was that there was a real attempt to create an Israeli identity in which people spoke Hebrew. And for that to happen, the diaspora languages had to be killed basically. And that meant no Yiddish and no Polish and no Russian, and it definitely meant no Arabic. So within one generation the Arabic speakers were gone and their kids were Israelis, which was a success for the Zionist movement but a loss, maybe, for the culture of this country. Definitely a loss for the intelligence services who could really use native Arabic speakers, but that’s what happened. The linguistic treasures that came here in the first years of the state, where you had all these people speaking Persian and speaking Kurdish and speaking 80 different languages or whatever it was, that was really eliminated by this drive to create an Israeli population. And that has its upsides, of course. We all speak the same language and that’s good, but a lot was lost. I wish we could recover some of it, but it’s hard two or three generations later to get any of it back.
Rebecca Burgess:
It’s kind of a longer unformed question, though, about language and how language creates a national identity. At the beginning, when you are so small and you’re starting out, it makes sense to tamper down on one common language, if you will. But, seven decades later, is it possible to loosen up a little bit, or is it the case that because the pressures from outside have only multiplied in that time? I don’t think anyone would say that the pressures surrounding Israel have lessened. Has it entrenched the idea of having this one language to help the cultural identity have a type of centrality to it, and that’s what will continue through the next decades?
Matti Friedman:
Yes. This society is so fractured and kind of at odds with itself that it certainly helps to have one language. And if you look at the country 50 or 60 years ago, many of the ultra-orthodox Israelis wouldn’t speak Hebrew. And many of the people were immigrants, even the leaders of the country were immigrants, and they spoke kind of immigrant Hebrew, very heavily accented. And the fact that most people in the country today, including our Arab citizens, speak Hebrew very well is definitely good for communication. Interestingly, it doesn’t seem to make us more unified or well-disposed to each other. So it does raise a question of whether a common language is actually helpful or not. But retrieving those old languages that were lost with our grandparents or great-grandparents is very difficult.
So there are attempts to bring back Arabic, and people are much more interested in the culture of the Jews of the Middle East and in the music, and there are attempts to revive it. And people are more interested in Yiddish. And people are more open to the experience of the diaspora, which was really radioactive in the early years of the state. One, Israelis were supposed to hate the diaspora and forget about it and be ashamed of it and never mention it. That has really passed. So people are interested in their roots. You can’t just wake up one morning speaking Arabic. And we’re not our grandparents. We might like our grandparents’ culture, but this generation is Israeli. And the search for different cultures or for different cultural roots, that search is Israeli. It’s not quite the same thing as being from Morocco or being from Poland.
Rebecca Burgess:
Well that’s interesting, because I would say in America today… And not to make everything a comparison with America, but America is what I know. When we talk about the current generation, one of the questions that comes up a lot is a sense of rootlessness amongst the current population and whether that drives some of this whole culture of depths of despair, the depression, some of these more medical-driven problems, you could say, of our society, and whether that’s rooted in questions about us losing our sense of identity or our central identity. I’m just wondering in Israel how younger generations feel or if, as you mentioned, they’re being Middle Easternized, that’s giving them a different type of rootedness instead of rootlessness and they’re kind of making it their own thing. And I know that you also recently wrote about a pop star. And I was a little intrigued by this. Is it a pop star? Is he Palestinian? He was the most popular in Israel.
Matti Friedman:
Do you mean Nasrin, the article I wrote for The New York Times?
Rebecca Burgess:
Yes.
Matti Friedman:
So I like to look at our cultural questions by looking at music, rather than looking at heavy things like academic research or anthropological study. So the dominant pop form in Israel is a kind of music called Mizrahi, which literally means eastern. And what it is is Middle Eastern pop music sung in Hebrew, often with Greek influences and western influences. But that is really the most popular pop genre in Israel, which is kind of proof that the country is basically a Middle Eastern country. So I thought an interesting window into all of this would be one pop star whose name is Nasrin Kadri. This was two or three years ago when I wrote the story. She was really the hottest name in the Mizrahi pop scene, and she’s really a diva. She’s got a phenomenal voice, and she happens to be a Muslim woman from Haifa who converted to Judaism which is very, very, very rare.
But it was a great way of looking at this mix of western and eastern and the Middle Eastern style in Judaism. So Nasrin is originally Muslim, but her fans are Jews, many of them of Middle Eastern background themselves. So she’s kind of an Arab diva for Jews affiliated with the Arab world. But she sings in Hebrew most of the time, although she also sings in Arabic. And all of that is just so interesting and confusing to anyone who wants to see this as a European country. So I thought a profile of Nasrin as kind of a pop goddess of the moment would be a fun way into one of the most important cultural questions here, which is: what kind of country is this? And if we’re a Middle Eastern country, what does that mean? So that’s what I was trying to do with that story. And there I really did enjoy listening to the music, and I got to hang out with Nasrin and then go to a concert. And I had a great time doing that one.
Rebecca Burgess:
Hopefully you had great seats, too.
Matti Friedman:
I did. I had excellent press seats close to the bottom. I could almost reach out and touch her knee-high glittery boots.
Rebecca Burgess:
That’s so not the image that we have of Israel today. So the contrast, it’s good for the senses to wake us up, like spicy food makes us reevaluate our assumptions.
Matti Friedman:
There was a bit of Beyonce in the concert and there was, of course, some Arabic and there was one point in the concert where she was posing against these screens which had satanic flames on them. And there were two guitarists on either side of her, and they were wailing like Slash from Guns and Roses. So there was just a lot going on at that concert, culturally.
Rebecca Burgess:
A lot of imagery.
Matti Friedman:
A lot of imagery. There was nothing about it that was purist. It wasn’t meant to be like pure Middle Eastern music or anything like that. It was totally commercial and very crass, and totally fun.
Rebecca Burgess:
So also looking at pop culture, you’ve noticed that there’s been an influx from China within the cultural moment. And I’m talking here about Chinese, and I’ll say his name wrong, Itzik. Is it the Chinese Itzik? This incredibly popular YouTuber who sells China, almost, to Israel. And I found this quite fascinating. One, how did you come across this? Is it just because it’s so prevalent? And the story that you found of China’s influence operations, if you will, within Israel through this one lens of this YouTube star?
Matti Friedman:
So I’m always looking for an interesting way of telling an important story. So Itzik, or Chinese Itzik as he’s known here, seems to be a good way of doing it. He’s a YouTube personality who works for a Chinese government media operation and he speaks phenomenal Hebrew, just almost native Hebrew. And he’s an incredibly smart and charming guy. So he does videos from Israel about being a Chinese person in Israel, and he also does videos from China explaining China to Israelis. But that’s his job, presenting a good face of China to Israel and serving as a cultural communicator between Israel and China, or the Chinese government. And I got to speak to him, and he’s a fascinating character. And he really gets Israel in a very interesting way. And he’s spent time here, and he’s picked up the language in a very remarkable way.
The article looks at him as a way of trying to understand what China’s up to in Israel, because of course the Chinese are on the move across the Middle East. They’re building installations. They’re taking infrastructure projects. They’re very much in evidence here in infrastructure. They’re building a big part of our new light rail system in Tel Aviv. A Chinese company now owns our biggest dairy products company, which is called Tnuva. A very important tunnel project a couple of years ago under Mount Carmel was handled by the Chinese. And they’re building us a hydro plant, at least one. But the biggest Chinese installation, or the most important one that has opened in recent years, is a port.
Israel has always had two ports, one in the city of Haifa and one in the city of Ashdod. And because the country’s grown and because the economy has boomed, those ports are insufficient and we needed another port. And a Chinese company won the tender for the port. And it’s the company that operates the port in Shanghai, which is called SIPG. So they won the contract and built an absolutely beautiful port that I got to visit. It’s a kind of shining, brand-new port open last year. These red cranes with huge Chinese letters on them, and you go into the command room and the workers are Israelis actually, but the executives are Chinese, and they’re running Chinese software, and the whole operation is Chinese. And it’s really, really striking because you can read all you want about the expansion of Chinese influence, but when you’re standing in a Chinese port facility in Israel and the corner offices are populated by Chinese executives, you realize that something’s going on.
Things are really changing. And the calculus of economic interest, and maybe even security interest, in the Middle East is shifting as the Chinese make themselves felt more and more and as the American presence seems to fade. So that article, which was also for Tablet, looks at those two elements: the port, and Chinese Itzik. That’s really what he calls himself, Chinese Itzik, Itzik HaSini in Hebrew. His real name is Xi Xiaoqi, and he’s from Beijing. That’s what I tried to do with that story, to try to take something really complicated and make it as simple as possible and a bit entertaining.
Rebecca Burgess:
So this summer I remember standing at the old Haifa port and looking across and being told about this new Chinese one and thinking, from the national security standpoint, the American Sixth Fleet gets refueled right there, right across from the Chinese. And of course, in America we have a heightened security sense around China. But it did have that sense. And it did make me wonder a lot about how regular Israelis feel about the increasing presence of Chinese industry, Chinese companies within their country operating what I would call sensitive infrastructure. We also went to Tel Aviv. That has been my first time in Israel, and it suddenly struck me that, oh, Israel is also a Mediterranean country. It’s right there on the Mediterranean, and I hadn’t really thought about Israel being a Mediterranean country.
And later on I was in Trieste, which the Chinese are also heavily influential in. That was the historic port of the Austria-Hungarian empire. It’s still very, very important to Italy, and the Chinese are there and in presence everywhere around the city in very tangible ways because that’s something that they’re supposedly using for their Belt and Road Initiative into Europe. And it drew together kind of that sense, I don’t want to say of foreboding necessarily. I didn’t necessarily have foreboding in Haifa this summer, but it felt unnerving the extent of seeing that in person. And I thought if I was a citizen living here, would I not notice it just because it’s something that happens over time or would I notice it and worry about it? And whether you had insight into how kind of everyday Israelis feel about that?
Matti Friedman:
So Israelis have always had many enemies, of course. And we’ve fought wars, unfortunately, against many states in the Arab world. And our most potent enemy at the moment is Iran, of course. And a country that has never been a problem for us is China. They’ve never been an enemy. So Israelis are not worried about them. And you can look at polling information which shows that Israelis are, for the most part, just not concerned about China. They don’t see China as a competitor, they don’t see China as a threat. They understand that the Chinese antagonize the Americans. And there’ve been two big defense deals that have been torpedoed by American protest because America was unhappy about Israel selling certain things to the Chinese, quite rightly. And so there’s an understanding that that’s sensitive, but there’s no kind of gut suspicion of the Chinese or feeling that we need to be worried about this.
And I’m not saying that that’s necessarily true. I’m just saying that Israelis have always had a sense of who their enemies are, and the Chinese seem to be making really good offers on infrastructure contracts. And they come in on time, and they come in below budget and great as far as Israelis are concerned. And we also tend to play a very short-term game. There’s very little long-term planning here. So if you have a port that needs to be built and the port company from Shanghai comes in and gives you a good deal, you’ll take it. And you might not necessarily think about what that’s going to look like 30 years down the road, 50 years down the road. We put out fires. That’s the Israeli way of doing things. And there’s very little long-term thinking, not like the Chinese, of course, who have very careful long-term imperial considerations.
So that’s also a difference between the Chinese and the Americans. When I was at the port, the obvious question is what… The Sixth Fleet is across the bay, I think. I don’t know, it’s less than a mile. And they said, “Well, what do you want from us?” When the tender was open for the port, because it was a public contract. It was open to any bidders. The number of American companies who bid was zero. No American companies bid on the contract. And so the Chinese got the contract. And that’s also something that’s going on. The Americans just aren’t there. The Chinese are hustling. They’re making good deals, both because they’re out to make some money and because they’re considerations are imperial as well as the profit motive. So an American company looking at a project like the Haifa port would’ve to say, “Okay, am I going to make my investment back within 20, 30 years?” And there would be all kinds of graphs showing yes, no.
The Chinese have other considerations. So they want to make their investment back, of course, but they’re playing a much bigger game. And that game is visible in Trieste, and it’s visible in Greece, and it’s visible across Africa, and it’s visible in Iran, and now it’s visible in Haifa. And the considerations are imperial considerations, ones that would’ve been familiar to the British a hundred years ago, which unfortunately are not that familiar to Americans, I think, who are also playing a shorter game than the Chinese are in Israel. Israel’s a very small player. We’re kind of caught between the two big powers. Of course, we have our affinity with the United States. There’s no cultural affinity to China. There’s no attempt by China to export Chinese culture to Israel. So Israelis are consumers of American culture, and everyone watches Netflix and loves the NBA. And there’s no danger of Chinese competition in that regard, but things are definitely changing.
Rebecca Burgess:
Yes, Americans do have not just shorter attention spans, but I would say our reaction isn’t necessarily ‘put out a fire’ as in ‘put a bandaid over it for now and move on and leave it for someone else to deal with down the road,’ which is a very unfortunate and very disastrous tendency, I think. But slightly along those lines, in our remaining minutes, I was wondering if… It reminded me of the larger framework of the whole Israeli and media discussion and how you in particular have drawn our attention in the West to how, and in America, how we get it wrong so often because we impose a framework that simply isn’t there for Israel.
So we tend to see everything happening within Israel, not only, as we mentioned earlier, from this very western, it’s a byproduct of the West and Europe, but also in America from a very kind of race and equality type of a discussion when in fact that’s not what it is, and how that kind of blinds us or hinders us from understanding what actually is in play within the state. And maybe that’s a little pivot for you to remind us again of why that just simply isn’t true, and especially in terms of this increasing Middle Easternization as you were mentioning, how that maybe is the key to tell us or remind Americans why it is not about this race and equality narrative.
Matti Friedman:
I think Americans often see things through an American lens, which I guess makes sense. And there’s a tendency to take American problems and then view other countries through the lens of those problems. And I understand why race is the demon that stalks the United States, and that’s clear to anyone who’s lived in the United States as I have very briefly, and anyone who knows anything about American history. But the problems here are different. I’m not even saying they’re necessarily better, but they’re completely different. The Jewish problem was never a problem of color. So my grandmother’s family, she had a bunch of brothers and sisters and her parents, they were all shot in the forest outside this village where they lived in Poland by people who looked exactly like them. There was no color difference between them. It wasn’t about color, it was about some other kind of difference.
And Jews had these incredible problems living in societies where they were a minority, and ended up in Israel. And now there’s an attempt to portray Jews in Israel as a kind of stand-in for white Americans or stand-in for maybe European colonialists. There’s a lot of guilt bouncing around the West and a lot of desire for stories that can help channel that guilt. And Israel is used, in many different ways, as a blank screen onto which to project characteristics that people don’t like. So you’ll see it described as a colonialist power, or racist, or militarist, or nationalist, and mostly it’s projection. It’s not that we don’t suffer from those problems necessarily, but mainly it’s projection. The Jewish population here is about 6 million people, and we live in the midst of the Arab world which is 300 million people, and in the midst of the Islamic world, which is one and a half billion people, maybe 2 billion. There’s some argument about the numbers.
So Israelis don’t feel like an empowered majority. They’re not analogous to white Americans. Palestinians are minority among Israelis of course, but they’re part of the regional majority that outnumbers Jews by a very wide margin. So one of the tragic aspects of this conflict is that both the Palestinians and the Israelis feel like an embattled minority, and both are right. There’s a lot of truth to those claims on both sides. It’s impossible to understand that dynamic if you’re just projecting the American sentiments or American problems. And there are American politicians who’ve begun doing this. And we heard people say in Congress things like, “What they’re doing to us in Palestine is what they’re doing to us in Ferguson,” in an attempt to really draw that line between Black Americans and Palestinians, who have nothing to do with each other.
The predicament is completely different, and it’s better to understand another country completely on its own terms rather than to bring in a lot of American baggage and then reach the wrong conclusions about what the solution might be. Because if you’re imagining that the solution here is civil rights struggle along the lines of Martin Luther King, you just will not be able to solve any of the actual problems that exist. So I think Americans sometimes get into trouble with things like that. And they’ve walked into some trouble in Iraq by making some incorrect assumptions about who Iraqis were, and what they wanted, and how similar Iraq was or could be to the United States. There’s a sense that Iraq was kind of an America in waiting if only it could be free to be America. And the cost of that error was extremely high, and you know more about that than I do. An earlier mistake was in Vietnam, kind of a similar assumption. So it is a problem that America seem to run into a lot, and it’s one that’s best avoided.
Rebecca Burgess:
Well, you’re mentioning some wars and conflicts, so I almost have to end on this note, but before I end on the note about conflict and war and veterans, since you had mentioned Maimonides earlier, as a student of political theory myself, with Maimonides and Al-Farabi, their western counterparts, Aristotle, Aquinas, the hardest thing it seems is to actually know what is, versus what you think you are seeing and describing and getting from opinion to knowledge is… Well, I know what you’re doing every day in journalism, but also what we are hoping to do on this podcast is uncover the things that we think we know and show all the rich complexity underneath it.
And part of that complexity, going back to war and conflict and knowing your enemy, but knowing who you are, is Israel is this fascinating culture, or nation now, of veterans. And since I study veterans, I’m often looking for the clues between how a society understands citizenship in itself and leadership and statesmanship in terms of what risk they have done for their country. And I often wonder if that does color their politics, and their political discourse, and their political understanding of themselves and their role in the world, or if that just doesn’t color it because it’s more common, if that makes sense.
Matti Friedman:
I think that the mandatory military service here does have an effect on the way people think. I think you’re less likely to embark on a military adventure if you are likely to be affected by it very personally. And of course, I served in the military. I’ve got two boys who are almost 16, and they’ll be serving in the military within a few years. It does change the way you think about what the army is. You know the military a lot better than most Americans do, so you’re much less likely to buy the kind of bullshit that the military likes to sell civilians. And you can really see that in our parliament, where I think it’s much easier to bullshit American politicians than Israeli politicians just because people have been in the army and they kind of have a realistic sense of what is and what isn’t possible and what the needs are or are not.
And that’s all very important, but the numbers serving here have gone down percentage-wise. So the numbers are still over 50%, but a lot of Israelis don’t serve. The ultra-orthodox, for example, don’t serve. Arab Israelis don’t serve. Many mainstream Israelis get out of it in different ways. And so the society’s changing. It’s becoming a more individualistic society, less that highly-mobilized, socialist society that we might remember 30 or 40 years ago. The place is changing. The military is still very powerful and it’s still, I think, our most trusted institution. I haven’t checked the polls recently, but I do believe that is the case. And it is a kind of unifying institution, but in this day and age, as you know it’s true in Israel and it’s true in the States, the idea of unifying institutions is very much under fire and everything is becoming divisive and binary.
And it raises real questions about how we’re supposed to live in a democracy if you can’t agree on the institutions, if you don’t agree who won the election, if you don’t agree about the judiciary, if you don’t agree about the military, about the people making decisions about the life and death of your children. So it’s a fraught moment here in that regard. That’s really what people are arguing about in Israel. There are protestors out on the street mainly because of this idea that the institutions are threatened, that the institutions are threatened by our fellow citizens who seem to be a threat to us, and we seem to be a threat to them. And it’s this strange, dark social media moment that’s raising real questions, I think, about how we’re supposed to maintain democracy and democratic institutions. And I know we’re all dealing with that, not just us here in Israel.
Rebecca Burgess:
Right. Well, to not end on a depressed, dark note has been a wonderful conversation. Thank you. I know we could have gone so much further into each one of the topics, but on a lighter note, to end, I was wondering if you could share with us maybe one of your favorite stories or anecdotes from the research you did for your latest book, Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen. And this is a beautiful wrap up moment, right? We were just talking about war, we talked about music earlier and culture and how these things kind of show us what’s actually going on, illuminates more difficult political kind of questions. So you wrote this book about Leonard Cohen going to the front lines in the Yom Kippur War and his music there, and you got special access, I’m pretty sure, if I remember right, to some of his notes, or a diary, or a manuscript that he had written. Was there one moment or little anecdote that stuck in your head as just either lovely, precious, or just hilarious?
Matti Friedman:
There were so many. I had such a great time researching the book, not only diving into the Cohen material. Cohen is, of course, this great kind of poetic, bohemian figure from the sixties who shows up here and gives one of the weirdest and maybe greatest concert tours of all time. And I got to meet these, I think of them as soldiers even though now they’re in their seventies and they’re all grandparents, some are men and some are women, people who encountered Leonard Cohen in Sinai in the middle of this war.
And I remember meeting one woman whose name was Orley, who remembered that Cohen showed up at their base. This was a base at the very tip of Sinai, and these very young women had just been through a horrific experience where their radar station was rocketed by the Egyptians and five of their friends had been killed. And they’d just gone through this, and then suddenly Leonard Cohen was at the base and someone told her that he needed a place to sleep. He needed a bed. And Orley, who loved Leonard Cohen, very quickly volunteered her bed and showed Leonard Cohen into the barracks and kind of put him in her bed and still remembered it. And she was so touched by it. And she said, “I wasn’t in the bed with him, but he slept in my bed.” And this still meant something to her, all these years later. It was something that they shared, and it was a very human moment amidst kind of inhuman events in the Yom Kippur War of 1973.
Rebecca Burgess:
The little human moments that actually keep things going. Thank you so much for sharing that, and thanks for your time. Again, that was Matti Friedman, journalist, and author. And I’m Rebecca Burgess, and this is Liberty Law Talk. Thanks so much for listening.