American-born Israeli journalist Yossi Klein Halevi is highly regarded for his insightful commentary on politics and culture in Israel. He has written for the Jerusalem Report magazine and penned articles on the Middle East for a variety of North American and Israeli publications. A senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, he’s the author of the 2001 book At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew’s Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land. His latest book, Like Dreamers: The Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation, won the Jewish book of the Year Award in 2013. His first book, Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist, has been re-released. He spoke to The CJN during a recent visit to Toronto.
Why re-release Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist?
Let me give you a bit of background about the strange trajectory of the book. I began writing it when I was 19 in 1972. I was very much immersed at the time in Jewish extremism, with the Jewish Defence League, [Rabbi] Meir Kahane, the violent wing of the Soviet Jewry protest movement. And I started writing this book as a way to defend Jewish militancy. Fortunately, I put it aside and didn’t finish it in my youth. I came back to the book in my 30s, and the book that emerged was the exact opposite of what I intended it to be, which was a repudiation of Jewish extremism.
The book came out on Nov. 6, 1995, two days after the Rabin assassination.
The book was very widely reviewed, but almost no one bought it. No one wanted to be seen walking into a bookstore and buying a book called Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist at that moment.
So the book died.
When I published Like Dreamers last year, my publisher, Harper Collins, said why don’t we publish your first book.
How is it relevant today?
It’s coming out at a particularly appropriate moment, when many Jews are asking themselves what is our relationship with the international community. Israel is increasingly isolated. Jews in Europe are being subjected to the worst forms of anti-Semitism since the Shoah.
The Jewish People today are divided between two anxieties. One anxiety is for the physical safety of Israel and of parts of the Diaspora. Another anxiety is for the soul of Israel and the consequences of an ongoing occupation of another people. And I embrace both of these anxieties at the same time.
So for me this book tells the story how one angry young Jew went from being a one-dimensional Jew capable of only relating to one form of threat to Judaism, the physical threat of anti-Semitism, to a Jew who is struggling with the ongoing challenge of complexity.
Was this a gradual evolution or was there an incident that led you to give up the way of violence?
Very much a gradual evolution. The deeper process this book describes is not just a break from extremism. The deeper story being told here is the question of how we perceive our place in the world. A Jewish extremist believes we have no friends, no allies in the non-Jewish world. Everybody hates us, and I was taught that by my father, a Holocaust survivor from Hungary.
The sense of radical aloneness in the world is the soil from which extremism grows. An extremist divides the world into two categories: those that actively want to harm my people and those who couldn’t care less. Everyone, to some extent, is implicated in my people’s suffering. And that’s what enables an idealist to place a bomb in a public place.
Did you engage in violence?
Yeah.
What did you do?
It began incrementally in New York City in the 1970s. We started with non-violent civil disobedience – sitting in the streets, blocking traffic, taking over offices that related to the Soviet Union, commercial and cultural offices. Then the next step was breaking up concerts of Soviet artists.
I threw chicken blood at a Ukrainian dance troupe.
One time I brought in a fake suitcase bomb to a Soviet cultural performance. We phoned in a bomb threat, but it didn’t succeed.
Gradually I was moving more and more toward the fringe. I was ready at one point to get involved in planning terrorist acts. By that time, the movement was disintegrating, and I never made the final descent into terrorism. But I saw very clearly in my own psychological trajectory how easy it is to take one step after another.
Do you believe there’s a direct line from those days to Baruch Goldstein to the Rabin assassination and the burning of the Palestinian teen this past summer?
Very much so. I think that what we were responsible for is breaking the first barrier – the notion that Jews don’t do X. When I was growing up, Jews did not engage in violence for a political cause, at least not as Jews.
The terrible line was crossed in January 1972 when a smoke bomb was thrown into an office in Manhattan that dealt with the Soviet-American cultural exchange and a secretary died of smoke inhalation. It turned out she was Jewish.
I was ready to rationalize that murder as collateral damage in our liberation struggle for Soviet Jewry.
But I realize now that something was beginning to gnaw at me. That was the beginning of doubt. That event was the moment when I first began to question.
The instances of violence you’ve referred to take place over more than 40 years. How can you deduce a trend from that?
The link here is Meir Kahane. He moved from the United States to Israel in 1971 and brought his culture of violence to Israel.
Those in Israel responsible for the horrific acts of violence we’ve seen periodically, one way or another were influenced by Kahane, or by the atmosphere he created. Certainly Baruch Goldstein, who murdered 29 Muslims at prayer in Hebron in 1994, was a direct disciple of Kahane.
Yigal Amir, who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin, was an indirect disciple of Kahane. He was actually influenced by Goldstein.
As far as the burning of this boy, we don’t yet know what influenced the three young men accused of the atrocity. We’re waiting for the trial. But there’s an atmosphere that’s been created. There is a breaching of moral, legal and psychological limits.
Isn’t that just among a small segment of the population?
Israeli society as a whole was horrified by every one of these acts of violence. Of course it’s a fringe. But my question is, how does this fringe emerge, how is it being nurtured? The fringe is growing.
You’ve said Israel is becoming more and more isolated. Why is that?
We’ve fought against pariah status from the very founding of the state. The Arab world has used various weapons against us – conventional warfare, terrorism, boycotts. The tragedy we are facing today is that what was once an exclusively Arab and Soviet campaign to isolate Israel is spreading in the West. The delegitimization of Israel is becoming legitimate in polite circles in the West.
The question is why. First of all, most of the international community ignored the fact that Israel repeatedly offered to end this conflict and to empower the Palestinians.
It’s a combination of faulty memory, animus toward Israel and tremendous success for the Palestinian propaganda machine, which doesn’t stop for a moment.
What can be done about it?
People often ask me when I lecture, why isn’t Israel’s information campaign more successful.
The reason for that is that the Palestinians need only three words to make their case: occupation, apartheid, expulsion.
We have a much more complicated story to tell. I think we have a profoundly truthful story to tell, but it requires explaining what happened with UN partition in 1947. And as soon as you start talking about UN partition in 1947, you’re dead in the era of social media.
We need multiple strategies. We need to tell our story quickly and we need to tell our story deeply.
There’s one more piece in this: the fact that the Israeli government continues to expand in the settlements is simply incomprehensible to me. Now, I’m separating that from the question of whether we have the right to be there.
We just fought a brutal 51-day war in Gaza. I make no apology for fighting that war. That was a war of necessity for Israel. It was a just war. But to come out of that war and then the first announcement of the government is expanding settlements in Gush Etzion. Have they lost their minds?
This government, which in other ways I support, is acting in a deeply self-destructive way to Israel.
What do you make of the progressive left’s criticism of Israel?
You say progressive left. I think the left in many ways is deeply reactionary, in the sense of limited vision. To look at the world, to look at reality through ideological blinders is to impose wishful thinking on reality.
The reality as most Israelis today know it is a combination of left-wing and right-wing insights. The left was correct about the dangers of occupying another people. The right was correct about the impossibility of reaching an agreement with the Palestinian national movement that denies our legitimacy in any borders. So most of us in Israel today, and I very much include myself in this, are neither left or right, but a mixture of both. We’re centrists.
The story I tell in Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist is the story of how I moved from a rigid ideological worldview to a centrist worldview that tries to understand the world as it is, and how to navigate in reality.