29: Yuval Noah Harari: Crisis and tragedy in Israel (Part 1)

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0:18Hello. Welcome to The Rest Is Politics, leading with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. And our guest this week is Yuval Noah Harari. So Yuval is a public intellectual. He's the author of extraordinary books which cover world history going back almost to the creation of the world, certainly all of human history. He's written books on the future. He's engaged with AI. He's sold tens of millions of copies. He's also, though, deeply involved at the moment as one of the leaders of the protest movements against Benjamin Netanyahu. So we are going to interview him into two episodes. And in the first, we'll focus on Israel and what he's up to at the moment, what's going on in Israel.

1:09And in the second, we'll do a much more typical leading episode about his work, about politics, about AI, and about his beliefs. Excellent. So, without further ado, here's part one of our two-part interview with Yuval Noah Harari.

1:27So, welcome to The Restless Politics Leading with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. And we're very lucky today to have with us Yuval Noah Harari, who I saw in Israel last week. And I'm now in Amman. He's still in Israel. We're both, I think, in extreme heat, although that's not very rare nowadays. I think there's extreme heat almost everywhere in the world. We're not an exception anymore. But Yuval, when I left you, it was a very, very tense moment because you were looking forward to what was going to happen in parliament on Monday when the government was going to be driving through a decision relating to the position of the judiciary in Israel.

2:08You have been very, very involved in many of the movements and the protests trying to stop this happening. Can you just tell me what's happened since I last saw you? Yes, basically, maybe we start with the context of what is really happening in Israel over the last few months. To understand it, we need to ask just one key question, which is what limits the power of the government, which is the key question basically in every democracy. Democracy is a system of checks and balances. So no single body, no single center has ultimate power. And in Israel, which has a problematic history, there really is just one check on the power of the governing coalition.

2:55And this check has always been the Supreme Court. If, for instance, a coalition has a majority in the Israeli parliament, in the Knesset, it can pass, for instance, a bill that takes away voting rights from Arab citizens of Israel. The only institution, the only mechanism that can prevent this anti-democratic bill from becoming the law of the land is the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court can intervene and says, no, you cannot do that. What the government of Israel has been trying to do in the last few months is to neutralize the Supreme Court in various ways. It's been called, I saw in foreign press, a judicial overhaul, but it's much, much more than that.

3:44It's actually an attempt to gain unlimited power. Once the government, in the specific circumstances of Israel, this is not true of other countries, But in Israel, if the government succeeds in neutralizing the Supreme Court, it means there is no other check on its power. It can do anything it wants. And it says openly, I listen to supporters of Netanyahu's coalition, to members of Netanyahu's coalition, and they repeatedly say, we won the last elections. That means we can do anything we want. And any limit on our power is anti-democratic. This is their conception of democracy. You win the election once, you can do anything you want, even, for instance, to disenfranchise some people.

4:34And this is their aim. And unfortunately, this week, they have gotten a crucial step closer to realizing their anti-democratic vision. Now, Yuval, I'm really, really pleased to meet you, albeit over the internet. We should just explain to the listeners as well, we're going to have two episodes with you. The first, we're just going to talk about what's happening in the here and now in Israel. And you're very, very well known in the UK and in different parts of the world for your broader writings. And, frankly, he's one of the leading intellectuals and historians and philosophers that we know. So we're going to be talking about that much more in the second part.

5:15But just on this first part, because I can feel in that first answer the anger and the passion that you feel. And I just wonder, what is it like being an Israeli at the moment? Because we had a question on our podcast the other day from one of our listeners. How are we being seen from the outside? And my sense is of Israel, frankly, that feels very, very on edge. that actually it's not impossible to imagine a civil war. Am I over-dramatizing that? One good thing I can say is that this has been going on for six months. There has been a very surprising and powerful resistance movement with hundreds of thousands of Israelis out in the street.

6:00Week after week, there has been some violence, but so far not a single person was killed. So this is the good news. But the level of hatred and fear between the different sections of Israeli society is mounting. This is a deliberate policy of the government. The government, as part of its propaganda campaign, it deliberately tries to incite hatred between different parts of the Israeli public, divide and rule a strategy. Do you mean the whole government or just these extreme religious parts that Rory and I have talked about on the podcast last week? It's very hard to tell the difference. I mean, it's not just this Jewish power party and religious Zionism party.

6:49It's also members of the Likud, also members of the ultra-Orthodox parties. They've been saying some really terrible things in recent weeks. For instance, a member of, I think, one of the ultra-Orthodox parties saying that the demonstrators are the worst enemies of Israel, worse than Hamas or Hezbollah and they should be destroyed. Saying the same thing, for instance, about LGBT people, that they are a worse danger to Israel than Hezbollah or Iran and should be treated accordingly. when people reserve soldiers in the Israeli IDF, Israeli Defense Forces, saying that they're refusing to serve anymore under a dictatorial government, you have some members of these parties calling them traitors.

7:38And even one of them mentions that the punishment for traitors on the battlefield is a firing squad. Yorval, can I just, I mean, one of the things that struck me seeing you last week is how deeply passionate and engaged you've become. And I wondered how that felt to go from being a historian reflecting on populism in Britain or the United States to then having to encounter it at home and what that's felt like as a more emotional journey. Yeah, well, I've been thinking about this question myself. Living in Israel all my life, wars and very tense situations are not foreign to me. So it's not like this is the first time I come face to face with a problematic historical event.

8:32But I think beyond the fact that I feel that the future of Israel and my personal future is at stake, because of my very broad, long-term historical perspective, I see the present event in Israel as more dangerous than I think most Israelis realize. I think this could be a turning point, not just a momentary turning point in the political history of Israel or even the state of Israel. I think this could be a turning point in the 3 ,000 years history of Judaism, that Judaism is facing one of its most dangerous moments ever. It has managed to survive the Jewish people and the Jewish religion, several terrible calamities during its history, but nothing really like that because this time we are facing not a physical destruction, we are facing spiritual and moral destruction.

9:38Because what is happening in Israel, the people who are leading it are members of extreme groups who hold an ideology of Jewish supremacy. And if they gain power, and they are gaining power, they could take the Jewish people in Judaism in an extremely dangerous direction, which could really result in a spiritual destruction or the splitting of the Jewish people or the Jewish religion into two rival currents. On the one hand, this new Judaism that believes in Jewish supremacy and uses brutal force to repress not just Palestinians and Arabs, but also secular people and LGBT people and women. And on the other hand, a more liberal Judaism that remains loyal to its traditional views.

10:42And these two types of Judaism may split and never be able to rejoin again. I think I've always found it quite difficult to place you politically. and I don't know whether that's been deliberate or whether you see yourself pretty much as being outside politics but now in a way what we're seeing is that you're entering the political debate the live current political debate in a more direct way and I just wondered whether there's any part of you that understands what these extremists are about and the reason I ask that is I read a very interesting profile of you in the New Yorker magazine before we did this interview.

11:21And you said you went through a period when you were, quote, a kind of stereotypical right-wing nationalist. You thought Israel as a nation is the most important thing in the world, and we're right about everything. The whole world doesn't understand us and hates us. So we have to be strong and defend ourselves. And I don't know if you follow English football, Yuval, but there's a football team called Millwall whose fans very proudly sing, no one likes us, we don't care. And I just wondered, is that what is now taken over? And just how political are you becoming? I want to get a sense of whether you feel yourself becoming more political.

12:00Yeah, I mean, this is not something I planned or hoped for or anticipated, but I have been drawn quite deeply into this resistance movement. For instance, shifting from just giving interviews in podcasts and academic lectures to standing in public squares, giving public talks to tens of thousands of people, which was quite a surprise for me that I can even do such a thing. And do you feel, when I say, do you understand where these extremists are coming from? Does it flow from right-wing nationalism? Absolutely. It's just an extreme version of it. It's just an extreme version of it, basically saying that we are right about everything.

12:42we are pure, we are the best, everybody is against us, everybody hates us, they don't understand us, but we are still right. And more than that, it's the feeling that we are superior to everybody. And they say so openly, they chant in the streets, it's difficult to translate from Hebrew, but basically saying that Jewish lives and Jewish souls are superior to the lives and souls of Arabs or of non-Jews. They say it completely openly. Our finance minister, our minister of internal security, other members of the coalition, they're completely open about these views. For instance, they are completely open about their plan to annex the occupied Palestinian territories without giving citizenship to the local Palestinian population.

13:38Again, one of the reasons they want to neutralize the Supreme Court, and this has been a long-term goal of theirs, is that they know, they suspect that the Supreme Court would block such a move as being anti-democratic or against basic human rights. Some of them even talk about destroying the Al-Aqsa compound and replacing it with the Jewish temple. When you tell them, you know, this would lead to World War III and nuclear war and things like that, no matter, God will help us. So, this must be both a very courageous thing to do, but also a very uncomfortable thing to do, because presumably there will be strong pressure on you from people saying you mustn't criticize Israel, because if you criticize Israel, you will be giving, I don't know, comfort to Israel's enemies.

14:34It's that, I mean, do you feel that you're under pressure from people who say, look, I understand what you think you are, but please don't say this because this is going to be bad for our international reputation. Some people say it. I mean, I'm not doing these things. I'm just talking about them. It's not me that is causing the problem. And I think, again, the danger to Israel itself, to the Palestinians, to the entire region, to the future of Judaism, the danger is so great that I think we have to talk about it openly. And I think that even people who don't care about the Jewish people or about Israel, I mean, this will have repercussions far beyond.

15:17I mean, just think about Mr. Netanyahu has been mourning the world repeatedly in recent years about the dangers of a nuclear Iran, going from capital to capital around the world, saying, don't give nuclear weapons to religious fundamentalists. And he is now creating exactly this regime here. He is giving Israel on a plate to religious fundamentalists, including our nuclear weapons, our army, our cyber industry. And this could have consequences far beyond the limited borders of Israel or the immediate region. Okay, Yuval, fascinating. Great to talk to you. We've got a lot more to talk about, so let's just take a quick break and we'll see you in a minute.

16:26Only pay for what you need at LibertyMutual.com. Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty. Savings vary. Unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.

16:38Hello, and welcome back to The Rest is Politics Leading, where we're joined by Yuval Noah Harari. So one of the things you said when I saw you last week is I was drawing analogies with other populist movements, with Donald Trump or with Erdogan in Turkey. And I think partly for these reasons, you said, no, Rory, you have to understand it's worse than that. This is a different type of context. Yes. I mean, partly because of the occupation. If you think about Hungary or Turkey, Hungary doesn't hold millions of non-Hungarians under occupation. And it is also part of the EU and wants to stay that way.

17:20So it places significant limitations on what the urban regime is doing there. Also, in most of the other places, yes, the populists are supported by parts of the religious groups. But in Israel, it's the religious zealots who are leading this anti-democratic power grab. And their opinions, or at least some of their opinions, are really, really extreme. It's not about let's not let immigrants into our country or let's limit LGBT rights. It's about establishing a theocracy. Just like a week ago, one of the members of the coalition who is partly in charge of the education ministry, he's not the education minister, but he's in charge of one of the branches of the education ministry, gave an interview in which he said, yes, I know that Israel has always been described or was created as a Jewish democratic state, this was a mistake.

18:26We need to get rid of the democratic part and make it just a Jewish state. Do you think that Benjamin Netanyahu, in his heart, believes any of this? Or is he now just a prisoner of these extremists? First of all, last week we discovered that he certainly has a heart.

18:49because he said, and this is so characteristic, he was hospitalized. He said that he forgot to drink water and had sunstroke and then he had a pacemaker implanted. Now, usually you don't implant people with a pacemaker because they didn't drink water, but this may be the first case in medical history that this happened. So we know he has a heart at least, or at least a pacemaker for the heart. But what's going on there? As a historian, I find it extremely difficult to get into the minds of leaders in general, especially in extreme situations. And I think that it's a general rule in intelligence gathering, also in the military, that it's very dangerous to base your intelligence on your assumptions for what people think or believe or want.

19:42you need to look at capabilities you need to look at what they are actually doing now I don't know what goes on in the mind of Benjamin Netanyahu I don't know if even he knows it, you know this is why we go to therapists because we often don't know what we do the things we do but I watch I observe what is he actually doing and what he is actually doing is giving more and more power to these religious extremists, like taking somebody who was convicted in incitement to hatred by a court of law and was not recruited to the Israeli army because the army thought, oh, this person, his views are too extreme.

20:27And he made this person minister of internal security in charge of the police. And I look at the kind of laws that the coalition he leads is passing in the Knesset And this is what I base my analysis on, not on trying to get into his mind. Yeah, I understand that. So I met Netanyahu a few times when I worked with Tony Blair, and I can remember the very, very, very first meeting, turning to one of the Foreign Office senior advisors and saying, what's this guy like then? This was back in the mid-90s, mid to late 90s. And he said, all you've got to know about Netanyahu is he's a 24-carat bullshitter.

21:11Now, the 24-carat bullshitter that we then saw was incredibly fluent, spoke perfect Americanized English, very Western-leaning, very fond of displaying his credentials with America. And I didn't have a sense of this religious, any sense of religious zeal at all. I got the security picture. That was it. So that's what makes me think, and I agree you're right not to sort of follow our own assumptions, but I don't see the religious bit. First of all, it's been quite a number of years since that meeting, and people change, sometimes quite dramatically. For sure. Another thing is that in the Middle East, and Rorik, I think, can back me up on it, we say, don't give any importance to what regional leaders are saying in English.

22:05Only listen to what they are saying in their mother tongue in Arabic or in Hebrew. Listen to what Mr. Netanyahu is saying in Hebrew. Ignore everything that he's saying in English. Yuval, I've got to say, I don't speak Hebrew. And one last thing is that nobody disputes that the man is a genius. He's an extremely clever politician. He is a genius in PR. So we are dealing with somebody very, very impressive. Unfortunately, using his considerable talents, I think, for detrimental purposes, certainly for Israel. So what does he say in Hebrew? I know it's very hard to translate things from a language where you express something that can't necessarily be expressed in the language.

22:57But are you saying he's more extreme when he speaks Hebrew than he is? And how does that express itself? Much more in the way that, for instance, he talks about the demonstrators, the protesters in the street, inciting hatred against them, even calls for violence sometimes. If not he himself, then his PR team and his son, Yaya Netanyahu, who is a very central figure also in all that. It's the way. Let me explain it like this. I mean, when people here listen to him speak, it's very obvious to us. And as people, let's say, from the protest movement, when we hear him speak, we know for 100 % certainty he is not talking to us.

23:47He doesn't care about us at all. Who's he talking to? He's talking only to his base of supporters. He's been giving a lot of speeches also on television and so forth about what's happening in Israel. and he sometimes makes a show as if he's trying to be conciliatory. But again, the man is a PR genius and the man understands Israeli society like almost nobody else. He knows, if he wants to, he knows how to reach me and how to reach other people in the protest movement. And he doesn't even attempt to do that. And it doesn't matter exactly what he says, but what you hear all the time is, I don't give a fuck about you.

24:30I care only about my base, my tribe. I'm talking only to them. And I don't care that you know that. I don't care that you know that I don't care about you. And this is a feeling about the person who controls our country, who controls the security forces, which is really, really scary. Can I come back to what's happened in the weeks since I saw you? So just if you can, having given the context and the background, talk us through. I guess I saw you last Friday and we're talking again now on a Thursday. Just what's been happening over the last six days? Oh, so many things. The main things are that the Knesset, the parliament, has passed the first crucial law, neutralizing, stripping away authority from the Supreme Court, limiting the ability of the Supreme Court to strike down laws of the Knesset or resolutions of the government.

25:35I don't want to get into the legal details. It doesn't really matter. But it's a law that limits, doesn't completely abolish, but limits the ability of the Supreme Court to resist actions or non-actions, Also, if the government doesn't do something, you can't go to the Supreme Court and say, hey, tell the government it must do that. By the way, can I just say one thing? Can the Supreme Court, with its old powers, look at this legislation? Yes, absolutely. This has now happened. People, of course, immediately ran to the Supreme Court and told the Supreme Court, strike down this law. And the Supreme Court said, I'll look at it in September.

26:17So now that the next big crisis will be in September, when the Supreme Court is supposed to debate this new piece of legislation. What also happened dramatically around this time is a wave of reserve soldiers in the Israeli army stopping their military service. It's most dramatic in the Air Force, but it's not only there. You have hundreds of Air Force pilots, of cyber weapons experts, of commanders, of elite units, of ordinary soldiers saying, this is it. Our contract is with Israeli democracy. Israeli democracy has expired. Our contract has expired. We no longer serve. And again, this is most dramatic in the Air Force, which relies to a very large extent on reservists.

27:12Nobody knows the extent of what is happening because it's a military secret, obviously, but was unimaginable just a few months ago. You know, in Israel, after the Holocaust, given all the wars and the security situation, military service is almost like sacred duty. And you have people, including former chiefs of the army, former commanders of the Air force, former commanders of the security forces, publicly and openly saying to soldiers, don't serve, we support you. But this shows you the extent of what's been happening in Israel. Just one last example. One of them is the former chief of the internal security service, the Shin Bet, Nadav Argaman, who was appointed by Netanyahu and until about two years ago was in charge of the security service.

28:10And this is what he's saying now. So this is not, you can say, okay, I'm a historian, a scholar, whatever, with my views. You have the heads of the security forces telling the soldiers, this is an anti-democratic power grab, don't serve. That's why it feels like it's on the brink of a civil war. If you have people like that saying things like that, that feels very, very, very fragile. Yes, the government has been trying to describe this, especially in internal propaganda, as a military coup. You had people like Netanyahu and his coalition members saying, this is a military coup against the government.

28:45In military coups, usually soldiers take up arms against the government. Here we have soldiers laying their arms down. It's the first military coup in history that is conducted by soldiers who are laying down their arms. Yeah, well, one of the things that I guess we feel all the time is an attempt to try to understand the perspective of the other side. So obviously, you are very familiar with trying to describe why people vote for Brexit, why people vote for Trump. What is your best account of the other point of view? What is the most generous, empathetic account you can give of why people are voting for this coalition around Netanyahu?

29:30Some of them honestly believe in this religious ideology of Jewish supremacy. I mean, it should be very, very clear. It's not just, you know, three people in the government. You have hundreds of thousands, maybe more, of Israelis who authentically and honestly believe in Jewish supremacy. Yes, we are God's chosen people. Everybody else is below us. And we should have more rights. We should be superior. Then you have a lot of people who really don't understand what democracy is. It's a very widespread problem. You have lots of people who honestly believe that if you win the elections, it means you can do anything you want.

30:13This is democracy, right? And they don't understand, no, this is not democracy. Democracy means that those who win the elections can form a government and can do many, many things, form policy on foreign affairs, on security, raise taxes, lower taxes, go to war, make peace, so many things. But they have to work within the limits of the law. and there are certain basic things like the structure of the regime and like basic liberties, human rights that you cannot change even if you won the last elections. Otherwise, anybody who wins the last elections immediately says, okay, now I pass a law that there are no more elections and I rule for the rest of my life.