Halevi Analyzes Oct. 7 Impact on Jewish World
In a conversation with Emory University historian Ellie Schainker at The Dupree, Yossi Klein Halevi reflects on recent Israeli life.
Yossi Klein Halevi, the Israeli journalist, prize-winning author, and senior fellow of the Shalom Harman Institute in Jerusalem doesn’t believe that the shock of what happened on Oct. 7, 2023, is a temporary phenomenon. In a recent discussion sponsored by the Zalik Foundation at their Dupree building in Sandy Springs, he expressed the belief that it will resonate for at least another generation.
“Israelis always prided ourselves on not seeing ourselves in a Holocaust context, of not seeing this defenseless condition as being in any way relevant to us. But on Oct. 7, we experienced a relapse into powerlessness in the State of Israel.”
In one 24-hour period, he maintains, the promise that early Zionists made, that the state of Israel would be a safe refuge for Jews, came crashing down. The fact that more than a thousand Israeli civilians died defenseless, many in horrific ways, within the borders of Israel, without the immediate protection of the IDF, was, Halevi believes, a traumatic experience.
In a conversation with historian Ellie Schainker, a Jewish Studies scholar at Emory University, about “How Oct. 7 Changed the Jewish World,” Halevi noted that what occurred on that day recalled the memory of the helplessness that marked the Holocaust years.
“What Oct. 7 reopened was the trauma of the Holocaust,” he said, “and it forced us to realize that we haven’t really overcome the Holocaust and for me in particular, it was a very difficult revelation, because I’m working on a book whose subtitle is how the Jews overcame the Holocaust, and I still believe that it’s more or less true, but I’m a little less certain than I was when I started writing this book five years ago.”
What lent the attack by Hamas particular power was its timing — coming as it did, after an extended period of domestic political upheaval that was marked by deep divisions within Israel society. Those divisions only deepened when the Knesset passed a law in July of 2023 which limited the power of the country’s Supreme Court. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets to protest the law and the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“The year leading up to Oct. 7 we experienced a kind of a scenario,” Halevi notes, “of what the internal unraveling of Israel would look like, the country devouring itself, losing its minimal sense of solidarity, of shared purpose. We never experienced anything quite like the year leading up to Oct. 7, and then Oct. 7 comes, which was a kind of pre-enactment of, G-d forbid, the destruction of Israel from without.”
But despite all this and despite Halevi’s own misgivings about the state of the country’s political direction before Oct. 7, the Israeli author was impressed at how the country put all that aside on Oct. 8.
“One of the great achievements of Israeli society in our history was Oct. 8. Because what happened on Oct. 8 was not only that we came together, it was one of the peak moments of unity in the history of Israel, but we came together from the lowest point of schism that we had ever been in in nearly 80 years of our history.”
Moreover, what has particularly impressed Halevi was the response of Israel’s younger generation, what he said had been dismissed as “the TikTok generation.”
On his podcast recorded during Israel’s Independence Day, May 1 he admitted to his colleague, Donniel Hartman of the Hartman Institute. that before the terrorist invasion from Gaza there was some question as to whether young people had the right stuff. The question he said many asked, was, did the older generation impart the ethos of Israeli courage, of self-defense, of heroism to the next generation and did it all make a difference during this long war?
“They rose to the occasion immediately,” Halevi believes. “Some of these kids have been in uniform for 500 days, reservists, leaving their families, their work, their businesses, and taking up the burden of their generation’s role in the next phase of the Israeli story of Jewish history. And I’m so moved by them. You see their exhaustion and their determination, and we haven’t seen anything like this in a very long time.”
So, the challenge, as Halevi sees it, is that Israel has two models to choose once this war is over and the nation rebuilds for the future.
“We have Oct. 6, where we’re tearing ourselves apart. We have Oct. 8, where we instantly pivot to and relearn the instincts of peoplehood. I think most Israelis want to be in Oct. 8, a majority, maybe even a strong majority of Israelis want healing.”
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