Yuval Noah Harari Wants to Reclaim Zionism
11 min read
At a rally in Tel Aviv this past summer held by Israel’s beleaguered left, Yuval Noah Harari appeared as the keynote speaker. He began his speech not with the latest developments from Gaza or a grand pronouncement about how the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians might be solved. Instead, he did what Harari does best: place all of it, everything people tend to take for granted, within a very, very long historical framework. “Once upon a time, there was neither a Jewish people, nor a Palestinian people,” Harari said. “A hundred million years ago, this land was home to dinosaurs.”
Harari, as anyone who has bought a gift for a dad must know, is a historian whose books, starting with his account of human and civilizational evolution, Sapiens, have sold in the millions. Since the beginning of his stardom, Harari’s identity as an Israeli was no secret. His accent would give that away. But his feelings about his country were not something he openly shared. Consciously or not, he kept his distance from Israel as his stature rose in the pop-intellectual firmament and he jetted off to meetings with the likes of Mark Zuckerberg.
But starting two years ago, when Benjamin Netanyahu was reelected prime minister and formed an extreme-right government intent on dismantling some of the basic guardrails of Israeli democracy, Harari felt he couldn’t stay quiet. He is now among the most internationally famous Israelis speaking publicly about the possibility and necessity of peace.
As the anniversary of the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel approached, I wanted to hear from Harari, who happened to be in the United States touring with his new book, Nexus. We met on the Upper East Side of Manhattan one morning in mid-September.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Gal Beckerman: I’ve probably never felt more despairing in my life about Israel than I have in the past year. You bring historical perspective to everything that you work on, so I’m curious if that makes you see things more hopefully, or whether the country seems even more stuck from where you stand.
Yuval Noah Harari: Israel is at a crossroads. I don’t think its existence is at stake. I do think its identity is at stake. The soul of the country is now the battleground, and the outcome will decide not just the shape of Israel for many, many years to come, but also the shape of Judaism. I think that Judaism is at an intersection. Maybe we haven’t been in such a place for 2,000 years, since the end of the Second Temple era.
Beckerman: What is the parallel with that moment?
Harari: The Second Temple era ended after the Zealots took over with messianic visions and almost destroyed the Jewish people, almost destroyed the Jewish religion, which had to then reinvent itself. And we’ve come full circle. Judaism as we know it was born from the ashes of the Temple of Jerusalem in the failed rebellion against the Romans that the Zealots instigated. For me, the birth scene of Judaism is Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai, one of the great sages, fleeing Jerusalem and coming to the Roman general Vespasian, who later became Roman emperor, and asking him for a favor: “Please give me Yavne and its wise men.” And Vespasian agrees. This is myth more than history. But this is the founding myth of Judaism. Yavne was a small town not far from present-day Tel Aviv, and that was where ben Zakkai established a learning center, and it changed the nature of Judaism.
Beckerman: It turned from a religion based on priests and temples and sacrifices into a religion of learning, right?
Harari: What do Jews do for the next 2,000 years? They learn—they sit in Yavne and they learn. They go to Egypt; they learn. They go to Brooklyn; they learn. And eventually the circle is almost closed. They come back. They come back to Jerusalem. And the Zealots have now taken over Jerusalem again. And the question that keeps bothering me: What did Jews learn in those 2,000 years? Why did ben Zakkai have to go ask Vespasian for Yavne? He could have just asked Vespasian, Tell me, how do you build an army? How do you fight wars? You Romans, you are so good with power, with violence. We Jews, we want to learn violence. We want to learn power. And Vespasian could have told ben Zakkai. Why did it take 2,000 years of learning in yeshivas to go back to that same moment and basically adopt the values of the Roman legion? Because if I think about what the values are of people like Itamar Ben Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, Netanyahu—it’s the values of the Roman legion.
Beckerman: So if Netanyahu and his partners on the extreme right are the Zealots, how do you see the other side—yourself—in this battle for the soul of Israel?
Harari: I would say that the other side is Zionist, and it’s important to emphasize and reclaim this word, which has been vilified, not just now, but for decades. When I hear people compare Zionism with racism, this itself is a racist statement, because Zionism is simply the national movement of the Jewish people. And if you think that Zionism is racist and is abhorrent, you’re basically saying that Jews don’t deserve to have national feelings. Turks can have national feelings, and Germans can have national feelings, but when Jews have national feelings, this is racism. Zionism basically says three simple things that should be uncontroversial. It says that the Jews are a nation, not just isolated individuals. There is a Jewish people. The second thing Zionism says is that, like all other peoples, the Jewish people also have a right to self-determination, like the Palestinians, like the Turks, like the Poles. And the third thing it says is the Jews have a deep historical, cultural, spiritual connection to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, which is a historical fact.
Beckerman: This is Zionism as I understand it. But the term has taken on different dimensions for so many people.
Harari: What the political conclusion is from these three facts, that’s up for grabs. And throughout Zionist history, for the past 150 years, people had different ideas. Some ideas were definitely racist and very violent. Some Zionists have denied the existence of a Palestinian people and the right to self-determination of Palestinians. But this is not a logical conclusion from the premises of Zionism. You can acknowledge that there is a Jewish people. It has a right to self-determination. It has a historical connection to the country. And at the same time, there is a Palestinian people. It also has a right to self-determination, and it also has deep historical, spiritual, cultural connection to the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. And now the political question is, what do you do with these two facts? And there are potential solutions, a two-state solution, which you can argue, where exactly will the border pass and what will be the rights of Palestinians who remain in Israeli territory? And we can discuss all that. But basically, Zionism doesn’t deny the existence and rights of Palestinian people.
Beckerman: One of the other things I’ve been struggling with this past year has been the inability of most people to contain more than one narrative in their minds—like the two narratives you just described. And I’ll go a step further, which is to ask about empathy. I can contain the pain and the sorrow that I feel for what happened on October 7 and the people I know, what happened to Jews. And I can still open the newspaper and see what’s happening in Gaza and feel extraordinary pain too, but there are settings in which I can’t talk about the pain that I feel for one side or the other, because it immediately becomes a zero-sum game.
Harari: It’s like in an emergency room in a hospital, where there is triage. You have a couple of people shouting in pain. I’m shouting in pain and somebody near me is also shouting in pain. If the doctor pays attention to them, then maybe they take care of them and not of me. So I shout harder, and like any attention given to the pain of the other person, I feel it as an attack on me, because it has repercussions. I will suffer.
Beckerman: Do you think that Israelis’ capacity for empathy has been degraded over the past year?
Harari: This is one of the things that wars do. This is not unique to Israelis. When there is a war, the first few casualties get so much attention. The millionth casualty, it’s just a number. And this is one of the biggest dangers with the current war, is this process of desensitizing people, brutalizing people. This is how violence breeds more violence, because you get used to it, and it becomes easier. And this is what is now happening with the hostages. When Gilad Shalit was taken hostage 18 years ago, the whole country was focused on that, and Gilad Shalit’s family was sacred. Whatever you thought about the deal to release Shalit, to say a word against him or his family was really blasphemy. And now the police are beating up the families of the hostages. The people spit at them. People curse them. There is a propaganda campaign against them through the right-wing media.
Beckerman: Does this worry you?
Harari: It bothers me, and at the same time, as a historian, unfortunately it makes sense; it’s humanity. Most people have no capacity to empathize with the suffering of the other side, partly because it’s like a resource that is exhausted. In the Second World War, you would not see in British newspapers a lot of images of German families burned in their homes during the bombardment of Hamburg or Dresden.
Beckerman: I’ve heard you talk about the distinction between peace and justice, as a more reasonable way of trying to think about the conflict.
Harari: To some extent, every peace needs justice and every justice needs peace. But they are different ways of looking at reality, at history. Every peace deal in history required giving up some justice. You can’t have absolute justice. Peace is more objective. You can see, are people being killed or not? But people have very, very different concepts of what justice means to them. So if you try to gain absolute justice, you will never have peace. You cannot go back and bring the dead to life; you cannot undo the injuries, the rapes, the humiliation. The only change you can make is in the present. How do we make sure that more people are not killed and injured now and in the future?
Beckerman: I’m curious what you think about the pro-Palestinian protests here and why they have been so compelling, in particular, to young people.
Harari: Obviously, as often happens, you project your own problems, your own issues, onto a distant conflict. And many times, people don’t really understand the conflict. I see it especially with this projection of the colonialist interpretation. People take this model, which is very central in the United States and other Western countries, and impose it on a completely different situation. And they say, Okay, the Israelis are the white Europeans who came to colonize the indigenous Palestinians. And there are some kernels of truth in this, but it’s a wrong model. I mean, it denies the fact that there was continuous Jewish presence on the land, going back 3,000 years. For 2,000 years, Jews were one of the chief victims of European civilization, and suddenly now they become the Europeans? This also ignores the fact that more than 50 percent of Israeli Jews are not European. They are descendants of Middle Eastern Jews from Egypt, from Yemen, from Iraq, who were brutally expelled from their ancestral homes after 1948 by Arab governments in revenge for the 1948 war. So my husband, for example, his family is from Egypt, expelled by Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Beckerman: I know that you made a decision to publicly weigh in when Netanyahu’s coalition tried to pass a law curbing the power of the supreme court; you saw a threat to democracy. Does it still feel like that threat exists?
Harari: Yes, and then even after everything that has happened with October 7 and the war, Netanyahu and his colleagues are still at it. You know, he has not taken any responsibility for October 7. I don’t hold him responsible for every decision of some company commander in the army and so forth. But the prime minister, the leader of the country, has one major responsibility—to set the priorities. He decided that the No. 1 problem with Israel is the supreme court. The priority is to destroy the supreme court. And this is his responsibility, nobody else’s. And if he, if Israel had given a quarter of the attention that was given to the supreme court to Hamas, there would have been no October 7. And the other thing, which goes back to the beginning of our discussion: The Israeli nation is collapsing, the patriotic bonds that hold the nation together are being torn deliberately by Netanyahu and his colleagues. He is the most hated person in the history of Israel. Like 50 percent of the people just hate him on a level that is unimaginable. I think the No. 1 responsibility of a leader, especially for a country in such existential danger as Israel, is to unify. And he’s the last person on Earth who can unify Israel. If you go down the street in New York, you pick at random some person, that person has a better chance of uniting Israel than Benjamin Netanyahu.
Beckerman: This interview will be published around October 7, on the first anniversary. I’m curious where you think we will be next year, on the second anniversary.
Harari: I think it has a lot to do also with events in the United States, with the election in November. You see this wave of strongmen who believe only in power, only in force, who spread hate. People here ask me, Should Jews vote for Donald Trump? Should Jews vote for Kamala Harris? Who is better for the Jewish people? The key question is, what are the values of the Jewish people? Are the values of the Jewish people those of a bully who sees the world simply as a power game, where you need to subdue and win over everybody else?
Beckerman: Do you think the United States should exercise more pressure over Israel? A lot of activists really want Harris to pledge to stop selling arms to Israel. Do you think that’s a good thing?
Harari: Israel is facing a real existential threat from Iran and its proxies, and it’s no secret. They say it openly: They want to destroy Israel. What I think is that the United States should continue to support Israel, but demand something. Here, I am with Trump. You know this transactional worldview. You give so much money. Make some conditions for what Israel should do in exchange; use the leverage.
