We Need a Different Government – Interview on TheMarker’s Podcast with Guy Rolnik – Rabbi Michael Avraham
This transcript was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.
🔗 Link to the original lecture
🔗 Link to the transcript on Sofer.AI
Table of Contents
- Opening and presentation of the joint document – Rabbi Michael Abraham explains why he wrote, together with Amnon Levav, a man of the left, a document calling to replace the government actually out of ideological difference.
- The distinction between the right and support for Netanyahu – the Rabbi argues that identifying the right with the current coalition is mistaken and creates public and intellectual confusion.
- The government’s points of failure – not necessarily on right-left issues, but in public service, state functioning, management, responsibility, and a corrupt political culture.
- The meaning of cooperation with the Haredim – concern about demography, inequality in sharing the burden, lack of economic and security participation, and taking public resources without contribution.
- Criticism of Likud and Netanyahu – the Rabbi describes a culture of lying, irrelevant appointments, managerial decay, and deep harm to the integrity of the public service.
- His assessment of Ben Gvir and Smotrich – Ben Gvir is described as a “punk” with no staff work and no achievements, and Smotrich as a militant and unchecked right-winger.
- The 12-point document and the recommendation to right-wing voters – the Rabbi calls for refreshing the concepts and voting for any alternative bloc, including the center and even the moderate left.
- His personal position in the election – the emphasis is on replacing the bloc, not on a specific party; he leans toward Eisenkot and perhaps Bennett, out of a search for sanity.
- A look at the “change government” and the claim that there is currently no “full-on right” – the previous government is seen as a ray of light, while the current coalition does not represent a real right.
- The claim of “monarchy” and the weakening of the branches – the Rabbi presents a situation in which the Knesset is subordinate to the government, the judiciary is threatened, and power is effectively concentrated in the hands of one person.
- The controversy around the judicial reform – the Rabbi thinks reform is needed, but that the move that was made went too far; therefore the issue was not included in the joint document.
- The argument over the danger of dictatorship – the interviewer sees it as an immediate danger, while the Rabbi thinks the scenario exists in principle but the practical fear of it is exaggerated.
- The discussion of Ben Gvir as a public symbol – beyond being a marginal figure from the past, the Rabbi is troubled that today he is seen as the representative face of Israel.
- The issue of Rabin’s murder and Yigal Amir – the Rabbi criticizes the “Rabin carnival,” argues there has been exaggeration in turning Rabin into a symbol, and raises a complex but controversial view of Amir.
- A defense of complex thinking and a rejection of compromise politics – in his view, one should deeply understand the opponent’s arguments without blurring disagreements, and in that way make shared life possible.
Summary
General Overview
The conversation revolves around the joint document Rabbi Michael Abraham wrote with Amnon Levav, a man of the left, under the title “We Need a Different Government.” The main novelty, in the Rabbi’s view, is not so much the content of the arguments as the very agreement between two people located at opposite ideological ends. The goal of the document is to separate right-wing identity from support for Netanyahu and the current coalition, and to say explicitly: you can be a right-winger and still see this government as causing serious harm to the country.
## The Right Is Not Netanyahu
The Rabbi opens by qualifying the label “clearly right-wing” and stresses that one must distinguish between the classic right and phenomena such as racism, total occupation, or aggressive conduct. In his view, the identification that has emerged in recent years between the right and Netanyahu and his coalition is a dangerous distortion. The government’s damage is not only in the diplomatic-security sphere, but mainly in the basic functioning of the state: public service, integrity, priorities, and management.
## The Center of Danger: Partnership with the Haredim and the Breakdown of the Public System
Abraham says that the most worrying factor in his eyes is not Smotrich or Ben Gvir, but the partnership with the Haredi parties. He describes a situation in which a growing sector of the public does not share the economic and security burden, yet enjoys the resources of the state and even uses them to perpetuate the situation. At the same time, he sharply attacks Likud for a culture of lies, irrelevant appointments, bankruptcy of the public service, and concentration of governmental power.
## Ben Gvir, Smotrich, and the Call to Vote for an Alternative Bloc
He describes Ben Gvir as a “punk” who acts without staff work, without consequential reasoning, and without real achievements. Even where there are ideas he supports in principle, such as distributing weapons or the death penalty, he thinks the implementation was rushed, unprofessional, and unhelpful. Against that background, he calls on right-wing voters to “refresh the concepts”: not to vote for the current coalition, but for any alternative bloc. From his point of view, the important distinction is not between parties within the alternative bloc, but between the “bloc of those causing damage” and another bloc. He mentions Eisenkot, Bennett, and even partnership with figures who are not clearly on the right as reasonable possibilities.
## The Change Government, the Reform, and the Fear of Monarchy
The Rabbi expresses relative appreciation for the change government, which he saw as proof that diverse forces can work together. By contrast, he argues that the current government is not at all “full-on right,” but rather a collection of interests, punks, and politics of control. From here comes his sharp description of the situation as a kind of “monarchy”: the Knesset is subordinate to the government, the judiciary is under threat, and the entire system is controlled by one person. Regarding the judicial reform, he presents a complex position: there is room for reform, but the move that was made went too far. That is why the issue was not included in the joint document, because it requires more delicate distinctions.
## The Argument about Dictatorship and Netanyahu’s Motives
The interviewer presents the central danger as the establishment of a dictatorship through taking control of the legal advisory system and the Supreme Court. Abraham disagrees: he admits the scenario is possible in principle, but thinks the practical fear is exaggerated, and that apocalyptic talk may also be a tactical mistake. In his view, Netanyahu is not acting only out of personal interest connected to his trial, but also out of ideological and conceptual motivations about how the state should be run.
## Rabin’s Murder, Yigal Amir, and the Need for Complex Thinking
In the stormiest part of the conversation, the Rabbi defends a complex position toward Yigal Amir: absolute condemnation of the act, but a willingness to recognize the dedication of a person ready to pay a price for his belief. In that context he criticizes what he calls the “Rabin carnival” and the transformation of Rabin into a mythical figure. This position arouses sharp opposition from the interviewers, who see it as granting dangerous legitimacy. Abraham replies that the real problem is precisely totalistic thinking, which sees people as either absolutely wicked or absolutely righteous.
## The Conclusion: Understand Your Opponent Without Compromising the Truth
The core of the Rabbi’s message is a rejection of dichotomous thinking. He is not asking to “find the middle” or create an artificial compromise, but to understand the other side’s arguments well, to identify points of truth there too, and from that to sharpen disagreements in a sane way. In his eyes, only complex thinking can make shared life possible, allow acceptance of majority rule, and enable real persuasion of political opponents. Alongside that, the clear practical conclusion of the conversation is an explicit call for people on the right not to vote for the current coalition.
Full Transcript
[Speaker B] Thank you, and good luck to all of us. We need to work hard.
[Speaker A] Hello to Miki Abraham. Hello, hello. The reason I asked you to come to the studio this week is simple: a mutual friend of ours, Amnon Levav, sent me last week a document that the two of you wrote together. You’re a very clearly right-wing person—we’ll hear that in a moment—and he’s a very clearly left-wing person, and it turns out that despite that, you maintain a friendship even in these crazy times. And together you wrote a document reflecting your shared positions, a document of agreements. And that’s interesting, because you really come from opposite ends of the spectrum, and its title is: “We Need a Different Government.” So explain why, a few days or a few weeks before the election, as a clearly right-wing person, you decided to call for a different government.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] All right, first I’ll qualify that a bit. I don’t know what “clearly right-wing” means. Yes, I’m a man of the right, you could say, but whether clearly or not clearly—that’s already another question. It depends how you define what the right means, yes? If the right means racism, then no. If the right means some kind of total occupation at any price, then also no. But yes, in the classic terms, not the ones coined in recent years, then I’m a man of the right. That’s one thing. Second, precisely because of that difference, I felt that this ongoing and mistaken identification between support for Netanyahu and his coalition and the right is causing a breakdown for many people, an intellectual distortion for many people, because I think the damage this coalition is bringing is enormous. I mean, it’s a horrific coalition. And that damage is not necessarily on right-left axes, in what’s called policy, foreign policy or security, though there too we all know what’s going on. But in terms of public service, in terms of society, in terms of how a state functions, in all those terribly prosaic terms, the feeling is that this is simply a total failure heading toward even more total ruin. And therefore, even if you can argue whether you really love Smotrich’s settlements everywhere, or the rampages there in Judea and Samaria or not, there are other aspects such that even if you really love all those things, it seems to me they still don’t justify supporting anyone in this coalition. Now, in the arguments that we’ve been having with Amnon for years—we’ve been friends since childhood and then again from the army—
[Speaker D] Where did you meet in childhood, by the way?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] His uncles were simply my neighbors, so he came to play with them, and then by chance we met again in the army. And since then we’ve stayed in touch, good contact, good friends. We like to think about many things together, and we have our arguments. But we felt that although the arguments sometimes go to extremes or even to anger, there is a lot in common, and when we try to maintain balanced thinking and see where there is disagreement and where there isn’t, we discover that our agreements are not insignificant. And regarding this coalition, they are more or less absolute. So we thought there would be value in writing a joint document, precisely to emphasize that point. That is, the points themselves—I don’t think there’s some huge novelty there, except perhaps in the concentration of them or something like that, though I assume even that exists elsewhere. But I do think the connection between two such writers, both of whom can agree on all these points, and leave out what they don’t agree on—and we wrote there that we are leaving out what we don’t agree on—and what remains, I think, is enough to form a decision regarding the coming election.
[Speaker A] Miki, what scares you most as a citizen of the State of Israel, as a father of children, as a philosopher, as all of those things—what scares you most in the possible scenarios if Netanyahu manages to form another government with Smotrich and Ben Gvir?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You mentioned exactly the names that are actually less frightening to me. There are people there—it’s true, the competition is tough—but there are names there like Goldknopf and Deri and others who, first and foremost, frighten me, and the demography that comes with them. And I think the cooperation with them is—I don’t know if it’s the primary damage, but it’s a very central damage of this coalition.
[Speaker A] Wait, wait, Miki, before we talk—what scares you? What will happen if another government like this is formed?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What scares me is that a growing percentage of the population in this country does not participate in its economic life, does not share its security burden, and at the same time takes abundantly from both those areas for its own benefit. That is, they make security and policy decisions without bearing the burden those decisions impose, and of course there’s the economic issue: they take, they loot the public purse, if we want to say it less politely, without contributing anything to it. On the contrary, they take the money in order to continue their non-contribution into the future, or to perpetuate that lack of contribution into the future. That’s regarding the Haredim and cooperation with them. But the other components of the coalition aren’t much better. The Likud components frighten me mainly in terms of integrity, management, and public service. There is a culture of lying—really, you simply can’t believe a single word that comes out of anyone’s mouth anymore. There were always lies, and people tell me: always, politicians always lied and always manipulated. That’s true. But it seems to me that certain boundaries were crossed in this term that hadn’t been crossed before. The public service is simply going bankrupt. Irrelevant and unworthy appointments in enormous numbers; some positions are not filled at all because they can’t find yes-men to stand there. That’s what frightens me about Likud, apart from the cooperation among all these factors. Right now I’m focusing on each one separately. And Smotrich and Ben Gvir—I don’t know, Ben Gvir is just a punk, so I don’t even know what to say about that.
[Speaker D] Just a punk?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. Nothing—he’s a punk who runs around intersections shouting. He doesn’t do anything. He fails at everything he touches.
[Speaker D] And what he did to the police?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, what he did to the police, and what he didn’t do as well—he did nothing, meaning he didn’t succeed at anything. Even the things he boasts about. Crime in Israel isn’t punkishness, it’s—
No, he’s a punk, and that’s why these are the results. His punkishness is the cause; it is not the result. It’s the cause of the fact that nothing happens. And if nothing happens, then the damage piles up, because if you don’t deal with the things you’re supposed to deal with, then naturally—the second law of thermodynamics already tells you what happens when no hand intervenes: the mess grows. And therefore, even achievements he boasts about—I don’t know, weapon distribution, which in principle I support, although in my eyes it was far too uncontrolled, and they didn’t examine it systematically, they didn’t really do the work to see where yes and where no, and how to prevent the possible harms and try to maximize the possible benefits. That requires some kind of staff work, and I don’t think Ben Gvir has any connection to that. Or worsening the conditions of prisoners—again, appealing to 18-year-old kids looking for revenge. And I have no problem with revenge. I have no sentimental feelings toward those prisoners. I just don’t think it’s an achievement, because I don’t see what it contributes to me, except some kind of release or catharsis for feelings of revenge. And what else? And the death penalty, of course—well, there’s no need to elaborate on that. No examination was done; if an examination had been done, I assume they wouldn’t have done it. And again, I pity no one. I’m entirely in favor of the death penalty in principle. I just don’t think it’s practical, I don’t think it’s useful, and therefore a person has to weigh things according to benefit and not according to what his gut says. And that is exactly what a punk does not do. So that covers…
[Speaker A] So let me read, let me read for a moment the 12-point document you wrote together with Amnon—what you think… how the current government has failed. Failure to take responsibility for the events of October 7, total surrender to the Haredi leaders, appointments of cronies without qualifications, civilian dysfunction following October 7, distorted economic priorities, ongoing fighting on six open fronts, cancellation of orderly decision-making processes, deterioration in our international standing, loss of governance in Judea and Samaria, violence and crime in Arab society, a culture of lies and slander, and you ended—really topped it off specifically—with Qatar, with what they allowed the prime minister’s advisers to do by working in parallel with Qatar. So in practice, for the people listening to you, Miki, and persuaded by what you’re saying—I’m talking about right-wing people—what are you actually suggesting they do on Tuesday? Who should they vote for?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] First of all, I suggest they refresh the concepts. The fact that you are a man of the right does not mean you need to vote for one of the gang of people causing damage who are now serving in the coalition. There are other right-wing options too. Even if you are a right-wing person, you can also vote for centrist parties, and I don’t think the difference between the right and the center is really all that significant—which worries Amnon a bit and makes me happy. And you can even vote for Yair Golan. I don’t like the man; I think he has no control over his mouth. And I also don’t like his worldview. But I don’t think he would cause the kinds of harms that propagandists attribute to him when they try to scare us with apocalyptic scenarios—what will happen when he’s there, as, I don’t know, ten seats within that government, as if that’s some enormous thing. So therefore, for my part—I said this, I later wrote a much longer post that expressed only my own opinion, not with Amnon—and there too I said that in my view the question is which bloc you vote for, not which party. The party is really not significant in my eyes. The bloc—the question is whether you go with the current bloc of people causing damage, or whether you vote for the other bloc. Within the other bloc, I don’t see very significant differences between the various components, and therefore I think I’ll probably go for Eisenkot, maybe Bennett, but probably Eisenkot. Really, you just want a little sanity, that’s all. There is sanity there. There are people there from all sorts of directions who sound entirely reasonable to me. There are people on the right there, there are people less on the right—everything is fine. I’m not frightened even by people who are not on the right. I also think we do need to reach some kind of political compromise with the Palestinians, even though I’m a man of the right, and that’s not a contradiction. There are many people on the right who think that way, they just don’t see much chance for it. So I’m not frightened—if they reach a compromise, all the better, if it will really be something one can build on. At the moment I don’t have much confidence in that possibility, but I’m not frightened by it at all.
[Speaker D] Can I ask what you thought of the “full-on right” government at the beginning of its path, at the end of December 2022 when it was taking shape?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I formed my view of this government during the period of the government that preceded it. The change government we had here was, in my eyes, really a ray of light in the darkness, precisely because of the combination of different forces and the success in functioning together. And it seems to me—I’m not really immersed in the details—but it seems to me they functioned fairly well. And the violent struggle that was conducted against them from the opposition showed me very quickly what was waiting for us when these guys switched sides and became the coalition. Not that I needed many indications of that. I think you could already see it long ago. But this government is not really a “full-on right” government, not at all. I don’t see what connection it has to the right.
[Speaker D] That’s what it calls itself.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, it calls itself that. That is exactly the consciousness engineering I was talking about at the beginning. What is right-wing about distributing food vouchers to Deri’s voters? Is that right-wing policy? Or keeping people on welfare payments without giving them fishing rods, without giving them some way to make a living—I’m talking mainly about the Haredi public. What is right-wing about terrible educational outcomes that are deteriorating lower and lower? I really can’t see what is right-wing here. Aside from the emotional fervor, and perhaps Smotrich, who in my eyes really does represent a kind of right wing, too militant and not sufficiently restrained, he is the genuinely right-wing wing of this government. Other than him, in my opinion there is no right there. There is a collection there of—I don’t know—unidentified people, punks at one level or another. The people around Netanyahu—it seems to me he really gathered around himself a lot of punks who won’t interfere with him. He runs everything alone. And something very, very important in my eyes is that for many years now in the State of Israel there have been only two branches and not three. That is, the Knesset is completely controlled by the government. The firing of Yuli Edelstein was an excellent example of this. The chair of a committee whose role is to oversee the government is determined by the government, and if the overseer is not to its liking, then they throw him out and bring someone else. That’s just an indication that in fact we don’t have a Knesset, we don’t have a legislative branch. We have an executive branch and a judicial branch, which now is also under threat. And now, when the entire executive branch has been emptied of people with backbone and any kind of common sense, and is controlled exclusively by one person, what has happened is that from three branches we’ve gone down to two. One of them is under threat, and the second still exists under the complete control of one person. That means we have become a monarchy. Now, a monarchy—even if that person is very smart, good, a perfectly righteous man, and only the public interest as he sees it stands before his eyes—one can agree or disagree. He still cannot make correct decisions that way. If you don’t hear other positions around the table, if everyone is a yes-man, if anyone who doesn’t say yes is simply thrown away from the table, then you will not be able to make good decisions, even if you are a genius and a saint. All the more so if you are not a great saint. I think he is talented, yes, but he is not a great saint. So that is very dangerous in my eyes. We have become a kingdom of one person.
[Speaker D] Can I ask whether you voted for one of the parties in the change government? Clearly. You voted—meaning, you’ve already been on this path for some time?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, but for a long time already. For a long time already I’ve been voting for parties that, in today’s terms, one could call the change government. After all, the change government was created, I don’t know, five or six years ago—this is a relatively new term, yes? But I’m saying, for a very long time already I have not voted for parties that belong today to the current coalition.
[Speaker D] And your surroundings, if I may ask?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And my surroundings—it depends what you mean by my surroundings. The environment where I live is classic Religious Zionist. I think many there vote for Smotrich, and quite a few, in my opinion, for Ben Gvir. You might as well talk to the wall. There’s no way, there’s no way. Most people, I…
[Speaker A] You’re not managing to influence them?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m on the margins, in my opinion. I mean, I write, and that’s why I asked what community around me means. There are people who live around me who don’t read what I write. That’s not my community.
[Speaker A] Where do you live?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In Lod, in the core group, the Torah-oriented core group of Lod. But I don’t think—a large part of them, there are some who do, but a large part of them don’t really read what I write, aren’t really influenced, because they don’t belong to the relevant wing. I do have a kind of online community in Israel and also a bit around the world of people who do read, and there I think there is influence. There are many arguments; my website is very active. But there, yes, I think there is influence, though I have no way to measure it. I mean, I don’t know.
[Speaker A] It stands out that what you and Amnon obviously could not manage to agree on, and which does not appear in your 12 points, is Netanyahu’s attempt…
One thing with this coalition is changing the system of government in Israel, subordinating the Supreme Court and the Attorney General’s legal counsel to the coalition. Doesn’t that bother you?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It does bother me, but I told him I don’t want to write about it, and I’ll tell you why. It bothers me because in my opinion there should be reform, but I think this reform went too far. What’s happening now is—an example I’ve given many times—during the struggle against the reform, right? Ancient history already; a year or two is eternity. During the struggle against the reform, there were ads from those who supported the reform and those who opposed it that said exactly the same thing, exactly. Meaning, one side says: look, it’s true that reform is needed, but you went too far—that’s the opponents. And the supporters say: true, they went too far, but reform is needed. So in the end you have a half-full and half-empty glass, and the only question is which half you’re looking at. So I don’t see this reform as a catastrophe, even though I think they went too far. I do criticize it, but I also think there is definitely room for reform. I think the judicial system in particular—that’s what’s at issue here—and the legal advisory system are being run in a very, very problematic way, and that’s why we didn’t want to get into this issue, because once you start defining what yes and what no, that’s not for a short document of bullet points. We have agreements among ourselves there too, but to define them you have to get into more detail, and so we decided to omit it.
[Speaker A] So I don’t want to open up too much argument and a long discussion here. I’ll tell you that I agree with more or less all 12 of your points. Of course I see different explanations than yours for how we got to those 12 points, and different explanations from you and from Amnon. But with all these things, I say: okay, these are long processes in Israeli society, and it could also be that we’re reaching some point where they start accelerating. The only thing I see as a clear and present danger—meaning that if a new government is formed it will happen within three months—is dictatorship. Because here I put on my more technical hat and say that, knowing how the system of checks and balances works in Israel, I know that if the coalition succeeds in taking over the Supreme Court and the Attorney General’s legal counsel, it can basically establish a dictatorship in Israel without any problem. There’s absolutely no problem coming to your house or mine and arresting us until the end of proceedings, until the court releases us—if it releases us, I don’t know what will happen. There’s no problem tomorrow morning taking over the television channels once there is no Attorney General’s legal counsel and no Supreme Court. So everything you’re saying is true, only in my opinion the clear and immediate danger is dictatorship before anything else.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, so here I have a bit of an argument with you. There is such a concern, but my feeling is that the worst case is overrated. Meaning, you take the worst case, which may exist on the theoretical level, and you turn it into the focal point. My concern about such a situation is weak; it’s faint. I think it can happen in theory, I agree, but my concern that it actually will happen is faint. And I’ll say something else. I was part of a great many joint groups with people from Brothers in Arms and what are called the Kaplan protesters on our flanks, right? All kinds of people like that, and in fact even some of the leaders there of those groups, and we tried to conduct some kind of dialogue—we didn’t really succeed. And one of the things I told them was that putting the worst case at the center and painting everything black, as if there is no achievement at all and refusing to acknowledge any bright spot from this gang of wreckers, is a very problematic thing. Very problematic not only because it isn’t true, but also on the tactical level. I told them again and again: with your own hands you are going to bring Bibi back on us in the next elections.
[Speaker A] I understand what you’re saying. I’ll tell you why I don’t call it the worst case. Because I, who know Netanyahu a little, think that of all the desires of all his partners and all the people in Likud, they don’t really interest him. Netanyahu wants to get out of his trial before anything else, and to do that he needs to fire the Attorney General and change the composition of the Supreme Court. The other things—I think Netanyahu is much less interested in all the Palestinian issues and all the issues that appear on your list. For him all of that is just tools right now, positions there, in order to achieve the thing he wants: simply to dismantle whoever stands in his way, to dismantle the checks and balances. So I think this is his most important plan of all the plans he has, insofar as he has any.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Here we have a disagreement. I don’t see things that way. I think there’s some trend here that is not driven only by personal interest. Again, it’s hard to enter a person’s heart, but I don’t think he’s driven only by personal interest. On the contrary, I think the consequences for him personally are very distant gains; it’s very doubtful he’ll even be able to get there. I think he’s driven by other interests and other trends, which are very troubling to me, but not the— I don’t think that it’s…
[Speaker A] What do you mean—which interests do you think drive him?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Interests that will let him operate on the level that, as he sees it, as he understands it, the gatekeepers won’t limit his ability to act. There’s a…
[Speaker A] To act for what? For what?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you think he wants? Policy as he believes in it, and of course as his partners believe in it, and in order to accumulate more power and more ability to carry out what he believes in. And I do think there’s an ideological dimension in him. I think those who attribute everything to personal interest are mistaken. And again, these are psychological assessments; it’s hard to argue about them, but that’s my impression. And that doesn’t make it any less troubling—on the contrary, in some respects maybe it’s even more troubling. But we have a disagreement over the psychological assessment.
[Speaker D] Yeah, so—I got a little stuck on Ben Gvir. You called him a brat, which feels sort of cute and diminishing, and I’m curious—first of all, you didn’t say where you’re originally from. You probably didn’t grow up in Lod, or did you?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I’m a native of Haifa.
[Speaker D] Ah, from the north. I’m from the Krayot.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, nearby.
[Speaker D] So I was wondering: when you saw the young Ben Gvir holding the emblem from Rabin’s car—you were, I assume, always in Religious Zionism. Right. How did you feel back then in the early nineties when you saw him holding the emblem from Rabin’s car? What did that do to you?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t even remember him. There was some—generally I remember there was someone like that, but he wasn’t a figure that took any significant place in the whole affair. Meaning, it wasn’t… okay, there were all kinds of Kahanists of one kind or another there. That phenomenon never spoke to me, and he was one of them, fine. I didn’t see anything—him suddenly now becoming, I don’t know what, some public figure who represents us in the world—I wrote there, I think I wrote this in my own post, not the joint one, that…
[Speaker D] He’s the face of Israel.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, he’s the face of Israel. That is simply one of the most shocking things there is. Not because of what he is, but because of the ability to identify him as our representative. That really says that this ordinary Kahanist, who once was just one among various wild people, has now suddenly become some kind of—I don’t know—figure people talk about when they talk about me. That is very troubling to me.
[Speaker D] He’s not just some figure. He’s a minister, and a senior minister, and he controls our lives.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, and he gets eight seats, or I don’t know how many—seven, eight, something like that. Meaning, he has a public behind him. And I think generally it’s younger people; the statistics show that too, because thuggishness and release for feelings of revenge speak more to younger people. But still, he has a very significant electorate. That amazes me.
[Speaker D] So when I was wandering around your website a bit and trying to get to know you, I came across an article from 2021. Actually today it’s five years old—from October 22, 2021. I don’t know if you remember it: “Another Look at the Rabin Carnival.” There was a paragraph there that I want to read. I think I’ve been thinking about it from the moment I read it. You go into detail there about—this week, by the way, we mark the day of Rabin’s assassination according to the Hebrew date—you write about that, and then you explain your earlier attitudes. Like this: “I have also written in the past about the trauma they keep putting us through around the assassination. It seems to me a ridiculous and pitiful hysteria, which in many cases is driven by a political agenda—although not always consciously—by a moral vacuum, and by simple loss of composure. Precisely because we are dealing here with a murderer who deserves a great deal of appreciation, certainly more than any other murderer who deserves none at all, the hysteria indicates that the motives here are not substantive. I also did not spare my rod from the crisis of the candle youth and the rest of the miserable people. I wrote that these phenomena arouse compassion in me and even amuse me a little (don’t tell them—it’s not nice to catch a person in his moment of grief). I understand that people are looking for a father figure, a Rebbe, and a guide inside the secular vacuum, and unfortunately for them they found nothing better than that redhead. Sometimes I think Yigal Amir did him a favor by murdering him and thereby instantly turning him into a historical exemplary figure admired by many and granting him an eternal name. That is how the Rabin legacy was created out of nothing. Really pathetic.” I feel here as though this is also about me.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It could be. I don’t know you, so I don’t know. But it was said about whom it was said. If you’re there, then it was also said about you—I don’t know. I really do think this phenomenon has gone out of proportion, in my opinion.
[Speaker D] The murder of a national leader?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. Again, I mean not the severity of the act, but the treatment that this thing receives and that this man receives seems bizarre to me. We’re talking about a person who in my opinion really has no legacy, no significant legacy at all. Even his diplomatic moves, he was dragged into them to a large extent. And in the end, to turn this into some sort of father figure, as I wrote there, some sort of father figure, leader, legacy—I’m saying, condemning the murder is one thing, and turning the man into some kind of, I don’t know what, that points to a kind of vacuum in people, a kind of—
[Speaker D] A vacuum of what? First of all, we talked about “Song for Peace” as a kind of symbol, and Rabin is a symbol.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay. In general, symbols don’t speak to me, neither on the right nor on the left.
[Speaker D] But isn’t the Fast of Gedaliah also basically commemorating the murder of a leader in the Jewish community?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] True, and there too I don’t see the Fast of Gedaliah as the center of the year. No problem—they can mark Rabin’s assassination, that’s perfectly fine. I just don’t think the carnival, as I wrote there, that goes on around it is proportional. I mean, in the end there really was a problematic act here. This man went to prison. As I wrote there too, when you read it, in my opinion he deserves a great deal of appreciation—Yigal Amir, sorry to say that here on this stage. Why? I’ll tell you why; I’ll explain why. Not because the act wasn’t dangerous and not because the act wasn’t severe, but because this was a person who was willing to pay a very heavy price—after all, most likely he would not have gotten out alive—for what he believed in. In my eyes that is worthy of appreciation. Along with all the great condemnation and the severity of the act and the need to punish him, in my eyes he is much better than various murderers who just murder because they feel like it, or because they want money, or because they’re angry.
[Speaker A] All of history is full of murderers who did the worst things in the world and were willing to pay prices, and those are exactly the people about whom we need to say that they are not worthy of appreciation. The fact that you’re willing to pay a price—there’s no limit to that line of reasoning. Tomorrow you’ll say that Hitler too is worthy of appreciation because he was willing to pay his prices. Where does this go? How far do you take it?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not tomorrow—I already said it yesterday. I mean, I’m extreme on this issue; I mean regarding Hitler. What I said, what I’m saying in the end, is that appreciating a person—and this is part of the struggle I’m trying to wage against the flood that keeps washing over us all the time, the flood of agenda-driven thinking that keeps washing over us all the time—we have to get used to complex thinking. And complex thinking says: this act was very severe, this act was very harmful, this person has to answer for it and sit in prison. All true. And together with that I can say that this person is worthy of appreciation for his devotion to the values he himself believes in and for his willingness to pay a price for—
[Speaker A] But that’s a very dangerous statement, because a lot of people who hear what you’re saying basically take from it: okay, we’ll be willing to pay the price. There are people in Israeli society who still think that a person’s dedication, willingness to pay a price, and willingness to do brave things—even if they are destructive, terrible, and immoral—is something to be appreciated. So in what you’re saying—and you are a public figure because you speak publicly and so on—you create, you say “complexity, complexity,” but the message the person receives from it is that you are lionizing this, you’re saying: there are also advantages in people of this kind. That is very dangerous.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not advantages but virtues. I’ll make two remarks on this. One remark: the approach of total condemnation will bring the next murder much faster than my approach. When you press an entire group of people into a corner—in my view, people who are not thinking correctly, but still, you press them into a corner—and pressing people into a corner yields extreme actions. Therefore, even on the tactical level, since you’re speaking now on the tactical level—what will bring the next harm, the next act, the next murder—I think my way is more useful even tactically, besides being more correct on the substance, because we need to think in a complex way. That’s the first point. The second point is that part of the damage lies in that approach itself. Because if you assume, as you do, that one may not evaluate a person in a complex way—say he is wicked in this respect, righteous in that respect, or something like that—but rather the evaluation has to be total, then indeed this danger is created: if I say, look, he should be appreciated for this aspect of his personality, then people will say, okay, but appreciation is a total thing, so apparently what he did was okay and therefore we should do it too. By contrast, if I manage to instill—yes, I’m putting myself too high here—but if I manage to advance this complex way of looking at things, then even if people hear me appreciating someone, they won’t necessarily conclude that they too should act that way. That’s exactly the point. I think we make our peace too quickly with this shallowness, and it’s a process that reinforces itself, because once you encourage this shallowness, that shallowness itself creates the danger. And I say: true, it’s more complicated to instill complex thinking, but I think in the long term it’s also correct and also more tactically useful—not only more correct. And I think people should be evaluated in a complex way. People from my side too, and from the other side too.
[Speaker A] Yes. I think that even in the short term, when you say these things—when you say let’s also look at the virtues—it reminds me a bit of the phenomenon in recent years of Tucker Carlson, who keeps saying all the time, I’m not antisemitic and so on, but every now and then he also says positive things about Hitler. And when you look at it in a very narrow way, he’s supposedly offering us a more precise, more nuanced perspective and so on. But the result is that within three years he built around himself a movement of people—a movement of antisemites, of historical revisionism, and so on. And the result is that he basically gave legitimacy in the United States, which is where his influence is centered, to saying: let’s rethink World War II and the Holocaust. And there’s a wave of antisemitism, and it’s happening in the biggest wave of antisemitism in history, and he’s a bit like you in saying: wait, wait, wait, I was only proposing that we look at things in a more complex way; Hitler is not such a homogeneous figure, not such a simple figure, he’s a more complex figure. And even if that’s true, so what? What’s the relevance? Once you open that up and say it on a podcast, the damage is enormous, because you’re creating an opening, creating legitimacy to later say awful things that spread more and more.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’ll answer you the way I answered the previous question. I think the damages caused here are not only a result of Tucker Carlson. Those damages are caused by him together with the approach you are representing here. Because if the approach you are representing here basically says: look, either we totally condemn someone or we totally praise someone—once you instill such a shallow perception, then whoever praises Hitler in some aspect will, of course, cause people to want to be like Hitler. But if you say no—I can appreciate someone who is a very dangerous person, an evil person, all true, but who has virtue A, B, C, I don’t know, something like that. Again, I’m not getting into the question of Hitler’s virtues; that’s not the point. The point is the principled question. Then I think this path will bear better fruit. And therefore I feel that it is precisely this totality of condemnation on the one hand, or affection or admiration on the other—both directions—that is what is to our detriment. The fact that people are unwilling to present a complex picture, unwilling to say: look, Bibi had an achievement, A, B, C—you won’t hear such a thing. Why? There are things he did achieve, in my opinion. Again, maybe we disagree, that’s not important, but in my opinion there are things he did achieve. And at the same time I criticize him very severely and I claim he should have been thrown out yesterday. But if I paint him as completely black, with no achievement, nothing at all—that has no credibility. The people who support his path simply let go of me; they disconnected from me. So what did I gain? I unified my camp very strongly, I gave them motivation that we are the children of light and those opposite us are entirely the children of darkness, and I unified the opposing camp as strongly as possible to remain the children of darkness. So did we gain anything? What did we gain from that? We gained nothing. Now this is strange to me, because as a man of the right I would have expected precisely people on the left to present such a position. Left-wing people who say: look, you need to understand the Palestinians on their own terms, you need to understand LGBT people on their own terms, or anti-LGBT people on their own terms, or all kinds of others. That is, you need to get into the other person’s shoes and try to understand how he looks at things, and there may be certain aspects where he is right, even though in the bottom line I’m against him—and that’s perfectly fine. But for some reason today, both on the right and on the left, I cannot hear or find people willing to look at things in a complex way, who say: look, there are positive sides, there are negative sides; in the bottom line I think the negative outweighs the positive—greatly outweighs the positive—and therefore I will fight against him with all my strength, but I will not hide what is positive in him. No, absolutely not. Because I think you also have to understand: when I want to persuade someone, I want to persuade someone who wants to vote for Bibi. I don’t want to persuade you; you’re not going to vote for Bibi. When I want to persuade someone not to vote—someone who likes Bibi and I want him not to vote for Bibi—if you say everything is black, you’ve lost him. Not just tactically—you’ve truly lost him, because he knows not everything is black.
[Speaker D] I just want to challenge that, because a few days ago I got off the train and met activists from “Noam” at the exit, with a huge loudspeaker and all that noise, handing out flyers, and I said: okay, let’s talk. A nice, friendly boy came up to me, a teenager, and he said: “We agree, right? Education needs to change.” And I agree, right, we need—there are many things in the education system—exactly, change toward what? So we started talking about things and went a bit deeper, and then I said to him: “Okay, and what about the Arab public?” And of course, absolutely not. I asked him: “Come on, I want us to find the middle. I don’t want me over here and you over there, as if we don’t live here together.” We tried to reach the middle. I said to him: “Look, even Ofer Winter has an Arab candidate friend on the list.” “No, absolutely not, Winter is canceled, because Yoseph Haddad is Christian and the Christians tried to kill us and it’s impossible.” I want to find the middle and I can’t. I’m willing to talk, I want to sit down, but I won’t be able to sit and talk with someone who thinks that whether Rabin’s murder was justified or not is an open question. I absolutely won’t be able to find the middle with a person like that. I really am open to the Religious Zionist public, I want to be—we’re going to live here together, all the more so if a Palestinian state is established and whatever is going to happen there in the West Bank, this public and we are going to have to live here together within the State of Israel in its current borders, and I’m trying to understand this complexity of how we connect.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Let me tell you something that in my eyes may be the most important point. I don’t want to find the middle. Not at all. I want to clarify our disagreement, but in a balanced way. That is, I want you to understand very well what I think, and I want to understand very well what you think. What we agree on, we agree on, and what we don’t, we don’t. Now what happens today, because of this totalizing approach that isn’t willing to recognize bright spots in the dark camp—depending, of course, on which camp is dark from your perspective—let me tell you what happens as a result. What happens is that from side A’s perspective, side B is entirely dark. Now who can hold such a foolish position? Either he’s wicked or he’s stupid. And this happens on both sides—or both, it happens on both sides. Now if he’s wicked and stupid, then of course I don’t listen to his arguments. There’s no point listening to wicked and stupid people. And then if he has no arguments, he’s even more wicked and stupid. So what results from this is a black-and-white picture in which, from my point of view, the other side is completely wrong and I am completely right. I don’t want a middle. I want you to see that there are certain aspects within what I’m sayingthat you can agree with them or disagree with them, but you can understand the logic in them. After we reach the conclusion that there is something to what you’re saying or to what I’m saying, even if I don’t agree, we’ll be able to live together. Even without having to meet in the middle. What’s happening today is that we can’t agree because you don’t agree that there is anything true in what I’m saying, or vice versa, it doesn’t matter, it’s true on both sides. And therefore compromise is, in my view, one of the most problematic strategic directions there is here. Compromise won’t solve anything. It won’t solve anything because I do not compromise with the sons of darkness; no one is willing to compromise with the sons of darkness. Only if I discover that they are not sons of darkness, I’ll discover that there is logic in what they are saying; I don’t agree with it for this reason or that. You know, in the Talmud it says that someone chosen for the Sanhedrin had to provide 150 reasons to declare the creeping thing pure. Now, in the Torah it says that the creeping thing is impure. So what is there to declare pure about the creeping thing? So the Maharal of Prague says: there are 150 correct reasons to declare the creeping thing pure, and there are also 150 to declare it impure. In the final analysis the Torah says that the creeping thing is impure, but it is very important also to understand the 150 reasons to declare it pure, and only after that to make a decision. That doesn’t happen among us. Each side makes its decisions inside its own bubble, unwilling to consider the valid points on the other side, and every such side has them; no side is completely black or completely, completely white. And I think that once we get there, we won’t need compromises. Once we get there, we’ll hold a vote, and the majority will decide, and we will accept the majority view. We will accept the majority view because we will appreciate that it really is the majority view, and not just a takeover by sons of darkness who have nothing in what they say except wickedness and stupidity. That is why, in my view, a policy of compromise is actually a very harmful policy. It is very harmful because it exempts you from really considering what I’m saying. Okay, let’s compromise, I’m here and I’m there, we need to live together so let’s compromise. No, I don’t want to compromise.
[Speaker D] I’m not there. I’m not not into compromise; I’m into justice and injustice. Okay. I think murder does not need explaining; there is no justice in it.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, I think so too.
[Speaker D] And look, we agree. Right. There, that’s it, we agreed.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] One hundred percent, exactly the point. Yes.
[Speaker A] You know, some of your ideas that you voiced over the last quarter of an hour—not about Yigal Amir, because there I have no ability to contain, to contain that conversation—but some of the ideas you mentioned, yes, about complexity and seriousness, I have to say that I was also on that side for many years. And then, when a gun was pointed at my temple on January 4, 2023, and I understood that in another moment we would have a dictatorship here, exactly along the path that we saw happen, by the way, in the United States, that Trump has been trying to do over the last two years and failed, and in South America and so on—my tolerance for complex discourse ended. I said, no, no, no, now we need to be much, much sharper and faster, because the other side knows exactly what it wants. The other side understood that it wants, that there is an opportunity to take maximum power, and basically to make future elections in Israel irrelevant. Because in the one area I really understand—and that is both in its history and in reality—once you take control of all the media outlets, you establish a dictatorship; that is always how it works. And what the regime coup made possible for them, and we saw that the very first thing they did with the regime coup was that they began saying: we are going to dismantle all the protections over media outlets in Israel. And at that moment, to sit and listen and think about 150 ways to declare the creeping thing pure does not interest me, because the creeping thing is going to kill me, so I need to act.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I’ll say, I’ll say one sentence, if I may—the same sentence I told you earlier: even if you are right, the way you advance your goal is not the way you are choosing. Because if you do not declare the creeping thing pure—not declare the creeping thing pure, but understand the reasons to declare the creeping thing pure—you will not succeed. You are fighting windmills. And if you paint everything as black, do you think you’ll succeed more? It is psychologically difficult to see the white within the black, but tactically it is wrong. It is wrong because there are forces here that see it differently.
[Speaker A] No, no, I understand what you’re saying, it’s just that my personal experience is the opposite. What happened is that until January 2023 I spent much of my life looking for ways to declare the creeping thing pure—that is, always saying this and that—and then I saw that all of it, including in my case, I also published all my views and so on, I saw that the other camp, I saw it most clearly with Smotrich, takes my journalistic work, all the corruption and failures that I presented over the years in governments that were not Smotrich-type governments—I have been writing about corruption since the days when there were also center and left governments here—and he uses it; because of my work of declaring the creeping thing pure, they use it as a spade to dig with. And today I see the most effective actors in Israeli society; sometimes I identify various uses they made of my work of declaring the creeping thing pure from 10, 20, and 30 years ago, and I say to myself: actually, I gave that group ammunition.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I think that that way is the more correct way, also on the tactical level. You will fail much more if you continue—again, not personally, we don’t know each other well enough—but if you continue with this approach that describes everything as black. You will simply fail, tactically. It just won’t work.
[Speaker A] Let’s end with the agreement that Miki Abraham said on our podcast, five days before the election, that right-wing people should do anything—just not vote for the current coalition. Absolutely. Miki Abraham, thank you very much for coming to our studio.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Thank you.
[Speaker A] That’s it, that’s all for TheMarker This Week. Thank you very much, Rafaela, Rafa, for coming to us in these crazy days. Thank you for inviting me. Today we talked only about politics, and not even one word about our shared hobby, the struggle against the destruction that the technology giants and the social networks are causing to democracy in this country and throughout the world. But next Wednesday we will wake up to a new morning, to a new government, a government of repair, a government of change, a government of recovery, and then after four terrible years in which this podcast dealt, most of the time unfortunately, with politics, the army, and the hostages, we will be able to return to dealing with life itself: to talk here about artificial intelligence, a lot about artificial intelligence, about economics, about the capital markets, and above all about the dramatic and unprecedented reforms that the new government needs to lead over the coming year, in order to move Israel away from the abyss it approached in the days of the terrible government that will finish its term next Wednesday. Many thanks to our wonderful team, to Yaeli Shavit the producer, to Dan Brumer the legendary editor, who this time has an hour and a half of podcast to edit—thank you, Dan. Thanks to Roy Vermus, to Miki Abraham, and of course to Rafaela Goichman, who all came to our studio in Tel Aviv. We will see you here next week. Let the sun rise, let the morning shine.