Welcome to What Matters Now, the Times of Israel's weekly podcast, drilling down into one issue facing Israel in the Jewish world. I'm Amanda Borsseldahn, joined by Mika Goodman, philosopher and, dare I say, friend. Thanks for letting me join you today.

Thank you. It's so nice to be in a podcast again. We have been speaking since the terrible massacre of October 7th, about every half a year for the podcast.

So we're looking ahead right now and behind and at this very uncertain moment.

But I'd like to begin with something that you said in our first podcast since the massacre.

Days, like two days after the massacre, right? Exactly. And it was a morning of strong emotions.

Both of us had just heard news of losing loved ones. And we talked about a cocktail of emotions.

Then it's definitely real. it's raw, and it's

worth listening to.

But at that point, you also started describing something that has really occupied listeners'

thoughts and recently somebody wrote me about the idea of the zero-sum game. So let's talk, first of all, explain what do you mean by this?

Yeah, I think about it a little bit differently now, but in the first week of the war, we put it

this way. Israel has not, has to protect its reputation, but we have two different reputations

to protect. We want one kind of reputation when it comes to the

Western civilization. And a different kind of reputation when it comes to the Middle East,

and especially the jihadist forces within the Middle East. So when it comes to the West,

we want the West to see us as a country that protects human rights, that plays according to

the rules.

And we always want to be loved by the West and loved by America.

And in some sense, like, like, oh, maybe love is a strong word. We want to be liked.

We want to be appreciated.

We want to be seen as one of the good guys at the West.

That's a reputation we want to protect.

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