Peter Berkowitz on Israel at War: A Nation United and Divided

Conversations with Bill Kristol

News, Society & Culture, Government, Politics

4.7 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 5 January 2024

⏱️ 62 minutes

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Summary

Three months after October 7 and amidst the ongoing war in Gaza, what is the national mood in Israel? How are the partisan divisions which gripped Israel in recent years playing out in wartime? How will this war change Israel? To discuss these questions, we are joined by Peter Berkowitz, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and longtime analyst of Israeli politics and society. Having just returned from Israel, Berkowitz observes that the enormity of the Hamas attack within Israel’s borders threatens a core principle of Zionism, which promised that Jews would be safe in their own homeland. In the face of this, Israelis have displayed a remarkable unity around the cause of defeating Hamas and returning the hostages. Yet the partisan divisions that existed before the war persist, along with a deep trauma and anger stemming from recriminations about the failure to protect the nation from the attack on October 7. Across the political elite and among Israelis more generally, there is a new reckoning about the profound threats Israel faces—not only from Hamas, but also from Hezbollah, and from Tehran.

Transcript

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0:00.0	And the Hi, I'm Bill Crystal. Welcome back to Conversations. I'm very pleased to be joined
0:19.5	today by an old friend Peter Berkowitz, with whom we've had two previous conversations I believe
0:25.0	in in studio pre-pandemic, one on higher education, one on liberalism, both of which stand up very
0:31.2	well I've got to say.
0:32.2	I look quickly at them and also which remain both very important topics as we speak here in the early in the new year of 2024, but we're not talking about that today.
0:41.7	Peter is a senior fellow at Hoover,
0:44.2	at the Hoover Institution, was Director of Policy Planning
0:47.1	for 2019 to 2021 at the State Department,
0:50.3	distinguished academic career,
0:52.0	really some excellent essays in the book,
0:55.4	Virtue in the Making of Modern liberalism.
0:57.8	Before that, a book on Nietzsche.
0:59.0	So many arrows there in your quiver.
1:01.6	But I thought today we would talk about
1:03.8	Israel with Peter because a he knows a ton about Israel has been there many times
1:07.9	has written about it has studied there has lectured and taught there and it's just back from Israel and obviously it's a very interesting and
1:17.2	important moment in the history of Israel and so I wanted to pick
1:20.6	Peter's reign and what it what he learned from his I guess two weeks over there
1:24.9	which you just returned a couple of days ago is that right so welcome back
1:28.0	thank you very much good be with you bill and and great to have you here so So, I don't know, I mean, what, you and I,
1:35.6	I've been to Israel Fair and Mount,
1:36.8	you've been many more times and you have the language,
	...

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