I think that we are in the lowest moral point of Jewish history.

That's what I think.

In the lowest moral point of Jewish history.

Hello and welcome to Wises happening with me your host Chris Hayes. You know after 9-11 in the United States there was this sort of very intense kind of mix of grief and rage and you know sort of humiliation and bewilderment and it all pretty quickly was channeled into this desire for retribution, justice, revenge, in some combination of those three.

The support for President George W Bush was, you know, pulling at 85 or 90 percent approval. Support for the

subsequent war in Afghanistan was similarly very high and dissent from that

view was pretty rare and pretty far at the margins.

And there was a lot of pressure in the culture and in mainstream media to not voice that dissent. That would change over time. It would start to come undone and it was quite

strong in the run up to Iraq and that as Iraq became more and more of a disaster that unraveled a bit.

There's a similar situation, I think it's fair to say, in Israel, where the vast majority of

Israelis in the wake of October 7th supported the war in Gaza, the first bombing, and then ground invasion into Gaza.

And the difference being that in Israel, before October 7th, the country was already in the midst of the largest protest movement and kind of constitutional crisis it had in at least a

generation maybe more over the Netn Yahoo government's plan to basically change the

degree to which the judiciary had independence and the reason that's relevant is there was a kind of existential question among Israelis

and Israeli politics and society about whether the country was going to maintain being

a liberal democracy.

And the reason that's relevant is that, you know, we know what wartime

provisions look like in liberal democracies where there is this kind of desire to tamp down dissent,

there's a desire to keep everyone in line,

and sometimes that can tip over into the state

playing that role.

And in Israel, in November, just a few weeks after the attack Hamas

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