Sneak Peek: Inside Call Me Back with Dr. Tal Becker

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Hi, it's Dan. I'm probably catching you as you're coming out of Shabbat.

And just to be clear, this was recorded before Shabbat. As you can see, for those who are watching and not listening, the sunlight blasting through here through these windows on me right now.

And the episode was on automatic scheduled release. So technology was actually releasing this episode.
No human being was pressing the send or publish button on Shabbat.

This week, Dr. Tall Becker joined me on Inside Call Me Back, the members-only edition of the Call Me Back podcast.

He came on to answer your questions from listeners who submitted them, from our members.

These were sharp and challenging questions, and the conversation conversation that came out is really worth your time. I actually learned a lot in real time.

So for everyone who hasn't yet joined Inside Call Me Back, I wanted to share a sneak peek of my episode with Tal.

If you like this conversation, consider joining us on Inside Call Me Back by following the link in the description or going to arcmedia.org. Here's my conversation with Dr.
Tal Becker.

Welcome to the Inside Edition of the Call Me Back podcast, where we pull back the curtain and have the conversations we typically have after the cameras stop rolling.

Thank you for subscribing to the show and supporting what we do at Arc Media. It means a lot to us and it helps us do what we do and to continue growing what we are building here.

Today, we have a special guest on Inside Call Me Back, someone who is truly one of the ultimate insiders, one of the most insider-y of insiders.

My friend Taul Becker, who is based in Jerusalem, who is at the Shalom Hartman Institute, who represented Israel at The Hague when it was accused of genocide, who's a longtime advisor, legal advisor to various Israeli governments, to the foreign ministry, to foreign ministers.

He's been involved in Israel's peace processing one way or the other for decades. He can certainly see around corners, and there are a lot of corners to see around or try to look for today.

And so we're excited to have this conversation with Tal, which will be basically driven by all these questions we've received. So Tal, good to see you.
Nice to see you, Dan.

You make me sound like a bit of a policy wonk there. I'm not sure whether the insider or the insider.
What's wrong with being a wonk? What's wrong with?

I actually, in my home, being a wonk is a badge of honor. The Soviets used to say that there were people who are widely known in narrow circles, right?

Which means basically in very small groups, being a wonk is something that's cool. Yeah.

Well, my wife used to joke that there was like this debate going on online between seven or eight sort of quasi-Jewish intellectuals or wonks or whatever politically engaged Jews.

And they were just like having this fierce debate and no one else was paying attention to the debate. But to us, it was the only debate in the world that mattered.
Of course.

As long as you delude yourself that you're making a difference, then it's fine. Exactly.
Okay. So, and Tom, by the way, it was good being with you on that panel the other night in New Jersey.

I think we're going to try and release that as an episode where you and Nadav and I got to have a longer conversation. Yeah, it was a great conversation.

And it really, for me, you know, demonstrated what an incredible community you've built through this podcast at such a difficult time.

So it really just have so much appreciation for what you've done, Dan, with Archimedia and your team. Thank you.
And I will, I will, I want to let that episode play.

We're going to play it because there were a couple of things I've thought about after, more that Nadav said about anti-Semitism in the U.S.

that I actually found myself disagreeing with, but I didn't disagree with it in the moment. I more disagreed with it as I was driving home from the event.

And I thought, you know what, I got to pick this back up with Nadav and you actually. But first we'll release the conversation, then I'll get into it.
Okay, but let's get into these questions.

First one is from Amy, Amy from Atlanta, Georgia. Israel decisively won the war against Hezbollah and Iran, but with Hamas still standing, Israel arguably reached a draw in Gaza.

What are some historical examples of wars ending this way? And what were the political outcomes? So I guess, Tal, is this an outlier?

Yeah, well, I mean, first, you know, my teachers always taught me to challenge the premise of a question.

So I'm not sure that I share the premise in the question about the way the war in Gaza is being described.

I mean, one of the things we've discovered is that what we mean by winning in war is a kind of more slippery than we expect. But let's try to break it down a little bit.

First of all, what were Israel's objectives in this war? To return the hostages at great cost. That has largely been achieved.

We have one hostage, Run Gvili, whose remains remains have not been returned yet. With the help of President Trump and many other factors, we achieved that objective.

The second objective was to destroy Hamas as a threat to Israel. And I think that has largely been achieved.
There is a concern about its reconstituting that threat.

But Hamas does not pose anything like the threat it posed to Israel on October 7th. It has been decimated in that respect.

And then the third goal, this idea that Hamas should no longer be able to essentially dictate the future of Gaza, be a governing force in Gaza.

Another way to say that is that Hamas has lost the ability to threaten Israel, but it still retains the ability to threaten Gazans and to prevent us from moving to a better future.

And that is going to be tested right now with the attempt to implement the Trump Plan, with the attempt to create a kind of transitional administration in Gaza that will hopefully achieve the objectives of fully disarming Hamas and removing it from power.

The Trump Plan and the Security Council resolution talks about Hamas having no role in governance, whether directly or indirectly or in any form.

And so that third element is still up for grab. So my first point I would say to the question is that I think that the military successes against Hamas are much more significant than we described.

There is a risk on the third issue that we do see

parallels of a kind of Second Lebanon War situation where Hezbollah remained a potent force. And there is a risk that,

God forbid, under some kind of dynamic, Hamas is able to rebuild and remain a force and reconstitute itself. But the very object of the Board of Peace and the Comprehensive Plan is to prevent that.

Maybe one last thing I'll say, though, about victory in this war.

And I think in a previous podcast, I mentioned to you how I'm attracted to Sun Tzu's definition of victory in war, the Chinese philosopher, who said that in war, you're not really fighting your enemy, you're fighting the strategy of your enemy.

And I think a big component of the strategy of Hamas that we were fighting was not really about the capability to threaten Israel, but was about the story of Israel's legitimacy, was about whether, you know, you can be an authentic Muslim, an authentic Palestinian, and make the case for coexistence with Israel.

In other words, in war, you're fighting both the capabilities of your enemy, but also the appeal of their story. And there, I think, we have a lot of work to do.

right i think uh sinwar you know he has a lot to answer for in terms of the horrific suffering he caused and that hamas has brought devastation, not just on Hamas, but of course on Gaza.

But he would probably make the case that he had some success and significant success in the attempt to delegitimize Israel. And there, I think, we have a lot of work to do.

I'm listening to what you're saying, and I'm rereading as we're speaking Amy's question. And I'm struck that there's also this desire to take what we've thought of as conventional warfighting.

and the outcomes of conventional wars and apply it to what Israel has been dealing with. When's the last time Israel actually decisively won a conventional war?

It was probably the 1973 Yom Kippur War, right? I mean, that was in the end a decisive win.

Has Israel fought a war since then, sort of clean cut in terms of the outcome, A, and B, if not, then I guess the next question is, has Israel actually fought a real conventional war of that nature of 73, of 67, of 56, of, you know, those kinds of wars actually since then?

It's a really good question what we mean by decisive victory, especially against these kind of fundamentalist groups.

You know, from Hamas's narrative to some extent is that victory is promised by Allah. And even if we're standing on rubble and still breathing, that suggests that our mission is still continuing.

I think for Israel, victory really is whether we will not be defined by this, whether we're bigger than this, whether Hamas essentially is not going to define what we can achieve, what we're looking to do in the region, and so on.

on and one of the big issues i think as the war ends is what kind of dynamics and trends are unleashed, right?

So if we're moving in the direction of normalization, if Israel is picking itself up from this war and Israeli society is picking itself up, that is also a form of victory.

And I think we need to kind of maybe let go of this idea that decisive victory, especially against these kind of groups, comes when they wave a white flag.

In essence, victory comes from the fact that we are bigger, much bigger than this and have so much more to achieve. And we are moving away from this attempt by Hamas to limit who we can be.
Okay.

How would you then define what in this context, in the context of this conversation, in the context of the standard you're setting, you're articulating right now, how would you think about Israel's victory?

I use that word in quotes, but at the time and for some time, it certainly did seem like a victory against Hamas and the other Palestinian factions in the Second Intifada.

Well, I mean, those groups were pretty decisively set back in the Second Intifada.

And again, what it meant was that Israelis could go about their lives and Israel as a country could imagine itself and not be exhausted or subsumed by that.

It's a crazy kind of parallel, but I have this image in my mind of this great scene in Mad Men where Don Draper is in an elevator, and this guy goes into the elevator and says to him, Oh, you're Don Draper.

Everybody hates you in the office. You're such a pain.
And he goes, spends the whole time kind of dissing him in the elevator. And Don Draper is just totally silent.

And then the elevator doors open, and Don just says one thing. He says, I don't think about you at all.

And I think that that, in a way, if we get to a place where these terrorist organizations, though they don't disappear, but they don't shape the agenda, they require constant vigilance and a very proactive posture by our security forces.

We cannot let them ever kind of regroup and threaten us. But they're a kind of...

From the perspective of the average Israeli, from the perspective of Israel and its aspirations, they're a kind of nuisance.

That is the way I think after the second intifada, intifada, when we really succeeded in pushing back the terrorism, and here also after this war, the metric of whether it has been a sustainable success will be about whether our agenda and our dreams and what we do and how we think about ourselves is shaped by that threat or whether we push that threat back constantly enough so that Israeli society can thrive.

That is how I think about it.

Okay, Steve from Scarsdale, New York writes, as I think about what is going on in Israel, I think back to my rudimentary Jewish history and wonder if we were just witnessing the splintering of the Israeli people with two kingdoms of Israel and Judah.

Do you, Tal, see this comparison? What historical context can be brought to bear? What can we learn from our history? Steve asks.

Well, it reminds me of a Rashi, actually, where at the moment of the giving of the Torah at Sinai, the Torah uses the singular, Vayichan Bet Tachtitahar, that they camped at the bottom of the mountain, but it uses the singular for their camping.

And Rashi says, essentially, that this was the only time that the Jewish people were united. At the giving of Sinai, Keishachad Belevichad, he said, as one people with one heart.

And Rashi talks about at every other encampment there was strife. And I think we do have, as a people, this kind of self-sabotage mechanism.
We seem to be incredible at uniting in crisis.

And we seem to have a real difficulty not to be at each other's throats so often outside of that.

And I think, you know, there are moments, and I think there have been moments since this war, where Israeli society has felt that internal division is its own national security threat.

And if we don't overcome that, we really can't deal with our other challenges. You know, that's a definition of the problem.
And you can call for unity as much as you like.

But at the end of the day, the question is, how do you get there? It's like that line. It's like, we can just do X, Y, and Z if there's the political will.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you know,

it's like, it's kind of often the hardest part. Yeah.
I once had breakfast with this one of the candidates for presidency on the Democratic side.

And I was at the time policy advisor for the foreign minister. And he said to me, you know what the problem with you policy advisors is?

You always tell us what to do, but you never tell us how to do it. And the how is obviously the really important part.

And there I would say, I don't see a better path to this than really investing in education. We have a sovereign state, but we need to cultivate a people people that have a sovereign state of mind.

And what I mean by that is a people that values more the collective welfare of the Jewish people than the victory of their own tribe.

One of the things that Hartman Institute is really investing in is kind of cultivating a new generation of Jewish leaders in Israel and in North America in particular that will have that kind of sensibility that tribal victory is not as important as the collective welfare of everyone.

And that means your tribe probably should win a little bit less so that the collectively the Jewish people can win more.

And what that means, I think, in practice is a real education in kind of inoculating the next generation of Jews of Israelis away from polarization and tribalism and really having a sense, a deep sense of Jewish peoplehood.

I don't see a shortcut to that kind of investment in education. You've talked about this, Dan, in terms of the investment in America and in Jewish day schools and Jewish resilience and Jewish unity.

Having Jews who are literate, who love the Jewish people, who care about people they disagree with because they value Jewish peoplehood is the only way we kind of improve on that real problem.

So, Tal, just to drill down on that, what kind of education do you have in mind? Because that's also one of those terms people hear. We need unity.
We need people to be educated.

Okay, what's the education? Yeah.

I think if you think about our tradition broadly speaking and what Judaism and Jewish texts give the world, they really embrace this idea of community across difference.

You know, when you think about the Talmud as a model of teaching the view you do not agree with, you mentioned this on the podcast with Rachel the other day between Hillel and Shammai, but it's a much bigger idea.

And at some level, it is an embrace of an idea that the truth exists above you and not within you.

And you have to be in conversation with others and you have to engage across difference in order to be able to get to a larger truth. Right.

And there's an element of Judaism, which I think is so important today, given especially AI and social media.

You know, and a friend of mine called this Judaism's attachment with the idea of enchantment, with the idea of wonder, that you're constantly pursuing truth, but you're never quite there.

And you actually need to be engaged in conversation and argue with people in order to be closer to the truth. If you're just in your own echo chamber, you are going to not be able to.

embrace a larger truth and a larger community.

And those ideas, I think, are critical in this social media age, but they're also also just critical to holding Jewish peoplehood together across difference.

Yeah, I got to say, I've been thinking more about the education of Jews and the next generation over here. And I know I've been...

It's a necessary, maybe not sufficient, but it's a necessary key to continuity. But I've also been thinking about more.

I was just reading the speech that Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove gave in the last few days in which he talks about how divided young Jews are over here, which I think is overstated, but whatever.

That's a topic for another day.

And he talks about how disillusioned or alienated young Jews are here from the current Israeli government, and specifically the prime minister and some ministers in his government.

And I'm thinking when I read that, the idea that Jews over here would define their connection to Jewish peoplehood based on who Israel has at any given moment as its prime minister tells me we're not educating Jews over here.

Yeah. I mean, you know, I often think about Jews and synagogues, you know, that Jews think that they have a right to have their synagogue operate according to their individual specifications.

And if it doesn't operate according to their individual specifications, then you do the famous Jewish move of the breakaway minion, right? You make your own.

And there is a way in which the relationship to Israel is almost as if it's your synagogue and not a state, right?

Unless, you know, Netanyahu is the rabbi, but if his sermon is too long or if he's doing something not to your specifications, then you can't have a relationship. Right.

And I think it says something about, I mean, obviously, a lot of people care deeply about Israel's values and the policies of its government.

But Israel is a broad canvas and the opportunities for relationship with a state rather than a synagogue and with people in that state and with causes within that state that you care about are so much bigger than whether an individual government's policies is one way or another.

And I think that also is part of the educational challenge. Can we engender a kind of Jewish sensibility that understands that Israel is so much bigger than its government.

You know, Mark Twain famously said that patriotism is to love your country all the time and your government when it deserves it, right? Right.

And there's no obligation for Jews to love any Israeli government, but your Jewish identity and meaning will be so enriched by a relationship with the Jewish sovereign project and with the people in Israel who are trying to build that project in partnership with advancing also the thriving of world Jewry.

Yeah.

By the way, that point about that you can only feel a connection to jewish peoplehood and to the zionist project and to the state of israel if you're comfortable with whoever's prime minister at the time is it's an amazing notion because it's it's a notion that we would never expect anyone else to apply to any other country right i don't sit here like i have friends from russia who are russian who live in the united states who talk to me about russian literature and they talk about their family's history in russia i mean they're very proud i would never say but how have you not broken with all of that because of putin it would never occur to me.

But it speaks to the way in which our Jewish identity is tied up in this.

We have, you know, everybody has a set of Jewish values and Jewish identity, and they want to see in Israel a reflection of that. Right.

And when those two things are too tied together, you actually give the keys to your relationship to Israel to people you disagree with. And there's no reason to do that.
Okay.

David from Kensington, California writes, we have no problem calling Arabs terrorists when they attack Jewish civilians, but we are using the word extremists, quote-unquote, to describe Jewish settlers who attack and even murder Palestinians and burn their land and homes.

Isn't this textbook terrorism? Why can't we call Jews attacking Arabs what they are? He writes, which is terrorists, he says, would love to hear a convincing explanation.

Yeah, well, I won't give a convincing explanation because I agree. I think that if extreme Jewish actors are in Jewish.

This is it for this sneak peek.

In the rest of the episode, Tal and I continue discussing whether Israeli settler extremists should be considered terrorists and whether a partnership between Israel and Saudi Arabia would help de-radicalize the region and also whether Israel is a country, a nation defined, quote, by religion.

If you're curious about the full conversation, join us on Inside Call Me Back by following the link in the description or going to arcmedia.org. That's A-RKMedia.org.

Call Me Back is produced and edited by Alan Benatar. Arc Media's executive producer is Adam James Levin Aretti.
Our production manager is Brittany Cohn. Sound and video editing by Liquid Audio.

Our associate producer is Maya Rockoff. Community management by Gabe Silverstein.
Our music was composed by Yuval Semo. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.