Ezra Klein has a really interesting interview today with an Israeli named Yossi Klein Halevi. Here’s how Klein introduces him:

Halevi is a Senior Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. He’s the author of, among other books, “Letters to my Palestinian Neighbor.” He’s somebody who spent quite a lot of his life trying to make the Israeli narrative understood to others, a narrative he feels, and has lived very deeply.

Politically, Halevi describes himself as someone who has been a critic of Netanyahu and Israel’s current government. At one point in the discussion he describes himself as someone who was in the streets protesting prior to Oct. 7. What I found really interesting was his brief history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since the late 1980s when he served as a soldier patrolling Gaza.

So I was drafted into the Israeli army in the late 1980s, which was the period that we call the first intifada. It’s like the first Lebanon war. We didn’t know there was going to be a second or maybe a third. We just called it the intifada then…

Just before our unit had gotten to Gaza, an Israeli reservist, driving through Gaza, had made a wrong turn, and ended up in a refugee camp, and was surrounded and burned alive. And we used to get taunted every day that Amnon — that was his name, Amnon. Amnon sends you regards.

He went on to describe the first intifada.

Well, the first intifada broke out in 1987. And it lasted more or less until the first Gulf War, 1991. It was basically riots. It was young people — large, very large numbers, hundreds, thousands of young people, throwing stones, sometimes Molotov cocktails, every so often, a terror attack. But primarily, it was — the Palestinians call it the intifada of stones. And that’s how I personally experienced it.

I got a stone thrown to my head. And I was briefly hospitalized for that. Luckily, I had a helmet on. And I still blacked out. And there was something visceral about experiencing a rock in your head because a rock is a symbol of powerlessness — I mean, David and Goliath. And it was this encounter with Gaza’s rage…

And the political consequence of the first intifada was the election of Yitzhak Rabin in 1992. Rabin ran on the slogan, “Take Gaza out of Tel Aviv.” That was the winning post-intifada slogan of Israeli politics — separation. Let — whatever they want to do. A state? Give them a state.

After the first intifada Israelis believed maybe separation from the Palestinians was the best path forward. And that brings us to the land for peace offer and the 2nd intifada which Halevi says is really key to the current Israeli psyche.

So the second intifada broke out in the year 2000, September 2000. And the second intifada was the intifada of suicide bombings. And that went on for five years. And those were the longest five years of my life.

At Camp David, in July 2000, Israel put an offer on the table of an Israeli withdrawal, a Palestinian state…

And Arafat walked away from that offer…

This is all by way of trying to explain what the second intifada did to the Israeli psyche. If you believe that your side genuinely tried to make peace, and received, in return, the worst wave of terrorism in Israel’s history, then your first conclusion is going to be that the Israeli left, which promised us peace now, are simply fools.

And that’s exactly what happened. The Israeli left collapsed immediately after the second intifada began. And it never recovered.

So you had a previous generation including Halevi’s father who lived in a kind of survival mode because of the Holocaust. He says his father believed there were only two camps of non-Jewish people, those who wanted to kill Jews and those who were glad someone was doing it. And that mindset was reinforced by wars Israel fought to survive in its first decades.

But by the 1990s younger Israelis were coming out of that mindset. They were open to making some kind of peace deal. And then the Arafat rejection and the 2nd intifada killed that. It was back into survival mode.

And for a while after pulling out of Gaza in 2005, Israel thought it could control the chaos with a border fence and checkpoints. But 10/7 has changed all that. Now Israelis are once again in survival mode as a group and that’s why the strategy has changed from a tense cease fire to the goal of destroying Hamas for good.

In the second intifada, for five years of suicide bombings, a thousand Israelis were killed. We lost 1,400 people the first day of this war, on Oct. 7. So the dimensions are something that we’ve never experienced before.

And the fatal mistake — and I believe it is a fatal mistake — of Hamas. And it will be a fatal mistake of Hezbollah if they join the war — is that you cannot defeat this people from that place, that mind-set, of existential threat.

There’s a lot more in the interview (these excerpts are just a bit of the first half) but I thought the explanation of the Israeli psyche and how that combines both history and politics over the past 40 years was pretty interesting.

Update: Here’s a darkly humorous take on the Israeli perspective.

If the conflict was a game show…

Spoiler alert: no outcome is good enough for the Arabs besides the total destruction of Israel.

🚨🚨🚨🥴☠️

pic.twitter.com/O2E6ywAVvH

— Kat Kanada (@KatKanada_TM) November 9, 2023