The Tikvah Podcast

By the spring of 1948, three armed Jewish militias had been fighting and working towards the birth of modern Israel. There was the Haganah, under David Ben-Gurion, which would become the core of the new Israel Defense Forces. There was the Irgun, led by Menachem Begin, and a smaller group, the Lehi. Begin agreed to dissolve the Irgun units operating in Israel into the new army, a decision he made in the name of national unity and cohesion even though tensions between the Irgun and the Haganah were deep, and Haganah operatives had previously informed on their counterparts in the Irgun to British officials. Even so, the Irgun had pledged to become a part of the IDF in the newly formed state of Israel. A month after Ben-Gurion declared independence, a ship named the Altalena set sail from France under the auspices of the Irgun, carrying rifles and some 900 immigrants, many of them survivors of the Shoah. The ship left port the same day a United Nations cease-fire took effect, a truce that barred the importation of any new arms or combatants into the country. When it reached the coast at Kfar Vitkin just north of Tel Aviv, a dispute broke out over how the weapons would be distributed, and in particular over Begin's insistence that a share go to an Irgun battalion in Jerusalem, which he argued stood outside the truce's terms since Jerusalem's status remained unsettled under the UN partition plan. The standoff turned violent onshore, and Begin ordered the ship to sail south, to Tel Aviv, in full view of the city and the international press. Near what is today Frishman Beach, Ben-Gurion gave the order to open fire on the ship, and by this time, with Begin aboard, on his main political rival. Two officers refused before a third accepted the command. Sixteen Irgun men and three IDF soldiers were killed. And Begin, standing on the burning deck with comrades dying around him, ordered his own men not to fire back. He would repeat that order over the radio that night: never, he said, could he condone a war between brothers. The specter of the Altalena has haunted Israeli politics ever since. It plays a potent and mythological role in the imagination of the political right as one of the earliest examples of a centralized government dominated by the political left that uses the power of the state against its domestic opponents. Now, six weeks before an Israeli election, the wreckage of the Altalena has been discovered. To discuss the ship's sinking and the significance of its recovery, Jonathan Silver, the host of the Tikvah podcast and the editor of Mosaic, is joined by the historian, educator, and writer Avi Shilon. Shilon is the author of, among other works of scholarship, the definitive biography of Menachem Begin, published in 2012 by Yale University Press.

Visitors to Jerusalem's Old City see a marvelous religious diversity that is unique in the contemporary Middle East, and made possible by Israeli sovereignty. For most of Jewish history, the Jewish people have lived at the mercy of other nations, and the security of Jewish communities depended on the Christian or Muslim rulers in whose lands Jews lived. But in the Old City of Jerusalem, one walks around and sees so many religious sites, Christian and Muslim, of immense theological significance, all protected by the laws and law-enforcement officers of the Jewish state. Israel's commitment to the security of Christian and Muslim sites and worshipers is, seen through the eyes of history, a breathtaking accomplishment. But an accomplishment of this kind is also a test. There are shocking reports of Christian worshippers and Christian clergy being harassed by Jewish Israelis. The Wall Street Journal and other outlets have recently reported on a spike of such abhorrent incidents. Israel's president, prime minister, and chief rabbis, along with several members of the Knesset and other prominent figures, have all condemned this behavior. But even if the perpetrators are not in any way representative of Israeli society as a whole, it is worth seeking to understand why these contemptible acts are happening and what they mean. Rabbi Mark Dratch chairs the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations and has been writing about the ugly reports of spitting on Christian worshippers and on the damage and disrespect done to a Christian statue by an Israeli soldier in Lebanon. He joins the podcast today to discuss these topics with the host and editor of Mosaic Jonathan Silver. The primary subject of their conversation is not diplomacy or Israel's reputation abroad, though of course these things matter greatly. Instead, the focus of this episode is what the Jewish tradition calls hillul Hashem, desecration of God's name, and what it means for a people who spent thousands of years in exile to preside over religious minorities of the kind they once were.

For half a century, Israel treated its adversaries as if their intentions could be tracked and might change according to circumstances. With the states surrounding it, that assumption largely held: Egypt, for instance, signed a peace treaty and kept it, whatever else occurred in the region. But with the radical forces that Iran built around Israel in the years before October 7, that same assumption proved catastrophic. Hamas, Hizballah, the Houthis, and the militias in Syria and Iraq do not vary in their commitment to Israel's destruction. What varies is only their capability. And so Israel has been forced to exchange a doctrine built on monitoring intention for one built on continually destroying capability, whatever the diplomatic cost, wherever preparations for war are found. Today's guest, Dan Schueftan, calls this doctrine preventive violence, or simply, violent maintenance. Schueftan is the director of the National Security Studies Center at the University of Haifa. In conversation with Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver, he lays out this doctrine, its roots, and the circumstances that forced Israel to adopt it. He then offers a threat assessment of Iran's proxy network as it stands today: in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq—before turning to the sepearate question of Turkey.