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Israeli officials have also been quick to express their support for Kerry’s efforts while indicating that they are not convinced that the Palestinians want to return to the negotiating table.

Netanyahu said of the attempt to resume peace talks, “It’s something I want. It’s something you want. It’s something I hope the Palestinians want as well. And we ought to be successful for a simple reason: When there’s a will, we’ll find a way.”

Harari: What do Jews do for the next 2,000 years? They learn—they sit in Yavne and they learn

Beckerman: It turned from a religion based on priests and temples and sacrifices into a religion of learning, right?

For me, the birth scene of Judaism is Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai, one of the great sages, fleeing Jerusalem and coming to the Roman general Vespasian, who later became Roman emperor, and asking him for a favor: “Please give me Yavne and its wise men.” And Vespasian agrees. This is myth more than history. But this is the founding myth of Judaism. Yavne was a small town not far from present-day Tel Aviv, and that was where ben Zakkai established a learning center, and it changed the nature of Judaism.

Harari: I would say that the other side is Zionist, and it’s important to emphasize and reclaim this word, which has been vilified, not just now, but for decades.

Vespasian could have told ben Zakkai. Why did it take 2,000 years of learning in yeshivas to go back to that same moment and basically adopt the values of the Roman legion? Because if I think about what the values are of people like Itamar Ben Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, Netanyahu—it’s the values of the Roman legion.

Beckerman: So if Netanyahu and his partners on the extreme right are the Zealots, how do you see the other side—yourself—in this battle for the soul of Israel?

eventually the circle is almost closed. They come back. They come back to Jerusalem. And the Zealots have now taken over Jerusalem again. And the question that keeps bothering me: What did Jews learn in those 2,000 years?

Zionism is simply the national movement of the Jewish people. And if you think that Zionism is racist and is abhorrent, you’re basically saying that Jews don’t deserve to have national feelings

Zionism basically says three simple things that should be uncontroversial. It says that the Jews are a nation, not just isolated individuals. There is a Jewish people. The second thing Zionism says is that, like all other peoples, the Jewish people also have a right to self-determination, like the Palestinians, like the Turks, like the Poles. And the third thing it says is the Jews have a deep historical, cultural, spiritual connection to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, which is a historical fact.

Harari: What the political conclusion is from these three facts, that’s up for grabs. And throughout Zionist history, for the past 150 years, people had different ideas.

You can acknowledge that there is a Jewish people. It has a right to self-determination. It has a historical connection to the country. And at the same time, there is a Palestinian people. It also has a right to self-determination, and it also has deep historical, spiritual, cultural connection to the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River.

now the political question is, what do you do with these two facts? And there are potential solutions, a two-state solution, which you can argue, where exactly will the border pass and what will be the rights of Palestinians who remain in Israeli territory? And we can discuss all that

basically, Zionism doesn’t deny the existence and rights of Palestinian people.

Beckerman: Do you think that Israelis’ capacity for empathy has been degraded over the past year?

So I shout harder, and like any attention given to the pain of the other person, I feel it as an attack on me, because it has repercussions. I will suffer.

Beckerman: One of the other things I’ve been struggling with this past year has been the inability of most people to contain more than one narrative in their minds—like the two narratives you just described

Harari: This is one of the things that wars do. This is not unique to Israelis. When there is a war, the first few casualties get so much attention. The millionth casualty, it’s just a number. And this is one of the biggest dangers with the current war, is this process of desensitizing people, brutalizing people.

now the police are beating up the families of the hostages. The people spit at them. People curse them. There is a propaganda campaign against them through the right-wing media.

Harari: It bothers me, and at the same time, as a historian, unfortunately it makes sense; it’s humanity. Most people have no capacity to empathize with the suffering of the other side, partly because it’s like a resource that is exhausted.

Harari: To some extent, every peace needs justice and every justice needs peace. But they are different ways of looking at reality, at history. Every peace deal in history required giving up some justice. You can’t have absolute justice. Peace is more objective

people have very, very different concepts of what justice means to them. So if you try to gain absolute justice, you will never have peace. You cannot go back and bring the dead to life

The only change you can make is in the present. How do we make sure that more people are not killed and injured now and in the future?

Beckerman: I’m curious what you think about the pro-Palestinian protests here and why they have been so compelling, in particular, to young people

Harari: Obviously, as often happens, you project your own problems, your own issues, onto a distant conflict. And many times, people don’t really understand the conflict. I see it especially with this projection of the colonialist interpretation. People take this model, which is very central in the United States and other Western countries, and impose it on a completely different situation. And they say, Okay, the Israelis are the white Europeans who came to colonize the indigenous Palestinians. And there are some kernels of truth in this, but it’s a wrong model.

For 2,000 years, Jews were one of the chief victims of European civilization, and suddenly now they become the Europeans? This also ignores the fact that more than 50 percent of Israeli Jews are not European

Harari: Yes, and then even after everything that has happened with October 7 and the war, Netanyahu and his colleagues are still at it. You know, he has not taken any responsibility for October 7. I don’t hold him responsible for every decision of some company commander in the army and so forth. But the prime minister, the leader of the country, has one major responsibility—to set the priorities. He decided that the No. 1 problem with Israel is the supreme court. The priority is to destroy the supreme court. And this is his responsibility, nobody else’s. And if he, if Israel had given a quarter of the attention that was given to the supreme court to Hamas, there would have been no October 7.

The Israeli nation is collapsing, the patriotic bonds that hold the nation together are being torn deliberately by Netanyahu and his colleagues. He is the most hated person in the history of Israel. Like 50 percent of the people just hate him on a level that is unimaginable. I think the No. 1 responsibility of a leader, especially for a country in such existential danger as Israel, is to unify

People here ask me, Should Jews vote for Donald Trump? Should Jews vote for Kamala Harris? Who is better for the Jewish people? The key question is, what are the values of the Jewish people? Are the values of the Jewish people those of a bully who sees the world simply as a power game, where you need to subdue and win over everybody else?

Harari: Israel is facing a real existential threat from Iran and its proxies, and it’s no secret. They say it openly: They want to destroy Israel. What I think is that the United States should continue to support Israel, but demand something. Here, I am with Trump. You know this transactional worldview. You give so much money. Make some conditions for what Israel should do in exchange; use the leverage.