David Horovitz: ‘We need this state to survive’

Transcripts are lightly edited. Please excuse any imperfections.

David Horovitz:
I think this country has to survive, and when the time comes, you have to make sure you’re choosing people who are going to do their best for this country.

David Horovitz:
Hi, I’m David Horovitz. I’m the editor of The Times of Israel, and this is 18 Questions, 40 Israeli Thinkers from 18Forty.

Sruli Fruchter:
From 18Forty, this is 18 Questions, 40 Israeli Thinkers, and I’m your host, Sruli Fruchter. 18 Questions 40, Israeli Thinkers is a new podcast that interviews Israel’s leading voices to explore those critical questions people are having today on Zionism of the Israel-Hamas war, democracy, morality, Judaism, peace, Israel’s future, and so much more. Every week, we introduce you to fresh perspectives and challenging ideas about Israel from across the political spectrum that you won’t find anywhere else. So if you’re the kind of person who wants to learn, understand, and dive deeper into Israel, then join us on our journey as we pose 18 pressing questions to the 40 Israeli journalists, scholars, and religious thinkers you need to hear from today. The term “fake news” has been popularized for almost a decade, and with Israel, it’s all the more difficult and all the more relevant. Which outlets we can trust, which outlets are good, which outlets are bad, when they’re good, when they’re bad, how they’re lying, how they’re not lying, how they’re misrepresenting, a lot of different questions and it’s very, very hard to unpack them.

Sruli Fruchter:
Personally, my go-to news source for all things Israel is a bunch of different places, but my go-to is always The Times of Israel. I’ll usually supplement it with other outlets, some more controversial, we’re talking New York Times, we’re talking to Haaretz. That’s always a huge triggering point in Israel when I mention that I read Haaretz. Again, not an endorsement. A lot of times reading an outlet is because you want to see what they’re reporting, you want to see how they’re reporting things. That’s a side point. For Times of Israel though, even with its tens of millions of readers every single month, I still think it’s way too underappreciated. It’s credible, it’s quick, it’s very timely, and it’s very thorough. That’s why it was ranked as the world’s fastest-growing news site in October and in November of this past year. After Hamas’s attack on October 7th and in the subsequent war against Hamas and how that was filling news outlets across the world, Times of Israel became people’s go-to news source.

Sruli Fruchter:
So naturally, I wanted to interview the man who made this all happen, David Horovitz, the editor-in-chief and founding editor of Times of Israel since 2012 when it began. This interview was really a delight, and I’m not just saying that because it feels like a British word and he’s British Israeli. It just really captures my experience of our conversation, especially when I realized that I’m talking with someone who is literally invested in the minute-to-minute happenings of this war. A lot of what made this interview so special and I think distinguishes it from our past ones is how David throughout really demonstrates the standards we should have and the commitment we should have to Israel and to truth. He spoke a lot about journalistic biases that we see nowadays in different outlets, explaining how it manifests, how he notices it, and how a lot of the times it goes overlooked and there just isn’t enough people power to actually keep track of it.

Sruli Fruchter:
And while his view may be a bit grim and worried and concerned for Israel, there’s still that tinge of hope that definitely shone through, which, to me, emphasized the seriousness that we should be holding the current situation is that I think a lot of people are aware of where Israel and the Jewish people are at this point in time. But in terms of David’s background, he comes with 40 years, according to my calculations based on his bio, of 40 years in journalism, editing The Jerusalem Post and The Jerusalem Report. He’s the author of several books, including Still Life with Bombers: Israel in the Age of Terrorism, which came out in 2004, and the award-winning, Shalom, Friend: The Life and Legacy of Yitzhak Rabin in 1996. This was a fascinating interview with, again, someone who is following the minute-to-minute, and really minute-to-minute. After our interview, he actually showed me the Reuters feed that journalists use to find out what’s happening in Gaza with the war, statements that are coming out.

Sruli Fruchter:
And there are times where you can have in an hour, 100 updates and each one can be a headline-worthy story. So to hold both those things while living in Israel and while experiencing this personally as all Israelis do, was something that I found very fascinating and admirable. So before we jump into the interview, I’ll make that classic pitch. If you have questions that you want us to ask or guests that you want us to feature, shoot us an email at info@18forty.org. And aside from that, we want to hear from you. Tell us about your experience with the podcast, what you’d like to hear more of, how it’s going for you, what are you thinking? 18Forty is really all about that listeners’ feedback. So don’t be shy, please reach out, info@18forty.org. If you are interested in sponsoring an episode of 18 Questions, 40 Israeli Thinkers, shoot us an email at that same email. And without further ado, here is 18 Questions with David Horowitz. As an Israeli and as a Jew, how are you feeling at this moment in Israeli history?

David Horovitz:
Wow, pretty bleak. People have lived here longer than I have. I’ve lived here for two-thirds of my life. That’s about 40 years. This is the worst period that I’ve lived through and I don’t think it’s ridiculous to believe that it’s the hardest period in the modern history of the state. We are surrounded by extremely uncompromising and, unfortunately, capable enemies who have inflicted incredible harm on this country and we’re terribly riven from within and we need to make sure this state survives and thrives also because of what’s going on for Jewish people around the world who are going through, I don’t know, a terrible period of rising antisemitism, things that I didn’t expect to see in my lifetime. So, this is a pretty awful period and you have to hope that we will find the wisdom and the resilience and the common ground from within to get through this.

Sruli Fruchter:
What has been Israel’s greatest success and greatest mistake in the current war against Hamas?

David Horovitz:
Okay, I can see you’re going to ask me really hard questions that I’m going to have to think about. Its greatest success and its greatest mistake in the war. The greatest mistake is unfortunately far too easy to identify, which is allowing itself to be complacent about Hamas’s declared intentions and capabilities and therefore, creating a reality in which Hamas was able to invade. We’re many, many months after and October the 7th is not some past incident that Israel has overcome and got through and is receding. It’s an enduring nightmare, partly because of the hostages, of course, and therefore, it’s raw in terms of there are people who are alive who are held captive by the terrorist government of the entity next door. But also, everything that has happened to Israel, everything that happened on October the 7th, the destruction of the national sense of security, the failure of the military, the misguided policies, these have abiding consequences and it remains unfathomable. Truly unfathomable.

David Horovitz:
How could this have happened? In the days running up to October the 7th, much of the discourse was on the 1973 war. The Yom Kippur War, it was 50 years after Yom Kippur and people were marveling, “Wow, Israel had sources in Egyptian intelligence and we knew they were about to attack and how could it be that Israel was so imprisoned by this misconception, it’s just unthinkable.” And then came October the 7th, 2023, and it’s even more unfathomable, in a way. Any of us would’ve done a better job of protecting this country in the run-up to October the 7th than the people whose job it was and who failed to do so, the politicians and the security of military people. Because anyone, you, me would’ve looked at the evidence that was all there and said, “Okay, the analysts don’t believe that this is for real, but hey, we should probably put some more troops down on the border, shouldn’t we?”

David Horovitz:
And there are endless partial and inadequate explanations. The army’s too macho, and therefore, because the surveillance soldiers at the border warning of an attack were all young women, they weren’t taken seriously. Well, maybe that’s part of it, but it’s not a sufficient explanation. Maybe the army is too detached from what’s going on on the ground. Really not the case. The deputy head of the Southern Command lives on Kibbutz Be’eri. His mother was murdered that morning. They were not remote from the physical scene. So it remains unfathomable. And partly, that’s one of the reasons why it’s so hard to get over. If we can’t explain why it happened in the first place, how it was allowed to happen, how can we be confident that it wouldn’t happen again? So the second half of your question, one of the greatest successes, it’s unfortunately not easy to identify any great success.

David Horovitz:
I think the one thing that one can point to is the resilience and the capabilities of the army going into the most treacherous territory, basically, a terrorist state where every step is potentially your last and tackling Hamas. Hamas did not think that Israel would enter its home ground. It’s spent, I don’t know, 16, 17 years preparing and confident that Israel would not dare and would not be able to tackle it in its home territory. It subverted every resource that it possibly could to building this underground infrastructure and building weapons and all the things that we know about. And the Israeli army has done what its commanders required it to do with tremendous courage in an incredibly difficult military reality.

David Horovitz:
I don’t think there’s been a war like this where basically an entire quasi state was subverted for the purpose of being able to kill people who they knew they would be prompting and provoking into trying to destroy them. So, I don’t think one should consider that marginal, but I think it’s hard to speak about any, I don’t remember if you said greatest success, I don’t think that it’s easy to talk about a great success in the context that we’re talking about.

Sruli Fruchter:
Do you think Western media covers the Israel-Hamas war fairly?

David Horovitz:
To generalize terribly, I don’t. You have to say, first of all, having done this for a long time and I think by definition, wars are very hard to cover. It’s very hard to verify things. It’s hard to get to the truth. But this is a particularly difficult conflict to cover because to some extent, it’s a new reality. I’m not a military historian, but I think it’s a new reality in that you have a physical territory and territory, we should add, from which Israel had withdrawn to international approval. Israel had no military or civilian claims on Gaza, no military or civilian presence on Gaza. And Gaza was so desperate to not be responsible for Gaza that it refused to believe that Gaza and Hamas were coming to invade. The reality of Hamas-run Gaza is that there was and is no possibility of independent journalism from within Gaza that I don’t think there are any independent Western or other genuinely independent journalists who are in Gaza in any kind of protracted way.

David Horovitz:
There are people who go in and so on. It may well be that the local hires of the news agencies and other outlets who are doing journalism in Gaza may that many of them are trying to do independent journalism, but they’re doing it in a climate in which to be honest about Hamas in the way that a journalist would strive to be, to find out everything you can that the public needs to know. The more capable you are as a journalist, the more of a threat you would be to Hamas. And there’s an actual personal, definite deadly threat. Well, that’s kind of a disincentive to do decent journalism. And then from the Israeli side, the army takes in reporters, they take in our reporters, but our journalists see the limited things that the army is able to show them for one reason or another, safety, security interest, and so on.

David Horovitz:
And therefore, you’ve had month after month of endless material. I could talk about this for a long time, which is not the framework of this podcast, but in terms of media coverage, I think social media is a huge driver of the first draft of history now, but so still too are the news agencies. And the Reuters feed, for example, out of Gaza is a new headline every few minutes. People who haven’t looked at that will not know what I’m talking about, but people who have will understand. And in many cases, all the material coming out of Gaza is essentially unverifiable. And in some cases, it is spot on and absolutely true, and in some cases it has nothing to do with reality and it’s very, very hard to know which is the case with almost every incident.

David Horovitz:
And then from an official Israeli public diplomacy perspective, you have an army spokesman’s hierarchy that, to the best of my knowledge, has not deliberately lied to journalists, which is something worth highlighting because it was not always the case over the years, but does not respond in real time to lots of stuff, does to some stuff, but not to lots of stuff. You have no effective civilian public diplomacy operation in Israel. And therefore, in terms of trying to cover this, it’s very, very hard to get to the truth and it’s very, very hard even to get credible people asserting on either side of this conflict what is going on and knowing what to make of that.

David Horovitz:
So in that context, it’s hard to do the job, but at the same time, coming back to your original question, it seems to me, and I did generalize in the big answer, that’s not to say that there aren’t journalistic outlets that are straining every sinew to report this honestly, but I think that there are pretty prime journalistic outlets that are not straining every sinew to do good journalism, that are complacent, that are prepared to give too much credibility to claims made by Hamas, for example. Hamas is not interested in having the world see the truth of everything that went on prior to October the 7th and since October the 7th, Hamas is interested in killing Jews and destroying Israel.

David Horovitz:
Obviously, they’re going to skew and lie and misrepresent, and it seems to me that there needs to have been throughout this conflict considerably more, not a little more, considerably more wariness and skepticism and caveating in terms of reporting Hamas claims. We could talk about this, like I said, for a long time, and this might be the longest answer I give you about October the 17th, not the 7th, the 17th when there was an explosion at al-Ahli Hospital and Hamas claimed that it was an Israeli strike and hundreds of people were dead. In many cases, that was reported without caveat or with limited caveat that this obviously had happened because the Gaza Health authorities were saying it. Well, the Gaza Health authorities, to some or other extent, are Hamas, and it was not true, but it wasn’t even particularly credible.

David Horovitz:
It certainly wasn’t emphatically credible, and yet it was reported in many sectors as that’s what had happened. Well, that hadn’t happened. It was an Islamic Jihad rocket that fell short, et cetera, et cetera. That was 10 days into the conflict, so maybe one should be more forgiving. People didn’t really realize how hard it would be to get to the truth and so on, but I think that’s continued in some quarters, including in really, really well-resourced media outlets that should know better.

Sruli Fruchter:
What do you look for in deciding which Knesset party to vote for?

David Horovitz:
First of all, that’s permissible that you’re allowed to make that kind of radical transition from one question to the other? What do I look for in terms of which Knesset parties to vote for? I look for what anyone should look for in making their blessed democratic choice, blessed in that we have the right to make it. You want people who, first of all, I think you need to believe are genuinely interested in the public good. In Israel’s case, these are life-and-death choices that you make when you vote for people. So are they actually interested in trying to ensure that this country makes wise choices to keep its people safe to thrive, to survive even now? And then I suppose you’re looking for people who, once you’re sure that they will actually be trying to make the right choices, that you think they will make choices that reflect, again, in the case of Israel, the direction you think this country needs to go in order to thrive and survive.

David Horovitz:
I think this is a huge big deal, the situation in Israel and the leadership of Israel and the direction that Israel takes. I think we’re living in an acutely worrying historical period. I think this country has to survive and when the time comes, and it came quite often in the last few years, I’ve lost count of how many elections we had within how short a period, but it was something like five in three and a half or four years or something. You have to make sure you’re choosing people who are going to do their best for this country and that their sense of their best is yours. That has not been a particularly happy process in the last few years.

Sruli Fruchter:
Which is more important for Israel, Judaism or democracy?

David Horovitz:
You have to have them both, that’s the whole point, right? And one of the mini-miracles of Israel has been, I don’t know what language to use, but we’ve been able to ensure that this has been the only majority Jewish state in the world, the only place on earth where the Jews were ever sovereign and democratic. It’s an incredible thing. And I’m not sure we took it for granted, but, boy, must we not take it for granted and we must strive to maintain it, which is not easy, really. That takes us into all the questions about relinquishing territory and control of the people who are hostile to you and will use territory to try and harm you utterly. But that’s a fundamental. We don’t have a constitution in Israel. We have that document that they dropped in a rush called the Declaration of Independence.

David Horovitz:
I’m not sure anyone has bettered that in terms of the foundational principles for Israel, and I’m not sure that we should look for anything beyond that in terms of what essentially should stand as a constitution for this country. It doesn’t actually use all the words that we’ve been using and I’ve been using in this answer, but essentially, it provides for a country that is the homeland of the Jews and where the Jews are sovereign and is at the same time, democratic. They’re both crucial is the short answer to your question.

Sruli Fruchter:
What role should the Israeli government have in religious matters?

David Horovitz:
God, I think that’s a very complicated question. This is a First World democracy, but it is atypical because it’s a democracy for a nation that was exiled from its homeland for millennia and that survived in exile around fealty to a faith and a code of life which is something that the Jewish people have been able to contribute to humanity. And in the revival of Israel, we have to somehow stick to the democratic principle but also ensure that respect for the Jewish faith and heritage that is central to our justification for being here.

Sruli Fruchter:
How do you do that?

David Horovitz:
I would submit that the presence of people in politics using political leverage on behalf of ostensible religious interests, I think it’s broadly speaking, fundamentally unhealthy and I think you can see it in the traumas and the divides and the things that we’re going through now. Just for example, in terms of military and national service for the fastest-growing element of the Israeli demographic, which is the ultra-Orthodox community, I don’t think it’s healthy to have, I guess I don’t even know how to define it, but religious advocacy as an essential element of the political fabric. And I think there are probably historians and scholars who will tell you that, ultimately, that’s not in anyone’s interest. It doesn’t help politics function properly and it doesn’t do a service to true faith and religion. It’s an unhealthy mix.

David Horovitz:
I’m not sure how many precedents there are for quite how unhealthy it is in Israel. In terms of, like I said, at the moment now you have a large sector of the public that is acting in what its leaders tell it are the interests of authentic Judaism and it’s the opposite. Orthodox Judaism does not say you do not fulfill your responsibilities to the country that you live in and/or to your family. Your obligation is quite big in traditional Judaism to earn a living and provide for your family. And you have instead a mass not earning a living, not providing for your family, not sharing properly in the full responsibilities of the state in the ultra-Orthodox world. So it’s unhealthy and I don’t have a full fix and I don’t think you should be compelling people and coercing people in any directions, but you need to provide for the national good in politics, and I don’t think the deep presence in politics of ostensible religious leadership or religious demands and advocates, I don’t think it’s healthy. I think it’s the opposite.

Sruli Fruchter:
Should Israel treat its Jewish and non-Jewish citizens the same?

David Horovitz:
Yeah, broadly speaking, I think so. We have laws in this country and if they’re drawn up properly and norms of behavior and if they’re respected, they should be applied and respected and imposed equally.

Sruli Fruchter:
Now that Israel already exists, what’s the purpose of Zionism?

David Horovitz:
Well, I don’t think the goal of enabling a flourishing Jewish homeland is done because Israel exists. It’s an ongoing challenge and opportunity. This country has to thrive. It has to be a light unto the nations and a light unto its own citizens, and we’ve done some fantastic things in this country that reflect that, but it’s not a mission that is over. It’s a perpetual mission, and the more effective we are at protecting this country and steering it in a constructive way, the better we’re doing that job as Zionists. At the moment, we’re battling for our lives to some extent, which apart from being an awful period for Israel means that there’s less attention that you can give to, and that its people can give to some of the most extraordinary and laudable things that we’ve been able to do.

David Horovitz:
This is a country that has … One of the most amazing things it ever did, I think, was first of all, learning how to grow quite a lot of food with very little water centrally via drip irrigation, and then telling lots of other countries who were having a really hard time feeding their people how to go about doing it. The extent, the scale of medical and other tech innovation in the last few years was astonishing. We’re cynical now about the startup nation and the focus on tech because, hey, we’re fighting for our lives now, and look where were our heads, but there’s no real need for cynicism and there’s no place for it. We did amazing things in this country when we allowed ourselves to focus on innovation and creativity and so on. And one of the consequences of having hundreds of thousands of your civilians being required to serve in the military and being taken away from their jobs is that some of the best and brightest people and some of the most constructive and productive areas of innovation and so on were kind of put aside now.

David Horovitz:
I would love to think that Israel has some purpose or particular capability to do something with solar energy. There’s great biblical resonance to the notion of harnessing the powers from on high to help this planet. And there’s so much innovation that Israel was engaged in and should be engaged in. That’s part of Zionism. This country needs to thrive. So, the premise of your question, which I know is deliberately worded in that way, it’s wrong. Zionism isn’t done because the state exists. First of all, there’s no guarantee about the state or anybody’s country. And Zionism is an ongoing thing to make the best of this revived country.

Sruli Fruchter:
Is opposing Zionism inherently antisemitic?

David Horovitz:
I don’t know. It’s very hard to do an interview like this, and I credit you as a journalist because the shorter the questions, of course, the harder it is to answer them because you need a little time to think

Sruli Fruchter:
If you want to pause to think—

David Horovitz:
No, it’s fine. Well, yeah, I’d like to think two hours over all of the questions so far. So yeah, let’s add the caveat that my answers to you are being given in a very short and sharp interview format, and therefore, I’m sure there are smarter things that need to be said and answered to many of your questions. When there’s an obsessive focus on anti-Zionism, on hostility to Israel and the assertion of illegitimacy against Israel, when you’re not concerned about mass famine in Sudan or horrible years of civil war in Syria or any number of other places where terrible things have happened or are playing out and so on when all the focus is on Israel, yeah, then it’s antisemitism.

David Horovitz:
And there’s a huge amount of that around at the moment, and it’s pretty overt combined with a quite staggering degree of ignorance apart from being concerned that in my lifetime we’ve seen spiking antisemitism like this in the last few months, which is something I did not expect to see. I wanted to believe that after World War II, people had recoiled from the evidence of how terrible we can be to each other, and I didn’t think antisemitism had gone, but I thought it was more marginalized than it has turned out to be. Apart from my concern for the well-being of this country and for Jews all around the world, I’m also insulted and what does it say about intellectual rigor and basically any sort of fundamental wisdom on the part of people that people are prepared to go out and demonstrate for causes about which they know nothing and don’t even care to investigate.

David Horovitz:
It’s a little cliche now to see all these TikTok videos of people being asked as they hold their “From the River to the Sea” signs, which are basically calling to destroy Israel and being asked, “Which river is that?” And not knowing. “And which sea?” And not knowing. And not even caring to know and to have faculty at universities coming out and defending their students’ right to campaign for genocide, apart from the ignorance, the evil of that demand. It’s quite astonishing how ill-informed in some cases, in some cases, very well-informed, sophisticated and malicious and how overt this hostility has become. How many have we done so far?

Sruli Fruchter:
I was going to ask you, which question do you think we’re up to?

David Horovitz:
I’d say we’re about halfway through.

Sruli Fruchter:
We’re halfway through.

David Horovitz:
Okay.

Sruli Fruchter:
It’s the first time I got a right answer. That’s the only one that there’s a wrong answer to. Is the IDF the world’s most moral army?

David Horovitz:
I hope so. I don’t know. I haven’t surveyed other people’s armies. I do have a fair amount of interaction with the people who are commanding it. I think they are concerned to try to act as morally as they can. These are very hard decisions that they’re making and being asked to make. And like I say, I don’t know about other armies. I don’t think the army and its leadership is indifferent or callous. And I think your question comes, of course, because of the war against Hamas in Gaza. So I don’t have the expertise to give it that certification, but I do believe that its command is a strive to act morally. I would just add, I’m not unconcerned about tactical instance, specific instance. I’m not saying that things have not been done that require investigation or that should not have been done. I don’t think any army would be immune from that. But in terms of the broad strategic approach, I do think that the Army’s commanders are trying to act morally.

Sruli Fruchter:
If you were making the case for Israel, where would you begin?

David Horovitz:
First of all, it’s a ridiculous requirement. Nobody should have to make … Who has to make the case for the United States or the case for Great Britain? This is a country, it was belatedly relegitimized by the United Nations in 1947. I say belatedly too late to save the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe, but has served as a refuge and thrived from within in the decades since. This is the only place on earth where the Jews have ever been sovereign.

David Horovitz:
It was re-established on the basis of a two-state solution, in other words, a process that was intended to have two nations, one revived and one for the first time for Jewish and Arab residents of this area, which was what the international community felt was the right and fair way to go about resolving issues here. Its case, if it needs to be made, is based on historical legitimacy. As I’ve said before, it’s the only place on earth where the Jews were ever sovereign, never willingly left, always prayed to return. And like I said, we’re unfortunately only allowed to revive their nation too late for the people who were the victims of the Nazis 80 years ago. But I understand why you have to ask that question, and it’s a shame that it is necessary. It shouldn’t be necessary.

Sruli Fruchter:
Can questioning the actions of Israel’s government and army, even in the context of this war, be considered a valid form of love and patriotism?

David Horovitz:
Look, you’re asking a journalist, our job is to question the actions, motives, and lots of other things about everybody, certainly including people who are running our lives and acting ostensibly on our behalf. I don’t recall the wording you actually asked in the question, but what did you say? Questioning the legitimacy of the actions?

Sruli Fruchter:
The actions of the government and army.

David Horovitz:
Absolutely. Whether that is legitimate.

Sruli Fruchter:
Consider it a valid form of love and patriotism.

David Horovitz:
Yeah, I definitely think it’s a valid form of love and patriotism. I think you have to have that questioning. It’s an expression of love and patriotism, and if there is not some kind of credible, independent, passionate, determined questioning, then you’ll live in a society that is much weaker.

Sruli Fruchter:
I’m sorry, give me one moment. What do you think is the most legitimate criticism? I’m laughing from our-

David Horovitz:
Remember, you don’t have to ask these questions. It’s your choice.

Sruli Fruchter:
Yeah, it’s my choice. I’m setting myself up for this. What do you think is the most legitimate criticism leveled against Israel today?

David Horovitz:
Look, I haven’t done this at all so far in this conversation, which is try to reshape your question in my answer, so I’m not sure this is an actual direct answer to your question, but I think Israel’s capacity to retain the support that it deserves in this terrible period when we were attacked unprovoked by the terrorist army government of the entity next door, most of the efforts to demonize, de-legitimize, and render Israel defenseless are motivated by malice and in some cases, ignorance. But unfortunately, I think the nature of some of the people in government has enabled or smoothed the path for some of the criticism. So it’s a criticism I have from within. We have people in the heart of government in various central positions in government who have no place in the leadership of a self-respecting life-seeking country, democracy, Jewish state.

David Horovitz:
I’m thinking of ministers from the far right, at least one of whom is a dangerous pyromaniacal thug in my opinion. I’m talking about Itamar Ben-Gvir who is in charge of our police force. You asked me before about which matters most or something like that, a Jewish Israel or a democratic Israel. We have people in the leadership of Israel who seem to be oblivious to the dangers of Israel departing from those fundamental foundational values and so on. So nevermind external criticism, internal criticism. We have people who are a discredit to this country and a danger to this country who are at the heart of the leadership of this country.

Sruli Fruchter:
Do you think peace between Israelis and Palestinians will happen within your lifetime?

David Horovitz:
That’s really hard to envisage. I don’t think anything lasting and real in terms of genuine coexistence and mutual respect and so on is going to happen in the near future. We saw lots of American administrations in years past trying to, in some cases, strong-arm, in some cases, more gently try to prod the sides towards coexistence and permanent accords and so on. And maybe we came close and in some cases maybe we were victims of really unfortunate timing and different people, had they all been around at the same time, I don’t know. For example, I don’t know if a President Clinton and a Yitzhak Rabin and a Mahmoud Abbas might’ve gotten us closer, but those people were not in situ at the same time. But I think everything really depends ultimately on education. If you’re educating your people to things as fundamental as the fact that in the case of Palestinian education, if you’re telling your people that, “Hey, the Jews have history here too,” then you’re going to maybe start to create a climate in which people will be prepared to coexist.

David Horovitz:
If you’re educating people that essentially the Jews have no legitimacy here, that Zionism is a colonialist project, if you’re a leader, and Mahmoud Abbas is not the worst, his predecessor was actually directly orchestrating terrorism, but I think Mahmoud Abbas deep in his heart and in some of the things he’s said and done indicates that he doesn’t actually fundamentally believe that Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish state. It’s hard to envisage when you’ve got successive Palestinian leaders who are educating their public to Israel’s ostensible fundamental illegitimacy, it’s hard to see how you get from there to peace. You asked about peace. You didn’t ask about tense adjacent existence, but it comes through education. It’s going to take generations. It has to be bottom-up as well as top-down, and therefore, it’s hard to envisage in the foreseeable future. And I’m not so young anymore, so probably not in my lifetime.

Sruli Fruchter:
What do you think should happen with Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict after the war?

David Horovitz:
It’s the same answer to the previous question. Ultimately, it depends on education. Ultimately. I’m not talking about the very specific, on X date. Israel does not have any interest, in my opinion, in the long-term governance of Gaza. I think the need to ensure that Hamas can’t rearm and do October the 7th again when it has said that that’s exactly what it will do if it can, Israel needs to prevent that and certainly, there needs to be the necessary partnerships. Israel was not able to prevent this alone in part because of things like Hamas being able to arm across the Egyptian border and so on. So we need partnerships there. But we don’t want tens of thousands of troops perpetually deployed. We shouldn’t seek to resettle Gaza and plunge Jews again into the midst of, I don’t know, anything around 2 million people who are hostile to Israel.

David Horovitz:
You’ve heard my answer from before, I don’t think there’s any quick fix to anything here, but I don’t think we should be closing doors to an eventual accommodation where you devote your resources, where you place your people should not be contradictory to your ultimate goal of some viable separation that preserves Israel as a Jewish and a democratic state. So in terms of the very specifics about Gaza, we need to build some kind of alternative governance within Gaza that is not a huge drain and a huge entangling of Israel. It’s very hard to do. You can’t be immune to the concern that if Israel wants somebody else to come in and take over, it has to be safe for them to do so. Nobody’s going to rush into Gaza unless Hamas is, broadly speaking, defanged. And Hamas is fighting differently already now.

David Horovitz:
In most cases, it’s not fighting in the organized battalions, the 24 battalions that it had arranged and were ready for Israel on October the 7th. It’s increasingly some kind of urban guerrilla warfare now, and I think they’re still recruiting all the time and so on. So it’s not easy in that context to have anybody else doing anything. But that’s Israel’s interest, working for some kind of non-Israeli day-to-day governance of Gaza, while Israel does its best with partnerships, which I think are necessary. It’s certainly geographically unavoidably necessary with Egypt and maybe others to ensure that nothing like October the 7th can come to pass again.

Sruli Fruchter:
Do you think that will happen?

David Horovitz:
What? Do I think we’re out of the woods or whether—

Sruli Fruchter:
Or do you think that after the war the direction that you were outlining will happen?

David Horovitz:
I do not think credibly that there’s any other option. One of the reasons for saying that is it’s not as though that’s the only front on which Israel is threatened. I’ll put it the other way. In order to ensure that Israel is able to defend itself, we’re fighting on seven fronts, you could argue, at the moment, blessedly not, we don’t have the fighting from within that we had in 2021, for example, in the so-called mixed cities, but there’s Gaza, there’s the West Bank, there’s Lebanon, Syria, militias in Iraq, the Houthis, Iran closing in on the bomb, and so on, you can’t afford to have vast resources semi-perpetually devoted to running Gaza when you’ve got so many other threats on so many other fronts. And this is a small country with a small standing army and a reserve compliment that is already under unprecedented strain where people have been away from their homes and their jobs for months. So that has to be the direction that Israel has to ensure it is able to go in.

Sruli Fruchter:
Where do you read news about Israel?

David Horovitz:
Well, I’m talking to you now with the television off so that’s already an atypical situation. I watch news almost constantly. Your listeners can’t see this, but I have black circles under my eyes now, which I did not have seven, eight months ago simply because I do sleep occasionally and even see my children and my wife. But I’m consuming news all the time so that what we do at The Times of Israel is well-informed. And many of my staff would say the same thing, I think, which is not terribly healthy for any of us. I’m being very specific in my answer, so I probably look at 40 websites a day, but in a methodical manner. In other words, I don’t happen upon. I’m giving you really the specifics here. So my computer is set-

Sruli Fruchter:
Inside secrets.

David Horovitz:
Not terribly secretive, really, but you can set your computer to open certain tabs whenever you log into your computer. So at least three times a day I look over about 30 or 40 news sources and listen to the radio when I’m not at my computer. And it’s constant and it’s wide, including lots of outlets whose coverage I find unreliable or troubling, but I need to know what’s being reported. I’m not sure that’s atypical for an editor-in-chief of a 24/7 news outlet, but that’s what I do.

Sruli Fruchter:
Would you share which of the few that you do find reliable that you look to, aside from Times of Israel?

David Horovitz:
Look, as I said before, it’s very, very hard. I wouldn’t have been speaking like this five years ago. I’m not even sure I would’ve done two years ago. The degree to which you need to have one eyebrow up about everything, not just what other news outlets are reporting, but what is ostensibly coming from people who are in the position to know stuff, politicians and military chiefs. First of all, nowadays, you don’t even know if the person actually said it. And even when you’ve seen the person saying it, we’re getting to the stage where, “Well, but yeah, I know I saw him saying it or her saying it, but that doesn’t actually mean that he or she said it because we’re now in an era where you can manipulate everything.”

David Horovitz:
So there’s not a single news outlet. And that’s not necessarily a reflection on them where I would say, “Oh, but I saw it or read it or heard it there. Therefore, it must be true.” There are places where it’s more likely to be credible and there are places where it’s less likely to, and there are places where you know that’s just so not true. And there are places where, “Well, actually, I’ve seen that document and it doesn’t say that,” or, “I spoke to that person and he or she didn’t say that.” And we’re in a situation sometimes where this is being really widely reported and we know it’s not true. So then you’re in the dilemma of, “Well, maybe we should ignore it because it’s not true.” Or maybe we need to have an item that says, “Well, this isn’t true actually.”

David Horovitz:
That’s some of the considerations that we deal with now. And again, I don’t think that’s unique to us. So there’s no outlet that is utterly reliable. There are outlets that you know are straining to be accurate. And reliability is also a function of how prominent you consider you should make certain material. So nobody is absolute, including The Times of Israel. We get stuff wrong. We get stuff wrong, not because we’re deliberately skewing or because we’ve deliberately sensationalized because sometimes we get stuff wrong and we try to fix it. Again, as I said before, when you’re covering a war like this in this era, it’s incredibly challenging. And there are some outlets that are plainly doing their best and others, less so.

Sruli Fruchter:
Where do you identify on Israel’s political and religious spectrum? And do you have any friends on the, quote-unquote, other side?

David Horovitz:
Yeah, I’m somewhere in the confused middle ground of Israeli politics, I would say. By which I mean, as is obvious from this conversation, I would like Israel to retain its Jewish majority and democratic character and its strategic policies should be directed to achieve that religiously. I have, I’m sure as is common, quite a complicated relationship with higher powers. I do believe that there are higher powers. I don’t think that’s an act of faith. I think that’s an act of common sense. I don’t know how I would define them. But you look at your children or I just was watching the movements of an owl, I kid you not, and I don’t think that’s the best-

Sruli Fruchter:
Is that one of the news sites that popped up?

David Horovitz:
No, it was not. It was the back garden of a relative of mine and what an incredible creature that is. And obviously, no power that I know could have created that. I don’t know what that means. Anyway, you asked me this question so you get the answer that I give you. I come from an Orthodox family. My great-grandfather founded a synagogue in Frankfurt. I have an uncle who’s the head of a yeshiva. The shul I don’t go to very often is a Reform community where my daughter wonderfully was bat mitzvah and read from the Torah.

Sruli Fruchter:
And do you have any friends on the other side politically and religiously?

David Horovitz:
Yeah, I have friends and relatives all over the place politically and religiously.

Sruli Fruchter:
Okay. And to close this off, do you have more hope or fear for Israel and the Jewish People?

David Horovitz:
I suppose fear is the opposite of hope, but I’m worried. Look, I think humanity’s hurtling off a cliff. I couldn’t sound more apocalyptic than that. I’ve never lived through a period like this. And what I said before, I’m very struck by not only “from the river to the sea” being projected onto Big Ben in London, which has a certain resonance for me as someone who grew up in London, but the campus protests in the States and the tolerance for the horrific statements, and in some cases, actions. And the sight of the presidents of America’s most elite educational institutions acting like white-collar criminals who’ve been lawyered up when giving congressional testimony, that’s dire. And what I said before about the lack of intellectual rigor in what you’re campaigning for, I just think it’s awful. So it has very specific consequences for an effort to render Israel defenseless and to misrepresent what’s going on here and so on.

David Horovitz:
That’s tremendous cause for concern that goes far beyond Israel and the Jews, but has very particular application for people who care about Israel and the Jews or who are Israeli and Jewish like I am. And my hope revolves around the many fine people who are dedicated to treating others as they want to be treated and who are dedicated, in this case, to ensure that Israel is able to protect itself and survive and thrive. But there’s never been a period where if you’re looking at the balance between those two where I’ve been more pessimistic about where all of the world is heading and the specific consequences for Israel and less confident that the good and the decent and the fair will prevail. I certainly hope that will be the case, but I’m less confident than I was even a year ago about that.

Sruli Fruchter:
All right. Well, thank you so much for the 18 questions, David Horovitz.

David Horovitz:
Thank you.

Sruli Fruchter:
This was really a lovely interview. I’m a huge fan of Times of Israel. Again, I read them all the time. I think that they are so reliable. They’re very quick, they’re very thorough, they’re very credible, and those things are not to be taken for granted, especially in the age when you have disinformation, that classic term, on social media from outlets that aren’t reliable, that have biases. I always find Times of Israel is delivering the news as it is, as they see it, and as we want to read it. David was wonderful. I recommend that you check out his op-eds on Times of Israel and all of his work, his books as well. I haven’t personally read them yet, but I hope to and they are on my list.

Sruli Fruchter:
So in the meantime, stay tuned for more questions with more thinkers. If you have guests you want us to feature or questions that you want us to ask, shoot us an email info@18forty.org. And for all things Jewish ideas in the Jewish world, I’m talking podcasts, essays, book recommendations, programs, and more, visit us at 18forty.org. That’s 18 F-O-R-T-Y.org. And if you are interested in sponsoring an episode of 18 Questions, 40 Israeli Thinkers, shoot us an email at that same email. So until next time.