Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: ‘I am scared that in 20 years, Israel will be isolated completely’

Transcripts are lightly edited—please excuse any imperfections.

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: I think that we need America’s help with all of this because if America doesn’t press Qatar, who are the sponsors and the paymasters and the hosts of Hamas, then how on earth are we going to get our hostages home? And how on earth could we ever dream of getting Hamas to surrender itself? If Qatar understand that they’re going to lose the relationship with America by standing with Hamas, then that’s power. Question is are they using it forcefully enough? I don’t know.

My name is Fleur Hassan-Nahoum. I’m a Foreign Ministry special envoy for trade and innovation, former Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, 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 podcast that interviews Israel’s leading voices to explore those critical questions people are having today on Zionism, 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. Fleur Hassan-Nahoum is not just an activist and lawyer who watches and comments upon the happenings of Israeli society, but she is a political thinker and activist immersed in its world. Originally from London, and a lawyer by trade, in May 2016, Fleur became a city councilor in Jerusalem, and the following February, the leader of the opposition.

In November 2018, she was reelected to the Jerusalem Municipal Council and appointed Deputy Mayor for Foreign Relations, Economic Development, and Tourism. She co-founded the UAE Israel Business Council and the Gulf Israel Women’s Forum in 2020. Since September of 2023, she has been serving as Israel’s special envoy for innovation. Fleur is the first woman to be appointed as Secretary General for Kol Israel, the ideological successor to the General Zionist Party in the World Zionist Congress.

And she recently joined the Misgav Institute for National Security & Zionist Strategy as a senior fellow and sits on its International Advisory Council. In March 2024, she completed her tenure as Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem. There are so many things that fill this conversation with such depth and perspective. And I think that much of that came not just from the work that Fleur is actively involved with, but from her personal and professional history and experiences.

There is so much to learn from her, learn about her, and I’m excited for you to hear this episode. So before we get into it, if you have questions you want us to ask or guests that you want us to feature, please shoot us an email at info@18Forty.org and be sure to subscribe and share with friends so that we can reach new listeners. Fleur is our 36th Israeli thinker, and you know what that means, we have four left until we reach our 40. So if there are people you are dying for us to interview or questions that you are dying for us to ask, now is your time to let us know.

info@18Forty.org. And I’m particularly excited, as you probably heard in the intro, to mention that 18Forty is celebrating its fifth year on the Upper East Side. I will be there. David Bashevkin will be there.

We’ll have great people from the 18Forty team there as well. In conversation with Malka Simkovich. It is an event you do not want to miss. You can find more at 18Forty.org/5years or probably in the description below.

And so, without further ado, here is 18 Questions with Fleur Hassan-Nahoum. We’ll begin where we always do. As an Israeli and as a Jew, how are you feeling at this moment in Israeli history?

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: I think I’m feeling a little disturbed and yet I try and hang on to optimism because of the historical context that we find ourselves in. I think that Israel is really at a crossroads of many wars, not just one war. We have the war against us, which is actually being fought on many different fronts, with Hamas in Gaza, with Hezbollah, Lebanon, the Houthis, and all our classic enemies.

I also believe we are fighting in the front lines of a civilizational war. Free worlds against extreme Islamism. And we are, like I said, the first stop on their tour to basically conquer the world and turn it into a caliphate. They are colonizing the world, soft colonization through the media, and hard colonization through Muslim Brotherhood and other entities like Qatar.

And so we find ourselves in that war. And we also find ourselves in another iteration of the war against antisemitism that we’ve had and we’ve suffered for two and a half thousand years. Every hundred years, it rears its ugly head in a very extreme way. And we are now going through that wave.

I have no doubt in my mind. And so we find ourselves in the middle of a storm in many, many ways.

Sruli Fruchter: It sounds very overwhelming, I think even just from the different challenges that you’re mentioning. As someone who’s been involved in the political space for well before October 7th, how would you have answered this type of question, say 5, 10 years ago?

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Well, I kind of knew we were in the Middle East at least.

I knew that we were in the war between the countries that want peace and prosperity in the region and the countries that want extremism and destruction. I knew we were in that war already. I didn’t realize how far these countries, the countries that want destruction and Islamism.

Sruli Fruchter: Which countries?

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Qatar, the Islamic Republic of Iran, parts of Iraq.

I didn’t realize how far they’ve gotten into the psyche of the West. And I didn’t realize how lost Europe is to Islamic extremism. So I didn’t realize how far they’ve gotten. I knew we were in a war.

I didn’t realize that they were making real gains.

Sruli Fruchter: In terms of Israel’s war right now, what would you say has been Israel’s greatest success and greatest mistake in the war against Hamas?

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: I think it’s very difficult to talk about success when we still have, you know, 59 hostages, 12, 20, 21, two of them alive to call about success. But I think the greatest success we’ve had is that we’ve managed to restore deterrence. It turns out that on the 7th of October, Hamas was not deterred.

And Hezbollah was not deterred in the north on the 8th of October. The Houthis don’t seem deterred still. Our only real strength is deterrence. What does deterrence mean? Nobody will strike us because they fear that us striking them back is bad for them.

And I think for the most part, we’ve reestablished deterrence. That’s our greatest success. Our greatest failure is that we have not taken and do not take the invisible war seriously, which is the war of words, the war of rhetoric, the war for the hearts and minds of normal people. We have never invested in it.

We don’t have a strategy for it. We don’t put our best soldiers, we don’t have a headquarters, we don’t have a real solution. And I blame Israel for that.

Sruli Fruchter: But hasn’t the Hasbara empire or at least, you know, not necessarily cohesive, but Hasbara as a force within Jewish and Israeli society been heavily invested in over the last, at least the last two decades or so? What do you feel like is particularly lacking that made them unprepared for this moment?

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: The only investment that has been done in Hasbara has been bottom up.

Has been by non-profit organizations who understood that the Israeli government has no intention to actually take it seriously. And I think that there’s so much you can do bottom up. You also need a top down solution, and we’ve never had a top down solution. And that’s really the problem.

Israelis and successive Israeli governments, not this particular government, all governments, have always seen the communications war as a nice to have and not a need to have. And unfortunately, in this war, we’ve discovered that losing the communications war has also affected our ability to fight the military war. And that is what I would hope they would have taken seriously. But today, we don’t have, the Prime Minister doesn’t have a foreign spokesperson.

There is a function in the Prime Minister’s office called Public Diplomacy Directorate, doesn’t have a head. It didn’t have a head on October 7th. You have this war being fought divided into a number of ministries. No ministry really has the real mandate to deal with it.

Then you have the army spokesperson, and nobody’s coordinated, and nobody’s leading the efforts. So if I was to compare this to a military war, it would be like fighting a military war without a headquarters, without a unified strategy. And that’s what’s happening in the communications war.

Sruli Fruchter: How do you think Hamas views the outcome and aftermath of October 7th? Was there a success in their eyes?

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: I mean, I think if they’re really honest with themselves, it was a complete failure.

But they’ve managed through the propaganda and the communications warfare to isolate Israel diplomatically in a number of ways. Thank God, you know, not everywhere, not in the most important places. We still have the backing of the United States.

Sruli Fruchter: Do you think that relationship is being mishandled?

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Well, I think that it’s become partisan, and that’s what concerns me.

So we can’t have a situation where only the Republicans get what’s going on here. And that’s what’s slowly becoming that the Democrats are becoming more and more woke. And woke means radicalized towards a new form of communism. And woke also means this kind of unholy, nonsensical alliance with Islamic fundamentalism that makes absolutely no sense, except for the fact that they all hate or they all hate Israel and Jews.

So I am concerned that the new generations in America don’t understand the importance of the Israel-America relationship. Don’t understand that essentially we’re an outpost of liberal values and the free world in the Middle East, only democracy in the Middle East, only place where we sanctify the same type of values. I’m scared that in 20 years, we could be isolated completely.

Sruli Fruchter: Given recent news, it seems like Trump has started to break from Netanyahu in certain ways that many had a perspective on.

I mean, at least from how he was elected first as president of the United States, that they didn’t expect. What’s your perspective on that?

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: I don’t believe it. I speak to a lot of friends of mine who have very close relationships in the White House, especially the Christian Evangelical community. And they’re telling me that that’s not the case.

Uh, you know, uh, there’s no real daylight between America and Israel. They’re strong personalities. Strong personalities are always going to clash.

Sruli Fruchter: Does that apply in terms of negotiating a ceasefire deal or a long-term deal for ending the war?

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: I think that we need America’s help with all of this because if America doesn’t press Qatar, who are the sponsors and the paymasters and the hosts of Hamas, then how on earth are we going to get our hostages home? And how on earth could we ever dream of getting Hamas to surrender itself? If Qatar understand that they’re going to lose the relationship with America by standing with Hamas, then that’s power.

Question is, are they using it forcefully enough? I don’t know.

Sruli Fruchter: The reason I asked that is because I think that for many people, it does seem like Netanyahu is the Prime Minister and that he doesn’t really seem to be in the direction. It seems that he has emphasized a lot more of military pressure and a military end to the war, whereas, you know, whether it was a deal a few months ago, the Middle East envoy Witkoff pressed, or even the latest deal with Alexander, who was released, which the United States negotiated, you know, sidestepping Israel. Meaning, how do you respond to someone who says that this does, in fact, seem to be a break, not necessarily from Israel, but at least from Netanyahu? What do you think they misunderstand if you disagree with that?

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Well, I, like I said, nothing is ever black or white.

Everything is shades of gray. Everything is nuanced, and we don’t even know the majority of what’s going on behind closed doors. We don’t know anything. We don’t know what we were promised in order to, you know, accept this interference or that interference.

We don’t know anything. And so it’s very difficult to make an assessment on what the media tells us or what the media wants us to believe. I truly believe that America understands Israel’s predicament. I truly believe that, well, I mean, yesterday Witkoff said that there is actually no sense in the latest deal that Hamas has agreed to.

What normally happens is America has a deal, Hamas agrees to whatever they want to, they agree to a deal that doesn’t exist. Then they go to the news media and they say, Hamas have accepted the deal, now Israel hasn’t. When it’s all lies. They have not agreed to the deal that Witkoff presented them.

They have agreed to whatever deal they want to agree to. And so again, there’s a lot of misinformation. We don’t really know what’s going on behind closed doors. When Witkoff saw the deal yesterday, he said, of course Israel can’t agree to this.

And so again, we have to take a breath and understand that what we see and what we hear is not necessarily what’s going on. And trust in our friends. And let me tell you how I trust in our friends. We have a dilemma at the moment with aid.

Israel, the aid that we’ve allowed in for the last year and a half or longer now, is being used by Hamas. They steal the aid, they sell the aid at a premium to innocent people, and then they use that money to fund their terrorists, to pay their soldiers, which is essentially means that the aid that we are, according to humanitarian law, allowing in and helping facilitate, is being used to perpetuate the attack against us. So what does Israel do? So what do people who are not friends do? They attack. They say Israel’s committing starvation, they talk about 14,000 babies, they propagate the blood libel that 14,000 babies are going to die in 24 hours.

Then after a few days, you realize it’s all a lie. You realize that that’s not what the guy said, even though the guy wanted it to be interpreted that way because there is a lot of malice and there’s a lot of demonization going on of Israel and the Jewish people. And that’s part and parcel of the history of antisemitism, demonization, double standards. And but what does America do? They understand that we’re in a dilemma.

So they come up with an alternative plan for humanitarian aid. They send people here. They see, okay, let’s see who else can distribute. Let’s see if we can do that in a way that leaves Hamas out of the equation.

That’s what friends do. And that’s what America did. So I don’t think we’ve been abandoned by America. I think there’s always strong personalities, always a little bit of egos always in the room, especially when there’s men involved.

I just think that we don’t know the half of it. We have to give it some time, take a breath and see how this whole thing plays out.

Sruli Fruchter: So, I want to switch gears a little bit to talk more broadly about democracy and Israeli society and so on. I know this is an interesting question given your own political history in Israel, but what do you look for in deciding which kind of Knesset party to vote for?

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: That’s interesting.

I try and look for honest politicians. Honest doesn’t mean in the sense of monetary briberies. Honest mean people of integrity, people who are not just chasing political slogans or popularity, and people who are doers, people with a record of doing. I find that in Israel, there’s a lot of career politicians that, you know, spend all their lives just wheeling and dealing political jobs for themselves, but in fact have very little actual projects and ventures and results under their belts.

And I’m a person that came into politics when I was 40 years old. I had three careers before that. I think it’d be nice if politicians actually had something to bring to the table other than that they want to be politicians. Some life experience, some real experience, some management experience would be good.

But I also look for patriots. I look for people who get the big picture, which I think a lot of people in this country don’t. A lot of Israelis don’t really understand antisemitism. A lot of Israelis think that the world begins and ends in the borders of Israel, whatever they think they are.

They don’t understand that we’re fighting a much wider war.

Sruli Fruchter: What do you mean by that? What do you think that they don’t understand about that?

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: That we’re in a war for the soul of the free world against Islamic fundamentalism, and that antisemitism has reared its ugly head again, and that the only place you’re actually really safe as a Jew is Israel.

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

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: I don’t think you can separate. We are a Jewish state.

Without our Jewish values, principles, tradition, and culture, we don’t deserve to be here. But Judaism is also in by nature democratic. When you think about the first democratic construct in humanity, the Bible, it’s not Greece. It’s Yitro advising Moshe about how to delegate.

We just read the parsha, Bechukotai, all about how Judaism is about lifting up the people who suffer inequality, inequity. How do we pardon debts? How Judaism is the religion, the first religion that first brought about workers’ rights with Shabbat. Shabbat is a day off, including for slaves. And that is the first instant ever in humanity about workers’ rights.

The right that you are not completely owned when you have one day to yourself. And so I find it that Judaism and and democracy are inherently tied. That is Jewish values. But a lot of people just don’t understand.

They they haven’t been educated in in the real value of our heritage.

Sruli Fruchter: What do you mean when you say Israel as a Jewish state?

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: We’re a state for the Jews. We respect minorities. We, of course, preserve their rights, because that is also a Jewish value, protecting minorities.

But we’re a country of Jewish language, culture, tradition, and religion.

Sruli Fruchter: So, do you think that Israel should treat its Jewish and non-Jewish citizens the same?

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Yes, absolutely. But inherently, there’s going to be a difference. Let me give you an example.

I lived in Gibraltar, which is a Catholic country, and then I moved to England, which is a Protestant country. Maybe not so much anymore. What are the national holidays? They’re not Rosh Hashanah. They’re Christmas.

Now, do I get offended and say that I don’t have rights as a Jew because the national holiday is Christmas and not Rosh Hashanah? No. I adapt. I become a productive member of society. I take the day off from my own days off.

Do I cry that I’m living in an unequal society? No. It’s a Christian country. And so I adapt. And so, yes, this is a Jewish country where the national holidays are Jewish.

We respect minorities. We should see the city of Jerusalem, what we do for Ramadan. We do a lot of cultural engagement and, uh, and also we give budgets for Muslim cultural events. But this is a Jewish country where the main holiday is Rosh Hashanah.

Now, why should we apologize when there is hundreds of Christian countries around the world who do the same thing as we do, but with Christianity? And there’s almost 30 Muslim countries that do the same thing with Islam. Why are we the only people that have to excuse ourselves for being Jewish, for being our religion? Why? That double standard is called antisemitism.

Sruli Fruchter: Do you think that that’s the particular issue that people are talking about when they talk about the conflict between the Jewish and democratic parts of Israel? For example, many of the times that I think, or many of the reports for, let’s say, Arab citizens of Israel, the gripes that they may have with the Israeli government or so on is with questions of education, education in Arab communities, or with how the government deals with crime in Arab communities, or so on, in those types of disparities.

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: I don’t think that is something which is undemocratic, because everybody can run for office.

The main problem with the Arab community is that the leaders that run for office and the leaders that get elected to Knesset are more preoccupied with the Palestinian cause than they are in representing their people to get better resources from the government. If they were a little bit more like the Haredim, for example, their populations would be in much better, in much better conditions, because that’s real representation. At the moment, they just grandstand about Palestinians who have nothing to do with them and in fact hate them deeply for having stayed in Israel and being citizens of Israel.

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

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: So, I’m a big believer in the separation of synagogue and state.

I mean, I was going to say church and state, but it makes no sense. As a woman, and I would even say as a religious woman, even though some people don’t see me that way, I think that we always will be at a disadvantage when there are beit dins, when there are religious judges who are all men. It’s just the way that it is. And so I believe that yes, of course we should have religious ritual in this country, but it shouldn’t be government jobs.

Because the minute you mix in religion with state and with politics and jobs, you sully the religion. You make it something dirty. You make it something people can criticize. You politicize the religion, which is exactly the problem with Islam.

Political Islam is the problem. May not necessarily be Islam because you could take some chapters and you could leave some chapters. And there are some nice things and there are some horrible things. The minute you politicize a religion, then you run into problems.

So I don’t want, I don’t say we’re the same as Islamic extremist countries, of course, God forbid. But I don’t want the politicization of my religion because then that sullies my religion.

Sruli Fruchter: Does that change your perspective on religious political parties in Israel?

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Um, yeah, I mean, I think that, for example, as a Sefardi woman, I think Shas has ruined the reputation of Sefardi people as being bridges. We are bridges.

We are bridges between the secular and the ultra-Orthodox because Sefardim have always been middle of the road. We’ve never really been extremists. We’ve never been extreme secular, we’ve never been extreme religious. But just came and wanted to emulate the ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazim, and they kind of ruined our special status, I would say that we should have aimed towards.

Um, we’re also the bridge between Arabs and Jews. Sefardim. We understand Arabs. We’ve lived in Arab countries.

We know what they, we know how they tick. And so to me, Shas has been counterproductive to where Sefardim should be in this society. And the Ashkenazim are just there because they are opportunists. They don’t believe in the Zionist state.

They’re just there because they might as well take the resources and, you know, and advance their communities and not integrate, which is what they do.

Sruli Fruchter: You’re referring to the other Haredi parties there? Yeah?

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Yeah, the Ashkenazim that, you know, that they’ve joined. They they neither of them would pass without joining. The uh Lithuanians and the Hasidim.

So they join into one United party and they are there to get three things from the government. That’s all they’re there for. That’s all they’re about. They want um exemption from the army, they want money for the yeshivas, and they want money for their independent school system.

If you give them that three, they have zero values, Zionist values about anything else. They’ll put their hand up for anything. And that’s why right-wing and left-wing governments have been able to uh function with the ultra-Orthodox parties.

Sruli Fruchter: So, speaking of Zionism, now that Israel already exists, what is the purpose of Zionism?

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Zionism is the self-determination of the Jewish people in our ancestral homeland.

So first of all, as long as we have some existential threats, Zionism is still relevant. We’re still fighting for our self-determination in our homeland here. Especially … Well, especially because the world wants to delegitimize our right to exist in our homeland. Your questions, even, are of democracy and Jewish state.

What other country is thinking about these questions as almost like a justification to us being here? Only us. And so as long as uh there are threats to our existence, and I don’t just mean military threats, we have internal threats. Threats that Jewish people have had for thousands of years and the the the very real threats of internal division that have caused the exile of our people from this land a few times because of our own internal divisions. That’s a threat.

And the third threat to me is economic. How do you live in a country uh where in 20 years a third of the people here will be ultra-Orthodox, a third will be Arab, and a third will be the rest of us, uh when 50% of ultra-Orthodox men don’t work? It’s just not sustainable. So how do we create more workforce participation and in general more participation into the destiny of our people in our ancestral homeland? That’s why Zionism is still relevant.

Sruli Fruchter: Is opposing Zionism inherently antisemitic?

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: That’s a good question.

I think it is because if you don’t believe, if you believe in general, uh and I think Gadi Taub said that on on your program, if you believe in the self-determination of people, but you don’t believe in the self-determination of Jewish people, you’re an antisemite. So I think that anti-Zionism is a very convenient way for people to be antisemitic and still be politically correct. If you scratch the surface of most anti-Zionists, they’re real antisemites. And so in practice, absolutely it is.

Anti-Zionism is antisemitism because if you don’t believe in Jewish survival, then you’re an antisemite.

Sruli Fruchter: Among Arabs who have a different connotation or a different experience of what Zionism means, do you still see that the same way?

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Well, you know, you don’t have to be a Zionist, but if you’re anti-Zionist, it’s different. I don’t think most Arabs are anti-Zionists. They’re just not Zionists.

That’s okay. I don’t need them to be. Look, an Arab doesn’t have to be gung-ho about the Jewish people returning to their ancestral homeland. They have to accept that Jewish sovereignty is the reality, that they have rights, that they have opportunities, and that overall, this has been a successful venture that they’re part of.

That’s it. That’s all they have to believe in.

Sruli Fruchter: Is the IDF the world’s most moral army?

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Absolutely. Hands down.

We’re the only army in the world that puts our own soldiers at risk in order to protect civilians from the enemy side. We’re the only army in the world that, I mean, we don’t, I mean, there are always bad apples everywhere, but it’s not in it’s not systemic abuses of the enemy. And, you know, we’re the only army really that uh that almost that I know values life more than the enemy values their own lives. So, absolutely, we’re a moral army, and I’m proud of our boys and girls who are fighting and putting their lives on the line every single day for their homeland.

It’s not a given. And uh we have to support them in every single way that we can and do everything we can so they can do the job that they need to do.

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

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: I would begin with our historic connection, which a lot of people don’t get. Historical facts, our historic connection, but even more than that, you know, we have a historic connection, but we’ve also conquered the land.

Make people understand that uh that when you start a war that you lose, there is a price to pay. And people don’t want to talk like that. Everybody’s become a snowflake. But any country that ever won a war, actually, the status changed.

We won wars we didn’t start. Do they expect that we’re going to go back as if nothing would have happened? There has to be a price. So I guess that’s what I would start.

Sruli Fruchter: Have you had any criticisms of this before?

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Have I? What do you mean? I get called a baby killer every day.

That’s what happens when you’re an advocate.

Sruli Fruchter: No, have you had any criticisms of your own?

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Oh, well, I think that we should have gone into Rafah a lot earlier than we did. I think that if the Israeli government would have done the job that they needed to do in terms of the media, then we wouldn’t have been stopped into going in. I think it’s the first war where the media, the loss of the media war has affected our ability to actually execute the military war.

We couldn’t go into Rafah for three months. Our soldiers were sitting on a border because it was Ramadan, because the Biden administration pushed us into not going in. Eventually we did and and we moved it. In terms of the hostage deals, I don’t know enough about what went behind the scenes.

And you know, I understand the parents who are frustrated, heartbroken, and feel the government didn’t do enough. I don’t want to put myself in their shoes because I can’t understand for one second what they’re going through. Whether I think that there could have been a deal. done, that didn’t save lives before.

I just don’t have any trust in Hamas. And so I have no, you know, people say we would have done a deal last summer then we would have saved more hostages. Nobody can say that. We don’t know that.

Maybe yes, maybe no. And so I’m not going to judge a situation and malign military decisions that were made on some theory that maybe we could have saved some lives. If I would know for sure that it would save lives, it would have saved lives, I would say yes, the government did wrong. I don’t know that.

And I don’t think anybody can.

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

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Absolutely. There’s three ways when legitimate criticism crosses over to antisemitism or Jew and Israel hatred. Three ways.

Better than me, Natan Sharansky defined them. Delegitimization. In other words, you don’t have a right to exist and by extension, you don’t have a right to defend yourself. That’s one way.

Where anti, anti-government or anti-policy of the government or criticizing the Israeli government switches to antisemitism. The second is demonization. When you say that soldiers are killing babies, like Yair Golan did last week. Our own ex-general is maligning the army that is defending our country.

He doesn’t even know that that’s anti-semitism because like I said, Israelis don’t really understand anti-semitism. But that is when legitimate criticism of the of the state of Israel crosses to anti-semitism and and in his case, he maybe inadvertently or advertently perpetuated a blood libel that has gotten a lot of Jews killed over millennia. And the third is double standards. When you ask Israel to have standards in fighting a war that nobody has, has ever had, or there is record in military history.

That is antisemitism. So the three Ds, very important to remember them. That is the litmus test for me.

Sruli Fruchter: What is the most legitimate criticism leveled against Israel today?

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Maybe that we don’t have a strategy.

That we don’t have a plan for the day after. Israel doesn’t do strategy very well. They do tactics very well. I think that we’re so preoccupied with kind of putting out fires all the time.

And like, you know, every day in Israel’s a miracle or Ben-Gurion’s old statements, you know, to to to to be a realist in Israel, you have to believe in miracles. All that type of rhetoric, which is very much the culture in this country, means that we don’t really think ahead. We don’t think 20 years ahead, where are we going to be? What should we be doing? How do you reverse engineer a better future? We don’t do that enough. And at the moment, maybe the government has a plan for the day after in Gaza, but none of us have seen it.

Maybe that’s part of the strategy, not to show it because then maybe there’s a plan. But I think that people would feel better, especially with the losses we’ve had, knowing that somebody has a plan. And I think that’s the one criticism that I level. Do I have a plan? For me, the plan would be a regional plan, bringing in the Saudis, bringing in the Emiratis, but again, it’s that road is cobbled with so many, with so many different blocks, so many barriers.

It’s not it’s easy for us to sit and talk about it. And it’s another thing to actually come up with a realistic strategy.

Sruli Fruchter: Why do you think such a plan hasn’t been suggested or announced?

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Hasn’t been announced? Well, there’s a few reasons. One, we don’t have one.

So what are you going to announce? Two, we have one, but somehow publicizing it will hinder getting there. Or three, the people that we have a plan with don’t want us to publicize for their own reasons. Like I said, we’re not great with strategy. We’re very good at putting out fires.

We’re not great with great with long-term thinking. Why isn’t there a plan? I don’t know. Maybe we need different leaders.

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

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: It would only happen if the indoctrination of Palestinian children stops now.

And there’s no sign that it’s going to stop, especially when the UN and countries around the world are perpetuating the indoctrination by funding poisonous school curriculums and funding terrorist groups and funding a Palestinian authority that pays pensions to terrorists to kill Jews. Unless the funding for poisonous Palestinian rhetoric against Israel, and also poisonous Palestinian poisonous rhetoric around the Arab world, unless that stops, we’re not going to have peace in my lifetime.

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

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Well, Gaza needs to be demilitarized, there’s no other way. I would let the good people of Gaza that want to leave, leave.

We we seem to be in the only conflict where people are not allowed to escape from. I mean, think about what happened in Syria. Half a million people died, were killed, were brutally murdered. Some of them with chemical weapons.

There’s millions of Syrians who escaped and now live in Europe and other places around the world. They were allowed to leave. Somehow, we seem to be wanting to trap the Palestinians to stay. I say, whoever wants to leave, let them leave.

Whoever wants to stay, have a choice. Do you want to continue living under a disastrous, catastrophic, and lethal terrorist regime? Or do you want to bring a better life for your families, for your people? And really, what we should be doing is investing in alternative leaderships, in general, with the Palestinian people. Instead of propping up the tried and tested and failed current leaderships.

Sruli Fruchter: How has your view of the situation in Gaza, specifically Israel’s relationship to Gaza and the future of Gaza, changed from before October 7th to where we are today?

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Well, I don’t think anybody thought Hamas would go on this kind of suicide mission, which is what they’ve done.

My friend Eric Weinstein calls it assisted suicide, IDF-assisted suicide. But that’s the nature of radical ideology. They don’t care how many. They’ve said it.

30,000 should die, 50,000. I think Sinwar even said 150,000. They don’t care about losing 150,000 people. Then that’s who we were dealing with.

I think we were blinded. We were blinded into thinking that we could incentivize them with money and jobs into somehow managing this conflict we have with them. We were wrong. We were wrong.

Sruli Fruchter: Do you think Israel is properly handling the Iranian threat?

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Look, I think we’ve done as much as we can do on our own to hold back the threat, uh, through intelligence, through cyber warfare, through everything else we’ve done, through targeted assassinations of top nuclear scientists, etc. Stealing documents, all of it. We’ve done as much as we can do to push it back without anybody’s help. I don’t think we could have done it any differently. And I think now America should help us destroy the threat for good.

But more important than that, the the free world owes helping the Iranian people, who 80% of them want to destroy their regime that subjugate women, subjugate free thinking. We need to help the Iranians get rid of their poisonous leaders who are also our biggest threat.

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?

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Yeah. I’m one of the few people that actually does have friends on all sides.

I’m a I would call myself center, center right, liberal. I am a Orthodox feminist. So, I very much believe that Jewish values is something that we can actually help save the world. Those values if they were communicated properly, we would be in in another position.

And I don’t believe in suicide, so I don’t believe you can currently make peace with the current Palestinian leadership. And that’s what would people would see me as on the right. I’m liberal economically, I think I believe in free markets, deregulation, things like that. But I also believe in a kind society that helps pull up people who are weaker than you.

I don’t think any of this contradicts itself. And I have plenty of friends on the left and plenty of friends who are Palestinians and Arabs from the region and from Israel and Jerusalem, Arab Israelis and Palestinians.

Sruli Fruchter: Yeah, so we always ask this question and one of the things that made it particularly interesting for me was that I saw recently, I think it was even in the last few weeks, that you spoke out against the new or the renewed group Betar in the United States from their participation in the World Zionist elections.

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Well, they started it.

We didn’t we didn’t want to pick a fight with anyone. Uh they basically started by attacking Shai Davidai, who you could agree or disagree with him politically. But Shai Davidai has showed up.

Sruli Fruchter: I’m curious if you can share a bit about what led to that decision and how you decided.

And I guess what you fear in that group. And for context for our listeners, Betar is a new resurgent group. I mean, how would you describe it?

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: I mean, I don’t know. Betar has a beautiful legacy of being uh the youth group of Jabotinsky.

That’s how I knew them. Um I’m connected to Betar in many different places around the world. They asked me to come and speak in Brazil, here, there. But in America, it’s uh wants to present itself as a vigilante force against people beating Jews on the street.

I have some sympathy for the fact that, you know, they want to advocate for people to not be bullied by Israel haters. But what I am against and I stood up against is them attacking other Jews. What, we don’t have enough enemies? That you go and pick a Jew that is just a little bit in your eyes on the left? That’s what you want to do with your time and energy? Not attack the people going around stabbing and punching Jews in the face? But dealing with other Jews, fighting other wars because you don’t agree with them politically? That’s what I stood up against. Jews attacking Jews.

Sruli Fruchter: Do you sense that same division in Israeli society?

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Yes, there is, but it’s I mean, I don’t think it’s violent here. I don’t see, I mean, look, protests can get violent. I’m not saying they can’t. But I don’t think there’s, maybe there are, maybe the Bentzi Gopsteins of this world are the people going around punching gay people on the streets of Jerusalem, which I’ve seen, and punching Arabs, yes.

Yes. But these people are extremists. To in a way, Ben-Gvir comes from that school of thought, but I don’t think his party are presenting themselves as that anymore.

Sruli Fruchter: What do you mean by that?

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Party of Ben-Gvir is not openly advocating for us to go around taking the law into our own hands.

He’s the minister for the police.

Sruli Fruchter: But would you not say that Ben-Gvir has in some sense encouraged a sort of vigilantism among certain sects?

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Maybe. Maybe he does. And that’s why I don’t ascribe to his way of doing things.

Um I don’t think, I think we’re a country of law and order, of democracy. If people are violent, there’s courts, there’s police, and we have to, we have to just if the police are lacking in some way, we have to make it better. Can’t take the law into our own hands, otherwise it’ll be the Wild West. And again, Betar have a wonderful legacy of standing up for the Jewish people.

And the minute, to me, in my eyes, that they decided to put all their energy into attacking another Jew, they lost my respect. So they came after us and we just said, no, enough is enough. We’re not going to accept you attacking other Jews and this is not what the Jewish people should be focused on right now. And this is in fact what led us to be exiled from our temple twice.

Sruli Fruchter: And now for our last question, do you have more hope or fear for Israel and the Jewish people?

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: You know, Golda Meir once said that the Jewish people don’t have the luxury of pessimism. I don’t have that luxury to be pessimistic because we need to survive and we need to thrive. And I also my nature, I’m an optimist by heart. If I wasn’t an optimist, I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed in the morning.

And so I spend my energy, my time and gifts that God gave me to create a better alternative for the Jewish people and for my country.

Sruli Fruchter: All right, well Fleur, thank you so much for your time and thank you for answering our 18 questions.

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Thank you.

Sruli Fruchter: Thank you so much for tuning in to another episode of 18 questions, 40 Israeli Thinkers.

Thank you as always to our friends Gilad Brounstein and Josh Weinberg for editing the podcast and video of this respectively. This was a really wonderful conversation and there is so much to learn, ask about and continue to unpack. And I hope that you do that through the other interviews we have and on your own. So before we sign off, as usual, if you have questions you want us to ask or guests that you want us to feature, we are nearing the end of this series.

Please shoot us an email, info@18Forty.org and be sure to subscribe and share with friends so that we can reach new listeners. So with that said, I’m your host Sruli Fruchter and until next time, keep questioning and keep thinking.

Transcripts are lightly edited—please excuse any imperfections.