Moshe Koppel: ‘We won the war in Gaza’

Transcripts are lightly edited—please excuse any imperfections.

Moshe Koppel: Israel is where the cutting edge of Jewish history is happening. I mean, if you want to be at that cutting edge of Jewish history, you ought to be here. I mean, we’re really doing important things. The future of the Jewish People is being determined right now in Gaza and in Lebanon and all over the State of Israel.

Hi, I’m Moshe Koppel. I’m a mathematician, the head of two think tanks here in 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, Shirley Frichter. 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.

One of the biggest topics in Israel before October 7th, one that we have continuously returned to in different forums with many different guests, is judicial reform. The government planned to change the power balance between the Knesset and Israel’s judiciary, namely the Supreme Court, which to its proponents would restore balance by giving more power to the Knesset, and to its opponents would destroy it and democracy by weakening the Supreme Court. Today’s guest heads the policy institute that has been dealing with the judiciary for decades and actually helped spearhead judicial reform, Moshe Koppel. Moshe Koppel is founding chairman of the Kohelet Policy Forum, which Haaretz calls the, quote, most successful initiative of the right in the past decade.

Kohelet defines itself as striving, quote, to secure Israel’s future as a nation-state of the Jewish people, to strengthen a representative democracy, and to broaden individual liberty and free market principles in Israel. Kohelet wrote the nation-state law of 2018 that drew praise and ire for its definition of Israel as the Jewish nation-state and is believed to have influenced the U.S.’s reverse stance in 2019 of the legality of settlements in the West Bank, Yehuda v’Shomron. But I wouldn’t quite say that politics is Moshe’s day job. He is a professor emeritus of computer science at Bar Ilan and is the founding director of Dicta, a research institute devoted to developing tools for computational analysis of Hebrew texts with a focus on biblical and religious works.

He also authored three books on Jewish thought, most notably, Judaism Straight Up: Why Real Religion Endures. This conversation was very interesting and we get into a lot of the things that I mentioned earlier. But at the same time, I tried to provide a more holistic view of how Moshe understands Israel’s challenges today, of yesterday, and of tomorrow. It was really insightful and I hope you enjoy.

But before we get to the interview, 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 be sure to subscribe and share with friends so that we can reach new listeners. So without further ado, here is 18 Questions with Moshe Koppel. 

We’ll begin where we always do. As an Israeli and as a Jew, how are you feeling at this moment in Israeli history?

Moshe Koppel: That’s a hard question. It’s hard for me to distinguish between the personal and the national. So my son’s in Lebanon. My son’s-in-law are in and out of combat.

I was at an azkara today for the son of a good friend. I’ve been to funerals and shivas. So I guess in a personal sense, you know, it’s a trying time. But in a national sense, in other words, if the question is, do I feel good about where Israel is now? The answer is, yeah, I feel great.

If I think back to where we were, say, a year ago or before the war, we assumed that tens of thousands of rockets would come landing in Israel from Lebanon. We didn’t know how well the war in Gaza would go. We didn’t know what Iran would do. And if our defenses were good enough to prevent total catastrophe, it turns out this war went very well.

I mean, astonishingly well. We’ve destroyed Hamas. We’ve degraded Hezbollah. We defended ourselves well against Iran and, in fact, probably took out a significant part of their air defense, which makes them vulnerable.

So the war has been great in that respect. Of course, people are killed. So it’s not like I’m joyous, but I would say that I’m more confident and more optimistic than I was a year ago. 

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

Moshe Koppel: All right, I’m going to answer a question that’s similar to yours, if it’s OK.

It’s greatest success and its greatest failure rather than its greatest mistake. OK, the greatest success is that I just said, well, you know, I think we have pretty much destroyed our enemies. That’s a huge success. And it was not something that I would have taken for granted.

And that’s really what I should put the emphasis on. In terms of our greatest failures, I would point to two things. And one is we obviously we failed to rescue the hostages. I’m choosing my words carefully there.

I said rescue the hostages. I don’t think that there was a way to release the hostages through negotiation. So that’s not a failure. I don’t think that was a possibility that we failed at.

But there was a real possibility that we could rescue them. And we failed to do that. So that’s one failure. The other is, you know, we took Jabalia, for example, and then we took it again.

And then we took it a third time. And now we’re taking it a fourth time. So the fact that we’ve had to fight the same battle over and over again is definitely a failure. We should have taken it and kept it so that we didn’t have to fight for it again.

It kind of reminds me of, you know, Mark Twain, who said, you know, it’s easy to quit smoking. I’ve done it 20 times. You know, it’s easy to take Jabalia. We’ve done it four times and at high cost.

So that’s a failure too. But I think the emphasis should be on the fact that we have won the war in Gaza. We won the war against Hezbollah. We took out the Houthis, at least to some extent.

We destroyed their economic base. And we have certainly made Iran more vulnerable. So that’s what I’d emphasize.

Sruli Fruchter: So on the note of having defeated Hamas or winning the war, at what point would you say that, in your view, the war was won? And if the war is won, then why is the war continuing in Gaza?

Moshe Koppel:  Okay, so yeah, maybe the idea of winning a war isn’t a zero-one thing.

You know, it’s the more you’ve weakened them, the greater is your victory. Yes, there is a possibility of total victory where they come out with white flags and surrender, you know, like Germany did at the end of World War II, right? Yeah, that’s a real victory. But I don’t know if that’s a realistic possibility. 

Sruli Fruchter: So what do you mean when you say that we defeated Hamas? 

Moshe Koppel: Well, I maybe should have chosen my words in a way that suggests that it’s somewhere on the continuum of victory.

It’s not like, okay, you know, it’s a zero-one type victory. But we’ve degraded them. I mean, obviously, you know, we’ve killed a great many of the fighters. We destroyed most of their ammunition.

We’ve destroyed most of the tunnels. I mean, it’s hard to know exactly how many tunnels there are. You only know about the ones you found. But by and large, we have weakened them.

I don’t want to use the phrase, Hamas is now deterred, because that’s been used very unfortunately, you know, in the past. But I mean, we’ve weakened our enemies. And by the way, you know, and this is not an insignificant part of it, we have also proved to ourselves that we know how to fight. You know, we haven’t had a war in a long time here, thank God.

And there was a certain loss of confidence, you know, can we really do this? And it turns out, yeah, we can, you know, and we will be less hesitant to fight the next time we need to fight, knowing that we’re capable of fighting and winning.

Sruli Fruchter: On the note, you also mentioned a separate follow-up, that you said we had failed to rescue the hostages. Negotiations weren’t a failure, because that wouldn’t have been any course of action that would have led to the hostages returning to Israel. So the question I have on that is, many people have said that it was, that they seem to be the opposite, that rescuing the hostages, through a military campaign or through the IDF, actually finding them and bringing them home in Gaza was never necessarily realistic, given the size of Gaza and locating where the hostages are and who they’re with.

And that only negotiations would have been possible to bring them out. It seems like you disagree with that.

Moshe Koppel: Yeah, I mean, it’s not that I have any inside knowledge, but as far as I could tell, Hamas at no stage was willing to release the hostages for any kind of realistic exchange. In other words, to come and say, yeah, you know, we want to go back to October 6th, you’re going to retreat completely from Gaza, you’re not going to fight us anymore, you’re going to release all of the, you know, all of the captured terrorists, etc. That doesn’t sound to me like the beginning of a negotiation by somebody who actually wants to finish that negotiation.

Sruli Fruchter: What do you think should happen now with the hostages? Do you think that there is a course of action that Israel can take to rescue them, or do you think that at this point there isn’t much that can be done? 

Moshe Koppel: I have no idea. You know, the fact that we haven’t succeeded in releasing the hostages, you know, after all this time would suggest that it’s a difficult task, and we may not be capable of it, but it’s possible. Maybe we still can. And it may be that now that Hamas has been sufficiently defeated and that Hezbollah is at least very temporarily, and by the time this airs this may no longer be true, but at least very temporarily out of the game, it may be that there are new possibilities that are opening up.

I have no idea.

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

Moshe Koppel: I have no idea. You know, I cannot put myself in the mind of a Hamas terrorist. I don’t understand what their utility function is.

You know, like, what is it that they’re trying to achieve? If all of them died but they killed a lot of Israelis, I mean, do they regard that as success? I don’t know. The last thing I want to do is what many people do, and that is assume that, you know, human nature being universal, I should just project my own preferences on Hamas. I think it’s a dumb thing to do. They’re obviously very different than me, so I really can’t get myself into their heads.

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

Moshe Koppel: Okay, let’s attack this from a more general point of view. What are the possible ways you could approach choosing, right?

Sruli Fruchter: Just to clarify, I’m not asking who you’re voting for.

Moshe Koppel: And I wasn’t going to answer it.

Sruli Fruchter: Okay, fine, some people get a little scared when the Knesset comes out.

Moshe Koppel: No, no, no, I would answer you too, but that’s not your question. 

Sruli Fruchter: Oh, let me follow up with that. 

Moshe Koppel: Look, there are three ways that you can decide who to vote for, right? I mean, one is to vote sincerely, which is you just say, well, which party’s views are most similar to my own views, or whose policies are the ones that I would like to see enacted? The other one is you can— another one is you could vote strategically, which is to say, well, you know, there may be parties that don’t exactly agree with me as much as some other parties, but for various strategic reasons, I’d prefer to vote for them because I think I get more bang for my buck if they’re on the verge of the threshold and I can push them across the threshold, so I’m getting four seats instead of one, or because I think that the kind of coalition they’d be able to make is a coalition that would be better, closer to my preferences, et cetera. So that’s strategic voting.

And then there’s a third one, which is what I would call performative voting, which is to say that you’re not really interested in policy at all, and you don’t even take any interest in the policies that the parties are pushing, but rather you vote for somebody, you know, that gives you a warm, fuzzy feeling, you know, for voting for them, or that, you know, just makes you feel cool, right? So you can vote for the Pirates or for the Marijuana Party or for the, you know, Breslov Party, or for, you know, whatever party makes you feel good about yourself. So—and by the way, that’s a completely rational thing to do because the chances of your vote actually mattering is just about zero, so you might as well vote in a performative way and feel good, but that’s the utility you get is you feel good, right? Whereas if you vote sincerely and you make no difference, you actually get no utility. But nevertheless, I vote based on a combination of my sincere views together with some strategic thinking.

Sruli Fruchter: And so what are some of the things that you’re considering when you’re trying to evaluate which party aligns with your views?

Moshe Koppel: What are the political issues that are important to me? 

Sruli Fruchter: Yeah, or the things that you look at that may be political issues or there’s maybe something else, but however you feel answers the questions.

Moshe Koppel: I mean, these are political parties who are going to be doing politics, so guess what? I think about political questions when I vote for them, right? So, you know, like when I choose my barber, I, you know, choose the guy who actually can cut hair, right? Not for his political opinions. Even—who would wear that? But I mean, my considerations basically are I’m generally hawkish in my views about security. I’m generally tend towards free markets when, you know, in my opinions about politics. I have nuanced opinions about the relationship between religion and state.

So, you know, those are the things that I look at. And it’s usually pretty easy, you know, you look at the parties and it’s not that difficult to figure out, you know, who are the ones that are close to your political views. 

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

Moshe Koppel: Stop, you didn’t really ask me that.

Sruli Fruchter: I’m asking.

Okay. You saw me smiling as I asked.

Moshe Koppel: Yeah, I know, right. Yeah, you probably got flack for that question a thousand times already.

Sruli Fruchter: Yeah, you’re the 21st. 

Moshe Koppel: Yeah, okay. Yeah, so let me be also the 21st to explain why I don’t like the question. The question seems to assume that these are two conflicting things, you know, there’s either Judaism or democracy and which one is the one that you prefer? So, I mean, in fact, these are two things— 

Sruli Fruchter: Well, I mean, there may be times where the two do conflict.

They don’t always have to conflict, but there may be points where the Jewish and democratic elements do conflict and which point, which one, you know, should be preserved.

Moshe Koppel: In any event, it’s not like they lie on the same axis and, you know, you need to decide whether you want to be pulling in that direction or pulling in the other direction. That’s not the way it works. They’re not exactly orthogonal.

I mean, the question of democracy is, you know, the methodology. Like, okay, we have lots of people here who have lots of different opinions. How are we going to go about resolving this, right? So it’s a procedural question, right? And the procedure is we’re going to have elections, we’re going to vote. The question of the state being Jewish is not a procedural question, right? It’s a substantive question.

So not only are these two things, you know, not on the same axis, but— 

Sruli Fruchter: Just to interject very briefly, understanding the democratic nature as procedural does, I think, not totally acknowledge that there is a substantive element to what a democratic, liberal democracy or otherwise does mean in a state, no?

Moshe Koppel: Yeah, and even so— 

Sruli Fruchter: Doesn’t that then put it on a substantive plane next to the— 

Moshe Koppel: I understand that. You know, we can try to shoehorn these two things onto the same axis by understanding democracies being liberalism as opposed to democracy. Fair enough.

Sruli Fruchter: But however you want to understand it, I was just interjecting with the clarification.

Moshe Koppel: I get that. I understand. The question of what it means for the state to be Jewish in a substantive way is also one that’s not very well formed, right? I mean, I don’t exactly know what that means. So why don’t I instead answer the question implicitly by telling you what kind of state I would like Israel to be, okay? With regard specifically to the question of, you know, liberalism and Judaism and so forth.

Sruli Fruchter: But you don’t have to define democratic as liberalism. I was just trying to interject with a little bit of a clarification. I don’t think the democratic has to be merely procedural. But if you want to understand it as substantively liberal, then I will allow you to do so. I’ll grant permission. 

Moshe Koppel: I appreciate your open-mindedness on that point. Some people think that Israel was supposed to replace the Jewish religion with Jewish nationalism, right? From now on, we don’t have to bother with all that old-fashioned religious stuff. We’re going to have a country, and just the mere fact that this is a Jewish country in some undefined sense, well, that’s actually good enough, right? Other people think that Israel should be a theocracy.

I don’t know anybody like that, but I’m told there are such people. But the way I think of it is different altogether. I think that the main advantage of having a Jewish nation-state is that it creates a framework in which Jews feel comfortable, confident, and free, right? So that if you’re living in galus, and other people really are the ones who create the dominant culture, and you feel either, you know, like in Eastern Europe, you feel oppressed, right? Or if in Western democracies, you kind of feel just that you’re not the one who’s determining the culture, you’re a counterculture, right? You’re not the dominant culture, or you live in fear of assimilation, so that you need to build very high walls, right? Israel is supposed to get us past that, right? Israel is a place where the Jews can, you know, you can take your shoes off, right? Put them up on the cushion, right? Lean back, because this is your country. You’re a ba’al habayit here, right? That’s what Israel does for us.

Now, so by giving us that, it’s more than freedom, right? It’s more than freedom. It’s autonomy. It’s confidence. It’s self-confidence.

That allows us as Jews to think about, okay, well, where’s Judaism going, right? Here, we’re in a different situation. Where’s it going to go? How do we take this civilization that we’ve been carrying with us for thousands of years that, you know, has appeared in various forms, most, you know, most prominently in halakha, right, in its various versions? How do we take that and adapt it to our current situation, right? And some people think, well, forget about all that. And some people think, you know, like, no, it’s just like Poland, right? We’re just going to carry on as if nothing happened. And other people are, you know, trying to adapt it in various ways, most of which are going to fail, right? I think that that’s the greatness of Israel.

The fact that it gives us exactly the freedom to develop our Judaism. So because I see it that way, not only democracy, but actual freedom, liberalism is the greatest friend of Judaism that there could possibly be. I see these two things not as being in conflict at all, but as supporting one another. 

Sruli Fruchter: So I’d be remiss not to bring up that in the conversation about the Jewish and democratic question, judicial reform was something that a lot of people understood to be.

And, you know, our listeners have heard of other episodes and we’ll maybe get a little bit of a review in the introduction. But judicial reform was seen as something that was relevant to that conversation. Obviously, yourself and Kohelet were very involved with judicial reform, kind of moving forward in Israeli society in different ways. I’m curious how you understand that.

Moshe Koppel: OK, so I don’t want to relitigate judicial reform, which took over my life for a year, but I pushed for judicial reform precisely because I am a liberal. This didn’t come from my desire to see Israel turn into a theocracy, which is something which I’m not in favor of. I did it precisely because I’m a liberal. In fact, I’m very strongly liberal.

In the United States, they use the word liberal differently than they use it in Europe. It has come to mean progressive. I mean, liberal as a classical liberal in favor of individual liberty. And in Israel, there are still certain pockets of unelected power, including the judiciary and the whole judicial bureaucracy and so forth that I thought were a threat to our liberty.

And for that reason, I wanted to make the system in Israel, the system of checks and balances, to be more similar to Western democracies. There is no Western democracy in which the attorney general’s rulings on things or forget rulings, the attorney general’s opinions on things are binding on an elected government that actually nothing could undermine democracy more than than giving a bureaucrat the power to boss the elected government around. I thought that the courts did not have any of the standard limitations that one has. Right.

You know, when there are checks and balances, there are checks and balances in all the branches and the checks and balances that there customarily are in Western democracies on the judicial branch didn’t exist in Israel. They still don’t in the sense that everybody has standing before the court. Everything is justiciable before the court. Everything is grounds for the court to get involved.

None of these things hold in any other Western democracy. I did it precisely because I’m a liberal. 

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

Moshe Koppel: Did anybody say no to that? It’s hard for me to imagine. But yes, obviously, Israel should treat its Arab and Jewish citizens the same.

But—I hate to say, but after that, OK, maybe maybe I should take back that but and say and OK, and it is important to distinguish between individual rights and collective rights. OK, so, you know, one could argue and many have argued, well, the fact that Hebrew is the national language and Arabic doesn’t have the same status as Hebrew, at least not not since 2018. Well, that does not grant equality to to those citizens whose first language is Arabic. Right.

The fact that Israel has on its flag, again, Magen David, which is a Jewish symbol and it doesn’t have an Arab or a Muslim symbol. That’s a form of inequality. OK, that’s a position that I do not agree with. OK, I think the whole idea of a Jewish nation state is that at the collective level, the symbols, the language, the immigration policies and more of the state reflect the values and preferences of one particular collective, in this case, the Jews.

Now, the question is, well, where is the boundary between, you know, collective rights and individual rights? Can I come up with some intermediate case, you know, where it would be difficult to determine whether that’s, you know, part of the collective character of the state or a matter of individual rights? You could probably come up with something and make my life difficult for me, you know, or for anybody who’s in favor of a Jewish nation state. But by and large, I mean, you know, usually the boundaries are pretty clear. And the answer is, yeah, you know, everybody’s equal before the law. Everybody has the same individual rights.

But Israel, as a country, is the Jewish nation state.

Sruli Fruchter: So you mentioned in 2018 that the status of Ivrit and Arabic changed, reference to the Jewish nation state law. How do you see that as relevant to this question? I mean, is that something that you see as reflecting merely the collective preference, as you said, or do you see that as somehow not necessarily balancing that correctly? 

Moshe Koppel: No, I wrote it. So I I think it balances correctly.

I wrote it in 2004. And then for 14 years, it went bouncing through the system, changing back and forth. What came out at the end was not exactly what I wrote, but it’s pretty close.

Sruli Fruchter: What was different?

Moshe Koppel: So the phrasing on settlement was kind of I think that in the final version, it was kind of an awkward phrasing.

I think it was a little bit aggressive. I think I read something much more subtle than that. There were all kinds of other, you know, subtleties. But by and large, it was fairly similar.

Yeah, the whole point of that was exactly to try to demarcate the line between what’s collective and should go into that law and what’s individual and doesn’t belong in that law.

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

Moshe Koppel: Short answer, the less the better, precisely because Judaism is very important to me. The last people I want mucking around with are Israeli politicians, Israeli judges, right? Then you get Israeli politicians trying to define Jewish things. You get Israeli judges, you know, telling you how you can and can’t implement certain rules about Judaism.

You know, you literally have the court coming in and telling kashrut organizations, in this case, the Rabbanut, you know, no, you do have to give a hechsher to that restaurant, despite the fact that you don’t want to, because we think that the reason that you don’t want to give that hechsher isn’t a good reason, right? That is not where I want to be, right? I don’t want, for the most part, secular judges or secular politicians and honestly, religious judges and religious politicians defining religion for me. So that is the reason why I don’t want the government involved in this kind of thing. But since it really is a nuanced issue, I should give you a slightly more nuanced answer and say this. In the United States, you can come and say, we think that you should not be able to serve whale blubber in a restaurant for reasons of ecology or save the whales or whatever, right? But you can’t come and say, you know, you can’t serve whale blubber in a restaurant because Christians don’t eat well, right? Or Jews don’t eat well and Muslims don’t eat well, right? You can’t, right? That’s a violation of religion and state.

I don’t think that makes any sense for Israel. In other words, I think it should be perfectly okay for somebody to say, I would like to propose this law because I think that Jewish culture or even Jewish law forbids it. And I think that the state should forbid it for that reason. I don’t think it’s a good idea to do that, okay? I would do that very infrequently and very sparingly and with great caution for the reasons that I said before, and also not to irritate people and cause resentment against religion.

But nevertheless, I think that on principle, if the Greens can come and demand that the government do something because of green ideology, I don’t think it makes any sense to say, well, you know, religious Jews can’t come and say the government ought to do something because of Jewish religious ideology.

Sruli Fruchter: Is that difficult to draw that line, given that there are certain issues that necessarily will overlap, maybe in terms of determining who is and who is not a Jew, in terms of marriage and conversion and so on? Meaning, where is, I guess, what are the questions or considerations to guide when it isn’t appropriate for the government to do so? And in your ideal world? 

Moshe Koppel: I, so there are several different kinds of issues. When it comes to the question of, yeah, should, you know, should the government forbid this because Jewish religion forbids it? That’s the kind of thing where it’s a judgment question. I don’t think there’s one right answer.

My general tendency is to say, let’s not get involved with that. Probably no good will come from it. But it’s nevertheless, it’s a judgment question. And there are plenty of cases where I would say, you know, it’s worth it.

I’m willing, I’m willing to pay the price of getting the government involved in religion, even though I don’t think that’s generally a good idea, because in this particular instance, I think it’s very, very important. OK, there are cases where I would take a much tougher view. And that is, should there be government-sponsored Rabbanut and things like that, which I think almost no good ever comes from that. OK, and then there are these, you know, cases like, should the government be, you know, funding shuls or mikvaot or things like that? And there, you know, my tendency is, look, I don’t want the government funding anything.

All right. I mean, anything, you know, very few things. OK, so people always say to me, oh, you don’t think the government should be funding shuls? Well, they fund the opera. Why shouldn’t they be funding shuls? And my answer is, well, I don’t think they should be funding the opera.

OK, so, yes, as long as they’re funding the opera, then, you know, I understand why people say, well, if you’re going to fund their preferences, fund my preferences, too. But if you ask me what I think the ideal is, I think the ideal is that anything that’s not really a public good, according to, you know, an economist’s definition of public good in the strictest sense, people should fund for themselves the opera and the mikvaot. 

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

Moshe Koppel: Like, it exists. So, like, what the hell? Forget it?

You know, why bother? Yeah. No, look, the definition of Zionism has evolved. OK, in the olden days, when the state was a pipe dream, you were a Zionist if you thought that it would be good for the Jews to have a state. All right.

And then, you know, people chose sides on that. And the Zionists, the people who thought it was a good idea, then moved on to the next question, which was they were there was a fight for us. There was a struggle to establish a state. We needed international recognition.

And then the question really was, you were a Zionist if you thought that the Jews have a right to a state. OK, you know, just like any other nation claims the right to their own country. Right. Well, the Jews are entitled to where they have the right to a country.

That was where the struggle that’s what made you a Zionist, you know, maybe in the days of the founding of the state. And so now I think what makes you a Zionist is if you say I want to contribute to the Jewish state. Right. So you ask me now, what is the purpose of Zionism? The answer is the purpose of Zionism is to contribute to the state, to contribute to its security, to its prosperity, to its cultural progress, et cetera.

That’s what Zionism is for. We couldn’t possibly maintain this state without people who felt that way.

Sruli Fruchter: Is opposing Zionism inherently antisemitic? 

Moshe Koppel: So it’s not inherently antisemitic, it’s just usually antisemitic. Let’s go back to my previous three definitions of Zionism.

There are plenty of people who think that it’s not good for the Jews to have the state. Right. I mean, if you’re if you’re a Satmar Hasid, you think that it’s not good for the Jews to have a state for, you know, your own theological or halakhic considerations. That certainly doesn’t make you an antisemite.

I mean, sometimes in anger, you know, when I’m arguing, you know, with or about Satmar Hasidim, I may make such an outlandish statement. But in fact, no, I don’t think that, you know, Satmar anti-Zionists are antisemitic. OK, that would be foolish. But most of the people now who claim to be anti-Zionists, but not antisemites, well, some of them are proud to be antisemites as well, but those who claim to be they’re not arguing whether it’s good for the Jews to have a state or not.

OK, and they’re not arguing the question about, you know, contributing to the state. I don’t I don’t expect anti-Zionists, you know, on the campus of Columbia University, right, to be volunteering on a kibbutz. Right. The issue is really about whether the Jews have the right to a state.

OK, so when somebody thinks that the Palestinians or any one of another thousand ethnic groups have a right to a state, but somehow that right ends with the Jews, yeah, they’re probably antisemitic.

Sruli Fruchter: So the question on a point you’re making that whether or not it’s good for the Jews to have a state, many of the people who are who do oppose Zionism will say that they oppose Zionism because whether or not it’s good for the Jews to have a state, it’s not good for the Palestinians for there to be the Jewish state. And at least what they profess to be their vision is the binational secular Kumbaya one state reality. So given that consideration, how does that really fit in with your understanding of those who are opposing Zionism today? 

Moshe Koppel: You’re suggesting that there are anti-Zionists who sincerely believe in a Kumbaya binational state with Jews and Palestinians living side by side?

I refuse to take that possibility seriously.

A is obviously not possible and B, it’s almost equally not possible that somebody sincerely believes that it is possible. 

I’m getting deep into modal logic here, I don’t know if you realize it. 

But no, seriously, that’s just not a possibility we’re taking seriously.

Sruli Fruchter: But for those who are opposing Zionism, citing that whether or not it’s good for the Jews, it’s not good for the Palestinians historically and actively in their view.

Does that change your understanding of their opposition to Zionism? 

Moshe Koppel: No, not in not in the slightest. OK, every single country on Earth has a minority. I mean, OK, maybe Japan and Iceland don’t, but almost every country on Earth has a minority. That minority could probably benefit by having their own country or by having the country that they live in cease to exist so that they could take it over.

Right. That is not a persuasive argument when there’s only one country in the world where you suddenly think, gee, they shouldn’t have a country because it’s bad for some minority group. No, that’s not serious. 

Sruli Fruchter: Well, just to clarify, as one of our one of our listeners have actually emailed specifically in general with this type of follow up that they’re arguing that for the minority of Palestinians, it’s unfair that they have to be a minority in the state.

They’re arguing that a historically it’s unjust or there is injustice done or wrongs against the Palestinians and how the state was created and that be there are active wrongs, let’s say, for the broadest word against Palestinians in that type of frame, which is a little different than how you were understanding it. Does that change your understanding of that? 

Moshe Koppel: OK, so let me just say that I’m making an assumption here that I’m guessing your interlocutor do not share with me. OK, and that is that the Palestinians or the Arabs who live in Israel could live here as equal citizens with full rights and with great prosperity, as many, in fact, do, if only they didn’t think it was really, really important to kill us all. OK, so if you if you accept the premise that any Arab in Israel who’s willing to live in peace in a Jewish nation state can do so and will prosper here, as in fact, millions do, right, then the onus, as far as I’m concerned, is on those who want us dead.

OK, it’s not on us for having the audacity to have a state

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

Moshe Koppel: I see you laugh every time you ask me. 

Sruli Fruchter: I laugh because you’re making eye contact and there’s an understanding in the questions that I hear—

Moshe Koppel: Every time you ask a question that, you know, is flawed, you know, or begs for a certain answer. But look, technically speaking, I have never been to Tuvalu and I have no idea what their army does.

OK, you know, as far as I can tell, the Swiss army has done nothing but, you know, prance around with these cool little tools that have a corkscrew and, you know, and a little life in it, you know. So, yeah, they’re really super moral. They never killed anybody. Right.

But but really, really, I mean, what is it that makes an army moral? What makes an army moral is when they’re actually challenged. Right. When they have to face a situation in which they need to fight a very cruel enemy that hides behind civilians and need to make these kinds of moral decisions every single day. Right.

Can we take out a mortal threat to our citizens? Right. When that involves killing, killing their citizens. Right. And these are subtle questions of proportion, right?

Yes, I’m not going to kill a million people. Right. In order to take out one guy, you know, with an RPG.

Right. So these are difficult decisions. And I think having served in the army myself as a combat medic, having two sons and two sons in law served in the army, I think that we deal with these questions admirably. I mean, sometimes I think that we make immoral decisions in the other direction, which is that we put our own soldiers at risk in order not to cause too much harm to enemy combatants and civilians, among whom those combatants are embedded.

Sometimes I think we actually go too far in that direction. And that also is a moral question. Right. It’s immoral to do that as well.

You’re endangering my son because of some kind of moral consideration that I think is completely wrong. Right. But the short answer to your question is, yes, we are a super moral army. I have no idea what goes on in a lot of other countries in the world.

Sruli Fruchter: So how do you understand when you’ll see different reports or different accusations against the idea of either in specific instances or more broadly when you’re reading those types of things? How do you usually respond to them? And I mean, if you’re looking for specific things, I’m happy to say individual things, but I’m curious more generally. 

Moshe Koppel: So more generally, since I think there are lots of people in the world who don’t have a great fondness for Jews or the Jewish state, I find it fairly easy and you may say convenient to brush them off as being less concerned with with Jewish lives than they are with other people’s lives or at least have a political or other interest in in painting the Jews in a negative light. Are there instances in which we’re not perfect? Obviously, the question is, you know, and in those instances where we’re not perfect, I think we should remedy it. Right.

But should I take seriously those who magnify every single mistake or even not mistake right every every single thing that Israel does right, but put it in the most negative possible light. Should I take them seriously? Should I? No. 

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

Moshe Koppel: Well, it depends on whom I was making the case to.

Fundamentally, there are three different ways you could attack it, depending on who your audience is. I mean, one, you could make the biblical case, right? You could say, well, you know, God promised, you know, Israel to the Jews, etc, etc. That’s not convincing to most people, but there are many people for whom it is convincing. I’m not speaking about Jews. I’m speaking more about evangelical Christians than about Jews who find that argument convincing.

And that is an important argument to make for people who are open to that kind of argument. Then there’s the argument, you know, based on collective rights, national rights, etc. You know, the Jews are, you know, I’d make the argument that the Jews are entitled to a state just like many other groups, you know, that I think that’s a pretty obvious one. I’m not going to remake the case for you right now. And then finally, the case that I would make for Jews living in the United States, probably most of the people who are listening to this is Israel is where the cutting edge of Jewish history is happening.

I mean, if you want to be at that cutting edge of Jewish history, you ought to be here. I mean, we’re really doing important things. The future of the Jewish people is being determined right now in Gaza and in Lebanon and all over the State of Israel. Their cultural future, their political future, the economic future.

Don’t you want to be part of that? I mean, do you really want to be just bopping around the Five Towns, you know, living a fairly decent life as a minority culture in the United States, which I admit is a malchus shel chesed, right? I mean, you know, it really is, you know, for the most part, one of the greatest places that the Jews have ever lived. But nevertheless, don’t you want to be part of this unbelievable experiment that’s going on in Israel now? I mean, I’m saying that not in response to your question. What would I say? I’m actually saying it, OK, because I really can’t understand why—

Sruli Fruchter: Breaking the fourth wall.

Moshe Koppel: Yeah, exactly.

Why would a Jew not want to be here? It’s I mean, I really feel like I’m living history now. And since this war started, I feel like it’s almost of biblical proportions. You know, like I feel like, yes, a thousand years from now, people are going to be talking about events that took place now. You know, you think back, you know, there was, you know, Churban HaBayit or, you know, right, Churban HaBayit.

He said, well, what was it like to live then? Did people understand that that they were actually living at a time that 2000 years later, we would still be fasting on Tisha B’Av and remembering that event and that everything that happened since then is colored by that event. I kind of feel that way about what’s going on now. You know, and it’s just mysterious to me that somebody would pass that up for I don’t know what.

Sruli Fruchter: It’s a good segue that you’ll be hosting our new podcast, 18 Questions, 40 Jews from the Five Towns.

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?

Moshe Koppel: You know, about Israelis questioning that’s the national sport. 

Sruli Fruchter: Questioning more generally, if you want to specify for Israelis, you’re welcome to, but the question didn’t specify. 

Moshe Koppel: So let me answer the question about Israelis. I mean, if you’re talking about people who don’t live in Israel and are just doing it … you know, like they just then I already answered that question.

OK, but let’s talk about Israelis, right? Who complain about the government, who complain about the heads of the army, who complain about judges? Right. I mean, what else are we supposed to do if we couldn’t sit around complaining about the government and the army and like, what would we do all day? 

Sruli Fruchter: But those outside of Israel, you don’t think? 

Moshe Koppel: Well, I said before, I mean, it depends. You know, I mean, there obviously there are people outside of Israel who love Israel and, you know, complain about the same things I complain about sitting in Israel. The question isn’t geography.

The question is, you know, what’s your motivation, right? If your motivation is, you know, well, I feel like I’m part of Israel, even though I live in the Five Towns, which is I get that. And I want to complain about it, just like my my brother in Efrat. I’m told I’m totally on board with that. No, but if you’re talking about people who just hate Israel, you know, because of some political agenda that they have as I said before, they don’t interest me much.

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

Moshe Koppel: You can’t get solid white tuna, but—

Sruli Fruchter: Can you actually not get solid white tuna?

Moshe Koppel: It’s pretty hard.

Sruli Fruchter: Oh, wow.

Moshe Koppel: Yeah, I’m sure you’re going to start getting like, you know, reactions about people, you know—

Sruli Fruchter: Yeah, I do want to hear from listeners.

Moshe Koppel: Listeners, yeah. Please let us know where to get solid white tuna. OK, look, when countries make policy, they’re always facing tradeoffs. Right?

I mean, you can have more freedom or you can have more equality. Right? Those two things are, you know, you can have recognized borders or you can have defensible borders. You can Right?

There’s a million things where there’s no right answer, right? You have two different things that you want that are both important. Right? And you need to find that sweet spot where you think you’re maximizing something. All right?

So where exactly is that sweet spot between freedom and equality? Right. Like, you know, when is there so much freedom that we’re leaving people behind? Right. Or when is there so much socialism that people are not able to live freely the way they’d like to? There’s not a right answer. I have my preferences and other people have different preferences.

So if the state of Israel has decided on some particular tradeoff question like that, and almost every question they deal with is a tradeoff question. Right? You know, being nice to our neighbors or being concerned with the security of our citizens. Right?

You know, these are things it’s perfectly legitimate for somebody to say, look, the State of Israel decided that on a scale of one to ten, you know, they decided seven. But I think the right answer is eight or six.

Sruli Fruchter: So in your view, what do you think is the most legitimate criticism that’s leveled against Israel?

Moshe Koppel: I’m not going to give our enemies ammunition here. You know, Israel is not a perfect country.

There are no perfect countries, you know. 

Sruli Fruchter: And is there a criticism that you hear that you think that there is legitimacy to that? I’m not saying it doesn’t for anyone in particular, but it is something that is, you know, not like an obscure, you know, there’s no white tuna. 

Moshe Koppel: But that was a joke.

Sruli Fruchter: No, no, yeah, for sure.

But is there a criticism that you hear that where you do see that there’s legitimacy to it?

Moshe Koppel: As I said, anytime somebody tells me, like on a tradeoff question, I think you’re not in the sweet spot.

Sruli Fruchter: What’s coming to mind for you when you say that?

Moshe Koppel: Whatever. Let’s say, you know, socialist economic policies versus free market economic policies where, you know, you see that, you know, the advantages of each, right? You want to have a safety net so that, you know, poor people are taken care of. At the same time, you want to have a free market so that the country prospers.

Right. And OK, so I think that Israel is a little bit too socialist, you know, for my taste. Right. So if somebody comes in and says, hey, it was a little bit too socialist, right? Yeah, that’s a legitimate criticism.

OK, but again, it’s all about fine tuning. I don’t think that there’s any legitimate criticism where somebody says, you know, Israel is at zero and they should be at one. I don’t I don’t know. I don’t think that’s the case.

Israel is fundamentally a free democratic country trying its best to do right by its citizens and by its neighbors and by its, you know, Jewish heritage muddling through, you know, as best any state can. It’s doing pretty well.

Sruli Fruchter: First of all, that’s why we ask most legitimate, because obviously the criticisms that may be popular or may be common may not necessarily.

Moshe Koppel: There’s not one that jumps out.

Sruli Fruchter: Is there one that you could that you would say? 

Moshe Koppel: No, I mean, honestly, you know, there’s nothing to jumping into my mind going, wow, you know, we already discussed judicial reform. I think that the balance of powers between the branches of government is completely screwed up in Israel. You know, that’s a legitimate. But that’s not the kind of criticism that people from outside Israel generally level against us.

You know, we think your judiciary has too much power. Right. I haven’t heard a lot of that coming from outside the country, except for close friends of Israel who are essentially Israelis who just happen to be in the Five Towns at the moment. OK, I have nothing against the Five Towns, but I love the Five Towns just want to make that clear.

OK, next time I’ll talk about Teaneck and Englewood. But, you know, have I heard people outside Israel leveling criticism against it when I went, gee, they really have a point there. I think I think we really need to, you know.

Sruli Fruchter: Well, it may have been a point to you.

It may have been a point that you yourself agree with.

Moshe Koppel: Well, as I said, I complain about Israel just like every other, you know, Israeli citizen. You know, what do we do here between the kugel and the cholent on Shabbos? I mean, except for complain, right. But I don’t think there’s one particular criticism of the type that one hears from outsiders that makes me stop and say, yeah, we ought we ought to reconsider and do this differently.

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

Moshe Koppel: I think that praying for that is a segulah for a rich young man. I will live a long life indeed if I live to see that is all I can say, honestly. I mean, if I thought that the wars between us and our neighbors were over, you know, where the borders are and, you know, we just need to negotiate, you know, like a kilometer here or there or anything that could be reduced to a number, you know, and, you know, they want a four and we want a six. Could we settle on five? Yeah, then I would think, yeah, what’s the big deal? OK, I don’t think that I think they want us dead, OK, to be as blunt as possible.

Those neighbors who keep starting wars with us and, you know, shooting rockets at us and threatening us with nuclear weapons, et cetera. I don’t think that that’s something that’s negotiable. I don’t think it’s the kind of thing you can reach a compromise on. They just want us dead.

I mean, you can’t negotiate with people whose whole purpose in life is to kill you. 

Sruli Fruchter: What do you envision as a solution or as an end to this type of conflict? 

Moshe Koppel: I think that Israel needs to be so strong as to simply make our enemies incapable of fighting against us. Right. I mean, it would say that it should be not worth their while to fight against us.

Right. They should be deterred by our strength. But that doesn’t seem to work. We are much stronger than them.

And this didn’t deter them. Apparently killing a bunch of us in exchange for us killing a whole bunch more of them was either they greatly misjudged the outcome of this war or they thought that was a worthwhile deal. So I think that we need to get ourselves into a position where we are so overwhelmingly strong that they don’t make a misjudgment like that and they don’t dare start with us. That’s it.

Strength is the only answer. 

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

Moshe Koppel: That’s a hard question to answer. Look, I’ll tell you what we want. All right.

What we want is for them to no longer be a threat to us. OK, and the way for them to no longer be a threat to us is for them simply not to be there. OK, as long as they’re there, they’re going to be using rebuilding as an opportunity to rebuild the threat, to rebuild the tunnels, to rebuild their weapon stock and their positions and so forth. Honestly, you know, and hypothetically speaking, and I want to make sure I’m clear on this point, this is hypothetical.

If Gaza would sink into the Mediterranean, that would be the actual optimal solution. I don’t mean with people in it. OK, if it simply disappeared, then there would be no threat to us. It’s not in other words, the point for us is not, hey, you know, we have designs on Gaza.

We would really like to be living there. We want to put all of the yishuvim back there. There are many people who want to do that, but they mainly want to do it because they think that that is the only way for us to maintain military control of the area, that you can’t maintain military control without a civilian presence. OK, but that’s not in itself important.

What’s important is that the threat ceased to exist over there. One thing that we should be doing, and it’s primarily because the United States and Egypt have prevented this from happening. You may have noticed that when Russia invaded Ukraine, Ukrainians left Ukraine, Russians left Russia. Many of them came to Israel.

But with the war in Gaza taking a heavy toll on civilians, why are there no Gazan refugees going to the Ukraine? OK, maybe the Ukraine wouldn’t be my first choice either, but why aren’t they going to other countries? Well, nobody’s letting them out. Israel would be perfectly happy to let them out, but Egypt isn’t letting them out, and the United States has not done anything in order to force Egypt to let them out. In fact, the United States created pressure on Israel by making sure that Egypt didn’t let these refugees out. So one part of it would be to let them go.

I’m not forcing them to go. I’m not saying force them. Let them go. There are people who want to get out of that hell.

We have no interest in keeping them there. So certainly one major part of the solution would be to let people who want to leave, leave. 

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

Moshe Koppel: I think it’s too early to say. There’s this legend, right, that Henry Kissinger asked Zhou Enlai, the premier of China, and he said, what is, he asked him what he thinks of the French Revolution, and he said it’s too early to say.

Right. So that is actually a legend because he wasn’t talking about the French, he was talking about the French student rebellion that was just a few years before that, but it’s a great story, okay. The point is you need to take the long view. I mean, we clearly can’t live with an Iran that has crossed the nuclear threshold.

That threat would be too great. But whether or not we’ve handled it correctly, we’ll only know a month or six months from now, or maybe a year or five years from now, when either we’ve destroyed the Iranian nuclear program completely, or when they have crossed that threshold, and then we’ll know the answer to your question. I mean, on the whole, I think that by taking out its main proxy, Hezbollah, and its minor proxy, Hamas, and by taking out at least a good portion of its air defenses in our last attack over there, we have certainly put ourselves in a position where we have a pretty decent opportunity to take them out, especially after January 20th.

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?

Moshe Koppel: So let me just say that in my life, I have lived among almost every type of Jew, right? In my early life, I studied in the Haredi institutions.

I then was in all kinds of universities that were very, very far from that. I lived most of my adult life in Efrat … and Bar Ilan, which would clearly put me in what they call the Dati Leumi world. But the way I would put it is I’m Religious Zionist or Dati Leumi without the hyphen, meaning Yosef Borg, the famous Mafdal politician, you know, back in the 60s and 70s, was known to have said that in Dati Leumi, in the phrase Dati Leumi national religious, the most important thing is the hyphen, meaning to say that your nationalism needs to be of a religious type, and that your religion needs to be of a national type, okay, which is a kind of a very Kooknik-y way of looking at the world. I’m a Zionist and I’m religious, but I generally don’t think of myself as a Religious Zionist, okay? I’m both of those things, but without the hyphen.

And the answer to your other question, do I have friends on the other side? Yes, I have many, many friends on the other side, having, as I said, lived among all of these different communities and especially being involved in policy issues and things like that, I spend much more time speaking to people who disagree with me than people who agree with me. People who agree with me, you know, we understand each other. We don’t really need to talk it out that much, but people who don’t agree with me, I need to spend a lot of time talking to them, seeing if we can find compromises.

Sruli Fruchter: And for our final question, final of the 18, a lot of follow-ups.

I hope you weren’t trying to keep track. I’m sure there’s a mathematician. Okay, you can’t count cards. You can’t count questions. It’s the golden rule. Do you have more hope or fear for Israel and the Jewish people?

Moshe Koppel: So short answer is hope. I’m very optimistic and I’ll happily explain to you why.

But there is definitely an element of fear, which is more short term. The hope is more long term and the fear is more short term. The reason that I’m hopeful, first of all, because of our great military successes this year, but more than the military successes themselves, is that like everybody else, you know, I, before this war happened, I kind of thought of the way things work is like, you know, like the generations just keep getting worse, right? You know, I looked at these kids going, I don’t know. They don’t seem too serious.

They’ve got their faces in their phones all day, you know, not serious. It turns out I was, thankfully, completely wrong about that. This young generation of people in their 20s and 30s now, basically my kids age, they’re the greatest, the greatest generation I’ve ever seen. They’re amazing.

They know what they’re about. They know what’s important and what’s not important. They don’t fight about things that aren’t important. They, you know, you asked me, do I have friends who are on the other side of, you know, this whole political, religious.

So the answer is yes, but I’m very aware that they’re on the other side. When I look at my kids’ generation, they don’t just have friends who aren’t on the same side as them religiously and politically. They’re hardly even aware of all that. You know what I mean? They just very naturally, naturally cross boundaries all the time.

So I think that Israel is really on the verge of a major breakthrough in the sense of where we’re headed. Tremendous amount of unity that I see in the younger generation. The idea of an Israeli Jewish culture, right, which we’ve been struggling towards and, you know, and people write books about it and none of it matters because this next generation is simply living it. Okay, they’re just making it happen by living it.

And that gives me tremendous, tremendous hope. The short term fear is, and I go back now to, you know, I told you that I had many, many conversations with people who disagree with me in the context of judicial reform, mainly. We are now on the verge of a major, major transition, right? It’s the old guard, the old elite, the people who, you know, dominate the institutions of the country, you know, the army and the media and the universities and the police and the courts and the whole judicial bureaucracy. Those people are aging out and there’s a whole new generation coming in that’s very different than they are, right, that doesn’t have the same axes to grind that they do, that doesn’t have the same resentment of religion or the same resentment of right-wingers or the same resentment of Bibi Netanyahu personally, etc. And my fear is that I know from conversations that I had, some of them extremely unpleasant, right? I should tell you that many of the conversations I had were very productive and I spent many hours with people who wanted to find common ground and we succeeded in finding common ground.

But I also, especially with older people, found that many of them were very, very angry and fearful that they were being replaced, which they are, by people who aren’t like them, which is true. And they were willing to inflict tremendous, tremendous pain on Israeli society by, you know, encouraging insubordination in the army and things like that just to get their way. In other words, they’re not, these are not people, many of them, who are willing to give up power easily, right? Even if the way they’re replaced is, you know, completely democratic and above board and according to the rules, etc., they may exact a price from Israeli society in order to try, you know, to prevent their being replaced. This causes me tremendous fear.

But because I know that in the end, you know, the younger generation is not there and this is going to happen eventually anyway, for the most part, I’m extremely optimistic about where we’re headed. As I said, you know, culturally, economically, militarily, in all those ways, I’m extremely, extremely hopeful with a tinge of fear that before we get moshiach, we’re going to get chevlei moshiach, right?

Sruli Fruchter: All right, well, thank you so much for answering our 18 questions. How was this for you?

Moshe Koppel: This was wonderful. Thank you.

Sruli Fruchter: All right, thank you so much. I really enjoyed the interview. I thought there was a lot of insight gained and there’s definitely a lot more left to be explored, as there always is. You can find a lot more of moshiach‘s work online.

Thank you to our friends Gilad Brounstein and Josh Weinberg for editing and recording the video version of the podcast, respectively. And before we head out, as usual, 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 until next time, keep questioning and keep thinking. Bye. 

This transcript was produced by Sofer.AI.