Yuval Noah Harari: 'There is a battle for the soul of the Israeli nation'

Yes, your latest book focuses on children. It's a children's series that's coming out. Yes. Unstoppable us. Just tell us why at this moment you felt it was so important to write for children. For children, you know that the basic idea is to explain the world. to children, especially at this crucial moment in history when, for the first time, adults are not really good guides for these children's future. I mean, for the first time we have no idea what the world would be like as children today. They are adults, nobody knows what the job market will be like, what the economy will be like, what society will be like in 10 or 20 years, and dealing with the unknown history is always an important key, so, you know, start with your deepest emotions. basic, since you are a child you wake up in the middle of the night afraid that there is a monster under the bed this is actually a historical memory from hundreds of thousands of years ago when there were indeed monsters that came to eat children in among the night lions and the cheetahs and things like that, and if you woke up in fear and called your mom, you could be saved if you stayed asleep, they would eat you, so even to understand something as basic as that, it's helpful for kids to know our history.

And indeed, when it comes to the big questions of politics and economics, why are there so many wars in the world? So it's a historical question: where do wars come from? Where do pandemics come from? For example, I think it was very revealing to know during the covid pandemic that pandemics were not a constant feature of human history they began Only with the Agricultural Revolution did hunter-gatherers in the Stone Age not suffer pandemics, they moved in very small groups, even if someone got sick and infected like five other people, there could not be a pandemic, it began with the Agricultural Revolution, when many people and farm animals, goats, chickens, live together in crowded villages, where people built these first villages and cities that were supposed to be like a paradise for humans.

It turns out that this is heaven for germs and it's the same with wars, you know, people sometimes think that war is part of human nature, in fact, the first clear evidence in the archaeological record of war. between people is only from about 13,000 years ago. 13 13 13,000 years ago from the Nile Valley we have no archaeological evidence of warfare before that time, why do we still do it? So what war? Yeah, I mean, if it's a phenomenon, like you say, you know history is a long time, it's only when you think about it as a historian, 13,000 years ago. it's not that long it's not that long no and yet to this day I mean if you look at the state of the world it continues to happen and it's a tool that people use first before speaking first before dialogue or diplomacy um like el Stan, I think the most important thing to keep in mind is that wars of human choice are never inevitable between humans.

Some people think that humans fight for the same reason that wolves and chimpanzees fight, that we fight for food and territory, and this is just part of objective nature. of things and this is almost never the case, most wars in history are not really about food or territory, but about stories that we imagine in our own minds and I look at the war between Israelis and Palestinians for example, there is something objectively speaking there. There is enough land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River to build houses, schools and hospitals for everyone. There is enough food to feed everyone.

People don't really fight over food, they fight over the imaginary stories they have in their heads and can't find a solution. common history and you know that religion plays a very important role in it, as you have the Holy Rock in Jerusalem under the Dome of the Rock and both Jews and Muslims say that God gave us this sacred Rock, you know that the Palestinian philosopher Sarin NBA wrote A few years ago Jews and Muslims armed with nuclear weapons were about to carry out one of the largest massacres of human beings on a rock, this is not an objective necessity, you really don't have to fight for this rock, you fight for it because in your mind it becomes something much more important than food or territory or even your life and yet here we are today, generation after generation, fighting the same fight, especially in the context of this conflict.

That is the big question: are we condemned to repeat the same tragedy over and over again? and again and again with a different decoration each time or do we have some choice about it and as a historian I believe in the possibility of change, history is change, things change, look, for example, um, you know, for me , one of the best measures. of the level of violence in the world is the state budgets because the budgets are very cold, you know, it's not like poetry, it's where the money goes for most of history in most polity kingdoms, empires, city-states, at least 50% of the state budget. went to the military if you look at the great wars of the 20th century, in World War I, the average military expenditure in the United Kingdom was 50% of the government budget in World War II, 70% of the budget went to the military in At the beginning of the 21st century, average military spending worldwide, taking all countries together, fell to 7%, while healthcare was about 10%.

It's surprising, I mean we take it for granted that a lot of people in the UK say the healthcare budget is bigger than the military budget, but it's been a remarkable achievement, it demonstrates the ability to change human behavior and now it's in danger. , now we see military budgets around the world skyrocketing again, well that is about power and control, control because you want to be the most powerful state with the largest army and the greatest force because even here there is criticism about why the military budget is Under why it is not increased, they tell us that if we went to war with Russia, for example, in about a decade we would lose as a state because we are not investing in the army, so two types of magic circles occur.

You can have a vicious cycle in which Russia increases its military budget and invades Ukraine in a European way. Nations obviously feel obliged to increase their budget, then more

nation

s feel threatened, they also increase their budgets and everyone increased their budgets until we return to a situation in which everywhere in the world looks like Russia, which already before the war in Ukraine Putin was in preparation for the Putin invasion increased military spending in Russia to about 30% of the budget and now this is happening in more and more countries because they are fed, if you don't you are exposed and this It leads to this kind of vicious circle and we basically go back to the Middle Ages, but there is an opposite trend that worked in previous decades: if some countries reduce their military spending, their neighbors feel more secure, they also reduce their military spending, they can spend more on health and education, citizens. of these countries get used to the situation where money is spent on nurses and schools, not on tanks, and life improves, they like it and more people want to live like that, so you have these two possibilities of magic circles and we have to to get it. trapped in the Positive Circle we are currently being sucked into the Negative Circle so we have a situation if we look at the situation in the Middle East where on October 7th a horrible event took place which left 1200 people dead and shocked Israel.

It shocked Israel on so many levels that we now have a situation where almost 30,000 Palestinians have been killed in total. They say that 100,000 Palestinians have died, wounded or missing. Do you think the answer was the right one as a historian, as someone who understands the pain of Israel and the tragedy of the Palestinians. The biggest missing piece of the puzzle is what the goal of the war is. You know, the most basic maxim of military theory, going back to Car Kovitz, is that war is the continuation of politics by other means. You can't understand anything about a war unless you know what its political objectives are and we have many cases in history where people think that in strictly military turns they win all the

battle

s and lose the war completely, as we saw in the US invasion of Iraq.

The Americans won every major military engagement and completely lost the war. The big winner of the Iraq war was Iran, which emerged from the war as a hegemonic power in the Middle East and much of what is happening now also to Israel and the Palestinians. the war between Israel and Hamas the threat of war with Kisala all goes back to some extent to the Iranian hegemony in the Middle East, which was brought about by the American military victory, so what I would ask, of course, also of my government is, what are you trying? achieve without knowing the political objective of a war you can't really know anything about it, especially not if it's just whether it's uh um leading in a positive way or not and as a historian I can also say that justice is a very, very slippery term because always, especially in war, both sides have a very different conception of Justice because the historical narrative is completely different if we go back to October 7 or thousands of years ago, Israelis and Palestinians tell a very different historical narrative story and therefore Therefore they understand Justice differently and there is no way to really reconcile it.

You will never get them to agree. The key is to change the discussion from a discussion about Justice to a discussion about peace. You can't agree on what Justice is. but peace is much more objective because whether they kill people or not, that is something objective, but they have tried for decades to talk about peace and it failed, so they have to do it, so we have to try again. I mean, do you know what the alternative is? just keep fighting forever um yeah, I mean all the previous attempts made to achieve peace in the Middle East, at least between Israel and the Palestinians, failed um, what can you do except try again?

What keeps you up at night with this conflict? What are you afraid of? Personally, I feel more for the

soul

of my country than my

nation

in Israel, right now there is truly a

battle

for the

soul

of the Nation of Israel between patriotism on one side and ideas of Jewish supremacy on the other side. The current government has elements that are anti-Zionist, they are against the secular nationalism that Israel built and they are in favor of Jewish supremacy, and you know that there is a very important line in the line for each nation between patriotism and feelings of supremacy to be a patriot is to recognize the uniqueness of your nation and each nation is unique, there is nothing wrong with feeling that my nation is unique and has the right to develop its unique traditions and cultures, etc., and that does not prevent If they prevent you recognize the uniqueness of other nations and their rights to live with dignity and prosperity, the danger arises when you start to think that my nation is not only unique, it is supreme and has rights that override those of anyone else and now there is a huge titanic struggle within Israel between these two forces and this is my greatest spirit I is I am not from Kamas it is not from kah it is not from Iran it is from this internal struggle that uh uh we could lose this fight and then you I know that one of the objectives al beginning of this conflict was to eliminate Hamas.

There are many who now leave at the beginning of the conflict, but now they also say that Hamas is a political movement. You can't kill an ideology. You fear that something more violent, more brutal will come out of this, given that we now have 177,000 orphans as a result of this conflict. MH, well, I think talking about Hamas being eliminated is unrealistic. The most realistic goal is to eliminate Kamas' military capabilities. Well, again, if you think about what the goals of the war are, from Hamas's perspective on October 7, the goal was very clear. On October 7, Israel was quite close to signing a historic peace treaty with Saudi Arabia, which sought to normalize relations between Israel and much of the Arab world and also potentially restart the Palestinian-Israeli peace process, this was a mortal threat.

For Hamas, which opposes any prospect of peace and normalization between Israel and the Palestinians and the Arab world, the goal of the October 7 attack was to derail this attempt and sow seeds of hatred that will prevent any chance of peace in the future and unfortunately Hamas is achieving its political goals. I think that given the ideology of Hamas which many times stated that it sees no potential for any peaceful solution which it only accepts is the complete destruction of Israel, as long as Hamas retains its military capabilities at all times, even if we have a halt to the fire now and we begin to reconcile and rebuild and continue on the path in two years.

Five more years, we are getting closer to a peace agreement, they will attack again, so I think, again, you can't eliminate Hamas, but you need to eliminate at least most of theirmilitary capabilities, of course, as you say, something even. something worse could replace it, so it is not enough to eliminate the military capabilities of Kamas, we have to fight and I mean that when we say that Israel presents the Palestinians with a better future than the one Hamas offers and a better future means they have decent lives. there in the Palestinian Homeland. I talked to someone who said that he has been negotiating with both sides for a long time and he said that you need to be able to write the other side's victory speech.

H, that's a good point, you know, but here today we are the Prime Minister, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is saying that even if the hostages are released, we will go to Rafa. Do you think this is the right kind of goal and plan and I just don't know what it is? Going through his mind I'm definitely not his press officer and I can't explain or defend his thinking. I haven't heard a clear statement from him yet about what the long-term political goals of the war are, such as, what does he envision? our region, the Middle East, two years, five years later, um and wars, political conflicts, there are these kinds of puzzles for children, like these mazes where you have to find your way inside a maze, each child learns in a certain point you have to start from the end like if you have to start from the goal from the door coming out of the Labyrinth and then walk backwards to where you are now, how will we get there?

Unless you tell me how you envision the Region 5 years 10 years later there is no way we can get there and he refuses to say what his vision is. Sometimes I suspect that he has no vision. At the beginning of this conversation, you talked about your children's book and said for the first time. In your knowledge and understanding of history, people don't know what the future will be like. There is uncertainty in a deep sense. I mean, it's not just political uncertainty. Besides, in the Middle Ages, no one knows. If you live in England in 1024, you don't know.

Maybe next year the Vikings will invade, no one can predict that, but we do know a lot of things that aren't going to change in the next 10, 50, or 100 years, like the basic economic structure and the skills you need to teach your children. . Teach them how to ride horses and bake bread and grow wheat, because these are the kinds of things people will still be doing in 50 years. Now we look to the future, even in 10 or 20 years nobody has any idea. what the job market would be like because there are things like AI because of AI, which means we have no idea what skills to teach kids today in school because you know you say, okay, let's teach them to code computers in 20 years, maybe AI is doing it. all the encryption, so you don't need that and of course the repercussions for the social and political system are huge, which is why this is a time of such uncertainty and also in other fields like, you know, 100 years ago, the romantic life no.

It doesn't change much between generations, so if you go on your first date you can get some good advice from your grandfather or grandmother, but today just to understand the environment of online romantic relationships is very different than it was in your 20s or not to say 50. years ago, but it is becoming increasingly difficult for adults to understand the world that children have to deal with every day, which again deprives children of something that was always there: good advice from adults, So, what advice would you give to Future generations, the most important skills have to do with emotional intelligence.

The only thing we know about the future is that it will be very different from the present and will change at a very, very fast pace, so people will need a very strong one. psychological resilience to keep changing and keep learning throughout their lives we are traditionally used to a situation where when you are a child or teenager you learn a lot, you change, you basically invent and then as life progresses you can calm down. This means that you always learn new things, but you mainly depend on the skills, the worldview, the personality that you acquired in your youth.

This is not a good plan for the 21st century, the pace of change will be so rapid that even when you are. 40 50 60 If you want to remain relevant you will have to radically reinvent yourself to relearn things over and over again and this will create tremendous psychological stress because change is always stressful and we must prepare for it not only as individuals but also as societies in which I think governments need to think very carefully about investing a lot more resources into building mental health infrastructure, because otherwise I don't know if people are really built to deal with that level of stress over the course of a lifetime. their lives and Harari thank you very much for your time thank you