A View of the War in Gaza From the Editor of the Forward

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. As we continue to get a wide variety of views on the Israel-Hamas war and the larger Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with us now is Jodi Rudoren, Editor-in-Chief of the news organization, The Forward, which describes itself as Jewish, independent, nonprofit. Jodi Rudoren has been Editor-in-Chief since 2019. She previously was The New York Times' Jerusalem bureau chief for about four years, which included covering wars in Gaza in 2012 and 2014. She spent 21 years altogether at The New York Times. She was also just in Israel to report on the post-October 7th situation there during and around Hanukkah. Jodi, thank you for coming on, welcome back to WNYC.

Jodi Rudoren: Thanks for having me, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: First on The Forward, for people who don't know it, when I was little, I would see my grandfather sitting at his kitchen table in the Bronx reading The Forward in Yiddish, and I was told it was a liberal Jewish newspaper. I see on The Forward's website where it describes its early days as being for democratic socialism, but I saw you recently describe it as non-ideological. Does The Forward have a political orientation today that you would identify?

Jodi Rudoren: No, really, not. I like to talk about our ideology as being one of inquiry. We come at questions and stories from a place of curiosity and we're really committed to providing the broadest possible spectrum of diverse Jewish perspectives on all subjects. We have a robust opinion platform that publishes personal essays and political arguments from all kinds of American Jews, from Palestinians, from other people. Our news coverage, as I said, comes at things from a place of inquiry and curiosity and not taking sides.

We do have a Jewish lens on the news. We are a Jewish news organization and we are serving a mainly American Jewish audience. That's a perspective in itself, a filter, but it's not a political perspective or an ideological perspective, it's more of a focal point.

Brian Lehrer: The idea that it once was a self-described defender of democratic socialism, today the DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America, describes itself as anti-Zionist. They question whether Israel should even continue to exist as a Jewish state, yet maybe they and The Forward still share some economic values, I don't know. How would you describe The Forward's take on, or relationship with democratic socialism today considering the publication's roots?

Jodi Rudoren: The publication was a socialist publication. It was founded by socialists who were Eastern European immigrants. For the first 50 years of its life from 1897, it was wildly successful, it had more readers than The New York Times in the 1920s, and its purpose was really to teach those immigrants how to be American and they were decidedly socialist. It was a collective ownership of The Forward. It was always a nonprofit, but it was a 501(c)(4) originally. The owners that were known as The Forward Association actually, when they were wildly successful and making a lot of money, they would divvy up some of the profits to socialist candidates.

It was actually Zionist. Other Yiddish publications were not Zionist in New York in the early days of pre-state Israel and as the Zionist movement was forming and becoming more active, and then around the war and the formation of Israel. The English Forward, which was founded in 1990, has never been connected to socialism at all. Its first editor was actually a neoconservative, Seth Lipsky, who is now the editor of The New York Sun. Throughout the 33 years of The English Forward, it's really been a news organization without, as my old employer likes to say, fear or favor, taking on Jewish organizations that were corrupt, looking at Israel and the Palestinian conflict with a critical eye against surfacing multiple perspectives.

I think like the vast majority of American Jews, the vast majority of our audience probably describes themselves as liberal Zionists, people who support the existence of a Jewish and democratic state in Israel that should live in peace and security with its Palestinian neighbors. That is the mainstream American Jewish view and has been for a number of decades although, of course, we've seen polling in the last week and in the last months that show that the younger generation of Americans generally, including American Jews, are diverging from that in a significant way which is a prime theme, a prime storyline that we've been following.

Brian Lehrer: Absolutely. With your experience reporting from Israel over the years and having just been there now, and in the context of that American polling you were just citing, how would you describe the Israeli left at this point? I see your office drew our attention to a poll by the Israel Democracy Institute. That's a poll over there that indicates a split between the American Jewish left and American liberal Zionists on the one hand, and Israelis across the political spectrum there. What did you see in that poll that paints that picture or makes a contrast with American liberal Jews?

Jodi Rudoren: I think American, the Jewish left, the Jewish far left, the anti-Zionist left, as well as Jewish liberal Zionists, which I would say is really a very mainstream view in the US, have all been, I think, really torn up somewhat by this war since October 7th. Many, many, many American Jews were quite anguished and fearful and felt more isolated after the attacks, devastating terror attacks that killed 1,200 people, kidnapped more than 200, horrible brutal, brutal crimes, and are also extremely worried, deeply concerned about the devastation and high death toll being wrought on Gaza ever since then, and are really, really focused on how any of this could possibly lead towards a future that is more peaceful, has less stuff in it, and involves a two-state solution. It feels very, very fraught and confusing right now for most of us here.

In Israel, Israeli Jews are not in that place. Regardless of where they live on the political spectrum, the polling shows that they are lined up in the 90 percentiles behind the war and its stated goals of eradicating Hamas. When you talk to them individually, even people who understand that you can't really eradicate an ideology and that this devastating war could build up a whole new generation of Hamasniks, they're just not ready to go there.

One of the most telling things that anybody said to me during 10 days of non-stop interviews, I was actually just walking with a friend, a rabbi who's been very involved in Rabbis for Human Rights, and he just said to me, he said, "I'm ashamed at how much my heart has shrunk," and I heard this from so many people. They just don't have room in their pain and anguish and mourning and fear of what this all portends for their security to really think clearly about what's happening in Gaza.

Brian Lehrer: Well, to much of the political world, as I don't have to tell you, the pace of civilian deaths in Gaza right now is not just a source of debate, it's an emergency that has to take full center stage compared to anything else in the conflict no matter how serious or justified various arguments are. Around 20,000 people killed in such a short time, and not to believe any numbers that Hamas puts out, but we know that independent estimates seem to confirm approximately 20,000, unprecedented anywhere on earth in this century, in this short a time, and that Israel has to stop or slow down somehow.

The argument goes, no matter how justified it is conceptually in responding to the viciousness of October 7th and Hamas's intention to stage more October 7ths, that there has to be a more humane way, at very least. How active a debate is that within Israel?

Jodi Rudoren: It's really not an active debate, I'm sorry to say, among Israeli Jews anyway. I think Palestinian citizens in Israel are actually deeply concerned about the death toll, but they're really concerned about the way that the Hamas attack stole the narrative of the Palestinian identity and national aspirations from a more reasonable one. Look, the death toll is totally staggering and hard to grapple with in any way. I just want to say two things about it, which is one, we do need to keep in mind that the international laws of war are not based on what the total death toll is, they're based on the proportionality of civilian casualties or collateral damage on each targeted attack, and it takes a long time to figure that out. It's hard to see that in the fog of war.

The second thing I want to say is I do think that it's on the international community to pressure, I think, the Palestinians and the Arab world to provide some alternatives that might work for Israel right now. I think that this call for an immediate ceasefire versus the Israeli insistence on this aggressive all-out assault, it's like two people talking so far past each other. I'm starting to hear a little bit from the Biden administration of is there something they can convince the Israelis of that would be more targeted, but I think also, for example, the Arab world and the Palestinian's complete refusal to consider humanitarian corridors or temporary refugee camps outside of Gaza as happens in so many other conflicts.

I understand the history here, but I don't know, there's got to be some third way or some third alternative for people to start to talk about because the starkness between immediate ceasefire and this daily terrible assault, the divide is too great.

Brian Lehrer: I want to take a break from discussing the politics for a minute, though we're going to come back to it, to do something on the human experience level. I see one of the places that you visited on your recent reporting trip to Israel was a kibbutz near Oz, the kibbutz less than a mile from Gaza where one-quarter of the residents were killed on October 7th. What did you find there?

Jodi Rudoren: One-quarter were killed or kidnapped, and some of them have been returned. It's interesting, people have probably seen some images of some of the destroyed kibbutzim, particularly Kfar Aza, and Be'eri, where there was mass destruction and a lot of homes were burned down, some with people inside them. That's not what Nir Oz is like. It's a little bit house to house. Some houses were really bombarded, assaulted, torn off, burned, and others untouched. I actually met an older man there, he's in his 80s, who was next door down a few 100 yards from a place where people were killed and kidnapped and he was in his safe room the whole time, and nobody did anything to him. He's actually moved back to the kibbutz.

The kibbutz is in a strange limbo right now there. Soldiers have made a little base camp in what is the children's house where you've got these toys, and then you've got these soldiers' cots or mats laid out and they're shaving here because they are soldiers, they are there. You can hear the war happening. Rockets firing from Gaza and artillery, and tanks going into Gaza from Israel's side while you're standing there.

Then there's this guy who's living there, who's in his 80s. Then there's a bus full of journalists have come, and the day before, bus-fulls of tourists, really, of voluntourists coming, and there are survivors showing us around. Then there's some stray cats around, and some of the houses, as I said, are destroyed and condemned, and others are in fine shape. The kibbutz is very bucolic and there's a bunch of houses where there's sculptures of found objects in the yards. One of the guys who's an older man who is being still held hostage, Lipchitz, is a sculptor who makes these crazy sculptures out of found objects. Then there's also a lot of houses that have these murals of flowers painted on them. Those are just there as though nothing happened.

Brian Lehrer: People not familiar may wonder why is there a kibbutz so close to Gaza since even before October 7th. For the many years, Hamas rocket fire from Gaza was a thing that would happen. Do you know?

Jodi Rudoren: Well, I think it's a great question and there's a lot of ways to answer it. One is that the Israelis, it's important to settle all parts of the land, and why not live there? There are two different places near the Gaza border that often get talked about in the news. One is Sderot, a city where there's constant rocket fire, and that is a sort of a city and it's actually a stronghold of the Likud Party that elected Benjamin Netanyahu all these times, and then there are these kibbutzim, these smaller rural agricultural communities. They're these peaceful lovely places where kids run around.

The one Nir Oz, no cars are allowed. They go around in golf carts or bikes or walking. They are filled largely with leftists, with people from the Labour Party or the Meretz Party. They're peaceniks. A lot of the people who live there, including a lot of the people who were killed or kidnapped there, worked on peace programs, coexistence programs. Some brought people from Gaza into Israel for medical treatment. They, I think, thought about the hopeful future of a place where the border could be more open, and people could go back and forth.

A lot of people who I've spoken to from that area remember going to the beach in Gaza in the '80s. Having people going to the marketplace, getting fresh produce from Gaza. You used to be able to just take the bus in there both ways.

Brian Lehrer: All right. Back to the politics.

Jodi Rudoren: [chuckles]

Brian Lehrer: We had a guest yesterday, a young journalist and activist, who when I asked if she thought there could be a unified peace movement between Israelis and Palestinians who might march together for their sides to stop the horrific violence, she responded with what you might call the Palestinian or the left version of a one-state solution. A democratic country where Israelis and Palestinians are all equal citizens. I asked a follow-up question about the fact that history suggests that anywhere Jews have lived as a minority, they've been oppressed almost anywhere, certainly been true in modern times in the Arab-majority countries in the region.

Are you surprised to see, covering Israel for as long as you have for The New York Times, and after, The Forward, to see how much the campus activist communities in this country are now calling for an end to the Jewish state altogether rather than simply an end to the occupation, or an end to this level of military response to October 7th, calling for a one-state solution end of the Jewish state altogether, rather than a two-state solution?

Jodi Rudoren: Yes, I was having a second. I do want to say about the one-state solution. The one-state solution is Palestine. As you said, it's not a Jewish state. I certainly understand why some Palestinians find that to be a fulfillment of their national aspirations, to have a state that would be majority Palestinian. I also understand ideologically why people who are very focused on civil rights and human rights and just oppose the idea of an ethnocracy and just think one person, one vote is the way to go, but it's not Israel and it's not a Jewish and democratic state. It's a state much more like our own. We're different people who have their own ethnicities and backgrounds, but there'll be a melting pot and an elected democracy, et cetera. That's not what Israel was founded to be in 1948. It was found to be a Jewish and democratic state.

In terms of what's happening on campuses in the last, I guess, 10 weeks, a lot of people talked about the intelligence failure of Israel that allowed October 7th to happen. I think we add a similar intelligence value here. We all knew, everybody who was paying any attention, knew that there was a growing generational divide over Israel and that young people, including young Jews, were so fed up by the occupation that they had decided that the Zionist project was not tenable. I don't think we had any idea how big, powerful, or frankly, anti-Semitic some of that movement had become.

I think the size, the virulence of the activism, and the ways in which it does bleed into pretty open antisemitism at times, definitely did surprise me and I think has most of the Jewish world properly freaking out as we saw in the moral panic over the hearing with the university presidents. Was that two weeks ago?

Brian Lehrer: Yes.

Jodi Rudoren: People are just terrified at the idea that college campuses seem to have become an increasingly hostile and potentially unsafe place for Jews. I think the underpinnings of this are clear. An occupation that was declared to be temporary in 1967 has been going on for more than 50 years, for not only all of these college students' lifetimes, many of their parents' lifetimes, so they don't believe that it's a temporary occupation. Also, the need for a Jewish national homeland, a safe haven, has faded in memory.

It's hard when you grow up free and prosperous and successful here in America, to imagine why we need such a thing. I think those two things together, plus the more general, broad ideology gripping a lot of this generation relating to the way identity politics works now, has made people just question whether this place has any right to exist.

I'm not a person who believes that all anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism by any means, but I think that Deborah Lipstadt and some other people have made a smart point in the last couple of months about the difference between being an anti-Zionist in 1947 when there was a debate over whether there should be a Jewish state, and being one now, 75 years in, calling for the elimination of the Jewish state. It's a different thing. I think it's not always clear that the campus activists who are calling for that really understand what that feels like for the Israeli Jews who live there and for Jews worldwide who see it as part of their identity that there is a Jewish homeland.

Brian Lehrer: Here's a pushback question coming in as a text message. It's a pushback on me, but by extension, I think, on how the media generally frames the war. This says, "I want to take issue with the phrasing of this conflict as the Israel-Hamas war. You don't refer to it as the Likud-Hamas war. Every time you call it a war against Hamas rather than a war against Palestine and Palestinians, you engage in manufacturing consent for these atrocities." Do you call it the Israel-Hamas war in The Forward? I think most of what we might call mainstream news organizations in the United States call it the Israel-Hamas war, not Israel-Gaza or Israel-Palestinian's war.

Jodi Rudoren: Right. I appreciate the question, but what it really reveals is the maddening and challenging asymmetry of the whole conflict. As we talked about earlier, there's not a Likud war because Likud was not-- First of all, there's unanimity in Israel practically around the war, large majorities of support, and the war cabinet is actually more diverse than Likud. Also, Likud was not attacked. Israel was attacked. Hamas is not the governing-- It's the de facto government in Gaza, but it is not the government of the whole Palestinian people. There is no unified government of the whole Palestinian people.

Hamas is a terrorist organization, according to the United States, the European Union, and others, and also has this strange ad hoc civilian responsibility for Gaza. We do call it the Israel-Hamas war. I think those are the combatants in this war. We also do sometimes call it, and I think others do too, the war in Gaza. It is also true that Hamas triggered this war with its attack in Israel on October 7th and now the war is happening in Gaza. That is a way, I think, that you can make clear, or at least indicate that it is affecting certainly all of Gaza, as well as the Palestinian people at large, but it is not a war against all Palestinian people. There obviously have also been-- There have been increased violence in the West Bank that is worth talking about separately, but the war is between Israel and the Hamas, really the Hamas military wing.

Brian Lehrer: Let me quote from the lead piece on The Forward website this morning, your own website, as what might be pushback to that answer. The top center article on the homepage, as you obviously know, it's an opinion piece by UC Berkeley Sociology Professor Emeritus Jerome Karabel called Israel's Choices — Not Hamas — Are an Existential Threat to the Jewish State. It says, "Against the backdrop of its violent occupation of the West Bank and obstruction of Palestinian statehood, Israel's apparent disregard for Palestinian lives in the current Gaza campaign risks not only global condemnation but the fate of South Africa during apartheid, economic, political, and cultural isolation and ultimately collapse."

It says, "Israel can continue to violently impose its will on the Palestinians in an illusory quest for security, or it can finally recognize that its own peace and security is bound up with the creation of an independent Palestinian state, and acknowledge in word deed that Palestinian lives are as precious as Israeli lives," from that lead editorial on The Forward site today. I think Karabel seems to be implying that Israelis don't even get what they're doing to themselves. You talked about intelligence blind spots earlier, making themselves a rogue state, a pariah state, to use his words, in the eyes of much of the world. Why did you publish that piece front and center and what are your own thoughts about it, and then we're out of time?

Jodi Rudoren: I wouldn't characterize it as a lead editorial. It may be at the top of our site right now, but our site is dynamic and changes around a lot. As I said earlier, our opinion section publishes a broad range of opinion. I think this one is on the pretty far left, although not anti-Zionist left. We've published lots of things that are much stronger in support of the war effort. Look, I think there's a lot of important things in that piece. I think what you just said at the end of your question is probably the most important takeaway.

I do think that Israelis have been somewhat blind for years about the essentialness of resolving the conflict for their own future. The status quo is not sustainable. It was not sustainable on October 6th, and we've learned a lot more about how badly it's not sustainable since then. Israelis have been so frustrated at the lack of a solid Palestinian partner at the ongoing terror threats that they won't see that. I think, unfortunately, that was set back hugely on October 7th in terms of Israelis' willingness to see the importance of a Palestinian state to their own secure future. I'm sure Professor Karabel was not wrong that the horrible devastating war that has ensued has set back Palestinians' ability to engage meaningfully in any kind of resolution of the conflict also significantly.

I think we are in a much, much worse place today than we were three months ago. My only bright spot within that is it is also true that in history, catastrophic events sometimes do catalyze change that stagnant negotiations never could. I've been signing my emails lately, "Hoping for a 2024 with more light," kind of a low bar, but, yes, I think we're in a bad place around this conflict, and the divisions that we're seeing in our own country, on our campuses, are part of that bad place.

Brian Lehrer: Jodi Rudoren, Editor-in-Chief of The Forward. Thank you so much.

Jodi Rudoren: Thank you, Brian.

 

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