This past October 6, as evening approached, I arrived at the home of author Haim Be’er. He greeted me at the door with a smile, even though the first anniversary of the October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre was already looming. He would travel to meet the people of the decimated Kibbutz Nir Oz that day, not knowing what he would say to them, but he took with him a text by Hebrew literary pioneer Yosef Haim Brenner.
“October 7 was a terrible shock,” Be’er says of the massive onslaught that saw 1,200 people in Israel’s south savagely butchered by Hamas-led terrorists and 251 kidnapped to the Gaza Strip.
“But if the survivors of the Holocaust managed to rebuild, there is a chance for the forces of life. It will take time. It’s not simple. But if we managed to rise after 6 million of our people were slaughtered, despite all the madness and troubles, perhaps there is hope,” he says.
However, hopefulness doesn’t fully describe Be’er’s current mood. He is melancholy because, at age 79, he believes he won’t live to see the anticipated change, perhaps subconsciously echoing the well-known “Ani Ma’amin” prayer in which a penitent believes with “perfect faith” in the coming of the Messiah — though he may tarry.
The foundational shift Be’er invisions would include a change in leadership, a change in the vision of the country, and perhaps most of all, a change in the way we perceive ourselves.
The crux, he is certain, is not the rift between religious and secular, right and left. It’s about understanding the limitations of power and it goes to the core of our being as a people.
“I’m not sure we’ve decided what we want to be. What kind of Jews do we want to be?” he says. “The Jewish man has not been a master in 2,000 years of exile. We don’t know how to be masters and rulers, and we don’t know how to be generous.”
Be’er sat down for an interview ahead of the anniversary of the invasion and upcoming holy day of Yom Kippur — and a mere 10 days before Israel’s long-sought termination of Hamas head and October 7 mastermind Yahya Sinwar.
The renowned author discussed the 1973 Yom Kippur War and its lasting scars, the homeland growing ever darker, the early days of Zionism and Hebrew literature, the Six Day War, the transition from the Greater Israel movement to openly opposing messianic extremism — which he analogizes to uranium — his departure from Orthodox Judaism, and writing.
Be’er was born in Jerusalem in 1945. He is a writer, professor emeritus of Hebrew literature at Ben-Gurion University and a lecturer on literature. He is married to Batya and the father of three, residing in Ramat Gan.
How are you?
For 50 years, I’ve been haunted by a trauma that upended my life. A trauma that turned me into a writer. It filled me with anxiety and pain, feelings that remain with me to this day. I’m talking about the Yom Kippur War.
I was called up for reserve duty in the burial unit from Simchat Torah [autumn of 1973] until Purim [early spring of 1974]. I served in Jenifa, across the Suez Canal, dealing with collecting bodies and bringing soldiers for burial. I was already married and the father of two children. My mother was still alive. Since then, the smell of death hasn’t left me, especially in my dreams. From time to time, I wake up from the nauseating stench of death.
I couldn’t touch my small children when I came home on leave from the reserves. I couldn’t touch another human being. It’s hard to touch someone after experiencing what I went through.
What else do you remember from the Yom Kippur War?
Yom Kippur for me was a cloud. A shadow. After the war, I held countless conversations with people who were there. I wanted to understand how this happened to us. I spoke with Yoel Ben-Porat, who was the commander of Unit 8200. He knew there would be a war, warned everyone, but no one wanted to listen.
I had deep talks with Shlomo Gazit, who was head of Military Intelligence, and Tzvika Zamir, who was head of the Mossad, whom I greatly respected and loved. I remember asking Zamir, how did it happen that no one heeded the warning of an imminent, combined attack? How was prime minister Golda Meir so captive to the concept promoted by defense minister Moshe Dayan and head of IDF Intelligence Eli Zeira?
Last Sukkot, exactly one year ago, I traveled with my son, a physicist, to a conference in Würzburg, Germany. He asked me to come along, so we went. After the conference ended, we went for a drink, then back to the hotel to sleep. Early in the morning, October 7, the phone rang. My son woke me up and said, “Dad, war has broken out.”
In Frankfurt, waiting for our flight back, a woman sat weeping bitterly. She told me her grandson had been at the Nova music festival. To this day, I don’t know what happened to him.
We flew back to Israel, and the plane, which always enters Israeli airspace above Tel Aviv, entered this time from the north, near Hadera. Suddenly, I had a sense of déjà vu. Even today, I recognize the Yom Kippur survivors walking around with their scars — and on cold days, the scar hurts. October 7 was a doubled and multiplied Yom Kippur.
After the Yom Kippur War, for years, I hated Moshe Dayan. I hated him so much that I had a dark fantasy of taking a bucket of black paint and pouring it on his grave. And suddenly, since October 7 a year ago, I’ve developed a tremendous empathy for Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan.
I remember them on TV, standing in front of the camera. I remember it was the night I had an asthma attack, so I didn’t go to synagogue. Golda looked ashen, and Dayan looked like a terrified child. Back then, I was furious with them.
But they came to speak to the nation immediately after the holiday ended. They looked the public in the eye. You could see leadership, that despite their sin — they acknowledged it. They established a state commission of inquiry.
They were far from perfect, but compared to what I see today? It took Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a few days before he appeared before the public — not in a pre-recorded video. And when he did, he wore a suit, in the unbearable heat.
Did that surprise you?
I’ll tell you something. One day, in the midst of the judicial overhaul in 2023, a few months before October 7, [IDF] Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi — a very brave man — got into his jeep and drove to Jerusalem. He wanted to speak with Netanyahu, warn him of the imminent danger to Israel’s security, but he was turned away. This happened twice, day after day, and twice Netanyahu refused to meet with him. One of those times, Netanyahu was reportedly sitting with his close advisor, TV pundit Jacob Bardugo.
From that day, I understood that we are doomed. And that’s the answer to how I’m doing. We are doomed.
There are at least four people who, if they arrive at the Prime Minister’s Office, the secretary or one of the aides must go into the office and say: “Mr. Prime Minister, the Chief of Staff has arrived. The head of the Atomic Energy Commission has arrived. The head of Shin Bet has arrived. The head of Mossad has arrived.”
If these people come and want to speak with the prime minister, he must dismiss everyone else and meet with them. He must hear what they have to say. If Bardugo is more important than Herzi Halevi — that means we are doomed.
That’s a harsh statement. I hoped to hear from you some faint glimmer of hope.
I don’t see anyone here today capable of turning things around, because the problem is not Netanyahu. It’s also not the group surrounding him.
The issue is that part of the nation sees reality completely differently. This is not an isolated disaster. The Yom Kippur War was an isolated disaster, and thus there was room for recovery and renewal. But now, I don’t see the forces capable of making that change.
Here we arrive at your critique, which you’ve been openly voicing for many years now, of religious Zionism — the cradle of your childhood, which has transformed into a messianic and increasingly extreme, burning force, pushing to the brink.
There are things that cannot be taken from the realm of dreams and fantasies and turned into reality. In 1982, my book “At the Time of the Nightingale” was published. I wrote there — and I believe I was one of the first — about toxic messianism, but no one wanted to address it. The religious mocked me, and the secular said, “What nonsense are you talking about? None of this is realistic.”
But messianism is like uranium. It’s like a radioactive material. It’s a substance that must be harnessed, but in moderation. That is, it must be contained within lead walls, in small quantities. Zionism, as Gershom Scholem said, tried to bring the Jews, who had been dispersed, back into history. But the attempt didn’t succeed. It failed.
In any case, right now it seems like a complete failure, and I think the issue is not right versus left, religious versus secular, but whether we understand the limits of power. Jews have never understood the limits of power. Take Bar Kochba, for example: You cannot revolt against Rome. You cannot defeat Rome. You must learn to live with Rome. You need to learn to live within reality, and as a nation, we don’t have that ability.
We didn’t understand that we were coming to the Middle East and had to learn to live here. To find a way to integrate. And that it won’t happen by force.
The Zionist movement grew in Europe. The Zionism of Herzl and Pinsker led the Zionist enterprise, and they forged an alliance with the European Western option. The great mistake was that we came here not with the desire to integrate into the environment and acclimate, but with the dream of creating a replica of Europe. A colony. That’s an alien plant, and it didn’t succeed.
You’re almost delivering a eulogy for the Zionist project.
In hindsight, yes. But the tragedy is that even if we had come ready to be part of the Middle East — which didn’t happen — the Muslims would not have been prepared to accept us here as a nation. At best, they wanted us as a protected people [the Islamic concept of dhimmis]. And “protected people” means, “I’ll allow you to live and operate here, but I’m the master.” The Jewish fantasy was of self-rule. The Muslims were not willing to accept that.
In 1965, I edited the book “Meetings with Arab Leaders,” written by David Ben-Gurion. I was the proofreader for the publisher back then. I even met with our first prime minister to clarify some points. Ben-Gurion wanted to meet with the Arabs and did meet with them, but it became clear there was no basis for discussion.
When I look back, I think we could have been nicer. We could have been more considerate of those who lived here. But in the end, at the core, we were not wanted among the peoples of the region. And although we brought progress, we brought it primarily for ourselves.
Moshe Dayan understood that certain flexibility and consideration were essential and that you couldn’t just bulldoze your way through. He was both a hawk and a dove, just like Yitzhak Rabin — and unlike Ezer Weizman, who was a member of the Revisionist movement, or Ariel Sharon, who were hawks.
It was around this time that the secular Gush Emunim [Bloc of the Faithful] began to form, with activists from the Labor party who believed in the complete Land of Israel. This process began after the Six Day War, following the conquest of the territories. And to this day, it’s hard for me to say the word “occupation.”
Why is it hard for you to say “occupation”?
Because I don’t think we did it to occupy but because of the threat from the fedayeen — the infiltrators. That’s why Israel settled there. If you ask me, our biggest missed opportunity was after the Six Day War, which I believe was the most justified war.
After the Six Day War, there was a unique opportunity to solve the problem created when Jews first arrived in the Land of Israel and wanted to establish a political entity here. There was an opportunity to approach the Palestinians in the West Bank and say to them, “Friends, let’s create a federation. You will govern your part, and we will govern ours, and together we will establish joint institutions.”
We could have told them, “There’s an opportunity now. Set up your state. You won’t be our subjects, and you won’t be subjects of Hussein, the King of Jordan. We will work together.” But we didn’t do that.
And then the messianic devil awoke. The Palestinians themselves were frightened by the situation created after the war, and instead of bringing them closer, our nationalistic desire grew stronger — the desire for the ancestral homeland. I don’t blame anyone, because I too was an activist for the Greater Land of Israel. We wanted it all.
But no one wanted to deal with the question of what to do with the people. Gandi [Rehavam Ze’evi] was very decisive: transfer them. But I believe that after the blow of the Six Day War, when the Jordanians saw our strength, there was an opportunity for a federation. And now, in the current situation, with the West Bank filled with settlements and Arab villages intermingled, hostile to each other, it’s impossible.
At the time, I spent a lot of time with Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua. They believed in the two-state solution. The first to become disillusioned was A.B. Yehoshua. He said the possibility of two states for two peoples was lost, and only the option of “a state for all its citizens” remained. And if it’s “a state for all its citizens” — then our children come first.
I remember that after the Six Day War, Dayan said, “We have returned to Anathoth, the inheritance of our forefathers.” But the most dramatic upheaval occurred in religious Zionism. Until then, it was politically moderate. In fact, it was the religious Mapai [Labor Party], and all the national-religious people were part of the religious Mapai.
And then a drama occurred. Suddenly, we had assets that were once ours, or so we believed. Hadera and Ramle, Bat Yam and Tirat Carmel, Shiloh and Bet El, Hebron and Kiryat Arba — these are also names we know from the Bible. Our forefathers roamed there. Jacob slept on a stone at Bet El and dreamed of the ladder. King David was in Bethlehem. Ruth the Moabite walked there. It overwhelmed me.
Did you feel euphoric?
Yes. Not so much regarding our conquest of East Jerusalem, because some of my friends were killed there, but the feeling in those years was that we were returning to the inheritance of our forefathers. Even the cultural elite was thrilled about the return to the ancestral lands. And then came a moment of awakening.
Tell me about that moment. When did you realize that religious Zionism was undergoing a transformation and that messianism was becoming a problem?
I’ll answer you with a story. One day, one of the Greater Land of Israel activists returned from a tour of the Gaza Strip. I asked him, “Are you sure you came back from Gaza? How did you return so clean, without any dust?” He told me, “There was an Ishmaelite boy, a shoe-shiner. Before I got on the bus back, he sat down and shined my shoes.” I asked him, “And how much did it cost?” He said, “I’m the lord of the land, so I told him how much I’d pay him.”
That was the moment when, internally, everything collapsed for me. I went to my friends and told them I wanted to leave. And when I explained why I was leaving, they said, “That’s not a reason to leave.”
I assume they saw your decision as a form of heresy.
Perhaps. Today, the situation is different. Today it’s the business of religious messianists, but I’m talking about serious secularists from the pre-messianic era. We had a fantasy of creating a center for non-Muslims in the Middle East. To forge an alliance with Druze, Lebanese Christians, Copts, and Circassians — to unite various minority groups against the pan-Arab forces.
There’s no doubt that all these fantasies were neither true nor possible, but I think the only thing that might have been possible — and I have no proof — was to form an alliance with the Palestinians in the West Bank.
They hated King Hussein and his exploitative treatment of them, calling him a Bedouin who came from the desert. It’s no coincidence that a Palestinian assassinated Hussein’s grandfather, King Abdullah, while he was coming for Friday prayers at the Temple Mount.
The Palestinians also mocked the Syrian Arabs, calling them derogatorily “Hauranis.” They saw the Egyptians as a nation of slaves. The Palestinians were smarter, and therefore also harder to deal with. We and they are of the same stock.
There is a three-part triangle — the People of Israel, in the Land of Israel, according to the Torah of Israel. The central issue for the extremist groups is the Land of Israel. But vast segments of the Jewish people are increasingly distancing themselves from them. What are they achieving? They’ll have southern Lebanon and they’ll have Gush Katif, but they won’t have a people. How many people left Israel this past year, and no one seems worried about the fate of the nation, the people?
I’m a man of religious Zionism, and I know you cannot maintain a Hebrew nation without the Land of Israel according to the Torah of Israel. But not in a wild and coercive manner, because soon we may lose the Jewish people.
How would you characterize the literature of your generation?
I think that for years, Hebrew literature dealt with one topic over which it carries a lot of guilt. And I’m referring to our relationship with the Arabs. But in my opinion, the big question that should occupy us as literary people is not the nature of our relationship with the Arabs, but how we perceive ourselves. And I’m speaking here about literature — as a reflection.
A reflection of an identity problem?
I’m not sure we’ve decided what we want to be. What kind of Jews do we want to be? Do we want to be liberal, the Diaspora Jew, or masters? The Jewish man has not been a master in 2,000 years of exile. We don’t know how to be masters and rulers, and we don’t know how to be generous.
And here I return to what I told you about the time after the Six Day War: We could have been generous. And “generous” means saying, “I have power, and I’m willing to share it with you. There was a war; we ousted Hussein, there are no more Jordanians — let’s solve the tragedy.”
But before generosity, you must be wise. And this current government, and the forces that sustain it, are not wise. I listen to the legitimate representatives of the people and see people without imagination and without courage. And that’s why I think the tragedy of the Yom Kippur War pales in comparison to the current tragedy. After surgery, there is always an effort by the body to heal. I don’t see any effort to heal.
Is there any hope?
In April 1945, World War II ended. The Jewish people had never faced such a great catastrophe in its history. There had been exiles, wars, and pogroms, but such industrial extermination — there had never been.
The majority of the Jewish people were annihilated in the Holocaust, and in a strange and miraculous way — what my religious friends would surely call “the grace of God” — the Jewish people managed to rebuild.
October 7 was a terrible shock. It still is, because we haven’t emerged from it. But if the remnants saved from the Holocaust managed to rebuild, there is a chance for the forces of life. It will take time. It’s not simple. But if we managed to rise after 6 million of our people were slaughtered, despite all the madness and troubles, perhaps there is hope.
And I’ll finish where I began: After the Yom Kippur War, I knew that I would live to see the change. I was young. But today, the deep melancholy I’m in is not because we won’t emerge from this but because I, your humble servant, will not live to see the change. And on a personal, primitive, selfish level, it bothers me.
I hope my children and grandchildren will live to see it. And we already have one great-granddaughter. They are the arrows we send toward the future.
