Yair Zivan is a young British-Israeli who for the past decade has served as foreign policy advisor to Israel’s Opposition Leader, Yair Lapid, head of the centrist party Yesh Atid (“There Is a Future”). He is the editor of a new collection of essays entitled The Center Must Hold: Why Centrism Is the Answer to Extremism and Polarization. Contributors include leaders and commentators from around the globe including former British prime minister Tony Blair, former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, and some forty other essayists. In this volume, Zivan and the other contributors make the case that centrism is a distinct ideology that seeks to “create a constant balance between the contradictions of modern life,” and one that draws good ideas from both left and right but cannot be reduced to merely a midpoint between the two.
In this podcast interview, Zivan analyzes both the pragmatic foundations of centrism but also its underlying ideological framework, which rests particularly on an unswerving commitment to liberal democracy and its institutions. He discusses the time that his centrist party was in power and the lessons learned from that experience, along with his speculations on why many established center-right and center-left parties the world over have been losing ground to populist and extremist parties. He makes the case that centrism can succeed when it is defended with passion and intensity, rooted in liberal patriotism, and pointed toward a realistic but hopeful view of human nature and the future. At a time when politicians trading in fear and anger seem to be on the march, Zivan argues that centrism is the best counter to populist extremes of left and right.
Transcript
Yair Zivan: I’m not compromising because I have to. Even if I can pass absolutely everything I want, I would rather compromise a bit and get a wider consensus built around it — because I think it creates better, more effective, more long-lasting politics in a better political system.
Geoff Kabaservice: Hello! I’m Geoff Kabaservice for the Niskanen Center. Welcome to the Vital Center Podcast, where we try to sort through the problems of the muddled, moderate majority of Americans, drawing upon history, biography, and current events. And I’m delighted to be joined today by Yair Zivan. He has served since 2014 as foreign policy advisor to Yair Lapid, who is the former prime minister, foreign minister, and finance minister of Israel, and he has since January 2023 been the leader of the opposition as head of the centrist Yesh Atid party. Yair had previously served as international media spokesperson for Israeli President Shimon Peres. He is also the editor of the recent book The Center Must Hold: Why Centrism is the Answer to Extremism and Polarization. Contributors to this book include Tony Blair, the former prime minister of the United Kingdom; Malcolm Turnbull, the former prime minister of Australia; Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City; and some forty other essayists from Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Chile, and a lot of other countries that I’m leaving out. Welcome, Yair!
Yair Zivan: Thank you very much, thank you for having me.
Geoff Kabaservice: It’s great to have you on this program. It was also good to see you a month ago or so when you visited Washington, DC. I understand that your travel plans were set well in advance, but your visit certainly coincided with a period of extreme political upheaval here in the United States. You arrived just a few days after the assassination attempt on Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, and I believe you were here when Joe Biden announced that he was dropping out of the presidential race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as his successor. And your visit also coincided with the intense anti-Zionist protests here in DC against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was here to address Congress. So did you come away from all that chaos in Washington more hopeful or less as to American society’s receptivity to a message of moderation?
Yair Zivan: It’s interesting… It was definitely an interesting time to be there, to be in New York and then in DC. I arrived, like you said, just after the assassination attempt, which I think for those of us who believe in moderate politics is the worst possible political thing that could happen. In the book, I actually write abount one of the formative moments for me, for my political identity, which was the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. It really is the terrible conclusion of political extremism when it leads to political violence. So it was an interesting time to be there.
I actually came away from the whole visit to the US feeling more positive, I think, than people would expect about the hope for centrism and for moderation in politics. I was surprised at how receptive people were to the message, how positive people were, and how much people wanted to engage with this idea that there was an alternative to the polarization, the populism, and the doom and gloom that I think has dominated politics — not just in the United States, it’s a global trend. But I think there is a sense that the pendulum is swinging back away from that, away from the extremes, back towards something that we can all unite around, that we can all rally around to create a different kind of politics. So I am, perhaps by nature but I think also supported by events, hopeful about the future.
Geoff Kabaservice: This is a very unusual book in being a compendium of global authors writing on centrism, many of them with wide experience in politics in very different contexts. Let me ask first, what inspired you to put together this cosmopolitan collection of centrist essays?
Yair Zivan: I’ve been a political centrist as long as I can remember. I grew up — perhaps dating myself here — but I grew up in the times of the Third Way: New Labour in the UK and the New Democrats in the US. And while my friends were all being anarchists and socialists and all the exciting things that students decide to be, I was drawn to pragmatism and moderation from an early age — partly I think, like I mentioned, because of seeing where political extremism leads, and being really repulsed by it and feeling a strong need to counter it in the most effective way. And so I guess the concept has been brewing in my mind for a long time.
I served in the last Israeli government before this one, what we called in Israel the “government of change,” which was led by Yair Lapid, my boss, and Naftali Bennett, who was the leader of a right-wing party, and they formed this government together. During that time I served as a diplomatic advisor to the prime minister and to the foreign minister at various stages with Yair Lapid, and I saw up close politics across the world. And when we lost the election in November ‘22, Israel elected a government that was by any measure the most conservative, right-wing government that we have ever elected: religiously conservative, politically conservative, with real elements of populism and extremism within it. People who in the past had been beyond the pale were now going to be serving as ministers.
And I think it led me to ask really two questions that led to the formation of the book. The first one was: Is Israel unique or is this something that’s happening everywhere? And very quickly the answer to that became clear that this wasn’t just an Israeli thing, this was a global thing. And the second question was really: What had we done wrong? I think that level of self-reflection for political figures and advisors is probably quite helpful. What was it that had led the Israeli public to reject what we had offered, which was a government that functioned as a centrist government, and elect a government that was so completely opposed to everything that we had suggested?
I started reaching out to contacts and friends that I’d built up over the years, and the book was kind of born from that. My contention was and remains that there is a thing called political centrism. There are a set of values and ideas and principles that underline this political approach that are completely different to trying to find a political middle point. And the second contention was that if one of the biggest threats that we’re facing is extremism, polarization, populism — and those things are tangled up and mixed up together often, nearly always I would say — centrism is the answer to that. Whether that’s the populism and illiberalism of the far-left or of the far-right, the answer can only come from a strong, coherent, articulate, passionate, confident political center.
In order for that to make any sense, I had to show that that was something that could apply beyond just one particular geographical area. And I started reaching out and was pleased to find that there were buyers across the world for the idea. And I think when you read the book and you read through the essays, one of the things that I’m proudest of is that there’s a coherence through the essays in terms of the ideas and the principles. The things that I thought are what make up political centrism are reflected in all of the essays that touch on different policy areas in different parts of the world.
Geoff Kabaservice: Since the authors do reflect your own personal connections and affiliations, I would love to hear something from you about your origins, your upbringing, your education, your influences, whatever you feel like sharing.
Yair Zivan: Sure. I’m Israeli-born. I was born in the north of Israel, and today as we’re talking there was a huge barrage of rocket fire on the place where I grew up. At a young age I moved to England and, like I say, I grew up and my formative years were through the Blair years. I was always interested in politics and watched that and I think learned a lot from those early years. I cut my political teeth in the UK student movement, where I worked in the Union of Jewish Students, which is a Jewish community organization that organizes students. And I did the political work of that organization for a few years before coming back to Israel.
I think I was always drawn to moderation and pragmatism. And I think in Israel and England, in the two places where I’ve spent most of my life — I’ve been back in Israel now since 2009 — in those two places the challenges were very different, but the conclusions I kept coming back to were the same. And I think that probably says something about where I’ve ended up.
Here in Israel, I was fortunate to work for Shimon Peres when he was president for two and a half years, and really learned from somebody who was an incredible statesman. And then I jumped from there in the summer of 2014 — so a decade ago — straight away to work for Yair Lapid, who was at the time the new kid on the political block; he was finance minister in Netanyahu’s government, would you believe. And not long after I arrived, Netanyahu, in one of his typical (of him) moments of paranoia, fired Yair Lapid and Tzipi Livni, who were at the time the moderate ministers in his government. And I think he actually stepped off on a path from there that’s gone downhill ever since.
That opened the opportunity for me to spend ten years with a political leader who is not only a real centrist by instinct and I think by style in the way that he’s led, but also was interested enough in centrism to allow us to explore that. He has a very good personal relationship with President Macron in France, and he was a contributor to a book that talked about what they called “start-up centrist parties” written by Josef Lentsch, who’s one of the contributors to my book. And so I’ve spent those ten years primarily, I should say, as a foreign policy adviser doing international relations work, but doing the centrism work alongside that in those years.
And as I say in the acknowledgements in the book at the end, when you get to a certain point in politics you ask yourself why you’re doing it. For me the most significant thing is I’m married and I’m a father of two boys. I can’t imagine leaving the public sphere to them in the way that it is today. I think we have a responsibility to improve the state of politics, to change the trajectory of politics for the next generation. It’s just not responsible for us to leave for them the mess that our generation and maybe the generation above us have created.
Geoff Kabaservice: That’s very well put. Out of curiosity, where did you live and go to school in the UK?
Yair Zivan: I grew up in Leicester, a city I’m very proud of partly for its sports teams (of which I’m a passionate fan) and partly because it’s a very multicultural city, so it was a great place to meet lots of different people. I went to a high school called Oakham, which is a great school, and then I studied history at University College London in central London as well. So that was my UK career.
Geoff Kabaservice: Most Americans, in my experience, don’t know much about cities and towns outside of London in the UK. However, they might have heard of Leicester because the remains of King Richard III were discovered there in a car park a decade or so ago. And then, of course, in sports, as you mentioned, the Leicester City Foxes shocked the world in 2016 by winning the Premier League after having come out of absolutely nowhere, and I think just two years after having been relegated to the lower division. A marvelous story.
Yair Zivan: And those two stories happened at the same time, and if you ask people from Leicester they will tell you that is not a coincidence; that was King Richard III thanking Leicester and bringing us the title, if you believe in that sort of thing.
Geoff Kabaservice: Fantastic. I’ve had a lot of people on this podcast to talk about centrism and moderation, but very rarely have they been part of an explicitly centrist-inspired government. So what can you tell me about that experience?
Yair Zivan: I should say our government wasn’t made up just of centrists. It was a coalition of eight political parties — which is too many, it was a very narrow coalition — but it was held together by centrist principles. The way that it functioned was ultimately centrist, and I think that was predominantly down to Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett with him, who said there were a few principles that we needed to abide by. The first is it’s a more optimistic, a more hopeful, and more positive type of politics where you trust the people around you, where you’re willing to give up political credit, where you’re understanding of other people’s political needs in order to make things work. A government like that can only function through compromise, can only function through finding ways to work together. And the good thing about that government was that compromise was never about finding the lowest common denominator. Compromise was about finding things that people were 80% happy with, or 75% happy with, and could live with and were good enough for them while also taking into account the considerations, the needs, the political reality of other parties.
In the end, the extremes in our coalition went back to an all-or-nothing politics, the exact opposite of the kind of politics that we would want to see, and managed to pull that apart. But for the eighteen months when that government was working… First of all, compared to what we have now, it was clearly working far better. It functioned actually really well compared to previous Israeli governments. And when you speak to civil service professionals here in Israel, they also tell you that it was much more effective than what we had before and what we’ve had since. And I think it inspired a sense of moderation and pragmatism in all of us.
Now, there were also challenges with it. When the coalition was as narrow as it was, we weren’t able to really tackle some of the biggest issues facing society. But it did mean that we were very focused on making sure that the things that were more consensus-based we could do really well: trying to improve the healthcare system, the education system, infrastructure, transportation, economics… The things that really influenced people’s day-to-day lives, which weren’t hugely controversial, we were actually able to make some really good progress on. And most importantly, for a short while we gave people a sense that they could trust their government, that the government was looking out for them and cared about them and it was trying its best to do the best that it could in a difficult situation.
And I think in the end that’s really what the public expects of governments everywhere. Nobody is naive enough to expect perfection from their government. Nobody expects governments to not make mistakes. Nobody expects to agree with government 100% of the time. But they want to see a government that is serious, that is pragmatic, and that remembers that it’s in government in order to serve them, and at the end of every decision that you make — any reform, any bill, any budget that you allocate — there are real people at the end and there are real consequences to your decisions.
That kind of centrist spirit I think was one that we managed to create. I think we managed to create a positive national story that people could rally around, and I think we managed to keep the extremists at bay for a while. Not everything in the government was to my liking, and I guess that was part of the charm. But I think those were really the main things we were able to do and do differently.
In the end — and you and I have spoken about this before — centrism is about finding the right balance between some of the tensions that exist in running any society. There is inherent tension between globalization and local community, between security and civil rights, between the welfare state and free markets. Now, you have people on the left and on the right of politics who say, “I want to win. I want my side of this argument to dominate the other side” — where centrists come at it differently and say, “Actually that’s not really the goal. The goal is to understand that there is a place for globalization because we like having cheap goods in our supermarkets and because it helps keep our cost of living down, and that’s important. But we also do need to protect local communities — there’s a value in that too. There is no way to achieve a zero-sum game between civil rights and security. Those two things clash, and it’s okay that they clash, it’s okay that we manage that tension.”
The other thing I would say that our government did, which I think is fundamental to political centrism, is it went out of its way to protect the core institutions of liberal democracy. And after our government fell, we saw a sustained assault on that in Israel that was very well published; anybody who follows our politics will have seen it. Again, not unique to Israel, unfortunately at all. We see it in places in Eastern Europe, we’ve seen it in places in Latin America: attacks on the judiciary and on the press and on civil society organizations, attempts to coerce institutions to serve political needs rather than national needs. And that protection of liberal democracy is core to political centrism, and it was something that in our government we placed a premium on as well. So there were some of the elements of my view of what centrism should be on which the government did I think really, really well; others that we’ll need a bigger majority next time to put into practice.
Geoff Kabaservice: I think one of the notable aspects of that government was that it was also the first to include an Arab-Israeli political party in a ruling coalition, is that correct?
Yair Zivan: Yeah, that’s right. It was the first one. We had an Arab party, they were in the coalition. They didn’t serve as ministers in the government; they didn’t want to. But they were in the coalition as partners in the coalition.
Geoff Kabaservice: You have an essay in your book by my friend Aurelian Craiutu, and he’s very taken with the metaphor of balance for indicative of moderation more generally and particularly when it comes to balancing valued but also opposite and even sometimes contradictory values.
Yair Zivan: His essay is fantastic, and he’s a great thinker and I was really pleased that he agreed to contribute to the book. And I think that concept of balance is really important. It isn’t about — and I touched on this before but it’s worth focusing on — it isn’t about looking for the middle point. It’s not about saying the left is here, the right is here, and where’s the middle between them, where’s the medium point that we can find that keeps everyone happy? But it is about understanding that there are very few zero-sum equations in running a government, in running a country, in a society as complicated as really any society that values a plurality of ideas and voices. And so that idea of needing to balance and of not being afraid of it — I think that’s part of what centrism needs to bring to the table.
And I think Aurelian does this in his essay really well, and in his other writings as well, which is to say, “We should be proud of those terms.” There’s a sense that people back away from words like compromise and nuance and pragmatism and moderation rather than saying, “These are really good words. They’re really important. They’re really key concepts for how to actually make a society work.” Saying “I want to beat the other side into submission,” saying an ideology that I subscribe to — whether that’s really small government, or whether that’s high taxes and sharing out the resources equally amongst everyone — can be right all the time in every scenario for every country is clearly nonsensical. There is no way that in a society as complicated as the United States, or any European country, or really anywhere in the world, you can take an old ideology and apply it despite all the changes that we’ve seen, all the complexities that we’ve seen at all times.
One of the examples that I give when I’m talking about this is I say, look, if you believe in small states and in a small government, as small as possible, ideally out of our lives in everything that it shouldn’t be in — you couldn’t really make that case during the COVID pandemic. It didn’t make sense to say to small businesses, “We know you are closing down but we’re not going to help you because don’t worry, the free market will pick up again,” when the free market clearly wasn’t going to pick up and businesses were crashing. There was clearly a time there when businesses needed more government support. And almost everybody, the vast majority of the political field understood that. There are times, different times, that call for different solutions. There is a balance that’s needed to be found between these competing tensions, and we shouldn’t be scared to say that. In fact, we should be very vocal about saying that, and very open and very honest.
And the truth is, when you speak to the public and you talk to people about this idea, it makes perfect sense — because we all compromise in our day-to-day lives. We understand that we have to compromise. I live in a country where it’s about 35, 36 degrees Celsius outside right now. We spend our days compromising about what temperature the air conditioning is going to be on, between those of us who’d like it to be on minus-15 and those of us who want it turned off completely. But that compromise is an essential part of living together. It’s an essential part of a family working together, of a community, of a company. You need that. And so why is it that when we get to government we suddenly all get worried about compromise appearing to be weakness?
And I think the answer to that is because centrists have too long allowed people to define it as weakness rather than saying, “Actually, my ability to balance between competing tensions, my ability to embrace compromise and moderation, comes from a position of strength and it comes from a position of confidence in the things that I believe in.”
Geoff Kabaservice: It’s interesting that in American political history one of the most successful conservative presidents of recent times was Ronald Reagan, and he had a well-known saying that “I’d rather get 75% of what I want than go over the cliff with my flags flying.” And I’ve actually seen a quote from you somewhere or other where you said that if given the choice between passing everything you wanted but only with 51%, versus getting about 75% of what you wanted but also getting an 80% margin, you would definitely take the latter option.
Yair Zivan: Yeah, that’s right. I didn’t realize I was channeling Reagan, but it makes sense — because there was that element of pragmatism I think in the conservative movement, and within the centrist and the liberal movements too. There is something about building consensus that allows us… First of all, I think it creates a better type of politics. It creates a healthier political dynamic. If my goal is to try to co-opt you into what I’m doing, to give you a sense of ownership as well rather than just defeat you, that creates a more positive political loop. Lee Drutman talks about “the political doom loop,” and so this is the opposite of that. This is creating a more positive brand of politics that says, “If by compromising a little on the things that I want I can help you feel a part of this political reform, this political process, that’s a good thing. And I would hope that when you’re in power, you will want to do the same.” That’s the first thing.
The second thing is it creates more sustainable policy. When policy has ownership of more of the political spectrum, it’s less likely to be reversed, it’s less likely to be undercut, it’s less likely to be cut apart by the next government that comes along. It creates something that is more sustainable and more lasting. And the third thing — and this maybe requires a little bit of humility — is to say, “Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I don’t know everything. And maybe there’s something that the other side can bring to the table when I’m putting together my next economic package or my reform bill for a healthcare service or for an education system — maybe they have something to bring to the table that’s worth listening to, and actually adopting some of what they believe will make my policy stronger rather than weaker.”
Now, for all those reasons, I think that the Reagan quote is the right one, but it comes at it from a slightly different place. That is to say, I’m not compromising because I have to — and this is where my 51% analogy comes from. Even if I can pass absolutely everything I want, I would rather compromise a bit and get a wider consensus built around it — because I think it creates better, more effective, more long-lasting politics in a better political system. So the difference maybe is whether you’re coming at it because you have to compromise or because you recognize the value of compromise.
Geoff Kabaservice: There are competing board game metaphors for centrism as a political approach. Arthur Larson, who was an advisor to Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, famously said that “In politics, as in chess, the man who holds the center holds a position of almost unbeatable strength.” But then again there’s an example from the board game Risk which says, “Never get involved in a land war in Asia” — because it’s too hard to sustain the center when people are firing at you from all sides. How do you feel about this question?
Yair Zivan: This takes us away from policy and substance to some of the politics. And this is another thing that I always say about political centrism… One of the things that’s thrown at political centrists is they just want to win. And part of what I say is yes, we do want to win. We want to win elections. It’s okay in politics to want to win votes. It’s okay to want to bring the public with you. It’s okay to want to have the power to be able to enact the kind of politics and kinds of policies that you want. There is nothing honorable about constantly losing in politics. You don’t represent your people well when you do that. You’re not effective when you do that.
I have spent more of my political career in the opposition than in the government, and when I look back in ten years on this past decade in Israeli politics, I have no doubt that the year and a half I’ll be proudest of is the year and a half we were in government rather than the time around that when we were in the opposition. And it’s important to have a strong opposition, there’s no doubt. So that’s the first thing I would say: it’s okay to want to win.
I think it’s right that you win from the political center, not just because that’s where the majority is — although I do believe that’s where the majority of the public is — but because it becomes a self-fulfilling loop that creates the kind of politics that people want to rally around. Extremists and populist movements inevitably burn themselves out; there is no alternative to that. It might take an election cycle or two or three, but they burn themselves out because they’re not sustainable. The constant need for purity tests, the constant looking for who has betrayed the cause… Because one of the things we know about extremists and about populists is they’re great at campaigning, they’re great at tapping into public sentiment, they’re terrible at governing. And eventually when they fail, they need to find people to blame. And so they find the people who have failed their purity tests that are holding them back. It is not a sustainable method of government. Whereas when centrists do well, you can create (I think) a healthier political climate that allows you to keep winning and allows centrists to keep winning.
Now, one of the things about this book… I am not politically partisan in any country other than Israel. I have an absolute preference here and I’m very proud of the party that I work for. But everywhere else, I don’t pick a political party to align with. What I do think is there is space for political centrism — take the US example — in both the Democratic and the Republican Party; in the UK, in both the Conservatives and Labour; and in Australia, in the Liberals and the Labour Party. There is space for centrists in multiple political parties.
And it becomes self-reinforcing. When centrism does well, the other party, in order to win, will also come towards the political center. And as somebody who believes in centrist politics, that’s good. I see that as a net positive, as a benefit for society, without it mattering too much whether it’s a Conservative government or a Labour government or a Liberal government per se. So I do think you win from the political center, and I do also think you should avoid getting caught in land wars in Asia. I’m not sure that analogy is as strong for this particular case.
Geoff Kabaservice: It did seem to me that the preponderance of the contributors to your book were from the center-left, or at least have ended up on the center-left. But there also was a book recently published in the UK called The Case for the Centre Right, I believe edited by David Gauke. There’s actually quite a good deal of overlap between what both the commentators in that book and yours are saying about the political center.
Yair Zivan: Yes, absolutely. I met with David when I was in London, and we had a great conversation. I do think the two books complement each other. And although my publisher reminds me that I’m not supposed to recommend other people’s books when I’m selling my own, I would highly recommend to anybody who’s interested in UK politics to read his book as well. Malcolm Turnbull, the former Prime Minister, doesn’t come from the center-left, he comes from the Liberal Party. Yair Lapid, here in Israel, comes from the political center, the same with Macron. So it’s true that there are some that definitely do come from the center-left to the center, and have shifted, but I also think there are plenty of voices in the book who would otherwise have found themselves on the center-right as well. The challenges are different in different countries as well; it’s not always the same division as we might take in Western liberal democracy.
Geoff Kabaservice: I begin every show by talking about the putative muddled, moderate majority of Americans. Do you believe that the majorities of voters in most democratic countries are in fact moderate?
Yair Zivan: I do. I think for most people, their expectation of government is to deliver for them. And I think that comes from centrist, moderate, pragmatic government. I do think that’s where most people find themselves. That’s not to say that people don’t have very passionate views about issues. I have incredibly passionate positions that I hold on a whole range of issues, and I don’t think those two things are contradictory. I think what people in the end look for, though, is a government that is able to deliver.
I’ll take an example which I think is relatively universal. I am a big believer in gay rights, in LGBT marriage, in the fact that everybody should be able to marry whoever they want, and I think I always have been. That doesn’t make you not a centrist, or having a very strong opinion on something like that doesn’t make you not a centrist. It does make you say, “What is the most effective way to deliver that?” And then you come to the conclusion that you say, “Okay, I have to look at each country, look at each political context and say, ‘What is the best way to advance that goal in the way that is sustainable?’”
And I look at the advancement of gay rights in the UK, where I grew up, and I say it was done slower than I would’ve liked — by the time the UK enacted gay marriage, I think it was much later than it should have been — but at a pace that actually the British public was able to feel so comfortable with that there’s now no real political debate about it; it’s not really a question that anybody talks about. And there is a value to that. There is a benefit to moving at that pace.
I think people can be very passionate about issues and still be in favor of a moderate government, and I think that’s where the majority of the public is. We clearly have a challenge of polarization today where people feel like if they hold one position, they have to hold all the positions that their political camp argues for or believes in, and it’s all or nothing. And that’s part of what we have to break. We have to move people away from that. It’s okay to support a candidate or a party that you agree with on 80% of the issues — because you believe they’re the best party to move forward on the majority of things that you agree on, but you may not be entirely aligned with them on everything. When you put people through that kind of purity test, you will find that the likelihood of a view and a political party being a 100% match is incredibly low. That isn’t the goal that we should be searching for in our political leadership.
I think if we hold up a set of values and principles that we want people to believe in, that we want to advance, we can then deal with the policy differences that inevitably exist. That is especially true in two-party systems. There is, I imagine, almost nobody who aligns with absolutely every single political position of the Democratic Party or of the Republican Party; it is such a broad tent. And that’s okay. That’s part of what makes the system work, I think. So if you’re a centrist, I think the things that you look for — the liberal patriotism that’s discussed at length in the book, the moderation, the attempt to find balance, the belief in compromise but also radicalism on things like technological change and protection of liberal democracy and free speech — when you find those values, then you find a political centrist.
Geoff Kabaservice: Let me rephrase my question in slightly sharper form then. You had said that you got the idea for writing the book when your centrist government eventually lost to the most right-wing and illiberal government we’ve seen in recent times in Israel. And there’s a similar pattern in much of the rest of the developed world, where the United States Republican Party has gone in a much more illiberal populist direction. The UK Tory party went with Brexit and all that ensued. And you see on the continent the remaining centrist parties of both left and right are increasingly beleaguered and disintegrating as you get much greater rises in populism on both the left and the right. And certainly here in the United States, you’ve also seen the takeover of critical institutions such as academia by a kind of left-leaning populism. So how is it possible, or how has it happened at this particular moment in our history, that a basically moderate voting populace has nonetheless seen so much of its support or so much democratic support generally go to these populist parties of left and right?
Yair Zivan: I’d say a few things. One is there are places where that’s not the case. I think the last UK election was an election where the electorate overwhelmingly said, “We want something moderate and pragmatic,” in enormous numbers, whether that was Labour or the Liberal Democrats. There was a rejection of the Conservative Party, which will now have to decide which direction it goes in; I think that’s probably the most fundamental question in British politics today. The second round of the French parliamentary elections… I think there are examples where the moderate and the centrist approach to politics is holding.
Geoff Kabaservice: One could also add that in Poland, for example, the populists have been turned out by a non-populist coalition.
Yair Zivan: Poland’s a fantastic example, absolutely, and I think it’s one of the most positive examples. And I will say if we have an election here in Israel at any point in the next six to eight months, as I suspect we will, you’ll see the same process happen here. And there are a few things that I would say about it. One is, look, you never win every election in politics. There is always an element of the pendulum. You don’t always hold on, and some of that swings, and it swings back — and that’s okay. Part of the role of those of us who believe in political centrism is to be a constant voice to say, “This is a better path for our countries to go down,” and to make that case and win the argument. And when we lose, we get back up again and try to win it again and again and again.
One of the things that I’ve tried to do around the launch of this book, and one of the things that you asked me at the beginning about whether I left the US more hopeful despite all the political turmoil… One of the reasons I did was because I found people really receptive to this idea that the solution in part comes from centrists being passionate about what they believe in. Daniel Lubetzky, in his essay, has a great line about how radicals wake up in the morning thinking about how to change the world and moderates wake up in the morning thinking about what to have for lunch. If that is the case, then we won’t win. We have to be as passionate and as committed.
One of the things that I have said throughout this process — and I picked a lot of it up from Yair Lapid, my boss here, who took it on — is the issue of patriotism, which is incredibly important, in Israel and I think everywhere. I think we saw a glimpse of it in the Democratic Party convention. We certainly saw it in the UK in a whole debate that happened around Remembrance Day. You see successful centrists do it again and again, which is to say, “We are not any less patriotic than the right. We won’t give grounds on who loves the country more, on who cares more and who’s more passionate about the country and its future.” And if we are willing to be as passionate on that as the political right, and if we’re willing to say to the political left, “You don’t have a monopoly over empathy and over caring for the weak. We care about people who have fallen by the wayside just as much as you do” — if you’re able to do that with the same passion, you’re able to win. In places where you don’t do that, you leave yourself susceptible to populists coming in.
One of my critiques of centrists — and I’ve said this on a number of occasions now — we have to be able to genuinely understand the grievances and the pain that people feel. If somebody is worried about immigration, it doesn’t make them a racist. If somebody’s worried about technological change, it doesn’t make them backwards. If somebody’s worried about globalization, it doesn’t make them a nativist. It’s okay that people have very real, very genuine reasons to be worried about these things. If you want them to listen to your policy solutions, to your way out of some of these problems, you have to show them that you genuinely care and genuinely understand rather than be dismissive of it. And I think we can do a better job of that.
There are places that you mentioned specifically where I think there are unique challenges. I think academia is certainly one of them, and I think that has an influence over the rest of society. But in politics, wider politics, the way that we do that is by not giving ground, and by being as committed and as passionate as anybody else on the political map, and not always just being too cerebral.
I was fortunate in the UK to do an event with Ed Davey, the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party. The Liberal Democrats in the last election went from eight seats in Parliament to 72. They were the untold success story of the election. And they weren’t afraid to be humorous and to pull stunts that drew attention to the issues that they care about, but they also unveiled a real human side and a real touching personal story from Ed Davey throughout the campaign as well. They managed to weave those two things in together to create an emotional connection that goes beyond just the policy ideas. And so there are plenty of places that we can look to and learn from for how to do that.
Geoff Kabaservice: It does seem to raise your hackles, though, when centrists talk about “sensible politics” or “common sense politics.”
Yair Zivan: Correct. Look, I don’t like “common sense” as an idea because it basically says, “I think everybody else’s ideas are not sensible or not worth taking seriously.” I understand the use of the phrase. There are times when it’s successful and when it’s an effective political message. As a way of genuinely thinking about it, I don’t think it’s a particularly good way to go about it. The last thing that I would say is we also have to celebrate our victories rather than allow ourselves to sink into this sense that we’re always losing. And I saw this after the UK elections. I was in the UK during the general election, and it was incredible. Labour won an enormous landslide on the basis of a centrist, moderate campaign. The Liberal Democrats became the third-largest party again with the huge jump in numbers.
But the narrative was “a loveless landslide,” or a sense of “Actually, the real winners of this election were the Reform Party” — who got five seats as opposed to the 72 that the Liberal Democrats got. And part of that is an unwillingness maybe, or an inability on our part, to celebrate our victories and say, “Actually, we offered the public something and they wanted it, they supported it, they liked it. They saw what we had on offer and they said, ‘Yeah, we’re buying. We’re buying that brand of politics.’” And we actually need to be better in creating a sense of positivity around our own brand of politics and not always being so down on ourselves.
Geoff Kabaservice: I think it’s also worth pointing out that Keir Starmer did not reach some kind of mushy moderate accommodation with the anti-Semitic left. He expelled them, he crushed them.
Yair Zivan: And I think, by the way, that’s one of the things that made him appealing. One of the criticisms that’s often leveled at centrists… I think I told you this in the past. The book is called The Center Must Hold, and the first time I tweeted about it, I put out a tweet, really excited about the launch of my book — and within 25 minutes I was both a communist and a Nazi, right? I was either really a right-winger covering for right-wing politics and trying to steal left-wing votes across through it, or a left-winger trying to steal right-wing votes across through a kind of a secret agenda.
I think there’s an element within that that I understand, that criticism that says, “Are they just trying to be something they’re not?” And that’s why what Keir Starmer did I think politically was very smart. First of all, morally I think it was the right thing to do He took on the anti-Semitic left in the Labour Party, and like you say, crushed them. I think that was entirely the right course of action, to move them out of the party. And that sent a message to the wider public — not just to the Jewish community in the UK but to the wider public — “Okay, he’s actually against all forms of extremism and all forms of populism.”
It’s much easier to call out the extremists and the populists on the other side than the ones on your side. But it’s actually much more important that we all take responsibility for people who may be slightly closer to us and call them out when we see them. And so I think what Keir Starmer did is a good example, because it was both the right thing to do and also the politically smart thing to do.
Geoff Kabaservice: The Yesh Atid Party in Israel — I believe that name translates as “There Is a Future,” is that correct?
Yair Zivan: That’s right.
Geoff Kabaservice: Which is an interesting, optimistic stance for a centrist party. And yet that does actually run into what’s a fairly widespread streak of cultural pessimism in many societies, not least our own, and that shows up in polls when people are asked do they think the country’s going in the right direction or the wrong direction? And in this country it’s been strongly negative for a while.
And this raises a point… Tablet, as I’m sure you know, is a right-leaning online American magazine focused on Jewish news and culture. And its editor and founder, Alana Newhouse, has published at least a few essays I know of suggesting that the real debate in American politics is not between right and left but between those who feel that the dominant institutions of American life (whether that be politics, the federal bureaucracy, the media, academia, the arts, nonprofits) are broken versus those who feel that they are troubled but fixable.
And there’s a quote where Newhouse characterizes centrists as what she calls “status quoists, people who are invested in the established institutions of American life, even as they acknowledge that this or that problem around the margin should of course be tackled. … On the other side are brokenists, people who believe that our current institutions, elites, intellectual and cultural life, and the quality of services that many of us depend upon have been hollowed out. To them, the American establishment, rather than being a force of stability, is an obese and corrupted tangle of federal and corporate power threatening to suffocate the entire country.” How do you respond to that kind of critique?
Yair Zivan: First of all, I’m always amazed at her writing. I think she’s a very talented writer and it comes across in that quote as well. I’m not sure I disagree with the basic analysis, which is to say there are people who are optimistic and positive about the future, and there are those who are pessimistic about the state of society. I will say by and large — and I know this is perhaps counterintuitive and not a particularly populist statement to make in these days — by and large, the quality of our life is better than that of our parents and our grandparents. There are things that have gone too far that need to go back the other way: social media, the use of phones, some of the lack of personal interactions. There are plenty of challenges. But I also think there are lots of things we can be proud of.
Now, if the fundamental question that’s being asked under that quote is: Should we throw it all away and start again? Is it so completely done that we have to rebuild from scratch something completely different? My answer is no. I think liberal democracy is the best form of government that we have had so far. Part of that is because it’s able to correct itself. It’s able to improve. It’s able to take some of those places where there are real problems — and there clearly are real problems — and fix them and be open to solutions. Do I think liberal democracies are at a point of perfection? Absolutely not. But do I think we’re on a positive curve? Yes. I think the general trend is upwards.
And I want to give you a very personal example. My country is going through, I would argue, the darkest year of my life, and almost inarguably the darkest year in the history of the country. My grandparents were Holocaust survivors — that’s what they lived through. Now, that’s not to say that we should tolerate the horrors that we have had to live through in this last year, and that’s not to minimize at all the terrible suffering. But there is also a trend that says, “Look at where we are as a people compared to where we were a hundred years ago. We have a country of our own. Our destiny is in our own hands.”
When you look at the United States, when you look at where Europe is today compared to where Europe was a hundred years ago — a continent that not long ago fought two world wars — there is a lot that actually we can be positive about when you look at the overall trend. I think part of that doom and gloom I find difficult. I was at an event on the book tour — and you’ve written a book so you know this as well — you find yourself in all sorts of places with all sorts of people. And I was told — in this case, it was the UK — that it was just maybe mere months away from becoming almost like Russia under Stalin or Germany under Hitler. And I don’t recognize that. I don’t recognize that place of Western society.
And I think it’s okay for us to say, “Actually, we’re in a much better place than some people want us to believe.” I think, by the way — and this is absolutely not a reflection on Alana Newhouse’s Tablet or that quote at all — but there are certainly also outside forces, illiberal autocracies, desperate to convince us that our countries are failing and falling apart. Anne Applebaum writes about this in her new book, and it’s a fantastic read that I would recommend: Autocracy, Inc. It’s about outside forces trying to make us believe that our countries are falling apart. The truth is our countries aren’t falling apart. They have weaknesses that need to be fixed, and they are fixable. If somebody would like to suggest a better form of government that protects our freedoms and guarantees the freedoms that we take for granted and offers us the quality of life that we take for granted, I’d be happy to hear it. I haven’t seen it yet.
Geoff Kabaservice: Anne’s Autocracy, Inc. is a terrific book. So too was her previous book, Twilight of Democracy. And one of the points I remember from that book was that it’s the complexity of the modern world which is one of the main reasons why people who have trouble dealing with complexity turn toward extremism and authoritarianism and the simplistic messages of populism. And it seemed to me that one of the quotes in your book that also spoke to that problem of how to approach complexity was from Bill Galston, who said that “Humility in understanding suggests moderation in practice.”
Yair Zivan: Yes, it’s a great quote. And there’s another one in there, which is the quote by President Macron in his first acceptance speech, where he says — and I’m paraphrasing, and it was in French so I’m allowed to — “We will give you reason to not vote for extremists again.” And that is a call to us to say it’s okay that people really are worried about the state of the world, that the brokenists (as they were termed in that quote) really are concerned, and people are suffering. I mean, an industrial town where the industry has fallen apart and where poverty levels are up, and addiction is up, and all the other things that come with that deprivation — it’s up to us as centrists to offer a better solution and to offer a better path forward and then deliver on it. And that is our responsibility.
Now, if you’re making the case or if I’m making the case that liberal democracy is a good form of government and it’s the best form of government that we have, then it’s also incumbent upon me and people who share the views that I share to make sure that it delivers for people, and to make sure that we show results for that. It’s difficult — I think in part because of the complexity that Anne writes about and others as well — but I think it’s also difficult to make the case that sometimes things take time, not everything is immediate. There is no switch that you can flick that restores a town that has suffered greatly economically. There is no switch that you can flick that deals with a pandemic of addiction in a country or that fixes illegal immigration or whatever the major challenge that’s troubling people might be. Those things take time. If you have the best possible policy and the smartest possible way to enact it, almost everything in countries as complicated as ours still takes time before people feel the impact of it.
And that’s a difficult case to make, particularly in a world where there is a media pressure and a social media pressure to deliver results right now, to show that things have changed straight away. Asking people to be patient is difficult, and I understand why people don’t want to be patient. And we have to show real results from our policies in order to convince them that we’re on the right track. I do think it’s possible. And I do think it’s why I’m, again, to go back to that quote, why I’m certainly on this side… I don’t think it’s about the status quo. I think it’s about moving forward. I think it’s about constantly improving and constantly striving and understanding that we face new challenges that we’ve never faced before.
The technological challenges that we face today are vastly different to the ones that we faced a decade ago. And we now have to find the right ways to fix them, to deal with them, to maximize the potential that they bring. My faith is in liberal democracy to be able to do that more effectively than in illiberal countries. I believe in the ability of liberal democracies because of the freedoms that they allow, because of the opportunity that they create for innovation to be able to maximize technology and minimize the harmful impacts of it better than any other country.
Geoff Kabaservice: There have been previous essays written about centrism, of course, even whole volumes in the past. But it seemed to me that one of the essays in your book that was really speaking to the present moment, and particularly centrism in the present moment, was by Polly Bronstein. I don’t know her, but apparently she’s a social activist who wrote a book called How I Became a Moderate: A Journey from Left to Center. But I think what she’s addressing in her essay is partly this charge that centrism is just (particularly in the form of Tony Blair) neoliberalism or technocracy. And the phrase that she keeps coming back to is “national liberalism” or “liberal nationalism.” And she says it’s only a combination of the two, nationalism and liberalism, that meets both basic components of citizens’ identities in the modern nation state. And I was actually reminded that Menachem Begin, who I think is the first Israeli leader to be identified as from the right wing, didn’t define himself as a conservative. He defined himself as a national liberal.
Yair Zivan: I talk about it in terms of liberal patriotism, but it’s the same, the concept is the same. Polly is a social activist here in Israel. She has created a think-tank called The One Hundred Initiative, which I think is doing some of the best work that I’ve seen on actual models for governance, how to actually build policy as centrists, how to conceptually think about creating policy on whatever issue it might be. And I love the pragmatism in her essay. It gets down to the brass tacks of how to really build policy. And I think she’s right.
\And part of that liberal patriotism that I keep coming back to is connected to the other element that I think shines through in the book, which is the politics of hope. That’s the quote that I take from former Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, who talks about a politics of hope as opposed to the politics of pessimism. This idea is that if we can create a positive, liberal patriotic story that gives people a sense of hope, it allows us to create space for the kind of politics that we want that helps move countries forward. So I love her essay and her work and I think she’s exactly right about it, especially when you connect it to the politics of hope and to everything else within the book in terms of building the actual models of government.
Geoff Kabaservice: Most of the essays in your book I believe were submitted before the Hamas atrocities of October 7th. How have you seen Israeli society respond in the wake of those attacks and does that make you more or less hopeful about your hopeful moderate approach?
Yair Zivan: Look, I think there are two sides to that answer. You’re right, all the essays were submitted before I actually submitted the manuscript for the book on October 6th, the day before the horrors of October 7th. And a few people made some edits, but you’ll see that it’s not heavily featured within the book. There are two things I think that have happened in Israeli society. The first is a deep pragmatism about what is possible, what we can really achieve, the need to create priorities. We are in a terrible situation where there are still over a hundred Israeli hostages being held in Gaza. And the Israeli public knows… The Israeli public is I think incredibly smart and connected to what’s going on around us. People are tuned into the news in enormous numbers because it affects us so directly. And when you ask the Israeli public, do they support a hostage deal? Overwhelmingly the support is there, 60% and 70%, despite the very difficult compromises we will have to make in order for that deal to happen. I think that shows a public that is very pragmatic, very cold-headed, that knows about and understands the need to make priorities, to build priorities. I’m proud of the fact that Yair Lapid, the leader of the opposition who I work for, has been one of the leading voices for that for a while.
The other thing — and I’m always a little wary of talking about politics after October 7th, but it’s a part of what we do — is there is no poll that shows anything other than an Israeli desire for a centrist, moderate, pragmatic coalition as the next coalition in Israel. And that is because the Israeli right, and I think the right everywhere, offered two things. They offered a patriotism and a sense of security — which obviously fell apart on October 7th. But the right also always offers a sense of competence; the right won’t do anything big or dramatic or revolutionary, but they’ll manage things well. And one of the big challenges that we have faced here in Israel was just how terribly things were managed in the year before October 7th, or in the months before October 7th and in the days immediately following. One of the questions we get asked all the time is: “Could October 7th have happened on your watch when you were in government?” And I think the answer to that is no, because the focus was always there. Yair Lapid gave a speech on September 20th, I believe it was, warning that this was coming, based on the same intelligence that the cabinet ministers and the Prime Minister saw. And he stood and he warned the Israeli public that this was going to happen. And you read it back now and it’s chilling. That level of focus, I think, wasn’t there, and that’s what happens when governments are driven by populism.
But the other thing that happened was that on October 8th, the Israeli public felt like the government kind of faded away. There wasn’t really anybody there to take control of the situation, to do the things that government is supposed to do to help people who had been forced out of their homes, who had lost everything, who had no idea what was happening with their families. And civil society really stepped into that. So I think what we’ve seen since October 7th is a shift of the Israeli public actually back to moderation and pragmatism and a political center. That’s not to say that people haven’t become more hardline on security — I think a natural kind of response. But the leaders that they’re looking to are leaders that they think they can trust to deal with that situation.
Geoff Kabaservice: American academia has become pretty resolutely left. I believe that the AAUP, after years of resisting it, has finally endorsed [or dropped its categorical opposition to] the BDS movement, for example. And you must have seen up close the hostility toward Israel veering into outright anti-Semitism and the kind of pro-war, pro-Hamas nature of the demonstrations on campuses. Do you think that there is some way out for the left that would mitigate this hostility, that would move the left back toward the political center in a way that might be more long-term survivable? And what do you think is the fate of the universities, particularly given this kind of ideologically monolithic nature we’ve seen revealed in these demonstrations?
Yair Zivan: So look, I’d say a few things about these demonstrations. Firstly, I’m not sure how representative they are. In the polling that I saw, when you asked American college students, the majority of them did not place the Israeli-Palestinian conflict anywhere near the issues that they care about most. And despite the images and despite the narratives and despite the protests, the majority of the American public still supports Israel. And I think that tells you something about where people are.
One of the things that’s happened is that that left has been shifted to the fringes. We’re speaking not long after the Democratic Convention, the DNC, where we were told there were going to be enormous protests, and we met in DC when the Prime Minister was there and we were told there were going to be enormous protests. And actually they weren’t that enormous. They weren’t really anywhere near as big or as disruptive or as influential as they thought they were, because they don’t really represent a very large section of the American public, I don’t think.
I can understand people who are calling for a ceasefire and who say we need to end this war. I can understand people who have different views about the need for a hostage deal and what ceasefire should look like. And if the protest movement was a protest movement saying, “We need a ceasefire,” then at those protests you would also see signs saying, “Release the hostages.” But you don’t. Instead, what you see is burning of American flags, support for the Houthis, support for the Iranians, outright support for Hamas and Hezbollah.
And, first of all, you said it veers into anti-Semitism; I think the anti-Semitism is rampant in those protests and it should horrify people who think of themselves as progressives. But it’s also so ideologically incoherent. It is impossible to think of yourself as a progressive and align yourself with movements who just don’t believe in the fundamentals of what you believe in: women’s rights, gay rights, minority rights, democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of religion… Take your pick of anything that liberals and progressives are supposed to believe in: these guys don’t believe in any of that. If you think that Houthis are your friends, it can only be because you have no idea of who they are because you’re willfully ignorant. So the only way for that fringe — and I do think it’s a fringe — to move back to the political center is to fundamentally change the way they look at the conflict in this part of the world.
Ultimately I think there is an anti-Semitism problem, and I don’t say that lightly. It’s not that everybody that’s critical of Israel is anti-Semitic. It is perfectly legitimate to voice your criticisms of Israel. I work for the opposition; we have criticisms of the Israeli government, far more than most people. And that’s okay, that’s part of any healthy democratic discussions that people have. But if you believe that Israel is the source of all evil in this part of the world, and if essentially what you’re calling for is the destruction of Israel, and if what you want is to see Israel under an arms embargo so it can’t defend itself from missiles and rockets…
And again, we’re talking on a day when Hezbollah opened this morning by firing about 300 rockets and missiles at us, a few months after Iran did the same. We’re under attack from Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Iran, Lebanon, Gaza, terror attacks in the West Bank. We had a failed terror attack in Tel Aviv not that long ago with a bomb that went off, and fortunately nobody was injured. We had a drone hit in Tel Aviv. The north and the south of Israel are under constant bombardment. If you think that Israel is the source of everything, it’s at fault for everything, I can’t find a rational explanation for that that is not anti-Semitism.
And one of the things that has been fascinating for me to watch is that horseshoe closing: seeing the fringes of the far-left meeting the fringes of the far-right, and the thing they unite around is anti-Semitism. It is a belief in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that I have to say… You asked me a little bit about myself at the beginning and where I come from. Maybe part of my aversion to extremism is that it is always infested with anti-Semitism. Jews are always the enemy within extremism. And when people define and divide the population into two, into the good guys and the bad guys, we are always in the camp of the bad guys, whether that’s from the right or the left.
And maybe that’s part of where my aversion to extremism comes from. It’s also why the majority of the Jewish community is nearly always moderate and pragmatic and centrist in its voting patterns, almost everywhere in the world, because we recognize and we see that aversion. When you see it in the United States now, the connection between the fringes of the far-left and the fringes of the far-right when it comes to Israel and to the Jews, it is the perfect encapsulation of the horseshoe theory of politics.
Geoff Kabaservice: So as not to end this discussion on a somewhat pessimistic note, one of the contributors to your volume is the Israeli philosopher Micah Goodman, who laid out an analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in his book which I believe is called Catch-67?
Yair Zivan: Yes.
Geoff Kabaservice: And he points out that sometimes the right will make more sense in their analysis, sometimes the left will make more sense. And that it’s okay for centrists to borrow from the best of both so long as they avoid zealotry and focus on what’s actually happening in the real world. And this would seem to apply pretty closely to a lot of the debate inside Israel on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The left tends to be pushing for peace now at almost any cost, not thinking too much about the unreliability of the negotiators on the other side. And the right ignores the threat that permanent occupation poses to Israeli democracy. So can you paint us a more optimistic picture, let’s say, of an Israeli government influenced by Micah Goodman’s philosophy that is able to make progress toward a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
Yair Zivan: Look, I think we are further away from a resolution to the conflict than we were before October 7th, and it’s important that people realize that. There was a line of thinking that said maybe October 7th was the tragic kind of spark that would lead us towards a better future, and it doesn’t work like that. Everybody in the region is rightly more cautious and more careful about where we go from here. And I’m someone who believes that a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an Israeli national security interest. I think it’s good for us, and it’s somewhere where we need to get to — but we also have to do it carefully. We have to do it step by step, and we have to do it fully aware of who it is that we’re dealing with.
What Micah says — and I don’t entirely agree with his analysis on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I think he’s a fantastic political philosopher and a great mind, and it’s one place where I don’t entirely agree with his analysis. I think there is a value to what he says. There is no reason for us, as Israelis, not to help make the lives of Palestinians better as much as we possibly can. Until we can get to a place where there’s a resolution, we should do what we can to make their lives as successful, as prosperous, as free as they possibly can be without it impacting on our security and without the negative consequences hitting us. That I think is a positive, and it’s something that any moderate, pragmatic Israeli government can do.
I think the other side of that, though, is that there has to be a horizon that w’’re heading towards. There has to be a goal that Palestinians can look to and say, “Okay, this is where this is going in the end.” Where we on the center I think differ is that part of what we now have to say to the world on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that the burden of proof has moved to the Palestinians. If you want the Israeli public to support a resolution to the conflict, the only way to get to a two-state solution, the only way to get to that resolution to the conflict is for the Palestinians to also take responsibility. That means taking responsibility for ending extremism, incitement to hatred, fighting terrorism, fighting corruption — all of the issues that are difficult within Palestinian society that are for Palestinians.
Now, I think if the Palestinians reformed their education system and dealt with the incitement in their textbooks and in their media and in their mosques, it would benefit Palestinian society. I think it would create a better education system and it would be good for Palestinians in general. But it’s also legitimate for us now as Israelis to say that is part of what we expect. We will deal with our internal problems and our internal challenges, and we have those and that’s fine. But you also have to deal with yours.
It can’t be — especially now, especially after everything that’s happened — that the world comes to us and expects everything to be done by Israel and puts all the weight of expectations on Israel. That’s not realistic. We have enormous challenges. We will have to find a strategy for the day after in Gaza, we will have to find a strategy that takes into consideration the West Bank. And if we want to move forward — and you wanted to end this on a more optimistic note — there are opportunities for Israel’s integration into the region. Our relationship with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain has held through the great challenges of the last year, and that is a testament to the strength of that relationship. More opportunities exist for even further integration into the region. For that to happen, we need to be looking for ways to move forward. And I hope that we’re able to do that, and the future Israeli government will be able to do that as well.
One of the things that we are saying here in Israel — which seems again maybe counterintuitive in light of the weight of the situation that we’re facing now — is we can move forward from this, we can rebuild from this. And that I think is an incredibly centrist ethos and approach. That is to say, we can come out of this and go back to being the society and the country that we know we can be. For me, all of that can only start with the return of the hostages. That is the number one thing that Israel needs in order to rebuild itself at this point. When that happens, when they come home sooner rather than later, then we’ll be able to start rebuilding and start moving forward.
Geoff Kabaservice: Well, Yair Zivan, thank you so much for joining me today. I wish you all the best. And congratulations again on your publication of The Center Must Hold: Why Centrism Is the Answer to Extremism and Polarization.
Yair Zivan: Thank you. Thank you for having me on.
Geoff Kabaservice: And thank you all for listening to the Vital Center Podcast. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred podcasting platform. And if you have any questions, comments, or other responses, please include them along with your rating or send us an email at contact@niskanencenter.org. Thanks as always to our technical director, Kristie Eshelman, our sound engineer, Ray Ingenieri, and the Niskanen Center in Washington, DC.