Bryan Schwartzman:
From my home studio, welcome to Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations.

Rabbi Haviva Ner-David:
We've had some sirens and we've had to go into safe rooms, but very little compared to a lot of other places, but everything really changed on October 7th in many ways.

Bryan Schwartzman:
I'm your host, Bryan Schwartzman, and today, we'll be speaking with Rabbi Haviva Ner-David, an Israeli writer and peace activist. We'll be discussing a few of her recent Evolve essays, including "The Other Side of the Rain," "At the Cemetery in the Galilee," and "Let Not Our Anger Blind Us: Jews and Palestinians in Israel." We'll also be referencing some of her post October 7th articles for the Times of Israel and be linking to those in our show notes.
Haviva is a repeat guest on our show, and I've gotten to know her a bit outside the podcast, and this wasn't an easy conversation. It's the difference between knowing a friend is facing a tough situation and checking in and really hearing the details. We'll be discussing some of her personal losses that Haviva's suffered on October 7th and after, what it's like to live next door to a member of Benjamin Netanyahu's ruling coalition government, and how her thinking has changed in the months since October 7th. We'll also be talking about what she and others are advocating for right now.
Today, I'm in luck. With me for this interview is Rabbi Jacob Staub, my friend, executive producer, standing breakfast date. Jacob directs Evolve and edits our website, evolve.reconstructingjudaism.org. Jacob, it's great to have you in the virtual booth today.

Rabbi Jacob Staub:
Great to be here, Bryan.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Excellent. Excellent. So Jacob, as an editor, you've asked Haviva to write a trio of Israel related posts in the last year. She'd written something before October 7th that was much more inspired and related to the year of protests that preceded it. I'm wondering if you could say anything about what it is about her writing that you've wanted to bring to the discussion on Israel, Palestinians, war and peace. Why is this someone we keep going back to to get her take?

Rabbi Jacob Staub:
Great question, Bryan. I consider Haviva, who is also a spiritual director who works with some of the students at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College to be pretty unique as a character on the Israeli scene. I knew of her first because of the mikvah that she runs at Kibbutz Hanaton in the Galilee, which is, I don't know, I think it may be the only non-Orthodox mikvah where you can do lots of creative things, and she helps you to do them. So she is really a figure of spiritual breadth, and she does a lot of interfaith work, but specifically on the Palestinian, Israeli, Jewish front, she is frontline. She is there across the road from a Palestinian village from Hanaton and she does joint work with them and really creative joint programming for teenagers and has not abandoned that work during this war.
She has maintained those relationships and has gone really full steam on [inaudible 00:04:39] this new emerging, quickly growing Israeli organization movement standing together, which is composed of Jewish and Palestinian Israelis who advocate for some real accommodation within the state of Israel for all of those reasons, and the fact that she is an accomplished novelist and a fine writer. It's maybe that I go back to her too often in terms of frequency of a single contributor, but I always think of her when I want to know what's going on in the Israeli heart and mind in the middle of this crisis.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Also the parent of seven children, so it's hard to imagine somebody more invested in this for those reasons. I also think that there's something almost iconoclastic about her if we will listen to this. If you've got more of a center or right leaning perspective, she's going to say things that will challenge you, but I think also if you're coming at this as a member of the left, she's going to say things that are challenging. So I just thought that brings something refreshing to this discussion where folks seem locked in to fixed position, so thanks.
So before we get to our guest, just note, if you want to stay up-to-date on the latest essays, videos, and podcasts from Evolve, sign up for the Evolve newsletter. We'll put the link right in our show notes. We'll make it easy for you. You can also find it easily at evolve.reconstructingjudaism.org.

Rabbi Jacob Staub:
Let's just mention, Bryan, that we are in the middle of our annual Purim campaigns to support the work of the whole Evolve project, and that means if you sign up for the newsletter, right now you will receive two special essays about antisemitism, one on Islamic militancy, and one on the right and the left as sources of antisemitism in the US. If you make a $36 donation, you will get a video. You will get a video of Rabbis David Teutsch and Toba Spitzer talking with me about a whole range of antisemitism concerns and issues. For a $250 donation, if you're really able to be more generous, which we would really appreciate, you'll get the full video of Rabbis Spitzer and Teutsch talking about those issues.

Bryan Schwartzman:
We know we don't always want an extra email in our inbox, but this carries resources each month that'll really make it worth it. We'll put a link in our show notes, and you can also find it easily at evolve.reconstructingjudaism.org.
Okay. One final note here. This conversation touches on the nature of calls for ceasefires around the world. So our own organization, Reconstructing Judaism, has signed, has joined the call for a bilateral ceasefire and release of hostages and surge in humanitarian assistance. You can go to reconstructingjudaism.org to read the full statement, and we'll also have a link in our show notes.
All right. Let's get to our guest. Rabbi Haviva Ner-David is a post-denominational interspiritual rabbi, spiritual director, and author who has published memoirs, novels, and a children's book. She's also a social activist living on Kibbutz Hanaton in the Galilee. She's active in the group Standing Together, which is a grassroots movement, mobilizing Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel in pursuit of peace and a better future.
Rabbi Haviva Ner-David, welcome. It's good to see you again. It's been a while.

Rabbi Haviva Ner-David:
Good to see you too.

Bryan Schwartzman:
How are you doing? I guess I just wanted to start there. How are you doing? How is your immediate family doing?

Rabbi Haviva Ner-David:
So it's been a roller coaster since October 7th. We're all okay. Where I live in the Galilee, we are far enough from each border that we've had some sirens and we've had to go into safe rooms, but very little compared to a lot of other places, but everything really changed on October 7th in many ways. So there's just so many things that are difficult right now.
So let's see. First of all, even just the fact that ... So a lot of people went to fight in the reserves, so a lot of people from our Kibbutz just were gone that day, the next day. So there's been a lot of support, people supporting each other in the Kibbutz. In general, all these people from the north and from the south had to leave their homes, and that meant rehousing them. So every place just opened the doors everywhere where there was an empty apartment, an empty house, an empty institution that had ... The hotels were all filled, and still a lot of them are. We have families living on the Kibbutz also who came because they were displaced.
Then also schooling those kids. So the kids who were living here and the educational center, then we didn't know how long it was going to be. So first, maybe it's a few days, a few weeks, then all of a sudden it's like several weeks and these kids need to go to school. So then the schools took them in. So just so many things turned upside down.
Let's see, I'm thinking of every aspect of life. I know I'm missing lots of things. Then there's the hostages, which is a whole other thing and story and thinking that they would also come home soon after October 7th, and it's just dragging on and on. Then people who we thought were hostages, turned out that they were really killed. So a friend of mine, Vivian Silver, who we thought was a hostage, and then it turned out that she was killed on October 7th, and then we had her funeral.
Soldiers, so that's a whole other ... So my son, I have a son who's 20 years old, and he did not do the army. He did national service because I have a genetic muscular disease that he also has. So he did national service, but all his friends were in Gaza and two were killed already. Two of his good friends and his best friend was wounded, and the guy next to him was killed, but he was wounded in the leg and he's been in rehab and he's not going to go back to Gaza, so that's a relief. So I'm just thinking what else.

Rabbi Jacob Staub:
Wondering if we could zoom out a little bit to the larger picture. When I talk to Israelis like you, what you're doing is what I get. Well, you're busy, you're helping, you're volunteering, you're feeling the effects. I sense that there's a real divide that people here [inaudible 00:13:11] don't really have a feeling of what it was like on October 7th, 8th, 9th, the sense of collective trauma, of vulnerability. We end up talking about 1200 dead, and then you're comparing that to how many Gazans have been killed, but there's something that underneath the numbers, I think, wondering if you can illuminate a little bit for us.

Rabbi Haviva Ner-David:
So I'm sure that it's different being there and being here, no doubt about that. Even just for me, the difference between being here and being in Gaza feels different. I know there's death in both places, but I know some people personally here, so that always feels different, even the hostages. So there's all these faces of all the different hostages, but the ones that I have a connection to that I know that I can grasp onto those and think about those or even the ones that you read their stories and then you know their stories. So I do think that it's hard to grasp these large numbers and hard to be far away.
What was it like on October 7th itself? So here, that was Simchat Torah. One of our sons was in Egypt on a trip, backpacking around Egypt. So then all of a sudden I'm like, "Wait a minute. Dan's in Egypt right now. I think that's not a good thing." Then he's WhatsApping with all ... We have a family group, and he's saying, "I think I should leave and I can't come back on the bus the way I came. I have to get out of ..." So we had to figure out to get him a ticket, and he didn't want to come to Israel because he said that there were people ... He didn't want to take ... He's not in the reserves because he was in the army, but he was wounded. So anyway, he doesn't do reserves. So he said, "I don't want to take a place on the plane from somebody who's going back in the reserve."
So we sent him to Barcelona where our son, a different son, had just started. Wow, I forgot about this, a different son had just started. He was supposed to go for the year to Barcelona in a soccer academy, and he had just left a few weeks ago, and he was a little homesick. So he said, "Oh, I'll go visit him." He went to Barcelona. In the end, that son came home too the next week because he said he couldn't stay so far away when there was a war going on here. So he's back a long time already. So he's not doing soccer academy, and there was also some antisemitism. It was not a good time just to be there.
So that was October, that was the few days after was getting people home. So then there was just the shock of it. As it got bigger and bigger and when the magnitude of it became more clear, I'm very active in Arab Jewish partnership. We're Palestinian Israeli, Jewish Israeli partnership groups, and that was, I think, the first day, by that night, we all realized that it could turn into rioting within the country.
There had been during wars before with Gaza or missions as they were called, there was that kind of unrest in rioting. This group, Standing Together, that I'm involved with the last time around was started, well, we were doing a lot of standing on street corners saying we were against the violence. So this time we said, "Okay. Let's see if we can try to prevent violence from happening."
So it was that night, there was a big Zoom meeting around the country of different people involved with Standing Together to talk about what kind of work we could do on the ground to prevent rioting and violence and hate crimes. So that we did, and we did. There have not been riots and hate crimes that armed people were doing things like cleaning out shelters together and hanging up signs and giving out flyers and painting signs. We were painting signs saying neighbors, good neighbors even at hard times and doing all kinds of activities like that to bring people closer together.
So I was very involved with that soon after October 7th already. So that was a big concern and something, and I'll say that our chapter of Standing Together has actually, I think, doubled in size since October 7th, which is amazing because it could have been gone the other way.

Rabbi Jacob Staub:
Both Palestinians and Jewish Israelis?

Rabbi Haviva Ner-David:
That's a good question. From what I can see in our chapter, yeah, definitely people, well, in both communities are definitely, absolutely. Around the country, it's harder for me to tell because I don't ... One thing that's going on in the Arab Israeli community is that there's been a lot of people are very afraid to speak out and speak what they really think because there have been arrests, there have been questionings, detaining people, and it's very hard to be an Arab Israeli in general in terms of one's identity and feeling torn between being Israeli and being Palestinian, but especially in these times when there's a war going on.
So my friends say that it's just very hard because they feel the pain on both sides. I can say I feel the pain on both sides too, but not to that same extent that if I don't have family there or ... So yeah.

Rabbi Jacob Staub:
I was going to ask you whether Jewish Israelis are also afraid to speak out, but it seems less so than here where people get really shunned if they speak out as being not loyal. I know you go to demonstrations, you go to ... You feel okay speaking out.

Rabbi Haviva Ner-David:
It's an interesting question, yeah, because I do. There's been an evolution, I guess, of ... So that was the first few weeks. I was not demonstrating against the war and nobody was demonstrating against the war, and I didn't even want to demonstrate against the war. At the beginning I was like, I felt like we should retaliate, we can't do something. We can't just ... especially because Hamas were saying that they're going to keep doing this again and again and, "Okay. So we can't just sit by and let them do another October 7th. We need to do something." For me, the turning point was when I realized that the people running this war didn't have any endpoint of Keith. Again, Netanya was saying that he wasn't planning to come to any two state solution or anything like that. So for me, that was like, "Oh, well, what's the point of all this if the endpoint is not peace, is not some political agreement, something?" So then I was like, "Okay. Now I'm against continuing."
That was around the same time that people started to demonstrate against the war. It wasn't so long ago, maybe a couple months ago, but I didn't feel afraid. I don't know anyone who felt ... Maybe some Palestinian Israelis felt afraid. I didn't feel afraid, even though there is, well, at least brutality at demonstrations, and now we've started demonstrating against the government too every Saturday night. Again, there's those same demonstrations that were happening before the war, so they started up again.

Bryan Schwartzman:
We're talking in late February. We have a couple week lag till folks will hear this, but I'm just wondering, what are you advocating for right now? What is Standing Together advocating for today?

Rabbi Haviva Ner-David:
Okay. So first of all, to go to elections, not municipal-only elections, but national election too. It feels that we can control more what's going on here. I don't feel like I can have an effect on what the Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank necessarily are going to do and what their leadership is going to be, but here, I feel and we feel that this government has to go. We knew that before the war, but especially now that this government is very problematic on so many levels. So that's a big message of demonstrations right now is that the government needs to go, but then what does that mean?
So it means we need to have elections, and the idea would be that this government should take responsibility for what happened on October 7th and say that they shouldn't be leading anymore. It doesn't look like they're going to be doing that. So that's what can we do that so we can demonstrate, we can try to put pressure on people in the government to resign because I think it's four or five people resign in the government, then the government falls. So that's one thing also that we can do and we are doing. On our Kibbutz, we have a minister in the government, so then a bunch of us have been demonstrating next to his house.

Bryan Schwartzman:
That totally floored me. You have a member of a right wing government living on a Kibbutz. That just seems like, I don't know, I didn't think that happened. We have this image of Kibbutz being all left-leaning residents. So is that just a false assumption or perception or just an accident of geography? What's going on there?

Rabbi Haviva Ner-David:
So some Kibbutz, we're actually not left wing, I guess, but we are a liberal Jewish Kibbutz, which already tends to be more left wing. Also, that this government isn't just about Palestinians and Jews. There's all of these other Jewish supremacist attitudes and orthodox premises and all that. So this government, I think it's a good question to ask how have you dealt with this ministers living on our Kibbutz and-

Bryan Schwartzman:
[inaudible 00:25:15]

Rabbi Haviva Ner-David:
Yeah. So he wasn't in politics when he joined the Kibbutz, and people don't usually ask about your politics when you joined the Kibbutz, and he grew up in the conservative movement here.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Is this somebody you've been friendly with before this? Because it's wild, I don't know, the whole neighbor against neighbor dynamic, which-

Rabbi Haviva Ner-David:
There are a lot of people in the community who are not happy about us demonstrating. I can definitely say that, absolutely, but I personally feel like you can still be neighbor and be even friends, but if you disagree, I feel like we have a right to peacefully demonstrate in front of his house. We're careful, but our demonstrations are very respectful, I think, and quiet. We don't use megaphones or anything. We just sang and hold signs. So we just want to make our voice heard.

Bryan Schwartzman:
This show is a production of Reconstructing Judaism, and 2024 marks 10 years of Rabbi Deborah Waxman's presidency. Rabbi Waxman has met turbulent times with hope and resolve projecting a vision of Judaism that lowers barriers, inspires meaningful action, and defends the most vulnerable. Don't miss your chance to be part of a conversation with Waxman about the Jewish present, past, and future. On Wednesday, April 3rd at 7:00 PM Eastern time, you'll have the chance to hear from Rabbi Waxman and hear her reflect on her leadership in conversation with other Jewish women leaders. The program is called When Jewish Women Lead Activating People and Possibilities Through Turbulent Times. We'll include a registration link in our show notes. You can also find it on the events page at reconstructingjudaism.org.

Rabbi Jacob Staub:
You mentioned the supremacist elements in the government. That's what we hear a lot about in the US because what they're doing in Gaza, what they're doing in the West Bank, what they're doing in terms of suppression of speech, of who's in prison, and it seemed ... I'll say it in my own voice. One thing that's hard for me is what seems to be the, correct me, please, I hope, the consensus in Israel that somehow Palestinian lives, 20,000 of them, are less valuable than Jewish lives. Is that a misperception on my part? Is that just an effect of ... Is that a traumatic reaction of being attacked? Do you have anything to say about that?

Rabbi Haviva Ner-David:
Yeah, I don't speak to everyone. I don't know what everyone's thinking, so I also can just have a perception. I'm also, obviously, somewhat limited also by the people that I hang around with. I don't know anyone who feels that way, even people who are not against the war. I think the perception is more like we're fighting back, we're attacked, we're fighting back, we're trying to get rid of Hamas. There's a lot of casualties in the process of trying to do that.
First of all, I don't know anyone who would say, "Let's kill all those Palestinians." I know there are people who say that just like they're Palestinians who would say, "Let's kill all the Jews," but I don't think that that's the general public feeling. Obviously, there's this more extremist element in this very society that might be thinking that, but I don't think that's certainly not mainstream as well, I would say.
I think you also have to remember that people here are not seeing the same news probably that you're seeing or that certainly not that Palestinians are seeing, and they're not seeing the news that we're seeing. That's even a question too if Palestinians even know what really happens on October seven and how much their ... I know that some of them don't think that what happened happened. So I don't know how much we're seeing about what's going on in Gaza exactly.
Of course, there's trauma. There's definitely trauma and fear and this idea that we need to do what it takes so this doesn't happen again. I've heard people use the word also revenge. I don't know. I guess it's hard to define what revenge is exactly. I was thinking about it today. If you have this instinct, I'm just thinking out loud because I was thinking about this when I was driving today, that someone punches you and then you automatically punch them back. So what is that? I don't know if I would automatically punch somebody back, but that's, I think, a lot of people have that instinct. Is that revenge? Is it trying to defend yourself? I really, really do think at least the people that I talk to are really very afraid, physically afraid for a bigger war, breaking out of Hamas attacking again.
So the way I react to that for myself is that the answer is peace, the answer is some agreement, the answer is to not keep fighting all the time violently. So that's how I feel about it. A lot of other people might feel like, "Okay. The answer is just trying to defeat them, that this is war and we need to win." So there's a lot of this in Israel. There are all these signs of we need to win [foreign language 00:32:10] together, we'll win, and there's a lot of that, but I also hear a lot of people saying that they're skeptical about that now and, "Can we even win anyway, and what does winning mean?"
So that's a lot of I think what's going on. I think it's much more complex than, "Oh, we just want to kill a lot of Palestinians or our lives are worth more than theirs because if you feel like it's us against them, then it's not necessarily that yours is worth more than theirs." We're just like, "Of course, you care about your own life more when someone else's life if someone's going to kill you, so you would kill them before they kill you," and it also part on the chart too, so I think there's a lot of that.

Bryan Schwartzman:
I guess whoever has to make these life or death decisions is in a very ... I'm talking about these Israeli military, the government, a very difficult moral situation that so much of the world just doesn't seem to see, but I feel like even just reading constantly, it's very hard to know what constitute the punching back, the desire for revenge and what's necessary to safeguard against future attacks. Maybe that's which acts had to happen, which collective punishment and still don't know, but it seems like for you at some point, you crossed a barrier where you're like, more operations are not going to make us safer. It sounds like you've reached that at some point or continue to hold that position.

Rabbi Haviva Ner-David:
For me, it was about the end point, which maybe sounds callous too because then it's that, "Oh, so I don't care about the people dying." That's not true, and it's hard to see. I guess I'd like to think of it more like people dying all over and how can we put an end to this killing back and forth. The moral dilemma piece of it, that was something that ... So I do spiritual direction, and some of the people I work with are rabbis and rabbinical students. One rabbi that I do spiritual direction for already a number of years, and she was talking about how being a more left wing rabbi to a more centrist right-wing community on this issue and how that was challenging for her and how she became much more sensitive to Jewish fear and to also a connection, a more visceral connection to Israel and to the Israeli people and understanding some of the Holocaust trauma too.
I was bringing this up because I said something to her about ... This was early on in the war and how I saw this as a moral dilemma. She hadn't put it that way or heard it that way. For me, that was very clear what was going on that this question of, "So what do you do when Hamas is putting their headquarters under hospitals or under people's houses and when they're putting hostages in people's homes?" and it's not so clear what-

Bryan Schwartzman:
Maybe going on or taking from, stealing supplies from ambulances or digging. We've seen tunnels starting underneath kids' bedrooms.

Rabbi Haviva Ner-David:
Exactly. So that seems to me like a very difficult moral dilemma, and because I also have these soldiers hanging out at my house when they're on leave with my son in the backyard, and they're talking and they talk about that. It's very hard to know what to do in those situations. They're also afraid being there and afraid and not ... I don't know because I'm not an expert or a military person, but the feeling that I get is that the [foreign language 00:37:21] policy, I don't think that Shoah, that the IDF is telling soldiers, "Just kill everybody you see and just kill as many [inaudible 00:37:32] as you can." I don't know. I don't know what they're being told exactly, but I don't think that that's what they're being told.

Rabbi Jacob Staub:
You mentioned you're a spiritual director. I wonder if you have more that you could say given confidentiality, not in general what you're encountering. I imagine that the people you do spiritual direction with who are in the US, rabbinical students, rabbis, talk more to you about what's going on with them vis-a-vis Israel and the war. So you just mentioned a greater awareness of the fear that people have and the buttons that are pushed for the Shoah. Are there other things that you encounter?

Rabbi Haviva Ner-David:
Yeah, so much. I have directees who are in hills and on campus. So that's a whole other story too, and trying to support both the people who are anti-Zionist and the people who are Zionists and people's own journeys with this and where they work with, they're just trying to figure it out themselves. One thing that's been maybe challenging for me, but is me being here and then being there and things that you were just talking about, Jacob, about your perception there and my perception here. I'll admit seeing the day after October 7th, seeing people demonstrating against Israel was very hard for me.
So now, if I'm demonstrating for a ceasefire, I feel like that's very different. Four months later living in Israel, very different than seeing people on October 8th demonstrating for a ceasefire, which to me was saying that Israel had no right to exist, really, because what does that mean? A ceasefire when the other side, Hamas was certainly not going to be stopping, and are you just supposed to lay down and say, "Okay. Well, we surrender to you." No, I didn't understand what that message was of the ceasefire on October 8th.
So I think that's one thing that I can say as somebody sitting here who is a peace activist and a shared society activist and a partnership, and even my Palestinian friends in Israel were condemning Hamas. So it was very strange to see specifically Jews maybe, but not only, celebrating Hamas or saying, "Well, finally, Palestine is free." I felt like that was out of touch with what's going on on the ground here.

Bryan Schwartzman:
This is Bryan speaking to you about three weeks after our conversation with Haviva with a quick followup note. Haviva wrote me after our interview to further clarify that from her perspective, a key difference between the protests in Israel for a ceasefire and those around the world after October 7th is that in Israel, quote, "We are calling for a mutual ceasefire and the return of all hostages," end quote.

Rabbi Jacob Staub:
This is Rabbi Jacob Staub again. Have you been moved by this conversation? Have you found a new perspective on the Evolve website? Have you deepened your Jewish practice with resources from ritualwell.org? Has your life been impacted by a reconstruct in this rabbi or community? Consider making a gift to Reconstructing Judaism. We bring you this podcast and so much more. We partner with people and communities to envision the Jewish communities we all want to be part of and set out to build them. There's a donate link in our show notes here, and you can also give at the Evolve homepage and click Support Us. Now, back to our conversation with Rabbi Haviva.
We were talking a few months ago and you looked at me on Zoom and said, "Don't give up on us." I wonder if you can speak to that. The temptation for people, for non-Israeli Jews is, "God, this is awful. Is it ever going to end." I don't think the polls say there is an increase in non-Zionists among young people, Jewish and non-Jewish. So let's talk for a few minutes about why we shouldn't give up on you.

Rabbi Haviva Ner-David:
Okay. So even what does that mean don't give up on us? Who is the us? I don't even know if I define myself as a Zionist, but that doesn't have to do with whether I think Jews should not be allowed to live on this land. So for me, I separate whether it needs to be a Jewish state, what it needs to be exactly, like why you need to define it, but this was actually ... Then I'll get to answer your question, but for me, I'll share something that for years I have not been singing along in the Hatikvah because I find that it's a totally Jewish center anthem. There are people who are not Jews who live in this country, and I feel like it's alienating to them and that we could come up with something that's more inclusive.
So at the end of all these demonstrations for the year before the October 7th, they'd end with the Hatikvah and not the ones that were standing demonstrations, but the more mainstream ones and we end with Hatikvah. I wouldn't sing along, but I would stand there respectfully. After October 7th, we, Jacob and kids, we went to the hostage square in Tel Aviv and someone ... It was a Friday and somebody was singing, and then he sang the Hatikvah at the end. The house of his family were standing behind him. I just started to sing along and I hadn't sung in a really long time and I was crying. It touched this place inside me of reminding myself that I have a right to be here too, that I have a right to not be taken from my home and taken across to Gaza.
That really, it brought home to me that feeling of ... I've always felt this way. I've always felt that Jews and Palestinians have a right to be here. Through all my evolutions and learnings and growings and learning more about the Palestinian narrative and all my activist work, I always felt that Jews and Palestinians both have a right to live on this land and that we need to find a way to do it together.
So October 7th definitely brought out this part in me that was like, "Yes, I also have right to be here," I feel affirmed that for me. I feel like don't give up on this dream of that we can live here together in peace. That's what it means for me. It's not like don't give up on the Zionist dream. I think it's evolved and I think it's still evolving, just like I think the Palestinian approach of all or nothing, we want all of the land or we'll just keep fighting also I think needs to change.
I think that both peoples need to realize that we have to share this land, whether it's going to be two separate states, whether it's going to be one state that we can all live in together, whether it's going to be some confederation, whether it's going to be one land for everyone, two homelands, one people. I'm sorry, I don't remember the slogan.

Rabbi Jacob Staub:
One homeland, two people, right?

Rabbi Haviva Ner-David:
One homeland, two peoples, maybe. Maybe that's what it is. So I think don't give up on this idea that we can work it out, but we can live here in peace someday. What we often say here, the Palestinians and Jews who are doing this work, we often say none of us are going anywhere, we're all here to stay, and so we just need to find a way to live together. I think it's also sometimes people living not here don't understand that most of the Jews here don't have anywhere to go. It's not this colonial image that a lot of people have of White people came from Europe and killed all the Palestinians and took over the land. It's not that historically what happened. A lot of the people here, first of all, aren't from Europe at all, and were actually even kicked out of the country that they were living in in this part of the world. It's just it's much more complex.
So this idea is that a lot of people really don't have anywhere else to go, and also that both peoples feel connected to this land. So even friends of mine who learn about saying Nazareth, and I say to them, "Well, if there's a Palestinian state, where would you go?" and they say, "I'm staying in Nazareth. Nazareth is my home. If Nazareth is part of Israel, it's a part of Palestine. I'll just stay in Nazareth."

Bryan Schwartzman:
So you've given us a little bit of your hopeful sense. I think I want to close by asking where you're drawing your hope from or what you're doing to sustain yourself during this time because you might not be writing fiction, but you're continuing your activism, you're out there writing, you're teaching.

Rabbi Haviva Ner-David:
So I can tell you about this really nice event I did, I just did with kids from here and Kafermanda. Kafermanda, it's the Arab Village across the way from Hanaton. This we just did a couple of days ago, and then in general, this worked. So somebody donated 100 trees to Standing Together in our area to our circle to do some activity that would bring together Palestinian, Jewish, Israelis. So I had this idea to do tree planting with youth from neighboring Jewish and Arab villages in town. So we started here in Hanaton with kids from here and kids from Kafermanda across the way.
It was so nice. We didn't plant the trees yet. We're going to do that later this week, but we had a meeting of kids just to meet each other. I started it by saying, before the kids from Kafermanda came over to us, I said to the other kids, "How many of you have friends in Kafermanda across the way?" I knew it was a trick question now because none of them do obviously. They're not in school together. They have no nothing and they don't even necessarily speak the same language.
So then I said, "Well, I have friends there and I have friends in a bunch of villages around here, and I think that's a shame that you don't have a chance to meet these kids, so they're going to come over and you're going to meet them." So they came and it was so amazing. I wasn't sure what was going to happen. I didn't know how much we grew the advocates had and how much they both learn each other's languages in school, but they don't use them so much. They came over and we did these ice breaking games, and literally within 10 minutes, the kids were all just chatting and talking and having fun and showing each other things on their phones. Then they went and took the kids over to the park and they were playing soccer and climbing on things and doing games.
It was amazing. It was absolutely so, so, so nice. So that stuff gives me hope, doing all this work on the ground because it seems that the political situation is so dire, and that makes me really depressed seeing what's going on politically and what the leadership is doing, but the people caring about each other. Even just after October 7th even put aside the Palestinian Israeli, whatever, stuff, but even just that the government was so dysfunctional and the grassroots scare just came out, as I said, in their homes, to people who were displaced were going to volunteer. Even people who picked up guns and drove down to the guy's envelope and just were saving people, literally going and saving people from the Nova Festival. Civilians just went down there, and we live in that area. We're driving in with their trucks and saving people and driving them out and risking our lives and some didn't make it. Just that hope, the government's such a mess, but the people here, it's a special place, well, not a place.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Well, I think ... Well, speaking for myself, I appreciate your time. Thank you. Thank you for this interview and keep it up. Your writings and Facebook posts give me and so many others a real window into what's going on and show us that there are folks who are brave enough to reach across divides and try to make peace.

Rabbi Haviva Ner-David:
That's something I'm trying to do with the Facebook posts is things that you don't see in the news necessarily so that people can know that that's happening too.

Rabbi Jacob Staub:
Always a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you and be safe and healthy, you and everyone else.

Rabbi Haviva Ner-David:
We're trying.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Amen.

Rabbi Haviva Ner-David:
Amen and Shala.

Bryan Schwartzman:
We'll be back next month with an all new episode. Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations is executive produced by Rabbi Jacob Staub and edited by Sam Walks. Our theme song, Ilu Finu, is by Rabbi Miriam Margles. This show is a production of Reconstructing Judaism. I'm your host, Bryan Schwartzman, and I'll see you next time.