Two of the Jewish world’s leading podcasts, People of the Pod and Israel Story, are teaming up to bring you inside the making of ‘Signed, Sealed, Delivered?’ – the latest series from Israel Story that explores the lives of the signatories of Israel’s Declaration of Independence and their descendants.
Recorded live at AJC Global Forum 2023 in Tel Aviv, the episode features Mishy Harman, host of Israel Story, and Eran Peleg, the grandson of signatory Moshe Kol (born Moshe Kolodny). Tune in to hear Eran’s lasting memories of his grandfather, the strong Zionist values he instilled in his family, and why the Declaration of Independence matters 75 years later.
*The views and opinions expressed by guests do not necessarily reflect the views or position of AJC.
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Transcript of Interview with Mishy Harman and Eran Peleg:
Manya Brachear Pashman:
As many of our listeners know, People of the Pod recorded not just one but two episodes in front of a live audience at AJC Global Forum 2023 in Tel Aviv. We also took the show on the road and did a few more interviews in Tel Aviv and in Jerusalem. You’ll hear those episodes in the months to come. This week, we bring you our second live show in partnership with one of Israel’s most popular podcasts: Israel Story.
Welcome to the second live podcast recording here at AJC Global Forum 2023 in Tel Aviv.
So on Monday, you heard two very different perspectives from two women who fled war torn Ukraine and landed here in Israel, their new home. Today, you will hear the story of Israeli Moshe Kol, born Moshe Kolodny, in 1911, in what is now Belarus. He was one of the 37 founders of the State of Israel, who signed Israel's Declaration of Independence. We're bringing you this live show together with another podcast that you might enjoy, Israel Story. Think This American Life except it's This Israeli Life. Broadcasting in English since 2014, each episode introduces us to the wide array of characters who make up this diverse and dynamic democratic nation.
In honor of Israel's 75th year of independence, the team at Israel Story set out to find the closest living relative of all 37, who signed Megilat Ha'atzmaut. In March, they began rolling out what I would call audio portraits of those 37 people. Portraits about who they met, what they could tell us about the 37 people who signed that founding document. They call the series, 'Signed, Sealed, Delivered?' And since March, we have met eight of Israel's founding mothers and fathers. Over the next several months we will meet the other 29 including Moshe Kol, through the lens of his daughter. Today, you get a special preview through the lens of his grandson. With me to talk about 'Signed, Sealed, Delivered?' is the host of Israel Story, Mishy Harman, and the grandson of Moshe Kol, Eran Peleg.
Mishy, Eran, welcome to People of the Pod, live in Tel Aviv. So Mishy, I will start with you. The title is not 'Signed, Sealed, Delivered,' it's 'Signed, Sealed, Delivered?' What's with the question mark?
Mishy Harman:
Well, first of all, that's a good question. I mean, it's always difficult to adjust with your intonation to indicate a question mark. But I think that this is a real question. When we began this series, it was actually before the last elections which took place in November, and before this unprecedented wave of democratic, cry for democratic values in this country in light of the government's judicial reform. And we set out to ask, there is this founding document, its status, its legal status is unclear. It's the best way I think, to think of it is, it's some sort of moral compass for our country. And, you know, interestingly, the only action item that actually exists within the Declaration of Independence is to formalize the Constitution, which of course, never happened. So we want to say, to ask the question of what this document actually is in Israeli society, whether we live up to the promise of the words and the ideas that were described within it, whether we haven't. In which ways we have or we haven't, and we wanted to do this through the prism. I'm sure every citizen of Israel has something to say about this and we wanted to do it through the prism of the descendants of the people who signed this document who you know with, with strike of their pen birthed, this country. Actually Moshe Kol call was in Jerusalem at the, on the day of the declaration. There were 11 out of members from Moetzet Ha’am who were who were stuck in Jerusalem, that was besieged and didn't participate in the, in the ceremony, which was here in Tel Aviv. So I think your grandfather signed something like a month later, during the first ceasefire, the different members of Moetzet Ha’am were brought to Tel Aviv by plane actually, to sign. But we wanted to ask, well, here we have this group of people. And it's an interesting group, because the first thing to say about it is that there are no non Jews who signed Megillat Ha’atzmaut, and that's, I think, a very important thing to keep in mind. But when you look at the group of these 37 signatories, it's a little bit like a pointillist painting. So when you look from afar, it looks like a pretty monolithic group of Polish and Ukrainian and Russian Labor Party operatives. But when you come closer, you actually see that there was a dazzling diversity among the signatories.
There were ultra-orthodox Jews, and there were atheists, and there were revisionists. And there were communists. And there were people who were born in the middle of the 19th century, and there were people like Moshe Kol, who was the second youngest signatory who was born in 1911, I think. And they represented very different ideologies. And we want to see if a generation and a half or two afterwards whether that diversity had expanded, or shrunken. And to what extent these people who are closest to the ones who imagines the state, how they think about the place we live in today.
Manya Brachear Pashman:
So 25 signed in Independence Hall, just a little ways from here, actually, here in Tel Aviv, 11, we're in Jerusalem under siege, including your grandfather, two women. Hm. But there was a lot of diversity in the group. That said, I know that they–oh, one in America, I forgot about one in America. They organized it alphabetically. When they signed it, though, even though they signed it at different times?
Mishy Harman:
With the exception of David Ben-Gurion, who signed first. Everyone else signed alphabetically, and they left little spaces for them. Some of them signed terribly. Like, even though it was the founding document of the state, they couldn't sign on the right line. And actually right underneath Ben-Gurion is the signature of Daniel Auster who was the mayor of Jerusalem. His surname is Auster, which begins with an aleph. So he was the first to sign. And he recalled how Ben-Gurion berated him because his signature was just like some sort of scribble and Ben-Gurion said, don’t you understand the importance, the historical importance of the document you're signing. I think your grandfather's signature actually is sort of legible, right?
Eran Peleg:
Yeah, you can read it.
Mishy Harman:
I don’t know if you sort of, when you were a boy, when you went up to the Declaration of Independence and sort of pointed to your grandfather's signature with pride or something.
Manya Brachear Pashman:
One of the women you interviewed said that her father or grandfather, I don't recall, but she remembers practicing and practicing the signature beforehand. It was an exciting, it was such an exciting moment. So going back to the organization, how did you organize the episodes? And how did you decide the sequence of how you would release the episodes?
Mishy Harman:
So we decided not to follow the order in which they appear on the scroll. We did start with David Ben-Gurion. An episode in which his grandson who was really his, the closest person, I would say to him in the family, including his own children, talked about Ben-Gurion. And interestingly, Yariv Ben-Eliezer, Ben-Gurion's grandson, has quite radical views about Israel today. And he thinks of Israel as an apartheid state and says that his grandfather would be very, very upset, and that the whole dream sort of went down the drain.
So it was important to us in the next episode to present a pretty different view. So the next episode was the son of Zerach Warhaftig, who was one of the leaders of the Religious Zionist movement. And is a sort of mainstream right winger today. We do try to take into account, you know, gender. So even though there were only two female signatories, we obviously tried to interview as many women as we could who are descendants. Some sort of political variation, we also do try to have episodes have a theme, so whether it's economy or socialism, or tourism or you know, Yemenite Jewelry, or women's rights. So it's not just about the, about the signatory himself or herself, but also sort of about the things that were most important to that person.
Manya Brachear Pashman:
I tried to as we were, as we were planning this and planning this episode, I tried my hand at tracking someone down from Israeli history and tracking down descendants. And I told your producer that it just made me even more impressed by the work that went into this project, because it was damn near impossible to find who I was looking for. Tell us how you tracked everyone down? Or are there some really good stories about how you connected the dots and landed the right, right person.
Mishy Harman:
So all of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence are dead. The last one, who was the only one who was younger than your grandfather, Meir Vilner, died about 20 years ago. 14 of the 37 have children who are still alive. In fact, your grandfather, you were just telling me that all of his three daughters are still alive. So that was quite straightforward to find the children. When you start getting into grandchildren and great grandchildren, it becomes quite messy, there are 1000s of descendants. There were only three ultra orthodox Haredi signatories, but they have many, many descendants. And there becomes an interesting question of who you choose, right? Because depending on who you choose, you can tell a very, very different story. And we always tried to prefer people who knew their ancestor, and had firsthand experiences with them. But also to try and maybe we'll get into this a little bit later, but to try to demonstrate a variety of opinions today, too. So it is an interesting fact that the vast, and maybe maybe you'll talk about this, but it is an interesting fact that the vast majority of the descendants of the signatories of the declaration are in what you might call today, the sort of center and center left camp in in Israel, who are concerned about assaults on Israeli democracy. And in fact, the Declaration of Independence has, in recent months, become a rallying cry for the demonstrations. Suddenly the Declaration of Independence, you can't you can't escape it. It's everywhere. The municipality of Tel Aviv, hunger, massive replica, on the building. In demonstrations. There's sort of resigning of the Declaration of Independence, it's really, it's really become an icon, basically. And it was important for us to also show that there are descendants who think otherwise. And so for example, in episodes that haven't yet come out, their descendants who wonder why we even talk about Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, they say democracy is an important concept. It's some sort of Hellenistic fossil. It's not a Jewish value. We don't think that that should even be something that we aspire to.
Manya Brachear Pashman:
Interesting. Interesting. Eran, how did you get the call that Israel Story was putting this together? Do you recall that day?
Eran Peleg:
The truth is, I don't remember exactly. Because I've had numerous conversations with them. I think it was probably towards the end of last year at some point. And again, as Mishy said, it was before kind of all these events happened here in Israel. Very happy because I thought, you know, it's, as you say, now it's like the declaration is everywhere. Yeah, people talk about it all of a sudden people, you know, it's, we see it everywhere. But for many years, I mean, hasn't been much discussed, actually. So I was kind of saying, Ah, yeah, it was the 75th anniversary, the State of Israel is coming up. Some chance that we'll get something about it, but that wasn't expecting much. And I was quite happy, to have the opportunity to talk about the declaration, my grandfather, obviously.
Manya Brachear Pashman:
Tell us a little bit about your own upbringing and what Moshe Kol was like as a grandfather.
Eran Peleg:
Well, I was just telling Mishy, I mean, quite a small family. My grandfather Moshe or as we called him, Saba Misha, grandfather Misha. You know, he had three daughters. Elisa, Sari, who's my mother and Yehudit, who is the younger one. And altogether, you know, a bunch of grandchildren, seven grandchildren. But that's, that's pretty much it. And so we're a very close family. Every Friday night, for example, we would all gather at my grandparents house and have Shabbat dinner there that was like, you know, you had to be there was no discussion about it or negotiation. So even like, my friends always know that if we want to go out on Friday nights, always after dinner at Saba Misha and my grandmother Keta’s house. So we spent a lot of time together. At the point when I was growing up already, my grandfather was obviously getting less involved with state affairs.
When I was seven years old, he kind of retired essentially, in 1977. So I had the opportunity to spend time with him actually, both here and also they took me abroad on a couple of trips with them. So it was very interesting. He was a very kind man, very interesting man.
I thought he was very smart. The Zionist project was kind of his life mission, if you like. So he was always talking in some way about it. He was always involved even after he retired he was involved in various different projects. Some of them had to do with coexistence within Israel, between Arabs and Jews, Druze, he was very involved with the Druze community, actually, he made good friends there. So even after his retirement, he continued to be active. And so I had the great privilege of kind of knowing him until I was 19 years old when he passed away. And really learned a lot from him.
Manya Brachear Pashman:
When did you learn that he had signed the Declaration of Independence?
Eran Peleg:
I don't remember exactly, frankly. And this is one of the interesting things is that I don't remember much discussion at home about the Declaration of Independence. And I think my mother and aunt as well, I don't think, I think they'll probably agree with that even at an earlier stage. And it's quite interesting that he never made a big deal about it, definitely. And I think that in a way, he, although obviously, in hindsight, it was, and maybe at the time, it was a big event, but to him it was I think, and look at here, I'm kind of interpreting, this is my perspective on it. I think to him, it was one necessary and important, obviously, but you know, one necessary step in the big project, and the big project was, you know, establishing and building the Jewish state, the state of Israel. But I don't think if you asked him probably what was the highlight of kind of what was the most important thing you did in your life? I'm not sure if he would have said signing the Declaration of Independence. For example, I think—
Mishy Harman:
He would have said bringing over 100,000 kids from the Diaspora.
Eran Peleg:
Exactly yeah, so he was head of youth Aliyah for 18 years after the Holocaust and after the establishment of the State of Israel. To him, I think that was his kind of big, the big thing he you know, he accomplished more than anything else, and he was even later a minister, a cabinet minister, and so he did you know, many other things, but I think that was probably to him, the highlight of his career, Zionist, you know, and the declaration was kind of, you know, one step, kind of a necessary step, but just, you know, one step along the way.
Manya Brachear Pashman:
So why was he invited to sign that day?
Eran Peleg:
So, and maybe Mishy, who's more of a historian can, perhaps, can you shed more light on this? But what I know is that, you know, the signatories were invited, it was based on kind of a, it was a party basis, or there were different movements, as Mishy mentioned, within, you know, Zionism or wasn't specific Zionism, because it really, it was supposed to represent the people who were living here actually ex the non Jews, right?
Mishy Harman:
Though interestingly, there probably would have been non Jews who would have agreed to have been part of this effort, I mean, your grandfather was involved in, in the cause of Christian Arabs from the North, who were, who were removed from their villages, Iqrit and Biram and stuff like that. Those kinds of people were actually allies of the Zionist movement in those days. And it's, it's possible, although Druze leaders-
Eran Peleg:
It’s possible, although, I mean, it's difficult, I think, for us sitting here now to know, because we have to remember this was like, it was a very tense time and, you know, we just had the War of Independence, kind of breaking out and all that. So it's difficult to say, I think. So he was representative of one of the movements, one of the factions within the Zionist movement, he was part of the, what they called, at the time, the General Zionists, Tzionim Haklaliym. And I think he was one of six representatives, I think of the General Zionists. And already at the time, he was a prominent leader within, you know, the kind of centrist Zionism. He was very early on in his life, he was already head of the, what was called the Noar Hatzioni, the movement, the global leader of the Noar Hatzioni. From there, so he kind of knew, he attended several of the Zionist congressional,l the conferences along the years, he was already a member of the executive committee of the Jewish Agency at that point. So he already had a certain position or statue within the kind of Zionist Movement. And as one of the leaders of the General Zionist, he was invited to participate in Moetzet Ha’am, which were the signatories of the declaration.
Manya Brachear Pashman:
You said, I'm sorry, the first thing you said, he was the global leader of, and I didn't quite hear what you said.
Eran Peleg:
The Noar Hatzioni movement.
Manya Brachear Pashman:
What is that?
Eran Peleg:
It was a youth movement. One of the, at time it still exists, actually. Interestingly, less so in Israel, actually. But in some countries in South America, I know it still exists. Today it's quite small, then it was a decent youth movement. That's actually how we met my grandmother. Because my grandmother was involved in the Noar Hatzioni in Belgium in Brussels. She was one of the heads of the Noar Hatzioni there, and and he has kind of part of his job as the Global Head, whatever of the movement, he was traveling and went to see all these different, all these different places. And that's how he ended up in Brussels where he met my grandmother.
Manya Brachear Pashman:
You mentioned earlier that some of the descendants had evolved, drifted away from their ancestors, ideologies, political perspectives or philosophies. I'm curious, what your team found was it was did that account for most of the interviews that you did? Or a minority? I mean, did you find that in most of the interviews, the philosophies were kind of embedded in the family DNA?
Mishy Harman:
It’s interesting. Most people are quite similar to their fathers, grandfathers, uncles, mothers, and so on, so forth. But, and, of course, I mean, the important thing to remember is that we're talking in a completely different worlds now, right? If you think about Israeli society today, and you think about our chances of ever agreeing on a single document or a single vision of this state, that's you have to be crazy, basically, to think that that's possible.
I mean, we live in such a fragmented and fractured society today, that getting a group that is in some way representative of the country to agree on what this country actually is, what this project that we call Israel, really is, today seems almost unimaginable. And I think, honestly, that it was pretty unimaginable at the time too. I think that they had other things going for them that in the background that allowed them to reach this moment of agreement. Which, you know, there were, as Eran just said, that we were in the middle of a war and it was, seemed like an existential war, right. We were gonna live or die. This all came together very, very quickly. You know, people understood that this was this opportunity, the British Mandate was about to end, there was going to be a power vacuum, the Zionist movement had an opportunity to declare statehood, which was something that, you know, in the Jewish psyche, had been a dream for 2000 years, 1900 years.
And they weren't going to, there was some sense of sort of, I would say, communal responsibility, which, you know, there's this word in Hebrew that is difficult to translate, really, which is Mamlachtiut, it's really some sort of sense of, of being part of a larger state collective, that that wasn't going to allow them even if they disagreed with a specific phrasing or a specific idea to be the one saying, No, I'm going to I'm going to be the sole naysayer in this otherwise historic opportunity. And that's what got a lot of people on board, right. I mean, otherwise, how, and I know, they're all these stories about sort of vague phrasings whether they refer to God or don't refer to God or whether they can be interpreted in other ways, and so on and so forth. Today, we're a much more blunt society today. People would want things to be said very, very clearly. And we just unfortunately, and then I'd be interested to hear what you think. But I don't think that as a collective we share any clear understanding of what we can agree on. At least it doesn't seem that way today.
Eran Peleg:
It's definitely, I agree. But I still remain optimistic, maybe it's my nature. But I do think that, you know, we've seen, you know, the huge amount we've achieved here in such a short period of time. And I do think that, you know, in some ways the values and political views are more clear now than they were back then. As you say, because of everything that was going on at the time, and they, and they were really occupied with kind of let's build this state more than anything else. You know, they put a lot of other things aside, frankly, it's not that they didn't have views about the economy about, you know, they had views about other other things about education, economy, it's just that they said, let's put this aside for now. And let's focus on the main project or the main mission.
And they hope to get to the other stuff. Well, they actually promised to put together a constitution, which I guess, but the truth is, it was, frankly, with historical perspective, I think it was very difficult because they were actually set a date. I think. They said that until the, you know, the declaration was signed in May. And they said by October 1st, something like that, I think it's a very short period of time after they already want to have a constitution. And I think that probably wasn't realistic.
Also because there was a war going on. And they were occupied with, you know, just existence, or survival. But also, because, you know, views were not, you know, really clear on many different issues, and they didn't have the opportunity to discuss them really yet.
United States, for example, putting together a constitution, the Constitution came really only I think, like more than 150 years after people landed, with the Mayflower. So there was a long time where they were already living together. And also then, there was a very serious job around putting together the American Constitution here, they, they were trying to put it together a middle of a war and just wasn't realistic.
Mishy Harman:
I think that this is particularly interesting for American listeners, because 75 years is a long time, but it's also almost no time at all. And what we feel lucky about with this project is that we're able to still touch these people, who, before they sort of drift into the realm of becoming historical figures in in books and research papers and stuff like that, and we can, we can talk to two sons and daughters, who remember these people as real as real people. And I think, you know, that's unimaginable, obviously, in the American context. And we tend to, we tend to attribute so much importance to phrasings and to wordings, of these kinds of declarations of, and we forget that at the end of the day, these are people who are writing writing these words within within specific historical context and bringing themselves and you know, Moshe Kol, for example, is signing, signing his name on on this scroll of independence. You know, a few years, four years, I don't know, after, after his parents and sister are murdered in the Holocaust, and that was the story of many of the signatories. And as it was saying, it was in the middle of the war and 1% of the population was killed in this war. I mean, they're writing these words, both without sort of knowing what we know today that 75 years hence, Israel is going to be around and Israel is going to be this thriving country with a cantankerous democracy.
It was, I think, in many ways, sort of a prayer or a wish, of what, of what this place could be. Many of them came from, you know, socialist backgrounds or from small villages and stuff like that, and suddenly found themselves here in this radically different environment than anything that they had known previously. And they were trying to imagine, well, what can we imagine a just society being?
And another interesting thing is that, sort of patriotic symbols like the flag and like the Declaration of Independence, which for years had been essentially owned by the right in this country have in the last year.
Eran Peleg:
Less so the Declaration.
Mishy Harman:
The declaration was a little more in the right. But have been completely appropriated by the protest movement, right? I mean, if you go here to Kaplan on Saturday night, which I strongly recommend everyone to do, whether you agree with the protests, or not just because it's a really, it's an incredible, incredible sight for anyone who cares about democracy, to see what these protests are like. You'll see basically a sea of flags, of Israeli flag. So that's, for me, that's a fascinating development.
Manya Brachear Pashman:
But doesn’t it belong to both? I mean–
Eran Peleg:
I mean, it definitely does. But, you know, the flag was, you know, is always perceived as a bit kind of nationalistic kind of, has this kind of flavor to it. But yeah, but you're right, it obviously belongs to both.
Manya Brachear Pashman:
They're just embracing it in different ways.
Mishy Harman:
One question that I would have to you about who things belong to is whether, sorry, I don't know if you– is whether being the grandson of one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence, makes you feel different about your own ownership of this place? Whether it sort of casts a shadow of responsibility.
Eran Peleg:
I don't think I'm in a position of privilege or entitlement different from anyone else. I happen to be his grand, yeah, grand grandson. But, but what I think I do have, which maybe some other people don't, I do have, I think, a good sense of history, at least, kind of understanding where we've come from, you know, etc. And I think that's something that sometimes I see missing with other people, maybe that gives me a slightly different perspective on things.
So, for example, I see, you know, because we're the generation that was already born into the state of Israel. For us, it was like a given that, right? Self-evident, it’s given. And I see especially with people who, like us, some people. It does make me angry when some people might say, I don't like what's going on, I'm just gonna go elsewhere. And to me, like, that makes me angry. But I don't think it makes me angry. Because I'm the son of Moshe Kol, I think it makes me angry, because at least I have an understanding of, you know, what's been put into this project already.
And the efforts that have been made, and obviously, you know, people have given their lives as well, I mean, soldiers, for us to be where we are today as well. So, just kind of thinking that, Oh, you know, Israel will always be there for us, even if we go elsewhere, then we decide to come back, right. If we want, we can always come back. But no, that's not the case. Israel wasn't always here.
I mean, you have to understand that we have a very, very special situation or position where we have the State of Israel, it's such a valuable thing. We can't just give it up, you know, just like that, okay. And you can't just take it for granted that we'll be here or that it's here, that we'll be here when you decide one day to come back from wherever you're going.
Manya Brachear Pashman:
Maybe you don't feel that Israel belongs to you. But do you belong to Israel?
Eran Peleg:
Definitely. Yeah. It's definitely the case.
Manya Brachear Pashman:
Do you ever, and I actually, I address this question to both of you. Wouldn't it be great if we could make plans. But if you had complete control over the universe, and your future, do you foresee ever leaving Israel?
Mishy Harman:
Eran?
Eran Peleg:
Again, it's very difficult to know what the future holds. But I see Israel as my home, I've actually had the opportunity to go abroad and come back. And part of the decision to come back was because this is my home. And my home also consists of the fact that my family's here, obviously. So it's a family, family reasons as well. But also, definitely, also Zionism played a role in my decision. I've lived 12 years outside of Israel, but my assumption was always that I’m there for a limited period of time, and I'm going to come back at some point. And that's actually what happened. And so, to me, Israel is where it's place for me.
Mishy Harman:
So I don't totally know what the word Zionism really means. Today, and something I think about a lot. My grandparents, who were of the same generation of Eran's grandparents, and also very active in the Zionist movement and in building the state. So not quite the blue-bloodedness of signing the Declaration, but they met in the early 30s. They were both students, they were both British, and they met because my grandfather, who was later on Israel's ambassador to the US for many, many years and the president of the Hebrew University, he was the he was the head of the student of design a student union at Oxford, and they met at a debate in which he debated my grandmother who was the head of the anti Zionist Student Union at the London School of Economics and she was an anti Zionist not because she had any particular beef with the Zionist movement but because she was an internationalist and she didn't believe as many others in the in the years between the wars, but leave she did believed in the concept of nation states and, of course, then spent the remainder of her life in the service of this particular nation state. But she was a tremendous presence in my life, she lived to be almost 100 and lived across the street from us.
So I'll just share with you very quickly, one of the sort of formative memories of my life is that in 2006, she was already a very elderly woman in her mid 90s. She, we were and not totally with it all the time. At that point, we were watching television together and it was the Second Lebanon War. And she sort of perked up out of nowhere. And she said, Look what a strange thing we're talking about, there are hills to the north of here, that have vegetation, and have wildlife, and have flowers. And we've drawn a line in the middle of those hills. And we call one side of that line, Israel and the other side of that line Lebanon. And there are people living on both sides of that line. And what the TV is saying is that when Moti Cohen’s life is destructed, or he's injured, because a Katyusha missile fell on his building, or something, we need to be deeply, deeply sad. And Ahmad Salman’'s life is destructed because the Israeli Air Force bombed his village or something, no one's saying that we need to be happy, but we can basically be kind of indifferent.
And she said, I don't know Moti Cohen. And I don't know Ahmad Salaman, but I'm equally saddened by the hurt that both of them are feeling. And that was that statement that stayed with me and stays with me, till today.
So my connection to this place, I would say, is less from an idealistic point of Zionism, in sort of the classic sense of Jewish self determination. And more from the fact that I was born here, and I grew up here. And the park in which I played soccer, growing up still exists, and the streets, in which I, you know, walked hand in hand with my first girlfriend still exist, and my family are here, and my friends are here. And I like the food that I am accustomed to eating my entire life. And in some fundamental way, this is my home. So, you know, Madison, Wisconsin, or London are not my home in the same way. So that's what makes me want to be here and in the spirit of the Declaration of Independence, try to make our country live up to the lofty and beautiful ideals that that set out to achieve.
Manya Brachear Pashman:
That’s beautiful, both of you. Both beautiful answers. Before we go, I do want to talk about, you've mentioned that a couple times, maybe the absence of God and democracy, those words from the declaration, and I'm just curious if you could both share your thoughts on: does that matter? And is it mattering today? If those words were embedded in the document, would anything be different today, possibly?
Mishy Harman:
I think the absence of the word God was very intentional. And there's a lot of historical documentation about that. And I think the absence of the word democracy was less intentional in that. I mean, I don't want to bore you with a lot of technicalities. But democracy did appear in previous drafts of of the Declaration of Independence, and was ultimately taken out but not because I think that anyone had any sense that they wanted to be less…yeah, the the intent of Israel being a democracy, I think it's very clearly stated that Israel will come into existence based on the guidelines of the United Nations and the Partition Plan that called for the creation two democratic entities here.
I think the Declaration of Independence talks about equality and about freedom of religion and, and in all the main tenets of democracy. So, I think that the Declaration of Independence does, as a document does appeal to a wide variety of people even today. I think that you know, it would be more difficult Today to write a founding document, that in the current makeup of Israeli society that doesn't refer to God and doesn't refer more clearly to the divine.
Eran Peleg:
But there is some implicit- God is implicity present. I think there's a-
Mishy Harman:
Tzur yisrael (rock of Israel).
Eran Peleg:
Exactly, right.
Mishy Harman:
Which was sort of a very famous kind of pie style compromise, of saying things and not saying them at the same time.
Mishy Harman:
And maybe as the last thing to say, which opens up a whole other conversation with you, if you maybe want to invite us again, to the podcast, we can discuss, is that, you know, the Declaration of Independence set in place, a notion which I think to most signatories did not seem like a contradictory notion of a Jewish and democratic state. And I think we're grappling till this day with whether those terms are contradictory whether a democracy can be a Jewish state, whether a Jewish state can be a democracy, I think all of them signed the Declaration thinking that this was a possible outcome. And I don't think that they thought that these terms would come to clash in the ways that they have.
And I think till today, we're dealing with that legacy of this sort of impossibly simple and yet impossibly difficult coupling of terms, which we're now living in a moment in which we're trying to understand whether the signatories were right, whether this is a possibility.
Manya Brachear Pashman:
Mishy, I hope you don't mind me asking you a personal question to close us out. And that is, I know you lost your father shortly before the debut of this series. It is dedicated in his memory. And you just shared a story about his mother, I believe that was your paternal grandmother. I'm curious as your team was having all of these conversations, you and your team were having these conversations with children and grandchildren, about the people they love their legacies, did that shape any of the conversations you had with your father in his final days, because you were working on it kind of simultaneously.
Mishy Harman:
Sure. My father would have loved this series very much because it represented his Israel. It's also Eran’s Israel, which is an optimistic Israel, which sees the good in people and the potential and the dream of this project that we began here. I think he would have been very interested, he knew many of these characters who we’re talking about. I think he would have also been saddened to hear that a lot of them are dismayed by where things have gone. And I think he was as well. He was the greatest Zionist that I could imagine. And that he really believed. Zionism is a sort of catchphrase in which you can insert almost anything that you want into it. But I think his most fundamental belief, which he attributed to the heart of Zionism was a belief and the quality and a belief that people are people and the belief in education, and the belief in the spirit of the Jewish people. And in this really miraculous entity that we've created that allows us to ask these fundamental, difficult questions about our past. And for me, it's very, very meaningful to be able to dedicate this series to his memory.
Manya Brachear Pashman:
Thank you so much to both of you for joining us. Thank you for the series. I encourage everyone here to listen to episodes of-
Mishy Harman:
And the next episode that's coming out on Monday is about Moshe Kol.
Manya Brachear Pashman:
Oh, perfect timing. Wonderful. And thank you both for joining us.
Mishy Harman:
Thank you.
Eran Peleg:
Thank you very much.
Manya Brachear Pashman:
Thank you, audience.
Manya Brachear Pashman:
To listen to Israel Story’s special series on the Declaration of Independence or any other regular episode, you can subscribe to Israel Story wherever you get your podcasts. Just don’t forget to also subscribe to People of the Pod and our award-winning series, The Forgotten Exodus. To learn more about Moshe Kol, here’s a sneak peek of Israel Story’s interview with his daughter, Yehudit Kol Inbar, the former director of the Museums Division of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.
Excerpt from Israel Story - Episode 89 - Moshe Kol:
Yehudit Kol Inbar:
He was eating grapefruit and he was crying, because for him it represented, ‘wow, we are in Israel and we have a grapefruit that we ourself grew it.’ He was very proud and happy with the feeling that they're building a place for the Jewish people.
Mishy Harman:
That’s Yehudit Kol Inbar, the daughter of Moshe Kolodny, who - for nineteen years - headed the Jewish Agency’s Youth Immigration Division, and was responsible for bringing more than 100,000 unaccompanied minors to Israel from eighty-five different countries. Despite being among the founders of at least seven kibbutzim and five youth villages, and later on holding senior cabinet posts, he considered that immigration effort to be his greatest public achievement. It was, he once said, a project that had no equivalent in the annals of human history.
Manya Brachear Pashman:
To listen to the rest of the episode, head to the link in our show notes. Our thanks once again to host Mishy Harman and the staff at Israel Story for sharing these incredible stories with us at AJC Global Forum 2023 in Tel Aviv.
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