Six years ago, Micah Goodman had just reached one of his proudest moments. His first book – on Maimonides, already a bestseller in Hebrew – had finally come out in English. He was in New York for a talk on the book, after which people in the audience gathered around him to buy it.
“Americans expect you not just to sign the book but to write specific dedications,” Goodman says. And I’m sweating and turning red – it’s difficult for me. And then I hear a woman walking away saying ‘what ugly handwriting!’ And it’s like that every single time. It’s so humbling.”
As we met for this interview, Goodman, 47, had another new book out in Hebrew. That work, which translates as “Broken Attention: How to Heal a World Fractured by Technology,” is his sixth book in 11 years, an enviable output, especially for an author who is also much in demand as a lecturer and founder of a network of colleges with a range of study programs for young Israelis after their military service.
In the new book, which explores the dysfunctional relationship we all have with our digital devices, Goodman explains in the introduction how technology saved him. At 10 he was diagnosed with severe dysgraphia, a learning disability that impairs handwriting skills. For most of his childhood it badly hampered him at school, until his late high-school years, when PCs and word-processing software allowed him to forge a breakthrough.
This book on our overdependence on our screens was written from the perspective of someone who would have never been able to become a philosopher, educator and author without this technology.
“It made me feel like an impostor for years,” he recalls. “When I finished officer school as an outstanding cadet, I thought I had managed to fool everyone. It was the same when I wrote my doctorate on the philosophy of history on the writings of Maimonides and Nachmanides in a year and a half, and when my first book was published. I was afraid what people would think of me when they discovered I couldn’t spell.”
Full disclosure: I can testify that everything Goodman is saying here is the truth. He’s a year younger than me, and as teenagers we lived in the same two-family house in Jerusalem. Growing up, he was anything but academically inclined. When we were teenagers, I never saw him with a book.
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But six or seven years after leaving home, I was astonished to see him speaking in public; I had to look twice and make sure this was the same unprepossessing kid I knew. Something extraordinary had been unleashed in him after he got his hands on a keyboard.
Twenty-five years later, we’re still friends and I’m still surprised (and a bit jealous) regarding his ability to write a bestseller every couple of years, not to mention his sudden status as arguably Israel’s most influential public intellectual.
Goodman is rumored to be a discreet adviser to Naftali Bennett and other senior ministers of the new government, and the originator of some of its policies and broader themes. Uncharacteristically, he confirms this, though he won’t elaborate on his private discussions with politicians.
Goodman at his home in a West Bank settlement outside JerusalemOhad Zwigenberg
“I’ve been working for years on the hidden Israeli consensus, which hadn’t been articulated,” he says. “I’ve been trying to conceptualize that consensus. And then along comes this government that I was preparing for.”
Goodman’s first three books, on Maimonides, Judah Halevi and Moses, are his interpretations of canonical Jewish texts. They have been popular because they answer a need among many Israelis of different walks of life for access to these classics without a commitment to the strictures of Orthodoxy.
The next two – “Catch-67” (2018 in English) and “The Wondering Jew” (2020 in English) – written after he had already established himself as a popular writer – were works of political philosophy searching for a middle ground on the two thorniest issues facing Israel – the occupation of the Palestinians and the question of Israel’s Jewish identity. These books anticipated the current Naftali Bennett-Yair Lapid coalition of contradictions before anyone could have conceived it.
This new government of right-wingers, centrists and left-wingers, a cabinet led by Israel’s first openly religious prime minister, is seen as a victory for secular Israel over Benjamin Netanyahu and his ultra-Orthodox allies. This is exactly what Goodman envisaged in his last two books.
“Public intellectuals have two roles,” Goodman says. “They usually challenge the received wisdom from left or right. Say things that annoy people. Personally, I don’t get a kick out of that. I’m too thin-skinned. But they also have a role to articulate the shared impulses of society, and that’s what I’ve been trying to do. And I think the time of my ideas has come because of the unique personality of this new government.”
I was expecting Goodman to demur, even push back at my suggestion that he has become one of Israel’s most influential thinkers, but he surprised me by accepting it. “I don’t have any control or power, but I do have influence,” he says.
Breaking habits
This moment in Israeli politics is a bizarre byproduct of the battle over Netanyahu’s political survival that has consumed Israeli discourse for too long. Goodman acknowledges that “politically, it looks like an accident – because of Bibi, all the political maneuvering and the splits among religious-Zionists and Arab Israelis.
“But is it really an accident or is Israeli politics finally reflecting Israeli society and what most Israelis actually believe? I think the people in this government get it, that there’s an opportunity to cash in on this moment, to use this consensus no one told us about and break the habits of thought that dictated polarization.
“Both leaders of this government believe that most Israelis agree on the core issues. Bennett says it’s 70 percent. Yair [Lapid] says 80. This government can succeed because for so long our politics have hidden the fact that Israeli isn’t actually polarized.”
After his Hebrew-language “The Last Speech of Moses,” a treatise on leadership based on Deuteronomy, was published in 2014, three senior politicians sought him out. One was the prime minister. “Netanyahu read the book and was very complimentary, but we never actually had a one-on-one conversation, though I would have liked to,” Goodman says.
Bennett with then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a meeting of right-wing parties in the Knesset last year. Emil Salman
Netanyahu asked him to lead some of the “prime minister residence’s Bible circle” meetings, a forum that existed when David Ben-Gurion and Menachem Begin were prime minister and was briefly resurrected by Netanyahu.
“I didn’t feel you could influence Netanyahu, and it looked like the circle was being held for political purposes,” Goodman says. “He would come very focused. He wouldn’t speak on the phone during the lesson. But there was nothing beyond that. Netanyahu always wanted to rule from the right, so my ideas aren’t relevant to him.”
Another politician who had read the book was the new leader of the Habayit Hayehudi party and the recently appointed economy minister, Naftali Bennett. “We met in the ministry and I thought that he was curious, which to me is a sign of humility. Not that he doesn’t recognize his own worth, but he admits that he doesn’t know everything. He doesn’t try to be someone he isn’t. He’s curious,” Goodman says.
“Netanyahu is great at talking. Bennett is a great listener, and we have similar backgrounds as American Israelis who feel comfortable in religious and secular settings. Like me, he has a biography that’s comfortable with internal contradictions.”
Goodman won’t disclose any details of their conversations except to say cryptically that “we talk about Bible and Taoism, and the Talmudic context of his hybrid politics.” But he admits that Bennett as a staunch right-winger was originally less interested in his next book, “Catch-67” on the conflict with the Palestinians.
But after “The Wondering Jew,” which challenges the religious-secular paradigm, Bennett phoned and told Goodman he felt he had articulated his feelings as well. At the time, in mid-2019, Bennett’s political career seemed over, as his New Right party had failed to cross the electoral threshold and he lost his seat in the Knesset. Two years and three elections later, Bennett is prime minister, leading the kind of government that bridges that religious-secular divide.
“Bennett isn’t a liberal,” Goodman says. “But he is post-sectarian. He doesn’t belong to a particular Israeli tribe. His patriotism is being open to all Israelis – unlike Bibi, whose patriotism is rejecting others.”
I try to challenge Goodman’s sunny view of Bennett with some of his more egregious quotes against left-wingers and Arabs. He waves me off. “I’m not trying to defend anything he has said, but I don’t think that reflects who he really is. He’s a politician and politicians aren’t always coherent.”
Liking Lapid
IDF checkpoint outside Nablus. ‘Most Israelis don’t want to rule the Palestinians’, according to GoodmanJAAFAR ASHTIYEH / AFP
Goodman won’t say which party he voted for, but the politician he seems most comfortable with is the third one he began speaking with after the Moses book, another newcomer to politics at the time, Lapid, now foreign minister and in two years, if this government survives, the prime minister. Unlike many Israeli intellectuals and pundits who until recently saw Lapid as a shallow dilettante, Goodman was captivated by him.
“He has three qualities. He’s constantly reading and learning. He works unbelievably hard, getting up early each morning and going across the country. And he’s charitable. He really is an intellectual who likes to exchange and fine-tune ideas,” Goodman says.
“He does many acts of kindness for other people that no one knows about, out of empathy for people’s pain. He’s not perfect, he’s an opportunist and a cynic as well. But he has that combination of curiosity, empathy and hard work. Plus he has a sense of humor, which Netanyahu lacks.”
Lapid calls Goodman “our party ideologue, though he isn’t a party member.” I was very skeptical in the past of Goodman’s infatuation with Lapid, whom he always refers to as “Yair.” Now I think he may have a point. Lapid has confounded most of his critics, myself included, by the way he formed this impossible government: conceding the first two years as prime minister to Bennett despite leading the largest party in the coalition.
I used to think Goodman was politically naive about Lapid, but now I agree with him when he says that Lapid “gave us all a lesson in politics as the architect of this government. He proved that by giving up power, you can accumulate power. That’s something that Netanyahu could never understand.”
Goodman is a settler. After growing up in West Jerusalem, he has now lived about half his life in Kfar Adumim, an upscale settlement in the Judean Desert. The headquarters of his Beit Prat network of colleges is in the neighboring Alon settlement. He doesn’t seem to think any of this has much relevance to his analysis of the Israel-Palestine conflict, which I think is telling.
In 2017, when he published the Hebrew version of “Catch 67” – whose title in Hebrew reads “Catch-67: The Ideologies Behind the Disagreements Tearing Israel Apart” – former Prime Minister Ehud Barak wrote a long essay in Haaretz’s literary supplement offering a coruscating critique of the book’s underlying theories. He wrote that “Goodman’s overall thesis, though abundant with multifaceted analyses and with respect for all streams, is steeped in a right-wing agenda.” Barak added that “the reader, without realizing, absorbs more and more rightward-tilting ideas concerning security, demographics, the adversary’s stances and Israel’s possible room to act. Goodman is serving – unconsciously, I hope – the political approach of the messianic right and the ‘one-state’ government.”
“When I first read Barak’s essay, I was actually scared,” Goodman recalls. “I thought he destroyed the book. It took me a few days to realize he made the book.” By taking Goodman on so comprehensively, Barak built Goodman up more than any PR campaign ever could.
Personally, I think Barak effectively dismantled many of the key arguments in “Catch-67,” but it doesn’t matter right now what Barak or I think. Because right now the “diplomatic tsunami” that Barak once warned would crash over Israel if it didn’t pull out of the West Bank and allow the creation of a Palestinian state has failed to materialize.
Yair Lapid and Bennett at the new coalition’s first cabinet meeting earlier this year. Ohad Zwigenberg
Shrinking the conflict
Instead, there’s an Israeli government that includes left-wing and Arab parties, that has a policy of not having a policy on solving the conflict, and when Bennett met with U.S. President Joe Biden in the White House, there was no mention of the two-state – or for that matter any – solution to the conflict. For now at least, the Palestinian issue has been marginalized, and Goodman’s “Catch-67,” or as its message has been summarized, “shrinking the conflict,” is the new normal.
Goodman sees this as the inevitable result of the conflict’s inherent contradiction. “Most Israelis, including on the right, don’t want to rule over the Palestinians. They’re deeply uncomfortable with enforcing a military occupation over a civilian population. And most Israelis are very worried about a pullback that will allow [the Palestinians] to threaten us,” he says.
“Faced with the need to reconcile both those feelings, Israelis have become paralyzed and indifferent, which is why for a decade now you haven’t seen the big demonstrations for peace of for building new settlements, which once drew tens of thousands of people. Instead, we’ve had big protests for social justice and over the price of cottage cheese and affordable housing. Not because we’ve solved the conflict, but because we’ve become indifferent to it.”
Instead of trying to solve the contradiction, Goodman believes we need to embrace it. “Twenty percent of Israelis are on the extremes, for either withdrawing from the territories or annexing them,” he says. “The remaining 80 percent who don’t want to rule over the territories or relinquish them don’t have a way to talk about the conflict, so they just don’t think about it. Which is the tragedy of the Israeli center.”
Shrinking the conflict, rather than solving it, is what Goodman calls “replacing indifference with pragmatism,” and it sounds a lot like what ministers and senior advisers to the Bennett-Lapid government are already talking about in private. Goodman himself, in meetings with foreign diplomats, is a lobbyist for the plan that’s essentially a combination of economic incentives for the Palestinian Area A enclaves in the West Bank and various mechanisms designed to enhance “self-governance.”
Examples of these include creating corridors between the enclaves and a border crossing to Jordan “up to the level that the Palestinians feel they are ruling themselves, without the capacity to threaten Israel,” Goodman says. “But they don’t get anything like the right of return, a state or Jerusalem.”
This sounds of course very palatable to Israelis, and perhaps acceptable to some Western governments, but why should the Palestinians agree to the continued denial of statehood?
Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak has criticized Goodman. Olivier Fitoussi
Goodman claims to have spoken with Palestinians about his ideas, though he won’t name them.
“Israelis have their own paralysis for their own reasons. And so do the Palestinians. All the solutions proposed so far mean some element of sacrifice from them, both on the national level in having Israel controlling part of the territory they see as their land, without a full right of return everywhere, and on the religious level, with Jews having sovereignty over Dar al-Islam,” Goodman says, referring to what Muslims consider Muslim land.
“Israelis shouldn’t be surprised they’ve refused so far to agree to any such sacrifice. We shouldn’t expect them to do so, which is why what I’m proposing isn’t a permanent solution,” Goodman says. “I’m clear this is an interim arrangement, but it’s still in the Palestinians’ interest because this isn’t normalization of the status quo but a dynamic process of increasing self-governance, and this opens new options in the future, such as a confederation with Jordan.”
It still doesn’t sound like something any Palestinian representative could ever agree to, but Goodman insists it’s the only viable alternative to the status quo or to “the peace process industry’s narrative. Both sides have frozen the status quo because they insist on their own myths, not just the settlers’ myth, but the peace myth as well. So we don’t have to agree on which myth we prefer; this government can’t agree on an endgame anyway, but we can agree on the game we play in the meantime. We don’t have to agree on the narrative to do the right thing.”
How is this so different from Netanyahu’s zero-concessions policy if the Palestinians don’t stand in the foreseeable future to realize their goals? Goodman is at pains to emphasize that his proposal is difficult for the Israeli hard right as well.
“Netanyahu is an alarmist. He can only see the scenario where the Palestinians threaten us, not the other bad scenario where we perpetuate the occupation,” Goodman says. “He’s a one-catastrophe person. It’s just like the way he dealt with the pandemic, when he couldn’t see the damage the lockdowns were causing. Most Israelis are capable of seeing both scenarios.”
Ultimately, Goodman isn’t focused on peace with the Palestinians but on peace among Israelis, who aren’t that worked up about the conflict anymore. “Until 1967, Israelis were split over whether we needed to be a collectivist-socialist system,” he says.
“Then the focus was on peace or holding the territories, and Israelis forgot all about the previous argument – a right-winger then didn’t even need to be a capitalist. Now we’re not even fighting about the occupation anymore. Instead, Netanyahu has made this about identity.”
The antidote to that, Goodman says, is the unique makeup of the new government. As he puts it, “If we were to translate it into American political terms, it’s as if Ted Cruz and Liz Warren were sitting in the same government and getting stuff done together. Which makes this government a light unto the nations in a period where the entire world is suffering from political polarization. It may be a political accident, but it faithfully represents how most Israelis feel.”
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