The Honest Take

Yossi Klein Halevi grew up the son of Holocaust survivors in Brooklyn. As a teenager, he joined Meir Kahane's Jewish Defense League. Then he moved to Israel, broke with extremism, and wrote a book called Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor - released free in Arabic - asking Palestinians to see Jews as an indigenous people returning home, not colonizers.Today, on college campuses across America, the answer is: you're colonizers. The Nakba proves it.With Nakba Day approaching, Ben sits down with Halevi for an honest, unflinching conversation about what actually happened in 1948 - the partition vote, the Arab invasion, Deir Yassin, the Hadassah convoy massacre, the 850,000 Jews expelled from Arab countries that nobody talks about. And then: how a legitimate historical grievance became a weapon of delegitimization.Halevi is not a denialist. He openly names the Nakba as a real catastrophe. He has criticized Israeli education for refusing to teach it. But he also argues that collapsing 1948 into a "narrative of total innocence" - and using it to erase Jewish indigeneity - is something categorically different from honest historical reckoning.This is the conversation about 1948 that most people never get to have.In this episode:00:00 — Cold Open (Deir Yassin / Hadassah convoy quote)00:22 — Intro: Ben introduces Yossi Klein Halevi and the episode00:53 — The Real Story of 1948 — episode framing02:43 — Growing up in Brooklyn, joining the JDL04:12 — Breaking with Kahana and moving to Israel05:25 — Living with the partition wall in Jerusalem07:42 — Two overlapping geographies: Land of Israel vs. Land of Palestine08:02 — The UN Partition vote (1947) — Arab rejection and the pattern of refusals12:07 — The Palestinian maximalist frame vs. the Israeli counter-narrative14:08 — When does land become about existence?14:55 — The Israeli center: head vs. heart on two states16:33 — Why two states feel impossible after October 7th16:54 — The six months between partition and war (Nov '47–May '48)18:50 — Ethnic cleansing on both sides — flight vs. expulsion20:58 — The 850,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries25:20 — Why Arab countries kept Palestinians as permanent refugees27:34 — Inversion: Nazi collaboration accusations flipped30:35 — Plan Dalet: ethnic cleansing blueprint or defensive plan?34:04 — Deir Yassin vs. the Hadassah convoy massacre36:06 — Acknowledgment vs. apology — teaching the Palestinian Nakba41:13 — Settler colonialism goes mainstream: Al Jazeera, Jacobin, the Oscars47:01 — Why 'indigenous' and 'no metropole' arguments aren't landing48:13 — The language war: genocide, apartheid, settler colonialism as weapons49:03 — Myths & Facts doesn't work anymore — it's about narrative now53:00 — Has dialog survived October 7th?58:02 — Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor — the German edition and new intro01:00:59 — OutroAbout the guest:Yossi Klein Halevi is a Senior Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. He is the author of Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor (Harper Collins, 2018), a New York Times bestseller released free in Arabic at letterstomyneighbor.com. His previous books include Like Dreamers (National Jewish Book Award winner) and Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist.Follow him on X: @YKleinHaleviHosted by Ben Chertoff @ben.chertoffThe Honest Take is produced by HonestReporting - rebuilding trust in media.

Welcome to The Honest Take, the new long-form interview podcast from HonestReporting.For 25 years, HonestReporting has been the global watchdog on media bias against Israel — monitoring newsrooms, calling out distortion, and forcing corrections from some of the world's most powerful outlets. The Honest Take is where we go beyond the rapid response and sit down with the people who understand what's really happening: journalists, scholars, lawyers, diplomats, and activists.Hosted by Ben Chertoff, every episode is a sustained conversation about the stories the mainstream keeps getting wrong — antisemitism, the war in Gaza, the UN, campus politics, the future of Jewish life, and the fight for truth in an information war.Subscribe now. New episodes weekly.Featuring voices including Hillel Neuer (UN Watch), Shai Davidai, Yardena Schwartz, Yossi Klein Halevi, and many, many more.

What happened on American campuses after October 7 did not come out of nowhere.In this episode of The Honest Take, Shai Davidai joins HonestReporting to trace the intellectual roots of the antisemitism now shaping elite universities. From Edward Said’s Orientalism and the rise of the activist professor, to moral relativism, postcolonial theory, and the normalization of anti-Zionism as virtue, Davidai explains how decades of academic ideas helped create a culture where Jew hatred is repackaged as justice.The conversation also explores Columbia’s long history with antisemitism, the role of groups like Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, and why so many students and faculty cannot even recognize their own bigotry. Davidai argues that this is not just campus radicalism. It is a broader moral and intellectual failure with real consequences for Jews, for higher education, and for American society.Shai Davidai is a social psychologist, former Columbia Business School professor, and host of Here I Am with Shai Davidai. His forthcoming book, American Intellectual Antisemitism, is scheduled for release on October 6, 2026.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often thought of as a protracted political dispute based on two peoples fighting over one land. Often, they place the start date at 1948. Sometimes 1967. But for a real understanding, it is necessary to reach back to the pre-State era, and realize the religious nature of the conflict, and one man who played a pivotal role in shaping it: The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.We speak to Yardena Schwartz, author of "Ghosts of a Holy War," about Hajj Amin al Husseini, his surprisingly close relationship with Adolf Hitler, the 1929 Hebron massacre, and how reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has changed over the course of the century that followed.