EVENT TRANSCRIPT: The Centre Must Hold: Why Centrism is the Answer to Extremism and Polarisation
DATE: 16:00 03/09/2024
VENUE: Online
SPEAKERS: Yair Zivan
EVENT CHAIR: Dr. Theo Zenou
Dr. Theo Zenou 0:03
And thank you for joining us at the Henry Jackson Society’s event with Yair Zivan to discuss his formidable book, ‘The Centre Must Hold. So, Yair is based in Israel, in Tel Aviv, and he’s got a distinguished career at the highest level of Israeli politics. He’s a foreign policy advisor to Yair Lapid, the former Prime Minister of Israel and the leader of Israel’s largest centrist party. Before that, he was also a spokesperson for the President of Israel, Shimon Peres, one of the great, legendary figures in Israeli politics and history and, of course, he’s the editor of this book ‘The Centre Must Hold’, which has gotten rave reviews across Western media, and which has chapters by Tony Blair, the former UK Prime Minister; Matteo Renzi, the former prime minister of Italy; Stéphane Séjourné, I believe, the French foreign minister; Michael Bloomberg, businessman, mayor of New York; and many, many other luminaries, including Yair, of course. So, we’ll start off with a conversation with Yair, but if you have any questions put them in the chat and we’ll get to them in the second half of the conversation. And I suppose a real point to start is, okay, you say centrism is the answer to extremism and polarisation, but what really is centrism, right? For a lot of people, if you’re centrist, it means you’re not really left wing, you’re not really right wing, maybe you’re a bit of both, or you’re in the middle. But there is a lot more to centrism than just the middle point between left and right. [Inaudible].
Yair Zivan 01:54
First of all, thank you Theo for having me and for hosting me at the Henry Jackson Society. You guys do incredible work, and I’m really honoured to be here on a seminar with you. You know, when you’re trying to define something it’s usually a good idea to start with the positive but, because you’ve mentioned it, I’ll start with what centrism isn’t. Centrism isn’t the middle. It’s not the search for a point between where the left and the right happen to be in any given country at any given time. The search for the middle is a political tactic; sometimes a good one, sometimes a bad one. But it’s not a belief system. It’s not an approach to politics. It’s certainly not short of a philosophy or an ideology. Centrism isn’t that. Centrism isn’t the centre of the political map, it’s the ideas that we believe should be at the centre of our politics, of our political work, of our political society. And look, we can go into detail about any one of these, but there are a number of things I would highlight, kind of, upfront, I guess, as points for discussion about what centrism is and what it means. Firstly, I’ll start with something that I know is dear to the Henry Jackson society, so it’s important for the audience, which is; I think centrism is the place that is entirely, deeply, unflinchingly unapologetically committed to liberal democracy and, not just as a theoretical concept or as a couple of nice words, but while liberal democracy is under attack across the world, centrism is the place where we say, not only is liberal democracy good, it is the best form of government we have today, and it’s worth defending. But defending liberal democracy means defending the institutions of liberal democracy, means defending the principles and the type of politics that we have in a liberal democracy. What does that include? It means we defend an independent judiciary, even if we don’t like every decision the courts make; It means defending a free press, even if we don’t like everything that they write, and we don’t agree with all their criticisms; It means defending a strong civil society; It means defending free speech. And the essay in the book by Ruth about free speech is, I think, as close to free speech absolutism as you will find in a political work today. So, there are a whole series of concepts that come with defending liberal democracy; I would say that is one of the things that’s at the heart of political centrism, but that isn’t enough on its own. There are others who would claim to do that; I’m sceptical. I’m suspicious of the political left and the political right. I think the right has taken on free speech as an issue that they really passionately care about and fighting censorship and free speech for all, right up until the point they start banning books they don’t like in libraries. And I think the left is really for an independent judiciary, all the way up to the point when the judiciary makes decisions that they don’t like, and then they start talking about having to ignore them or override them, or whatever else. So, I’m sceptical of the political fringes, certainly. So liberal democracy is one. The second thing I would say that’s key to political centrism is what we call liberal patriotism. This idea that patriotism and love of your country is part of a healthy politics. It helps create a positive story that we can unite around. It gives us something that combines us, that brings us together, that helps us join together, and it’s a good thing. We shouldn’t be shy or bashful about loving our country and being patriots. Now, where does that differ from where the political right and the political left are today as an approach? And I think this is where the liberal part of the liberal patriotism comes in. For the right, patriotism is about showing that you’re better than others. It’s a nationalism. It’s a sense of superiority. It often, too often, seeps into xenophobia, into racism. Where the left, I think, has a kind of slight sense of embarrassment, about patriotism, a kind of uncomfortableness. A sense that we’re all the same and we’re all part of the global community. And the truth is, every single one of us that watched the Olympics, and are watching the Paralympics now, know that we care more when it’s a representative of our country winning a gold medal than a representative of another country. We might like particular sports, but in the end, we’re all committed to our countries, and we all feel excited when it’s our national anthem that’s played. So, a real, deep commitment to a liberal patriotism that says that’s a good, healthy part of our political identity. The third thing I would say is, what in the book we kind of talk about as an embrace of complexity, an embrace of nuance. That is to say, in every decision you have to take in society today, in government today, there is an inherent tension that’s built in; the struggle between globalisation, which is good: brings free trade; cheaper goods into your supermarkets; brings down your cost of living; opens up whole worlds to you, versus protecting local communities. Local farmers are harmed by globalisation. There is a tension that’s inbuilt within that between capitalism, which centrists believe is a force for good; believe that innovation and entrepreneurship and meritocracy are positive; and a need to protect the weakest in society. Centrists don’t believe, as I think libertarians would certainly argue, that everybody can just pull themselves up by their bootstraps. We understand that there are people that start off less privileged in life, which links to, I think, the next thing, which is to say; centrists believe in what, again in the book we call, equality of opportunity. That is going to say, the goal is not equality of outcome. My job is not to make sure, Theo, that you succeed as much as everybody else in British society, earn the same salary, and do as well. My job is, as a government, to make sure you get as good an opportunity, and then if you choose to take it, to support you. If you choose not to, that’s also okay, that’s on you. And that’s why I think centrists so often focus on education, healthcare, infrastructure as core elements of their politics, because the goal is to create as much equality of opportunity as we can, for everybody to have the chance to succeed if they choose to. I’ll say two more things, and then pass back to you and we can dive into to whichever ones you want. The first is to say there are a series of words that I think centrists embrace, concepts that centrists embrace that have fallen out of fashion in politics; words like pragmatism, moderation, nuance, complexity and, God forbid, compromise. And part of the role of political centrism is to say those are good words. They’re positive. They are positive concepts around which to organise our politics. I don’t know if you’re married or not, or if you live with other people. If you share a flat, it requires compromise all the time. If you work in a team, it requires compromise all the time. Society functions because we’re able to come to compromise. It’s not splitting the difference. Where’s the middle point between what you want and I want? But finding something that works for both of us. And that’s true all the way up to politics, when suddenly compromise is weakness and betrayal, rather than a sense of seriousness and good governance. So, part of what I’m trying to do around the book, and other people around the book as well, is to try to say, actually, those are words that we should embrace. We should speak loudly and proudly in favour of moderation and pragmatism and getting things done, because that is much more effective than what the political extremes offer us. And the final thing, and I think this is perhaps where centrism goes most against the trend of global politics today, is a term that I borrowed from the former Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, Rabbi Sacks, Jonathan Sacks, who, aside from being the Chief Rabbi, I think, was one of the great thinkers and writers of our time, and he is sorely missed, I think, by many of us; and he talked about the politics of hope. When you look at political centrists throughout the last 30, 40, 50 years, they’ve been successful when they’ve offered a message of hope. Today, we have this sense that the world is falling apart; that everything’s getting worse; that we’re on a downward spiral. We’re in what Lee Drutman, a political scientist, calls a doom loop, cynicism and mistrust, doom loop. And part of what centrism does is to say, actually, there is a different way. There is a way to offer a politics that says to people, here’s a positive vision for the country; here’s how we can achieve it; here’s what we need to do to go out and make it happen. So, I think those, broadly, are some of the ideas. And then the book itself, which he very kindly held up and did the promo for me, has within it essays on a whole series of different policy issues. And for me, the most pleasing thing about the book is whichever of those essays you look at, whether it’s about infrastructure or innovation or economics or education, the principles all come back to those same principles. Those are the kind of underlying principles around each of the policy decisions or policy recommendations that come out in the book. That’s by way of a long introduction, I guess.
Dr. Theo Zenou 10:43
No, and thank you very much for clarifying this, because people will find it useful to understand the broader intellectual contours of what you call centrism. And what strikes me is that centrism sounds like a great idea, but almost impossible to put into action in 2024 because almost everything you said goes against the way our society is going, right. So, as you said, a core tenet of centrism is accepting nuance, promoting compromise. We live in a world where extremism gets rewarded. They get rewarded on social media because the algorithm pushes for more and more extreme content. They get rewarded in the media when it’s about the story of the day, and the good guys and the bad guys, and you’re this and you’re that, and you’re the greatest threat to democracy since Adolf Hitler; no, you’re the greatest threat to democracy since Stalin, blah, blah, blah. This is the world we live in, so how do you find ways to resonate with a message that is extremely sensible but goes against the entire ecosystem that we live in today. How did you do that with your team when you were in government, and how do you do that now across the west?
Yair Zivan 11:53
So, yeah, look, I think, first of all, that’s part of what makes centrism radical; It’s part of what makes it different and exciting and interesting. There is a, I think, a swinging of the pendulum back away from the kind of political ecosystem that you’re talking about. I think there is a growing understanding in the world that it doesn’t serve us well, and there is a move away from it. Now, you’re right, and I think the media has a role to play, and John Avalon, who, when he wrote the essay, was a senior correspondent at CNN, wrote a piece about the media, right? He’s now a congressional candidate in New York. There is an element of responsibility on the media to play their part in this. That’s not to say to support the politics of centrism, right? That’s not the goal of the media, but to do the work more seriously of presenting real arguments; of checking what people are saying is true; of calling out stuff that’s just, you know, outrageous. I was in the UK before the election, and I’m careful not to get into other countries politics, I work in in Israeli politics as you pointed out, and so I will keep my political views on every other country out of it, but I was sat on the on the tube on the day before the election, and I picked up a copy of the metro because I haven’t lived in England for a while, and I forgot that you don’t pick up a copy of the metro unless you want your hands to go black, and in it, there was one page that had the main promises of the four big parties: Labour; Conservatives; Lib Dems; and Reform, and it struck me that they were all presented there as equally reasonable main promises. And Labour were talking about cutting NHS waiting times, and Reform promised that you won’t have to wait to see a doctor [Inaudbile]. Now, Is there anybody on this conversation who doesn’t want a situation where they don’t have to wait to see a doctor anymore? I would love to be able to call the top doctor in the country at any given moment and go and see them within an hour’s notice, but there is a responsibility in the media to say, okay, let’s try to present things in a way that works as a service to the public. Social media is a unique challenge, but it’s been around long enough now that, to me, it’s an excuse. Politicians who argue that we can’t change, we have to just go along with it, because that’s the way social media is, are the ones that aren’t being creative enough; aren’t being loud enough; aren’t being interesting enough. And you know how to do it by now, right, it isn’t new. The fact that the first five seconds of your video have to be catchy and interesting and have to contain your main message, because that’s how long you have people’s attention for; the fact that you have to be able to communicate in 240 characters, those things are not… You know, when I started working for your Yair Lapid, people were getting to grips with the idea of Facebook as a political tool, right? We’re past that point now. We should all be good enough now to overcome those challenges. One of the things that is missing from centrism, has been missing; this is one of my criticisms, and where I think we can do a better job; two things really. The first is being proud and passionate about what we believe in. Too many centrist leaders hide away from the from these ideas, and I think one of the things we have to do is start speaking out and say, actually, this is who we are, this is what we believe, and we’re willing to fight for it. I am not willing to anymore, and I haven’t been for a while, let people on the fringes define what real politics is, or committed politics is, or principled politics is. I am as principled as committed to my values as they are to theirs. I am as committed to liberal democracy as any of the fringes are to destroying liberal democracy. I’m as committed to my country; I’m as much of a patriot as anybody to the right of me, and I’m as empathetic and caring about those in society that need our support, as anyone to the left of me. We shouldn’t let other people define us in the way that too often I think centrists have done. That’s one part. The second part is, and I think this is where populists do really well, and why I think some of the ecosystem argument is a bit of an excuse; one of the things that populists do really well is they tap into the grievances that people feel. And too often, there’s a temptation to explain to people why they’re wrong, right? You’re worried about immigration but you’re wrong; it’s not really a problem. Actually, when I got to the UK, it was about a week before the election, and I started, you know, doing meetings and events and talking about the book, and one of the things I heard from, you know, sensible centre-left people very quickly, was, you know, immigration is a net economic gain for the United Kingdom. That might be true, I don’t have the numbers in front of me; maybe it is, or maybe it isn’t, but that’s not the argument. And if you’re not able to really connect with what people feel, with the real grievances that they have, right? The idea that everyone that cares about immigration is a racist, or anyone that’s worried about globalisation is a nativist, or anyone that’s worried about AI and technological advances is a Luddite and is backwards, right? All that does is disconnect you from people. You have to be able to really understand and empathise with what people are feeling; why people are worried about it. That is, I think, the minimum cost of entry for a political figure to be able to present an alternative approach to something. You have to know as a member of the public that I genuinely care and I’m listening to you, and then you will give me the opportunity to present an alternative view. If you think I don’t care about you; if you think I’m an elitist; I’m a snob; I’m dismissive of you; I think you’re ignorant, and I don’t take you seriously, you have absolutely no reason to listen to what it is that I’m saying, or to the arguments that I want to make, or to the policies that I suggest to you, and centrists have to be much better at that.
Dr. Theo Zenou 17:33
Absolutely. I think most people, when they picture a centrist picture, someone wearing a grey suit, grey blend, technocrat, you know, in some bank or some office, disconnected from the passions of real life. And what I felt very compelling about this book and your approach is you own it, right? You’re not on the defensive, and you’re not saying, well, yes, but no, but maybe; you own that with a passion that is usually associated with the other side of the political spectrum. And I’d be interested in getting your thought on the presidency of Emmanuel Macron, who perhaps is a prototypical centrist of the last decade, to the point that there was a big left wing party in France, the Socialists; a big right wing party in France, the Republicans, and he created his own party En Marche in the centre. It got people from the Socialists, people from the Republicans, and won the presidency; won majority in his first term; was re-elected. And the common criticism of Emmanuel Macron and his centrist leadership is precisely what you’ve just outlined, that he is out of touch; that he lacks empathy; compassion; that he is not able to relate to people’s problems; that, as a result, he is governing in a Jupiterian way, you know, like a god coming down from Mount Olympus, giving the plebs his wisdom. And perhaps that’s an exaggerated criticism, but certainly widespread in France, and we saw it in this last election that’s gridlocked. So, what can centrists learn about the Macron experiment, both in the good, that the guy managed to become president of a major country with very little political experience, and in the negative, which is that now the countries perhaps more divided politically than ever between three blocs, two extreme blocs, extreme left and extreme right, and the centrist bloc. How can that gridlock be overcome?
Yair Zivan 19:34
So, I’ll say a few things, and again, speaking as an outsider, and now on to French politics. There was a documentary made about President Macron’s first election campaign.
Dr. Theo Zenou 19:45
On Netflix actually, right.
Yair Zivan 19:46
It was a Netflix documentary. It was an excellent documentary; I highly recommend it. And there’s a scene in that where he goes to, and I don’t remember where it is, but he goes to a factory, and it’s clear that there are a large number of Le Pen supporters around. People are kind of shouting stuff back from the street above [Inaudible]. I think it’s like the main courtyard of the factory, and he’s standing there surrounded by a pretty angry group of men, and he just listens to them and engages with them and talks to them. There’s no stump speech; there’s no microphones; there’s no distance. He just talks to them. Now, at the end of that scene, I don’t know how many of them voted Macron and how many of them voted Le Pen, but you could see that they felt that he was connecting to them; that he was listening to them; that he cared about them. That is an example for me of how to do that politics really, really well. And the other part, and I think you know, this broadens out to others as well is that positive vision, right? I think Macron was unapologetically French and believed in France and France’s ability and France’s future, and that sort of hopeful, positive, forward-looking vision, I think, is one that’s very powerful.
Dr. Theo Zenou 20:59
Now that’s very un-French, might I add, actually.
Yair Zivan 21:01
But actually, but I think resonates right? [Inaudible] If you look at some of the votes, I think he probably bought from the Republicans, from the centre-right, they came about because of that. So, that’s one part of it. The other thing, I would say, and this is a more broad point about politics, you don’t win every election. I think I’m right in saying, you’ll correct me if I’m wrong, only one party has ever won three presidential elections in a row in France. You know that’s happened once in French history. If Macron is able to win the next presidential election with whoever his candidate is and hand it on to somebody else, that will be, I think, a historic success in terms of politics. You don’t win every time. People want to change. People get frustrated. People want something different. And that’s a natural part of it. The test of political success is not if you win every single election; that’s an unreasonable bar to clear, and not one that I think is particularly positive. It’s okay. The test is what will happen to En Marche, to the party, if they lose. Are they able to maintain themselves as a serious political force? To adjust? To learn the lessons? To rebuild and to come back again next time? That, I think, is the test of whether the Macron experiment has been a successful one, from a centrist point of view. I’m certainly not in a position to judge whether it’s been a success or not, from a French perspective. I do think there was something interesting in France between the first and the second elections. The first round of the French parliamentary elections, when it seemed like that the right was going to steamroll its way to a pretty large victory, to the second round, where part of the reason I think the centre did better was ordinary people saying, ‘wait, wait, wait, this isn’t what we wanted. We might not love Macron. We might feel he’s out of touch. We might think it’s time for a change, but we definitely prefer him to the fringes’. And that’s how you ended up, I think, with the situation of really three blocs. Now, interestingly, from a centrist perspective, the right is obviously pretty coherent today in France; the centre, I think, is pretty coherent in France, and the left is not. It’s actually the left that I think is most likely to fall apart and to start to break apart between. You know, really, the old social democrats and the far left have nothing in common, and if it wasn’t for the fact they’d want to challenge Macron, I suspect the social democrats feel more comfortable with Macron than they do with Mélenchon.
Dr. Theo Zenou 23:36
Yeah, never say publicly, but I agree with you. And what’s interesting is the result of the election sort of shows your point that when people are given a choice in the French election, the second round, say between a far-right candidate of National Rally and a social democrat candidate of the left-wing bloc, they might not be social democrat and might be Republican-right, but they’ll still vote tactically against the far-right. So, people are more sophisticated, more able themselves to have that culture of compromise and of negotiating with themselves about, well, I can vote for him, but not for him. And when you give them a potential choice, like you want to give them with your version of centrism, I think a lot more people than just the 30% that vote for the Macron centre would respond to that.
Yair Zivan 24:26
You touch on something that I think, that I didn’t say earlier, but always, kind of, in a room full of people when the events are live, and as an audience, I always see this kind of, like eye rolling reaction when I say this, but I think people are smart. I think the voting public, as a bloc is smart, and I respect them enough to say, here’s a vision for how things can be, and I don’t think you inevitably prefer the simplistic solutions of the fringes. And I think when you present it to people with enough passion and enough clarity, they will respond to it, because I genuinely do respect the voting public and their intelligence. In the end, when you look at the way the public votes, they often are voting according to a rationale. Now, that might not be the rationale that you have or the rationale that I have every single time, but there do tend to be reasons, and they do tend to make sense. You look at the UK elections, right? And it was pretty clear that the Conservative Party, and I don’t mean this in any disrespect, I have friends in the Conservative Party, but it was pretty clear that the party as the party, had lost its way, and the public came out and said, ‘enough’, right? We might not love Keir Starmer; we might not all be Labour voters our whole lives, but something has to change, because this government has lost its way. And, you know, you look at that, and that’s a pretty rational thing for a voting public to do. And I think you’re right about the tactical voting, when you give people a choice, they are able to and do, kind of, make that calculation pretty smartly.
Dr. Theo Zenou 26:02
What I would like to hear now are your thoughts on centrism as not just a product of political theory or just reading a lot of books, but of actually being an actor on the political scene of your country, Israel. And you advised a former prime minister, Yair Lapid, who built together a centrist coalition that I think lasted for almost two years. So what was it like to be part of another democratic experiment in your country’s history? Let’s start with that, and then we’ll see why it didn’t succeed, maybe.
Yair Zivan 26:38
So yes, first of all, it was, it wasn’t a government of centrists, right? We had people who were anything but centrists in our coalition. For those people that don’t know, the Israeli political system is almost pure proportional representation, so it’s a very fragmented parliament. We have 120 members, and our coalition on its very, very best day had 60 members, and we did not have many particularly good days; we were often with 58, 59. It was an enormous challenge, made up of eight different political parties. So, it was not a particularly stable coalition that we were able to create, but it worked well for a year, and then worked pretty well for another six months afterwards, during the election campaign, in part because it was governed by centrist ethos. And what do I mean by that? The people that led that government, Yair Lapid, Naftali Bennett, and the heads of the other parties, did the things that centrists do in order to govern well; they embraced pragmatism; they embraced moderation. And when the government fell apart, it fell apart because the fringes went back to all or nothing, to demanding they get absolutely everything. One of the things that we talk about in the book a lot is the value of compromise, not as a last resort, not because you have to compromise to make things happen, but because compromise creates better policy; more sustainable policy; it helps build broader consensus. I always say to people, if I have a policy that I want to pass, and I have 61 votes in the Knesset and I can pass it exactly the way I want, but if I have to give up 20% of what I want for my policy in order to get another 20, 25 votes in the Knesset, I will choose the second option, not because I have to, but because I think it creates better policy; more sustainable policy. Because I think you need a level of humility that says maybe there’s something in the other side that adds to this, that makes it better, that’s worth listening to, and in the coalition that we had that became a way of governing. You had to take into account other people’s needs and considerations. That didn’t mean splitting the difference. It didn’t mean always looking for the middle point between where two camps were. It meant trying to find things that say, okay, you know what, this is really important to you, and you’re very passionate about this, so this is something I’m willing to move towards you on, but this is something I really need from you. And working to make those things happen created, I think, a style of government and a model of government; It was actually really effective. We were able to get more done. And you know, tragically, I think when we look at the government that we have in Israel now, the level of incompetence compared to what we had then is staggering. When you speak to the civil servants, the people that worked in that government and this government, they will tell you it was just much more functional. It was just focused on getting things done and making things better for people in a way that this very ideologically coherent government that we have now doesn’t do. So that was one part the other part, and I’m happy to talk more about foreign policy; specifically, I worked with Yair Lapid when he was foreign minister, and then when he was Prime Minister, was we were able to put into place what I think was a centrist foreign policy.
Dr. Theo Zenou 29:52
[Inaudible] a lot of your essay, in fact, in in the book. So, do you to explain what exactly is a centrist foreign policy, and in the context of Israel, what does that mean?
Yair Zivan 30:02
Yeah, so I took the privilege of, or I guess the right to do an essay of my own within the book; comes with being the editor you’re allowed to. And I wrote about foreign policy, partly because that’s my day job and my passion as well. I think a centrist foreign policy is, again, one that looks for creativity in what is, for those of us who have worked in international diplomacy, a pretty dated and slow bureaucracy that doesn’t really work so well in the modern world. So, we focus very heavily on kind of what diplomatic speakers call mini lateral forums. So, stepping away from the United Nations and the big international forums where things are bloated and frankly biased against Israel almost entirely, which make it very hard for us to be effective in them, to forums that we’re able to come together around a shared vision. So, we invested heavily in a trilateral forum between Israel, Greece, and Cyprus around issues of energy and climate and Turkey and other things that unite us. We created something called I2U2, with the United Arab Emirates, India, Israel, and the United States; kind of a quad focused more on this part of the world, and on dealing with some of the big challenges we face. We created the Negev Forum, which was the Abraham Accord countries, which were done by the Abraham Accords, done by the previous Prime Minister, by Netanyahu. We took that, we added Egypt to it and the United States and created a forum that was focused on real problems in the region. So rather than another forum just for security, security was one of the working groups, we also focused on health, education, water, and food security, and, you know, the issues that really affect people’s lives. That was one part of it, and the other fascinating part for me was the way that we did foreign policy, which was just much more informal. On my first day in the foreign ministry, I was shocked to find that this thing called diplomatic cables still exist, where I get a piece of paper telling me about an event that happened a week ago that I’ve not only read about in the newspaper since then but has already finished. And the diplomacy of Signal and WhatsApp and direct phone calls between leaders is an incredibly powerful tool that I think we were able to put into practice very effectively as well.
Dr. Theo Zenou 32:21
It’s very interesting to hear because I did some research into John F. Kennedy before coming here, so we’re on the early 1960s, and this is very much what he did. You could say he was a pioneer of your centrist policy. He had the kind of flexible diplomacy where he would have envoys that he would send to talk to Castro or Khrushchev. These were usually from people from civil society, journalists, people from the clergy and so on, to get that personal relationship going, to be able to go beyond the State Departments and giant behemoth where they had a stake in the Cold War staying the same and Kennedy wanted to hear the other side and have a discussion. in some of that, that’s pretty much what you also did with this other country. It’s very interesting to see.
Yair Zivan 33:09
Yeah, it’s a terrifying thing for advisors, but sometimes it’s worth remembering that there’s a reason politicians get to where they get to; they’re actually pretty good at what they do. So, one of the things that we always tried to encourage was for Yair Lapid to have one on one time with principals from other countries, so with his counterparts, without us in the room. The Negev forum, the first meeting, the Negev summit that we hosted, opened with a dinner of the six foreign ministers together in a room without any staff. Now that is usually a nightmare for advisors, leaving all in a room together to plot and to plan. But the truth is, one, they’re the elected officials, that’s their job. They’re the ones that bear responsibility, you know, and have to kind of carry things out and define the policy. And two, honestly, with most of these people, when you leave them in a room, they’re really good at what they do, and so giving them that face time, giving them that one on one time to build relationships, I think, is really important. I go back to JFK in the book as one of the examples of the politics of hope, right? Sinatra re-recorded ‘High Hopes’ for JFK’s election campaign. It was a campaign that talked about a positive vision for the United States.
Dr. Theo Zenou 34:27
Absolutely, in a sense, he is one of the historical antecedents. And this is something I’m interested in as well; a lot of people think maybe centrism is a new phenomenon or a new fad. It really comes into focus in the 90s when you have Bill Clinton doing the Third Way, then in the UK, you have Blair, one of your contributors, doing New Labour, but do you see other antecedents to your brand of centrism in 20th century liberal democracies?
Yair Zivan 35:01
Yes, yeah, sure.
Dr. Theo Zenou 35:02
[Inaudible] decades before that you can point to show actually, time and again, centrism has worked in this and this and this situation.
Yair Zivan 35:11
Yeah, for sure. Look, I think there are. You go back and you can find 100 years ago, historical figures who I think you would define as centrist. I’m careful about labelling people with labels they didn’t use themselves, which is a common thing for political people to do, to try and claim various people because, because it suits us. But one of the books I have behind me is Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who, you know, go back and read his writings, by any measure was a centrist. I like to upset my conservative friends by reminding them that Edmund Burke really wasn’t a modern-day conservative; he would have been a centrist. If Edmund Burke was around today, he would be a down-the-line centrist. The idea of a contract, society as a contract, between the past, the present, and the future, the generations that were, that are, and that will be, is an entirely centrist approach. Burke was never against progress; he was against revolution. So, there is a canon, I think, of political philosophy. For those people who that’s their thing, there are some good essays about that. There are some sources that go all the way back. We have one of the essays in the book, at the beginning, that draws on religious and philosophical texts that create, I think, a kind of a solid foundation for centrism. He draws on Jewish texts, but also on Buddhist and Buddhist principles. So, I really think there is that there’s a strong background. For me, one of the reasons for writing the book, was the sense that we’d slightly lost, I think, our narrative and our coherence around what political centrism is. And I think the other thing that this book tried to do, and I think it’s the first time, I’m always wary of saying first one to do something, but I think it’s the first time that anybody’s bought centrists together in one book from different countries and tried to, kind of, create something that sounds and seems coherent across the world; so, Japan, Latin America, North America, Europe, Australia, obviously, Malcolm Turnbull and others, all kind of coming together in something that I think at least is coherent and makes sense across all the essays in the book. I think that’s the first time anyone’s tried to do that. When you look back to the Third Way, for those of us who spend too much time reading about political centrism, they had meetings of the Third Way politicians. There are protocols of the meetings where Clinton and Blair and Prodi and Schroeder, that seems strange now, were all sat in the room discussing their approach to politics and their beliefs and how they can strengthen that approach to politics across the world, and I think there’s a value in going back to that. The left have always had the Socialist International uniting kind of socialist, centre-left, social democrat parties. The right, I think, built a network of everything from very conservative to downright illiberal figures, and they built a network very quickly that supports one another. Here in Israel, we barely had an election where some illiberal right-wing leader or another didn’t come to endorse Netanyahu just before the election. And you know, people don’t do that generally, right? You don’t insert yourself into other people’s politics, but the illiberal right doesn’t play by those rules anymore. I don’t know if you saw, I’d highly recommend reading it, an interview by David Brooks with Steve Bannon, just before Steve Bannon went to jail, and he sat down with David Brooks in the New York Times. And Steve Bannon, to his credit, is incredibly honest and open about what he’s doing, and he said, you know, we built up this network of illiberal leaders across Europe. We made them we made them rock stars. We did everything we could, we supported them, we built them up, we gave them attention, we put our machine behind them. Now you can look at that and say, ‘shouldn’t do that’, right? You have no business being involved in British, French, Hungarian, Polish, whatever it is, politics, or you can look at that and say, ‘that’s the world we live in today. now, how do we do that as well? How do we support one another in a way that doesn’t overstep the mark, but allows us to share experience, allows us to build a coherent narrative together, and allows us to push forward the values that we believe in?’
Dr. Theo Zenou 39:31
Absolutely awesome, also, because international cooperation is needed to start making progress on those challenges of the 21st century: regulating AI; climate crisis; and many other big issues, will need to have those networks and informal networks like you mentioned. Steve Bannon, I read, at one point wanted to do an academy for really right-wing leaders somewhere in Italy, and he was going to lease like an old monastery or something, and the Italian government told him he couldn’t do it. But maybe you could pick up that idea.
Yair Zivan 40:09
We’ll ask Matteo Renzi if he knows anywhere nice in Italy.
Dr. Theo Zenou 40:13
There you go in Florence, which I believe he is still the senator of, so maybe you’ll come back using the court for him, hopefully. You are now in a country that is at war, but that is also incredibly polarised inside. You, as you were saying before, worked with one of the main opposition leaders, who is committed to building a centrist coalition, who is, especially in this time of war, I think, is committed in bringing as many people under his leadership as possible. So how do you see the situation in Israel now, and how do you see the path forward for the country’s domestic politics? Because at some point or another, you’re going to need to have an election for prime minister.
Yair Zivan 40:58
Yeah, look, I will say this has been the worst year in our history by any measure. We thought the year before was bad, with the protests over the judicial overhaul, the divisions within society, a real, I think, attempt by forces in our politics to undermine our country as a liberal democracy, which was met with incredible opposition, incredibly intense opposition on the streets, and successful in the end. But the reason those protests, I think, were successful was the symbol of the protests became the Israeli flag. They were patriotic protests. They were led, I think, by in large part, the political centre, Yair Lapid was a key figure in that, others as well. So, one of the things I would say is, you know, we thought we’d had a bad year before. Since October 7, it has just been a level above and beyond anything we’ve ever experienced before. The last 48 hours in Israel have been incredibly painful. The murder of six hostages when we were so close to them and so close to being able to get them out. And I think it’s true, the country is very divided, but actually it’s less divided than it seems from the outside. There are a few things that I think we should lay out before we get into the divisions that we all agree on. There is an enemy, and the enemy is Hamas, and in the north, the enemy is Hezbollah, and behind them both, the enemy is Iran. There’s no disagreement about that in Israel. Hamas needs to be destroyed. Its leaders need to be taken out. There is no disagreement about that anywhere on the Israeli political spectrum. The situation in the north cannot continue, and Hezbollah have to be pushed back; there’s no disagreement about that. We disagree about tactics, we disagree about priorities, and we disagree primarily and most pointedly about the hostages and how high up the priority list that should be. That is an incredibly emotive division within Israeli society. It’s something that tears us apart honestly, and I’ll explain why in a moment. But before I get into those divisions, it’s important for us all to remember the things that we don’t disagree about; this government should have done more to get the hostages out, much more than it has done. It hasn’t done enough. But it was Hamas that murdered them, and that’s important to important to say. But it is possible for both things to be true at the same time; Hamas is responsible. Hamas started this war. Hamas is responsible for this war. Hamas is responsible for everything that’s happened since. But our government has failed in its primary task, and that’s a very painful thing for me to for me to say. I have to explain a few things about the return of the hostages from an Israeli perspective. Firstly, it is a incredibly important part of our national identity. It’s a Jewish value in Jewish law, It’s called pidyon shvuyim. The return of hostages is an incredibly high value in Judaism. And it’s an Israeli national value, so much so that you’ll remember Prime Minister Netanyahu released 1200 Palestinian prisoners, including [Inaudible] as well, to get back one Israeli soldier. And that was always the way things were, we would risk everything. If that was a special military operation in Entebbe, or if it was a very painful deal, we would do what we needed to get our people back. When I send my children to the army, I know, or I’m supposed to know, that they will never be abandoned by their government. That is not the sense today. And if you want to understand the power and the emotion of the protest, It comes from that. Now there are two reasons why, from our perspective, the opposition’s perspective, a hostage deal should come above everything else. One, morally, the government, the state, the institutions, the security services, failed these people on October 7. The primary job is to keep the public safe, and they failed, and now they have to do everything they can to bring them back. And secondly, Israeli society will not be able to rebuild; will not be able to heal without the hostages coming home. Now, do we think Hamas should be destroyed? Absolutely. But there’s a question of what is more urgent rather than what is more important? What needs to happen first? And what we saw in the last 48 hours is the hostages don’t have time. We lost six young Israelis who we should have been able to save. We know three of them were on the list for the hostage deal. The Israeli public is split about whether it accepts or doesn’t accept the Prime Minister’s argument. But I would take it somewhere else, and I would say whether you support a hostage deal or not, and I do, if you’re on the side that doesn’t think we should do the deal, that doesn’t think we can compromise about the Philadelphi corridor or about the hundred other things that have come up during these negotiations, it is then incumbent upon you to offer the alternative. And if, after 11 months, we are not able to bring Israelis back from our border, they’re not being held halfway across the world, they’re being held kilometres from where we are, then that is a failure that is intolerable to the majority of Israelis. So, it’s an incredibly difficult time. One of the things that we’re trying to do within all that; one is to obviously embrace the families and offer them our support however they need it, but two is also to keep Israelis with a sense of hope. One of the things that worries me most is people who are deciding to leave; who don’t see a future; who have lost a belief in the country, and that’s incredibly painful, and that is something that can only be fixed by a leadership that gives them a positive vision and a sense that things can be better again. And we have risen from terrible situations before. The State of Israel was founded three years after the end of the Holocaust. We rose out of the worst tragedy that the Jewish people, the world has ever seen. Three years later, we founded a state, we fought a war, we survived, and we built a country that we should be incredibly proud of. We know how to come out of terrible situations, but for that, we need the leadership that’s capable of doing it.
Dr. Theo Zenou 47:28
What is a positive vision that you and Yair Lipid and millions of other Israelis have in mind right now, when you’re trying to see a path through the darkness of this current time? What do you hang on to?
Yair Zivan 47:44
So, there’s a few things. Look, the first is an attempt to heal Israeli society again, to bring us back together, to overcome some of the divisions that I think have been caused unnecessarily by this government, even before October 7, and since as well. We had a general strike yesterday in Israel, and the courts ruled that the strike was illegal, and we had to stop it. Now that’s a victory for the prime minister, a prime minister who’s shown deep scepticism of our judicial system, the courts ruled in his favour. Now there are two things the prime minister can do in that time. One is, he can come out and say, I understand the people that wanted to strike; I understand the pain that they’re feeling, but we’re a democracy, a court’s ruled, and they’ve decided. Instead, what he did was come out and say, the people who supported the strike are working hand in hand with Sinwar, with the leader of Hamas. For the Prime Minister to call hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Israelis supporters of Sinwar, or people cooperating with Sinwar, does nothing but deepen the divisions further and further, and that’s after he’s won. That’s when he could be magnanimous in that moment, but he just has no interest in doing that, unfortunately. So, what are the things that we offer? First of all, a greater regional integration, a sense that there is in Israel, after the war. That we will win this war, we’ll finish this war, and then we’ll start to rebuild. So, we’ll rebuild our international relations. We’ll rebuild our relations within the region. The Abraham accords have survived this war, and I think that is a testament to the United Arab Emirates and to Bahrain and to Morocco. But to the best of my knowledge, have never once threatened to suspend the relationship or cancel the relationship. I think that says a lot about their leadership and their vision for the region. But the relationship’s frozen, I mean, it hasn’t moved forward like it should have done. It hasn’t progressed in the way that it should have done. We have a lot of work to do with the Egyptians and the Jordanians, the old peace agreements, that are strategically as important, if not more important. And there is further regional integration to come, Saudi Arabia and others. The other thing is, and again, these are internal Israeli issues, but a return to an Israel that’s innovative and positive, creative.The startup nation model that, you know, was so successful here, the belief that we can achieve anything. I think Israeli self-confidence has been knocked by October 7, understandably, and we need to rebuild that. We need to rebuild that sense of belief in who we are and what we can do, and to remind ourselves of really quite how incredible this country is. I’m incredibly positive and patriotic and hopeful about the state of Israel. It’s an amazing country that’s done incredible things since 1948 and we shouldn’t lose sight of that. We just need to remind people of that and remind people of what we’re capable of doing. So that is at the heart, I guess, of what we what we’re trying to do. And the other part of it, and this is a domestic issue, again, a sense in Israel, the Israeli middle class is being overlooked, once again. The majority of people doing military service, reserve duty, months and months and months at a time are middle class Israelis. The tax burden on the Israeli middle class is enormous. The demographics are such that the tax burden on middle class Israel is increasing more and more and more, and that is that’s something that’s just not sustainable in the long term. And so that’s another thing that we talk about. I think almost nobody else really does.
Dr. Theo Zenou 51:15
It strikes me that perhaps the silent majority really is centrist, right? This comes in, when Richard Nixon was president in the late 60s, he came up with this concept of the silent majority, thinking the silent majority was conservative or nationalistic. But it turns out that actually, perhaps, at least in Israel, from the sound of it, you’ve got sensible, decent, law-abiding, patriotic people who are human and compassionate, and who can see nuance, and perhaps that can be that can tap your coalition, back into power. Who knows?
Yair Zivan 51:56
Yeah, look, I think the silent majority is an excuse the politicians use when they’re not able to mobilise people to their side. And I think part of what we need to do is say, you know, I don’t know what a silent majority looks like. I will say, two nights ago, a conservative estimate is there were 300,000, 350,000 Israelis out in the streets. We’re a country of 10 million. So, multiply that by however many to get to kind of UK numbers. And that’s a protest that was organized in 12 hours. That is not a silent majority. That’s a very active group within Israeli society.
Dr. Theo Zenou 52:34
Yes. So good luck with that. Good luck with what you’re doing here, with the book and just trying to build this centre, doing it in Israel and building your centrist international. So, a couple of questions in Q&A that you might be interested in in answering. There is a question which maybe comes from the right, we’ll see, that says, ‘do you recognise that the problem with the term liberal democracy is that the world liberal now often denotes political attitudes that are, in fact, authoritarian and intolerant, as in left liberal?’ In other words, the word liberal, has been hijacked by the left [Inaudible].
Yair Zivan 53:13
So, it depends on the national context. There are certainly places where that is the case. It’s not the case everywhere. There are plenty of places, I think, where liberal isn’t necessarily associated with the left. And this goes right back to what I said at the beginning, I’m not interested in other people defining who I am and what I believe, for me. I think it’s up to us to say this is who we are, this is what we believe in, this what we’re fighting for. So, if some people want to try to hijack a particular word, our job is to say that doesn’t apply to us. That’s not where we are. The centre is not the same as the progressive-left, and so we shouldn’t let them define the terms that we use. Liberal is about people’s ability, people’s freedoms to make their own decisions, it’s about seeing people as individuals. And I think when we look at some of the excesses, I think perhaps because, you know, when we think about Europe, we think about the rise of the far-right, but we shouldn’t ignore the dangers of the populist far-left. If you’re a liberal, classic liberal that believes in individual rights and believes in seeing people as individuals, that is entirely impossible to square with an ideology that defines people only by what identity category they fit into. And I think that is something that to centrists is entirely alien. You look at this idea that I know everything about you as long as I know your gender, the colour of your skin and your sexuality, I can decide everything about where you fit into society; that is something that that centrists just can’t in any way connect to, and something that I think on the left is incredibly problematic. I can decide exactly what I think about you and what your place in society should be, just based on a few demographic identifiers, rather than on the character of who you are, how you live your life, what you’ve done and what you believe. So, is there an attempt by some people to hijack the word? Possibly. we shouldn’t let them. liberal democracy is our form of government. It’s a form of government that keeps society moving forward. A form of government that’s because of the focus on freedoms, is able to correct itself, and a form of government, I think we should be very proud to fight for.
Dr. Theo Zenou 55:24
It strikes me just hearing you, that universalism, in fact, is also one of the key bedrocks of your brand of centrism here, in the face of identity politics from the left and sort of extreme nationalism on the right.
Yair Zivan 55:43
Yeah, I think. And look and again, it really depends on where you are in the world as to what’s troubling you more the rise of the far-left or the rise of the far-right. But what I will say is one of the reasons why I think centrism is the answer to the extremism and polarisation that we see is because we’re able to call out extremists on both sides. Too often, the right is hesitant to call out the extreme-right, and the left is hesitant to call out the extreme-left, because they need them. They see them as coalition partners. They see them as somebody that’s within their group or within their tent. And so, you have people on the centre-left who are really clear about the dangers of right-wing extremism, but entirely absent when it comes to the dangers of the far-left and vice-versa on the right. Now, again, it’s not always equal. In Israel today, the danger comes from the extreme far-right. We don’t have a real left of any significance. It’s the right that’s in government. But there are plenty of other examples. Carefully and without jumping into another kind another country’s politics, again, I looked at the last elections in Brazil, and I find it pretty shocking that the choice that a country as big and important as Brazil is left with was a choice between Bolsonaro and Lula. These are two candidates who are on the fringes, and ultimately that was the choice that Brazilians had to choose from. That’s not healthy for a democracy. The centre is the place where we can actually contradict and fight against the extremes on both sides. When you think about politics as people, I think often do, rather than as a spectrum, but as a horseshoe, you see that the extreme starts to meet up. The centre actually ends up being the opposite of both of those. It’s why the the extremists on both sides hate us so much. When I tweeted the first tweet I put out about the book, within half an hour, I was both a Nazi and a communist. Depends who was replying, right? It was either you’re, you know, secretly a right-wing Nazi trying to steal left-wing votes, or you’re secretly a left-wing communist trying to steal right-wing votes. The extremes are scared of centrism, because that’s the real mirror image to them. The main issues that we face today are not between left and right. They’re between the centre and the extremes, between the centre and the populists.
Dr. Theo Zenou 57:56
I guess the quality of your enemies says a lot about you then, so that’s good.
Yair Zivan 58:01
But it does go it goes to something deeper, right? Daniel Lubezki, in his essay, says, I’m paraphrasing, but it says something along lines of, radicals wake up in the morning thinking about changing the world, and moderates wake up in the morning thinking about lunch. That is something that we have to be much better at, right? We have to be willing to be strong and to be proud of where we stand.
Dr. Theo Zenou 58:27
A final question, which should be quite quick to answer, is, should liberal democracy include separation of religion and state?
Yair Zivan 58:37
It depends on the country. Yes, I think a connection between religion and state is nearly always problematic. I will say, you don’t always need a complete separation between religion and politics. Religious identity, like national identity, can be a positive, right? I quote a former Chief Rabbi of Great Britain in the introduction to my book. There is a place for religion and for religious texts within political belief systems, I would say there’s much more that we could do to separate between the two though.
Dr. Theo Zenou 59:10
Yes, and you have a tradition in Germany of Christian Democrats as well. Very positive all over Europe. But listen, Yair, thank you so much for taking the time. I shall plug once more your fantastic book, which, in fact, also was recommended to me by our friend Jonathan from Sanctuary Counsel. So, ‘The Centre Must Hold’, which you can buy on Amazon or on the website of Henry Jackson as well, if you go to the page of this event. But really do read it, because it’s very thought provoking. It’s not facile. He takes into account the challenges of centrism, and I think it provides a roadmap towards sanity and decency and compassion and pragmatism that we all need. So, good luck with your fight for those values, wherever they lead you.
Yair Zivan 59:58
Thank you. And I’ll say, if people have questions that we didn’t get to for any reason, they can reach out to me, social media, on Twitter and on LinkedIn. I’m always happy to kind of try and answer the questions that we that we didn’t get to, and just to say, thank you again for hosting me. It’s been, it’s been a really great conversation. Thank you.
Dr. Theo Zenou 1:00:15
Likewise. Be well.