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Gadi Taub grew up in a valley in Jerusalem, in a house he can almost see from the studio window: a spot bounded by the Hebrew University, the Israel Museum and the Knesset. "The triangle of academia, art and politics," he called it. His father was secretary of the Bank of Israel and later head of the Securities Authority. His mother spent her life reading Alterman and warning anyone who would listen that postmodernism would take down Western culture, and that post-Zionism was its Israeli vanguard.
In other words, he came from the heart of the Labor establishment. He has spent the last two decades leaving it.
Taub, today one of the most cited intellectuals on the Israeli Right, told me the story he says explains where he started. The morning after the 1977 election, he came out of his room to find his mother packing food for a school trip. She told him Menachem Begin had won. "I sat down and cried," he said. He was 12. "I didn't know anything about politics, but I understood from my parents that this was the end of the world."
Years later he interviewed Yuli Tamir, a founder of Peace Now and a former education minister, on his podcast. She mentioned, in passing, that she and her boyfriend had spent that election night at his parents' house. There were no exit polls, the buses had stopped running, and they stayed over. He had no memory of it. "Look where Yuli is and where I am," he said. "You see how intimate the circles are."
The classroom as a lab
His father was Palmah, and lost half a hand in the War of Independence. From him, Taub says, he inherited a suspicion of the well-intentioned. "Beware of do-gooders," his father used to say, in English. Being moralistic, in that house, was not the same thing as being moral. "It's often a pose, and the pose comes at the expense of actual morality."
That instinct shows up in how he teaches. He tells his students, on the first day, that he is there to offend them, and that anyone who fails to feel offended is welcome to come to office hours so he can take care of it personally. No one, he says, begins a question in his class with "as a woman," "as an Ethiopian," "as a Jew." "You are here as a student. This is not therapy."
He teaches postmodernism, which he considers poison. "But we are in a lab, so we don't die from it here." He starts by showing why Foucault is seductive, why people were willing to die for Marxism. "Critical thinking is not just bashing everything. You first have to get inside something and see what's in it. If you don't see what's in it, you don't understand it, because it's never only cerebral. You have to understand the passion."
He says he does not grade opinions, and that his exams often ask students to make the strongest case on both sides, well enough that the grader cannot tell where the student's heart was. He also says right-wing students increasingly arrive in his classroom feeling that their grades depend on their politics, and that they are often right. When his department held a conference on the judicial reform, the two faculty members who supported it were not invited to speak. A student complained. Nobody listened.
The long turn
The shift, Taub insists, was gradual. He was never on the radical Left. "All the way to Peace Now, but not further." He supported Oslo. Then buses exploded. Then Rabin was assassinated. Then Ehud Barak went to Camp David in 2000 and offered more than his own voters would have countenanced, and Arafat said no.
"That was the moment," he said. "Why would they not take a state, even if they wanted the whole thing? Why not start with a state? And I understood: it isn't about peace, or coexistence, or even self-determination. We had imagined them in our own image."
He became a unilateralist, like most of the Israeli center: leave, separate, keep a Jewish majority. Then the rockets kept coming from Gaza. Then the Second Lebanon War showed that interception can be saturated, that the rockets are cheap and the interceptors expensive, and that the whole thing is an economic war of attrition. Then came the Arab Spring, and Arab nation-states collapsed one after another.
"If nationalism isn't a workable principle of political order in the Arab world," he asked, "how are we supposed to trust a new nation called the Palestinians to become a stabilizing element in this region?" The region, in his telling, is political lava, and it can spill over the ridge. Nine miles separate the foot of Samaria from the beach where much of the population and most of the national assets sit. Hence the Jordan Valley. Hence, in his view, no withdrawal.
October 7, he says, closed the argument. "The Left said Gaza would be Singapore. The Right said it would be Hamastan, in those words, before Hamas even took over. Who was right?" The public, he believes, absorbed the shock and reached the same conclusion, which is why, in his reading, left-wing candidates are now campaigning as though they are on the Right.
Netanyahu, with reservations
Taub is not a courtier. He listed the failures: the judicial system Netanyahu neglected until it came to bite him, the Negev, the Galilee, illegal weapons and murder in the Arab sector. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the man responsible for internal security, he dismissed as "a lot of noise and not enough substance," someone who should have started confiscating weapons village by village and did not.
He also rejects the idea that the judicial overhaul was Netanyahu's project. It came from the base, he said, and Netanyahu read the room when Yariv Levin, the man identified with it, came second in the Likud primaries.
But when it comes to the vote, he says, the question is narrower than the scandal sheet. The war with Iran is not over. "If we are left alone, without American support, facing a wounded hyena that will try to buy a bomb, who is the best leader to handle that?" His answer: "We had Ben-Gurion, and we have Netanyahu. If you find someone of that caliber, I'll probably vote for him."
He was contemptuous of the former general now telling Israelis that Israel must win, noting that the same man opposed going into Rafah. Had Israel listened, Taub said, Nasrallah would be alive with his arsenal intact, Assad would be in Damascus, and Iran would be closer to a bomb.
'A license to fabricate'
On the press, Taub does not bother with the symmetry that both sides are biased. True, he says, and trivial.
What happened to the Israeli Left's media, in his account, is that postmodern epistemology married moral certainty and produced a license to invent. "They see their job as educating the public, not informing it." Once you believe you know the morally necessary conclusion, you administer the right dose of facts and factoids until the public gets there.
His illustration is Channel 12's Sde Teiman video, which he calls a blood libel. The footage, he said, was narrated to tell you what you were seeing, and pixelated in the middle so you would imagine what was behind it, and there was nothing behind it. "On the Right there's sloppy journalism, mistakes, sometimes lies. But it's shameful to lie. On the Left, if you lie for a good cause, you're not forgiven, you're a hero."
He knows the cost. He wrote in Haaretz, years before it became conventional wisdom, that the bribery charge in the Netanyahu trial would not stand. Colleagues at the paper called for his column to be shut down for spreading fake news. Eventually, he was let go.
God, and the story
Taub is not religious and does not pretend to be. He was critical of political theology, he said, because bringing God into an argument ends the argument. "You can't argue against God."
But he does not sneer. He envies the religious for what he learned from an anthropologist, Clifford Geertz: that religion preserves a sense of meaning without having to answer the question of meaning. If your son is killed in a war, there is still a guarantee that it means something. He cannot get there himself. "After the Holocaust, I can't see that there could be any plan behind this." Belief, he said, is not something you argue your way into. "And I despise people who think religion is dark and retrograde and something we should have outgrown."
What worries him is not observance but the story. A Judaism reduced to vague ethnicity and a nice talk show, he said, will melt away. And the same goes for the state. Ben-Gurion was militantly secular, "and he read the Bible. His Hebrew was the most biblical of any politician. He knew chapter and verse." The draft Declaration of Independence called it the eternal Book of Books. "Because he understood that without preserving the Jewish story, there is no Jewish people."
We ran out of time, and I told him I had a dozen more questions. He said he would come back. As he stood up, I teased him about being one of those Jerusalemites who moved to Tel Aviv.
"I am from Jerusalem," he said. "I teach in Jerusalem." He paused. "Now it feels like slightly hostile territory. But I'll manage."