Dan Senor

• Why Dan feels October 7, 2023, was the most important event in Israel in his lifetime (5:35)
• How the conversation about this war inside Israel is more complicated than people realize (22:19)
• Why people throughout Arab nations are tuning in to Dan's show (8:35)
• The 7 fronts Israel is fighting on right now (20:53) What Americans are getting wrong about the war (18:16)
• The source of conflict that isn't getting enough attention (20:32)
• What Israel does differently that helps make their people more resilient (24:26)
• Lessons Dan drew from his mother, who narrowly escaped the Holocaust (36:26)

FRANK BLAKE: So Dan, welcome to Crazy Good Turn podcast.

I gotta start by saying that I've been a faithful listener to your podcast Call Me Back, particularly since after October 7th.

You've done just an extraordinary job.

And my first question is, I want to ask so immediately after the October 7th attack, you had a podcast on October 8th, and since then, you've really devoted the coverage of your podcast to the impacts of the attack and Israel's response and the larger response in the Middle East and throughout the world.

Why did you make the decision to focus your podcast that way?

DAN SENOR: Well, first of all, thanks Frank for doing this.

I, we, we've known each other for some time, but we've never actually had a recorded conversation.

FRANK BLAKE: Right.

DAN SENOR: So it's great to do that.

I was focused, the podcast was focused on a number of issues long before October 7th that included a lot of geopolitics, a lot of focus on the Middle East, the Russia, Ukraine War, China, China and Taiwan.

We were focused a lot on American politics, the interplay between geopolitics and American politics.

We were focused on a lot of macroeconomic issues.

And included in all of that was, as I said, the Middle East and Israel.

I would do probably every third or fourth or fifth episode was something related to Israel.

And then obviously after October 7th, on October 7th, I realized this was the most important event in the life of Israel.

And it, and I think in the life of the diaspora, the Jewish community around the world, in my lifetime.

I can't think of another moment, in my lifetime, perhaps the fall of the Soviet Union, which led to hundreds of thousands, millions of Jews from the former Soviet Union finally being free.

That was, that was a major event.

I can think of the Second Intifada was a major event.

The second Lebanon war was a major, these are major events, but in terms of its role in the history of the Jewish people and the history of the state of Israel, there's the October 7th was in a category of its own.

And I realized that that was where my head and heart were and where my passions were, and I was going to be consuming information and having conversations with my Israeli friends nonstop from that moment.

And I figured I might as well just record these conversations, and to the extent that they are almost like an audio journal of what we were all thinking during that time.

And also a way to use my contacts, my friends, my colleagues in Israel to help explain to the world the challenges and, and the dilemmas facing Israel as it dealt with this historic tragically genocidal attack against its country and the against Israel, and the implications going forward.

And so, I just, it was just intuitive.

My producer Ilan Benatar, who's Israeli, he and I just, it, it was just the two of us.

And we just said, okay, we gotta pivot.

And we just started, and then we just started doing, I just started calling my friends in Israel, by the way, the weekend of October 7th, I just started calling my friends in Israel to say, how you're doing checking in is one, many people who live abroad from Israel know that's what they were doing on October 7th, is checking in with people.

And one of those people was a gentleman by the name of Haviv Rettig Gur, who you've probably gotten to -

FRANK BLAKE: Yes. Gotten to know through the podcast. Yeah.

DAN SENOR: He's an amazing guy.

I'm actually seeing him today. I'm having lunch with him today. He's in New York City.

But he was so powerful. And that was the first conversation I had after October 7th that we posted.

I said to Haviv, we've gotta record this conversation. And we posted it and it went viral.

And I thought, okay, there's, people want understanding.

People wanna understand nuance.

People want to hear from Israelis. People wanna hear the conversation happening inside Israel.

And so we just, we just went for it.

FRANK BLAKE: Have your goals for the podcast changed over time?

As you've developed this, you know, as it's gone on sadly far longer than anybody would've thought.

DAN SENOR: That's a good question.

What I'll tell you what I've learned since, since from the podcast, since October 7th, which I didn't know at the time.

Because I just didn't spend time thinking about it. I had no reason to, before October 7th.

One, I've learned that there is extraordinary demand among folks I wouldn't have expected to understand the conversation - not happening between the Israeli government and the American people, I mean the Israeli government blasts out its message and the press here covers it.

Not in American journalists' interpretations of what's happening in Israel.

But there's extraordinary demand for the conversation happening inside Israel, between Israelis, between Israel.

It's a, it's a vibrant, thriving, messy democracy.

And there's a, there's a rich, often very divisive, very intense conversation happening among Israelis.

And there's enormous demand for understanding what's going on in that conversation, because people realize it's much more complicated than one would think.

FRANK BLAKE: Right.

DAN SENOR: And, and so we've captured a lot of those conversations.

I didn't know that there would be huge demand for that, but there is, A.

B - what I also didn't know is there's extraordinary demand for history, for getting educated.

I've been blown away by this, frankly.

Like, I, you know, I am been involved with Israel for a number of years.

My really, my entire, from college days on, even younger, I've written, I've co-authored two books about Israel. I've spent a lot of time on Israel.

I kind of took for granted that the resources that were out there that help explain Israel's history, tell its story, were updated and modernized.

And what I realized after October 7th is they're not. That, that the degree to which there's a demand for education, was surprising to me.

I just didn't realize the resources had become outdated.

I mean, just to give you a sense, the episodes.

So we do no planning about what we're trying to achieve with an episode.

We, we, we just, it's sort of like what's interesting to us. We record and we sort of look - probably what you do.

It's what's interesting to us. And then we record it and post it.

So I'm very interested in history. I'm very interested in how we got here.

So I have a lot of dense, which someone could argue boring and, and heavy episodes, very wonky episodes about the history of UNRRA, the history of the two state solution, the history of I mean, I can go on and on and on.

The origins of the '48 War of Independence, those episodes, which are long, and I would say boring, but interesting to me, are some of our highest performing episodes.

FRANK BLAKE: So people want, and I've just gotta say, as a listener and not Jewish, and not having deep knowledge of Israel beforehand, not boring in the slightest.

DAN SENOR: Okay, good. Well, I didn't know that.

I didn't know that.

FRANK BLAKE: You are your version of "Fauda" on a podcast. I, you sort of get the complexity of this, and it's, it's riveting.

DAN SENOR: So, so I think so I didn't, I didn't expect that, like how much demand there is for history.

People wanna get educated.

And then the last thing I would say is, I have been surprised, I gotta be careful how I say this, but, but my politics, at least in the U.S. and as it relates to us, foreign policy tend to be right of center.

And what I have been struck by is how much of our audience is left of center.

And meaning, I think there are a lot of people who live outside of Israel, particularly Jews whose politics are generally left of center, but they feel like they don't have a home now because they're not allowed to in many of their political or, or ideological communities oriented communities.

They're, being a Zionist is not welcome.

That's like, they can't, those communities don't let people reconcile being a, a liberal and being, and being pro-Israel.

And they found, they have found, at least on my podcast, some of my guests are just that.

So take someone like Scott Galloway, who is a very proud, unapologetic liberal, and is a very angry Zionist because he thinks the Jews in Israel are being held to a standard that no other people are, are whatever be expected to be held to.

FRANK BLAKE: A great, he has a great example of what would happen if it happened in the United States, the equivalent, right.

Which is something like somebody coming in and taking an entire class at Baylor University back to, you know?

DAN SENOR: Right, exactly. Kidnapping them. Exactly.

And so, and putting them in a tunnel somewhere in the, in Mexico, that's what he says, hiding them in Mexico.

And so, and so when someone like him, Scott, comes on, and it's not just Scott, but he's an example, I just think there's a lot of liberals who gravitate to the podcast, otherwise wouldn't.

So it's more like what I'm surprised by what I've learned.

And, I, my view is I'm just gonna keep doing what I'm doing.

The one thing I think we're gonna do more of, I guess one goal that like has, has now become a goal of ours, which I just didn't think of as a goal at first, is we're gonna be much more deliberate now about these history-focused episodes, because we just think there's a vacuum out there and we want to fill it.

FRANK BLAKE: Well, I would encourage all our listeners to go back through your episodes because they are fascinating and just incredible learning, and incredibly important.

I have a, this is a modest question, but it's curious to me.

So you begin each of your Call Me Back episodes with a timestamp.

DAN SENOR: Yeah. And -

FRANK BLAKE: You have a time in New York, and you have a time in Tel Aviv.

DAN SENOR: Yeah.

FRANK BLAKE: I find that interesting. Why do you do that?

DAN SENOR: The reason we started doing it is because soon after October 7th, we were doing like three or four episodes a week because news was happening so quickly.

And we were bringing on our guests, our cast, our ensemble, you know, of, of guests to come on to react often, or analyze or make sense of news developments.

And the problem is, is because the news was moving so quickly during those early months, often I was concerned that if we had a conversation, and we often, as you know, you have a podcast, so we will record a conversation at one hour, but we won't post, post it for hours later.

Our, our, our podcast was initially not intended for an Israeli audience.

It was intended for an audience outside of Israel.

What we soon discovered is we've developed a massive audience inside Israel.

So we're one of the, we have one of the largest audience podcasts among podcasts for Israelis.

And a lot of Israelis were complaining, you know, you release episodes on a US schedule, so we don't get to listen to the episode on our morning commute.

So that's why we always release episodes at midnight.

So, like for instance, last night we released a episode at midnight, and then it's 7:00 AM in Israel.

So, we have this gap between when we record the episode and when we release it.

And often news would happen during that gap.

News would happen from when we, when we finish, recording and when we post it.

And if news had happened, we didn't want our listeners to say, well, what, wait a minute, they're, they're, they're talking about X, but Y has happened. Why wouldn't they talk about Y?

And so we by time stamping it, we're letting our listeners know, don't worry, we didn't miss talking about whatever's transpired.

We just want you to know when we're recording and dropping this conversation, so you know that if something happened since you can… So that's why we started it.

Now, since October 7th, or sorry, since those early months, the news has slowed down a bit.

Not entirely, but it's slowed down a bit.

So we don't really need to do the timestamp anymore.

I don't, but then with certain episodes where we didn't do the timestamp, our listeners would reach out to us and say, what do you mean no, timestamp?

They, like, for some reason, people love the timestamp.

That's, I don't know why they find it like a, i, I don't know, it's like a calming thing or something.

FRANK BLAKE: Oh, I think it's very much like an Edward R. Murrow from London.

Here's where we are.

DAN SENOR: Right.

FRANK BLAKE: A place, it's, it makes it very tangible.

DAN SENOR: Okay. All right. Well, there you go. Yeah.

In fact I'm doing this special series now to reflect on the one year anniversary.

And for that, those are, those are long form, very long form, like over an hour conversations that we intend to you know, hopefully live for a long time.

And so they're bigger picture, they're not focused on the news at all.

And so for those, we're not timestamping it, but we're putting those on YouTube.

They're video interviews, but otherwise, listeners should know we're not giving up the timestamp.

FRANK BLAKE: Have you been surprised by, I'll call it the arc of the response here in America since October 7th, where we could, not ended, but where we could recently have an American hostage shot with really remarkably little reaction here?

DAN SENOR: It's one of the most depressing things to me about this past year. there's a lot of things to be depressed about, so there's a lot to choose from.

But it's about, you know, if you think about the, the hostage crisis in Iran in the, in 1980, in the last year of the, of the, of the Carter administration, you know, the idea of Americans being held abroad was being covered literally every single day.

Nightline with Ted Koppel, that show was started to just cover day-to-day.

The idea that there are American hostages being held somewhere.

You look at the Britney Griner hostage taking more recently in Russia or Evan, the journalist with the Wall Street Journal, who was held hostage, I mean, in prison, but really held hostage.

Everyone over here was fixated on it. Everyone knew who these people were.

Brittany Griner became a household name.

There was a sense of a national cause around it, national American cause.

And the idea that American Jews being held in the dungeons of Gaza are somehow held to a different standard, is shocking to a degree, but also very revealing of this moment which we can get into.

But I, yeah, it's just amazing to me.

I mean, if I know for, take Hersh Goldberg-Polin, for instance, who was just executed a little over two weeks ago I know his parents I know the family.

They are, I've had them on the podcast.

I had them, last spring when the video was released of Hersch.

And they came on my podcast to talk about it.

They are the most American people you could imagine. I mean, really, for some reason they don't count.

And I think that's illustrative of a, of a deeper something much deeper going on here.

That, that Jews are generally just held to a different standard.

FRANK BLAKE: And are there things that, I mean, as you've looked over the past year, first, it is amazing, there's been almost a year as you, as you look, is there, is there a knowledge base or ignorance with the American people that's been surprising?

I mean, do you go, I wish they knew more about this, or I wish they took the time to know more about this?

Or do you think it's sort of a willful ignorance?

DAN SENOR: One would be that the Jews have been in Israel and the land of Israel for thousands of years.

The Jews didn't just show up in 1948, or in the years preceding the founding of the state, the Jews have so - so this idea that the Jews were somehow, you know, colonialists or representatives of colonialists or whatever the, the narrative is, just any basic understanding of Jewish history, of history, period, gives lie to that, canard.

Second is, I wish Americans could understand that Israel left Gaza in 2005. Israel left Gaza.

I feel like I have to say that over and over Israel left Gaza.

The idea that that the massacre of October 7th was in any way, a legitimate or quasi legitimate response to an occupation is, again, belied by just basic history.

Israel left Gaza in 2005.

Hamas took over in Gaza after Israel was gone in 2006, and decided that instead of building what Israel had left, which as many envisioned could have been like a Singapore on the, on the Mediterranean, it's a beau - I've been to Gaza, by the way.

It's a beautiful strip of land. Beautiful. And it, could be an extraordinary asset.

And Israel left behind when it, when it left Gaza in 2005, when it, when it had its own military, go door to door in Israeli settlements in Gaza, and forcibly remove its own citizens from their homes.

They left behind homes and greenhouses. And they were all lit on fire and burned by, by Hamas, by Palestinians after Israel was gone.

So Israel's gone. So, so this idea that Israel is responding, that the massacre of October 7th was some kind of response to an Israeli presence is absurd.

And the same goes for the North Israel, left Southern Lebanon, 1999, 2000 Israel's out of there.

So Hezbollah's in Southern Israel, Southern Lebanon, Israel is not, so, what is the basis for the Hezbollah attacks, constant barrage of attacks against Israel?

There's no, there's no territorial dispute. There's no, so, so what?

So, so that's the idea that these, these attacks against Israel are somehow a response to Israel's presence in these places is not true.

And the third thing I wish Americans understood, and this is probably the most important, is too many people tend to think of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the conflict.

And the reality is it's just one front in a much bigger conflict.

And that much bigger conflict is Iran's ambition to annihilate the state of Israel, which they've said quite explicitly that that is their intention.

They have an annihilation strategy.

I think they're going to pursue that strategy more robustly.

Now in the post-October 7th World, and they have a number of fronts from which to squeeze Israel.

There's Hezbollah in the north, there's the Houthis, there's Syria, there's some radicalized Palestinian groups in the West Bank, and there's Hamas or what was left, what is left of Hamas in the South.

And then there's obviously Iran's own capabilities, which could become nuclear capabilities very soon.

Their intention is to squeeze Israel from every direction.

I think there's currently a seven-front war against Israel, and it's all being orchestrated by Tehran.

And to fixate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is to fixate on just one front of a much bigger war.

It would be Matti Friedman, who's a very thoughtful Israeli journalist and observer of Israeli events, who lives in Jerusalem, who I've had on my podcast twice, three, twice actually recording him again soon.

He, you know, he makes this point that to talk about the Israeli Palestinian conflict would be like during World War II, or looking back at World War II, we'd talk about, you know, America's, the Allies' war with Italy.

Like what war with Italy? What do you, what do you mean the war?

It wasn't, it was a world, yes, but there was this war with Italy, but to, to focus on America's war, the west's war with Italy during World War II is to actually believe it was an isolated event that was worthy of understanding in its own isolated way.

But of course, you can't understand the West's war with Italy or the Allies' war with Italy without understanding where it fit into the broader world, second World War.

And I would say to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is to understand Iran's war against Israel.

And once you understand what Israel's up against you wonder why Israel hasn't taken even a stronger position against Hamas.

FRANK BLAKE: Right. Those are three brilliant, brilliant points.

Shifting gears some, because your show is also very effective in identifying some of the stresses within Israeli society, very logically and emotionally powerful ways, just given the horror and the attacks they're facing.

And you have a really interesting view of Israel's and Israeli resilience and how that comes about.

Do you want to discuss that a bit?

DAN SENOR: I co-authored a book with the same gentleman I co-authored "Startup Nation" with named Saul Singer, who's my, who lives in Jerusalem.

He's my brother-in-law, actually. And we're very close friends in addition to being family.

And we wrote a book called "The Genius of Israel," and the subtitle is "The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent World."

And we wrote this book before October 7th. We wrote this book, not anticipating October 7th, but of course, it's become as relevant in the post-October.

The book was published on November 1st, which is, you know, means that we had to write it well before October 7th.

We wrote it and, and, and is like many, including the New York Times book review of all places, which I normally don't count on for a fair review, said that the book, the "Genius of Israel" to come out after October 7th, is, you know, a year which Israel has had a very tumultuous year, not just October 7th, but the divisive debates inside Israel over judicial reform, which dominated much of 2023 for Israel, to have a book called "The Genius of Israel" seems like the worst possible title, worst time title.

And he says, and yet the reviewer said in the Times, he says, yet, if Israel manages to dig out of this major setback, this book will explain how they did it.

Because it's a book that explains why Israelis are so resilient.

Now, I'm not gonna go through all the factors.

Hopefully your listeners will buy the book.

FRANK BLAKE: Yeah.

DAN SENOR: But I will say a few things.

One, it is a country that prioritizes service and public service among above, most everything else.

So the, you know, average Israeli, not all, but most Israelis at formative periods of their lives serve in the military - ages, you know, males for three years, females for two years, unless they go on to serving an officer, you know, do officer training, or they serve in an elite unit or, or they get called up for reserves like they, many of them are now, but they basically serve for a few years.

And it's definitional in Israeli life.

I mean, your connection to Israeli society, your status in Israeli society, is very much your reputation in Israeli society is largely driven by your military service.

And what that does, Frank, is it, is it puts, it puts a sense of, country above self, meaning there's a sense that, some things are larger and more important than just, just me.

Me being part of something larger, a family, a community, and a country is, is the priority.

That's very important when a country faces a setback.

When a country faces a setback, that individuals feel connected to that country, to the point that they're willing to put their life on the line, on the lines for that country. A.

And, and by the way, the sense of service begins before military service.

If you look at every stage of Israeli life, which we show in our book, Israeli youth from every stage of their life, are raised with this sense of national and communal purpose.

Two, the role of ritual in Israeli life.

And it's everything from religious ritual.

So we have a chapter in the book called Thanksgiving Every Week where we say, we argue that Israel has its equivalent of an American Thanksgiving every Friday night.

Most of the country shuts down.

Families are together every Friday night for the Sabbath, often multiple generations.

And they, and, and they just, families stay connected to each other.

And again, that sense of, I'm part of something larger than just myself, my own life, my own success, my own material gain.

I'm connected to a multi-generational experience.

I'm connected to a family and a and a people, and a country that has this long history that I can help shape.

And then even non-religious rituals.

So Israel's, we write a lot about in the book about Israel's Independence Day and Israel's Memorial Day.

I'm always struck when Israelis come to the U.S. if they're here, friends of mine, and they're here around our Memorial Day, and they're perplexed when they hear things like, what on earth is a Memorial Day sale?

Like, what's, like, they, they see these advertise memorial, they're like memorial, isn't it Memorial Day to honor people who've given their lives for the country, and it's now a sale and a barbecues, and, you know, and so in Israel, Memorial Day is, first of all, they, they have Memorial Day and Independence Day back to back.

So, so they're one day apart.

So the idea is you go through the loads of Memorial Day where you're honoring people whose lives have been lost.

And you go right into Independence Day, which is celebratory, but it's because it's against the backdrop of Memorial Day.

Independence Day means something, meaning people understand we don't get this, the independence and freedom without that, which is sacrifice, people sacrificing their lives and the whole country.

If, if your listeners haven't been there, I, I always tell people, if you, if you're going to Israel for the first time, if you can, time it try to go on is Israel's Memorial Day, or be there around then, because what you see is on Memorial Day, there's a siren that goes off across the country, an air raid siren, and for two minutes, approximately that siren bellows, and the whole country stops.

People, cars on highways stop.

People get out of their cars and stand in silence together. People leave office buildings, university classes, schools, restaurants, whatever.

Everyone stops for two minutes.

And in that two minutes, of course, they're, they're remembering their individual loss, but there's also a collective experience where they're, where they're, where they're remembering those who put their lives above all else for the country.

And the fact that all Israelis share in that experience is, is so, so I just think ritual is so important to, to resilience.

I think if you, if you teach young people that service is important, and some things are more important, important than their own individual ambition, if you ground them with a sense of religious ritual, communal ritual, and, and then a sort of national ritual that ties them to their history and ties them to the country's future, you add all these things up and others we write about, it gives people resilience.

They have shock absorbers on how to like bounce back from setbacks.

FRANK BLAKE: So I, there are two quotes that stick with me from your book, which we are gonna give away to our listeners.

You talk about the optimism within the country, and there's one, there are two great phrases.

One was you quote someone as saying, it's not about being optimistic that things will work out.

It's about being optimistic about what happens when they don't.

DAN SENOR: Right.

FRANK BLAKE: Does that survive this event?

DAN SENOR: So obviously, I hate to make a full throw of prediction in real time during a real time crisis.

It's a great question, but I think, yes.

And, and the, what I'm basing that on so far is, well, first of all, while I said that, Israel has, this is the, the worst event and the most historic event, tragically in the history of the Jewish people in the history of Israel, in my lifetime Israel has experienced major setbacks.

And the, and the period I look to and point to that I think is most illustrative of this is the 1970s.

In 1972, you know, there was the massacre at the Munich Olympics where Israelis were slaughtered by a Palestinian terror group in Munich, 1973, Israel's completely caught off guard by the Yom Kippur war, by the attacks from Egypt and Syria and others.

And, and this was after Israelis were feeling triumphant from the 1967, six day war, 1974, you had Maalot, which is a town up in Northern Israel, where there was a terrorist group that had come into Israel from, from southern Lebanon, and took over an Israeli school, massacred a massive number of, of Israeli children.

It was quite brutal.

These are all massive setbacks, by the way.

But 1974 was also peak period for the Soviet Union, basically declaring any Jew in the Soviet Union that wanted to leave to go to Israel was gonna lead a miserable life trapped in the Soviet Union.

There was a policy, that was implemented. 1975, the United Nations General Assembly passes a resolution defining Zionism as a racist.

Okay, so I just described to you 1972, 1975, any one of those events would be tragic.

1976, by the way, I can keep going.

1976, you had the Entebbe terrorist operation in Uganda, which, which were Jews were separated from non-Jews, and they just assumed they were all gonna be slaughtered.

Fortunately, there was this heroic rescue, 1976, and then, so this was like a very dark period, '72 to '76.

And then 1977, Anwar Sadat, the president of Egypt, flies to Israel, goes to Jerusalem, goes before the Knesset Israel's parliament, and says, I want peace with Israel.

I want, you know, mutual recognition. I recognize Israel's right to exist.

And basically, within two years, there was a peace treaty, a formal peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, which for all its flaws and complications is still held.

And, and then, you know, obviously it's not to say that Israel hasn't had setbacks after that.

I don't think you could imagine such a stunning turnaround from such despair in the first part of that decade.

And then, you know, the possibilities of normalization, at least with one of Israel's longest standing, largest, most powerful enemies in the end of that decade.

And so I think things can turn around and they can turn around, you know, in unexpected ways relatively quickly.

And I think a, a big reason they can, and they will in Israel's case, is because Israelis, despite the despair right now about the length of the war, despite the degree to which Israel's not equipped for fighting this kind of war, though it's learning to meaning the length of the war which Israelis are not.

You know, this is the longest war Israel's fought since Israel's War of Independence.

They, and then despite the, the tense debates inside Israel about how Israel navigates going forward this war, Israelis are still committed.

There aren't reservists who are refusing to serve Israelis are still in net numbers returning to Israel, not leaving Israel.

Sure, there are some Israelis that are leaving Israel, but they're statistically insignificant.

The more interesting thing is, I mean, Israel's population, it's literally, it's population grew something by like 7 or 8% in October of 2023.

Meaning while the massacre was happening in the immediate aftermath of the massacre, Israelis living abroad or traveling abroad were fighting to get plane seats back to Israel.

They weren't like, wow, phew. I dodged a bullet literally and metaphorically, I dodged a bullet.

I wasn't in Israel when this happened. And I'm, I'm, I'm working at Intel in, in the Bay Area. I'm working at, or I'm traveling in Asia.

Oh, thank God I missed that, and I'll just return when things calm down.

No, they were, they were, they were doing everything they can, everything they could to get on planes back to Israel.

And so I think Israel's the only country in the modern history that whose population grew during wartime rather than shrunk.

And so, or at least maintained the same size.

And so I, I think all this, what all this speaks to is Israelis are not giving up on their country.

And, and so I remain cautiously optimistic.

We have a whole chapter in the book about, about just the fact that Israelis, even secular Israelis are having so many children, is is illustrative of, of a, of a dynamic forward-looking optimistic country.

So it's a country with a high fertility rate.

It's got the highest density of technology startups in the world outside of Silicon Valley.

It, it's got over 400 multinational companies with innovation centers and R&D centers in Israel.

And those R&D and innovation centers are not closing.

These are multinationals from all over the world, and despite all the stress in Israel, they're not shutting down.

And it is a country where people still feel connected to each other and to the country as, as articulated by these rituals I just talked about and expressed.

And in other ways too. I wouldn't bet against a country with those dynamics.

I wouldn't bet against the country with those dynamics anytime, especially while it's facing a seven front war, and those dynamics are still at play, I would put that country against any other country any day of the week.

So I, so I guess I'm rounding out by saying I'm, yeah, I'm optimistic.

FRANK BLAKE: Yeah.

And the other point in your book and this is now asking you to reflect on the implications here in the United States is you say, Israel, one of the sources of optimism is Israel's a country built on a story.

As is the United States.

What should the United States, what should Americans be learning from this?

DAN SENOR: From the Israeli story?

FRANK BLAKE: Yeah, yeah.

DAN SENOR: Look, it's, it's a story about a people that have been in a land for thousands of years, despite multiple empires trying to drive them, and sometimes successfully for periods of time out of, out of the land.

And a persistence to stay in the land, return to the land, and build a modern free liberal small-L liberal society that is, you know, open and dynamic and democratic and is a society that is not only a model for the world, because it's an island in the sea of chaos, meaning the region and, and still manages to thrive in all the ways I just described.

But it's also making a real contribution to the world through all its innovation when life sciences and dealing with climate challenges and, and dealing with security challenges and dealing with, I mean, I can go on and on and on, the way Israel is, helping the world become a better place.

And, and it is, it is like this mix of, it's a blend.

It's a balance between a sense of rootedness to history, community and family, and, and sort of forward looking this of how can we be a dynamic modern country in a, in a fast changing world.

And that it has struck this balance between the two is really is Israel's story.

FRANK BLAKE: Last question.

I ask this to everybody we have on the podcast, and, again, I thank you for what you're doing on your podcast.

Because I think that's a crazy good turn. Who has done a crazy good turn for you in your life?

Who's done something really kind, really important, had a big impact on your life?

DAN SENOR: I guess, and this is gonna be a cliche, but I'll, I'll say it nonetheless.

My mother, Helen Senor, who is a who's had massive disruption in her life at every stage of her life.

She's the child was a hidden child during the Holocaust. She's from Slovakia.

She's a survivor of the Holocaust. She was on the run as a little kid.

She was saved by, her life was saved by what we call a righteous Gentile, a non-Jew who risked his own life to protect the lives of Jews.

And then she moved to North America as a young girl, had a very difficult time as an immigrant.

Ultimately got married, had children, lost her husband, too early, early, too young, my father. She was a widow.

In her 70s, she made the decision to make Aliyah to move to Israel in the middle of the 2014 Israel, Gaza War, Israel Hamas war, despite us trying to discourage her from moving at that time.

I would just say, I can go on and on at every stage of her life.

She's, she's dealt with major, major challenges and adversity.

And, she kind of keeps all in stride, never panics, never gets hysterical, stays calm.

She is almost, to me like a walking… she embodies the Jewish story, the Israeli story of how do you, she's a religious woman.

She takes her Judaism very seriously in terms of, I think that's a part of her calm, that's part of her connection to a larger story, to your earlier question.

And, in so doing, she's become a role model for me. Because I deal with a lot of crazy, unpredictable events.

I try to make sense of major volatility in the world.

And I just, I think I have some calm in the midst of it all because of her model to me and her role modeling to me without even intending, just, just the way, by the way, she's lived her life.

FRANK BLAKE: That is brilliant.

This whole conversation has been exceptional. Thank you again, Dan, for what you're doing.

I just urge all our listeners to listen to your podcast. We're going to give away your book.

This is important at an incredibly important time in the history of not only the United States and Israel, but also I think the whole world.

So thank you.

DAN SENOR: Thanks so much, Frank. Really appreciate it.