INTERVIEW: Know Thy Enemy

Having grown up in Iran and served with distinction in the IDF’s elite 8200 intelligence unit, Eliyahu Yossian has gained insights that threaten Israel’s liberal secularists, from the right and left.

By Avraham Dov Greenbaum

 “So, I’m talking to an Iranian spy?”

I open the interview a bit brazenly, but Eliyahu Yossian isn’t taken aback. Over the past few months, he’s heard it all. He’s been called a spy, primitive, a throwback to the dark ages.

His response to his critics is to smile. “I call them enlightened ignoramuses,” he says. “They label anyone who thinks or speaks differently from them. The chareidim are primitive, the national religious are messianic, traditional nationalists are fascist, and sometimes neo-Nazi. I don’t get excited about it.”

Yossian burst onto the national scene as an in-demand analyst two months ago. On Motzoei Simchas Torah he was featured on all four major news channels, on all possible media.

The country, which had been captive to a false conception of Hamas, suddenly understood that it didn’t understand the Middle East, and turned to Yossian for help. Yossian, who grew up in Iran and served in the elite IDF intelligence unit 8200, offered fresh new insights.

It took a few weeks for the establishment media to grasp that Yossian was showing up their conventional wisdom as patently false, and so he became muktzeh on state broadcasts. For now, his image does not appear, and his views are no longer heard, except on Channel 14, the nationalist right-wing station.

What exactly bothered enlightened Israel so much about Eliyahu Yossian and his views? To answer the question, we have to delve into his life story.

In 1979, the Ayatollah Khomeini rose to power in Iran as part of an Islamic revolution that saw the overthrow of a pro-Western government that had good ties with Israel. The Islamic Republic had radical aspirations and a burning hatred for Israel. It suppressed its people and dispatched terror proxies around the world.

It was into this reality that Eliyahu Yossian was born.

Growing up in the Iranian Jewish community, he faced difficult conflicts from an early age. “Life in Iran was filled with dilemmas and tensions,” he shares. “It continues to this day. Not long ago, the Jews of Iran went out into the streets to identify with the Palestinians against Israel. There are people who are very divided between their Jewish and their Iranian identities. It’s a conflict over the feeling of belonging. Are you more Jewish, or more Iranian?”

His childhood memories are mainly images from the Iran-Iraq war that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. He remembers well the speeches of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. He was interested in the news and grew to admire the State of Israel.

“Until the age of 23, I lived in Iran,” he says. “I remember the Jewish community and its Rabbis. Until the age of 15, I stayed mostly inside the community, but later began blending into the local society.”

He decided to move to Israel, but it took time. “It was a slow, internal process,” he says. “The stories of Israel always made me feel proud and aroused a sense of admiration.

With aliyah on his mind, he got out of military service by studying civil engineering at Kashan University. “The truth is that I wanted to move to Israel from a young age, but my father wouldn’t allow it. In Iran, until the age of 18, your father is your legal guardian. After 18, you are transferred from his responsibility to the guardianship of the state, which forbids anyone from leaving the country before being drafted. However, you can defer military service if you take academic studies. I decided to go to university, where I studied for three years. At that point, I decided to leave everything and make aliyah.”

Moving to Israel wasn’t easy. It took courage and a willingness to sacrifice. “In the third year of my studies, the Majles [National Assembly] passed a law whereby students interested in leaving Iran would have to deposit several thousand dollars. … On leaving, one had to declare the destination and the duration of the trip. I declared that I was going to Turkey until a certain date and deposited the amount required. I left and never returned.”

From Iran he traveled to Turkey, where he entered the Jewish Agency and arranged his aliyah. “At long last,” he says with emotion, “my dream was realized. I made aliyah to Eretz Yisrael.”

A SICK COUNTRY

How were you received in Israel?

“To tell the truth, it was a disappointment. I was sure that I would arrive here and see Jews with fire in their eyes. But instead, I encountered a generation that was cut off, that didn’t understand their connection to this land, why they were living here. People have shaken off their historic past and live in the present, without thinking about the future.”

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The conversation with Yossian is fascinating. The Hebrew he learned in ulpan works overtime to come up with the words he needs to express his frustration.

“Israel is a sick country,” he says. “It has a chronic illness that it isn’t even aware of.”

I look at him uncomprehendingly. Is he referring to the politics between right and left, or the anarchy of demonstrations surrounding judicial reform that flooded the country in the past year? But Yossian insists that he’s not talking politics.

“This isn’t at all a question of right and left. This country is seriously sick.”

He puts his finger on the source of the illness: liberal secularism. “If you ask a Jew on the street to explain what right he has to live in Israel, if he’s religious, he will point to the Tanach and religious heritage and speak of the holiness of Yerushalayim. The nationalist Jew will speak of heritage and nachalah of the fathers. … But the liberal has no claim. … Liberalism is not an independent stream. It simply emptied the Jewish religion of its values and assets. And if you don’t have a religious perspective, you don’t have a heritage, you don’t have tradition, and you have no way to answer the question, why are you sitting on land that the other side claims belongs to it?”

So what needs to be done?

“First of all, be yourselves, be who you are. Stand proud behind a Jewish society. Without this basis, this cornerstone, you have no moral justification for being here. Without faith in the righteousness of your path you have no future here.

“In my opinion, you have to introduce this into the curriculum, to teach from the youngest age about our rights to this land. Children grow up here with studies that don’t deepen their connection to the land, and sometimes they’re taught things that do the exact opposite. It is a terrible injustice that the Education Ministry of the past two decades — which was under the control of nationalist-traditional elements — didn’t take a close look at the curriculum.”

How will this help Israel achieve victory over its enemies?

“If we don’t believe in the justness of our cause, we won’t be able to convince the world of it. How can I explain to outsiders something I myself am not convinced of?

“I am frequently interviewed by news agencies around the world, including in Iran. One Muslim corresponded with me and tried to understand my opinion. I asked him: Are you religious? Yes. Believe in G-d? Yes. Believe in the Koran? Yes. In Muhammad? Yes. Then I told him: Do you know that the city ‘Yerushalayim’ doesn’t appear in the Koran even once, but appears in the Tanach 669 times?

“I continued: Did you know that the Al-Aqsa Mosque was built 1,330 years ago, while Har Habayis and the Kosel were built 2,978 years ago — or to put it simply, the Jews predated the Muslims by 1,648 years? Our right preceded yours.

“And Yerushalayim is the third holiest city to the Sunni Muslims and the fourth to the Shiite Muslims — and, l’havdil, to the Jews it has always been number one. In addition, Yerushalayim was only for a short while the direction in which you prayed — before you traded it in for Mecca. The Jews never replaced Yerushalayim.

“I simply backed him up against the wall with the facts, with knowledge; and knowledge is power. You can see that when it comes to Yerushalayim, from a historical perspective, or religious or theological, the Jews have first rights over the Muslims. To this proven assertion there is no response.

“The Hebrew University of Jerusalem sits atop the ruins of an Arab village. So if you speak in the language of the United Nations … the Muslims are right. But if I base myself on the Tanach, or l’havdil elef havdalos, the Koran — then I’m right. It depends on which language you speak, and therefore I repeat: We must first change the terminology.

“I’m not telling the world, ‘Recognize me, because the great America recognizes me, or because the United Nations recognized Israel as a Jewish homeland.’ The response to that would be, ‘They recognize you? Very nice. Let them give you Berlin. What are you doing here, on this land, at the expense of the Muslims?’ Westerners have no answer to this.

“If our soldiers in Israel would know this theology, would know our right to exist here, they wouldn’t leave the battlefield until having totally destroyed the enemy.”

RELIGIOUS AND STATE

And it’s precisely these kinds of sentiments that have turned you into the scourge of the media?

“This isn’t my language, but the language of the Tanach. Go and learn from the wars of Dovid Hamelech, Gideon, and Devorah. The enemy that seeks your destruction is not a partner. With such an enemy you don’t make pacts, you don’t negotiate via Qatari mediators. Such an enemy must be eradicated. ‘He who comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.’

“I always say that you need to know the culture of the enemy; you don’t eat sushi in a place where they eat hummus. You don’t come in tailored suits to reach deals with barbaric people. Learn to recognize your enemy and you’ll be able to defeat him. A thousand signed agreements with our enemies will not stand up to a second of jihadi insanity.

“Look, this is a fact: In the first 40 years of modern-day Israel, we established a state, won wars, took Egypt and Jordan by the ears and forced them to sign peace treaties. In the past 30 years, we’ve returned territory — in southern Lebanon, Gush Katif — and received terrorism and nonstop missile fire. We can’t get peace with Syria and Lebanon; we go from war to war. Something’s gone off here.”

And this has been done by right-wing governments?

“There is no significance to right and left. There is a disease of liberal secularism, that the right is also infected with. Yoav Gallant and Benny Gantz are right wing in their orientation. Bibi [Netanyahu] is the symbol of secular liberalism. This is our problem. We are not us. We took a drop of kippah, a drop of tzitzit, a drop of flag, mixed it together and called it the State of Israel.

“We don’t have our own culture. Ask a Jew on the street for the date, and he’ll tell you December. He won’t know the date on the Hebrew calendar.

“If Jewish settlement turns into ‘settlements,’ if pioneers who come to settle the land are derogatorily labeled ‘hilltop youth,’ then something in the system is messed up. If Sharon evacuates Gush Katif and justifies a Palestinian hold on the land, we’ve lost our way and have no hold here. The result is that 18 years later, Mohammed tries to bring down the border fence and enter Kfar Aza and Be’eri.”

There are those who accuse you of taking the country backward to the Middle Ages, while the “enlightened” analysts are bringing us forward toward a more Western society.

I’ll ask you, in your opinion, is Israel more advanced than Iran? So how is it that Iran sits on our fence and not the opposite? The Iranian regime is a religious regime, which on average every seven years has taken control of another state in the region. Over the course of 44 years of the Islamic regime, they were stuck in the mud of the Iran-Iraq war for eight years. In the remaining 36 years they took control of Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Gaza. So they aren’t advancing?

“Iran today is among the five leading countries in the world when it comes to the number of engineers it graduates. There is no clash between religion and advancement. You can be religiously zealous and at the same time advanced. And I would add: The more Western you will be, the more they will hate you.”

And if I will be more Jewish, they will hate me less?

“No, but you will have the power to defend yourself. In war, every combat soldier needs to know who he is fighting and what he is fighting for. We have a situation where soldiers know who they are fighting for, but no idea what they are fighting for. This is no way to defeat the enemy.”

To sum up, in your view, Israel is not worthy of its state when it practices liberalism?

“Correct. There is a trademark by the name of Israel. Who is Am Yisrael? The Jewish nation! What is Eretz Yisrael? The land of the Jews. What is the State of Israel? The state that the United Nations recognizes. Israel is a word that encompasses a religion and a nation, and you can’t separate the two. Comes along the liberal and wants to separate between state and religion.

“There is a sukkah in the middle of the city square. It is not relevant whether I enter it. This is a Jewish state and a sukkah is part of its fabric, but the liberal speaks of ‘religious coercion.’ This is something I call a disease that must be treated from the root, from first grade.

“Therefore, I wrote that it is forbidden for the government to fund a school that gives a liberal education. And for this they wrote about me that I am bringing the Iranian culture to Israel.

“Remember this: In the Middle East they speak theology. There is no place for Western liberalism here.”

VOCAL MINORITY

Yossian arrived in Israel in 2003 and was sent to Kibbutz Be’erot Yitzchak, where he learned Hebrew and began reading the Israeli newspapers. From the first moment, he knew that he wanted to serve in the elite intelligence unit 8200, but he couldn’t get security clearance as long as any members of his family were still in Iran. A few years later, when the last of his relatives left Iran, he joined the unit.

He can’t discuss what he did in 8200, but suffice it to say that he received a prestigious security prize and a citation of excellence for his work there.

This fact is difficult to swallow for the enlightened liberals who try to undermine his credibility.

“They have difficulty with the fact that I served in the system for 15 years and understand the army and security.

“The public sees in me a contradiction to their value system, difficult to digest.”

So half the country is not on your side?

“It’s really not half the country. It’s a vocal minority that controls the media and the judicial system. I don’t think that half the country are liberals. Much less. Look at the map of the mandates in the last election. There were 64 official mandates for the religious/nationalist camp and another 15 for the Arab public. … We’re left with about a third of the country that champions liberalism. Not more than that.”

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The more I talk with Yossian, the more I understand why the establishment is afraid of him. He speaks with Jewish pride that you don’t hear today. While everyone else is trying to be “enlightened” vis-à-vis the Western world, he tells it like it is: “You are cut off. Cut off from your historic past and from spiritual life, and thereby granting legitimacy to the enemy.”

Some will accuse you of challenging secularism.

“Not at all. There was once here common ground among all Jews — religious, secular, traditional — Jewish nationalism. Herzl, Jabotinsky, Begin … all wrote about Jewish nationalism.

“Liberalism stole the narrative and created a situation that is called ‘modern Zionism.’

“Our ‘primitive’ fathers read every year on the Seder night, for 2,000 years of galus, ‘Next year in a rebuilt Yerushalayim.’ Show me one secular liberal that has such staying power and faith in the justness of his cause. They swim in a secularism that is 200 years old, and I swim in faith that is 2,000 years old. “My fathers, under the boot of the Romans, called out, ‘Next year in rebuilt Yerushalayim,’ under the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Nazis, the Arabs, the Persians — always, always knowing and believing, ‘Next year in rebuilt Yerushalayim.’”

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This article originally appeared in Hamodia Prime magazine.