For decades, historian Tom Segev has critically documented momentous events involving Jews, Israel and its neighbors. Recently, he has also looked back at his own life story. Now, at 80, he weighs in on the current state of the nation.
Only now, having reached the age of 80, is Tom Segev ready to admit that he was brought up on a lie. In recent years, the longtime historian and journalist who published numerous books and articles about the lives of others, has reexamined his own biography and discovered a few intriguing details. Ever since his father was killed, during the War of Independence, Segev believed that he was the son of one of the fallen in Israel’s wars – Pvt. Heinz Schwerin, who was “struck by a murderers’ bullet while on guard duty” in Jerusalem’s Arnona neighborhood. That’s the text that appears on the Defense Ministry’s Izkor commemoration site.
Segev, who was 3 at the time, remembers nothing, of course. His mother, Ricarda, told him, “from the day I was old enough to understand,” as he puts it, that his father “was shot by an Arab sniper.” She also received the War of Independence ribbon honoring his participation in the fighting after his death. At school, when classmates asked Tom about his father, “I was able to say that he was killed during the War of Independence and that I was a war orphan,” he recalls.
One person knew the truth all those years but kept it to herself: his older sister, Jutta, who left Israel in 1960 and moved to Germany – the country from which their communist parents had fled the Nazis, in 1935. Jutta, who went on to become a member of the Bundestag in The Greens party, was 7 during the 1948 war. On February 3, 1948, her father was assigned guard duty on the roof of a residential building not far from their home. Jutta accompanied him.
When they reached the building they found the front door locked. Jutta related that her father, 38 at the time, decided to climb up the drainpipe. When he had almost reached the third floor he lost his grip and fell to his death. Schwerin was laid to rest on the Mount of Olives. His name is inscribed on the monuments commemorating those who fell in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City and the fighters who were killed in the battle for Jerusalem.
’From Samson to Bibi
Tom Segev turned 80 on March 1, 2025. “Life is as a story. Like an endless series of stories. It’s astonishing,” he tells Haaretz during a conversation in his Jerusalem home, going on to talk openly and publicly about his own life story for the first time. While searching for more details about the circumstances of his father’s death in the War of Independence, an air-raid siren goes off and he moves to the protected space, waiting for updates about the missile that’s on the way from Yemen. “You couldn’t stage this interview more insanely,” he quips.
Segev’s career as a journalist, which began in the 1960s, encompasses his work at the legendary Hebrew University student journal Pi Haaton, as well as at the Al Hamishmar and Maariv dailies, Israel Radio, the newsmagazine Koteret Rashit – and Haaretz, where Segev published hundreds of reports and columns. He has written numerous books on Israel, the Jewish-Arab conflict, the Holocaust and other topics; some of his works are best-sellers and have been translated into a number of languages. These works have made the Zionist story accessible to the general public in a lively, vibrant way but also in a critical and iconoclastic light, as no one had done before him.
Segev is currently at work on his next project, an article for an Australian publication, that documents the Jewish history of Gaza. “From Samson to Bibi,” he says with a smile.
The vast experience he has accumulated has taught him a crucial lesson about writing history and about journalism in general. “The fundamental rule that guides me is skepticism. That’s another definition of freedom: to cast doubt on everything and to check everything.”
And now that you’ve reached the venerable age of 80, you have found time to apply that rule to yourself.
“I told myself: first of all, acquire proficiency and experience in working on the stories of others – only then will you be able to get a better handle on your own story. I did with myself what I do with others: I wrote about myself as though it’s the story of someone else. I treated myself as a story – I checked everything meticulously. I knew from the get-go that some of the stories I was told weren’t correct.”
He told his own exceptional life story in a memoir published only in Germany, “Jerusalem Ecke Berlin: Erinnerungen” ("Jerusalem Corner Berlin: Memories"). On the face of it, there’s something symbolic about Segev’s decision to publish it in his mother tongue. But since he writes only in Hebrew, it was translated into German by someone else.
The story about his father gives rise to multiple questions. For example: Why did his mother lie to him, and why did his sister wait until not so many years ago before telling him the truth? From Segev’s perspective, the most difficult question of all is, “How do I live from now on with this story, and what do I do with it? Where does it place me vis-à-vis real war orphans, widows and bereaved parents?”
In regard to his mother, he writes, “Perhaps it never occurred to her that I didn’t know [the truth]. Perhaps she still found it difficult to share with me the trauma that shaped her whole life.” His belated journey in quest of the truth led him to a family acquaintance who claimed that his father hadn’t actually shown up for a guard shift but to bring coffee to people on the roof. Segev also found a letter that a friend of his father had sent to mutual friends after his death.
“He climbed up to a height of about 10 meters and then fell. That is the factual situation,” the letter says. “Now there is an attempt to explain it somehow, service in the [pre-state Jewish army] Haganah and so forth – all in order for the Jewish Agency to pay… In any event, you don’t know anything, I beg of all of you. No money remains, either, only debts.”
So the friend who wrote the letter thought that a regular sort of accident wouldn’t have entitled your mother to a widows’ allowance, and he wanted to protect her by means of this lie.
“In this story I discern touching human solidarity among a small Jerusalem community that is defending itself. Everyone is trying to help, ready even to deceive the authorities of the coveted state that hadn’t yet come into being. All so that my mother could receive a widow’s allowance. Everyone knows and everyone agrees never to say a word. So maybe those are good reasons for not telling me the truth, either.”
Subsequently Segev approached the Defense Ministry unit dealing with war dead for more information. “I tried to find the first link in this story. How the words ’murderers’ bullet’ cropped up, who the first person was who articulated them and how exactly they insinuated themselves into the official truth.” All he managed to come up with was an envelope containing a few documents. One of them, from 1954, caught his eye. It was a memorandum from one clerk to another.
The Defense Ministry had then been preparing an Izkor (Remembrance) book and had collected data on almost 6,000 of those killed in the War of Independence. There were no details about his father. The document indicates that officials wrote his mother to ask for more information, but received no reply. There is no photograph of his father on the memorial website. “I never visited his grave on the Mount of Olives, which I can see from my apartment window. To this day I haven’t succeeded in explaining it,” he says.
What the monks wanted
Segev’s parents met in the famed Bauhaus school of design and architecture in Dessau. His mother, Ricarda, was studying photography; his father, Heinz, was an architecture student. When the Nazis came to power they found refuge in Mandatory Palestine, even though they were not Zionists. They made their home in Jerusalem, where Segev and Jutta were born. His parents made a living from a workshop for toys that they established. Segev still has some of the toys.
How did growing up without a father from the age of 3 affect your childhood?
“I have no memory of him. I can’t actually say I missed anything because I didn’t know anything else. I wasn’t really aware of it. I think I simply repressed it, because it couldn’t be that this was a normal situation. I am not self-aware enough to know – it’s not something I’m hiding. I simply don’t know how I grew up as a boy without a father.”
Your parents didn’t exactly fall in love with the Land of Israel, to put it mildly.
« After World War II, my father decided that he wanted to return to Germany, and he started to correspond with friends from his past. My parents started to plan their return to Germany. They were never Zionists and they wanted to go home. A month after the last letter my father wrote to a friend about how much he wanted to go back – he was killed.»
In his autobiography, Segev quotes letters written by his mother to family and friends back in Germany, in which she describes the difficulties of acclimating to life in Palestine. “There is a lot of shouting, dirt, a stench and masses of Arabs who are actually dressed like the people in the pictures in ’A Thousand and One Nights,’” she wrote about her first impressions upon disembarking from the ship.
In contrast, she painted a very different picture of Tel Aviv in her first letter from the country. “A clean city, almost European, fine modern homes, many cheerful young people and good shops in which you can buy everything at quite reasonable prices.”
For his part, Segev, however, remembers his mother telling him very different things about the first Hebrew city. “Tel Aviv looked to her like one big heap of sand… The heat was intolerable, so were the bugs,” he writes in the book.
During her first visit to Tel Aviv, she told him, she saw a white tablecloth on a restaurant table adorned with black dots – a sight that pleased her. He writes, “When she got closer, the black dots moved away. They were flies.”
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From Segev’s perspective, the most difficult question of all is, “How do I live from now on with this story, and what do I do with it? Where does it place me vis-à-vis real war orphans, widows and bereaved parents?”
Who or what does historian Tom Segev believe? The stories he heard from his mother, or the descriptions in the letters she sent her relatives? He generally leans more toward written documentation and recoils from relying on oral testimonies or human memory. Accordingly, he reacted with a smile to David Ben-Gurion’s comments, during a 1968 interview with him on behalf of the student newspaper that predated Pi Haaton, that the then-former prime minister had become a Zionist at the age of 3.
“Mr. Ben-Gurion, you knew that at the age of 3?” the young Segev wondered brazenly. “Of course, of course, naturally. We were all Zionists,” Ben-Gurion replied. “I thought maybe he didn’t have both feet on the ground,” Segev says now.
Today you are close to the age that Ben-Gurion was when you met. Have you learned over the years to be critical with regard to your own personal memories as well?
« Sometimes I discover that an event that I supposedly remember in great detail could not have taken place in that way. Generally, my story as I remember it is more interesting than what actually happened. It also improves with the years, and that greatly hampers the historian’s work. People don’t remember things, or they falsify them, maybe not intentionally, and hide them. And yes, you can also say right away that the transcript of a government cabinet meeting can also be falsified, and that a person might remember an event about which no documentation exists. But in order to write history, I must be sure of the facts.»
Over the years, Segev discovered a few more holes in the stories he grew up on. His mother related that his father had escaped from Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Germany before they left for Palestine. “I treated him as a genuine hero… It filled me with pride,” Segev writes. Later, he learned that the reality was different: His father could not have been incarcerated in Sachsenhausen, as the camp, outside Berlin, wasn’t established until 1936, when his father was already out of the country and safe.
The real story is that in 1933 his father was taken into custody with other students, who were suspected of betraying the homeland by having called for violent resistance to the Nazi regime. That happened in the Sachsenhausen quarter of Frankfurt.
One of the stories he remembers from growing up, between the War of Independence and the Six-Day War of 1967, is about a donkey that appeared near his house after wandering off, and the attempt to bring it back, at the end of which Segev and a friend were arrested by the Jordanians. “I really liked old-time Jerusalem and the weird people who wandered around here, before it became an intolerable city,” Segev notes.
Why did you decide to remain in Jerusalem?
« Most of my friends have left the city. I stayed out of habit and because from my window I can see the Old City walls, Mount Zion and the Dead Sea.»
Segev is an alumnus of Leyada – the Hebrew University Secondary School, a prestigious institution that typically perceived itself as the breeding ground for Israel’s intellectual elite. In his senior year he got a grade of 6 (out of 10) in the subject of Hebrew expression. “His achievements are no more than satisfactory and are not commensurate with his capabilities. He needs to learn how to organize his ideas more reasonably,” the teacher wrote.
Apparently you did learn at some point how to organize your ideas.
“All told, I was a pretty lousy student. I interrupted classes a lot and I wasn’t a happy kid. I really didn’t like school. And it didn’t like me very much, either.”
You ruined their 50th anniversary celebrations by writing in one of the newspapers: “You exerted heavy pressure on us and fostered an excessively competitive – and hence excessively frustrating – atmosphere. It seems to me that you were bent on imposing on us the belief that we were more talented and better than others… Among many of us there is something condescending and disconnected. I don’t like that.”
“The school was elitist and educated us to be university professors. Until the army I didn’t know there were also Moroccans in the world.”
Where did you do your army service?
«I was a librarian in the National Security College in Jerusalem.»
Around that time, he Hebraized his name: Thomas Schwerin became Tom Segev. During his military service, he now reveals, he was contacted by a representative of the Mossad who offered him the opportunity to study Chinese at Harvard and to work afterward for the agency. “When I hesitated for a moment, he said: ’In America you’ll get a car.’ I told him that it might be interesting, but that I didn’t want to be a spy under some streetlight in Hanoi.” The Mossad man corrected him. “Hanoi isn’t in China.”
Segev discovered his penchant for history at an early age when he started to collect autographs of famous people. “Not famous actors, only important people in history,” he explains. Like other children, he ambushed lawmakers outside Froumine House in downtown Jerusalem, where the Knesset was then temporarily located. He also wrote to statesmen abroad, asking for their autograph.
« It was pretty amazing, how people from all over the world answered my letters," he recalls. "But there were also a few scoundrels who didn’t answer me.» In addition to local figures – lawmaker and ministers – his collection includes autographs from Churchill and Kennedy, even though he later learned that the office of the American president had sent a facsimile of the signature, not the real thing, to young collectors like Segev.
In this context, Segev remembers an unusual story from his childhood in Jerusalem. “I was standing in the street and I saw two monks looking for something. I approached them and offered to help. They said they were looking for someone named Tommy. I told them it was me. They had a large envelope. It turned out that they were from the Vatican’s legation in the Old City.” Pope John XXIII had sent the 12-year-old Segev an autograph, at his request. Maybe, one wonders, that was related to the pontiff’s pro-Jewish stand and support for Israel.
Not a great success story
In 1977, before beginning to work at Haaretz, Segev served as the bureau chief of Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek. “I treated it as a journalistic experience,” he says. “Celebrities from all over the world came to visit him. One day I arrived at the office and found Kirk Douglas there. I said to him, ’Oh, my God, Frank Sinatra.’ He thought I was trying to be funny, but I actually was mixed up, because Sinatra had been there before him,” Segev muses.
After graduating from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem – with a bachelor’s degree in history and political science – he went on to complete a PhD in history at the University of Boston, writing his dissertation on SS officers who commanded concentration camps. The dissertation, based on documentation in the SS archives, was later published as “Soldiers of Evil” (English edition, 1991). After completing the archival part of his research for his doctorate, Segev embarked on a journey across Germany, in search of surviving camp commandants and of the deputies, aides, widows, children and acquaintances of those who had died.
“I would go to the local Kneipe [bar] and engage the bartender in conversation, or visit a priest at home. People would remember things: ’Yes, you mean the guy who became something important in the SS,’” he writes. In this way he got to the deputy of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, the son of the commandant of the Stutthof concentration camp and the commandant of another camp.
Segev reveals in “Soldiers of Evil” how it was that certain people enlisted in Germany’s mass murder campaign, describing who they were and what induced them to join the Nazi movement and the SS. He probes the nature of the officers’ willingness to serve in concentration camps and where the inner resilience came from that enabled them to execute their tasks.
“It was not easy to interview these people; the fact that I came from Israel made it even more difficult,” he writes. “They agreed to talk with me because their past haunted them and they didn’t know how to escape it. The questions I raised had bothered – and intrigued – them unceasingly for decades. This was the basis for our conversations. Each person hoped that he would succeed, albeit partially, in clearing his past.”
Following the trial in Israel of Adolf Eichmann, in 1961, the concept of the “banality of evil” – coined by philosopher Hannah Arendt, who believed that “we are all potential Eichmanns” – was much discussed. Segev knew Arendt personally, as a friend of his mother, and when they met up, he writes in the conclusion to the book, she sometimes snapped at him, “Why do you have to ask why the concentration camp commandants did what they did, or how they could have done it? They simply did it and that’s all there is to it.”
Segev did not back down. “She was wrong. Eichmann, for example, did everything he did out of deep ideological conviction. It’s not the banality of evil, which claims that everyone could do it,” he says. He writes in the book, “It is not the banality of evil that characterizes them [the camp commandants], but rather inner identification with evil.” From the personnel files of the commandants he concluded: “They were mediocre people, without imagination, without courage, without initiative... most of them seem to have had shallow personalities.”
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«Again and again the students were warned that the Holocaust meant that they must stay in Israel. They were not warned that the Holocaust requires them to strengthen democracy, fight racism, defend minorities and civil rights, and refuse to obey manifestly illegal orders," Segev writes.»
Segev acknowledges that among them were opportunists and sadists, as well as emotionless men who behaved like “robots.” However, his bottom line was different. “They were political animals who identified with the method,” he asserts.
Segev’s 1993 book “The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust” begins with a searing prologue titled “Ka-Tzetnik’s Trip.” One of the major scoops in Segev’s career (which he originally reported in Koteret Rashit), it describes the LSD treatment Auschwitz survivor and author Yehiel De-Nur, who wrote under the pseudonym Ka-Tzetnik, underwent after the Holocaust.
“He was disturbed,” Segev recalls. “It’s sad to say, but that’s simply how it was. One day he suddenly said to me: ’There were six million. Six million, they were. Where are the millions? Not even one remains.’ I said yes – and then it turned out that he was referring to 6 million shekels in the bank that he claimed was owed him as royalties for his books.”
In “The Seventh Million,” Segev describes the “rather long and strange conversations” the two writers conducted, in which his interlocutor “spoke from within the storm in his soul.” There were “long monologues, parts of which I did not completely understand and parts of which terrified me – memories of Auschwitz atrocities combined with mystical, apocalyptic visions.”
The encounter between Israelis and the Holocaust, Segev observes, has followed two main axes. One progressed from national insularity and xenophobia to universal, humanistic openness, while the other moved between Israeli identity and Jewish identity. The more the Holocaust receded, the more its presence deepened and evolved into a personal and family trauma that determined the course of life of Israelis, their emotional makeup and their worldview – from which they drew elements of their identity as individuals and as a collective, he adds. Between the great silence they imposed on themselves in the 1950s and their children’s school trips to death camps in Poland years later – the memory informed a series of fateful decisions that Israelis made between one war and the next.
And his text, from 34 years ago, could have been written yesterday morning: “The country was isolated, set apart from its surroundings. Its religion, culture, values, and mentality were different. It lived in insecurity.” External threats and an isolationist self-image unite Israelis and envelop them in a feeling of constant anxiety – and also make it difficult for them to create a permanent form of existence, he continues. The element of temporariness is dominant in the life they lead. The assumption is that anything could happen at any moment.
Segev found that the legacy of the Holocaust is amenable to being shaped and exploited according to different ideological and political exigencies, as he explained in “The Seventh Million”: “Again and again the students were warned that the Holocaust meant that they must stay in Israel. They were not warned that the Holocaust requires them to strengthen democracy, fight racism, defend minorities and civil rights, and refuse to obey manifestly illegal orders.”
Like many of your topics of research, such comments remain extraordinarily relevant today, as many in the Israeli leadership and public draw comparisons between the events of October 7 and the Holocaust, and between Hamas and the Nazis.
“[Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s remark that they are Nazis, and the declaration that October 7 is the worst thing that’s happened to the Jewish people since the Holocaust, are very problematic. During the War of Independence, 6,000 Israelis were killed. No such number was killed in the present war. Perhaps the Holocaust, as such a central element in the Israeli identity, is now involved in a competition. It could well be that the war [in the Gaza Strip] is overshadowing the memory of the Holocaust.”
Another one of Segev’s eye-opening books is “1949 – The First Israelis” (1986). In the course of researching the dramatic first year of the Jewish state’s existence, he uncovered Jewish Agency documents that for the first time revealed the discriminatory policies used against new immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa, while favoring newcomers from Poland. “The Jewish Agency Executive had come to the conclusion that the Polish Jews deserved a better reception than their predecessors,” Segev writes, referring to Mizrahim – Jews of Middle Eastern and North African origin – who had arrived a bit earlier.
“’There are many respectable people among them,’ it was said, by way of explanation. To spare them the hardships of the [transit] camps, it was proposed to house them in hotels… At the same time the Jewish Agency hastened to make arrangements for their permanent housing, [partly] in houses already earmarked for immigrants from Arab countries… Members of the Executive talked openly about giving preference to the Polish immigrants, and some said they should have special privileges.”
The documents Segev quotes speak for themselves. Eliahu Dobkin, a member of the Jewish Agency Executive and a signatory of the Declaration of Independence, is quoted as saying, “We must give this immigration [from Eastern Europe] special privileges and I am not afraid to say this,” and also: “An exceptional effort must be made to facilitate the absorption of these people.”
Dobkin’s colleague at the agency, Yitzhak Gruenbaum, who later became Israel’s first minister of the interior, stated: “We have to hurry so we’re not caught unawares and respectable people won’t have to go to the [transit] camps.” He added, “Instead of putting the Polish Jews in this situation, it would be best to do it with the Jews of Turkey and Libya. That won’t be hard for them… Will you put a doctor [from Poland] into a camp like Beit Lidd, or Pardes Hannah – how do you think he will feel, what will he think?”
In addition, Yitzhak Rafael, who eventually served as a lawmaker and cabinet minister for the National Religious Party, observed, “The Polish Jews have been living well. For them, the camps are much harder than for the Yemenites, for whom even the conditions of the camp mean liberation… These [Polish Jews] are not like the immigrants from Yemen, whose names you can hardly figure out. When a Polish Jew gets a loan he knows he has to return it.”
Two other books written by Segev in his distinctive style chronicle major periods in the history of the Israeli people and their state: “One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate” (2000), and “1967: Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East” (2007). The former was written in the period of the Oslo Accords. “I was very optimistic then,” he says. “What I was asking in the book was when the last time was that Jews and Arabs lived together and how it was.”
Yet Segev’s memory of feeling optimistic is also deceptive – reading the book’s conclusions today doesn’t leave much room for hope. He describes two competing national movements whose identities were forged in Palestine and which moved inexorably toward a confrontation. Thus, from 1917 on there were only two possibilities: Either the Arabs would defeat the Zionists, or the Zionists would defeat the Arabs. War between them was inevitable. Some members of the British administration identified with the Arabs, some with the Jews. Others were repelled by both sides. “I dislike them all equally,” one Mandatory official is quoted as saying.
Segev’s “1967,” which dealt with the Six-Day War and its aftermath, made headlines in the wake of a peculiar decision by the military censorship. The local publisher, Keter Books, was ordered to recall every copy of the book and to use whiteout to cover the half line that mentioned the words “unconventional weapons.” Once more Segev had uncovered acts of folly backed up by archival documentation. Journalist and author Amos Elon took note of this vividly in a review of the book published in Haaretz on July 22, 2005.
“Today we know that Israel’s triumph in 1967 was a Pyrrhic victory. Tom Segev’s ’1967’ makes that more clear than anything written on the subject,” Elon wrote. “Segev documents this historic tragedy brilliantly, authoritatively, as no one has before. For the first time, Israel had enough territory to trade for peace, but it passed up an opportunity to sign a treaty with Jordan just a few months after the war… [T]here was no leadership. It was not so much a dearth of ’great leaders’… but of enlightened leadership with a sense of history and an appreciation of what is liable to happen to a country that expands beyond its natural proportions, especially demographically… In consequence, the Six-Day War only led to another war, even more terrible, with an ever greater toll in human life. Tom Segev documents this historic tragedy.”
The debate over the outcome of that war still occupies us, at a remove of 58 years.
“The biggest mistake of Zionism is that, on the seventh day [of that war] we didn’t return to the Arabs everything we had – including East Jerusalem. None of that is of any interest to us. We should have returned those territories even without peace, just as Ben-Gurion decided not to conquer certain territories in the War of Independence. We got stuck with them.”
In his short 2002 book “Elvis in Jerusalem: Post-Zionism and the Americanization of Israel,” Segev pondered the question of whether Zionism had concluded its historic role. He also wrote dazzling biographies of the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal and of David Ben-Gurion. The latter is revealed to have been not only a larger-than-life national leader but also a man of flesh and blood, with anxieties, bouts of depression, a tendency to escape from reality, and as someone who serially cheated on his wife.
Meticulous archival research combined with the ability to tell a story and to be incisive, detached and unconventional have made Segev one of Israel’s most highly esteemed historians overseas. By contrast, his detractors have labeled him a “post-Zionist” and “accused” him of being part of the group of “New Historians” who have researched the Arab-Jewish conflict in a highly critical way. Segev does not go along with those labels.
“People have also said I am anti-Zionist, but I am not an ideologue and not a philosopher, and I don’t think in terms of ideologies,” he says. “It was said that I want to shatter myths. But that’s not true, either. I was not part of the ’New Historians’ but rather of the ’First Historians.’ With respect to the state’s establishment there was no history here – just mythology and a great deal of indoctrination. In the 1980s we opened documents in the archives and said, ’Wow, this isn’t what we were taught in school.’”
« The biggest mistake of Zionism is that, on the seventh day [of that war] we didn’t return to the Arabs everything we had – including East Jerusalem. None of that is of any interest to us. We should have returned those territories even without peace.»
Tom Segev
About what, for example?
“About the expulsion of the Arabs and the attitude toward the Mizrahim, for example. The Zionists always acted out of a profound feeling that they are right and always wanted to present a Zionism that was prettier than what was really the case.”
Who else criticized you?
“My harshest critics are history professors. Often they don’t know how to write or they hate writing, and their books aren’t intended for the public at large.”
This interview is taking place at a dramatic time in the state’s history. The war, which started after the October 7 massacre perpetrated by Hamas, is being renewed, along with the regime coup. Historically, this is not the best period to be living here.
“Gradually I have reached the conclusion that the conflict has no solution, because it doesn’t deal with rational matters. It’s not a question of borders and of the partition of the country. It’s about two national identities that are confronting each other. Each of the two peoples defines its identity through the whole land, so every compromise requires that we forgo part of our identity. I don’t see how it’s possible to solve this problem. I contemplate a period in which this conflict will be viewed as something historical, which somehow disappeared and found its solution. But in the present situation that can’t be. Something terribly dramatic needs to happen so that people will start to think anew.”
In your 2019 biography of Ben-Gurion, “A State at Any Cost,” I read the following quote by him: "Everyone sees the difficulty of relations between Jews and Arabs, but not everyone sees that there is no solution to that question… We want Palestine to be ours as a nation. The Arabs want it to be theirs – as a nation. I don’t know what Arab would agree to Palestine belonging to the Jews."
“At the age of 80 I’m starting to think that maybe it wasn’t right from the outset, the whole Zionist thing. Most Israelis are refugees or the offspring of refugees. Not Zionists, but refugees. So you’ll say, ’Well, that justifies Zionism, because this was a land they were able to come to.’ But we need to remember that the majority of the Holocaust survivors did not come to live in Israel and that the majority of Jews in the world are not coming to Israel. They can, but they don’t want to live in this country. So Zionism is not such a great success story. It also doesn’t provide security to Jews. It’s safer for Jews to live outside Israel.”
You won’t be able to write Netanyahu’s biography – the documents relevant to his period will be declassified, if at all, only decades down the line.
“If I were to write in the future about the history of this period, I would start with one of the state’s great mistakes: Netanyahu’s trial. It’s causing us terrible, and unjustified, damage. I am following the trial and my hair is not standing on end – and not because I don’t have hair. Because of this trial, [Itamar] Ben-Gvir and [Bezalel] Smotrich joined the government, and all kinds of snakes started coming out of their lairs. It was a major mistake to put Netanyahu on trial. Certainly in the matter of his relationships with the media. There is no breach of trust on his part; the person who committed a breach of trust is the publisher who sold his newspaper to a politician.”
Other historians will offer contradictory views. But how will history remember Bibi in relation to October 7, in your view?
“Netanyahu pursued a wrong conception about Hamas [i.e., by strengthening the organization and transferring Qatari money to it]. But that’s understandable, because in the Zionist movement’s relations with the Arabs someone was always bribed. The problem is that the Arabs always take the bribe and never deliver the goods.”
« We need to remember that the majority of the Holocaust survivors did not come to live in Israel and that the majority of Jews in the world are not coming to Israel. Zionism is not such a great success story. It also doesn’t provide security to Jews. It’s safer for Jews to live outside Israel.»
Tom Segev
From the Bible to the 21st century
Before readers get the idea that Segev is in any way a supporter of the government, he adds a grim comment: “Like everyone, I am shocked by October 7 and by the [issue of] the hostages. But since the war began, I have experienced a very uncomfortable feeling of guilt, which I don’t know how to cope with. Guilt for tens of thousands of people who were killed, half of them civilians, and among them 10,000 children,” he says, referring to the Palestinians killed in the Strip. “The massacre that Hamas perpetrated against us does not justify a spree of revenge like this, and we don’t have the slightest clue of where it’s supposed to lead.”
Just after the war broke out, you invoked the term "second Nakba."
“Meanwhile, everyone is talking now about a second Nakba. It’s possible that Netanyahu sees an opportunity here to foment a large-scale expulsion of Arabs from Gaza, and then to go before the cameras and say, ’Since Ben-Gurion’s time, no one has done more for Zionism than I have.’ I was astonished to see the joy with which Israel accepted [U.S. President Donald] Trump’s idea, to the point where today it’s already acceptable to say that the Arabs have to be expelled.”
Are you worried?
“I am deeply concerned for my grandchildren. I don’t know where in the world they will find their happiness.”
Mention of grandchildren brings Segev to another personal anecdote. “I owe my son, Itay, to Haaretz,” he says. In 1991, Segev was sent by the paper to Ethiopia to cover the preparations for Operation Solomon, during which Ethiopian Jews were flown to Israel. An astounding sight awaited him when he arrived at the Israeli Embassy in Addis Ababa, he reported: “Thousands of people, among them biblical figures wearing white robes, were sitting along the road leading to the building and expecting to be called in. They arrived in a sudden stream of refugeehood and messianic vision, seeking to be united with their families in Israel. Many of them will thereby catapult over 2,000 years of history, right into the 21st century.”
One of the protagonists of the article was an 11-year-old named Itayu Abera, who had a captivating smile that caught Segev’s eye. “Itayu is a lovely boy who radiates a sort of dreamy cleverness. I got to know him a little bit. He likes to play soccer and wants to be a teacher when he grows up,” Segev wrote. “He knows how to write his name in Hebrew and in [English]… Of Israel he knows that it’s a clean country, that there are no thieves and that it has a big city called Kiryat Ata. That’s where his relatives live. His impression is that he will get along well with the children in Israel. He knows a little karate and also how to juggle, like an acrobat.”
Segev decided he would stay in touch with the boy and do a series of articles on his integration into Israeli society. “I wanted to document how an Ethiopian child becomes an Israeli,” he says. In 1996, he reported: “Itayu is an intelligent youth. He has a subtle sense of humor. Five years after his arrival, straight out of the age of the Bible, he has a personal computer… Whenever possible, he has a Walkman plugged into his ears.” That same year, Segev accompanied the teenager on a “family roots” trip to the village in Ethiopia where he was born, recording his impressions in a monumental article in Haaretz, entitled “Back to the Fig Tree.” "It was a dramatic and emotional journey," Segev recalls.
The ties between the two grew closer. “I was 50 at the time and had no children of my own. When we came back, we knew we were father and son. We simply knew it. It’s not registered anywhere. It’s not a real adoption, but it was like that emotionally and it’s been like that ever since,” Segev says. Itayu became Itay, he today works as an electrical engineer at Israel Aerospace Industries. He also has his own family. “When I want to bug him I tell him that he’s a Zionist cliché,” Segev adds.
Do you go to demonstrations these days?
"I found myself at a demonstration on Azza Street, near the grocery store where I shop. And it occurred to me that 200,000 people – that’s what there is. The nation is not divided and not torn. There is no parity between [the numbers of] supporters and opponents of the regime coup. The nation supports Netanyahu. Who doesn’t support him? The 200,000 people who are defending their status as an obsolete elite.
“There won’t be a civil war,” he continues, “because the demonstrators will not bring about a war and the other side in any case constitutes the majority. And as far as that goes, Israeli democracy was never real. For 20 years all the Arabs [in Israel] were under martial law, and then came the Six-Day War, and thereafter the entire population there [in the territories] was under that form of regime.”
But even so, the country is in turmoil.
“As for the [judicial] reform: What’s done today can be undone tomorrow. We have endured extremely difficult periods of crises in Israel. Not only wars and austerity. Also [political and/or security-related debacles including] the Lavon Affair and the Bus 300 affair, and Sabra and Chatila, commissions of inquiry. Each time it seems to us that everything is crumbling, but somehow life goes back to being a lot less fraught afterward.”
Still, Segev admits during our conversation that he was mistaken in the past in his attempts to predict the future or assess the present. “Immediately after the Six-Day War I went on a tour with Matityahu Drobles, head of the Jewish Agency’s settlement division. He showed us a map with the plan of settlements. I wrote afterward that he was fantasizing and that it could never happen. Since then I’ve understood that it’s best to write only what happened and not to offer forecasts, because I always get them wrong.”
What other things did you get wrong?
"Abba Kovner, who went to Europe after the Holocaust to poison six million Germans as part of Nakam [a group of survivors seeking revenge against Nazis], said he received poison from Chaim Weizmann. I thought that was a great story, but I couldn’t find any mention of the fact that Weizmann was even in the same country as Kovner, and I assumed that it was impossible that he had supplied it to him.
“Years later, [historian] Dina Porat discovered that Kovner had received the poison from Ephraim Katzir [a leading scientist in the institute founded by and in the name of Weizmann, later Israel’s president]. How narrow-minded and square I was.”
