Hopeless Wars

20 hrs. 19 min.

Language Russian

Author Yakov Kedmi

Narrator Pavel Ivanov

Description

As a born fighter and “an ardent nonconformist,” the author of this book always took up a challenge and never avoided participation in the most desperate clashes and the most “hopeless WARS,” whether it was the uncompromising struggle to get permission to leave the USSR for Israel, the famous Yom Kippur War—which Yakov Kedmi went through in an Ehoud Barak battalion, fighting alongside the future prime minister—or work in Israel’s most highly classified intelligence service, Nativ, which is considered “a kind of closed club of the ruling elite of the State of Israel.” In all these battles, he came out victorious—once again proving that there are no “hopeless wars,” and that a person who does not bow to anyone and anything is capable of making the impossible happen. Yakov Kedmi managed not only to escape the “iron curtain” himself, but, becoming director of Nativ, to bring about a radical change in Israeli policy—largely thanks to his efforts, a mass exodus of Jews from the USSR took place in the early 1990s.

These are the topics he addresses: resistance to the Soviet regime and interdepartmental struggle in the Israeli establishment; the victorious Yom Kippur War and the command errors that led to unjustified losses; outrageous cases of discrimination against Soviet Jews in Israel and the need for decisive reforms that must pull the country out of a systemic crisis. In his memoirs, Yakov Kedmi spoke about all this without avoiding the most painful subjects and without being afraid to ask the most difficult questions—chief among them: “Does the current State of Israel deserve its people?”

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