My guest this week will be familiar to avid readers of this newsletter. Haim Shweky is a writer and sometime soldier who’s given us a first-person account of the situation on the ground in Ukraine. He’s written about volunteering in Ukraine, running reconnaissance missions at the front, and the geopolitical stakes of the war. Haim and I have had a correspondence going for a while now, but this is the first time we’ve spoken face to face, and he’s every bit the perspicacious, romantic figure that I’d envisioned.
Haim and I begin by recounting how we first crossed paths—I was happy to learn that I played a small role in his career as a published writer. While he has to remain silent on some of the details, Haim recounts his decision, following writers like Hemingway and Orwell, to “leap over his desk” and join the war effort in Ukraine. This was no reckless decision—clearly, Haim knows how to take care of himself—and it further buttressed his view that defending Ukraine is necessary both to maintain stability in Europe and as a matter of principle. Throughout the conversation, he suggests that the principle of sovereignty at work in his defense of the international effort to support Ukraine might have something to do Israel-Palestine as well. Haim is an American by birth but an Israeli, as he says, “by birthright,” and he offers some carefully worded thoughts on the matter.
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0:00 Haim’s history with The Glenn Show
7:54 How Haim ended up fighting in Ukraine
17:42 The legionnaire’s lingua franca
27:55 Haim’s riposte to Cornel West on Ukraine
42:27 A pen in one hand and a gun in the other
47:56 Haim: Ukraine’s sovereignty and national identity must be respected
53:34 Is the two-state solution dead?
Recorded July 23, 2023
Links and Readings
Haim’s writing for this newsletter
Glenn’s recent conversation with Cornel West
Haim and Nikita Petrov’s exchange on the Ukraine War
Nikita’s Substack, Psychopolitica
Haim Shweky – An American-Israeli at the Ukrainian Front