Academics and Israel: a new ‘trahison des clercs’?

It is hard to say who has let themselves (and us) down most since the barbaric attack on Israel by Hamas on 7 October. Of course, both BBC News and Sky News have had a catastrophic time. Their coverage of Israel’s war against Hamas has been full of distortions, bias and omissions. It is hard to imagine how their reputations will recover from this. They have certainly lost the confidence of many in the Jewish community.

Danny Cohen, the BBC’s former director of television, accused the BBC of being “institutionally antisemitic” and said that the BBC’s inaccurate reporting on Israel “risks adding fuel to the fire” of Jew hate in Britain. “I think there’s institutional bias at play,” he added. “That’s why it keeps happening. Mistakes happen once, perhaps twice, but when they keep happening you have to ask why. I think there are institutional biases.” Cohen added: “What’s clear to me is there is an ongoing issue with anti-Israel bias that there appears to be an inability to control.”

I have written several pieces for TheArticle documenting some of the worst examples of our mainstream news coverage, giving specific examples, such as the BBC’s disastrous coverage of the Palestinian terrorist attack on the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza. David Collier has written on social media about the anti-Israel bias of numerous hospital doctors in Gaza that has been overlooked by TV News. Meanwhile @CAMERAorgUK has exposed numerous examples of bias and distortion day by day.

But perhaps the most disturbing form of bias has come from academics in Britain and America. Some are longtime critics of Israel, for example Professor Ilan Pappé, Professor of History, Director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies, who was introduced by one TV presenter as “an Israeli writer and historian” when he should have been introduced as an anti-Israel polemicist. When his book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, was translated into Hebrew, the leading Israeli newspaper Haaretz commented that his work “suffers from negligence, manipulations and mistakes galore, and the result is not serious research.” His interview was entirely predictable.

Omer Bartov is a distinguished Holocaust historian. Born in Israel, he teaches at Brown University and has written acclaimed books on the Holocaust, the Nazis and the vanishing traces of Jewish Galicia in Ukraine. But when he appeared on The Context on the BBC News Channel earlier this week, he told Christian Fraser that Israel “has managed to kill very large numbers of Palestinian civilians … perhaps in order to kill one or two [sic] military commanders of Hamas.” He went on, “If you drop a very large bomb on a school in which there are refugees, therefore you have information that there is one or two commanders and you choose an especially large bomb knowing there would be hundreds of civilians there, then you should consider that twice.”

Is this the language of a leading historian? We know that Hamas has used schools and hospitals to protect its terrorists and that as soon as the invasion of Gaza started, journalists and politicians warned that Israel would be faced with an agonising dilemma: How could they attack Hamas terrorists without endangering Palestinian civilians?

Look at Bartov’s answers. How many single bombs have killed “hundreds of civilians” in Gaza? How can Bartov be so sure that Israelis have chosen “a very large bomb” to kill “hundreds of civilians” in order to kill “one or two commanders”? Why not just say they have often used bombs with many casualties? And when Bartov says, “you should consider that twice,” how does he know Israeli officers have not agonised repeatedly over such choices? And since he can’t know this, why does he assume they are so immoral? This is very crude analysis for someone who has written such important books on the Eastern Front.

The presenter Christian Fraser did not ask any of these questions. Instead, he said he had recently returned from a visit to Auschwitz, where he saw a very moving quotation about the lessons of Auschwitz and then said: “Some would argue that it is equally relevant – entirely relevant in fact – when we consider what is happening in Gaza. Would you agree?” Bartov did agree. However, others might have wondered whether this reference to Auschwitz was “entirely relevant” to “what is happening in Gaza,” and might have thought what happened on October 7 was closer to what so many Jews experienced in countless villages and small towns during the Shoah by bullets.

This is precisely the sort of comparison that Bartov and many “scholars of the Holocaust and antisemitism from different institutions” criticise in a long letter  to The New York Review of Books, “An Open Letter on the Misuse of Holocaust Memory” (November 20). In the letter they say they write “to express our dismay and disappointment at political leaders and notable public figures invoking Holocaust memory to explain the current crisis in Gaza and Israel.” By “political leaders and notable public figures” they mean, of course, Israeli politicians. It is important to point out that the signatories include not only Bartov, but Christopher Browning, Deborah Dwork and some other distinguished historians of Nazism and the Holocaust, as well as some familiar critics of Israel:

“Comparisons of the crisis unfolding in Israel-Palestine to Nazism and the Holocaust —above all when they come from political leaders and others who can sway public opinion—are intellectual and moral failings.”

Later, they write:

“Israeli leaders and others are using the Holocaust framing to portray Israel’s collective punishment of Gaza as a battle for civilization in the face of barbarism, thereby promoting racist narratives about Palestinians. This rhetoric encourages us to separate this current crisis from the context out of which it has arisen. Seventy-five years of displacement, fifty-six years of occupation, and sixteen years of the Gaza blockade have generated an ever-deteriorating spiral of violence that can only be arrested by a political solution. There is no military solution in Israel-Palestine, and deploying a Holocaust narrative in which an ‘evil’ must be vanquished by force will only perpetuate an oppressive state of affairs that has already lasted far too long.”

However, the attack on Hamas is indeed “a battle for civilisation in the face of barbarism”, just as the war against Nazism was, and just as Ukraine’s attempt to defend itself against Putin’s invasion is. If the misogyny, brutality, homophobia and genocidal antisemitism of Hamas is not “barbarism”, what is?

This is related to the belief, shared by all these signatories, that “there is no military solution in Israel-Palestine”. Instead, they talk of “a political solution”. Various Hamas leaders have repeatedly said they would commit similar acts to October 7 again. No one expressed surprise. Their followers in the West chant “From the river to the sea”, which is a call for genocide, the extermination of Jews from the Jordan to the Mediterranean.

Who will stop Hamas? Who will impose “a political solution” on them? Indeed, the timing of October 7 was precisely prompted by the growing success of the Abraham Accords, just the kind of “political solution” so many of us have hoped for for years. Terrorists dread such negotiated settlements. Their strategy is motivated entirely by the hope that a pogrom like 7 October would provoke a military attack on Hamas and that because of their use of human shields in schools, hospitals and refugee camps, sympathy for Israel in the West would quickly evaporate — exactly as it has. The role of the British and American mainstream media and of academics in this has contributed to this significant shift of sympathy.

Of course, there are Israeli politicians and military leaders who have used incendiary and vile language. Similarly, we are right to feel pity for the Palestinian civilians who have been so ruthlessly exploited by Hamas and killed in large (though at this point still unknown) numbers. But that doesn’t mean we should forget who started the war and who hopes to benefit most from it.

These eminent historians write: “In this climate of growing insecurity, we need clarity about antisemitism so that we can properly identify and combat it. We also need clear thinking as we grapple with and respond to what is unfolding in Gaza and the West Bank. And we need to be forthright in dealing with these simultaneous realities—of resurgent antisemitism and widespread killing in Gaza, as well as escalating expulsions in the West Bank—as we engage with the public discourse.”

“We need clarity about antisemitism”, “We also need clear thinking”, “we need to be forthright…as we engage with the public discourse”. These are platitudes, the sort of vague pieties we hear endlessly from the UN, relief organisations and numerous politicians. What does any of this mean? How would any of these well-meaning sentences save Israelis (or Palestinians) from a genocidal death-cult like Hamas? Since they are historians of Nazism, perhaps they can explain how occupied Europe would have been helped by “clarity about antisemitism” during the Second World War, or how today Ukraine, under genocidal attack from Russia, would be helped by engaging “with the public discourse”?

Of course, we all believe in “establishing peace and justice in Palestine and Israel”, but sometimes we have to deal with enemies, with “barbarism”, who do not believe in peace and justice and never will. That’s why so many, especially in Israel, turn to comparisons with Nazism. Not out of bad faith, but because that is one of the few times in modern history when evil was confronted and destroyed and a new civil society was built out of the ruins.

That new Germany has taken a firm stand against the barbarians of Hamas. The German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, said five days after 7 October, “This is what we mean when we say the security of Israel is Germany’s raison d’être. Germany’s history and the responsibility it had for the Holocaust requires us to maintain the security and existence of Israel.” Perhaps these historians also read the Chancellor’s words with “dismay and disappointment”, as they look out on the streets and see students at some of America’s top universities calling for genocide against the Jews in Israel?

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