Friends,
I’ve been using my Substack principally to post articles that I publish so that you can get around paywall barriers. This post, by contrast, offers some thoughts on the war in Gaza, which have not been published elsewhere. It was prompted by New York Times op-ed columnist Pamela Paul’s January 9 account of a resolution offered recently—this past Sunday—at the American Historical Association’s yearly business meeting by a group, “Historians for Peace and Democracy,” on the war in Gaza. The resolution had three parts: First, it called for the condemnation of Israel’s destruction in Gaza of numerous educational facilities, including museums, something that the group labeled as “scholasticide.” Second, it demanded an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, on which talks have been held for months without success. Third, it called for the formation of a committee to help rebuild Gaza’s schools and colleges. The resolution was approved by a vote of 428 to 88, though it’s important to note that it has yet to be voted on by the AHA’s elected Council—which can approve, veto, or refuse to concur—let alone the Association’s full membership and indeed may never come up for a vote.
Here are some thoughts on Paul’s column:
Pamela Paul objects to members of an organization that seeks to further the study of, and research on, history taking a public position on the Gaza War. Her logic seems to be that these scholars ought properly to be burrowing into archives and teaching their classes—the more so, she avers, because enrollments in history classes are dropping and the number of history departments declining. Yet, in the same column, Paul quotes an AHA member as saying that the organization publicly condemned the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 and Russia’s attack on Ukraine in 2022. So what Paul presents as an unusual action—and the subtext of her piece makes it clear that she thinks that it’s driven by animus toward Israel—turns out not to be so exceptional. As for her observation about the ill fortunes of history departments, one would think based on what she says that that problem could or would be changed if only historians would stop devoting their time to crafting resolutions like the one she tries to eviscerate.
A moment’s reflections suggests that hers is a specious argument: It’s not as if large numbers of historians are spending vast amounts of time drafting political resolutions on and speaking out about wars that they deplore, let alone erecting protest barricades. The reality is the academic profession—which happens to be mine—is hardly noted for its outspokenness on controversial matters. The average academic isn’t marching in rallies, signing, let alone drafting, petitions, or taking stands that would jeopardize his or her professional success and security. Tenure was supposed to encourage university professors to speak and write without fear: it has done no such thing. Indifference, the rationalization of passivity, even cowardice abounds within the professoriate. So this part of Paul’s argument doesn’t withstand scrutiny.
Paul reports that at the meeting (which she attended), “I saw many members heading in wearing kaffiyehs and stickers that read, ‘Say no to scholasticide’.” Let’s leave aside the question of how many counts as “many” in her eyes. (Her language conjures up visions of hordes of academic clogging the corridors of the AHA’s convention hotel, sporting kaffiyehs and screaming pro-Palestinian slogans.) What’s more important about her description is its scarcely subtle suggestion, which is all too common, that the kaffiyeh connotes support for Hamas, even terrorism. Now, could someone wearing a kaffiyeh be supportive of Hamas’s means and ends? Of course, wholly or in part. But the kaffiyeh has also been worn by numerous demonstrators—notably back in the days when campus protests were allowed—seeking to stop the carnage in Gaza and the American government’s fulsome support of it through arms worth billions of dollars.
Moreover, the kaffiyeh itself is a square, checkered scarf long worn by men in the Middle East as an article of clothing. Has it been donned by protestors at rallies, on campuses or elsewhere, against the Gaza War to express opposition to the deaths (50,000 or so, but in fact many more: thousands of people remain entombed in the rubble, estimated to total 40 million tons), injuries, and destruction it has caused? Yes. But in itself the kaffiyeh doesn’t necessarily connote approval of Hamas, let alone terrorism, which is what Paul suggests—and has likely succeeded in communicating without saying so explicitly. One wonders whether she would have found it objectionable had historians supporting a resolution in defense of Israel’s Gaza War worn the Star of David or an Israel flag pin—or had the backers of an AHA resolution defending the Bush administration’s 2003 Iraq war affixed American flag pins to their lapels. I don’t know, but I’m guessing not.
As for the Israel Defense Forces’ destruction of Gaza’s schools, colleges, and museums, Paul doesn’t deny that this happened: the evidence is incontrovertible. Instead, she serves up the IDF’s standard defense that Hamas routinely uses educational institutions—and hospitals and residential buildings—as redoubts and that such installations are hence fair game. By this logic, the Israeli army would be justified in demolishing every building in Gaza on the grounds that each one serves as a Hamas hideaway. Not only would this serve as a rationale for obliterating Gaza, the IDF has hardly been known to welcome outside inquiries into its blanket allegations, which much of the media has dutifully reported without raising questions and that the Biden administration has never condemned or even criticized. with any force.
Paul is in effect doing the work of the IDF’s PR department—which doesn’t need her help—notwithstanding the fact that the IDF has not followed up its attacks on, say, the Al-Shifa Hospital or the Kamal Adwan Hospital by offering definitive proof that Hamas bunkers, command centers, or large weapons depots were located in their buildings or below ground in their basements. Nor is there a hint in Paul’s column that serious questions have been raised about the IDF’s claims on this score, not least because they amount to an assertion that Gaza’s hospitals, and schools for that matter, have lost the protections accorded to medical facilities under international humanitarian law, aka the laws governing warfare.
I wrote this post not just to take issue with Pamela Paul’s opinion piece but also because the debate on the Gaza War—such as it is—has been warped by a series of claims (none made by Paul in this particular column I should stress) that are, at the very least, suspect.
Consider the slogan “from the River to the Sea,” regularly condemned by our politicians as an anti-Semitic trope, one that calls for Israel’s destruction. There are several problems with this characterization. This slogan can doubtless been used to deny the legitimacy of a Jewish state. (Take a look at Hamas’s 2017 Charter and its specification of the movement’s ideal objective, albeit one qualified by the willingness to accept as a compromise a full-fledged Palestinian state on the West Bank with Jerusalem as its capital, though without conceding the legitimacy of a Jewish state.) The problem with the claim that “River to the Sea” is solely an anti-Semitic war cry to incite the destruction of Israel is that its exact wording also appears in the 1977 founding document of Likud, the right-wing Israeli political party—to which Benjamin Netanyahu belongs, by the way. It is also commonly used by the Israeli far right to claim that Israel should encompass all the lands between the “River and the Sea,” including the dwindling ones inhabited by Palestinians. You can also find it on the Twitter page of Yair Netanyahu, Benjamin’s son. Nor is it recent: back in 2014, Uri Ariel, then Israel’s Housing Minister, declared that “Between the Jordan and the sea, there will be only one state, and that is the Land of Israel. We will continue to build the land of Israel in all places…”
Plus, to some on Israel’s far right, especially militant settlers whose allies include National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, the slogan has an even more expansive meaning. The river in question is not the Jordan but the Euphrates—and the sea in question isn’t the Mediterranean but the Nile. Implementing this conception of a Jewish homeland would of course require not just sweeping aside Palestinians’ right to self-determination but also annexing parts of Iraq and Egypt.
Let me conclude with some thoughts on the description of the Gaza War as a genocide, which, like “the River to the Sea,” has also been denounced as nothing but pure anti-Semitism. Can those who make the genocide claim do so with an anti-Semitic intent? Yes, they can. But that doesn’t settle the argument—not even close. Respected organizations, including Human Rights Watch, Doctors Without Borders, and Amnesty International, have characterized the Gaza War as a genocide. They are hardly claiming that all Jews are guilty of or complicit in genocide but that wartime acts consistent with the Genocide Convention’s definition are being perpetrated by the IDF on the orders of a particular Israel government. To attribute their conclusion to anti-Semitism therefore amounts to a dodge, not a serious criticism based on facts.
Furthermore, respected Jewish scholars of genocide, such as the Israeli-American historian Omer Bartov, as well as the former Executive Director and co-founder of Human Rights Watch, Aryeh Neier, a Jew whose parents fled the Nazis when he was an infant, have reached the same conclusion—and reluctantly. Bartov initially argued (in November 2023) that “there is no proof that genocide was occurring in Gaza”; Neier has accused a government of genocide only once before: during Saddam’s Hussein’s mass killing of Iraq’s Kurds in February-September 1988. Neither is a name-caller or rabble rouser, let alone a hater of Jews.
There is certainly room for those who reject the genocide claim as applied to the Gaza War to enter the debate, but attributing all such characterizations as stemming from a loathing of Jews tout court is not a good starting point. The hatred of Jews culminated in one of the most horrific events in modern history, the Holocaust. The memory of the millions of Jews killed by the Nazi ought not to be dishonored by invoking their fate to score rhetorical debating points.