Frances Coppola – The Five Commandments of writing about Gaza
Break any of these and you will be accused of antisemitism.
Frances Coppola is the author of the Coppola Comment finance and economics blog, which is a regular feature on the Financial Times’ Alphaville blog and has been cited in The Economist, the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The Guardian. Coppola is also Associate Editor at the online magazine Pieria and a frequent commentator on financial matters for the BBC.
Cross-posted from Frances’s blog
My last post unflinchingly documented deaths by fire in Gaza, which have become increasingly frequent over the last year and now occur almost every day. I called the post “Holocaust”, because mass slaughter by fire is the dictionary definition of a “holocaust”, and also because I believe the people of Gaza are being sacrificed to satisfy the gods of pride and lust for power. “Holocaust” is the ancient term for a burnt offering on an altar.
Inevitably, someone accused me of antisemitism. He didn’t use that word, but that’s what his critique amounted to.
My critic’s comments can broadly be organised into Five Commandments. I have broken all of them. I stand by what I wrote, but in the end it is what you, my readers think that matters. Am I guilty of antisemitism?
First Commandment: Thou shalt not use the word “holocaust” to mean anything but the Shoah
Firstly, my critic objected to my use of the word “holocaust” about Israel’s actions in Gaza (his emphasis):
The Shoah is not merely a historical episode. It is a benchmark of human evil. To invoke its name while describing the actions of the Jewish state, especially without so much as acknowledging the genocide that gave rise to that state, is not brave. It is obscenely careless. It treats the Holocaust not as a wound in Jewish memory, but as a rhetorical tool, a metaphor made available for political anger.
I read this to mean I must never use the word “holocaust” about anything the Jewish state does, because the word “holocaust” is reserved exclusively for the genocide of the Jewish people.
Frankly this is ridiculous. No-one has a monopoly on the meaning of a word. The word “holocaust” has several meanings. It should not be taboo to use this word about something other than the murder of six million Jews.
And it should not be taboo to use this word about atrocities committed by Jews. I reject out of hand the line of argument that says “Jews would never do anything that could be called a holocaust.” Jews are human beings, not angels. All humans are capable of evil. Saying Jews would never do anything evil is arrant nonsense. It is also antisemitic, since it renders Jews inhuman.
In the post, I distinguished clearly between The Holocaust, which I explicitly stated was the most horrific genocide of our time, and other holocausts. The other holocausts I cited were not conducted by the Israeli military. It would be antisemitic to uniquely refrain from calling the Gaza conflagration a holocaust simply because the proximate perpetrator is the Jewish state.
Second Commandment: Thou shalt always blame Hamas
Next, he objected to my sources, complained about what I didn’t write, and ascribed dark motives to my words:
And that is the root of the problem. Coppola’s essay is written with the language of witness, but it is not witnessing. It is omission. It cites Forensic Architecture as gospel, rejects Israeli statements as propaganda, and attributes every fire, every injury, every corpse solely to Israeli intent. There is no mention of Hamas embedding in civilian zones. No acknowledgment that tent fires may result from secondary explosions, or that the IDF’s warnings are routinely documented. She speaks of “the world turning away,” but what she offers is not light. It is shadowplay.
True, I didn’t mention Hamas embedding in civilian zones. That’s because this doesn’t mitigate or excuse mass slaughter of civilians. I did however mention that tent fires could result from secondary explosions, and I discussed at some length the IDF’s use of warnings.
I found his objection to Forensic Architecture’s account of the Tel Al-Sultan massacre disturbing. He provided no alternative account of equivalent depth and rigour. Is forensic evidence of no value unless it comes from Israeli sources? Must we favour the words of the IDF over those of other bodies, even though the IDF has been repeatedly caught lying and fabricating evidence?
As for his attribution of “dark motives”, people can interpret my words however they please. He chose to interpret my post as ascribing all blame for the conflagration to Israel. But I did not say this, and I did not name the “evil men” on whose altar the innocents are sacrificed. I left it open for readers to decide for themselves who, ultimately, is responsible for this holocaust.
Third Commandment: Thou shalt not criticise the actions of the State of Israel
Then he accused me of blood libel:
There is something else too, more disturbing. In the closing paragraphs, Coppola writes of “a burnt offering to the spawn of Moloch.” Here, the metaphor is not just religious. It is apocalyptic. It reaches for the oldest and darkest tropes: the language of pagan sacrifice, of children burned for a tyrant god. It is hard to read that line and not think of medieval accusations of ritual murder, of blood libel in another form, rewritten for the modern left. One hopes that was not her intent. But intentions matter less than consequences.
Admittedly, I have used apocalyptic language here. But in my view the situation in Gaza is apocalyptic. Should I not use appropriate language?
It is not a blood libel to state facts, however they are presented. And nor is it blood libel to criticise the actions of the government and military of the State of Israel. Insisting that Israel must be exempt from such criticism because it is “the world’s only Jewish state” is both racist and antisemitic.
Fourth Commandment: Thou shalt not omit Oct 7th
He didn’t leave it there, of course. He replied with another comment in which he complained that I hadn’t mentioned the Oct 7th attacks:
“But writers are responsible not just for what they say, but for what they choose not to say. You omitted October 7th. You omitted the rape, the murder, the children shot in their beds, the festival-goers butchered and filmed. You omitted the hostages dragged into tunnels that wind under the ground like theology. And into this void, you poured fire…”
True, I didn’t mention Oct 7th. I’ve written about it in previous pieces, notably “The Road to Armageddon”, published 31st Oct 2023 and still up on this site. It’s free to read. If you aren’t sure of my views on the Oct 7th attacks and their long-term consequences, please read it.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect my readers to have read my previous work on a subject. After all, that’s the whole point of a subscription service. All my posts on Gaza are unsurprisingly tagged with “Gaza”, so are easy to find. And the “Related reading” section I include at the end of each post points readers to pieces I think are particularly relevant to the topic of the post. These pieces may or may not be about Gaza: one of the pieces I included in the “Related reading” section at the end of the Holocaust post dates from 2016 and is about refugees. The “Related reading” section at the end of this post includes a post about evil, published in 2013.
Anyway, Oct 7th has been more extensively covered by mainstream media than any terrorist attack since Al Qaeda’s demolition of the Twin Towers on 11th September 2001. It has been so widely reported, analysed and discussed that anyone who doesn’t know Oct 7th is the background to the Gaza conflict must have been living under a rock for the last two years. So I didn’t think I needed to mention it in my latest piece.
But my critic was not satisfied with this. He insisted that every piece about the Gaza conflagration must be framed in the context of Oct 7th. He accused me of “bad editorial practice” for omitting it.
It is fair to say that many writers do repeatedly mention Oct 7th. But I’m not going to. Giving prominence to Oct 7th at the expense of everything that has happened since – and indeed, all that went before – tells the world that all that really matters is Jewish lives. The lives of Palestinians are of no consequence. This too is both racist and antisemitic.
Fifth Commandment: Thou shalt not leave thy beliefs and intentions unsaid
He denied he was accusing me of antisemitism but then, in subsequent sentences, accused me of exactly that:
What I pointed out, and will repeat, is that your language echoes tropes with centuries of resonance: fire, sacrifice, demonic hunger. If you invoke Moloch while describing Jewish military action, if you erase context while invoking annihilation, you do not need to blame Jews “collectively.” You have already primed the myth.
Then he penned a sentence about Oct 7th, claiming it was “the sentence I omitted”:
They did not come for land. They did not come for freedom. They came for something older: to teach the Jew what he is.
I have never said anything like this. Nor would I. No human being deserves to be “taught what he is” by other human beings through mass slaughter and destruction.
But this accusation is not fundamentally about what I have written, it is about what I have not written. It is about my beliefs and my intentions, not my words. There is no possible defence against such an accusation.
Judgment
All I can do is ask you, my readers, to judge for yourselves. Please read myholocaust post, and tell me what you think. It’s free to read and I’ve opened comments to everyone. (Usual comments protocol applies – refrain from abusive comments and stay on topic. I will delete any comments that break these rules.)
I hope and pray that those perpetrating the holocaust in Gaza will be held to account in international courts. But even if they aren’t, they will answer for their crimes before the throne of God – along with those, now dead, who perpetrated the crimes of Oct 7th.