Letter to the Editor: How We Speak to Each Other: Israel, Antisemitism and Civility

It’s a good thing, in my eyes, that my op-ed, “Can We Talk About Israel?”, published in the May 6 issue of The Commentator, has generated responses. As the title implies, I wrote this piece in order to spark conversations about the conduct of the war in Gaza. The question of how we, as members of the Yeshiva University community, respond to this grueling, now months-long conflict is, I believe, one of urgent moral and political importance. Yet the rhetorical framing of the two responses published in the Aug. 28 issue is troubling: both cross the line separating impassioned debate from ad hominem attacks on my bona fides as an observer of the war and as a historian. The response authored by Philip Dolitsky is mocking and supercilious (“I laughed reading this”). The piece written by Rabbi Professor Ari Zivotofsky is frankly defamatory, even going so far as to equate my arguments with the ancient blood libel against the Jews. The use of the antisemitism accusation as a rhetorical cudgel to beat down dissent on Israeli policy has become all too familiar. It discourages meaningful dialogue even as it trivializes the danger posed by real antisemitism. Why defenders of the current Israeli policies in Gaza and the West Bank are so quick to resort to such scurrilous attacks is an important question to which I will return in my concluding comments. First, I wish briefly to address the principal points of the two writers — and to do so on the same terms in which they are presented.

Rabbi Zivotofsky begins by stating that discussions about what is happening in Israel, Gaza and the Occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank (in his piece, Judea and Samaria) are to be encouraged but must be based on facts. He claims that my op-ed contains many factual errors — mistakes that he proposes to correct. Yet what he presents in his response are not facts but rather assertions grounded in his own understanding of Israel’s history and in press statements issued by the Israeli government or the IDF. Over the last few months, representatives of Israel have regularly cast doubt on data reporting and characterizations of the situation in Gaza coming from the Gaza Ministry of Health, the United Nations, aid organizations operating in the region, and international media. These challenges do not, however, prove the accuracy of the Israeli claims about how the war is being prosecuted or its impact on civilians. They are, rather, counter-assertions, subject to doubt just like those coming from Gaza and all the more questionable since they regularly conflict with the preponderance of testimony about the impact of the war on the civilian population.

Among the supposed inaccuracies that Zivotofsky sets out to correct are the casualty figures for Gaza that I had cited. He alludes to the fact that in May (after the publication of my piece), the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OHCA) revised downward its estimates for the percentage of women and children killed in the conflict. It now maintains that of 32,380 casualties identified as of Aug.1, only 10,627 are children and 5,956 women. That the OHCA has adjusted its statistical picture of the impact of the conflict in Gaza should remind us that exact, completely reliable casualty figures in this war — or any war for that matter — are an illusion. And yet the impossibility of obtaining precise numbers should not be used as an excuse to look away from the devastating carnage that is undoubtedly occurring. To imply, as Zivotofsky does, that because the details are murky, nothing at all is happening, is a form of moral evasion. It calls to mind Dr. Pangloss, the relentlessly optimistic philosopher of Voltaire’s “Candide,” who always proclaims in the face of evil and suffering, “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”

The same strategy of deflection is on display in Zivotofsky’s comments about the “impending” famine in Gaza. So long as the “impending” famine has not escalated into a full-blown famine, he implies, nothing of concern is happening and we can safely dismiss as false the warnings about food insecurity issued by the UN, the EU, the ICC, international aid organizations, and even the United States government, which went so far as to build a pier off the coast of Gaza to deliver food and medical supplies. What the author sets in the balance against the weight of all this testimony is a single, rather dubious source: an “analysis” — in actuality, an op-ed — written by two Columbia University Business School professors, one of whom is listed on his Wikipedia page as a principal logistics consultant for the Israeli Air Force. The opinion piece, which dismisses all the talk of famine as baseless, first appeared in the Highland County Press of Hillsboro Ohio on April 6, 2024. Two months later it was picked up by the Jerusalem Post, and since then, its claims, though not the piece itself, have been widely cited. In the process, the claims acquired authority, becoming a set of “research findings” and a talking point in the Israeli media. As a historian, I believe in source verification, so I retraced the chain of transmission to see what the original looks like. It isn’t much. In barely a page, the authors make sweeping assertions about the plentiful food supplies in Gaza, citing as their principal evidence data generated by COTAG, the Israeli Agency that coordinates “government activities in the territories,” a source that can hardly be viewed as impartial.

In light of his professed commitment to factuality, I find Rabbi Zivotofsky to be remarkably cavalier in the accusations that he directs at me. He dismisses my claim about settlers expelling Palestinians from their villages in the West Bank as “a veritable blood libel” and concludes that it has as much basis in fact as the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” As it happens, my source was a series of articles by David Shulman published in “The New York Review of Books.” Shulman is an emeritus professor at Hebrew University and an activist in Ta’ayush, the Arab-Jewish Partnership, in the Occupied Palestinian territories. He was an eyewitness of the expulsions that he described. More recently, a rampage by vigilante settlers through a Palestinian village became so violent that Israeli President Isaac Herzog was moved to describe it as a “pogrom.”

Philip Dolitsky too promises to rectify what he views as the factual errors of my op-ed. Rather than facts, however, what he provides are references to military theorists who have written about the conduct of war and the best ways to eliminate guerilla insurgencies. He begins by taking me to task for not placing Israel’s assault on Gaza in a comparative frame. If measured by the yardstick of the Allied bombing raids on Dresden and Tokyo in the Second World War, he argues, the number of victims in Gaza appears modest — indeed it is a testimony to the IDF’s laudable efforts to limit civilian casualties. Comparisons, however, are only meaningful when we are comparing the comparable. The Allied bombing raids on German and Japanese cities took place in a war among states in which aerial bombardment was used as a tactic by all parties. The Israeli ground invasion of Gaza is taking place in a very different and far less symmetrical conflict with Hamas militants. Hamas has perpetrated a hideous assault on Israeli civilians. Its militants are now scattered among the civilian population of Gaza and are no doubt in some instances using them as shields (a point, incidentally, that I never denied and that I, in fact, stated in my op-ed). But these facts do not exempt us from asking moral questions about the scale of death and destruction that we find acceptable or from wondering whether the Israeli government’s claim that it can completely eradicate Hamas is plausible. Dolitsky cites experts in military strategy who claim that if a state is ruthless enough, it can destroy a guerilla insurgency. These authors argue, and he concurs, that a scorched earth policy is often, in the long term, the best course of action. But quotations from a handful of carefully selected experts do not in themselves prove anything. I can think of several cases in which the violent repression of a movement or uprising fanned the flames of dissent. Following the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, the British army meted out exemplary punishments against the leaders of the insurrection. The result was to create a pantheon of nationalist martyrs and to endow the cause of Irish independence with a kind of halo that it had not before possessed. In more recent times, the all-out War on Terror conducted by the United States succeeded in crushing Al Qaeda, and soon after it was dealing with ISIS. 

Further examples both for and against the strategic value of ruthlessness could certainly be adduced. But I doubt that pursuing that line of inquiry would shed any meaningful light on the best course of action in the current conflict. Instead, I would like to return to the topic of antisemitism that I touched on earlier, since Dolitsky also cites it as the underlying cause of what he regards as erroneous or biased reporting on the situation in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank. Unlike Rabbi Zivotofsky, Dolitsky does not directly accuse me of being an antisemite, but the existence of antisemitism as a near-universal global propensity is no less a background assumption of what he writes. He speaks, indeed, of “Pavlovian contempt for everything it [Israel] has ever done,” the implication being that people around the world reflexively criticize the Jewish state regardless of whether criticism is warranted because they are animated by antisemitic feelings. On that basis, he dismisses as “brazenness” (an odd choice of word) my suggestion that we should be concerned about Israel’s deepening isolation and declining reputation in the international community. Yet it is simply not true that throughout its history, Israel has faced “Pavlovian contempt.” The member nations of the UN voted in 1947 to approve the original partition plan for Palestine. Since 1967, if not earlier, Israel has enjoyed strong backing from the US government as well as solid support in American public opinion. That such support is now eroding, not least among young American Jews, is unfortunately correct. But that is not, I would contend, simply because latent antisemitism has again risen to the surface. Rather, it reflects legitimate concerns about what is happening in Gaza and the Occupied Territories and, quite frankly, about the gradual entrenchment of a situation of inequality and oppression. The African-American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, who visited the Palestinian territories in the West Bank sometime before Oct. 7, has spoken in interviews of the uncanny familiarity that he experienced on witnessing the everyday indignities to which Palestinians were subjected, a situation that called to mind for him the Jim Crow South described by his parents and grandparents. To dismiss this kind of reaction as knee-jerk antisemitism — “Pavlovian contempt” — would, in some respects, be comforting, but in my view, it would be dishonest. Instead, we should consider more open-mindedly why Coates and other prominent African-American intellectuals and political leaders empathize with the plight of Palestinians living under occupation.

As a Jew who desperately wants Israel to be a beacon to the world, I would like to plead for more light and less heat in our discussions about the current conflict. Such a change needs to begin with serious reflection on how the ascription of antisemitism to others functions in these discussions. From an early age, I absorbed from my parents — both of them refugees from Hitler’s Europe — a keen awareness of the ravages of antisemitism. In the wake of the Holocaust, it is indeed vitally important that we remain vigilant against the resurgence of that poisonous ancient prejudice. Yet for precisely that reason, it is also important that we maintain a sense of just proportion and discrimination. In my view, both Rabbi Zivotofsky and Philip Dolitsky fail to do this. Dolitsky makes antisemitism into an all-purpose explanatory mechanism (whatever people say about Israel is “Pavlovian contempt”), while Zivotofsky uses it as a rhetorical weapon (criticisms of Israel are just variations on the theme of the medieval blood libel). Although the uses are slightly different, both work to discredit any criticism of Israeli policies and conduct by representing it, on a priori grounds, as a mere cover for antisemitism. The stakes of the current debate are too high to allow for such evasions. 

Professor Jeffrey Freedman is chair of The Robert M. Beren Department of History. He has taught at Yeshiva University since the fall of 1992.

Photo Caption: War damage in Gaza

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons