Only wars involving Israel command worldwide attention

Photo: Flash90

WE

have already devoted one lengthy column to Omer Bartov’s July 15 piece in the New York Times, “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It” (“Genocide, Not,” Issue 1071). And we do so again not because Bartov’s original essay was so powerful, but because it was sure to attract substantial attention, due to being prominently featured in the Times and because of Bartov’s Israeli background.

Indeed, the essay is remarkable primarily for how flimsy it is. Bartov’s summary reliance on the agreement of other “genocide scholars” with his conclusion constitutes the weakest form of argument — that from authority. And that weakness is compounded when the experts cited include such figures as the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Palestine, Francesca Albanese, and South Africa’s complaint to the International Criminal Court.

Bartov’s more-than-3,000-word essay is part of an ongoing onslaught on Israel in the Times. (Mitchell Bard has suggested the paper should consider adopting the crusaders’ Jerusalem cross as its new logo.) Along with Bartov’s piece, the Times published another long article arguing that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is deliberately prolonging the war in Gaza to preserve his coalition.

That article did not even attempt to demonstrate that Israel’s goal of removing Hamas from Gaza is either illegitimate or could have already been achieved sooner. Further, it did not address Israel’s significant achievements over the past year and a half: the dramatic degradation of the Hezbollah threat, and the major setback dealt to Iran’s nuclear ambitions, chief among them.

The Times recently broadcast around the world a front-page photo of an emaciated infant child in Gaza, as emblematic of the widespread starvation there. And even when it was established that the infant in question suffered from cerebral palsy and other genetic birth defects, and that the photo in question was cropped from a larger one including the infant’s healthy, well-fed older brother, the Times could not muster an apology, only “added context” to the photo and an exculpatory statement that there are, in any event, other starving children in Gaza.

JEFFREY HERF, a professor of modern European studies who has written extensively on the Holocaust, took Bartov to task for having lent academic legitimacy to the old Soviet propaganda tool of labeling Israel’s defensive wars genocidal. Bartov, he charged, had remarkably written about the Gaza war as if there were only one party. Omitted was any context for Israel’s actions, including Hamas’s explicitly genocidal goal of reclaiming the entirety of Israel and killing its entire Jewish population, and its actions on October 7 in pursuit of the goal. Nor did Bartov mention that Hamas is the only party that benefits from civilian casualties in Gaza, and that it has deliberately pursued a strategy to maximize those casualties, which it could end by surrendering and going into exile, as Arafat and the PLO did from Lebanon in 1982.

Both Herf and Major John Spencer stressed how weak is Bartov’s effort to prove any genocidal intent on Israel’s part — a couple of statements by right-wing politicians, who do not command any troops or issue battlefield orders, and Netanyahu’s reference to Hamas (not the Palestinians) as “Amalek.” Bartov, Spencer writes, has “not even tried” to show genocidal intent on the part of Israel.

In a play on Bartov’s title, he entitled his response to Bartov, “I’m a War Scholar. There Is No Genocide in Gaza.” Spencer heads the Modern War Institute at West Point. He has trained military units in urban warfare for decades and taught military strategy and the laws of warfare for years. Most relevant, he has embedded with IDF forces in Gaza four times since October 7.

He writes: “I have reviewed [IDF] orders, watched their targeting process, and seen soldiers take real risks to avoid harming civilians.... Israel has taken extraordinary steps to limit civilian harm. It warns before attacks. It opens safe corridors and pauses operations so civilians can leave combat areas.... I have seen missions delayed or canceled because of children nearby. I have seen Israeli troops come under fire and still be ordered not to shoot back because civilians might be harmed....

“Israel has delivered more humanitarian aid to Gaza than any military in history has provided to an enemy population in wartime,” including millions of vaccine doses, fuel for hospitals and infrastructure, and it has facilitated the delivery of 1.8 million tons of aid, mostly food. It has increased the flow of clean water, and even allowed 36,000 Gazans to seek medical treatment abroad.

The laws of war, Spencer points out, do not prohibit war. Rather they require distinguishing between combatants and noncombatants, a distinction Hamas does everything possible to obscure; requires commanders to take precautions to protect civilian life; and to make sure that the force employed is proportional to the objective.

“I have watched the IDF do exactly that. I have seen restraint, humanitarian aid, and deliberate compliance with legal standards, often at tactical cost,” he concludes.

WHILE MUCH of the critique of Bartov’s article has rightly centered on his accusation of Israeli genocide, there is another aspect of his essay that I wish to address: his indulgence in what Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin long ago labeled the “de-Judaization of the Holocaust.”

He notes that “scholars of genocide” have been nearly unanimous in their condemnation of Israel’s actions in Gaza, whereas those whose focus is on the Holocaust have been far more hesitant, out of a concern that “genocide” not become a synonym for “a lot of people were killed.” As a consequence, Holocaust scholars risk “retreat[ing] into some ethnic ghetto in which the study of the Holocaust began its life at the end of World War II — as a marginal preoccupation by the remnants of a marginalized people.” He prefers to see study of the Holocaust integrated into the broader category of genocide studies with its concern with universal justice and the promotion of “tolerance, diversity, anti-racism, and support for migrants and refugees.”

Bartov accuses Israel of using the Holocaust to cover the crimes of the IDF and, in the same vein as Thomas Friedman, who once described Israel as “Yad Vashem with an army,” views Jews, in general, as being obsessed with the Holocaust. The claim that Israel faces a “Nazi-like enemy” in Hamas is nothing more than “propaganda,” Bartov asserts.

Presumably, Bartov is aware of the close collaboration with Hitler by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini. The latter was one of the spiritual fathers of the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is an offshoot. And while Hamas may lack the Nazis’ capacity for the efficient extermination of tens of thousands of Jews in a day, does anyone doubt that it would gladly do so if it could? The euphoric celebration of October 7 reflects a hatred of Jews equal to that of the Nazis.

Israel’s determination to uproot and destroy Hamas, whose leaders repeatedly declare its intention to repeat the massacres of October 7, is prudential, not obsessional. Bartov says that Hamas had not constituted an effective fighting force for nearly a year. So what? Does he deny that if Hamas remains in place, it will reconstitute itself, build new tunnels, and do everything possible to fulfill those promises?

Similarly prudential is Israel’s insistence on taking seriously repeated Iranian threats to wipe it out, especially when Iran was poised on the knife’s edge of obtaining nuclear weapons. One lesson of Jewish history is: When your enemies proclaim the desire to kill you, believe them.

IN ANY EVENT, the de-Judaization of the Holocaust and its reduction to just another subcategory of genocide has proven a colossal failure. Witness the world’s almost complete silence in the face of real genocides — the slaughter of 800,000 Tutsis by machete-wielding Hutus over a month in Rwanda in 1994; or the murder of 200,000 to 400,000 black Muslim farmers in Sudan’s Darfur province by their Arab co-religionists, the Janjaweed, between 2002 and 2004.

In our own time, repeated Russian war crimes in the form of drone and missile attacks on purely civilian targets, such as hospitals, in Ukraine, and China’s concentration camp-like enclosures in which a million Muslim Uyghurs are held have not engendered demonstrations anywhere in the world.

The leveling of multiple cities in Iraq in the battle against ISIS; the hundreds of thousands killed in wars in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan have never been the subject of campus protests of any kind, even though the casualties dwarf those in Gaza.

Ironically, then, even when no special status is granted to the Holocaust, it all comes back to the Jews. Only wars involving Israel command worldwide attention; only Israel’s attempts to defend its citizens in the wake of a massacre by an enemy that has declared its intent to repeat such massacres again and again attract mass demonstrations against Israel and Jews in cities around the world and provoke attacks on Jews and Jewish businesses.

TOWARD THE END of his essay, Bartov frets that Israel will lose its moral claim to existence based on the Holocaust. But it is not the Holocaust that gives legitimacy to the world’s only majority Jewish state, though the Holocaust might be adduced as an argument for the existence of at least one such state in which Jews can find a safe haven.

Even without reliance on the Hashem’s Biblical promise of the Land, the Jews are the oldest indigenous people in the Land, capable of tracing their continuous existence in the Land back over 3,400 years. When Jews first started to return to the Land in significant numbers, they did not come back as foreign conquerors but as people who had prayed for that return over nearly two millennia of exile.

And far from conquering the Land as colonizers, they purchased it from the local landowners — a frequently overlooked fact — paying $1,000 per acre for malarial, nonarable land, at a time when prime farmland in Iowa sold for less. They made that land bloom, and, as a consequence, began to attract Arabs from southern Syria as well to a place that had previously been sparsely populated.

Bartov warns that Israeli Jews must undergo a paradigm shift and recognize that there is no solution to this conflict other than an agreement to share the Land in some form. But when have the Jews ever refused to divide the Land? In 1948, Jews accepted the UN partition plan; the Arabs rejected it and embarked on a war to drive the Jews from the Land in its entirety.

Even after the 1949 armistice agreement, the Arab states refused to negotiate over refugees or anything else, for doing so would constitute recognition of Israel’s existence. Even if every refugee were returned to his former home, it would mean little unless they returned as conquerors, “without the Israeli flag flying on a single square meter of our country,” said one prominent Arab thinker.

At the Camp David conference in 2000, President Clinton’s CIA director, George Tenet, could not believe the generosity of Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s offer. Yet Yasser Arafat left the conference without putting forth a single proposal or counteroffer. Bill Clinton summed up the failure of Camp David during the last presidential election cycle: “The Palestinians don’t want a state; they want to kill Israelis and make Israel uninhabitable.”

Israel is entitled to make sure they do not succeed.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1076. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)