Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism, Vol 7.2, Special Issue 2024

JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORA RY ANTISEMITISM

VOL 7.2

SPECIAL ISSUE 2024

COMMEMORATING THE ANNIVERSARY OF OCT OBER 7, 2023

Commemorating the Anniversary of October 7, 2023

Edited by Lesley Klaff

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Lesley Klaff (Sheffield Hallam University, UK; University of Haifa, Israel)

DEPUTY EDITOR

Daniel Allington (King’s College London, UK)

ASSOCIATE EDITORS

Steven Baum (Independent Scholar, US)

Eve Garrard (University of Manchester, UK)

Neil Kressel (William Paterson University, US)

David Seymour (City, University of London, UK)

EDITORIAL CONSULTANT

David Hirsh (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK)

NORTH AMERICAN EDITORIAL CONSULTANT

Mark Goldfeder (Director, National Jewish Advocacy Center)

BOOK REVIEW EDITOR

Balázs Berkovits (Comper Center for the Study of Antisemitism, University of Haifa)

EDITORIAL BOARD

Jonathan Arkush (Past President, Board of Deputies of British Jews, UK)

Daniel Chernilo (School of Government, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez)

Ben Cohen (Senior Correspondent, Algemeiner Journal, US)

Donna Robinson Divine (Smith College, US; University of Haifa, Israel; President, Association for Israel Studies)

Claudia Globisch (Institute of Employment Research, Germany)

Chad Alan Goldberg (University of Wisconsin-Madison, US)

Rusi Jaspal (Pro Vice-Chancellor [Research & Knowledge Exchange], Brighton University, UK)

Anthony Julius (University College London, UK; Mishcon de Reya LLP, UK)

Efraim Karsh (Kings College, UK; Bar-Ilan University, Israel)

James Kirchick (Tablet Magazine Columnist, US)

Richard Landes (Bar-Ilan University, Israel)

Lord John Mann (Government Antisemitism Tsar)

Kenneth L. Marcus (Louis D Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law; former Assistant Secretary of Education for Civil Rights, US)

Stephen Norwood (The University of Oklahoma, US)

Rafal Pankowski (Collegium Civitas, Poland)

David Patterson (University of Texas at Dallas, US)

Eunice Pollack (University of North Texas, US)

Lars Rensmann (University of Groningen, Netherlands)

Dave Rich (Community Security Trust, UK)

Asaf Romirowsky (Executive Director, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East; University of Haifa, Israel)

Samuel Salzborn (University of Giessen, Germany)

Monika Schwarz-Friesel (Technical University, Berlin, Germany)

Philip Spencer (Kingston University, UK; Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, UK)

Derek Spitz (Barrister at One Essex Court)

Gerald Steinberg (Bar-Ilan University, Israel)

Shmuel Trigano (University of Paris X-Nanterre, France)

Jonathan Turner (Chief Executive, UK Lawyers for Israel, UK)

James Vaughan (Aberystwyth University, UK)

Leslie Wagner (Former Chancellor, University of Derby, UK; Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Israel)

Shalva Weil (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel)

ISSN: 2472-9906

Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism

Volume 7.2, Special Issue 2024

Contents

Editorial v

Lesley Klaff

ARTICLES

When Military Targeting of Hamas Combatants was Misrepresented as Genocide: An Open-Source Data Analysis with a Focus on Israeli Airstrikes in the Gaza Urban Warfare, 2023–2024

Lewi Stone and Gregory Rose

The Crisis of Critique and Academic Antizionism—Before and After October 7

Balázs Berkovits

From 1967 to October 7: The History of an Antisemitic Cartoon from the Civil Rights Era to a Harvard Encampment

Sara Yael Hirschhorn

Can Jews Speak Freely on Ivy League Campuses?

Mattie Harris and Robert Maranto

INTERVIEW

“Keeping our little corner clean”: An Interview with Matthew Feldman on Antisemitism after October 7

Lesley Klaff

01

23

39

51

67

There is a general acknowledgment that October 7 saw the worst act of violence perpetrated against Jews since the Holocaust. Nevertheless, a global anti-Israel protest movement has taken to our streets, to social media, and to university campuses, to accuse Israel of perpetrating a “genocide” against the Palestinians, to denounce it as a “settler-colonial” state, and to justify October 7 as an “act of resistance.” This demonizing anti-Israel rhetoric has coincided with a record rise in antisemitism, as Jews are taken to be Israel’s proxies. In this Special October 7 Issue of the Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism , which has been made fully open access by the generosity of JCA associate editor, Dr. Steve Baum, we offer a handful of specially selected papers that address the accusation of genocide against Israel, the deployment of the settler-colonial narrative, and the hostile environment for Jews on American college campuses. We are happy for the readers of this issue to share it as widely as possible. Israel stands accused in the United Nations principal court of perpetrating genocide against the Palestinian population in Gaza during the 2023–2024 Hamas-Israel war. A genocide is the intentional destruction of a population group. In our first article, “When Military Targeting of Hamas Combatants was Misrepresented as ‘Genocide’: An Open-Source Data Analysis with a Focus on Israeli Airstrikes in the Gaza Urban Warfare 2023–2024,” Professors Lewi Stone and Gregory Rose test available open-source statistical data concerning Gazan civilian death rates. They find that the overall rate of women and child casualties, taken as an approximation for civilian casualties, significantly declines with the progression of the war and is far less than the claims made by media sources. The civilian-tocombatant death ratio also significantly declines over the war. The data show that the IDF does

not carry out indiscriminate attacks or bombings in Gaza, thus refuting politicized accusations that Israel targets civilians, which are widely represented in mass media. Conversely, the data substantiates the Israeli claim to target Hamas combatants but not Gazan civilians. Thus, in the mirror of history, false accusations of genocide in the courts of the United Nations more clearly reflect the revival of medieval blood libels against Jews than reveal anything about the actual war in Gaza. Lewi Stone is professor of biomathematics in the Faculty of Life Sciences at Tel Aviv University, Israel, and professor of mathematics in the School of Science at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. Gregory Rose is professor of law at the Australian National Centre for Ocean Resources and Security (ANCORS), Faculty of Business and Law, University of Wollongong, Australia.

The next article, “The Crisis of Critique and Academic Antizionism—Before and after October 7” by Balázs Berkovits, focuses on the criticism of Zionism and Israel as a Western-type of “white settler colonialism,” by having recourse to an epistemological, instead of a merely political, framework of analysis. It sets out to show that contemporary antisemitism, besides antiJewish motivations, stems largely from the epistemological shortcomings and radical ambitions of contemporary social critique. Jews are predisposed to figure at the juncture of social critique and the conspiratorial mode of thought, and to be categorized by rigid, binary conceptual schemes, thereby constituting a “Jewish problem.” Beyond this epistemological insecurity and “conceptually” directed radicalism, Jews are also affected by the “white” tag appended to them. The “white” label directly triggers the category of “colony”/”settler colony” applied to Israel, and, especially after October 7, accusations of genocide. Dr Berkovits is a senior

researcher at the Comper Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism and Racism and a lecturer in antisemitism at the University of Haifa. He is also a research fellow at the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism.

Next, the article “From 1967 to October 7: The History of an Antisemitic Cartoon from the Civil Rights Era to the Harvard Encampment” by Sara Yael Hirschhorn, restores to history the saga of an antisemitic cartoon and broadside first published by the Student National Coordinating Committee, a civil rights organization, in the summer of 1967. The cartoon and broadside were reprinted by Students and Faculty for Justice in Palestine at Harvard University immediately after October 7. It demonstrates the long duration of the vocabulary, solidarities, and platforms for these views over more than fifty years, and shows how a set of discourses was institutionalized within the progressive Left that later bore fruit on October 7. The article also points to similarities and differences in the way this imagery and text was received, and the possibilities for interventions after October 7 to break a cycle lasting half a century. Dr Hirschhorn is a senior researcher at the Comper Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism and Racism and an instructor in the Ruderman Program in American Jewish Studies at the University of Haifa.

Ivy League universities are thought leaders, making the pro-Hamas protests on these campuses since October 2023 likely harbingers of future US views towards Israel and, relatedly, societal levels of antisemitism. Journalistic accounts and some quantitative research offer evidence that, in the United States, twenty-firstcentury antisemitism is more common among elites than non-elites; yet, relative to studies of other forms of prejudice, little peer-reviewed research has explored elite antisemitism. In the fourth article, “Can Jews Speak Freely on Ivy League Campuses?,” US Senate staffer Mattie Harris and University of Arkansas Twenty-First Century chair in Leadership Robert Maranto use

survey data with a large, representative sample (n = 44,847) of undergraduate students from 207 campuses collected by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), to explore whether Jewish students are relatively more likely to report self-censoring on Ivy League campuses. Controlling for demographic and ideological variables, ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions indicate that  Jewish Ivy League students are more likely than both gentile Ivy Leaguers and non-Ivy League Jews to report self-censorship on social media and regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The authors caution that, since the FIRE survey was implemented well before the October 7 attacks, these must be considered baseline findings. They speculate that Jewish self-censorship has increased since data collection, particularly on elite campuses. They conclude by urging researchers to use FIRE data to study trends in antisemitism, and selfcensorship generally.

The final contribution to this issue is ‘“Keeping our little corner clean’: An Interview with Matthew Feldman on Antisemitism after October 7” by JCA editor Lesley Klaff. Klaff and Feldman engage in a wide-ranging discussion that touches on various forms of antisemitism today: right-wing extremist—especially so-called “lone wolves”; Islamist; and far-left. The latter have emerged in prominence since 7 October as antisemitic hate crimes have reached postwar highs. Are they related? How relevant are comparisons with the Holocaust and other instances of genocide, violent antisemitism, or urban warfare? Moving on from this context, and the highlighting of other issues related to extremism in contemporary Britain, Klaff and Feldman dive directly into the attacks of October 7 and its transnational effects. Importantly, just  how these issues are engaged by scholars is also a running theme in this conversation, which originally took place in person on April 19, 2024. Matthew Feldman, emeritus professor in the Modern History of Ideas, is a leading UK expert on the radical right, and has written and spoken extensively in this country and in Europe

on fascism and the radical right, and on radical right narratives and counter-narratives. His history of fascism will be published with Yale University Press in 2025.

This open access Special October 7 Issue of the Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism is

dedicated to the victims of October 7. May their memories be for a blessing and may those still in captivity be safely returned to their homes.

Lesley Klaff Editor in Chief

JCA 2024 (DOI: 10.26613/jca/7.2.162)

When Military Targeting of Hamas Combatants Was

Misrepresented as Genocide: An Open-Source Data Analysis with a Focus on Israeli Airstrikes in the Gaza Urban Warfare, 2023–2024

Abstract

Israel stands accused in the United Nations principal court of perpetrating genocide against the Palestinian population in Gaza during the 2023–2024 Hamas-Israel war. A genocide is the intentional destruction of a population group. In this study, we analyze available opensource statistical data concerning Gazan civilian death rates, finding that the overall rate of women and child casualties, taken as an approximation for civilian casualties, significantly declines with the progression of the war and is far less than claims made by media sources. The civilian-to-combatant death ratio also significantly declines over the course of the war. The data shows that the IDF did not carry out indiscriminate attacks or bombings.

Keywords: casualty data analysis, Gaza genocide, Gaza October 7 war, Hamas human shields, international lawfare, urban warfare, war misinformation

In the International Court of Justice (ICJ) under the current presidency of Nawaf Salam of Lebanon, the crime of genocide is alleged against Israel.1 It complements cases alleging the criminality of the Jewish leaders of Israel2 brought by the chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court (ICC), Karim Ahmad Khan, who has requested the issue of warrants for their arrest.3

Protests across the globe have centered around the deaths of, or injuries to, Palestinians. Pro-Palestinian/anti-Israel groups accuse Israel of attacking civilian populations and bombing in an indiscriminate, disproportionate, and genocidal fashion. Contemporary news media disseminate criminal accusations against the Jewish state, while social media accelerates their global spread by multitudes of influencers. No other war or geopolitical issue has so agitated the

publics of principally Christian and Islamic countries, where charges of Israeli bloodlust revive antisemitic blood libels. These United Nations cases alleging the most severe breaches of humanity’s rights are reminiscent of medieval disputations and of Soviet show trials in which ancient arch-enemy Jews are transfigured into modern Israelis.

In this paper, we limit our considerations to the alleged crime of genocide, the “crime of crimes,” defined as “a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part.”4 Within the international legal definition, a criminal intention to destroy the population group is what motivates culpable acts such as killing or causing serious mental or bodily harm, or imposing physical conditions calculated to destroy the

Lewi Stone and Gregory Rose

group. We focus on Gazan civilian deaths to assess whether genocide by Israel is in evidence, as distinct from targeting of Hamas combatants at the cost of collateral damage to the Gazan civilian population in an urban warzone. Thus, we assess the overall destructive impact and intention of Israeli military targeting operations. The paper is meant to complement our previous study on the mortality statistics of the Gaza war.5

Relevant to, but beyond the scope of our assessment of the open-source mortality data, are further statistics concerning Israeli facilitation of humanitarian assistance into Gaza to support the civilian population that provide evidence in contradiction of alleged genocide. Nor do we consider other wider humanitarian law questions, such as the proportionality of civilian deaths as compared to the military advantage of killing Hamas combatants in each Israeli military strike. The drafters of the 1948 Genocide Convention clarified in their discussions that:

[t]he infliction of losses, even heavy losses, on the civilian population in the course of operations of war, does not as a rule constitute genocide. In modern war belligerents normally destroy factories, means of communication, public buildings, etc. and the civilian population inevitably suffers more or less severe losses. It would of course be desirable to limit such losses. Various measures might be taken to achieve this end, but this question belongs to the field of the regulation of the conditions of war and not to that of genocide.6

Moreover, to assess proportionality of civilian deaths it would be necessary to evaluate each Israeli military strike in context, which would require resources well beyond our reach.

Our objective in this paper is to offer a preliminary assessment of data claimed to support allegations of overall intent and acts of genocide by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Specifically, we focus on the Israeli aerial bombing campaign in the first weeks of the war, when the alleged civilian death rate was at its

highest, and which informed the early allegations of genocide. What is the evidence that the ICJ judiciary might rely upon to evaluate genocide by Israel? How do we distinguish verifiable facts from disinformation, propaganda and psychological warfare? The available data has become a focus of fierce debate.

We find that the open-source casualty data shows that precision strikes on Hamas combatants dominated Israeli aerial targeting. Following the aerial campaign, the open-source casualty data emerging from the ground invasion shows increased precision in targeting and a sharply declining civilian to combatant death ratio. In brief, open-source data shows no genocide.

Data, Statistics, Allegations, and Disinformation

Hamas’s attack on the early morning of Saturday, October 7, 2023, at the Israel-Gaza border, resulted in the massacre of 1,139 victims, mostly Israeli civilians and some military, but almost half from 24 different or dual nationalities. A further 247 hostages were kidnapped by Hamas and mostly hidden in the tunnels of Gaza for use as human bargaining chips. Soon after, the Israeli government responded with a declaration of war, with the stated mission to destroy Hamas and to return home the hostages.

Quantifying the Gazan war casualties over time has become an important feature of this war, given modern interests in data and visualization, and given its usefulness in providing information concerning the pace and evolution of events. Unfortunately, the unavailability of extensive mortality data of sufficient quality and reliability impedes proper evaluation of questions about the accuracy, proportionality and intent of Israeli targeting practices, making it difficult for external observers to piece together the “big picture” from the many inconsistent reports published. For extended periods of time, neither side released estimates of the number of Palestinian combatants who were killed over the war, or did not know them, and estimates of civilians killed are under debate. Following our

earlier work, 7 here we make use of Gazan Ministry of Health (MoH) reports and publicly available open-source data to investigate: a) the distributions of civilian deaths as the war progressed and b) the degree to which the Israel Air Force (IAF) bombing attacks in the first phase of the war were precise or random, including whether any underlying patterns can be discerned from the data. This data provides an important glimpse into the manner in which the IDF has operated through the war.

Ostensibly scientific literature analyzing datasets of casualties in Gaza has been published recently. A 2023 paper in the Lancet8 suggested that traumatic injury deaths during the first three weeks of the war in the Gazan population prior to the ground operation “are likely to be largely civilian.” It gave the impression that the IDF makes use of random or haphazard bombing, as many reports by influential NGOs and in the media uncritically suggested. It was followed shortly by another paper in the Lancet9 that examined fatalities of UNRWA staff during the same period. It sought to prove that the Gazan MoH casualty statistics were not inflated, and so it extrapolated across the entire Gazan population the supposedly reliable UNRWA casualty data. However, subsequent analysis demonstrated that characteristics of UNRWA staff are not representative of Gaza’s civilian population (for example, children are not represented), and that the study has major statistical flaws.10

A further paper projected Gazan deaths forward for six months in 2024, from February 7 to August 6, based upon casualty data from October 7, 2023, to February 6, 2024.11 Again, it incorrectly extrapolated the UNRWA staff’s traumatic injury death rates of adults and was based on problematic assumptions. While this study predicted some 53,000 injury deaths in their “status quo” scenario in these six months, in reality and in hindsight there proved to be very close to 12,000 deaths, according to Gazan MoH reports. Thus, the paper’s statistical predictions of the death toll were overestimated by more than 400%.

We explain below the MoH reporting methodology and discuss statistical issues in more detail, when considering the reliability of MoH data. In contrast to the article in the Lancet and the analysis in the later paper, the evidence suggests that the IAF airstrikes conducted in the early phases of the war were highly targeted rather than indiscriminate. Despite the IDF’s best efforts, aerial bombing in urban areas inevitably results in civilian deaths as collateral damage, but they are nevertheless almost always, if not always, targeted against Hamas.

Evidence from the Data Demonstrates Intent to Target Hamas and Not Civilians

After the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of the Israeli Olympic team by the Black September group, Mossad—the Israeli spy agency—tracked down and executed the Palestinian terrorists responsible, one by one, as popularly recounted in Steven Spielberg’s 2005 film Munich . Immediately following the October 7, 2023, massacre of Israeli villagers by Hamas, a similar retribution against Hamas leaders has been in motion at the hands of the IDF. Mossad director David Barnea said that his service was “obliged” to hunt down the leaders of Hamas after its October 7 attack on Israel. It “will take time, as it took time after the slaughter in Munich, but our long arm will reach them in any place that they may be.”12 Barnea then warned that everyone who “participated, directly or indirectly, in the slaughter of 7 October—they signed their own death warrant.” On October 15, 2023, the IDF chief of staff, Brigadier General Herzl Halevi, told the troops: “Our responsibility now is to enter Gaza, to go to the places where Hamas is preparing, acting, planning, launching. Attack them everywhere, every commander, every operative, destroy infrastructure.”13

The IDF’s primary objective in practice was to eliminate Hamas political leaders and commanders, neutralize its military brigades, and to eliminate Hamas combatants who

participated in the October 7 massacre.14 Our priority interest is on Hamas leaders for whom more public information is generally available. The key elected leaders of Hamas comprise eighteen Politburo members, although all but four lived outside Gaza, while there are sixteen “senior leaders” of Hamas, who mostly resided in Gaza. A list is given in Appendix 1 Tables A1 and A2 as derived from information published in early 2024. Hamas itself is ruled through a centralized hierarchy with these organizational leaders at the top, who are in complete control,15 then dominating the most powerful Gazan leadership clans and families.16

Important findings emerge simply by reviewing and identifying individuals and buildings hit during the initial aerial phase of the war, before the major ground forces movement into Gaza on October 26. We did this using open-source data provided by NGOs such as AIRWARS (a British online monitor of civilian casualties),17 the Palestinian Center for Human Rights 18 and Al Mezan Center for Human Rights 19 (both based in Gaza and linked to the PFLP terror organization), 20 the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (Israel),21 Israel Defense Forces reports, 22 Gazan Ministry of Health reports, 23 and a selection of media publications and social media sites (Appendix 1), which were all checked and compared for consistency.

Hamas attacked Israel at 6:30 a.m. on Saturday morning of October 7. From Saturday midnight in a space of less than nine hours, eleven of the most senior leaders in Hamas, including three Politburo members or their residences, were successfully pinpointed and targeted. These individuals are all listed in Table 1. The Table lists thirty senior leaders and commanders who were targeted by airstrikes in the first three days. Many other Hamas operatives without leadership positions were also targeted in this time period but are not listed here due to the constraints of space and paucity of identification information.

The IDF destroyed the offices and targeted the home of Yahya Sinwar (12:40 a.m., October 8) who in practice is the most senior leader of Hamas; the property and houses of Hamas leader Younes and other senior leaders Fathi Hamad (4:15 a.m., Interior and Security), Kamal Awan (6:20 a.m., Education and Culture), Ghazi Hamad (6:55 a.m., Border Crossings), Nizar Awdallah (7:00 a.m.), Salah Bardawil (7:00 a.m.), Zakaria Abu Muamar (7:30 a.m.), Ismail Barhoun, Issam Dealis, Mahmoud al-Zahar; a second residence belonging to Politburo member Fathi Hamad (8:45 a.m., in Jabalia); and the residence of Suheil al-Hindi. A whole range of Hamas commanders and/or their residencies were targeted in the next forty-eight hours including Hamdan Al Najjar “Abu Zaki” (Saturday, October 7, director of Clans Office Ministry of Interior), Abu Rakab (7:00 a.m., October 8, leader of Air Operations), Hamdan Al-Najjar (9:00 a.m., Ministry of Interior), Ayman Younis (brigade commander, eliminated), Anas al-Ghandour (leader of terrorist operations), Abu Zuhri (9:50 p.m., head of Political Department abroad), the military leader Mohammed Deif (see below), and Awad al Sultan (head of the Ministry of Martyrs).

In summary, during a thirty-six-hour period, some thirty Hamas leaders were targeted by the IDF, which either neutralized their Hamas target or damaged or destroyed their residencies, as shown in Table 1. Roughly, this is about one Hamas leader every 1.2 hours. The actual number is likely to be far higher than thirty, given the limited data accessible. The evidence of the ability of the IDF to carry out targeted airstrikes on Hamas leaders in such a short span of time with this degree of precision is overwhelming.

By October 19, in less than two weeks, some thirteen of the eighteen listed Hamas senior leaders living in Gaza had either had their residencies damaged or been themselves neutralized through airstrikes. At least five were killed. Some 100 operatives that we could identify were

targeted by this time, as reported in open-source data. See Appendix 1 for access to a more detailed and expanded list of 170 Hamas operatives targeted, and not just leaders, compiled over the war with the focus on the first four-five weeks. They are just a few of many, since the identities and deaths of Hamas operatives were deliberately being concealed by Hamas.

The extraordinary hit rate and lethal effectiveness of IAF in targeting of Hamas senior leaders suggests that the IAF was going to a lot of effort to target combatants rather than civilians. The goal of the IDF in this period evidently was also to apply deliberate pressure on Hamas leaders to release Israeli hostages.

A notable example of Hamas leaders seeking refuge in tunnels and in civilian shelters is Mohammed Diab Ibrahim al-Masri, a military commander and skilled rocket engineer. Al-Masri, who designed the widely used Qassam rocket, became a near-mythical national symbol in the Hamas movement. To evade Israeli attacks, he moved randomly from house to house in Gaza, sleeping every night in another location for decades, earning him the nickname “Al-Deif”—“the guest.” According to Israeli intelligence, Al-Deif and his brother were key architects of the October 7 massacre. On October 9/10, the IDF bombed his residence, although Al-Deif managed to escape. Eventually, on July 13, 2024, Israeli fighter jets targeted a compound in Gaza’s Khan Yunis, based on precise intelligence, which resulted in Al-Deif’s death.24

According to detailed analyses, many families in Gaza, like Al-Deif’s, are closely aligned in their support for Hamas, whether by choice or through domination within the family and clan. 25 They provide storage of weapons, concealed bunker access points, launchers for rockets, ammunition caches, intelligence, logistical support, and more. Their participation in hostilities is a factor that the IDF may take into account when planning airstrikes. For example, if the IDF was aware that information on hidden kidnapped hostages is known to certain clan

leaders and/or of powerful families, the IDF would apply military pressure to them.

The datasets show that the IDF targeted particular family residencies in multiple locations, either because they were seeking out a specific Hamas operative, or to pressure the family or to destroy weapons and terror infrastructure. An example is the residence of Yahya Sarraj, the Hamas-appointed mayor of Gaza City, who wrote in a New York Times article: “Without warning, a direct hit to my house on Oct. 22 killed my eldest son, Roshdi, a photojournalist and filmmaker.”26 Sarraj wrote: “It made me wonder if I could have been the target.” Given Yahya’s senior status in Hamas, it would be reasonable to assume that the IDF identified both Yahya and his personal residency as legitimate targets. Roshdi was a Hamas propagandist struck in the kitchen of the family home. The airstrike seems to have been carefully calibrated, as nine other Sarraj family members in the residence survived.

The targeting of residences of Hamas families raises questions about which family members are participants in hostilities (as combatants are legitimate military targets), and which precautions should be taken against harming civilians. These questions must be answered within the context of each targeted strike using the information available at the time to assess the specific military advantage of killing the combatants as compared to the unintended and collateral killing of persons not participating in the hostilities. However, that would require a review of each targeted strike individually, including the intelligence reasonably available to, the intentions of, and the precautions taken by, the responsible Israeli commanders at the relevant time, in order to assess the proportionality of civilian collateral damage in each strike, and that is not the objective of this paper. Instead, we assess here the evidence for genocide, which concerns the killing of a civilian population group, or part thereof, with the overall deliberate intention to destroy it.

The extraordinary “hit rate” of top-ranking Hamas terrorists and their residences could only be achieved by a combination of precision bombing, real-time intelligence for tracking of the terrorists concerned, and detailed information on the Hamas command structure maintained by the IDF. The data clearly shows that the IDF used its extraordinary ability to swiftly pinpoint and strike Hamas leaders and/or their residencies in order to weaken Hamas. This culminated with the lethal precision-targeting of Ismail Haniyeh, the head of the Hamas Politburo, during his visit to Iran on July 31, 2024, although his home in Gaza had been

targeted much earlier on October 17, as indicated in Table 1.

Using open-source information, we show that IDF bombings in the opening phase of the war were not indiscriminate, as an extremely high proportion of known Hamas political leaders and military commanders and/or their residences were struck, clearly with intent to target them as combatants. Each of the fifty-two entries above indicates a Hamas leader and their role in Hamas, and whether they or their residencies were targeted. An expanded list has been collated listing more targeted combatants over a longer time period—see Appendix 1.

Target Status Responsibility Date of aerial attack

Salem Abu Quta Hamas Operative Oct. 7 Massacre Oct. 7 (8:00 p.m.)

Hamdan Al-Najjar Leader Minister of Interior & Clans Oct. 7 (8:30 p.m.)

Muhammad Sinwar Senior Leader Brother to Hamas Chief Oct. 7

Yahya Sinwar Senior Leader & Politburo Chief Hamas Senior Leader Oct. 8 (12:40 a.m.)

Fathi Hamad Politburo Interior & Security Oct. 8 (4:15 a.m.)

Kamal Abu Awan Senior Leader Education & Culture Oct. 8 (6:20 a.m.)

Ghazi Hamad Senior Leader Border Crossings Authority Oct. 8 (6:55 a.m.)

Nizah Awadallah Politburo Hamas Founder, Finance Oct. 8 (7:00 a.m.)

Salah al-Bardawil Politburo Spokesperson & Reforms Oct. 8 (7:00 a.m.)

Zakaria abu Maamar Senior Leader Economic Department Oct. 8 (7:30 a.m.)

Abu Rakab Commander Air Operations, Drones Oct. 8

Fathi Hamad Politburo Interior & Security Oct. 8 (8:45 a.m.)

Suhail al-Hindi Senior Leader Head of UNRWA Union Oct. 8

Al-Nabaheen Leader Air Attacks Oct. 8

Sameh al-Siraj Politburo Internal Security Oct. 8

Rawhi Mustasha Senior Leader Prime Minister Oct. 8

Mahmoud al-Zahar Senior Leader Foreign Minister Oct. 8

Ismail Barhoum Senior Leader Finance Oct. 8

Essam al-Dalis Senior Leader Prime Minister Oct. 8

Al-Najjar Family Leader Minister of Interior Oct. 8 (8:30pm)

Mohammed Deif Senior Military Leader Commands Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Oct. 8

Anas al-Ghandour Commander Terrorist Operations Oct. 8

Ziyad al Nakhala Senior Leader (PIJ chief) Designated Global Terrorist Oct. 8 (4:30pm) (Continued)

Table 1. Israeli airstrikes on Hamas leadership in the first days of October 2023

When Military Targeting of Hamas Combatants Was Misrepresented as Genocide

Table 1. Israeli airstrikes on Hamas leadership in the first days of October 2023

Target Status Responsibility Date of aerial attack

Farah Hamed Leader Terrorist Operations Oct. 8

Mohammed Dahlan (atah) Senior Leader Fatah Oct.8/9

Zakar Abu Maamar Senior Leader Head Office Interior Oct. 9

Abu Zuhri Leader Head Political Department Oct. 8 (9:50pm)

Rafat Abu Helal Leader Al-Nasser Brigade Oct. 9 (1:20am)

Abu Obeida Leader Spokesman, Political Wing Oct. 9

Ali Mustafa Ali Daloul Commander Field (DFLP) Oct. 9

Ibrahim Al-Madhoun Leader National Relations Oct 9

Abd al-Fattah Dukhan Leader Hamas Founding Member Oct. 10

Ali Qadi Commander Nukhba Forces Oct 10

Omar al-Hindi Commander Nukhba Forces Oct.11

Mohammed Deif Senior Leader Leads Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Oct. 10

Zakaria abu Maamar Senior Leader Economic Department Oct. 10

Jawad abu Shamala Senior Leader Economic Department Oct. 9

Yasser al-Bardawil Politburo Senior Leader Family Oct. 12

Yusuf Abu Marzouq Politburo Brother of Politburo Senior Leader Oct. 12

Muhammad Shamala Commander Nukhba Elite Naval Force Oct. 12

Mussa Nasir Commander (PIJ) Founder of Al-Aqsa Brigade (PIJ) Oct. 12

Hamed Sinwar Senior Leader Brother of Senior Leader Y. Sinwar Oct. 12

Additional senior leaders below

Merad abu Merad Commander Aerial Attacks in the Oct. 7 Massacre Oct. 14

Muetaz Eid Commander National Security Oct. 14

Bilal al Kedra Commander Nukhba Force; Oct. 7 Terrorist Oct. 15

Mohammed al-Masri Senior Leader Chief, Izz ad-Din al Qassam Oct. 15

Osama Mazini Senior Leader Shura Council / Education Oct. 17

Ismael Haniyeeh Politburo Chair Oct. 17

Ameen Nofal Commander Izz-ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades Oct. 17

Jamila al-Shanti Senior Leader Women’s Division Oct. 18

Mohamed Awdallah Senior Leader (Indirect) Commander, Family of Senior Leader Oct 18

Abdel Deif Senior Leader Brother of M. Deif Oct 19

Gaza Mortality Data and Issues about Its Reliability

The key source for war mortality analysis is the Gaza Ministry of Health (MoH). The MoH claims that its raw data was obtained directly from hospitals, morgues, and burials earlier in the war, although raw data from less reliable sources was added later in 2023 and through 2024.27 Given that the Gazan MoH is directly under Hamas control, there has been considerable controversy concerning the validity of its dataset. The MoH extensive but erratic reports may be accessed via Appendix 2. The data is understood to be rearranged, modified, and republished by the Government Media Office (GMO), the Palestinian Authority, and the UN Office for Coordination in Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

For our analysis, we divide the Hamas reporting of casualty data in 2023 into four distinct data phases.

Phase 1: October 7–26. This phase covers the period of primary emphasis on aerial bombing. MoH published daily death counts in various outlets and an extensive summary report on October 26.

Phase 2: October 27–December 11. This phase covers the period when the IDF ground forces first entered Gaza on October 27 and operated in the North. The MoH published daily death counts until the northern health administration system at Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City collapsed when IDF called for its evacuation in the second week of November and the GMO took over publication on November 11.28

Phase 3: December 12–April 2024. This phase covers the period when IDF ground forces entered central Gaza at the beginning of December. The GMO published death reports every few days. MoH published two summary reports in December, followed by erratic reports until April 2024. In March two studies appeared demonstrating major problems with the system used by Hamas to count the death toll.29

Phase 4: April 2024. This phase begins when Hamas and the UN changed their counting

methods. Phase 4 covers the April 11 MoH report and those following, which make use of a modified method of reporting that includes a new category for notifications of deaths online, such as via Google documents, which for the first time were included in “registered” data.

A simple scan of the MoH data reveals many inconsistencies and peculiarities, especially during Phase 2. For example, during Phase 2 the cumulative number of non-elderly adult male (aged eighteen to fifty-nine)30 deaths decreased from 2,890 on November 4 down to 2,616 on November 5. But by definition cumulative numbers cannot decrease with time. It is as though 274 men have simply come back to life! The removal of dead males from the statistics also serves to inflate the apparent ratio of women and children killed. Indeed, if we look over the entire week of 2 November to 9 November, the deaths of non-elderly adult males—those in the prime fighting-age category of eighteen to fifty-nine—increased by a total of 92, yet the total deaths of all men, women and children increased by 1,757. It is as though the IDF were going to great lengths to target everyone but potential combatants! Aizenberg points out other major quirks in the datasets.31

From November 10, the MoH stopped releasing regular casualty updates with age and gender breakdowns, although it did intermittently release “total” death figures, as well as two reports in December. From November 10 onwards, the GMO became the primary source of information on daily deaths in Gaza. Its dataset introduced further inconsistencies during the Phase 2 period. In fact, the GMO data is even more implausible than the MoH’s. The most astonishing period occurred in December 1–8, when the recorded cumulative number of male deaths declined from 4,850 to 3,499, with multiple individual declines occurring over the period (December 2, December 5, December 8). 32 Again, it is impossible for cumulative numbers to decline in time. Over the same period, the total number of reported women and children casualties increased from

10,664 to 13,991. That is: 1,351 men came back to life while 3,841 women and children died! This anomaly had the effect of dramatically increasing the women and children death ratio from 68% to 80%.

A report by the Washington Centre for Near East Policy33 examined anomalies in the datasets and concluded that the datasets were unreliable and apparently manipulated. The unreliability of data published by Hamas during Phase 2 might also be explained by the collapse of Hamas data gathering and processing systems during that period. The Al Shifa Hospital provided central casualty statistics collation for all of Gaza and also hosted the Hamas headquarters in Gaza City. Clashes between Hamas and Israeli forces occurred at the hospital throughout November, leading to its evacuation. In news reports on December 19, the credibility of the MoH decreased further when its directors admitted that its hospitals were instructed and controlled by Hamas, which had physical offices within the hospitals.

Because of its glaring inconsistencies, any analysis that includes the Phase 2 dataset (or even any of its MoH/GMO/OCHA subsets) over the November until December 12 period should be considered so unreliable as to be meaningless. This conclusion automatically invalidates many statements appearing in the media concerning the cumulative data, such as “by December 31, 2023, 70% of the total death toll comprised of women and children.” The errors in Phase 2 data invalidate such estimates, and indicate more investigation is required.

A key factor to bear in mind is Hamas’s policy of suppressing information about combatant deaths. The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorist Information Center notes that ten years ago, in the 2014 Gaza war, “the Interior Ministry in Gaza posted a message on its Facebook page warning the Palestinians not to disclose details about terrorist operatives (those in the ‘Resistance’) killed during Operation Protective Edge.”34 The center also notes that “Hamas’s policy is designed to create an image

of a large number of civilians who were killed, to strengthen the image that Israel is carrying out a “massacre” of civilians and to create an ostensibly factual infrastructure for a political, propaganda and legal campaign against Israel.”35 Figure 1 (below) shows an image, from August 5, 2014, at 10:54 p.m., of the Interior Ministry’s Facebook page. The post states that it is forbidden to post images of Hamas soldiers because Israel “collects all the information and the reports [about the fallen] and uses them as evidence to justify its crimes against [the Palestinian] civilians” (translated from Figure 1). Similarly, in the current conflict, we caution that Hamas’s announced casualty statistics

Figure 1. Copy of Facebook page as found in the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorist Information Center reports.36

relating to individual incidents are also often very problematic. For example, in the incident at Al Ahli Hospital in Gaza City on October 17, 2023, several independent reports indicated a death toll of about 200 and several intelligence reports estimated approximately 50 deaths.37 However, the MoH reported 471 nameless individuals killed, which is still the number in MOH records within Phase 1 of the dataset, and also the number published in the open-source data of AIRWARS (which monitors casualties by analyzing other online data sources such as social media). Furthermore, the incident was caused by Palestinian rocket fire rather than by Israeli missiles. Problematic statistics about casualty incidents were still reflected in these reports in the aftermath of the Israeli strike on August 10, 2024, when Hamas reported a death toll total of 100 civilians, but the IDF identified 38 terror operatives struck and almost no civilians.38

The UN Downward Revision of the Gaza Death Toll

In March 2024, two studies appeared highlighting major problems with the system used by Hamas to count the death toll.39 The problems were partially corroborated in the MoH report of April 11, 2024, which made clear that the bodies for over 10,000 of 34,000 claimed casualties could not be identified or were hypothesized in the new dataset it had just released. Soon after this, the UN revised its casualty estimates as shown in Figure 2 screenshots of the relevant UN webpage. Thus, on May 8 we learn that although there were 34,844 cumulative casualties in total, only 24,686 were identified, i.e., giving full details of name, gender, birth dates, and identity number. Some 10,158 were unidentified. Since the genders of most, if not all, of the unidentified deaths were unknown, only the identified deaths could give useful information. As a result, the number of women (and children also) was changed. According to Figure 2, on May 6 the number of women casualties is listed as >9,000, while on May 8 the revised number

is listed as 4959—a reduction of at least 45%. On May 6 the number of children casualties is listed as >14,500, while on May 8 it was listed as 7,797, again at least some 46% lower. Simpson et al. set out a detailed discussion on Hamas’s misclassification of more than 93% of its 6,629 unidentified deaths as women and children at the end of 2023. The GMO may well be deceptively increasing these ratios to conform with their propaganda narrative,40 whereby the proportion of women and children casualties appears close to 70%. That 93% of the so-called unidentified deaths are women and children is a strong indication that the data has been manipulated, hence the UN’s downward revision.

In addition to the above, the format of the MoH report was changed with the inclusion of an “elderly” category, which made it impossible to compare men and women casualty statistics from before April to after April, as the new “elderly” category was not disaggregated by gender. Furthermore, the lack of a category of natural deaths of the elderly suggests that the total figures include such deaths, which ordinarily would amount to over 5,000 per annum,41 and are not a result of war. All of these changes make clear that even the UN recognized a problem with the Gaza mortality data, and this led to their downward revision.

Proportion of Women and Children Deaths

We now provide a focused analysis of the available data to examine mortality patterns in the Gazan war. According to population demographers, the Gazan population is distributed across approximately 50% children, with adults divided evenly between males and females, each 25%, maintaining the 50:50 sex ratio. Therefore, indiscriminate airstrikes and killing of Gazans would comprise 75% women and children and 25% adult males. We refer to this proportion as WC = 75%. This demographic breakdown serves as the “random” mortality reference frame we use here. Indeed, a Gazan civilian casualty rate of 75% women and children has been frequently

Figure 2. UN’s May 6 and May 8 OCHA reports.42

asserted by UN sources as evidence in itself of Israeli indiscriminate killing and genocide.

Phase 1 (October 7–26). Analysis of the MoH data in data phase 1 of the war reveals that WC = 66.5% of the total deaths, i.e., 65.5% casualties were women and children. While this percentage is large, it is less extreme than the 75% random reference frame and reflects a deliberate avoidance of targeting civilians by the IDF.

Phase 2 (October 27–December 11) data are excluded from analysis because of their unreliability, as indicated above.

Phase 3 (December 12–31). For the third phase in December 2023, summary mortality data of southern Gaza and central hospitals can be found in MoH statistical reports, while the GMO published data every few days and

included statistics of northern hospitals derived from “reliable media reports.” The Tables in the MoH reports do not give direct information on the breakdown of women and children for all areas of Gaza. However, through careful calculations that compare the different datasets (MoH and GMO), and the two areas (north and south), we have found a way to reverse engineer these numbers.

Our calculations required willingness to work with the GMO data as well as the MoH reports and are given in more detail in Simpson et al.43 We considered the Phase 3 period for all of Gaza, and for combined identified and unidentified deaths. In this case, women and children made up WC = 42% (1,225/3,825) of all overall deaths, separable into WC = 37% (1,010/2,729) in the north and WC = 53% (585/1096) in the center and south. Again, these observed proportions of women and children casualties are far lower than the 70% figure frequently cited in the media. Moreover, it should be emphasized that this finding is based upon Hamas’s own data.

A more accurate assessment is most likely obtained from examining just the MoH registered hospital-identified deaths in Phase 3 for southern and central Gaza. The hospital data casualties have all been identified and are therefore less likely to have been manipulated. In this case, the following monthly breakdown is found from analysis of the MoH reports: December 2023 WC = 52.9%; January_2024, WC = 43.4%. Both numbers are far below the 75% reference frame.

Reductions in Gaza Civilian to Combatant Ratio and in Total Casualties

During Phase 3 of the data in December, the estimated death toll of roughly 50% for women and children in southern and central Gaza hospital data is far smaller than the random reference of 75%. If we assume that the remaining one third of that 75% comprises of excess deaths that resulted from intentional killings, we can estimate a civilian to combatant

ratio in southern Gaza of 2:1 (there are some reasonable but nontrivial assumptions built into this calculation, in that it assumes that any indiscriminate killing would impact all ages and genders equally).

A similar calculation estimates a 0.97:1 ratio in northern Gaza where WC = 37%. This change in the proportion of civilian casualties across the geography (from southern to northern Gaza) is due to the switch from predominantly air to ground combat in the north. North Gaza’s lower ratio likely resulted from local IDF operations employing fewer airstrikes and more ground forces (with the ground forces being comparatively more precise). The IDF’s efforts to direct vulnerable civilians south may have also contributed.

In Phase 3 of the data, for both the MoH and GMO datasets, the total deaths across Gaza for December 12–31 (20 days) amounted to 3,566 ( = 21,978-18,412). This is about half the 7,028 deaths for the same number of days at the start of the war, i.e., during Phase 1, October 7–26. Total casualty numbers steadily declined, so that, in August 6–25 2024, the total casualty numbers had lowered to 782, for the same nineteen-day period, which is 11% of the October 2023 figure (see Table 2). This reduction in total deaths likely reflects the same factors that reduced the ratio of civilian-to-military deaths: the replacement of airstrikes with comparatively more accurate ground operations, and an increased ability of IDF forces to engage Hamas terrorists directly, sometimes even by operating in the tunnels that were previously difficult to target from the air.

The same reduction in death rates was also noted during an earlier round of Hamas-Israel conflict in 2014.44 It should be emphasized that these estimates of total casualties do not represent civilian deaths, as Hamas has not revealed how many are civilian and how many are combatants. Thus, these numbers over-represent civilian deaths. Moreover, many of the deaths are unidentified and cannot be verified. In the previous section, we discussed how the GMO manipulated the unidentified casualties to the point that the UN had to revise its estimates. These results for 2023 are reasonably close to those suggested by the IDF. On December 5, 2023, IDF spokesperson Jonathan Conricus claimed that its forces had killed 6,000 Hamas combatants during the war. He elaborated that this represented a civilian-to-combatant death ratio of approximately 2:1, given the MoH’s recent announcement of 16,000 total casualties.46 On January 14, 2024, the IDF estimated that it had killed over 10,000 of the 40,000 trained and equipped Hamas combatants. Given that total deaths were supposedly at 26,000, this implied a civilian-to-combatant death ratio of 1.6 to 1 according to IDF calculations. By May 29, 2024, the IDF had estimated that 15,000 Hamas combatants were killed, and Hamas had claimed 36,171 casualties, bringing the civilian to combatant ratio close to 1.4:1. By August 15, 2024, the IDF had estimated that 17,000 Hamas combatants were killed, and Hamas had claimed just over 40,000 casualties, bringing the IDF calculation of the civilian to combatant ratio close to 1.35:1.47

Table 2. Total casualty numbers (identified + unidentified) for different nineteen-day periods. Hamas has not revealed how many of these deaths are civilians and how many are combatants. The data is taken from GMO reports, and has been shown to be of limited reliability45 19-day period # casualties over 19 days October 7 to 26,

With the high WC = 66.5% in October at the beginning of the war, and the difficulty in targeting Hamas combatants by air, we could expect a higher civilian-to-combatant death ratio for the first two-three weeks of the war. Clearly, there was a reduction in the civilian-to-combatant ratio over time. Furthermore, the reduction in Gazans deaths overall across the same period indicates the growing difficulty of targeting combatants who fled into hiding. Instead of total Gazan civilian casualties increasing across this period due to targeting of combatants hidden or embedded among civilians, total casualties decreased, demonstrating IDF reticence to cause higher collateral damage.

It is apparent that the rate of civilian deaths declined after the entrance of IDF ground forces into Gaza on October 26 reduced the need for IAF bombing operations. Both the reductions of the civilian to combatant ratio over time and of the number of total casualties provide strong statistical evidence that the IDF is not engaged in indiscriminate bombing. Rather, the evidence demonstrates that the IDF is engaged in intelligence-led targeting of Hamas combatants and is improving its efforts to protect civilians. Moreover, the declining rate of civilian deaths implicitly contradicts any genocidal intention. Nonetheless, whether in aerial or ground warfare, civilian deaths in Gaza remain the tragic consequence of battle in a dense urban environment where Hamas shields its combatants with civilians, often in sites constructed underground below schools, hospitals, and UN infrastructure.

Hamas Civilian Shielding and IDF Targeting Procedures

The IDF claims that it expends much effort to keep civilian casualties to a minimum. Airstrikes on residences are procedurally based on intelligence assessments that Hamas leaders, commanders, or operatives are identified at the targets’ locations, or that weapons, ammunition, rockets, or missile launchers or firings are present. IDF operating procedures vary with

specific conditions of battle, such as to allow expedited decision making to protect soldiers in imminent danger, but standard operating procedures aim to ensure that planned airstrikes are first checked by legal experts to ensure they comply with international law. Israeli warnings issued by text, telephone, and pamphlets have called for evacuations in local target areas.48

In contrast, Hamas has deliberately ensured that its infrastructure is embedded deeply within the Gazan civilian population. Some 400 to 500 hundred kilometers of Hamas underground military tunnels, which the IDF needs to eliminate, are located beneath the densely populated cities.49 Tunnel entrances and exits are often at sensitive locations such as mosques, hospitals, and schools, as conclusive video footages have corroborated. In this way, Hamas has taken every opportunity to enmesh itself into the civilian population and use the civilians as human shields, quite possibly on a larger scale than known in any other modern war.

Hamas units have been observed operating within schools, hospitals, and residential buildings. As a commander of the IDF reported upon entering a Gazan town near Jabaliya: “There isn’t a single house here without weapons, there isn’t a house without [tunnel] infrastructure. It’s unbelievable. In dozens of yards of homes we found dozens of rocket launchers,” he said. “We found Kalashnikovs under mattresses, inside clothes closets . . . [T]hey were hidden in the homes.” 50

Moreover, Hamas itself is likely to be directly responsible for over 20% of Gazan casualties reported by the Gazan MoH from misfire, friendly fire, and domestic suppression, calculated cumulatively. About 15% of Hamas rockets directed at Israel misfire within Gaza, as is well documented.51 Additional close-range friendly fire casualties would certainly exceed 10% in the Hamas operating environment of Gazan cities using civilian shields. Moreover, an unquantified number of civilians have died in known instances where Hamas has violently suppressed a

desperate populace.52 Finally, it should also be noted that a significant number of women and children are Hamas combatants.53

Our point is not to compare Hamas and the IDF. They are different planetary systems in military terms. It is that Hamas has created a uniquely difficult operational environment for a conventional army to conduct itself under the rules of international humanitarian law as formulated in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Hamas is embedded deep within the populace and urban infrastructure of Gaza; its shielding by civilians and its denial of any civilian defense are its main strategic strengths. Hamas’s strategy is to use the death and suffering of civilians to force a halt on Israel. Hamas is willing to fight to the last civilian. Although not as effective for Hamas to deter the IDF as the Israeli hostages, the Gazan civilians are also Hamas hostages.

It is in the interests of Israel to minimize civilian deaths for a multitude of imperative reasons, including: 1) general morality and international law; 2) military morale and domestic social license; 3) international supply chain logistics and trade security; and 4) Israeli hostages’ lives. Documented measures taken by the IDF to protect civilians include warnings, evacuations, and humanitarian aid. The High Level Military Group (HLMG)—an “independent body of former chiefs of staff, senior military officers and cabinet ministers from NATO countries with many decades of expertise at the highest level of land, air and sea conflict and the legality thereof”—conducted an in-country assessment of the Gaza conflict in July 2024, “visiting IDF military HQs from the top level; humanitarian aid installations and operations; units down to battalion level of command; and a visit inside Gaza” and observed that:54

20. . . . In our view, the IDF has developed and implemented innovative procedures to mitigate the risk to civilians arising from attacks on valid military objectives. These procedures often result in suspension or cancellation of attacks

due to civilian risk estimates. IDF policy is that every service person adheres to specified Rules of Engagement, which conform with the Laws of Armed Conflict. We have conducted limited questioning of IDF commanders and front-line soldiers on the Rules of Engagement and are convinced that their understanding is fully coherent with the legally approved policies.

21. One of the most pertinent examples of innovative civilian risk mitigation is the Civilian Harm Mitigation Cell (CHMC), established prior to the conflict and in operation during every phase. The CHMC integrates digital map technology, updated hourly, and intelligence to show population density in each area of Gaza. Every IDF operations centre has access to this map which is cross-checked with real-time air surveillance to verify civilian presence.

22. IDF targeting of airstrikes is made in conjunction with the CHMC and influenced by civilian population density in a particular area. Selection of munition size is based on the nature of the military target, intelligence regarding enemy presence and the proximity of civilians.

23. It is our professional opinion that such a unit is extremely unusual, and we are not aware of any other military with a comparable risk mitigation methodology. We assess this is an unprecedented measure, along with millions of leaflet drops, phone calls, text and voice messages, to help commanders prevent or minimise risk to civilian life. . . .

Urban Wars in Comparison

In 2022, the UN Secretary-General lamented rising civilian casualty ratios globally, up to 9:1 in urban warfare.55 For example, in Mariupol in Ukraine, casualties are estimated by the UN to be about 22,000 but are more likely to be 100,000 Ukrainian civilians (in only several months) and 10,000 combatants. In the final battles with ISIS in Mosul in 2017, the lowest estimated civilian casualties were 9,000 to 3,000 combatants. In the battles with the Tamil Tigers

in Sri Lanka in 2009, it was about 10,000 civilians and 4,000 combatants.

John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at the United States Military Academy at West Point, discussed the above events. He observed in February 2024 that there is no historical comparison for the October 7, 2023, Gaza war, due inter alia to the extensive defensive and offensive tunnel system, embedded within the civil population, and use of rockets. He urged commentators to “stop comparing Israel’s war in Gaza to anything. It has no precedent.” “The closest comparison was the 1945 Battle of Manila, the largest urban conflict of World War II, which directly caused 100,000 civilian casualties, although U.S. and Filippino forces faced 17,000 Japanese soldiers, less than half the number of Hamas fighters today, and the Japanese were embedded within a Manila civilian population less than one half of Gaza’s population.” Spencer’s analyses remain authoritative despite critiques that decontextualize the Gaza warzone.56

Within Gazan cities, where Hamas is deeply embedded in civilian infrastructure, it is extraordinary that civilian casualties are not multiples higher. In its urban warfare in the Gaza Strip, Israel claims a combatant to civilian ratio that is close to 1.3:1, despite the Hamas military strategy of human shielding. In the complex operational circumstances of urban warfare generally, military historian Lord Roberts of Belgravia told the British House of Lords in February 2024 that the Gazan civilian to combatant casualty ratio is “an astonishingly low ratio for modern urban warfare . . . and is a testament to the professionalism, ethics, and values” of the IDF.57 It appears that the IDF is employing tactical opportunities and lessons learned to reduce civilian casualty ratios over time.

CONCLUSION

In this study, relying upon Hamas’s own Phase 3 dataset, women and children make up 46% of deaths for all of Gaza, 36% in the north and

50–55% in the center and south. This is far lower than the 75% women and children casualty rate to be expected from a random distribution of civilian deaths that might be observed in a genocide. Moreover, following the IDF aerial campaign, total deaths across Gaza for December 12–31 (twenty days) were less than half that for the same number of days during Phase 1, at the start of the war, that is, 3,566 casualties in the period of December 12–31 versus 7,028 casualties in the period of October 7–26. Datasets from 2024 are yet to be compared in detail, but recent reports show that, in August 2024, the average mortality rate is 11% of what it was in October 2023, with 728 deaths for the same nineteen-day period (see Table 2). The major slowdown in the war is also self-evident from the UN casualty rate plots given in Figure 1. These latter casualty estimates are not all civilians and would include a significant number of Hamas combatants. They also include deaths from Hamas misfiring of rockets and friendly fire, which can be of the order of 20%. There is also the strong possibility that they include a substantial number of natural deaths that are not a result of war.

A storm of condemnations asserted that the IDF recklessly and indiscriminately carpetbombed Gaza with no consideration for civilians during Phase 1. The aerial phase of Israeli attacks on Hamas in Gaza (7,028 killed in nearly three weeks) was wrongfully compared to the British bombing of Dresden, which in a few nights killed 25,000 civilians, and to the bombing of Tokyo in 1945 (without an atomic bomb), which killed 100,000 citizens in a few hours. The huge difference here is that the Dresden and Japanese bombings were indiscriminate. In contrast, the Israeli aerial bombing campaign in October 2023 was targeted to neutralize Hamas combatants and the evidence demonstrates that it was informed by detailed intelligence, executed with precision technology, and took unprecedented precautions to protect civilians.

Analysis of the data corroborates this. The evidence in Phase 1 in October 2023 shows

intelligence-led targeting of combatants. By Phase 3 in 2023, it is clearly apparent that the civilian to combatant ratio is low relative to typically high ratios in urban armed conflict, between 1.3:1 and 2:1. In 2024 it is declining further.58 The lower civilian casualties in the north were likely the result of airstrikes being less prevalent due to ground forces being more active there. The statistics asserting women and children casualties for Period 2, after October 2023, were exaggerated through manipulated data and faulty calculations, as was recognized by United Nations agencies themselves. Other data provided by Hamas itself, as well as by Israel and third parties, all demonstrate avoidance of civilians despite a warzone of deeply embedded urban combat.

Moreover, as noted in our introduction, infliction of losses upon the civilian population in the course of urban warfare is regulated by the laws of armed conflict as distinct from those concerning genocide. 59 The ICJ case brought by South Africa against Israel alleging genocide seems, on the evidence, to be unsupported.

The court’s provisional ruling on January 26, 2024, held that South Africa had a “plausible right” to interim measures. 60 As it was summarized by the then-presiding judge, Joan Donoghue: “The court decided that the Palestinians had a plausible right to be protected from genocide and that South Africa had the right to present that claim in the court.” 61 Judge Donoghue explained that “[t] he court test for deciding whether to impose measures uses the idea of plausibility, but the test is the plausibility of the rights that are asserted by the applicant, in this case South Africa, so the court decided that the Palestinians had a plausible right to be protected from genocide, and that South Africa had the right to present that claim in the court.” In “correcting what’s often said in the media,” she explained quite clearly that in

fact “it didn’t decide that the claim of genocide was plausible.”

To grant an ICJ provisional measure, the objective external factual evidence required to establish the plausibility of the protected right is minimal. If there is a risk of harm, plausibility of a right is found by the court. It is a low bar and, in a humanitarian case, crossing it is largely automatic. There are no tests for the threshold of risk. In its delivered judgement, the court crafted provisional measures in favor of South Africa in especially ambiguous and abstruse language to deliver a finding in this exceptionally politicized issue. The ICJ has made no finding yet on the actual plausibility of any actual occurrence of genocide alleged against Israel. It remains for the ICJ to consider the merits of the allegations in full.

South Africa is due on October 28, 2024 to submit to the court its evidence for the allegations of genocide but is reported to be seeking an extension of several months to prepare its submission.62 South Africa has been joined by Chile, Columbia, Libya, Mexico, Nicaragua, Palestine, Spain, and Turkey in bringing the allegations of genocide. It is now incumbent upon them to collect evidence to prove, if they can, Israel’s guilt for committing genocide.

Seen in broader context, this genocide case is one of several attacks against Israel in the ICJ and is reinforced by charges against Jewish leaders of Israel in the International Criminal Court and also in many national courts, stirred up by criminal accusations against the Jewish state swirling around the globe on news and social media. International lawfare has transfigured medieval disputations and blasphemy trials into modern show trials. The ancient evil Jew is resurrected before us today in the form an Israeli arch-enemy transgressing humanity’s most fundamental rights.

The best available evidence, nevertheless, shows no Gaza genocide by Israel. It demonstrates only the rhetoric of a modern blood libel.

When Military Targeting of Hamas Combatants Was Misrepresented as Genocide

Appendix 1—Tables

Table A1. Senior leaders (fifteen Hamas members + three additional high-ranking members)63

15 (from official website)

3 (additional)

Yahya Sinwar, Khalil al-Hayya, Mahmoud al-Zahar, Rawhi Mushtaha, Sameh al-Siraj, Marwan Issa (“Shadow Man”), Jamila al-Shanti, Fatima Sharab, Ghazi Hamad, Ismail Barhoum, Suheil al-Hindi (Education), Zakaria abu Maamar, Jawad Abu Shamala, Kamal Abu Awan, Issam al-Dalis

Osama Mazini, Ziyad (Hamas Shura Council), Ziyad al Nakhalah (Palestinian Islamic Jihad chief), Mohammed Deif (chief military leader)

Table A2. Hamas Politburo (eighteen members)64

18 (mostly living outside Gaza)

Appendix 2—Data

Ismail Haniyeh, Saleh al-Arouri, Nizar Awadallah, Husam Badran, Salah al-Bardawil, Fathi Hamad, Khalil al-Hayya, Zaher Jabareen, Moussa Abu Marzouk, Khaled Mashal, Haroun abu Muhammad, Mohammed Nazzal, Abu Khalil al-Quds, Izzat al-Rishaq, Anu al-Abed Salah, Maher Jawad Salah, Yahya Sinwar, Sameh al-Siraj

Table 1 main text: We used a large number of open-source databases when assembling our dataset of airstrikes in the opening phases of the war, including: Airwars:

“Israel and Gaza 2023,” Airwars, https:// airwars.org/conflict/israel-and-gaza-2023/; Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center:

“The Iron Swords—the First Gaza War in the South of Israel (Updated to 1 p.m., October 8, 2023),” Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, October 9, 2023, https:// www.terrorism-info.org.il/en/the-iron-swordsthe-first-gaza-war-the-war-in-the-south-of-israel-updated-to-1-p-m-october-8-2023/;

“The Iron Swords—the War in the South of Israel (Updated to 1 p.m., October 9, 2023),” Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, October 10, 2023, https:// www.terrorism-info.org.il/en/the-iron-swordsthe-war-in-the-south-of-israel-updated-to-1-pm-october-9-2023/;

“Periodical Studies,” Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, https://www. terrorism-info.org.il/en/c/periodical-studies/page/;

“Operation Iron Swords (Updated to 1 p.m., December 10, 2023),” Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, December 11, 2023, https://www.terrorism-info.org.il/en/ operation-iron-swords-updated-to-1-p-m-december-10-2023/;

IDF:

“Daily Recap: Hamas-Israel War November 13th, 2023—Day 38,” IDF, November 13, 2023, https://www.idf.il/en/mini-sites/idf-recaps-daily-summaries-of-the-hamas-israel-war/ hamas-war-daily-recaps/daily-recap-hamas-israel-war-november-13th-2023-day-38/;

“Eliminated: Key Terrorist Operatives Eliminated by the IDF and ISA,” IDF, October 20, 2023, https://www.idf.il/en/mini-sites/ hamas-israel-war-24/all-articles/eliminated-key-hamas-terrorist-operatives-eliminated-by-the-idf-and-isa/;

Palestinian Centre for Human Rights:

“Gaza under Attack: Civilian Objects Targeted and Destruction and Casualties Inflicted by Israeli Retaliatory Strikes,” Palestinian Centre for

Human Rights, October 9, 2023, https:// we4gaza.org/2023/10/09/gaza-under-attack-civilian-objects-targeted-and-destruction-and-casualties-inflicted-by-israeli-retaliatory-strikes/;

MEZAN:

“Days 2–3: Palestinian Human Rights Organizations Call on the International Community to Intervene to Stop Israeli Massacres in Gaza and Provide Protection to Palestinian Civilians,” MEZAN, October 10, 2023, https://www.mezan.org/public/en/ post/46280/Palestinian-human-rightsorganizations-call-on-the-inteastalrnational-

REFERENCES

community-to-intervene-to-stop-Israelimassacres-in-Gaza-and-provide-protection-toPalestinian-civilians.

Our expanded list of Hamas leaders targeted in the first weeks of the war lists more targeted combatants over a longer time period and can be found online at the GoogleDrive repository, in the file Gaza_airstrikes.doc: https://drive.google. com/drive/folders/1PnfePh-6lyDafGvIunmNoz2oM9FjaPL4?usp = drive_link.

Gazan Ministry of Health reports used in this article may be found at the GoogleDrive repository at: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1PnfePh-6lyDafGvIunmNoz2oM9FjaPL4?usp = drive_link.

1 International Court of Justice, Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel), https://www.icj-cij.org/case/192

2 International Criminal Court, Situation in the State of Palestine (ICC-01/18), https://www.icc-cpi.int/palestine

3 International Criminal Court, Prosecution’s Consolidated Response to Observations by Interveners Pursuant to Article 68(3) of the Rome Statute and Rule 103 of the Rules of Procedure and Evidence (ICC-01/18-346), https://www.icc-cpi. int/court-record/icc-01/18-346.

4 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948, entry into force January 12, 1951), article 2:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part . . .

5 Tom Simpson, Lewi Stone, and Gregory Rose, “Statistically Impossible: A Critical Analysis of Hamas’s Women and Children Casualty Figures,” Fathom (2024), https://fathomjournal.org/statistically-impossible-a-critical-analysis-of-hamass-women-and-children-casualty-figures/

6 UN Economic and Social Council, “Draft Convention on the Crime of Genocide, Section II: Comments Article by Article,” E/447 (June 17, 1947), reproduced in Hirad Abtahi and Philippa Webb, The Genocide Convention: The Travaux Préparatoires (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 2008), 231.

7 Simpson, Stone, and Rose, “Statistically Impossible: A Critical Analysis of Hamas’s Women and Children Casualty Figures.”

8 Zeina Jamaluddine, Francesco Checchi, and Oona MR Campbell, “Excess Mortality in Gaza: Oct 7–26, 2023,” Lancet 402, no. 10418 (2023): 2189–2190.

9 Benjamin Q. Huynh, Elizabeth T. Chin, and Paul B. Spiegel, “No Evidence of Inflated Mortality Reporting from the Gaza Ministry of Health,” Lancet 403, no. 10421 (2024): 23–24.

10 Lewi Stone and Andrew Solow, “On Detecting Inflation in Gaza War Deaths” (2024). Available from authors (while under publication review).

11 Zeina Jamaluddine et al., Crisis in Gaza: Scenario-based Health Impact Projections-Report One: 7 February to 6 August 2024, February 24, 2024, https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/crisis-gaza-scenariobased-health-impact-projections-report-one-7-february-6-august-2024

When Military Targeting of Hamas Combatants Was Misrepresented as Genocide

12 Yonah Jeremy Bob, “Mossad Chief Barnea: Every October 7 Terrorist Is a Dead Man,” Jerusalem Post, January 3, 2024, https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/article-780574.

13 Lazar Berman, “As Israel Prepares Massive Ground Campaign, the End Game Remains Opaque,” Times of Israel, October 16, 2023; https://www.timesofisrael.com/as-israel-prepares-massive-ground-campaign-the-end-gameremains-opaque/

14 David Aliberti and Daniel Byman, “What does Destroying Hamas Mean?,” Centre for Strategic and International Studies: Commentary, December 15, 2023; https://www.csis.org/analysis/what-does-destroying-hamas-mean

15 Imad Alsoos, “What Explains the Resilience of Muslim Brotherhood Movements? An Analysis of Hamas’ Organizing Strategies,” Mediterranean Politics 28, no. 2 (2023): 278–301.

16 Abdalhadi Alijla, “The (Semi) State’s Fragility: Hamas, Clannism, and Legitimacy,” Social Sciences 10, no. 11 (2021): 437.

17 “Israel and Gaza 2023,” Airwars, https://airwars.org/conflict/israel-and-gaza-2023/

18 “Gaza under Attack: Civilian Objects Targeted and Destruction and Casualties Inflicted by Israeli Retaliatory Strikes,” Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, October 9, 2023, https://we4gaza.org/2023/10/09/gaza-under-attack-civilian-objects-targeted-and-destruction-and-casualties-inflicted-by-israeli-retaliatory-strikes/.

19 “Days 2–3: Palestinian Human Rights Organizations Call on the International Community to Intervene to Stop Israeli Massacres in Gaza and Provide Protection to Palestinian Civilians,” MEZAN, October 10, 2023, https://www. mezan.org/public/en/post/46280/Palestinian-human-rights-organizations-call-on-the-inteastalrnationalcommunity-to-intervene-to-stop-Israeli-massacres-in-Gaza-and-provide-protection-to-Palestinian-civilians.

20 “Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR),” NGO Monitor, March 10, 2024, https://www.ngo-monitor.org/ngos/ palestinian_center_for_human_rights_pchr_/; “Al Mezan Center for Human Rights,” NGO Monitor, August 18, 2024, https://www.ngo-monitor.org/ngos/al_mezan_center_for_human_rights/

21 “The Iron Swords—the First Gaza War in the South of Israel (Updated to 1 p.m., October 8, 2023),” Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, October 9, 2023, https://www.terrorism-info.org.il/en/ the-iron-swords-the-first-gaza-war-the-war-in-the-south-of-israel-updated-to-1-p-m-october-8-2023/ ; “The Iron Swords—the War in the South of Israel (Updated to 1 p.m., October 9, 2023),” Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, October 10, 2023, https://www.terrorism-info.org.il/en/the-iron-swordsthe-war-in-the-south-of-israel-updated-to-1-p-m-october-9-2023/ ; “Periodical Studies,” Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, https://www.terrorism-info.org.il/en/c/periodical-studies/ page/ ; “Operation Iron Swords (Updated to 1 p.m., December 10, 2023),” Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, December 11, 2023, https://www.terrorism-info.org.il/en/operation-iron-swordsupdated-to-1-p-m-december-10-2023/

22 “Daily Recap: Hamas-Israel War November 13th, 2023—Day 38,” IDF, November 13, 2023, https://www.idf.il/ en/mini-sites/idf-recaps-daily-summaries-of-the-hamas-israel-war/hamas-war-daily-recaps/daily-recaphamas-israel-war-november-13th-2023-day-38/; “Eliminated: Key Terrorist Operatives Eliminated by the IDF and ISA,” IDF, October 20, 2023, https://www.idf.il/en/mini-sites/hamas-israel-war-24/all-articles/eliminated-key-hamas-terrorist-operatives-eliminated-by-the-idf-and-isa/

23 Gazan Ministry of Health reports, https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1PnfePh-6lyDafGvIunmNoz2oM9FjaPL4?usp = drive_link.

24 Adam Rasgon and Aaron Boxerman, “Mohammed Deif, Top Hamas Commander, is Dead, Israel Says,” New York Times, August 1, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/01/world/middleeast/muhammad-deif-hamas-death. html

25 Dag Tuastad, “Hamas and the Clans: From Islamisation of Tribalism to Tribalization of Islamism?,” Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal 6, nos. 1–3 (2021): 83–104.

26 Yahya Sarraj, “I am Gaza City’s Mayor. Our Lives and Culture Are in Rubble,” New York Times, December 24, 2023; https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/24/opinion/gaza-city-palestine-war.html

27 Isabel de Bre, “What is Gaza’s Ministry of Health and How does It Calculate the War’s Death Toll?,” PBS, 7 November 2023, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/what-is-gazas-ministry-of-health-and-how-does-it-calculatethe-wars-death-toll

28 Ali Sawafta and Maggie Fick, “How Many Palestinians have Died in Gaza? Death Toll Explained,” Reuters, December 9, 2023; https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/how-many-palestinians-have-died-gaza-war-howwill-counting-continue-2023-12-06/

29 Gabriel Epstein, “Gaza Fatality Data has Become Completely Unreliable,” Washington Institute for Near East Policy, March 26, 2024, https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/gaza-fatality-data-has-become-completely-unreliable; Simpson, Stone, and Rose, “Statistically Impossible: A Critical Analysis of Hamas’s Women and Children Casualty Figures.”

30 Gabriel Epstein, “How Hamas Manipulates Gaza Fatality Numbers,” Washington Institute for Near East Policy, January 25, 2024; https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/how-hamas-manipulates-gaza-fatality-numbers-examining-male-undercount-and-other

31 Salo Aizenberg, Twitter post, December 4, 2023, https://twitter.com/Aizenberg55/status/1731753062622982386; Salo Aizenberg, Twitter post, December 7, 2023, https://twitter.com/Aizenberg55/status/1732766309006324060; Salo Aizenberg, Twitter post, December 8, 2023, https://twitter.com/Aizenberg55/status/1733139136154833151.

32 Simpson, Stone, and Rose, “Statistically Impossible: A Critical Analysis of Hamas’s Women and Children Casualty Figures.”

33 Gabriel Epstein, “Gaza Data Unreliable.”

34 “Examination of the Names of Palestinians Killed in Operation Protective Edge—Part Three,” Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, August 19, 2014, https://www.terrorism-info.org.il/en/20704/.

35 “Preliminary, Partial Examination of the Names of Palestinians Killed in Operation Protective Edge and Analysis of the Ratio between Terrorist Operatives and Non-Involved Civilians Killed in Error,” Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, July 28, 2014, https://www.terrorism-info.org.il/en/20687/.

36 “The Iron Swords—the First Gaza War in the South of Israel (Updated to 1 p.m., October 8, 2023)”; “The Iron Swords— the War in the South of Israel (Updated to 1 p.m., October 9, 2023)”; “Periodical Studies”; “Operation Iron Swords (Updated to 1 p.m., December 10, 2023)”; “Examination of the Names of Palestinians Killed in Operation Protective Edge”; “Preliminary, Partial Examination of the Names of Palestinians Killed in Operation Protective Edge.”

37 Eric Tlozek, “New Assessments Point to Rocket Failure in Gaza Hospital Blast, but Questions Remain,” Australian Broadcasting Corporation, October 26, 2023, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-26/gaza-al-ahli-hospitalblast-new-assessments/103015066.

38 “Israeli Attack on Al Tabi’een School in Gaza Underscores Desperate Need for Ceasefire, Scaled Up Humanitarian Assistance, UN Political Chief Tells Security Council,” UN Security Council 9704 meeting SC/15790, August 13, 2024, https://press.un.org/en/2024/sc15790.doc.htm.

39 Gabriel Epstein, “Hamas Manipulates Data,” January 25, 2024, https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/how-hamas-manipulates-gaza-fatality-numbers-examining-male-undercount-and-other ; Simpson, Stone, and Rose, “Statistically Impossible: A Critical Analysis of Hamas’s Women and Children Casualty Figures.”

40 Simpson, Stone, and Rose, “Statistically Impossible: A Critical Analysis of Hamas’s Women and Children Casualty Figures.”

41 “Gaza Strip,” The World Factbook, CIA, https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/gaza-strip/#people-andsociety.

42 OCHA impact report, day 213, May 6, 2024, https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-reported-impact-day-213; OCHA impact report, day 215, May 8, 2024, https://www.ochaopt.org/content/ hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-reported-impact-day-215

43 Simpson, Stone, and Rose, “Statistically Impossible: A Critical Analysis of Hamas’s Women and Children Casualty Figures.”

44 David Leonhardt, “The Decline of Deaths in Gaza,” January 22, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/22/ briefing/israel-gaza-war-death-toll.html.

45 Simpson, Stone, and Rose, “Statistically Impossible: A Critical Analysis of Hamas’s Women and Children Casualty Figures”; Epstein, “Gaza Data Unreliable.”

46 “Military-Civilian Ratio,” CNN, December 5, 2023, https://edition.cnn.com/2023/12/05/middleeast/israel-hamas-military-civilian-ratio-killed-intl-hnk/index.html; “IDF Officials: 2 Civilian Deaths for Every 1 Hamas

When Military Targeting of Hamas Combatants Was Misrepresented as Genocide

Fighter Killed in Gaza,” Times of Israel, December 5, 2023, https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-officials-2-civiliandeaths-for-every-1-hamas-fighter-killed-in-gaza/.

47 Emanuel Fabian, “IDF: Dozens of Tunnels Raised on Gaza-Egypt Border, 17,000 Terror Operatives Killed in War,” Times of Israel, August 15, 2024, https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-says-it-razed-over-50-tunnels-in-gaza-egyptborder-area-in-past-week/

48 John Merriam, “Inside IDF Targeting,” Articles of War, October 20, 2023 (Lieber Institute, United States Military Academy, West Point), https://lieber.westpoint.edu/inside-idf-targeting/

49 “Hamas Use of Human Shields in Gaza,” NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence, June 6, 2019, https:// stratcomcoe.org/cuploads/pfiles/hamas_human_shields.pdf.

50 Anshel Pfeffer, “We Found Kalashnikovs in Almost Every House, Say Israeli Soldiers,” Times, November 16, 2024, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/we-found-kalashnikovs-in-almost-every-house-say-israeli-soldiers8x8n0st97

51 Tia Goldenberg and Joseph Krauss, “Misfired Rockets May have Killed over a Dozen in Gaza Battle,” Associated Press, August 9, 2022; https://apnews.com/article/middle-east-israel-tel-aviv-403d37366347e0f2446e2f90a9b0d02f

52 “Hamas Blocks Road to Gazan’s Fleeing—‘They’re Shooting at People,’” Jerusalem Post, October 26, 2023, https:// www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-770242

53 Emanuel Fabian, “Soldiers Find Terror Tunnel, Evidence of Children being Trained with Weapons in Gaza School,” Times of Israel, January 8, 2024, https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/soldiers-find-terror-tunnelevidence-of-children-being-trained-with-weapons-in-gaza-school/

54 “Amicus Curiae Observation of High Level Military Group Pursuant of Rule 103,” International Criminal Court ICC-01/18, August 5, 2024, https://www.icc-cpi.int/sites/default/files/CourtRecords/0902ebd180920f26.pdf

55 “90% of Wartime Casualties are Civilians, Speakers Stressed, Pressing Security Council to Fulfil Responsibility, Protect Innocent People in Conflicts,” Security Council Meeting 9042, SC/14904, May 25, 2022, https://press.un.org/en/2022/ sc14904.doc.htm

56 John Spencer, “Memo to the ‘Experts’: Stop Comparing Israel’s War in Gaza to Anything. It Has No Precedent,” Newsweek, February 12, 2024, https://www.newsweek.com/memo-experts-stop-comparing-israels-war-gazaanything-it-has-no-precedent-opinion-1868891. Also see John Spencer, “Israel has Created a New Standard for Urban Warfare. Why will No One Admit It?,” Newsweek, March 25, 2024, https://www.newsweek.com/israel-hascreated-new-standard-urban-warfare-why-will-no-one-admit-it-opinion-1883286

57 Lord Roberts of Belgravia, speech during short debate in the House of Lords, Gaza: Humanitarian Situation, vol. 835, February 8, 2024, https://hansard.parliament.uk/lords/2024-02-08/debates/C5588F3F-2786-4CD3-9D34BC2E58878A05/GazaHumanitarianSituation.

58 Fabian, “IDF: Dozens of Tunnels Raised.”

59 “Draft Convention on the Crime of Genocide, Section II: Comments.”

60 International Court of Justice, Application of the Convention.

61 “Joan Donoghue—Former President of the International Court of Justice,” BBC HARDtalk, April 26, 2024, https:// www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001yplc.

62 “South Africa Attempting to Defer Deadline for Giving Evidence at ICJ,” Jerusalem Post, September 10, 2024, https:// www.jpost.com/breaking-news/article-819470.

63 “Gaza Leadership,” European Council on Foreign Relations, https://ecfr.eu/special/mapping_palestinian_politics/ gaza-leadership/; “Shura Council,” European Council on Foreign Relations, https://ecfr.eu/special/mapping_palestinian_politics/shura_council/; “Palestinian Islamic Jihad,” European Council on Foreign Relations, https://ecfr.eu/ special/mapping_palestinian_politics/palestinian_islamic_jihad/.

64 “Politburo,” European Council on Foreign Relations, https://ecfr.eu/special/mapping_palestinian_politics/politburo/.

JCA 2024 (DOI: 10.26613/jca/7.2.163)

The Crisis of Critique and Academic Antizionism—

B efore and A fter October 7

Balázs Berkovits

Abstract

During the last two decades there has been a large-scale production of texts that might be grouped under the common heading of “academic antizionism,” which strive to equate Zionism with colonialism. However, the labeling of Israel as a settler colony raises multiple questions with respect to the main intention of these scholarly enterprises and their activist agenda, and particularly to their politics and scientific methodology. This “theoretically” anchored criticism often turns into accusations of “apartheid,” “ethnic cleansing,” and even “genocide,” without empirical verification, whenever there is a new chapter of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—and especially so after the October 7 Hamas massacre and the subsequent Gaza war.

Keywords: antizionism, crisis of critique, “activism,” “persuasive definitions,” settler colonialism, whiteness, genocide

THE CRISIS OF CRITIQUE

The study of the ideological structure of present-day antizionism invites a multifaceted approach. There are political, sociological, but also properly epistemological elements in play, which are to be considered against the backdrop of the contemporary crisis of social critique. I believe that the contemporary crisis of critique can be characterized by a growing uncertainty concerning its tasks and normative standards, which often results in forms of “conceptual radicality.”

My question is: Why is it specifically antizionism that is accorded such an important critical function in the “activist” mindset formed by the crisis of critique? What are those elements of critique, styles of reasoning, and “associative mergers” that are assembled under the heading of antizionism? According to my hypothesis, the emergence of radical forms of antizionism can be linked to a number of theoretical failures in

some branches of critical social science, among them conceptual radicality, the focus on moralizing critique, and even the recourse to conspiratorially minded explanations perceived as anti-hegemonic. Also, in these critical “studies” particularities and ambiguities are disregarded and flattened while the categories of critique are becoming more and more binary in character.

Assuredly, radicalism in critique exists even without the question of Israel and Zionism as a result of the crisis of critique; however, this radical outlook has found Israel to be its ideal target. How and why this happened would necessitate a long and thorough historical and conceptual investigation of which this article can only accomplish a tiny part by focusing on the criticism of Zionism and Israel as a Western-type of “white settler colonialism,” and by having recourse to an epistemological, instead of a merely political, framework of analysis. It intends to show that the problematics of the “new antisemitism,” besides anti-Jewish motivations,

stem largely from the epistemological shortcomings and radical ambitions of contemporary social critique. It should demonstrate that clear-cut categories of contemporary critical social science cannot easily contend with the peculiarities of Jewish history, Zionism/Jewish nationalism. Jews are predisposed to figure at the juncture of social critique and the conspiratorial mode of thought, and to be categorized by excessively critical and radicalized conceptual schemes, thereby constituting a “Jewish problem.”

Beyond the epistemological insecurity stemming from the uncertainty of categorization, Jews are also affected by the “white” tag appended on them. The whiteness framework at once helps to prove that Jews are not a minority anymore, as they are devoid of “color,” thereby erasing Jews as a group and also antisemitism, declaring them obsolete, quasi non-existent; and, in an intensified critical or accusatory mode, it suggests that Jews are in fact the paradigmatic oppressors, as they are also endowed with the emphatically understood “white” color. The “white” label directly triggers the category of “colony”/”settler colony” applied to Israel. In this respect, I intend to explore the range of perspectivations of Israel conceived as the last existing “colonial entity” in academic publications produced by a sort of “activist” social science.

The analysis concerns the application of the concept of colonialism to the case of Israel, and that of whiteness to Jews, and the subsequent political criticism, coming from and bolstered by a certain academic scholarship. This criticism often turns into accusations of “apartheid,” “ethnic cleansing,” and even “genocide,” whenever there is a new chapter of the IsraeliPalestinian conflict—especially so after the October 7 Hamas massacre and the subsequent Gaza war.

“ACTIVISM” IN CRITIQUE AND “PERSUASIVE DEFINITIONS”

In the wake of the late Adorno, the peculiar “critical mindset” that emerged in some social

and even legal studies fields and has been spreading throughout the political left the last two-three decades could be called “activist.” “Activism” assumes a leading role when theory becomes so politicized as to serve only political ends, completely ignoring the interpretation of empirical reality. Above all, Adorno objected to the emphasis placed on quick and drastic social change at the expense of developing a workable social theory. He believed that giving up on reason and engaging in theoretically baseless and unjustified discourse is the hallmark of blind radicalism and “activism.”1 It is when concept formation is overdetermined by political stance and critical attitude and when the explicit or implicit call for political action takes precedence over theoretical reflection, that we talk about “activism”: “Where experience is blocked or altogether absent, praxis is damaged and therefore longed for, distorted, and desperately overvalued. Thus what is called the problem of praxis is interwoven with the problem of knowledge.”2

Whereas Adorno could maintain that the main problem with “activism” is that it gets rid of theory, what we witness concerning today’s “critical theories” is that “activism” is already built into theory. For what is interesting for our purposes in Adorno’s thoughts on “activism” is not so much the question of botched practice, which is blind to theory, but the cases when practice has already colonized theory itself: the practical-political orientation parasitizing both thought and theory

The idea of “activism” is ideally captured by the utilization of concepts that are by their very nature critical and avoid both theoretical and empirical validations. The terminology of critical theory is still used in contemporary activist academia, but it is often reconstructed as “ethical,” emotive, or even “moralizing” terms, losing their original legal, social, and historical connotations. This is the epitome of what Charles L. Stevenson termed “persuasive definitions.”

In any “persuasive definition” the term defined is a familiar one, whose meaning is both descriptive and strongly emotive. The purport

of the definition is to alter the descriptive meaning of the term, usually by giving it greater precision within the boundaries of its customary vagueness; but the definition does not make any substantial change in the term’s emotive meaning.3

And further:

Our language abounds with words which [. . .] have both a vague descriptive meaning and a rich emotive meaning. The descriptive meaning of them all is subject to constant redefinition. The words are prizes which man seeks to bestow on the qualities of his own choice.4

The concept of “persuasive definitions” seems to capture well the type of interpretations characteristic of “academic antizionism”—whether those appear in academic articles or journalistic opinion pieces and statements. When used in reference to Israel, terms like “colonialism,” “apartheid,” “genocide,” and others seem to be stretched to the point where their descriptive meaning is lost or rendered ambiguous, while their emotive meaning remains intact. This type of criticism is mostly devoid of objectivity grounded in the social and historical contexts of the present and is instead predicated only on subjective suffering, emotions, and sentiments expressed in the indignant mode. 5 When discussing Israel, terms like “genocide,” “apartheid,” and similar words—which refer to the most horrible and unfair circumstances conceivable—are employed to convey a fundamental and even fundamentalist moral outrage presented as socially and historically grounded critique.

Since the October 7 Hamas massacre and the subsequent Gaza war, this politically minded activist and emotive critique of Zionism and Israel has become even more prevalent, which is testified by the usage of the concept of “genocide.” The critical discourse in question is characterized by some conceptual reversals, as the Hamas massacre and its potentially genocidal

nature or intention are not discussed at all (and it is hardly even mentioned as an event), while Israel is outright being accused of genocide, and this already before the actual war has unfolded.

So far, radical antizionism voiced as anticolonial engagement has been mainly studied in the context of political rhetoric. In this article, I will expand the scope of the research by exploring the various ways of conceptualizing “colony” and the multiple forms of colonialism analogies with regard to Israel within academic discourse. I will try to show that the political rhetoric employed by academics regarding the Gaza war and the theme of “Israeli genocide” have long been discussed in certain relatively new academic disciplines, being closely linked to the “colonial” view of Israel.

In fact, there has been a lot of effort expanded on establishing the colonial characteristics of Israel and its genocidal nature—this latter supposedly stemming from its coloniality. Therefore, when it comes to a real war, it seems that this original position on “Israeli genocide” is often just being reaffirmed in newspaper articles, social media posts or statements written by public intellectuals and academics without much empirical validation. Is there a certain conceptual overdetermination already at work in the academic conceptualizations, in which empirical examples and comparisons only play a subordinate role (if any)? Isn’t it the case that when academic critics painstakingly strive to establish the colonial nature of Zionism and Israel in the framework of such disciplines as “critical whiteness studies,” “settler-colonial studies,” and the like, the authors mostly turn to a sort of “deductive” approach and turn their critical concepts into “persuasive definitions”? What is the method of the academic disciplines in question for establishing the Israeli “colonial fact,” and what are the themes associated with “Israeli coloniality”? It is this academic foundation of antizionist topics that I intend to examine; but first, I should like to analyze briefly some reactions to October 7 by academics and the way they employ the concept of “genocide.”

DECLARATIONS DENOUNCING ISRAEL AFTER OCTOBER 7

I propose as a starting point of the analysis several significant statements on the war in Gaza and the role of Israel following the October 7 pogrom, which were all published very early in the conflict: at a time when the Israeli ground operation barely began. These are statements by professional academic bodies: university departments, professional associations, student unions; open letters and articles by reputed university professors and public intellectuals.

For example, the statement made by professors of communication and media experts on October 18 says the following: “Israeli government and army officials are using genocidal language in reference to Palestinians, including terms such as ‘human animals’, ‘barbarians’, and ‘savages’”— from which they conclude that Israel is preparing to commit genocide (although the language mentioned was mainly used to qualify Hamas).  They also emphasize the importance of looking at the “context” of the October 7 atrocities, however this invariably alludes to their conceptual framework, and not to findings: “the colonial context of Israel’s more than 50 years long military occupation of Palestinian territories and 16 years of siege on Gaza—repeatedly condemned by the UN and human rights organizations.”6 Likewise, another statement, “Sociologists in Solidarity with Gaza and the Palestinian People,” published also in mid-October, wrote:

We are witnessing internationally supported genocide. This latest siege comes as a continuation and escalation of the daily violence Palestinians faced for decades from Israeli colonization; an apartheid regime whose occupation is in clear violation of international law, but persists with the support of powerful governments globally. Furthermore, the dehumanizing language used by heads of state, military leaders, and journalists throughout the West, has begun to increase anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim sentiment and violence.7

Scholars of international law, conflict studies, and genocide studies issued a particularly lengthy statement on October 15, writing that

we are compelled to sound the alarm about the possibility of the crime of genocide being perpetrated by Israeli forces against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. [. . .] The Palestinians of the Gaza Strip constitute a substantial proportion of the Palestinian nation, and are being targeted by Israel because they are Palestinian. The Palestinian population of Gaza appears to be presently subjected by the Israeli forces and authorities to widespread killing, bodily and mental harm, and unviable conditions of life— against a backdrop of Israeli statements which evidence signs of intent to physically destroy the population.8

According to this text, Israel is waging a war against the Palestinian nation and people, with the motive of destroying it, which is asserted without mention of the October 7 pogrom (it is casually alluded to in four words). Instead, we encounter the conception of “eternal genocide” that Israel has been committing possibly for decades even without being in a state of war. As the statement puts it: “The pre-existing conditions in the Gaza Strip had already prompted discussions of genocide prior to the current escalation.”

There are dozens, possibly hundreds of these statements, but the blueprint is essentially the same. First, they either don’t mention at all what happened on October 7, when Israel was attacked, or mention it in a brief sentence without ever analyzing its significance. Second, and in contrast, they invariably intend to draw attention to Israel’s “genocidal intention and practice,” “seventy-five years of occupation and apartheid,” and “Israeli settler colonialism” as “root causes” of the conflict. Sociologists, seemingly in contradiction with their own basic methodology, advocate to consider unhistorical and essentialized “root causes” that they find in the “history” of Zionist “colonization.” These

“root causes,”9 without further consideration of more recent events and present-day contexts, would be solely responsible for the pogrom of October 7 in the eyes of the signatories, although this is only euphemistically and casually mentioned in the text as “recent Hamas violence against Israeli civilians.” Likewise, Israel’s actions in the Gaza war are taken to be in organic continuity with its previous “aggressions” and, generally, “oppression.” Third, there is also much emphasis put on declarations by certain Israeli politicians and the “dehumanization” of Palestinians, along with the assertion that Palestinians are killed because they are Palestinians, which seemingly points to the genocidal intention.

In a recent interview, Amos Goldberg, an Israeli historian, aptly summarized these arguments, trying to give them a somewhat more systematic form:

As a historian, if you look at the overall picture, you have all the elements of genocide. There is clear intent: the president, the prime minister, the minister of defense, and many high-ranking military officers have expressed that very openly. We have seen countless incitements to turn Gaza into rubble, claims that there are no innocent people there, etc. Popular calls for the destruction of Gaza are heard from all quarters of society and the political leadership. A radical atmosphere of dehumanization of the Palestinians prevails in Israeli society. [. . .] The outcome is as would be expected: tens of thousands of innocent children, women, and men killed or injured, the almost-total destruction of infrastructure, intentional starvation and the blocking of humanitarian aid, mass graves of which we still don’t know the full extent, mass displacement, etc. There is also reliable testimony of summary executions, not to mention the numerous bombings of civilians in so-called “safe zones.” Gaza as we knew it does not exist anymore. Thus, the outcome fits perfectly with the intentions.10

The main point in question is whether the Israeli government/army have had the intention of committing genocide against the Palestinians, as these texts confidently assert. A key aspect of the legal definition of genocide is genocidal intent, especially in its narrower and stricter version: “The acts specified have to be undertaken with the intent to destroy the group. In some ways this is as important as the acts themselves.”11 A looser interpretation is rather based on the knowledge of the outcomes: “that the act or acts are committed by the perpetrator knowing that they will or are likely to destroy the group.”12 The statements cited clearly refer to intent, while the Goldberg interview somehow gestures also toward the looser definition.

As much as the rhetorical saber rattling of politicians are attributed utmost importance— although most of the time they are speaking about the terrorists, and much less about the Palestinian population—other important aspects of the conflict are totally neglected. As the international lawyer Barak Medina wrote: “The accusation of genocide is based exclusively on statements made by several Israeli politicians. Most of these statements were made by officeholders who have no control over setting Israel’s policies.”13 The extreme-right parties have not been members of the war cabinet, and have been regularly reprimanded after uttering extremist statements. At the same time, there isn’t any direct proof that Israel intentionally and systematically targeted civilians, on the contrary: the evacuation orders and the construction of “safe zones” should testify to the opposite intention. It is also in dispute whether Israel hindered the entry of humanitarian aid for any sustained period, while it is well-known that Hamas systematically looted and hoarded those for its own benefit.

However, it is easy to construct a straight line from rhetoric to reality: look, what they promised is now accomplished: “Gaza turned into rubble.”14 Now, one could say that even if there was no clear intention of destroying large parts of the civilian population, it could have been known that this

war would lead precisely to this outcome. However, the total number of deaths cannot be known as of yet, and especially not the number of civilians among them, since Hamas authorities are suspected of wildly exaggerating the casualties while refusing to make even this distinction.

Most importantly, the most crucial element is missing from the picture, systematically avoided in the statements propagating the accusation of genocide: Hamas. As Medina put it:

The supporters of genocide accusation insist on ignoring the Hamas’s extensive military use of civilian infrastructure, the practice of using civilians as human shields, and other aspects that are essential in evaluating the activities of the IDF. [. . .] To sum up, the only evidence presented to support the accusation of genocide is the scope of damage in the Gaza Strip and several statements by Israeli politicians.15

All this doesn’t exclude the possibility that Israel committed war crimes, maybe even “summary executions” as Goldberg put it, which are completely different matter than genocide. But since particular “war crimes,” even if based in reality, lack the emotive force of “genocide,” adepts of activist critique will turn to this latter to be able to pronounce their radical and blanket denunciation of Israel.

This verdict has been in preparation for a long time. Assuredly, these declarations and analyses didn’t pop up from just anywhere; they originated in, and have been legitimized by, certain frameworks created by branches of contemporary, supposedly “critical” social science. For example, in “settler colonial studies,” a now academic discipline in which Israel constitutes a prime example, it is already always assumed that Israel or the “Zionists” are committing genocide against the Palestinians. Therefore, there remains nothing to verify when there is an actual conflict: the accusations are automatically triggered. And conversely: a genocide potentially committed against Israelis, or the genocidal intention of terrorists cannot be perceived, let alone

recognized. The thought that Israel is inherently genocidal is anchored in the interpretative framework that construes it as colonial or settler-colonial in the Western style, constantly practicing oppression and apartheid. It is an extremely simplified binary view of oppressor and oppressed where not only Palestinians never appear as actors, but where the broader context of hostile Arab and other Islamic countries is equally missing.

ACADEMIC ANTI-COLONIAL RHETORIC CONCERNING ISRAEL: POSING THE JEWISH QUESTION AGAIN

During the last two decades there has been a large-scale production of texts that might be grouped under the common heading of “academic antizionism,” which strive to equate Zionism with colonialism. These texts criticize Israel and the Zionist enterprise by having recourse to scholarly tools, in most cases by the adoption of a sociological or historical outlook. They represent the output of certain disciplines that belong to a kind of “activist” social science: “critical whiteness studies,” certain variants of “race studies,” “colonial settler studies,” and so on. These scholarly publications are significant in so far as they seem to provide a supposedly scientific interpretation: their academic prestige and scientific aura suggest that they are based on thorough research and careful analysis.

However, the equation of Zionism with colonialism, and the labeling of Israel as a colony, raises multiple questions with respect to the main intention of these scholarly enterprises and their activist agenda, and especially to their politics and scientific methodology. First and foremost, it should be noted that the qualification of “colony” is the ultimate argument against the existence of an administrative unit or state. A “colony,” in the politically emphatic sense of being the product of colonialism (therefore distinguished from the more neutral expression of “settlement”), by definition, should not exist, as it was constituted by land grab, conquest, and the oppression, exploitation, and often displacement and even genocide

of the indigenous population. Therefore, it is illegitimate, and decolonization must take place. Also, in recent European history, the end of colonial empires teaches us that decolonization is not only desirable but possible. So now, in a postcolonial world, the existence of a colony (a neo-colony?) is a scandal, the survival of a vestige of the inglorious past of the Western nations; a past, which, furthermore, has been the subject of repentance on the part of the ex-colonial powers. Therefore, if as a result of historical examination, a state turns out to be a colony on the interpretative level, it automatically becomes illegitimate on the normative level: it is doomed to be dismantled. The verdict of “it should not exist as such” or just “should not exist at all” is spelled out along with the qualification of “colony.” As Tuvia Friling has put it:

Those who reject the claim that Zionism is nothing but a Hebrew incarnation of colonialism explain that the use of that term to describe, analyze, and evaluate Zionism does not arise from the need for a sharp, productive, and objective theoretical tool that can be used to analyze and explain the building of the Israeli nation and society [. . .]. It has thus become a concept that contains an explicit and a priori moral condemnation of Zionism and the State of Israel. As such, its adoption and use by scholars who identify Zionism and colonialism are no coincidence.16

However, Israel is perhaps unique or nearly so in the sense that critics have only gradually realized that it should be considered a colonial product issued of colonialism. Nobody would ever have doubted the colonial nature of parts of the British or French empires upon their foundation and all along their histories until their independence and the process of decolonization or, on the contrary, their “naturalization”/“indigenization.” There was no political argument or scientific evidence needed to understand that those entities are in fact colonies, nor the issue would ever have provoked debates.17

In contrast, and possibly as a unique case in point, the “colonial nature” of Zionism is far from being obvious. After the foundation of modern Israel, it clearly was considered as a postcolonial state, issued from anti-colonial struggle. Nowadays critics of Zionism have been enthusiastic with regard to this quasi-novel perspective, as it could have furnished them the ultimate proof of the illegitimate nature of the Jewish State. For sure, the interpretation of Israel as a colony is not entirely new, as Palestinian authors (such as Sayegh, Said) from the sixties on have written about dispossession and colonization. But in their case, it was rather obvious that their political stance determined their analyses to a large degree; this qualification was mainly the mark of their political struggle in favor of the Palestinian nationalist cause. It is slightly different with regard to the Marxist author Maxime Rodinson; notwithstanding the general opposition to the Zionist state and its dogmatic denunciation by communist parties throughout Europe from the fifties on, Rodinson did not entirely follow their logic— which is also expressed by the question mark in the title (Israel, a colonial-settler state?). His evaluation of Israel as colonial is restricted to the fact that Zionist settlers encountered an autochthonous population already living in Palestine that is, parts of the land was already occupied by a different people. His adoption of this “minimal definition” of colonialism helps him answer his initial question in the affirmative, but he is adamant on refuting the other colonial traits associated with “classical” Western colonies, which is also the reason why he is not advocating the dismantling of the Zionist state. 18 In this sense, his procedure can be contrasted to that of other, subsequent antizionists, who, on the contrary, intended to widen the pool of colonial traits attributed to Israel. Also, Rodinson did not attribute colonialist motivations to Zionism, the lack of which, according to him, differentiated the Zionists in an absolute manner from countries building their genuinely colonial empire.19

However, the discourse on Israel as a colonial enterprise has intensified from the end of the eighties on in the writings of the Israeli new historians (Shalim, Pappe) and critical sociologists (Kimmerling, Shafir). In their wake, a large part of academic writing on Israel, and especially a whole academic branch called “colonial settler studies” (with numerous authors) have been trying to establish that Zionism is a European white settler movement, originating in European settler colonialism and resulting first in a colonial and now in an “apartheid” state. Frederick Cooper’s remark on the unhistorical vision we can often encounter in colonial studies is a perfect match here: these approaches treat “colonialism abstractly, generically, as something to be juxtaposed with an equally flat vision of European ‘modernity.’ This side of the field has focused more on stance—on critical examination of the subject position of the scholar.”20

It should be noted that, in this literature, “colonialism” does not refer merely to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza after the Six-Day War. The authors either take the modern-day history of Israel from early Zionism until today as a whole and as a colonial enterprise without further reflection and without making meaningful distinctions according to different periods; or they explicitly affirm that no distinction should be made between the periods of before and after the Six-Day War, as the whole history of modern-day Israel would follow the same logic from the beginning. This latter stance could be termed as a deterministic and finalistic conception of colonialism, in which the outcomes, the foundation of a country, the displacement of an autochthonous population, further occupation of territories, etc. are envisaged as a continuous process, and as already contained in the inception of the project—more precisely, in the concept of the supposed project. To be sure, the Six-Day War and the subsequent Israeli occupation of the West Bank has provided the basis on which the whole history of Zionism—by recourse to a

teleological methodology—could retrospectively be presented as a colonial enterprise in post-or anti-Zionist historiography. 21 Also, this conception has had recourse to a very broad definition of colonialism, according to which the criteria for qualifying something as such are fairly loose and flexible, and in which colonization and colonialism are intentionally not distinguished.22

This broad, loose, and at the same time essentialist definition of colonialism applied to the Israeli case is perfectly epitomized by the work of Gershon Shafir. Although Shafir does try to enter into the empirical details of “Israeli settler colonialism” by distinguishing between several different historical periods, he nevertheless reaffirms the necessity of applying a “single theoretical framework” in which the entire history of Zionism should be interpreted.

My intention [. . .] was to do away with the customary frameworks that analyzed Israeli society, dividing up its history between two airtightly sealed and separated periods: the preand post-1967 eras. To that end, I propose to use a single theoretical framework, based on the colonial dimensions of Israeli society and now on its ongoing, though still very partial, decolonization.23

It is in fact this non-distinction, or retrospective projection, which is the condition of possibility for taking Israel as such as a colonial entity. Therefore, it has to be emphasized that it is precisely this conception, which should be criticized, and much less the one, which points out the possibly colonial nature of the settlements on the disputed/occupied territories after 1967, and which is a much more arguable position.24 This is the reason why hereby I am not dealing with texts that point out the colonial nature of the settlements on the conquered territories after the Six-Day War. In contrast, in the texts examined, “colony” and “colonization” do not merely refer to Israeli occupation of the West Bank after 1967.

Whiteness and Jews

The perception of Jews/Zionists/Israelis as “white” has contributed to a large degree to the treatment of Israel as a colonial entity. Jews increasingly being qualified as “white” in critical academic writings on Israel can be possibly traced back to the influence of an academic branch of study, called “critical whiteness studies,”25 as well as to the politics of “intersectionality” advocated by spokespeople of minority groups, which, along with postcolonial studies26 has always excluded Jews as “whites,” supposedly belonging to the dominant majority.27 “Critical whiteness studies” have been conceived as the interpretation of the process of “whitening,” assuming a social historical framework, which describes the successful integration of certain minority groups, including that of Jews in American society: “whiteness” is not so much about skin color (although the concept bears a lot of ambiguities), rather about the perception of the level of integration of minority groups of European origin:28 history shows that discrimination against them has gradually ceased or at least attenuated over several decades. Therefore, “whiteness” as an interpretative concept, expresses a successful integration, and the process of whitening, which, in the case of American Jews, is supposed to have attained its fulfilment by the end of the second World War.

However, “whiteness” in “critical whiteness studies” is also meant to express a position of domination and privilege, thereby becoming a critical rather than a merely interpretative concept. In this sense, white people as a collectivity would benefit from their dominant position in society and are equally complicit in oppression. In this type of discourse, where “white” majority society is characterized as essentially racist, and whiteness is understood in a critical mode, the evaluation of acculturation and social mobility processes is reversed: these are now seen as negative phenomena. The representation of Jews as a successful minority could no longer find its place within this new

constellation, when preference is given to groups, a kind of “counter-cultures,” which understand themselves in strict opposition to what is considered the majority culture. “At a time when the moral imperative is to ‘be less white’, there is no identity more pernicious than that of a formerly powerless minority group that, rather than joining the struggle to dismantle whiteness, opted into it.”29 These reassessments give the impression that Jews have in fact become part of the oppressive majority in multicultural societies, in which people of color are oppressed on a racial basis. This perception of Jews as white is reinforced by the image of Israel as a supposedly foreign entity in the Middle East, modeled on the historical settlements of white settlers.

The label “white” produces both an erasure— as the qualification by definition cancels out a group’s minority status—and a very sharp critique—as the white majority is insistently denounced as racist, or at least as benefiting from “systemic racism,” even if unwittingly. Since “white” has become one of the most important concepts in contemporary criticism, when it attacks “white privilege” or “white supremacy” for example, labeling people or groups as such cannot be considered anodyne.

The conceptual framework of whiteness has a dual effect when applied to Jews. Firstly, it helps to prove that Jews are no longer a minority, since they are devoid of “color,” thus erasing their group existence and the antisemitism of which they nevertheless continue to be victims: antisemitism is declared obsolete, virtually non-existent. Secondly, it seems that Jewishness functions as a kind of whiteness amplifier: when Jews are labeled as white, it is often suggested that Jews are in fact the paradigmatic oppressors. In their case the white tag will signify that they assume a position of extraordinary power, since the appendage of the “Jew” alters the meaning of “whiteness.” In fact, in this case, as a result of a supposedly progressive critique of power (through the critique of “whiteness”) those are the oldest anti-Jewish tropes, antisemitic metaphors and conspiracy theories which

will come to the fore in the guise of social critique.

It is also interesting to note that, in this critical mode, unlike other “white ethnicities,” Jews can still be identified as a clearly defined group within the “white” collectivity. Therefore, when whiteness is applied to Jews within this discursive framework—working exclusively with binary oppositions—the “Jewish question” will reappear. To sum up: when Jews are qualified as white and as not being targeted by racist and discriminatory practices any more, they are, by the same token, taken to be part of the dominant and oppressive majority—placed on the other, the negative, side of the rigid binary.

White Jews and Israel

In fact, when racism scholars deal with the question of Israel, they often turn to a theoretically overdetermined concept of “whiteness.” Zionist Jews are framed as European white people settling in the Middle-East, which already prejudges of their status as colonizers. This means that the features attributed to Zionist settlers originate in their presupposed social and ideological characteristics, and much less in their actual or past practices. From then on, the stereotypes associated with whiteness, racism, or the “ethnic state” will prevail in the interpretations, without further empirical research into the actually existing Israel or its history.

For example, according to Abigail Bakan, a Canadian racism scholar of Marxist and postcolonial obedience, American Jews had been progressively whitened during their history on American soil until the end of World War II, whereas the whitening of European Jews came about with Zionism. The two processes intersected, asserts Bakan, thereby creating the entity known as Israel.30 Furthermore, Bakan thinks that the Jews remaining in the European diaspora have been further whitened as a result of the creation of Israel as a white racist state. She detects “the role of Zionism in the transition of Jewishness from non-white to a specific form of

whiteness,” what she terms as “whiteness by permission.”31 According to her, the price of whiteness for Jews, even if they did not become Israelis, was the ideological identification with the state of Israel, and the corresponding policies of colonialism and racism.32 Like many other authors critical of Zionism, Bakan also takes it to be totally homogenous and unambiguous, while she maintains that it is absolutely indistinguishable from other European colonial enterprises, to which, according to her, it was simply subordinated. Gabriel Piterberg has the same view: “From the moment Zionism’s goal became the resettlement of European Jews in a land controlled by a colonial European power, in order to create a sovereign political entity, it could no longer be understood as ‘just’ a central or east European nationalism; it was also, inevitably, a white-settler colonialism.”33 Just like Gershon Shafir: “[A]t the outset, Zionism was a variety of Eastern European nationalism, that is, an ethnic movement in search of a state. But at the end of the journey it may be seen more fruitfully as a late instance of European overseas expansion, which had been taking place from the sixteenth through the early twentieth centuries.”34 It would be interesting to know whether these authors think that the tens of thousands of Jewish refugees seeking a new home in Palestine after the Shoah were also the part of this “ethnic movement,” this century-old “European expansion.” Or were they just the pawns of some “historical tendency,” directed by European colonialists?

The whiteness scholar Matthew Frye Jacobson, contrary to the previously mentioned authors, does not think of Zionism as a “white” movement, because he takes whiteness to be the opposite of a separate Jewish identity (which, interestingly enough, he equates with “racialism”), at least until the end of the Second World War. Nevertheless, he maintains that Israel is essentially white, as he seems to detect a historical transformation, which came about due to geopolitical reasons linked to the international standing of the United States and perhaps the change in the status of American Jewry: “[. . .]

if racialism had historically been an important component of Zionism, the establishment of a Jewish state ultimately had the opposite effect of whitening the Jews in cultural representations of all sorts: America’s client state in the Middle East became, of ideological necessity and by the imperatives of American nationalism, a white client state.”35 To be sure, this exclusive binary opposition between “racialism” and “whiteness” in the characterization of Zionism, where both terms are negative, poses further delicate questions that the author does not address.

As the law scholar David Schraub has put it: “Discourses of White power and privilege—valid as far as they go—acted as a sort of accelerant for prejudiced tropes of Jewish power and privilege. The whiteness of the Jewish figure served to cleanse, even validate, arguments that otherwise would reek in their antisemitic familiarity.”36 Therefore, when Jews are completely and unequivocally subsumed under the category of “whiteness,” it certainly evokes many features of antisemitic discourse. Furthermore, as the colonial features of Zionism and Israel are at the same time taken to be Jewish features of whitened Jews (white dominators, pursuing Western colonialism and mystifying the world concerning their deeds, relying on Holocaust memory for impunity), the characteristics of the discourse analyzed above point to the linkage and potential common ground between antizionism and antisemitism. The tropes of Jews as Western, white, privileged, powerful oppressors— hark back to antisemitic imagery, where it is the “white” adjective as an operator that makes the only difference, by supposedly rendering this discourse anti-hegemonic.37

It seems that Piterberg, Jacobson, and Bakan either do not actually engage in empirical research, or, if they do somehow, they still maintain a “theoretical” focus on questions of racism and whiteness in relationship to Jews and Israel. But, in fact, their supposedly scientific procedure is hardly more than the manipulation of certain stereotypes and the articulation of a priori normative judgments.

5. SETTLER COLONIAL STUDIES AND ISRAEL

In contrast to the previous approaches, “settler colonial studies” is meant to be an empirical endeavor to understand the colonial issue, operating with large-scale comparisons; furthermore, it is also conceived as a separate academic discipline, “seeking to explore the dynamics of settler domination and indigenous subjugation in various contexts, most commonly Australia, Canada, the United States and New Zealand.”38

Works under this heading are supposedly built on historical findings, while their characteristic activist agenda and theoretical and political overdetermination are less evident at first sight. However, on closer examination, it becomes clear that these overdeterminations equally characterize these more “historical” disciplines, which make them just as questionable as the previous types. In all of the cases the accusation is made to prevail to the detriment of interpretation, therefore the analysis falls back on the manipulation of concepts (“whiteness,” “colony,” “genocide,” “apartheid,” etc.) and their manifold combinations, which become “persuasive definitions,” thereby posing the “Jewish question” in the above-described manner.

The settler colonial research program is founded upon the distinction perceived as fundamental between colonialism (or “metropole colonialism”) and settler colonialism, or rather, on a veritable paradigm shift, from the former to the latter, which, according to its adepts, would amount to a veritable “theoretical revolution.” “The former is organized around a logic of exploitation while the latter is characterized by a logic of elimination. In contrast to the colonizer who seeks the labour of the colonized, the settler colonizer instead seeks their land, with the elimination of the native, while the settler attempts to replace them.”39 It is said that this paradigm shift, striving to redefine some basic concepts linked to colonialism, would make possible the inclusion of Israel (as a seemingly unlikely candidate) among the countries mentioned.

This willed radical change is clearly expressed by Lorenzo Veracini, one of the founders of the “settler colonial” paradigm. According to him, the task of this latter is “the discursive overturning of presumed power relations.” Israel seemed to be an outlier as long as the concept of “colony” could not be applied to it in a credible manner. In fact, it had so many features that could not be handled by the paradigmatic concept of Western “metropole” colonialism: no mother country, no exploitation of local, indigenous work force, no appropriation of land by force, etc. In contrast, now it can be classified under the heading of “settler colonialism.” As Piterberg has put it: “It is within the typology of settler colonialisms that I place the Zionist colonization of Palestine and the state of Israel—a move which surely should have put to rest the tedious contention that Zionism could not be termed a colonial venture because it lacked the features of metropole colonialism; as if anyone were suggesting otherwise. What its apologists fail to confront is the settler-colonial paradigm.”40 However, it seems that the inclusion of Israel among the “settler colonial” states is also conceptually (and much less empirically) directed, first, by the manipulation of the usual binary oppositions: native-settler, indigenous— European colonists, oppressor—oppressed; second, by the conceptual association of settler colonialism (or the act of settlement) with a so-called fundamental intention of the “elimination of the native” comprising ethnic cleansing, murder, and even genocide; and, third, by seemingly empirical comparisons to other settler colonies—which are at best superficial and far-fetched, and at worst totally factitious.

Veracini, in his “empirical” endeavors, such as his book entitled Israel and Settler Society, compares Israel to apartheid South Africa, French Algeria, and Australia. Obviously, differences between Israel and these “classical” colonies abound, and Veracini does not even hide those, only treats them as unessential; however, he is keen on preserving the “structure” of the colonial situation, which, according to him,

always remains the same in the form of the opposition between the settlers and the natives. Therefore, he asserts for example that the fact that Israeli Arabs have political representation does not mean much, for in apartheid South Africa the Black population also had some kind of political representation (although he refrains from describing this latter, as it would turn out that the two situations have nothing in common). Also, he talks about “recurring calls” for the transfer of Palestinians and proposals for withdrawing their citizenship, without mentioning that those come from Israeli extremist politicians and fringe political opinion that never gained traction (even so in the actual situation of the Gaza war). In a programmatic introduction to one of the special issues on Israel of the academic journal Settler Colonial Studies founded by Veracini, this notion of an essential “structure” of colonization is reaffirmed: “Viewed through the lens of settler colonialism, the Nakba in 1948 is not simply a precondition for the creation of Israel or the outcome of early Zionist ambitions; the Nakba is not a singular event but is manifested today in the continuing subjection of Palestinians by Israelis.”41

Also, in his presentation of the Israeli case, Veracini accentuates that the struggle is not between competitive nationalisms, but between the conqueror, on the one hand, and the conquered, the displaced, the occupied, on the other.42 The article in Settler Colonial Studies cited above also clearly states that research should be motivated by the need for political action, as a clear example of “activism” in the abovementioned sense:

In order to move forward and create a transformative, liberatory research agenda, it is necessary to analyse Zionism’s structural continuities and the ideology that informs Israeli policies and practices in Israel and toward Palestinians everywhere. In other words, while Israel’s tactics have often been described as settler colonial, the settler colonial structure underpinning them must be a central object of analysis.43

However, one can only talk about decolonization with regard to a colony, therefore a “liberatory research agenda” that already presupposes (without demonstrating) Israel’s colonial nature, amounts to a perfect case of circular argument (where, furthermore, the use of “structure” is conceptually abusive, as it only means “essence”). But obviously, it turns out that the treatment of Israel as a “settler colony” is much more a political than a scientific issue, as conceptual overdetermination (binary oppositions, the essentialized conception of the “elimination of the native,” arbitrary or pseudo-empirical attribution of colonial features) is stemming from an ideological agenda.

It is another eminent figure of the paradigm, Patrick Wolfe, who coined the term “structural genocide” in order to qualify the “substance” of settler colonial practices, and to broaden their theoretical and even moral significance. As he puts it: “I suggest that the term ‘structural genocide’ avoids the questions of degree—and, therefore, of hierarchy among victims—that are entailed in qualified genocides, while retaining settler colonialism’s structural induration.” 44 “Structural genocide,” besides mass killing, comprises population transfer, but also assimilation. For Wolfe, these all point to the replacement of the native by the colonizer, so no meaningful distinction should be made between them. Furthermore, he also talks about “genocide in abeyance,” which means that even when there is no actual genocidal practice, the potentiality always remains: No empirical evidence could dispute the potentiality (which is assumed to be equivalent to the reality) of “genocide” defined in this exceedingly flexible yet essentialized fashion.45 Thus Wolfe is relativizing genocide (a concept established in reaction to the Holocaust) while also exploiting the tremendous imagery connected with it and utilizing it against Israel. (To not to say that this is Holocaust relativization, instrumentalization, and reversal in one swoop.)

The “post-Zionist” Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, following in the footsteps of Veracini and Wolfe, has also become an adept of this

“structural” view. According to him, the whole history of Zionism from its beginnings, regardless of conflicts, internal strife and wars waged should be viewed as a unitary colonial project. The process of creation of the State of Israel up until 1948 and the territories acquired in 1967 obeyed the same logic, both being products of the same underlying “structure.” For example: “The Zionist project can be best described as a cumulative, colonial enterprise that has continued unabated since its inception.”46 Or: “This is colonisation, I suggest, although it sounds like an anachronistic term in the 21st century, I think we should understand that Israel is colonising Palestine. It started colonising it in the late 19th century and is still colonising it today.”47

If Israel cannot be interpreted in the colonial framework, then the obvious danger is that it becomes a “normal” country just like any other, and the basis of radical criticism formulated with the help of hollowed out concepts becoming emotive “persuasive definitions” slips away. Now, that the interpretation has been renewed, thanks to the novel concept of “settler colonialism,” the political and critical force of the concept has, supposedly, also been preserved or restored: it has also initiated something like a symbolic revolution – and the reaction of the researchers is more than enthusiastic. At long last, Israel can be blamed and criticized in a “justified” manner, supported by the credentials of an allegedly genuine scientific investigation.

CONCLUSION

In the academic literature examined, what is at stake is not so much to demonstrate the colonial nature of Israel by conducting new empirical research; rather, it is to come up with a conceptual change (at times alluded to as “paradigm shift”), from “(metropole) colony” to “settler colony” and further adapt the concept in order to be able to subsume Israel under it, normally an unlikely candidate to be criticized for colonialism. Other conceptions use the framework

of “whiteness,” constructing the European and the Israeli Jewish populations as dominators and oppressors, who collectively harbor racist attitudes against the Palestinians, directly informing their actions. The frameworks of “whiteness” and “colonialism” frequently overlap, thereby strengthening each other and reinforcing this peculiar, conceptually guided criticism. The features associated with “white” Israeli colonialism are conquest, racism, elimination of the natives, and even genocide. As it has been noted already, the qualification of Israel as a “colony” on the interpretative level automatically renders it illegitimate on the normative-political level. Furthermore, it is apparent most of the time that the interpreters’ goal is outright political or “activist”: to delegitimize Israel and Zionism by this qualification.

The beliefs associated with Israel in this framework are the following: that Israel’s colonialism is unitary, without regard to the situation before and after 1967; that Zionism is the continuation of European, white, Western colonialism; that Jews are a non-autochthonous, foreign population without a legitimate genealogy, therefore without legitimate claim to the territory; that Zionists have had the explicit intention of eliminating the native Palestinians by ethnic cleansing, and even genocide. Authors working in the colonial or settler-colonial paradigm pretend neither to give an exhaustive definition, nor a “proof” of Israel’s colonial nature; this is why they have recourse to analogies and vague comparisons. They recourse to an essentially “deductive,” concept-laden, and even conceptually overdetermined approach, with minimal or no empirical input, striving to elaborate a category that could fit the very

REFERENCES

uncommon case of Israel, as they take the cognitive-political stakes to be high.

For all these reasons, the problematic to be examined by researchers of antisemitism is not how a particular antizionist stance inadvertently or unintentionally poses the “Jewish question” or even may slip into antisemitism due to rhetorical or symbolic exaggeration; neither should the goal be to prove that antizionism and antisemitism are essentially the same by way of getting into rhetorical or semantic arguments. Their relationship is not to be taken as semantic or even pragmatic; on the contrary, it has to be established that they are not only susceptible to assuming similarities, but that they may even emerge from a common ground.48

One of the main reasons why antizionism has become the most widely shared and cherished critical idiom on today’s left, is that Jews are perceived as white colonizers. Criticism of Israel feeds on criticism of Jews as inchoately “white.” Therefore, it would be too simplistic and even incorrect to assert that “antizionism is just antisemitism in another form.” There is no pretense here, nor is there a need for one, because the condemnation of Jews as whites is obvious and openly stated on the side that erroneously calls itself “progressive.” The connection between criticism of Jews and that of Israel is not metonymic, but structural: it is founded on the allegation of whiteness and coloniality—which shows the importance of analyzing the “white” and the “colonial” signifier together. Therefore, it is the problematization of Jews and their ascribed characteristics, the posing of the “Jewish question,” which, with the help of the “white” signifier, qualifies Israel as colonial, and singles it out for attack.

1 Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).

2 Ibid., 260.

3 Charles L. Stevenson, Ethics and Language (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1944), 210.

4 Ibid., 212–213.

5 See, for example, Danny Trom, ”La crise de la critique sociale de Paris à Francfort,” Esprit, July 2008.

6 Letter by Media & Communications Scholars on British News Media Coverage of the War in Gaza, October 18, 2023, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EGZ2ubh_rKyRq3TXPPELXBGKOrjpIAKgMaWpnXAOptM/edit?pli = 1.

7 Sociologists in Solidarity with Gaza and the Palestinian People, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wIKLuNYWre8jdV-tqqVJjz_GyM9_WasWjVuV9HSwazs/edit.

8 Public Statement: Scholars Warn of Potential Genocide in Gaza, October 15, 2023, https://opiniojuris. org/2023/10/18/public-statement-scholars-warn-of-potential-genocide-in-gaza/

9 See, for example, Susie Linfield, “Root-Causism,” Sapir Journal (Winter 2024), https://sapirjournal.org/friends-andfoes/2024/03/root-causism/

10 Elias Feroz, “Israeli Historian: This is Exactly What Genocide Looks Like, an Interview with Amos Goldberg,” Jacobin, July 11, 2024, https://jacobin.com/2024/07/amos-goldberg-genocide-gaza-israel?fbclid = IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR0jFf9vvqJ7niPAuAoWQX0ZdJDGLvwsOsQZda9oBZ8LuBMLu2TttfEMst8_aem_1U4WoTokH6DF5j6eSgT-mw.

11 Philip Spencer, Genocide since 1945 (London: Routledge, 2012), 12.

12 Ibid.

13 Barak Medina, “Hamas’ Lawfare: The Plot of Accusing Israel in Genocide,” HUJI Law Blog, July 20, 2024, https:// www.hujilawblog.com/single-post/hamas-lawfare-the-plot-of-accusing-israel-in-genocide?fbclid = IwY2xjaw EQnv9leHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHbfvJxv6-QD4o_GVJWjV9yz1EnbMGtMVTUyrNpAuMPIfHpukkOZ8i02A3Q_aem_ DbQs3OViqK2LLxPMJSrytw.

14 Feroz, “Israeli Historian: This is Exactly What Genocide Looks Like, an Interview with Amos Goldberg.”

15 Ibid.

16 Tuvia Friling, “What do Those who Claim Zionism Is Colonialism Overlook?,” in Handbook of Israel: Major Debates, ed. E. Ben-Rafael et al. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 855–856.

17 The debates were about the modernizing or in some cases even the “beneficial effects” of colonization, and not about whether the classification as “colony” is justified.

18 See the very detailed and convincing analysis of Rodinson by Camilla Bassi: Outcast. How Jews were Banished from the Anti-Racist Imagination (No Pasaran Media, 2023).

19 John Strawson, “Colonialism,” Israel Studies 24, no. 2 (Summer 2019): 34.

20 Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question. Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

21 Friling, “What do Those who Claim Zionism Is Colonialism Overlook?,” 869.

22 See Yitzhak Sternberg, “The Colonialism/Colonization Perspective on Zionism/Israel,” in Handbook of Israel: Major Debates, ed. E. Ben-Rafael et al. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 842–843.

23 Gershon Shafir, “Zionism and Colonialism: A Comparative Approach,” in The Israel/Palestine Question, ed. Ilan Pappé (London: Routledge, 1999), 241.

24 The importance of this distinction is pointed out by Derek J. Penslar, who in fact thinks that the territories occupied in 1967 are colonial in their nature. “After 1967, however, Israel underwent a rapid revolution into a colonial state. We would be well served, therefore, to consider the importance of ruptures as well as continuities within the fabric of Israeli history when evaluating the relationship between Zionism and colonialism.” See Derek Penslar, “Is Zionism a Colonial Movement?,” in his Israel in History (London: Routledge, 2007), 111. (Republished in Ethan B. Katz, Lisa Moses Leff, and Maud S. Mandel, eds., Colonialism and the Jews [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017], 275–300).

25 See, especially, Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks? (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color. European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). See also Enzo Traverso, “Les Juifs et la ‘ligne de couleur,’” in De quelle couleur sont les Blancs?, ed. Sylvie Laurent and Thierry Leclère (Paris: La Découverte, 2013). For a much more subtle account, see Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness. Jews, Race and American Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

26 See Bryan Cheyette, “Against Supersessionist Thinking: Old and New, Jews and Postcolonialism, the Ghetto and Diaspora,” The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 4, no. 3 (2017): 424–439.

27 See, for example, Karin Stögner, “New Challenges in Feminism: Intersectionality, Critical Theory, and Anti-Zionism,” in Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism. The Dynamics of Delegitimization, ed. Alvin Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 84–111.

28 On the conceptual contradictions relative to “whiteness” and “color” conceived in such a way, see Peter Kolchin, “Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America,” Journal of American History 89, no. 1 (2002): 154–173; Ladelle McWhorter, “Where do White People Come From? A Foucaultian Critique of Whiteness Studies,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 31, nos. 5–6 (2005): 533–556; Balázs Berkovits, “Critical Whiteness Studies and the ‘Jewish Problem,’” Zeitschrift für kritische Sozialtheorie und Philosophie 5, no. 1 (2018): 86–102.

29 Pamela Paresky, “Critical Race Theory and the Hyper-White Jew,” Sapir Journal 1 (Spring 2021), 23, https://sapirjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Sapir_VolumeOne.pdf

30 Abigail B. Bakan, “Race, Class, and Colonialism: Reconsidering the ‘Jewish Question,’” in Theorizing Anti-Racism. Linkages in Marxism and Critical Race Theories, ed. Abigail B. Bakan and Enakshi Dua (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 254.

31 Ibid., 252.

32 Ibid., 261.

33 Gabriel Piterberg, “Settlers and Their State. A Reply to Zeev Sternhell,” New Left Review 62 (2010): 116.

34 Gershon Shafir, Land, Labour and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 8.

35 Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 188.

36 David Schraub, “White Jews: An Intersectional Approach,” AJS Review (2019): 11.

37 See ibid., 15.; see also Karin Stögner, “Intersectionality and Antisemitism—A New Approach,” Fathom (May 2020), https://fathomjournal.org/intersectionality-and-antisemitism-a-new-approach/

38 Rachel Busbridge, “Israel-Palestine and the Settler Colonial ‘Turn’: From Interpretation to Decolonization,” Theory, Culture & Society 35, no. 1 (2018): 92.

39 Ibid.

40 Piterberg, “Settlers and Their State,” 115–124, 118.

41 Omar Jabary Salamanca, Mezna Qato, Kareem Rabie, and Sobhi Samour, “Past Is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine,” Settler Colonial Studies 2, no. 1 (2012): 2.

42 Lorenzo Veracini, “What Can Settler Colonial Studies Offer to an Interpretation of the Conflict in Israel–Palestine?,” Settler Colonial Studies 5, no. 3 (2015): 268–271.

43 Salamanca, Qato, and Samour, “Past Is Present,” 2.

44 Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 403.

45 Ibid.

46 Elia Zureik, Israel’s Colonial Project in Palestine. Brutal Pursuit (London: Routledge, 2016), 59.

47 Ibid.

48 An exceptionally thoughtful analysis of the links between antizionism and antisemitism in France is the book by Danny Trom, La France sans les Juifs. Émancipation, extermination, expulsion (Paris: P.U.F., 2019).

JCA 2024

(DOI: 10.26613/jca/7.2.164)

From 1967 to October 7: The History of an Antisemitic Cartoon from the Civil Rights Era to the Harvard Encampment

Sara Yael Hirschhorn

Abstract

This article restores to history the saga of a antisemitic cartoon and broadside first published by the Student National Coordinating Committee, a civil rights organization, in the summer of 1967 and reprinted by Students and Faculty for Justice in Palestine at Harvard University after October 7. It demonstrates the long durée of the vocabulary, solidarities, and platforms over more than fifty years and how a set of discourses was institutionalized within the progressive Left that later bore fruit on 10/7. The article also points to similarities and differences in the way this imagery and text was received and the possibilities of interventions after October 7 to break a cycle lasting half a century.

Since the massacre on the October 7, 2023, where Hamas terrorists invaded civilian residential communities and attacked a rave in the desert of Southern Israel near the Gaza border, carrying out war crimes that included massacres of entire families at home, gunning down free-spirited festival-goers as they ran for their lives, burning kibbutzim to the ground, raping women, and carrying off hostages including toddlers and old ladies into captivity, universities across the West have erupted as the epicenter of activism around the Israel-Hamas war. For months, campuses were sites of constant demonstrations, which culminated in winter/spring 2024 with encampments that spread across the United States and overseas.

Harvard University, as perhaps the most elite university in the world, emerged almost immediately as a site of both solidarity and scrutiny. Only days after 7 October, student groups signed petitions that sought to “contextualize” how they condoned violence—these same pupils seemed shocked when their names were released and

Keywords: Israel, Palestine, civil rights, Black-Jewish relations, universities they were publicly called to account for their statements.1 Then, Harvard was also criticized for not issuing a public memorandum about the massacre (as it had institutionally commented on many recent domestic and foreign concerns); after days of studious reticence, it took the public shaming of a former president and donors closing their checkbooks for leaders to issue a tepid statement—one that was amended a second time for failing to take a stand.2 Months of restiveness followed, with dozens of allegations of verbal and physical antisemitic attacks against Jewish and Israeli students, which drew Congressional investigation—and required federal subpoenas due to compliance failures. 3 The sitting President Claudine Gay, who famously remarked “it depends upon the context,” to whether calls for Jewish genocide constituted antisemitism that violated university policy before a House committee,4 later stepped down and much of the Harvard antisemitism task force has now resigned.5

Yet, a curious incident occurred in midFebruary that directly linked 1967 to the post10/7 realities at Harvard and beyond. Social media began to circulate an advertisement promoted by Faculty and Students for Justice in Palestine at Harvard University (first issued by Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee and the African and African American Resistance Organization), a flyer featuring an antisemitic image that fifty years ago became the touchstone of a decade-long confrontation between (what I am calling) transnational Black Power vs. Jewish Power, which reordered both domestic and global politics and was the first iteration of many debates of the post-10/7 era.6 How the use of this cartoon again—in a different context and response than in the original context but meant to evoke similar solidarities and framings as fifty-years ago—encapsulates a half-century of political and ideological evolution that led to 10/7, as well as some historically based insight into the future.

Yet it was not clear on its face how millennials in a Cambridge dorm room decided to use this imagery—not exactly part of the woke vernacular in 2024—to promote their activities. Did they even know its origin and significance, then as now?!

The drawing by a cartoonist named Kofi Bailey was older than most of their parents (!) and was originally printed in a broadside of the Student National Coordinating Commission (SNCC) newsletter of July-August 1967 (Fig. 1). The image depicted a hand tattooed with a Star of David around a dollar sign, which held the ropes of two nooses strangling the figures of Egyptian premier Gamal Abd-al Nasser and the boxer-convert-to-Islam Muhammad Ali, as, from the left of the frame, a brown arm with biceps and forearm emblazoned “Third World” brandishing a scimitar inscribed “Liberation” came to cut them down. (In case it isn’t sufficiently self-explanatory, the cartoon implicated Israel and the Jews, rendered indistinguishable by the star, with the help of the United States and its holy dollar, in murdering not only Black and Brown peoples, but Arab nationalism and Islam, to be saved by the sword of Third World solidarities.)

To be fair, this wasn’t even the most antisemitic of the illustrations that accompanied the article (which were not featured in the flyer)— there was an unsubtle sketch of Israeli General Moshe Dayan in uniform with the Star of David on his chest and dollar signs on his lapels (Fig. 2); alongside, few eye-raising, unattributed photos, two captioned “Gaza Massacres—1956: Zionist lined up Arab victims and shot them in the back in cold blood. This is the Gaza Strip, Palestine, not Dachau, Germany” (Fig. 3), and another of smiling women with weapons described as “Zionist Jewish Terrorists” (Fig. 4).

While it was not reproduced in the Faculty and Students for Justice in Palestine at Harvard advertisement, these images accompanied a centerfold of text in the June-July issue of the SNCC newsletter. While Jim Foreman, the International Affairs Commission director of SNCC (who had a storied career in the civil rights movement) had initially commissioned a research brief on the 1967 war for internal circulation within the organization, it appears that the SNCC newsletter editor decided to publish it instead as a two-page feature. Entitled “Third World Round Up—The Palestine Problem: Test Your Knowledge,” the quiz promised to provide a new interpretation of “news and analysis of what’s happening around the world and how it relates to our struggle here,” especially since “the white American press seldom, if ever, gives the true story” (Fig. 5).7

The thirty-two-point informational spread (allegedly lifted almost in its entirely from Palestine Liberation Organization propaganda booklets provided by Arab embassies8 including one entitled “Do You Know?: Twenty Basic Questions About the Palestine Problem,” with major similarities to the SNCC text9) queried such ‘facts’ of brutal Zionist colonialism with the aid of Western Powers, couched in antisemitic conspiracies, as,

Do you know . . .

1. That Zionism, which is a worldwide nationalistic Jewish movement, organized, planned and created the “State of Israel” by sending Jewish immigrants from Europe into Palestine (the heart of the Arab world) to take over land and homes belonging to the Arabs?

And

2. THAT in this operation, they received maximum help, support and encouragement from Great Britain, the United States, and other white western colonial governments . . .

15. THAT the Zionists conquered the Arab homes and land through terror, force, and massacres? That they wiped out over 30 Arab villages before and after they took control of the area they now call “Israel.”

And

28. THAT the U.S. Government has worked along with Zionist groups to support Israel so that America may have a toe-hold in that strategic Middle-East location, thereby helping white America to control and exploit the rich oil deposits of the Arab nations?

And

29. THAT not only have American Zionists and their cousins in Europe poured billions of

dollars into Israel since its founding, but they have also promoted a propaganda campaign to cover up their true aims, plans, objectives? That they have prevented the world from knowing the truth of the Palestine Arab refugees who were and still are victims of Zionist, British, and U.S. Aggression against them?

And

31. THAT the famous European Jews, the Rothschilds, who have long controlled the wealth of many European nations, were involved in the original conspiracy with the British to create the “State of Israel: and are still among Israel’s chief supporters? THAT THE ROTHSCHILDS ALSO CONTROL MUCH OF AFRICA’S MINERAL WEALTH.

(Harvard students merely summarized these bullet points by omitting any antisemitic overtones, noting only that SNCC “likened Zionism to an imperial project” on their poster.)

As in 1967, as will be discussed, once the advertisement was discovered by online pundits, it triggered a firestorm, with Jewish students, faculty, and alumni (as well as many outsiders) outraged over the antisemitic overtones of the cartoon. Harvard Chabad condemned the cartoon as “Reprehensible. Bigoted. Hateful.”10 Harvard Hillel urged an investigation in its “call upon our administration to take action against virulent antisemitism at Harvard.”11 Divinity School student Shabbos Kestenbaum, who is party to a lawsuit against Harvard for breaking Title VI antisemitism clauses, suggested that “with professors like these, it’s easy to see why we Jewish students don’t feel safe in class.” 12 Prominent professor and former Medical School dean Jeffrey Flier wrote, “Star of David on a hand choking the Third World . . . No debate about this being antisemitic.”13 Rabbi David Wolpe, who resigned within its first week from the Harvard Antisemitism Task Force, alleging it as not empowered to do its job effectively by

the administration, added, “the cartoon is despicably, inarguably antisemitic. Is there no limit?”14

HFSJP then quickly swapped out the original cartoon for a photograph of Black Power leader Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), who was the chair of SNCC in 1967 and its chief promoter of Black-Palestinian solidarities, having once quipped, “the only good Zionist is a dead Zionist,” and defended the PLO’s armed struggle. (Interestingly, no one seems to have commented on an even more inflammatory graphic on the flyer’s bottom left that appeared in both version of the advertisement of Huey Newton meeting Yasser Arafat in 1980 taken from The Black Panther, an often virulently antisemitic periodical supporting political violence.) This too brought further condemnation. By this point, the Harvard administration had had enough: President Alan Garber characterized the cartoon as “flagrantly antisemitic,”15 and a disciplinary committee was tasked with reviewing the advertisement. (No action subsequently seems to have been taken, nor any individuals named for producing this poster amongst students or faculty.) Ultimately, HFSJP deleted these social media posts and issued an apology, writing “it has come to our attention that a post featuring antiquated cartoons which used offensive antisemitic tropes was linked to our account. We apologize for the hurt that these images have caused and do not condone them in any way. Harvard FSJP stands against all forms of hate and bigotry, including antisemitism.”16

It’s perhaps no surprise that some of these themes appeal to Harvard faculty and students again today as their poster speaks to a moment in the making and unmaking of solidarities around Israel/Palestine that began in the 1960s. Yet unlike the anticlimactic dénouement of the circulation of the cartoon in this occasion, the original publication of the SNCC cartoon had much more long-lasting effects that have in fact structured the kinds of debates that are being had on campus today. Indeed, it is perhaps no coincidence that this very cartoon was resurrected from the archive, a literal illustration that

1967 was the first iteration of the discourse of the post-10/7 moment. It is important to contextualize the origins of this cartoon within the evolution of SNCC, the civil rights movement, and the Black-Jewish alliance as well, since these precursors to the incident itself had important consequences for its aftermath—up until today.

This article does not presume to summarize the entirety of the history of African-Americans or Jews in the United States, nor the relationships between them and the mythologies that have surrounded it.17 Yet, the SNCC incident intervened in a critical moment in the histories of both identity politics groups—that were increasingly able to identify as hyphenated Americans18 in the 1960s—after nearly fifty years of projects of Jewish patronage (perhaps exemplified by the Julius Rosenwald education project 19) and heavy and disproportionate activism of Jewish-Americans within the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.20 This was also a moment when African-American and Jewish-American radicals saw America/Amerika as an alien Diaspora where full liberation and equality had yet to be realized. Yet, the origin stories of how each of these identity politics groups came to the United States—one taken in chains as slaves from Africa, the other trying to liberate themselves from political and economic subjugation in Europe by mass immigration— meant that their experience of the ethnic revolution of the 1960s as hyphenated Americans could never be analogous. Further, despite both the real ideological and tactical congruences of the community, by mid-century the hype of Black-Jewish alliances often obscured that the historical paths of these two identity politics groups had already diverged sharply.

Despite often humble immigrant beginnings when many European Jews came to the USA (including times and places in American Jewish history where Jews were not only associated with African-Americans, but even considered black!21), which often did not free them from the experience of antisemitism, after World War II,

American Jews ultimately gained access to institutional advancement through the GI Bill, the ending of university quotas, and new social programs.22 Some Ashkenazi fair-skinned Jews were even increasingly seen as a subcategory of white ethnics who “passed” in American society as part of a social construct that coded (Jewish) whiteness as a symbol of assimilation, ascendancy, and authority against the color line.23 While some American Jews protested that their white-adjacent status never amounted to the true privileges and protection of “whiteness” as a non-Christian minority who remained victims of antisemitic prejudice and violence24 and that most American Jews immigrated to the United States after the end of slavery so could hardly be held culpable for the original sin of American society,25 many American Jews26 became increasingly associated with the power structure and even white supremacy. The recategorization of Jews from powerless minority to part of the oppressive “majority” threatened their continued activism in the movement for racial equality and their status as an American minority. 27 (Simultaneously, it also sowed the seeds of a new Judeo-Christian establishment unthinkable on the Right in previous generations, which is not the subject of this study, but is a remarkable phenomenon worthy of further research.)

Meanwhile, African-Americans continued to suffer from structural racism and a lack of opportunity imposed by the immutability of Blackness. While the “Great Migration” had brought many African-Americans out of the South,28 anger was building in overcrowded inner cities which periodically erupted into violence.29 Furthermore, many of the opportunities afforded to Jews by the GI Bill were not accessible to AfricanAmericans and yet another war in Vietnam was also decimating the Black community.30 BlackJewish interactions became increasingly charged in the 1960s despite (or because of) the disproportionate involvement of Jewish-Americans in the civil right movement, as both the Black and Jewish establishment were confronting demographic, geographic, and generational change.

Further, as many middle-class Jewish-Americans started moving out of the old immigrant urban neighborhoods and made a successful transition to suburbia,31 African-Americans (as well as working-class Jews) were literally and metaphorically left behind.

Despite the aspirational alliance forged by Blacks and Jews in the United States—most often immortalized in the iconic image of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Herschel marching arm-in-arm in Selma—tensions were already mounting by the 1960s over whether this partnership was equitable, necessary, and sustainable.

The evolution of SNCC fell squarely into the new dilemma of the mid-sixties. By 1966, under Carmichael’s new leadership, SNCC had shifted from an organization focused on Southern civil rights to a Northern international human rights agenda. It also began to question whether white participation, often with an ethos of classical liberalism and gradual change, was in fact holding back Black progress and whether African-American autonomy and resistance (including a shift away from non-violence) was a more appropriate means to the end of liberation and equality. Even before the 1967 war, SNCC had already initiated a process of purging white activists (mostly Jews) from its ranks even before the Israeli-Palestinian conflict captured their imagination.32 As those like Norman Podhoretz pondered “My Negro Problem and Ours,”33 Black intellectuals from Harold Cruse to James Baldwin reflected on the what they considered the problematic role of Jews as ‘middleman’ in continued African-American misery, even going so far as to explain (if not justify) antisemitism within their community of the basis of this status.34 The tensions between Black radicalism and the Black establishment were also accelerating as new figures came to the fore; while Stokely Carmichael was cutting his teeth (allegedly his first protest was with his Jewish friends from the Bronx High School of Arts and Sciences) in activism and Malcolm X was galvanizing a new generation of young

African-Americans,35 those like Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King himself were moving leftward, especially with Poor People’s Campaign and his opposition to the Vietnam War.36 So too was the Jewish establishment confronting an new, often a USA-born cohort of “New Jews” (and later “Radical Zionists”) who were seeking to understand their own roots as hyphenated Americans and reconnect to traditions lost in the processes of Americanization and suburbanization and who were oriented toward activism as part of the civil rights and anti-Vietnam struggles.37 While both communities were often facing similar crises, they were also on a collision course by the 1967 war.

Yet, whilst SNCC had already begun to take an interest in a broader global agenda and solidarities with the Third World under the leadership of Carmichael from 1966, the 1967 war proved to be a transformative moment not only in centering these agendas, but also in linking a philosophy of domestic oppression at the hands of Jewish middleman in the Black ghetto to the backstreets of the Middle East. Until 1967, Israel/Palestine had not been a focus of Black-Jewish relations, beyond general support from both communities for the founding of the State of Israel in 1948.38 Most saw Israel as a new country borne out of international shame of the Shoah that was struggling to get on its feet—the Palestinian issue was not a subject of significant attention. (Not least because the Palestinian Liberation Organization itself was not founded until 1964 and had not yet attained a place on the world stage.) With its swift victory in six days over combined Arab armies led by Nasser’s Egypt that June, Israel (and Zionism) was suddenly transformed from a state of plucky yet powerless pioneers, destitute European and Arab-Jewish refugees, and traumatized Holocaust survivors into a veritable bully on the block in the bad neighborhood of the Levant.39 While the 1948 war had already earned the enduring enmity of the Arab world and inaugurated the revanchist ambitions of the Palestinian people after their national Naqba (“The Catastrophe”), the

nineteen-year interregnum meant that, for its early years, the State of Israel was still largely understood as a David and Goliath narrative in international eyes.40 Yet, after the 1967 war, Israel had Jewish-Zionist power and was holding it over the Palestinian people; Israel had prestige and a new role in Cold War power dynamics; and perhaps most importantly, with its Ashkenazi Jewish leadership and population (although Israel today is a minority-majority country of “brown” and “black” Jews from Arab Lands and Africa), Israel was perceived as a “white” colonizer in a de/ postcolonial moment. Suddenly, domestic issues were bound up with an international agenda which put Jews and Israelis in the cross-hairs of global controversies—indeed, the issue of the SNCC newsletter served as the first public shotover-the-bow of the clash between two incipient and dueling transnational movements, that we might call by shorthand Black and Jewish Power, over the Israel-Palestine question which has endured until today.

Unlike the reaction to the Harvard SNCC cartoon, which seemingly petered out in the days following the deletion of the post, the uproar over the original newsletter became a kind of dress-rehearsal for the proxy battles between Black and Jewish power over the next decade. Jewish organizations swiftly condemned the broadside, decrying its antisemitic content and even likening SNCC to the Ku Klux Klan for its racist and violent attitudes.41 (They also noted that SNCC were acting as Arab-Soviet pawns, or at least parroting their propaganda,—making clear that dilemmas of the Cold War and the Color line.42) While most Jewish groups avowed not to let the incident prejudice the entire BlackJewish project, they retreated their financial and ideological support of the organization. Even some Jewish radicals—notably Theodore Bikel43 and Jonathan Golden44—who had been actively involved in the civil rights movement and had worked closely with SNCC in the South, publicly pilloried their former ally and resigned in protest. The Black establishment too quickly distanced themselves from the new radicalism of

SNCC, as moderates like Whitney Young of the National Urban League, Bayard Rustin, A. Philip Randolph each issued statements in opposition to the newsletter.45 (Martin Luther King Jr. would not comment on the article as he claimed he hadn’t seen the publication but generally reiterated his opposition to antisemitism.46) Yet, SNCC itself, in a series of press conferences and further articles, refused to apologize or back down, despite the loss of both financial support and friendships.47 While the group itself was radically diminished by the 1970s, the generation of radicals it had produced like Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Eldrige Cleaver, Huey Newton and the Black Panthers, and other intellectuals and activists made antizionism, the Palestinian cause, and an ArabAfrican alliance the new centerpiece of their agenda over the next decade, culminating in the “Zionism is Racism” resolution in the United Nations.

The story of this generational confrontation between Black and Jewish Power remains to be told. (In full disclosure, the author is writing a book on this subject.) Yet the SNCC scandal foreshadows these future clashes and is an important case study in the broader history of the period.

There are several important themes that are relevant to understanding October 7 and its aftermath that this story of a sketch from 1967 to 2024 encapsulate. The first is that the international solidarities—and Israel’s isolation within the progressive movement—in the post10/7 moment are not spontaneous; rather they emerge from a half century of deep, yet still uninterrogated, alliances. There remains profound nostalgia and nominal reference to the Black-Jewish partnership, yet, since 1967 this has largely collapsed under the weight of the Israel-Palestine conflict (and affirmative action). Not only did the African-American community turn away from the Black-Jewish alliance, it was actively cultivated as participant in a new ArabAfrican-American association. This has had a seismic effect on Jewish and Zionist communities

in the United States who found themselves quickly abandoned by the progressive camp after October 7, but also new institutional orientations from the Arab-Black and Brown coalitions within the “squad” in Congress to the NAACP’s recent support of arms ban for Israel to encampments on university campuses. Interestingly, much like some of the criticism raised by Jewish organizations to the SNCC cartoon, that evoked Arab slave trading and antiBlackness within Arab nationalism of the period, there has been new breakdown of the Black-Arab alliance by African-Americans who are questioning whether it is in their interests. Yet, there seems to be far too much water under the bridge, including on Israel/Palestine, to see a reinvigoration of the Black-Jewish alliance.

The second intervention here is to highlight the set of discourses that were institutionalized in the 1960s has been easily accessible in new iterations to today’s generation, including Harvard faculty and students. The fact that framing of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has changed little on the progressive Left for decades—in a way that is completely ahistorical and ignores any developments in the history of the region—is in and of itself striking and perhaps even a significant causative factor for 10/7. Moreover, that radical students and faculty are still utilizing documents and cartoons from 1967 shows direct continuity between past and present. Further, that antisemitic imagery and vocabulary, including tropes drawn from Soviet

REFERENCES

and Arab propaganda, has been allowed to incubate within progressive circles and be utilized in the wake of 10/7 shows how deeply violence against Jews has been tolerated and inculcated as part of the discursive articulation of solidarities for more than half a century leading up to 10/7.

Last but not least, this vignette demonstrates that youth culture, activism, and higher education remain epicenters of conflict off the battlefield. Just as in 1967, SNCC attempted to appeal to a generation of young radicals, so too did students and faculty at Harvard. It is important to see how this episode set a tone that inculcates a worldview, with the torch being once again passed today. The roots of 10/7 go back decades, but if these discourses are not disrupted for the future, one can only expect that what young people read and see today will only replicated— including with mass violence against Jews. While produced under duress, the fact that HSFJP recognized that their content was offensive and antisemitic and apologized is perhaps a hopeful sign that the unlearning of some of these tropes is possible.

The SNCC newsletter of 1967 still represents the first shot over the bow of a conflict in the United States over Israel/Palestine that has left much scorched earth—even as the kibbutzim and moshavim of Southern Israel themselves burned on October 7. Learning from the history of this period may help understand the present and future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the American context today.

1 Anemona Hartocollis, “After Writing Anti-Israeli Letter, Harvard Students Are Doxxed,” New York Times, October 18, 2023.

2 Miles J. Herszenhorn and Claire Yuan, “Following National Criticism, Harvard President Gay Condemns Hamas, Distances University from Student Groups,” Harvard Crimson, October 10, 2023.

3 “House Committee Subpoenas Harvard over Antisemitism Investigation,” Times of Israel, February 16, 2024.

4 Max Larkin, “Harvard’s President Faces Backlash Following House Antisemitism Hearing,” WBUR-Boston, December 8, 2023.

5 Rebecca Falconer, “Co-Chair of Harvard’s Newly Formed Antisemitism Task Force Resigns,” Axios, February 26, 2024.

6 The original post was subsequently deleted, but still exists in numerous copies on X, see, for example, Rabbi Wolpe’s post of February 19, 2024, https://x.com/RabbiWolpe/status/1759608930731524298

From 1967 to October 7: The History of an Antisemitic Cartoon from the Civil Rights Era to the Harvard Encampment

7 “Third World Roundup—The Palestine Problem: Test Your Knowledge,” SNCC Newsletter (June-July 1967): 4–5.

8 Robert G. Weisbord and Arthur Stein, Bittersweet Encounter: The Afro-American and the American Jew (New York: Schocken Books, 1970), 104.

9 See Michael Fischbach, Black Power and Palestine: Transnational Countries of Color (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018), 39–40.

10 Jenny Jarvie, “The Antisemitic Cartoon Roiling Harvard? It’s Not the First Time It Caused a Firestorm,” Los Angeles Times, February 23, 2024.

11 Michelle N. Amponsah and Joyce E. Kim, “As Harvard Warns of Disciplinary Action, Pro-Palestine Groups Apologize for Antisemitic Image,” Harvard Crimson, February 20, 2024.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid.

14 “Harvard Pro-Palestinian Faculty Group Apologizes After Sharing Antisemitic Imagery,” Times of Israel, February 21, 2024.

15 Jarvie, “The Antisemitic Cartoon Roiling Harvard.”

16 Andrew Lapin, “Harvard Pro-Palestinian Faculty Group Apologizes for Sharing Post with Antisemitic Image,” JTA, February 20, 2024.

17 See, for example, Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Jack Salzman, ed., Bridges and Boundaries: African Americans and American Jews (New York: G. Brazilier, 1992); and Jonathan Kaufman, Broken Alliance: The Turbulent Time Between Blacks and Jews in America (New York: Scribner and Sons, 1983).

18 See Matthew Frye Jacobson, Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).

19 See, for example, Hasia R. Diner, Julius Rosenwald: Repairing the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017); Peter M. Ascoli, Julius Rosenwald: The Man Who Built Sears, Roebuck and Advanced the Cause of Black Education in the American South (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2006); and Norman H. Finkelstein, Schools of Hope: How Julius Rosenwald Helped Change African American Education (Honesdale, PA: Calkin Creek/ Highlights, 2014).

20 See, for example, Kenneth L. Marcus, Jewish Identity and Civil Rights in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Todd Gitlin, Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books, 1987).

21 For the context and historical contingencies of Jewish whiteness, see Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

22 For the impact of post-World War II government programs on American Jewish advancement, see Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998); and Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness. On the university quotas, see Dan A. Oren, Joining the Club: A History of Jews and Yale (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985); Benjamin Wurgaft, Jews at Williams: Inclusion, Exclusion, and Class at a New England Liberal Arts College (Williamstown, MA: Williams University Press, 2013); Susanne Klingenstein, Jews in the American Academy, 1900–1940: The Dynamics of Intellectual Assimilation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991).

23 Frye Jacobson, Roots Two.

24 See, for example, the literature on the New Antisemitism, a term I do not embrace, but which has come to represent the conceptualization of a post-Holocaust antisemitism based on new racial paradigms of American Jewry caught between white nationalism from the Right and white privilege from the Left. It was first coined here, Arthur Forster and Benjamin Epstein, The New Anti-Semitism (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974); and this has been developed in recent years particularly in response to left-wing antisemitism, see David L. Bernstein, Woke Antisemitism (New York: Wicked Son, 2022).

25 This subject is a matter of open scholarly debate, see the new introduction to Marc Dollinger, Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2018), here: https:// marcdollinger.com/new-preface/.

26 It is important to note that the large-scale migration of Mizrachi and other Jews of Color to the United States is a fairly recent phenomenon, accelerated by the 1948 war, and later, the Iranian revolution in 1979. There is also

a concurrent trend of the conversion of African-Americans to Judaism, see, for example, Julius Lester, Lovesong: Becoming a Jew (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1988); and Nora Rubel, “Chicken Soup for the Souls of Black Folk: African American Converts to Judaism and the Negotiation of Identity,” Social Compass 51, no. 3 (2004): 335–347. However, according to recent survey results, 92% of American Jews identify as “white, non-Hispanic” and two-thirds identify as Ashkenazi. While it is difficult to tabulate, perhaps 8%–14% of Jews identify as Mizrachi or Jews of Color of another background. See Pew Survey, Jewish Americans in 2020, “Section 9: Religion, Ethnicity, Heritage, and Immigration amongst American Jews,” https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/race-ethnicityheritage-and-immigration-among-u-s-jews/

27 Dollinger, Black Power, Jewish Politics.

28 See Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: Vintage Books, 2011).

29 See Peter B. Levy, The Great Uprising: Race Riots in Urban America during the 1960s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

30 See James E. Westheider, Fighting on Two Fronts: African Americans and the Vietnam War (New York: New York University Press, 1999).

31 See David Kaufman, Shul with a Pool: The ‘Synagogue-Center’ in American Jewish Life (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 1999).

32 For the most astute analysis of changes in SNCC that provide context for the 1967 Newsletter that I am indebted to for my thinking, see Clayborne Carson, “Blacks and Jews in the Civil Rights Movement: The Case of SNCC,” in Bridges and Boundaries: African Americans and American Jews, ed. Jack Salzman (New York: G. Brazilier, 1992), 36–49.

33 Norman Podhoretz, “My Negro Problem and Ours,” Commentary Magazine, February 1963.

34 See Harold Cruse’s response to Podhoretz, “My Jewish Problem and Theirs,” in Black Anti-Semitism and Jewish Racism, ed. Nat Hentoff (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 143–188; Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: New York Review of Books Classics, 1967/2005); and James Baldwin, “Negroes are Antisemitic because They’re Anti-White,” New York Times, April 9, 1967.

35 Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Grove Press, 1966).

36 Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–1968 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006).

37 See James A. Sleeper and Alan Mintz, eds., The New Jews (New York: Vintage Books, 1971); Jack Nusan Porter, ed., Jewish Radicalism: A Selected Anthology (New York: Grove Press, 1973); and Michael E. Staub, The Jewish 1960s: An American Sourcebook (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2004).

38 See Roger Baumann, Black Visions of the Holy Land: African American Christian Engagement with Israel and Palestine (New York: Columbia University Press, 2024); and Robert G. Weisbord and Richard Kazarian, Israel in the Black American Perspective (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985).

39 See Michael Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); and Tom Segev, 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East, trans. Jessica Cohen (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007).

40 See Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–1999 (London: John Murray, 2000).

41 See “Jewish Groups Strike Back at S.N.C.C. Attack,” Chicago Tribune, April 16, 1967, 119; “American Jewish Comm. Rebukes SNCC for Racism—Says Hate Talk Won’t Deter Jews from Helping Negroes,” Philadelphia Tribune, September 12, 1967, 3; “SNCC Attack Draws Attacks,” New York Amsterdam News, August 19, 1967, 1; Gene Roberts, “S.N.C.C. Charges Israel Atrocities,” New York Times, August 15, 1967, 1; and “Anti-Semitic Attack from Negro Newsletter Flayed,” Jewish Advocate, August 17, 1967.

42 See “Jewish Groups Strike Back at S.N.C.C. Attack”—one Virginia Congressperson even suggested that SNCC should register as an official foreign agent!

43 See Theodore Bikel, “A Farewell to SNCC,” Jewish Civic Leader, September 7, 1967. The article was apparently also reprinted in several other newspapers, with a given date of August 25, 1967. Also see Aimee Ginsburg Bikel, “What Happens to a Dream Gone Wrong?: Civil Rights Icon Theodore Bikel Left the SNCC, but He Never Left the Cause of Justice,” Tablet Magazine, August 16, 2016.

From 1967 to October 7: The History of an Antisemitic Cartoon from the Civil Rights Era to the Harvard Encampment

44 See “Golden Criticizes S.N.C.C. and Quits: Finds Its Antisemitism is Like Klan and Nazis,” New York Times, August 22, 1967, 24; and Harry Golden, “Only in America: Revolutions Breed Terrorist Groups Such as SNCC,” Chicago Defender, September 16, 1967, 10. The column was syndicated nationally as well.

45 See Kathleen Teltsch, “S.N.C.C. Criticized for Israel Stand,” New York Times, August 16, 1967, 28.

46 Ibid.

47 See “SNCC and the Arab-Israeli Conflict,” Movement 3, no. 9 (September 1967): 2; Douglas Robinson, “New Carmichael Trip,” New York Times, August 19, 1967, 8; Gene Roberts, “S.N.C.C. Charges Israel Atrocities,” New York Times, August 15, 1967, 1; and C. Gerald Fraser, “S.N.C.C. in Decline After 8 Years in the Lead,” New York Times, October 7, 1968, 51.

(DOI: 10.26613/jca/7.2.165)

Can Jews Speak Freely on Ivy League Campuses?

Mattie Harris and Robert Maranto1

Abstract

Ivy League universities are thought leaders, making the pro-Hamas protests on these campuses since October 2023 likely harbingers of US views toward Israel and, relatedly, levels of antisemitism. Journalistic accounts suggest that, in the United States, twentyfirst-century antisemitism is more common among elites than non-elites; yet little peer reviewed research has explored this question. Using survey data with a large, representative sample (n = 44,847) of undergraduate students from 207 campuses collected by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), we explore whether Jewish students are relatively more likely to report self-censoring on Ivy League campuses. Controlling for demographic and ideological variables, ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions indicate that Jewish Ivy League students are more likely than both gentile Ivy Leaguers and non-Ivy League Jews to report self-censorship on social media and regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We discuss limitations and directions for future research. Most notably, this data was collected before the October 7 attacks, so it can best provide a baseline for future studies.

Keywords: antisemitism, self-censorship, free speech, Ivy League, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Middle East Studies

I cannot think of a worse stretch in Harvard history than the last few months . . . Confronting antisemitism does not mean punishing offensive speech as some suggest. Free speech is sacrosanct in a university. But effective leadership does involve assuring the appropriateness of speech made by the university and its subunits and it means encouraging speech that counters prejudice and balances debate.

Former Harvard President Larry Summers (January 30, 2024)2

INTRODUCTION

Inherently, elites have an identity and selfidentity distinct from others, sometimes showing more loyalty to other elites than to non-elite voters and consumers.3 Lacking a hereditary

royalty, in the United States few markers confer elite status like a degree from an Ivy League institution. As David F. Labaree shows, most Ivy League universities enjoyed a century plus head start over other private colleges and state universities, many decades more time to build respected brands, massive alumni networks, and endowments.4 Since the early 1900s, educators at and alumni from Ivy League universities have been keenly aware of their role in selecting and shaping national and increasingly international elites.5 Ivy League universities influence future ideas, politics, art, and business in the United States and globally, through thought-leader professors and entrepreneurial (or at least socially networked) graduates; thus, ideas which start in the Ivies spread down.6 Such contagion may be for good or ill. As Josh Barro argues, rapidly

declining public trust in US higher education, which has fallen in tandem among Republicans and Democrats—whose opinions typically move in opposite directions—may reflect institutional practices and behaviors (including tolerating pro-Hamas speech but not more moderate speech) that began at Harvard and other elite universities.7

Here, we test whether a religious and cultural minority that has often faced discrimination, Jews, report less ability to speak freely on Ivy League campuses than their gentile peers, and when compared to Jews on non-Ivy League campuses. This is particularly important given the recent salience of conflict in the Middle East. Using a unique data set developed by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression,8 Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regressions find mixed results. Controlling for a range of variables, surprisingly, compared to other students, Ivy League students generally see their university leadership as somewhat more supportive of free speech. Despite this, they also reported higher levels of self-censorship on social media and particularly regarding the IsraeliPalestinian conflict. Jewish Ivy League students were even more likely than both gentile Ivy Leaguers and non-Ivy League Jews to report self-censorship on social media and regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In short, we find evidence that Jewish students perceive relatively less ability to speak freely on Ivy League campuses, particularly regarding the state of Israel. This likely indicates higher levels of antisemitism in elite than non-elite educational settings, in accord with some popular accounts 9 and experimental evidence.10 We end with limitations and implications from the findings.

Ivy League Elites and Antisemitism

Since at least the early 1900s, educators and alumni from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton have been well-aware of their role in selecting and shaping national elites.11 Referring to the most

prestigious of institutions, historian (and Harvard alumnus) Richard Norton Smith described the twentieth century as “the Harvard Century.” These campuses have long hosted and produced a disproportionate share of leaders and leading intellectuals. Ivy League universities have had enormous impact on public policy, foreign and domestic, as politician and sometimes Harvard professor Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote.12

Elite creation and status markers have ideological components and may presage the direction of the United States socially and politically.13 Harvard influenced intellectual and political history through the mid-nineteenth-century abolitionism, and later in developing African American history by preparing leading intellectuals like Carter G. Woodson and W. E. B Du Bois.14 In a less positive manner, Columbia University arguably had more impact on K-12 education than any other institution, leading the twentieth-century movement to limit academic content in schooling,15 and spreading scientifically unsound “whole language” rather than phonics-based reading instruction.16

Regarding foreign policy, in part due to the influence of the late Professor Edward Said, for decades Columbia has enjoyed influence in Middle East studies, spreading postcolonial theory portraying Israel as lacking a right to exist, defining it as a “settler-colonialist” state in which Jewish settlers displaced indigenous Palestinians, and deriding Israel’s now seventyplus year old internationally recognized status.17 Embracing these beliefs has become a status marker for some twenty-first-century cognitive elites. While postcolonial theory and related approaches toward the Middle East have enjoyed support in many academic fields and elite media outlets, they have far less US public support and the extent to which US elites believe rather than signal such beliefs is unclear.18

To be clear, one can criticize Israel without supporting antisemitism—many Jewish Israelis regularly protest their government’s policies. That said, particularly on college campuses, even

before the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack that awakened latent views, criticisms of Israel often descended into calls for indiscriminate killing of Jews, disruption of pro-Israeli speakers, and verbal and physical harassment of Jewish students.19 Critical theories such as postcolonial theory have substantial influence in academia, and students and educators supporting such intellectual currants often sanction views they oppose, including pro-Israel views.20

In part for such ideological reasons, campus antisemitism garners substantial bureaucratic support. For example, anti-Israel views which stray into antisemitism (including holding Jewish individuals and the single Jewish state to higher standards than others) seem common among higher education Diversity/Equity/ Inclusion (DEI) bureaucrats, whose frequent tweets about Israel are overwhelmingly negative but whose frequent tweets about China are mainly positive, despite China’s far worse human rights record both generally and toward Muslims.21 These bureaucracies often have the power to expel students and fire professors.22 Recently, thirteen researchers affiliated with interest groups as well as Rutgers University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Texas at Dallas, and Bar Ilan University in Israel have tracked both documented and undocumented foreign funding to US universities, finding statistically significant relationships between funding from Middle Eastern states and reported antisemitic incidents on campus.23 This may parallel behaviors in the 1930s, when elite US universities and professors therein receiving funds and honors from Nazi Germany endorsed antisemitic policies and practices.24

Notably, Harvard Dean of Faculty (and briefly President) Claudine Gay expanded Harvard’s DEI bureaucracy, seemingly using it to purge centrist professors and leading Harvard to have the nation’s worst climate for free speech, as measured by FIRE.25 Of course, Gay would hardly be the first Harvard leader to use bureaucratic staff and procedures to limit the rights or numbers of minorities who are resented by elites.

Can Jews Speak Freely on Ivy League Campuses?

In the early and mid-twentieth century some students and many alumni and trustees at elite colleges resented a large Jewish presence, seeing Jews as too hard-working and of questionable ethical character. Some traditional white AngloSaxon Protestant (WASP) elites did not consider Jews, no matter how accomplished, to be respectable members of the elite. Limiting the numbers of Jews in Ivy League universities served the perceived interests of legacy elites. Such elite (and sometimes mass) resentments toward educationally and economically successful minorities are common in a wide range of societies and have sometimes been made worse through affirmative action policies, which make ethnic identity more salient to both minorities and majorities.26 In the United States, regarding Jews, it was not until the 1960s that quotas limiting their numbers in elite institutions faded away.27 Given this stereotyping on the part of admissions and other institutional gatekeepers, Jewish applicants to Ivy League institutions, particularly Harvard, were traditionally coached to emphasize their love of sports and to avoid seeming “too Jewish,”28 just as Asian students are today counseled to avoid seeming “too Asian.”29 As Karabel details,30 after attempts to impose quotas limiting the numbers of Jews proved controversial, in the 1920s Harvard responded with geographic quotas and holistic (rather than primarily academic) admissions methods to obtain the same outcome, using admissions gatekeepers to limit Jews to fifteen percent of incoming classes. As shown by the National Association of Scholars, 31 the same holistic admissions processes are now used to limit the numbers of Asians, for the same discriminatory reasons.

Scholars like Richard Hofstadter32 chronicled the tendency for working class and agrarian populists to resent Jews, for their seeming status as foreigners and “rootless cosmopolitans,” and their disproportionate employment in elite financial sectors seen as having interests opposed to those of working and small business classes. Such populist, nonelite antisemitism has a long

history across the world, including the United States, and attracted considerable empirical research.33 Yet, by the 1980s, US antisemitism was no longer closely related to education, income, or even measures of authoritarian ideology.34 Further, upscale antisemitism also has a long history while attracting less scholarly notice than downscale antisemitism. Indeed, a single carefully designed, peer reviewed study of antisemitism found it to be greater among those with advanced degrees than among the mass public, perhaps in part due to the aforementioned influence of postcolonial theory among contemporary elites.35 This was a nascent issue in US academia in the 1980s when Julius Lester wrote Lovesong: Becoming a Jew. 36 This memoir describes hostile reactions from colleagues when the author, a distinguished Afro-American Studies professor (and African American) converted to Judaism.

Some survey research and qualitative accounts, albeit mainly by activists and journalists, also indicate a twenty-first-century upsurge of antisemitism on campuses, particularly elite campuses. A Brandeis University survey of Jewish undergraduates at fifty-one US colleges and universities found many respondents perceiving hostility both towards Jews and Israel on their campuses. Jewish students at three Ivy League institutions, Cornell University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Columbia University reported the most perceived hostility. Survey respondents, including those who identified ideologically with the left, reported more campus antisemitism from the political left than the right.37 These findings accord with qualitative and journalistic accounts noted above, as well as others.38

Notably, postcolonial theory and other intellectual approaches which sometimes demonize Jews, particularly in narrow fields like Middle East Studies, received little public attention until the surprisingly positive reaction to Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel. Regarding this, transparency can have enormous impacts. Most notably, the widely watched December 5, 2023, congressional committee hearing on antisemi-

tism at elite universities held by the US House Committee on Education and Workforce Development proved a public relations disaster for Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and to a lesser degree MIT, with the two Ivy League presidents later forced to resign. (Harvard President Gay resigned in the wake of a serious plagiarism scandal, which might have attracted less notice were it not for the antisemitism hearing.) In the hearing, the three prominent university presidents seemed unable to condemn student and faculty support for Hamas despite the organization’s call for the destruction of Israel and mass murders and rapes of civilians; they instead pled support for free speech, even though all three institutions (but particularly Harvard) have very weak records protecting free speech expressing (conservative and centrist) views their leaders do not like.39

Interestingly, this congressional hearing featured inter-elite conflict, most notably between a Harvard graduate, New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, against Harvard (doctoral) graduate Gay and a Yale graduate (University of Pennsylvania President McGill), each promoted to their posts by Ivy League governing boards. Ivy League leaders and the boards which select them have considerable power partly owing to their alumni networks. Consider that five of the last six US presidents earned undergraduate, law, or graduate degrees from Penn (Trump), Harvard (George W. Bush and Obama), Columbia (Obama), or Yale (Clinton and both Bushes). Ambitious young people in the twenty-first century go to great lengths to gain admission to these institutions, which has fueled admissions scandals.40 As in the early and mid-twentieth century, such ambition may enable or even encourage antisemitism and other forms of bigotry. Further, a focus on status and connections has in part supplanted academic learning, producing Ivy League graduates who can network, but lack intellectual depth, empathy, and judgement. They may make suitable financial analysts, but less effective and trustworthy leaders, public servants, and citi-

zens.41 Institutional emphases on material status leave behind low-income students working their way through college, who are often considered unsuitable for dating or friendships.42 It also undermines elite abilities to defend (or even recognize) democratic norms, instead prioritizing conformity to class norms, even norms which encourage bigotry against class or ethnic outsiders.43 This is important in part because as sociologists remind us, in wealthy societies the class struggle often becomes a classification struggle, with high prestige individuals seeking increasingly complex means of differentiating themselves from the less prestigious, and then taking great pains to signal class membership through conspicuous ideologies more than through conspicuous consumption.44 At elite campuses, some see support for Israel as lower status, particularly given widespread support for the single Jewish state among non-prestigious, traditional Christian groups who elites seek to distinguish themselves from.45 At elite institutions, defending Israel may entail risks, particularly where campus bureaucracies with the power to expel members46 signal that support for Israel (in contrast to, say China) offends class norms. This discussion suggests testable hypotheses regarding whether Ivy League students profess more support for censorship than non-elite students, whether Ivy League Jews feel more constrained than Jews at other campuses, and whether Jewish students would feel less constrained with a greater Jewish presence on campus.

HYPOTHESES

Given the enormous body of research regarding racial and sexual discrimination on college campuses, it is remarkable how little empirical research addresses anti-Jewish prejudice on campus. Here, we will begin to fill this gap by testing the hypotheses that regarding free speech, compared to other students, Ivy League students will be:

H1: less supportive of free speech;

Jews Speak Freely on Ivy League Campuses?

H2: more supportive of violence to stop what they consider offensive speech;

H3: more likely to self-censor on social media;

H4: more likely to view conversations about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as high risk;

H5: less likely to view school administrators as supporting free speech.

Further, within Ivy League schools, we predict that Jewish students compared to gentiles will be:

H6: more supportive of free speech;

H7: less supportive of violence to stop speech they consider offensive;

H8: more likely to self-censor on social media;

H9: more likely to view conversations about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as high risk;

H10: less likely to view school administrators as supporting free speech.

DATA AND METHODS

We use the 2022 Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE, 2022) survey data of 44,847 undergraduate students across 207 campuses. Between February 15 and May 30, 2022, FIRE surveyed approximately 100–150 full-time undergraduate students at small campuses and roughly 250 full-time undergraduates at universities. The survey consisted of twenty-eight items focusing on demographics, ideology, perceived support for free expression on campus, and the perceived climate for free expression on campus; here, we analyze all the free speech climate questions. (See Appendix 1.) The survey used a two-stage validation process to ensure students were enrolled and applied a post-stratification adjustment based on demographic distributions from multiple data sources. FIRE conducts such surveys annually. For details on survey methodologies, see the summary by German and Stevens.47 We analyzed 44,847 cases, excluding those with missing data. The sampling strategy,

the large sample and the diversity of college students enable us to test a range of hypotheses with reasonable statistical power.

Table 1 presents frequencies for various demographic and ideological characteristics of the sample. Regarding religion the most commonly selected category is “nothing in particular,” 17.4% for the sample. In analyses not shown here, we find relatively few differences between Ivy League and non-Ivy students, with two notable exceptions. Jewish students are 6.8% of Ivy students (n = 131) and 3.6% (n = 1,314) of non-Ivy students, yielding sufficient power for OLS regressions. Ideologically, self-identified liberals outnumber conservatives 68–14% among Ivy League students and 53–19% in the sample, confirming views that Ivy League students are more ideologically homogenous. This may be important since, as shown by decades of research, like others, students are more apt to restrict free speech rights of those they disagree with.48

1. Demographic and ideological variables

Table 1. Demographic and ideological variables

Ivy League schools comprise seven universities and one college grouped together in an athletic conference: Princeton University, Harvard University, Yale University, University of Pennsylvania, Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, and Dartmouth College. We present three OLS regressions to test hypotheses. First, we estimate the differences between Ivy League students and students at other schools. Second, we examined the differences between Ivy League Jews and Jews at other schools. Lastly, we analyzed the differences between Ivy League Jews and Ivy League gentiles. To control for other variables and offer greater precision, we conducted an analysis for three categories using ordinary least squares (OLS) regression to estimate how Ivy league students compare to their non-Ivy League peers, Ivy League Jews compare to Jews at other schools, and Ivy League Jews compare to non-Jewish Ivy League students in answering a set of 10 survey questions. Specifically, we estimate:

1)

2)

3)

where Y i is one of the outcome variables for individual i; Ivy_leaguei is an indicator variable equal to 1 if individual i was an Ivy League student and 0 if non-Ivy League student. Ivy_Jewi is an indicator variable equal to 1 if individual i was a Jewish Ivy League student and 0 if non-Ivy League Jewish student. Ivy_JEWi is an indicator variable equal to 1 if individual i was a Jewish Ivy League student and 0 if Ivy League non-Jewish student. Privatei is an indicator variable equal to 1 if the school is private and 0 if it is public. We also control for a variety of demographic and ideological characteristics in the model as indicated by the vector X i. These characteristics include gender, ideology, race, religion, and socio-economic status. See appendices 1 and 2 for the questions used as dependent variables, and for Ivy League and non-Ivy frequencies for student responses. To repeat, we include in analyses all the free speech climate questions on the survey.

Can Jews Speak Freely on Ivy League Campuses?

Results: Table 2

Table 2 shows the results for equation 1, which compares Ivy League and other students. Though six of the ten tests yielded statistically significant results, hypotheses find mixed support. Question 1 finds Ivy League students 3.5 percentage points more likely than students from other schools to believe that their school should allow a speaker on campus who promotes the idea that getting rid of inequality is more important than protecting the so called “right” to free speech. Whether these results confirm H1 (that Ivy League students are less supportive of free speech) is debatable. On one hand, Ivy League students would allow a speaker on campus who promotes a controversial viewpoint; yet this viewpoint diminishes the value of free speech. One could argue that this result disconfirms H1 as much it confirms this hypothesis. (Importantly, in this and later tests ideology is controlled for.) Here, we note that we did not design the questions.

Question 2, regarding H2 (support for violence to stop controversial speech), did not yield statistically significant differences. As for question 3, somewhat surprisingly, Ivy League students were 2.3 percentage points more likely than other students to say their college administration protects free speech on campus. Results from question 4 (that administration would defend controversial speakers) were not distinguishable from zero. However, in question 5, Ivy League students were 2.3 percentage points less likely than students at other schools to feel that they could not express their opinion on a subject because of how students, a professor, or the administration would respond. Question 3 and 5 seemingly disconfirm H5, which predicts that Ivy League students are less likely to see their colleges as supportive free speech. Arguably, this could reflect relatively ideological homogeneity at these colleges, at least regarding invited speakers.49

Regarding social media, compared to non-Ivy peers, Ivy League students were 5.5 percentage points less likely to feel comfortable expressing

an unpopular opinion to their fellow students on a social media account tied to their name (question 6), supporting H3. Question 7 (reluctance to discuss controversial issues in class) did not produce statistically significant results. Yet question 8 produced the most profound differences: Ivy League students were 9.4 percentage points more likely than non-Ivy peers to believe

that it is difficult to have an open and honest conversation about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on campus, strongly supporting H4. While question 9 did not provide results worth noting, question 10 found Ivy League students 4 percentage points less likely to feel that they could express themselves if there were more people of different religions than their own.

Table 2. The difference between Ivy League students and Non-Ivy students

relative difference for Ivy League students standard error P-value

students at other schools mean

Question 1: Believe school should allow a speaker on campus who promotes the idea that getting rid of inequality is more important than protecting the so called “right” to free speech

Question 2: Believe it is acceptable for students to engage in using violence to stop a campus speech

Question 3: Believe it is clear is that college administration protects free speech on campus

Question 4: Believe the administration would likely defend the speaker’s right to express their views if a controversy over offensive speech were to occur on my campus

Question 5: Feel unable to express opinion on a subject because of how students, a professor, or the administration would respond

Question 6: Feel comfortable expressing an unpopular opinion to fellow students on a social media account tied to their name

Question 7: Feel much pressure avoiding discussing controversial topics in classes

Question 8: Believe the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is difficult to have an open and honest conversation about on campus

Question 9: Feel they could express themselves if there were more people of their religion on campus

Question 10: Feel they could express themselves if there were more people of different religions than them on campus

Notes: The relative difference for Ivy League students are listed as decimals. The numbers in this column should be multiplied by 100 to obtain the percentage point differences in either belief or feeling about a statement. N = 44,847. *p<0.1; **p<0.05; ***p<0.01.

Results: Table 3

Table 3 shows OLS regressions comparing Ivy League and non-Ivy Jewish students. Questions 1–3 showed no significant differences across the groups. Question 4 surprisingly showed Ivy League Jews as 6.9 percentage points more likely than Jewish peers at non-Ivy schools to agree that administration would defend offensive speech, again tending to disconfirm H5, a matter discussed further in the Limitations section below. For question 5, Ivy League Jews were 9.2 percentage points (p = .014) less likely than Jews at other schools to agree that they could not express opinions on a subject in class because of how students, professors, or the campus administration would respond, again tending to disconfirm H5. In contrast, Ivy League Jews were 10.9 percentage points (p = .014) less comfortable than Jews at other schools to express an unpopular opinion on a social media account tied to their name (question 6). Yet results for question 7 find Ivy League Jews 7.9 percentage points (p = .029) less likely to feel pressure to avoid discussing controversial topics in class. Perhaps hinting at the sensitivity of the issue in elite circles, Jews at Ivy League schools were 7.2 percentage points (p = .096) more likely than peers at non-Ivies to report finding it difficult to have an open conversation about the IsraeliPalestinian conflict on campus (question 8). Finally, we found that Jews at Ivy League schools were 9.2 percentage points (p = .024) less likely to feel that they could express themselves better if there were more people of their religion on campus (question 9). In short, comparisons of Ivy League and non-Ivy Jewish students yield mixed results.

Results: Table 4

As Table 4 shows, comparing Ivy League Jewish and gentile students, only two findings yielded statistically significant results, perhaps indicative of cultural homogeneity within these elite institutions, as suggested above by Ivy League

Can Jews Speak Freely on Ivy League Campuses?

students and professors. 50 This homogeneity and pressure to conform may limit Jewishgentile disagreements, with the highly salient Israeli-Palestinian conflict being a notable exception. For question 6, Jewish students were 10.6 percentage points (p = .012) less likely than their non-Jewish peers to feel that they could express unpopular opinions on social media, strongly confirming H8. More notably, for question 8, Jews were 26.6 percentage points (p = .000) more likely than non-Jewish peers to view open and honest conversations possible regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, strongly confirming H9.

LIMITATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

This study fills an important niche. While considerable qualitative work addresses a perceived free speech recession on US campuses,51 this is the first large empirical work comparing Jewish and gentile perceptions regarding what students can and cannot discuss in their daily interactions. It is particularly important given the current debates over the degree to which elite campuses have free speech issues, antisemitism issues, or both, matters brought to a head with the aftermath of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel. Yet, this study has notable limitations. Most importantly, this FIRE survey and the single survey which followed this one each occurred before the Hamas attack; hence, findings are time bound, showing baseline conditions before the attack. We strongly suspect that Jewish self-censorship has increased since the survey, particularly on elite campuses. Second, we could not create survey questions, and in certain cases (particularly question 1) would have chosen different question wording. Third, questions measuring what Jewish students (relative to gentiles) feel they can say are likely indicative of but do not precisely measure antisemitism. In fairness, most studies of racial, religious, or sexual discrimination use similarly imprecise measures, often via surveys of the target population. 52 Fourth,

Mattie Harris and Robert Maranto

though college campuses and in particular elite campuses play a vital role in shaping the future, findings here may not reflect current conditions off campus. Finally, the FIRE surveys offer a rich dataset. This work leaves many other questions of interest to explore in future, including regarding how students from other religious traditions view free speech: Jewish students

seemingly self-censor more than gentile peers on some issues, but they may not be the only outliers.

Despite limitations, we believe that the findings have notable implications. Ivy League students see their administrations as relatively supportive of free speech. This contrasts the popular perceptions and firsthand accounts

Table 3. The Difference between Ivy League Jews and Jews at other schools

Ivy League Jews

Question 1: Believe school should allow a speaker on campus who promotes the idea that getting rid of inequality is more important than protecting the so called “right” to free speech

Question 2: Believe it is acceptable for students to engage in using violence to stop a campus speech

Question 3: Believe it is clear is that college administration protects free speech on campus

Question 4: Believe the administration would likely defend the speaker’s right to express their views if a controversy over offensive speech were to occur on my campus

Question 5: Feel unable to express opinion on a subject because of how students, a professor, or the administration would respond

Question 6: Feel comfortable expressing an unpopular opinion to fellow students on a social media account tied to their name

Question 7: Feel much pressure avoiding discussing controversial topics in classes

Question 8: Believe the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is difficult to have an open and honest conversation about on campus

Question 9: Feel they could express themselves if there were more people of their religion on campus

Question 10: Feel they could express themselves if there were more people of different religions than them on campus

Notes: The relative difference for Ivy League Jews are listed as decimals. The numbers in this column should be multiplied by 100 to obtain the percentage point differences in either belief or feeling about a statement. N = 1,576. *p<0.1; **p<0.05; ***p<0.01.

Jews Speak Freely on Ivy League Campuses?

Table 4. The difference between Ivy League Jews and non-Jewish Ivy League students

for Ivy League Jews

Question 1: Believe school should allow a speaker on campus who promotes the idea that getting rid of inequality is more important than protecting the so called “right” to free speech

Question 2: Believe it is acceptable for students to engage in using violence to stop a campus speech

Question 3: Believe it is clear is that college administration protects free speech on campus

Question 4: Believe the administration would likely defend the speaker’s right to express their views if a controversy over offensive speech were to occur on my campus

Question 5: Feel unable to express opinion on a subject because of how students, a professor, or the administration would respond

Question 6: Feel comfortable expressing an unpopular opinion to fellow students on a social media account tied to their name

Question 7: Feel much pressure avoiding discussing controversial topics in classes

Question 8: Believe the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is difficult to have an open and honest conversation about on campus

Question 9: Feel they could express themselves if there were more people of their religion on campus

Question 10: Feel they could express themselves if there were more people of different religions than them on campus

Notes: The relative difference for Ivy League Jews are listed as decimals. The numbers in this column should be multiplied by 100 to obtain the percentage point differences in either belief or feeling about a statement. N = 1,946. *p<0.1; **p<0.05; ***p<0.01.

noted above. Possibly, this question measures institutional loyalty. Ivy League students might treasure their institutional elitism, small size, and social and ideological homogeneity, and thus (even after controls are added) view their administrators more positively than non-Ivy peers. Indeed, Ivy League students like Natalia Dashan suggest this. 53 Further, findings may reflect how Ivy League students view the question. Ivy League presidents have defended speech supportive of Hamas, while sanctioning speech which outside the ivory tower would be noncontroversial. 54 In answering this survey question, students may be thinking more about the former cases than the latter, viewing university leaders as protecting their institutions from outsiders.

Notwithstanding this finding, relative to other students and controlling for demographic and ideological variables, Ivy Leaguers report more self-censorship on social media and regarding the Israel-Palestinian conflict. This is particularly true of Ivy League Jews relative to non-Ivy Jews, and relative to Ivy League gentiles. This is suggestive of antisemitic institutional climates, in which relative to others, Jews feel they cannot speak freely. If what happens at Harvard portends the future elsewhere, this has troubling implications across US society regarding antisemitism, and regarding social and institutional restrictions of free speech, particularly when that speech is supportive of Israel. As social scientists show, censorship and self-censorship degrade teaching and research inside academia, and foster greater polarization outside.55 Certainly, more research, and more respectful dialogue, are needed.

APPENDIX 1: SURVEY QUESTIONS REGARDING FREE SPEECH

Q1: Student groups often invite speakers to campus to express their views on a range of topics. Regardless of your own views on the topic, should your school ALLOW or NOT ALLOW a speaker on campus who promotes the following idea?

**Getting rid of inequality is more important than protecting the so called “right” to freedom of speech.**

1) Definitely should allow this speaker.

2) Probably should allow this this speaker.

3) Probably should not allow this speaker.

4) Definitely should not allow this speaker.

Q2: How acceptable would you say it is for students to engage in the following action to protest a campus speaker.

**Shouting down a speaker to prevent them from speaking on campus?**

1) Always acceptable.

2) Sometimes acceptable.

3) Rarely acceptable.

4) Never acceptable.

Q3: How clear is it to you that your college administration protects freedom of speech on campus?

1) Extremely clear.

2) Very clear.

3) Somewhat clear.

4) Not very clear.

5) Not at all clear.

Q4: If a controversy over offensive speech were to occur on your campus, how likely is it that the administration would defend the speaker’s right to express their views?

1) Extremely likely.

2) Very likely.

3) Somewhat likely.

4) Not very likely.

5) Not at all likely.

Q5: On your campus, how often have you felt that you could not express your opinion on a subject because of how students, a professor, or the administration would respond?

1) Never.

2) Rarely.

3) Occasionally.

4) Fairly often.

5) Very often.

Q6: How comfortable would you feel doing the following on your campus?

**Expressing an unpopular opinion to your fellow students on a social media account tied to your name.**

1) Very comfortable.

2) Somewhat comfortable.

3) Somewhat uncomfortable.

4) Very uncomfortable.

Q7: How much pressure do you feel to avoid discussing controversial topics in your classes?

1) No pressure at all.

2) Slight pressure.

3) Some pressure.

4) A good deal of pressure.

5) A great deal of pressure.

Q8: Some students say it can be difficult to have conversations about certain issues on campus. Which of the following issues, if any, would you say are difficult to have an open and honest conversation about on your campus?

**The Israeli/Palestinian conflict.**

0) No.

1) Yes.

Can Jews Speak Freely on Ivy League Campuses?

Q9: What **campus changes** would make you feel that you can express yourself?

**If there were more people of my religion.**

0) No.

1) Yes.

Q10: What **campus changes** would make you feel that you can express yourself? If there were more people of different religions than me.

0) No.

1) Yes.

Q11: Where do you think the political views of the **average faculty** member on campus is on the following scale?

1) Very liberal.

2) Somewhat liberal.

3) Slightly liberal.

4) Moderate, middle-of-the-road.

5) Slightly conservative.

6) Somewhat conservative.

7) Very conservative.

8) I haven’t thought much about this.

9) Other.

10) Write-in.

REFERENCES

1 Robert Maranto (rmaranto@uark.edu) is the corresponding author. He wishes to thank the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression for supporting this work through Grant #2203, “Studying Free Speech Using FIRE data.” The usual caveats apply.

2 Jeffrey Clark, “Ex-Harvard President Says School Going through ‘Worst Stretch’ in History, Still Not Confronting Antisemitism,” Msn.com, 2024, https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/ex-harvard-president-says-school-going-through-worst-stretch-in-history-still-not-confronting-antisemitism/ar-BB1huJNt?ocid = entnewsntp&pc = U531&cvid = 952524afd2304e539bc7bc6cf0fda244&ei = 22 (link not active now).

3 Louis Schubert, Thomas R. Dye, and Harmon Zeigler, The Irony of Democracy (Boston, MA: Cengage Learning, 2016). Notably, Israeli politician and political scientist Yuli Tamir argues that nationalism has an important purpose in bridging elite-mass divides in democracies: Why Nationalism? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019).

4 David Labaree, A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

5 Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2005).

6 Richard Norton Smith, The Harvard Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

7 Josh Barro, “American Universities are Post-Truth,” The Atlantic, January 12, 2024, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ archive/2024/01/claudine-gay-harvard-scandal/677096.

8 Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, College Free Speech Rankings, 2022, https://www.thefire.org/ research-learn/2022-2023-college-free-speech-rankings.

9 Clark, “Ex-Harvard President”; Shira Telushkin, “The Vanishing Ivy League Jew,” Tablet, October 15, 2018; https:// www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-vanishing-ivy-league-jew.

10 Albert Cheng, Jay P. Greene, and Ian Kingsbury, “Are More Highly Educated Individuals More Antisemitic? Findings Based on a New Approach to Measuring Antisemitism Using Double Standards ,” Antisemitism Studies 6, no. 1 (2022): 70–98.

11 Karabel, The Chosen

12 Daniel P. Moynihan, Miles to Go: A Personal History of Social Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

13 Darel E. Paul, From Tolerance to Equality (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2018).

14 Jonathan Zimmerman, Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2022), 38–48.

15 Labaree, A Perfect Mess; Diane Ravitch, Left Back: A Century of Battles over School Reform (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).

16 Emily Hanford, “Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong,” podcast, apmreports.org, 2022, https:// features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/.

17 Martin Kramer, Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2001); Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody (Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2020).

18 Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, Occidentalism: The west in the eyes of its enemies (New York: Penguin Press, 2004); Charles Pincourt, Counter Wokecraft: A Field Manual for Combatting the Woke in the University and Beyond (Las Vegas, NV: New Discourses, 2021). On the tendency of Ivy League elites to signal certain beliefs to gains status, see Rob Henderson, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class (New York: Forum, 2024).

19 Cynthia Lummis, James E. Risch, Marsha Blackburn, Kevin Cramer, Mike Braun, Marco Rubio, Roger M. Wicker, Ted Cruz, Mike Crapo, Ted Budd, John Cornyn, Rick Scott, Tom Tillis, John Hoeven, and Josh Hawley, letter from Senator Cynthia Lummis to Secretary Miguel Cardona, 2023, https://www.risch.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/a/d/ ad1db0b9-31a2-4295-bd21-45cfe29af6a0/BDA5AB39BB404B2F10913FD1ADD33C72.letter-to-dept-of-education-on-taxpayer-funded-antisemitism-final-version-risch.pdf; “The Corruption of the American Mind: How Foreign Funding in U.S. Higher Education by Authoritarian Regimes, Widely Undisclosed, Predicts Erosion of Democratic Norms and Antisemitic Incidents on Campus,” Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), 2023, https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/NCRI-Report_The-Corruption-of-the-American-Mind. pdf

20 Robert Corn-Revere, The Mind of the Censor and the Eye of the Beholder (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021); Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott, The Cancelling of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023). Pluckrose and Lindsay, Cynical Theories

21 Jay P. Greene and James D. Paul, “Antisemitism is a Growing Problem among College Diversity Administrators,” Heritage Foundation, December 24, 2021, https://www.heritage.org/religious-liberty/commentary/antisemitism-growing-problem-among-college-diversity-administrators.

22 Lukianoff and Schlott, The Cancelling.

23 “The Corruption of the American Mind.”

24 Timothy Jackson, “Nazism, Anti-Semitism, and Today’s Islamo-Fascism at American Universities,” Minding the Campus, December 15, 2023, https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2023/12/15/nazism-anti-semitism-and-todays-islamo-fascism-at-american-universities/.

25 Robert Maranto, “The DEI Cosa Nostra: Why Claudine Gay will Survive Harvard’s Antisemitism Scandal,” The Hill, December 28, 2023, https://thehill.com/opinion/education/4378546-the-dei-cosa-nostra-why-claudinegay-will-survive-harvards-antisemitism-scandal/; Sean Stevens, “Harvard Gets Worst Score Ever in FIRE’s Free Speech Rankings,” Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, September 6, 2023, https://www.thefire.org/news/ harvard-gets-worst-score-ever-fires-college-free-speech-rankings.

Can Jews Speak Freely on Ivy League Campuses?

26 Thomas Sowell, Markets and Minorities (New York: Basic Books, 1982); Thomas Sowell, Affirmative Action around the World: An Empirical Study (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).

27 Robert C. Christopher, Crashing the Gates: The De-WASPing of America and the Rise of the New Power Elite (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989).

28 Michael Feldberg, “Anti-Semitism in the U.S.: Harvard’s Jewish problem,” Jewish Virtual Library, 2012, https://www. jewishvirtuallibrary.org/harvard-s-jewish-problem; Telushkin, “The Vanishing Ivy League Jew.”

29 Jeannie Suk Gerson, “Anti-Asian Bias, Not Affirmative Action, is on Trial in the Harvard Case,” New Yorker, October 11, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/anti-asian-bias-not-affirmative-action-is-on-trialin-the-harvard-case.

30 Karabel, The Chosen

31 “Amicus Curiae in Support of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College,” National Association of Scholars, July 30, 2018, Civil Action no. 1:14-cv-14176-ADB, accessed May 6, 2022, NAS_SFFA_Amicus Brief.pdf

32 Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Knopf, 1963); Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays (New York: Vintage Books, 1965).

33 Daniel Pipes, Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From (New York: Touchstone, paperback, 1999).

34 David Raden, “Is Anti-Semitism Currently Part of an Authoritarian Attitude Syndrome?,” Political Psychology 20, no. 2 (June 1990): 323–343.

35 Cheng et al., “Are More Highly Educated Individuals More Antisemitic?”

36 Julius Lester, Lovesong: Becoming a Jew (New York: Henry Holt, 1988).

37 “Anti-Semitism @ College,” Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights under Law, September 2021, https://brandeiscenter.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Brandeis-Survey-Findings.pdf

38 Charles Kadushin and Elizabeth Tighe, “How Hard Is It to Be a Jew on College Campuses?,” Contemporary Jewry 28, no. 1 (2008): 1–20, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23455420; Luke Tress, “Jewish Columbia Students Demand University Take Action against Rising Antisemitism,” Times of Israel, November 1, 2023, https://www.timesofisrael. com/jewish-columbia-students-demand-university-take-action-against-rising-antisemitism/; Telushkin, “The Vanishing Ivy League Jew.”

39 Maranto, “The DEI Cosa Nostra”; Barro, “American Universities are Post-Truth”; Stevens, “Harvard Gets Worst Score Ever.”

40 Daniel Golden, The Price of Admission (New York: Random House, 2007).

41 William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (New York: Free Press, 2015).

42 Anthony A. Jack, The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges are Failing Disadvantaged Students (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019).

43 Natalia Dashan, “The Real Problem at Yale is Not Free Speech,” Palladium, August 5, 2019, https://palladiummag. com/2019/08/05/the-real-problem-at-yale-is-not-free-speech; Henderson, Troubled.

44 Paul, From Tolerance to Equality; Henderson, Troubled.

45 George Yancey, Compromising Scholarship: Religious and Political Bias in American Higher Education (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2011).

46 Lukianoff and Schlott, The Canceling.

47 Komi T. German and Sean T. Stevens, “Scholars under Fire: The Targeting of Scholars for Ideological Reasons from 2015 to Present,” Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, 2021, https://www.thefire.org/research/publications/ miscellaneous-publications/scholars-under-fire/.

48 John L. Sullivan, James Piereson, and George E. Marcus, Political Tolerance and American Democracy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

49 Robert Maranto, Martha Bradley-Dorsey, Nathanial Bork, and Andrea Honeycutt, “FIRE On Campus? Testing Undergraduate Free Expression in Higher Education” (under review).

50 Dashan, “The Real Problem at Yale is Not Free Speech”; Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep; Henderson, Troubled.

51 Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, The Rise of Victimhood Culture (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2018); Ilana Redstone and John Villasenor, Unassailable Ideas: How Unwritten Rules and Social Media Shape Discourse in American Higher Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020); Lukianoff and Schlott, The Cancelling.

52 Craig Frisby, Richard E. Redding, William T. O’Donohue, and Scott O. Lilienfeld, eds., Ideological and Political Bias in Psychology: Nature, Scope, Solutions (New York: Springer, 2023).

53 Dashan, “The Real Problem at Yale is Not Free Speech.”

54 Maranto, “The DEI Cosa Nostra.”

55 Works within Frisby et al., Ideological and Political Bias in Psychology; Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind (New York: Penguin Press, 2018).

Mattie Harris and Robert Maranto

“Keeping our little corner clean”: An Interview with Matthew Feldman on Antisemitism after October 7

Lesley Klaff

This interview was conducted between Lesley Klaff, editor in chief of the Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism, and Matthew Feldman, emeritus professor in the modern history of ideas, who specializes in political extremism since World War I. As a scholar, legal expert witness and independent consultant for third-sector ‘big tech’ and governmental bodies, much of Feldman’s work deals with evolving forms of antisemitism. Initially recorded at Sheffield Hallam University on April 19, 2024, this interview was kindly transcribed by Kate Yanduganova of Academic Studies Press and has been lightly edited for clarity. It is otherwise reproduced in its entirety below.

LK: Thank you for coming to Sheffield to discuss aspects of contemporary antisemitism, Professor Matthew Feldman. We are within a week of Iran’s attack on Israel. Here in the United Kingdom, we’re still witnessing antiIsrael marches and the challenging aftermath of October 7. In fact, ahead of our interview we’ve just walked past a pro-Palestine or, perhaps more accurately, anti-Israel demonstration, beside the train station. I’m very pleased that you’re here to talk to us all about some of your specialisms as a former . . . Are you an academic or a former academic?

MF: You could do worse than “quasi-academic” . . .

LK: Quasi-academic, then. Could you tell us something about your work on fascism and neo-Nazism, and its relationship to antisemitism?

MF: Sure. And thank you for interviewing me, Lesley. I mean, I’ve been a reader of your journal since its inception, and proud to contribute a couple of book reviews as well. I’m really pleased to have the chance to speak given the importance of what you’re doing. Because events are moving so quickly, it might be useful to time stamp, as you say, where we are in mid-April. Yesterday, the United States was the only country to veto UN membership for Palestine (Switzerland and Britain abstained). As you mentioned, on Saturday Iran launched more than 300 missiles and other projectiles at Israel, and only yesterday Israel responded by attacking sites in Iran. So, there is certainly a risk of events bubbling over in the Middle East. Again, only yesterday, two days after Columbia University’s leader Nemat Shafik testified to Congress, officials have cleared what was called a Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia University, saying they took this extraordinary step because of extraordinary circumstances, and over a hundred students were arrested for trespassing. All of that suggests to me that this is a very quickly moving set of issues relating to the whole UN and the Middle East and beyond. But obviously its ramifications have very quickly exceeded these geographical boundaries.

Returning to your question, I have been researching fascism and in particular neo-Nazism for about twenty-five years now. I think there was a path dependency-making event for me at the start of my postgraduate studies in spring 1999. Many will remember the horrible

London nail bombings by the neo-Nazi attacker David Copeland, which was amongst the first in the wave of far-right so-called “lone wolf” terrorist attacks. I’ve now appeared in more than two dozen terrorist cases, acting as an expert witness for the CPS (Crown Prosecution Service), and about half of those cases involved lone attackers—or what’s now called self-initiated attackers—that we might trace back to Copeland. Perpetrators can be highly suggestible and radicalized by the materials so prevalent online. I’ve been researching terrorism and teaching about it since that time, and it’s been quite clearly shown that Copeland was directly motivated by a book called The Turner Diaries; a deeply antisemitic, very racist book written by the-then head of the National Alliance—the largest neo-Nazi outfit in the United States at the time—William Pierce. The Turner Diaries was published in the 1970s but became a kind of gospel of hate—the FBI even called it “the Bible of the racist Right.” It remains a key text for fascists today. And at the end of this novel, as is oftentimes forgotten, Pierce writes that the “race war” in America has been won, and it’s now “one hundred and ten years since the birth of the Great One.” Now, this neo-Nazi is talking about the birth of Adolf Hitler when this dystopian war was supposedly won. And of course, one hundred and ten years on from Hitler’s birth is April 1999. The attacks were deliberately timed to coincide with the end of this book. And these fascist imaginaries do matter and believe me, it’s no coincidence. Copeland’s three bombs went off in April 1999. It was a direct response to The Turner Diaries’ conclusion. Sparking this “race war” has existed in the fevered minds of violent right-wing extremists for decades, but increasingly so since the end of the Cold War.

LK: We see that with the attack on the Pittsburgh Synagogue “Tree of Life” in October 2018 by Robert Bowers, who was a kind of a lone wolf as well.

MF: Yes, he was, and not even kind of. And I think this point is really important—so let me separate Bowers, who, I agree with you, was a

lone wolf, from a person that a lot of people mistakenly think is a lone wolf, which is Timothy McVeigh, who was responsible for the 1995 murder of Murrah Federal Building attack that killed 168 people in Oklahoma City. It was devastating, and less than three months into adulthood I remember it happening clearly. McVeigh had accomplices: Terry Nicholls was also convicted for that, and he helped in securing some of the fertilizer for the truck bomb. I can’t stress enough how important this distinction is. This is where research and the value of impartial scholarship arises because, if one dives into the myth of the lone wolf, it’s almost like people are trying to breed fear. There are dozens—literally—of articles by this name, “The Myth of the Lone Wolf.” It boils down into one thing: these people have a network—what I’ve called a “network of support,” typically online—and therefore they aren’t acting alone. In reality, however, you either go through something that in the field is called the “terrorist cycle “by yourself, or you have someone else (the terrorist cycle includes phases like planning and preparation, site surveillance, the acquisition and deployment of weapons, and sometimes what’s called “exploitation”: the writing of a manifesto or live streaming). This is all very well delineated in academic research. You either have a logistical accomplice, or you don’t. The mistake that many people have made, and that the police have now learned not to make, seems to forget that humans are social animals; that we all have a network of like-minded people, and knowing this tells us little.

In fact, the person who popularized the concept of the lone wolf was named Ted Kaczynski, operating right around that time, the so-called Unabomber from the 1980s and 1990s. Many forget how he was caught. He was sending bombs around the country, leaving a trail of death and destruction, and in the mid-1990s he sent a handwritten manifesto to the New York Times and the Washington Post, which partially published the handwritten documents. This was by a man who lived in the wilds of Montana,

“Keeping our little corner clean”: An Interview with Matthew Feldman on Antisemitism after October 7

miles from everyone; truly, the most alone of lone wolves. Yet, after sending his manifesto, Kaczynski was caught. A member of his family recognized his handwriting and turned him in. This most alone of lone wolves also had a social network, because humans are social animals. Put simply, lone wolves are no myth. As you rightly said, Robert Bowers went through this process himself, alone, in 2018, leading to the greatest terroristic loss of Jewish life in American history.

LK: Actually, when you think about it, there have been a lot of lone wolves recently, relatively speaking, especially in America, at least when compared to Britain.

MF: That’s exactly right. In the United States, more lone wolf attacks have been “successful”—I put this in scare quotes because I don’t mean successful in any kind of laudable sense, these are killers targeting innocents—but they have been more able to achieve their goals of mass murder and terroristic violence, largely because of the availability of guns—but not only that. In Britain, it is obviously harder to obtain these kinds of weapons, which leads people towards doing other types of attacks; let’s say, bombs and so forth, which is basically more involved than going down to your local sporting goods store getting a gun. In addition, the British police managed to prevent most attacks in this country, thanks to their experience in Northern Ireland and long counterterrorism efforts relating to Islamism, and other security threats. There but for the grace of G-d go we all, but there have been far, far more attempted attacks than “successful” ones.

LK: I think that the Community Security Trust (CST) has a lot of dialogue with the police, and with the government. Recently, this three-way process has been boosted by anti-terror legislation, so that the police have the power to intercept certain communications, for example.

MF: I think that’s absolutely what’s happening, because in some cases they’re aware of someone who is moving through this terrorist cycle and planning an attack. However, all the newest

technology did not stop someone like Andrew Leak who attacked—only a couple of years ago—a refugee center in Dover with firebombs. That was a vehicle-born attack.

LK: You also have the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017 . . .

MF: Yes, although there were two people that were involved, and I think that’s an important distinction. When people work in pairs, or what’s termed dyads, as was the case in Manchester or with the far-right bombing in Oklahoma City, one person in the dyad might very well turn around and say, “Well, I want out, we’ll be killing innocent people.” But then the other person might respond: “But don’t forget this cause is why you’re doing it.” As we saw during the Boston Marathon bombing, and in other cases, having a partner can reinforce someone’s path towards terrorism. Of course, lone wolves don’t have this active support.

LK: It’s interesting that they maintain and sustain their plan and their ability to implement it alone, even though they don’t have this backup and encouragement.

MF: That’s right. In fact, self-initiated terrorism first emerged with anarchists in the nineteenth century, so it has a very long history. The question is, why did the far right take it up with such aplomb after the Cold War? Some of this relates to new media technologies, but I think a lot of it is because far-right attackers have this idealized self-image when they go out to the streets, especially in the last twenty years: they are not just a keyboard warrior, but in reality, an Aryan warrior. For people that far down the path toward political violence, one way to prove that is to undertake this kind of attack and to become a living Nietzschean Übermensch (or “superman”), as it were. I contend that has a role to play in the motivation of some of these far-right attackers.

LK: And they probably do get support from the online communities.

MF: Absolutely, they do. Online communities play a big part in their radicalization and can even provide instructions and paramilitary

manuals. But they are not a core part of the terrorist cycle in the sense that do not give direct or logistical help when preparing an attack— otherwise it ceases to be a “lone wolf.”

LK: It’s almost like what you and I do with writing or some other academic pursuit. You have an idea, and you go through the stages, and at the end of it you feel a sense of accomplishment. And while you’re planning it, when you’re structuring your article, you’re engaged and you’re focused, and it’s a nice feeling, isn’t it? And then you do it, you write it and get it published, and you get a sense of accomplishment, and that’s possibly what these people have.

MF: Yes, though in their cases in contrast to yours, of course, the “accomplishment” is the loss of human life. One of the most notorious lone wolves is Anders Behring Breivik, who took seventy-seven human lives in Norway, nearly half of them teenagers shot at a close range. That attack was planned over a period of literally years. One of the reasons why he was “successful” was that he kept it a secret, because what some scholars call “leakage”—or revealing your plans to other people—increases the chances of getting caught. So, with very limited leakage, he was able to inflict the worst so-called self-initiated attack in history. Today, a third of the people who survived his attack, even more than a decade afterward, cannot live normal lives. I’ve met several, and their trauma still radiates. Quite apart from awful loss of life and the deep trauma that this attack left upon Norwegian people, the sad fact is that victims and survivors still find, more than a decade on, that these kinds of attacks are life changing.

LK: It was reported just this week, I think, that quite a significant number of youngsters who survived the Nova music festival attack in Israel have since committed suicide.

MF: Yes. I think they talked about fifty suicides, which is an enormous, searing number. It takes us back to what was the greatest loss of Jewish life, the greatest pogrom since the Holocaust; or, put differently, which in a way is relevant to our exchange just now, was an attack that, after 9/11,

represented the worst loss of life through a terrorist attack in history. Almost 3,000 people tragically lost their lives in 9/11, out of a country of 300 million. Israel is about a thirtieth in terms of the population. If you reword that, the effect on a country the size of Israel, just in terms of loss of life, is about fifteen 9/11s.

LK: I think there’s also quite a lot of trauma still being experienced in Israel. It’s definitely changed, I think, the psyche of the whole country. I mean, most Israelis are behind the war in Gaza, even liberal and left-wing people support the war.

MF: As we turn to that issue, we might remember a point from before, which is that online, in debates and discussion around this massively sensitive issue, people really aren’t using facts, and become dogmatic and very emotive—on all sides. It may be natural but it’s hardly informative. I find the unwillingness to hear opposing arguments regrettable, especially amongst people who fancy themselves intellectuals, who should possess a degree of skepticism, reflection, and openness to knowledge-seeking dialogue.

LK: The facts have been drowned out by a dominant narrative. And not just social media, the mainstream media also has a lot to answer for in terms of the casualty figures they give us from the Gaza Ministry of Health. The figures for the number of dead are only marked as coming from the Gaza Ministry of Health, but it is run by Hamas. Why then have they not also used the figures given by ISIS or any other terrorist organization?

MF: Unfortunately, we do not have any other figures. But the thing that I find frustrating about that reporting is that it’s often not noted that the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health does not separate civilians from fighters. So, when you talk about a very large death toll of 30,000 people, roughly about a third of those have been quoted in various sources as being Hamas fighters. Another important factor to consider is that in the Gaza strip we’re talking about urban warfare, and in this type of military

“Keeping our little corner clean”: An Interview with Matthew Feldman on Antisemitism after October 7

action casualty rates often reach up to about nine civilians to one fighter or terrorist. That has been shown in other conflicts, for example, Aleppo in recent years—about which there has been mostly silence—or in Grozny during the Chechen wars, or before that, in Hue during the Vietnam War. Urban warfare, in its very nature, has massively high civilian casualties, and there’s no way around it. And that is before we note the documented Hamas tunnels and alleged use of human shields in Gaza. All of this can be, equally, heartbreaking and complex.

LK: The IDF first said at the end of February that they killed 13,000 combatants. If you subtract that number from the Ministry of Health figures, and account for the fact that some civilians were killed by Palestinians themselves, such as by Hamas’s rockets that fell short, the ratio goes down to 1 civilian for 1 combatant (although this is only an estimation based on IDF figures).

MF: Well, to me, two things are clear. One: for some of the reasons you mention we are not going to get an exact figure any time soon. Two: there has been significant loss of innocent life, you know, there is no question about that. I hate that, but also recognize that this the nature of war today. I think this obvious point is too rarely acknowledged. Whether in Syria, Sudan, or Gaza, war is awful, it has always been awful, and the nature of modern warfare by itself leads to atrocities and disproportionately high civilian casualties—as we’ve seen in all of these places in recent years. That goes irrespective of where one sees these wars, on which continent, in which urban setting or using whichever rules of engagement. Again, I don’t remember there being the same kinds of discussions after the invasion of Iraq, when war raged on a bigger scale, with urban warfare in Mosul.

LK: To press you on statistics: The latest figure from the Gaza Ministry of Health, as reported by the Human Rights Organization, is 14,000 children have been killed. But there’s been several independent surveys or statistical reports done, which show that these figures have been fabricated.

MF: Relating to this, only today you sent me an interesting article that had come out in Honest Reporting, “US Academic Skews Stats in The Guardian to Compare Gaza to Worst Recent Genocides.”1 Quite apart from what appears to be revealed bias there, and never mind the underlying motivation, we can’t know whether it was sloppy research or a deliberate distortion of facts. The thing that feels to me really important is that, right now in the Democratic Republic of Congo there are about three times as many people displaced than in Gaza, up to five or six million, and in the Sudanese conflict there are still more people displaced. Darfur in Sudan is, of course, the place that the UN and others identified as a site of genocide only twenty years ago. And closer to where I grew up, in Haiti, there’s an awful amount of suffering and loss of life. Now, speaking personally, this doesn’t in any way preclude focus on Gaza for reasons we might touch on, and the world is understandably much focused on that. But if we care simply about human suffering, innocent human suffering, I would like to hear other people talk about, to give you one example that was raised this week in the Washington Post, the 350,000 casualties of Boko Haram in Nigeria this century, including an enormous scale of abduction of innocent people, often children. What I haven’t heard or seen in any mainstream reporting is somebody implying that those abductees somehow deserved it.

LK: There are lots of justifications for October 7, especially in academia.

MF: I fear that may be true. My experience of working on terrorism has made me deeply unsympathetic to terrorists, although terrorist supporters or people who, you know, might have other motivations than political violence, such as mental health, are a much more difficult challenge—including in terms of the radicalization process. But the aftermath of October 7 really changed public sympathies quite quickly. There are a lot of people who have been calling for a ceasefire, many who would like to see an end to the violence, and I think, probably, most decent

people would like that—it’s the terms of such a ceasefire that are so contentious. No less problematically, if we turn to polling now (March 2024), more than two-thirds Palestinians, in both the West Bank and Gaza, think that the Hamas attack was justified on October 7. That’s more than two out of three Palestinians. Likewise, more than two out of three Israelis are against unconditional humanitarian aid to Gaza. After six months of war, then, a supermajority of both Israelis and Palestinians believe that their side will emerge victorious. In the United States, partly since much of this conflict is playing out there in terms of American support for Israel, about six out of ten Americans think that Israel is justified in fighting Hamas to this day. All of this tells me that this conflict is far from exhausted. Two-thirds on both sides are essentially saying, even if they don’t presumably want conflict on their doorstep, that we need to go further than we have so far. While I hope that I’m wrong, I think that people who are wishing for there to be an imminent moment where all this stops, seems to me unrealistic. Dialogue looks distant. It is my fear that between our discussion today and the time when this interview comes out there may still be conflicts of a very grave interstate nature in, and over, the Holy Land.

LK: A more regional conflict could happen as well. Yesterday, there were reports of a deal between President Biden and Prime Minister Netanyahu, whereby Israel agreed not to strike Iran in return for American support for going into Rafah. But then today other reports are suggesting that Israel may have hit Iran with a drone or something, and Israel hasn’t really owned up to it.

MF: Indeed, all this is happening as we speak. The background for this is the assassination strike in Damascus on a large embassy compound on April 1 that, it appears, led Iran to strike Israel in a kind of a tit-for-tat response, which is no doubt further putting the entire region on edge. I’d like to believe that, even though everyone now is entrenched in their own

foxholes, in the months to come that reasonable people would like to see greater security for everyone in the Holy Land and less violence, but it may very well be the opposite. My point is that, unlike so many of the other regional conflicts that were short and sharp, this is much closer to a protracted total war in a tiny amount of space.

Another thing I feel equally strongly about is that there are well entrenched sides, and I’m trying to approach this as an analyst. I feel slightly fearful when I see people that have chosen their “sides” and have no moral confusion whatsoever about it. Every war, I’d like to think, should trouble the conscience; every war is morally unsettling, even what is oftentimes seen as an absolute good war—World War II against fascism. I am still morally troubled by the firebombing of Tokyo or the destruction of Dresden—these things aren’t entirely morally comfortable looking back upon today. They are easy to justify as “this was awful but necessary in the context of winning a war,” but anyone who doesn’t have some sort of moral uncertainties about this leaves me cold. For there are a lot of civilian casualties going around. Anybody who looks at October 7 without being troubled morally, I think, is a ghoul. And similarly, we see truly awful pictures coming out of Gaza. It is unreasonable that people on either side should be expected to say “yes but ignore that.” It’s okay to be morally troubled and uncertain for intellectuals and right-thinking people, and it’s down to individual consciences that have to weigh these things up. To say there’s a kind of clear right and wrong, one hundred percent to zero percent, I think, is a mistake. Critical voices are needed to point out that anybody who’s not morally troubled by what we’ve seen in the last six months, taken as a whole; well, I would question how moral that person really is.

LK: Since October 7, there have been quite a few open letters circulated in universities, including at mine. The letter was very one-sided; it didn’t mention the hostages at all, justified October 7 as a legitimate act of

“Keeping our little corner clean”: An Interview with Matthew Feldman on Antisemitism after October 7

“resistance” and accused Israel of “genocide.” It was a couple of activist academics who drafted it, circulated around thirteen different departments using the internal university email system, using the letter to call on the university to issue a statement in support of Gaza and condemning Israel, which the university didn’t do. But the letter, despite being full of misinformation and antisemitism, drew about three hundred signatures from colleagues. Those who signed it are presumably an example of people who do not feel any empathy at all for the victims of October 7. And I dare say there are probably other people who don’t feel any empathy and sadness for civilian loss in Gaza. We don’t know what it is, what the mortality figure is, but it is a tragedy that those poor people got caught in.

MF: As someone who’s spent the majority of my life in and around academic departments, I am quite familiar with what you’ve just described. One of my increasing concerns about academia—I don’t want to take us too far on a tangent from our focus, but this needs to be said—is the supplanting of dispassionate, neutral, even, dare I say, humanistic scholarship by something much closer to ideological activism. I know that this is a wider issue of which Gaza is a huge part—it seems like every week there’s a new story where it seems like academics broadly, or universities understood broadly, are much further to the left than the general public. I think that these people haven’t necessarily thought through what their actions will mean in the longer term. If academics lose the trust of the public, at whose grace and favor they ultimately serve, I fear that academics will face far greater funding cuts and reduction of the role that universities play in society. I’ll give you one example from some of the work where I intersect with politicians and government a bit. I’ve been asked more than once over the last year if we can trust what academics say about the far right and on the subject of terrorism. I don’t see that academics are taking that uncertainty seriously. Once this trust has been removed it’s very

difficult to get it back, it seems to me, yet I keep seeing it play out again and again.

I’d ask your readers to ask themselves: Who benefits from calling everything under the sun “fascist” or “far right”? When ideologically leftwing academics talk about Keir Starmer being “far right,” or Joe Rogan being “far right” (he’s a podcaster in the United States), or Nigel Farage being a “fascist” and a “Nazi”—who really benefits? I think it’s a serious and pertinent question. I have my own thoughts that, since 1945, fascists have often tried to hide within the societies in which they are a part, not changing their spots so much as painting over them, like white paint over asbestos. It seems like that’s continuing to happen today and suggests to me they are the great beneficiaries of rubbishing the terms “far right” and “fascism,” making them mean basically whatever it is you want them to mean. Similarly, if we change concepts like “genocide” or “terrorism” simply into anything that we don’t like then I’d have to ask your readers, who else besides camouflaged fascists profits from this? I fail to think of anyone else. Because it feels to me that people who don’t benefit are academics, first and foremost, who should be further back from the political fray than they are now, I feel, since I believe that strident activism is massively undermining academia’s deeper core mission: knowledge acquisition and transfer.

LK: Yes, academics should be able to look at things in a balanced way, using analysis from different sources. But for many, their thinking has become shaped by ideological activism. I’m a member of the University and College Union, or UCU for short, and my branch has several members who are also members of the Sheffield Palestine Solidarity Campaign. They are very anti-Israel, and they submit motions that are completely stupid in terms of what they claim, and no sources are provided to support these claims, and yet somehow the motions draw a majority vote and are passed, becoming the branch policy.

MF: This is territory I have more become familiar with in recent years. For example, one

of the calls that I’ve seen in the United Kingdom is to stop arming Israel. Britain is responsible for less than one percent of the arms that are imported by Israel; less than £20 million. Germany and United States are responsible for more than ninety-five percent. A British arms embargo wouldn’t do much. Of course, it doesn’t matter what issue it is, clearly there will be some importance attached to it. For instance, Britain might have used its veto differently in the United Nations and influenced other countries in doing the same. But the thing that doesn’t necessarily get asked by these activists is what this is doing to the idea of the university where people think, and they reflect, and they debate civilly. Another example is BDS. It seems to me that might be desirable want to bring the people from Israel over to this country and say, here’s a perspective you might not be getting, instead of boycotting them. In my view, what we need is more empathetic discussion, not less.

Only yesterday I was in my local, and I overheard two people who, I’m sorry to stereotype slightly, were of a certain type: beardy, sixty-somethings, self-described socialists. I overheard one of them employing what we have now come to call the Livingstone formulation, thanks to the work of Dr. David Hirsh: “Hitler was a Zionist.” In response, do I: a) pretend I didn’t hear, as I literally sat across from these people, and do nothing; or b) tell them, “You’re an idiot or bigot,” or something like that—which, I think, no matter the issue, is unlikely to change minds. I’ve done versions of these things in the past, but this time I decided to try to engage them in discussion. I didn’t begin with this issue, but instead brought it up in a roundabout way; I said, “you must be Socialists, and I assume not National Socialists, but left-wing Socialists given what you’re saying?” They replied, “why did you mention it?,” and I said, “well, you talked about the Havaara agreement of 1933, and you called Hitler a ‘Zionist,’” and they said, “that’s right.” To that my response was, roughly, “by every definition of Zionism—and it’s important to say that Zionism changed over time, from the

nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, to after the State of Israel was founded—in almost all understandings of Zionism there was at bottom a homeland for the Jewish people. Hitler didn’t want a homeland for Jews—he wanted the extirpation of all Jews around the world, above all any he could get his hands on. To have Jews removed from Germany, then from Europe, and then elsewhere—whether North Africa or the Channel Islands – these were all stages in this plan. The idea that creating a homeland for the Jewish people was on Hitler’s mind is absurd and an abuse of the term ‘Zionism.’” Now, reasonable people can disagree about the aims of Zionism, and the ways in which it has changed over time, including being quite critical of Zionism. However, to call Hitler a ‘Zionist’ demands of reasonable people the question: are we going to stay silent about this naked historical revisionism? Are we going to respond with an ad hominem insult? Or are we going to maybe try to debate that; perhaps retorting that there are literally no definitions of ‘Zionism’ that are seriously accepted that would allow for Hitler to be called a ‘Zionist.’ Now, I don’t know if I convinced anyone last night, but at the very least it didn’t lead to a punch-up, and I didn’t walk away feeling like I didn’t say anything and feeling guilty. I really have to stress that I am far from perfect, but I acted in the belief theirs wasn’t a demonstration of intolerance but ignorance. I do tend to agree with Karl Popper that we can’t be tolerant of intolerance. But what about ignorance? If we—especially the readers of this journal, likely to be a little more on the academic or intellectual side—have given up the idea of dialogue, of correcting errors, then I think we’re in a darker place than even I fear.

LK: How did the two men respond?

MF: I suppose the answer would be “normally,” which means defensively at first. I wasn’t trying to make them look foolish, but I said, really, this was an understanding that no one could reasonably agree with; that it’s even called the Livingstone Formulation now. I’ve been very influenced in this view by Dave Rich’s book, The

“Keeping our little corner clean”: An Interview with Matthew Feldman on Antisemitism after October 7

Left’s Jewish Problem, 2 which argues that this formulation reflects a part of the left worldview that is very much post-1967 and Soviet in its origins. Unlike the pre-1967 view, which held that Jewish settlement in the Holy Land was an anticolonial venture against Britain and against the League of Nations mandate, this later approach says that the Jewish state was itself settler-colonial. That sea change, as Dave Rich charts so brilliantly in this book, happened largely between 1967 and 1973. It is very much part and parcel of a worldview that sees Israel as a far more important, far more culpable than any other kinds of countries, whether it’s Sudan, which has a much higher rate of internally displaced people today, or Nigeria, which has a much higher rate of death through terrorism this century. That’s what I think a lot of, for lack of a better term, ‘pro-Israel people,’ who feel that Israel is being maligned, see as a double standard. I don’t know how we square that circle between people who think Israel is the greatest evil of its age, for example, and others who respond by saying, but you are not talking about Sudan, or any one of the number of places that are seeing horrible deaths and anguish. For all the talking past one another, I still believe that meaningful dialogue remains possible, and maybe even allows for changing views. I did point out, for example, to these pretty clearly “Corbynista” types, of certain age and vintage, that eighty-six percent of Jews thought Corbyn to be antisemitic. Either those people are all part of what one, I think, particularly noxious poster on Twitter says is just a scam; or we choose to listen. On the latter, in the way in which we have considered post-Macpherson hate incidents and crimes is that we listen to victims first and foremost. It doesn’t mean, for example, that if somebody believes they witnessed a hate crime, that it’s a fact like gravity, and there may be other contextual factors in play, but it does mean that we listen to victims initially and take seriously their point of view.

LK: We take what hate crime victims say seriously, from any background.

MF: Exactly. That goes for Muslims just as it goes for LGBTQ+ people and any other minority group. As I often point out, this country is still three-quarters white British. That doesn’t include white people from Europe and elsewhere, but really, the remaining twentyfive percent is basically everybody else of minority national, religious or ethnic or sexual orientation.

LK: Revealingly, the Livingstone Formulation has completely inversed the Macpherson principle.

MF: Absolutely. It suggests there are certain groups that can’t be trusted; there are certain groups that must be immediately treated with skepticism—I believe I am characterizing the Livingstone formula accurately—that we wouldn’t extend to other, historically marginalized groups. It is simply a fact that Jews have been historically marginalized, over and above the searing experience of fascism and the Holocaust but which goes back long before that. Persecution has also happened to people of color and others, such as gender or sexual minorities, and competition for greatest victim helps no one either. For me, the question is how we accommodate ‘difference’ in a modern society. I think most people would include in their answer diversity and that listening to minority voices is important, especially when they tell us they’re being persecuted. Such an approach either works for all minorities or works for none.

LK: The notion is that Jews are just conspiring to be self-serving when they raise a concern of antisemitism.

MF: It is a very old trope, one of the three or four that, unfortunately, still appears all the time—especially online—namely, that Jews are undermining others for some sort of profit, or that loyalty to Israel is greater than the Jewish diaspora might have to the countries of their birth. These longstanding antisemitic notions are being reheated, and sadly they are much more visible of late.

This brings me to another observation, which is that even everyday Jews and Muslims in

Britain, let alone anywhere else in the world, have to accept that they can actually do very little to alter this conflict between, you know, two peoples in the midst of a seemingly existential fight. One of the talks I gave right after October 7, when its horror was slowly being revealed, was at a book launch for a friend. It had already become apparent that both anti-Muslim attacks and antisemitic attacks in Britain had reached either all-time highs or were very close, and they’ve both stayed at quite elevated levels since that time. Because I was talking about a book dealing with fascism and World War II, I recalled what George Orwell said in 1942, at the very depths of that conflict: we can’t all necessarily be paratroopers sent into Berlin to kill Hitler, and most suffering its consequences cannot physically fight the war. But we, all of us, can keep our own little corner clean. Orwell believed that it was everyone’s duty to keep your own little corner clean. Those outside the Holy Land can do little to nothing to affect the course of this voracious conflict, but either way; surely, it’s up to all of us to keep our own corner clean here in Britain, or in the United States, or South Africa, or in Australia, indeed anywhere else in the world. Quite obviously this directly relates to this journal and to the wildfire of antisemitism that is reaching unprecedented postwar heights around the world. Still more, I think, that entails treating people as individuals, listening to them in good faith—while not ceding any ground to hatred, or tolerance of intolerance as Karl Popper put it—but also trying to meaningfully, not performatively, stand up for people who are persecuted, above all for those from minority groups.

Naturally, that approach applies to Jews, but it also applies to all minority groups. To take one personal example, I’ve worked on anti-Muslim hatred for more than a decade and I can tell you, it is also real, also pernicious, and also dehumanizing—albeit based upon very different tropes and associations. I speak as a proud Catholic convert; although I have Jewish heritage, I wasn’t brought up in the faith. Right now, I feel very

compelled to stand with my Jewish brothers and sisters, even in small gestures like this discussion, as in the years after 9/11 felt compelled to stand with Muslims who were—and are—too often demonized and wrongly tarred as extremists. I just think that this is a simple matter of decency. It’s also a way anyone can assist in keeping our little corner clean. Put differently: we can’t actually do much about a conflict some 3,000 miles away, but turning Britain, your and my little corner, into a hell of intolerance is no answer to upsetting or even enraging scenes that are happening around the world.

LK: This is about not being a bystander as well. If you see, or you think you see, acts of discrimination, you need to do what you can. And I think referring to it as keeping your own corner clean is a good way of putting it.

I now wanted to turn to the extent to which social media pollutes dialogue. I only signed up to Twitter, now called X, a couple of years ago, and it’s an absolute sewer of misinformation and rubbish. You also see this on Facebook to a lesser extent. People have their opinions, but state them as facts. It’s just strange how distorted the ‘facts’ they present are.

MF: I contend that the increase in places like Twitter of antisemitic abuse and other forms of racism is part of a wider problem. To disentangle and to address it—and it should be addressed, of course—groups like the Center for Countering Digital Hate do a very good job. To your pessimism I would respond, regrettably, that I think the problem is even worse.

Some twenty years ago when I was, I think it’s fair to say, pretty left-wing, I was very critical of gatekeepers, who would keep debate within a certain set of parameters, whether they were editors of newspapers or producers of TV shows. Never did we, who had taken this “manufacturing consent” perspective, ask what happens if you just remove the gatekeepers completely. What does a world without gatekeepers look like? Well, now we know. It’s the Wild West. It’s chaos, and the loudest and cruelest voices tend to win out. More than rampant abuse and

“Keeping our little corner clean”: An Interview with Matthew Feldman on Antisemitism after October 7

bullying, for me, it’s the stupefying effect of social media, of scrolling, of believing that you’re missing out if you’re not participating or looking at this or that.

Without putting too fine a point on things, I think this has been hugely deleterious to our shared social fabric. I have worked with several leading social media firms as an advisor on rightwing extremism, and a lot of the middle managers tasked with combatting this stuff are good people. I really don’t doubt they want to see improvement and are willing to work to make things better. But that is no match for a principle of maximizing revenue and shareholder value; and to do that, the more cost you have in moderation (or safety and trust and countering disinformation, as it is often framed by the companies themselves), then the less profits there are. This is Capitalism 101. But it also seems that some places have deliberately disinvested in moderation, because they pose as free speech champions. These types are similar to what Elon Musk claims about himself but are still more absolutist on speech. For instance, some of the smaller platforms responsible for appalling racism have literally handfuls of moderators (by contrast, Facebook has many thousands of paid moderators). Often the job on smaller platforms is just to take down the most egregious forms of child sexual exploitation, or beheading videos, and so on, rather than responding to user complaints or acting proactively on racism, incitement to violence, or glorification of terrorism which is, anyway, explicitly against these companies’ codes of conduct.

LK: Certainly, a lot of it is decided by algorithms as well, or even AI now.

MF: Algorithms can lead people down very dark rabbit holes if they have expressed an interest in a particular subject. I’ve seen this in terrorism trials again and again. It might be “who started World War II?,” put into a normal search engine or YouTube, a legitimate question if, say, you’re preparing for your exams. It might be then that one of the links that comes up is something like “who really started World War II.” Then, if you

click on that, all of a sudden, you can be fed an avalanche of racist material. And you might come out the other side denying the Holocaust. So yes, algorithms can be a big part of the problem.

The best analogy I can think of for the way in which social media is curated and used today—both at the societal level and the individual level—is cigarettes. Some people smoke all their lives and have, or appear to have, no lasting effects at all; they smoke like chimneys until they’re ninety, while other people may get lung cancer and die much earlier. For still others it’s perhaps somewhere along that spectrum. There are some people who are hugely affected by being bullied or “cancelled,” or radicalized, and there are some people who use social media who don’t show signs of addiction, and don’t seem to be troubled in the least by the varied content. Maybe they curate their content in such a way that it’s only just their friends or lock their accounts down completely. But I think for most of us it’s both a gamut and gambit that can all too easily shade into harm.

That said, there’s no doubt that internet and social media have changed communication and have brought people together—I say this as somebody who has family in the United States and, when I was using these apps, it was easier to keep abreast of what somebody was doing over the summer, or to comment on pictures they were sharing. I don’t want to suggest social media is all negative—remember, people smoked for a reason, because it felt good or tasted good; and they still do despite clear warning labels—which is also potentially applicable to us today.

LK: You gave up social media completely?

MF: Completely and totally, yeah. It was after ugly experiences, and I’m disappointed to say that it took that for me to kind of read around the issue, find incisive writers on the subject like Jaron Lanier, and think a little bit more deeply about it.

LK: How do you feel now that you’ve given it up? Do you feel better?

MF: Well, I’m definitely wasting less time1 Right now, the stats say about two-thirds of humanity scrolls for two hours a day on average. Given those figures I’m not sure that, on the whole, I’m losing out on being part of a wider conversation, which in any case it’s possible to get through other fora. It could be reading a newspaper or taking part in other forms of digital engagement. There are other ways in which one can comment without recent forms of social media like TikTok or, heaven forbid, Telegram. But I also think that it’s allowed me to be more reflective and I have come to believe, philosophically, that social media has fundamentally changed the way that human beings relate to one another. I’ll give you just one example that sticks with me. When I was growing up in the 90s, my friends and I would oftentimes meet up outside the 7–11. Usually, one of us would get there, you know, usually two or three minutes before the others, and that kid would sit there and, for the most part, collect his or her thoughts for two minutes, or five minutes let’s say, or, if somebody’s really late, then even ten minutes. And yes, there were times when I maybe had a book in my hand or I would use the public pay phone, something like that—I’m no Luddite. But since time immemorial people would take bits during the day to reflect and to think. And at least now, with this engagement machine in your pocket, offering near infinite content geared toward attracting your attention, if you don’t wish to then you don’t have to ever reflect ever again. More, I think that there are serious consequences following on from that. For one, reacting to social media has a dopamine hit that some people find addictive. To ignore these changes, particularly at the psychosocial level, would be a mistake.

LK: On the reflection point, I haven’t thought of that. But it’s like every spare minute people have, they’re on their phones. I saw it with my students. Five or ten minutes into the session and they’re checking their phones. Walking down the street, people have their heads down,

and I think to myself, any minute now they’re going to walk right into me.

MF: I should stress that I’m not perfect, there are times I’m texting in public too—I wouldn’t want to come off as floating above these concerns!

LK: Yeah, that’s fine, but these people are not communicating with anyone.

MF: Lesley, I agree with you, and I think that the question that oftentimes isn’t asked is what may have been lost amidst all this newness. We can say what’s been gained by social media, which is access to the opinions of billions of people around the world 24/7, alongside cute cat pictures, posturing, incitement, and who knows what else. What has been gained? Without doubt, there have been some gains. But I ask those not too far gone to reflect on whether the gains are worth the trade-offs. It seems only very rarely do people talk about these trade-offs. The lack of reflection or the lack of being able to take a beat and slow down the world, to be with your own thoughts, feels to me like an amputation inner depth, and actually contributes, if only indirectly, to so many of these “culture wars” that we see, not just online, but increasingly in the real world. The lack of ability to debate, to search out knowledge together; the inability to think critically, to question, grows stronger each day. These are indirect drivers for a lot of ills, including radicalization, including turning towards extremism. But I think that stuff is the highlights, the statements in bold type. And I wonder, for most of us, what it is that we’re losing amidst the smaller print.

LK: There are a lot of people, and certainly people I know, who are pretty much addicted to social media. They do it for the likes, basically.

MF: Well, there’s a certain self-reinforcement there. There’s fear of missing out. Some of these people, of course, can do it as a job—not just a time-consuming hobby—as “influencers.” And we know that the curation of perfection online can have disastrous effects, ranging from young people having major eating disorders right the way through to low-level feelings of inadequacy.

“Keeping our little corner clean”: An Interview with Matthew Feldman on Antisemitism after October 7

LK: You can see some people just use social media to post holiday pictures, and you never even see anything else. You see it and think, oh, they have a great life compared to me, why don’t I get to go to the Maldives?

MF: As if it’s designed to make you jealous, right?

LK: Earlier you suggested that we need to educate people to value reflection and to distinguish between disinformation and reliable information. This touches on what we’ve discussed about the narrative of Israel being a settler-colonial enterprise; a Nazi state; or an apartheid state. This is a very prominent narrative, which has taken hold in many left-wing academic circles, and in universities; it has informed the academic boycott movement against Israel, and so on. So I understand it’s a difficult question to answer, but have you got any suggestions at all as to how we might educate young students to be more reflective and to be able to discern the difference between misinformation and reliable information, especially in our age of social media?

MF: There are two responses to that. First, I’ve long been on record as saying that one of the great challenges of the twenty-first century— right up there with nuclear proliferation and climate change—is digital literacy. Knowing the difference between something that feels right, and something that is empirically right; well, I think that it is a growing concern, especially because content is growing by leaps and bounds. It was said that, you know, already a generation ago you had more information in your phone than Nixon’s entire national security when visiting China in 1972. That’s only increased exponentially since then. Today you have more information at your fingertips than any human being ever had before this century. But is it good information? Is it trustworthy information? And that’s where the role of, dare I say, academics, intellectuals, as the old cliché goes, telling you not what to think but how to think, is more important than it’s ever been.

Second, it seems to me imperative that people who really want to understand an issue would

say in response to charges of genocide or apartheid, where do these terms come from? I’ve seen many people cite, for example, Raphael Lemkin’s definition of genocide, that came out of the UN Genocide Convention of 1948. Scholars more recently have been able to say that Raphael Lemkin did brilliant things coming up with his definition, but it wasn’t perfect and sacrosanct for all time. When he talked about “part of a group” to be exterminated, for example, how small or large is part of a group? These and other key questions have been debated vigorously over the last seventy-five years. I would suggest to people that there is a value in looking at what scholars take genocide to be this century. For example, usually scholars are talking about some sort of “extermination order,” or top-down kind of command-and-control amongst perpetrators; you’re also talking about mass killing that is systematic and planned; and most with instances of genocide, you’re talking about a kind of “race and space” ideal. Having taught courses on the Holocaust for many years, as well as courses on genocide, I know that this is merely skimming the surface of important research that has been put forward and which is widely accepted by scholars.

It feels to me like people who use such massively loaded terms like “apartheid” or “genocide” owe it to themselves to inquire into them. I don’t think it’s for me to say, “you need to read this book” or “you need to think this way”— there are more than enough chomping at the bit to do that, and in any case I don’t seek out activism—and for me this is where the academic humanities are making an absolute wrong turn that will cost it in the long term, perhaps dearly. Truly I think that the harm is potentially incalculable, and I’m not just talking about varied types of ideological activism. Instrumentalization of knowledge has its place and has its finer points, but in certain circumstances critical thought and reflection and weighing up evidence are the first things to get trampled on in the rush to be the first one to make a point, or to go low in order to win a debate.

LK: That’s a good point. There’s a huge move to “decolonize” the curriculum in Anglo-American education at university level. In my department, we’ve even been given a list of people to recommend that the students read. It’s very hard to decolonize English common law, but it also completely devalues the whole idea of exposing students to different perspectives and teaching them how to think, instead trying to brainwash them with one set of values. Why choose decolonization over any other ideological framework?

MF: My question would be, why is that the term that we’ve chosen? Is it really a process of something being colonized and then undoing this influence? In nearly twenty years of university teaching, I taught “Empires through History” and “Colonialism and Modernity” for nearly a decade, and I don’t know whether it is really the framework that we’re going to find most useful in being more inclusive of other backgrounds and perspectives. Here too, it seems to me that the calls to decolonize the curriculum are using words in a way that isn’t meant to help but, just as often, using words as a bludgeon so that they do you more harm than good when, actually, if stripped away from intemperate language, many of these calls are saying, we want to curate a subject in a way that is inclusive for all—not just the minority but the majority—something that we can place store by, that we can learn by. That seems to me honorable and worthy of embrace. How we present it comes back to my story about the encounter in the local. If it’s finger-jabbing and accusatory, if somebody’s responding on the defensive, it makes discussants far less willing to reflect, to debate as people try to get closer to the truth. These are scholarly values to me, while the kind of ideological supremacism, the unwillingness to listen to other perspectives, are ultimately non-and even anti-scholarly. My fear is that the latter tendencies are becoming commonplace, seeping out of academia in ways that aren’t helping the very causes that people might be getting behind.

Speaking of such causes, I would like to believe that people on all sides of the debate

post-October 7 would like to see less violence in the Middle East and would like to see a durable type of peace where two peoples who have been in conflict for decades become able to live side by side. That’s something I believe most people would sign up to, if it’s presented in a way that is working towards that dual security—a realist framework, not an idealistic framework—one that is wrapped in at least a bit of empathy.

The language that we often see in public spaces is not conducive to peaceful cooperation. There may be some debate about whether “from the river to the sea Palestine will be free” is inherently antisemitic or referring to the elimination of Israel. I think that reasonable people can disagree about this, in my view. Quite apart from that, I’ve not come across many people in Israel or many Jews that don’t regard it as, at minimum, crassly insensitive and hurtful. And here my point would be, if you would really like to see an end to strife and violence and to have some form of dialogue then retire that phrase. It can only be heard by its opponents as provocative at least – if not genocidal or antisemitic.

LK: Maybe they just think it’s what they should chant when they’re on these marches or demonstrations.

MF: To that my response would be, if it’s something they know that many people regard it as the very least, hurtful and aggressive, it seems to me pretty obvious that you could easily find another phrase to chant that would immeasurably do more to advance your cause, let alone facilitating greater dialogue.

Please allow me to conclude with a story, in fact one of my favorite stories. My hero growing up was the Resistance icon Albert Camus. In the 1950s he was one of the only people who called for a civilian truce in the Algerian war of independence—for which he was absolutely excoriated by all sides. On one side were left-wing intellectuals who advocated for Algeria’s National Liberation Front FLN no matter what it did, and the more conservative people on the other who said, how can you even be willing to talk to these terrorists? Camus was in no man’s land between these ideological forces. He

“Keeping our little corner clean”: An Interview with Matthew Feldman on Antisemitism after October 7

wrote in response, and I paraphrase, “I’m going to retreat from this, because there’s no way we can have dialogue any longer.” Later, he said of this Algerian war, that it was like two people who have lived together and decided they can no longer live together, so they have decided they’re going to die together. Those are beautiful words from a person who tried to find a different path forward. I’d like to think that such a different way for two peoples who have shared the Holy Land for so long is far better than a death embrace that suffocates them all. Today, there are two peoples who are going to continue living in that region. And they either live in that region in an ongoing embrace of death or find a way to life side by side. Returning to those alternatives, historically minded—and, dare I say, humanistically minded as well—is more the job for an intellectual or academic than standing on a soapbox and telling everybody why you’re right and they are stupid or wrong or just unenlightened.

REFERENCES

So, to conclude, there’s also great power in listening as well as talking, and even more so in being willing to change our opinions. When I was growing up, I spent a lot of time thinking that having strong and vocal opinions was something that made a person morally courageous.

But the older I get the more I have realized that being willing to change opinions in light of new evidence is far more morally courageous if it comes with a recognition of fallibility.

LK: And that also involves self-reflection, as we were saying before.

MF: Reflection, willingness to admit that one is wrong, trying to do better in future—those are values that don’t get much of a hearing online, it often feels like. But they are also part of the human condition, which is our gift and our curse. Here’s to hoping people of goodwill can contribute to making that condition more of the former and less of the latter.

1 Rachel O’Donoghue, “US Academic Skews Stats in The Guardian to Compare Gaza to Worst Recent Genocides,” Honest Reporting, April 18, 2024, https://honestreporting.com/us-academic-skews-stats-in-the-guardian-to-compare-gazato-worst-recent-genocides/.

2 Dave Rich, The Left’s Jewish Problem: Jeremy Corbyn, Israel and Anti-Semitism (Hull: Biteback, 2016).