Jews have long been accustomed to being
history’s double victims. We are victims of its most murderous currents
and the victims of subsequent attempts to revise, play down or even
outright deny these episodes of bloodshed, usually emanating from the
perpetrators themselves or their fellow travelers.
The most glaring example of this trend is
Holocaust denial. And the one thing we have learned from dealing with
the deniers is that they are impervious to fact and reason. They engage
in denial because their hatred of Jews predisposes them to conspiracy
theories about Jewish power and Jewish dishonesty. You can patiently
explain the milestones of the Nazi genocide—the anti-Jewish legislation
of the 1930s, the Wannsee Conference convened by the Nazis in 1942, the
shift in the method of killing from extermination by gunfire to
industrialized slaughter in gas chambers and the obsessive antisemitic
ideology underlying all this—but you’d be wasting your breath on these
people.
There are other examples outside of the
Holocaust. In the Arab and Islamic worlds, where antisemitism ironically
runs rampant, the myth that Jewish communities lived in peaceful
harmony with their Muslim neighbors until the Zionists began “colonizing
Palestine” prevails. Among Communist apologists—sadly, a growing trend
today, more than 30 years after the Cold War ended—the Soviet wartime
dictator Josef Stalin is seen as a symbol of anti-fascism, whose postwar
antisemitic campaign, reminiscent of the excesses of Russia’s imperial
czars, is portrayed in these circles as a willful “Zionist” attack on
his reputation.
The Hamas-led pogrom in Israel on Oct. 7,
has not been spared from these efforts. But while the methods are much
the same as the examples I cited—especially by taking small nuggets of
fact and turning them into full-blown conspiracy theories—the context is
different. Technology now provides a platform for anyone to declare
himself or herself a “historian” or a “journalist,” and to purvey lies
by turns monstrous and ridiculous using those professions as a cover. The Wall Street Journal’s Gerard Baker put it best
in a recent opinion piece analyzing the spread of antisemitic tropes on
the nationalist right: “Our culture is dominated by people with epic
levels of historical, economic and scientific ignorance.”
When it comes to the Oct. 7 atrocities,
there have been similarly epic levels of social media posts denying the
gang rapes, mutilations and mass slaughter that took place on that dark
day. One popular theme spread by organizations like “Code Pink,” a
pro-Russian advocacy group based in the United States that masquerades
as a peace movement, and online publications like the Grayzone,
which functions as an outlet for Russian and Iranian propaganda, is
that Israel itself was responsible for the vast majority of civilian
deaths, rather than the Hamas terrorists and the thousands of ordinary
Palestinians who joined them for the onslaught.
The underlying claim here is that the
so-called “Hannibal Directive”—an Israeli military protocol introduced
in 1986 to prevent the capture of Israel Defense Forces personnel by
terrorist groups, which was abandoned by the military’s top brass in 2016—was operational during the assault. “The Hannibal Directive,” noted
the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an independent organization that
monitors political and religious extremism around the world, “has been
central to false claims that Israeli security forces killed as many or
more civilians than Hamas, and in downplaying well-documented war
crimes against civilians.”
Last week, a report
prepared for the British parliament on the Oct. 7 pogrom entered this
melee. Written by Lord Andrew Roberts, the eminent historian whose
output includes magisterial biographies of Napoleon Bonaparte and
Winston Churchill, the harrowing report is the most comprehensive
account of the Hamas land invasion issued so far. It painstakingly
documents the unfolding of the slaughter across more than 40 distinct
locations. It spares no details, and so we learn, inter alia, how
3-year-old Abigail Idan, daughter of the murdered Ynet
journalist Roee Idan, “crawled out from under her father’s body and took
refuge at a neighbor’s house.” Or how Bar Kislev, a resident of Kibbutz
Kfar Aza, watched from hiding as a squad of killers, some as young as
14, broke into apartment after apartment screaming “Kill the Jews!”,
pausing for snacks and cigarettes along the way. Or how the body of Itai
Hadar, a 28-year-old attending the Psyduck festival (a smaller
psychedelic trance music party that took place at the same time as the
better-known Nova festival a few kilometers away), was booby-trapped
with grenades after his murder. Indeed, the 381 pages of the report are
replete with stories like these, all of them forensically accounted for.
Yet, as Roberts explains in his foreword
to the report, its purpose was not simply to provide a comprehensive
record of what happened. “Holocaust denial took a few years to take root
in pockets of society, but on 7 October 2023 it took only hours for
people to claim that the massacres in southern Israel had not taken
place,” he wrote. The report, therefore, was prepared “to counter such
pernicious views and to lay down incontrovertible proof—for now, and for
the years to come—that nearly 1,200 innocent people were indeed
murdered by Hamas and its allies, and very often in scenes of sadistic
barbarism not seen in world history since the [Imperial Japanese Army’s]
Rape of Nanjing in 1937.”
In the days since the report was released,
Roberts’ social media accounts have been inundated with abuse from Oct.
7 deniers. “This is the kind of thing we’re up against, and why people
should read the Report and decide for themselves if it’s ‘Zionist
propaganda,’ or detailed, fully footnoted and irrefutable proof of the
atrocities from multifarious impeccable sources,” he posted in response
to one such missive. I don’t believe that Roberts seriously thinks that
his report will change the minds of those in thrall to the denial
agenda. The abiding value of his work is that, when it comes to the
detail and quality of his research, it offers an impressive
counterweight for undecided readers who will encounter the deniers as
they seek the truth.
Even so, given the epistemic crisis that
envelopes public discourse these days, we would be naïve to expect that
everyone will be persuaded of the truth. Like the struggle against
antisemitism, the struggle against denialism has no end in sight.
1 comment:
It is easy to be ignorant if you WANT to be ignorant.
Post a Comment