Grading is one of the most time-consuming, onerous, and often dreaded tasks of a university professor, especially the first round of it with a new class. Don’t get me started on how unprepared fresh-faced first-year undergraduates are for writing at the university level (or honestly, at a high school level), especially these past few years in the aftermath of covid-ucation. But the inability to write a complete sentence, to use a comma, or to know when to start a new paragraph are all trivial and easily correctible problems for which I’ve gotten into the habit of simply linking my comments on the paper to an educational website that explains the basic rules of grammar and syntax. The more difficult idea to teach students – beyond the larger issue of how to think critically for themselves – is what the difference is between an argument and an opinion. When I ask them in an essay prompt to make an argument about xyz, I explain that I don’t want their opinion, but rather I want them to “provide references to the text in question that demonstrate evidence in support of their overall thesis.” So many words in that sentence are confusing, misunderstood, or simply inspire blank stares and panic, but I do my best to explain and to work through examples before letting them loose on the text in question. I work with students in office hours ahead of the assignment due date to explain again, to show them what I mean by working specifically with the theses and ideas that they worked up and bring with them to show me for feedback. And yet, inevitably, when they hand in the final version I find myself writing the same comment over and over in my feedback: “stating it doesn’t make it so.” Telling me that Eve’s secondary creation to Adam is what makes women easily corruptible and therefore they are supposed to be inferior to men in rights and status, or quoting the serpent in Genesis 3 and opining that his words show that he is really the devil in disguise, don’t make for arguments. They are based, I explain, on preconceived ideas that the students are bringing to the text. The point of the essay prompt is to force them to dig deep into the text, to read carefully what it actually says and to take note of what it doesn’t say, and to make an argument based on the evidence that they find in the text itself.
My same refrain of “stating it doesn’t make it so” has been repeating in my mind for 11 days now as I read media coverage from around the world of what’s going on here and why. When influential journalists like Fareed Zakaria allow the same terms like “apartheid” and “occupation” to characterize Israel’s engagement with Gaza to simply be stated on live television, without correction or even comment, in an interview with a Hamas supporter blaming Israel for what is happening on the day after over 1000 Jews were slaughtered in their own homes, in their own state, by terrorists sent by the actual governing body of Gaza to do so, equipped with weapons as well as manuals on how best to torture these civilians, there is no excuse. At the same time, there is, at this point, for those of us who have been observing this tendency for as long as Israel has been around – and, sadly, long before that – no surprise either. The truth is that “stating it” – repeatedly, relentlessly, insistently, innocuously, and blithely – has indeed made it so. Because the stories we tell about events in the past – ancient or yesterday’s – determine the way we respond to those events in the present.
Let’s take the following story from a first-person account as an example.
"Right after eight o'clock in the morning we heard screams. Arabs had begun breaking into Jewish homes. The screams pierced the heart of the heavens. We didn't know what to do…. They were going from door to door, slaughtering everyone who was inside. The screams and the moans were terrible. People were crying Help! Help! But what could we do?"
The rape of Jewish women, the beheading of Jewish children, the castration of Jewish men, and the mutilation, torture, and massacres directed at an entire Jewish community that took place that day are well documented. But this quote does not come from events recorded on Saturday October 7, 2023. It’s a description of events on Friday August 23, 1929. By the end of the next day, 58 men, women, and children in a community of about 700 people were dead, and another 9 would later succumb to their wounds.
The Jewish community in Hebron – fabled site of the biblical patriarchs’ burial place and the second holiest site in Judaism – was one of the oldest continuously inhabited Jewish communities in the world. But in the 1920s under the British mandate, it was swept up in a wave of anti-Jewish riots by Arab communities – many of which had lived side-by-side with Jewish communities for centuries in peace and mutual prosperity – that took place throughout Mandate Palestine, spurred on by one Haj Amin el-Husseini, a virulent antisemite who, after organizing suicide-attacks on Jewish communities throughout the region, was encouraged by one Col. Waters Taylor, financial adviser to the Military Administration in Palestine 1919-23, to continue in this effort because, as the colonel explained, “freedom could only be attained through violence.” Haj Amin was appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and made it his mission to remove Jews from the region by force or by slaughter. Under the pretense that the Muslim holy site of Al-Aqsa mosque was in mortal danger of destruction by Jews (sound familiar?), he provoked riots, pillaging, and mass destruction which claimed 133 Jewish lives and eliminated a number of Jewish communities in its wake. Haj Amin later joined forces with the Nazis as a personal guest of Hitler during the 1930s, and helped recruit Muslims toward the Nazi cause.
British High Commissioner Sir John Chancellor later wrote of the Hebron massacre: “The horror of it is beyond words. In one house I visited not less than twenty-five Jewish men and women were murdered in cold blood.”
But this was not the response of the British Mandate on the ground in the region. To say that the British response on the scene was slow would be an understatement. “After six days of rioting, the British finally brought in troops to quell the disturbance. Even though Jews had been living in Gaza and Hebron for centuries, following these riots, the British forced Jews to leave their homes and prohibited Jews from living in the Gaza strip and Hebron to appease Arabs and quell violence. By the end of the rioting, the death toll was 133 Jews, including eight Americans, and 110 Arabs (most killed by British security forces).” (Full reference and further information here.)
And the U.S.? When the government was urged by Americans on the scene to do something, one non-Jewish witness received the following response from President Hoover:
My dear Mrs. Haverkamp:
I have your kind letter of August 27th. I wish to thank you for sending your very interesting observations on the situation in Palestine.
Yours faithfully,
HERBERT HOOVER
Today, as the IDF continues blasting Gaza City to smithereens and the rocket launches raining down on many parts of Israel slow and even stop for several hours at a time as a direct result; as Hamas does its best to keep Gazan civilians from escaping – even bombing a convoy of civilians moving south on one of the designated evacuation routes, and then blaming Israel for it (a claim which the media outlets have universally bought, choosing to believe Hamas over Israel once again) and Israel nonetheless pursues the destruction of Hamas operatives and military capabilities in the northern part of this territory, those of us in central and northern Israel are wrenching our eyes away from these southern battles to glance nervously at the northern borders. Communities there are being evacuated pre-emptively for their safety (a fact being reported by Israeli news outlets but not too many others). At the moment, half a million Israelis have been displaced from their homes either because those homes – and entire towns – have been destroyed by rockets and/or massacring, pillaging, terrorist rampages, or for fear of Hezbollah incursions in the north (a refugee situation also not being widely reported outside of Israel). We don’t know what will happen next, and we – and much of the world – are holding our breaths as Iran’s leaders who back Hamas meet with each other, as Putin meets with Xi, as the US moves another aircraft carrier into place, and as EU allies continue to struggle to pledge support for Israel’s right to defend itself. If history is any guide to understanding what happens next in world opinion though – opinion which will have a direct result, as it always does, on whether such support in rhetoric and in deed will continue – we do, unfortunately have a strong sense of what to look for this week and in coming weeks. As always, Palestinians in Gaza are suffering because of the wars waged in their name. The growing humanitarian crisis there has already stolen many of the headlines, and efforts to allay more civilian deaths are laudably underway. Slowly though, as always happens, the headlines will shift from statements that Israel must destroy Hamas because this terrorist organization cannot be allowed to continue to determine the fate of the millions under its control (if they even say that in the first place – looking at you, BBC), to criticisms of Israel for going too far, for seeking revenge instead of focusing on their mandate to destroy the Hamas infrastructure and eliminate its supporters, and eventually the headlines will become full-on calls to Israel to cease and desist its operations in Gaza because Israel has been responsible for too many deaths.
Defending the collateral damage that is the cost of war is not something most of us want to do. No one wants civilians – children, the elderly, whole young families – to suffer and to die simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time (except Hamas, obviously). Israeli soldiers themselves don’t want to kill anyone who is not a Hamas operative, who is not shooting at them first, who is not actively raping and slaughtering their mothers, their sisters, and their daughters. And to say “this is the cost of war” doesn’t make anyone feel better. So when you read those changing headlines in the coming weeks, ask yourselves – as I continue to ask myself – what then, is the solution? What is the Israeli army, whose task it is to defend the state of Israel against its enemies, supposed to do when those very enemies continue to not only hide behind their civilians, in tunnels under hospitals and schools, but actively prevent those same civilians from evacuating through the corridor that the army itself has designated? (And I note that I couldn’t find a single mainstream news outlet outside of Israel reporting that last fact.) The IDF warned them to leave, and postponed its ground operation intended to eliminate Hamas targets only, so that civilians could leave - knowing full well that they were also allowing Hamas leaders to escape the safety along with the civilians. Where will they go, the UN and the media asks? Egypt doesn’t want them – Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood of which it’s a part have caused enough trouble in Egypt. And Egypt knows – as does the IDF – that the main agitators, the masterminds behind the massacres on Saturday October 7 2023, will definitely be among those “refugees” in civilian guise who are streaming into their borders. I can’t blame Egypt for not wanting them there any more than Israel wants them here. But I can absolutely blame the media who already misrepresent what’s happening and why, who downplay or omit the role of Hamas in trapping its own civilians and in neighboring Arab states’ refusal to do anything to help the legitimate civilian refugees escape from the nightmare that is Hamas rule in the open air prison of Gaza.
World opinion is often formed based on the voices that clamor the loudest and most frequently. These are the voices of the media, of public intellectuals, and of the various organizations – from unions to employers, from professional organizations to church authorities – to whom they look for guidance about what to believe and how to act. The stories they hear determine how they understand what’s happening; and their understanding in turn directs their opinions and where they will throw their own support.
Every year in August, Israeli newspapers include something commemorating the slaughter of Jews in their homes in Hebron in August 1929. For their part, the Palestinian Authority also makes remarks, reminding Palestinians of what happened. But their commemorations of the event provide a different story. In this story, the Arabs who raped, tortured, mutilated and slaughtered their neighbors in 1929 Hebron are national heroes to be celebrated; they were martyrs and freedom fighters in an ongoing jihad to rid the land of Jews. (Reminder: the PA is the non-terrorist organization that cooperates with Israel in order to maintain themselves as the governing body of the majority of the West Bank.)
Many of you may be wondering at this point in all of these stories and histories, how it can be that the versions of what Zionism is and means and how the modern state of Israel came to be can be so different from each other, can vary so much. You may also be wondering how it is that supporters of BDS and Zionists can exist in the same spaces in North America – even educated spaces, like universities; or even Jewish communal spaces, like synagogues and community centers – and have such opposite understandings of where we’re at and how we got here. I know I’ve been thinking about all of that a lot, and my discussion of BDS attempts some sympathy with how that movement came to grow so large and have such wide-spread support around the world; and how their blatant distortions, omissions, and lies about Israel and Zionism came to be accepted blindly as historical truths. I wrote my thoughts about how one could come to sympathize with BDS and blindly accept Israel as white colonialist settler oppressors, in brutal occupation as they enforce an apartheid regime aimed at ethnic cleansing. Saying it has made it so, and now we’re all so used to hearing it that it has achieved the status of historical truth.
History-telling is story-telling, and the stories we tell matter. When organizations like BDS or any of their affiliates tell stories, they have consequences and impact on those who listen. But ultimately the responsibility for the willingness of the population at large to listen to these stories and give them credibility lies with those of us who should know and do better: educators, administrators of educational institutions, policy-makers, and the media. Because the stories we tell (or don’t) should serve as correctives and have much more influence over those who have no reason to know whether those behind the BDS movement represents fact or fiction. By retelling their stories instead of crafting our own -- based on evidence and well-founded arguments about that evidence – educators and journalists not only abdicate responsibility for the consequences of history repeating, but are ultimately complicit in its repetition.