Author: Martin Kramer

Scenes from the massacres

On By Martin Kramer

Exactly 200 years ago, a disturbing painting debuted in Paris, depicting a massacre in a distant corner of the Mediterranean. No other work in the artistic canon speaks more to the events of October 7 than this one.

The painting Scenes from the Massacres of Chios by the French artist Eugène Delacroix was first unveiled at the Salon, the exhibition that defined artistic taste in 19th-century Paris, on August 25, 1824. For the past 150 years, it has belonged to the Louvre Museum in Paris. Millions have seen it over two centuries, and critics, art historians, and Delacroix biographers have analyzed it from every possible angle.

Scenes from the Massacres at Chios, Eugène Delacroix, 1824. Oil on canvas, 419 cm × 354 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris.

My purpose is more personal than theirs. For myself—and, I imagine, for many of my fellow Israelis, Jewish co-religionists, and friends of both—this painting cannot but evoke the primal brutality of October 7. I’ve attended a few exhibitions in Israel that attempt to capture October 7 in art. Contemporary sensibilities, along with the Israeli modernist tradition in art, permit this only at a high level of abstraction. By contrast, Delacroix’s painting is visceral. Indeed, it’s reminiscent of the horrific videos of slaughter, abduction, and abuse recorded by the body cams of Hamas terrorists.

Death or slavery

The young Delacroix—only 26 when he finished the painting—was inspired by the Greek War of Independence from Ottoman rule, which began in March 1821. “I am thinking of doing a painting for the next Salon on the subject of the recent wars between the Turks and the Greeks,” he wrote to a friend in the fall of 1821. “I think that under the circumstances, this would be a way of distinguishing myself.”

He didn’t complete the painting until the 1824 Salon. Fresh events gave him the impetus. In 1822, the prosperous Ottoman-ruled island of Chios, in the Aegean Sea, was seized by Greek insurgents. The Ottomans recaptured the Greek-populated island with a ferocity that shocked Europe. Estimates vary, but the Ottomans massacred, enslaved, and starved as many as 100,000 Greek Christians, leaving the island depopulated. Graphic accounts of savage torture spread across the continent, fueling the philhellene movement with rage and resolve. In composing his painting, Delacroix relied on such reports, as well as conversations with a French eyewitness.

The subtitle of the work as submitted was “Greek families await death or slavery, etc.,” with the “etc.” serving as a discreet allusion to rape. The painting is centered on a cluster of despairing men, women, and children. Defeat, degradation, and resignation are etched on their faces. The most poignant tableau rises on the right side of the painting: a naked, bound woman is being dragged away by an indifferent Turkish horseman, destined for rape and slavery. Beneath lies the corpse of a dead mother, while her living infant instinctively searches for her bare breast. The bodies of Greek wounded and dead are strewn across a scorched and devastated landscape, where a battle still rages. The impact of the work is magnified by its overwhelming size: the painting is nearly fourteen feet high (over four meters) and almost twelve feet wide (over three meters). It hangs today in the gallery reserved for the largest masterpieces.

It was an unconventional work. The painting referenced contemporary events, not classical history. Delacroix did not portray his Greeks as ennobled, but as ordinary people. Moreover, the work had no redeeming hero. One contemporary critic found it more evocative of a plague scene than a massacre. Art historians have also offered their interpretations. Is the painting a subversive critique of the French regime’s neutrality regarding Greek independence? Is it Islamophobic, positing Islamic barbarity against Christian civilization? Or is the depiction of the Turkish horseman, indistinguishable from a Greek, a deliberate challenge to prejudice?

In an art history seminar, these questions all have their place. But this is a painting that has always stirred emotions and invites analogies. Many could be drawn; the intervening 200 years provide plenty.

Historical continuities

The foremost French specialist on Islam and politics, Gilles Kepel, in his new book Holocaustes: Israël, Gaza et la guerre contre l’Occident, has presented October 7 through the lens of its perpetrators, as a ghazwa (razzia in European parlance): a raid deliberately intended to subjugate and dehumanize a non-Muslim adversary. The Prophet Muhammad conducted such a raid against the Jewish tribes of the Khaybar oasis in Arabia in the year 628, establishing the ghazwa as a model of warfare that would be replicated throughout history. At Khaybar, writes Kepel,

cruelty was explicitly embraced as an exemplary punishment of God’s enemies. Men were tortured and put to the sword, women were captured and distributed among the victors’ harems, and children were enslaved, all to the cries of ‘O Victorious One, bring death, bring death!’ (Ya mansûr! Amit, amit!). On October 7, there was an attempt to emulate this feat from sacred history with the ruthless massacre of Jews, the abduction of women and children from border kibbutzim and the attack on ‘the tribe of Nova.’ Videos circulating online showed prisoners being assaulted, paraded as trophies in jeeps, unfortunate women stripped naked on pickup trucks and perched on motorcycles to be transported to Gaza’s tunnels—just as the captives of Khaybar were once carried off on camels.

The line that connects the years 628 and 2023 (with 1824 along the way) is one of traditionally Muslim and now Islamist supremacism. It not only promises victory but seeks to inscribe it upon the bodies of the vanquished.

We cannot bear to see or hear this, which is why the most graphic images and testimonies from October 7 are still withheld. Delacroix, for all the emotion and outrage he wished to stir, likewise did not depict the full extent of the brutality on Chios. But Scenes from the Massacres of Chios came as close as Western art dares. That this canvas from another era still speaks to our moment is a reminder of continuities we would rather forget.

Down and out at Columbia

On By Martin Kramer

The resignation of Minouche Shafik, president of Columbia University, is being hailed as a victory all around. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), who had called for her resignation back in April, celebrated the news:

Since her catastrophic testimony at the Education and Workforce Committee hearing, Shafik’s failed presidency was untenable and it was only a matter of time before her forced resignation. After failing to protect Jewish students and negotiating with pro Hamas terrorists, this forced resignation is long overdue.

But at Columbia, the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) also celebrated:

After months of chanting ‘Minouche Shafik you can’t hide’ she finally got the memo. To be clear, any future president who does not pay heed to the Columbia student body’s overwhelming demand for divestment will end up exactly as President Shafik did.

While Stefanik and SJP play tug-of-war over Shafik’s scalp, the battle for Columbia is far from over. Once the academic year begins, Columbia could face some of the same problems it encountered last spring: encampments, building occupations, intimidation of Jewish students, faculty alienation, and campus shutdowns. The demand by faculty and student radicals for “divestment” from Israel isn’t going away, and it’s one that no Columbia administration can satisfy.

My personal view is that Shafik was probably as good as you could get at a university as corrupted as Columbia, and likely more than Columbia deserved.

What went wrong

I began sounding the alarm over Columbia many years ago. I spent a year there as a graduate student and earned a master’s degree in history in 1976. Aside from the indomitable J.C. Hurewitz, I found nothing to keep me there. So I returned to Princeton for my doctorate. I had completed my undergraduate degree there, and Princeton had just acquired Bernard Lewis.

I left Morningside Heights, but I continued to watch Columbia with an insider’s interest. After I published a critique of Middle Eastern studies in 2001, I began identifying Columbia as the epicenter of the problems plaguing the field—so much so that Columbia’s Palestinian star, Edward Said, made this complaint in 2003:

An outrageous Israeli, Martin Kramer, uses his Web site to attack everybody who says anything he doesn’t like. For example, he has described Columbia as ‘the Bir Zeit [West Bank university] on the Hudson,’ because there are two Palestinians teaching here. Two Palestinians teaching in a faculty of 8,000 people! If you have two Palestinians, it makes you a kind of terrorist hideout.

Only seven years later, Columbia inaugurated a new Center for Palestine Studies. The announcement stated that “Columbia University is currently the professional home to a unique concentration of distinguished scholars on Palestine and Palestinians.” How did Columbia go from “two Palestinians” to a “unique concentration” in just seven years?

The same way Hamas built an underground warren in Gaza: through resolve, deception, cooptation, and intimidation. No one should have been surprised when an army of pro-Palestine and even pro-Hamas students, encouraged from behind the scenes by faculty, appeared last spring. The plot against Columbia had been more than twenty years in the making.

Most of the tunneling took place during the tenure of Lee Bollinger, president from 2002 to 2023. Whenever trouble surfaced—whether it was granting tenure to unqualified extremists or hosting the antisemitic Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on campus—Bollinger turned on the charm machine. Columbia is so much more, he reassured. This “move on, folks, nothing to see here” approach worked because donors, alumni, and students needed it to work. After all, they had shares in Columbia, Inc. That included many Jews, in all three categories.

Shafik had nothing to do with the administrative neglect that ate away at the foundations of the university. She wasn’t an alumna, and she’d never taught there. Her whole career had unfolded in Britain. When she assumed the Columbia job in June 2023, she may not have known how deep the rot went. What had started as a faculty problem had metastasized over two decades, spreading both to the student body and to the administrative bureaucracy. “Bir Zeit-on-Hudson” had gone from (my) hyperbole to reality.

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I didn’t say so at the time, to avoid adding fuel to the wrong side, but I thought Shafik showed grit in calling in the NYPD twice: first, to clear the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” on South Lawn, and second, to clear Hamilton Hall, which had been forcibly occupied by a mix of students and off-campus radicals. But those decisions are what ultimately doomed her presidency.

More precisely, it was the faculty who made her position untenable. They had already taken umbrage at her Congressional testimony, where she appeared vaguely amenable to disciplining faculty speech. Her decision to call in the police compounded the crisis. A no-confidence resolution passed by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (with 65 percent in favor) declared that Shafik’s decisions “to ignore our statutes and our norms of academic freedom and shared governance, to have our students arrested, and to impose a lockdown of our campus with continuing police presence, have gravely undermined our confidence in her.”

It was just such a vote of no-confidence that drove Lawrence Summers out of the Harvard presidency in 2006. When you lose such a vote, you’re on borrowed time. Shafik prepared her departure, and announced that she would be returning to Britain to take up an economic advisory position with the Foreign Secretary. The statement by her temporary replacement, the CEO of Columbia’s medical center, made it quite clear who must be appeased henceforth: the Columbia faculty. “You are the ultimate keepers of the institution’s values and the stewards of its long and proud history.”

Upon Shafik’s resignation, Stefanik gloated: “THREE DOWN, so many to go.” The other two were the presidents of Harvard and Penn. But not every campus is the same. The pro-Israel stakeholders at Columbia have always been weak, and what Congress thinks doesn’t much matter on Morningside Heights. In my view, Shafik’s fall should actually be counted in the pro-Palestine column. If I’m right, it’s not “three down,” but “two to one.”

Does it get better?

Shafik was born in Egypt to a well-to-do family. In 1966, Nasser’s “Arab revolution” stripped her father, a chemist by training, of his expansive estate and all his property, in a wave of nationalization. The Shafiks arrived on America’s shores “with little money and a few possessions.” Minouche was four years old. “It taught me that you can go from having a lot to having nothing overnight, and you can’t get too attached to stuff because you can lose it.”

Shafik was driven from the land of her birth by an angry and aggrieved nationalism. Now, she’s been driven out of America by another variety of angry and aggrieved nationalism, this time Palestinian. She’ll always be remembered as the president who called in New York’s finest to handcuff some of Columbia’s worst. I’d be surprised if the next president is made of sterner stuff.

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Header image created by DALL-E, OpenAI’s image generation model.

Bibi’s evolving Hamas story

On By Martin Kramer

Last November, I asked this question: why didn’t Benjamin Netanyahu keep his 2009 campaign promise to topple Hamas? I found at least part of the answer in his 2022 memoir, Bibi: My Story.

In that account, Netanyahu explained, first, that “the cost in blood and treasure was not worth it.” Overthrowing Hamas would involve the loss of “many hundreds [of soldiers] on the Israeli side,” burden Israel with governing Gaza “for an indefinite period,” and result in “the wholesale destruction of Gaza, with tens of thousands of civilian deaths.” Second, it wasn’t a priority. “Did I really want to tie down the IDF in Gaza for years,” he wrote, “when we had to deal with Iran and a possible Syrian front? The answer was categorically no. I had bigger fish to fry.”

In a new interview with TIME, conducted by Eric Cortellessa, Netanyahu preempts the question before it is asked. After rationalizing the Qatari funding of Gaza, he explains that before October 7, he had conducted “three full-fledged military campaigns against Hamas in which we killed thousands of terrorists, eliminated some of their top military leadership, and sought to prevent them from having the capacity to attack us.” But he adds this:

One thing we didn’t do was we didn’t come out to eradicate Hamas completely, because that would require a full-scale ground invasion for which we had no internal legitimacy or international legitimacy. Look at the problem we have with legitimacy now, after they conducted the worst terror onslaught on the Jewish people since the Holocaust…. We sort of cut the weeds, but we didn’t come in to uproot them completely until October 7th. October 7th showed that those who said that Hamas was deterred were wrong. If anything, I didn’t challenge enough the assumption that was common to all the security agencies.

The interviewer said he would “come back to that in a second,” and when he did, he formulated the question in his own pointed way: “Why didn’t you take out Hamas earlier? You could have gone all the way in 2014.” Netanyahu responded:

No I couldn’t. I don’t think there was—there wasn’t a consensus. There was, in fact, a consensus among the military that we shouldn’t do it. But more importantly, you can overrule the military, but you can’t act in a vacuum. There was no public, no domestic support for such an action. There was certainly no international support for such an action, and you need both or at least one of them in order to take such an action. I think that became evident right after the October 7th massacre.

“I decided”

These explanations differ significantly from the rationales Netanyahu provided in his memoir. There, it isn’t the public that lacks “consensus” over toppling Hamas; rather, “The public invariably expects the government to continue the battle and ‘flatten Gaza,’ believing that with enough punishment the Hamas regime would collapse.” In his memoir, Netanyahu credited himself with tempering this unrealistic expectation, which was fueld by political rivals who would “irresponsibly take contrarian positions which they know are wrong.” The final decision he claimed for himself alone: “I decided against a full-scale ground invasion.”

As for the need for “international” (largely American) legitimacy, Netanyahu made no mention of it in his memoir. While he obviously faced constraints during the eight years of Barack Obama, everything changed during his four-year partnership with Donald Trump. A centerpiece of the memoir is Netanyahu’s exploitation of Trump’s unprecedented support, from enhancing the Israeli status of Jerusalem and the Golan to rolling back the Iran nuclear deal. There is no evidence that Netanyahu prioritized Gaza.

And that brings us to the most important difference in Netanyahu’s latest apologia. It makes no mention of his earlier view of the relative threat posed by Hamas. According to Netanyahu’s own strategic priorities, a final showdown with Hamas would have been a trap: “After destroying the Hamas regime, Israel would have to govern two million Gazans for an indefinite period. I had no intention of doing that, especially since I had my gaze fixed on Iran, a much greater threat.”

Netanyahu, then, wasn’t simply aligning with the “consensus” of “security agencies” and the public when he held back on Hamas. Clearly, he calculated his priorities and took a decision that ended a policy debate. The TIME interview is disappointing for not quoting his memoir. Bibi: My Story offers the most comprehensive statement of his pre-October 7 strategy.

Another question remains unlikely to be answered: Did Hamas leaders who read the relevant passages of his memoir in 2022 conclude that Netanyahu, should he return to power, would be preoccupied elsewhere? Did they believe that as long as Netanyahu ruled, they enjoyed immunity from destruction? And did this belief embolden them to implement their plan, assuming he would stop short of toppling them? The mere possibility serves as a warning to all leaders: one should never publish one’s most closely held strategic thoughts before stepping down for good.

Bibi: My Story sold well. In November 2022, it spent three weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. It remains the most reliable starting point for understanding the events leading up to October 7.

Header image created by DALL-E, OpenAI’s image generation model.