Tag: Rashid Khalidi

The Nazi case for Hamas

On By Martin Kramer

Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor at Columbia University, is no fool. He started out as a spokesperson for the PLO in Beirut in the 1970s, and he’s been at it ever since. A New Yorker by birth, he knows something about perceptions of the conflict in America. And he knows that terrorism has set back the Palestinian cause time and again. That’s why he’s spent much of his career trying to anesthetize America to terrorism, divert attention from it, or minimize it.

The horrific massacre of Israeli men, women, and children committed by Hamas on October 7 has made his mission much harder. “The current sentiment,” he told an Arab interviewer (in Arabic),

politically, popularly, and in the media, is overwhelmingly negative. This contrasts sharply with the past decade, which saw growing support for Palestinian political rights and strong opposition to Israeli policies…. They’re capitalizing on the deaths of Israeli civilians during the Al-Aqsa Storm operation…. Having lived in the U.S., particularly New York, for over half my life, I’ve never seen such an onslaught of lies and crude propaganda that are actually making an impact.

Khalidi recommends a number of talking points to his followers. He’s dropped some in reaction to new and awful evidence, but one remains constant. Here is how Khalidi has made it, on two separate occasions:

There are ways of making war, which advanced technological societies employ, which involve the killing of huge numbers of civilians, who are never somehow counted in the calculus. Oh, that’s collateral damage. Oh, we didn’t mean to do it. If a pilot does it from 1,000 feet, and kills fifty people, or some somebody with a gun comes in and murders fifty people, there is a difference, obviously, but in the last analysis, if this is a violation of the rules of war on the one hand, it’s a violation of the rules of war on the other hand… One kind of killing of civilians—only that kind—is called terrorism and another kind of systematic killing of civilians, with much higher death counts, is simply ignored.

And here, another formulation of the same talking point:

Israeli lives should be considered civilian lives, should be considered important, obviously. Any civilian death should be mourned. But all people are supposedly equal…. The 900 or 1,000 Israeli civilians who died starting on the seventh of October, are now matched by a mountain of two or three times—it will soon be four times—as many Palestinians, again, like the Israelis, innocent civilians…. The rest of the world… do[es] not see the difference between Hamas or other militants coming out of Gaza killing civilians, and Israeli pilots, or Israeli gunners, or Israeli gunboats killing civilians. Killing civilians is killing civilians, especially in these numbers…. The world sees that, even as the American and European… media, which seem to move in lockstep with their governments, may distort this.

This talking point has become standard in many attempts to “contextualize” October 7. Queen Rania of Jordan made it in abbreviated form in a television interview seen by millions: “Are we being told that it is wrong to kill a family, an entire family at gunpoint but it’s OK to shell them to death? I mean, there is a glaring double standard here. And it is just shocking to the Arab world.”
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The ‘Dresden defense’

I am a historian (like Khalidi), interested in the origins of ideas and arguments. It turns out that Khalidi’s premier talking point has a very specific genesis.

It figured in the case for the defense in the Einsatzgruppen Trial, conducted by the Nuremberg Military Tribunal from late 1947 to the spring of 1948. The Einsatzgruppen were the paramilitary death squads of Nazi Germany, which carried out mass murder by shooting in Nazi-occupied Europe. They destroyed well over a million Jews, and two million people all told. After the war, their surviving senior commanders were put on trial at Nuremberg, charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes.

The chief defendant, SS-Gruppenführer Otto Ohlendorf, had been commander of Einsatzgruppe D, which carried out mass murders in Moldova, southern Ukraine, and the Caucasus. An economist and father of five, he had supervised the killing of 90,000 Jews. Ohlendorf imagined that he had a moral conscience. The killers under his command, he told a U.S. Army prosecutor, were prohibited from using infants for target practice, or smashing their heads against trees.
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During trial testimony, the prosecutor pressed Ohlendorf: “You were going out to shoot down defenseless people. Now, didn’t the question of the morality of that enter your mind?” Ohlendorf referred to the Allied bombings of Germany as a context:

I am not in a position to isolate this occurrence from the occurrences of 1943, 1944, and 1945 where with my own hands I took children and women out of the burning asphalt myself, and with my own hands I took big blocks of stone from the stomachs of pregnant women; and with my own eyes I saw 60,000 people die within 24 hours.

A judge immediately pointed out that his own killing spree preceded those bombings. But this would become known as the “Dresden defense,” to which Ohlendorf resorted still another time, in this exchange:

Ohlendorf: I have seen very many children killed in this war through air attacks, for the security of other nations, and orders were carried out to bomb, no matter whether many children were killed or not.

Q: Now, I think we are getting somewhere, Mr. Ohlendorf. You saw German children killed by Allied bombers and that is what you are referring to?

Ohlendorf: Yes, I have seen it.

Q: Do you attempt to draw a moral comparison between the bomber who drops bombs hoping that it will not kill children and yourself who shot children deliberately? Is that a fair moral comparison ?

Ohlendorf: I cannot imagine that those planes which systematically covered a city that was a fortified city, square meter for square meter, with incendiaries and explosive bombs and again with phosphorus bombs, and this done from block to block, and then as I have seen it in Dresden likewise the squares where the civilian population had fled to—that these men could possibly hope not to kill any civilian population, and no children.

Ohlendorf thought this defense so powerful that he invoked it yet another time:

The fact that individual men killed civilians face to face is looked upon as terrible and is pictured as specially gruesome because the order was clearly given to kill these people; but I cannot morally evaluate a deed any better, a deed which makes it possible, by pushing a button, to kill a much larger number of civilians, men, women, and children.

(The chief prosecutor, an American, called this particular iteration “exactly what a fanatical pseudo-intellectual SS-man might well believe.”)

At Nuremberg, this sort of tu quoque defense (“I shouldn’t be punished because they did it too”) wasn’t admissible. Still, in the verdict of the Einsatzgruppen Trial, the judges chose to refute it. “It was submitted,” the judges wrote, “that the defendants must be exonerated from the charge of killing civilian populations since every Allied nation brought about the death of noncombatants through the instrumentality of bombing.” The judges would have none of it:

A city is bombed for tactical purposes… it inevitably happens that nonmilitary persons are killed. This is an incident, a grave incident to be sure, but an unavoidable corollary of battle action. The civilians are not individualized. The bomb falls, it is aimed at the railroad yards, houses along the tracks are hit and many of their occupants killed. But that is entirely different, both in fact and in law, from an armed force marching up to these same railroad tracks, entering those houses abutting thereon, dragging out the men, women and children and shooting them.

The tribunal sentenced Ohlendorf to death. He was hanged in June 1951.

“In the last analysis”

Nuremberg enforced a fundamental distinction. All civilian lives are equal, but not so all ways of taking them. The deliberate and purposeful killing of civilians is a crime; not so the taking of civilian lives that is undesired, unintended, but unavoidable. The errors made by a bomber squadron cannot be deducted from the murders committed by a death squad. It’s a difference compounded many times over when those civilian men, women, and children are subjected to torture, rape, and mutilation before their murder. To borrow Khalidi’s phrase, “in the last analysis,” this distinction is what separates modern civilization from its predecessors.

More disturbing is the thought that it separates the contemporary West from its peers. Otto Ohlendorf and the regime he served did all they could to conceal their deeds from Western eyes. Nazi Germany still operated in a West founded on Enlightenment values. So massive a violation of a shared patrimony needed to be hidden from view.

In contrast, Hamas initially sought to publicize its deeds, assuming they would win applause, admiration, or at least tacit acceptance in the Arab and Muslim worlds. Here they succeeded beyond their expectations. The many millions who don’t share the West’s patrimony, and who know next to nothing about the Holocaust or Nuremberg, do see things as Khalidi says they see them. (So, too, does a sliver of alienated opinion in the West, where such views are cultivated and celebrated.)

Finally, and still more disturbing, is the fact that Ohlendorf’s defense has been revived to frame the massacre of Jews. Let’s be clear: this isn’t a world war. October 7 isn’t the Holocaust continued: in three months of 1942 alone, on average, the Nazis killed more than ten times the amount of Jews killed on October 7, every single day (Operation Reinhard). And Gaza is not Dresden, Hamburg, Pforzheim, Kassel, or any of the other German cities bombed so intensively that they literally burst into flames. The Israel-Hamas war is a skirmish by comparison.

But the Ohlendorf and Hamas defenses are the same, and so is the identity of their victims. That’s why it’s important that Israel take some of the Hamas masterminds alive, and place them on trial, Nuremberg-style. Israel owes it to the dead and wounded, their families, all Israelis, and all Jews. But it’s the Arabs and Muslims who most need to see the evidence, hear the testimonies, and weigh the arguments. No part of the world is further from drawing the line drawn at Nuremberg. October 7 is the place to start.

“Gaza = Auschwitz”

On By Martin Kramer

First published in Mosaic Magazine, August 26, 2014.

Five years ago, during an earlier Israeli operation in Gaza, the British novelist Howard Jacobson explained why “call[ing] the Israelis Nazis and liken[ing] Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto” goes far beyond mere “criticism” of Israel:

Berating Jews with their own history, disinheriting them of pity, as though pity is negotiable or has a sell-by date, is the latest species of Holocaust denial. . . . Instead of saying the Holocaust didn’t happen, the modern sophisticated denier accepts the event in all its terrible enormity, only to accuse the Jews of trying to profit from it, either in the form of moral blackmail or downright territorial theft. According to this thinking, the Jews have betrayed the Holocaust and become unworthy of it, the true heirs to their suffering being the Palestinians.

Experts call this Holocaust inversion. Based in the claim that Israel now behaves toward the Palestinians as Nazi Germany behaved toward the Jews, it originated in post-World War II Soviet propaganda, and from there spread to the Soviets’ Arab clients. It is now fully embedded in the Arab-Muslim world, where it grows and mutates in symbiosis with outright denial that the Holocaust occurred or a radical reduction of its genocidal scale, ferocity, and number of victims. Holocaust inversion has a graphic omnipresence in cartoons all over the Arab and Iranian press, where Israelis are regularly portrayed in Nazi regalia. Elsewhere in the Middle East and beyond, it has surfaced in the rhetoric of populist demagogues and the media. In Turkey’s new president and long-time prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, it now has a champion in a head of state. In Europe, Holocaust inversion is busy spreading beyond its original locus of infection and finding a home among intellectuals and activists, especially on the Left.

Thankfully, the disease is still rather hard to find in America, where it festers in only a few dark places. Some of those places, regrettably, operate as institutions of higher learning, and in one of them—Columbia University—a number of professors, mainly instructors in Middle East studies, have distinguished themselves in the black art of defaming Israel as a Holocaust emulator. Only a decade ago, Columbia was compelled to investigate departmental instructors who had been accused of intimidating their students with extreme anti-Israel diatribes. Not only did the university absolve its professors, however, it even granted tenure to the one faculty member against whom its own investigators found a student’s claims to be “credible.” Encouraged by this green light, the extremists have been tunneling under Morningside Heights ever since, fortifying their positions and waiting for a signal to emerge firing.

 

The recent war in Gaza has supplied the signal. Columbia now boasts three American exponents of the process described by Jacobson as “habituation to a language of loathing.”

The first is Hamid Dabashi, the Hagop Kevorkian professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature. Almost exactly ten years ago, Dabashi sized up the security personnel working at Israel’s Ben-Gurion airport—a “fully fortified barrack,” he called it—in these words:

Half a century of systematic maiming and murdering of another people has left its deep marks on the faces of these people, the way they talk, the way they walk, the way they handle objects, the way they greet each other, the way they look at the world. There is an endemic prevarication to this machinery, a vulgarity of character that is bone-deep and structural to the skeletal vertebrae of its culture.

Now, ten years later, Dabashi hasn’t lost his capacity for demonizing Jews. In an article entitled “Gaza: Poetry after Auschwitz,” Dabashi borrows a title and what he imagines is a license from the post-Holocaust theorist Theodor Adorno to make his key point:

What are Israelis? Who are Israelis? They are Israelis by virtue of what? By a shared and sustained murderous history—from Deir Yassin in 1948 to Gaza in 2014. . . . After Gaza, not a single living Israeli can utter the word “Auschwitz” without it sounding like “Gaza.” Auschwitz as a historical fact is now archival. Auschwitz as a metaphor is now Palestinian. From now on, every time any Israeli, every time any Jew, anywhere in the world, utters the word “Auschwitz,” or the word “Holocaust,” the world will hear “Gaza.”

Once again, there is the conflation of Israel with “murder”—and not just murder but, in a new step for Dabashi, a “sustained murderous history” that has finally achieved Holocaust-class status: in Gaza, he writes, Israel has created an Auschwitz. As a “historical fact,” the real Auschwitz—the one where 500 totally innocent Jews perished for every single innocent or guilty Palestinian killed in Israel’s recent operation—is now merely “archival.” Now, the world’s most infamous death camp has become a “metaphor” for a place where, as it just so happens, the population grows by almost three percent per year. Such is the abyss of ignorance, bigotry, and casual mendacity inhabited by Columbia’s chaired professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature.

Next up is Joseph Massad, associate professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history and the man who, having compiled the clearest record of classroom intimidation at the very time he was being considered for promotion to permanent faculty status, stood at the center of the last Columbia scandal. Then, in his struggle for academic survival, Massad had protested to the university’s investigating committee that the “lie . . . claiming that I would equate Israel with Nazi Germany”—the essence of one student accusation—“is abhorrent. I have never made such a reprehensible equation.” In a moment that won’t be remembered as Columbia’s finest, President Lee Bollinger and his board, succumbing to the bullying of radical faculty members, granted him tenure.

By 2009, after another Gaza flare-up, Massad no longer had any need for dissimulation. The professor who had found “reprehensible” the equation of Israel with Nazi Germany published an article entitled “The Gaza Ghetto Uprising.” Illustrated by the famous image of a surrendering child in the Warsaw ghetto, the article invoked an alleged Israeli plan to “make Israel a purely Jewish state that is Palästinener-rein,” and characterized the Palestinian Authority—or, rather, “the Israeli-created Palestinian Collaborationist Authority”—as “the judenrat, the Nazi equivalent” in this scenario. Al Jazeera ran a pathetic response by an American Jewish critic of Israel who scolded the author for damaging the Palestinian cause.

Last year, Massad penned another effort, “The Last of the Semites,” carrying the equation back in time. It was, he, postulated, their “shared goal of expelling Jews from Europe as a separate unassimilable race that created the affinity between Nazis and Zionists all along.” Massad ended the article by anointing the Palestinians as the true “heirs” of the pre-Holocaust Jewish struggle against anti-Semitism. So great was the revulsion caused by this piece of Holocaust inversion that its publisher, Al Jazeera, pulled it for a time.

Massad views each Israeli-Palestinian crisis as an opportunity to extend the range of his “language of loathing.” The Nazi analogy no longer sufficing, he has now seized upon the latest conflict in Gaza to promote yet another loaded trope: Israel as the international Jew engaged in child sacrifice. In an piece devoted to the role of foreign volunteers in the Israeli military, Massad slips in a crucial phrase denouncing these “international Zionist Jewish brigades of baby-killers.”

There’s an irony here, and a tragic one. During Columbia’s investigation of the complaints against him, Massad was most vigorously defended by an unlikely student supporter, who once showed up on campus in a sandwich board inscribed “I served in the Israeli army. I love Massad.” The student, who insisted that “nobody calls me a baby-killer when I go to office hours,” later committed suicide, and is memorialized at Columbia through a summer travel scholarship for students in the Middle East program. With Massad’s own airing of the “baby-killer” canard, the professor has now betrayed the ghost of his most ardent Jewish defender.

And then there is Rashid Khalidi, holder of the Edward Said chair of modern Arab studies and a professor of a somewhat higher class. While Dabashi and Massad find it difficult to place their effusions in publications other than the death-to-Israel Electronic Intifada or the angry-Arab Al Jazeera and Ahram Weekly, Khalidi has entrée to the elite liberal New York press. He also knows enough not to try his editors’ patience with naked examples of Holocaust inversion. Yet here he was, in a piece for the New Yorker, creeping up to the edge. Decrying the “collective punishment” being meted out to Gaza, Khalidi introduces his telltale allusion: “The truth of ghettos . . . is that, eventually, the ghetto will fight back. It was true in Soweto and Belfast, and it is true in Gaza.”

Soweto and Belfast? Where’s Warsaw? It’s there, hovering in the background, as was pointed out by two political scientists examining the increasingly popular use of “the language of genocide and the Holocaust with reference to Gaza”:

An example of this trend [they write] is a growing use of the word “ghetto,” a term associated directly (but in no way exclusively) with the Holocaust to describe the Gaza Strip. . . . While [Rashid] Khalidi does not directly compare the Gaza violence to the Holocaust (he uses the examples of Belfast and Soweto), the image of a fighting ghetto is strongly associated with the Warsaw ghetto.

Indeed, a few days after his article appeared, Khalidi confirmed just which ghetto he meant by denouncing “the siege, the blockade, the starvation of these people” in Gaza. The Nazis did indeed starve the Warsaw ghetto, and famine killed thousands. But not a soul has died of starvation in Gaza, and if stunted growth in childhood is a measure of poor nutrition, Gaza’s rate is lower than that of any Arab state but Qatar. Philip Gourevitch, also writing in the New Yorker, characterized Khalidi’s ghetto-referencing piece as an instance of “magical thinking.” He was being charitable.

 

Beyond these three cases, another Columbia-related episode is worth noting. Probably the cleverest of the anti-Israel lot on Morningside Heights is Nadia Abu El-Haj, associate professor of anthropology at Barnard College. A few years back, she, too, won a bruising tenure battle. But in her case, the outcome was never in doubt because (unlike Massad) she trod lightly. “I’m not a public intellectual,” she said at the time. “I’m drawn to archives, to disciplines where the evidence sits for a while. I don’t court controversy.” This, despite the fact that her entire “academic” project is aimed at casting Zionism as the fabrication of a totally specious national identity. “Israel is a settler-nation,” she writes, “that is, a project of European colonial settlement that imagined and believed itself to be a project of national return.” Those deceiving Zionists—they even duped themselves into thinking they were going home!

Much too smart to indulge in Holocaust inversion, Abu El-Haj hit upon an alternative in a recent contribution to the London Review of Books:

The IDF’s tactics [in Gaza] recall the logic of the British and American firebombing of German and Japanese cities during World War II: target the civilian population. Make them pay an unbearable price. Then they will turn against their own regime. When Israel attacks hospitals in Gaza, when it wipes out extended families, when it mows down children running on a beach, it is engaged in a premeditated act.

No Auschwitz or Warsaw ghetto for Abu El-Haj. But Dresden and Tokyo—why not? So what if Israel, unlike the Allies in World War II, warns civilians of impending strikes and, again unlike the Allies, eschews area bombardment and incendiary bombs? So what if one night of bombing over Tokyo killed 50 times as many as Israel’s month-long campaign in Gaza?

When you see four boys dead on a Gaza beach, Abu El-Haj wants you to “recall,” with her, the 40,000 civilians killed in Hamburg. (Sorry, the actual figure was 42,000—but what’s another 2,000 here or there? Either way, the entire toll in Gaza fits into the margin of error of one firebombing in World War II.) Might the Israelis, in their targeting, ever commit something as human as a mistake, even a negligent one? No, they’re far too inhuman for that: when they kill, it’s always “premeditated.” “Nothing Unintentional” is the delicate title of Abu El-Haj’s article, which might as well have been called “Baby-Killers.”

There is such a thing as legitimate criticism of Israel, and there is such a thing as crossing the line into demonization and, to put it plainly, Jew-baiting. The analogies spewed by Columbia’s tenured professors are of the latter kind, and are obscene. Jew-baiting covers a wider range than anti-Semitism, and Holocaust inversion is its favorite technique. Jew-baiting is the demand that Israel and its supporters explain why Gaza isn’t like a Nazi extermination camp or a starved ghetto for the doomed, or why a targeted air campaign isn’t just like the incineration of Dresden. That it should be practiced so openly by tenured professors at New York’s Ivy League home is a scandal, and a warning.

New York Times: soft spot for Rashid Khalidi?

On By Martin Kramer

This post first appeared on the Commentary blog on February 27.

There’s a brouhaha at Ramaz, the private Orthodox Jewish high school on the Upper East Side, around Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor at Columbia and promoter of the Palestinian hard line. Some students invited him to speak, but the head of the school didn’t like the idea and disinvited him. Khalidi has said nothing, but he doesn’t have to. He only benefits from these episodes, and it’s not the first time. In 2005, he was dropped from a New York City teacher ed program, with the same predictable result of turning him into a free speech martyr. This tableau seems destined to be repeated over and over again.

I’m not an officer, donor, trustee, student, teacher, or parent stakeholder at Ramaz, so I don’t care how many pretzels they have to twist over Rashid Khalidi. But I do care how the New York Times reported one aspect of the story this morning: “Critics have accused the professor of having had ties to the Palestine Liberation Organization, which he has denied.” The reference here is to the activities of Khalidi when he resided in Beirut in the 1970s and up until Israel’s 1982 invasion. In those days, the PLO ran an exterritorial gangland, and was neck-deep in terrorism planned by Arafat and his mob.

Note this phrase: “Critics have accused…” Today’s article thus repeats a trope that appeared back in 2008, when the Times ran a piece on Khalidi prompted by his past association with Barack Obama:

He taught at universities in Lebanon until the mid-’80s, and some critics accuse him of having been a spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organization. Mr. Khalidi has denied working for the group, and says he was consulted as an expert by reporters seeking to understand it.

Again, it’s the “critics” who “accuse him.”

Well, I’m a critic, but we critics didn’t just imagine Khalidi’s PLO affiliation. We were alerted to it by a parade of highly regarded journalists, including two from the New York Times. So here are the “critics” who first leveled the “accusation” (still more sourcing here):

  • Joe Alex Morris Jr., reporting from Beirut for the Los Angeles Times on September 5, 1976, quoted Khalidi and described him as “a PLO spokesman.”
  • James M. Markham, reporting from Beirut in the New York Times on February 19, 1978, quoted Khalidi and described him as “an American-educated Palestinian who teaches political science at the American University of Beirut and also works for the P.L.O.”
  • A Pacifica Radio documentary, reporting in 1979 from Beirut, interviewed Khalidi “at the headquarters of the PLO in Beirut,” and described him as “an official spokesperson for the Palestinian news service Wafa,” “PLO spokesperson,” “official spokesperson for the PLO,” and “the leading spokesperson for the PLO news agency, Wafa.”
  • Thomas Friedman, reporting from Beirut in the New York Times on June 9, 1982, quoted Khalidi and described him as “a director of the Palestinian press agency, Wafa.”
  • Doyle McManus, reporting on rumored American-PLO contacts in the Los Angeles Times on February 20, 1984, quoted Khalidi and described him as “a former PLO official.”
  • James Rainey, reporting on Khalidi’s connection to Obama for the Los Angeles Times on October 30, 2008, described him as “a renowned scholar on the Palestinians who in the 1970s had acted as a spokesman for Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization.” (As I noted at the time, the Los Angeles Times thus honorably stood by the 1976 reportage of its legendary, long-dead Beirut correspondent, Joe Alex Morris Jr.)
  • Thomas W. Lippman, for thirty years a diplomatic, national security, and Middle East correspondent for the Washington Post, in a letter published in that paper on November 1, 2008, wrote that “Khalidi was indeed ‘a PLO spokesman.’ In the early years of the Lebanese civil war, Mr. Khalidi was the Beirut-based spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organization, and his office was a stop on the daily rounds of journalists covering that conflict. As we used to say in the pre-electronic newspaper business: Check the clips.”

None of these people were or are “critics” of Rashid Khalidi, and two of them were reporting for the New York Times itself. So why does the Times repeatedly inform us that it is only Khalidi’s “critics” who have “accused” him, when in fact a raft of esteemed journalists who interviewed him in Beirut identified him as a PLO spokesman, as a fact? This is not another he-said she-said (or Jew-says Arab-says) question. As Thomas Lippman said: Check the clips.

This is another opportunity to urge the New York Times to get off its derriere and get to the bottom of the Khalidi story. It is unthinkable that a Brooklyn-born, Yale-educated U.S. citizen operated in PLO headquarters in Beirut in the late 1970s, and wasn’t known to the personnel of the U.S. embassy and the CIA station. That was over thirty years ago, so some documents must have been declassified. Can we get some investigative reporting here? Instead all we’ve ever read about Khalidi in the Times is the puff piece. How boring.