Arie M. Dubnov: 7 Questions on Israel

Join us for an insightful conversation with Arie M. Dubnov, Jewish-Israeli historian and associate professor at George Washington University. Dubnov discusses the complexities of genocide studies, the role of oral histories in the Holocaust, and its influence on understanding genocide. He also touches on academic freedom, populist media challenges, and his work "Agnotology in Palestine/Israel".

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for me, sort of so much of Holocaust history is about testimonies of survivors. Do we really want, you know, can we really understand even the Holocaust by only recollecting the documents that the the the Nazis and their collaborators left behind them? It's it's it's it's a you can do a lot but not everything. So it was for me a moment in which I had to pause and think. This is not to forgive, but to understand. With your host, writer and scholar of genocide studies, Sabah Carrim. I am your co-host, Luis Gonzalez-Aponte. Not to forgive, but to Understand. Not to forgive, but to Understand. Joining us today is Ari Modupe Nof, a Jewish-Israeli historian and essayist living in the U.S. He serves as an associate professor of history and international affairs, holding the Max ticket and chair of Israel studies at George Washington University. Among his publications are The intellectual biography Isaiah Berlin The Journey of a Jewish Liberal. Tracing the genealogy of the idea of partition and the British interwar imperial context. And Amos Oz's two pens between literature and politics dedicated to the late Israeli novelist and public intellectual. Please enjoy our conversation. Hi Arie, I am very happy to have you here today and I'd like to welcome you to this program that we have put together. And we've had various conversations with scholars from everywhere about genocide studies in general, and we're here today to speak specifically about, you know, questions regarding Israel's rule or Israel's future in the ongoing war. So the first question I have for you, Arie, is can you tell us what you know about the division of opinions currently prevalent in Israel in the ongoing war? Right. So think first and foremost, thank you for for hosting me on the program. It's a it's a pleasure to be here. And and of course, I need to to make it clear that I am not a scholar of genocide studies by training. I am historian of Israel and Jewish history. And so my comments are coming from that vantage point. I think that for those who are following Israeli politics for some years now, won't be surprised probably to hear the October 7th attacks were seen as a such a traumatic experience and they had such an immense effect. It had to do not only with the gruesome realities on the ground on that specific day, but the fact that it met already a society that is deeply polarized and deeply divided. So I think that I value this in writing as well, that at the eve of October 7th already people were talking about and a society that is on the verge or on the precipice of a civil war, and this has to do both with long term and short term divisions within Israeli societies. So one can talk in general about the ethno-national dimension of Israeli society, that that creates divisions. And of course, we all know very clearly that it created a division between the Jews and the non-Jewish population in Israel. And one has to remember that roughly 21% of the citizens in Israel, not even including the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, so 21% of the citizens that have voting rights are not Jews, but Israeli society is very much divided along other accesses Ashkenazi, meaning Jews of European descent or background, and Mizrahi, which is a term that we use as a kind of a basket term for Jews from Middle Eastern and North African states and so on, the divisions between religious and secular and of course, divisions between right and left. So all these already reached a boiling point. At the eve of the October 7th attacks, there were mass demonstrations for more than 30 weeks before the attack against the extreme outright government that now in Israel that was or of course, orchestrating this extremely polarizing and controversial judicial reform that its opponents even call it a judicial revolution that tries to demolish the last remnants of kind of a democratic rule and separation of powers in Israel and so on. So given this long kind of division of opinions within Israel, that really highlights also the division today regarding the war. So once the war, once the attack took place, it was in a short term, but very clear sense of suddenly these divisions need to be checked to debate. They are less important years of war of defense. But as we are now recording this podcast, more than half a year after the war and the atrocities took place and the war is ongoing, it becomes clearer and clearer that the war at this stage is sometimes remarked as- - which is the war to save Bibi Netanyahu in power, That became very cynical. So you see more people going back now. The same demonstrations that we saw before the war are now returning and so on and so forth. Where does it exactly lead us? There's a good question, but I'll just highlight that it's kind of a this was highlighted and of course, the very gruesome way in which even from within the Jewish Israeli community, the attitude of the government towards the hostages and the POW’s. That there were the feeling that among many of the hostages there were coming from those circles of more left leaning, not exactly supporting the existing establishment. So the very, very pessimistic feeling of a deep breach of of trust that the government will not do well whatever it can to save these hostages and bring them back, which is a really deep questioning of the basic trust, a covenant that was broken. This is part of the pessimism. And within the Israeli society today, even before we go into the very gruesome realities and and the genocide that is taking place. What does it feel like to be... and I want to try to imagine, what does it feel like to be someone from a non-mainstream perspective right now? Because, of course, when I say mainstream, I mean, right now Israel is waging a war. But what does it feel like if you were to be one was to be in Israel right now. Well, these are narrowing circles. I mean, so there's like this interesting dialectic, right? Sometimes people that are very when you're an activist, you have something to wake up in the morning for. So people are very otherwise you sink into depression. So in a way, people are deeply pessimistic, especially the older generation feels that sort of a project that they were so invested in is sinking in before their eyes. So this is really there's I would wouldn't even say melancholia, but like a melancholy but really some sort of a thin layer of depression when you're going in circles of center or center left kind of circles and especially the kind of what we would called educated bourgeoisie. Right. So people that see one to imagine Israel is as integrated into, you know, a club of Western democratic societies that also connected through business and academia to other places. They're seeing Israel kind of sinking into this kind of pit hole of something that is very alienating for them. And also that they are seen as the enemy. They are seen as this liberal elite. They are the populist right is looking at them as the source of the problem. They themselves feel that they are carrying so much of the burden in terms of tax paying and and so on. So this is a deep depression, but at the same time, people are really feisty and fighting when they're out in the streets and and so on. So far, you know, despite the fact that the Israeli police is becoming more increasingly brutal, there's still something to be said about the power of ethno-nationalism and demonstrations by Jews would not be crushed down as violently by as a demonstration of non-Jews. So there is still something to be said about almost a ritual that you can go every it's usually Saturday night, it's usually Kaplan Street in Tel Aviv. It became like a ritual that you would go to demonstrate in the same places, in the same spots, meeting the same faces and so on. So this is kind of a the environment on the ground, but there is a deeper feeling that that you're fighting against a very highly populist media and also a media that is very good at turning the attention away from what's going on in your own backyard and in Gaza to look at student protests in the USA and creating as a feeling that the entire world is anti-Semitic. So sort of telling you that, you know, if you're not invested in this project, the alternative is even worse and so on. So this is kind of a dual isolation kind of the atmosphere. And so I think this brings us although I would have asked this question much later in time, but if this question now becomes relevant, you wrote a book together with Basma Fahoum and it was published in 2023, and it's titled Agnotology in Palestine/Israel. It was specifically about Teddy Katz and the Tantura affair. Can you tell us more about it since we are not talking about how information is tweaked so as to further the interests of those in power? Sure. Well, thank you for plugging it in. I mean it’s sort of to take us to that article, We need to go back in time. Back in time to two movements, one is the 1990s and the other one is 1948. So what is the Teddy Katz affair? For those of you who are not familiar with it and why should you be familiar? It's kind of a very kind of an intra-academic affair. In the 1990s, there was a student named Teddy Katz at the University of Haifa. He was a graduate student, although it was only an M.A. student and not even a dissertation, He was looking into the history of the 1948 war and specifically the country that and the way in which there were battles in the area of Haifa, not too far from Haifa, including in villages on the seashores of the Mediterranean called Tantura. And as part of his studies, he also used oral history and he interviewed elders of the of the villages and also veterans from that war. And he came to the conclusion that there is a very significant amount of evidence to suggest that there were there was a massacre of P.O.W.s even after the village was surrendered and was conquered. The fighters of the Alexandroni Brigade committed war crimes. Now, why do I mention that? And I started with that in the 1990s, because it was a thesis that was written at a relatively time of openness in Israeli history and Israeli history. During the early nineties, early 2000 people were talking about the new historians, historians that were willing to open up, so to speak, the closets and look at the skeletons in the closet. So seeing that Israel is perhaps moving into a more secure place, it was a time of cautious optimism, the Oslo Accords and so on. So you're willing now to also question some of the founding myths of Israel from 1948, this image of only David versus Goliath, the few brave Israelis that are surrounded by armies and never committing war crimes. And to look into into these cases, why do I this case became famous or more accurately, infamous, is because the thesis was was crushed in initially it was awarded an A-plus and was an excellent thesis and it was applauded. But then veterans of that brigade heard about it. It shed you know, not a very nice light on them. And before they know it, they they used the courts and a libel suit was there. And the university played a very problematic role, to say the least. And instead of defending its student to reopen the case, kind of a took away his degree and surrendered to that kind of pressure and and brought into it kind of and external evaluators that produced in anonymous reviews and so on. Now why is that specific case so important? And so interesting and, and your listeners might be interested in watching a documentary called Tantura that goes back and recalls that that story. I my colleague Basma Fahoum and myself and she's a young Palestinian scholar, Palestinian citizen of Israel, we looked back into that and we wanted to understand not necessarily we were not there to solve exactly the enigma, what happened in 1948, but what are the protocols and the processes that people are using in order to prevent us from going and investigating exactly these atrocities? And so sort of at the end, for my generation of historians, that Teddy Katz affair was a very clear warning sign that, you know, think twice before you start opening these Pandora boxes. Look what happened to him, you know, so use it's better to to steer away from such controversial issues. And it really highlights the way in which even within academia you have hierarchies of power. So if one would have investigated a Jewish soldier from 1948 that their site of burial is unclear, it is something that is taking place. You will have this the establishment support and even power, right? So soldiers nowadays, we we as historians are living in a very interesting time that you can come up with crews that bring a specific kind of expertise together, people who are doing oral interviews with with survivors and elders, people that are even coming from forensic science and are looking at remain human remains. So there are attempts in other parts of the world when there is a very kind of dark chapters in history. I'm thinking about Spanish historians, for instance, that are recovering atrocities from the Civil War in the 1930s. So there are tools to try and investigate it. But we were interested in understanding and this is why we use a term agnotology, right? You know, you make, you know, you create something conditions of not knowing. You want to make sure that people will not use the tools that we are using in order to investigate and knowing and come down and understand the truth. And part of it was really expose this hierarchy of power, both in the way how you dismiss any type of oral documents, oral testimonies, excuse me. And you're saying only documents. Only documents. So part of the way in which the Teddy Katz the thesis was dismissed is to say we have no recorded documents to prove that such war crimes took place. Of course, the oppressor. Why should someone record his own war crimes, right? When the Palestinians don't have their archives. So many of their archives were confiscated by the IDF in the various civil wars, and the IDF would not record its own war crimes. Of course, there are no records to support it, and you have to rely on some sort of testimonies that were gathered over the years from survivors, from refugee camps and so on and so forth. And it was very troubling for me, not only as a historian, but also as as a second generation Holocaust survivor, to see that some Israeli historians, not all of them, but some of them coming and saying oral testimonies, that's you know, that's not a credible just throw it out of the window. It's kind of a and even sometimes it came with an undertones of some sort of subtle orientalism. Oh right. Of course, the Palestinians have a very creative imagination. These are Oriental fantasies. They imagine atrocities where things were not did not take place in kind of a saying or witness testimonies. And oral history is not credible. And for me, sort of so much of Holocaust history is about testimonies of survivors. Do we really want, you know, can we really understand even the Holocaust by only recollecting the documents that the the the Nazis and their collaborators left behind them? It's it's it's it's a you can do a lot but not everything. So it was for me a moment in which I had to pause and think. Because of the duplicity, obviously. So therefore, in this war between academia or academic knowledge, that is that I think you mentioned in your article, which was generated mostly by Israeli scholars who were who were in the and I'm not going to generalize here because you have tons of Israeli scholars who have different perspectives, but those who are basically in denial of what happened. the Tantura affair. What we have, therefore, is a war with a division between the scholars who are in denial of that. And we have these oral testimonies from the Palestinian side, mostly that of course, counter that account of the scholarly account. So I think there is a very important lesson to learn there because as academics, we or in general we tend to also revere academic knowledge for its truth, for its haughty power, which can be convincing power. And in that article you end by saying the past is too precious to be left in the hands of historians. So I think it's worth I think I would love to hear you speak a little bit more about why you said that and why you ended that article. On that note, in light of this discussion about the Teddy Katz affair. Now, Absolutely. So I think that by historians, I mean academic historians that are based in institutions. So I have much respect to my discipline. I'm not spitting into the well from which I'm drinking. But and we do need people that are well-trained and have following rigorous protocol. And they're trying to make sure that they contextualize and they have evidence. I'm not saying we need to throw it out of the window. This said, we do need to understand that that academia in general and university in particular are hierarchical institutions and established institutions of power and power. In fact, you know, you don't need to read Michel Foucault to understand the connection between power and knowledge and to put it even in a vulgar way. You know, a historian who's based in the academia will be promoted based on what these other peers are telling him, not necessarily by what the wider public is saying. And of course, sometimes there's also a bit of a fear or ambivalence toward what we would call memory activism. And there is an attempt to to say we are the only ones to narrate the events of the past. The alternative agents of memory, you know, are saying different things. And this is it can be a creative tension. And we should not look at only one group in the sense in the following sense, I will try to explain what I mean by that. We, you know, our everyday life, we we encounter narratives about the past all the time, every other, you know, newspaper article has some sort of a meaning narrative about the past. People are giving meaning to their life by telling stories about the past now, so historians can come, Professional historians for academic historians can come to that and say, no, no, no, no, no. I'm the only one entitled to say what happened. All the rest is nonsense. These are fairy tales. These are tall tales. Or we can say, Yeah, let's see, what are the dynamics that are taking place here. And to see it as a creative tension. The case of the Teddy Katz affair was a case in which the established university history in Israel was too much invested in saying we will demarcate and define the limits of our of our profession in such a way to make sure there is no room for any type of memory activism. And memory activism of this kind is a very important democratic sentiment, and often it should be acknowledged by professional historians and also pushed them to do things and open up these kind of affairs that they would prefer not to go to. Maybe the ones that you want be recognized by the state. You want to be awarded the best prize from the Ministry of of Education in the Israeli government and so on. And so I think that for me, the way in which the Teddy Katz affair ended, not how it started, it started from a good sentiment, but it was crushed so brutally was showed. It was another symptom of a bigger closure of mind and my and of mindset less open minded Israel and how it percolated even into academia. So the moment there was this brief window in which in the nineties new historians like Avi Shlaim and Benny Morris and Tom Segev were willing to questions some of the conventional standard narratives about 1948 and show that the picture is more complicated. Benny Morris is a very famous and controversial case because his methodology was actually very, very traditional. He's what we call historians positive historians. He had documents available to him and he was simply saying what I found in the document and even that kind of a moment of relative opening was narrowed down by the early 2000, the second intifada could really feel for me, and that's my generational experience, how this kind of a there was a brief moment you can feel that you can breathe and open up was narrowing down very quickly. So then my next question is, and since you're a historian and I've studied a little bit about that and my question is just based on my reading of Karl Popper and Collingwood, where they come up with these ways of say how historians have tried to predict the future based on past happenings and how they come up with some people saying of course the world is tending towards catastrophe and then there are others and seeds turning towards, you know, a golden era where of perfection. And then there's a third one is cyclical. I mean, I mean there are all of these different, you know, of course, perspectives. And I think we understand today with what's been happening that it's always more complex than these three lines of thinking. But having said that, my question to you is I am more inclined of these three different directions to believe in the cyclical one, the cyclical one. And so my question to you is, with this closing of the doors as we speak about of interpretation of openness because of the Teddy Katz affair, has this happened before where there were periods in Israel's rather young history, but still rather young, young past with periods where there was this possibility of openness and it was clamped down by some event, such as Teddy Katz. Or was the Teddy Katz affair the first of its kind? Yeah, it's an excellent question. I mean, so I don't know whether I can connect it to these grandiose philosophies of history and I definitely would not be able to prophesies. And I always quote George Eliot that said that from all forms of human error, prophecy is the most avoidable one. But there were definitely some cases in which they were like things that we would call today. Revisionist history is or critical histories. Often they came up from from the more left, left leaning parties.-was a very famous in the circles of was a member of - that was a left Jewish Arab party together so was already writing very controversially books that debunk a lot of those myths about the 1948 war. Earlier to use, members of that party were also the ones that were involved in the fifties. There was a very infamous case of the massacre in Kafr Qasim when the 1956 Suez crisis took place. There was a massacre taking place in a village called Kafr Qasim, in which 49 citizens were killed. They did not come back home on time for a curfew. No one told them there was a curfew and they were shot by the Israeli guard. Police. It was a... became a very famous case because even the judge did not acquit them and said that the soldiers should have seen that there was a black flag hanging over the order that they were given to shoot these citizens. And this expression, black flag became like a proverb that people are repeatedly reciting time and again. So the ones that were involved in and in showing that these things happened, that it was a massacre at a time when the Israeli media was a very state controlled, very orchestrated, everyone was super Zionist, were usually members of Mapam. So it often had to do with right versus left divisions within Israel. The and so on and so forth. This is part of, you know, indirectly connected again to the tragedy of October 7th. Many of those members of Mapam, you won't be surprised to hear, were members of kibbutzim, you know, at least in one case, members of Mapam old members Mapam in their eighties and nineties were in some of those kibbutzim that were attacked on October seven. So the those same people that were working on a coexistence of Jews and Arabs and fighting against the discrimination of Palestinians in Israel found themselves the forefront and the first ones to be, you know, abducted and killed and on October seven and that's kind of a part of the internal Israeli narrative then about October seven. So I will mark this as well. Okay. So I think I think one of the sort of like I have it in my in my head, I have probably three parts to this conversation with you. And I think what interests me as well is the legacy of Israel in terms of, you know, we know that we know about the connection between the Holocaust and the formation of Israel as a nation, as a country. And we also know how that has formed the identity of the country. My reading of, for instance, the Eichmann trial in 1961, which was set up by Ben-Gurion, was I remember reading about how he furthered this project as a he said that he made sure that the trial was set up in Jerusalem and it was it was done to to prove a point to actually help in this formation of that Jewish identity and to strengthen the people as a nation. And I think we all know that these kinds of projects or these political projects are very important in the formation of a country's identity. So I don't think that is condemnable, but I just think he was furthering that objective. So my question is, now that we are seeing all of this happen and we have more and more supporters of across the world, supporters who are against the current war supporters or against, you know, what the government is doing over there. And I am very I'm very skeptical about saying the government is doing over ther not the people in their involvement in the war. And my question to you is, what is being said right now about how this image of Israel is going to change in the future because of the ongoing war, because it's the first time in its history, although, of course, we have heard about perpetration against the Palestinians. But this has never been clearer. I think that the country or not the country. But the government has been acting as a perpetrator. Right. Well, that's a very loaded question. And it's also multilayered because you have both the domestic front and the international front and kind of the way in which the Israelis understand themselves and the way they are perceived outside Israel. What is very clear is is yes, of course, you know, what October seven showed very clearly, it's not very surprising is that you don't need to scratch much. And Holocaust memories come out from to the surface. Right. And at the same time, it also proved very poignantly and tragically, I would say, that telling the stories about the Holocaust and educating the generation of Israelis about the Holocaust did not serve as a, you know, immune system or vaccination that would prevent them for doing atrocities. So even even if we want go into the debate about whether what's taking place in Gaza now is genocide or not, there was something that is a up call for us as educators saying that the fact that we just tell, you know, a young generation about the Holocaust, whether this narrative of never again does it translate into never again to me or never again point, right point. So I'll say several things on that respect. I will start maybe from the domestic kind of element and an internal Israeli one and many. And I like the fact you alluded to the Eichmann trial of the 1960s. It was for many years people tended to argue the following, saying that the actually in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust in the late forties and fifties, Holocaust survivors were looked down upon. They were walking ghosts. They were silent because the ethos was so Zionist to the narrative. They were only seen as sheep to the slaughter. These are the embodiment of the diasporic Jew incapable of defending themselves. It this kind of image has to do even with an older trope tropes in Zionist literature that is very much connected to questions of violence. So I would allude to a very famous poem by Bialik on depiction of Pogrom, again, a pogrom in the early 20th century, way before the Holocaust, and the image of the religious East European Jew that is not defending himself, incapable of defending themselves in times of pogrom, of atrocity, was there and then double it and triple it after the Holocaust. The image, you know, it was very important for the nation making it and the Ben-Gurion type of approach to sovereignty is to not only to create the image of the new Sabra, who, as you know, has, as sometimes people say, hair on his chest and his legs and his walking straight and proud and he's a masculine and he will be fighting and working in the fields and so on. But also kind of this the reverse image that what will create the new Israeli subject is exactly this. The IDF in its early years was also seen almost as a melting pot. You will bring Jews from Northern Africa, from Eastern Europe and so on. But what would turn them into the Israeli is the military service. They come into the military, all the Jews, they come out the new Israeli subject. And that was really the ethos. So the 1960s moment in which certainly Israel says, let's put the Eichmann on trial. And also the pushback we received from Hannah Arendt that says it's a show trial and she's mocking the persecutor, getting housing and so on and so on, was kind of shifted the memory about how you deal with the Holocaust, a Holocaust and in Israeli history and so on. And whether you really give voice to the survivors themselves or just subjected to that image. But years passed both around seven decades since the Holocaust and many years since the Eichmann trial. And what remained is kind of a this image of a, you know, a binary that existed between the Jew that is helpless and the Israeli Jew that is not defenseless. And October seven really question is shed a big, you know, a huge question mark about this larger narrative that really shook Israelis. So so October seven, within the Israeli public opinion worked in a kind of a double edged sword, on the one hand, because it was seen as the most serious bloodshed of Jewish of of Jewish blood since the Holocaust. You would have soldiers saying we are going now into Gaza to fight the new Nazis. So I admit immediately identifying the Hamas with with the new Nazis and and so on. And you also of course, will have unfortunately, numerous cases in which, yes, people that were killed on October seven had some sort of connection to the Holocaust. And there were some Holocaust survivors and their families that were among those that were killed there at the same time. But and this being said, there was a very clearly a lack of proportion, and there was almost also a level of lack of better words. I will call it kitchen death. So social media played a huge role in that. People are even talking today about AI generated images that were used that would create these posters or memes or visuals that you see an Israeli fighter soldier from today contrasted with a muslim man, which is like a survivor from a death camp that is only skin and bare bones. And to show the contrast. Right. You know, if you don't support the IDF, what you end up is this or a connection between the hostages and people in in ghettos and death camps and so on. There was a there's an Israeli educator and a Holocaust scholar named Nama Gozi that is tracking these kind of and she's saying there's something alarming about the way in which suddenly the October seven eclipsed it and almost hijacked the memory of the Holocaust to make it to then support a message of gloves off. You know, if that is you know, if today, October seven is really a war was not a simply a terrorist attack, but actually an attempt to annihilate the Jews. Again, this is a new Holocaust. So no rules of engagement and no or, you know, don't talk with me about The Hague, Don't talk to me. Be about wars, proportional or a reaction to and so on and so forth. And that's kind of where we're headed, where we're headed now. And so and this is an intra-Israeli narrative that is completely divorced from what's taking place outside Israel. So it has also to do with the media in Israel that is not showing pictures from what's taking place in Gaza. It comes even with people that are saying my empathy is is has its limits. So I can empathize only with the Israeli victims and I can and incapable of going beyond it and looking at the the stories and if horror pictures coming from Gaza, despite its its proximity to to Tel Aviv and and this is where things became almost a dialog of death between some Israelis and that consider themselves more or less liberal or progressive before October seven and then are now feel that they were abandoned by the external and by the broader community. They lost ties with colleagues and so on and so forth. I'm not saying that that's the case in everyone with everyone and everywhere, but there's definitely a narrative that is taking place and in a lot of it has to do, I would argue, with media the way in which the Israeli media with few notable exceptions, such as outlets or maybe few other more kind of a fringe media channels, is very much hyper nationalistic. It's a very much chosen narrative, which is a very state narrative. It looks at any type of criticism of that. Israel is is getting from outside of of Israel as automatically based on prejudice or antisemitism. So it created this cover impossible situation. I think what you're seeing just now for me evokes this thought I had yesterday in which I discussed with with a scholar, with a friend. We were talking about the power of stories. And, you know, we were talking about how as scholars of genocide, especially because a lot of us are trained to, you know, from a political science perspective or was the historians we don't actually talk about the power of stories and the impact that they have on the imaginations of people. We don't actually speak enough about how literature so stories write media stories because the media uses the stories story telling techniques to to, you know, to your people, to convince people about a certain perspective, how literature actually has such a big impact on what happens in a genocide. So sometimes, if you like, I set a topic about, you know, in symposium that I organized, which was literature, prevention or perpetration. Now people don't necessarily think it's an important subject to talk about the impact of literature, but I just now I'm thinking about how, as I said, the media is about telling stories in the media is about convincing people. So I think all the governments we know, even when there was, for instance, the Kashmir conflicts or any conflicts, when we speak about Myanmar, we speak about the other recent genocides. We always speak about how the first thing that the perpetrator does is to control the media in a certain way, to make sure that the information that's been out to the public is controlled. Yeah, this is just a thought, a digression. It's a very important thought. And I think that this is extremely important because there's something to be said about the importance of storytelling. And I think that especially in cases of of such mass atrocities. So we for good reasons, we're looking at the scales, we're looking at the numbers. And unfortunately and as we are going coming closer to the present, the the charts, you know, the numbers are off the scales that the again, as a scholar of Jewish history, I can say right there were very famous pogroms. The Kishinev of pogrom 49 Jews died the Kafr Qasim massacre I've mentioned 49 from the Palestinians died. Kielce program in Poland. Again, something to be said about this 49. Of course, the numbers of the dead today are outside. Now the proportions are completely different. But how can we even understand this by looking at the scales of that case without telling stories of individuals? Right. So the probably the most famous case is, of course, the diary of Anne Frank. You know, the you told the story of one single young woman and then people understood, you know, in a way that this is why in literature we call the synecdoche, right. You cannot understand sex millions. It's incapable and you cannot tell 6 million stories. So you will do things. You know, Daniel Mendelsohn, the story of six out of six millions about his own family. So there is something to be said about the very strong ethical power of storytelling when it attaches. And at the same time, we need to be extremely careful from the other way in which the media can tell a story that will create this linear narrative, right? So sort of how, you know, that would connect, you know, something in ahistorical way between, you know, different atrocities to create this image and the narrative that I alluded to earlier that, okay, generation after generation, as Jews are persecuted and are discriminated and even killed, what we see now is yet another station in that endless and ongoing a cycle of violence. And hence there's no questions, right? So storytelling, I don't have a bitter lament, but I'm sure the people that are talking about ethics of storytelling, how it can work in both ways. And so my my last question to you, because we're running out of time, is based on I think you did touch on this earlier when you were saying that, of course, we we spoke about it just now as well. But how the people in Israel are maybe right now restricted in terms of the information they're getting. And all of this is controlled, curated by the media outlets that they have access to. So you are Israeli and you're based in the United States. You're at George Washington University. I'm curious to know in an anecdotal ways since speaking about the power of storytelling, telling, what are your most obvious encounters in noting this difference very directly between what you are getting as information and what your friends, your family members are getting back there in Israel. That's my first question. And my second question then is about what is happening in America right now in terms of university involvement, involvement and and protest by protest by students on campuses. We will come to that, of course. But yes, these are the two questions about. Well, thing I mean, so we are recording this program only about a week after Israel decided that, for instance, it will ban Al-Jazeera's broadcast from Israel. So if I mean so it really comes even we are at a moment in which it really boils down to these even technical issues. Right. If I you know, my friend in Tel Aviv, if they want to understand what's going on in Gaza, what can they do? So either they can plug in to these kind of telegram channels that are under the radar, but if they want to do something there is there's really technical, even limitations on what they can know and they can do, especially if you are thinking about the average citizen. I'm not talking about the activists that are part of the group and they have connections and communication with people from the other side of the border and it's still taking place. I think that for me, again, anecdotally, but I don't I think I speak to several of my my colleagues as well, you know, the expats, Israelis that we’re very you know, I feel that that we’re suffocating in Israel intellectually. So part of the reason is that I could have conversations in the U.S. that I could not have had, sadly, in Israel prior to October seven, I did kind of the fact that I can meet with a Palestinian here as equals, For me, part of the reason I felt suffocating in a bit in the Israeli academic setting, despite it has pockets of excellence. Is that in the topics I am studying, it was seen as that there's these hierarchies of power that have to do with realities outside of academia percolate into it. And the type of conversation I could have with a Palestinian colleague here in the US are different from the same thing. The same conversation cannot take place in Israel. It's not that we cannot meet in the same room, but there is automatically a hierarchy of power that is that has to do with the politics of the place and how it runs. And I think that that that nowadays people like attacking, getting academia. So before we we we get into the protest, the student protest and there there are a lot of good things to say about it. There's also disturbing things about to say. But before we said there's I mean, I am very cautious because part of the very right wing populist kind of back, you know, very troubling wave we are seeing now is really trying to to dismantle the academia right. To really to see university and academia in general, not as the thing that is generating a new generation of young men and women that will be open minded and well-educated, articulate and well-educated. And they will think critically about their place and about their environment, but also these are hotbeds of radicalism. So a lot of the conversation was, you know, hijacked by it. So I think that with all the problems, I think that part of what is taking place in academia is a bit of a war, a reaction, a kneejerk reaction to this very, very dark quasi McCarthy's moment. We're living through it. And I think that part of what I have the benefit to my colleagues in Israel sometimes do not have the benefit is really to be in conversations not with others who are like me. So it's even at the level, surprising as it may sound, before October seven, people will say, Why is that important to have like a student of Israel? Right? So that's a tiny corner of the world. Why does it justify an expertise? Right. It's kind of if I my colleague is studying slavery in the Caribbean and the other colleague is studying the civil war in America, I need to make a case about why that specific history matters in Israel. I don't need to make that case that in that case, because of international narrative. And so I need to sort, so to speak, sell my my, my stuff to others. But that said, I think that that for me, ever since October seven, even before the student demonstrations took place, it was very interesting to see how much there's a big divide between what we think that is taking place and, academia and the other things. So people tend to to ask me, So how would you think about your classroom experience? Was they know, Is it so difficult? And actually, no, it's the opposite. The students were already taking one year class and they're ready to do the heavy lifting of reading and immersing themselves in the materials and discussing and discussing different. This is education at its best. It's really had so many amazing teaching moments since October seven because young students, open minded thinking, willing to engage respectfully with different opinions and topic and tackle topics that are very controversial. So it's not within the classroom that a lot of the ugly dynamics are taking place. It's some of it has to do with things that are taking in the public space outside. So is that, you know, a graffiti or a projection and of statements that would feel that would make some groups of students uncomfortable in this way or the other way. There's something that has to be said about me as an Israeli coming from a country where First Amendment is not something that we're familiar with. So they did the very extreme cases in which you can use the First Amendment to voice opinions that would shake and rattle. So it works both ways, right? You can use the First Amendment both to voice slogans of the Students for Justice for Palestine, but you can use the First Amendment to go with the Confederacy flag and so this is something that for me as an Israeli, is kind of a what's going on. There's a bit of a need still introduction to the culture, the American culture, to explain how invested they are in the First Amendment. That is something that is not from the culture and the country. I'm coming from, and I need to accept it and embrace it. So I think that there's a lot to be said about actually the good, so to speak, that came out in the few months. There is slogans about social justice have a place to to say that this it's not an abstract discussion in the classroom. There are like questions that need our urgent attention and and it highlighted me I know very important about whether the US can support Israel unquestionably any time, all the time, or whether there are places where you do need to raise black flag or red flag, whatever your metaphor is, and to question it, it also allowed places for a new type of solidarity. And within the Jewish community in America, you can see a very strong, almost intergenerational divide between an older generation that is very it's very difficult for them to digest any type of criticism of Israel and other a younger generation that are thinking about their Jewish identity, not as automatically supporting Israel, no matter what they they think about themselves in a different way. And I would like to emphasize, it's often from the same family. It's really an intergenerational divide, more than different sectors within the American Jewish community, actually, at least from from what I see. They said they were, of course, moments in which despite the good intentions of the protest, it did. You know, there were some slogans that were very discriminatory and problematic. There was also dynamics on the campus that that are could have been preventable. So, for instance, the demonstrations took place during times that students it was the last two weeks of the semester. So some students said we just want to, you know, study for our final exams, write our papers. And it was a bit of a dynamic, which is, of course, not surprising if you're talking about 19, 20 year olds, that, if you're not the encampment, you are actually implicitly supporting genocide in Gaza or and especially when subjected to Jewish student. There were some cases in which, you know, if you're not Jews supporting the encampment, you're actually supporting the Jewish supremacist, Ben-Gvir government that is that is doing horrible things in Gaza. And that was kind of a moment that should have been navigated more, more carefully and so on. There's also an important discussion that we need to have about the way in which higher education in this country relies heavily on philanthropy. And it works both ways. So it's important to to talk about, you know, the place in which universities in the US cannot not rely on philanthropy nowadays. And there were moments in which the debates about it could go and almost traffic a border old anti-Semitic tropes about the sinister, faceless pig capitalist that is controlling media and universities and businesses from behind the curtains, which is for me again, coming from Jewish history rings, you know, rubs me the wrong way. Maybe I can be accused of being oversensitive, but also because it echoes with very, very dark moments in Jewish history that this image of, you know, the Jewish power behind the scenes, that they are controlling and maneuvering in such a way. We've been there. We were familiar with that rhyme and tune and it's not a nice tune. And it ended up in very ugly places. So people are very careful to say about donor pressure. But often there are circles in which, you know, donor is standing in for the Jew. So we are living in a moment in which there are a lot of anti-Semitic tropes that are being trafficked. I wish I could have been in a place that I could say, yes, it's only the right wing white supremacists that are trafficking anti-Semitic tropes. I wish it. That would have been the case. That was the case when you know the Proud Boys in Charleston, they were marching with with and saying Jews would not replace it. It does go into ugly places today and we need to fight it. But it fight it is not by weaponizing antisemitism, as I feel that too many of Jewish organizations such as the ADL said that any type of pro-Palestinian protest, any type of student will encounter a colleague or a student peer with a coffee or a Palestinian flag that will be reported as an anti-Semitic incident. That's a very dangerous place to to start creating a statistics that creates an image that there was a spike of 300% of anti-Semitic cases in a university. And then you look at what exactly it's made of, it's most of it is pro-Palestinian activism that is not antisemitism. And that's there's a we still need to keep that line that differentiates between kosher criticism of Israeli policies and and support of Palestine, which is one thing and antisemitism. And and it's important for both sides to keep that red line and to allow us not only to converse, but also not to create a weaponization of antisemitism on the one hand, and also to make sure that the right cause of saving lives in Gaza, in the West Bank would not then be hijacked by very, very sinister. I, I think the student protests also what comes out what stands out for me is the fact that the genocide is not restricted to geography, a genocide that's taking place thousands of miles away from America and from the rest of the world is what is affecting all these countries in its own way. So in America, in the in the protests that took place in UT for instance, Texas in Austin, I remember watching the videos and people who were angry with the police here were speaking about Uvalde. The shootings there, I mean, and the reason being that I can understand that people over here would not have a contemporary experience with genocide, but they would connect with what is closest to them, which is atrocious in the country. And that is why they made this reference to school shootings. And in fact, in many conferences that I attend in America, whenever witnesses would rather people testify about being victims of genocide, being survivors, the first thing that American American audience does is to to school shootings. And that's for me, understandable, again, because although they are two very different forms of, you know, they can be differentiated on many accounts in terms of the violence and everything involved. What we do, which is human, is to connect to what we know and what we we have direct experience with. And that's the reason why school shootings are paralleled, constantly paralleled with, you know, what I was going on whenever we speak about genocide. So I think for me, yes, I think I have been reading about the fact that, you know, people over here, regard these students protests, the disturbances on campus as being a distraction from the larger matter, which is let's deal with the war there and try to do something active. Why are we getting distracted in our country here? But I think over and above that, as I said, it's a reflection of how we are all affected by any genocide that happens in any part of the world. And I think, you know, even if there are, again debates about how, you know, the Russia Ukraine war is being neglected now because the focus is on Israel and Palestine, the truth is that if you look deeper into documentaries covering both wars, you realize the parallels that exist even in just in terms of military strategies that are being deployed in these two different parts of the world and across the world where other genocides would take place. So I think we can't run away as an international community with the reality of how a genocide in any one place is going to affect absolutely every other place as well. And going to just now go down to a more sort of like a grassroots level and say sometimes when I have conversations over coffee with people who are absolutely not connected to the genocide in Israel, in Palestine, because of the nature of their professions. You know, they may be booksellers or or whatever it is. And you do hear about them getting into conflicts with their mothers and fathers and grandparents because we have a of opinion about whether one should be on the Israeli side or the Palestinian side. So I'm just saying that, you know, I find it important that we all get involved as an international community in what's going on in any other part of the world because it is affecting us without a doubt. Yeah, well said. And I always hope that we would be on the humanities side, right. So to to always think about it, there's pro-Israel or con. You know, pro-Palestine is, is a way that that we are locking ourself in a hyper nationalistic prison iron cages it's also invites to look at things in a binary black and white picture that would not allow the Israelis to understand, the problems that coming from within themselves. And I have no problem to go on record saying that the government, the Israeli government today is like is composed of several people that are like the Israeli jihadists, Jewish jihadists, that that are very dangerous extremists. And and I would love to see them behind bars. And if we're talking about pro-Palestine and then would not be willing to acknowledge when I crimes against humanity is appropriate, perpetrated by Hamas and just say that's inevitable, that's the price of freedom fighting that would justify anything we wont move on. And I think that the moving on there is also has to do not only with social justice, it also how do we envision the future? Right. And so in that space between, you know, River Jordan and the Mediterranean, there are millions of people living. They need to understand, you know, to think about a way to coexist in very close to the desert front in a time of global warming. People in Gaza, in Tel Aviv are both drinking their water from the same aquifer. They will have to find a way to share those natural resources. If we are going into the 21st century and beyond it, if we want if they want to survive in that area. So so just think about it through naturalistic terms would not move us forward, but it would only perpetuate this kind of antagonistic, conflictual framework. Thank you, Ari. I would love to. I, I probably need to end this, but I also have one one last question, because I think you've done something remarkable and admirable, which I would like to highlight in this podcast, if possible. And that is because regarding the publication of a paper called Word Crimes: Reclaiming the Language of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, this was in a journal in Israel Studies. And could you tell us more how you were involved in that and what the conflict was about? Yeah, I mean, it was affair or a controversy that took place a few years ago before October seven, and that and I was involved a journal called the Israel Studies that used to be kind of a the flag journal that is associated with the Association for Israel Studies. I'm my official position as a chair of Israel studies and so on. I was very much connected to that organization, an academic association that is there to promote an academic study of Israel, Israeli history, sociology, society, culture, you name it. And and it was specifically on that specific year. I was on the one hand, received a very positive news that I was awarded a prize from that association. But literally a couple of weeks after I received that very happy announcement, a special issue called Word Crimes came out. And the special issue was a very unconventional journal, you know, consisted of journal articles that the that each one of them decided focused on a specific term occupation, settler colonialism and apartheid. And these were, if you like, buzzwords or keywords that are often used by pro-Palestine activists or BDS activists. And it was clear the special issue was curated in a way that it will voice will provide the vocabulary and and the language to to debunk Pro-BDS statements. But it was not based on a very credible academic search. Sort of the articles would be written in a way that would only use one. You know, it's a set of scholars they're not acknowledging other set of scholars. It was not clear whether it went through a proper peer review. And and I was if we talked earlier about academic protocol, I was actually there. The one saying, yeah, we need to follow proper academic protocol. You cannot do this under the radar in such a way. And then hijacked and create in this a situation in which the Association of Israel Studies becomes this assertion to protect Israel from its critics. I should be association dedicated to an academic study of Israel that would promote education and research of the highest caliber. So if we want to, you know, practice what we preach, this cannot be done. And a and it led me to to withdraw both from the association and to say I would not accept the prize. So it created a mini controversy. And though I cannot take credit for everything in it, it was it involved burning not many bridges and sadly, some some colleagues there were very upset by by my move. It kind of led me to be honest, to a limbo state because it was a I don't feel at home at any big academic association nowadays. I am a big believer in 1 to 1 conversation, the one that we have today, or a very small workshop that are dedicated to a specific topic. These mass conferences, I increasingly become more and more alienated by them that I don't see them. They're doing the academic job that they should perform. But it was a moment of of, if you'd like, drawing the line the sand and saying, you know, if I'm an academic, I will keep these academic standards. I'm not personally a huge supporter of BDS, but it's a legitimate argument. So I'm not there to say that I will exclude and will those who are you know have different definitions or using other paradigms such as settler colonialism and say that they are not part of the conversation. You know, all we can do is voices, more and more voices not to extract them. So yeah, that was the background to that debate. I really appreciate that you speak about, including as many voices. It's possible because I think that's my largest project as well, is just recognizing the complexity of voices and the complexity of perspectives and everything, you know. So I think and in the end, we we can always, as academics, find ways to present arguments in a certain way and convince people. But I think we also can we can also adopt a certain approach of being as honest as we can, as it's possible. And I think there is this concept called multi partizanship. We don't speak about not being biased because we know we're all biased in a certain way, but speak about the idea of being multi partizan when we're approaching a subject and therefore to explore all the possible perspectives we can on it to give the closest overall view of it. Well said. I endorse this message. Thank you, Ari. Thank you so much for your time and I really enjoyed it. Thank you for your question and a fascinating conversation. This is not to forgive, but to understand with our guest R.E.M. Do enough to our listeners. Don't forget to, like, subscribe and stay tuned for more discussions. for me, sort of so much of Holocaust history is about testimonies of survivors. Do we really want, you know, can we really understand even the Holocaust by only recollecting the documents that the the the Nazis and their collaborators left behind them? It's it's it's it's a you can do a lot but not everything. So it was for me a moment in which I had to pause and think. This is not to forgive, but to understand. With your host, writer and scholar of genocide studies, Sabah Carrim. I am your co-host, Luis Gonzalez-Aponte. Not to forgive, but to Understand. Not to forgive, but to Understand. Joining us today is Ari Modupe Nof, a Jewish-Israeli historian and essayist living in the U.S. He serves as an associate professor of history and international affairs, holding the Max ticket and chair of Israel studies at George Washington University. Among his publications are The intellectual biography Isaiah Berlin The Journey of a Jewish Liberal. Tracing the genealogy of the idea of partition and the British interwar imperial context. And Amos Oz's two pens between literature and politics dedicated to the late Israeli novelist and public intellectual. Please enjoy our conversation. This is not to forgive, but to understand with our guest R.E.M. Do enough to our listeners. Don't forget to, like, subscribe and stay tuned for more discussions. Today we are joined by Omar Yousef Shehabi, assistant professor at New York University School of Law and Doctor of Juridical Science, candidate at Yale Law School with extensive experience in international law and human rights. He previously served as a legal officer with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. Joining us today is Ari Modupe Nof, a Jewish-Israeli historian and essayist living in the U.S. He serves as an associate professor of history and international affairs, holding the Max ticket and chair of Israel studies at George Washington University. Among his publications are The intellectual biography Isaiah Berlin The Journey of a Jewish Liberal. Tracing the genealogy of the idea of partition and the British interwar imperial context. And Amos Oz's two pens between literature and politics dedicated to the late Israeli novelist and public intellectual. Please enjoy our conversation. This is not to forgive, but to understand with our guest, Omar Yusef Shehabi To our listeners, don't forget to like subscribe and stay tuned for more discussions.