What the Media Misses

Part 1: The historians.

Yesterday, a friend in Israel sent me a New York Times column by opinion writer Pamela Paul, titled, “Historians’ vote to condemn Israel’s ‘scholasticide’ is counterproductive.” Why couldn’t the historians just pretend to be balanced, she complained. I was prepared to mentally write it off, but then the column appeared on the opinion page of the Seattle Times today.

Paul writes about the recent American Historical Association conference in New York, where rather than dealing with the problem of Americans not really knowing or caring about history, or the anemic rate of college students majoring in history (1.2 percent), attendees instead issued a referendum on Israel’s “scholasticide” — the intentional destruction of Gaza’s educational system. An event that, according to Paul, normally attracts around 50 people, saw hundreds of people drop in from the rafters to vote 428-88 to pass the vote.

Paul is right: the vote is counterproductive. But why? In a neatly laid-out argument, Paul sets aside the moral value and thoughtfully outlines the challenges of academic associations engaging in political work. To close, she meekly posits, “I would argue that while historians should be free to take part in public affairs on their own, it would be better if the AHA as an institution never weighed in on political conflicts.”

Uh, yeah. That ship has sailed, and it’s halfway down the Styx by now.

A stronger argument is that the education system in Gaza was already irreversibly corrupted by indoctrination. While my child’s kindergarten end-of-year-play was about the animals of the rain forest convincing a logger to spare their tree, kindergarten plays recorded in schools in Gaza show 6 year olds acting out attacks on Jews. Myriad reports of materials in Gaza and PA schools demonstrate a denial of Jewish history and calls to violence, not to mention Islamic supremacy. Primary sources abound. For some reason, no one seems very interested in them.

The problem is not that academic associations should be church-and-state with regards to politics. It’s that the smartest people among us have been ideologically captured by propaganda adroitly disguising itself as the highest intellectual pursuit.

Historians are making a mockery of themselves by committing to a political position about a made-up word applied to a region that long ago abandoned any sort of educational vision, in the sense that education leads to strong economies and prosperous societies. The education system in Gaza, it could be argued, is the whole reason they’re in this mess. Hamas and its benefactors in Iran and Qatar are entirely responsible for this catastrophe.

But it’s hard to make this argument. It doesn’t square with our understanding of reality, in which everyone wants the same thing: peace, a job, love, a little corner of time and space to call their own.

Take this video, produced by the New York Times, that came out around the time of the 2021 Gaza conflict.

Unlike the videos where children chant for war and to trample the heads of Jews and to destroy son-of-a-Jewish-mother Benjamin Netanyahu (click on the links above), these children share what they want to be when they grow up with heart-wrenching, wide-eyed dreaminess. A doctor, says a toddler. A YouTuber, says a cute, chubby-cheeked boy.

Between the delicate pings of the emotional piano soundtrack interrupted by images of rockets (launching from buildings in Gaza, but nevermind) and the sounds of popping of machine gun fire, toothy, olive-skin children smile and look up at the sky and share their dreams: “freedom,” to “go back home,” to end the war. It’s easy to miss that these aspirations imply acceptance of Hamas’s grip on the beachfront territory. Freedom and going back home don’t apply to their current reality. Freedom and going back home apply to the goals of Hamas: to eliminate Israel and to return to Jerusalem, a place none of these children have been and are not from.

Writers and creatives and scholars of the humanities tend to be emotional types. We seek out humanity, shared narratives, places of intersection and hope. Everything is poetry. It makes it very hard to read between the lines or even to entertain a narrative that doesn’t match your own vision of shared values. Imagine all the people living life in peace.

The ideological capture taking place in academic associations and departments is a larger story that involves bad actors and obscure theories that have jumped from the ivory tower into the public.

But the media has a hard time understanding this. We can’t possibly blame the suffering of these children on their schools, much less their parents, even if their teachers and parents have come forward and said as much. We can’t imagine that the keepers of history at our sacred institutions could be…wrong.

Paul shies away from addressing the bigger issue, preferring to give the moral benefit of the doubt to the so-called scholars and to pursue a more neutral line of reasoning:

Clearly there was a real consensus among professional historians, a group that has become considerably more diverse in recent years, or at least among those members who were present. One could read it as a sign of the field’s dynamism that historians are actively engaged in world affairs rather than quietly graying over dusty archives, or it may have been the result, as opponents suggested, of a well-organized campaign. (Emphasis added)

Sadly, she and many others with media platforms end up holding back the truth: these starry-eyed children really could be productive members of a flourishing society, if only their own systems would stop putting them on the front lines.

Community Announcements

Check out the Seattle Jewish community calendar.

Candlelighting in Seattle is at 4:20 p.m. The parasha is Vayechi.

Cholent subscriber and fellow Substacker Broadway Maven David Benkof will be coming to Seattle from Jerusalem to present “Barbara Streisand’s Musicals” at Limmud Seattle Sunday, February 16th.