ews have long been accustomed to being history’s double victims. We are victims of its most murderous currents and the victims of subsequent attempts to revise, play down or even outright deny these episodes of bloodshed, usually emanating from the perpetrators themselves or their fellow travelers.
The most glaring example of this trend is Holocaust denial. And the one thing we have learned from dealing with the deniers is that they are impervious to fact and reason. They engage in denial because their hatred of Jews predisposes them to conspiracy theories about Jewish power and Jewish dishonesty. You can patiently explain the milestones of the Nazi genocide—the anti-Jewish legislation of the 1930s, the Wannsee Conference convened by the Nazis in 1942, the shift in the method of killing from extermination by gunfire to industrialized slaughter in gas chambers and the obsessive antisemitic ideology underlying all this—but you’d be wasting your breath on these people.
There are other examples outside of the Holocaust. In the Arab and Islamic worlds, where antisemitism ironically runs rampant, the myth that Jewish communities lived in peaceful harmony with their Muslim neighbors until the Zionists began “colonizing Palestine” prevails. Among Communist apologists—sadly, a growing trend today, more than 30 years after the Cold War ended—the Soviet wartime dictator Josef Stalin is seen as a symbol of anti-fascism, whose postwar antisemitic campaign, reminiscent of the excesses of Russia’s imperial czars, is portrayed in these circles as a willful “Zionist” attack on his reputation.
The Hamas-led pogrom in Israel on Oct. 7, has not been spared from these efforts. But while the methods are much the same as the examples I cited—especially by taking small nuggets of fact and turning them into full-blown conspiracy theories—the context is different. Technology now provides a platform for anyone to declare himself or herself a “historian” or a “journalist,” and to purvey lies by turns monstrous and ridiculous using those professions as a cover. The Wall Street Journal’s Gerard Baker put it best in a recent opinion piece analyzing the spread of antisemitic tropes on the nationalist right: “Our culture is dominated by people with epic levels of historical, economic and scientific ignorance.”
When it comes to the Oct. 7 atrocities, there have been similarly epic levels of social media posts denying the gang rapes, mutilations and mass slaughter that took place on that dark day. One popular theme spread by organizations like “Code Pink,” a pro-Russian advocacy group based in the United States that masquerades as a peace movement, and online publications like the Grayzone, which functions as an outlet for Russian and Iranian propaganda, is that Israel itself was responsible for the vast majority of civilian deaths, rather than the Hamas terrorists and the thousands of ordinary Palestinians who joined them for the onslaught.
The underlying claim here is that the so-called “Hannibal Directive”—an Israeli military protocol introduced in 1986 to prevent the capture of Israel Defense Forces personnel by terrorist groups, which was abandoned by the military’s top brass in 2016—was operational during the assault. “The Hannibal Directive,” noted the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an independent organization that monitors political and religious extremism around the world, “has been central to false claims that Israeli security forces killed as many or more civilians than Hamas, and in downplaying well-documented war crimes against civilians.”
Last week, a report prepared for the British parliament on the Oct. 7 pogrom entered this melee. Written by Lord Andrew Roberts, the eminent historian whose output includes magisterial biographies of Napoleon Bonaparte and Winston Churchill, the harrowing report is the most comprehensive account of the Hamas land invasion issued so far. It painstakingly documents the unfolding of the slaughter across more than 40 distinct locations. It spares no details, and so we learn, inter alia, how 3-year-old Abigail Idan, daughter of the murdered Ynet journalist Roee Idan, “crawled out from under her father’s body and took refuge at a neighbor’s house.” Or how Bar Kislev, a resident of Kibbutz Kfar Aza, watched from hiding as a squad of killers, some as young as 14, broke into apartment after apartment screaming “Kill the Jews!”, pausing for snacks and cigarettes along the way. Or how the body of Itai Hadar, a 28-year-old attending the Psyduck festival (a smaller psychedelic trance music party that took place at the same time as the better-known Nova festival a few kilometers away), was booby-trapped with grenades after his murder. Indeed, the 381 pages of the report are replete with stories like these, all of them forensically accounted for.
Yet, as Roberts explains in his foreword to the report, its purpose was not simply to provide a comprehensive record of what happened. “Holocaust denial took a few years to take root in pockets of society, but on 7 October 2023 it took only hours for people to claim that the massacres in southern Israel had not taken place,” he wrote. The report, therefore, was prepared “to counter such pernicious views and to lay down incontrovertible proof—for now, and for the years to come—that nearly 1,200 innocent people were indeed murdered by Hamas and its allies, and very often in scenes of sadistic barbarism not seen in world history since the [Imperial Japanese Army’s] Rape of Nanjing in 1937.”
In the days since the report was released, Roberts’ social media accounts have been inundated with abuse from Oct. 7 deniers. “This is the kind of thing we’re up against, and why people should read the Report and decide for themselves if it’s ‘Zionist propaganda,’ or detailed, fully footnoted and irrefutable proof of the atrocities from multifarious impeccable sources,” he posted in response to one such missive. I don’t believe that Roberts seriously thinks that his report will change the minds of those in thrall to the denial agenda. The abiding value of his work is that, when it comes to the detail and quality of his research, it offers an impressive counterweight for undecided readers who will encounter the deniers as they seek the truth.
Even so, given the epistemic crisis that envelopes public discourse these days, we would be naïve to expect that everyone will be persuaded of the truth. Like the struggle against antisemitism, the struggle against denialism has no end in sight.
{Reposted from JNS}
