Rationalizing the Horrors of Israelās War in Gaza
The novelist Howard Jacobson has argued that too much press coverage of dead Palestinian children is a new form of āblood libelā against Jews.
spoiler
The novelist Howard Jacobson had already written a number of books, many of them about the British Jewish community, when he won the Booker Prize for āThe Finkler Question,ā in 2010, which the New York Timesā Janet Maslin called a āriotous morass of jokes and worries about Jewish identity.ā In a review in this magazine, James Wood was more critical than the consensus, writing that the novel was āalways shading toward the atavistic and reactionary,ā and adding, āJacobson has a weakness for breaking into one-line paragraphs, so as to nudge the punch line on us. The effect is bullying.ā Jacobson is also a prolific writer and commentator on current events, and on Judaism in the United Kingdom; heās spoken out against Brexit, and raised concerns about antisemitism in Jeremy Corbynās Labour Party. His most recent novel is called āWhat Will Survive Of Us.ā
Since Hamasās attack on October 7th, which killed approximately twelve hundred Israelis, Jacobson has been increasingly outspoken about antisemitism, and critical of those who question Israelās military campaign in Gaza, which has killed more than forty-two thousand people. Earlier this month, in a controversial piece published in the Observer, Jacobson wrote that the sustained media coverage of children being killed in Gaza was functioning as a new āblood libelā against the Jewish people. āSuch bias as I have describedāconscious or notāhas contributed not just to the anxiety level of Jews but to the atmosphere of hostility and fear in which they now live,ā Jacobson wrote. āThe litany of dead children corroborates all those stories of their insatiable lust for blood.ā
I recently spoke by phone with Jacobson. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed his views about Israeli military tactics, his concerns about how Jews are being treated in the U.K., and whether the coverage of dead children in Gaza is the result of antisemitism.
What is it that you have wanted to get across to readers since October 7th?
I was in such a confusion of fear and stress and upset and then rage. The fear and the upsetāand the heartbreakāwas the massacre itself. And then the speed of the response to the aftermath of the massacre was so hideous, so unexpected, such a kind of topsy-turvy version of what we normally expect a response to a catastrophe to be, that it just threw me into half confusion, half fury. What the hell was going on that people could turn like that on the people whoād been attacked? All those people who said, āNo, no, hang on, donāt talk about antisemitism. This is anti-Zionism.ā All that went as the people attacking Israel couldnāt remember if they were attacking Jews, Israelis, Zionists. I thought, The world that I live in is not the world I knew. Itās changed and I still feel that. Iām living in a world I donāt recognize and find it very hard to comprehend.
After October 7th, there was a rise in antisemitic incidents in many countries. But there was also strong support for Israel, including diplomatic and military support, from almost every powerful Western country.
It was ambiguous but certainly stronger even than what Iāve just suggested. And here was another extraordinary phenomenon: suddenly you could trust the government but you couldnāt trust the people. Governments were sound; people were flaky. Much of this irrationality was coming from institutions of higher education. That was the bewildering thing. And I suppose because Iām an academic at heart and was a lecturer for many years before I became a full-time writer, I looked to that.
After the war in Gaza started and there were all these civilian casualties, we saw Israel intentionally denying humanitarian aid to people who were starving. What should the response from people have been at that point?
Thatās not something I can say because I donāt know what my own response should have been. I trusted no one and I trusted no report. That doesnāt mean that I didnāt see some pictures on television. The BBC has been appalling. It just showed you pictures, unbearable pictures, heartbreaking pictures of dying babies every night, but any war would look appalling if you just showed the suffering of the women and children.
So, I thought, Who am I to believe here? I read a lot of people; I believed some, and I didnāt believe others. Itās turned out very badly and the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu is contemptible. I have no doubt about all that, but that didnāt mean that something didnāt need doing. There was no alternative to it. Israel had to try and get Hamas. I thought Netanyahuās belief that he could wipe out Hamas was stupid. So I felt that this war had to be prosecuted. If a war is prosecuted, it will be ugly.
I asked you about the specific intentional denial of humanitarian aid, and your answer was something like āWell, I donāt know what to believe anymore when I read the news, so I canāt really comment on that.ā Is that right?
Put quite like that it sounds as though what I said was stupid and ignorant. One got accounts and accounts and accounts and it was very hard to know what was the truth.
Well, just for example, the American government, which has been very supportive of Israel and has kept sending them weapons, has tacitly acknowledged that Israel intentionally denied humanitarian aid. Lots of humanitarian groups have said the same thing.
Well, if Israel was doing that, then what can one feel except that itās monstrous? Iāve said one has to balance these things. This thing has got to be done. Did it have to be done quite so cruelly? No. Did it have to be done so . . . See, Iām very worried about the indiscriminate and the disproportionate. Iāve got snagged up on the disproportionate argument and the indiscriminate argument. The disproportionate one I canāt buy because I donāt know how youād measure what you have to do after that massacre. We know we canāt measure life for life. I donāt buy the disproportionate. I donāt buy it.
So youāre saying the idea that twelve hundred Israelis were killed and now forty-two thousand Gazans have been killedāthat comparing the two in itself is not any sort of argument?
Well, all right, Isaac, whatās the figure youād choose?
I was just trying to clarify what you meant.
I donāt know how you do the mathematics of this, and Iām not going to say the āmathematics of revengeā because, while of course there was an element of revenge, and you wanted it not to be revenge, you didnāt want it to be a punishment either. I hated that wordāāpunishment.ā I think the justification for what Israel did was to try to make sure that this never happened again. And I think in the attempt to make sure that this never happened again, the numbers were going to inevitably have to be high. If youāre a terrorist, you do hide yourself in schools and hospitals. So if the Israelis are going to get you, theyāre going to have to attack those things.
If itās a war crime to hide in a hospital, itās also a war crime to indiscriminately bomb a hospital.
Well, youāve just used rhetoric. Indiscriminately. Well, whatās indiscrimination? If youāre trying to go after people who are hiding there, how do you get them if you have to be discriminant? What do you do?
You have to make a judgment about balancing civilian casualties with war.
Iād like to think that Israel has in the main done that.
Does how they have fought the war in the past year, let alone what members of the Israeli government think of Palestinians, make you think that theyāre trying to do that?
I would like to think Israel has done its best. Some people will laugh in my face, but I havenāt been convinced that they have been wildly indiscriminate. One or two people in Netanyahuās cabinet have said the most appalling things. And if they were just taken out right now, removed from government, I would be perfectly happy. The current Israeli administration has no imagination for what it might be to be a Palestinian, I feel that with a great passion. There has been cruelty in this government.
Your piece brings up the number of children being killed in Ukraine and the number of children being killed in Gaza. And you say that the news coverage of the two has been very disproportionate. Can you talk about that?
Yes. Itās interesting. Of all the pieces that Iāve done, this is the piece that seems to upset people most. Iāve thought about writing it for many months and didnāt, and then I thought, Well, no, Iām going to have to do it and just risk it. And it upsets people because the minute you talk about the death of children, not only every word, but every comma, is scrutinized.
Crazy how that works.
Well, I get it, and now think I should have trusted my own feeling at the beginning: donāt go there. But I wanted to record the experience as a Jew, and it was shared by many of my Jewish friends. Night after night after night after night, the BBC showed pictures of a beautiful Palestinian child alive one minute and dead the next. That is the most monstrous thing. We shed tears, we couldnāt bear to see it. Were some children targeted? If children were deliberately targeted, that is absolutely monstrous and indisputably a war crime. If some were targeted, I donāt know. But when a plane flies overhead, it doesnāt deliberately target the Jew. It cannotāthereās no such plane, and thereās no such pilot. And to turn the war into nothing other than the murder of children made me sick, made me not want to trust the news. I was happy to say, This is like watching Hamas propaganda. Look what the Jews do. Look what the Jews do. Ring the bell, folks. Jews kill children.
You compare this with Ukraine, and asked why there is more coverage of children in Gaza. About two thousand children in Ukraine have been injured or killed in two and a half years of war. This year, in Gaza, more than fifteen thousand children were killed.
How do we explain that?
Some Ukrainian children were able to leave many of the front-line areas. Gazans, including children, are not allowed to leave. And Israel has fought an incredibly intense war that has killed a ton of children because theyāre not trying to avoid civilian casualties as well as they should. Thatās how I would describe it.
And how careful do you think the Russians are to avoid civilian casualties?
I donāt think theyāre being careful. And in fact, a lot of Ukrainian children have been kidnapped and taken to Russia. But you were talking about the media. And way more children have been killed in Gaza. So that could explain some of the discrepancy.
Why should this be a matter of numbers? Iām not saying that the media should underestimate the number of Palestinian children killed. Itās a question of whether you choose to lead every story with children killed. Forty-five children were killed today. Thirty children were killed today. Fifteen children were killed today. It became an obsession. It became, and still is.
What should be the lead story on days when lots of children are killed?
Iām not talking about those days. This was every single night. Iām telling you I saw a dead baby every single night.
You couldnāt look at a child, pictures of a child being killed every single night without thinking this is making my people, my kin, out to be child murderers. Iāve got two options for you. I can believe itās true. O.K., itās true. Itās true. Thatās what we do. Thatās what the Israelis, not us, but the Israelis, do. But we feel a kinship with the Israelis. Thatās what they do. And so maybe there we are again. Maybe everything that they said about us in 1200 and 1300 was true. This is what the Jews doākill children. Iām not going to buy it. Iām not going to buy it.
Howard, I think maybe weāre in a bit of a worrisome place if you see photos of dead children on television and your first thought is, Theyāre trying to make me, a Jew, hate my people.
Youāve twisted what Iāve said. Thatās not my first thought. Thatās not my first thought.
Second thought?
And itās not my second thought. It all depends on how often you see them, and when you see them. You see them and you see them and thatās all you see, and then you feel, Is this what the war means to the media? This is what they want to stress again and again and again?
I am not saying that if all those children were being killed that we should not know about it. But itās perfectly possible now for people to call Jews in the streets of London child-killers. Child-killers. Exactly as we wouldāve heard seven hundred bloody years ago.
In April, you wrote, āNetanyahu is enough to try the patience of the West whose leaders have little appetite for sticking to a mission. There is a flaw in our natures that leads to our growing bored with even the noblest causes, let alone those grown stale in their own complacency.ā Did you mean the mission to defeat Hamas?
Yeah. I canāt remember. Thatās a long time ago. But certainly my feeling, I think itās fairly well agreed that often the pressure has been brought on Israel to stop it now.
You yourself said they werenāt going to completely defeat Hamas. But I want to bring this back to what you said about the streets of London. One of the things that has been so disturbing about antisemitism, especially after October 7th, is American Jews or British Jews being blamed for what the Israeli government is doing. I agree this is disgusting, but it seems that this has somehow led a lot of American and British Jews, like yourself, to support whatever the Israeli government is doing.
I take your argument. But itās a bit of a quagmire when you say, āWell, donāt confuse us with the Israelis. Weāve got nothing to do with that.ā Because the next stage of that is: all the terrible things that you say about Israel are allowed to be true.
I castigate myself all the time. I know lots of Jews who castigate. I wake up and I think a hopeless war is over. I want it to stop. And then I castigate myself because I think thatās weak. And then I wake feeling quite different, and I want the war to be pursued. I castigate myself for feeling bloodthirsty. I castigate myself for feeling apologetic and I castigate myself for feeling bloodthirsty. Look, the war isnāt about me and the war isnāt about my nature.
Who the hell knows whatās the right thing to do? Why canāt we admit that? We just donāt know. Thatās not a carte blanche for the Israelis. If war crimes have been committed, then let them be tried when itās all clear. But at the moment, in the fog of warā
The fog of war is a year later. I hear what youāre saying about how tortured you are by all this, and you donāt know what is to be doneā
No, no. Iām not tortured. Iām not tortured. Iām not tortured. The people who are tortured are the Jews who were tortured and the poor Palestinians. Iām just a Jew living in a safe space at the moment, watching it all, wishing it wasnāt happening. But trying to distinguish what might be true from whatās not true and listening, from where I live, to the helicopters going overhead and people marching through the streets, shouting gibberish and accusing Jews of being genocidal and apartheid and child-killers and the rest of it, and getting very angry. Feeling unsafe. Feeling sorry for Jews. You get that?
Yeah, of course. I guess my fear is that your anger about antisemitism in Britain is leading you to a place where basically nothing the Israeli government can do will be seen as too far. And you may say you feel torn about it, but fundamentally you are going to support this Israeli government whatever it does.
No, I wonāt. No, no, no. Thereās no āwhatever it does.ā I donāt know what theyāre going to do tomorrow. And Iām not prepared to say I support it.
But fundamentally you think this war should be supported and that the West should continue giving Israel weapons. Is that accurate?
I think the West should continue to give them weapons because I think they are an island surrounded by enemies. Theyāve got a lot of fights on their head. But just to be clear: I do not support anything that they might do. I do not support everything that they have done. But I get why they have to do it. I get why they have to do it.
What are things you donāt support but that you think that they have to do?
Well, I didnāt support the whole notion from the start of going in and wiping Hamas out. That looks a bit pitiless, but how do you show pity? This is the problem. How do you show pity when you have to remove an enemy that wants you dead?
I think you should show pity to civilians.
Well, of course you do. And if thereās any suggestion that they are, if you are telling me that you know for sure that the Israelis are going out there and theyāre picking off civilians for the fun of picking off civilians, I agree with you. Thatās unforgivable if thatās what theyāre doing.
They intentionally denied humanitarian aid to people who didnāt have food. We can start there. If we know for sure thatās what they did, then, A, thatās cruel. And, B, thatās stupid.
I would tell you itās been all over the news, but I feel like youāre not going to trust me when I say that.
Well, I donāt trust. I know, I know. That sounds as though Iāve just turned myself into somebody that puts his head in the sand. I am unwilling on all sides, actually, to trust anybody at the moment. This is what I support: I support the Israeli governmentās attempt to wipe out Hamas, to kill them all, to get rid of them all. I support that.
Despite thinking itās unrealistic?
Despite thinking itās unrealistic, I want them to do the best they can. I remember Amos Oz saying about a previous war, What do you do if the people you are trying to get to because they are trying to kill you are holding up a child in one hand and shooting at you with another? You go wrong is what you do. You go a little bit too far is what you do. You are forced into cruelties is what you are. Yeah.
I appreciate you taking the time to talk.
I donāt know how this is going to come out, but my fear is somehow or other Iām beginning to sound hysterical or overexcited or extreme. I think that I have been so thrown by the topsy-turvyness of peopleās response to the massacre. When people denied that children were killed and women wereremovedd. That was denied. I think the attitude towards that has made me a different kind of person. ā¦
The interviewerā¦
forty-two thousand Gazans have been killed
Israel really created an insanely false narrative with that absurdly wrong and absurdly low number. In July - The Lancet estimated the death toll to be 186,000 or more.
Those seeds were sown when the whole āHamas run health ministryā started preceeding any death toll to make it out like they were overestimations. The death counts have been very conservative and only counts the people actively killed by the IDF that were able to be identified. Not the people dying from starvation or the thousands buried under rubble.
Not the people dying from starvation or the thousands buried under rubble.
And disease and illness andā¦
For many reasons Jacobson kept saying he doesnāt trust the media. One reason is the reality of the genocide is right there for anybody to see if theyāre willing to use their critical thinking skills just a little bit.
Chat, is focusing on the victim creating an unhealthy stereotype of the genocider?
Germany should get its own version of Come and See where the only shots in Belarus are of German soldiers crying because theyāre away from home for so long. Showing dead bodies everywhere for no reason makes them seem like the bad guys. Itās very subjective and takes the side of the children theyāre burning alive.
Thereās going to be some post-genocide shoot-and-cry prestige tv shit on future Netflix, isnāt there?
Itāll be the rest of humanityās job to ensure it is flooded out with media of the other side- showing the barbarism of the imperialist west and of their Zionist proxies, then. I have hopeā¦ if humanity cannot break and remain free of the the imperialist narrative then we truly are doomed
A good way to get people to stop reporting on how many Palestinian children are being murdered is to stop murdering Palestinian children.
Well, just for example, the American government, which has been very supportive of Israel and has kept sending them weapons, has tacitly acknowledged that Israel intentionally denied humanitarian aid. Lots of humanitarian groups have said the same thing.
Well, if Israel was doing that, then what can one feel except that itās monstrous? Iāve said one has to balance these things. This thing has got to be done. Did it have to be done quite so cruelly? No. Did it have to be done so . . . See, Iām very worried about the indiscriminate and the disproportionate. Iāve got snagged up on the disproportionate argument and the indiscriminate argument. The disproportionate one I canāt buy because I donāt know how youād measure what you have to do after that massacre. We know we canāt measure life for life. I donāt buy the disproportionate. I donāt buy it.
We know we canāt measure life for life.
Oh? Whyās that, pimp?
holy fuck this interview is great lol. just asking the most basic fucking questions sends this guy into weird ass loops. truly someone with only the memory of being anchored to a moral center.
The New Yorker also discusses this book on their front page today:
Do They Really Believe That Stuff?
According to a new book, Americaās political derangement has psychological roots.
In which the author of Good Reasonable People: The Psychology Behind Americaās Dangerous Divide realizes that distrusting Tara Reade came about via a thought process exactly like his brotherās Trump support after the 2020 election. But donāt worry, folks! It turns out that living with that kind of distortion is āthe price weāll have to pay to live with each other.ā
if the economist is the journal which speaks for british millionaires, the new yorker is the journal which speaks for park slope sorkinites
Well, youāve just used rhetoric.
Why should this be a matter of numbers? Iām not saying that the media should underestimate the number of Palestinian children killed. Itās a question of whether you choose to lead every story with children killed. Forty-five children were killed today. Thirty children were killed today. Fifteen children were killed today. It became an obsession. It became, and still is.
What should be the lead story on days when lots of children are killed?
Iām not talking about those days. This was every single night. Iām telling you I saw a dead baby every single night.
Huh, wonder how many children die per night if 15000 die in a year. What is the lower limit of dead Palestinian children where it becomes acceptable to report on it?
Itās a question of whether you choose to lead every story with children killed.
A pathetic excuse of a man. Just Reading the first halfā¦ Heās utterly incapable of material thought.
Oh you canāt measure life for life? So if Hamas comes and kills 500,000 Israelis that would be understandable right? They have to get Bibi who you yourself described as terrible. So no hard feelings? Oh that doesnāt work for some reason??? Weird.
Vile and disgusting.
Jacobson is also a prolific writer and commentator on current events, and on Judaism in the United Kingdom; heās spoken out against Brexit, and raised concerns about antisemitism in Jeremy Corbynās Labour Party.
Into the trash it goes
E:
I asked you about the specific intentional denial of humanitarian aid, and your answer was something like āWell, I donāt know what to believe anymore when I read the news, so I canāt really comment on that.ā Is that right?
Put quite like that it sounds as though what I said was stupid and ignorant.
Yes, it does sound like that, doesnāt it
Your piece brings up the number of children being killed in Ukraine and the number of children being killed in Gaza. And you say that the news coverage of the two has been very disproportionate. Can you talk about that?
Yes. Itās interesting. Of all the pieces that Iāve done, this is the piece that seems to upset people most. Iāve thought about writing it for many months and didnāt, and then I thought, Well, no, Iām going to have to do it and just risk it. And it upsets people because the minute you talk about the death of children, not only every word, but every comma, is scrutinized.
Crazy how that works.
Thank u comrade journalist, now stab him in the spleen
What should be the lead story on days when lots of children are killed?
Iām not talking about those days. This was every single night. Iām telling you I saw a dead baby every single night. You couldnāt look at a child, pictures of a child being killed every single night without thinking this is making my people, my kin, out to be child murderers. Iāve got two options for you. I can believe itās true. O.K., itās true. Itās true. Thatās what we do. Thatās what the Israelis, not us, but the Israelis, do. But we feel a kinship with the Israelis. Thatās what they do. And so maybe there we are again. Maybe everything that they said about us in 1200 and 1300 was true. This is what the Jews doākill children. Iām not going to buy it. Iām not going to buy it.
Howard, I think maybe weāre in a bit of a worrisome place if you see photos of dead children on television and your first thought is, Theyāre trying to make me, a Jew, hate my people.
Youāve twisted what Iāve said. Thatās not my first thought. Thatās not my first thought.
Get in the
Yeah, of course. I guess my fear is that your anger about antisemitism in Britain is leading you to a place where basically nothing the Israeli government can do will be seen as too far. And you may say you feel torn about it, but fundamentally you are going to support this Israeli government whatever it does.
No, I wonāt. No, no, no. Thereās no āwhatever it does.ā I donāt know what theyāre going to do tomorrow. And Iām not prepared to say I support it.
But fundamentally you think this war should be supported and that the West should continue giving Israel weapons. Is that accurate?
I think the West should continue to give them weapons because I think they are an island surrounded by enemies. Theyāve got a lot of fights on their head. But just to be clear: I do not support anything that they might do. I do not support everything that they have done. But I get why they have to do it. I get why they have to do it.
Cognitive dissonance sure makes you feel topsy-turvy!
I hope thereās a special place in hell for people trying to explain away genocide with āifā, the legal process, and the fucking fog of war.
Who the hell knows whatās the right thing to do? Why canāt we admit that? We just donāt know. Thatās not a carte blanche for the Israelis. If war crimes have been committed, then let them be tried when itās all clear. But at the moment, in the fog of warā
Listen to this fucking whiner. Iād bet money that eventually Jacobson says he was ābetrayedā by Israel but heāll always insist that anti-Zionism is always antisemitism. Israel is part of his identity.
I castigate myself all the time. I know lots of Jews who castigate. I wake up and I think a hopeless war is over. I want it to stop. And then I castigate myself because I think thatās weak. And then I wake feeling quite different, and I want the war to be pursued. I castigate myself for feeling bloodthirsty. I castigate myself for feeling apologetic and I castigate myself for feeling bloodthirsty. Look, the war isnāt about me and the war isnāt about my nature.
The fog of war is a year later. I hear what youāre saying about how tortured you are by all this, and you donāt know what is to be doneā
No, no. Iām not tortured. Iām not tortured. Iām not tortured. The people who are tortured are the Jews who were tortured and the poor Palestinians. Iām just a Jew living in a safe space at the moment, watching it all, wishing it wasnāt happening. But trying to distinguish what might be true from whatās not true and listening, from where I live, to the helicopters going overhead and people marching through the streets, shouting gibberish and accusing Jews of being genocidal and apartheid and child-killers and the rest of it, and getting very angry. Feeling unsafe. Feeling sorry for Jews. You get that?
[ā¦]
I am unwilling on all sides, actually, to trust anybody at the moment. This is what I support: I support the Israeli governmentās attempt to wipe out Hamas, to kill them all, to get rid of them all. I support that.
Despite thinking itās unrealistic?
Despite thinking itās unrealistic, I want them to do the best they can. I remember Amos Oz saying about a previous war, What do you do if the people you are trying to get to because they are trying to kill you are holding up a child in one hand and shooting at you with another? You go wrong is what you do. You go a little bit too far is what you do. You are forced into cruelties is what you are. Yeah.
You are forced into cruelties is what you are
āWe will never forgive them for making us kill their childrenā
-Zionist girlboss
Chotiner is either a genius or densest motherfucker on earth
A Socrates for our time
Jacobson has a weakness for breaking into one-line paragraphs, so as to nudge the punch line on us. The effect is bullying
oh shit, I do that with my punchlines a lot, am I a hack?
this sucks
I think I got the interview formatting right. It all jumbles together when copypasted. The antizionist interviewerās lines are marked with >. This is a pretty unhinged interview.