Seth Mandel: Why Israel’s Critics Keep Changing the Rules
Compared to Israel’s November operation at Shifa, this one has attracted far less press attention (aside from the usual perfunctory stenographic work mainstream newspapers in America do for Hamas). One reason for this is that in November, Israel had to spend time searching the hospital after securing it and committing to the slow process of finding and neutralizing the tunnels. This meant the world spent weeks criticizing Israel before informed criticism was even possible, and then moved the goalposts every time Israel revealed a Hamas war crime in the hospital complex. It was a round of Calvinball. By the time the scope of Hamas’s use of the complex was made clear, the press had moved on.The Accused
This time, the press had no excuses even before the operation. Everyone already knows how Hamas turned a large hospital into a war zone. As well, the presence of senior Hamas military commanders makes even the attempt to spin this is an Israeli overreaction look ridiculous. Hamas has been caught in the act, which should theoretically be a headline-dominating story for days. There should be a tidal wave of condemnations from foreign ministries around the world and apologies from medical NGOs and media organizations for having—wittingly or unwittingly—aided a terrorist army’s unprecedented assault on international law and coopting journalists and doctors into undermining the safety and credibility of their peers in other conflict zones.
Ah, but that wouldn’t be Calvinball. The rules adjust, and Israel must adjust with them—and as soon as it does, the rules will change again.
“Israel’s opponents are erasing a remarkable, historic new standard Israel has set,” writes John Spencer, perhaps the leading expert in the field at the moment.
But of course they are; if there is no potential for a Hamas victory, even a public-relations one, there is no story. Israel’s critics should be overjoyed at the blueprint Jerusalem is providing for new and creative ways to protect civilians in urban warfare. But to Israel’s critics, international law isn’t stagnant; those were the laws of war in the last round of Calvinball. And hey, why is Israel’s army always fighting the last war, anyway?
Hannah Arendt once called the Dreyfus affair a “dress rehearsal for the Holocaust.” For more than a decade, the saga of a Jewish military officer wrongfully convicted of treason riled turn-of-the-century France and foreshadowed the European horrors to come. Yet there has been a curious tendency by some historians to remove both Dreyfus and his Jewishness from the center of the story. In his authoritative new book, Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair, the historian Maurice Samuels rectifies this error, while challenging long-standing myths.Holocaust Re-Revisionism
As Paul Johnson pointed out in his magisterial History of the Jews, the Dreyfus affair brought a “decisive end to an epoch of illusion in which assimilated western Jews had optimistically assumed that the process of their acceptance in European society was well under way and would shortly be completed.” It upended Jewish life, leading Jews as far away as the United States to ponder whether they would ever be truly accepted in the lands in which they were a tiny minority. It gave a shot in the arm to political Zionism and eventually mobilized much of the French left against anti-Semitism. And it led to years of political upheaval, toppling French governments and revealing divisions that, as Samuels notes, are still evident today.
Born in the Alsatian town of Mulhouse in 1859, Dreyfus grew up in an upper-class Jewish family. Alfred’s father, Raphael, made his fortune in the mill industry and was able to provide a comfortable life.
The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 shattered the family’s serene existence. The forces of Prussian minister Otto Von Bismarck defeated Napoleon III and France. A new nation, Imperial Germany, was declared at Versailles. And the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine were annexed by Germany. This amputation was a severe blow to the French psyche, which mourned the loss for the next half-century. It also made quite the impression on young Alfred, who watched enraged as Prussian troops entered Mulhouse. It spurred his desire for a career in the military.
At the time, it was not unusual for a French Jew of Dreyfus’s social and economic background to pursue such a calling. Indeed, as scholars such as Derek Penslar have highlighted, in the 19th century the armed forces of many European nations opened their ranks to Jewish officers. This was certainly true in France, which had played a historic role in emancipating Jews after the French Revolution. An ardent patriot, Dreyfus wanted to serve.
“The Dreyfus family,” Samuels notes, “had embraced French culture because it was socially advantageous, but they also felt a great loyalty to France for having been the first country to emancipate the Jews.”
What more can there possibly be to say about the Holocaust? Plenty, as Dan Stone demonstrates in The Holocaust: An Unfinished History, his sobering and meticulous exploration of aspects of the Shoah that have remained, until now, under-analyzed. And these aspects of the Holocaust are especially salient today, as the Nazis’ carefully orchestrated murderous program has been adopted and adapted by Hamas and other jihadist groups and abetted by their fellow travelers in the West.
“There are still major parts of the history of the Holocaust that have not been understood in the prevailing narrative,” writes Stone, a historian at the University of London and the director of the Holocaust Research Institute. These include a comprehensive genocidal ideology originating with and propagated by, but transcending, the Nazis themselves; the “ubiquity” of collaboration throughout Europe and North Africa; and the extraordinary nature of the trauma suffered by the survivors and the slaughtered alike.
The conspiracy that fed the genocidal instincts of the Nazis and their collaborators began and ended with Nazi race “science.” Stone writes, “To understand the drive for Lebensraum, the creation of a German empire in Europe in which the racial community could thrive, one has to grasp the overriding significance of race for the Nazis.” Invoking the historian Eric Voegelin, Stone contends that the fuzzy, mystical notion of race unified German philosophy, politics, and culture.
Specious as this racial theory was—even “pseudoscience” doesn’t do it justice—it galvanized both Nazi elites and everyday Germans young and old. “It is plain to all who are willing to see,” said Nazi culture minister Karl Weber in the mid-1930s, “that this philosophy involves a call to the younger generation to heroic living, for this reality of race is something which claims them, gives them a standard and orientates their whole life.” Jews became, simultaneously, subhumans who were unworthy of polluting the German gene pool and a collective global superpower that threatened German geopolitical interests.
This nascent worldview reached its first apotheosis on November 9, 1938, when the Kristallnacht pogrom erupted across greater Germany. Some 177 synagogues were burned down, 8,000 Jewish businesses were destroyed, 100 Jews were murdered, and 30,000 others were hauled off to proto-concentration camps in Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen. The attack, Stone reckons, evinced “an alarming degree of consensus and cooperation among local inhabitants” and signified a key turning point for what the Nazi race ideology endorsed—and what it could get away with.
The entire Nazi war machine, police and Wehrmacht included, began to dedicate itself to the mission of eradicating global Jewry. Stone’s research gives the lie to historical analyses that blamed only the SS and exonerated the regular German army. Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau, in his “Orders for Conduct in the East,” instructed the Wehrmacht in no uncertain terms to “liberate the German people once and for all from the Asiatic-Jewish danger.” That the SS’s focus on killing Jews was more single-minded than that of other military organs does little to excuse the latter.