Israeli TV News Sanitizes the Bombing of Gaza. Plus, a Plagiarism Fight Gets Political
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They do see the destruction, but they don't see the human cost. The result is that Israel is very much still on October 7th. For the last three months, Israelis have seen on TV a version of the bombardment of Gaza without the victims.

From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Loewinger. As the war drags on, the debates swirling around it morph into fights about all kinds of things, including plagiarism. Bill Ackman said, this plagiarism, this is like Oppenheimer inventing the atomic bomb. This is going to change the world forever. And it's just like, what? You know, just because your wife was accused of plagiarism.

Plus, the tug of war over the memory of the Holocaust. And who gets to decide what's okay to say? The only way to make good on the promise of never again is to constantly be checking whether we are actually falling into darkness. It's all coming up after this.

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I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. And our new podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. We're both journalists whom we light as poker players, and that's the lens we're going to use to approach this entire show. We're going to be discussing everything from high-stakes poker to personal questions. Like whether I should call a plumber or fix my shower myself. And of course, we'll be talking about the election, too. Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.

From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Loewinger. As of earlier this week, Israel's bombardment of Gaza has entered its fourth month. Israel is still pounding Gaza. The UN now deeming it, quote,

Israel is facing new questions about an airstrike near the city of Han Yunis that killed two journalists. Palestinian health officials say Israeli's offensive has killed nearly 23,000 people. Nightmarish images of destruction in Gaza have filled the news and social media feeds for months.

But within Israel, the mainstream media tells a very different story. Oren Persico is a staff writer at The Seventh Eye, an independent investigative magazine focused on media and freedom of speech in Israel. Ever since the war started, there's been a huge spike in ratings and TV and

Radio, it's like two, maybe three times the amount it was before, mostly on Channel 12. That's the major commercial TV channel in Israel. You also have Channel 14, which is a right-wing pro-Netanyahu propaganda machine, which became the second most popular TV channel in Israel even before the war.

You'll have Ynet, the digital arm of Yediot Ahonot, a very big media corporation in Israel. You have Israel AYOM, which is a free newspaper company

Haaretz, which is maybe more well-known outside Israel than it is read inside Israel. Yeah, people always point to it and sort of see it as a beacon of liberal thought in Israel, but you're saying it doesn't have that much traction among Israeli readers. No, that's right. It's because the left in Israel is small and getting smaller all the time.

There was a piece in The Guardian from last weekend that reported that nearly half of Israelis get their news from TV channels and that TV in particular has been hugely influential in shaping Israeli opinion after October 7th. During the first day, October 7th and probably October 8th and 9th, Israeli television really filled in a void that the Israel state left open.

A lot of the Israel establishment, of course, the military, but also the health, social welfare, the first aid, it really didn't know how to respond. Israeli television really did outstanding work in the first few days. You could really hear live on air people saying,

asking for help from their shelter, saying, we can hear Hamas, jihad terrorists outside, they're shooting. Israeli TV showed that to the public and later helped those people get in contact with their families and loved ones. Ever since, it became a very important factor in shaping the reality in Israel. It sounds like TV journalists really rose to the occasion today

Since then, though, I wonder how strong their reporting has been. Former National Security Advisor Eyal Hulata has described, quote, a dome of disconnection with Israelis increasingly feeling isolated from a world that they feel doesn't understand their pain and their fear of Hamas. Yes, I think that's very true. The main two roles of TV journalism in Israel after October 7th

was one to lift the morale of the army, lift the morale of the Israeli public, and the second is to not show anything damaging that's happening in Gaza because of the Israeli bombardment and invasion. The logic here is that if you show civilians in Gaza getting hurt,

then a lot of people in Israel will start questioning the legitimacy of the IDF attacks in Gaza. The result is that Israel is very much still on October 7th.

And I don't doubt that it would take any nation a long time to heal. I'm surprised, though, to hear that if you turn on Israeli TV, you would not see what we're seeing in the U.S. media, which is brutal footage, a growing death toll and reports about starvation, disease, death.

Are Israelis really not seeing that? They do see soldiers collapsing buildings and cleaning out terror tunnels that were used by Hamas. They do see streets that are now rubble. What they don't see is humans in Gaza being killed or wounded, especially women and children. They don't see that at all.

Nothing of the human cost. Even if you do mention the number of the casualties, you always say this is the numbers that we get from the Hamas-controlled health ministry in Gaza, and Hamas is a terrorist organization, and you shouldn't trust their numbers. What they never mention is past conflicts in Gaza. If you look at the numbers of Hamas and you look at the numbers of the IDF,

They're roughly the same. There is a difference if you look at the male casualties, 16 to 50 or something like that, the age where you can be a militant. But if you look at the women and children, there's not such big a difference between the numbers that Hamas has and the number that the IDF releases after the war. They just ignore that.

And if you do see footage of shirtless men in Gaza, handcuffed, they would be regarded as terrorists surrendering. And that would be the headline. Perhaps a day or two later, you could see maybe in Haaretz or in the bottom of an article that after interrogation, the IDF found out that most of them weren't terrorists.

But most people would get the feeling that the only people still occupying northern Gaza where the invasion started are now terrorists. There's no citizens there. And that's why you can bombard the area without hesitation. OK, but I see TikToks from Israeli soldiers. I see posts.

from Israelis on social media. Surely Israeli citizens are seeing footage of the suffering of Gazans. It's hard not to find it if you're online. So I find it hard to believe that maybe outside of the legacy media, Israelis aren't exposed to this stuff.

Well, if you don't want to know something, even though it pops out that TikTok or Telegram channel or whatever, it's very easy to go past it to a video of a fallen soldier's family or the Israeli victims. There's no lack of material that is pro-Israel and anti-Hamas. It's just a matter of your decision.

Ever since October 7th, you've said nearly all mainstream outlets have started to shift towards the right, or at least have adopted more propaganda. With Channel 14, which is basically an arm of Netanyahu's propaganda machine, still being the most extremist.

Can you give me some examples of this wider shift? Right. Shortly after the beginning of the war, you could hear very extreme guests that you wouldn't see before on the mainstream media popping up. And also the journalists themselves getting more and more extreme, calling for harsh retaliation. You could hear there is no innocent people in Gaza.

Amit Segal, the most popular journalist in Channel 12, which is the most popular channel in Israel, on his Telegram channel referred to the Hamas terrorists as Nazis, and therefore the people who support them are also Nazis. And again and again, you could hear the comparison to Dresden. You have to fight like you're fighting the Nazis, and if the ally forces...

completely destroyed the city of Dresden, then we can completely destroy Gaza because it's 100% good against 100% evil. It's completely black and white. It's not exactly like Dresden is celebrated today as a discriminant act of warfare, right? No, it's exactly the opposite. This is the moment that there was no consideration of human life.

Much like Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That's mentioned also in Israel in the past few weeks. Saying the Americans did it so we can do it too? Yeah, I mean, who are you to cast doubt on our morality when you did the same when you faced pure evil? That's the logic. I see.

Another example of the shift that you're talking about is Israel's top satirical TV show Eretz Nehederet. In November, it broadcasts a sketch making fun of pro-Palestinian progressives. Hi, everyone. We are live on YouTube with Columbia Yundi Semedi News, where everyone is welcome. LGBTQH. H. Hamas. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. Do you know why it's true? Because everyone...

There have been other English skits mocking BBC journalists for how they've been covering the war. This was odd because Eretz Nehederet used to be known for mocking Netanyahu and the Israeli government.

They're still mocking Netanyahu, but they are mobilized, like most of the other people in Israel, to support the war effort. If a satirical show needs to do hazbara, which is Israeli propaganda, then that's what they'll do. They're completely with the mission to explain why the world is wrong, and we are right. And you mentioned before the dome of disconnection.

People in Israel are shocked that the world doesn't see the situation like they see it. They are shocked and baffled. How could anyone be angry at Israel and speaking about atrocities that Israel does,

when Hamas butchered and raped and killed so many people in Israel on October 7th. Because they're still on October 7th, they don't realize that the world saw different images in the past few weeks.

The passion with which you speak makes me think that you inhabit a different kind of ideological perspective. You're consuming different media than the average Israeli. You are a media critic, but I'm just curious to know how common is the perspective that you are sharing right now?

It's not very common. Like I said, the Israeli left is small and getting smaller. But if you do read Haaretz, you get the information. And there's still tens of thousands of subscribers to Haaretz. A lot of them are people in the government, the intellectual elite. But I would say that this point of view is considered fringe in Israel these days, almost treacherous.

In the American media, we've seen reports that Israel plans to scale back some of its offensive, at least in northern Gaza, following pressure from the American government. For instance, Netanyahu has said that Israel doesn't intend to have, say, a permanent occupation in Gaza. But as many outlets have observed,

Israeli media and officials are telling a different story about the next phase of the war. And this seems to be a larger pattern of the kind of information that Netanyahu gives to American Western journalists as opposed to what he says to an Israeli audience. So what are you all hearing about the coming months?

Well, our prime minister has two Twitter accounts or X accounts. One is very dignified, where he published his video of himself saying we don't want to conquer Gaza or expel the population. The other X account is where all the populist material is published. And he speaks a very different language there and addresses a very different audience, the Israeli audience.

We do hear also in Israeli media that there is a new phase starting to evacuate parts of the military reserves that were drafted on October 7th.

But what nobody is talking about is what will happen in the day after. What would happen after you collapse Hamas. If that's even possible. Exactly. You've made a strong case that Israelis don't understand what's taking place in Gaza. Is there anything you think that American audiences don't understand about what's happening in Israel that you would like to communicate?

Well, basically that, that Israelis are inside a bubble and are unaware of, A, what's going on in Gaza, and B, how is it seen in the entire world? So when you speak with your Israeli friend or relative or whatever, you should remind yourself that you're speaking with someone who is in a parallel universe, who does not see what you see.

Oren, thank you very much. Thank you. Oren Persico is a staff writer at The Seventh Eye, an independent investigative magazine in Israel. Coming up, the war at home among the rich and powerful. This is On The Media. On The Media.

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I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. And our new podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. We're both journalists whom we light as poker players, and that's the lens we're going to use to approach this entire show. We're going to be discussing everything from high-stakes poker to personal questions. Like whether I should call a plumber or fix my shower myself. And of course, we'll be talking about the election, too. Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.

This is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Olinger. Back in the U.S., debates about the war in Israel and Gaza have refracted into convoluted sideshows. Like this week, when the same billionaire who wielded plagiarism accusations to unseat Harvard president Claudine Gay went after a news outlet that made similar allegations against his wife.

A quick reminder of how we got here. Protests that erupted after the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel have roiled college campuses across the country.

College campuses are deeply divided, including here at Harvard. The presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania are testifying on Capitol Hill about anti-Semitism on college campuses. Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik of New York followed up. Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment? Yes or no? It can be, depending on the context.

Republican Representative Elise Stefanik saw this as an opportunity to really press these college presidents. Will Sommer is a media reporter at The Washington Post. I think a charitable way to look at it is that she wanted them to take a firm stance on anti-Semitism. I think a less charitable way is that she was looking for a soundbite and really trying to back them into a corner. The point Claudine Gay was making was nuanced, but that doesn't really work in Congress, particularly if you have a hostile interviewer.

From there, various activists got involved, particularly Bill Ackman, hedge fund manager, and Christopher Ruffo, campaigning to get her and some of these other university presidents fired. Ruffo has openly discussed Ruffo's

over the years how he has successfully manipulated the media to raise panic around a whole bunch of culture war issues like critical race theory. He was successful in helping turn CRT into a catch-all boogeyman, applying the same strategy to raising alarm around

health care for transgender people. And most recently, he has set his sights on DEI, diversity, equity and inclusion. So can you just give us a sense of what role Christopher Ruffo played in shaping the conversation that we all ended up having for the last month or so? Yeah, I mean, Christopher Ruffo is really good at latching onto these wedge issues and getting Republicans to pick them up.

In December, shortly after Claudine Gay is facing all this pressure from the congressional hearing, he then comes out with these plagiarism allegations against her. Now, apparently these allegations have been floating around on the Internet. Someone had packaged them up into sort of like one document, a person who seems to have been opposed to her management of Harvard in terms of anti-Semitism. And Christopher Ruffo was the first one to really go public with them.

And alongside Christopher Ruffo was billionaire Bill Ackman. He's one of those hedge fund guys who's so rich that we should know more about him. But if I'm being honest, I had no idea who he was until all of this started. You know, I only became aware of him because on the HBO stock market show Industry, there's a character based on him played by one of the Duplass brothers.

So he's kind of like a pop culture figure in some way. Bill Ackman became famous during the pandemic because of some smart plays he made predicting that the pandemic would depress stocks and then predicting that the stock market would rebound. And that's sort of what elevated him from rich guy to rich guy a lot of people think is sort of a font of wisdom in some way. Why was he lending his platform to the campaign to get Claudia and Gaye?

to resign. So Bill Ackman is a Harvard alum. And after October 7th, he became convinced that Harvard students were just running amok with anti-Semitism. And so even before the congressional hearing, he was on this campaign to get the board of Harvard to fire Claudine Gay. After these plagiarism allegations come out, he latches onto that. And so the anti-Semitism stuff sort of takes a back seat. And then he says, well, look, like you simply have to fire her because of this plagiarism issue. Yeah.

What were the plagiarism accusations against Claudine Gay? It was research papers or publications where she would cite research she was drawing on, and then she would, rather than putting quotation marks around the phrasing, she would just take the phrasing wholesale.

The source would show up in the bibliography, but in some of her research, the source she was quoting from that same language showed up not in quotes. Yes, in the bibliography or even at the end of the paragraph. Material that should have been in quotation marks was not in quotation marks.

Bill Ackman met with members of the Harvard community. He claims to have met with students and professors and board members. He said something like this, if an undergrad did even less plagiarism than this or a more minor instance, they would have been expelled from Harvard. And so what does it say that the president of this institution is a plagiarist?

So we have Christopher Ruffo, Bill Ackman really pushing this. And then we had media coverage from the conservative press, most notably the Washington Free Beacon, that broke a lot of these stories about Claudine Gay's alleged plagiarism.

But the New York Times also played a significant role in keeping the heat on these university presidents and Claudine Gay specifically. A lot of stories on their front page. Last week, media critic Adam Johnson, who's the host of Citations Needed, posted to X that, quote, articles about Claudine Gay and her various scandals were top five featured stories on the New York Times homepage December 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th,

11th, 12th, 13th, 14th, 17th, 22nd, and 25. And her firing is now their top story. On January 2nd, the day that she resigned, Christopher Ruffo tweeted, this is the beginning of the end for DEI in America's institutions. We will expose you, we will outmaneuver you, and we will not stop fighting until we have restored colorblind equality in our great nation.

So what do we make of that? This is not exactly critically coded language. There is the insinuation there that Claudine Gay was essentially an affirmative action hire, that her scholarship did not justify becoming the president of Harvard, and that the plagiarism underlines that. And so this was seen by the right as sort of a symbolic victory against affirmative action or diversity, equity, inclusion. What they see is sort of the post-2020 progressive cultural landscape.

Two days after she resigned, Bill Ackman, the billionaire, was now the subject of a similar story that he would not like very much. A Business Insider investigation that ran with the headline, Bill Ackman's Celebrity Academic Wife, Neri Oxman's Dissertation is Marred by Plagiarism.

Okay. So first off, who is Bill Ackman's wife, academic Neri Oxman? Sure. So Neri Oxman is a professor at MIT in a sort of idiosyncratic category called material ecology, which is something she invented.

She does TED Talks. She's a big hit on podcasts. I listened to a podcast she was on where she talks about what if we could grow iPhones in nature. She was on the cover of Fast Company magazine, of Wired magazine. She was profiled in the New York Times. So she really had a successful career on her own and sort of a public figure in her own right.

Last Friday, Business Insider ran another story about Neri Oxman in which they found 28 additional cases of plagiarism in her dissertation. In some cases, Business Insider alleges that she lifted passages from Wikipedia without attribution.

So how did her plagiarism compare to that of Claudine Gay? So some of her plagiarism is actually very similar in that there are citations to articles, and yet she is, rather than paraphrasing the material, as you should, she's taking it wholesale without putting quotation marks. So she's acknowledging there's another source for this idea or this data, but then she's not acknowledging that she's also taking these words. Right.

Neri Oxman seemed to acknowledge the reporting and the instances of alleged plagiarism that were found. How did her husband, Bill Ackman, respond? Bill Ackman went ballistic. I mean, he has, since Friday, been on a sort of Elon Musk or Trumpian level of Twitter meltdown. Like saying what? Business Insider didn't give us enough time to comment on this. Business Insider is going to go bankrupt and be liquidated. But essentially, his argument is,

This is really unfair. Business Insider is only writing about my wife because I was involved in getting Claudine Gay fired. And in fact, is it even really plagiarism? Who's to say what plagiarism is? Why can't you plagiarize from Wikipedia? So he sort of does a U-turn from we got to stamp out plagiarism in academia. This stuff is so serious to it's a matter of degrees. And some plagiarism is like a spelling error. Are you going to hold that against my wife?

First, he claimed that, as you said, they didn't give him enough time to respond. Second, he says it's not fair for them to go after his family just because he's in the news. And third, Ackman says that a top editor at Business Insider has been critical of Israel and therefore potentially had ulterior motives in pushing the story because Ackman's wife, Mary Oxman, is Israeli.

This is where Axel Springer gets involved. And Axel Springer is a big German media company that owns Business Insider and Politico and many German outlets, including the conservative newspaper Die Welt. Ackman brought his suspicions that there's some kind of anti-Zionist agenda to take down his wife right up the chain of command right to Axel Springer. What happened next?

Then Axel Springer makes a very unusual move. They put out a statement on their own, separate from Business Insider, saying, well, no one disagrees about the facts here. Yet, we are still going to review this story because we are looking into the motivations and the processes of how this story came about. That really suggests...

that they really kind of want to throw Bill Ackman a bone here. They want to undermine the reporting in some way so that he can say, well, that story is under investigation. And yet, there's frankly just not a factual basis for them to do that. In your reporting, you found that Axel Springer actually has some

unusual policies for how it runs its companies, at least by American journalism standards. Over the past decade, Axel Springer has really been increasingly getting involved in the American media market. They own Business Insider and they own Politico.

I've been anticipating the day this conflict would arise because Axel Springer operates in a way that American media outlets do not. It requires employees in Germany to sign a statement of political principles. So you have to commit to support NATO, support the right of Israel to exist, among other things. That would never happen at an American outlet. It's certainly not a mainstream outlet.

Axel Springer, after an outbreak of anti-Semitism in Germany, its CEO flew the Israeli flag in front of headquarters for a week. And he said, if anyone has a problem with what this suggests about us not being entirely nonpartisan when it comes to Israeli coverage, you're welcome to quit your job and leave Axel Springer.

At Business Insider, the editor-in-chief there put out an email to the staff that sort of almost was like a brushback to the corporate ownership in Germany and said, we are really standing by this story. There's nothing wrong with this story. We welcome any review. Bill Ackman, he is not done fighting. On Monday of this week, he posted on Twitter slash X that he will pursue, quote, problems with

how our media operates, the ideological takeover of our education system, discrimination in all forms and free speech to the end of the earth. And he says that this is the most important battle he's ever fought. Do you see any bigger messages in this story?

About the influence that billionaires like Bill Ackman wield, what does it mean? There's sort of this story about billionaires, whether it's Elon Musk or Peter Thiel, who bankrolled essentially the destruction of Gawker illegally, or Bill Ackman, get very involved. And often with, in the case of Musk and Ackman, with sort of like a Twitter valence to it. You know, they're very willing to sort of pursue these pet projects with their money. And change.

to twist personal slights into populist crusades and kind of pretend that they're fighting for the common person or universal values when their ego has just been, you know, scratched a bit. I was struck by after the plagiarism allegations against Neary Oxman came out that Bill Ackman said, oh, you know, this plagiarism, these allegations, this is like oppositional.

Oppenheimer inventing the atomic bomb. This is going to change the world forever, but we'll just have to destroy academia and rebuild it. And it's just like, what? You know, just because your wife was accused of plagiarism, you know, you have to just sort of remake the American university system.

Well, let me ask you about that, because in an op-ed published in The New York Times, Claudine Gay, after she resigned, argued that the campaign to have her resign was, quote, a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society. She goes on to say campaigns of this kind often start with attacks on education and expertise because these are the tools that best equip communities to see through propaganda.

Do you think she had a point? I think she does have a point. I do think that there has been a decades-long attack from the right on independent institutions, particularly ones that relate to truth and reason, whether it's science, and we can think of all the attacks on scientists and medicine during the pandemic, or these decades-long attacks on the media, where these attempts to paint colleges as just like sort of these out-of-control loony bins.

I do think she's right on there. I think the challenge for her and her supporters has been that if you do feel that you're under all this pressure, it really doesn't help if you have this plagiarism in your background. Will, thank you very much. Thanks for having me. Will Sommer is a media reporter at The Washington Post. Coming up, the big arguments over history and language that fuel the small ones swirling around the war. This is On the Media.

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I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. And our new podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. We're both journalists whom we light as poker players, and that's the lens we're going to use to approach this entire show. We're going to be discussing everything from high-stakes poker to personal questions. Like whether I should call a plumber or fix my shower myself. And of course, we'll be talking about the election, too. Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.

This is On The Media. I'm Michael Loewinger. And I'm Brooke Gladstone. On Thursday, hearings in the International Court of Justice in The Hague began. The first time Israel has been tried under the Genocide Convention, drafted after World War II and the Holocaust.

It began with South Africa bringing the charge that Israeli air and ground assaults were meant to, quote, bring about the destruction of its Palestinian population and that Israeli leaders had in comments signaled their genocidal intent.

On Friday, Israel responded. The attempt to weaponize the term genocide against Israel in the present context does more than tell the court a grossly distorted story. Dr. Tal Becker, the legal advisor of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs at The Hague. It subverts the object and purpose of the convention itself with ramifications for all states seeking to defend themselves against those who demonstrate total disdain

for life and for the law. Meanwhile, the petty proxy war stateside rages on. Adib Sassani, communications director for Axel Springer, the German company that owns Business Insider, declared that billionaire investor Bill Ackman was, quote, completely losing it, and that his suggestion that anti-Semitism prompted those plagiarism stories about his wife is so far out there. That's

That seems likely because Axel Springer holds that supporting Israel's right to exist is German duty. The New Yorker's Masha Gessen recently took a deep dive into the German view of the Holocaust after becoming ensnared in its orthodoxies and contradictions. The piece is called In the Shadow of the Holocaust. I'm from a Jewish family in Russia.

So I grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust, and I also grew up in the shadow of Stalinist terror. I was living in Russia in the 90s, wondering if there was any hope that Russia was ever going to be able to reckon with its own totalitarian past.

And then Germany seemed to be doing it so beautifully. In the late 90s and early 2000s, when a lot of Berlin's memorials were conceived and installed, you visited often. I was really riveted watching the formation of this, right? The building of museums. There was so much radical thinking about representation going into this.

But at some point, you said that the effort began to feel glassed in. Something happened sometime probably in the last decade. The philosopher Susan Nyman said that German memory culture has gone haywire. It's created a bureaucracy that enforces the right ways of thinking about memory, the right ways of talking about the Holocaust, the right ways of talking about Jews, and central to my piece, the right ways of talking about Israel.

On November 9th, about a month after Hamas's attack on Israel, it was the 85th anniversary of a series of pogroms against German Jews called Kristallnacht. A Star of David and the phrase, never again is now, was projected in blue and white on the Brandenburg Gate. The same day, the Bundestag, Germany's parliament, considered a proposal called Favillierung,

Fulfilling Historical Responsibility, Protecting Jewish Life in Germany. It's part of this system of enshrining in not law, but resolutions and bureaucratic mechanisms of enforcing this unconditional support for Israel. But I'm more interested in resolutions that have already been passed, such as the BDS resolution.

So BTS has the boycott divestment sanctions movement to exert economic pressure on Israel to end the occupation. And Israel has put a lot of effort internationally

into portraying the movement as not a movement against Israeli policies, but an anti-Semitic movement. It doesn't affirm Israel's right to exist. I think the BDS movement would probably be more effective at disarming its critics if it affirmed Israel's right to exist. At the same time, it's a really strange thing to ask of a boycott movement.

So there's a non-binding resolution that was passed in the Bundestag a few years ago that equates support for BDS with anti-Semitism. And that's had a profound effect on Germany's cultural scene. We don't feel it so much in the United States, where similar resolutions and, in fact, laws exist in 35 American states equating BDS with anti-Semitism.

You note that this resolution against BDS in Germany has an interesting history because it was originally introduced by the AfD, the relatively newish radical right alternative for Germany party, that has in the past openly made anti-Semitic statements and endorsed the revival of Nazi-era language. But it really loved going against BDS. And why?

It was a brilliant move on the part of Ayyub Debb. At the time, Ayyub Debb was newly represented in parliament, and there was a kind of agreement between mainstream parties that they would not cooperate with Ayyub Debb. And so then Ayyub Debb brings this resolution, and following this prior agreement of not cooperating with this far-right party, the mainstream parties vote the resolution down.

But now they're in a pickle because they've just voted down a resolution that is presented as part of the fight against anti-Semitism. So they immediately introduce an almost identical resolution and approve it. For Ayyaf Duh, the far-right party, it's a double victory. From that point on, basically the system of not cooperating with them in parliament broke down.

But the other thing is that you can use the supposedly anti-anti-Semitic weapon to go after immigrants. A majority of immigrants to Germany are from Muslim countries. And Ayatollah, the primary gender is anti-immigrant. And a lot of that is animated at this point by the supposed fight against anti-Semitism.

You know, if that sounds crazy, look at what's happening in the U.S. Congress. It's the exact same thing. We see Representative Stefanik using anti-Semitism in the exact same nihilistic way.

Right. Anti-Semitism defined in part as being anti-Israel. Right.

The side that's winning appears to be the 2016 definition offered by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, or IHRA. It's an intergovernmental organization. What was the definition that it proposed and that has been widely embraced? The definition itself is anodyne.

Anti-Semitism is a certain perception of Jews which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and or their property toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities. But then it provides 11 examples of what can be considered anti-Semitism.

Those examples include denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, for example, by claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavor. Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis. Those are the examples that have really created a culture of interpreting criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic.

And how widely has this definition been adopted, even though it has no legal force? Zero legal force. Even the IHRA calls it the working definition of anti-Semitism. And yet, it has been adopted by all kinds of governmental bodies, including all but one countries of the European Union, the United States State Department.

and many of the institutions of the German state. And the German state has created a system of anti-antisemitism commissioners who use this definition of antisemitism to go after people that they perceive as antisemitic who have disproportionately turned out to be Jews. You can't make this stuff up.

Jewish artists, Jewish writers, Jewish thinkers are accused by German bureaucrats of being anti-Semitic because they criticize the state of Israel.

You write about an artist named Candice Breitz who tried to organize a symposium on German Holocaust memory. The state funding for the panel was pulled because one panel compared Auschwitz to the genocide of the Herero and the Nama people by German colonizers in Namibia. What does this event reveal about the politics of memory there?

It's an incredible story. Candice Bright is a Jewish artist of South African birth living in Berlin for more than 20 years. She was working with Michael Rothman, who is Jewish and a Holocaust scholar at UCLA.

A lot of these cancellations are couched in incomprehensible bureaucratic language, but apparently it was because of this panel that compared genocides. There was a German historian, Stephanie Schuller-Springorum, who heads the Center for Research on Antisemitism in Berlin.

who said that any attempt to advance our understanding of the historical event itself through comparisons with other German crimes or genocides can be and is perceived as an attack on the very foundation of this new nation state, by which she means Germany, because Angela Merkel said that fighting antisemitism was a vital project for the German state.

As Germany came back together in the aftermath of the Cold War, it made Reckoning with the Holocaust its national project, in part to show that this new reunified Germany was an entirely different country. What Stephanie Schuler Springorm is saying in the quote you mentioned is that this national project revolves around the idea of the absolute uniqueness of the Holocaust.

And so when Candace Bright's and Michael Rothman's panelist was going to compare it to the genocide in Namibia, thereby putting it on a historical continuum, saying that Germany, like other empires, had been guilty of genocide before the genocide of all genocides.

That went directly against this explicit assertion that the Holocaust is unique and the German project of reckoning with the Holocaust doesn't bring with it the obligation to reckon with other genocides. And you note that some of the great Jewish thinkers who survived the Holocaust, Zygmunt Bauman, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, spent the rest of their lives trying to convince the world that the Holocaust could happen again.

All of them, in one way or another, were saying that you have to view the Holocaust as an unprecedented evil, but also as a function of a kind of politics, a kind of moment in time that could happen again. Jewish thinkers compared the Nazis, Nazi party politics, and the Holocaust to contemporary events quite liberally.

Hannah Arendt compared an Israeli political party to the Nazi party back in 1948. It was Israel's Freedom Party. What did she base her comparison on? She based her comparison on the paramilitary part of the party's attack on an Arab village in Israel-Palestine that was not involved in the military conflict then.

She saw that attack as being motivated solely by the fact that this was an Arab village. And that was just three years after the Holocaust. Just months after the formal creation of the State of Israel. You said that Zygmunt Bauman argued that the massive systematic and efficient nature of the Holocaust was a function of modernity, that it wasn't predetermined, but it fell in line with other inventions of the 20th century. Yes.

And this also goes to why we say that the Holocaust is unique and why it isn't. The Holocaust is unique in the very specific sense of being the genocide in which the largest number of people were killed in the shortest amount of time.

and in which the killing of people was systematized and industrialized. Bauman really focused on how modernity gave us the railroads, ideas of efficiency.

That sort of efficiency approach was of the 20th century. But genocide? Not a Nazi invention, not a 20th century invention. I read a talk that you gave when you accepted the Hannah Arendt Prize not long ago. In that piece, you note that Germany and others rely on the singularity of the Holocaust as essentially not of this world.

And that thinking works counter to the phrase never again.

Originally, I was supposed to get the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought. And then my essay in The New Yorker came out and all hell broke loose. The Heinrich Bill Foundation, which is one of the sponsors of the prize, pulled out. The City of Bremen, which hosts the prize, pulled out. The Institut Francais, which hosts the discussion that follows the prize, pulled out. And then it ended up being a kind of back alley prize in the sense that I got it in a fortified shed in

in a back alley, not kidding. All of this controversy was because in the piece, "In the Shadow of the Holocaust," I make the comparison between Gaza and a Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe. Germans who take it upon themselves to police the memory of the Holocaust were outraged. I ended up writing a talk about the value of historical comparisons.

And my argument is that the only way to make good on the promise of never again is to constantly be checking whether we are actually falling into darkness. In The Hague, South African lawyers make the case that Israel is committing genocide and Israel is going to argue against South Africa's case.

They're arguing about whether it is valid to make the comparison between the kinds of crimes against humanity that the Nazis committed during World War II that gave rise to the Genocide Convention. Like our entire post-World War II international legal order

is based on the idea that we have to be constantly asking, is this the kind of thing that happened during World War II, the kind of thing that we swore to prevent? Since October 7th, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been revisiting the legend of Amalek.

The biblical legend of Amalek, you personally knew quite well. When I was a teenager and my family emigrated from the Soviet Union, basically we were waiting outside of Rome for our papers to come to the United States. And there was a rabbi who would give Torah lessons to kids of these Jewish refugees waiting for their papers.

Now, for most of us, this was the first Jewish education that we ever received.

because this was illegal in the Soviet Union, which was part of the impetus for some of our families leaving. You were a Jew in your passport, not a Russian. I was a Jew in my passport, in my school file, in my parents' personnel files, my medical records. Everywhere you went, you were marked as a Jew, and yet you could not have any Jewish education. You could not practice Judaism or study Hebrew. And so...

My very first Torah lesson took place when I was 14, and it was on Amalek, which was a people that set out to destroy the Hebrews. The way that the rabbi taught it, which is a very common way, was that every generation of Jews has its own Amalek out to destroy us. And the only way to survive is to destroy Amalek ourselves.

And, you know, that spoke to me when I was 14. It gave a framework to what I had experienced, both as a kid growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust and a kid growing up with this really pervasive state-enforced anti-Semitism mentality.

But this is also the legend that Netanyahu and other Israeli officials have been wielding to justify the indiscriminate destruction of Gaza. That second part of the legend of Amalek, that you have to kill the seed of Amalek,

is a biblical quote, being used now in the International Court of Justice by the South African lawyers to make their case that there's clear genocidal intent. It's so crazy-making, but also so familiar. And I think even 43 years later, I remember how comforting it was to fall into a sense of communal victimhood.

Israel is the victim of October 7th and will be the victim of October 7th for a long time to come. But people can be victims and perpetrators at the same time. This is actually one of the other great lessons of the 20th century. Israel was the victim of a horrific attack and a horrific series of crimes against humanity and is at the same time now committing crimes against humanity. If you were to state how we'd get out of this

and intellectual conundrum, what would it be? I think we need a pro-comparison movement. That is what learning is, trying to figure out how one thing is like another. But I really think we need to rigorously discredit the idea that you can't compare the Holocaust to anything else. Masha, thank you very much. Thank you, Brooke. It's great to talk to you.

Masha Gessen is a staff writer at The New Yorker and author of the article In the Shadow of the Holocaust.

That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Eloise Blondio, Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Calendar, and Candice Wong, with help from Sean Merchant. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineers were Andrew Nerviano and Brendan Dalton. Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Loewinger.