Revisionist History

In the introduction, Yaron asserts her belief “in the dream of two states for two peoples, ensuring democracy and human rights for Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians alike.” This declaration serves as a caveat for everything that comes next, an account characterized by a stubborn refusal to acknowledge Palestinians as anything other than simple-minded terrorists, which she justifies with a unique excuse: “While I share the grief of Palestinians, and bear the weight of our entangled histories, I know that Palestinian stories, especially now, are not my stories to tell.”

This erasure can assume subtle forms. Take Yaron’s description of the Israeli city of Sderot, where a young man named Yanon Azougi sheltered young girls separated from their family on October 7: “Founded in 1951, a few miles from the ruined Arab farming village of Najd, Sderot began as a ma’abara (transit camp) of about seventy tents.” Those unfamiliar with the Nakba might be surprised to learn that Najd was not “ruined” by its backward Palestinian inhabitants but ethnically cleansed in 1948 by the Negev Brigade, a Zionist militia that became part of the IDF. The Negev Brigade expelled over four hundred Muslim farmers, turning them into refugees and relocating them to Gaza.

Yaron’s abrupt historical digressions do not add context to the October 7 attacks so much as reframe them as part of Jewish history, the most recent chapter in an unending pogrom. (In his blurb for 10/7, New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik gushes, “In this extraordinary and uniquely timely work, Lee Yaron gives names, faces, and histories to the victims of the pogrom of 10/7 . . . [a] masterpiece of journalism, and of what can only be called humanism.”) Yaron wants you to know, for example, about the antisemitism that drove Jews from Iraq to Palestine, but not about how deeply integrated they were into Iraqi society during the early twentieth century. She wants you to understand that the British-installed grand mufti collaborated with the Nazis during World War II, but not that Zionists also collaborated with them when they cosigned the Haavara Agreement, breaking an international boycott of the regime.

She wants you to believe that in 2005, “Israel withdrew from Gaza, giving the land over to Palestinian control,” but not that the United Nations and the majority of international human rights organizations consider Gaza to be under military occupation, or that Israel’s removal of its settlers has allowed it to periodically bomb the area ever since. And she wants you to appreciate the generosity of former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, who “offered the Palestinians most of Gaza and the West Bank in return for peace and was refused” without acknowledging that he once called Israel “a villa in the jungle” or that the Palestinian state he and Bill Clinton proposed at Camp David in 2000 would have consisted of noncontiguous cantons modeled on South Africa’s Bantustans.

Selective Empathy

The book is strongest when sketching broad swaths of Israeli society through the eyes of that day’s victims, filling each page with small personal details that invite the reader into their lives. It is clear from reading the accounts that Yaron has spent many hours talking to witnesses and trying to recreate, in her writing of their stories, the emotional resonance of that day’s trauma. But every time she shows the empathy she’s capable of, her refusal to extend that empathy to Gazans becomes all the more glaring.

It is no accident that the word “terrorist” appears in 10/7 more than twice as many times as “Palestinian,” or that “Allah-hu Akbar” and “Kill the Jews” are the most articulate expressions you will find of Palestinian resistance (for a more nuanced understanding of Hamas’s aims based on in-depth interviews with its members, you can read Jeremy Scahill’s excellent piece on the subject). And though Yaron does a good job of making the fear of October 7 palpable, she’s uninterested in asking or explaining what it was like for Palestinians, including these terrorists, to live in a walled ghetto under constant Israeli military surveillance, or to survive the massacres Israel inflicted on Gaza in 2008, 2014, and 2021.

Yaron’s LinkedIn profile shows that during Israel’s 2014 Operation Protective Edge, which killed over two thousand Gazans and left over one thousand Palestinian children permanently disabled, she was serving as editor in chief (2013–15) of the news division of Bamahane, the official IDF magazine, after working for two years as one of its military correspondents (for someone not shy about delving into her own family’s history, Yaron’s silence on her own compulsory military service and her work for the IDF’s own outlet — seemingly her only professional journalistic experience before joining Haaretz — is a notable omission).

The word “terrorist,” of course, is never extended to the Israeli military, which has spent most of the last year bombing schools and hospitals, targeting residential buildings, and, more recently, blowing up pagers and walkie-talkies and leveling whole city blocks in Lebanon, including killing over five hundred of its citizens in a single day. The Israeli government continues to block humanitarian aid to Gaza, the territory it has blockaded since its 2005 withdrawal, starving its residents and denying them clean drinking water and basic medical care.

Two months ago, Israeli right-wingers made headlines for rioting in support of IDF soldiers who gang-raped a Palestinian prisoner on video at the Sde Teiman detention facility in the Negev desert, and though Israelis have taken to the streets to protest Benjamin Netanyahu’s handling of the hostage situation, polls show they’re broadly in favor of the current slaughter. The details and overarching style of 10/7, which gives a humanistic gloss to its Orientalism, provide some clue as to why.

On Not Reading Your Colleagues

Limiting the scope of her research to the events and participants of October 7 may be a decent excuse for refusing to acknowledge the daily humiliations under which Gazans are forced to live, but Yaron also comes up short here, playing fast and loose with the established facts of that day. She makes repeated references to rapes without identifying or interviewing a single victim and ignores the controversy surrounding unsubstantiated claims of mass rape on that day.

This oversight would be more forgivable if Yaron was simply unaware of the work of journalists who exposed the coordinated campaign to spread misinformation as a means of influencing international opinion in favor of the war on Gaza. But to leave out these claims completely, to ignore both the original propaganda and the reporting of her own paper in debunking it, is revealing.

While discussing the massacre at the Nova Music Festival, Yaron tells the story of a young man named Raz Cohen who dodged bullets before managing to hide behind a bush with his friend Shoham and three other young men. He luridly describes five men brutally raping a light-haired woman, whom they then stab to death and continue to rape.

Cohen was a primary source for the New York Times’ largely discredited report “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.” He’s a veteran of the Israeli special forces whose claims about that the day have changed several times in drastic ways, including the single woman he witnessed becoming multiple. Anat Schwartz, the coauthor of the Times report, who drew fire for liking a tweet calling for Gaza to be turned “into a slaughterhouse,” neglected to ask Cohen why he had previously said he witnessed multiple sexual assaults and unconvincingly claimed that, out of the five people hiding in the same bush, only he was able to see the gang rape. If, by the time you read Cohen’s recollections (about two hundred pages into the book), you still expect Yaron to question any elements of his story, seek corroborating testimony from any of the other four people hiding in the bush with Cohen, or provide any evidence to back their claims, you have already missed the point.

Yaron also depends heavily on ZAKA officials’ accounts, the organization whose controversial “fast response” in disposing of bodies “made the collection of hard evidence impossible,” according to the author. She speaks to Haim Utmazgin, a reserve officer in the Israeli army and a volunteer commander for the organization, who she incorrectly identifies as its founder (ZAKA’s real founder is Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, a member of the ultra-Orthodox Haredi community who died in 2022 following a suicide attempt after Haaretz published an article alleging he had sexually abused girls, boys, and women since the 1980s).

Yaron never considers the possibility that Otzmagin (the more common spelling of his name in the English-language press) is feeding her misinformation — a possibility made likely by the source’s history of doing just that. A joint Times of Israel and Associated Press investigation published in May entitled “How 2 debunked accounts from ZAKA workers fueled global skepticism of Oct. 7 rape” describes his false rape claim:

Working in a kibbutz that was ravaged by Hamas’s October 7 massacre, Otmazgin — a volunteer commander with ZAKA, an Israeli search and rescue organization — saw the body of a teenager, shot dead and separated from her family in a different room. Her pants had been pulled down below her waist. He thought that was evidence of sexual violence. He alerted journalists to what he had seen. He tearfully recounted the details in a nationally televised appearance in the Knesset. In the frantic hours, days and weeks that followed the Hamas attack, his testimony ricocheted across the world. But it turns out that what Otmazgin thought had occurred in the home at the kibbutz had not happened.

This was not simply a matter of confusion but incitement, the flames of which were fanned by ZAKA. “Still,” the article continues, “it took ZAKA months to acknowledge the accounts were wrong, allowing them to proliferate.” In those last three months of 2023, ZAKA managed to raise over $13 million, escaping insolvency and remaking its image with the help of hagiographers like Yaron. In January, the journalist Aaron Rabinowitz accused ZAKA of “negligence, misinformation and a fundraising campaign that used the dead as props.” That report was also published in Haaretz, Yaron’s paper.

In another Haaretz investigation from December 2023, journalists Nir Hasson and Liza Rozovsky tracked the progression of the myth that Hamas and members of Islamic Jihad beheaded forty babies, a claim that was virtually omnipresent in the days after the attack (the official Israeli government Twitter/X account has still not taken down a tweet repeating the lie). An IDF commander provided the figure during a report on Israel television station i24NEWS, reportedly based on testimonies by officers who removed bodies from Gaza border communities” and “ZAKA personnel.” In other words, ZAKA was caught red-handed by Yaron’s own newspaper, nine months before the US publication of 10/7, propagating one of the most outrageous falsehoods about October 7. None of this information, you will by now be unsurprised to learn, appears in the book.

For hasbara proponents, the sheer horror of October 7 somehow wasn’t horrible enough. (If you’re curious about Yaron’s most recent work, she’s been on the “antisemitism at Columbia [University]” beat, once synonymous with Bari Weiss but now dominated by the perpetually aggrieved Shai Davidai — a fan of Yaron’s work). Yaron is prudent enough to leave out the lies about beheadings and babies in ovens (clearly intended to evoke the Holocaust) but seeks to emulate their effect, painting Hamas fighters as Nazis intent on carrying out pogroms while either ignoring or obfuscating the Palestinian cause.

The Cohens

10/7 ends with an afterword by the American novelist Joshua Cohen, who, in an unintentional bit of Jewish humor, waits for the very last page to announce that the author is his wife. Cohen won the Pulitzer Prize last year for his novel The Netanyahus, which presents a fictionalized version of a real-life visit by Bibi’s father, Benzion Netanyahu, to the late literary critic Harold Bloom. This premise serves as a jumping off point to delve into the history of Revisionist Zionism and its influence on the elder Netanyahu, a historian specializing in the Jews of medieval Spain and one of Israel’s most prominent stateside propagandists. Considering his knowledge of hasbara’s history in the creation of Israel, and the through line from Revisionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky (Benzion’s mentor) to the architect of the current slaughter, Cohen’s participation in post–October 7 hasbara is ironic and alarming.

In a January discussion with fellow novelist Ruby Namdar in the Atlantic, one of the Israeli propaganda machine’s most treasured outlets, Cohen criticized those who protested against the Israeli genocide in Gaza as having “plugged Israelis and Palestinians into their racial binaries of white and Black” in an effort to be seen as “good whites.”

More details regarding his outlook came to light when the New Republic published an article aptly entitled “Has Zionism Lost the Argument?” Cohen predicted that “Most anti-Zionists are not going to be Jews in a generation.” He added, “The vast majority of these Jews don’t speak any of the Jewish languages. They don’t know the Jewish texts or live in Israel. And if they’re going to have children, there’s nearly a 50 percent chance they’re not going to have them with Jews or raise them as Jews.”

Cohen’s hand-wringing about miscegenation and his implication that half-blood Jews like myself, whom the Third Reich would have been labeled “mischlings,” are less Jewish because of our 23andMe results, shows Zionism most likely has lost the argument. Even the matrilineal principle, which dates back to roughly the destruction of the second temple in Jerusalem, is not sufficient for Cohen. His emphasis on language is also misguided, since most diaspora Jews, who for two millennia have comprised the majority of the Jewish population, do not speak Hebrew, Yiddish, or Ladino. For someone apparently dedicated to protecting the eternal flame of Judaism, Cohen is either oblivious to or unconcerned with the way his no-true-Scotsman argument rhetorically eliminates the majority of world Jewry by denying their validity as real Jews, and therefore their authority in criticizing Israel.

Cohen devotes his brief afterword to discussing such October 7–related matters as the “challenge of whether to approach its slaughter as an era-defining tragedy or a theological recrudescence,” before arriving at a passage so baffling, and so illustrative of Zionism’s contradictions, that it deserves to be quoted in full:

Jews were killed for being Jews; not because they were wearing kippot; not because they were conspiring to raze Al-Aqsa and erect a Third Temple, but merely because they had the temerity to exist as Jews within the borders of a Jewish state; while the Arabs who were killed that day, the Christian Arabs and Muslim Arabs both, were killed because they had the gall to live among Jews as fellow citizens; and the Nepalese and Thai citizens who were killed that day were killed because they dared to work for Jews, toiling in Jewish fields, picking Jewish produce. It’s tempting to take this even further and say that the dogs that were killed that day were killed because they were Jewish dogs, and that the cars that were burned that day were burned because they were Jewish cars.

From a less knowledgeable interpreter of events, the passage could be brushed off as paranoid or ignorant; coming from Joshua Cohen, it’s disingenuous. If Hamas is only concerned with killing Jews, why have they never targeted Jews outside of Israel? Does Cohen really believe that Nepalese workers were killed for “picking Jewish produce” and not because they had the terrible fortune to be doing so on land ethnically cleansed of Palestinians? We should be able to mourn the murder of innocent Israelis without perpetuating the lie that they were killed for being Jewish.

Cohen, like Yaron, is afraid that any engagement with Hamas’s aims would be seen as a justification, but to comprehend the true motive of the killers is not to excuse the killing of innocents. It doesn’t take much digging to find the full text of Hamas’s revised 2017 charter, which states, “Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they’re Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity.”

Cohen evidently plumbed the depths of Revisionist Zionism in his research for The Netanyahus, an erudite and intermittently entertaining Saul Bellow–esque novel that gave some on the Left, myself included, the false impression he was a fellow traveler. Cohen is presumably smart enough to know his statement doesn’t hold up, yet determined to push a childlike explanation for the violence of the occupied and besieged.

The Death Throes of Liberal Zionism

The fact that Cohen is compelled to ignore his own research in this context is evidence, like the book itself, of Zionism’s fragility. Zionists seek to shut down debate by punishing curiosity: the more you become aware of the colonialism and apartheid inherent in the Zionist project, the more Zionists will tell you you’re an antisemite. And this, ultimately, is what we’re left with: intelligent people like Yaron and Cohen crushed under the weight of the contradictions of liberal Zionist ideology. The settler logic of this ideology prevents its adherents from seeing the true reasons for anti-colonial violence, preferring the fairy tale of brave Israelis keeping the barbarians at bay.

Herein lies the problem: you cannot be a liberal Zionist in 2024 without making arguments you would take exception to in any other context. You cannot complain about intermarriage like an early twentieth-century eugenicist and still claim to care about the Jewish people as a whole. You cannot mislead your readers about Hamas’s motives without perpetuating the ignorance and blind rage that has fueled the current genocide, which will make a repeat of October 7 all the more likely. And you cannot blame the events of that day solely on antisemitism without every somewhat knowledgeable person around you — your readers, your friends, even your family members — understanding that you are lying by omission, dishonoring the dead and delaying the peace many of them dreamed of, by only telling half the story.