Untangling Popular Anti-Israel Arguments: Critical Thinking
about the Israel-Hamas War
Note to readers: See previous APOLOGIA post for Chapter 4. (Also, Table of Contents with links is listed below. Or download pdf of the whole book here.)
Note to critics: Please read the whole of my little book (including notes) before offering criticism. Thanks.
Chapter 5: Gaza is like a Jewish ghetto?
Objection: Like the Nazis created ghettos for Jews, Israel has created a ghetto for Gazans.
Reply: No. Izabella Tabarovsky explains:
Historical analogies are fine, so long as they inform the present. But the Gaza-as-Jewish-ghetto equation collapses under inspection. Jews who perished in the Holocaust would have wished they had a fraction of the armaments the IDF is uncovering in Gaza. Jews did not shoot rockets at Germany. Nor did they rape, sexually torture, and mutilate German women or kidnap German infants. And no one intended for their ghettos to become flourishing enclaves akin to Singapore, as many hoped Gaza would when Israel withdrew from the territory in 2005. (Hamas destroyed those hopes by stealing billions in foreign aid and investing them in its terrorist infrastructure.) Nor did the ghettos have international agencies singularly dedicated to their well-being. Jews were enclosed in the ghettos for a single purpose—to be slaughtered. And that is precisely what happened to them while the world stood silent.
Those using this false Holocaust comparison, then, are not doing so to elucidate the present but to stoke outrage and provoke the kind of anti-Israel responses we are now seeing unfold across the world. … The Nazis had no need to lock Jews in ghettos, while the Israelis faced real and present dangers from Hamas.... 1
NOTES
1. Izabella Tabarovsky, The Language of Soviet Propaganda, Quillette, January 11, 2024. Tabarovsky adds:
Holocaust inversion is just one example of ways in which poisonous Soviet anti-Zionist rhetoric continues to reverberate through the contemporary progressive Left. Today’s far-Left is driven by a mongrel ideology that cross-pollinates Marxism, intersectionality, post-colonialism, and critical theory, and that draws upon a battle-tested set of rhetorical tools built and honed by Soviet masters of ideological subversion during the last 25 years of the Cold War.
Table of Contents (links)
Chapter 1. Israel is engaging in colonial retaliation?
Chapter 2. Israel is a powerful state and thus the oppressor?
Chapter 3. Israel is not a legitimate state?
Chapter 4. Israel occupies Gaza?
Chapter 5. Gaza is like a Jewish ghetto?
Chapter 6. What about Gabor Maté?
Chapter 7. What about Gabor Maté, again?
Chapter 8. Israel targets a hospital?
Chapter 9. Israel’s attack on Gaza is as bad (or worse) as Gaza’s attack on Israel?
Chapter 10. Israel is wrong to cause Gaza to suffer?
Chapter 11. Israel is guilty of genocide?
Chapter 12. Israel’s response to Hamas is not proportional?
Chapter 13. Israel should agree to a permanent ceasefire?
Chapter 14. Israel should embrace a two-state solution?
Chapter 15. Conclusion and prayer
Appendix 1: Criticizing Islam is Islamophobic? (Part 1 of 2)
Appendix 2: Criticizing Islam is Islamophobic? (Part 2 of 2)
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