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The JTA conversation: Pogrom? Terrorism? What do we call what happened in Huwara?
(JTA) — On Sunday, after a Palestinian gunman shot and killed two Israeli brothers in the West Bank, Jewish settlers rioted in the nearby Palestinian town of Huwara, burning cars and buildings. A Palestinian was killed and dozens were injured.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the Jewish rioters for “taking the law in their own hands,” but many observers — including the top Israeli general in the West Bank and Abraham Foxman, director emeritus of the the Anti-Defamation League — used stronger language, calling the attacks a “pogrom.”
The use of the word, which most famously refers to a wave of anti-Jewish violence in the Russian empire beginning in the late 19th century, in turn became the subject of debate. Does using “pogrom” co-opt Jewish history unfairly and inaccurately by suggesting Jews are no better than their historical persecutors? Does avoiding the term mean Israel and its supporters are not taking sufficient responsibility for the actions of its Jewish citizens?
The debate is not just about language, but about controlling the narrative. Political speech can minimize or exaggerate events, put them in their proper context or distort them in ways that, per George Orwell, can “corrupt thought.”
We asked historians, linguists and activists to consider the word pogrom, and asked them what politicians, journalists and everyday people should call what happened at Huwara. Their responses are below.
Sidestepping the real issue
Dr. Jeffrey Shandler
Distinguished Professor, Department of Jewish Studies, Rutgers University
The meanings of the word “pogrom” in different languages are key here. In Russian, it means a massacre or raid, as it does in Yiddish; in neither language is it understood as specifically about violence against Jews. The Oxford English Dictionary concurs that pogrom means an “organized massacre… of any body or class,” but notes that, in the English-language press, it was first used mostly to refer to anti-Jewish attacks in Russia, citing examples from 1905-1906.
Therefore, though the association of pogrom with violence targeting Jews is widely familiar, its meaning is broader.
That said, because of English speakers’ widely familiar association of the term with Jews as victims, to use pogrom to describe violence perpetrated by Jews is provocative. As to whether it is appropriate to refer to recent attacks by Jewish settlers on Palestinians, it seems to me that this question sidesteps the more important question of whether the actions being called pogroms are appropriate.
Call it what it is: “settler terrorism”
Sara Yael Hirschhorn
’22-’23 Research Fellow at the Center for Antisemitism Research at the ADL, and author, “City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement”
Let me say first with a loud and clear conscience: What happened in Huwara was abhorrent, immoral, and unconscionable and certainly was not committed in my name.
But to paraphrase Raymond Carver’s famous formulation: How do we talk about it when we talk about Huwara? What kind of descriptive and analytical framework can adequately and contextually interpret that horrific event?
The shorthand of choice seems to be “pogrom” — but it isn’t clear that all who deploy the term are signifying the same thing. For some, pogrom is a synonym for pillage, rampage, fire, property damage and violence in the streets — a one-word general summary of brutal acts. For others, pogrom refers to vigilante justice, an abbreviated story of the non-state or non-institutional actors and their motivations.
More specifically, however, pogrom is seemingly being mobilized as a metaphor to Jewish history, juxtaposing the Jewish victims of yesterday to the Jewish-Israeli perpetrators of today, an implicit analogy to the prelude to the Shoah, recasting Zionists as organized bands of genocidaires (with or without regime sponsorship) like the Cossacks, the Nationalist Fronts or even the Einsatzgruppen. Some would use the word to incorporate all three meanings (and more).
As a historian, I am troubled by the haphazard and harmful use of terms that are attached to a specific time and place — such as the thousand-year history of Jews in the Rhinelands and Eastern Europe, with many layers of imperial, national, local, economic and religious forces that precipitated these events — in such an ahistorical manner. Nor do I find the parallels between Zionists and Nazis to be historically careful (if deliberately offensive) — the State of Israel is committing crimes in the West Bank, but not a genocide. The equivalence also all too easily and incorrectly grafts tropes of racism and white supremacy drawn from American history into the West Bank’s soil.
So what to say about Huwara? Israel — for reasons both political and lexiconographical — has failed to consistently adopt a term for such attacks. (Often the euphemism of “errant weeds” who are “taking matters into their own hands” is the choice of Knesset politicians.) To my mind, the best term is “settler terrorism,” which puts Jewish-Israeli acts on par with Palestinian terrorism. It should also mean that these actions merit the same consequences under the occupation like trial, imprisonment, home demolition and other deterrents enforced against all those who choose the path of violence.
Last but not least, a pogrom was historically an unpunished crime against humanity that led only to war and annihilation. Don’t we aspire for more in Israel/Palestine?
Palestinians call it “ethnic cleansing”
Ibrahim Eid Dalalsha
Director, Horizon Center for Political Studies and Media Outreach, Ramallah, and member of Israel Policy Forum’s Critical Neighbors task force
Palestinians generally view and describe what happened during Sunday’s Huwara attacks as “racist hate crimes seeking to destroy and dispossess the Palestinian people of their homes and properties.” While no specific term has been used to describe these attacks, it was likened to the barbaric and savage invasion of Baghdad by Hulagu, the 13th-century Mongol commander.
Palestinian intellectuals tend to use “ethnic cleansing,” savage and barbaric ethnically motivated violence against innocent civilians, as another way of referring to these attacks. When such events include killing, Palestinian politicians and intellectuals tend to use the term massacre, or “majzara,” to underline the irrational and indiscriminate violence against defenseless civilians. I don’t think the term “pogrom” and its historic connotation are widely known to most people here. From a Palestinian perspective, using such terms, including “Holocaust,” is not considered a mistake. In fact, even using “Holocaust“ to describe violence against Palestinian civilians in and around 1948 was not considered a mistake until very recently when it caused such a saga for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Germany.
View of cars burned by Jewish settlers during riots in Huwara, in the West Bank, near Nablus, Feb. 27, 2023. (Nasser Ishtayeh/Flash90)
In the name of historical accuracy
Rukhl Schaechter
Yiddish Editor, The Forward
The recent attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians in Huwara are abhorrent. I commend those in Israel calling them peulot teror, “actions of terror,” and I trust that the perpetrators will be brought to justice. But these riots were not pogroms.
The word pogrom refers to one of the many violent riots and subsequent massacres of Jews in Eastern Europe between the 17th and 20th centuries. These attacks were committed by local non-Jewish, often peasant populations. They were instigated by rabble-rousers like Bogdan Chmielnicki, who led a Cossack and peasant uprising against Polish rule in Ukraine in 1648 and ended up destroying hundreds of Jewish communities. According to eyewitnesses, the attackers also committed atrocities on pregnant women.
Note that the massacres of Jews carried out by the Nazis, and the murders of Armenians by the Turkish government at the turn of the 20th century — as horrific as they were — were never called pogroms because in both cases, there was a government behind it. In the name of historic accuracy, let’s continue to use the word pogrom solely for mob attacks on and massacres of Jews.
When the Poles banned “pogrom”
Samuel D. Kassow
Professor of History, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut
In Poland in the late 1930s, altercations between a Jew and a Pole sometimes ended with either the Jew or the Pole getting badly hurt or even killed. When the victim was a Pole, mobs of Poles rampaged through Jewish neighborhoods smashing windows, looting shops and often beating or even killing Jews. Poles often held Jews collectively responsible for the death of one of their own. This happened in Przytyk, Minsk-Mazowieck, Grodno and other places. Jews called these riots “pogroms,” which they were. But the Polish government banned use of the term in the press. After all, “pogrom” was a Russian word, and “pogroms” happened only in a place characterized by barbarism and ignorance. Since Poland was not Russia, and since Poles were eminently civilized, logically speaking, pogroms simply did not take place in Poland. What happened in these towns were to be called “excesses” (zajscia). But certainly not pogroms!
I take it that since we Jews are so civilized, we too are incapable of pogroms. So should we label what these settlers did “‘excesses”? Or perhaps we should take a deep breath and call them pogroms?
A Jewish, but not exclusive, history
Henry Abramson
Historian
The word “pogrom” is rooted in time and place, although the type of violence it describes is as old as human history. It is a Russian word, but it entered the English language in the late 19th century through the medium of Yiddish-speakers, outraged at the wave of antisemitic disturbances that surged under rule of the last tsar of the Russian Empire, Nicholas II. Russians themselves used a variety of words for the ugly phenomenon, with translations like “riot” or “persecution,” but the term “pogrom” proved the most evocative: the Slavic prefix “po” suggests a directed attack, and the root “grom” is the word for “thunder.” A pogrom, therefore, meant a focused point where a great deal of energy was dissipated in a single dramatic act of violence.
The focused point, in the context of that dark history, was the civilian Jewish population in the tiny shtetls that dotted the Pale of Settlement. In this regard the word could be used to encompass attacks on Jewish populations from as long ago as the year 38 in Alexandria, Egypt. It does not, however, have any specific designation to indicate that Jews are the victims.
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The post The JTA conversation: Pogrom? Terrorism? What do we call what happened in Huwara? appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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What pledges Eisenkot and Netanayhu need to break to become PM
(JTA) —
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his opponent Gadi Eisenkot will have to break their promises to their constituents if they want to form and lead Israel’s next government.
Their potential political allies will have to do the same.
Netanyahu’s Likud and Eisenkot’s Yashar party both garnered more votes than any of the other nine parties that met the threshold to join the next parliament.
Netanyahu and the bloc of parties that ideologically align with him, however, secured only 53 of the 61 seats needed for a governing majority in the 120-seat Knesset. The Eisenkot bloc won 48.
For Eisenkot, three divisive issues are likely to dominate the debate and force some politicians to renege on campaign pledges: aligning with Arab parties, mandatory military service for Haredi men and a unity government with Netanyahu.
Support from the Arab parties
Eisenkot’s bloc includes four Jewish Israeli parties, referred to as Zionist parties: his own party Yashar, B’Yachad led by former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, Israel Beytenu led by Avigdor Liberman, and the Democrats led by Yair Golan.
Eisenkot could easily become prime minister with a 67-seat coalition if he added the Arab parties, Ra’am with 8 seats and the Joint List with 11. But that is far from straightforward. Three of the bloc’s four parties — Yashar, B’Yachad and Israel Beytenu — explicitly pledged not to form a government with the Arab parties. And relying on their support would face an additional legitimacy hurdle given Netanyahu’s advantage among Jewish voters.
Eisenkot himself has repeatedly and unequivocally said he does not intend to form a government with the Arab parties. During the campaign, he set four conditions for joining his government, including a commitment to Israel as a Jewish and democratic state and to the values of the Declaration of Independence, mandatory military or national service, and recognition of Hamas as a terrorist organization.
In an interview with Channel 12 News in late September, Eisenkot, a former IDF chief of staff, said the Arab parties did not meet his conditions and therefore would not be part of the government.
On election night and since then, he has continued to speak of a coalition with Jewish Zionist parties.
Naftali Bennett, the former prime minister who relied on the support of the Ra’am party in 2021, when he and Lapid formed their coalition, also ruled out sitting in a government with the Arab parties. Liberman, whose party won seven seats, said he would form a coalition made up of “Zionist parties only.” Only Golan spoke prior to the election of sitting with Arab parties and has since the election called on the other three parties in his bloc to do so.
One attempt to circumvent the issue would be for Eisenkot to form a minority government that would depend on votes from Ra’am and the Joint List from outside the coalition. A more solid version of that game plan would be a coalition that included Ra’am but relied on the Joint List from outside the government. However, this option is also likely to face significant political and public opposition.
The Joint List stated in an official declaration following the election that it was willing to engage in “political cooperation to bring down Netanyahu’s government,” but it did not publicly clarify whether, and under what conditions, it would support a government led by Gadi Eisenkot. Ra’am leader Mansour Abbas said in an interview with Channel 12 News on the eve of the election: “I will know how to bring a government to the Knesset.”
The draft issue
Without the Arab parties’ support, the change bloc could theoretically turn to the 13 seats held by the ultra-Orthodox parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism, to form a government.
All four parties in the bloc made ending the ultra-Orthodox exemption from military service a central campaign issue. Cooperation with those parties would amount to breaking an explicit campaign promise.
Shas and UTJ have similarly promised their Haredi constituents that they would not allow for forced conscription.
A unity government with Netanyahu
With the path to a government that excludes Netanyahu looking tenuous at best, the change bloc’s alternative would be to join Netanyahu in a national unity government.
But that, too, would represent a flagrant breach of its campaign pledges. The one clear binding principle of these four parties is their goal of unseating Netanyahu, Israel’s longest serving prime minister, whom they have said poses an existential threat to the country.
In a late-October radio interview, Eisenkot said, “I unequivocally commit that I will not sit under Netanyahu, not even in a rotation,” in which he and Netanyahu would share the prime ministership. Bennett said in a radio interview, “I am not going to sit under him because he is the person destroying the State of Israel.” Liberman wrote on X two weeks ago, “With Netanyahu — even if the world turns upside down, we will not sit with him under any circumstances.” Yair Golan, leader of the Democrats party, said, “We will not sit with Netanyahu and his partners. Period.”
The challenge for Netanyahu
On the other side, Netanyahu also has no clear path to forming a government. The parties in his coalition defied expectations by winning 53 seats, but securing the eight additional seats needed for a majority appears out of reach. Netanyahu deployed the prospect of the Arab parties in the coalition as a cudgel to bash the opposition during the campaign. In a speech on the eve of the election, Netanyahu called cooperation with those parties “a disgrace.”
That may not stop him from trying to form a government with one of the Arab parties, particularly Ra’am, whose leader Mansour Abbas told Channel 12 on election night that he was speaking with politicians from both blocs.
Netanyahu during the 2022 election held talks with Abbas about forming a government.
Even if Netanyahu were to do the unthinkable and cooperate with the Arab parties, however, he would be unlikely to secure a majority. His ultra-nationalist partners, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, made clear during the campaign that such cooperation was out of the question for them.
With all apparent paths to a government blocked, forming a coalition in Israel may require a fundamental breach of campaign promises that would shake up the entire political system. The alternative is another election, which would be held if no side succeeds in forming a government.
The post What pledges Eisenkot and Netanayhu need to break to become PM appeared first on The Forward.
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The Ethan Klein YouTube cheating scandal is reigniting a debate about IDF service
The chronically online are still reeling from — and reveling in — the cheating scandal surrounding Jewish YouTubers Ethan and Hila Klein. And, after Hila’s estranged brother spoke out for the first time this week, commenters have revived a debate over the siblings’ service in the Israel Defense Forces, reflecting the ways in which shifting political trends online can impact even seemingly-unrelated stories.
Hila, an Israeli who met Ethan during his Birthright trip to Israel in 2007, posted a statement accusing Ethan of the affair on Oct. 22. The two had built a joint YouTube career in America garnering millions of subscribers to their show, the H3 Podcast. They married, had three children together and employed around a dozen people on their production crew — one of whom is alleged online to be Klein’s affair partner.
Because of the show’s Israeli connections, the Kleins’ Birthright meet-cute, and the show’s myriad other Jewish connections — the podcast employee allegedly having the affair with Ethan is also Jewish — discussions of Israeli politics have long swirled around the show. Ethan feuded with numerous other YouTubers and internet figures, including Hasan Piker, with whom he used to cohost a podcast, over the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks and Israel’s war in Gaza.
In recent years, especially after Oct. 7, with pro-Palestinian sentiments increasingly dominating online, the H3 Podcast’s connection to Israel has become a central part of its identity, and drawn controversy and analysis across the internet from Piker and general viewers. Each time Israel has been brought up on the show the conversations are closely tracked and analyzed in relevant subreddits.
With the Kleins making headlines because of the affair, old Israel discourse has resurfaced surrounding the internet celebrities. Central to it is the question: what level of Israeli military service is forgivable in the eyes of the far left? As Hila routinely came under scrutiny for her service, the Kleins would point to Hila’s brother Moses Hacmon, who also served but has faced far less criticism for doing so.
Hacmon, another internet celebrity, has long been feuding with Hila and Ethan, thanks to his now-wife, infamous YouTuber Trisha Paytas. (Paytas is known for an endless string of controversies including taboo OnlyFans content and saying the n-word while singing along to a rap song, as well as being accused of physically abusing Hacmon.)
Hacmon, who moved to the U.S. in 2002 to launch his art career after finishing his IDF service, met Paytas through Ethan and Hila. The Kleins had just begun having Paytas on their show, which led to Ethan launching a new podcast, Frenemies, with Paytas. Initially, the two couples were close. But the show lasted less than a year and ended in a bitter falling-out over revenue, creative disagreements and family drama, severing ties between the two couples. Now, that conflict is finding new life as fans fight over which siblings’ IDF service was most immoral.
Scrutiny over military service
In defending Hila’s IDF service, Ethan mentioned multiple times that she worked a noncombat desk job and never hurt anyone personally.
The Kleins, who show a vindictive streak against their enemies, also often deflected criticism of Hila by pointing at Hacmon, saying he was an active combatant in the air force, and pointing angry commenters in his direction. (Hacmon and Paytas, while they have drawn their own controversies in the past, have come under less fire as of late and currently are popular in the online ecosystem.)
The Kleins said that they didn’t take issue with Hacmon’s service. But, they said on numerous episodes of the podcast, if people were upset with Hila for serving in the IDF, they should be just as upset with Hacmon.
Until this week, Hacmon hadn’t publicly spoken to or about the Kleins for five years as tensions simmered. He did not invite them to his wedding with Paytas or introduce them to the couple’s three children (who are named — actually — Elvis, Malibu Barbie and Aquaman).
But Hacmon broke his silence on Tuesday to talk about the affair. He said he felt for his sister and that his door was open to her, but added that things the couple had said about him, particularly his military service, were painful lies.
“I never graduated from flight school,” said Hacmon on his podcast with Paytas. “I never was a pilot. I’ve never been in combat. I’ve never hurt anyone. I’ve never shot a gun at anyone.”
This may sound like a petty feud over minor details; either way, both siblings served in the IDF. But it reflects the shifting tides of political trends and viewer favor online.
Pro-Palestinian activism, and harsh criticism of Israel’s army in light of the war in Gaza, has become the mainstream acceptable stance online, and views are so black and white that small details can ruin an online career. Fans, hungry to cancel their enemies, scour the internet for evidence of what they consider to be a sin — for some people, even recommending the wrong book or using the wrong brand of makeup can be an indication of cancellable politics around Israel.
For many influencers, serving in the IDF at all, regardless of role, is enough for online cancellation, but since both of the siblings served, the fight boils down to details, with each sibling attempting to distance themselves from the violence as much as possible to prove that they are not the wrong kind of Jew.
Getting into the weeds on Israel
But a decade ago, this political framework had not yet taken hold of the internet, and Israel was not a pariah online — meaning that the evidence on both Hila and Hacmon’s service can get muddled, as they presented their records differently back when they seemingly thought it sounded cool to be in the army.
An interview with Hacmon published sometime circa 2015 seems to corroborate some of his most recent statement:
“I spent a year and a half in the flight school,” Hacmon said about his service in the air force. “When I left the military after three years I really wanted to catch up for that time.”
But despite his insistence that he did not see combat, in a 2021 episode of Frenemies, long before Oct. 7, Paytas seemed eager to prove her husband had been an active combatant. She bragged about Hacmon’s service in the IDF saying he deactivated bombs in Lebanon and was a “bomb specialist.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” replied Ethan.
“That’s what he did,” yelled Paytas, gesturing to Hacmon who sat silently off screen.
Hila, on the other hand, worked a desk job throughout her service and at one point was, as she described it, a secretary for a brigade that conducted military missions in Ramallah, a major city in the occupied West Bank. One night, unauthorized and acting out of curiosity, she accompanied the brigade on a mission to detain “a terrorist.” This anecdote, which she shared during a 2017 episode of the couple’s podcast, would be used against her time and time again by Piker and various critics after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza.
Viewers commenting on the siblings’ mandatory service had various takeaways.
“I don’t like either of them but you can’t call out one without the other being terrible too,” said one X user. “It’s hypocrisy.”
One commenter, coming to Hila’s defense argued: “Moses was in the IDF, just like Hila. The difference is Hila worked a desk job then asked to go out on the field ONE TIME out of curiosity. Moses worked with bombs and was actually out doing field work, as Trisha loved to brag about.”
While the exact details of each siblings’ service remains disputed, one thing is certain: the casualness with which they once discussed the IDF is gone. What used to be simple background in their personal histories — an experience most Israelis share — has become ammunition in arguments over their alleged complicity in the conflict and an opportunity for moral grandstanding.
All of this is old news, really, though; today, its main effect is drawing attention away from Ethan’s affair. The military debate and disdain many online feel for the IDF — especially in the left wing circles these four worked in — has left little sympathy for the mother of three navigating separation after a devastating affair.
The post The Ethan Klein YouTube cheating scandal is reigniting a debate about IDF service appeared first on The Forward.
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Zoom chat: Memories of Yiddish and Bund gatherings in Melbourne
אין קאַרלטאָן, אַ געגנט אין מעלבורן, האָט מען אַ מאָל געהערט ייִדיש אויף דער גאַס; געגאַנגען אויף בונדישע פֿאַרזאַמלונגען און אין ייִדישן טעאַטער, און געזונגען ייִדישע לידער.
אין אָט דער וועלט איז אויפֿגעוואַקסן דער שרײַבער אַרנאָלד זייבל, אַ קינד פֿון בונדישע אימיגראַנטן פֿון פּוילן. זונטיק, דעם 15טן נאָוועמבער, 7 אַ זייגער אין אָוונט ניו־יאָרקער צײַט, וועט אלי בענעדיקט, פֿון דער ייִדיש־ליגע, פֿירן אַ זום־שמועס מיט זייבלען וועגן זײַנע קינדער־יאָרן אין מעלבורן — דער עיקר, וועגן די ייִדישע שולן, טעאַטערס, לידער און די מענטשן וואָס האָבן געשאַפֿן יענע וועלט.
זיי וועלן אויך אַרומרעדן ווי אַזוי די זכרונות פֿון יענער וועלט לעבן ווײַטער אין זײַנע ביכער.
אַרנאָלד זייבל איז אַ שרײַבער, דערציילער און אַקטיוויסט פֿאַר מענטשנרעכט. זײַנע ביכער, וואָס זענען אויף ענגליש, באַהאַנדלען טעמעס פֿון אימיגראַציע, זכּרון און גלות. צווישן זײַנע באַקאַנטע ביכער געפֿינען זיך „קאַפֿע שעהעריזאַד“ און „בריליאַנטן און אַש“.
די אונטערנעמונג איז פֿרײַ פֿון אָפּצאָל. כּדי זיך צו פֿאַרשרײַבן, גיט אַ קוועטש דאָ.
The post Zoom chat: Memories of Yiddish and Bund gatherings in Melbourne appeared first on The Forward.
