Contextualized and Decontextualized: Israel’s Fight for Truth

By Michael Oren

Speaking on a Pod Save America podcast last November 7, former President Barack Obama urged listeners to “take in the whole truth” about the war in Gaza. “What Hamas did was horrific and there’s no justification for it,” he said, but then added, “and what is also true is that the occupation, and what is happening to Palestinians, is unbearable”

If once our problem was moral and historical relativism, it is now the prevalence of its absence.

Two weeks earlier, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres reminded the Security Council that, “the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.”

Obama and Guterres were making the same point. When confronting a case in which 1,200 Jews are butchered, beheaded, burnt, raped, and dragged into torturous captivity, one must first understand the context. Such atrocities can never be ascribed to sheer Jew-hatred. On the contrary, at some less than subliminal level, these Jews brought it on themselves. Their murderers must have been motivated by something far more complicated than evil, and therefore cannot be unequivocally guilty.

The same argument was infamously made by the presidents of Harvard, M.I.T. and the University of Pennsylvania before the House Committee on Antisemitism on December 5. Asked by Representative Elise Stefanik whether calling for the genocide of Jews constitutes bullying or harassment at her university, Penn’s Elizabeth Magill replied, “It is a context-dependentdecision.” Claudine Gay, when pressed to say that Harvard protesters demanding Israel’s destruction were in effect antisemites, blandly answered. “It depends on the context.”

The contextualization of the Gaza war and the antisemitism it fueled soon spread to Lebanon. On June 19th, more than six months after Hezbollah first opened fire at northern Israel, the New York Times finally declared, “Israel and Hezbollah Play a Risky Tit-for-Tat, Leaving Region on Edge.” Both the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal employed the same term, describing the “tit-for-tat fighting on the Lebanese border.”  The reality, of course, was that Israel was defending itself from the 8,000 Hezbollah drones and rockets that destroyed thousands of houses and displaced 100,000 Israelis. There was no tit-for-tat—no more than America’s entry into World War II was a tit-for-tat for Pearl Harbor. Somehow, once again, the Jews are complicit in their own murder.

There is nothing new, certainly, about contextualizing the massacre of Jews and its advocates. As previously pointed out on these pages (The Final Battle for the Holocaust), historians have long sought to deny the uniqueness of the Holocaust and place it with a regional or broader racist context. Regarding the events of October 7, 2023, though, and the subsequent wars both in Gaza and Lebanon, the emphasis is no longer on contextualization. Obama, Guterres, and Gay have long become passé.

Once the victims of contextualization, Israel and the Jewish people, are today targeted by its opposite—decontextualization.  

If once our problem was moral and historical relativism, it is now the prevalence of its absence. If once the horrors Hamas inflicted on Jews were juxtaposed with the Palestinian suffering caused by Israel and the Holocaust was linked to other mass killings in Eastern Europe and the caste system in India, the comparisons are regularly being jettisoned.  Once the victims of contextualization, Israel and the Jewish people, are today targeted by its opposite—decontextualization.  

Take, for example, the Washington Post op-ed, published on October 22, by columnist Shadi Hamad. In “A wake-up call for Kamala Harris from Muslim and Arab Americans,” Hamad assails the government’s failure to stop the “devastation of Gaza” and to prevent Israel from invading Lebanon. “The complicity of Biden and Harris in two wars that have deliberately targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure has become hard to deny,” he writes. Nowhere in the piece is the slightest mention of the barbarous attacks that triggered these wars—the names “Hamas” and “Hezbollah” nowhere appear. Nowhere does Hamad consider the possibility that the Iran-backed terrorists Israel battles also pose a tangible threat to the American freedoms Hamad, himself, enjoys.

Israel simply kills Arabs for fun, the columnist suggests, with the Biden Administration its enabler. The wars in Gaza and Lebanon, once contextualized as the product of clashing Israeli and Palestinian rights and the cycle of violence between Israel and Hezbollah, are now presented as gratuitous acts of Zionist aggression. Such a distortion, published without correction on the pages of a major American newspaper, it is intellectually dishonest and arguably anti-Semitic.

Further examples abound. Interviewing about the Lebanon war on CNN International on October 4, I protested a previous report that focused exclusively on the damage and suffering that Israel was inflicting on Lebanon. “To listen to CNN, you'd think Israel just wakes up and continues attacking Lebanon over and over again,” I began. “Not once did you mention the hundreds of rockets that have been fired by Hezbollah onto northern Israel. My family are in bomb shelters tonight and that's not mentioned anywhere...There were drone attacks from Iraq all sponsored by Iran.” I literally pounded the table. “You've got to give a context.”

The anchorwoman responded by inviting me to listen more frequently to CNN which, she claimed, was dutifully covering Israel’s side of the story. “We have reporters who are in bomb shelters like everyone else.”

Perhaps, but eighteen days later, CNN aired another report from Lebanon, this one lasting a full seven minutes, which once again deal exclusively with the agonies wrought by Israel. Once again, there was no Hezbollah, no rockets or drones, or 100,000 Israeli refugees, just unadulterated Jewish savagery.

Subtler but no less decontextualized are frontpage New York Times reports (October 18th and 30th) on the destruction of hundreds of buildings by the IDF in southern Lebanon. While Hezbollah’s “cross-border attacks” are scarcely mentioned in passing, immense detail is devoted to the demolition of villages which Israel “says” served as Hezbollah strongholds. Before and after photos of the seemingly peaceful hamlets, together with videos of soldiers exulting after an explosion, reenforce the message of an Israel driven solely by vindictiveness.

Formerly contextualized and now increasingly decontextualized, Israel’s struggle for survival must nevertheless continue. Our public diplomacy must relentlessly place the blame for this war on the terrorists who launched it and who bear the responsibility for both side’s suffering. We must always emphasize the malign Iranian hand behind all the violence sweeping the Middle East and that even now threatens the West. Ultimately, though, the only contexts that count are our own—of people, state, and Jewish history. Fight within them, honestly and fiercely, and Israel will prevail.