Since an open letter from Oberlin’s Jewish students was published in November (“Open Letter from Oberlin’s Jewish Students,” The Oberlin Review, Nov. 17, 2023), there have been several op-ed responses, primarily written by alumni, that seek to challenge or disprove the pro-Palestinian perspectives expressed by students in their articles. This article is a response to one of these responses, published Feb. 16, by Karen Bekker, OC ’94, in which she attempts to debunk the “misinformation” expressed by College third-year Zane Badawi, ultimately calling on President Carmen Twillie Ambar to officially denounce his position (“Review Article on Israel–Gaza War Contains Numerous Misrepresentations,” The Oberlin Review, Feb. 16, 2024).

While this article was published by Bekker in her capacity as a Oberlin alum, her rhetoric is in line with that of the pro-Israel media watchdog that she is employed by: the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, or CAMERA. Founded in 1982 in response to what they saw as anti-Israel reporting by The Washington Post on Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, CAMERA focuses on lobbying for corrections in major media outlets, seeking to enforce a pro-Israel line in the media under the guise of “neutrality,” much like Bekker does in her article. You may have heard of CAMERA from the recent controversies at The New York Times regarding their article on sexual violence on Oct. 7, which brought attention to the fact that the Times’ Executive Editor, Joe Kahn, is the son of a former longtime CAMERA board member. While The Oberlin Review has nowhere close to the influence of The New York Times or The Washington Post, Bekker’s article illustrates the influence these pro-Israel organizations have on journalism of all sizes, and the need to counter these talking points wherever they appear.

We do not expect an organization that thinks that Palestinians should be thankful for Israeli checkpoints to have a change of heart from reading this article, but we thought it might be useful for the Oberlin community to understand exactly why Bekker’s various statements are incorrect so that they can know how to counter these tired talking points. The typical pro-Israel arguments that Bekker employs are premised on racist depictions of Palestinians and Arabs as war-mongering antisemites who bear sole responsibility for all violence enacted during the more than 100-year history of Zionist settlement in Palestine, including the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians from what is now Israel. 

Bekker’s narrative disregards the fact that between 250,000 and 350,000 Palestinians were expelled between the adoption of the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine Nov. 29, 1947, and the beginning of the Arab–Israeli War May 15, 1948. In other words, close to half of all Palestinians cleansed from their land during the Nakba were displaced before any Arab armies launched their attacks on Zionist forces.

By blaming the entirety of Gazan suffering over the previous six months on Hamas’ actions on Oct. 7, 2023, Bekker attempts to rid Israel of any responsibility for the killing of 25,000 women and children. She rhetorically asks: “if one of these young [Israeli victims of rape] were your sister, or your friend, what would you expect your government to do?” However, by that same logic, Hamas’ horrific attacks on Oct. 7 could be justified by 75 years of Palestinian dispossession, 56 years of military occupation, brutal torture, arbitrary detention, settler violence in the West Bank, demolition of homes, and/or the killing of mostly unarmed protestors by Israeli snipers at the Great March of Return in Gaza in 2018. We are sure that Bekker would not view those as grounds for justifying Hamas’ attack — nor should she, or anyone. To utilize the suffering of Israelis to defend a genocidal military assault, which has effected a wholesale destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure and civilian life, is an insult to the intelligence of the Review’s readership and indicates a desperate attempt to excuse the inexcusable. If we are willing to extend a carte blanche to Israel to wreak as much havoc as they wish upon Gaza in return for the horrors of Oct. 7, the laws of war and international human rights mean nothing. In an article she wrote for CAMERA, Bekker has argued that a lack of U.S. accountability for war crimes makes criticizing Israel’s killing of aid workers a double standard, indicating that her dismissive attitude towards international law is a consistent part of her pro-Israel viewpoint.

One of the more odious points of Bekker’s Review article comes when she claims that “among the 25,000 casualties are 10,000 Hamas fighters,” which she points to as a clear sign that Israel’s assault is a legitimate military operation and that any civilian deaths are truly accidental. Setting aside the countless examples of members of Israeli Occupation Forces (IDF) murdering surrendering civilians — including their own hostages, declaring that nobody in Gaza is innocent, or calling for Gaza to be flattened, this is an insane statistic. Recent UN estimates claim that of the more than 34,000 Palestinians — a drastic undercount due to the engineered collapse of Gaza’s healthcare system — who have been killed since Oct. 7, at least 14,685 children and 9,670 women were among those killed, leaving roughly 10,000 adult males among the dead. For Bekker’s Hamas casualty statistic to be true, every dead Palestinian male above the age of 18 has to be labeled as a terrorist, with no exceptions. This is blatantly racist, as should go without saying, but also makes little logical sense. If the IDF did kill at least 50 percent of Hamas’ total membership, this would be a death blow to their fighting capabilities. On the contrary, testimonies from Israeli and US officials say that Hamas’ fighting capacity has been diminished but is nowhere close to being destroyed. If we are to believe official sources, the IDF has killed more hostages than it has rescued and has not come close to destroying Hamas, all while killing over 34,000 Palestinians. We think that this is a much clearer illustration of Israel’s true objectives than the testimony of military experts or Israeli spokespeople. 

Even with that said, the intentionality necessary to designate this assault as genocidal is present in abundance in statements from Israeli officials. On Oct. 9, 2023, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant claimed that Israel was “imposing a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” Was this “human animals” comment in reference to all Gazans or specifically Hamas? The difference, for Israel, is insignificant. By Bekker’s own logic, all males above the age of 18 are considered Hamas fighters, so the line between combatant and civilians is impossibly thin. On Oct. 28, 2023, while Israel was preparing for its ground invasion of Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated publicly, “you must remember what Amalek [a phrase referring to the descendants of Amalek, the enemy of the nation of Israelites in the Hebrew Bible] has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember.” He again referenced Amalek in a letter to Israeli military officials and soldiers. The Biblical passage he referenced contains the following passage: “Now go, attack Amalek, and proscribe all that belongs to him. Spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings, oxen and sheep, camels and asses.”

Bekker’s claims are all premised upon racist assumptions about Palestinians — either that they are so violent that they cannot be reasoned with or that their widespread death is an acceptable cost of war. Indeed, her ugly portrayal of Palestinians living in perpetual refugeehood with the sole intent to destroy the State of Israel illustrates her distorted view of an entire nation. Such racist rhetoric should not be taken seriously.

We are hopeful that this article will provide a basis for refuting the types of surface-level arguments that Bekker, and others like her, spew en masse in an attempt to stifle any and all criticism of Israel. It is impossible to address all of Bekker’s ill-informed points here, as they each deserve considerable attention. But this article demonstrates, firstly, that her claims are incorrect, and secondly, how they might be countered. Bekker’s basic Zionist talking points are easy to debunk, but the backwards claims they push take far more time and effort to disprove than they do to make. For that reason, all of us concerned with truth and justice need to remain vigilant in the face of a professional propagandist publishing dangerously misleading content in our school newspaper.