We all have our triggers. Mine is when someone in a coffee shop asks for an "expresso”. I come out in hives.
For the historian William Dalrymple, we learned last weekend, it’s mention of the IDF. To be precise, not just a mention but the assertion, as someone put it on Twitter: “The IDF stands for freedom in Israel and America alike.”
Cue this response from Dalrymple: “A blindly ignorant and near-Orwellian tweet that inverts the truth, Sir! How can you not know that Israel illegally occupies the West Bank and Gaza in defiance of 47 UN Resolutions, and daily keeps 5.5 million Palestinians suspended in stateless serfdom, demolishing their houses and dispossessing them of their ancestral land. It illegally holds, tortures, rapes and sexually abuses 10,000 Palestinians detainees.
“It has damaged or destroyed 34 out of 36 hospitals in Gaza and has killed over 40,000 civilians (including 113 journalists & 200 health care workers) as well as injuring 80,000+ more, with some 15,000+ missing, presumed dead under the rubble. Israel is responsible for unprecedented civilian casualties, after dropping the equivalent of five Hiroshima bombs on an area a quarter the size of London. It performs almost daily pogroms on the unarmed farmers and shepherds of the West Bank.
“It has total impunity in completely ignoring international law, and it does so with Western arms, finance and full diplomatic support. There is no parallel to this appalling mass-suppression of freedom and Israel deserves instant and immediate sanctions to make itself fall into line and return to the fold of international law and human rights.”
Dalrymple is one of our leading historians, lauded by many of the world’s most prestigious history prizes and winner of the President’s Medal of the British Academy, its highest honour, for “outstanding service to the cause of the humanities and social sciences”. But if his history is as grotesquely wrong as his social media posts on Israel, then let’s just say his reputation needs reassessment.
Israel has, he tells us, “killed over 40,000 civilians”. These are, of course, the figures provided by the Hamas-run Government Information Office in Gaza. But even if one accepts they are correct, is Dalrymple really asserting that not a single terrorist has been killed, and that every one of those who has died is an innocent civilian? He really is, because the 40,000 figure supplied by Hamas is for total deaths.
That’s just one of the astounding number of basic errors in his post. We can pick apart many more – except we don’t have to, because Dalrymple’s buffoonery (I’m being kind) aroused the ire of that magisterial historian, author of the definitive history of Jerusalem, Simon Sebag Montefiore. Dalrymple’s post, he responded, was “a mélange of facts and unfacts, hyperbole, inaccuracy and ahistorical musing. There is much to criticise in this Israeli government (as I do daily) and some of it we agree on; there is much Gazan suffering to mourn and the tragic loss of life of ordinary Gazans is, we agree, unbearable. We long for the war to end, to protect Gazans and return hostages. But exaggerations, untruths and lack of context are neither necessary nor helpful: they just stir more hatred and place a real peace of Israel and Palestine further away. Serfdom? The whole point of serfdom is to tie peasants to the land; we can all agree that messianic Jewish settlers want to drive Palestinians off the land. So serfdom is the one thing it isn’t.
“And on facts? ‘40,000 civilians killed’ but not a single Hamas soldier? How does pretending Hamas doesn’t exist or fight help Palestinians? Ministry of Truth would be proud.”
It was like watching a panther dismember a goat. Dalrymple carried on with futile attempts to rebut Sebag Montefiore’s calm elaboration of facts and evidence – and each time the latter came back with devastating clarity: “You call the tragic Gaza War ‘unprecedented’, yet I question that: 500,000 killed by Assad Syria, 40,000 civilians by Assad in Hama in two weeks in 1982, let alone Iraq, Sudan and Congo.
“To accept Hamas’s figures but never Israeli figures equals bias. You and I aren’t qualified to guess extra-mortality figures. Hamas says 40,000 killed. Israel says 17,000 Hamas soldiers killed. You state Israel ‘killed 40,000 civilians’. A clear error you should correct to avoid a job offer from Ministry of Truth? If I’m allowed one last point, dear William, on arming Israel: it is a Western ally under attack from Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran backed by Russia – all of them enemies of all we stand for.”
Knowledge is advanced through claim, refutation, counter-claim and rebuttal – which is on perfect display here, with Sebag Montefiore taking Dalrymple’s monstrous assertions apart. More, please.
