The Road to October 7

Disclaimer: This transcript is an edited version version of a transcript created using AI technology and may not reflect 100% accuracy.

The video can be found here.

Sarah: Good afternoon and welcome to yet another really timely, topical and compelling EMET webinar. In another few days, we’ll be experiencing the second-year anniversary of the barbaric, brutal and savage attacks of October 7th, 2023. And we should all bear in mind that there are perhaps 20 live hostages living in the terror tunnels of Gaza. I can think of no greater way of commemorating this than interviewing Dr. Rafi Medoff, who’s the founding director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies. Rafi is the co-editor of the Institute’s Encyclopedia of America’s response to the Holocaust and the author of more than 20 outstanding books. And I really recommend that all of you go on to amazon.com and get some of his books. Raffi’s expertise has also been highly called for as a consultant on many films about the Holocaust coming out of Hollywood. Okay, Raffi, I just finished reading your excellent and very compelling book, The Road to October 7, from cover to cover. Practically every single sentence that you’ve written is footnoted and documented in your approximately 70 pages of single-spaced compendium of footnotes. I really cannot recommend this highly enough. First of all, why exactly, Raffi, did you write this book?

Dr. Medoff: Thank you, Sarah, for having me on. It’s always a pleasure to be joining with you and EMET on one of these webinars, and especially in view of all the good and important work that you do on Capitol Hill and elsewhere to expose many of the same, truths and the important points that I also address in my new book, The Road to October 7. Those who are familiar with the previous books that I’ve written may wonder what led me to, as you say, what led me to write this book, which is to say, it’s kind of a, it’s a deviation from my normal area of focus. As you know, most of my previous books deal with the 1930s and the 1940s, in particular, American responses to news of the Holocaust, American government, American media, the American Jewish community, and so on. And writing about events that took place 80 and 90 years ago gives me a kind of a safety zone because I’m looking at stories that have already concluded. I’m looking at documents, internal correspondence in the White House and in Jewish organizations and elsewhere, which tell us how the story turned out. Approaching the topic of October 7th was very different for me. For the first time I found myself writing about events that are unfolding even as I’m writing about them. Again and again throughout this past year and a half as I worked on the manuscript I found myself having to re-examine and sometimes change aspects of the manuscript because of breaking developments in the news that nobody could have anticipated. So this is not the ideal setting for a historian. We prefer to look at events where the old documents are now available. We can get the inside story. We don’t have to speculate as to the motives of some political leader or some Jewish organizational figure. We can actually read what they were writing confidentially at the time. But the topic of October 7th is too important and too compelling to not address. I felt like I had to write about it for this reason. I woke up to the news of the Hamas invasion and atrocities, just like we all did, with a sense of profound shock. This attack seems so different. It seemed as if something completely new. And yet as I looked more and more at it, especially in the days that followed the initial attack, as we learned the details of many of the atrocities, as we learned about those who aided and abetted it, as we looked at the world’s reaction, again and again, through the eyes of a historian, I was struck by the parallels to the past. I realized that this was an aspect of the story that needed to be told by a historian to understand the parallels, that October 7th was not some aberration, of course, it was different in certain ways and in the scope of the attack, but in its essence, in the motives of the perpetrators and often in the methods of the perpetrators, October 7th was part, first of all, of the 100 year Palestinian Arab war against Israel and Zionism and the Jews. And even more than that, it was part of a broader war. The subtitle of the book is Hamas, the Holocaust and the eternal war against the Jews. My argument is that looking back at 1500 years of crusades and pogroms and terrorist attacks and the Holocaust that the parallels, the similarities are much more significant than the differences. Of course, October 7th is not identical to its predecessors. No two events in history are ever identical. But what October 7th has in common with the many attacks on Jews in different countries, different generations, what it has in common with them is more significant than the differences between them. And so that is why I felt that this book had to be written, even knowing the hazard that there would be some things that would change in the news that could affect it. And I was making last minute adjustments to the manuscript right up until the point where we were proofreading Galli’s just a few months ago. Despite that, however, much of the book is, of course, about history. And it is about how that history informs what we have seen on October 7th and the events that followed it.

Sarah: So the attacks of October 7th demonstrated, as you put it, the overwhelming power of this amalgamation of ideology, Islamist fundamentalism, and Arab nationalism. Can you explain to our audience the relationship that the Palestinian Arabs have with the concept of death as opposed to the Jewish concept of death and of life?

Dr. Medoff: This is one of the many fascinating aspects of studying the Arab-Israeli conflict, looking at how in Palestinian Arab society, things we take for granted are viewed so differently. When we send our children off to summer camp, we expect them to have fun and play games. And it’s still shocking for many of us to read that what happens in Palestinian Arab summer camps is so different. And I’m speaking here about both the camps run by the Palestinian Authority, primarily, as well as those that were run by Hamas, in which children are trained in military preparedness, in which they are taught to hate Jews, to hate Israel, to glorify the use of violence against Jews. These are not summer camps at all in the model of what we as Americans and Westerners are used to. And most importantly, summer camps like Palestinian Arab schools are in effect a training ground. They’re a breeding ground for a generation of people who, of young people who grow up to be murderous adults. Not in every case, obviously, but when we look at October 7, it’s important to always remember that the young men who perpetrated those atrocities, the slaughter, the mutilation, the torture, the gang rapes, up until just a few years ago, in most cases, there were students in the Palestinian Authority schools, and they had taken part in the Palestinian Authority summer camps. So if you raise young children in an environment where every day they learn in their schools, they hear in their mosques, they watch on television, they hear from their parents that Jews are evil, that Israel has to be destroyed, that all methods, as they say, any form of resistance, as they call it, any method, matter how grotesque, violent, is legitimate, in fact, more than legitimate. It’s considered a goal to which they should aspire. The entire concept of martyrdom in Palestinian Arab society is something that is very unsettling to our ears because it is such a, it is so much the opposite of how Judaism sees life and indeed how most Americans view life as something which is precious and which you should use to better society and to serve productive aims. As opposed to in Palestinian Arab society where martyrdom that is to the killed while attempting to murder Jews, that has become the most important value. And that’s what they’re taught from a young age. So the perpetrators of October 7th, in essence, were acting out what they had been taught in school and at home and summer camps year after year after year. The most striking historical parallel to Palestinian Arab education which I describe in my book, The Road to October 7th, is the Hitler Youth Movement and the way in which the Nazi German government completely changed the curriculum in German public schools, made it conform to Nazi ideals, and then raised in the 1930s an entire generation of youngsters who were taught to believe, again, the same thing, that Jews were evil, that they deserve to be crushed, expelled, killed that Germany should expand, that Germany had a right to take over the land of its neighbors, that Germany should rule the world. There are eerie parallels between the way in which young people were raised in Nazi Germany and the way in which young people are raised in Palestinian Arab society. You know, historians of the Holocaust often note that the Hitler Youth Movement graduates were among the most devoted. the most savage of the young soldiers in the German army. And many of the atrocities we read about in the final months of World War II were specifically committed by teenagers, by Hitler Youth Movement members and recent graduates who were so devoted to Hitler and Nazism and violent antisemitism right up until the final days of Germany’s surrender. Well, think about that. These youngsters, what had they been? taught in schools and in their summer camps in Germany, in Nazi Germany, just before the war. And there too, we see a frightening similarity between what the perpetrators of October 7th were learning right up until the day that they came storming across Israel’s southern border.

Sarah: It is an excruciating and horrific parallel. There is, of course, one distinction. That is the theological element that Palestinians, many of them members of Hamas, believe in. And Hitler Youth, I think it was just they wanted to take over the world, but I don’t know if they had this otherworldly view of going up to 74 virgins.

Dr. Medoff: Well, let’s take a look for a moment, if we may, at some of the theological aspects of anti-Jewish violence, both that committed by Palestinian Arabs and sometimes by others. Let me share with you and with our audience here. Just a couple of images which illustrate this troubling phenomenon. Now here I’m going to, I’m beginning with an image from Tsarist Russia in 1903. So it’s not the Middle East. This is a different part of the world and the perpetrators are not members of Hamas or other Palestinian Arab factions. These are Cossacks. But following a religious ideology of their own, a kind of a fundamentalist version of Russian Orthodox Christianity, in which they too were taught that Jews were evil and deserved to be violently assaulted. In their case, because of their belief that the Jews 2,000 years earlier had killed Jesus. But these are still people acting out of extreme religious zeal. Now, the reason I chose this particular photograph is because it’s a scene from a synagogue. Now, in Tsarist Russia in the early 1900s, there were thousands, literally thousands of pogroms. And typically, of course, the pogrom would target Jewish men, women and children. Their intention, the intention of the attackers was to kill people. But it’s interesting and revealing, I think, that here in this case, they attacked a synagogue. As we all know, the average synagogue on an average day is not filled with people. Of course, on Shabbat or on holidays, there are many congregants. But on an average day, and many those pogroms took place on days other than Saturday, the Sabbath, there are not many people in a synagogue. So for a pogromist to deviate from their what you would think was their main goal, to kill people. And instead, invade what was almost certainly a largely uninhabited synagogue is remarkable. Now notice that what they did here is they tore up these Torah scrolls. As we know, a Torah scroll is not just sitting out in the middle of a synagogue waiting to be read, or in this case, waiting to be attacked. Of course, they are wound tightly. They’re covered. And they’re stored away in an ark, or what we call an arrown. So they’re not even normally visible. A Russian Cossack smashing his way into an empty synagogue had to be extremely determined, methodical, and be committed to finding something that was not just a Jewish life he could take, but a symbol of Judaism itself. He had to go and find where the Torah scrolls were secreted away. And then of course, as we know, they’re not easy to lift. They’re heavy, had to lift them out, take them, unwind them to get to the point where they could actually violate the sacred literature.

My point is that there’s a level of extreme religious zeal here that is necessary to carry out this kind of a horror. And we see that again in later scenes and other parts of the world. Here I want to share with you a photograph that will take us about 25 years ahead to 1929 in the Middle East. No Russian Cossacks here. These are Palestinian Arabs, very much like those who attacked Israel on October 7th. But in 1929, during the pogrom in Hebron, where they slaughtered 69 Jews, injured, mutilated, and raped many others. And yet again, the pogromists took time out to invade this synagogue. It’s called the Avraham of Vinu Synagogue. It’s near the Cave of the Patriarchs, where Abraham, Isaac, Jacob are buried. Again, they attacked a site where they would not expect to find many people. But these Muslim fanatics wanted not only to kill Jews, but also to strike at a symbol of Judaism. And so again, they smashed into a Jewish holy place looked for Jewish sacred literature, found those Torah scrolls, lifted them out, uncovered them, unwound them, and then desecrated them. Unless we think that such images were confined to a century ago, let’s just look at one last image. This one is from much more recent horror. In the year 2000, there was a Palestinian Arab mob attack on another Jewish religious site. And this was the Tomb of Joseph located in the city that Arabs call Nablus, which Israelis know by its Hebrew and biblical name, Shechem. It is the traditional revered burial site of the biblical patriarch Joseph. It’s a small building in a Palestinian Arab inhabited area where there is a synagogue and there are devout Jews who come to study and pray there, but there are no Jews living there. So this Palestinian Arab mob attacking on Rosh Hashanah in the year 2000 did not expect to find any Jews in the building. They attacked Israeli soldiers nearby, but the choice of this site again speaks to the level of religious extremism among these Palestinian Arab Muslims, just as it was among the Cossacks we looked at a moment ago, and the Crusaders in Middle Ages about whom I write in the Road to October 7. Notice the details here of the attack. We see a young Arab stomping on what is known as a Mizrah. This is a large laminated document that normally hangs on a wall. It has God’s holy name on it. You can see it there between his feet. And they’ve torn this Mizrah from the wall. It has various Jewish prayers written on it. And he’s stopping on it while you see a second person to the left is actually beating it with a club, just as he would have beaten a person if he had found any individual, any Jews in the synagogue. But there weren’t, was nobody there. And so as he and the other smile gleefully, he is pounding at a Jewish religious document with a club. So a lot of symbolism here. Much of the Arab war against the Jews revolves around symbols. It’s not always simply practical warfare, as we in the West have come to expect. Arab terrorism against Jews does have a religious element. But as I show in my book, that religious element is one of the common things about anti-Jewish mob violence going back more than a thousand years. When I was looking at first-person accounts of pogroms in the middle ages, and we have some of those, in other words, some of those accounts survived, or we have accounts by chroniclers who heard it from eyewitnesses, we find descriptions of the atrocities, the methods, used by the attackers that are strikingly similar to what we’ve read about October 7th. It’s remarkable to think that you can go back 1500 years and still find violent anti-Semites using essentially the same language, often using the same methods, sometimes using the same weapons. And that’s the continuity that I emphasize in the road to October 7th, that this road really goes back 1500 years and it winds its way through different continents, over the course of different generations. The attackers often speak different languages. Sometimes they’re overtly religious, sometimes not. During the Holocaust, Nazism was, although it had certain religious elements, that wasn’t the basis of Nazi antisemitism. But certainly, the antisemitism advocated and taught in Nazi Germany also relied on the fact that average Germans had been raised in a religious tradition which blamed Jews for killing Jesus and looked at Jews with contempt based on early and longtime Christian religious antisemitism. So the roots were there even though the Nazis had a different emphasis.

Obviously in the case of the Holocaust, the methodology was also different because once in the modern era, thanks to scientific advancement, the Germans found themselves able to kill Jews in a much more sophisticated manner. But let me emphasize, during the first year of the Holocaust, the period which we now refer to as the Holocaust by bullets, before the gas chamber technique was perfected, more than a million Jews were slaughtered by gunfire, often at close range. And there again, I found remarkable parallels. A lot of the descriptions of the atrocities committed during that first year of the Holocaust, we have in great detail from various sources. And they form the centerpiece of Daniel Goldhagen’s famous book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, where he explores a question that I also take up, and that is, how is it possible for a human being to point a gun or a knife or a sword at a defenseless civilian, often a child, and proceed to commit some barbaric act? Because after all, nobody is born a killer. It’s something which has to be taught. The Palestinian Arab terrorists who carried out the October 7 atrocities didn’t begin life as future killers. It was in the hands of their parents and their religious leaders, their imams, and the news media of the Palestinian Authority, which inculcated them with imagery, with messages year after year after year that then brought them to the point that they saw Jews as evil monsters who should be killed, who should be tortured, maimed, and gang raped. And then they proceeded to act on exactly what their religious leaders and their teachers and their parents had told them year after year throughout their lives.

Sarah: And I also will never forget there was a young man named Hillel Lieberman. who went to cover Yosef to try to rescue the Sefer Torahs and he was lynched. And this was towards the beginning of Oslo.

Dr. Medoff: Sarah, thank you. Thank you for mentioning that because that that also touches on an important related concept. Here you had an unarmed Jewish civilian coming from a nearby town to try to rescue the Torah scrolls that were in the burning tomb of Joseph, that Rosh Hashanah. The mere sight of a Jew inspired this Arab mob to murder him. Again, that’s not the kind of attitude, the sentiment that any human being is born with. You don’t start out looking at people of a different ethnic group or religion or race and then immediately think, I want to kill that person. It’s such a foreign and animalistic kind of sentiment. Of course, we saw some of that in the old South when African-Americans were likewise treated as targets and found themselves the victims of lynchings and other kinds of barbarism, which it’s hard for us to understand. Now, the big difference, of course, is that American society matured. We are today living in an America which is enlightened and progressive and where peaceful coexistence between religious and ethnic groups is the norm. Tragically, the norm in Palestinian Arab society always has been hatred. of non-muslims and of course of non-palestinian Arabs and first and foremost of jews and a desire to destroy them it’s shocking to us because it’s so different but it’s a reality we cannot deny because that is that is the reality of life in the middle east for the Jewish state.

Sarah: Right so your book is extraordinarily comprehensive you go back to the time of the crusaders but more, I think, relevant to us is you describe what happened at places like Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and George Washington University in the prelude to the Holocaust and during the Holocaust? And the parallels to what’s going on today?

Dr. Medoff: My research on American universities and their relations with Nazi Germany follows in the footsteps of my late colleague Stephen Norwood, who wrote the pioneering work in this field called The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower, which I strongly recommend. Professor Norwood exposed how Ivy League universities such as especially Harvard and Columbia, but also others, deliberately cultivated friendly relations with Nazi Germany, with Nazi controlled universities in Germany. They often invited a Nazi representative to speak on their campus. They exchanged students with Nazified universities in Germany. In my research, I followed up with by studying other universities that Professor Norwood had not yet examined. And I was specifically interested in universities where there have been notorious outbreaks of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic sentiment since October 7. I wanted to know how did the administration, faculty, and students on campuses like George Washington University, Wesleyan and others, how did they respond when they had to deal with a regime that was genuinely genocidal? We have the irony today of students and radical faculty members at many universities falsely accusing Israel of genocide. By the 1930s, you had a Nazi regime that was actively preparing to commit genocide and had committed all sorts of atrocities against Jews. And yet these universities actively befriended the Nazis. In the case of George Washington University in Washington, DC, the irony is particularly striking because it was there that not long ago, one of the pro-Hamas student protesters held up a sign that said, final solution. Well, how did their campus respond back in the 30s? That student with the final solution sign and many other students calling for the destruction of Israel and in effect the mass murder of Jews today were not penalized by the George Washington University administration. They were handled with kid gloves. When they projected in huge letters on the sides of campus buildings a glory to our martyrs. By the way, think about that for a moment. Glory to our martyrs. This was within a few days after October 7th. It was an open endorsement of the atrocities committed by the so-called Hamas martyrs. And yet the students received a slap on the wrist, if anything.

Now, there’s no direct parallel to what a different George Washington University administration did in the 1930s. But let’s think about this for a moment. Because what I found in examining every single day’s edition of the campus newspaper, George Washington, was that they repeatedly invited representatives of the Nazi German embassy to campus. So there were literally Nazis on campus receiving friendly welcome, allowed to address the students. There were student exchanges between George Washington University and Nazi universities. The administration approved and undertook this program of welcoming Nazis to campus. The parallel, in my opinion, is a basic indifference to Jewish suffering. It’s not exact, and it’s in a different administration, but the concept is the same, and it’s important. In the 1930s, when Nazis were coming to the George Washington campus, back in Nazi Germany, Jews were being brutally persecuted, and it was well known. And yet, the administration had no problem seeking friendly relations with the Hitler regime. And so too in our own time, where students can hold up signs calling for a final solution or glory to the perpetrators of the gang rapes and the mass murders. And again, the administration took little or no action. So that’s the, there’s the commonality that I point to in the road to October 7th, that these administrations in both cases, same universities, both instances faced with the phenomenon of mass atrocities against Jews and both times turning away and ignoring Jewish suffering and trying to hide behind concepts like free speech and distorting other kinds of oh really phony principles in order to justify their behavior.

Sarah: Right. So you described a certain gentleman who was an official of the Nazi party that had gone to Harvard and how the Jewish students actually staged a protest, and they had actually been, they suffered certain consequences. And this gentleman was invited back and welcomed. Do you want to describe who he is and the kind of fascination that Harvard University had for Nazism?

Dr. Medoff: This remarkable phenomenon of Jewish anti-Nazi protesters being punished while Nazis were being given the red-carpet treatment occurred at Harvard, but also elsewhere. I found at MIT an instance where a dean went around tearing down posters that Jewish students had put up advertising an anti-Nazi rally to protest MIT’s friendly relations with Nazi Germany. Something similar happened to Columbia, where students organized a protest outside the home of the president of university. And as a result, the leader of the perfectly peaceful legal rally was expelled from Columbia and never awarded his degree, while the Nazi ambassador to the United States was welcomed on campus. So again and again, we find this extraordinary phenomenon of representatives, of a fascist terrorist regime being welcomed to some of America’s most prominent universities. And the people who try to speak out peacefully and legally find themselves expelled or punished. In the case of Harvard, the students were arrested. Some of them were sentenced to a number of months at hard labor for the crime of disrupting, disturbing the peace. And that was the disturbing the peace of Nazis who were being welcomed to the campus by the Harvard administration. Harvard in particular has a sordid history when it comes to its relations with Jews. Back in the 1920s, it was among the most prominent oh implementers of a quota to severely limit the number of Jews who could be admitted to Harvard. So there’s a long trail here. And that may or may not have any connection to the welcoming of Nazis to campus in 1930s. But what we can say is that Harvard has a lot to apologize for and to make up for. And I’ve not heard them doing it. I’ve seen Harvard and other prominent universities apologize appropriately for having own slaves, for example, in America’s early years. And I appreciate the fact that they are sensitive to the concerns of other minority groups. In the case of George Washington University, the administration a few years ago not only apologized, they changed the name of their sports team’s mascot because it was considered offensive because of its reference to colonialism. And yet I see no similar oh apologies or acknowledgement that these universities befriended Nazi Germany and all that Hitler represented.

Sarah: And of course, people like Hatem Bazian and others, Hatem Bazian from Berkeley University, who’s the chairman of their Department of Islamophobia, are always invited to speak on college campuses. So can you describe what is written in the Geneva Convention? Because Israel has been under the microscope for the disproportionate use of force in places like hospitals, mosques, schools within Gaza. Can you describe how the Geneva Convention is worded so that one can reach their objectives of eliminating the enemy?

Dr. Medoff: Well, the Geneva Conventions and international law authorize the use of deadly force by a victim of aggression against their aggressor. Everything Israel has done in its pursuit of Hamas since October 7th has been very much within what international law stipulates regarding civilians. When terrorists take over a hospital building, that building does not have any immunity from attack by the victims of Hamas’s aggression. The same is true for the school buildings that Hamas has commandeered. Anti-Israel elements in the news media refer to Israeli strikes on those targets as attacks on hospitals or schools. But that’s not at all what they are, of course. Those buildings are no longer primarily hospitals or schools. They become terrorist centers. And as such, Israel has every right under international law to strike at them. I go into some history in the Road to October 7th about how the allies conducted themselves in World War II. And I think it’s important to recall because nobody today, no reasonable person looks back at World War II and says the allies were wrong in the methods they used. That nobody says Roosevelt and Churchill were war criminals or that America and the other Allies committed genocide. Of course not, because America was the victim of aggression. Great Britain was the victim of aggression. And as such, they were within their rights morally and legally to use whatever force was necessary against whatever target was necessary to defeat those who had attacked them. Now, the allies went much further in their attacks on civilian targets than Israel. While Israel deliberately avoids civilian targets, even to the point of risking the lives of its soldiers by giving up the element of surprise and by going door to door instead of just flattening all of Gaza from the air as it could if it wanted. Israel has chosen to go above and beyond what international law says about safeguarding civilians. When fighting in a dense urban area like the Gaza Strip is, inevitably some civilians will be harmed if they choose to ignore Israel’s repeated advance warnings to get out of various areas where there are going to be battles. The allies did not do that at all. During World War II, Roosevelt did not send out issued warnings to Japanese civilians that the Americans were going to strike a certain city or a certain region, nor were such warnings given to German civilians. On the contrary, the allies in many cases deliberately struck civilian targets in order to undermine the morale of the enemy. The most famously, of course, the use of nuclear weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those weren’t military bases. Those were civilian areas. But even before that, going back to when President Roosevelt was still alive and he ordered the mass fire bombing of Tokyo, over 135,000 Japanese civilians were killed in hours by a deliberate decision by the allied leadership to undertake attacks which were harsh but were necessary to win a world war. So I explore that in some detail in the road to October 7th. In particular, I describe a remarkable battle in Italy involving Canadian troops. I was motivated to research this when Canada’s prime minister was lambasting Israel for unintentionally harming civilians in Gaza. Whereas there was an important battle in 1943 in Italy where Canadian troops fighting of course as part of the allies, struck at a German occupied village where interestingly most of the German soldiers were hiding underground in the town’s rail stations. Very similar obviously to Hamas terrorists hiding in their underground tunnels. And the Canadians had no hesitation about attacking that town, about blowing up civilian homes. More than 1,000 innocent Italian civilians were killed, but it was necessary to take that village as part of the overall strategy of defeating the Germans. So to hear Canadian or many other world leaders today denouncing Israel, well, I say look in the mirror, recall what your own soldiers did correctly, justifiably in World War II before you start lecturing Israel about not chasing Hamas terrorists in areas where there might be some civilians.

Sarah: So Rafi, one of our readers or listeners wrote in, how do you interpret the constant decadence and both Holocaust denial and the denial of October 7th, while at the same time, Palestinian sympathizers promote the propaganda even to Israeli Arabs that it did not happen even while they still celebrate the very acts these barbaric savage acts publicly?

Dr. Medoff: So isn’t that interesting? That’s one of the phenomena I just I explore in the book. We read the state statements by Palestinian Arab leaders all the time. accusing Israel of being like the Nazis. But then we also read them saying that there was no Holocaust. And then a third approach, they often will say the Nazis were justified. We’ve heard this out of the mouth of the chairman of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, who wrote an entire book, his dissertation as a graduate student in Moscow, denying the Holocaust. And yet he also praises and defends the Nazis saying that they were simply responding to the Jews trying to take over German society. So how can you, as the questioner poses, how can you understand this weird discrepancy? Either the Nazis were bad and the Israelis are bad like them, or the Nazis were great, in which case, why are you mad at the Israelis? It doesn’t make any sense. And it goes to the point you raised earlier, Sarah, about the starkly different worldviews between how we in the West look at things and how Palestinian Arabs and many others in Arab countries see the world and how they understand history. In this case, I think it’s simply this, Palestinian Arab leaders and propagandists will say anything that they think will somehow discredit or harm Israel in the eyes of public opinion. So whether that means defending the Nazis or accusing Israel of being like the Nazis, it doesn’t matter. It’s almost like they can say whatever they want. And frankly, for a long time, it seems the Palestinian Arab leadership had come to believe that saying such things carry no consequences. As you know, for decades, the United States government provided the Palestinian Authority with $500 million a year in aid regardless of how many anti-Semitic things Palestinian Arab leaders said, or how many times the Palestinian Authority’s own policemen were involved in terrorist attacks against Israeli Jews. So I think what we see from the record of the past 25 years is that the Palestinian Authority got very used to this idea that they could say any crazy thing. They could even denounce America and America’s leaders, as they often did. And yet there would be no consequences. Now there was a time, Sarah, as you well remember, when few of us in the United States had any idea what was being said in the Palestinian Arab news media. And every once in a while, something would leak out, like when Yasser Arafat made that infamous jihad speech in 1994. And then people were all shocked because nobody ever heard this sort of thing. But fortunately, since then, several particular organizations, Palestinian Media Watch and MEMRI, have been providing the free world with ample views of what Palestinian Arab leaders are saying in Arabic. And so today we have a much better idea of what they have in fact been teaching their children. And of course, we saw the result on October 7th of what happens if you teach children for 30 years that Jews are evil and need to be slaughtered. Then yes, eventually some of those children grow up to be young adults who then will act on what they were taught.

Sarah: Of course, right now it’s pretty difficult to be able to take a poll of what the Gaza and Palestinians believe about Israel and the Jews, you know, in this period of war and flux. However, you did cite certain polls about before the war and when these polls were a little bit more accurate and more reliable and polls of Palestinians in the West Bank or Judea and Samaria, if you will. Do you remember those?

Dr. Medoff: You know, polling is a very interesting way of trying to measure public opinion. We Americans, I think, have become very reliant on polls, especially to gauge the possible outcomes of political races. But polling in the end depends on how honest the answers are that the respondents provide. There’s an inherent problem in polling, which is known as the Bradley effect. It goes back to the race for a mayor in Los Angeles in 1980, in which all the polls show that one candidate was going to win. And yet on election day, the results were dramatically different. And what the pollsters concluded after studying, trying to figure out where they went wrong, what they concluded was that there were a lot of people who, for personal, political, ideological reasons, did not want to tell the truth to poll takers. They said they would be voting for one candidate because they thought that was the more socially acceptable and popular answer to give. But in fact, they voted for the other candidate. And the Bradley effect is still a problem. Although polling today is much more sophisticated than it was many years ago, still, it relies on the honesty of the person who’s being asked. That’s what makes the polls of Palestinian Arabs so fascinating because again and again, they show majorities giving what we would consider to be very extreme answers, very radical answers to questions that we as Americans see very differently. The fact that they’re saying it openly to pollsters is remarkable. It also means that inevitably there are others who are not openly saying they support violence or they support the destruction of Israel. They’re not openly saying it because they might have a sense that that’s not the most socially desirable thing to say, depending on who is taking the poll in other circumstances. But what I’m saying is probably the results are much worse from our point of view than what we hear. And yet we hear again and again large majorities of Palestinian Arabs telling pollsters that Israel deserves to be annihilated. In the case of October 7th, we find large majority saying that the October 7th attack was justified. And also, of course, denying that there were any atrocities. And there again, we have this weird discrepancy here where on the one hand, they’re saying Israel deserves to be the victim of atrocities. And at the same time, they’re saying, there weren’t any atrocities. Well, which isn’t? The answer is it doesn’t really matter because the mindset in Palestinian Arab society among most people is that, yeah, the Jews deserve it, but also the Jews are liars and it didn’t really happen to them. But we hope it would happen to them. It’s all kind of a big stew of horrible emotions, justifying violence and speaking in terms which are so foreign to our ears because they clash so starkly with basic concepts of tolerance, of pluralism, the kinds of things we take for granted, which are the pillars of American society and of the free world. And yet, tragically, again and again, despite the peace agreements, despite the Oslo Accords, despite all the promises by the Palestinian Arab leadership that they would live in peace with Israel. And yet again and again, we find that they have nurtured an entire society of people who still hate Jews and hate Israel and think that October 7th was just great. And their only regret is that it doesn’t happen again and again.

Sarah: Okay, so Rafi, you and I saw, I assume that you saw, a mass exodus from the General Assembly when Prime Minister Netanyahu spoke last Friday. Why do you think the rest of the world, this is a question from Murray Falbin, believes the Palestinian narrative and not the Jewish narrative? What is at work here?

Dr. Medoff: It seems to me that the history of the international community’s attitude toward Israel has always been kind of a roller coaster. And that’s why when there is a walkout, such as the one that you just mentioned, I’m not terribly unsettled by it because I think back to other occasions in relatively recent history when large numbers of countries took extremely unreasonable positions toward Israel. And then later, befriended Israel or at least back down from their overt hostility. I’ll mention a few examples. When Israel captured the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1980, the entire United Nations Security Council, including the United States, condemned the Israelis for violating Argentina’s sovereignty. Can you imagine such a thing? In 1975, majority of countries at the United Nations voted to declare that Zionism was racism, meaning that Israel should be destroyed because it’s racist at its core. And yet 16 years later, when the international mood was different, the UN voted overwhelmingly to repeal that resolution. How do we explain that? In 1976, when Israel staged the heroic rescue of hostages from Entebbe, Uganda, dozens of African countries demanded that the UN hold an urgent session to condemn Israel for violating Uganda’s sovereignty. I mean, is that Unbelievable? Well, yes, yet it happened. In 1981, when the Israelis struck Iraq’s nuclear weapons facilities, again, the UN Security Council, again, including the United States, condemned Israel’s action. It wasn’t too many years after that that the US government was very grateful that Israel had done that, because otherwise Saddam Hussein would have had nuclear weapons, when American soldiers were going to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation. So my message to American Jews is don’t be too disheartened when it seems like the nations of the world are ganging up on Israel. They do that from time to time. We know that they’re wrong. We know that Israel was right to capture Adolf Eichmann, to rescue the hostages in Entebbe, to hit those Iraqi nuclear facilities just like they have now hit in more recent years, Syria’s weapons factories and just a few months ago, Iran’s. We know that was the right thing to do, even if many countries were angry at Israel for doing it. So I look at the walkout from Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech as another circumstance of this too will pass. It’s not something that should bother us.

Now, critics of Israel like to use these kinds of episodes as a kind of a stick with which to bash the Jewish state. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times in particular is notorious for writing columns saying that Israel is going to be isolated. The world will treat Israel as a pariah. It’s really just scare tactics. He wants Israel to be nervous. He wants American Jews to pressure Israel to make more concessions because otherwise the world will hate us. What we actually see from the historical record is that the world will often hate us. Sometimes the world will be indifferent, sometimes the world will like us. It’s like a roller coaster, and I don’t think we should take any one particular episode to heart. It’s true that right now, there are a lot of countries that are making a lot of noise, countries in Western Europe who have been much more critical of Israel recently than they were in the past. But you know what? At the end of the day, a lot of the countries that are criticizing Israel today, they need Israeli weapons to defend themselves from foreign aggressors. They need Israel’s scientific and medical innovations to improve the welfare of their people’s lives. Resolutions in the end, I don’t think tell us the whole story about how various countries really will be interacting with Israel in the years ahead. In many ways, they need Israel. Their trade with Israel will continue. And things will not always be as they look at this moment.

Sarah: We have a few more minutes and I do want to just read some of the questions that you might be able to go into. And one is, Bernard Lewis wrote many books about an Arab and Muslim inferiority complex. Do you know the source of that inferiority complex? Okay, let’s start with that.

Dr. Medoff: I don’t want to generalize about Arabs, Muslims, or even Palestinian Arabs. As a historian, I simply look at the trends in Palestinian Arab society and try to understand what has happened in the past and what to expect in the future. The Arab war, the Palestinian Arab war against Israel, which has been going on for more than a century, is rooted in certain basic concepts. It’s rooted to a significant extent in Islam and in ideas of Arab nationalism. And I know there are those like Professor Lewis who look to psychological elements to try to understand some of the sentiments behind those attitudes. For me as a historian, the key is to simply look at what they have done. I found, for example, in looking back at Palestinian Arab terrorism in the 1950s, which was largely coming from Gaza, as a matter of fact, that was Egyptian occupied Gaza. I found again and again, Palestinian Arab terrorists using tactics very similar to October 7th. They were simply less successful in those operations. But we just we see the same kind of behavior again and again. So my focus is on the behavior more than on what kinds of psychological elements might be behind. much of those attacks.

Sarah: Okay. I want to also end with a note of optimism. We are the people of Tikvah, of hope. And at the end of the book, you do propose some reasons for us to keep believing and for our hope for Tikvah.

Dr. Medoff: This again comes from my perspective as a historian. As awful as the events of October 7th war, as horrific as every Arab terrorist attack is, I also recall what things were like when Jews did not have a state. When Jews were weak and stateless and constantly victimized by enemies far stronger than they. A time when Jews did not have a state, did not have an army. The very fact that we can speak of something like the rescue at Entebbe or the miraculous accomplishments of the Israeli army in the Six Day War or the most recent, the decimation of Hezbollah and the successful crippling of the Iranian nuclear facilities. I think we can feel a sense of hope that we are living in different times and it’s something to appreciate the genius and the might of the Israeli army and the knowledge that there is a strong and prosperous Jewish state that will continue to go from strength to strength, something that we will continue to feel proud of in and which has changed history in a way that ultimately should be a source of comfort and inspiration for us all.

Sarah: Thank you so much, Dr. Rafi Medoff. Please, everybody, be sure to go to amazon.com. Free audits coming out October 7th. The Road to October 7th. It is coming out October 7th, right?

Dr. Medoff: Well, I’d like to also add that the book is available now, and I’d like to add that on the website of my publisher, it’s published by the Jewish Publication Society and the University of Nebraska Press. If you go to the website, JPS.org, Jewish Publication Society. You can get a significant discount on the price of the book. And yes, it is available now. It’s published to coincide with the second anniversary, but copies already are being shipped. JPS.org.

Sarah: Okay. JPS.org and also go to Amazon and look up the other 19 books that Dr. Rafi Medoff has written. I also want to make a plug on November 19th. EMET is having its annual dinner where we will be honoring Ambassador Yechiel Leiter, the ambassador from Israel, Senator John Fetterman, a remarkable Democratic senator from Pennsylvania, Leo Terrell, who is investigating the instances of antisemitism in the United States, and Anela Ali, who is a wonderful a Pakistani Muslim who has reached across the religious divide and has befriended and advocated for the state of Israel and the Jewish people. And we are also having a very special tribute to Charlie Kirk. So if anybody can, please go to our website at emetonline.org. And while this is going on, two of my colleagues from EMET are on all hell talking about the latest developments and our legislative initiatives. So please be sure and support EMET as well. And please be sure to honor as many of Rafi Medoff’s books as possible. Thank you so much, Rafi.

Dr. Medoff: Thank you, Sarah. Take care.

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