New in Telos Insights
Today we publish two essays debating scholarly accusations of Israeli genocide in Gaza. The first, by Oded Balaban, is a critique of Verena Buser’s previous Telos Insights article “Targeting History.” This is followed by a reply by Buser to Balaban’s critique. Brief excerpts follow below, but be sure to read the full articles—and subscribe—at our website.
by Oded Balaban
Verena Buser, a historian of the Holocaust, published the Telos Insights article “Targeting History,” whose thesis is that the genocide accusation against Israel, made by a group of Holocaust and genocide scholars, among them Anthony Dirk Moses, Omer Bartov, and Amos Goldberg, is a politically motivated, anti-Zionist campaign that rewrites history and softens the definitions of the Holocaust, of antisemitism, and of genocide itself. Buser is right about one part, and it is an important part. But the article commits, against its adversaries, nearly every fault it charges them with.
The article argues about the accusers and not about the accusation. It explains the positions of Moses or of Bartov by their motives: they are “politically motivated,” they are “activists,” they hold a certain “self-image,” they “only read each other.” All of that may be said of a person, and the question of whether what the person asserts is true still stands. Attacking the origin of a claim instead of the claim itself is what logic calls the genetic fallacy: confusing where a thesis comes from with whether the thesis holds. Even if every one of the accusers were the bad-faith activist Buser describes, it would not follow that there is genocide in Gaza, nor that there is not. The question that matters remains untouched, because the article never touches it.
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by Verena Buser
Oded Balaban’s critique of my essay “Targeting History” is a serious one, and I thank him for it. He agrees with me on three substantive points: that intent is the defining criterion of genocide, that the genocide discourse places no demands on Hamas, and that critical Palestinian voices deserve to be heard. He also makes several points I accept, and I will say so where they apply. His central charge, however, rests on a misreading of what my essay set out to do. “Targeting History” was not an essay about whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. It was an essay about how a group of Holocaust and genocide scholars produce, frame, and circulate that claim, and about what this does to the concepts of their own field. I addressed issues related to legal and empirical questions elsewhere, at greater length. Balaban asks the essay to be a different essay. That is a fair wish, but it is not a refutation.
Arguing about the Accusers, or about the Field?
Balaban’s main objection is that I commit the genetic fallacy: I explain the accusation by the motives of those who make it, instead of testing whether it is true. I agree with the logical point. Where a claim comes from does not settle whether it holds. But the objection misses the object of my essay. When scholars present the genocide charge not as a personal opinion but as the verdict of their discipline, the way that verdict is produced becomes a legitimate object of analysis. Omer Bartov’s title “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It” makes exactly this appeal to expertise. To ask how such expertise is constructed is not an ad hominem. It is the ordinary work of the history of scholarship: which concepts are redefined, which sources are used, who cites whom, and how a “growing consensus” is announced.
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