Will Lauren Wolfe give me a “respectfully, FU” too?

When I read Lauren Wolfe’s latest article, Reconciling Being Jewish with the Siege of Gaza,I was enraged and I knew I was going to critique it.

I intend this to be my last post on Lauren Wolfe. Actually, I was surprised to see she did not block me from her site since I already critiqued three of her pieces on Gaza and one she found inspirational (see appendix). Unable to get to this piece before now, I was somewhat surprised that her site is still open to me, especially after having just read this response to one of the comments on that horrid piece I will soon tell you about; she wrote:

Respectfully, fuck you. I will call myself a Jew because I am one, and know the suffering of my family. And fuck you for having zero understanding of how empathy works. Enjoy being blocked.

“Respectfully, fuck you”??

Respectfully, Ms Wolfe:

• as a journalist who puts herself out there in the public sphere, who has no problem writing critiques of whatever it is you do not agree with, you should be prepared to respond with a bit more substance and professionalism to comments that call your ideas into question.
  I wonder if you will block me after I post this article. I only block those who insult me personally and are not amenable to working toward respectful disagreement. But maybe that’s just me.
• Because this is an article about Wolfe’s written piece and not the comment below it, I will respond to the comment on her site after I publish this article. You can see the comment here.

Bouncing between Aushwitz and Gaza like a ping pong ball

In this piece, Wolfe writes about growing up devouring material on the Holocaust. And then, in 2010 she became friends with a Palestinian woman. She asked her new friend to educate her about Palestine. That, and her journalistic encounters with cab drivers in Lebanon and Jordan, with their stories of keys to houses that were once in Palestine and now in Israel — ghost keys, she calls then, apparently provided her with all she needs to know about what is going on here.

Silly me for expecting an investigative journalist to have told us about having scoured the history books or having interviewed experts or having made investigative tours with reputable guides to gain her understanding of the conflict. She attributed her misunderstandings to having grown up around people who believed Palestine was the Jews’ only chance for survival (simple folks, eh?) and reading “too much Leon Uris.”

Interestingly, about half her article (I counted the words) is related to the Holocaust and her latest trip to Auschwitz and the other half is about what she feels about Israel and Israeli war crimes against the Palestinians. Is it carrying it too far for me to wonder if she was making some kind of parallel between the Holocaust and what Israel is doing in Gaza now? After all, in an earlier article of hers (critiqued here) she did compare Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto.

Wolfe describes what it was like for her to see, in real life, the “original Birkenau barracks” where the Jewish women slept:

Terrifying. The utter bleakness. My stomach clenched and does again now just thinking of it.

And then, with merely a thin gray line separating that from her next paragraph, indicating a quick switch to another dimension, she writes:

In the present day, watching the horrors that Israel’s president, Benjamin Netanyahu, . . .

You did notice that, did you not? Her error. Was that a slip of the keyboard or does she really think Bibi is our president and not our prime minister. If it’s the former, a slip, well, we’ll let that pass. But if she really did not know that Bibi is prime minister and Herzog is Israel’s president, then that shows a serious lack of basic knowledge about the country, rendering her opinions ignorable. I am going to go with the former. I’m in a generous state of mind. (Tell me if she ever corrects this and then denies she made the error — I have a screenshot.)

The sentence continues — “watching the horrors that [Israel]:

. . . is perpetrating on Palestinians in Gaza, my heart is being torn out yet again.

I don’t remember reading that she felt her heart was being torn out when she saw the horrors of Oct 7^th. Tell me if she did and I just missed it.

About one-third of the article talks about Bibi, her hatred toward him, blaming him for having:

. . . single-handedly ruined any good will the Jews have had in the world (which, granted, has never been much). He has created generations of Palestinians who deservedly hate Israelis (or, more specifically, deservedly hate the Israeli government), . . .

Wolfe really has no sense of historical context. Bibi didn’t create generations of “Palestinians” who DESERVEDLY (?) hate Israelis, oh, pardon her, she meant the Israeli government (so as not to look like a Jew-hater, I suppose).

That hate, while not universal in the Arab world, was clearly visible when we Jews had the temerity to buy land and establish farms on unfarmable land, to found the Palestine Post (now the Jerusalem Post), and to show other signs of actually thinking we belong here. Periodic pogroms well before 1948 sought to show us that we do not belong here and are not wanted here, even though Jews remained mainly in Jerusalem throughout history and half of us are from MENA countries as well as Europe.

And the greatest indication of what the Arabs and Ottoman Moslems thought about us, even if not all hated us, may be the simple fact that, before we liberated it in 1967, Jews were not allowed to go up more than 7 steps toward the entranceway to the Cave of the Patriarchs that houses the burial places of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob and Leah. Remember, Abraham bought the land just under 4000 years ago, yet the Moslems who occupied this part of the world since the Arab Conquest in 622 AD would not allow us into that sacred site that was uniquely holy to us over 2000 years before there was a Mohammad who grew up to be the prophet who brought Islam into the world.

So I must ask Wolfe what we did to deserve the hate of the Gazans. Naw! Don’t really need to ask her, do I? She thinks we occupied Gaza (even though we left it judenrein in 2005), blockaded Gaza (and did a poor job of that), and now are genociding Gaza.

I would like to see her produce one intelligent article defending that point of view. One. An article that gives facts and not propaganda points that cannot be backed up. If her evidence would be similar to what she used in her article on the IDF deliberately targetting Gazan journalists — i.e., data published on the CPJ’s website, (“That’s why I used CPJ’s count. They independently verify each case.”) and thoroughly debunked here — then I am not holding my breath.

She is scared:

. . . and with that comes the global hatred of all Jews, even liberal ones like me. It’s disgusting.
[. . .]
What I do know is that being a reformed Jew who doesn’t practice religion in the U.S. means being frightened by all the hatred.

Woe is she, a liberal Jew, who is now hated like all the rest of us. I wonder if her Holocaust survivor family members were among the liberal Jews of their era who were hated along with the the rest of them (damn Jews!) because of … What did THEY do to deserve it? Was there a Bibi Netanyahu type back then? If you are going compare today to Nazi years, then at least be consistent.

Let us compare this:

It’s also been confusing. I know so much about what was done to us in the Holocaust. My trip to Auschwitz made it so that I can’t read another novel again about it — what I witnessed was so much worse than I’d imagined. . .

with this:

I feel anger at what the Israeli government has created — a cauldron of hatred against Jews everywhere. I can’t, in good conscience, not speak out against the abuse and oppression of the Palestinians right now. After Hamas’s October 7 attack and Israel’s nascent response, I said to my father, born during World War II, that this was terrible, Israel’s reaction. That it was outsized.

I am struggling to find a way to put into words what reading this makes me think and feel. The most she can say about Oct 7^th is to call it an attack. Maybe she needs to see the 40-minute film for journalists and policy makers and visit the attack sites for herself to witness what is likely “so much worse than” she could ever imagine.

How “outsized” is a reaction that seeks to end all attacks by Hamas against Israel? Is she totally unaware of the fact that Hamas has promised future Oct 7^th‘s until they wipe out Israel entirely? Does she know how many Gazan civilians participated in the Oct 7^th atrocities? Does she know how many cheered the parades of Israeli hostages and praised Hamas until they suffered the brunt of Israel protecting herself against them?

If she stopped learning about contemporary Middle East history after she read “too much Leon Uris” and took it up again by talking with her Palestinian friend and cabbies in Jordan and Lebanon, well, what can I say?

FInally – Bothsidesism (again)

In a tips for journalists article, Wolfe writes:

When showing different sides of an issue, think about whether you are offering a “false equivalency,” which is a better way to think about what’s often called “bothsidesism.”

Yet here she goes again — offering this false equivalency: She sees a commonality between Arab Palestinians and Jews, but first she confounds “Palestinians” with Muslims.

Both Jews and Muslims have been historically rejected by too many countries, cast out and unable to find a home.

It is the Palestinian Arabs, not Muslims in general, who have been rejected by too many countries. There are two reasons for this:

1. By keeping Palestinian Arabs disenfranchised and living in refugee camps with no civil rights in the (Arab) countries in which they reside, by putting them under UNRWA rather than UNHCR as per all other refugees, they keep the “ghost key” myth alive. Does Wolfe not understand that the Palestinian Arabs are pawns in the ongoing fight to wipe Israel off the map?
2. Palestinian Arabs have been known to constitute a very troublesome minority. Does Wolfe know about Black September, when Jordan kicked Arafat out of the country because he started an insurrection? Does Wolfe know that Iraqis forcibly expelled Palestinian Arabs out of Iraq because they supported Saddam?

I doubt that Wolfe could find any parallel to this in Jewish history.

So when Wolfe writes “We are each other.” she is just purely and simply wrong.

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Appendix
Laurent Wolfe: Writing about journalism and saying this about the war includes a reaction to her article: “I am Jewish. I say that because I am scared.”
Lauren Wolfe: Ghettos, Victim Mentality, and Hatred
Laurent Wolfe on Gaza Again: Now it’s bothsidesism about rape
And a critique of an article she called brave, and that gave her inspiration for the middle one above: Marsha Geshen, this is just wicked

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Feature Image Credit: Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung from Berlin, Deutschland, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons