CAMERA’s Karen Bekker recently published the following two pieces in her alma mater’s campus publication, the Oberlin Review.
Appearing under the headline, “Review Article on Israel-Gaza War Contains Numerous Misrepresentations,” Karen wrote on February 16, 2024:
In his Feb. 9 article in the Review, Zane Badawi laments what he sees as President Carmen Twillie Ambar’s failure to condemn “genocide” (“Indifference to Palestine Exposes False Progressiveness at Oberlin,” The Oberlin Review, Feb. 9, 2024). With so much misinformation in Badawi’s piece, it’s hard to know where to begin, but let’s start with the most obvious: Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant never said, “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.” Did the editors of the Review check the accuracy of this quote prior to publication? More than two weeks earlier, this misquote was corrected in multiple news outlets, including both The New York Times and The Guardian.
“An earlier version of this article omitted part of a quotation from Yoav Gallant,” The Times’ correction, appended to the end of the piece, stated. “He said, ‘Gaza won’t return to what it was before. There will be no Hamas. We will eliminate everything.’ He did not say only, ‘Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.’”
The difference should be obvious. Israel’s intent is not to destroy the people of Gaza, but to destroy the terrorist group that tortured, raped, and murdered 1,200 Israeli men, women, and children, and took another 250 hostage on Oct. 7, 2023. As of Tuesday, 134 of those hostages are still held captive, with reports that the young women among them — some 18 or 19 years old, the same age as many Oberlin students — are being raped while in captivity. Every single Obie should ask themselves: if one of these young women were your sister, or your friend, what would you expect your government to do?
In any war, civilians will be killed. This is the tragedy of war and why it’s best not to start one, as Hamas did. But war is not genocide.
“Israel has taken more measures to avoid needless civilian harm than virtually any other nation that’s fought an urban war,” John Spencer, chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute (MWI) at West Point, wrote.
Read the rest here.