CAMERA UK co-editor delivers talk on "The Abuse of Oct. 7th Memory"

The following talk by our co-editor Adam Levick, titled “The Abuse of Oct. 7th Memory”, was delivered at the JNS International Policy Summit in Jerusalem on April 27th.

Here is the text of Levick’s talk:

Almost immediately after the Oct. 7th Massacre, media outlets, international bodies, NGOs, academics, entertainers and activists began framing the story not as one about the brutality of the barbaric pogrom itself, but, instead, about Israel’s alleged “disproportionate response” to Hamas`s assault, which was soon characterised as “ethnic cleansing” or “genocide”.

By the first anniversary of Oct. 7, those in Israel who had been murdered, brutalised or taken hostage had become merely a footnote in the increasingly common revisionist narrative of Israeli “genocide”.

Unlike Holocaust revisionists in the decades since WW2, who were generally consigned to the political fringes, the whitewashing, obfuscation and inversion of Oct. 7th is not only common in the West, but is arguably the most socially acceptable view on the attacks and their aftermath. This phenomenon has been characterised by academic Balas Berkowitz as the rendering of Oct. 7th as a “non-event“.

What we’ve seen continually since Oct. 7th is antisemitism atrocity inversion, revisionism and erasure that’s redolent of attempts after WWII – by the Arab and Muslim world, the extreme Left and the extreme Right – to deny and distort Holocaust history and its memory.

Here are the four main themes in this abuse of Oct. 7th memory:

Oct. 7th inversion: framing Oct. 7th massacre as a footnote, while centering the genocide libel against Israel as the main take-away from Oct. 7th
Disappearing Hamas: This erasure of the role the mass murderers play in the story takes place in the dearth of coverage of Hamas’s decisions in the war that followed Oct. 7th, in avoiding holding the group morally responsible for the massacre itself, and for the fact that they of course knew that their assault would result in a war causing untold suffering for Gazan civilians.
Soft justification of Oct. 7th: ‘Contextualizing” Oct. 7th by citing the “76 years of occupation” lie, or by repeating the mantra that Oct. 7th didn’t happen in a vacuum”, which are mealy mouthed ways of implicitly justifying the massacre.
Accusing Jews or Israel of exploiting Oct. 7th to garner sympathy, or to further oppress Palestinians : This narrative is consistent with one of the main tropes of antisemitism: that Jews must be up to something, and that whatever Jews say and do can’t be taken at face value: they must have some ulterior motive or hidden agenda. (Guardian ran a piece titled “How Israel has made trauma a weapon of war).

Finally, on what we should do: let me suggest, in light of the danger to Israel and world Jewry posed by this abuse of Oct. 7th memory, that, as part of our collective response, we engage in a serious effort to memorialise that day: establishing Oct. 7th museums, memorials and monuments in the diaspora, and the Oct. 7th version of the Shoah Foundation to record and make available the testimony of survivors.

In short, we need to fight back against the false narrative by doing whatever it takes to tell and widely share the real story of that dark Shabbat day. The preservation of Oct. 7 memory is the challenge of our generation.