Dr Lee Mordechai, a historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, discusses Bearing Witness to the Gaza War, a comprehensive database of facts and figures that he meticulously collected since October 7, 2023. How did a Byzantine historian come to meticulously collect evidence about the atrocities of the current war, still ongoing?
The episode is sponsored by the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History at UCLA and co-hosted by Prof David N. Myers.
I’m a fan of the podcast, but was very disappointed by the quality of this particular episode. I was curious to listen to it because I’m interested in hearing the other side of the Gaza debate, but unfortunately, Professor Mordechai is pretty inarticulate and the hosts didn’t press him to support his conclusions. From skimming Professor Mordechai’s website (like most of your listeners, I do have a day job that does not involve researching the Israel-Palestine conflict), my impression is that he has, like the South African government, done a thorough job of gathering all of the evidence he could find in support of one side of the issue. In order to be taken seriously about all of this, one has to deal with the operational side of the war, which arguably explains nearly everything that has happened in Gaza since October 2023. To put it another way, how does Professor Mordechai imagine that Gaza would look today if the IDF had in fact been trying to destroy Hamas as a military organization (rather than committing genocide) in a war zone that was designed to maximize the damage to civilian bodies and infrastructure, and from which the civilians were forbidden to flee? I’m sure that there have been excesses, as is always the case in war, and I appreciate that the IDF is not particularly forthcoming with useful information about what IDF unit commanders may have considered in each case that Professor Mordechai has cited, but it is simply not possible to make the case he’s trying to make without the other half of the factual matrix. You guys were asleep at the switch.