Simon Schama Defends Israel’s War in Gaza, Saying It Is Not Genocide
The truth is not dead, but it’s on life support,” says Simon Schama. He points to how basic facts such as the theory of evolution have become “That’s just your opinion” online, or how “institutionally organised lying” is now practised by the American government. We’re almost, he laments, at “that famous Orwellian trilogy, ‘Ignorance is Truth, War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery’ – and that is really horrifying to a historian”.
The writer, academic and television presenter is sitting on the veranda of his home in the Lower Hudson Valley in New York state, with treetops stretching into the distance behind him. (For one arresting moment, when he breaks off at the approach of a “large furry animal”, nature encroaches on his personal space, too. “We have chipmunks and squirrels, but this one’s larger… not a possum,” he decides, before it scuttles off.)
Schama was born in 1945, grew up in Southend-on-Sea, Essex, and Golders Green, London, and has lived and taught in the United States now for more than 40 years. He was knighted in 2018, turned 80 last year, and has for the first time begun writing a memoir. He’s famously loquacious – “I’ve written thousands of words already, and still only reached the age of 11” – and erudite: Plutarch and Suetonius make an early entrance into our conversation.
But he’s blessed with a talent for making the past accessible. He has been a literary star ever since his 900-page chronicle of the French Revolution, Citizens, was published in 1989, and has been a fixture on British TV since A History of Britain in 2000. His distinctive presenting style has been memorably sent up by the comedian Harry Enfield – “wonderful”, in Schama’s opinion, “a lot of people are better at me than I am” – yet he has so far escaped the purge of patrician, white, male presenters at the BBC. And he has no plans to retire: “I’m a stripling compared to the great treasure Attenborough.”
Last year, for the first time, Schama was asked to make a programme about the Holocaust. The result, The Road to Auschwitz, was rigorous in its examination of how the Nazis found willing accomplices in mass murder while others looked away. In one intensely moving interview, Marian Tursky, one of the last survivors of the concentration camp, told Schama: “Auschwitz did not fall from the sky. Evil comes step by step.”
Tursky was talking about dehumanisation, Schama says. “Once you’ve actually redefined a set of people as sub-human, as – in the Nazis’ favourite vocabulary – a kind of pestilence or rodent, then you are in profound trouble. And as far as the Jews are concerned, that’s unfortunately a long history, which well pre-dates the Nazis.
“The question is now, I suppose, are our antennae still acute enough to see that before it’s catastrophically too late? It is of concern to me – the internet does not thrive on reason or the recognition of mutual humanity. That’s not clickbait, that’s not revenue-friendly. ‘Revenue-friendly’ is hatred and the language of extermination and apocalypse. And the whole replacement theory in [the US], which presupposes that it is under siege from alien invasions. You go from nought to 60 in no time at all, not just disagreeing with someone but actually believing they should be dead. And against whomever that’s directed, that is frightening.”
In particular, The Road to Auschwitz chillingly explored the role of bureaucracy in the Netherlands, where the highest percentage of a Western European country’s Jewish population was murdered: 75 per cent. The slaughter was made possible with the introduction of an almost-impossible-to-forge identity card, and the infamous “dot maps” used by the Gestapo in Amsterdam, which marked precisely the streets and houses where Jews lived throughout the city.
Schama is “strenuously exercised” by what he sees as an observable rise in anti-Semitism. Growing up, he says, “It was not the case that it was physically unsafe to go out on the street with your kippah on your head if you were a little Jewish boy. It didn’t occur to me for a second. It’s not the case that you would have armed guards in front of a synagogue, simply as a matter of course. I resisted for a long time, as someone who had an incredibly happy life growing up as a British Jew, that sort of alarmism.”
And yet, he says, “There has been a qualitative shift towards the sense that the Jews are kind of enemies among us. I think there’s been a shift from the fury about what Israel’s said to have done in Gaza, to essentially dehumanising Jews generally.”
Schama, who made the moral case for Israel in the final part of his 2013 series The Story of the Jews, has long been a supporter of a two-state solution and an opponent of the Benjamin Netanyahu government. I wonder how he responds to the comments this month by Ephraim Mirvis, the chief rabbi of the UK and the Commonwealth, that to say Israel has committed genocide in Gaza is to reduce humanity’s gravest crime.
Schama gives his view carefully. “I hate it to be reduced to a debate about terminology, the terminology of extermination. I think really terrible things have been done by both Hamas, and sometimes disproportionate things have been done by the IDF, which I grieve over. I grieve over the loss of life in both communities. It is a catastrophic tragedy that has long roots.”
But he points out that “30,000 Jews were shot in a day and a half at Babyn Yar [in 1941], 18,000 were shot in one morning at Majdanek [in 1943], with band music being played… If you had to say, after October 7, was Israel bent on exterminating the Palestinians of Gaza in the way in which Himmler and Eichmann and Hitler were bent on removing the very last Jew from the face of Europe? The answer is no. So one is genocide and one isn’t, I think. But that doesn’t lessen the grievousness and the catastrophe and the brutality, both of what happened on October 7 and what happened afterwards.”
I wonder if Schama finds credible the accusations against Nigel Farage, in his schoolboy days, of both racism and anti-Semitism; and if so, what they tell us about the adult politician who may become Britain’s next prime minister. “Those accusations about him actually singing the [Nazi Party anthem] ‘Horst-Wessel-Lied’ and so on, on the school bus – well, it is revolting, I think, and surprising, and not something to be thrown away as an insignificant anecdote.”
Still, he argues, “some people are redeemable. I’m not a warm admirer of Nigel Farage, to put it mildly, but I wouldn’t presuppose that some disgusting thing that was said when he was a kid, would necessarily, you know… that’s to be distinguished from someone like [the hard-Right US commentator] Nicholas Fuentes, the young, bitter, ferocious anti-Semite, interviewed at length, disgracefully, I think, given a platform by Tucker Carlson [on his podcast in October].”
Schama responds with dismay to the decision by Zohran Mamdani, the new mayor of New York City, to scrap the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) definition of anti-Semitism immediately. “It’s a grotesquely unnecessary act to do on the first day.” As for the prospects of Mamdani’s tenure, he says: “We’ll have to wait and see a bit… He’s a brilliant campaigner, so in that sense, it was a very richly earned victory.”
In the meantime, he confesses he’s not as “clued in” to what’s happening in Britain – though he feels unequivocal about whether the BBC licence fee should end. “I have a very simple answer: it shouldn’t.” The US, he insists, has recently witnessed “an outright war on public broadcasting, and horrible damage has been done to an unbelievably important public institution”.
He continues to be prolific and ambitious in the projects he takes on: “When you get into your 80s, you feel the clock ticking inevitably, and you become urgent and slightly reckless. You do want to drain the last drop of geriatric energy.” He’s in London, in fact, this week, to visit the National Portrait Gallery and announce the winner of the first Elizabeth Longford Brief Lives 2025 Essay Award.
The main Prize for Historical Biography has been won in the past by Telegraph luminaries Charles Moore and Andrew Roberts, for their books on Margaret Thatcher and George III respectively; the new Brief Lives Essay Award, for works of 3,000 words or fewer, about a historical figure of significance, is worth £2,000 and open to writers aged 35 and younger in the UK and Ireland. It is, in some ways, a successor to the Catherine Pakenham Award for young female writers, run by this newspaper from 1970 to 2003, named for the youngest daughter of historian Elizabeth Longford and the prominent penal reformer Lord Longford; Catherine worked at The Telegraph, and died tragically young, aged 23.
For young historians, Schama says, life is more difficult than ever. “The writing has to be incredibly striking to break through. It has to be powerful literature… I think my generation were incredibly lucky in all sorts of ways.” Yet the success of podcasts such as The Rest is History, hosted by Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, “show that there’s still a huge public appetite for history.” He would advise those trying to push their way forward in this crowded field “not to lose sight of the analytical side, but to work at the writing… the poetry of history lies in the fact that it deals with people who, in many ways, are just like us, and in equally profound ways, irretrievably unlike us”.
Schama has even curated an upcoming art exhibition at the Mauritshuis of paintings of birds, which includes works by Leonardo, Picasso and Tracey Emin; and then, of course, there’s that memoir. He compares the compulsion to churn out words to the scene of the sorcerer’s apprentice in Fantasia, and begins to laugh: “The buckets keep coming, but you become stricter with yourself about throwing the sloshed water away. At least, I hope so. You rely on good friends to tell you when you’ve lost it, in terms of being interesting to read.”
Simon Schama will announce the winner of the Elizabeth Longford Brief Lives 2025 Essay Award tonight at the National Portrait Gallery, London WC2. Info: elhb.uk.
He will also deliver a lecture, ‘The History of Anti-Semitism: A Warning for Today’, at Oxford Literary Festival, in partnership with The Telegraph, on Monday March 23. Tickets: oxfordliteraryfestival.org; Telegraph readers can save 20 per cent with the code 26TEL20