Defending History: Shalem Military Historian Yagil Henkin Sets the Record Straight on the Gaza War
When Dr. Yagil Henkin, a lecturer in Shalem’s Program in Strategy, Diplomacy, and Security, set out to pursue a doctoral degree in military history, the year was 2000 and he had just concluded his extended army service. “People thought I was crazy for choosing my particular focus,” recalls Henkin, whose specialty is urban warfare and counterinsurgency. “They all said, ‘the age of wars is over. Why bother focusing on that?’ Within a few months, the Second Intifada began, and within two years Israel had launched a large-scale combat operation in Judea and Samaria.
Operation Defensive Shield, the subject of one of Henkin’s first major studies, garnered a flood of accusations of “massacre” in the international press. Comparing how Israel’s record in preventing civilian casualties stacked up against operations in Grozny, Kosovo, and Mogadishu, Henkin not only demonstrated that there was no massacre, but also that the IDF took unusual measures to protect Palestinian civilians—ones that not even the world’s most enlightened armies have used in their urban warfare. Published in abbreviated form in The New York Times, Henkin’s research became a leading source of factual analysis in English about the IDF’s conduct in the Battle of Jenin. And now, 23 years later, Henkin—who is also a lecturer at the IDF Command and Staff College and a reservist in the IDF History Department—is once again countering widespread claims of Israeli genocide through research.
Co-authored with a team of Israeli experts and published by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (BESA) at Bar-Ilan University in September of this year, the comprehensive, 300-page study distinguishes verifiable fact from politically motivated fiction in debunking the claim that the Jewish state sought the destruction of Gaza’s population. Specifically, it shows that the argument that Israel imposed a starvation siege on Gaza was based on incorrect data and circular reporting, and that there is no evidence to suggest an Israeli policy of targeting civilians (in contrast to the abundant evidence of a routine sacrifice of tactical advantage to avoid collateral damage). Finally, the team prove that Hamas inflated and manipulated the civilian death toll for propaganda purposes.
Written, Henkin insists, “not to defend Israel, but rather to defend history,” the study has already begun to influence the discourse surrounding the Gaza war. Along with garnering several articles and citations in the popular English press, the study was adopted by UK Lawyers for Israel, an association of British lawyers who fight attempts to attack or delegitimize Israel through research-based advocacy. It is also being translated into Hungarian, marking what Henkin hopes is the beginning of international exposure to “historical accuracy and truth.”
What made you decide to undertake this research, and who was your intended audience?
This study actually started out as something much smaller. Lee Mordechai, a historian of the Byzantine Empire at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, began posting about Israeli atrocities against Gazans within days of October 7th. He then published a widely circulated report, picked up by [the Israeli newspaper] Haaretz and other major newspapers that purported to show an ongoing genocide. My study’s co-authors and I knew personally that many of the things he said were untrue. Also, we know how to fact-check his claims, which few people were willing and able to do. So at first, our goal was simply to refute the false narrative pushed by a single anti-Israel academic, perhaps in a journal article or essay. As we began to research his claims, however, we saw that what stood behind his so-called “evidence” was a whole ecosystem of activists, NGOs, media, and more, all of which were producing and promoting false data and reporting. It was clear that a single article wouldn’t be enough. We decided to produce something big and comprehensive enough that historians who seek to investigate this war, seriously and rigorously, can turn to. Nine months and 300 pages later, we did.
In our age of instant information and disinformation, do you believe that even a scholarly study of this kind can succeed in changing perceptions?
First of all, we felt that if we didn’t take this project on ourselves, there would be no source at all to which scholars could point when refuting false claims. And so far, our study is the only one of its kind to be published about Israel’s prosecution of the Gazan war. If we’re concerned about how this war will be presented not merely by journalists or influencers on social media, but also those writing the history books, then the existence of this research is critical.
That said, we do see that the non-academic discourse has started to shift as a result of our study. For example, people who used to speak of a genocide now say, ‘Well, maybe Israel didn’t commit a genocide, but what’s happening in Gaza is still bad.’ And essentially, they’re admitting that the facts don’t support the genocide claim. Some people are also less able and likely to throw around the genocide accusation, now that proof to the contrary is out there and accessible.
What do you hope that students of military history like those in Shalem’s Program in Security, Diplomacy, and Strategy will take from your study?
What emerged from this research most strongly was the realization that many people don’t understand what war really means. Of course, there were those who ignored this war’s larger context for political purposes, from the fact that Israel was acting in retaliation for Hamas’ massacre on October 7th to the fact that Hamas deliberately puts civilians in harm’s way. But many others simply don’t understand the nature of war: that it’s a deadly, messy thing. This study is a corrective to that lack of understanding, which is crucial for all students of history, but especially those of the military kind.
Also, we discovered that many Israeli soldiers who fought in Gaza don’t have the full and accurate picture of what was happening there. The result was that some of them would hear the claims of forced starvation and genocide and wonder if they were true, and this naturally affected morale. So in the end, this study ended up being important not only for those who are studying it from a distance, but also for those who fought in it, too.
After Operation Defensive Shield, you wrote a seminal article showing that in the Battle of Jenin, the IDF did much better than other armies at minimizing civilian deaths during urban warfare. More than two decades later, you’re writing something similar about Gaza. How does this make you feel, as a historian and an Israeli?
As a historian and an Israeli, I expect that I will need to produce much more research like this: We now realize that we were too quick to declare the age of large-scale war over. Also, in Jenin, the area that saw the most concentrated fighting was about the size of a football field, whereas our current war in Gaza was spread over a much larger area, larger by orders of magnitude. It’s entirely possible that our next experience of urban warfare will be in a larger area still. If my research can offer lessons for those planning and executing that war, as well as for those writing about it, I will feel proud to have made that contribution—to Israel, and to history.
