An Eminent Historian Turns Militant Over Israel

A couple of decades ago, at least, I was an undergraduate student at one of Britain’s most respected universities, and I contributed my first and, to date, last short story to a new magazine of creative writing, the Ladder. It was a magazine with serious ambitions — the editors have probably gone on to colonize the LRB, NYRB, and many similar transatlantic titles — and it was a mark of this ambition that the cover star for the issue that I contributed to was none other than William Dalrymple.Even back then Mr. Dalrymple was a highly regarded Anglo-Indian historian of the first rank. I doubt that he was even 40 back then, but he was the respected author of such titles as “The Age of Kali: Indian Travels and Encounters,” and “White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India.” What Mr. Dalrymple appeared to represent at this point in his career was an honorable tradition, once regarded as almost the norm for any civilized Englishman, but which has largely fallen into abeyance since partition and the end of the British Raj. He was the scion of privilege — son of a baronet, educated at Ampleforth boarding school and Trinity College, Cambridge — who decided, when he was in his twenties, to head to India and make a life there. One admiring interview from 2011 stated that Mr. Dalrymple “lives in a farmhouse on the outskirts of New Delhi with his wife, their three children, four incestuous goats, a cockatoo, and the usual entourage of servants that attends any successful man in India’s capital city.”Few writers in America or Britain can expect “the usual entourage of servants.” I am sure that, say, the bestselling likes of James Patterson and Suzanne Collins are helped by an army of PAs, housekeepers, perhaps even private chefs, but Mr. Dalrymple has been living a life since 1989, when he first moved to India, of extraordinary, old-fashioned privilege. This is, of course, his right. He is an extremely successful writer, whose books have all been bestsellers, and whose public achievements put him in the first rank of literary achievement. Reviewing “The Last Mughal” for the Sun in 2007, Alex Travelli wrote, “Mr. Dalrymple excels at the devil of the details. In his hands, the minutest stages of the catastrophe find gratifying color and orientation.”His bio on X, for instance, suggests that he has been a visiting fellow at All Souls, Oxford, in 2024; that he runs the Empire: World History podcast with Anita Anand, from the same people behind The Rest Is History; that he is the co-director of the Jaipur Literary Festival, widely regarded as one of the world’s most prestigious literary festivals; and, modestly, that he “writes the occasional book.”However, another glance at X discloses something that many, if not all, of his 1.2 million followers might find distasteful. Although Mr. Dalrymple has previously described himself as a political centrist, he has seemingly embraced left-wing politics with a fervor that not only belies his privileged background but that runs the risk of over-simplifying complex political issues by dividing the world neatly up into a cartoonishly liberal moral universe of good and evil.Perhaps the most striking example of this are Mr. Dalrymple’s ardently pro-Palestinian and equally ardent anti-Israeli views. His recent posts, at the time of writing, suggest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that it is “time to send this Islamophobic racist war criminal to the Hague,” asks whether “surely it is the violent [Israeli] Settlers who should be expelled not innocent Palestinian villagers?,” and complains that “While Palestinian journalists are being massacred, useful idiots from the Telegraph, Spectator and Mail on Sunday are being taken on press bunkers around Gaza.”On and on it goes. While there is the occasional link to a recent podcast episode, or links to items of historical or archaeological interest, it becomes clear if you are following Mr. Dalrymple that there are straightforward heroes and villains, and that they are exactly the characters that you expect. Abdul El-Sayed and Mayor Zohran Mamdani get a thumbs up; President Trump and Mr. Netanyahu are regarded in satanic terms.To spend time looking at Dalrymple’s X account is curious, as it alternates between the kind of content that you would expect from a respected, literate historian and cruder, more basic, attacks on people whom he clearly regards as wicked and which accordingly generate substantial engagement. “Vicious Islamophobes” pops up, as does an attack on “a particularly stupid American Zionist.”Mr. Dalrymple, 61, does not express this reductionist view of the Middle East solely on social media. Born in Edinburgh, he seems to harbor a degree of national guilt over Britain’s role in reshaping the Middle East in the first half of the 20th century. “Britain’s moral responsibility for the plight of Palestine… is considerably greater than its moral responsibility for Ukraine,” he told a conference organized by the Britain Palestine Project in London last June.In an interview with Middle East Eye just over a year ago, he accused the Israeli government of “committing major war crimes of the sort which we rightly condemn anywhere else in the world. Sometimes the apologists for Israel talk as if Israel is being held to a higher standard than other countries. The opposite is true. Israel is given a carte blanche to commit atrocities.” Israeli military operations, according to Mr. Dalrymple on X, possess alarming historical parallels: “This is the Genghis Khan model of warfare: total destruction, mass slaughter of civilians, complete eradication. Netanyahu says he has barely begun.”In a penetrating 2024 interview with the London Times, conducted by the journalist Will Lloyd — not a man who misses much — Mr. Dalrymple suggested that, when it came to educating his fellow Westerners about the relationship between Palestine and Israel, “I feel a duty…I spent a long period of my life learning this stuff and most people just don’t know it. There is a vast ignorance. Nothing about the Islamic world is taught to us.” He drew on his particular specialty of history to compare the current situation in Gaza to the Indian mutiny of 1857, saying darkly that “The Mutiny has contemporary echoes. The same feeling that innocent women and children were attacked, and that it therefore provided a carte blanche for revenge and reprisals.”His penchant for invective over Israel is, he argues, rooted in his extensive historical studies of the Raj. “When you see the injustices suffered by the Palestinians and yet it is not reflected in most of the media or the writings or the representation of the Middle East that you see in the media, you do find yourself becoming angry that these truths are being obscured, that people are not being given the same impression that you get when you go there,” he told the Middle East Eye. “For the last 20-odd years my focus has been on India but Gaza, in a sense, just pulled me straight back in… you can’t just sit there writing about the British Raj when you know…very similar systems of subjugation and colonization and oppression are actually being put into place now at this moment.”William Dalrymple being made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire at Windsor Castle in June 2024. Andrew Matthews/ WPA Pool/Getty ImagesYou might expect Mr. Dalrymple then to be especially exercised with what is going on in contemporary India, in particular the administration of Narendra Modi, which, to put it mildly, comes with its own share of controversies. He has presided over a country in which the freedom of democratic expression has declined, rather than grown, and in which he has carefully cultivated a personal relationship with Mr. Dalrymple’s nemesis Mr. Netanyahu, allowing the latter to say last month, “We have some other friends, like a small country called India. It has 1.4 billion people, and boy, do we have tremendous support there.”You would have thought this might be problematic for Mr. Dalrymple, who is potentially faced with the possibility of his life of servants and incestuous goats being disturbed if he was to call out the failings of the present Indian regime. Therefore, he does what many others in his position have done: Kept quiet. It helps that he is rumored to be the Indian Prime Minister’s favorite author — such things can turn a head — but if you’re expecting criticism of Mr. Modi or contemporary India in public, you will look in vain.As he said to the London Times in 2024, discussing the country’s growing rise in Hindu supremacism and his book “The Golden Road,” “you can never, ever, ever be nationalist enough for them…I think there is far more about Buddhism than Modi or Indian nationalists would want in here.” Yet when asked for more details, Mr. Dalrymple equivocated, saying “[I love India] despite the politics…I am not an Indian nationalist, as much as I love the country.”Some might see this as nuanced. A thoughtful man attempting not to tread on toes and being perpetually aware that he remains a guest in India rather than a naturalized pukka sahib. Others, however, might argue that Mr. Dalrymple’s choice of nemeses is broad and obvious, even two-dimensional; that this fine historian and, by all accounts, clubbable and deeply affable man, might consider looking to another chapter of the past altogether and heeding the warnings from that before continuing to take quite so partisan a view on a global conflict that seems to be presently consuming so much of his attention.

An Eminent Historian Turns Militant Over Israel

An Eminent Historian Turns Militant Over Israel

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