Jewish group upset by Prince Harry’s chat with Hamas-defender Gabor Maté

An upcoming conversation between Prince Harry and Dr. Gabor Maté — a virtual event tied to Harry’s memoir, “Spare” — has drawn backlash because of Maté’s past comments about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The event — hosted on Saturday, March 4 by Random House, Barnes & Noble, Waterstones, and Indigo Books & Music — will feature an “intimate discussion” between Harry and Maté as they chat about “living with loss and the importance of personal healing,” according to a Random House announcement.

Maté is a Hungarian-Canadian retired physician whose work specializes in childhood trauma and addiction, according to the National Post. The 79-year-old — who survived the Holocaust as an infant — has been granted membership in the Order of Canada for being “a passionate advocate for social change in the prevention and treatment of addiction,” whose “professionalism and compassion have helped to restore dignity and health among people with addictions.”

In covering Maté’s upcoming chat with Harry, however, The Jewish Chronicle deemed the physician a “hard-left trauma expert who has compared Hamas terrorists to the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising,” pointing to a commentary Maté wrote for the Toronto Star in 2014.

In the piece, Maté wrote about what he called “the longest ongoing ethnic cleansing operation in the recent and present centuries, the ongoing attempt to destroy Palestinian nationhood.”

He went on: “The Palestinians use tunnels? So did my heroes, the poorly armed fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto. Unlike Israel, Palestinians lack Apache helicopters, guided drones, jet fighters with bombs, laser-guided artillery. Out of impotent defiance, they fire inept rockets, causing terror for innocent Israelis but rarely physical harm. With such a gross imbalance of power, there is no equivalence of culpability.”

Now, Harry’s association with Maté is sparking controversy.

“I am working under the assumption that the Prince did not know this person’s political bias, his hatred for the Jewish state, his cavorting with antisemites, and his covering for Hamas terrorists,” Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre told The Jewish Chronicle.

“This is a Holocaust survivor whose worldview sets him apart from 99% of world Jewry. As such, whoever made the arrangements to have this individual appear with Prince Harry, did him no favors. If Prince Harry knew this man’s record and still chose him for the interview, our Centre would criticize the prince for such an inappropriate choice.”

Maté hasn’t commented on the backlash, it seems, but he tweeted in 2019 that “legitimate fears of antisemitism have been confused/conflated with (equally legitimate) criticism of Israel [and] Zionism.”

In a conversation with his son at the time, Maté observed that “the charge of antisemitism is being raised against just about any critic of Israeli policy.”