By David K. Shipler
On
Monday, October 9, two days after the assault by Hamas on innocent civilians in
Israel, Kalpana Shipler was asked by a fellow student at her public high school
in Washington, D.C., “Whose side are you on?” That was the question being
tossed around by multiple teenagers to one another as Israel began bombing Gaza
in retaliation. And that seems to be the question dividing college campuses and
mobilizing protests, corrupting the capacity to analyze complexity. If you are
forced to pick sides, you miss the tangles of guilt that have bound Israeli
Jews and Palestinian Arabs for decades.
Kalpana
didn’t fall into the trap, I am proud to say as her grandfather. She was wise
enough at age 15 to resist an instant answer, to know that she didn’t know, a
rare skill in today’s America. She deferred to the cause of learning.
Luckily,
young people coming of age are not yet jaded. Shocked by the scenes of
devastation and starvation in Gaza, students have acted on a purity of outrage,
pushing the envelope of accepted rhetoric and calling to account their own
country, Israel’s major supporter.
Yet the impulse to pick a side, as
if war were a football game, has an unhealthy feature. It concentrates the
blame, villainizing one adversary and idealizing the other. The dichotomy was
prevalent among some activists who justifiably protested the U.S. war in
Vietnam and decried our ally’s (South Vietnam’s) assaults on human rights, while
regarding North Vietnam and the Vietcong as the only authentic patriots, skipping
over the North’s tighter dictatorship and the VC’s brutality.
A
similar intellectual and moral flaw runs through the current protests over the
Gaza war, in which Israel is supposedly “a monopoly of violence,” in the words
of a Cornell
professor. Palestinians through Hamas, which strives to replace the Jewish
state with an Islamic state, are portrayed as exercising their anti-colonialist
rights to liberty. Sometimes—only sometimes—vilification of the Jewish state
has crossed into vilification of Jews, raising the stench of antisemitism in the
“pro-Palestinian” encampments. They might be called “antiwar” encampments if
they actually opposed war, if they protested not only against the atrocities
Israel has committed in an effort to stamp out Hamas—the vast bombing, the barriers
to food and medical care—but also against the intimate atrocities by Hamas—the
rapes, torture, mutilation, and kidnappings—which unleashed this fighting.
It was astonishing to see 33
Harvard student organizations sign onto a statement
issued by the Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee immediately after
October 7 holding “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding
violence.” Seriously? “Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum,” the statement
declared. “The apartheid regime is the only one to blame. Israeli violence has
structured every aspect of Palestinians existence for 75 years. . . Palestinians
have been forced to live in a sate of death, both slow and sudden.”
So spoke some of the purportedly smartest
people of the next generation. One can imagine them delighting in their
incisive brilliance as they looked past the Hamas violence into its roots. Fine.
There is never a vacuum. There are causes of every effect. However, to turn back
only one page in a long history of mutual victimization demonstrates a laziness
of mind or, perhaps, a mind indoctrinated.
If you are pro-Israel, do you leave
out the thuggish gangs of Jewish settlers terrorizing and assaulting West Bank
Palestinians? If you are pro-Palestinian, do you omit Israel’s military withdrawal
from Gaza in 2005, the Palestinian self-government under Hamas arming itself
and rocketing Israel? If you are pro-Israel, do you leave out the stifling border
controls that suffocated Gaza’s development and fostered poverty? If you root
only for the Palestinians, do you ignore the Hamas suicide bombers sent against
Jews two decades ago to torpedo the growing Israeli acceptance of Palestinian
statehood?
In your journey back in time, do
you stop before Arab armies attacked the fledgling Jewish state? Do you stop
before the Israelis’ expulsion of Arabs from their home villages before and
during Israel’s 1948 war of independence? Do you stop before the earlier Arab
assaults on religious Jewish communities in the Holy Land or, on the other
side, the Jewish assaults on Arab civilians there? Do you stop before the
Holocaust? Before the pogroms of Europe, which so traumatized the Jewish people
that its reverberations still ring today?
If you are looking for the original
sin in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, keep going, and going, and going until
you come to realize that both sides are victims. This is not moral equivalence.
This is suffering that is particular to each people, not to be measured or weighed,
but—if you want to campaign against war—to be acknowledged. As an Israeli said
to me long ago, putting two victims together is like mixing fire and kerosene.
Victimhood confers an illusion of
moral immunity. “The sense of victimhood is functional for a nation that is
involved in an ongoing bloody conflict,” wrote the Israeli thinkers Daniel
Bar-Tal and Elkiva Eldar in the newspaper Haaretz. “It shapes the perception of the threatening
situation against the cruel enemy and provides moral justification for harming
it unrestrainedly and without mercy. Victimhood distinguishes between us and
the Palestinians and provides a sense of moral superiority and permission to
dehumanize them. . . . Victimhood severs the society from a sense of
guilt and leaves room only for feelings of anger and revenge.”
The same might be said of the
Palestinian side.
So, how does complexity figure into
the student-led protests? It doesn’t. Demonstrations don’t do nuance. They are meant
to be categorical and dogmatic. They are not dispassionate classroom exercises
in the ambiguities and contradictions of history, politics, and warfare. They
are meant to galvanize, excite, force change, and call on the clarity of
conscience. They don’t even have to be practical, as in thinking that university
divestments from companies doing business in Israel, one of their demands, will
tip Israel’s policies. What could tip Israel’s policies, imposing a modicum of
restraint, are the Biden Administration’s recent delay in certain weapons
shipments, steps that might have been propelled partly by those students on the
quads and greens.
The campus protests have amplified
the growing American disaffection with Israel’s unvarnished brutality against Palestinians
in Gaza, Israeli excuses and rationalizations notwithstanding. Yes, Hamas uses
civilians as shields and shelters fighters in networks of tunnels, some under
hospitals. Does that justify attacking the civilian shields and devastating
hospitals? Yes, Hamas smuggles weaponry into Gaza. Does that justify restricting
trucks of food and medical supplies destined for children, women, the elderly?
The “pro-Palestinian” protesters would presumably say no. “Antiwar” protesters
would presumably hold both sides in contempt.
