Israel vs. Hamas: "Whose Side Are You On?"

 

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.

            In true antiwar demonstrations, the symbols, the pieces of colored cloth woven into specific patterns, might be carried together. In true antiwar protests, wartime grief would be common ground. The Palestinian and Israeli flags might be intertwined, perhaps even tangled. Some demonstrators might want to burn them, as some Vietnam era antiwar protesters burned the American flag. But then, some leaders of the that antiwar movement thought it would be a more poignant symbol to wash the flag. What if both Israeli and Palestinian flags were washed in the middle of a college green?