For many of us, it’s never been a straightforward matter to just pick a side in Israel’s long-running struggle to live in peace with its Arab neighbors.
But, while the Israel-Hamas war rages on, I see no need to waffle or equivocate over the wrongheaded letter by a coalition of 34 student organizations at Harvard that held the Israeli regime “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”
Entirely?
The Hamas attackers on Oct. 7 targeted, killed or kidnapped more than 1,000 civilians, including babies and children. People from more than a dozen countries with no known responsibility for decades of Israeli-Palestinian conflict were killed or taken hostage, possibly to be used as human shields or some other deterrence against an Israeli counterattack.
Yet, students with similarly flexible ethics can be found on other elite campuses where some protesters immediately blamed Israel alone for the attack Hamas carried out, which predictably touched off a massive Israeli counterassault against Hamas targets in Gaza, raising the casualties on the Palestinian side into the thousands.
Some protesters went so far as to praise the massacre, as if the innocent babies and other bystanders somehow had it coming.
Fortunately, most of the protests that have broken out on campuses nationwide did not appear to be that blatantly one-sided. That includes the protests in Chicago’s Loop Monday, which called for a cease-fire and an end to U.S. aid to Israel.
But that’s not to say things have not been tense in Chicago as well, with students and faculty alike trying to frame a proper response to the international crisis.
The divide was on full display on the University of Chicago’s quad Friday. One side visibly identified themselves by flying a Palestinian flag as the other flew an Israeli flag.
If only the real world were as easy to sort out as flags.
“As a pro-Israel student on campus, it’s really easy to feel alone with this going on,” one female student told a WLS-TV reporter.
At the same gathering, a male student with Students for Justice in Palestine attributed the increased local interest to the reported rise in Islamophobic and antisemitic attacks across the country, which make people feel “personally affected” so that “they can no longer ignore this as some kind of faraway issue.”
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Indeed. Still, everyone who takes an interest in the war should do their best to know what they’re talking about.
That nugget of common sense was expressed by a former Chicagoan, Ezekiel Emanuel, a physician, medical ethicist and vice provost for global initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania,as well as incidentally being a brother of former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel
In a Sunday New York Times op-ed, headlined “The Moral Deficiencies of a Liberal Education,” he reflects on the Harvard letter and other protests at elite universities that hold Israel solely to blame for the attack or, in some cases, even praise the massacre, and finds “something is deeply wrong at America’s colleges and universities.”
It’s not what they are being taught that troubles him but, “more specifically, what they are not being taught.”
Emanuel cites ethicist John Rawls for clear, unambiguous “principles that allow us to wrestle through harder cases like how much an army is required to do to reduce and avoid civilian deaths.”
That’s a direct reference to what many of us often ask in times of war, including Israel’s frequent bombing of densely populated Gaza, where Hamas displays their own ethics by placing armaments and command posts in civilian apartment buildings and neighborhoods.
The ethical questions Emanuel raises are hardly new. We raised very similar questions back in the Vietnam War era when I, too, was a college student whose draft eligibility in those days made many of us feel motivated to learn what was going on in the larger world we wanted to enter — if we lived long enough.
Back then students held “teach-ins” and other self-education projects to discuss what caused the war and how we might help end it.
Many years later, some of the reasons America lost that conflict are more clear. As Ken Burns’ “Vietnam” documentary on PBS well illustrated, we were fighting two different wars, whether we realized it or not.
The Vietnamese were fighting a war they saw as a continuation of nearly a century of French colonialism. The Americans were fighting a war against what our leaders saw as the threat of global communist domination.
For Americans, the tragic Hamas-Israel conflict shows us how we don’t have all the answers that can help to end this war. A lot of us aren’t even asking the right questions.
Twitter @cptime