7 ways to talk about Israel and Gaza
Universities should promote discussion - not suppress it
Pro-Palestine encampments are springing up on campuses across the United States.
But university administrators are responding with heavy-handed tactics, calling in the police mounted on horseback and motorcycles. Over 100 students were arrested at Columbia University in New York.
Students are organizing against war, demanding that their universities divest from arms manufacturers and others with corporate interests in Israel.
It’s a beautiful moment for peace education
American writer and teacher Robert Reich, who was Clinton’s Secretary of Labour, says these universities are handling the peace protests all wrong (BTW I saw Robert Reich at the Broadbent Institute’s event in 2014).
“The most important thing I teach my students is to seek out people who disagree with them. That’s because the essence of learning is testing one’s ideas, assumptions, and values. And what better place to test ideas, assumptions, and values than at a university?” he wrote this week.
Reich, who is Jewish, says he recently spent hours working with a group of students: some were Jewish, some were Palestinian. He urged them to dig deep to understand what basic morals were at stake.
Together, they agreed on the following seven moral principles, which he shared in his Substack newsletter. I am quoting:
1. What Hamas did on October 7 was morally despicable. (Some of the students wanted to explain why Hamas did it — about the accumulated grievances and gruesome history suffered by many Palestinians, especially those in Gaza — but they finally came around to distinguishing between an explanation and a justification. In the end, even those who understood why Hamas did what it did on October 7 agreed that the killings and kidnappings of innocent civilians were not morally justifiable.)
2. Hamas’s avowed aim to murder all Jews is morally despicable. (Again, we spent time distinguishing between an explanation and a justification.)
3. What the Israeli government has done since then in Gaza is also morally despicable. Some students initially wanted to defend Israel by saying that after October 7, Israelis could not feel safe as long as Hamas existed, and therefore Hamas had to be rooted out. This precipitated a discussion about how Hamas could be rooted out without the killing of innocent civilians, including large numbers of children. Which got us to our next principle.
4. The murder or kidnapping of innocent civilians is morally wrong. This was not a difficult principle for them to agree on, although several argued that warfare always involved the killing of innocent civilians, while others charged that Hamas was intentionally using innocent civilians as shields.
5. Israel’s policies toward Palestinians have been segregation and discrimination, based on ethnicity and religion, which are morally wrong. This was a hard principle for many of the students to accept, because they had different understandings of history. So the discussion was difficult. But all of them finally came around. (Most, although not all, decided that a so-called “two-state solution” was necessary, but we didn’t get into the specifics or how it could be achieved, because I wanted to keep them on the track of seeking moral clarity and agreement.)
6. It is morally wrong to urge genocide against any group — whether they constitute a religion, ethnicity, race, or nation. No disagreement on this. Some participants were initially unsure of whether universities should permit such advocacy on campus (the presidents of Penn, M.I.T., and Harvard temporized when asked this at a congressional hearing last week), but all finally agreed that it should not be permitted.
7. All of us have a moral obligation to do everything within our power to prevent and stop all forms of genocide, all killing of innocent civilians, and the promotion of hate. All agreed on this.
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Might pro-violence chants undermine Gaza peace rallies?
Protesters against the war in Gaza cheered when a speaker at an Ottawa rally celebrated the surprise attacks on Israel by Hamas fighters on October 7, killing 1200 people and taking hundreds more hostage.
“October 7th is proof we’re almost free! Long live October 7th!” he shouted. The Prime Minister and leaders of the Conservatives and NDP denounced the remarks in the video recording captured in Ottawa.
What’s your opinion?
Consider leaving a comment.
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Thank you for everything you do for peace.
Steve
Violence provokes returned violence, so never a solution to disagreement about anything.
There will always be people who push the envelope, or say things that are out of line. The goal is to educate people as to why such a chant is harmful, and it is up to the organizers, as they have done in the past, to clearly state that this type of speech is unacceptable.