How Israel's war against Hamas reinvigorates an inherent issue of online discourse
Once I have come across this article on the internet and read it, I must confess that I wasn't surprised since it was happening on Twitter, which has always been problematic even before Elon took over, but worsened rapidly after he took over. «The Washington Post»
But it's also symptomatic of a culture where paroles have trumped elaborate, fine-tuned arguments especially on thorny issues. What I mean is: Instead of detailing why they, for example, would support Palestinians despite their strong endorsement of the Hamas, the organisation whose rape, murder and pillage spree has triggered this all-out war, they will just share hashtags and paroles that you could easily repeat loud and wide on protests, and later wonder why the response to this is equally hateful and dispirited. As we would say in German: “So, wie man es in den Wald hineinruft, so kommt es auch wieder heraus”.
I would still defend StopAntisemitism, since their work is essentially well-intent and important in this time. Ever since Israel started responding to the Hamas' singular attack on Israel, antisemitic incidents have spiked in the US, in Britain, and in Germany, &c. What would happen if those means of immediate repercussion didn't exist? Some people would call such behaviour a culture of denunciation, but in the end, such arguments frequently come from people who were affected as perpetrators, not as unaffected bystanders. Under the same guise, we could deny the need for law enforcement, because police officers too rely on eyewitnesses who will dial 911 (or 110 in Germany) to report a crime. And neither antisemitism, nor antizionism are bagatelles. It's a means of dehumanisation and segregation in society, so-to-say the first step towards apartheid, something that Israel is often alleged of committing*. We will not touch on this issue since, as in every Western country, there are some issues one could point out in terms of coexistence and equality, but no such issue would justify calling for Israel's dissolution to make space for a Palestinian state. Expanding the debate to the shared history would certainly burst the boundaries of this post. For now, we will agree that antisemitism and antizionism are impermissible and to be punished, just as discrimination of Arabs of any nationality or ethnicity must be punished as equally impermissible.
After this WaPo article, news reached me about a USC valedictorian whose speech was cancelled by the university's decan because of their prior comments supporting Palestine in this war. In my opinion, this reaction was at least ham-handed, especially in terms of PR. Instead of cancelling this speech, I expected a procedure in which the decan reached out to the valedictorian to see a manuscript of the speech they intended to orate. This way, critical passages could have been talked about and, at worst, be amended in order to prevent a different PR blow. Even without such a circumstance looming over the whole event, I would have expected such a procedure to exist. It seems as if I were wrong.
Altogether, I would opine that we as a society have forgotten how to discuss about controversial issues, and social media are to blame. at least because it has normalised replacing the aforementioned detailed arguments with paroles and taking every counter-argument personal. Just watch televised debates of the past, e.g., parliamentary debates or William F. Buckley Jr.'s “Firing Line”. No-one, or only a few, took arguments completely opposite to theirs personal, the majority only perceived them and apparently reacted to them. Taking arguments personal presents an easy way out of a dead end to which someone may be unable to respond; it proves an alternative to admitting one's argumentative defeat because one couldn't counter the argument. People don't like to end up in what Habermas, in a calque by Émil Durkheim, called the “Zwanglosen Zwang des besseren Arguments” (non-coercive force of the superior argument, as I'd translate it), because they don't view arguments as a beneficial way to obtain new points of view, but as a competition that could be factually won. Consequentially, there had to be a loser. We must get rid of this way of thinking about discussing with our peers. I know that humans are naturally competitive, but we are also cooperative; we are able to distinguish between situations in which one can be either playfully or seriously competitive, or cooperative to each other's benefit. But too many people suppress that instinct and instead treat every situation as a competition, a behaviour that makes entire social encounters inherently toxic, once a dominant amount of people share this approach.
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| I, Makaristos, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/> via Wikimedia Commons |
I don't claim that there weren't a severe plight experienced by Palestinians that is worsened by the IDF's penetration of the Gaza Strip to exterminate Hamas cells, but Israel is in a zugzwang to finalise this operation, or else October 07 will be perpetuated. That is something that hasn't been understood by everyone criticising (or outright hating on) Israel for what it is doing there: October 07 is only the edge of the iceberg, Hamas has been assailing Israel continuously with missiles from Gaza beforehand. It just didn't make the headlines anymore because Israel's cutting-edge anti-aircraft dome usually intercepts those attacks, so that civilian and proprietary damage are reduced to a minimum, whereas the Hamas has always counted on digging tunnels and obtaining more missiles to repeat the attacks. So to say, Israel has chosen a mixed approach of defence and offence, while Hamas went all-in for the offence, simultaneously instrumentalising civilian casualties (as well as soldiers, minors as well as adults) as martyrs who died in an alleged resistance war against an alleged oppressor and colonialist. (As I have also pointed out in a blog post) An argument that has also been equipped by people in the west who supported not only Palestinians but the Hamas. I don't want to expound further on the subject, but make the point that on the internet, people should apply more common sense and consciously scrutinise their own arguments, whether they were genuinely common or not something that would only gain cheers in a certain group of persons. To be unable to tell the two of them apart would affirm the cliché that reply guys on the internet had disconnected from the real world and become exclusive netizens.
As I have said, the internet has corrupted people: It has diminished people's ability to interact with each other without immediately going spare. The only cure I could recommend to this would be to log out and “”touch some grass”.
Update in wake of the Protests on US College Campuses
April 27, 2024 —Apparently, my words were not heard on US college campuses and so, instead of seriously, maturely discussing a subject that, as I have said beforehand, is tangential to the greater mass of Americans and personal to the fewest who may coincidentally have family in either Palestine or Israel (at worst lost in either of those two countries), they have gone absolutely rabid about it, in all the worst ways. What is more is that it is not at all surprising that this rabidness has not been expressed as against Palestinians or any person that was recognised as even a little Arabic-looking, but against Jews or Israelites. In particular, this sign of resurrected anti-Semitism—assuming that it had ever gone away from campuses¹—has been observed at the campus of the Columbia University in New York City. Because of that ongoing incident, this update to an existing blog post will focus almost exclusively thereupon. (Another reason is that because of the news reports and analyses, some of which will also be cited herein, have been written about those protests. Coincidentally, a university in the US city that is also home to the second-greatest Jewish population in the world, after Israel². But since NYC and neighbouring Newark (NJ) are also one of the Western world's largest metropolitan areas, it may indeed be nothing more than a coincidence, since the Western world's largest city's Jewish population is still small, compared to the net population)
Now, for the record, what is all the fuss about the Columbia University's pro-Palestinian protest, why is it treated so special, compared to other universities' protests, e.g., at the University of Texas in Austin or the University of Southern California in Los Angeles? Firstly, the former was meticulously planned by the initiators³, something that one would not expect of a simple protest that is simply meant to show support or opposition to an issue and the subject thereto. Secondly, the protesters have not only started protesting President Joe Biden's continued support for Israel in the wake of the ongoing war against Hamas, but even erected an encampment on the campus' fairway (as I like to call it). There already, after approximately eleven days of its existence, they have already shown their rather ambiguous appearance, holding a Passover seder⁴ to celebrate the Jewish holiday of פֶּסַח. One may wonder why I consider this to be ambiguous: That's only because calling it a travesty would be unobjective. To be honest, there are professors at Columbia University who, while being highly critical of the entire protest in its exercise, have opined that they were not anti-Semitic, making a debatable point⁵. There may be a lot of people who may be genuinely worried about the human-rights situation in the Gaza Strip and/or the West Bank; but there are also reports from Jews as well as non-Jewish observers who have reported a hostile approach to them by the gatekeepers of the protest encampment⁶. The reports from inside the encampment by people who have not been bounced out for being Jews—all the reports of them not being anti-Semitic but anti-Zionist doesn't hold when people are being gatekept or thrown out subsequently, are not all that better, especially regarding that this comes from US-Americans from all walks of lives and different disciplines, the greater majority of them wholly unrelated to what they are teaching there, aside of the political and social sciences majors that may introduce tangential knowledge of interest to the subject-matter, the conflict between Israel and Palestine, or more precisely the war against Hamas⁷. According to reports, there have been demilitarisation courses, whatever purpose that is supposed to serve unless those who attended them were planning to go on missions in the Gaza Strip to mediate between them. Yet if they were interested in helping the people in situ, they may have joined a humanitarian organisation, i.e. one that has not yet discontinued its services temporarily after an ill-fated airstrike exercised by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF)⁸.
Anti-Semitism
There is a reason why I deemed it necessary to speak about this protest camp, and that reason is the aforementioned anti-Semitism some of those members of the campus protest have shown. Reading through the “Atlantic” and the “Haaretz” piece will give you some insights into how fanatical it is, with people openly pledging support to Hamas. Nota bene: Yes, the word Hamas—חמס—does mean violence or (to) destroy in Hebrew, while it means bravery or strength in Arabic—حماس. I just wanted to notice it, but research has already shown that one ought not to jump to biased conclusions the ambiguous meaning of a terrorist organisation's name⁹ that is itself an acronym in the original: حركة المقاومة الإسلامية in Arabic, or “Islamic Resistance Movement” in English. So, moving on to the actual issue, after October 07, 2023, anti-Semitic incidents have already begun jumping, and this misbehaviour on behalf of what is supposed to be the US' up-and-coming Интеллигенция shows that in essence, it were alright because on the other side of the ocean, a nation that was built upon the premise of being a sanctuary for Jewish people after persecution by both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Theodor Herzl, before the emergence of those two rogue dominators of the European continent in the 20th century, has already pointed out the need for a Jewish State, based on his (kinship's) experiences of anti-Semitism in the Old World. As he wrote in his „Judenstaat”:
„Unsere Volkspersönlichkeit ist geschichtlich zu berühmt und trotz aller Erniedrigungen zu hoch, als daß ihr Untergang zu wünschen wäre. Aber vielleicht könnten wir überall in dem uns umgebenden Völkern spurlos aufgehen, wenn man uns nur zwei Generationen hindurch in Ruhe ließe. Nach kurzen Perioden der Duldsamkeit erwatcht immer und immer wieder die Feindseligkeit gegen uns. Unser Wohlergehen scheint etwas Aufzeizendes (sic!) zu enthalten, weil die Welt seit vielen Jahrhunderten gewohnt war, in uns die Verächtlichen unter den Armen zu sehen. Dabei bemerkt man uns Unwissenheit oder Engherzigkeit nicht, daß unser Wohlergehen uns als Juden schwächt und unsere Besonderheiten auslöscht. Nur der Druck preßt uns wieder an den alten Stamm, nur der Haß unserer Umgebung macht uns wieder zu Fremden.”¹⁰
Antisemitism is well-known and well-documented in Nazi Germany, since Hitler has made it front and centre of his reign of terror. This has spun from Germany in its borders during his days to the easternmost outreach of his war for Europe. A couple of cruel stories can be read in Илья Эренбург, a Russian journalist and historian who has written a painstaking documentation of the atrocities Wehrmacht soldiers have committed in the nations of the Soviet Union. For those who have watched the movie “ Come and See” («Ідзі і глядзі») or read the novels «Хатынь» by Леонид Левин, and/or «Я из огненной деревни» by Алесь Адамович, what I am now going to quote, and I would like to warn all those who are capable of reading Yiddish or curious enough to put the passage into a translator like Google's to be warned, as this is going to describe an atrocity no-one would believe or wish to know has indeed happened in real life and not in a slasher movie. There is no real surplus value added in this blog post other than to emphasise just how terrifying the Nazi régime executed its pursuit to leave nothing but scorched land behind in the Soviet Union. One of those inhumane war crimes committed, with a subsequent explanation as to why they did that, went as follows:
«אמט איז פול געווען מיט קרעכצן און געשרייען, ווייל ניט יעדער איז געטראפן געווארן פון דער קוילן-ווארפער-לענטע. אבער אויך די שווער־פארווונדיקטע האט מען פארשאטן מיט ערד. פון די עסעסלגיט האט באזונדערס זיך אויסגעצייכנט ווי א מערדער דער פעלד-פעבעל יאזעף שמידט פון פרייבורג. אויב עמעצער פון די מענער אדער פרויען הא טגעפרוווט אנטלויפן, האט מען זיי נאכגעיאגט און אונטערגעשאסן, ווי די האזן. קליינ עקינדער האט מען געכאפט פאר די פיסלעך און צעשמעטערט זייערע קעפלעך אין דער וואנט.איין יונג מיידל האט זיך באהאלטן אין א שטאל הינטער א בארגשטעג. ווען די עסעסלי-י טהאבן זי געפונען, איז איינער פון זיי אהין אריין און די איבעריקע האבן זיך אוועקגעשטעל טאונטן אין א קרייז מיט אויפגעהויבענע שטיקעס. זיי האבן עשטאכן דאס מיידל אין דע רהייך אזוי לאנג, ביז וואנען זי איז געצווונגען געווען אראפצושפרינגען. זיי האבן זי בוכשטעבלעךאדורכגעלעכערט מיט די שטיקעס. ווען איך האב געפרעגט דעם פאראנטווארטלעכן עסעסישן לייטענאנט קארל דער )פון לודוויגסהאפען לעבן טאגהיים(, פאר וואס מעטוט אזעלכע שוידערלעכע זאכן, האט ער געענטפערט : ״מיר האבן ארויסגעווארפן די יידן פון דייטשלאנד, איצט דארפן מיר זיי אויסראטן אויך דא״. צום סוף האבן זיי צונויפגעטריבן אלע בהמות פונעם דארף, אוועקגעפירט זיי און דאס דארף פארברענט ביזן לעצטן הויז.»¹¹
(In order to maintain legibility as I perceive it, the quote above has not been formatted into italics. I am familiar with Hebrew cursive, and I don't like it one bit) Of the Soviet régime, less is known, surprisingly. Although the degree of surprise is lowered when one realises that in the beginning ot the Bolshevik rulership, Ленин himself held his protective hand over the Jewry of Russia, as he thought that
«Только совсем темные, совсем забитые люди могут верить лжи и клевете, распространяемой против евреев. Это - остатки старого крепостного времени, когда попы заставляли сжигать еретиков на кострах, когда существовало рабство крестьян, когда народ был задавлен и безгласен. Эта старая крепостническая темнота проходит. Hарод становиться зрячим.»¹²
A point of view that I would personally have wished Marx had made in his “Deutsche Ideologie”, where has infamously rambled about the “Jewish Question”, parroting falsehoods about Jews being interested only in amassing financial wealth. As it is not of interest to this blog post at all, we will not quote him here. Instead, we should move our focus forward from the reign of Ленин to the much more terrible reign of Йосеф Сталин. Like Hitler, he had no scruples of murdering hundreds of thousands of people he deemed either subhuman or just in the way of what he perceived as the people's well-being. And in his opinion, Jews belonged at least to the last category. He has picked up on anti-Semitic language and conspiracy theories, such as them being “rootless Cosmopolitans” ( Безродные космополиты) Around 1948, he has initiated a campaign against Jewish intellectuals¹³, taking off a tradition that would be continued by his successors, like Брежнев и Крущёв¹⁴. Сталин's argument about Jews being rootless—understood as that they did not show any signs of particular bond to the Soviet Union as their homeland; they lacked patriotism, one could argue his case against the Jews—is particularly rich when one thinks about why Jews have never been true patriots in any country they inhabited: How would you feel such a bond with a nation that has occasionally persecuted for the outrageous reasons, such as poisoning wells or kidnapping children for rituals? Hannah Arendt, in her singular work on totalitarian rulership, has pointedo ut the benefits of Jews' rootlessness for a state (i.e. a government?). As she wrote:
„Da die Juden die einzige Schicht der Gesellschaft waren, auf die der Staat sich in gleich welcher Form und unabhängig von allen Regierungswechseln verlassen konnte, war jede Klasse der Gesellschaft, die mit dem Staat als solchem in Konflikt geriet, antisemitisch geworden, weil die Juden die einzige Gruppe waren, die innerhalb der Nation den Staat zu repräsentieren schienen. [...] Sie stand faktisch und ihrem Bewußtsein nach primär mit einer anderen Gesellschaftskrise, der Bourgeoisie, in Kampf, aber nicht mit dem Staate als solchem. Da die Juden zu dieser Bourgeoisie nicht gehörten, waren die Arbeiter antisemitischen Einflüssen nicht zugänglich.”¹⁵
In hindsight, Ms. Arendt may have been wrong about the workers' supposed immunity to anti-Semitism because their troubles were only linked to the bourgeoisie, because the workers could be tricked into believing that Jews controlled not only the government but the entire market and mass media, thus controlling next to everything. However, a couple of pages later, Ms. Arendt added to the above statement, explaining that
„[...] die Juden fortfuhren, einen mehr oder minder geschlossenen Körper innerhalb der Nation zu bilden; das gesellschaftliche Vorurteil wuchs in dem Maße, in welchem Juden aufgrund ihrer Assimiliertheit in die bürgerliche Gesellschaft einzudringen wünschten.”¹⁶
In conclusion, Jews were rigged in their position anyhow, there were no options for them to become commonly accepted citizens of whichever society they were born into. From the Middle Ages unto this day, they have functioned as the scapegoats for whichever ailment haunted the people. Nowadays, the sole state in which they never faced persecution has given their critics and haters additional gunpowder to explode. Not that all critique of Israel were unsubstantiated, there is enough to criticise particularly about the נְתַנְיָהוּ government, but when it comes to the people of the protest camp, they will usually cut to the chase and question the very foundation of its existence, regardless of its higher function, its function beyond just being another nation in the world—it's a safe haven for Jews from all over the world who sought a place to live without discrimination, without persecution or threats to their lives. It's the only place to surely go for a Jew; to call for its dissolution would mean to call for another שואה.¹⁷
Besides that, a state cannot just be dissolved, whether there were any interest groups calling for this or because a government allegedly committed a genocide. If that were possible, many African nations would no longer exist, for better or for worse. Concerning the two-state solution that frequently comes up when armed skirmishes between the IDF and Hamas flare up, Palestine has often rejected proposals made by Israel, the last one being in 2000 by אֵהוּד בָּרָק towards Yasser Arafat¹⁸. Other offers have been made by the Israeli side towards the Palestinians, but all in vain, so that the question of whether a two-state solution can be achieved someday remains as much a gamble as a game of Roulette¹⁹.In the end, it will depend on both sides to find a common ground upon which to work, although Palestinians have got the additional problem that the Gaza Strip and the West Bank are governed by two different parties, both of which stand in juxtaposition to one another. What is interesting is that the more extremist one, Hamas, seems to have understood that advances have to be made²⁰. We'll see how far that'll go, as it cannot be told from the time of this writing. The conflict will certainly remain hot for the time being, and beyond.
Conclusion
I don't claim that all of the protesters are anti-Semitic, just like Mr. McWhorter has said, although I have previously disagreed with him on that. Anti-Semitism is a fixed worldview of alternating radicalness, depending on the individual professing it. Those are just students, sweet summer children who have never been truly exposed to the reality from which they escaped by consciously running into an open trap called student debt, instead of learning a job at a trade school. We don't know what will happen to them once that camp at Columbia University has been dissolved—they have already announced that they would dissolve it come the exams season and the graduation celebrations. One could cynically remark that they picked this subject up like a toddler would pick up a stick in the forest or a toy: It's interesting for a short period of time, but will soon be dropped again because it lost all signs of allure. Some will continue protesting Israel's war against Islamist terrorism in its approximate neighbourhood, just as נְתַנְיָהוּ continues to exploit this war for his pork barrel politics, while he may risk losing Israel's strongest supporter, the United States²¹. In this footnote, I have pointed out a major nuisance that accompanies those camping protesters: To them, the Israeli war against the Hamas is nothing but a means to express themselves, shape political opinions and live out their youth while it lasts. If we had to assume that they were indeed serious and firm about their opinions on the war as they elaborate them now, then we must assume that whatever they have learnt during their studies concerning proper research and the weighing of opinions is zilch once they were supposed to put it into practice. For example, the death of Palestinian children has been mentioned frequently when arguing why Israel were wrong; the hostages who have been captured and murdered by Hamas soldiers as well as the slain, raped and pillaged Isareli families have been ignored by and large and only came up when mentioned by counter-protesters. I know the feeling of weakness when I am confronted with a knowingly strong counter-argument, and I often suppress them within my own draft arguments on imaginary issues, but whenever I write an argument down, I will address it and try my best to counter it likewise. Either ignoring or suppressing it intentionally is a sign of bad research when claiming to take the subject serious. If we contrarily assumed that they treat this enterprise as a pastime, as others would meet friends or exercise sports—in the WSJ article cited hereunder, it has been mentioned that yoga courses were offered in the encampment; the premise that no counter-protesters or zionists were allowed is another—we could at least rest assured that they may eventually make up their minds about what is actually happening. One must hope, because nothing else remains.
Finally, the question is how the universities themselves handle the issue. Throughout the past few days, we have heard about two approaches that were respectively chosen by the University of Texas in Austin, the Columbia University in NYC, and the Ohio University: Either arrest problematic students, or seek conversations with them to calm the tides. The penultimate one mentioned, our focal point, the Columbia University, has chosen to seek conversations with the students²². I personally appreciate those two sides' choice to continue conversations, although the question is whether they still keep in touch. History has proven to us that it is better to confront the dissenters when they amass rather than waving them off as irrelevant from the green table. When anti-Vietnam war protesters gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in 1970, then-POTUS Richard Nixon decided to make an impromptu visit to them to get in touch with them²². In spite of his general popularity, he knew that he had to weigh his decision-making concerning the strategy in Indochina, even though he said that he wouldn't let those protests influence his foreign policies²³. Truth be told, the only thing that would stop his B-52 bombing campaign over Eastern Cambodia in the early 70's was Congress, and shortly thereafter, the United States would learn about his resignation to anticipate an expectedly positive impeachment vote in the Senate. Ignoring his known legacy, we can admit that he was right about how to handle the extraparliamentary opposition as long as they were no journalists or other types of thought leaders he would likely have wiretapped. Like his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, he also was convinced that as a President, one had to make unpopular decisions in times of need—an indispensable trait that characterises every monumental statesman²⁴.
Biden is unlikely to be remembered as a statesman. Prior to his victory in the 2020 General Election, he was expected to host nothing but a caretaker presidency, sweeping the rubble left behind by his polarising predecessor. That Hamas decided to pick his tenure as the time to instigate another war next to that in Ukraine presumed that they took such factors into consideration. It nonetheless puts Biden in a zugzwang to make a marginally unpopular decision: Come hell or high water, he must stick to supporting Israel while simultaneously pushing Netanyahu to amend his strategy to take the Palestinians' plight more into consideration, even though we all know that it cannot be fully averted unless Israel surrendered, which would continue the vicious cycle for people on both sides of the border, as it remains Hamas' guilt that Palestinians suffer so much. This too is going to continue unless the IDF will be permitted to pull through with its mission to annihiliate this gubernatorial terror cell. The short-term impoverishment of Palestinians out of anybody's inability to intercept therein must therefore be preferred over the long-term plight that took place when Israel were coerced anyhow to withdraw all its troops before the mission has been accomplished.
To quote Hannah Arendt one more time before we will close this text a second time, she has written about the state of Israel too, although some of her texts are barely interesting for an historical retroperspective—she has asked the question whether the dispute between Arabs and Israelis can be solved, but in 1943, even before the state of Israel has been declared by David Ben Gurion. She has experienced the settler movement while there were only a couple of קִבּוּצִים in Palestine. She was very well aware of a need for an Israeli state, because of the more recent experiences of the שואה, and because she knew that this was only the tip of the anti-Semitic iceberg. As she has written:
„Entsprechend diesen Schemata stellen Juden sich heute zu dem großen Kampf um ihre Existenz. Die einen überzeugt, daß »keiner weiß, daß ich Rumpelstilzchen heiß«. Die anderen selig in dem Bewußtsein, den Zeitgeist zu personifizieren, indem sie ausgerottet werden. Und die dritten ängstlich darauf bedacht, nicht mehr zu verteidigen und nicht mehr zu fordern als jüdisches Territorium in Palästina, als Sicherheit für den Jischuw von 500 000 Seelen, als das Stückchen Erde, auf dem man hofft, vor Antisemitismus sicher zu sein. Vor Antisemitismus aber ist man nur noch auf dem Monde sicher; und der berühmte Ausspruch Weizmanns, daß die Antwort auf den Antisemitismus der Aufbau Palästinas sei, hat sich als ein gefährlicher Wahn erwiesen.”²⁵
Particularly the part about the Palestinian territory functioning as the refuge Jews have technically been looking for and pursued for their kinship's whole life, ever since the crusaders have displaced them in their personal pursuit to live a good life, attending the שול and exercise their religion without the fear of discriminatory retributions, has reminded me again of Herl's „Judenstaat”: He too has spoken about Palestine in particular, utilised it as a symbol. He has described it as a „Scholle” upon which the Jews pleaded their oppressors and persecutors to leave them be, in peace²⁶. It may sound like a gargantuan plea, but it is factually little :All those people demand doesn't differ at all from what the Palestinians demand: A safe place to live. What those protesters, in their childish immaturity, do in consequence is to play Palestinians' interests off against the Israelites'. Moreover, their arguments are more based in emotionality, hence the reliance on photographs the Hamas' PR department gleefully provide after every attack. I am hesitant to describe those protesters as the Hamas' koristne budale, but in the end, that's exactly what they are, involuntarily: They defend their cause to alternating degrees of proactivity, but either way, they do. Another point why I'd argue that what they should've learnt during their studies has been either lost or not fully understood. They lack all kinds of critical thinking. It is the less political reason to not take them serious in this subject-matter, no matter how many of them there are. Like Trumpists, they are unsusceptible to reason. They are lost souls in our society. Neither the Palestinians', nor the Israelites' fate should depend on their whims. Human lives are too precious to be left to ignoramuses.
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¹ Flasch, P. (2020). Antisemitism on College Campuses: A Phenomenological Study of Jewish Students’ Lived Experiences. Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism, 3(1), 59-70. https://doi.org/10.26613/jca/3.1.44
² DellaPergola, S. (2023). Chapter 7 World Jewish Population, 2022. In: Dashefsky, A., Sheskin, I.M. (eds) American Jewish Year Book 2022. American Jewish Year Book, vol 122. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33406-1_7
³ Offenhartz, Jake (April 25, 2024). Carefully planned and partly improvised: inside the Columbia protest that fueled a national movement. AP News: https://apnews.com/article/inside-columbia-protest-movement-0b35ff55f18d0bf4b2c8c0a27b1dbe04
⁴ McKee, Amira; Huddleston, Sarah (April 23, 2024). ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampment’ approaches one-week mark on South Lawn. Columbia Daily Spectator: https://www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2024/04/23/gaza-solidarity-encampment-approaches-one-week-mark-on-south-lawn/
Unrelated thereto, Twitter (alias: X) users have noted on posts that it was also ridiculous to see pro-Palestinian protesters holding a Passover when the very holiday is based upon Moses freeing the Israelites from Egyptian enslavement and leading them through the desert for forty years to the Holy Land, which is Israel, in the same place as today. Unfortunately, I have not read the תַּנַ״ךְ, so I can only quote from the Old Testament as it is known in Christian tradition. There, it is written that
“And I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land unto a good land and a large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey; unto the place of the Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Amorites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites.
“Now therefore, behold, the cry of the children of Israel is come unto me: and I have also seen the oppression wherewith the Egyptians oppress them.
“Come now therefore, and I will send thee unto Pharaoh, that thou mayest bring forth my people the children of Israel out of Egypt.
“And Moses said unto God, Who am I, that I should go unto Pharaoh, and that I should bring forth the children of Israel out of Egypt?
“And he said, Certainly I will be with thee; and this shall be a token unto thee, that I have sent thee: When thou hast brought forth the people out of Egypt, ye shall serve God upon this mountain.
“And Moses said unto God, Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What is his name? what shall I say unto them?”
(Exodus 3: 8-13)
It doesn't take a Bible scholar to tell you that Moses was bound to lead his people out of Egypt—we get the famous saying by Moses,
“And thou shalt say unto him, The Lord God of the Hebrews hath sent me unto thee, saying, Let my people go, that they may serve me in the wilderness: and, behold, hitherto thou wouldest not hear.” (Exodus 7: 16)—
and into the land of Israel, which is described more precisely in the same chapter in the Bible as follows:
“And I will set thy bounds from the Red sea even unto the sea of the Philistines, and from the desert unto the river: for I will deliver the inhabitants of the land into your hand; and thou shalt drive them out before thee.” (Exodus 23: 31)
So, whenever you hear someone declaiming “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!”, point out to them that they are historically wrong as the Bible was first to use the same expansions to describe the outreach of Israel, not something that is described as Palestine.
All jokes aside, I still stand sternly on the ground that while Hamas must be crushed, a two-state solution is the only option to bring long-term appeasement to the region. This does not mean that Israel had to either immediately or gradually stop fending off possible outside aggressors or terrorists—history has taught us that terrorist threats do not stop once peace had been made between neighbouring countries; Israel has learnt that in an even harsher fashion when יִצְחָק רַבִּין was assassinated by an alleged Zionist who despised him for the compromise deal he struck with Yasser Arafat (I am sorry for not using the original Palestinian spelling of his name. I unforutnately do not speak any Arabic language and cannot read the alphabet. Likewise, I can at least read Hebrew, I just don't understand it) The case of his assassination is interesting insofar as that we can thus close the circle of this post's update: It has changed the way protests are handled and managed in Israel:
Yuchtman-Yaar, E., & Hermann, T. (1998). The Latitude of Acceptance: Israeli Attitudes toward Political Protest before and after the Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 42(6), 721-743. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022002798042006003
⁵ McWhorter, John (April 23, 2024). I'm a Columbia Professor. The Protests on My Campus Are Not Justice. New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/opinion/columbia-protests-israel.html
⁶ Powell, Michael (April 22, 2024). The Unreality of Columbia’s ‘Liberated Zone’. The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/04/columbia-university-protests-palestine/678159/
Lederman, Noah (April 25, 2024). Jewish Students Are No Longer Safe at Columbia University. Haaretz: https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2024-04-25/ty-article-opinion/.premium/jewish-students-are-no-longer-safe-at-columbia-university/0000018f-14e9-da70-a7bf-7debe6900000
⁷ Ailworth, Erin; Choiniere, Alyssa; Pisani, Joseph (April 26, 2024). Inside the Pro-Palestinian Protests Disrupting Columbia University. The Wall Street Journal: https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/pro-palestinian-protest-new-york-city-universities-71c4c93e
⁸ McKernan, Bethan (April 02, 2024). Charities halt Gaza aid after drone attack that killed seven workers. The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/02/charities-halt-gaza-operations-after-israeli-drones-kill-aid-workers
⁹ Swart, I. (1991). In search of the meaning of hamas: studying an Old Testament word in context. Journal for Semitics, 3(2), 156-166. DOI: https://hdl.handle.net/10520/AJA10318471_187
¹³ Xiao, Y., & Zeng, J. (2023). Antisemitism or political purge? Stalin’s Jewish policies revisited. Israel Affairs, 29(6), 1154–1166. https://doi.org/10.1080/13537121.2023.2269729
Bemporad, E. Empowerment, Defiance, and Demise: Jews and the Blood Libel Specter under Stalinism. Jew History 26, 343–361 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10835-012-9162-6
¹⁴ Umland, A. (1999). Soviet Antisemitism after Stalin. East European Jewish Affairs, 29(1–2), 159–168. https://doi.org/10.1080/13501679908577900
¹⁵ Arendt, Hannah (2001). Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft. Antisemitismus, Imperialismus, Totalitarismus. München, Zürich: Piper. Seite 78. Hervorhebungen meine.
¹⁶ ibid., Seite 138.
¹⁷ Biddle, C. (2015). Israel: To Be, Or Not To Be. The Objective Standard, 10(4). Link: https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/israel-be-not/docview/2708091316/se-2
¹⁸ Korobkin, R., & Zasloff, J. (2005). Roadblocks to the road map: A negotiation theory perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict after Yasser Arafat. Yale J. Int'l L., 30, 1. Link: https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/yjil30&div=6&id=&page=
¹⁹ Shemer-Kunz, Y. (2023). Annexation, normalization and the two-state solution in Israel-Palestine. Frontiers in Political Science, 5, 981237. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2023.981237
²⁰ Sewell, Abby (April 25, 2024). Hamas official says group would lay down its arms if an independent Palestinian state is established. AP News: https://apnews.com/article/hamas-khalil-alhayya-qatar-ceasefire-1967-borders-4912532b11a9cec29464eab234045438
²¹ Lipner, Shalom (December 29, 2023). How Israel Could Lose America. Foreign Affairs: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/how-israel-could-lose-america
For the time being, it doesn't look as if the United States were going to restrict their diplomatic relationship with the only Democracy in the Near East, but the General Election looms, with only a couple of months left until incumbent POTUS Joe Biden and former POTUS Donald J. Trump are going to face off for the second and final time. Recently, Biden has passed a US$ 6 trillion aid package that comprised of benefits for some of the United States' most important, troubled allies in different regions: Ukraine, which has been fighting a war against Russia for more than two years now; Taiwan (alias the Republic of China), which stands on the verge of a war against the People's Republic of China; and, of course, Israel: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2024/04/24/remarks-by-president-biden-on-the-passage-of-h-r-815-the-national-security-supplemental/
Donald Trump, as the man who has brought back protectionism on the menu of US foreign-policy choices as the second POTUS and presidential candidate after William Howard Taft, has always been critical about aid for Ukraine, although there was the simultaneous rumour that he also stands closer to Владимир Путин than to Володимир Зеленськийґ, so that his arguments are not led by merit but by bias. If he were going to win in November 2024, The question is: What would his victory mean for Israel? We all remember that his son-in-law Jared Kushner has sealed the Abraham Accords that were followed by Israel normalising diplomatic ties with a row of Arab nations; we also remember that he has ratified the Golan Heights as part of Israel. Would he continue to support Israel if elected and the war still not being resolved? There is little reason to believe that he were going to withdraw support from Israel, although he is also more fixated on Ukraine than on Israel. He has said that Israel were about to lose the “PR war”:
Colvin, Jill (April 04, 2024). Trump says Israel has to get wr in Gaza over 'fast' and warns it is 'losing the PR war'. AP News: https://apnews.com/article/trump-biden-israel-pr-hugh-hewitt-21faee332d95fec99652c112fbdcd35d
But he is smart to not talk about the issue too much in order to not drop any clanger. His supporters are not all that interested in it since the US have been supporting Israel militarily for decades, so that the impact is not all that hefty on the budget, compared to the perceptibly sheer amount of money and arms that is going into Ukraine, regardless of the reasons why the country is being supported in its war against Russia. Biden, on the other hand, is anxious to not lose any support from his base, and that's where the student protesters, while hardly a majority within the eligible part of US-American society and hardly in the majority even within themselves when it comes to prioritising the war in Gaza, according to youth polls: https://iop.harvard.edu/youth-poll/47th-edition-spring-2024
It obviously delivers some bad optics; Biden could “lose the PR war” on his frontline because of those eligible individuals. From Michigan it has been heard that young Democratic voters have voted “uncommitted” because of that issue alone:
Cameron, Chris; Friess, Steve (February 27, 2024). Michigan Voters Talk About How the War in Gaza Factored Into Their Decision. New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/27/us/politics/michigan-voters-gaza-uncommitted.html
Although the fiercest voices—and by fierce, I mean stupid—have been others who could be read about in the POLITICO Playbook. One of them was not named but quoted as follows:
“A more particular fear is that anti-Biden views might be becoming increasingly entrenched inside the relatively small but crucial youth voting bloc — views like those of his Columbia University student who spoke to POLITICO about her eroding faith in the president: “I was excited to vote out a fascist from government [in 2020]. And in hindsight, I guess I see that I was just putting someone who’s a little bit less evil, but evil nonetheless.'” (https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook/2024/04/24/why-bidens-blase-about-campus-turmoil-00154044)
There are no words how deranged such comments are, outside of any need for objectivity on this blog: Trump has been proven to threaten US Democracy, as he has already done gradually during his first tenure, he could attempt to impose a theocratic régime and undermine Congressional authority. In the face of those facts, to claim that Biden were only an inferiorly lesser evil because he did not expediently give up support for a key ally in a distressful region because it apparently responded to a suddenly strengthened, more hostile threat alongside its border in order to monitor its government's strategy comes close to Trumpist. As I have written above, there is good reason to criticise the incumbent Israeli government, but the POTUS' election is, first and foremost, an interior affair with the instantaneous primary effect being felt at home, not abroad, despite what one may hear on foreign news services like the BBC or the Deutsche Welle. Voting “present” during this election therefore likened a shot into one's own foot, and not a single Palestinian would thank one for taking that shot. Alas, those voters who collectively took shots into their feet as a symbolic act would cheer each other (up) within their own echo chambers, as they are already doing in apparent journals:
Badawi, S. (2024, February-March). Refusing to Fall in Line: Biden's complicity in Israel's war is driving many Muslim and Arab Americans to withdraw their support. The Progressive, 88(1), 50+. https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A784105902/AONE?u=anon~d76d795f&sid=googleScholar&xid=e4fa4187
²² Silva, Manuela; McKee, Amira; Huddleston, Sarah; Vance, Shea (April 24, 2024). University, student representatives to 'continue conversations for the next 48 hours'. Columbia Daily Spectator: https://www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2024/04/24/university-student-representatives-to-continue-conversations-for-the-next-48-hours/
Richard Nixon Presidential Library & Museum (May 09, 2020). President Nixon's May 9, 1970 Unplanned Visit to the Lincoln Memorial. Link: https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/news/president-nixons-may-9-1970-unplanned-visit-lincoln-memorial
²³ Scott, K. (2011). Nixon and Dissent. A Companion to Richard M. Nixon, 311-327. Page 313.
²⁴ Kissinger, Henry (1982). Years of Upheaval. New York City: Little, Brown and Company. Page 169.
²⁵ Arendt, Hannah (26. Dezember 1941). Ceterum Censeo... In: ibid.; Knott, Marie Luise (2019). Vor Antisemitismus ist man nur noch auf dem Monde sicher. München: Piper. Seite 35. Hervorhebungen meine.
²⁶ Theodor Herzl (1920), Seite 72.
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