Thank you for your articles on the controversy over students protesting the war in Gaza. The polarization around the protests can be crazy-making, as each side seems to live in different realities. Reality is sometimes too complex for us, so we oversimplify through false binaries. Protesters are labelled as “pro-Palestinian” when they may actually be labelled more accurately as pro-human rights. I suspect that few of us who long for justice for the Palestinians are in any way pro-Hamas.
David Shulman, a peace activist and a professor at Hebrew University, recently published a powerful indictment of Israel’s long-standing mistreatment of the Palestinians in the Sept. 19 issue of The New York Review of Books. He observed that “It is amazingly rare in Israel to hear the naked truth about the occupation ... . The occupation hardly counts as news. ... [E]ven peace-oriented, left-wing Israelis often express shock when I tell them of witnessing violent attacks by settlers and soldiers on Palestinian shepherds and farmers. It is as if that kind of knowledge were pushed away from conscious awareness, or as if the knowledge itself exists somewhere in the mind but knowledge of that knowledge does not.”
I hope everyone concerned about the campus protests will read Professor Shulman’s article and ask themselves if his descriptions of Israelis’ state of denial about brutality of the occupation resonates for them.
Let’s get over the campus protests and focus on what the protesters are trying their best to draw to our attention — the horrendous human rights abuses in the occupied territories, both Gaza and the West Bank.