A Sense of Doubt blog post #3356 -Students Protest GENOCIDE against Palestinians in Gaza
I have stayed silent since October 7th, 2023 on the situation in the Middle East.
I am pro-Jewish. I always have been. I feel great affinity with Judaism. I was surely a Jew in a former life, probably a recent former life.
 April 25, 2024 |
Good morning. We’re covering the protests roiling college campuses — as well as the foreign aid bill, soccer and the Venice Biennale.
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| Outside Columbia University. Adam Gray for The New York Times |
Dueling priorities
Arnold Kling, an economist, published a book a decade ago that offered a way to think about the core difference between progressives and conservatives. Progressives, Kling wrote, see the world as a struggle between the oppressor and the oppressed, and they try to help the oppressed. Conservatives see the world as a struggle between civilization and barbarism — between order and chaos — and they try to protect civilization.
Like many frameworks, Kling’s is a simplification, and it’s easy to find exceptions. But his book has been influential because the framework often sheds light on political arguments.
The debate over pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia and other universities has become an example. If you want to understand why university leaders are finding the situation so hard to resolve, Kling’s dichotomy is useful: The central question for colleges is whether to prioritize the preservation of order or the desire of students to denounce oppression.
In today’s newsletter, I’ll lay out the cases of the dueling sides.
Confronting injustice
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| A Jewish student wearing a watermelon kippah, a symbol of Gaza. Bing Guan for The New York Times |
For the student protesters, the injustice in Gaza is so horrific that it takes precedence over almost anything else.
The death toll in Gaza since Oct. 7 is more than 30,000, the Gaza Ministry of Health reports. Entire neighborhoods are rubble. Israel has slowed the entry of basic supplies into Gaza, and many families are hungry. (My colleagues Vivian Yee and Bilal Shbair profiled two families trying to find their children enough to eat.)
The protesters view this suffering as an atrocity that demands action, much as Jim Crow laws, the Vietnam War and South African apartheid did for earlier students. In a statement yesterday, a pro-Palestinian group at Columbia cited as inspiration the anti-Vietnam War demonstrators who were killed at Kent State University in 1970.
If classes must be canceled and graduation ceremonies can’t happen, all the better, the students say. The disruptions will force the world to confront what the protesters describe as a genocide. “Big picture, genocide is happening, and this is where we stand,” one Columbia graduate student told the publication Hell Gate.
Many protesters specifically call for their universities to divest from companies that do business in Israel or help produce military equipment.
Some students have framed the debate as being about free speech, and free-speech principles do play a role. But I don’t think they are as central as Kling’s frame. Both sides, after all, have tried to restrict speech. Supporters of Israel have doxxed pro-Palestinian students and tried to penalize slogans like “From the river to the sea.” Pro-Palestinian protesters have ripped away Israeli and U.S. flags and tried to prevent pro-Israel students from speaking.
The protesters’ abiding principle is not freedom of speech. It is justice for the oppressed.
Preventing chaos
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| The “Gaza Solidarity Encampment.” Bing Guan for The New York Times |
For the protesters’ critics, the breakdown of order is the central problem — because a community that descends into chaos can’t function.
Protesters have frequently violated colleges’ rules. They have erected tents in public places and overwhelmed those areas. Columbia has switched to hybrid classes because of the turmoil.
Even worse, some protests have involved harassment and violence. The University of Michigan had to cut short an honors ceremony for students. At Vanderbilt, more than 20 protesters stormed the president’s office, injuring a security guard and shattering a window. At Columbia, videos have shown protesters threatening Jewish students with antisemitic vitriol, including a sign talking about Hamas’s “next targets.”
If universities do not enforce their own rules against such behavior, the rules have no meaning, administrators fear. Other protesters, seeing their own causes as existential, could likewise halt normal life. Perhaps they would be climate activists or students outraged by China’s oppression of Uighurs — or even demonstrators with right-wing views unpopular on American campuses. If anti-abortion protesters were to take over a quad for days, would university administrators ignore their own campus rules?
Jason Riley, a Wall Street Journal columnist, has compared the protesters’ tactics to those of the white residents of Arkansas who tried to use physical intimidation to prevent the enforcement of a law they didn’t like: school desegregation. President Dwight Eisenhower responded by proclaiming that “disorderly mobs” could not triumph, Riley noted.
College administrators are not making such analogies. Many express sympathy for the protesters’ concerns. But some insist that society can’t function if people violate rules without consequence. “We cannot have one group dictate terms and attempt to disrupt important milestones like graduation to advance their point of view,” Minouche Shafik, Columbia’s president, wrote to the campus this week.
What’s next?
I recognize that not everybody will accept Kling’s framework for this debate. Pro-Palestinian students will say that Israel is the true source of disorder, while pro-Israel students will say that Hamas is the true oppressor.
Still, I think the Kling dichotomy captures the dilemma that university leaders face. The protests continue, and graduation season is approaching. Those leaders will have to make difficult decisions about what values to prioritize.
The latest on the protests
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John Cage Would Want You to Listen to Columbia’s Pro-Palestinian Protesters
The composer would have likely have embraced the sound of discord.
John Cage, the influential composer and artist, is dead. So it’s technically impossible to know with absolute certainty how he would feel about the pro-Palestinian encampment at Columbia University.
But the question emerges after New York Times columnist John McWhorter, a music humanities and linguistics professor at Columbia, wrote that he was forced to stop students from playing Cage’s 4’33”—a seminal work that’s effectively four minutes and 33 seconds of silence (though Cage-heads might disagree with that description)—because of the demonstrations. According to McWhorter, that silence, which would have made room for the chants outside, would have inflicted cruelty on his students, some of whom he identified as Israeli and Jewish American.
But for people familiar with Cage’s work, McWhorter’s argument appeared antithetical to the spirit of 4’33”. Cage’s conception of silence, though heavily and often debated, went beyond the idea of serene nothingness. See, for example, his explanation of listening to traffic:
To see how Cage would have felt about his name being invoked in a piece that essentially browbeats antiwar protests, I reached out to Professor Philip Gentry, a musicologist at the University of Delaware who wrote a book on Cold War politics and American music that touches on Cage’s politics. His response, which has been lightly edited for clarity:
Ironically, Cage once attended lectures at Columbia University, with the Zen Buddhist scholar Daisetz Suzuki. He frequently told a story of how Suzuki would leave the classroom windows open in nice weather, and the sounds of planes flying into LaGuardia would drown out the lecturer’s voice—but there was a lesson to be learned in that.
The idea of 4’33” is to provide a frame for listening to the sounds of the world as a piece of music. Sometimes this means the sounds of nature, but most often it is the sounds of people. At the premiere in 1952 in Woodstock, NY, the initial sounds were of the forest surrounding the concert hall. By the end of the four and a half minutes, however, those natural sounds were drowned out by audience members who began to complain. Supposedly, one person stood up to shout, “Good people of Woodstock, let’s run these people out of town!” Cage was thrilled.
I suspect John Cage would have been equally pleased to know that a performance of 4’33” at Columbia in 2024 could contain, in addition to the sounds of the HVAC system and students breathing and shuffling their feet, the chaotic noise of the encampment outside the window. Whether or not he would have agreed with the protestors—he was a life-long anarchist who tended to sniff at student protests—he absolutely would have embraced that wide world of sounds. And while I can’t speak for them, it sounds like McWhorter’s students might have been subtly encouraging him to open his ears up a little wider as well.
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| An aerial view of destroyed buildings in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, on Monday. (AFP/Getty Images) |
In war-battered Gaza,
residents grow angry with Hamas
By Claire Parker, Heba Farouk Mahfouz, Hazem Balousha and Hajar Harb
April 27, 2024 at 2:00
a.m. EDT
But while the majority of Palestinians in Gaza blame Israel for their suffering, according to polling conducted in March, they also appear to be turning their ire toward the militants. In interviews with more than a dozen residents of Gaza, people said they resent Hamas for the attacks in Israel and — war-weary and desperate to fulfill their basic needs — just want to see peace as soon as possible.
If Hamas wanted to start a war, “they should have secured people first — secured a place of refuge for them, not thrown them into suffering that no one can bear,” said Salma El-Qadomi, 33, a freelance journalist who has been displaced 11 times since the conflict started.
Palestinians want leaders “who won’t drag people into a war like this,” she said. “Almost everyone around me shares the same thoughts: We want this waterfall of blood to stop. Seventeen years of destruction and wars are enough.”
Hamas, an Islamist political and military movement, was founded in 1987 during the first Palestinian uprising. It staged some of the deadliest attacks on Israeli civilians and later won Palestinian legislative elections, beating out the secular Fatah party that leads the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.
The rival parties entered into a deadly power struggle, fighting a brief but bloody battle in Gaza in 2007, when Hamas seized control. For years after that, the group fought sporadic wars with Israel, but it also presided over periods of calm.
It used the smuggling tunnels under the border with Egypt to manage the territory’s besieged economy and cracked down on criminal gangs that preyed on locals. More recently, however, Hamas’s fortunes turned. The tunnel trade had dried up after Egypt sealed off the network, and the group’s isolation deepened as some Arab states began normalizing relations with Israel.
Still, many observers, including Israel’s leaders, were sure Hamas wanted to stay in power and had little interest in a major conflict. The attack in October took many Palestinians — and much of the world — by surprise.
Hamas has said it launched the assault in part to avenge what it claimed was Israel’s “desecration” of the al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem, Islam’s third-holiest site, known to Jews — who also consider it sacred — as the Temple Mount.
The attack, a terrifying rampage through southern Israeli communities, initially boosted the group’s support in both Gaza and the West Bank, according the Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, which carried out polling in late November and early December.
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| Bodies of Hamas militants are covered and lined up in a park in Kibbutz Beeri, Israel, on Oct. 11. (Lorenzo Tugnoli for The Washington Post) |
Even recently, in a poll conducted over five days in March, a majority of respondents in both places say Hamas’s decision to carry out the attack was “correct.”
But, the center’s researchers said, “it is clear from the findings … that support for the offensive does not mean support for Hamas.” Instead, the results show three-quarters of Palestinians believe the attack refocused global attention on the conflict “after years of neglect.”
The anger mounting now in the enclave appears centered on stalled cease-fire talks, with Hamas insisting on a permanent truce and Israel’s full withdrawal from Gaza before it hands over any hostages.
“We can’t live like this anymore,” said a 29-year-old displaced lawyer and mother of three, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. Hours before the interview, she said, Israeli drones fired at her and her children on the street in central Gaza.
“We need to be able to mourn what has happened to us, to bury those who were killed and look for those lost,” she said. “By any means, we want the war to stop, whatever it takes.”
Fedaa Zayed, a 35-year-old writer from northern Gaza, said she thinks Hamas is avoiding a cease-fire agreement because it doesn’t want to admit defeat. She fled her Gaza City apartment on the second day of the war and is now staying in Rafah on the border with Egypt.
“In reality, we are in full retreat, the domestic front is destroyed,” Zayed said. “We, as a people, want a cease-fire, the withdrawal of the Israeli army. We want to return to our homes even if they are in rubble.”
Hamas says it understands the frustrations of those who are suffering in Gaza. “But these complaints do not reflect the political situation,” said Basem Naim, a senior Hamas official.
Instead, he said, “we are listening to thousands of voices that are emphasizing that despite the sacrifice, they refuse to let go of the big goals that involve ending the occupation, freeing Jerusalem and setting up a Palestinian state.”
Naim and other senior political leaders, including Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh, are based outside Gaza. Inside the enclave, Hamas leader Yehiya Sinwar, the apparent mastermind of Oct. 7, is believed to be hunkered down in a tunnel to escape the Israeli strikes.
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| Yehiya Sinwar, Hamas’s political chief in Gaza, center, attends a rally in Gaza City in 2021. (Mahmud Hams/AFP/Getty Images) |
Hamas, however, has never really tolerated dissent, and it arrested, jailed and beat activists who spoke out against its rule.
The group’s administration in Gaza was “full of corruption, nepotism, and bias in favor of the movement,” said Mohamed, 35, a graphic designer from Rafah. He spoke on the condition that only his first name be used out of fear of reprisal by the group’s fighters.
Also in Rafah, Ayman, 46, said he voted for Hamas in 2006 because he thought the Palestinian Authority was corrupt. But what came next, he said, also speaking on the condition that only his first name be used, “was a number of wars, the destruction of homes, the martyrdom of thousands, difficulty in life, and the siege.”
Earlier this year, demonstrations calling for a cease-fire broke out in at least two cities in Gaza. In a video of a protest in January, a crowd of mostly men and boys marches down a street in the city of Khan Younis, holding antiwar signs and chanting: “The people want an end to the war!”
Analysts say they have also seen an uptick in social media posts critical of Hamas.
“Hamas... don’t be upset with us and try to understand us correctly,” Rami Haroon, a 45-year-old dentist and father of five, wrote on Facebook on April 20.
“We have been suffocated by you for a long time,” wrote Haroon, who said he is not affiliated with any political party. “Your ship will sink and you will drown us with you.”
But while resentment is brewing, many Palestinians “feel it’s a shame to go after Hamas during this Israeli assault,” said Mkhaimar Abusada, associate professor of political science at al-Azhar University in Gaza, who is now based in Cairo. “They don’t want to be seen as collaborators with the occupation if they protest against Hamas now.”
In the March poll from the policy center, a slim majority of respondents in Gaza said they would prefer Hamas — rather than the Palestinian Authority — to control the Strip after the war. The other options included the United Nations, the Israeli military, or one or more Arab countries.
“Given the magnitude of the suffering in the Gaza Strip, this seems to be the most counter intuitive finding of the entire poll,” the researchers wrote. At the same time, the results were consistent with the increase in the percentage of Palestinians in Gaza who think Hamas will win the war and stay in power.
“There are many ways to understand that,” Palestinian political analyst Khalil Sayegh, who is based in Washington, said of the finding in an interview last week. “One of which is that the people understood and saw that Hamas is staying, and thus they’re afraid to express their opinions.”
According to Abusada, people “care about Palestine and resistance and freedom and independence. But first of all, they want to live as humans, to be able to eat and sleep.”
“That’s why the criticism is much more vocal now and much more public now,” he said. “Israel really sent us to the Stone Age.”
Mahfouz and Balousha reported from Cairo, and Harb from London. Sarah Dadouch in Beirut contributed to this report.
Israel-Gaza war
The Israel-Gaza war has gone on for six months, and tensions have spilled into the surrounding region.
The war: On Oct. 7, Hamas militants launched an unprecedented cross-border attack on Israel that included the taking of civilian hostages at a music festival. (See photos and videos of how the deadly assault unfolded). Israel declared war on Hamas in response, launching a ground invasion that fueled the biggest displacement in the region since Israel’s creation in 1948.
Gaza crisis: In the Gaza Strip, Israel has waged one of this century’s most destructive wars, killing tens of thousands and plunging at least half of the population into “famine-like conditions.” For months, Israel has resisted pressure from Western allies to allow more humanitarian aid into the enclave.
U.S. involvement: Despite tensions between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and some U.S. politicians, including President Biden, the United States supports Israel with weapons, funds aid packages, and has vetoed or abstained from the United Nations’ cease-fire resolutions.
History: The roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and mistrust are deep and complex, predating the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Read more on the history of the Gaza Strip.
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2404.26 - 10:10
- Days ago = 3220 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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