A Young Jew Looks to Gaza

12-01-2023

Tobias Hess

I came to the Hannah Arendt Center four years ago as a student-fellow, drawn by this strange, provocative institution. I resonated with the Center’s ethos in that I firmly believed that bad ideas would lose to better ones if aired with proper context. I had a certain faith in the relative intelligence and goodness of people, that they would come to the just conclusions if given the chance. I disagreed with our speakers often. I disagreed with fellow Arendt fellows and team members often. But the Center sharpened my thinking, and helped instill in me a principled dedication to dialogue amidst disagreement. 

After I graduated, I came to work for the Center. Today I support our programming with the Democracy Innovation Hub and format our newsletter, Amor Mundi. It is this latter work that brings me to this writing today. My role with Amor is not editorial, but logistical. I have formatted and posted much writing that I disagreed with since starting this job. But my larger principles, and my faith in our readership overwhelmed any qualms I might have had. Disagreement, after all, is a helpful tool in understanding. Last week’s article by Roger Berkowitz, our Founder, Academic Director and my boss, struck me as one of these times where disagreement sharpens stances. I found this piece to be a problematic characterization of the youth movement for Palestine (and specifically Jewish movement for Palestine) that I so proudly identify with. I asked if I could provide a rebuttal. Roger and the HAC team graciously allowed that.

Roger’s piece was a response to writer Barri Weiss’s recent speech at the Federalist Society. In that speech, Weiss asks aloud why the reaction by self-proclaimed progressives to the acts of Hamas on October 7th did not necessitate the same universal condemnation as did the acts of Al-queada on 9/11. She cites instances of individuals outright endorsing the Hamas killings and chalks it up to what she names as the trendy allure of decolonial theory. She writes, “Decolonization isn’t just a turn of phrase or a new way to read novels. It is a sincerely held political view that serves as a predicate to violence.” She goes on: 

Their moral calculus is as crude as you can imagine: they see Israelis and Jews as powerful and successful and “colonizers,” so they are bad; Hamas is weak and coded as people of color, so they are good. 

Roger, in reaction, notes the evidence of such an ideological strain on campuses, but says that some part of the popularity of the Palestinian cause on campuses is because of the lure of joining popular movements, and the often fleeting moral passions of the young. He writes:

It is true that most students chanting such slogans are well meaning, idealistic, and simply deeply upset by the images of seemingly wanton destruction of Gaza City and the killing of over 10,000 Palestinian civilians including 4,000 children. The politics of movements on college campuses are complex. Many people who show up for mass rallies have little actual knowledge of middle east politics, the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or even definitions of genocide.  

Most of these protesters—as is true by nearly all protest movements—are drawn by all sorts of personal and moral and political forces. The slogans rhyme. They announce that one is on the right team and make one feel righteous in one’s performance of outrage. And that is how it should be. If young people aren’t outraged at something in the world, there is something wrong with them. 

This characterization of pro-Palestinian protesters is more charitable than the sweeping statements of Weiss. But Berkowitz’s description still fails to take seriously the concerns of a generation of young people who are witnessing the atrocities of the Israeli military with horror. That such horror is inspiring mass mobilization and politicization should not be taken as a mere sign of youthful passions, but real political engagement on a profound humanitarian crisis. As the UN Secretary General has said himself, repeatedly: “The war in the Middle East is having a staggering and unacceptable number of civilian casualties, including women and children, every day.” 1,200 of the innocents slaughtered were by the theocratic and totalitarian government of Gaza led by Hamas on Oct. 7th (not to mention over 200 Israelis and foreigners taken as hostages), but in the rage and cynical policy of the far-right Israeli government, over 13,000 of those innocents have been Palestinians in Gaza. That’s to say nothing of the over 200 murdered by extremist Israeli settlers in the West Bank. 

Let me start with my own passion for the cause. I am a young Jew who finds the current conduct of the Israeli government morally repugnant. I find Israel’s bombardment reprehensible, and feel this in uncomplicated terms. Israel’s explanation for the mass casualties in Gaza as the nearly exclusive fault of Hamas’s use of human shields, strikes me as entirely unconvincing; and even if it were true for every single death in Gaza, I still fail to understand how this justifies Israel’s actions. Shouldn’t it be incumbent on Israel to minimize these civilian casualties given their assured awareness of this Hamas tactic? A bomb, after all, is not a lightning strike or act of God, but a decision made by human agents. The seeming comfort the Israeli government has with the loss of innocent life in Gaza is the clear result of an ideology and government that, in their own words, sees the people of Gaza as “human animals.” This is barbaric, bloodthirsty racism in its clearest form; and no trauma, or historical anguish, can justify it.

How could Israel, always sold to me as the promise and salvation of my people, become such a shameful disappointment, diametrically opposed to the moral lessons of my tradition? How could the promise of Jewish self-determination spiral until such craven, narrow minded nationalism? My astonishment at the justifications made by Israel and fellow Jews for this slaughter hits me like a new pain, a new feeling. I’m beginning to think of it as betrayal. I have long felt skeptical towards Zionist claims that Jews “need” the state of Israel for any hope of safety and self-determination. But skepticism, once curious and wandering, has given way to a new sense of horror and bewilderment at such claims. Recent events have proven to me that Israel’s actions are helping fuel global antisemitism, making Jews of the diaspora, as well Israeli Jews, markedly less safe. 

I say this all in the context of a media environment where there has been much ink spilled on the excesses of the campus movement for Palestine. This is not to minimize the real instances of antisemitism on campuses, or the nearsightedness of certain campus activists who end up justifying the unjustifiable in their righteousness and rage. But I worry that such a sustained focus on these instances risks reducing the campus movement for Palestine into a crude characterization, simplifying it into no more than a trope of naive, anti-semitic leftists, incapable of principled engagement. By focusing primarily on such instances, we are failing to grapple with students’ sincere engagement with this profound humanitarian crisis. 

I believe Berkowitz is right to diagnose the energy behind these movements as sincere, if at times misguided. But I believe he is genuinely overlooking the extent to which it is the actual crisis in Gaza itself, and the history of the Israeli state, that is the primary factor in widespread student mobilization on this issue. To make my position clearer: if Weiss attributes campus passions for Palestine to antisemitism masked under trendy calls for decolonialism, and Berkowitz, to fleeting passion, then I, a young Jew, attribute it to the reality of Israel’s conduct, as bloody, horrifying, and cynical as ever. Why do college campuses overflow with calls for Palestinian liberation? I do not know the heart of every protester, but I know my own; I protest because I feel I have been lied to about the promise of Israel. I feel that my — that our — history and trauma as Jews has been used like a cudgel for oppressive, and yes, colonial, ends. Take me at my word: I am not subject to fleeting feelings, or seduced by antisemitic forces. I am a young Jew of conscience and I yearn for the freedom and safety of the people of Palestine from Israel’s bombardment, occupation and siege.