One of my Students Responds

Roger Berkowitz

My former student and current Arendt Center employee, Tobias Hess, asked to write about his feelings of unease about my characterization of some student protests in favor of Hamas and the Palestinian people on college campuses. Like many students and non-students, and like myself, Hess is moved deeply by the plight of seemingly excessive destruction by Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza. Hess is also a thoughtful Jew in the diaspora who questions the moral complexity of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. There is every reason to question the way Israel has furthered the growth of settlements and, amidst real concerns for security, used those concerns to create a truly separate and unequal way of life in the West Bank. There are also good reasons to question the way Israel is prosecuting its current war, even while one should also be clear that the war itself is a just war as a response to a brutal and devastating attack. And beyond the simple evidence on television and the internet of devastation in Gaza, there is further evidence that Israel is targeting what it calls “power targets,” including high-rises and residential towers in the heart of cities, and public buildings such as universities, banks, and government offices. As a report in +972 finds, “The idea behind hitting such targets, say three intelligence sources who were involved in planning or conducting strikes on power targets in the past, is that a deliberate attack on Palestinian society will exert “civil pressure” on Hamas.” Bombing such power targets is not necessarily a war crime, but it does raise serious moral questions of proportionality and also questions of strategy. (Michael Walzer, one of the leading scholars on just and unjust wars, has written an excellent account of how to think about the justice and injustice of the Israeli campaign.) In short, many students on campuses are saddened and angered by the moral calculus that allows Israel to justify such bombing. That is fair and, as I’ve written, I understand such protests. 

My problem with many of the campus protests is when they move from expressions of empathy with the horrors of war and war crimes suffered by both sides to outright support or celebration for the acts of Hamas, something that has happened too frequently. The idea that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and its isolation of Gaza justifies war crimes in the name of Palestinian liberation, the idea that the justified dream of a Palestinian state justifies theocratic and terrorist efforts to kill Jews and destroy the state of Israel, is to flatten thinking about a tragic and complicated geo-political dispute into one-sided sloganeering. 

There is a place for protest. Protests can be a cry of the heart. They can be political weapons. And they can express anger and sadness. In all these cases, protests are, in their nature, anti-intellectual. I recall my former professor and Arendt scholar Hannah Pitkin who once explained how in the 1960s she went to a protest and while people were chanting slogans, she held up a sign with a 20 page explanation of her opinion. She quickly realized that her belief in moral and political complexity was incompatible with protest. None of this means that there is not a place for protest, there is. But protests, in their fundamental impulses, simplify complex issues in the name of political action. The protests on campuses in favor of Palestinians and Hamas, protests that blur the distinction between Palestinian aspirations and Hamas’ brutality, necessarily elevate slogans over thinking. In this particular case, doing so within a global discourse of antisemitism, such protests, even well-meaning protests, risk inflaming old hatreds, re-enlivening old conspiracy theories, and embracing a thoughtless idea of simple ascriptions of one side being innocent and thus good and one side being strong and thus evil. We do need a place for protest, but our goal must be to make such protests as thoughtful and effective as possible. In that common goal,  I appreciate Hess’ thoughtful response:

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.