Thursday, April 25, 2024
Harari and McWhorter on Gaza, Israel, and Columbia
Yuval Noah Harari and John McWhorter have written important essays on the the Israel/Hamas war (Harari, in Haaretz) and the response on American campuses (McWhorter in the NYTimes). Both are well worth reading in full, and I have excerpted a few paragraphs of each below.
Harari, “From Gaza to Iran, the Netanyahu Government Is Endangering Israel’s Survival“:
Following the horrendous massacre of October 7, Israel needed to liberate the hostages and disarm Hamas, but these should not have been its only aims. In light of the existential threat posed to Israel by Iran and its agents of chaos, Israel also needed to deepen its alliance with Western democracies, strengthen cooperation with moderate Arab forces, and work to establish a stable regional order. However, the Netanyahu government ignored all these aims, and instead focused on revenge. It has failed to secure the release of all the hostages, and has not disarmed Hamas. Worse, it intentionally inflicted a humanitarian disaster on the 2.3 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and thereby undermined the moral and geopolitical basis for Israel’s existence.
The decision to inflict on Gaza a humanitarian catastrophe resulted from a combination of three long-term factors: lack of sensitivity to the value of Palestinian lives; lack of sensitivity to Israel’s international standing; and skewed priorities that ignored Israel’s real security needs.
Netanyahu continues to promise Israelis “total victory,” but the truth is, we are a step away from total defeat. Whatever could have been achieved by fighting – rebuilding domestic trust in the IDF following the October 7 debacle, rebuilding Israeli deterrence abroad, and eliminating most of Hamas’ military capabilities – have already been achieved. Nothing more will be gained from continuing the war. It is a dangerous illusion to believe that one more victory, in Rafah, will bring about the collapse of Hamas, the release of all the hostages, and the surrender of Israel’s many enemies. Every additional day of war only serves the purposes of Hamas and Iran, and intensifies Israel’s international isolation.
McWhorter, “I’m a Columbia Professor. The Protests on My Campus Are Not Justice.”
I thought about what would have happened if protesters were instead chanting anti-Black slogans or even something like “D.E.I. has got to die,” to the same “Sound Off” tune that “From the river to the sea” has been adapted to. They would have lasted roughly five minutes before masses of students shouted them down and drove them off the campus. Chants like that would have been condemned as a grave rupture of civilized exchange, heralded as threatening resegregation and branded as a form of violence. I’d wager that most of the student protesters against the Gaza war would view them that way. Why do so many people think that weekslong campus protests against not just the war in Gaza but Israel’s very existence are nevertheless permissible?
However, the relentless assault of this current protest — daily, loud, louder, into the night and using ever-angrier rhetoric — is beyond what any people should be expected to bear up under, regardless of their whiteness, privilege or power.
Social media discussion has been claiming that the protests are peaceful. They are, some of the time.
And besides, calling all this peaceful stretches the use of the word rather implausibly. It’s an odd kind of peace when a local rabbi urges Jewish students to go home as soon as possible, when an Israeli Arab activist is roughed up on Broadway, when the angry chanting becomes so constant that you almost start not to hear it and it starts to feel normal to see posters and clothing portraying members of Hamas as heroes.
What began as intelligent protest has become, in its uncompromising fury and its ceaselessness, a form of abuse.
As McWhorter and Harari point out, it should be possible to oppose the nature of the war in Gaza without descending into antisemitism. Unfortunately, that isn’t happening in too many places.
Posted by Steve Lubet on April 25, 2024 at 03:10 AM | Permalink
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