Point of protests is Gaza killings by Israel
Like all forms of prejudice and ethnocentrism, antisemitism has no place in an enlightened society. But what about genocide? Is that an acceptable manifestation of a modern society?
Phil Boas argued in a recent blog (“Why antisemitic college protests are far more vile than those in Charlottesville,” April 26) that the widespread campus demonstrations in support of the Palestinians are vile displays of antisemitism. He laments protesters’ “antisemitic“slogans and the failure of the powers that be to put a stop to them.
Those arguments, however, are weak and historically uninformed.
Many people have decried the “antisemitism” inherent in these demonstrations. None have yet reconciled these claims with the fact that Jewish students nationwide are participating in these and other demonstrations, however.
Jewish student activists who have been interviewed said that these protests are neither antisemitic nor hatefilled. They are peaceful, mass gatherings of citizens outraged at the unconditional support the Biden administration has shown Israel as it moves ahead with its annihilation of the Gaza Strip. Is “Jew hatred” really the “most certain historical marker of social decline,” as Boas contends?
Like all forms of prejudice and ethnocentrism, antisemitism has no place in an enlightened society. But what about genocide? Is that an acceptable manifestation of a modern society?
Are Boas and those like him OK knowing that more than 34,000 people, the vast majority of them women and children, have been killed, along with tens of thousands more wounded and maimed in indiscriminate bombing raids across the Strip since Oct. 7? That more than 1.5 million people have been displaced?
After two years of bloody warfare in Ukraine, the Russian army has killed approximately 600 children. After six months of an unprecedented military assault, the Israeli Defense Forces has killed over 13,000 children. Two years into the war in Ukraine, the Russian military has murdered approximately 10,500 civilians.
After 61⁄2 months of land, aerial and sea bombardments in Gaza, the official number of dead is close to 35,000 with another 8,000 to 10,000 people unaccounted for under the rubble. If 8,000 of these people were Hamas fighters, that still leaves a total of nearly 40,000 civilians dead.
Are Boas and others OK with this? I have yet to hear a peep of outrage against these casualty figures by those who oppose a permanent ceasefire.
What does this tell us about the state of “social decline?” Thank goodness young people and their allies are standing up and saying this must stop.
These figures are indeed those given by the Ministry of Health in Gaza which, many of our prime-time news stations are quick to tell us, is “Hamascontrolled” (a statement that is not entirely accurate). It is worth noting that the United Nations accepts and uses these figures as do the governments of the United States and Israel.
So do most of the major media outlets, including newspapers such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Guardian, Reuters, PBS, CBS, NPR, Vice, as well as the World Health Organization and other major aid organizations attempting to operate in Gaza.
OK, opponents of these demonstrations say. Well, “Hamas started it! It was their atrocity that caused this war.”
What this comment demonstrates more than anything else is the appalling lack of historical knowledge about Palestinian history and about Hamas.
Middle East experts and journalists — from Avi Shlaim, Baruch Kimmerling, Eugene Rogan, Rashid Khalidi, Trita Parsi, and Mouin Rabbani to Andrew Bacevich, Nicholas Blanford, Richard Falk, Gideon Levy, Amira Hass and Rami Khoury — understood. Many of them expressed their surprise that this operation, which some have equated with a prison break, did not happen sooner.
When you lock 2.4 million people into a sweltering strip of land smaller than metropolitan Detroit, impose a
suffocating siege upon it, deprive it of the means to develop an economy, control what and how much its people eat and drink, deprive its inhabitants of adequate health care, education and job opportunities, it is unsurprising that eventually, after 57 years of this illegal occupation there would be a paroxysm of violence.
That outburst by Hamas is the result of these conditions, not the cause. I lived there and witnessed these conditions.
Still, nothing justifies the massacre of innocent Israeli civilians and, to my knowledge, not a single reputable person or institution has claimed otherwise — despite the whining of anticeasefire individuals, desperate to find genuine examples of “antisemitism” in order to block any meaningful resolution or call to end what the International Court of Justice in the Hague has deemed is “plausible genocide.”
Israel is neither a democratic nor a peace-loving society. It is an arm of U.S. regional hegemony and client of the United States that receives $3.8 billion annually in military aid and that has received over $30 billion additional military aid since October 7.
Since its founding in 1948, Israel has received more than $200 billion in military support from the United States, making it the greatest recipient in history of such U.S. aid. Israel has nuclear, biological and chemical weapons — the only such power in the Middle East to have this kind of arsenal.
I suggest the next time someone complains that little Israel is “surrounded by enemies,” people consider these facts. We need look no further than Tel Aviv to determine which nation is the real destabilizing force in the region.
Jennifer Loewenstein is a humanrights activist who has lived in Israel, the Gaza Strip, and Beirut, Lebanon. She was associate director of Middle Eastern Studies and senior lecturer in Middle Eastern History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and is now retired and living in Tucson. Reach her at sarinj111@gmail.com.