By David K. Shipler 

                OnMonday, October 9, two days after the assault by Hamas on innocent civilians inIsrael, Kalpana Shipler was asked by a fellow student at her public high schoolin Washington, D.C., “Whose side are you on?” That was the question beingtossed around by multiple teenagers to one another as Israel began bombing Gazain retaliation. And that seems to be the question dividing college campuses andmobilizing protests, corrupting the capacity to analyze complexity. If you areforced to pick sides, you miss the tangles of guilt that have bound IsraeliJews and Palestinian Arabs for decades.

                Kalpanadidn’t fall into the trap, I am proud to say as her grandfather. She was wiseenough at age 15 to resist an instant answer, to know that she didn’t know, arare skill in today’s America. She deferred to the cause of learning.

                Luckily,young people coming of age are not yet jaded. Shocked by the scenes ofdevastation and starvation in Gaza, students have acted on a purity of outrage,pushing the envelope of accepted rhetoric and calling to account their owncountry, Israel’s major supporter.

Yet the impulse to pick a side, asif war were a football game, has an unhealthy feature. It concentrates theblame, villainizing one adversary and idealizing the other. The dichotomy wasprevalent among some activists who justifiably protested the U.S. war inVietnam and decried our ally’s (South Vietnam’s) assaults on human rights, whileregarding North Vietnam and the Vietcong as the only authentic patriots, skippingover the North’s tighter dictatorship and the VC’s brutality.

                Asimilar intellectual and moral flaw runs through the current protests over theGaza war, in which Israel is supposedly “a monopoly of violence,” in the wordsof a Cornellprofessor. Palestinians through Hamas, which strives to replace the Jewishstate with an Islamic state, are portrayed as exercising their anti-colonialistrights to liberty. Sometimes—only sometimes—vilification of the Jewish statehas crossed into vilification of Jews, raising the stench of antisemitism in the“pro-Palestinian” encampments. They might be called “antiwar” encampments ifthey actually opposed war, if they protested not only against the atrocitiesIsrael has committed in an effort to stamp out Hamas—the vast bombing, the barriersto food and medical care—but also against the intimate atrocities by Hamas—therapes, torture, mutilation, and kidnappings—which unleashed this fighting.

It was astonishing to see 33Harvard student organizations sign onto a statementissued by the Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee immediately afterOctober 7 holding “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfoldingviolence.” Seriously? “Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum,” the statementdeclared. “The apartheid regime is the only one to blame. Israeli violence hasstructured every aspect of Palestinians existence for 75 years. . . Palestinianshave been forced to live in a sate of death, both slow and sudden.”

                 So spoke some of the purportedly smartestpeople of the next generation. One can imagine them delighting in theirincisive brilliance as they looked past the Hamas violence into its roots. Fine.There is never a vacuum. There are causes of every effect. However, to turn backonly one page in a long history of mutual victimization demonstrates a lazinessof mind or, perhaps, a mind indoctrinated.

If you are pro-Israel, do you leaveout the thuggish gangs of Jewish settlers terrorizing and assaulting West BankPalestinians? If you are pro-Palestinian, do you omit Israel’s military withdrawalfrom Gaza in 2005, the Palestinian self-government under Hamas arming itselfand rocketing Israel? If you are pro-Israel, do you leave out the stifling bordercontrols that suffocated Gaza’s development and fostered poverty? If you rootonly for the Palestinians, do you ignore the Hamas suicide bombers sent againstJews two decades ago to torpedo the growing Israeli acceptance of Palestinianstatehood?

In your journey back in time, doyou stop before Arab armies attacked the fledgling Jewish state? Do you stopbefore the Israelis’ expulsion of Arabs from their home villages before andduring Israel’s 1948 war of independence? Do you stop before the earlier Arabassaults on religious Jewish communities in the Holy Land or, on the otherside, the Jewish assaults on Arab civilians there? Do you stop before theHolocaust? Before the pogroms of Europe, which so traumatized the Jewish peoplethat its reverberations still ring today?

If you are looking for the originalsin in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, keep going, and going, and going untilyou come to realize that both sides are victims. This is not moral equivalence.This is suffering that is particular to each people, not to be measured or weighed,but—if you want to campaign against war—to be acknowledged. As an Israeli saidto me long ago, putting two victims together is like mixing fire and kerosene.

Victimhood confers an illusion ofmoral immunity. “The sense of victimhood is functional for a nation that isinvolved in an ongoing bloody conflict,” wrote the Israeli thinkers DanielBar-Tal and Elkiva Eldar in the newspaper Haaretz. “It shapes the perception of the threateningsituation against the cruel enemy and provides moral justification for harmingit unrestrainedly and without mercy. Victimhood distinguishes between us andthe Palestinians and provides a sense of moral superiority and permission todehumanize them. . . . Victimhood severs the society from a sense ofguilt and leaves room only for feelings of anger and revenge.”

The same might be said of thePalestinian side.

So, how does complexity figure intothe student-led protests? It doesn’t. Demonstrations don’t do nuance. They are meantto be categorical and dogmatic. They are not dispassionate classroom exercisesin the ambiguities and contradictions of history, politics, and warfare. Theyare meant to galvanize, excite, force change, and call on the clarity ofconscience. They don’t even have to be practical, as in thinking that universitydivestments from companies doing business in Israel, one of their demands, willtip Israel’s policies. What could tip Israel’s policies, imposing a modicum ofrestraint, are the Biden Administration’s recent delay in certain weaponsshipments, steps that might have been propelled partly by those students on thequads and greens.

The campus protests have amplifiedthe growing American disaffection with Israel’s unvarnished brutality against Palestiniansin Gaza, Israeli excuses and rationalizations notwithstanding. Yes, Hamas usescivilians as shields and shelters fighters in networks of tunnels, some underhospitals. Does that justify attacking the civilian shields and devastatinghospitals? Yes, Hamas smuggles weaponry into Gaza. Does that justify restrictingtrucks of food and medical supplies destined for children, women, the elderly?The “pro-Palestinian” protesters would presumably say no. “Antiwar” protesterswould presumably hold both sides in contempt.

            In true antiwar demonstrations, the symbols, thepieces of colored cloth woven into specific patterns, might be carriedtogether. In true antiwar protests, wartime grief would be common ground. The Palestinianand Israeli flags might be intertwined, perhaps even tangled. Some demonstratorsmight want to burn them, as some Vietnam era antiwar protesters burned theAmerican flag. But then, some leaders of the that antiwar movement thoughtit would be a more poignant symbol to wash the flag. What if both Israeli andPalestinian flags were washed in the middle of a college green?