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| 13-August 2024. |
This summer, one of my lectures was protested by far-right students. Their rhetoric brought to mind some of the darkest moments of 20th-century history – and overlapped with mainstream Israeli views to a shocking degree
On 19 June 2024, I was scheduled to give a lecture at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) in Be’er Sheva, Israel. My lecture was part of an event about the worldwide campus protests against Israel, and I planned to address the war in Gaza and more broadly the question of whether the protests were sincere expressions of outrage or motivated by antisemitism, as some had claimed. But things did not work out as planned.
When I arrived at the entrance to the lecture hall, I saw a group of students congregating. It soon transpired that they were not there to attend the event but to protest against it. The students had been summoned, it appeared, by a WhatsApp message that went out the day before, which flagged the lecture and called for action: “We will not allow it! How long will we commit treason against ourselves?!?!?!??!!”
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Henry Joy, many thanks for sharing this.
ReplyDeleteThis is an extremely well written and informative article. I am sitting a little stunned that I didn't link "the industrial killing of soldiers in the first world war and the extermination of civilian populations by Hitler’s regime." Seems obvious now but it had never occurred to me. The devaluation of vast numbers of human beings.
As a student in 1994 I wrote a dissertation on the Oslo Accords and remember the positivity and hope of that time. I found this profound, "The military theorist Carl von Clausewitz noted that war was the extension of politics by other means, and warned that without a defined political objective it would lead to limitless destruction. The sentiment that now prevails in Israel similarly threatens to make war into its own end." The absence of politics in Israel is striking, the appetite for genocide insatiable maybe because, as the author says, the Israelis are afraid of their own destruction.
With the poems and the description of the outlook of the Israeli people much is explained by the author that I was unaware of.
I don't buy the human shield argument no matter who it comes from. Gaza is an extremely small tract of land, much of the infrastructure and most buildings destroyed. A shield only works if it protects. Israel has bombed suspected Hamas targets, killing any civilians in their way and in fact killing many civilians when there has been no Hamas presence. So I don't buy the claim Hamas are using civilians as shields. It's a nonsense.
"This is the logic of endless violence, a logic that allows one to destroy entire populations and to feel totally justified in doing so. It is a logic of victimhood – we must kill them before they kill us, as they did before – and nothing empowers violence more than a righteous sense of victimhood."
I have read Philip Caputo's explanation of men committing unimaginable horrors during the American War in Vietnam, of seeing their friends die in frightening ways and doing even more horrific things in return. I have read Kill Everything that Moves which teaches us about how the Vietnamese were dehumanised and slaughtered. In the case of the American War in Vietnam 3 million of the population were exterminated but not because the GIs were afraid of the Vietnamese following them home to inflict similar damage in the USA.
It is clear to someone who has never visited the country that the author is correct when he says Israel has changed in many ways. Palestine, unfortunately has changed too. Destroyed beyond recognition. The author is also correct when he suspects genocide. There is no doubt.