Does the uproar over the “Joint Statement by Harvard Palestine Solidarity Groups” say more about its substance or its audience?
On Oct. 8, one day after the Hamas attacks that killed 1,400 people in Israel, more than 30 student groups at Harvard signed onto a joint statement holding “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”
On the same day, Haaretz, one of Israel’s leading newspapers, published an editorial taking a similar line: “The disaster that befell Israel on the holiday of Simchat Torah is the clear responsibility of one person: Benjamin Netanyahu.”
The parallels between the Harvard statement and the Haaretz editorial run deep. The former argues the “events did not occur in a vacuum” and “Israeli violence has structured every aspect of Palestinian existence for 75 years.” The latter states that Netanyahu “completely failed to identify the dangers he was consciously leading Israel into when establishing a government of annexation and dispossession … while embracing a foreign policy that openly ignored the existence and rights of Palestinians.” Both point to the failures of Israeli policy. Both point to the plight of the Palestinians.
Major donors are walking away.
What explains this contrast in the reception of two very similar statements? The answer lies in a lack of narrative empathy — “the sharing of feeling and perspective-taking induced by reading, viewing, hearing or imagining narratives of another’s situation and condition” — for Palestine in elite American discourse.
Conflicts have contending narratives. Harvard’s statement and Haaretz’s editorial direct our attention to a narrative that challenges Israel’s status as merely a victim. Haaretz can go there. Its audience is generally looking for a diagnosis. Harvard can’t go there. Most of its audience is looking for solidarity with Israel. In terms of classical rhetoric, the Harvard student groups encountered an ethos problem.
Hamas is a product of what psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton coined as “atrocity-producing situations.” It has been under blockade since 2007. Prior to the current war, more than 60 percent of Gazans were food insecure, almost 50 percent were unemployed and 95 percent were without safe drinking water, with an average of 11 hours per day of electricity. Unsurprisingly, major human rights organizations have called Gaza an open-air prison or an apartheid state.
Marc Galasco, a former United Nations war crimes investigator, observed that Israel dropped almost as many bombs in Gaza in a week as the United States and NATO did in Afghanistan in an entire year during the peak of that war. One of the most densely populated regions of the world, Gaza contains more than 15,000 people per square mile. Over 2,000 children have been killed under Israeli bombing since Oct. 7, more than four times the number of children that died in Ukraine from the start of the war to Aug. 22.
“Each year, approximately 500-700 Palestinian children, some as young as 12 years old, are detained and prosecuted in the Israeli military court system,” notes the Defense of Children International. “The most common charge is stone throwing.”
Meanwhile, settler violence in the West Bank has increased under the cover of the carnage in Gaza. The international community considers Jewish settlements in occupied Palestinian territories illegal. The United States considered them “an impediment to peace” until the Trump administration relabeled them as merely “unhelpful.”
In his weekly show on CNN, Fareed Zakaria asked Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University, why pro-Palestinian organizations have been unable to unequivocally condemn the brutal Hamas attacks. Khalidi’s response, which is worth pondering in its entirety, begins: “I think the utter hypocrisy of the West in ignoring indiscriminate killing of infinitely larger numbers of Palestinians … has desensitized people.”
Even Prince Turki al-Faisal, a senior member of the Saudi royal family characterized by BBC News as a “careful, thoughtful ex-diplomat,” slammed the West for “shedding tears when Israelis are killed by Palestinians,” but refusing to “even express sorrow when Israelis kill Palestinians.” He also condemned both Hamas and Israel, saying that there were no heroes in this conflict, only victims.
An empathy gap for the other side is natural in war but it is widening amidst escalating brutality. We need to start to close the gap. When we dehumanize each other as animals or rats, we close the door to understanding and begin to lay the groundwork for atrocity.
Raz Segal, an associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University, has called what is happening in Gaza “a textbook case of genocide.” Palestinians are resisting a multi-generation occupation in conditions of total despair. That by no means justifies attacks on civilians. I agree with those who say that nothing can. But it helps us understand the struggle of Palestinians as indigenous peoples dispossessed from their native lands.
Both Harvard’s statement and Haaretz’s editorial invite us to urgently consider this broader context of the war.
Mahan Mirza is a teaching professor at the Keough School of Global Affairs at Notre Dame. Follow him on Twitter: @mirzamahan.