A new set of ‘Four Questions’ for anti-Israel protesters

This week, Jews around the world have retold the Passover story in traditional seders. A painful history — the bondage, oppression and eventual liberation of Jews in Egypt — collides with the painful present: missiles fired from Iran, retaliation by Israel, war in Gaza, the surge of antisemitism around the world. Our history has taken us from building pyramids somewhere near Giza to dismantling terrorists in Gaza.

Traditionally, the Passover seder begins with the youngest person present asking the Four Questions (Ma Nishtana in Hebrew). These questions set the context for why the Passover night is different from all other nights.

This week, I have my own set of Four Questions, posed to the young people occupying and disrupting college campuses and businesses to protest Israel.

Question 1: On Oct. 7, the terrorist group Hamas slaughtered young Israelis at a music festival as well as other civilians in surrounding communities. They murdered, stabbed, shot, raped, beheaded, burned. They forced children to watch the butchering of parents. They cut off the breasts of women. They killed the defenseless elderly. They abducted and continue to hold innocent civilians hostage. 

Did you protest that massacre in the days, weeks, months after Oct. 7. At least once? Did you fly flags, wave banners, demand justice? If not, why not? Why do you protest only Israel? 

Question 2: In the ongoing civil war in Sudan, at least 13,000 to 15,000 people have been killed and 33,000 others injured. Over 6.5 million are internally displaced and more than 2 million others have fled the country as refugees. Here too, innocents have been beaten, burned, raped, tortured, murdered. Meanwhile, according to the human rights group Oxfam, Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine has killed more than 10,500 civilians, including 587 children, “as constant bombardments, mines, and drone attacks have left a generation traumatized, displaced, and fearful for their lives.”

Have you protested the grotesque and persistent war crimes in Sudan or Ukraine? If not, why not? Why do civilians in Sudan or Sevastopol seem less important to you than in Gaza? Why do you protest only Israel?

Question 3: In Gaza, Hamas violated international law with a heinous military doctrine that forced its own innocent civilians to become Israeli military targets. It embedded weapons systems in hospitals, schools and residential apartments. (Many foretold the strategy on day one: Hamas massacres Israelis, Israel responds by targeting Hamas weapons in civilian infrastructure, casualties skyrocket, the world turns on Israel, the university protests ignite).

Have you protested Hamas’s illegal tactics of deliberately putting innocents in harm’s way? Have you demanded boycotts, divestment, sanctions for nations that fund, enable and empower Hamas’s crimes against humanity? If not, why not? Why do you protest only Israel?

Question 4: You chant: “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free.” Recent history offers factual perspective on this possibility. In 2005, Israel withdrew from Gaza. How did this small slice of land on the Mediterranean use its freedom? Within days, it became a launchpad of unprovoked rocket attacks on Israel.

And while Israel has managed to make peace with Muslim neighbors in Northern Africa, Jordan, the Gulf and elsewhere, Hamas has never relented from waging war, digging tunnels, firing rockets, kidnapping Israelis. In fact, the Hamas charter continues to insist that the geographic borders of Palestine extend “from the River Jordan in the east to the Mediterranean in the west and from Ras Al-Naqurah in the north to Umm Al-Rashrash in the south,” i.e. the entirety of Israel, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank.

When you chant from the Hamas charter for the national liberation of Palestinians, do you not understand how Jews arrived in what is now Israel millennia ago? It was a national liberation movement, the freeing of slaves and their search for a land where they could express their identity safely. And while I’m asking — why is it that while I support a two-state solution in which Jews and Palestinians live with full rights, your chant seems to support the purging of one? Why do you protest only the presence of Israel? 

Free expression is easy when it’s just the hurling of slogans and flying of banners. Free thinking is much harder. It obligates us to question our own hypocrisies, shallow assumptions and, yes, implicit biases. It forces us beyond our tribal truths, broadens our apertures, breaks down the echo chambers. It’s often solitary — based on uncomfortable whispers versus the monopoly of a megaphone.

I happen to teach at a prominent university. I’ve had the privilege of speaking quietly with students with opinions on all sides of the conflict. They represent a wide range of faiths, races and backgrounds. They reflect strong opinions from far right to far left. These conversations don’t capture headlines and news cameras. They’re not disruptions but dialogues. Not sloganeering but soul-searching. They seek the possibility of answers by leaving room for challenging questions.

This Passover, to the campus occupiers who chant in a (perhaps) well-intentioned demand for justice, I repeat not the Four Questions, but the one that matters most:

Why do you protest only Israel?

Steve Israel represented New York in the U.S. House of Representatives over eight terms and was chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee from 2011 to 2015. Follow him @RepSteveIsrael.