Students and others at Middlebury College are among those around the state issuing heartfelt calls for understanding about the awful carnage during the past month in Israel and Gaza.
They’re far from alone. Public demonstrations around the world have brought out hundreds of thousands to plead for a halt to the war.
Soon after Hamas’s attack on Israel, an Addison County Jewish organization conducted a vigil on campus to mourn the loss of Jewish lives at the hands of Hamas terrorists. College President Laurie Patten issued a statement, saying in part: “As people of the world we long for justice, in and for Israel, in and for Palestine.”
As the war has continued, the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza has been visible in horrific daily video footage. The loss of thousands of lives, including thousands of children, has shaken the consciences of people around the world.
In response, an organization called Middlebury Students for Justice in Palestine held a teach-in on Nov. 1 and circulated a letter signed by more than 500 people calling on the college administration to be more assertive in condemning the violence against Palestinians.
The college’s student newspaper, The Middlebury Campus, has provided thorough coverage of these events, reporting on the teach-in, including a talk by a history professor, Febe Armanios, who sought to provide context for the conflict in Palestine, including the colonial history of the region.
Context is the key word. Context can open the door to an understanding that is broad and deep. And with understanding comes a path away from the cycles of violence and revenge that lead only to despair and more violence.
The context includes the oppression of Palestinians and other groups by the rulers of the Ottoman Empire and later by the British. Outrage among Palestinians is often expressed as outrage at colonialism and its legacy. Israelis, they say, are the latest group to impose colonial control through their occupation of the West Bank and blockade of Gaza. It is from within this context that terror groups such as Hamas impose their terror.
But there is additional context, including centuries of oppression imposed on stateless Jews, culminating in one of the gravest crimes in human history, the Holocaust. Jews who were determined to make a home for themselves in Israel had a connection to the place dating back millennia. They established a democratic Jewish state, but they also confronted the opposition of the resident Arabs, creating additional context: millions of Arab refugees.
There is additional context: campaigns of terrorism launched by Palestinians, using suicide bombings and other methods to oppose a peace settlement that would lead to an independent Palestinian state existing next to Israel.
And more context: Jewish extremists, among their number the man who assassinated the peace-making prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, as well as settlers determined to live in Palestinian territories that they hope eventually to annex.
The Irish author Fintan O’Toole has written recently about the dynamics of tribalism, using as an example the tribal conflict that for decades pitted Protestants and Catholics against one another in Northern Ireland. In a tribal conflict, one identifies less with one’s nation than with one’s ethnic or religious group. Each group in a tribal conflict is fortified by its history of grievance and victimhood.
The crimes endured on both sides are real, and unless one finds a way out, crime feeds upon crime, only enhancing the sense of victimhood. O’Toole wrote, “As we saw in Northern Ireland, awful consequences — up to and including killing, maiming, and economic collapse — don’t diminish the power of tribalism. They enhance it, because suffering deepens the sense of victimhood that fuels this kind of politics.”
That kind of politics is all about power because only power can protect one’s tribe from the other. There is no escape.
Except there is. O’Toole quoted Martin Luther King Jr. at the March on Washington, who acknowledged the oppression experienced by African Americans “fresh from narrow jail cells.” But he rejected the impulse to define oneself by one’s suffering: “Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness.”
O’Toole underscored a particular phrase of King’s, who called African Americans “the veterans of creative suffering.” He sought to lift his people out of the role of victim toward the role of courageous human being, enmeshed in the tragedy of human suffering but capable of responding creatively through nonviolence.
Nonviolence may seem an ineffectual strategy when one’s people are being gunned down or bombed. But when the bombing (or enslavement) stops, the choice is there: the thirst for vengeance and the desire for power sufficient to punish one’s enemies — or the recognition that the values of democracy and human dignity can never be realized until one accepts the humanity of the other.
For Vermonters and others who remain distant from the conflict in Gaza, the tendency is natural to believe that the pain of the side one identifies with most strongly has not been sufficiently acknowledged: the pain of oppressed Palestinians or the pain of murdered Israelis. But seeing the suffering on the other side is the crucial ingredient in escaping the cycle of violence.
On the left, there is a long history of support for anti-colonial revolutionary movements because, after all, the United States was formed in anti-colonial revolution. And there is a certain romance in standing up for the oppressed.
But time and again, the glory of revolutionary struggle is revealed as a tragic delusion. Some leftists of my generation venerated Mao, the Chinese revolutionary leader who was author of policies that cost the lives of tens of millions of Chinese. An earlier generation was duped by Stalin, another mass murderer.
Venerating Hamas is the same sort of mistake. It’s possible to hold two thoughts in mind at the same time: Israelis have suffered, and Palestinians have suffered. The answer is not extremist violence on the part of anyone. Movement toward democratic politics where all groups play a part and the dignity of the individual is the cornerstone must be the goal.
The Troubles in Northern Ireland ended when each side accepted that they had to live with the other and that the humane values embedded in democratic processes was the way to peace. Hate did not disappear, but when both sides laid down their arms, it lost its legitimacy.
The mathematical calculation of the human cost in Gaza is already under way. How does the loss of 1,200 Jewish lives at the hands of Hamas tally against the loss of 11,000 or more Palestinians?
Into the calculation we must figure the decision by Hamas fighters to hide themselves among the civilian population and Israel’s right to self-defense — along with the cruelty of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory. But that sort of tit for tat could go on forever — unless the suffering of each side finally gains recognition.
The extremes of antisemitism and anti-Muslim bias have been less evident in Vermont during the past month than they have been elsewhere. But the danger of tribal extremism will always lurk in the shadows as long as one takes one’s identity primarily from one’s victimized group instead of from the values of democracy and our common humanity.
The tide of authoritarianism will continue to rise, in the United States and elsewhere, unless those defending humane values — in Ukraine, Israel and Palestine, as well as in Ohio, Wisconsin and Mississippi — hold strong to an understanding that beneath it all must be the dignity of all.
