“My mind is closed,” said a protestor at one of last week’s anti-Israel rallies outside Columbia’s gates. Yet she flinched at her own words once they came out of her lips. (No doubt she’d meant to say, “My mind is made up.”) I repeated what she’d said back to her. While I wished she wouldn’t shake it off too fast, there was no gloat in my game. Maybe I had a clue I’d be playing gotcha with myself soon enough.
The Columbia building occupation on Monday night had me living in contradiction, twisted and turning. I started with a hard bias against the spectacle of Ivy guys with keffiyehs and hammers.[1] But I was slain by the occupiers’ choice to rename Hamilton Hall “Hind’s Hall” in tribute to Hind Rajab, a 6-year-old Palestinian girl killed by Israeli tanks in the war against Hamas. Blunt force against property (not people) may be justified if the aim is to fix attention on the pain of others.
I wasn’t much more subtle than the window-breakers on the evening of the day last week when Iran’s regime sentenced rapper Toomaj Salehi to death for exposing the “filth beyond the clouds” of Islamism. It was my invocation of Toomaj’s case that provoked the respondent at the rally who copped to her closed mind. I’d proposed protestors pair their “Hey Hey, Ho Ho, Netanyahu’s Got to Go” with a Hey-Ho chant avowing: “Ayatollah(s) Got to Go.”
Certain party lines at the demonstration – “No more money for Israel’s crimes / Not one nickel, Not one dime” – spoke to me though I wasn’t down with young Americans yelling “We will free Palestine/ in our lifetime.” Given that “we” – or those few thousand fighters Hamas once could muster – won’t ever take down the IDF, why were these replacement theorists all good with consigning generations of Palestinians to no-future hopelessness? It’s profoundly creepy to amp up river-to-the-sea fantasies that ensure kids you say you care about will come of age and grow old in perdition, even as you rant on a half-a-world away from their hells. Not to mention that Hamas’ heaven looks like Iran now.
I wasn’t beamish when I engaged strangers at the gates, asking them to roll with another stranger-rapper or call out Bibi and Khamenei. But I told myself (and some of it was true) I wasn’t some rando but a local nosing around my own neighborhood, looking past drive-by argufiers. Surely there’d be protestors acting in solidarity with Palestine who’d be ready to take in Toomaj’s plight.[2]
I’ve always liked to think demos could create demos. When I could no longer get on the Columbia campus last week, I didn’t expect to find a citizens’ university outside the gates. Yet I hoped for space to air what Max Weber termed “inconvenient facts” per his musings on the “primary task of a useful teacher”:
…to teach his students to recognize…facts that are inconvenient for their party opinions. And for every party opinion there are facts that are extremely inconvenient, for my own opinion no less than for others. I believe the teacher accomplishes more than a mere intellectual task if he compels his audience to accustom itself to the existence of such facts. I would be so immodest as even to apply the expression ‘moral achievement,’ though perhaps this may sound too grandiose for something that should go without saying.[3]
Not to worry, I’m not about to get grand on you. A master-teacher I’m not. The best I can be is a life-long learner. On that score, a day or two after I mulled around at the Columbia gate, I came across a dialogue in Haaretz that made my attempts to act like a would-be Weberian seem pretty paltry. I bumped into this set of exchanges in a report by Shlomi Eldar on his encounters in Egypt with Palestinians who’d managed to flee Gaza after October 7th.[4] One of those refugees in Cairo, Abu Zaydeh, is a former official in the Palestinian Authority who had been bounced out of the West Bank since he identified with a rival of the P.A.’s President Abbas. Abu Zaydeh had lived in Gaza since 2019, serving as a conduit for funds from the United Arab Emirates that went to various social welfare programs for Gazans. In that capacity, he’d dealt with Hamas, including the murder-minded Yahyah Sinwar. Abu Zaydeh was in Gaza on October 7th and heard “jubilant shouts” as Palestinians reveled in the spectacle of Hamas’ Israeli captives.
Not for a moment did he try to defend their reaction. “You can write it in capital letters,” he said. “From my point of view, it’s a disgrace.” He raised his voice so I would not miss his determination. “I, as a Palestinian, say to you in a loud voice: It is a disgrace. I am ashamed that they murdered and abducted people – children, women, old people. I am ashamed. That is not heroism. Absolutely not heroism.”
Reporter Eldar has known Abu Zaydeh since the 90s and recalls he has often been a voice of candor who “could be unsparingly critical of both the Israelis and the Palestinians.”
“I understand the Israeli response,” he says about the current, unprecedented round of violence… “I didn’t believe there would be a response of this cruelty. To kill Ahmed Andor you destroy a whole neighborhood? Have you gone mad?”
Who was Ahmed Andor?
Hamas’ northern Gaza brigade commander, and the man in charge of developing the military wing’s rocket arsenal. On November 16, the IDF bombed the site where he was hiding along with other ranking personnel…
According to Abu Zaydeh, the IDF used tons of explosives in the attack, wiping out an entire neighborhood and killing about 250 Palestinians. It was later reported in Israel that three captives – Sgt. Ron Sherman, Cpl. Nick Beizer and civilian Elia Toledano – were killed in a nearby tunnel, apparently as a result of the attack.
“For one person whom you wanted to assassinate, you killed hundreds of people. Does that make sense to you?” Abu Zaydeh says accusingly. “Even if the goal was justified from your viewpoint, and you are fighting against Hamas, do you not have any limits? No red lines? Afterward you are amazed that the whole world comes out against you. Because from your perspective, there are no innocent people in Gaza. As you see it, compassion died and therefore you are shutting your eyes to what is happening in Gaza.”
Reporter Eldar conceded Israelis can’t unsee Hamas’ atrocities or forget jubilation in the Gaza Strip on October 7th. But, aware those “who exulted are now crying,” Abu Zaydeh replied. “You can’t undertake…revenge…for six months. Shlomi, for us every day has been an October 7 – every day, for half a year already.”
What riles him no less is the attitude of the Israeli media toward the events in Gaza. As an example, he cites the rescue of two Israeli captives, Fernando Merman and Luis Har, from a refugee camp in Rafah on February 11, in the course of which more than 100 people were killed, according to Palestinian reports.
“You undertook a heroic action to liberate captives who never should have been abducted,” Abu Zaydeh says. “But you also killed 100 civilians, [including] women and children, in order to provide cover for the Israeli force. Is that an act of heroism by the Israelis? To liberate two captives and to kill 100 innocent people?” Abu Zaydeh pounds the table with his fist. “And that doesn’t even merit a mention of one second in the Israeli media?”
I checked his allegation. With the notable exception of Jack Khoury in Haaretz, there was hardly any mention of the circumstances surrounding that rescue in the Israeli media. “So then you say that these are Hamas numbers, and they’re lying,” Abu Zaydeh continues. “Well, no. They are not Hamas numbers. We see it with our eyes…
Zaydeh has lost ten family members: “Nine had nothing to do with Hamas, including a cousin and a nephew. They went to look for food and a missile was fired at them.” Eldor picked up where Zaydeh left off in Rafah…
In fact, contrary to what is going on today in Gaza, Israel was careful for many years to avoid mass attacks on civilians. If civilians were hurt, Israel was quick to explain, express remorse and learn from the event. The Israeli media took a critical stance and asked questions. The best example is the response to the decision to assassinate Salah Shehadeh, the head of Hamas’ military wing, at the height of the second intifada, in July 2002. The missile that struck his home also killed another 14 civilians. The event caused a public furor in Israel, and 27 Israel Air Force pilots famously sent a letter to protest the action. The then-commander of the IAF, Maj. Gen. Dan Halutz, who defended the assassination, was asked about the event in an interview in Haaretz, and replied that in a situation of that kind, a pilot feels “a light tremor in the wing.” The phrase entered the language as a synonym for a loss of compassion and morality.
Haaretz’s Eldar seems to want to see the war in Gaza feelingly. But in the wake of October 7, plenty of Israelis – along with this old goy? – have flown too high above the carnage there. That’s one reason why the on-campus encampment at Columbia, which shouldn’t be mixed up with the demonstrations I hovered around outside the U., seemed grounded in a better way. While the choice on Tuesday to occupy Hamilton Hall may be a sign students gave into extremism, before then the set of tents hadn’t been too far gone from a Big Tent.
According to one campus witness reporting in New York Review of Books, the whole thing had been “unbelievably well organized”:
There’s a food area; people are going around picking up trash; they have a code of conduct that you have to consent to before you come in, including prohibitions on harassment, littering, drugs, and alcohol. It’s extremely calm and somewhat festive.
The encampment bred exemplary spokespeople. See the video with Jon Ben-Menachem below.[5] He sounded fluent, morally serious, but not too pious. I doubt I’d share his sense of Israel’s past or his projections about Palestine’s future, yet I admire his and his comrades’ determination to keep the focus on suffering Gazans: “Look we’re seeing pictures of Palestinian children with their arms blown off and I’m being asked about [Jewish[ American students who feel uncomfortable with their peers protesting Israel’s genocide of Palestinians.”
Ben-Menachem’s use of the g-word made me…uncomfortable, but I didn’t hear anti-Semitism in his rhetoric. He and his comrades called for a ceasefire not vengeance against Israelis. (Though I wish they’d co-named Hind’s Hall after an Israeli infant slaughtered on October 7th.) I’m flashing on the “lovely” Passover Seder at the encampment last week, which should’ve quashed propaganda that Columbia students had erected a ladder-day camp of Jew-baiters. I’m not sure those students’ imperatives were undeniable as long as Hamas has Israeli hostages, but I’m glad they got right back on the lawn after their college president had cops arrest the first cohort of campers two weeks ago. Students’ calm resistance to Power in that moment isn’t the only growing point in our time. (And if I got a chance, I’d probably aim to Max out on Jon Ben-Menachem, pressing him to cope with inconvenient facts.[6]) But I wouldn’t pass over what students like him got done – or what went down on Columbia’s lawn during Passover. I can attest students have prompted surprising quivers of faith and guilt – sensations more humane than a light tremor in the wing.
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Postscript: Hard rain? I wondered when droplets fell after cops busted Columbia’s protesters last night. There wasn’t a lot of good talk-back in the streets. One awfully pure dude hectored cops behind the barricades on 114th St. Pro-Palestinians and pro-Israelis shouted “Shame” at each other. But I overheard at least one conversation between a fervent Jewish anti-Zionist and a trio of Israeli tourists that might have unfrozen all parties, though they got back to solid ice at the end. The true believer in the tragedy of Zionism proudly and, in a perfect world, properly dissed the idea of a state founded on a religious test. But she hadn’t thought through the reality that Israel exists in a region where Islam (Shia or Sunni) is the state religion in most countries. (Nor had she realized that half the Jewish population of Israel, the Mizrahim, trace their origins to families who’d been thrown out of Arab-First countries after 1948.) As I listened in on the back-and-forths, I said amen (to myself) when one of the Israelis brought that all home to the American, but I was promptly put off by his offhand assertion my country is a Christian state. I’ve grown used to hearing such tripe from anti-American leftists prone to hyping the dangers of Islamophobia in the U.S.A. So, it was a trip to hear it from the mouth of an Israeli on the right. Still, it was good to witness his discourse with the woman from the diaspora who grasped that engaging Israelis beat bellowing at American cops. Mulling over their dialogue after it faded out, she allowed she needed to figure out how to get through to Jews in Israel since they were the one constituency with the juice to free Palestinians. I wish it had occurred to me to suggest she might be able to learn a lot on this front from Joe Biden.
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Notes
1 Jelani Cobb, Dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, wasn’t helping when he intimated to Chris Hayes before the busts last night there was “a great deal of concern about outside elements, threats, possibly someone with a weapon.”
2 I ended up having at least one constructive convo with an Arab guy who seemed to be reporting on the protest for a web outlet. Maybe he was humoring me — he’d been flummoxed at first when I suggested protestors link Toomaj’s fate with the question of Palestine — but his face lit up at the idea of saying No! to Israel and Iran.
3 Pace Fredric Smoler who has cited Weber’s lesson in the past.
4 The meat in the article came in the middle. Yet its title, “Hamas Actually Believed It Would Conquer Israel. In Preparation, It Divided the Country Into Cantons,” and Eldar’s opening, which implied his subject would be Hamas’ mad fantasies, didn’t hint at where the piece was headed. I’m wondering if Eldar meant to surprise his readers — sneaking in his message from Abu Zaydeh to ensure it got through to Israelis who’d prefer to avoid facing up to what the IDF has done to Gazans since October 7th.
5
Thankfully, I missed one foolish student protester who held forth outside Hamilton Hall: (20) The Post Millennial on X: “Reporter grills Columbia student after she demands the university help feed protestors occupying Hamilton Hall: “It seems like you’re saying, ‘we want to be revolutionaries, we want to take over this building, now would you please bring us some food’.” https://t.co/vNczSAM4T1″ / X (twitter.com)
6 I’m guessing Ben-Menachem could cope with another opposing self:
A few days ago, five students came into the encampment with a huge Israeli flag and posters with pictures of the hostages. They were asked to agree to the code of conduct, they agreed, and they came in. They stayed for two hours. Nobody bothered them, and they didn’t bother anybody. It’s really not unsafe. NYRB