In a recent New York Times op-ed (17 October 2023), “The Moral Deficiencies of a Liberal Education,” Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a professor of medical ethics at the University of Pennsylvania among other positions, pronounced the failure of major universities to provide the kind of education which would enable their students to make reasonable moral judgments. He cited recent responses on these campuses, particularly Harvard, to the hostilities which recently erupted in the Middle East.
When a coalition of 34 student organizations at Harvard can say that they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence” and students at other elite universities blame Israel alone for the attack Hamas carried out on Israelis on Oct. 7 or even praise the massacre, something is deeply wrong at America’s colleges and universities.
Dr. Emanuel’s indictment is too narrow; “something is deeply wrong” outside its elite institutions of higher learning as well, pervasively inside America’s moral culture.
One such something in these students’ proclamations is the all-or-nothing assignment of blame: Israel is “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence,” not responsible for some or even none of the current violence. This deficiency leads to demonization of one side of a conflict, canonization of the other, with the complexities of five millennia or of the last century of conflict in the area not taken into account.
Another such something is a twisted sense of moral accountability for conduct; Israel is responsible for Hamas’s attack. This position makes a mockery of moral analysis; the victim causes the abuser or attacker to abuse or attack. This position parallels the common expression that the victims “got what they deserved” or “they were asking for it.” Of course, the abuser or attacker decides what is deserved or requested. This deficiency presumes to justify any violence against anyone for whatever reason the abuser or attacker offers, in this case, the victims’ existence as Jewish citizens of Israel.
The aim of these deficiencies, both of which pervade American politics in the Age of Trump, is to exonerate or justify the abuser or attacker. It is not surprising that they dominate the thinking of some of the best and brightest of students at institutions of higher education. For they, like the primary and secondary schools which send them their graduates, have taught a catechism of the vices of racism, sexism, and classism; of colonialization, displacement, and dispossession; and of the pure and undisputed virtues of those adversely affected. Yet their students’ antipathies and sympathies are highly selective, for the conflicts exist worldwide. Few care about abuses of one people by other people in African and Asian countries; many care about abuses only in Greater Palestine. For two reasons: the proximity and predominance of white, male decision-makers, and the involvement of Jews, the worldwide scapegoat of last—or is it first?—resort.
These elite students ignore or dismiss the recent history of Israel. After Russian pogroms, Jews lobbied to secure a British commitment, the Balfour Declaration, promising a Jewish state in Palestine, then occupied by British troops. After the Holocaust, the United Nations, dominated by America and European countries, relieved the British of their League of Nations Mandate and established Israel as a sanctuary for Jews, both the earlier arriving Zionists and the later arriving refugees. In short, America and European countries appropriated land conjointly occupied by Jewish Europeans and Muslim Palestinians, without much regard for the latter. Jews accepted this gift of the international community.
Sadly, nothing fails like success. Israel would presumably have been happy to live within its assigned borders. But, threatened by armies from surrounding Arab states, Israel pre-emptively protected itself in the Six-Day War, which left them occupying the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights. For many years, Israel was willing to return occupied land in return for peace by treaties with Arab states. But, when no such treaties were made, Israel slowly succumbed to the idea of a Greater Israel incorporating the West Bank, thus the incremental encroachments of its expanding settlements.
Palestinians have a justified quarrel with just about everyone. But America is across the ocean, Europe is across the sea, but Israel, populated by the hated Jews who occupy not only the land granted by the United Nations, but also much of the West Bank, is close by. So Palestinians quarrel with Israel and Jews, and Hamas is first and foremost among Palestinians in its purposes of destroying Israel and exterminating its Jewish inhabitants.
Speaking for myself as a Jewish American, I approve of what the United Nations did in 1947 but disapprove of what Israel has done since 1967. Indeed, I am appalled at a state which purports to be both democratic and Jewish, but treats resident Arabs as second-class citizens and conducts itself contrary to Jewish principles and values. Despite its love for Israel, the United States should adopt a policy which it used in dealing with South Africa when it was an apartheid state—boycott, divest, and sanction—but only until Israel abandons its settlements and returns to its original borders.
Speaking for myself as a citizen with an eight-word code of conduct—seek truth, do right, demand justice, pursue peace—, I deplore the barbaric Hamas attack, not on military targets, but on Jews (“innocent civilians” is the term everyone now uses for Gazans). The number of killed, 1400, may seem small, not quite half the number of those killed on 9/11. But proportionality makes it enormous. The populations of Israel and the United States are, respectively, about 9,400,000 and 331,900,000. The number of deaths proportionate to 1400 would be 50,000, a mid-size-city worth of citizens and more than nine times the combined number of people who died on 9/11 and 12/7.
Some students at America’s elite institutions of higher education may believe that “‘the Israeli regime [is] entirely responsible for all unfolding violence’” or that “Israel alone [should be blamed] for the attack Hamas carried out on Israelis.” If so, their justification of Hamas’s massacre denies Hamas moral agency in initiating yet not being responsible for its attack. They thus infantilize Hamas leaders and fighters as somehow too something-or-other to be held accountable for their conduct. Much worse, some of America’s best and brightest students are comfortable with others killing Jews simply because they are Jews. In them and many other students, genocidal antisemitism is alive and well. As future leaders in their fields and communities, they make the prospects of a truly pluralistic which they claim to want less bright. For now, forgive them; they know not what they do (not know). Going forward, teach them what they need to know.
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