HEARING OTHERS: Does pro-Palestinian mean antisemitic?

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 2023

When do we start calling names? Our own blue tribe has faced an obvious analytical challenge in these modern and perhaps final days.

That challenge centers on a key question: When do we start calling names?

The problem breaks down like this:

Rather plainly, no one else is ever as intellectually brilliant, or as morally pure, as we blue tribe members are. 

Basically, there's no chance that those who disagree with our instincts or our views could ever turn out to be right. This forces us to assess the motives of such people, or their inner moral states. The question we're stuck with turns into this:

Why do the others insist on adopting views which are so plainly wrong?

Understandably, we often adopt the simplest answer to that age-old question. The others, who have now become Others, are racist / sexist / homophobic / transphobic / just deeply morally wrong.

The others fall into a certain basket. They're deplorable, even irredeemable. 

So it often has gone. And as our perfect insight continues to function in the case of the Israel-Hamas war, some of us have reached similar conclusions concerning those who refuse to share our own unassailable assessments.

We can't imagine what they're thinking! A certain assumption about such people may rapidly follow from there.

No one could blame our blue tribe stars for reaching such obvious judgments. And sure enough:

Especially on some major "cable news" programs, some of our stars have been especially bewildered by the unsupportable, inexplicable views of These College Students Today.

Some of these students—way too many of these students!—have been adopting a "pro-Palestinian" view! Most cable news stars don't share those views. Indeed, they seem to be completely bewildered by the very existence of these countervailing views.

How in the world could a college student hold a different view from our own? This seems to be the question driving some of the blue cable stars.

Some major news orgs have offered reports which attempt to unpack this conundrum. To their credit, Hartocollis and Saul authored one such effort in the November 11 New York Times.

For the record, we don't think their effort was perfect. For now, their article started like this, principal headlines included:

After Antisemitic Attacks, Colleges Debate What Kind of Speech Is Out of Bounds

In the days after the Hamas attack on Israel, Max Strozenberg, a first-year student at Northwestern University, experienced a couple of jarring incidents.

Walking into his dorm, he was startled to see a poster calling Gaza a “modern-day concentration camp” pinned to a bulletin board next to Halloween ghosts and pumpkins.

At a pro-Palestinian rally, he heard students shouting, “Hey, Schill, what do you say, how many kids did you kill today,” an echo of a chant from the anti-Vietnam War movement, now directed at Northwestern’s president, Michael H. Schill, who is Jewish.

Mr. Strozenberg’s paternal grandparents escaped the Nazis just before other family members were taken to the concentration camps. Now, he finds himself in an eerie time warp, resisting his grandmother’s pleas to take off the small star of David that he wears around his neck.

It’s not that he is feeling safe—just defiant. The mood on campus these days, he said, “is not pro-Palestinian, it’s antisemitic.”

Max Strozenberg is a good, decent person. He's also a college freshman.

He heard a certain number of students engaged in a certain chant and he seems to have interpreted it in a certain way. 

He thought the incident was "jarring." In our view, there's no obvious reason why he shouldn't have reacted that way.

As a point of personal privilege, do you mind if we let our thoughts drift back to the days of the Vietnam War? We ourselves were college students then, and other students around the nation frequently offered this chant:

Hey, hey, LBJ,
How many kids did you kill today?

Presumably, that's the "chant from the anti-Vietnam War movement" to which the reporters refer. It was a tough and politically divisive chant then, but it made a lot more sense than the updated chant Strozenberg heard at Northwestern.

Michael H. Schill is Northwestern’s president. We'll assume he's a good, decent person.

Back in the day, "LBJ" was, in fact, the commander in chief of the American military. He was directly responsible for the military actions which led to a gigantic number of civilian deaths during the long-running Vietnam War.

In their report, Hartocollis and Saul don't attempt to explain the theory according to which Michael Schill stands accused of killing babies today, presumably in Gaza. Their updated chant strikes us as possibly being a tiny bit dumb—but then, did we mention the fact that it was a bunch of college students who were involved in the chant?

Max Strozenberg is a good, decent person? So, we'll hasten to assume, is Anna Babboni, a senior at Scripps College in Claremont, Calif.

Like Nestor addressing Diomedes not far from the towering walls of Troy, Babboni has several years on her freshman contemporary at Northwestern half a world away. That said, she too is cited in this Times report, and this is what she said:

Pro-Palestinian supporters are quick to push back, asking whether any criticism of Israel and Zionism is acceptable.

They say that the cries of antisemitism are an attempt to stifle speech and divert attention from a 16-year blockade of Gaza by Israel, backed by Egypt, that has devastated the lives of Palestinians. They point to the uprooting of 700,000 people during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. And they rail against Israel’s current invasion of Gaza, which has killed more than 10,000 people, according to the Gazan health ministry.

“We stand staunchly against all forms of racism and bigotry,” said Anna Babboni, a senior at Scripps College in Claremont, Calif., and one of the leaders of the local chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.

Ms. Babboni said her group is not antisemitic, but it is anti-Zionist...

In the language of this report, Babboni actually is "pro-Palestinian." Staunchly, she says her pro-Palestinian advocacy group isn't antisemitic.

It almost sounds like she might have said that her group opposes antisemitism. At any rate, she seems to have cited pieces of history, and at least one ongoing action, in an effort to explain her point of view.

At this point, Hartocollis and Saul author a passage in which we think they make an error of omission. That said, their article starts to suggest the possibility that students who actually are "pro-Palestinian" may have arguments to make on behalf of their stance!

If so, that doesn't mean that it isn't dumb to be chanting the chant that Strozenberg heard at Northwestern. It doesn't mean that a student like Strozenberg has to end up agreeing with their overall point of view.

It doesn't mean that those students are "right." It does make us wonder about the cable stars who can't seem to hear the various things Babboni and others have said.

Especially at times like these, hearing the voices of others can be very hard. By way of contrast, attacking others as racist is easy. 

Our tribe has leaned in the latter direction over the past quite a few years, and it seems to us that we've hurt progressive interests as we've insisted on adopting that stance.

Is Anna Babboni a food, decent person? How about Max Strozenberg? Is he good and decent too?

More generally, is it even possible that two people, each of whom is good and decent, could actually disagree about some deeply important matter? In recent years, our own blue tribe has had an increasingly difficult time with an age-old question like that.

We've had trouble hearing the voices of others. Tomorrow, we'll start with the voice of a college student whose reactions will strike most people as being quite hard to defend.

Tomorrow: Graduate student at Penn praises "glorious" Hamas attack