Crisis and Opportunity on Campus

 

The war in Gaza has generated far more heat than light on American college campuses. Students shout past each other as they bear helpless witness to the injustice and absurdity of the latest spasm of violence in the Middle East.

 

The protests provided an opening for politicians to examine challenging questions about bias, free speech, and student safety. Instead there was superficial posturing and playing “gotcha” with college presidents who are doing a difficult job.

 

Larger questions around the ultimate purpose and value of a college education remain insufficiently examined. The ivory tower cannot presume isolation from the world crisis of values of which the Hamas-Israeli conflict and the wars in Ukraine or the Sudan or elsewhere are a festering symptom—students sense this more than anyone.

 

For both Hamas and the present Israeli government, the deaths of so many innocents have been a means to exercise raw power rather than move toward genuine resolution of a fiendishly difficult conflict. In Israel’s case, the immediate goal seems to be to re-establish deterrence, and in Hamas’s, to disrupt the gradual accommodation of surrounding Arab nations to the legitimacy of Israel’s existence.

 

Violent and cynical means on both sides are themselves at war with the ends of authentic resolution. The indiscriminate nature of Hamas’s attack and the equally indiscriminate Israeli response has only set back long-term security in the region.

 

Unfolding events provide an opportunity for dialogue on college campuses, including between Jewish and Palestinian students. To ask Palestinians and Israelis sheltering in-country from bombs and rockets to sit down together in small groups and share food and stories in order to build mutual understanding would be a bridge too far in the present chaos—yet it has been done effectively here in the U.S. And colleges could, and sometimes do, provide occasions for something similar to happen on campus.

 

The education of the complete person, the enlargement of what was once called character, by a combination of formal curriculum and the informal experience of campus culture will always remain challenging.

 

For decades there has been talk about a crisis of the humanities. As students flee the liberal arts, classes in the business and computer fields expand. College is expensive, and students want to be able to monetize their learning, or at least have a fighting chance to pay down burdensome loans. It is hard for college administrators to resist trends that, left unaddressed, could shut down their institutions altogether.

 

Still one can’t examine too often what ought to be some of education’s bedrock goals, including how to mold active citizens, people who are informed, responsive, authentic, present, inclusive, and responsible. Education in that larger sense is a good in itself, a means toward a good life, beyond just making a good living.

 

This is a challenge not just for the humanities, but for education as a whole, including STEM, as indicated among other things by apathetic and misinformed voters, shallow politicians unequipped to cope with huge challenges like AI, leaders who choose authoritarianism and war over the difficulties of building peaceful democratic structures, and a materialist culture which knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

 

Pure scientific research for its own sake, like threatened humanist disciplines, faces its own need to demonstrate its utility. But there are projects which speak to such a depth in us that no justification is needed. The Webb observatory, which simultaneously looks outward into deep space and backward in time, because of the time it takes for the light of stars and galaxies to reach it, was designed by engineers from fourteen countries. The Webb shows what we can do when we cooperate toward larger ends rather than warring with each other.

 

The Webb brings into even greater focus the magnificent unfolding of the universe through a series of emergent stages, from pure energy, to matter, to life, to conscious life reflecting upon itself. The universe story confirms the reality that all of us, including Arabs and Jews, come from a single origin. The story also magnificently confirms the resilience of life on earth, which has persisted through billions of years of challenges.

 

Albert Einstein said that we cannot solve a problem on the same level of consciousness that created the problem. The connective tissue across all time and space revealed by the Webb points toward this new level of consciousness, a world where “us” against “them” is subsumed by the truth of interdependence. It will become the task of education to help students explore this larger context and apply its implications practically to all our problems.

 

Students face a future of environmental, demographic and disarmament crises laid on them (sorry) by previous generations.  The quality of their collective response will depend upon their seeing that all the wars on the planet, including the present horror in Gaza, are an absurd distraction from listening, sharing, working things out with each other and stewarding the natural systems that sustain us.

 

 

 

 

Watching, with Despair and Hope

 

It’s a queasy feeling to experience up close on the nightly news the further turn of a 70-year-old futile cycle of violence. We sit in our comfortable armchairs in front of the television, voyeurs of the living hell that Hamas and the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) have brought down upon innocent citizens in Israel and Gaza.

Intrusive cameras take us right to the heart of the agony, the rubble of blasted concrete, the blood of children smeared across hospital floors, the shrieks of matriarchs on both sides mourning the death or kidnapping of whole families. The world is so interconnected that we news junkies cannot help feeling—complicit. My tax dollars help to pay for the avalanche of undiscriminating vengeance unleashed by the Israeli Defense Forces.

When spokespeople for the IDF present their rationalizations for the bombing, there’s something a little strange in their eyes. They don’t seem altogether in their right mind, as maybe we Americans weren’t either in the weeks following 9/11. The trauma of October 7, followed by the conundrum of trying to defeat an enemy that holds so many Israelis hostage, along with the embarrassing failure to heed the signs of what was coming—these seem to have narrowed the Israeli military vision of strategic self-interest to a ruthless, helpless lashing out, even as Netanyahu urges his allies to “stand with civilization.” 

American officials also seem slightly off and over-scripted when they do their best to rationalize a form of “civilization” that has become supremely uncivilized. 

Our well-intentioned officials and well-informed pundits caution restraint and creative thinking, only to be ignored almost completely by the Israeli government. It is wrenching to watch descendants of those who lived through or died in the Holocaust begin to travel down a similar near-genocidal road for the sake of re-establishing the vaunted Israeli reputation for ironclad deterrence.    

Meanwhile Israel writhes in its apparent straitjacket of alternatives. Why would one not expect to see a certain nervous paranoia in the eyes of their generals after what Hamas did? As the late not-so-great Henry Kissinger said, even paranoiacs have real enemies. 

Whether as participants or spectators, we have all known since we were schoolchildren exactly what a cycle of violence is, why it happens, and how it perpetuates and never resolves underlying conflict. Inevitably woven into the cycle is a failure to see the “other” as just as human as ourselves. 

Extremists on both sides contesting the same land carry dehumanization to the end point, the intent to utterly annihilate the other. Simplistic bumper stickers like “from the river to the sea” become the same battle-cry for both settlers and those who deny Israel the right to exist. The extremes end up resembling each other all too closely.

But the familiarity of such cycles shows that a way out, however difficult, must be possible: it begins with a realization that what both sides are doing, however different their motivations and self-justifying rationales, is not working and will never work. Hamas cannot destroy Israel; Israel cannot wipe out Hamas. 

Hamas represents an abhorrent idea—the end of Israel altogether. But the idea itself cannot be killed; it can only be transcended by some less nihilist idea—such as a two-state solution or some creative new arrangement yet unarticulated. 

Talk of humans as “animals” is not helpful. Listening for the common humanity in the stories of the “other” is the only way through—people who initiate connections across boundaries that marginalize the extremes, people who resist becoming identical in fruitless violence. 

For many years an indefatigable California activist, Libby Traubman, has been inviting American Jews and Palestinians to break bread together and share stories.

Millions of Israeli citizens—and Jews elsewhere like Libby—try to maintain this good will in spite of their legitimate fears. 

Palestinians too—like Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish, who lost three daughters and a niece at once to a shell fired by an Israeli tank in 2009, but who goes on working tirelessly for peace. His book is entitled I Shall Not Hate. As a doctor, he says he doesn’t distinguish between the Muslim, Jewish and Christian babies he delivers. The world is starved for that larger identification with all humanity. 

Those who watch the horror from a distance at least have a responsibility to forego taking sides and to do what we can to make both Jews and Palestinians feel safe from hate, wherever they are on this small planet we share.

In a wise and funny anecdote in one of his books Erik Erikson writes: 

“Rabbi Hillel once was asked by an unbeliever to tell the whole of the Torah while he stood on one foot. I do not know whether he meant to answer the request or to remark on its condition when he said: ‘What is hateful to yourself, do not do to your fellow man. That is the whole of the Torah and the rest is but commentary.’” 

In a wise and funny anecdote in one of his books Erik Erikson writes: “Rabbi Hillel once was asked by an unbeliever to tell the whole of the Torah while he stood on one foot. I do not know whether he meant to answer the request or to remark on its condition when he said: ‘What is hateful to yourself, do not do to your fellow man. That is the whole of the Torah and the rest is but commentary.’”