“But it’s just wrong. We’re not going to — we’re not going to supply the weapons and artillery shells used, that have been used.”
“Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs and other ways in which they go after population centers.”
-Pres. Biden
How many civilian casualties have been needed for the US administration to recognize the fatal error of judgement in allowing Israel to dictate US foreign policy?
How many protesting students and professors on campuses nationwide have been sacrificed for upholding this self-evident truth: it’s just wrong to support Israel’s genocidal agenda in Gaza.
We fully agree with Thomas L. Friedman’s pragmatic position about the campus demonstrations to stop the war in Gaza.
I am a hardheaded pragmatist who lived in Beirut and Jerusalem, cares about people on all sides and knows one thing above all from my decades in the region: The only just and workable solution to this issue is two nation-states for two indigenous people.
If you are for that, whatever your religion, nationality or politics, you’re part of the solution. If you are not for that, you’re part of the problem.
And from everything I have read and watched, too many of these protests have become part of the problem — for three key reasons.
First, they are virtually all about stopping Israel’s shameful behavior in killing so many Palestinian civilians in its pursuit of Hamas fighters, while giving a free pass to Hamas’s shameful breaking of the cease-fire that existed on Oct. 7. On that morning, Hamas launched an invasion in which it murdered Israeli parents in front of their children, children in front of their parents — documenting it on GoPro cameras — raped Israeli women and kidnapped or killed everyone they could get their hands on, from little kids to sick grandparents.
Second, when people chant slogans like “liberate Palestine” and “from the river to the sea,” they are essentially calling for the erasure of the state of Israel, not a two-state solution. They are arguing that the Jewish people have no right to self-determination or self-defense. I don’t believe that about Jews, and I don’t believe that about Palestinians. I believe in a two-state solution in which Israel, in return for security guarantees, withdraws from the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Arab areas of East Jerusalem, and a demilitarized Palestinian state that accepts the principle of two states for two people is established in those territories occupied in 1967.
The third reason that these protests have become part of the problem is that they ignore the view of many Palestinians in Gaza who detest Hamas’s autocracy. These Palestinians are enraged by precisely what these student demonstrations ignore: Hamas launched this war without permission from the Gazan population and without preparation for Gazans to protect themselves when Hamas knew that a brutal Israeli response would follow. In fact, a Hamas official said at the start of the war that its tunnels were for only its fighters, not civilians.
Even if we do not agree with the unlawful occupation of Palestinian territory by the Zionists in 1948, the coexistence of Israel and Palestine is the inevitable solution for peace in 2024. Both Hamas and Netanyahu oppose and sabotage the only remaining politically viable option for peace. Thus, the need to support the pragmatism proposed by Friedman.
Friedman’s wise advice is worth pondering on, coming from an experienced and unbiased observer of the Israel-Palestine conflict. His pragmatic proposal, as well as Biden’s shift in US policy, may not be the definitive solution, but steps in the right direction of a possible final one-state solution. If both factions share the disputed territory under a common democratic system of government, then the phrase “from the river to the sea” will have the same meaning for both.
