Thu 4/25/2024 5:15 PM
A
new set of ‘Four Questions’ for anti-Israel protesters
BY STEVE ISRAEL, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 04/25/24 11:00 AM ET
This week, Jews around the world have retold the
Passover story in traditional seders. A painful history — the bondage,
oppression and eventual liberation of Jews in Egypt — collides with the painful
present: missiles fired from Iran, retaliation by Israel, war in Gaza, the
surge of antisemitism around the world. Our history has taken us from building
pyramids somewhere near Giza to dismantling terrorists in Gaza.
Traditionally, the
Passover seder begins with the youngest person present asking the Four
Questions (Ma Nishtana in Hebrew). These questions set the
context for why the Passover night is different from all other nights.
This week, I have my own set of Four Questions, posed
to the young people occupying and disrupting college campuses and businesses to
protest Israel.
Question 1: On Oct. 7, the terrorist group Hamas slaughtered
young Israelis at a music festival as well as other civilians in surrounding
communities. They murdered, stabbed, shot, raped, beheaded, burned. They forced
children to watch the butchering of parents. They cut off the breasts of
women. They killed the defenseless elderly. They abducted and continue to
hold innocent civilians hostage.
Did you protest that
massacre in the days, weeks, months after Oct. 7. At least once? Did you fly
flags, wave banners, demand justice? If not, why not? Why do you protest only
Israel?
Question 2: In the ongoing civil war in
Sudan, at least 13,000 to 15,000 people have been killed and 33,000 others
injured. Over 6.5 million are internally displaced and more than 2 million
others have fled the country as refugees. Here too, innocents have been beaten,
burned, raped, tortured, murdered. Meanwhile, according to the
human rights group Oxfam, Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine has killed more than
10,500 civilians, including 587 children, “as constant bombardments, mines, and
drone attacks have left a generation traumatized, displaced, and fearful for
their lives.”
Have you protested the
grotesque and persistent war crimes in Sudan or Ukraine? If not, why not? Why
do civilians in Sudan or Sevastopol seem less important to you than in Gaza?
Why do you protest only Israel?
Question 3: In Gaza, Hamas violated international law with a
heinous military doctrine that forced its own innocent civilians to become
Israeli military targets. It embedded weapons systems in hospitals, schools and
residential apartments. (Many foretold the strategy on day one: Hamas massacres
Israelis, Israel responds by targeting Hamas weapons in civilian
infrastructure, casualties skyrocket, the world turns on Israel, the university
protests ignite).
Have you protested Hamas’s
illegal tactics of deliberately putting innocents in harm’s way? Have you
demanded boycotts, divestment, sanctions for nations that fund, enable and
empower Hamas’s crimes against humanity? If not, why not? Why do you protest only
Israel?
Question 4: You chant: “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will
be free.” Recent history offers factual perspective on this possibility. In
2005, Israel withdrew from Gaza. How did this small slice of land on the
Mediterranean use its freedom? Within days, it became a launchpad of unprovoked
rocket attacks on Israel.
And while Israel has
managed to make peace with Muslim neighbors in Northern Africa, Jordan, the
Gulf and elsewhere, Hamas has never relented from waging war, digging tunnels,
firing rockets, kidnapping Israelis. In fact, the Hamas charter continues to insist
that the geographic borders of Palestine extend “from the River Jordan in the
east to the Mediterranean in the west and from Ras Al-Naqurah in the north to Umm Al-Rashrash in the south,” i.e. the entirety
of Israel, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank.
When you chant from the Hamas charter for the national
liberation of Palestinians, do you not understand how Jews arrived in what is
now Israel millennia ago? It was a national liberation movement, the freeing of
slaves and their search for a land where they could express their identity
safely.
And while I’m asking — why
is it that while I support a two-state solution in which Jews and Palestinians
live with full rights, your chant seems to support the purging of one? Why do
you protest only the presence of Israel?
Free expression is easy when it’s just the hurling of
slogans and flying of banners. Free thinking is much harder. It obligates us to
question our own hypocrisies, shallow assumptions and, yes, implicit biases. It
forces us beyond our tribal truths, broadens our apertures, breaks down the
echo chambers. It’s often solitary — based on uncomfortable whispers versus the
monopoly of a megaphone.
I happen to teach at a prominent university. I’ve had
the privilege of speaking quietly with students with opinions on all sides of
the conflict. They represent a wide range of faiths, races and backgrounds.
They reflect strong opinions from far right to far left. These conversations
don’t capture headlines and news cameras. They’re not disruptions but
dialogues. Not sloganeering but soul-searching. They seek the possibility
of answers by leaving room for challenging questions.
This Passover, to the campus
occupiers who chant in a (perhaps) well-intentioned demand for justice, I
repeat not the Four Questions, but the one that matters most:
Why do you protest only
Israel?
Steve Israel represented New York in the U.S. House of
Representatives over eight terms and was chairman of the Democratic
Congressional Campaign Committee from 2011 to 2015. Follow him @RepSteveIsrael.