THE PLIGHT of innocent civilians in Gaza, who are suffering greatly in this war caused by their Hamas rulers, is genuinely terrible. The distress of families displaced by attacks on their neighborhood can't help but evoke pity. Images of babies killed in airstrikes are heartbreaking. Israel's warning on Thursday that residents of the northern Gaza Strip head south to avoid the coming violence has sent many thousands of people fleeing to safety. Who could look at such upheaval and fail to be moved?
Apparently, the entire Arab world.
To begin with, the Hamas high command has demanded that the residents of the north ignore the Israeli alert and remain in the path of maximum danger. For years the use of civilian shields — launching rockets from population centers, positioning military equipment in hospitals, embedding gunmen in crowded neighborhoods — has been a Hamas strategy. Such behavior is morally vile, not to mention a stark violation of international law, but Hamas is not deterred by either law or morality. So while Israel urges Palestinians to evacuate the area where fighting is likely to be intense, Hamas has been broadcasting orders to the contrary and placing roadblocks in evacuation routes. The more civilians in the war zone, the more civilian casualties — and the more casualties, the more opportunities Hamas will have for anti-Israel propaganda.
Egypt shares a border with the Gaza Strip (which it ruled from 1948 to 1967), but it has balked at allowing Palestinians to cross to safety. "It is important that the people remain steadfast and present on their land," Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi intoned last week. The country's foreign ministry called the Israeli evacuation order "a grave violation of the rules of international humanitarian law" — as if warning civilians of a coming attack so they can protect themselves is somehow beyond the pale.
 Displaced Palestinians waited at the Rafah crossing between the southern Gaza Strip and Egypt on Oct. 16. |
"After an emergency Arab League meeting on Wednesday, Jordan's Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said all Arab states agreed to confront any attempt to displace Palestinians from their homeland," reported Reuters. In other words, the 21 Arab countries in the region, any or all of which could open their hearts and their borders to shelter Gaza families, are united in refusing to do so.
Such behavior is odious. During Syria's civil war, millions of people fled the country and were admitted by Turkey, Germany, and other nations. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians escaped the Russian invasion and found haven in Poland, Hungary, and elsewhere. More than 1 million stateless Rohingya people fled Myanmar when fighting erupted in 2017 and found relative safety in Bangladesh. Millions of people from Afghanistan have been displaced — an estimated 8.2 million Afghan refugees, according to the UN Refugee Agency, have made their way to more than 100 different host countries, with Iran and Pakistan leading the list.
But the Arab states that routinely profess their solidarity with the Palestinians will not take them in, even on a temporary basis. This is the inverse of the Jewish refugee crisis of 1948, the year of Israel's War of Independence, when across the Arab world, Jews were forced to flee for their lives. "Jews In Grave Danger In All Moslem Lands" reported the New York Times that spring. Within months, pogroms, expropriations, and expulsions had driven as many as 850,000 Jews from communities where their families had dwelt for centuries. Most made their way to the fledgling state of Israel, which accepted them as a matter of policy.
Israel is not preventing any other country from providing safe haven to Gaza civilians. It has already said that after Hamas is defeated, residents will be free to return to Gaza City and other communities in the north.
But Hamas — some of whose top leaders don't even live in Gaza — wants the images of Palestinian children suffering and dying in the rubble. It wants the Arab Middle East to do nothing for the civilians. It wants the number of casualties to climb.
Just as Hamas is responsible for the innocent blood shed so profusely in Israel, it is responsible for the innocent blood being spilled in Gaza. The Arab governments that decry the Israeli siege and airstrikes triggered by Hamas's staggering war crimes are not innocent bystanders. By refusing to open their gates to Palestinians in need of shelter, they are aiding and abetting Hamas in its evil.
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Antisemitism U
At Stanford University last week, students hung signs from their windows cheering the savage pogrom carried out by Hamas in southern Israel. "The illusion of Israel is burning," proclaimed one sign, even as the charred bodies of Israeli civilians were being pulled from homes burned by the terrorists. In a classroom on the same campus, an instructor reportedly ordered Jewish and Israeli students to identify themselves, then told them to take their belongings and stand in a corner. "That's what Israel does to Palestinians," the instructor allegedly said. (The instructor was subsequently suspended by the university.)
On the other coast, more than 30 student organizations at Harvard responded to the bloodiest massacre of Jews the world has seen since the end of the Holocaust by issuing a letter declaring that Israel, which they called "the apartheid regime," is "the only one to blame." As my Boston Globe colleague Carine Hajjar commented, "Even by the standards of radical-chic campus progressivism, it was a shockingly cruel statement." (Several of the organizations later retracted their endorsement.)
Harvard and Stanford were not outliers. At prominent institutions of higher education, the scenes of horror in Israel were jeered, cheered, defended, or minimized, as left-wing and pro-Palestinian groups engaged in an orgy of victim-blaming.
At New York University's school of law, the president of the student bar association sent out a message underscoring her "unwavering and absolute solidarity with Palestinians" and announcing that she "will not condemn Palestinian resistance." Columbia University professor Joseph Massad went into raptures of elation over the "astounding," "striking," "awesome," and "innovative" operation by Hamas, which he labeled "victories of the resistance."
Far-left student groups on many campuses, including Arizona State University, Binghamton University, the University of Virginia, and Purdue University, organized and promoted "Stand With Palestine" rallies. Students for Justice in Palestine, a fanatically anti-Zionist and antisemitic organization with hundreds of chapters across North America, characterized the Hamas atrocities as "a historic win for Palestinian resistance," and distributed materials that claimed the Palestinian cause requires "confrontation by any means necessary." The SJP chapter at Tufts University hailed the "creativity" displayed by Hamas in planning and carrying out its "historic" massacre. At Portland State, a student group posted: "Our hearts are with the brave Palestinian liberators."
 Israel-hating students demonstrate in New York City. |
Posters at Kent State University were emblazoned with the words "From the river to sea, Palestine will be free" — a slogan that endorses the complete elimination of Israel, which is located between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. At the University of Washington, activists advertised a "Vigil for the Martyrs" — a reference not to the Israelis slaughtered in cold blood at a dance festival and the babies killed in their cribs, but to Hamas terrorists who have been killed.
At my alma mater, George Washington University, a student group endorsed the deliberate killing of civilians: "We reject the distinction between 'civilian' and 'militant,'" the students announced. That's another way of saying they reject the basic premise of international humanitarian law and believe that ordinary Israelis going about their daily lives deserve no exemption from the most gruesome violence imaginable.
For decades, there have been warnings about the rising tide of hatred for Israel and its friends in the leftist groves of academe. For Jewish students and professors in higher education, the spreading menace has been all too real. "Security on campuses nationwide has evaporated, as antisemitic incidents have hit all-time highs and students report hiding their Star of David pendants and taking winding paths to their campus Hillel," reported Seth Mandel in Commentary four months ago. It has gotten so bad in some places, he wrote, that "merely to denounce antisemitic violence is to risk one's job, reputation, career, [and] livelihood."
But it was only last week, when progressives openly defended or even celebrated the ISIS-caliber cruelty and carnage unleashed by Hamas on Oct. 7, that the penny finally dropped for many decent liberals. "I always thought you were blinded by your politics when you wrote that left-wing antisemitism is as big a problem as the right-wing variety," a long-time reader and occasional correspondent wrote to me. "I think I was the blinded one."
In an Atlantic essay headlined "Students for Pogroms in Israel," the liberal writer Conor Friedersdorf confessed that he had "naively believed" that virtually everyone, regardless of where they stood on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, could agree "that certain actions were evil regardless of who took them." It shocked him, therefore, when "on dozens of campuses, student groups reacted to the attacks by attempting to absolve the murderers and child abductors of all responsibility."
I understand why some observers feel there is a double standard in the West that accords less attention to the killings of Muslim innocents. . . . What I cannot understand is endorsing, validating, or standing in solidarity with war crimes. That so many student organizations did so is stunning. It commits them to positions anathema not only to the conservatives they often tangle with but to left-leaning liberals and progressives, many of whom now perceive a frightening difference in core values that too many had scarcely pondered before. . . .
[O]ne cannot cheer what Hamas did and retain moral high ground; nor can one declare solidarity with campaigns of civilian slaughter and remain in solidarity with liberal humanists, progressive wonks, or adherents of international human rights.
In 2002, Larry Summers, who was then president of Harvard University, publicly rebuked the swelling ranks of anti-Israel activists in elite colleges and universities. "Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are antisemitic in their effect if not their intent," he said. "Profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities." Back then, the Ivy League antisemites could still be regarded as a fringe movement consisting of reasonable but misguided individuals. No longer.
"In nearly 50 years of Harvard affiliation, I have never been as disillusioned and alienated as I am today," Summers tweeted last week. American higher education is morally broken. Some good people may not have realized that before last week, but only the willfully blind can fail to see it now.
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Gloria Negri's extraordinary generosity
To end this newsletter on an uplifting note, I pause to marvel at the news that Gloria Negri — a Boston Globe reporter for 53 years, who retired from the paper in 2012 and died five years later — left a bequest of $1 million for Globe Santa, a program that provides toys and books for disadvantaged children each year at Christmas. It is, as the Globe reported, not only "the largest financial donation ever made to the 68-year-old nonprofit" but also "an extraordinary bequest from a single woman living on a modest reporter's income."
I only knew Negri in her later years and would never have guessed that the woman whose life seemed to consist entirely of her job had amassed a sizable fortune and was planning to give it all to charity. I knew she'd had a remarkable reporting career, with adventures that ranged from jogging with heavyweight boxing champion Joe Frazier to drinking whisky at the LBJ ranch in Texas with Lady Bird Johnson to covering Ted Williams's final at-bat at Fenway Park. But that she was saving every cent with the goal of donating it to worthy causes after her death? I had no idea.
Negri's story reminds me of an even more amazing tale out of Mississippi almost three decades ago. A Hattiesburg washerwoman, Oseola McCarty, after cleaning and pressing other people's clothes for 75 years, donated $150,000 to the University of Southern Mississippi. It was a staggering gift from a woman who had grown up in poverty during Jim Crow segregation, and lived such a humble life. From the day she quit sixth grade to go to work, her years had been filled with little but manual labor. She never had any fancy clothes, never had a car, never had a color TV, never had a "career." When her shoes grew tight, she cut out the toes; when her Bible fell apart, she Scotch-taped it together. She worked until arthritis in her "ironing hand" finally forced her to retire in January, at 87.
And then she gave away everything she had saved.
"I just wanted to do nice," she said, "something for the children to get an education. Because I didn't get mine, but I want them to have theirs."
The Economist once observed that "the extraordinary generosity of ordinary Americans often goes unnoticed." Many Americans give little or nothing to charity, but those who do collectively donate so much that the United States consistently ranks as the most generous country on earth. Last year, Americans reached into their pockets to give $499 billion to charitable causes. The philanthropies we support come in more varieties, support more ventures, and have done more good than the most industrious team of researchers could ever fully tally. Few of us will ever match the charitable achievements of a Gloria Negri or an Oseola McCarty, but their example can inspire us to dig a little deeper and give a little more. These days, so many things are wrong with the American spirit. The deep-rooted impulse to give to charity is one thing that remains very, very right.
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What I Wrote Then
25 years ago on the op-ed page
From "Microsoft's real crime: success," Oct. 22, 1998:
There are many differences between government and business, but none more basic than this: Governments depend on coercion, businesses depend on freedom. Yet, perversely, it is the government that accuses Microsoft of coercive practices.
The heart of the Justice Department's case against Microsoft is that the company has made Internet Explorer, its Web browsing software, an integral part of Windows, its overwhelmingly popular operating system. Microsoft doesn't charge for Internet Explorer — the price of Windows didn't go up when the Web browser was added — and it doesn't sell it separately. Computer makers wanting to load Windows into their desktop PCs have to take Internet Explorer as part of the package. This is the "coercion" that the government is spending millions of dollars to fight.
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The Last Line
"For now, Michael stood quietly in the hot Brooklyn night while clouds tried to become angels and birds talked and stones became roses and white horses galloped over rooftops, and the rabbi, at last, danced with his wife" ― Pete Hamill, Snow in August (1997)
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(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).
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