A Call for Empathy

Israel is a beautiful nation whose government has committed unspeakable crimes.

For many, only half of that sentence will register.

On our campus, viewpoints have grown highly polarized at a time when we most need solidarity. Chants of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” clash with “Am Yisrael Chai” until the discordance becomes deafening. Indistinguishable noise is as productive as silence.

The fights for Palestinian and Israeli self-determination need not be mutually exclusive.

As a Jew, I’ve found myself returning to this truth time and time again amidst the constant stream of news, volatile campus discourse, and my own internal debate over the past week and a half. It is possible to grieve for the Israeli people while acknowledging their government’s past and likely present violations of international humanitarian law. I do not betray my people by demanding more of our leadership.

Likewise, it is possible to grieve for the Palestinian people while acknowledging the role Hamas has played in this bloodshed. As many have aptly noted, the statement released Saturday by the Harvard Undergraduate Palestinian Solidarity Committee calling the government of Israel “entirely responsible” for ongoing violence in the region was dangerously reductionist. While Israel has committed countless atrocities, it is not the sole perpetrator in this recent conflict. The PSC’s original statement shamefully fails to identify Hamas, designated a terrorist organization by many nations, as complicit.

Hamas does not simply act out of solidarity with Palestine, but necessarily out of hate for Israel. It seeks the complete and total elimination of the Jewish state, as it has since its inception in the 1980s. The PSC’s failure to place blame on Hamas is striking and saddening, and in fact weakens the legitimate call to end a cycle of violence which has trapped Palestinians for decades.

Yet two wrongs don’t make a right. While the PSC’s statement has this glaring flaw, the response has been unacceptable. This week, I watched in horror as the safety of pro-Palestinian activists — many of them students of color, and many of them my friends — was compromised, their identities blasted across the internet and displayed on a “doxxing truck” in Harvard Square.

To add insult to injury, in its statements, Harvard administration has remained cowardly vague. The University has provided four statements so far: the first, too late and too weak; the second, denouncing Hamas but distancing the University from the student groups who signed with the PSC; the third, redirecting students with safety concerns to other resources; and the fourth, a broad rejection of hate and harassment and affirmation of free expression, with no direct reference to the groups targeted.

None of the statements are enough to address the urgent threat to student security.

I understand why my peers on the PSC and their allies are irate, because I am too. They have been attacked, largely on the basis of one sentence, and the very institution designed to protect such intellectual discourse has failed to do so. Still, I urge them not to let their fight for the human rights of the Palestinian people and effort to contextualize this violence become tacit acceptance of terrorism.

I understand why my Jewish peers mourn, because I do too. Israel is the land in which I had my bat mitzvah six and a half years ago at the Western Wall. It is the birthplace of significant technological advancements like drip irrigation, and home to a people whose every greeting and parting, “shalom,” translates to “peace.” It has been unimaginably hard — the kind of hard that can only be put into tears, never words — to observe helplessly as more than 1,400 Israelis have been killed, raped, and tortured.

Hyperfixation on what the PSC’s statement lacks, rather than what it aims to reveal, is equally unproductive. I, along with my fellow Jewish students, cannot let grief distort the cruelty of Israel’s crimes. We must turn this devastation into a call to action and demand that the Netanyahu administration immediately lay down their arms; restore basic necessities, like fuel and electricity, to the roughly 2.2 million residents of Gaza; and lift the callous 16-year blockade it has imposed on a population that was majority below the poverty line as of 2017 and is nearly half children today. Israeli occupation must end on all fronts: The government should seize this momentum and promptly remove its settlements from the West Bank, too.

The current conflict in Israel and Palestine has unmasked deep injustices in the region and brought them to the forefront of public consciousness. I do not know when the fighting will end, but when it does, I know that the region cannot return to a status quo marked by unthinkable Palestinian suffering.

To my fellow Jews: Now, more than ever, we need not look any further than our faith for guidance. A fundamental principle of Reform Judaism, the tradition I grew up in, is that of “tikkun olam,” which translates to “repairing the world.” Tikkun olam is rooted in the fact that persecution is intrinsically intertwined with the collective Jewish identity. Our tragic history engenders us with a particular obligation to recognize injustice, even if its perpetrators are the very leaders we have elected to office. We must fight to ensure that the oppression which has plagued us — from biblical enslavement in Egypt to systematic extermination in Auschwitz — does not extend to others.

We cannot allow the violence unfolding abroad to drive us away from each other — or from the capacity for empathy — at home. In the face of devastating loss, the path forward is for each of us to make concessions, take time to understand opposing perspectives, and seek out the commonalities and the ways in which our perspectives might not be so different after all. To say this path will be easy would be a lie. But to say we have any other option would be a lie, too.

Violet T. M. Barron ’26, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Adams House.

Editor’s Note: Readers should note that pre-moderation has been turned on for online commenting on this article out of concerns for student safety.

—Cara J. Chang, President

—Eleanor V. Wikstrom and Christina M. Xiao, Editorial Chairs