The Justice

I don't usually join the ranks of Brandeis students who express their opinions on every political topic under the sun, but there is now an issue on which I cannot remain silent. It's bad enough that my vacation at home in Israel was marred by the assault on Gaza, but it was even worse to watch my peers, both at Brandeis and elsewhere, lose all semblance of rationality.

With the invasion of Gaza, the first major international conflict of the Facebook era erupted. Everyone's opinion on the Gaza crisis became instantly apparent to the entire school community. Yet instead of using this fascinating forum for constructive debate, most simply donated their statuses to a cause, displaying counts of either Qassam rockets fired into Israel or Palestinian casualties. Students could be divided into two camps based on the atrocity of which they chose to keep track. Though Facebook was never really designed to facilitate sophisticated discourse, it nonetheless served as a venue for people's descent into a boneheaded competition of tribal bickering to appear more of a victim than your enemy.

But this isn't about Facebook or its limitations. This is about what it has revealed about the minds of our supposedly well-educated student body. These students are the product of a top-40 American university, and the most articulate phrase they can formulate about their feelings is "300 TERRORIST PIGS DEAD!!!"? What's worse is that with all the finger-pointing going on, no one was pointing in a rational direction.

Let me preface this next bit by stating that I have never been a strong supporter of Israel, if one at all. I look at Israel and I see my home. But I also see one people oppressed by another's desire to fulfill the prophecy of an ancient nation to which they have, at best, a tenuous connection (the Israelites did not migrate to Hoboken, N.J.). I still believe that Israel has a right to exist. I just don't believe that right is the result of some religious mandate. Truthfully, it's not even a matter of right; it's a matter of reality. Israel, much to the chagrin of many, exists. It is a modern, westernized country, and like every other nation on earth, it was forged through war and will hold on to the spoils of victory as long as it can. But no matter how many ways you slice it, Palestinians have gotten the bad end of the stick from Israel, from the Arab nations and most importantly, from their own government. This latest conflict is the product of that.

Continued...

Page 1 of 2 next >

Article Tools