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The following is an opinion contribution and reflects the author’s views alone.
Dear Tories,
This past spring, thousands of rockets launched from Gaza rained down on Israel. This attack followed thousands of rockets being launched against Israel in the summer of 2014, and the winter of 2012, and the spring of 2012, and the summer of 2011. It would seem that for Israel these skirmishes are just a rinse and repeat. But that is mistaken. Each operation exhausts physical and mental resources and is an escalation from the previous. More significantly, each conflict brings lives — innocent and young lives — to an end. Here at Princeton, too, the conflict has brought an escalated response.
Instead of supporting our Western, Jewish, and righteous ally, Israel, many in our campus community defended Hamas, a US-designated terrorist organization. Indeed, there were professors on our campus who claimed that pointing to Hamas’s rockets as cause for the battle is a “stale talking point.” They broke from the longstanding University position and endorsed the anti-semitic movement to eliminate the Jewish state, whose sins are no worse and oftentimes far fewer than any other nation, through economic warfare.
In the spring, we covered anti-Israel sentiment on campus and had our work cited in The New York Times. Nonetheless, our work was not finished. We have ordered this Israel edition of the Tory to examine Israel among the nations and challenge anti-Israel hatred on campus. In our issue, Alexandra Orbuch wages a valiant defense of the legal rights of Jews in their ancestral homeland, and Benjamin Woodard and Jeremiah Giordani each tackle anti-Israel claims proliferating on our campus. Cassandra James reports on the experience of Jewish Princetonians during the conflict between Hamas and Israel, while Germaine Washington argues that though anti-BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) laws might be just, they do not pass Constitutional muster. Finally, Reid Zlotky offers a timely take on Princeton’s race-obsessed orientation programming. I am especially excited to showcase the talents and mastery of our new writers.
This issue is also profoundly personal for me. Though an American through and through, I am a Jew. The same hate that unjustly targets Israel, targets me. I hope the urgency of this issue is not lost to you.
Adam Hoffman
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