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In May 2021, the Daily Princetonian published the “Princeton University community statement of solidarity with the Palestinian people.” This statement was signed by over sixty-five university faculty and staff as well as dozens of students and alumni.
“We, members of the Princeton University community, condemn the ongoing attacks on the Palestinian people in Gaza by the Israeli armed forces,” the statement begins. The signatories “refuse the ‘two-sides and ‘evenhandedness’ narrative” of the conflict, “salute the bravery and will-to-survival of Palestinians…as they resist the violence of the Israeli military,” and “stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people in their indigenous liberation struggle against forced dispossession by the Israeli settler-colonial state.”
This described resistance is a far cry from a noble struggle. The Palestinian Authority, which controls parts of the West Bank, incentivizes terror attacks against Israel by paying accused and convicted terrorists and their families and praising them on state-run media, despite its rhetoric about non-violence. In 2018 alone, Israel successfully responded to 500 terror attacks. Palestinian militant organizations, most prominently Hamas (a U.S. State Department-designated foreign terrorist organization for over two decades and the de facto government in Gaza, have launched and continue to launch countless rockets and mortar rounds from Gaza into Israeli population centers. Over 4,300 were fired at Israel in only eleven days in mid-May 2021. These intentionally inaccurate weapons are intended to cause as much havoc and death among the country’s civilian population as possible rather than target military sites.
Furthermore, Hamas munitions often misfire or fall short and land in Gaza itself, killing Palestinians. These attacks are war crimes and have been recognized as such by Human Rights Watch. Hamas’ goal in these attacks aligns with its foundational mission: killing as many Jews as possible.
Given this situation, Israel’s defensive acts are entirely reasonable insofar as they adhere to the specific principles of just warfare. The U.N. Charter recognizes “the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a [member state].” As former U.S. Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps Major David French explains, under the law of war, nation-states have the authority to invade and occupy enemy territory to eliminate attackers. Israel has primarily restrained itself to targeted airstrikes, though advancing into Gaza and wiping out Hamas building-by-building would be completely acceptable by French’s logic. The United States, Israel, Canada, and numerous other countries have recognized the justifiability of invading the territory of an otherwise-sovereign nation-state if it refuses or fails to take action against non-state militants within its borders, as Gaza has done.
Unfortunately, these airstrikes still cause significant civilian casualties. But, once again, from a neutral application of the law of war, this blood is on the hands of Hamas, not Israel. Hamas intentionally locates its combatants in civilian-heavy areas and structures (including a kindergarten and a mosque) to neuter Israeli forces or, at minimum, cause ethical dilemmas and public relations problems. This directly contradicts two fundamental tenets of the law of war recognized by the United States: that “primary responsibility for the protection of civilians” rests with the force in control of those civilians and that using civilians as shields is unlawful. Unlike Hamas, Israel does not launch indiscriminate strikes, but it must—and can—attack military targets located in civilian zones when they are waging war on its people. Thus, the deaths and injuries that occur are the force’s faults that are violating the law of war by putting non-combatants in harm’s way, to begin with.
But still, Israel is widely denounced. It was the subject of nearly three-quarters of the U.N. General Assembly condemnations in 2020. On Princeton’s campus specifically, the faculty mentioned above is not an outlier regarding sentiment towards Israel and Palestinian militants. In 2018, visiting speaker Norman Finkelstein invoked numerous antisemitic tropes, would not criticize Hamas (whose deadly attacks he described as “fireworks”), and repeated the phrase “shoot them dead” about Israelis. Neither the Princeton Committee on Palestine (PCP) nor The Young Democratic Socialists of Princeton, organizations responsible for hosting Finkelstein, were willing to object to his remarks. PCP in particular has been accused of anti-semitic rhetoric.
This nonsensical analysis of Israeli defense is appalling. Moreover, it aligns with one of the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s defining tenets of antisemitism (also adopted by the U.S. State Department): “Applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.” “Both-sides-ism” regarding the Israel-Hamas conflict should be emphatically rejected—but in the precise opposite direction that the faculty statement advocates.
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