Get Herald RSSLast Thursday, a panel assembled to discuss the recent hostilities in the Gaza Strip between Hamas and the Israel Defense Forces, and drew a crowd that packed one of Brown's largest lecture halls. The event was organized by the group Common Ground, which claims the lofty goal of bringing together Jewish and Arab opinions to find a workable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Buzzwords abounded: The forum was intended to mull "implications and reconceptualizations" of the conflict's many facets, and it delivered an illuminating if diffuse set of perspectives.
But the event could have offered its attendees far more insight had it included a speaker to address the political, military and psychological considerations that led Israel to launch the Gaza campaign - not necessarily a fervent believer in the decisions of the IDF, but someone prepared to discuss the currents of opinion that shape those decisions.
Some of the organizers, panelists and attendees seemed to think that presenting these views was unnecessary - that during the three weeks of the IDF bombardment of Hamas, the American media had full-throatedly endorsed the Israeli strategy and minimized the Gazans' suffering.
That is incorrect. American news outlets reliably focused on the bloody and traumatizing effects of the bombardment for ordinary Gazans and highlighted the IDF's failure to stop Hamas' rocket attacks on Israel.
For many Brown students, the IDF operation in Gaza was dumbfounding, the logic behind it incomprehensible. But even those who considered the campaign utterly unacceptable will have to grapple with that logic, and if they want to have any chance of defusing and dismantling it they will have to understand it.
The operation had the support of more than 90 percent of the Jewish Israeli public, ordinary people who wanted their elected government to protect them from rocket attacks and demonstrate to those who wish them harm that they are willing to use the military force at their disposal. Dismissing their views as bloodthirsty machismo unworthy of consideration doesn't do anyone any good.
Brown students could easily procure intelligent and detailed analyses of Israel's motivations. But they could just as easily turn up scholarly or political treatises on arcane topics like those covered by the panelists. Common Ground set itself the task of exposing its audience to perspectives they would have otherwise ignored. But when it came to Israeli public opinion, they shirked that task.
When an older attendee praised the forum but asked whether the panel's opinions should have been more "balanced," Alex Ortiz '09, one of the event's organizers, indignantly denounced the question as a "diatribe" and condemned the notion of equal time for all views as a way to covertly distort the discussion.
Ortiz is right that not every public forum on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be a diametric debate with equal representation for each major approach to the problem. But for many Brown students, the predominant Israeli view is the most radical "reconceptualization" of the debate to which they could be exposed.
For those less aware of Gaza's plight, Common Ground provided analyses of humanitarian dilemmas, alleged Israeli war crimes and the political motivations that led to the election of Hamas. The panel posed no comparable challenge to students unsympathetic to Israeli suffering.
Presenting an analysis of mainstream Israeli public opinion would not only have helped students sympathetic to the Palestinian perspective navigate the issue, it would have sent a signal to Brunonians fiercely in favor of the IDF operation that the members of Common Ground acknowledge and respect their opinions, even if they disagree vehemently.
When supporters of the IDF assault see their opinions ignored and hear the vitriolic outbursts of students willing to acknowledge only the Palestinian perspective, they become bitter and frustrated - more likely to bicker, less likely to listen.
Former Senator Lincoln Chafee '75, speaking about his experience observing Hamas' rise to power from Washington, inadvertently provided one of the event's low points. He recalled an American military expert emphasizing the crudeness of the Qassam rockets that are Hamas' main long-range weapon against Israeli civilians: "They could go north … or they could go east."
The remembered quip queued a ghoulish chorus of giggles from the audience, a sound to freeze the blood of any friend or relative of the 15 Israelis killed by Qassams since they were first launched in 2001.
I haven't forgotten that 15 lives are a drop in the blood-stained bucket compared to the 1,300 Gazans killed during the recent operation, much less the Israeli-Palestinian conflict's overall death toll.
But if you scorn the fears and anxieties of the vast majority of Israeli Jews and their sympathizers and reject their strategies for self-defense as barbarism, you harden the ideological battle lines that help sustain the turmoil in the Holy Land. For all their good intentions, that's what the members of Common Ground did last Thursday night.
William Martin '10 is a history concentrator from Seattle, Washington.
