From the Group | There is no such thing as a justification for terrorism

The killing of civilians isn’t justified, whether or not by Israel or Hamas. The opinion penned in The Stanford Every day by Stanford College students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) on the present Israel-Palestine battle is vile and despicable.

As the nice Martin Luther King Jr. intoned in his Nobel speech, “[v]iolence as a manner of attaining racial justice is each impractical and immoral. […] It solves no social downside: it merely creates new and extra sophisticated ones. Violence is impractical as a result of it’s a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. It’s immoral as a result of it seeks to humiliate the opponent fairly than win his understanding: it seeks to annihilate fairly than convert. Violence is immoral as a result of it thrives on hatred fairly than love. It destroys neighborhood and makes brotherhood unimaginable.”

Whereas I take deep problem with the therapy of the individuals of the Gaza Strip over these previous many years, and staunchly supported their trigger a few years earlier than that place was “fashionable,” there isn’t a justification for Hamas’s terrorism. Hamas has massacred Jewish males, defiled and raped Jewish ladies — parading their our bodies in entrance of jeering crowds — and littered the streets with the our bodies of Jewish youngsters. In Article Seven of their 1988 constitution Hamas wrote, “[t]he Day of Judgement is not going to come about till Moslems struggle the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will disguise behind stones and timber. The stones and timber will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there’s a Jew behind me, come and kill him.” Hamas’s dream is to not expel Israel from the Gaza Strip, nor even to exterminate Israel as a nation. Their dream is the extermination of the Jewish individuals. There have been many Israelis who advocated for the lifting of the Gaza blockade. What number of of them did Hamas homicide? Whereas the Israel Protection Forces have, at instances, dedicated grave injustices towards the individuals of the Gaza Strip, there isn’t a equivalence right here.

SJP excuses little one homicide, rape and terrorism as freedom-fighting. The SJP’s article attracts a false parallel with Ukrainian troopers who’re bravely combating to guard their nation from autocracy — maybe SJP believes Russia’s propaganda in regards to the Azov Brigade however takes no affront. SJP paints Israelis as colonialists, ignoring that the Jewish individuals have suffered persecution and genocides for 1000’s of years, ignoring that Israel is a nation besieged by antisemitic powers. Hamas is funded by Iran by way of Hezbollah and by the Gulf States. Lastly, allow us to not overlook the therapy of ladies by Hamas. SJP, below a pretend shroud of progressivism, defends a gaggle which, in 2021, decided that ladies shouldn’t be allowed to journey freely with out the permission of a male guardian.

That SJP would name upon the Stanford neighborhood to “educate themselves” is frankly insulting on condition that their article displays a scarcity of compassion and a poor understanding of historical past. To grasp the present battle, one should perceive that Hamas doesn’t acknowledge Israel’s proper to exist, as they reaffirmed in 2017. SJP rejects the notion of any long-term, peaceable answer. Whereas Israel bears some accountability for the failure of long-term negotiations, Hamas has, at quite a few instances, incinerated peaceable dialogue. As an illustration, in 2003 Hamas ended a cease-fire with the suicide bombing of a bus in Jerusalem.  

That college students at this college might be so inconsiderate and base as to defend terrorism, sitting safely of their dorm rooms and dwelling privileged lives, speaks poorly of American society and of social research departments, which have evidently outfitted college students with the language to debate colonialism, however a paucity of understanding.

An anecdote: tucked away below my mom’s desk is an previous field of household images, handed right down to us by my nice grandmother. A bunch of great individuals sit in that field, individuals my mom was robbed of the chance to know by the Nazis and the German focus camps the place they died torturous deaths. Most of their tales my nice grandmother took to her grave. It was too painful to speak about them.

I urge the members of SJP to rethink their place and never, led astray by good intentions, to don the attitudes of Nazis and terrorists. I might fairly welcome them as brothers and sisters.

Benjamin Driscoll is a Ph.D. pupil within the laptop science division at Stanford College.