It is the intimacy of violence that shocks us. It shouldn’t. It does so only in relation to our ignorance of the world.
Many students here, not all, pride themselves on a commitment to public service, while declaring that they hate politics.
But politics matters.
Politics is the process of deciding who decides the big questions for our chosen communities of identity and our larger civic one as citizens of one country or another, one culture or another, one creed or another – or some mash-up of all. It is this process that decides the standards and expectations you come here to study and to master. Under different political leaders those standards would be different, have been different, have been both more and less humane. What has changed those standards over time is politics, the people granted the responsibility to use power to set the standards of public action.
What I can say about the particular violence in Israel-Palestine today is only that there is no easy way out.
What you see on your phone screens is the choices of political leaders made real by the decisions of men, almost always men, to carry them out to the ethical standards the men, almost always men, in power have set. The leaders of Hamas have chosen terror in order to force the leaders of Israel to choose force. The risk of a spiraling out of control to Iran and elsewhere is real. When kids are taught that Jews are animals, some subset of men (almost always men) will grow up to see terror as glory.
But you live in a moment of your lives before you will be asked to carry out careers according to the moral narratives of political power. You still have a chance to learn the questions you’ll need to carry with you and use at the moment of decision you will eventually face. It doesn’t matter if you choose security fields, finance, healthcare, or education. You will need good questions, the best questions, to guide you when there is no longer an easy way out. Find those questions.
You have a luxury before you. You have time – to study and to reflect with each other. But as a teacher what I see is that too many of you avoid the intense grappling with a subject that is required for real study. To be a real student is to incur a sacrifice on the altar of learning. It’s a sacrifice of time and a sacrifice of comfort. Get below the screen. Get uncomfortable in your ignorance and do something to change it.
There are things you can do here, things that not only those interested in politics or security should take the time for.
Login with friends to a Brehm-Boucher Speaker Series lecture and learn from people who have been at the heart of these events.
Read deeply. Read outside your comfort zone. Read Edward Said on Palestine and Hezbollah’s manifesto; watch Shoah and read Ellie Weisel on the Holocaust. Go to the University’s Holocaust Memorial every Spring and hear from survivors. Read Mein Kampf and ask yourself how it was people could come to believe it. Read Nelson Mandela on Apartheid, watch Amandla (whose director came to UNH), read MLK and Ibram Kendi. Learn about the Black Panthers’ food programs and history in New Haven.
Read and listen to the arguments. They’re by no means equal, and in no way do I condone the terrorism of Hamas or Hezbollah. But I also despise the cynicism and corruption of Benjamin Netanyahu’s politics.
If not these questions about racism, violence, and politics, then others. The point is to learn deeply for once in your life, for maybe the only time in your life when you’ll have the freedom to do so. This is a gift, a luxury. Don’t waste it.
You must pick something to learn. Get close to something hard to know, embrace it and learn its questions if you want to someday find answers to the questions that matter most to yourself and your communities. You must sacrifice time and effort to do the work of learning, and ease and comfort to attain the fruits of it. Start here. Start now.
