Zev Farber

There are simply too many data points that have accrued at this point showing that these activists are literally pro-Hamas - and thus, yes, in favor of the mass-killing of Israeli civilians, which is Hamas’s fundamental impulse and strategy, which it has done repeatedly and vows to do again - for any of us to pretend otherwise. Those among the campus activists who don’t support the deaths of civilians, and I have to think there are a great many, are remaining silent as their brethren in the encampments raise this banner time and again. Perhaps they think they don’t matter enough to the reality on the ground for what they say to matter, that my children are safe from them and so it doesn’t really matter if they telegraph a desire to see my kids murdered. If that’s the thinking that allows for this rhetoric, then they’re absolutely right. They can’t harm me. But they can harm Palestinians terribly. The Israeli psyche, not the American college campus, is the central arena in which the fight for Palestinian self-determination will be decided. The Palestinians’ single greatest strategic predicament - follow me here if you care about the Palestinian future - is that factions like Hamas have convinced the vast majority of Israelis, including those on the left who yearn for Palestinian self-determination, that they will transform any step toward liberation into a bloodbath for Israeli children. That’s what happened in the second intifada. It’s the end result of Hamas’s takeover of Gaza. And now the only thing Israelis see coming out of these encampments - the thing that actually gets broadcast to Israelis from these protests - is that even Western left-wing support for the Palestinian cause is functionally (and often also explicitly) support for the death of Israeli children. It’s hard to exaggerate how catastrophic this is for Palestinians. Imagine a best-case scenario for the anti-israel movement: The Israeli economy cut in half and Israel’s high-tech elites fleeing en masse to Silicon Valley. Even then, Israelis will fight and win wars to prevent Palestinian factions like Hamas from holding territory. Palestinian self-determination cannot advance as long as ordinary Israelis see it as code for their extermination - i.e., as Hamas sees it. Any activist for Palestine who doesn’t understand that is part of the generations-old and so far continuing failure of the Palestinian cause. I know they’re not listening to me. But it’s worth creating the paper trail they can follow when they go looking for the reasons for their failure down the road.