For the last 19 months, Gaza has provided an object lesson in human inhumanity. Between Hamas’s massacre on October 7, the bloodiest day for Jews since the Holocaust, and the ongoing disaster that has engulfed the Strip’s Palestinians, it’s hard to comprehend the toll of shattered lives and broken homes. Yet if the grimness only looks set to continue—Israel’s draconian restrictions on the flow of aid into Gaza, made even tighter since the collapse of the 15 January ceasefire it signed with Hamas, means hunger and malnutrition, and the spread of infectious diseases, of which has been no shortage in Gaza, could become even worse, hard though that is to imagine.
Having jettisoned the ceasefire accord on 18 March and resumed its war, Israel hopes to reoccupy the Strip, and perhaps even reintroduce settlers.
While few in the West rejected Israel’s right to retaliate following the October 7 atrocities, the ferocity and duration of its war of retribution have turned public opinion in the West against Israel as never before. The protests on American college campuses have been all but shut down following pressure from the Trump administration, Congress, powerful pro-Israel organisations, and wealthy donors. Even so, they illustrated the outrage produced by the relentless killing in Gaza.
It’s common to hear that the demonstrations—on and off campuses—sprang from antisemitism or “pro-Hamas” ideology. This claim ignores the reality that it was the humanitarian catastrophe created by Israel’s war that ignited the protests and that Jews have been the most statistically overrepresented community in the antiwar demonstrations. And on 8 May, 38 leaders from some of the most prominent American Jewish organisations, which have been Israel’s most stalwart supporters, took out a full-page ad in the New York Times to warn the Jewish community against permitting Trump to undermine universities, civil liberties, the freedom of speech, and the rule of law, all in the name of stamping out antisemitism.
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