The eventful appearance of the presidents of three major American universities before a Congressional committee underlines the strong tensions that the Israel-Hamas conflict has brought to the surface.
I am visiting Harvard while the place is at the heart of a political storm caused by this war which inflames passions. Everything is calm on campus as exams approach, but the administration is on a tightrope.
Provost Claudine Gay was in Washington on Tuesday and, along with her counterparts from MIT and the University of Pennsylvania, weathered a barrage of criticism and attacks from Republican lawmakers who rarely miss an opportunity to inflame partisan tensions.
A war with murky moral issues
In the wake of Hamas’ terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians – including acts of incredible cruelty against children, women and the elderly – it was clear that an Israeli response against Hamas was morally justified. .
After two months of bombing and more than 15,000 Palestinian deaths, the vast majority of them innocent civilians, it is now just as justified to say that this response has gone beyond the limits. We would expect better from a democratic state.
It is this moral vagueness that has unleashed passions between defenders of Israel’s right to exist in peace and those who demand the same right for Palestinians, a debate that has inflamed university campuses for a long time.
Populism and partisan politics
This debate is intertwined with other no less sharp divisions. For example, the presence of three representatives of elitist institutions allowed Republican elected officials to give a distressing display of populism.
Nothing could be easier than showing off in front of an under-educated Republican electorate – who values ignorance to the point of worshiping Donald Trump – by bashing the backs of three women who personify elitism of large universities and, for some, their “wokism” (even if several of these Republican elected officials are themselves graduates of these institutions and come from privileged families).
A seed of truth
It is not untrue that the support of a certain left for the Palestinian cause has degenerated since October 7 into more or less open support for Hamas and its objective of annihilating Israel. It is also true that this support sometimes takes the form of harassment – even attacks – against Jews, on campuses and elsewhere.
It is therefore a golden opportunity for the Republicans to forget their links with the anti-Semitic far right to try to seduce Jewish voters (and donors) by accusing the entire left (and therefore the Democrats) of anti-Semitism.
It’s pure partisan recovery, but the episode still underlines the drift of a certain intellectual left, infatuated with the new fashion of “intersectionality”, for whom the defense of an oppressed group justifies the worst excesses. .
In the United States as elsewhere, major universities do their best to maintain a semblance of respect for free speech and healthy debate of ideas, but they do not always succeed and it is usually the right, sometimes the extreme right, which emerges as a political winner.