The Israel-Hamas war has set off fights over official statements by universities, business leaders, and towns. Jonathan Chait writes those statements are unnecessary.
On October 9, two days after Hamas launched a terrorist attack in Israel, Harvard University issued a formal statement. “We write to you today heartbroken by the death and destruction unleashed by the attack by Hamas that targeted citizens in Israel this weekend, and by the war in Israel and Gaza now under way.” Supporters of Israel reacted with anger. “The delayed @Harvard leadership statement fails to meet the needs of the moment,” wrote Harvard economist and former president Lawrence Summers. “Why can’t we find anything approaching the moral clarity of Harvard statements after George Floyd’s death or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine when terrorists kill, rape and take hostage hundreds of Israelis attending a music festival?”
In response to the backlash, Harvard president Claudine Gay issued a follow-up statement the next day, saying, “As the events of recent days continue to reverberate, let there be no doubt that I condemn the terrorist atrocities perpetrated by Hamas. Such inhumanity is abhorrent, whatever one’s individual views of the origins of longstanding conflicts in the region.”
Rather than end the complaints about Harvard’s position on the Middle East, this statement merely angered a different set of complainants. This month, pro-Palestinian protesters occupied a building and demanded, among other things, “an immediate call by Harvard’s administration for a cease-fire.”
The war between Israel and Hamas has exposed an ideological schism on the left that had been growing beneath the surface for many years. For that reason, some of the bitter conflict that is turning progressive Americans against one another was unavoidable.
But a significant proportion of the domestic strife we are currently experiencing is completely avoidable. It is a product of the newfound expectation that institutions will issue statements about national and world events. The solution is to simply stop making such statements.
Institutions have been making statements about issues outside their purview for a long time. But the murder of Floyd was a break point. The video was so ghastly, everybody saw it, and it came against the backdrop of a pandemic and a president who had routinely shattered long-standing social norms.
Donald Trump not only attacked minorities in nakedly racist terms, he openly refused to treat people and even regions that didn’t support him as equal citizens. Presidents traditionally alternated between dual roles of party leader and symbolic head of state, but Trump essentially abdicated the latter role.
