Here's my message to the Willamette University students who are occupying a campus building in protest of the horrific death and destruction being inflicted on the people of Gaza by Israel:
Like so many student protests of the past, including those I took part in during my own college days (1966-71) in opposition to the Vietnam War, at first many will criticize you as misguided rabble-rousers. Then, with time, history will show that you were right and your critics were wrong.
What are you right about? Many things.
How Israel is killing tens of thousands of innocent Gaza civilians needlessly. How Israel is blocking sufficient humanitarian aid from entering Gaza, causing tremendous suffering. How the United States is failing to put enough pressure on Israel to end that country's hugely misguided policy of avenging 1,200 deaths at the hands of Hamas on October 7, 2023 by killing an estimated 14,000 children in Gaza.
This is a photo of one of them, Karam.
Karam died not from a bullet or a bomb, but from complications of malnutrition, because Israel is using starvation as an act of war, which is likely a war crime. I learned about this boy from an opinion piece by Nicholas Kristof in today's New York Times, "One Photo That Captures the Loss in Gaza."
I'll share it in full, because what Kristof says deserves to be read as widely as possible.
An American surgeon who volunteered in Gaza sent me a photo that sears me with its glimpse of overwhelming grief: A woman mourns her young son.
I’ve known the surgeon, Dr. Sam Attar, a professor at Northwestern University School of Medicine, for a decade. He has worked in war zones around the world, from Ukraine to Iraq to Syria, but Gaza has been particularly harrowing for him, in part because so many children have suffered or died.
He performed amputations and other orthopedic surgeries recently at Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza. He was preparing to go into the operating room one day when a woman called him over and asked him to photograph her young son, Karam, in his bed in the I.C.U. Sam went over and only then realized that the boy was dead.
“Every time staff wanted to cover him fully with a blanket, she would flip it back and say, ‘No!’” Sam told me. “And she would start talking to him, asking him where he went.”
The nurses and other doctors who were in the I.C.U. that day said that Karam died of complications from malnutrition. The United Nations confirms that Gazan children have starved to death.
The nurses wanted to remove Karam’s body after he died an hour earlier, but his mother wouldn’t allow it. In her grief, she told Sam that Karam was a prince and she wanted Sam to share the boy’s photo. Perhaps she thought this was a way of commemorating her son.
I’ve criticized the way Israel has conducted the war in Gaza and President Biden’s strong support for it, for a child is killed or injured in the war every 10 minutes, according to the United Nations. More than 14,000 children have been killed in the war, according to the Gaza health authorities. But that’s a number; this photo captures a preventable tragedy.
As I argue that it’s time to end this war, I think this photo has a persuasive power greater than my words, so I’ve given my column space over to this image. As we discuss Gaza, let’s keep in mind that the war unfolds through lives like Karam’s.
Here’s the photo, a reminder to us all of what’s at stake.
The Willamette University students don't need that reminder. The rest of us do, because too many people are characterizing the nationwide student protests as not understanding how awful the Hamas attack on Israel was, and how Israel has a right to defend itself.
Actually, almost all of the students understand that perfectly well. What they don't understand is why the United States is supplying the weapons Israel is using to kill innocent people like Karam while demanding Israel do more to protect the lives of civilians in Gaza.
I don't understand that either. That's why protests are so important. Someone, somehow, has to drum some sense into the thick skulls of President Biden and Secretary of State Blinken to use the leverage our country has over Israel to bring the suffering of people in Gaza to an end.
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