The Student Newspaper's view on the war in the Middle East: Neutrality is a morally defensible stand
By Qinglang Wu, November 2023
The tragedy in the Middle East continues to unfold. In recent one month, there have been several large protests on this campus.
Some have claimed that Hamas is fighting a justifiable "anticolonial struggle" and have blamed Israel for the savage Hamas invasion. Some are mourning for the innocent Israeli people who have been murdered by Hamas.
Many students are not from the Middle East and have never been in that land, much less experienced war. But the moment the war started, the moral anxiety of making a quick choice seemed to permeate this group of “outsiders”. For many students, they wanted to know whether to support Palestine or Israel. And which is the right side?
However, they don't have to take sides in this conflict. Because it is morally defensible to remain neutral when you cannot tell the truth.
It is very difficult to try to figure out the issues that are happening in the present. Because fake news is all around.
In 2021, Ofir Gendelman, the spokesperson to the Arab media in the Israel Prime Minister's Office released a 28-second video showing militants in the Gaza Strip deliberately launching rockets in densely populated areas of Israel. If Israel were to fire back in defense, it would surely hurt the innocent people of Palestine, and then Israel would be accused of killing the innocent again.
This is undoubtedly accusing the militants in Gaza of using their own people as human shields. But this video is actually something that happened in Syria or Libya in 2018. Even officials release fake news.
On October 17, 2023, the New York Times published news of an explosion at a hospital in Gaza and headlined the story with a Hamas government official claiming that Israeli air strikes were the cause of the blast and that hundreds of people had been killed or injured. Both Israel and the Palestinians subsequently denied this fault, with Israel also accusing the story of misreporting the scope of the explosion and the party responsible.
In this media environment, it is understandable that the masses cannot see the truth. This is further complicated by the geopolitical entanglements and regional closures in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
The traditional media have to pay a huge cost in insisting and pursuing the truth, and their competitors don't care about that, because on social media, violence and hate content will always attract people's attention.
In this foggy situation, neutrality is tenable from a humanitarian point of view.
The issue of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has a long history, and the struggle of two groups over the same land cannot be directly reduced to a colonial war. But that happens to be the dominant narrative on major social media. Many people read three sentences and start attacking one group or another without understanding the complex issues behind them.
Choosing to be morally neutral means that we put empathy on the individual. When we look at the woman who was murdered and left half-naked at the Israel Music Festival, or at the shivering baby who has just been shelled, we have to set aside our most abstract judgment, which is to simply decide who is good and who is bad.
In the face of the loss of these lives, in the face of this tyrannical and unspeakable disaster, when we finally choose to speak, what we should be saying is that we are against all the indiscriminate slaughter of human beings from both sides and what we are questioning should be what kind of war machine brutally kills these living human lives.
Today we can speak out against Hamas massacres at music festivals, and tomorrow we can speak out against Israel's indiscriminate bombardment of Gaza, as long as it harms the basic principles of humanitarianism.
There's no need to get into the moral anxiety of a quick choice because you can't say absolutely whether it's fundamentally the Jews or the Palestinians who have justice.
Israeli writer Yossi Klein Halevi wrote in The Times of Israel: “To blame the occupation and its consequences wholly on Israel is to dismiss the history of Israeli peace offers and Palestinian rejection. To label Israel as one more colonialist creation is to distort the unique story of the homecoming of an uprooted people, a majority of whom were refugees from destroyed Jewish communities in the Middle East.”
But as Tony Judt said, moral scenarios should be taken apart. An Israeli soldier who is massacring ordinary civilians in Gaza is not having his crimes erased by the fact that his grandfather died in a concentration camp back in the day.
The people suffering in Gaza need to be supported, but the innocent masses murdered in Israel need justice just as much. The continuation of the war is abstract, but the realization that every person who dies because of the war is concrete and real.
Choosing neutrality is also a position and one that is morally defensible. When you can't see the truth, return to the individual, to humanitarianism, to mourning and defiance for all those who don't deserve this suffering.
