Finding moral clarity on campus about the Hamas-Israeli War (Robert Reich)

[LearnedHand]

(Subtitle: Seven basic principles)

Last weekend, I met with a group of students to talk about what’s happening in Israel and Gaza. Some were Jewish, some were Palestinian, one was Israeli, some were from other nations in the Middle East.

The purpose of the meeting was to see what they could agree on, morally.

[snip]

1. What Hamas did on October 7 was morally despicable. (Some of the students wanted to explain why Hamas did it — about the accumulated grievances and gruesome history suffered by many Palestinians, especially those in Gaza — but they finally came around to distinguishing between an explanation and a justification. In the end, even those who understood why Hamas did what it did on October 7 agreed that the killings and kidnappings of innocent civilians were not morally justifiable.)

[snip]

3. What the Israeli government has done since then in Gaza is also morally despicable. Some students initially wanted to defend Israel by saying that after October 7, Israelis could not feel safe as long as Hamas existed, and therefore Hamas had to be rooted out. This precipitated a discussion about how Hamas could be rooted out without the killing of innocent civilians, including large numbers of children. Which got us to our next principle.

The seven principles are spot on, and Robert Reich is a national treasure. I highly recommend the whole article.

https://open.substack.com/pub/robertreich/p/moral-clarity-on-campus-about-the

[Autumn]

1. Happy to recommend. Robert Reich is indeed a national treasure.

[LearnedHand]

2. I so appreciate his framing of this exercise:

I list them here — along with the process we went through — in hopes that they might be helpful to you in thinking about and discussing this ongoing tragedy.

[ms liberty]

3. K&R. He is so good at what he does. You're right, he is a treasure n/t

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