Tensions spill across universities like Columbia and Harvard as students on each side accuse the other of a kind of bloodlust
To one side, Columbia students stood silently, wrapped in the blue and white of Israel as they gripped pictures of the murdered and abducted. Across the grass and brick divide, a slightly larger cohort of students chanted “Free, free Palestine.”
The faultline between the two ran along the claim by each that the other was pursuing a kind of bloodlust – a charge that has divided university campuses across America in the wake of the bloody Hamas attack on Israeli communities and Israel’s ongoing military assault on Gaza.
Reactions within US universities to the killing of at least 1,300 Israelis and the abduction of about 100 more have swung from celebration of the Hamas assault as a legitimate act of resistance to occupation to condemnation along with a demand that it not be used to ignore the deaths of Palestinians killed in Israel’s retaliation on Gaza.
Both governments (Israel and Hamas) are driven by an urge to seek more power by claiming land and killing their “enemies”. The populace are witting and unwitting pawns of that. I am not surprised people back the Israeli government with the amount of propaganda being put forth and I’m not surprised that people who have been murdered and had their homes destroyed for decades are willing to tacitly support the only group that seems like it can fight back. Desperate people don’t make rational decisions.
