On Feb. 5, two events were held within hours of each other at Yale Law School; each reflecting a radically different understanding of reality. The first event, sponsored by Yale Law Students for Justice in Palestine — or YLSJP — was titled “Defense for Children International–Palestine v. Biden.” It featured lawyers and plaintiffs who sued President Biden and others in his administration to hold them “accountable for [their] role in the Israeli army’s genocide in Gaza.” The second event, sponsored by the deputy dean of the Law School and organized by Law Students for Israel — or LSI, an organization of which I am a member — was titled “A Conversation with an IDF Soldier: An Insider’s Perspective on the Israel-Hamas War.”
The events were markedly different from the start. The event advertised by YLSJP went smoothly. Despite the event’s content, charging the United States with assisting the “crime of crimes,” many students were excited to join and participate. In the days leading up to the event, a range of student groups showed support for the event by co-sponsoring. These groups included the Middle Eastern and North African Law Students Association, the Women of Color Collective, the Yale Society of International Law and the Black Law Students Association. At the event, the room was filled with around 100 students.
Promoting LSI’s event was much harder. Over 15 students hung up signs on the law school’s walls reading “No IDF on Campus,” even though nearly all the Israeli students in the law school served in the IDF. Some signs included slogans such as “Genocide is not self-defense” or “War Criminals Aren’t Welcome.” A letter circulated among students and YLSJP’s social media page challenged the administration for allowing the event. While I was not responsible for coordinating this event, I — as a board member of LSI — became painfully aware of the internal difficulties and stress caused by all the surrounding circumstances at the school.
The campaign to shut down the event did not stop there. Before the event, many students protested the event. They shamed people for supporting genocide and eating sushi while people starved in Gaza. Many of these protesters participated in the YLSJP event just a few hours earlier where lunch was served. The LSI event had multiple security and administrators present, and an announcement about school policy against disrupting events was read to ensure order. Despite the YLSJP’s claims of Palestinian speech being suppressed on campus, all these features were noticeably absent from the YLSJP event.
The events also displayed stark differences in grappling with the difficult realities of war. The YLSJP event, which focused on charging the United States with assisting Israel in committing genocide, spent almost no time explaining how their analysis of the facts gathered on the ground led to that conclusion. The speakers did not discuss the complexities of urban warfare, International Humanitarian Law, or how Hamas cynically embeds itself into civilian structures. Hamas was not mentioned at all until one Israeli student questioned whether Israel’s stated goal of eliminating an entrenched terror group holding civilians hostage is relevant to the genocide analysis. The speakers’ responses were dismissive and elicited snapping from much of the crowd, as if this were a game where their team scored some points by putting down an opponent.
At the LSI event, the protesting students displayed no interest in hearing what the speaker — an IDF reservist — had to say. At the beginning of the event, a small group of students placed signs on their laptops and propped them up in an attempt to dismiss the speaker before they heard anything he had to say. A few minutes into his presentation, these students disruptively left in unison. They apparently had nothing to learn from someone who had been in Gaza just weeks ago. Why listen when you already stand on the right side of history? Fortunately, many other students stayed to ask questions — a substantial portion of which criticized the IDF’s campaign in Gaza and its human cost — in the spirit of open inquiry and dialogue.
The IDF soldier, unlike the students, knew firsthand the tragedy and complexity of war and death. This was not merely something he read in a textbook or a political position. He lived and witnessed the horrors of war and death, and said that “every civilian casualty is terrible and unacceptable.” He left his family on Oct. 7 to protect his country from the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust — carnage he witnessed with his own eyes. He warned students, even those that might downplay or deny what Hamas did, against watching the films documenting those atrocities for risk of permanent scarring. He spoke about the responsibility each soldier has because taking a life is a matter of utmost seriousness. He repeated that IDF’s difficult goal is to destroy Hamas, who vow to wipe out Israel and the Jews, and liberate Gazans from Hamas’s tyrannical reign. All this was “for the sake that one day, [Israelis] will be living in peace with our Palestinian neighbors.” In response to students who challenged the morality of Israel’s actions, he acknowledged that the cost of dead innocents is always too high and that war is deadly and destructive, but underscored that it was Hamas who forced this terrible reality upon the people of Israel and Gaza.
There is always much to learn from other perspectives. At the YLSJP event, it was important to hear about the great pain and suffering Gazan people are enduring and to be aware of the terrible cost this war is having. The horrible number of civilian deaths, the instability and chaos for those in Gaza, and the feelings of pain, anger, and despair it has engendered are all essential for any discussion about the war. To ignore any of the weighty issues in this matter belittles the importance of the topic and leaves us poorer in our understanding. However, the slogans and facile analyses offered by the speakers present at the YLSJP event, and their denigration of serious questions asked in good faith, do not get us further in trying to understand these fraught and sensitive issues. Instead, they continue to sow divisiveness and discord.
If we pursue questions with empathy and seriously listen to each other, we can move in the right direction. At the very least, we must understand the reasons we hold fundamentally opposing views and inquire whether any common ground may be found.
AVI FEINSOD is a third-year student at the Yale Law School. Contact him at avi.feinsod@yale.edu.