The war in Israel and Gaza has already taken a huge human toll. On Friday leading experts from Harvard and beyond discussed the intractably complicated questions around what moderator Tarek Masoud, the Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Governance, described as the latest, bloody chapter in the “seemingly never-ending” conflict between Israelis and Palestinians: What happened? What does it mean? And what comes next?
The panel included Edward Djerejian, the former U.S. ambassador to Israel and Syria and former assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs; Shai Feldman, the Raymond Frankel Professor of Israeli Politics and Society at Brandeis University; and Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland.
The event was a reminder of the role of an institution like the Kennedy School, Dean Doug Elmendorf said in introducing the panel. “I think it’s the responsibility of a university, it’s the responsibility of the Kennedy School at this time, to take on hard issues and to do so with rigor, substance, and evidence, but also with compassion,” he said. “Compassion for people for whom these issues are not abstract. They’re not things one reads about from afar.”
At the end of a week in which disagreements over the Israeli-Palestinian issue on campuses all over America spilled over into something more, the event provided a welcome, if somber, occasion to provide, in the words of Telhami, explanation but not justification. “If we don't explain,” he said, “then we are doomed.”
Here are excerpts of the participants' remarks, lightly edited:
Tarek Masoud, the Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Governance and director of the Middle East Initiative at the Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
Whatever one’s take or position on the thorny issues that constitute the seemingly never-ending struggle between Israelis and Palestinians, the indiscriminate murder of civilians, the taking of hostages, the threats to execute those hostages have caused all of us to shudder in horror. But as we mourn the dead innocents of the state of Israel, we also fear what is to come for the people of Gaza. The Netanyahu government has shut off Gaza's water supply and its electricity. It’s ordered a c