As liberal arts college students, we are constantly reminded of the importance of education in life. We are told that education will help us make opportunities for ourselves in the future, but more significantly, that it will help us build a better world that values human dignity. A world in which human rights and equality apply to all people, not just a selected few. In recent news, that has not been the case and we have been disheartened witnessing the silence of our college. It has been heartbreaking to witness so much time spent on arguing over semantics when there is a potential genocide happening. Neutrality in the face of such atrocity is still choosing a side. One that remains silent while humanity’s worst injustices are being committed. We, as students, do not choose neutrality. We do not choose genocide. We do not choose to remain silent. We choose to speak out against injustices and stand up for what is right.
With that in mind, we write this statement to affirm the rightful presence of ALL students and their right to express their views and demand actions.
As members of the Muslim Students Association at Connecticut College, we stand in unwavering solidarity with the Palestinian people in their struggle for justice, freedom, and determination in their quest for human dignity and equality. We reject the college’s selective language describing events in Palestine and the lack of support for the many Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim members in our college community. Connecticut College always mentioning it as “Hamas-Israeli War” (Email from the Interim President Wong on February 13, 2024) or “War happening at Gaza” (Email from DEI Office on March 4, 2024, December 19, 2023) ignoring the fact that it is not a war, but rather a war on all Gazans including women and children, and a potential genocide as the International Court of Justice determined.
It is essential to recognize that what is happening in Palestine is not simply a “war,” as some may characterize it. The International Court of Justice states that it could amount to a genocide; a systematic campaign of extermination targeting the Palestinian people based on their ethnicity and identity. This is not a religious issue; Churches, monasteries, and Christian Palestinians alike are equally suffering the effects of settler colonialism. Connecticut College must stop the use of oversimplifying language around the ongoing genocide and instead acknowledge the nuance of the conflict as more than just the “Hamas-Israeli war”.
We are also in support of the Palestine Solidarity encampments across the United States. We stand firmly against police brutality. We believe in power to the students who are educated and commit to their right to peacefully protest. In one of the Guardian’s articles, it shows that 99% of the protest has been peaceful. Still, evident enough, pro-Palestinian student and faculty protesters nationwide are being subjected to violence, and their narrative (asking for ceasefire) is being hijacked and we stand in support of their efforts to advocate awareness and divestment from apartheid regimes.
We cannot turn a blind eye to the ongoing atrocities perpetrated against the Palestinian people for over 207 days. No amount of justification can overturn the reality that at least 15,780 innocent children have lost their lives. We as intellectual students and human beings will not accept this brutal collective punishment.
We condemn, in the strongest terms, the bombing of hospitals, places meant to be sanctuaries of healing and refuge. We condemn attacks on universities, with the disheartening fact that no universities in Gaza are left unbombed. These acts of barbarity not only violate the most fundamental principles of humanity but also exacerbate the suffering of an already besieged population. We condemn war crimes and violations of international law, including the blocking of humanitarian aid, that the state of Israel has continuously committed. We condemn the United States’ complicity in these atrocities.
We demand an immediate ceasefire in Palestine to halt the senseless violence and loss of innocent lives. The ongoing bombardment of Gaza and the military aggression against Palestinian civilians must come to an end. Every moment of delay in achieving a ceasefire means more lives lost and more families shattered.
We affirm the right of the Palestinian people to live in dignity and security, free from occupation and oppression. We support their right to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in United Nations Resolution 194. We call for an end to the blockade of Gaza and the dismantlement of illegal settlements in the West Bank.
We, as concerned members of the Connecticut College community, advocate for transparency, justice, and solidarity with the Palestinian people. In alignment with these principles, we present the following demands and requests:
● We demand that Connecticut College disclose financial investments and divest from all companies and institutions that profit from Israeli settler colonial apartheid and occupation in Palestine, including weapons, technology and surveillance, and construction companies.
● We urge our college community to stand with us in solidarity with the Palestinian people.
● We call on our peers, faculty, and administration to take concrete actions to support justice and human rights for all, including divestment from companies complicit in the occupation.
● We demand that the college provide an acknowledgement that explicitly protects academic freedom. We want more free and safe dialogues among students.
● Lastly, we call for the promotion of Palestinian voices and narratives on campus. We want more productive dialogues on campus through which we can educate our students from different beliefs across the campus about the injustice and to learn about their experiences.
In solidarity,
Muslim Students Association (2023-2024)
This statement is supported and endorsed by the following clubs and organizations:
Connecticut College Feminist Coalition ( 2023-2024)
People of Color Alliance (2023-2024)
Queer, Trans, Intersex, and People of Color (2023-2024)
Middle East and North African Alliance (2023-2024)
Las Voces Unidas (2023-2024)
Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanx de Aztlán (2023-2024)
Asian Students In Action (2023-2024)
Black Student Union (2023-2024)
Amalthos, Connecticut College Ultimate Disc Club (2023-2024)
Men of Color Alliance (2023-2024)
African Student Association (2023-2024)
International Students Association (2023-2024)
Wig and Candles Student-Run Theater (2023-2024)
N2O Improv Comedy (2023-2024)
Women of Color Plus Collective (2023-2024)
*This is an evolving list
One must commend the moral earnestness and activism reflected in the student “statement of solidarity” published here and thus inviting discussion. Yet we would be doing its authors and many signatories (15+ student groups!) a disservice, indeed failing to give them due respect, did we not subject the statement to the “critical thinking” that Connecticut College boasts about teaching here. Thus in the spirit of constructive engagement I attempt that here. (I am brief here, but happy to engage in further good-faith conversation.)
One is moved by the earnestness but saddened to see that its moral concern does not extend to the Israeli and Jewish lives lost from October 7 onwards and for the 130+ people currently held hostage by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, including Americans and children. Nor to the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who have also been displaced from or lost their homes and the millions who have been bombarded relentlessly with 16,000+ homicidal rockets and missiles. It rightly condemns the war and its concomitant destruction and loss of civilian life, yet strangely omits the proximal and distal causes, hence justification, of this war—not merely the barbaric Hamas massacre of October 7 but the five wars Hamas has started since violently taking over Gaza in 2007 and the thousands of Israelis Hamas has murdered since launching with its openly genocidal Islamic supremacist charter in 1988. It rightly condemns the destruction of hospitals and universities yet strangely omits the war crime militarization of those sites by Hamas that by international law removes their protections and justifies their targeting. In fact it omits mention of Hamas altogether, its genocidal aims and its many murderous actions (including against its own civilians), except to complain that the College called it the “Hamas-Israel” war. That is a neat trick: if we pretend Hamas does not exist, then it looks like Israel is just waltzing in and blowing things up for no reason. Who wouldn’t be against that?
But Hamas does exist. And it is very relevant to understanding what is happening now, and what must be done in order for there to be something like a fair resolution to the ongoing conflict that might actually involve something like justice for both peoples.
In the same vein there is the sometimes tendentious depiction of reality, shared, perhaps not coincidentally, with the faculty solidarity statement that appeared to coincide with it.
Even accepting at face value the casualty numbers that Hamas itself generates (which one almost surely should not) there is nothing remotely resembling a “genocide” occurring in Gaza. There is a war; both sides are fighting; civilian casualties are each one a tragedy but there has yet to be a war without them. Anyone disseminating this inflammatory misrepresentation reveals their cards: they are not motivated by “saving lives” but by supporting Hamas and its quest to destroy the one sliver of a Jewish state in the world, along with the murder and ethnic cleansing of seven million Jews that Hamas itself says that will entail. For it is Hamas that seeks genocide of a civilian population, openly in its charter and in literally every public remark since October 7 (“We will do October 7 again and again, as many times as necessary!”); it is Hamas that guarantees a forever war, by their own principles, words, and deeds; and it is in fact in an act of anti-genocide that Israel is attempting to remove this genocidal threat, and rescue its hostages. It is a just war fought overwhelmingly by just means. There is literally no country in the world that would not respond to a similar active genocidal threat and perpetrator on its borders as Israel has. If you actually want to “save lives” you must remove the party endlessly promoting war. And that requires condemning Hamas, not supporting it.
Remember, the war could stop today: Hamas could release the hostages. It could have stopped months ago: Hamas could have released the hostages. Many people could get behind that ceasefire. But Hamas itself has rejected at least a half-dozen absurdly generous ceasefires, including just this past week, an odd thing to do if its people were facing genocide. It rejected them because it wishes to continue fighting, because it believes it can destroy Israel. Those who (like this statement) simply demand a “ceasefire”—without demanding that Hamas return the hostages, and without demanding that Hamas cease its forever war against Israel—are demanding merely that Israel cease while Hamas continues to fire. That isn’t “saving lives” but supporting war, supporting the Hamas war effort and goals, and therefore supporting the murder and ethnic cleansing of seven million Jews.
Israelis may perhaps be forgiven for not consenting to go along with that.
The war is terrible. All war is terrible. The 100 other conflicts going on in the world right now are all terrible, including those involving orders of magnitude more casualties and more displacement and more suffering than this war, yet for some reason not one person on this campus seems to care about. (Just in the past week there are reports of Turkey bombing Kurds, of Russia bombing civilians and civilian infrastructure in Ukraine, of the tens of thousands dead in Myanmar and millions displaced, of the hundreds of thousands dead in Sudan and millions displaced and in active famine, etc. Crickets.) But, curiously, when Jews defend themselves against an openly genocidal group perpetrating repeated genocidal acts for four decades, culminating in a barbaric slaughter directly targeting babies, children, pregnant women, disabled, and elderly, the world, and this campus, and this statement, erupt, accusing the Jews of genocide. In so doing they obscenely transform a Jewish effort to protect Jews from genocide into the evil perpetration of genocide—and in so doing advancing the genocidal program against the Jews.
One appreciates the moral earnestness of this statement, then, but perhaps not those moral conclusions.
You’re literally Jewish. 14,000+ kids killed by Israel and you’re defending them. No one is saying the people who were killed on October 7th don’t matter. No one is defending Hamas for killing innocent Jews.
What we are upset about is the fact that Israel is committing war crimes, killing thousands of innocent women and children, and you’re here defending them. You’re not giving American Jews a good look. Where’s your humanity? Do you think their lives are worth less because they’re goyim?
I could not have said it better Professor Pessin. I would also add that Hamas and Iran have publicly proclaimed that they, too, stand in solidarity with the encampments. Why would any American or member of civilized society want to stand with Hamas and Iran?
Professor Pessin, you’re argument regarding the hyper-fixation of the general student body on “one sliver of a Jewish state in the world” is contradictory in itself as you are also extremely hyper-fixated on the small (but inherently wrong) civilian casualties and civilian hostages, compared to the over 40,000 civilian deaths in Palestine. You discuss the morality of the issue by stating that Hamas has killed “babies, children, pregnant women, disabled, and elderly”, but coincidentally your moral judgment disappears when Israeli forces killed more than 13,000 Palestinian children in Gaza. You critique us for not being able to think critically, I would hope that as a professor of philosophy, you would have critically thought that two wrongs don’t make a right.
Thanks so much for engaging. I appreciate your points, which are serious and merit a serious response, hence what follows—so thank you.
My concern about the “hyper-fixation” is that it reflects a bigoted double standard: no one cares when *far worse* things are happening elsewhere, they only care when Jews are defending themselves. No one even cares about Palestinian civilians suffering elsewhere either (look at how they’ve fared in Lebanon and Syria; world (and this campus) response: crickets). That suggests that what’s driving campus responses is not positive admirable concern for Palestinians (or for human rights) but negative bigoted concern against Jews. (That one “fixates” on the allegedly 40,000 dead in Gaza (see below) and ignores far larger numbers elsewhere is an indication of that.)
What’s absolutely fair, and I think you’re correctly getting at this, is to critique Israel’s conduct in this war, from the perspective of universal principles (such as ordinary morality and in particular from international law and human rights). But then one must equally critique Hamas’s conduct in this and all the previous wars it has started, and in its four-decade record of suicide bombings, terrorist attacks, and rockets, culminating in the barbaric October 7 slaughter. (For the record, Hamas openly and repeatedly violates every tenet of ordinary morality, international law, and human rights.) Curiously Hamas is entirely missing in the campus protests and conversations, in the student letter here, and in the faculty letter. And without Hamas in that conversation one removes the entire context and justification for Israeli actions, which is necessary for fairly critiquing its conduct.
I’m not sure why you think my “moral judgment disappears”: I acknowledged that civilian casualties are each one a tragedy and that the war is just terrible. I feel the agony of Palestinian civilian deaths, and especially children, as I feel that of Israeli (and Yemenite and Sudanese and Kurdish etc). You seem to, too, when you grant that the murder of Israelis was “inherently wrong.” But “moral judgment” requires making moral distinctions, and unfortunately there is a tremendous moral difference between the two sides. Hamas *targets* civilians; Israel targets Hamas, which by embedding itself among civilians and openly using its population as human shields (just this week they proclaimed, for maybe the dozenth time since October 7 that I’m aware of, how much they welcome the blood of their women and children), necessarily results in incidental civilian casualties. On October 7 Hamas intended to murder as many Jews as possible, and was limited only by its ability to do so; in response Israel has the ability to kill nearly every Gazan, but is limited only by its intention *not* to do so. Those facts alone—indisputable as far as I can see—distinguish the entities and the moral evaluation of their actions, the former being the one actually pursuing genocide (wrong) and the latter defending itself therefrom (not wrong). “Moral judgment” distinguishes the genocider from the one defending itself from genocide, thus regrettably compels the distinction in moral status between the civilian casualties. Each casualty is a heartbreaking tragedy, but one side, regrettably, has a moral justification the other lacks.
There is no country in the world that would not attempt to remove an ongoing active genocidal threat from its borders, not to mention rescue its hostages; by any universal principles universally applied, Israel is fighting a just war here, which, like every war, regrettably, involves civilian casualties.
The question now is whether Israel’s conduct in this war is adequately just, which is why it is fair, even necessary, to examine and critique it as you commendably do. Here we need some facts, and are hampered by the fact that Hamas controls the information that comes from Gaza and can report whatever it wants. You say “40,000 civilian casualties”; I’ve not seen anyone else claim that, so I’m curious about your source. Until this week the U.N. was reporting “35,000” total casualties (see link below)—numbers it takes directly from Hamas—and while Hamas doesn’t bother distinguishing civilians from fighters, surely no one believes that Israel has failed to kill a single Hamas fighter in these seven months? The IDF claimed as of a month ago that they had killed about 14,000 Hamas fighters, and even Hamas admitted a few months back that 6,000 of its fighters had been killed. We cannot know, but even taking Hamas’s figures at face value (surely questionable) the ratio of civilian:fighter casualties remains extremely low compared to all similar armed conflicts. By universal standards that is *remarkable*, particularly in this context: urban warfare with Hamas embedded among civilians whom it uses as human shields, militarizing hospitals, schools, and mosques, and with hundreds of miles of tunnels used for military purposes literally running under everything.
But it’s actually even more remarkable than that. Just this week the U.N. released revised figures (see link below) in which they report in fact not 35,000 but only *25,000* “identified” casualties, and they revise steeply downwards the numbers of “women and children.” That includes cutting the previous claim about the number of children (that you cite) nearly in half, to 7800. Each one is a horrific tragedy but when looked at “objectively,” which is necessary for this conversation, we must admit the following facts: (1) Hamas’s figures are not trustworthy, and (2) if the IDF turns out to be remotely right about Hamas casualties (and in every past war their figures turned out to be reliable), then we are talking about 14,000 fighters out of 25,000 total casualties. This would be a literally historically unprecedentedly low civilian:fighter ratio, even given the urban, human-shield context.
The only reasonable conclusion is that Israel is taking unprecedented measures, and executing them with unprecedented skill, to minimize civilian casualties. By all universal and international norms, this is a just war being prosecuted by just means.
It’s painful, it’s horrible, and every civilian casualty is a tragedy, but it’s true.
You say that “two wrongs don’t make a right.” I am not sure how seriously you intend this as a moral principle relevant to international norms and laws governing warfare. Do you mean no country, or even no person, should ever defend themselves from violent attack because that would involve inflicting violence on the perpetrator? So one country can attack another and the other should not respond? Would you use this principle to condemn Hamas for October 7, not to mention all its previously started wars and suicide bombings and terrorist attacks, because no matter what alleged grievances they may have against Israel “two wrongs don’t make a right”? Normally we recognize that where it is wrong to attack a person or a country, it is not wrong to defend oneself from that attack or attempt to prevent the perpetrator from attacking. Since Hamas has spent four decades intending and perpetrating genocide against Israeli Jews in particular, and openly declaring it will do October 7 “again and again, as many times as necessary,” it is *not* wrong for those Jews to defend themselves and attempt to remove that genocidal threat, as long as they do so by “just” means, respecting universal moral and legal principles, as I argue they do above.
You seem to apply that principle, though, in a very limited way, by just comparing casualty numbers: there were fewer Israeli casualties on October 7 than the larger number of Gazan casualties, so the latter is therefore “wrong.” (“Hyper-focus” again: if comparative numbers matter, then why are there no encampments about the much much larger number of civilian casualties from Syria, Sudan, Yemen, and more?) But that is just not how military conflicts are considered from a universal perspective. No one simply compares casualty numbers in a war and reaches any moral conclusions. The Allies killed far more German civilians than the Germans killed Allies’ civilians but that fact doesn’t mean the Allies behaved wrongly. No one ever says that when you are defending yourself you are only allowed to kill the same number that the other side has inflicted on you and then must stop, or that you must offer more of your own civilians to be killed in order to keep prosecuting the war.
What universal norms and the laws of war do require is “proportionality,” but that explicitly does not imply parity in casualty counts. It means roughly that civilian casualties must be proportional to the military objective in play. You are never permitted to directly target civilians but a certain number of incidental civilian casualties is acceptable proportional to the military objective: you can’t kill many civilians for a small military objective, but you can kill proportionally more, regrettably, for a large one. That obviously has a degree of subjectivity but is best measured by the civilian:fighter ratios discussed above, and there the case is crystal clear. Israel’s remarkably low civilian:fighter ratio indicates it is obeying proportionality to an unprecedented degree.
What all that indicates is that you’re comparing the wrong numbers. It’s not the number of Israeli dead on October 7 compared to the number of Gazans dead. It’s the degree of the threat compared to the number of civilians necessary in order to neutralize the threat. It’s thus the number of Israelis that Hamas, left undefeated and undisturbed, *would* murder compared to the number of Gazan dead required to neutralize the threat. Hamas openly declares its desire and intention to murder all seven million Jews in Israel. By any reasonable universal standard if it requires several tens of thousands dead to prevent seven million from being murdered, assuming this is pursued justly by targeting the fighters, then that is adequately proportional. (The alternative is to say that Israel must allow millions of its citizens to be murdered in order to protect several tens of thousands of Gazans from dying. But that is outrageous.)
Horrible, and tragic, but that doesn’t stop it from being true.
War is terrible. But remember this war would stop instantly if Hamas surrendered and returned the hostages. Civilian casualties would cease instantly. That is the ceasefire I personally am longing for, for the removal of the true genocidal threat, for the prospect of genuine enduring peace in the region, and for the mutual welfare of both Israelis and Palestinians, most of all the children. Any other outcome amounts to promoting the genocidal threat, guaranteeing the ongoing war, and generating continued civilian casualties on both sides.
What’s happening I believe is that you—along with so many others—are applying standards to the Jews that you simply do not apply anywhere else. Israel has no interest in killing Gazan civilians, but doing so is unavoidable given its justified interest in protecting its citizens from decades of Hamas-perpetrated genocide. By actual universal norms Israel is fighting a just war by overwhelmingly just means. The worldwide (and this campus) campaign to portray *Israel* as engaged in genocide, to suggest that what it is doing is “wrong” because more Gazans are dying than Israelis, requires applying standards to Israel that literally no one applies anywhere else and in fact is aimed at stopping Israel from defending itself. It is thus in service of the Hamas agenda, supportive of the ethnic cleansing and mass murder of Israel’s seven million Jews, and thus pro-war and pro-genocide.
https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-reported-impact-day-215
Yeah Israeli Jews are defending themselves from those thousands of women and children they’re starving. Pessin you should resign, you clearly lack the humanity required of a liberal arts professor. Stop being such a Jewish supremacist. You’re Jewish, you think Jews are Gods chosen people, you think you’re better than everyone, we get it.
We’re applying standards to Jews that apply to EVERYONE. And you call that antisemitic. Quit your kvetching and sit down. Show some humanity. The Jewish nation state is committing a genocide right now, as a Jew in America either keep your mouth shut or speak up with us against it.
I am extremely disappointed that this newspaper would keep such an antisemitic comment up. This is a disgrace.
As an non-Jewish alumni who attended Connecticut College in the 1980s, I’m saddened by the lack of critical thinking on the part of Shealy and Perriah when it comes to the situation between the Israeli government and Hamas, which I believe represents the elected government of the Palestinian people. In this situation, I think both governments represent the legitimate will of the people they represent.
From what I’ve read about the situation, most Palestinians in Gaza support Hamas, and do not consider them a terrorist organization, and if you do consider them a legitimate representative of will of the Palestinian people, then the October 7th attack was what I believe is considered an “act of war” by the legitimate Palestinian government. So, in my the Palestinian people were complicit in the attack, just as the Japanese people were complicit in supporting the Japanese government when they attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor prior to declaring war. As professor Pessin points out in his argument the Palestinian people can unilaterally end the war by releasing the hostages they took, and rejecting the leadership that abandoned the search for a peaceful resolution with the Israelis, and arresting the leadership for “crimes against peace”. On a real level the Palestinian are choosing what you call “genocide”, and I suspect what they would call martyrdom, which seems to be part of the Islamic culture. My belief is that Shealy and Perriah are viewing their situation through a “western” value system, and looking at the Palestinian people as victims, while they look at themselves as martyrs for a cause that they believe in, and I respect that, but I also believe you should suffer the consequences of your actions. Shealy and Perriah also do not acknowledge or fail to appreciate that the Palestinian people who support their government attacking Israel are viewed as an existential threat to the Israelis. Their position reminds me of Neville Chamberlain’s approach to Hitler before World War II, which was unsuccessful in stopping Hitler’s aggression, and may have encouraged it.
om history include both Germany in World War I, and Germany and Japan in World War II. Just ask the Germans and Japanese what the human price was for their aggression? Are the Palestinians being treated any differently than when we fire bombed Dresden or atomic bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki? It seems to me that the rules of war are being applied equally to the Palestinians, at least from Western standards. Or do you consider what the US and its allies did in World War II a form of genocide against the German and Japanese people?
Examples of a war that ended in a permanent case fire include Korea and China / Taiwan, and both those situations are much more fragile in terms of maintaining a permanent peace. In other words, the only way to have a more just and long lasting peace is through peaceful non-violent resistance, and a way to have a less just and lasting peace is to choose a violent approach which results in the more powerful dominating they weak. The World War I treaty of Versailles demonstrated what happens when the victors are excessively punitive in their peace agreement with a conquered foe, while the World War II Matshall plan demonstrated what happens when you are generous with your conquered foes, once they admit defeat, and stop being a threat to peaceful co-existence.
One more thing I do want to address is the “numbers” fallacy, and that somehow 2,000 or 3,000 casualties on one side does not justify thousands or millions of casualties on the other side. I would argue that there is a false “moral” equivalence there, particularly for people who are willing to die for their cause. Inciting war is amoral and so once you make a decision to attack, you lose control of the consequences, and history shows that the devastation that war causes is often asymmetric in the suffering one side imposes on the other. I tend to think of the Hamas government like the North Vietnamese government during the Vietnam war. Nixon’s rational in the “secret bombings” was to cause them so much pain that they would come to the negotiation table and accept terms reasonable to the United States. The Israelis are doing the same thing, where Sinwar is a combination of HoChi MInh and Le Duan, only if the Israelis can get to Sinwar and kill him and the other leaders on Hamas, they will.
My suggestion or challenge to both Sheely and Periah is to consider the solution you are proposing from an Israeli point of view, and ask yourself if you were in their position, would you adopt your suggestions? Rather than just consider the Israeli government “evil”, which is just propaganda to manipulate your emotions, consider that both sides are humans — and how can you get to a solution where both sides will feel safe and have their right to co-exist respected? If you do propose a solution — I would be much more likely to be persuaded if you demonstrate how it has worked in a similar situation in the past.
And to Sheely, please make an argument that is rational, and is less prejudiced and disrespectful than your earlier responses to Prof. Pessin. The professor made a rational, cogent, argument for his position, while you made a pretty weak argument by hurling insults at him because he is Jewish. In my opinion, that undermines any persuasive argument you may make for your position.