The Moral Necessity of Protest
What’s happening in Gaza is unbearable.
By the second week of May, Israeli forces had killed thousands upon thousands of civilians. Israel has killed aid workers, journalists, and academics and turned universities, hospitals, mosques, and countless homes to rubble. The war has displaced over 1 million people. Whistleblowers told CNN that incarcerated Palestinian men face torture at a detention center in the desert. Most of the enclave faces famine. A full-scale invasion of Rafah, where a million Palestinian refugees are gathered, would be a horror. Yet horror is what Israel promises next.
The news out of Gaza is unbearable. The videos, the photos, the reports all reveal tragedy after tragedy, which accumulate like the dead. The terrors of October 7 won Israel sympathy from the world; now it is becoming a pariah state. For eight months, Israel has pursued vengeance, and that vengeance, indiscriminate and cruel, has set the country on a path it cannot easily depart. As the Israeli government walks into hell, it drags its allies along — allies who don’t understand the danger they’re in. Whether Gaza costs Biden the election or not, it could cost him something else: his moral witness.
Perhaps it’s unfashionable to say so. The language of morality is often the language of the right wing. Deployed poorly it invokes the Moral Majority, gender traditionalism, and hate. But the left should not surrender this concept to its opponents. That was true before Israel’s latest assault on Gaza, but it is urgently true now. What is happening in Gaza demands a moral response — from us, from Biden, from the world. Some have responded accordingly, though they may be outnumbered. On Monday, U.S. Army Major Harrison Mann announced his resignation, citing the American government’s material support for Israel. “My work here — however administrative or marginal it appeared — has unquestionably contributed to that support,” Mann wrote in a letter he later published on LinkedIn. “The past months have presented us with the most horrific and heartbreaking images imaginable … and I have been unable to ignore the connection between those images and my duties here. This caused me incredible shame and guilt.”
If Biden wrestles with similar emotions, it doesn’t show. He has said that campus protests have not influenced his foreign policy, which is believable enough. In public remarks he has reserved most condemnation for the protesters and has said nothing about the violent repression those protesters have faced. At UCLA, law-enforcement officers fired rubber bullets at peaceful demonstrators even though the rounds can maim and even kill. On April 30, pro-Israel protesters attacked the encampment at UCLA for three hours before police intervened. Though Biden has frequently expressed sorrow and even rage over 10/7, his response to Palestinian suffering has — to put it charitably — been muted. Dr. Nahreen H. Ahmed, who worked in Gaza, attended an April meeting with the president and said that when she showed him photos of malnourished and suffering children, he responded by saying he’d seen the images before. But he hadn’t. The doctor had taken the photos herself and printed them from her phone. “This speaks volumes to the dismissive nature of the administration when it comes to strong-willed action toward a permanent cease-fire or, at a bare minimum, a red line on the invasion of Rafah,” Ahmed told NBC News.
Indeed, though the Biden administration says it opposes an invasion of Rafah and has paused the transfer of powerful bombs to Israel, recent history demands a measure of skepticism. On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that Biden is moving forward with a $1 billion arms sale to Israel. It’s hard to take Biden seriously on Gaza when he’s shown such little care for the dead. As protesters put their bodies on the line, and people end their careers over Gaza, Biden’s position looks weak, at least in a moral sense. Here, pundits will say that Biden’s opponent is not a man of robust moral character, and they’re correct to a point. There’s no doubt Donald Trump will be worse on Gaza. The same pundits might also say that Biden cannot unilaterally end a war he did not directly start, which is true, again to a point. But what is a person of conscience to do? Conventional wisdom prefers silence, and silence is fatal. People are being killed right now.
Protest, then, is not an Ivy League luxury but a moral necessity. It is salvation — not only for ourselves but for Gaza. The circumstances in Gaza are too dire to forget, even temporarily, and I am not convinced that our pundits, from atop their sinecures, will begin to care about Gaza if Biden wins in November. There will be another excuse, another reason to look away. And that is exactly what we cannot do. Protesters have called this a genocide for months; Aryeh Neier, co-founder of Human Rights Watch, has at last agreed. “In late December, when South Africa brought to the ICJ its accusation that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, I did not join some of my colleagues in the international-human-rights movement in their support of the charge,” he wrote in the New York Review of Books. Israel had a right to retaliate against Hamas, he believed. “And yet, even believing this, I am now persuaded that Israel is engaged in genocide against Palestinians in Gaza,” he continued. “What has changed my mind is its sustained policy of obstructing the movement of humanitarian assistance into the territory.”
Neier’s article is a sign that the narrative is shifting. Not everyone is willing to walk into hell. Now the world, faced with genocide in Gaza, must respond according to the scale of the crime. The kids might not be perfect, but they’re right. Moral rightness is not perfection, after all, but something else, an act of conscience that can push anyone toward the light. The future beckons, and it will judge us by the actions of today.