On the morning of December 10, I woke up to two messages. The first came from my father. He asked me to write to the US State Department to request the evacuation of my uncle and his family from Rafah, in southern Gaza, where they find themselves “without food, shelter or water and all the time very terrified by the bombings. . My aunt, my uncle’s wife, was killed by the Israelis in Gaza in 2014. Today, he and his children face the real possibility of joining her in death.
The second was an email from a friend in a senior position in one of the large multilateral organizations. We studied together at the University of Pennsylvania and she was dismayed by the capitulation of its current president, Liz Magill, to the right. But she felt, rightly so, that she was unable to express herself due to the oppressive environment at work and in America in general.
If Magill, a moderate who amounted to very little, couldn’t hold her own against a handful of rusty pitchforks, what hope was there for a woman of color with Middle Eastern roots?
These two messages, so close together, perfectly captured the different fronts of the war on Palestinian lives.
“We believed what we wanted to believe”
I graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor’s degree in political science in 2006. My experience with the school was mixed. Having resources – which Penn does – is a good thing for many reasons. But having money can also indicate an excessive orientation around and towards it.
Back then, getting a well-paying job after college was the main goal of undergraduate life. Internships in consulting and banking firms were very popular and should lead to rich offers from these same firms in New York or London.
Things don’t appear to have changed much: Penn ranked first, ahead of Princeton, Columbia, MIT and Harvard, in the 2024 Wall Street Journal/College Pulse Salary Impact study. Or, as the WSJ headlines, the school is first among “Best U.S. Colleges That Make Their Graduates Richer.”
Which is not to say that Penn was an apolitical place; the accumulation of large sums of money can in no way be apolitical.
I remember an initial conversation with a young woman who, upon learning that I was from Palestine, responded “that doesn’t exist.” Incidentally, I remember being furious with another undergraduate, in the context of my student activism, “if you don’t like it here, you can go home, you terrorist.”
Although I suspect that Penn’s focus on money may have been a major contributor to Magill’s ultimate undoing – his congressional testimony was cited as the reason for withdrawing a $100 million donation – this is not the whole story.
My Penn experience was representative of the American elite’s pinched contempt for anything that threatens its conception of itself as meritocratic, deserving of exalted status and morally impeccable. This is an essentially conservative posture, one that resists growth and defies all efforts at meaningful social education.
I observed this posture later in life, when I was a graduate student at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. There, I met some of the brightest minds behind President George W. Bush’s disaster in Iraq. I remember a conversation I had with a senior State Department official who is now ambassador to a major Asian country.
“Hans Blix,” I said, referring to the former head of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, “told you that there were no weapons of mass destruction. Why did you go to war?
He explained, disarmingly, that “we believed what we wanted to believe.”
In seven words, he captured the essence of a system that shields its people from accountability, which today partly explains why my family in Gaza is left to die with the rest of the Palestinians there. This explains the aggressiveness of President Joe Biden and the egg on the long face of his national security adviser.
Reproductive power
When I first learned that a great career was sought at Penn and Harvard, I shrugged my shoulders. I considered the subject a sideshow; a false moralism in an alternate universe intended to distract from the ongoing atrocities in Palestine. But now I think I was probably too dismissive of what was happening and how it was linked in a direct, albeit multifaceted, way to the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
The relationship between Capitol Hill, University City, home of Penn, Cambridge and Rafah is properly understood through the prism of power. The primary role of elite institutions of higher education in America is to replicate power and the infrastructure that goes with it.
If society is an organism, the university is the clonal petri dish. But in nature, nothing is reproduced perfectly; Evolution is an essential characteristic of any biological system. And developments within the university are leading to divergence from the tightly guarded power structures that define our current political order.
The right’s grotesque hype, on television, in newspapers, and in congressional investigations, is driven by the awareness that educated young people invariably think differently from one generation to the next. The assault on American universities is part of a larger effort to direct and control the evolution of thought in this society.
In this context, values are relative and speech only has value to the extent that it is not executed and lies dormant in the domain of abstract ideas, such as “freedom” or “the arc of the universe moral”.
Now Magill unwittingly, in all likelihood, presents himself as the lamb on the altar. In short, collateral damage. The people who demanded his resignation may not have been able to articulate all the reasons they wanted him ousted.
But they demonstrate an innate understanding of the issues: the organism’s ability to reproduce is anchored within the university, more than anywhere else.
What they don’t understand, however, is that, as in Daniel Dennett’s theory of mind, independent thought arises everywhere at once. Nothing but a bullet to the brain can stop its emergence.
Unfortunately, for the people of Gaza today, the advent of a new political settlement on Palestine in the United States does not mean much. My uncle and his family, along with thousands of others, may be dead by the time a new generation of Americans, whose evolution was forged by genocide, comes to power.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.