How Gaza Became Israel’s Unsolvable Problem

In January 2009, in Georgetown University’s august Gaston Hall, I took to the stage to speak about Gaza. Virtually all 700 seats were occupied, many by students who opposed Israeli policies, especially those concerning the Gaza Strip. A visiting professor at Georgetown’s Center for Jewish Civilization, I had recently returned to Washington from a winter break back in Israel where I’d hoped to vacation with my family. Instead, I spent three weeks serving as a reserve officer in Cast Lead, Israel’s operation against Hamas.

I returned to find the campus in an uproar, the entrance to my building blocked by prostrate protestors holding “Dead Gazan” signs. My lecture was intended as a response to that outcry, to place the Gaza issue in its full historical, military, and diplomatic context. The goal was to expose students to a perspective that they could never receive from the media or most of their professors. For once, they would see the Strip from an Israeli point of view.

Watching the video of that talk last month was an unsettling experience, and not only because of the degree to which I’ve aged. Far more disturbing was seeing how little has changed in the last twelve years. Though Israel’s ability to defend itself has been vastly augmented by the Iron Dome anti-missile system, its right to do so has been increasingly impugned. And nowhere in America has Israel’s case or even the freedom to make it been more strenuously denied than on college campuses. Most dismaying of all was the realization that American ignorance about Gaza and the terrorist regime that ruled it has only deepened over the years, in many cases willfully.