UCSD Should Not Ignore Violence in Israel

    Life in southern Israel has been shut down by a hail of rockets coming from nearby Gaza. Hamas, the fundamentalist Islamic terrorist organization that rules Gaza and openly dedicates itself to eradicating Israel, has admitted launching the rockets. Thus far, the barrage has injured six civilians, two of them critically. This is a not a new situation for Israelis; 800 rockets have been fired into Israel from Gaza so far this year. An exasperated Israeli woman whose neighborhood has been struck by five rockets lamented to a New York Times reporter, “It is absurd that we live like this.”

    Yet most UCSD students are not cognizant of these frequent rocket attacks on Israel because awareness of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on campus is primarily driven by MSA and SJP, whose agenda is, I feel, to convince their fellow students that the conflict is a straightforward case of egregious behavior by Israel perpetuated upon blameless and powerless Palestinians. They have no desire, therefore, to raise awareness of events, like the current unfolding spasm, which involve Palestinians inflicting deadly violence upon innocent Israeli citizens and which reveals a much more complex conflict dynamic then the narrative they are promoting. Instead their preferred modus operandi is to wait until Israel is pushed to respond in some highly dramatic fashion, like building security barriers or launching military operations to root out terrorists. When that happens they go wild with righteous indignation, bemoaning the inevitable impact on Palestinian civilians while assiduously sterilizing the narrative they serve up to the campus community so it contains no hint of the Palestinian provocations.

    So far the current episode of violence has offered no grist for the Israel-obsession mill because Israel’s military response, as widely reported by the press, has been tempered and precise, using air strikes to eliminate several rocket-launching squads without inflicting civilian casualties inside Gaza. As long as this remains the case, the Israel demonizing contingent on campus will ignore the situation. However, Israeli leaders are warning that if the rocket fire doesn’t relent, they may be forced to launch a larger military response as they were in 2008 when Israel invaded Gaza. If that happens, there is bound to be Palestinian civilian casualties and then we will witness the Israel demonizing machine vociferously come to life on our campus. Either way, we can be sure this year the same anti-Israel crowd will, once again, launch the usual obscenely disingenuous campaign to cajole A.S. into adopting a resolution calling for UCSD to divest in companies like General Electric because they supply Israel’s Air Force with the very technology that allows it to surgically target terrorists while avoiding Palestinian civilians.

    — David Feifel, M.D., Ph.D
    Professor, School of Medicine

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