Protests on American campuses are the current media obsession: They are relatively simple to cover, easily localized to a campus near you and filled with attention-seeking spokespeople, and they come replete with baked-in controversies.
When does free speech cross into antisemitism? How much disruption of its normal routines should a campus tolerate? Should those politically engaged faculty members be manning the barricades even at the expense of the institution they serve? Should that dithering university president really have called in the police? Is it fair to cancel graduation ceremonies for the very class that lost its high school celebrations to COVID-19?
We’ve been interested to watch how the White House has been managing the politics of all this, trying to appease the large internal Democratic Party constituency that supports the protests while rightly worrying that if the campus protests are seen to be out of control by Americans who do not interact much with elite campuses and who have not yet made up their minds which way to vote come November, they will make the election of Donald Trump all the more likely.
A delicate D.C. dance, you might say. Principles versus political expediency. They’re dancing the same two-step on many campuses.
Nonetheless, we’ve had our fill. The answers to the above questions, which have filled cable news networks of late, depend on which side you are on. Like everything in this region, they are contested matters, and a smart person can understand both sides, even if one is near impossible to choose.
We have a different controversial question to discuss with our readers today: If a hostage is dead when returned to their family, is that hostage being returned at all?
This hardly is a theoretical matter, nor is it friendly to a lively MSNBC talk show. On Tuesday, The New York Times reported, under the gut-wrenching headline “Hamas’s Offer to Hand Over 33 Hostages Includes Some Who Are Dead,” that some of the 33 hostages Hamas planned to return to Israel as part of its negotiated quota may be merely human remains. Whatever your politics, that is a sobering reminder of human brutality.
As has been widely reported, Israel and Hamas are negotiating a potential truce that would allow for the return of Israeli hostages, even as Israel took control Monday of the Gazan side of the Rafah border crossing that separates Egypt and the Gaza Strip. Israel has said that a ground offensive into Rafah, where Hamas is holed up, is an essential part of its strategy to defeat the terrorist group in the interests of its national security. But that’s where many Palestinian families have sought refuge, given the much underexamined refusal of the Egyptians to allow most Palestinians into its territory. The further compounding loss of innocent lives, including those of children, appears inevitable. Any truce would buy time, and, as we write, those negotiations toward a cease-fire were continuing through intermediaries.
Hamas wants a final end to Israeli hostilities so it can help the Palestinian people and allow itself to regroup and retain power over Gaza. Israel wants Hamas eradicated, as it has said from the beginning of this war, and thus wants to continue until that aim is achieved, even at the cost of civilian life in Gaza. Assuming you leave out the proxies involved, or maybe even if you include them, this remains at the core an existential battle for Hamas. Israel wants only a temporary truce and then to go back to action it considers essential for its existence; Hamas wants to live on.
For those impoverished civilians caught up in this awful war in Rafah and elsewhere, the situation makes U.S. campuses look Edenic by comparison, and the moral statements, carefully scripted by communications experts and expressed by amply compensated presidents, come across as just more elite noise. Most U.S. students, whichever their side, will come out of this unscathed, even a little more educated when it comes to the world’s hypocrisies and horrors, its ancient enmities and evils.
But some of the Israeli families that have fought for the return of their loved ones, snatched by Hamas from homes or a bucolic music festival on Oct. 7, might get only remains when they hoped for the return of someone they loved.
We met some of those families when they came to talk to us last fall. They were not political players, and some of them were, and are, critical of the actions of their own government.
But to get a corpse instead of a sister? Ashes instead of a child? And have that somehow “counted” in a formal mediated negotiation for a specific number of hostages? Even if that is not entirely a surprise to those families, we cannot even imagine the internal rage that must follow. Closure is overrated when the result is your worst nightmare.
But back to the question.
Are are you returning a hostage when that hostage is dead? We’ll answer that one without equivocation. No. A thousand times, no.
We long have suspected that Hamas would not release some hostages, especially young Israeli women, whose stories it did not want told to the world and that would disrupt its public relations offensive, one that has been extraordinarily successful, especially on American campuses. But corpses do not speak or testify.
There will be more Palestinian deaths in Rafah, coming even as we write. Far more than 33. We lament all of those and fervently wish for all of this to end.
Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.com.
