effort to take advantage of political controversy to score points a) for the upcoming elections and b) for the ancillary benefits to the MAGA movement of undermining higher learning. I don't think it says much at all about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict or what Republicans want to do about that. They have refused Biden's funding requests by placing unacceptable amendments in them and they desperately what to paint the Democrats as being sympathizers with Hamas.

When it comes to Israel and Gaza, two things can be true at the same time. Hamas is an extremist terror organization that brutally attacked Israel and, it seems, some Palestinians and left-leaning people in the US cannot acknowledge that. Also, while I think the comparison of the plight of black Americans is different in many respects to those of the Palestinians, there is an argument to be made that Israel has engaged in repressive policies of its own with regard to them.

This dichotomy presents an opportunity for discussion. Why have Palestinians felt that oppression? How have Israel's justifiable actions in partitioning in the face of Palestinian intransigence and violence, put Israel into a trap that is difficult to disentangle? Most Americans, myself included, don't really understand any of it very well. What we do see is people killing each other and this issue never getting resolved.

There is a desire by some to put this into the neat box of oppressor and oppressed, but that isn't really the case. There is a desire by others to make the argument about racial animus, antisemitism, and that isn't the whole story either. On campus, there are protests and angst over these questions, but fail to see how that is a bad thing. It's precisely the thing that should happen in colleges, so that people can hear different points of view.

The reason the "all white people are oppressors" argument irritates me is that I think this description is mostly the reaction of white people to what are clearly structural inequities. Like Megan Kelley going on Bill Maher and complaining that the elite private school her kids attend was making the feel guilty about being white. Good grief.