Why America’s Israel-Palestine debate is broken — and how to fix it

You may have heard of Shai Davidai, the Israeli professor at Columbia University who has launched a crusade against the school’s pro-Palestinian protestors.

He’s rocketed to fame by calling students terrorists, comparing himself to Jewish victims of Nazi Germany, and demanding the National Guard forcibly break up the student encampments. After the NYPD stormed Columbia’s campus on Tuesday night, arresting hundreds of students, he retweeted a message blaming the events on “a circus of narcissists, egged on by irresponsible faculty.” (Indeed.)

Davidai, like many of the loud pro-Israel voices in the national debate, is casting blanket aspersions on students who are protesting for good reasons. Well over 30,000 Palestinians are dead, many of whom are children; the devastation is so complete that a fully accurate death toll is now impossible. There is no good moral or strategic justification for Israel’s scorched-earth approach, which currently risks strengthening the terrorist group Hamas’s strategic position in the long term. Given that billions of American dollars are underwriting this atrocity, it’s easy to see why college campuses are in uproar.