| Bram Boroson <bram.boroson@gmail.com> | 1:45 PM (9 hours ago) |  | |
| to officeofthepresident | |||
Dear Office of the President:
My late father Warren Boroson attended Columbia University. He graduated Class of 1957.
I myself later attended the Columbia Science Honors Program in high school, taking classes in particle physics and in computer science theory.
I am writing to share my observations and opinions on the controversy over student protests of Israeli actions in Gaza at Columbia.
My father was resolutely pro-Israel. Having encountered antisemitism in his life, he perceived much or all of the activism on behalf of Palestinians to be motivated implicitly by hatred of Jews and using Palestinians only as props in that project. He took umbrage at portraits of righteous Palestinians oppressed by rich and complacent Jews, such as in the opera Death of Klinghoffer, based on a real incident in which an elderly Jewish man in a wheelchair was drowned by Palestinian terrorists. When I expressed how much I admired Jimmy Carter for his post-Presidential work, my father replied: “We don’t like him–he called Israel an Apartheid State.”
My mother, likewise, traveled in very pro-Israel circles. Before she retired, she was the editor of The Jewish Standard, the oldest English language Jewish newspaper in New Jersey. She admires Rabin, the fighter become peacemaker, and mourned that his assassination seemed to close off avenues for peace.
In my opinion, the deadly October 7 Hamas attack was followed by a disproportionate campaign of collective punishment that has been rife with atrocities and violations of international law. I used to count myself a Zionist, and emphasized to myself that Israel, founded in the wake of the Holocaust, was recognized by the United Nations and had agreed upon borders. I believed that the UN resolutions requiring Israel to limit itself to those borders needed to be followed, that it was international law that legitimized Israel and that should likewise constrain it. Participation in a model UN in high school inculcated in me a sense of respect for dialogue and procedure.
That international affairs should pivot on Biblical borders or mythical prophecies of end times to me seems scandalous, that it would place the lives and well-beings of so many real suffering people at lower priority than fulfilling unhinged fantasies.
My political stance now at age 57 greatly departs from that of my parents from decades ago. I see violations of international law becoming routine and the rise of ethno-nationalist states around the world. Some of the history I learned growing up was a mythical over-simplification, not to veer to opposite over-simplifications. Irgun practiced terroristic methods itself. Many Zionists chafe at the characterization of Israel as a “settler-colonialist state”, and while Israel’s origin as a haven for refugees of the Holocaust and the Soviet Union does muddy the waters, there seems a lot of truth to that characterization as well. I have learned to see the differing narratives as being like Kurusawa’s movie Rashomon, each being a self-serving partial truth.
I believe Columbia University has mis-handled student protests of the situation in Gaza. Many Jewish students themselves are on the side of the protests. I tell my story to illustrate generational change in Jewish-American views of Israel. My late father still receives mail from the pro-Israel organizations he donated to, such as AIPAC. Those who think they have the pulse on Jewish-American sentiment may be starkly out of date. At age 57 I myself am a generation or two older than current students. Attitudes towards Israel have been in rapid flux since the Israeli reaction to the October 7 attacks, which may plausibly be described as attempted genocide.
Being Jewish and formerly a pro-Israel Zionist, I see too that Jewish students may feel embattled. I understand that non-Jewish protesters may have only one side of that Rashomon-like story. I can see that chants of “from the river to the sea” may be taken as personally threatening to Jewish students with deep ties to Israel and Israelis (I visited once myself in 1993 in a relatively peaceful time).
However, I think the solution to such fears is not to limit legitimate protest. It is for greater communication and education, which one would think that a University would find more congenial to its mission than collaborating with police to suppress the younger generation, which must find its voice in shaping the world they will be living in for longer than we will.
Sincerely,
Bram Boroson
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