As pro-Palestinian protests erupted on American college campuses last week, I could not help but wonder how the nearly 5,000 students who learned history from me responded. First, however, I should acknowledge that I am not aware of any former students who are actually engaged in the protests and that by almost every measure my academic offspring are incredibly diverse. Indeed, my influence is the only thing they share in common.
I retired eight years ago. Consequently, most students who I taught near the end of my forty-plus year career have completed their formal educations. Many of them are now into careers and families that tend to temper one’s views. Conversely, students from my early teaching days are now in their fifties and sixties. A few of them may have engaged in earlier campus protests. But actors in last week’s drama could have been their grandchildren.
Still, my hope is that most of my former students have become conscientious citizen-voters. As such, they are at least paying attention to and concerned about this and the host of other challenges from our moment in history — including the upcoming presidential election.
My guess — or more honestly my hope — is that in this tumultuous historical moment some of my former students will recall my often-repeated assertion that “history is neither black nor white... but shades of gray.” Perhaps they will also recall that unintended consequences — for better and worse — often accompany good intentions and that presuming that history [exactly] repeats itself invariably forges unfortunate lessons and consequences.
But I similarly hope that my former students know that such ambivalent insights often fuel apathy and indifference. A resulting muddling mediocrity has often allowed the undesirable shades of gray to persist and even darken and often obscure brighter glimpses. At our best, we humans should be humbled by such insights and resist hubris’s multifaceted lure.
The historical backdrop for the recent protests offers tantalizing black/white glimpses that upon deeper reflection morph into more-sobering shades of gray. After centuries of anti-Semitism culminated in the holocaust, guilt-ridden Westerners carved a Jewish homeland from lands occupied for centuries by Palestinians. When the latter and opportunistic leaders of a host of surrounding, recently-emerged, Muslim-dominated states objected to the new nation, a series of Middle Eastern wars erupted.
With strong economic and military support from the United States, presumed underdog and victim Israel ultimately achieved costly victories. Thereafter, Israel — again with our support and approval — devised a variety of means to assure its future security even as broader, outwardly unrelated concerns complicated regional matters. Cold War demands and global dependency on Middle Eastern oil merged with longstanding divisions within Islam to accentuate shades of gray.
But at that juncture, victims and villains reversed roles in the eyes of many global observers. Recent aggressive policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu further validate longstanding negative charges of Israeli hostility for Palestinians. Indeed, the one American president who brokered the Middle East’s most notable peace agreement, likened Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to South African “apartheid.”
Still, until last October 7th, Israel dominated a prolonged period of relative calm. Hamas’s brutal assault on that day ended that calm and briefly restored Israel’s victim status. However, when Netanyahu determined to eradicate Hamas no matter the costs to Gaza’s civilian population, that changed.
By cruelly making innocent Gazans their own human shields, Hamas assured that cost would be horrific and further revealed their own wickedness. Clearly, neither Netanyahu, who is driven by a host of dubious and devious personal and partisan political ambitions, nor Hamas’s cruel and evil leaders occupy a moral high ground. Yet in the present historical moment, wrenching, televised accounts from Gaza further obscure more nuanced and balanced views of the situation. Collectively, all of these influences precipitated the pro-Palestinian protests that concern us here.
How many of my former students, I wonder, perceive this story’s shades of gray? And how many of them share the campus protester’s separation of the war’s protagonists into mutually exclusive and simplistic black and white categories? Hopefully many of them recognize that we need not ignore the evil of one to condemn the other, and that the old playground wisdom that “two wrongs don’t make a right” — even when those wrongs are not equal — still holds merit.
History suggests that drawing black/white lessons from pasts when shades of gray prevailed rarely resolve complex situations effectively and often worsen them. It also suggests that analysis can lead to equally counter-productive apathy and paralysis. But it also offers examples of effective resolution of similarly messy and complicated conflicts
If at least some of my former students are aware of the pitfalls that accompany hindsight yet champion more informed, humble, nuanced, and wise responses to this situation’s “shades of gray,” they will earn high marks from their former history teacher.
Mark Banker is a retired teacher and active historian. He can be reached at mtbanker1951@gmail.com.
