[2006alum]

Maybe I'm obtuse, but I thought the double entendre in the piece's headline was precisely to suggest the "war" "at" Stanford is in fact not "the war" nor really "at" or about Stanford. But our reporter at large is based there, and so naturally writing from lived experience, and some of the activists at Stanford are behaving as if they are the front lines of the "war" notwithstanding being so fully removed from it. 

What else can a reader take away from the last few paragraphs?:

At one rally last fall, a speaker expressed disillusionment about the power of “peaceful resistance” on college campuses. “What is there left to do but to take up arms?” The crowd cheered as he said Israel must be destroyed. But what would happen to its citizens? I’d prefer to believe that most protesters chanting “Palestine is Arab” and shouting that we must “smash the Zionist settler state” don’t actually think Jews should be killed en masse. But can one truly be so ignorant as to advocate widespread violence in the name of peace?

When the world is rendered in black-and-white—portrayed as a simple fight between colonizer and colonized—the answer is yes. Solutions, by this logic, are absolute: Israel or Palestine, nothing in between. Either you support liberation of the oppressed or you support genocide. Either Stanford is all good or all bad; all in favor of free speech or all authoritarian; all anti-Semitic or all Islamophobic.

At January’s anti-anti-Semitism event, I watched an exchange between a Jewish attendee and a protester from a few feet away. “Are you pro-Palestine?” the protester asked.

“Yes,” the attendee responded, and he went on to describe his disgust with the human-rights abuses Palestinians have faced for years.
“But are you a Zionist?”
“Yes.”
“Then we are enemies.”

If his point was something quite specific to Stanford, I sure missed it.

[2006alum]

Maybe I'm obtuse, but I thought the double entendre in the piece's headline was precisely to suggest the "war" "at" Stanford is in fact not "the war" nor really "at" or about Stanford. But our reporter at large is based there, and so naturally writing from lived experience, and some of the activists at Stanford are behaving as if they are the front lines of the "war" notwithstanding being so fully removed from it. 

What else can a reader take away from the last few paragraphs?:

At one rally last fall, a speaker expressed disillusionment about the power of “peaceful resistance” on college campuses. “What is there left to do but to take up arms?” The crowd cheered as he said Israel must be destroyed. But what would happen to its citizens? I’d prefer to believe that most protesters chanting “Palestine is Arab” and shouting that we must “smash the Zionist settler state” don’t actually think Jews should be killed en masse. But can one truly be so ignorant as to advocate widespread violence in the name of peace?

When the world is rendered in black-and-white—portrayed as a simple fight between colonizer and colonized—the answer is yes. Solutions, by this logic, are absolute: Israel or Palestine, nothing in between. Either you support liberation of the oppressed or you support genocide. Either Stanford is all good or all bad; all in favor of free speech or all authoritarian; all anti-Semitic or all Islamophobic.

At January’s anti-anti-Semitism event, I watched an exchange between a Jewish attendee and a protester from a few feet away. “Are you pro-Palestine?” the protester asked.

“Yes,” the attendee responded, and he went on to describe his disgust with the human-rights abuses Palestinians have faced for years.
“But are you a Zionist?”
“Yes.”
“Then we are enemies.”

If his point was something quite specific to Stanford, I sure missed it.