When bombs go off

When bombs went off this weekend in the Paris, I was sitting in a workshop discussing the two-state solution between Israel and Palestine. As a woman spoke about human rights violations in the West Bank, I wondered what connection could be drawn between these injustices.

Trying to make connections between the plights of different people can seem like a manipulative way to create empathy. But academic institutions encourage the study of history and society, and what is the meaning of such intellectual quests, if not to draw parallels between seemingly separate phenomena, if not to understand the faults of our past in order to not repeat them in the future?

Growing up in Israel, I was struck by the fact that just seventy years ago, the Jewish people were denied a right to their own country, and here we were denying the same right to the Palestinians. Shouldn’t it be obvious that just as the Jews rightly deserve a nation where they will be free of persecution, so do the Palestinians?

Another comparison can be made: In 1939, the SS St. Louis sailed from Europe in search of a new home for 937 Jewish refugees. They were denied entry to Cuba, the United States and Canada, before eventually returning to Europe, where more than 250 of them found their death during the Holocaust. And now — millions of displaced Syrians are knocking on our metaphorical doors with the plea to be given a safe haven from persecution. Shouldn’t we be opening our homes and ensuring that eighty years from now, we will be able to look back with a clean(er) conscious?

However, as I thought of these parallels, I realized that unfair connections could be made just as easily. A few weeks ago, a rapid series of terrorist attacks were committed in Israel, creating a wave of hatred towards Palestinians among some Israelis. But the decision of certain Palestinians to commit evil crimes does not mean that millions of innocent Palestinians do not deserve to live in dignity. Similarly, the terror attack in Paris might lead to a deepening of the Islamophobia that has permeated Europe. But this attack should not be used as an excuse to lessen commitment to ending the Syrian crisis.

France’s motto is “liberty, equality, fraternity” — a motto that encourages the view that the loss of an innocent Syrian life is just as tragic as the loss of an innocent Parisian life. And yet, it was the death of 129 people in Paris that has awakened the world to hatred and violence, and not the 210,000 confirmed Syrian deaths over the past four years of fighting, or the 3,000,000 Syrian refugees who have fled their nation, or even the 6,500,000 Syrians who have been displaced within Syria.

The tragedy that took place in Paris should be a call to protect allhuman lives.

This past Monday, I attended a benefit concert for the Syrian refugees, organized by the Center for Jewish Life’s Social Justice Committee and Muslim Advocates for Social Justice and Individual Dignity. The concert was planned months ago, but it seemed particularly fitting in light of this past week’s events. The message sent out by the Israeli musician, Gabriel Meyer Halevy, was remarkably simplistic: we are all human; we all deserve to live happy and dignified lives. The landless Syrians and Palestinians, the hurting French and Israelis — are all equal in their quest for safety.

Is attending workshops and benefit concerts enough? Will projecting the flag of France on national monuments and lighting candles make the world a better place? Even as these questions have occupied my thoughts this past week, I have no definitive answers. I do think that these actions are a good start. As students, our power to affect change is still limited, but as we continue to find the differences and similarities between evils, we should wonder how to contribute to making the world one in which we are proud to live — a world in which the wrongs of our past are not repeated.

Iris Samuels is a freshman from Zichron Yakov, Israel. She can be reached at isamuels@princeton.edu.