Greetings, Bowdoin Community! I’m writing to you from sunny Sabbatical Island, where I’m blissfully researching and writing to my heart’s content. I’m enjoying my time on the Island, but I confess that I feel the need to check in, if only for a moment, to address some of the angst that’s cropped up as of late among students, staff and faculty. Last year was an unusually challenging year at Bowdoin and on campuses across the country. The conflict in Israel-Palestine has divided classmates, broken friendships and, for some, cast suspicion upon the College as an institution. I’ve had the good fortune to be able to retreat to my Island, but I’ve become increasingly concerned of late as I see rhetorical “battlelines” hardening again.

Sabbatical Island has afforded me a perspective that might help soften some of the sharper edges of campus discussion. An academic sabbatical allows a person to immerse themselves in intergenerational conversations about big questions that concern us all.

To pick an example close to my work, scholars have debated the explanatory factors that contribute to the development or deterioration of democratic institutions. This research question is as old as democracy itself. As academics, we’re obligated not merely to research the questions that interest us, but also to examine how successive generations of scholars have done so.

Implicit in this arrangement is the assumption that our truth claims are fundamentally provisional. Our findings can and should be revised as scholars continue to collect new evidence, refine old concepts and propose fresh perspectives. One of the great privileges (luxuries?) of academic writing is that one gets to think aloud with others in this intergenerational community—a community that does not merely accept, but actively embraces, uncertainty.

My time on the Island makes me wonder: Why don’t we collectively lighten the moral weight we impose on ourselves and others and allow one another to be uncertain—and to do so in public?

We all possess a right to be wrong, a right to make mistakes. This right is especially crucial when there is public dispute about what constitutes the best and most reliable information on the matter at hand. Under such circumstances, members of a democratic community should not bite their tongues and remain paralyzed in uncertainty; they should instead be encouraged to vocalize provisional truths. If we were encouraged to do so, we might find that quite a few members of our community would espouse a variety of positions on the Israel-Palestine conflict that point in different political directions. Allow me to go out on a limb and share some things that I provisionally know about the conflict:

-The mass and indiscriminate murder of innocent Israeli civilians on October 7 was grotesque; among the other crimes that unfolded on that day, the sexual violence that took place is almost too horrifying to comprehend.

-For a country of its size, Israel is the most or one of the most militarily powerful nation-states in the world. Its leaders, however, grossly misallocated its forces. They prioritized the protection of Israeli settlers in the West Bank and recklessly dismissed intelligence assessments showing that Hamas was preparing an assault. These actions left the southern portion of the country uniquely vulnerable.

-Israel has the right to defend itself, but as a nation-state that is publicly committed to liberal democratic principles and receives billions of dollars in military aid, it is reasonable—and not antisemitic—to expect its military to adhere to a higher standard than a neighbor like Iran, which is resolutely theocratic and repudiates many basic premises of human pluralism.

-The Israeli military campaign in Gaza is entirely out of proportion to what is necessary to protect Israeli civilians. If properly deployed, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are more than capable of repelling an assault by Hamas fighters equipped with paragliders, mopeds and AK-47s—the low-tech gear Hamas used on October 7. This is especially true if IDF commanders are willing to listen to the intelligence warnings of their female soldiers on the front lines.

-The Israeli state has, from the start, unleashed a relentless campaign of war crimes against the people of Gaza; with the systematic destruction of homes, schools, hospitals and nearly all infrastructure, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the current government’s broader aim is to make Gaza an unlivable space. The hope appears to be that the Palestinian people who survive the bombs, malnutrition and disease will abandon the area. This is ethnic cleansing.

-Closer to home, there’s the question of divestment. So far as I’m aware, American arms manufacturers make their money from lucrative government contracts and have little, if any, reason to worry about whether divestment from higher education endowments will affect their stock prices. Divestment will not materially or symbolically impact these companies—even if university endowments across the country were to all divest at once. It is tempting to attribute responsibility for injustice to authority figures who are close at hand, but I fear that we may be misidentifying the actual culprits. National political and media elites who reflexively prioritize Jewish Israeli lives over Palestinian lives deserve the blame for U.S. policy; members of the American public who share these bigoted attitudes also bear responsibility.

Each of the statements listed above is a simplified gloss describing conclusions I’ve provisionally drawn over the past year. I share my own mix of provisional conclusions here, not because others need to know where I stand on these matters. I’m just one member of our community. I share this mix of ideas to—hopefully—make it a little easier for others to do so as well.

We should all be able to share our own, sometimes eclectic, mixes of tentative conclusions. We should do so and take the time to compare notes with one another. And we certainly should be okay with one another for expressing partial or incomplete truths. Sometimes, these are all we have.

Jeff Selinger is an associate professor of Government at Bowdoin College.