The Bowdoin Orient

The controversy over the Muhammad cartoons has faded from the front page, but I'm not over it. I felt mixed emotions about it. Anyone who has ever taken a class with me knows I exercise my right to free speech even when everyone else in the class wishes I would not. It would be beyond hypocritical of me, then, to not support free speech. Yet in this case, I actually thought the Danish newspapers should not have printed the cartoons, and papers like the New York Times made the right decision in not rerunning them. This was hard for me to square, until I realized this: There is a cost to free speech, and in this case, that cost was not borne by the speaker.

There's a man for whom I have enormous respect, who has just broken into true power politics. He's an immigrant who worked himself up by making the most of what the people in his new country were willing to do for him. He's an outspoken former labor leader, and an effective one at that. He was the best at making sure that municipal workers got paid on time, which, until he came, had been very problematic. After making his bones this way, he became head of his country's largest union, turning what had been an aging and ineffective organization into the powerhouse it is today and should have been in the first place. He makes clear the things he fights for, saying, "I think there are a lot of people waiting for the moment that someone will fight for their right to make a living with respect, to grow old with respect." The man is not the reincarnation of Caesar Chavez or Eugene Debs, though he might as well be.

I'm not even angry. Anger came and went a long time ago. No, Hamas's sudden rise to power January 25 just disappointed me. For you see, just about everyone who cares about Israel has this tantalizing dream, where an Israeli leader and a great Palestinian peacemaker spend weeks together, getting to know each other and negotiating a peace. The dream reaches its pinnacle when the two of them have a joint ceremony, Israeli and Palestinian flags intertwined, and declare a Palestinian state, economic cooperation, and, at long last, a time when parents can nurture their kids, rather than grieve for them. Then the two leaders leave, and the people they represent go their separate ways, tougher for the experience and deeply respectful of each other. Yasir Arafat put that dream on life support when he rejected Ehud Barak's offer at Camp David. And now Hamas has pulled the plug. The disappointment I feel now is the disappointment of a dream dying.

Quite simply, pro-Israeli actually means pro-Palestinian as well. Those who support Israel want the same things for the Palestinians that they want for themselves.