Ten hands form a heart representing the Santa Clara University three C's: Competence, Compassion, and Conscience. Photo by wildpixel / Getty Images via Canva for Education.
Meir Statman is the Glenn Klimek Professor of Finance at Santa Clara University and a faculty scholar with the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. Views are his own.
I was born in 1947 in a displaced persons camp in Germany to Holocaust survivors. My parents and I came to Israel in 1949 and I grew up in Ashkelon, only a few miles north of Gaza. I was 26 in 1973 when I left Israel for my Ph.D. studies at Columbia University, and have since lived in the U.S. for more than 50 years, teaching at Santa Clara University for more than 44 years.
In 2014, the time of a periodic war between Hamas of Gaza and Israel, I was asked by Hillel, the Jewish student organization, to speak at a rally organized by pro-Palestinian groups on Santa Clara’s campus. I spoke briefly, describing growing up in Ashkelon in the 1950s, when armed Palestinians regularly infiltrated from Gaza, spraying bullets in the streets and tossing hand grenades through windows. I recalled being drawn to a gathering of people in front of a house on my way to school. On the floor was a body, covered by a blanket, a person killed the night before. I said to the rally audience that it is surely time to end the bloodshed of Palestinians and Israelis and live side by side in peace. The speaker following me began by noting that Ashkelon also belongs to the Palestinians.
I present my essay by Santa Clara’s 3Cs of competence, conscience, and compassion, offering reflections based on my lived experience and knowledge.
Competence
Knowledge of facts is key in competence, and so is skill at making sense of them. Many facts about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are generally known, but not all, and some facts are in dispute. It is impossible to make sense of facts without knowing them and resolving these disputes.
Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian-American professor at Columbia University, is the author of “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017.” Khalidi is the great-great nephew of Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, a former mayor of Jerusalem. He begins his book with a letter al-Khalidi sent in 1899 to Theodor Herzl, a founding father of Zionism, the movement to create a Jewish national home in Palestine. In his letter, al-Khalidi told Herzl that he and the other indigenous people of Palestine oppose the creation of a Jewish national home there. “In the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.”
It is generally hard to go back far enough in history to find the indigenous people of a place. Were native Americans the indigenous people of America? Perhaps. But it is also possible that, lost to history, earlier indigenous people preceded them. In the case of Israel-Palestine however we know that Jews are indigenous in Israel-Palestine because Jesus was born a Jew in Israel-Palestine, more than two millennia ago, and died a Jew there, preceding both Christianity and Islam.
We also know that in 1947 the United Nations approved a plan to partition Palestine into Israel, a Jewish state, and Palestine, a Palestinian state. And we know that the Jews of Palestine accepted the plan and established the state of Israel in 1948, whereas the Palestinians and the Arab countries surrounding Israel-Palestine rejected the plan and invaded Israel to annihilate it. Israelis call the ensuing war, “War of Independence,” whereas Palestinians call it “Nakba,” meaning catastrophe. Today, Nakba is usually described as the catastrophe of turning Palestinians into refugee. But originally it described the catastrophe of failing to annihilate Israel as it was born.
Here comes a set of important facts not sufficiently known. When members of Hamas and many others speak about Israeli “occupation,” they are not referring to the 1967 Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. They are not even referring to the 1947 partition borders. They are referring to the existence of Israel in any borders, evident in their attempt to annihilate Israel in 1948. This is also reflected in the subtitle of Khalidi’s book “A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance.”
Today’s, 76 years after the birth of Israel, Hamas and many others demand the “Right of Return” to all parts of Israel. The Hamas fighters who invaded Israel on October 7, 2023, murdering more than 1,200 Israelis, consider the places they invaded as theirs, part of Palestine, and they likely consider the Israelis they murdered as colonialist settlers.
The status of Palestinians as refugees is anomalous. My parents were refugees when they escaped from Poland in 1939 as the Nazis advanced, and they were refugees in the displaced persons camp in Germany. But they and I ceased being refugees when we arrived in Israel in 1949. My younger brother and sister were born in Israel, and they were never refugees. The 20th century saw empires dissolve into nations, whether the Ottoman Empire dissolving into Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, and more, or India and Pakistan gaining independence from the British Empire. Borders were shifted, creating millions of refugees when Poland gained land previously held by Germany and Ukraine gained land previously held by Poland.
The process of turning residents into refugees is always miserable and often bloody, but none of the refugees of the 1940s or their descendants remain refugees today, except Palestinians, served by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). As Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf noted in “The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace,” UNRWA was charged with finding a solution for the Palestinian refugees of 1948, but gave in to political pressure by Arab states and other others to create a permanent “refugee” problem.
Approximately 700,000 Palestinians were turned into refugees in 1948, left or expelled from Israel. Today, UNRWA counts approximately 6 million Palestinian refugees, almost all children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of the 1948 Palestinian refugees now living in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Israeli citizens include approximately 7 million Jews and more than 2 million Palestinians.
The grievances of Palestinians against Israeli Jews are miles deep, and so are the grievances of Israeli Jews against Palestinians. A “one-state” solution whereby Palestinian refugees exercise the “right of return” to Israel might seem like a great idea but the reality is likely to resemble that of a single Yugoslav state common to Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Bosniaks and other ethnic groups. Palestinians born and living in Gaza can continue to live in Gaza, Palestinians born and living in the West Bank can continue to live in the West Bank. None of them are refugees. The same holds for Palestinians living in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and elsewhere, including the United States. Yes, Gaza City is crowded as New York City is crowded, but the areas around both cities are not. A one-state solution implied in the demand for the “right of return” would bring civil war and likely an Islamist dictatorship. Only a “two-state” solution of an Israel with its Jewish and Palestinian citizens and a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank is likely to bring peace.
Conscience and Compassion
We can think of conscience as fairness, the Golden Rule of “love your neighbor as yourself” and “do on to others what you would have them do to you.” A Palestine stretching “from the river to the sea,” advocated by Hamas and others is not fair, and neither is an Israel stretching “from the river to the sea,” advocated by the government of Benjamin Netanyahu and others.
Many, including some American Jews, call for Israeli Jews to “return to the countries they came from.” But which countries would Israelis return to? My parents could not return to Poland, knowing that Jewish refugees who returned there and attempted to reclaim their homes were murdered. Their application for immigration to the United States was denied. Israel was the only country that would accept them. I wish that American Jews who begin their letters to the editor with “I am a Jew, but …” would begin with, “I am a Jew holding an American passport, but…”
Conscience calls us to imagine ourselves as others and ask if it is fair for others to do us harm as we are contemplating doing to them. Compassion calls us to help others and refrain from harming others even if we are powerful enough to harm without concern about being harmed. At times, both Hamas and Israel are powerful enough to harm the other without concern for being harmed. But it is time to stop the bloodshed and live in peace.