Can We Debate the Israel-Hamas War?

I participated in my first demonstration against the Viet Nam War in March 1964. A bunch of us went down to Times Square, stood in front of the military recruiting station, and handed out a leaflet which said — U.S. Out of Viet Nam! People who went past us were polite, we handed out a couple of hundred leaflets and went home.

Over the next several years, as opposition to our involvement in Southeast Asia grew, the anti-war movement also got larger and louder, and the media began to notice that we were around. Their notice took the form of scolding us for being ‘dupes’ of the Communists, and when Ted Kennedy showed up at a 1967 teach-in that a bunch of us dupes put together in Chicago, he criticized us by saying the same thing.

The national media and the political establishment finally caught on to what was really happening in Nam after the Tet offensive in 1968. Never mind that by this time we had probably immolated a million peasants in Nam, Laos, and Cambodia, and also lost a lot of the young men whose names are on that goddamn D.C. wall.

I’m beginning to see the same scenario play out in the media coverage of the Israel — Hamas fighting in the Near East. History doesn’t exactly repeat itself, but we still seem to make many of the same mistakes again and again.