Debating Israel’s Future, One Week at a Time

Was Israel justified in using massive force following the October 7 attacks by Hamas?

This question has tested college campuses across the country, leading to shouting matches, protests, arrests, suspensions, firings, and congressional hearings. For Steven David and his students, it’s simply another Wednesday. In a small classroom on the Johns Hopkins University campus in mid-April, they spend two hours wrestling with this and other fraught questions, as they have done every week since January.

David, a longtime professor of international relations, has been teaching the course, “Does Israel Have a Future?” since 2016. The binding theme, he says, is that Israel is one of the few countries in the world whose existence is routinely called into question.

This semester brought new and urgent questions in the wake of the Hamas attacks and the ensuing war, but David has always expected his students to engage with ideas they may find repugnant and wrestle with the consequences of opinions they hold close.

Today the 16 students crowd around a long conference table, with David at the head, and dive immediately into the deep end of the pool. The course is taught chronologically, beginning with lessons from the ancient past before moving on to Israel’s birth, the resulting displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, the two-state solution, the U.S.-Israel alliance, the Iranian nuclear threat, and much more.

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Over the years, David says, it has drawn a wide range of students: Muslims, Jews, Christians, Hindus and the nonreligious. He has taught students from Arab countries who had never met a Jewish person and students from Jewish day schools who had never been asked to ponder the Palestinians’ plight. Some students arrive with strong opinions on Palestinian rights or Israel’s place in the Middle East; others are more disinterested observers.

Each class starts with two students debating a statement.

Week two: The primary responsibility for the Palestinian refugee problem rests with the creation of Israel.

Week five: Israeli settlements in the West Bank are illegal, immoral, and make a lasting peace with the Palestinians impossible.

Week nine: International efforts to delegitimize Israel are unfair and antisemitic.

At the beginning of the semester, students pick a topic and a side — usually the one they agree with. Then David tells them they have to argue the opposite.

Today, in the second-to-last class of the semester, the subject is Israel’s response to the October 7 attacks. Two students reel off their arguments in five-minute monologues.

Afterward, David gives a brief lecture on the history of Gaza; an overview of how many Israelis were killed or taken hostage on October 7; why Hamas may have attacked when it did; the aftermath for Hamas, Gaza, and Israel; and what lies ahead.

Then, he puts the question to the larger group: Was Israel justified in responding as it did?

The students, who have been meeting for 12 weeks, jump in. They speak directly and knowledgeably, connecting current events to historical ones, wading into domestic and international politics, homing in on the looming famine in Gaza.

Some say that Israel’s fierce response undermined whatever good will it had in the days following October 7, and that it should have instead rallied international support to pursue Hamas fighters and leaders. Others are doubtful, questioning the depth of support the country could have mustered and pointing to the immediate praise Hamas received from some areas, including pockets of the U.S. Some students approach the question through the lens of history, international strategy, or Israeli domestic politics. Others focus on the deaths of innocent civilians and the humanitarian crisis facing millions in Gaza.

The students continue, back and forth, making deeper and more layered arguments. They debate whether Hamas could ever be defeated, like ISIS, or whether it would regenerate. They disagree on whether Israel could have conducted targeted assassinations of Hamas leaders in other countries. They question what Israelis want and what its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, could achieve militarily and politically. Every argument — for a ceasefire, for military force, for diplomatic relations — is met with a counterargument.

David, a grandfatherly-looking man, occasionally marks a student’s observation with a “good point” or a clarifying statement. But while his demeanor is encouraging, he is quick to press them on whether they are willing to accept the consequences of their arguments.

To one student who says Israel must enter Rafah to destroy Hamas because Hamas will never stop trying to destroy Israel, David asks: Is it justified to kill thousands if that’s the price that has to be paid?

To another student, who says that Israel should agree to a permanent ceasefire in exchange for the hostages, David asks: Would you be fine with a Hamas victory celebration?

This tactic requires students to extend their thinking. Every decision, he seems to be pointing out, is influenced by many forces and has many consequences. Can any one line of argument possibly take them all into account? And can you live with what happens next?

While this is an academic course, nobody is expected to avoid connecting what they’re learning to their identity or experiences.

“They all know I’m Jewish,” David says in an interview a few weeks before this class. “They all know I’m, in a sense, broadly supportive of Israel, although very critical of much of what Israel does. But they also know that their job is not to agree with what they think I believe or think I don’t believe.”

Rather, he wants students to deepen and refine what and how they think. “As I tell them, there’s not so much right versus wrong, but there are good arguments and bad arguments here. And I expect them to back up what they’re saying with the readings and the discussions to make the points they’re making.”

To that end, David’s syllabus is packed with opinions. Each week, students engage with ideas they may not have encountered elsewhere.

“I pick out readings that make a point, that have an argument,” he says. “If you want to say Israel is a settler-colonial project, have Rashid Khalidi make that point. But then I’ll balance it with, say, Simon Sebag Montefiore, who says it’s ridiculous to call Israel a settler-colonial project. I’ll have authors openly talking about Israel not having a right to exist, or that Israel is not a democracy because it privileges one group over another.”

Students often feel whipsawed, he says. “They read it and say, ‘Well, that’s right.’ Then, ‘Wait a minute. This person says that.’ And at least they get a sense of the complexity of these issues.”

By the end of the semester, David says, engaging with multiple arguments makes students “less polemical and in some ways less intense, recognizing that there are many sides to these problems.”

Students agree that taking the course has deepened their understanding of the history of the region and challenged some of their beliefs.

Min-Seo Kim, a public health major and self-described politics nerd, says that he never learned much of the Palestinian perspective when he was growing up in Ohio, and that the readings helped fill in those blanks.

“My overall opinion on this whole conflict has definitely evolved,” says Kim. “It’s always been nuanced. But it became even more nuanced and, honestly, confused.”

No side, he has concluded, can lay claim to moral certainty. “You kind of become a little bit jaded,” he says of the course’s effect on him, “or a little bit more apprehensive of the hardliners on each side who are thinking, ‘My side is the inherently morally virtuous side. And therefore, the other side is the evil bad guy who is trying to oppress and destroy.’”

If you always believe you are the victim, he says, then you can paint any of your actions as justified, no matter the cost or consequence. That becomes particularly clear, he says, when you listen to the grief, fear, and anger coming from both Palestinians and Israelis. “You both have legitimate grievances against the other. You both have done terrible things to the other. But until you realize that and realize that hard reality, you are never going to come to a peaceful resolution.”

Students in David’s class also say that it’s helpful, if sometimes challenging, to be in the same room with classmates who hold different views on Israel.

“Navigating personal biases while also standing up for what you believe in can be difficult in a course like this, where everyone is passionate about the issue or has a personal stake in what is going on,” Arusa Malik, a sophomore who is studying international relations, and who is Muslim, wrote in an email. “Knowing when to supplement your arguments with lived experiences, statistics, or textual evidence is a tricky skill to master but one this course encourages.”

Yael Klucznik, a senior who is majoring in biomedical engineering and is Jewish, says she often found herself disagreeing with fellow students. “I was confused and I asked questions and I left certain classes a little upset about some things that my peers were saying. But every single week we would come back together and touch on a different topic. One week, I might disagree with a certain student about something, and the next week I might agree with them on something else.” The process helped her understand how “it’s not a black or white situation. It’s not, you’re pro-this or pro-that.”

David says that in years of teaching the course, he’s never had students step out of bounds. “What I find among many of the students is a real thirst to learn about the conflict. Not so much to persuade someone of this or that. But just to learn about the history: How did we get here?”

Through the readings, he says, “they’re sensitized to the notion that very few facts are indisputable: What is Palestine? How did, all of a sudden, Jewish faith emerge there? Who backed it? Who didn’t? What about these serious conflicts with Gaza before? How did Gaza come to be?”

A Jewish student — who asked to remain anonymous because he worried that future employers might see his name attached to the controversy — agreed that he and his classmates were able to overcome tense moments, thanks in part to David’s “wonderful” facilitation. But he added that the relatively calm environment on Hopkins’s campus also plays a role in the course’s success.

“I think that if Professor David was teaching this course at Columbia,” the student said, “it doesn’t matter who was in the course. The people outside of the course would be protesting. It would break it.”

Klucznik has a different take. The course worked well, she says, because everyone was willing to consider other points of view. “What that makes me think is that people who are extreme on either side don’t want to hear the other perspective,” she says. For that reason, she doesn’t think a course like this could really affect campus climate. “What contributes to campus climate are the more vocal people and that tends to be — on every college campus — students who are very extreme in their views. Those are the same people who wouldn’t be taking this class. In our class there was nobody with extreme views.”

The discussions in David’s course are not entirely academic. At the end of this class meeting, David sets aside a few minutes to ask how October 7 has affected them personally. That’s when some students’ feelings rise to the surface.

Klucznik, who is active on campus in her support of Israel, says that even though Johns Hopkins is a calm place, antisemitism is still “rampant” and not much talked about. She says that’s because it’s masked as anti-Zionism, and it shows up mainly online, such as in anonymous-posting apps like Sidechat.

“People have called for the death of all Zionists on this campus,” she says of these online postings. “People have called me a terrorist. People have called me a racist. People have painted me looking like a witch. Like a caricature of a witch. Which is the most antisemitic trope.”

A few minutes later, another student dabs at her eyes with a tissue as she talks about the rise in both Islamophobia and antisemitism. “To kind of see this, at its core a political issue, become a Jews-versus-Muslim thing, it’s so painful. So painful,” she says. (She did not want her name published in connection with these discussions.) “Since the beginning of the attacks, there’s been vigils for Palestinian lives lost, for Arab lives lost, for the Muslim lives lost. There’s been vigils for Jewish lives lost, Israeli lives lost. But there’s never really been something for everybody to kind of acknowledge that lives are lives, regardless of what they believe in.”

The Jewish student who wanted to remain anonymous recalls running into his roommate from the previous year, who is Palestinian. It was right before winter break. They hadn’t seen each other in months, and he was a bit nervous. “The first thing we did was we hugged each other and said, ‘How is your family doing?’ And we just kind of sat,” he says, his voice breaking.

Then he adds that they did what his classmate just said everyone should be doing: They said, “This is hard for all of us. I care about you, and you care about me.”