Middle East expert shares insights on ‘myths vs. realities’ in the Israel-Hamas war
Jonson Kuhn/The Aspen Times
Editor’s note: This event was not sponsored by Pitkin County Library or Pitkin County.
Nearly 100 people huddled closely together inside the Dunaway community meeting room at the Pitkin County Library on Thursday night to listen to Middle East expert and Georgetown University Associate Professor Dr. Nader Hashemi who provided an educational presentation on the ethics of global responsibility as it relates to the Israel-Hamas war and the myths and realities surrounding it.
Presented by local volunteer organization Ceasefire Now Roaring Fork Valley, founding member Will Hodges said he was both “humbled and overwhelmed” by the number of people who turned out for Hashemi’s lecture despite the tremendous divisiveness felt locally for the last several months concerning the controversial subject matter.
“I didn’t imagine that we would fill up a whole room with as many people who I think are here just seeking to understand a little bit more about this conflict,” Hodges said. “It’s obviously hugely deep and complicated, and I think all of us are leaving with more questions than answers. But after five months of really just hearing simple slogans and these official rationales for supporting a genocide, I think this is a breath of fresh air.”
After successfully persuading Glenwood Springs City Council to unanimously pass the state’s first municipal ceasefire resolution on Feb. 15, Ceasefire Now RFV next looks to attend Carbondale’s Town Trustee meeting on March 26 in hopes of encouraging Carbondale to support an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza.
A frequent guest on PBS, NPR, CNN, Al Jazeera, Pacifica Radio, and the BBC, Hashemi has had various writings featured in the New York Times, Newsweek, Wall Street Journal, The Nation, Al Jazeera Online, and CNN.com.
Pulling from slides and a six-minute video he uses to educate students attending his academic lectures, the presentation provided an extensive look at the origins of Israel before detailing the series of events that have led to the current situation in the region.
Thursday marked the 160th day of the Israel-Hamas war, and Hashemi began by offering an overview of basic facts as they stand today. On Oct. 7, 1,200 Israelis were killed in an attack by Hamas with most of those killed being civilians with over 200 then being taken captive and 100 being reported as still alive and under Hamas’ control.
On the Palestinian side, he explained how within the first 100 days of the war, Israel dropped the “kiloton equivalent” of three nuclear bombs on Gaza Strip. According to reliable estimates, he said 32,000 Palestinians have been killed, with 1.8 million having been displaced, and 70% of homes in Gaza either destroyed or damaged.
Hashemi also cited reports from human rights groups that have said as many as 500,000 people are on the brink of starvation as the International Criminal Court has ruled towards the events transpiring in Gaza constituting a “plausible case” of genocide. He also pointed to a recent John Hopkins University study that reported an escalation of the Gaza war on its current trajectory could lead to 85,000 more Palestinian deaths from injury or disease over the next six months.
“These (potential) fatalities are on top of the 32,000 people that have already been killed, and if this were to occur, that would mean that 6% of Gaza’s population would have been killed,” he said. “That’s one of the highest rates of death since the Rwanda genocide, according to Andrew Gilmore, a former senior UN human rights official.”
One of the preliminary interpretive points Hashemi said he often shares with his students is that when making moral judgments regarding political conflict, binary black-and-white approaches can often be misleading, and that, in fact, two things can be correct at the same time simultaneously.
“The Hamas attack on Oct. 7 was the moral obscenity that must be condemned – period, full stop. And by the same moral logic, Israel’s brutal assault from the Gaza Strip now into six months must also be condemned – period, full stop,” he said. “The task that lies before us tonight is how to connect political dots, how to connect the various moral data points into a coherent morally consistent and intellectually-honest framework of analysis.”
Of the several moral frameworks he outlined, one in particular he referred to as the ancient ethnic and religious hatred framework, which is the thought that because people residing in the Middle East have been fighting for 1,000s of years, there’s nothing that can be done to reconcile the situation, and both sides are ultimately beyond redemption.
Hashemi said it’s often a stance heard taken by former President Donald Trump and others within the Republican party and further likened the situation to a similar moral crisis from the 1990s when then President Bill Clinton would speak of Bosnia’s hundreds of years at war and how little could be done as a result.
“This is what I call the intellectual, lazy, and historically ignorant framework of understanding global conflict, but it frequently re-appears,” he said. “It’s often a convenient position to adopt when you don’t want to live up to your moral responsibilities.”
A number of popular myths associated with the war in Gaza were also explored and debunked – for instance, the idea that Hamas and ISIS are essentially no different. To dispel this notion, Hashemi referred to a Time magazine essay written by Monica Marks in which she explains that while Israeli leaders frequently compare the two, scholars of political Islam as well as counterterrorism officials have understood this comparison to be false for quite some time.
“As Gershon Baskin, one of Israel’s lead hostage negotiators, has said about Hamas in 2006, that its acts of terrorism resemble ISIS, but they don’t have the same ideology,” he said. “The first and foremost important difference is that Hamas is a Palestinian nationalist, Islamist movement. This fused, dual identity differentiates it from ISIS, which is a transnational, pan-Islamist movement that doesn’t believe in borders and wants to create some sort of Global Islamic State on the map as we know it today.”
In his closing remarks before taking questions, Hashemi illustrated that one of the key aspects of the Gaza war is that it has been a war against children, citing the United Nations Human Rights Watch, which has said that more children in Gaza have been killed over the last four months than in all conflicts between 2019 and 2022. He displayed a graph that showed the number of children killed worldwide between the years of 2019 And 2022 is less than the number of children that have been killed over the last four to five months within the Gaza Strip.
“I think what needs to get done is that we as Americans should be asking, ‘What is it that we control? What is it that we want? How much leverage do we have?’ Let’s focus on that,” he said. “We don’t have control over what Israel is going to do at the end. We don’t have control the Palestinians are going to do; what we do have control over is our policies and the predictable consequences that flow from those policies. I think that’s where the conversation should be in this country.”
In a following Q&A session that would last an hour and, at times, saw a line of people stretching the length of the room, Hashemi patiently and at length answered questions from various attendees. Of the many questions posed, one person asked how best to approach accusations of being anti-semitic for opposing the actions of Israel and its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or further being denied the right to speak on the issue if a person isn’t Jewish.
“The idea that somehow if you criticize Israel, you’re an anti-semite is as ridiculous as saying, if you criticize the government of Iran or Saudi Arabia, you’re an Islamophobe,” he said. “Now, criticism of Israel can veer into anti-semitism. If you’re not focusing your criticism on the policies of the state and the politicians, if you’re making generalized statements about Jews, and these have some sort of character flaw, then you’re in the area of anti-semitism.”
Hashemi added: “As for not having a right to speak, I think the response you should give is that my government is giving Israel $4 billion a year. That’s my tax dollars, and they’re using it to drop bombs on the people of Gaza. That’s not how I want my money spent, and I have every right to speak out on this issue.”
Among the many in attendance on Thursday night, Council member Ward Hauenstein was also present. Hauenstein, who has been no stranger to recent unfounded labels of anti-semitism based on his supportive views of a ceasefire conversation in Gaza, said he felt it was important to attend Hashemi’s lecture because of his strong personal belief that everyone should have the right to live without fear of genocide.
“There is great harm being done,” he said. “I don’t have any answers. I just have a heart. It’s bleeding for all the people that are dying on both sides, but the Palestinians in Gaza are being killed indiscriminately.”
In addition to being an Associate Professor of Middle East and Islamic Politics at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, Hashemi also serves as the director of the Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding.
Prior to joining Georgetown, he was the founding Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver where he also served as the co-director of the Religion and International Affairs certificate program.
He has authored a number of books including “Islam, Secularism and Liberal Democracy: Toward a Democratic Theory for Muslim Societies” and co-editor of “The People Reloaded: The Green Movement and the Struggle for Iran’s Future,” “The Syria Dilemma,” “Sectarianization: Mapping the New Politics of the Middle East,” and a four volume study, “Islam and Human Rights (Critical Concepts in Islamic Studies).”
To reach Jonson Kuhn, email him at jkuhn@aspentimes.com.
Middle East expert shares insights on ‘myths vs. realities’ in the Israel-Hamas war
Nearly 100 people huddled closely together inside the Dunaway community meeting room at the Pitkin County Library Thursday night to listen to Middle East expert and Georgetown University Associate Professor Dr. Nader Hashemi.
