Shtetl-Optimized’s First-Ever “Profile in Courage”

The purpose of this post is to salute a longtime friend-of-the-blog for a recent display of moral courage.

Boaz Barak is one of the most creative complexity theorists and cryptographers in the world, Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard, and—I’m happy to report—soon (like me) to go on leave to work in OpenAI’s safety group. He’s a longtime friend-of-the-blog (having, for example, collaborated with me on the Five Worlds of AI post and Alarming trend in K-12 math education post), not to mention a longtime friend of me personally.

Boaz has always been well to my left politically. Secular, Israeli-born, and a protege of the … err, post-Zionist radical (?) Oded Goldreich, I can assure you that Boaz has never been quiet in his criticisms of Bibi’s emerging settler-theocracy.

This weekend, though, a thousand Israelis were murdered, kidnapped, and raped—children, babies, parents using their bodies to shield their kids, Holocaust survivors, young people at a music festival. It’s already entered history as the worst butchery of Jews since the Holocaust.

In response, 35 Harvard student organizations quickly issued a letter blaming Israel “entirely” for the pogrom, and expressing zero regrets of any kind about it—except for the likelihood of “colonial retaliation,” against which the letter urged a “firm stand.” Harvard President Claudine Gay, outspoken on countless other issues, was silent in response to the students’ effective endorsement of the Final Solution. So Boaz wrote an open letter to President Gay, a variant of which has now been signed by a hundred Harvard faculty. The letter reads, in part:

Every innocent death is a tragedy. Yet, this should not mislead us to create false equivalencies between the actions leading to this loss. Hamas planned and executed the murder and kidnapping of civilians, particularly women, children, and the elderly, with no military or other specific objective. This meets the definition of a war crime.  The Israeli security forces were engaging in self-defense against this attack while dealing with numerous hostage situations and a barrage of thousands of rockets hidden deliberately in dense urban settings.

The leaders of the major democratic countries united in saying that “the terrorist actions of Hamas have no justification, no legitimacy, and must be universally condemned” and that Israel should be supported “in its efforts to defend itself and its people against such atrocities.“ In contrast, while terrorists were still killing Israelis in their homes,  35 Harvard student organizations wrote that they hold “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence,” with not a single word denouncing the horrific acts by Hamas. In the context of the unfolding events, this statement can be seen as nothing less than condoning the mass murder of civilians based only on their nationality. We’ve heard reports of even worse instances, with Harvard students celebrating the “victory” or “resistance” on social media.

As a University aimed at educating future leaders, this could have been a teaching moment and an opportunity to remind our students that beyond our political debates, some acts such as war crimes are simply wrong. However, the statement by Harvard’s administration fell short of this goal. While justly denouncing Hamas, it still contributed to the false equivalency between attacks on noncombatants and self-defense against those atrocities. Furthermore, the statement failed to condemn the justifications for violence that come from our own campus, nor to make it clear to the world that the statement endorsed by these organizations does not represent the values of the Harvard community.  How can Jewish and Israeli students feel safe on a campus in which it is considered acceptable to justify and even celebrate the deaths of Jewish children and families?

Boaz’s letter, and related comments by former Harvard President Larry Summers, seem to have finally spurred President Gay into dissociating the Harvard administration from the students’ letter.

When I get depressed about the state of the world—as I have a lot the past few days—it helps to remember the existence of such friends, not only in the world but in my little corner of it.