With three grandchildren currently serving on active duty with the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza, our views of the war there are perhaps felt more intensely than those of most other Americans. Of course we are repulsed by the bloodthirsty atrocities committed by Hamas against innocent civilians, but just as we are duly proud of their patriotism, we worry daily about their welfare.
Our oldest grandson spent some time with us in Baltimore as a kid. We remember him as free-spirited and flighty, seemingly care-less, hopping around aimlessly in right field (where Little League coaches traditionally put their least-able players). Now 23, he’s an IDF officer with a platoon of 18-year-olds under his command.
It seems like yesterday that his sister, a year younger, was just a pretty and typically talkative teenager. At the moment she’s in an intelligence unit somewhere near Israel’s northern border, where most of her workday conversation involves the critical task of telling IDF troops where to deploy.
Neither their parents nor we know their exact whereabouts or situation, much less that of our other grandson in the service there. Twenty-two, perpetually shy but likewise blessed with poster-boy looks, he chose on his own to sign up for combat duty. He was recently engaged, and scheduled to be married in February of 2024. We, along with his pretty fiancé, await news about him.
As most other Israelis, our daughter and son living in the Holy Land are all involved in the war effort in one way or another: making sandwiches for the soldiers in action, running errands for neighbors whose sons have been called to the front or, together with their pre-teen brothers and sisters left at home, taking care of the sundry household chores at hand.
How quickly they all grow up, so recently chastened by adolescence and now challenged by war.
Our daughter met her husband at the University of Pennsylvania. Now they live on a farm in northern Israel, where they do what they can to support the soldiers in Gaza. Our older son and his wife reside in Modiin, where under the current circumstances they are forced to work from home and – as the discomfiting nomenclature of the day describes it – “sheltering in place.”
My wife and I live a troubled world away, in more ways than one. While we sit on our backyard patio barbecuing with friends, we’re conscious of our kids having to hunker down close by the steel underground bunkers into which they’re obliged to descend whenever the sirens sound around them. In better times we’ve been able to stay in touch with them at will via WhatsApp and Skype. At the moment we’re often incommunicado.
As a law professor whose fields of interest have long been civil liberties and international human rights, I find myself increasingly thrust into the thick of nationwide campus skirmishes – such as those recently fomented by far-left-wing student groups at Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Stanford and elsewhere which have gone public with statements blaming Israel as the root cause of atrocities committed by Hamas and copycat terrorist gangs.
When students blatantly display their ignorance of basic facts – in particular here, the primary purpose of Hamas, whose very charter calls for the destruction of Israel – they should be quickly taken to task by administration and faculty: publicly identified, vocally challenged on the merits, and if found to have abetted violence, have their scholarships summarily withdrawn. Those of us who believe in justice and decency are waiting for that to happen.
We pray that our grandchildren aspire to the wisdom of King Solomon, who sought little beyond the blessing of a “discerning heart, to be able to distinguish between right and wrong.”
Kenneth Lasson is an emeritus professor of law at the University of Baltimore.