On the morning of October 8, before the Israeli Defense Forces had even begun its ground maneuvers, we were collecting bodies. I remember it vividly because I was there. I lifted stretchers, gathered the bodies of young, beautiful Israeli civilians, innocent children, and helpless elderly people who had been murdered, raped, and mutilated. Their blood was still fresh on the ground. Smoke was still rising from their homes. Screams were still echoing in my head.

And that very same morning, while we were still gathering our dead and the fighting inside Israel was still ongoing north and south, and Judea and Samaria, protests were already being organized on university campuses across the United States. Funded, orchestrated, aggressive demonstrations, violent toward Jews and Israelis, at a time when the IDF had not yet even entered Gaza. My wife, then a graduate student at MIT, witnessed it firsthand and relayed to me, in real time, what was unfolding.

Throughout the war, those same groups repeated the same words: genocide, systematic killing, crimes that never happened and were never created. I say this because I was there. I know our values, how we fought, and the efforts made to avoid harming civilians, even in Gaza, while Hamas used its own civilians as human shields.

And both at that time and in the years since, the world was burning elsewhere without protests of these kind [I add this here only because there are protests in the places you mention below, like Iran, but not supportive ones here, which I know you get to in the subsequent paragraphs] at  all.

Systematic genocide in Sudan – silence. An ongoing war with hundreds of thousands dead in Ethiopia – silence. The murder and abduction of thousands of Druze by the al-Julani regime in Syria – silence. The murder of thousands of Christians in Nigeria – absolute silence. The murder, abduction, and rape of thousands of Kurds by the al-Julani regime with the assistance of Erdoğan’s regime – not a single protester in the campus courtyards. Horrific terror attacks and the murder of Jews in Washington, Manchester, Bondi Beach – complete silence. And of course, in recent weeks, the massacre of tens of thousands of protesters by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.

And in all the central campus squares – a deafening silence. No encampments. No demonstrations. 

It turns out the question is not who the victim is. The question is who the right victim is.

I recently walked through Harvard Yard, at the height of the killing of innocent protesters in Iran, searching for those enlightened human rights defenders. The same plazas that had been packed on October 8 and later during the fighting in Rafah, were empty. Tumbleweeds, like in the Wild West, rolling past tourists taking pictures with the Harvard statue. I did not find a single moral protester defending the Sudanese, the Druze, the Kurds, or the Iranian civilians being slaughtered. Then you hear those opinion shapers, professors, artists, and actors, claiming that the protests in Iran are a plot by Israel and the United States. 

History has seen people wash their hands of responsibility. After horrors, voices said, “We didn’t know, we didn’t see.” In Deuteronomy, it is said: “Our hands did not shed this blood, nor did our eyes see.”

But today eyes are wide open. Everything is filmed, documented, and spread on social media. History will judge us, and we will not be able to claim that we did not know and did not see. 

During the massacre of protesters in Iran, I wrote in the Harvard students’ WhatsApp group. I did not call for violence. I did not ask for protests. I asked for the bare minimum, to share, to learn, not to be indifferent. As the days passed, I realized that it moved almost no one, especially in a group where people present themselves as the future leaders of the developed and developing world. I received only a few likes. Hours later, pictures of dogs in the Cambridge snow and beer parties were posted, and the likes jumped into the dozens.

It is a small example, but it reveals a larger truth: campuses are not driven by human rights. They are driven by funded political trends and the identity of the victim.

True morality does not choose victims based on political affiliation, it does not awaken only when the headline is convenient, when the issue is trending, when the outside financing is there; and it does not remain silent when the blood is not Jewish, or precisely when it is.

There are early signs of a course correction. At Harvard and at other institutions, new initiatives and programs have begun to address antisemitism and to broaden how we understand victimhood. Yet it must be said honestly: these outstanding students and these outstanding institutions appear to have lost their way. 

81 years after the liberation of Auschwitz and the end of the Holocaust, have we learned the lesson? Are we not standing idly by the blood of our neighbors? Is the identity of the victim not what matters most? It seems not. The steps that universities like Harvard are beginning to take are in the right direction, but it is far from enough. They must deepen and take root.