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In response to “Harvard Must Choose Engagement Over Censorship,” the Editorial Board is correct that a line in a Harvard Salient article by David F. X. Army ’28 resembles a line in a heinous 1939 speech by Adolf Hilter. But “France to the French… Germany to the Germans” wasn’t the heinous part of Hitler’s speech. Hitler complained that “the whole democratic world is oozing sympathy for the poor tormented Jewish people” but it refuses to “take them,” and Hitler threatened that there would be “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!”
The annihilation part is what we revile about Hitler. We don’t know if Hitler would have agreed to add “Israel belongs to the Jews” to the nationalistic formulation about France and Germany. But in the decades preceding 1939, Zionist leaders explored such a deal with Europeans who wanted the Jews out and were glad to allow Jews to join their brethren in the Middle East. For example, the British Empire’s Balfour Declaration called for a “national home for the Jewish people” in Mandatory Palestine. But the British also limited Jewish immigration during this crucial period.
A failure to reach such a deal seems almost puzzling today. In recent weeks we’ve seen an unprecedented unity of world leaders in calling for the nationalistic two-state solution of “Palestine to the Palestinians, Israel to the Jews.”
The call by the Board for engagement is a good one because the issue of nationalism touches many of the world’s conflicts. The call echoes a similar one in 1975 from government professor Martin L. Kilson Jr. for “serious public discussion in The Crimson” about nationalism in the Arab-Israeli conflict, to which I had the privilege of responding in these pages at the time.
David Army and the Salient were not wrong to discuss the virtues of nationalism. Our goal in such discussion should not be to punish authors, censor articles or protect the Harvard community from reading scary speeches. Our goal should be to understand the history of nationalism and brainstorm about ways to do better in the future.
— Dr. Michael M. Segal ’76, a neurologist and neuroscientist and a member of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard.
Letters to the Editor must respond directly and explicitly to either an opinion piece recently published on the Editorial page, or else to The Crimson’s manner of coverage within any section of the newspaper. Letters that respond to the subject matter of a non-opinion Crimson article, rather than The Crimson’s coverage of that matter, will not be accepted.
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