The two Israeli students and the pro-Palestinian protesters.

Two fine young men, a medical students and a business student gave a talk this week at Victoria University about their experiences as soldiers in the Israeli army during the 2014 Gaza war. The Australasian Jewish Students' Society (AUJS) organized this talk, something they were entitled to do as a university student club. Nevertheless this was clearly perceived by some as a provocative gesture. In a university environment a free flowing discussion and exchange of ideas should be encouraged, but this is not how some students, and regrettably, 30 university staff saw it. They demanded that the university stop the meeting, and the university to its credit refused to do this. Then they resorted to trying to drown out the meeting with their noise and invaded the meeting. Students, young, immature, and largely ignorant of world history, recent and distant, can be excused for jumping on whatever bad-wagon happens to be passing by. Perhaps as a callow youth I might have done this myself. But scholars, respected teachers like Dougal McNeill, should have known better. How can he, with his interest in Marxism, side with a hide-bound obscurantist, ruthless, autocratic regime, influenced by bigoted Islamic theology? Without doubt, a large number of Palestinians became casualties of war in Gaza, most killed by Israeli bombs and shell fire, though some killed by the Gaza militants, and a number were killed because the Gaza authorities deliberately exposed them to danger. It is also true that the casualties were disproportional, because the Israelis refused to be drawn into ambushes in closely built up areas and used mass destruction rather than expose their troops to lethal street to street fighting. Perhaps the war was preventable. There were negotiations to try to avert the war, but at the same time Hamas kept firing rockets into Israel, hardly the sort of action that would be conducive to peaceful neighbourliness. They also dug tunnels into Israel, one that would have opened into a kindergarten so that they could abduct the children. Not surprisingly, the Israelis perceived this as an unacceptable hostile act. It is not surprising either that the Israelis get tetchy about all attempts to murder Jews. The very rationale for the existence of Israel is that murdering Jews is not acceptable, Jews will never again be unresisting victims. But the conflict has very deep roots, going back to long before the Gaza war, the Israeli occupation and all the present grievances of the Palestinians. When Jews started to settle in the land of Palestine, they brought prosperity to a previously impoverished region. Jews created a market for Jaffa oranges and both Jews and Palestinians benefited from that. They all benefited from the industries that the Jews established. Yet the Arab response to Jewish settlement was to murder Jews. While the Jews of Europe were annihilated the Mufti of Jerusalem, the leader of the Palestinian Arabs, was Hitler's honoured guest. The Arab response to the partition of Palestine was to declare war on the new Jewish state. They waged a guerilla warfare against the new state before Palestinians thought of themselves as a national entity. Living under Jordanian rule they undermined the Jordanian kingdom, but continued their enmity towards Jews. There was no occupied territory before 1967, yet there was no peace. At no time did the Palestinians accept the existence of a Jewish state within Arab and Muslim lands. They were prepared to relinquish the prospects of a peaceful prosperous life alongside a Jewish state. They embraced a nationalist, chauvinistic ideology inconsistent with Arab or Ottoman history. True, the Zionist ideology was similarly chauvinistic, but that was a response to generations of persecution and the refusal of  Christian Europe to accept Jews as equal citizens with equal rights. There was no similar pressure on the Arabs of Palestine to separate themselves from the rest of the Arab world. In fact, they saw themselves as part of that Arab world, but did what they could to destabilize it. So Dr McNeill and your fellow protesters, think about the band-wagon you jump on and learn the history behind your cause.