We need to apply some critical thinking, and a complete history, to Paul Kerson’s LTTE “Protests—now and then” in The Observer on Jan. 17. It is astounding how he gets the Case Western Reserve University protests against the Vietnam War so right and everything else so wrong!

It is very appropriate that he sets the context for Vietnam, and now for Gaza, by going back to World War II. That was where I developed my first fascination with history. He recommends we study Western civilization and 20th century American history to understand wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine and the Middle East and “how all this fits in today’s issues.”

I first learned these lessons from my father who was a military intelligence officer in WWII. He went in on D-Day, was in the Battle of the Bulge, fought across Germany and drank vodka at the end with the Russians on the Eastern Front. He killed his share of Nazis, but one unforgettable memory I had as a child was seeing photos of him excavating a mass grave. He was tasked with ordering nearby German villagers out to do the digging, to bury the bodies properly.

At a young age I became aware of the Holocaust. Teaching high school in Lebanon in the 1960s, I got to know Arabs and Palestinians as friends when the Middle East was at peace. I was evacuated from the 1967 Arab-Israeli War to Cyprus when Israel illegally occupied the West Bank. Then I taught for 30 years in Beachwood with a majority of Jewish students. Some of my students were Israelis, and others had Holocaust survivors in their families. Several of my students narrowly missed suicide bombers when visiting Israel during the Second Intifada. I took students to visit the Holocaust Museum in Washington.

Apologies for running on. But all of this is to say I don’t take it kindly when Zionists smear me as an “antisemite,” as has happened frequently when I stand with Palestinians against Israel’s crimes and genocide in Gaza. My father interrogated many German prisoners of war as well as civilians, and he held them in contempt when they claimed not to know about Hitler’s crimes. Now I feel the same way about Zionists who dehumanize Palestinians.

Mr. Kerson lacks human empathy for the suffering of women and children non-combatants in Gaza. Palestinians are dying at a ratio of 50-1 in Gaza (worse yet if The Lancet is correct that over 100,000 Gazans have died). Mr. Kerson does not know about this? He obviously knows or should know.

I have two friends who live on, only on the Vietnam Wall in Washington. As we said about Vietnam, “the whole world is watching.” And the whole world agrees that South Africa is justified (except for a few U.S. partners in crime) in bringing its legal case against Israel for genocide to the International Criminal Court.  

I will close with the great Jewish journalist I. F. Stone, who documented the U.S. crimes in Vietnam, even before Daniel Ellsberg. In 1976 Stone flatly stated that “Israel is creating moral schizophrenia in world Jewry.” Thank goodness anti-Zionists in Jewish Voice for Peace, along with allies neither Jewish nor Arab, stand with Palestinians against the injustice. We will prevail. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”