Even as someone who is generally pro-Palestine, if I was working at a law firm I would rescind a job offer to the person who wrote and sent around that letter.

I mean if I was hiring a roofer or something and saw that he had a pro Palestine newsletter like that, who cares. But if I’m hiring another professional whose entire job it is to not only see nuances in cases and arguments, but to recognize how best to present and argue them before a court of people who may have very different beliefs than them, and make frequent on the record statements that will be preserved until society collapses, then this gives me pretty ample reason to believe they won’t be capable of executing any of that with the level of professionalism I would want out of a coworker.

Yikes

I’m a big advocate for considering Palestinians to be completely separate from Hamas, and that punishing civilians for the attack by cutting off crucial resources is unconscionable. If I were on a hiring committee, it would be for an engineering position, and I would strongly recommend against hiring them.

They have very pointedly not made a condemnation of the Hamas attack which killed innocent people and took them hostage. They liken that attack to legitimate Palestinian resistance, and they blame Israel for the actions of the terrorists, instead of the terrorists. This guy isn’t losing the job offer for supporting Palestinian civilians. He’s losing it for refusing to condemn murderers and the murders, and suggesting the terrorists are Palestine’s resistance. And others have pointed out how he used his position of power inappropriately as a bully pulpit.

It’s beyond clear that he’d be a terrible lawyer, and that he has a terrible morality. If he were an engineer, I wouldn’t be able to trust his professional opinion to be separate from his personal one. If Israel was wanting to buy our green energy product, and the deal fell through, I couldn’t know if he purposely tanked the deal or there were other issues. Not to mention, their causality is totally insane. When you have equipment failures or process events, if the reactor fails, the reactor fails. Something may have caused it to fail, but the reactor is still what failed, and you need to look into if the reactor design needs modification in some way. You can’t say the root cause of the failure was something before the reactor and then totally ignore the reactor.

What a fucking idiot.

It’s in our nature to take sides, and it’s unfortunate because this is a really complicated issue. You can trace this back centuries to try and understand why everything has happened, and you’ll find devils and angels in every group involved.

After Russian pogroms of Jews around the Russian Revolution time period, a prominent European Jewish thinker concluded that they would never have safety or respect unless they had their own nation. Being scapegoated and killed in Russia was just one of many instances where they were persecuted. Flash forward to the early 1900s, and you have Zionist insurgents in Mandated Palestine who want their own Jewish state, and are carrying out terrorist attacks against the British colonial authority.

We’re both well aware of what Palestinians are suffering right now. I believe I just read that an Israeli airstrike killed 600 in a hospital. A few weeks ago, extremists associated with Palestine killed and kidnapped a lot of people at a concert.

Civilians just want to live in peace and freedom. They’re surrounded by violence they don’t remotely deserve, and that just keeps getting perpetuated. Each side kills innocent people that the other side takes as justification to kill other innocent people, and so forth.

By the numbers, Israel is worse because they’ve caused more casualties, I agree. But I really don’t think that’s important here. Significant numbers of innocent people are being killed by Hamas and also by Israel’s government. Identifying both as major problems and the “bad guys”, while viewing the civilians as the “good guys”, is what’s important I think.

Edit: Forgot to say, the problem wasn’t that this guy supported Palestinians, but that they pointedly refused to condemn killing and kidnapping innocent people.

Now chart the number of attempted civilian killings and see how the picture flips.

Did you think the Israeli casualties are low because Hamas hasn’t been trying to murder them?

But, they choose monsters to represent them

Afaik, like over half the population of Palestine wasn’t even alive or were children when that decision was made and nobody has been given a decision since, at least not the kind of decision that doesn’t involve becoming a martyr and deading yourself in exchange for deading another person.

Go Mongooses! 🚩

they choose monsters to represent them who have never been good faith negotiators for a peaceful solution that doesn’t require genicide.

They did actually. There were two ceasefires in the past and it was Israel who didn’t follow them by lifting the blockade.

This is a really refreshing perspective that’s been way too rare.

I wouldn’t say that I’ve taken a side, and I don’t think that’s a productive way to analyze this issue. The way I see it, there are actions that contribute to peace, and there are actions that push it further away. I support the first and oppose the second, regardless of who’s doing them.

And unfortunately, there hasn’t been much of the first from either party.

I tried to trace it a while back. The specific conflict could be traced back to the after WW1, where the British thought they could expand their influence in the region by growing a Jewish population through Zionists.

That begged the question though, what started the desire for a Jewish state in the first place? Why had groups committed terrorism for that cause? It was a trail of nationalism that came from a very understandable genesis. After Russian pogroms killed innocent Jewish people (just one of many persecutions across Europe), a prominent Jewish writer opined that the only way for Jews to have safety and respect was a state of their own.

That’s where I stopped, but if you continued to look, you’d end up at the Romans in Jerusalem and the Jewish Diaspora as one of the events leading here.

The only side I can take in good faith is of the civilians.

Don’t think there needs to be a worse side when you’re killing civilians.

Seems like a clear case of freedom of expression, not freedom of consequences to me.

Everyone knows that true freedom is when law firms are forced to hire you /s

Not working biglaw may be dodging a bullet anyways

Want to review your victim blaming ?

Cool. So how is this any different? What moral supremacy does supporting this hounding someone for something they wrote or supports any different from Palestine as you say which discriminates against women?

I was going to say that there’s a difference between opposing Israel and supporting a massacre. But if what the article say is true, the guy never outright supported Hamas’ actions. It looks like the worst you can accuse him of is to sweep it under the rug by not mentioning it.

Here’s what the Student Bar Association’s (former) President wrote:

Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life. This regime of state-sanctioned violence created the conditions that made resistance necessary. I will not condemn Palestinian resistance.

But if what the article say is true, the guy never outright supported Hamas’ actions. It looks like the worst you can accuse him of is to sweep it under the rug by not mentioning it.

It’s worse than that. He said all of the bloodshed was Israel’s fault, and went on to issue several apt condemnations of Israel. He very pointedly did not condemn Hamas for the attack.

He blamed the context of how we got to the murders instead of the actual murderers. It was never swept under the rug.

Why? Why should this person have said something about both sides?

In a court of law, when an attorney goes to plead their case, do they have to plead their case or both sides equally?

What about their opponents? Does netanyahu or bush or any pro Israel supporter who condemns only hamas for “massacre” also say that Israel commits war crimes by doing collective punishment or by using white phosphorus or killing thousands of babies in the last week alone ?

Why should a job offer be affected by your persnla views unless you say you only hire people who have shared values and only those shared values ? Isn’t… That … discrimination?