Chemerinsky's false equivalence

In today's Sunday New York Times, the Dean of Berkeley School of Law at the University of California and eminent legal scholar, Edwin Chemerinsky wrote an Op-Ed piece titled "College Officials Must Condemn On-Campus Support for Hamas Violence." 

Over on Threads I responded with the following:

"I agree with Chemerinsky that colleges should condemn and even punish those on campus who advocate violence against innocent civilians, but then again unlike Chemerinsky I am not a big "free speech" advocate, nor do I support the view that Universities should be "apolitical" and not publicly support basic human rights and decency.

Further I found Chemerinsky's analogy to be misleading: "We should expect — and demand — that campus officials respond to a celebration of Hamas in the same way they would to a Klan rally praising racist violence."

It is important to acknowledge that the Palestinian people have been oppressed by the state of Israel, while the Klan most certainly was not oppressed by black people, and so this analogy is a false equivalence."

Does the systematic oppression of Palestinians by Israel justify the terrorism perpetrated by Hamas? In my opinion, the answer is an unequivocal and emphatic "NO", although I can appreciate the complexities of the situation. 

Chemerinsky weakly grants that "there is an important conversation to be had about Israel’s actions over the past year, which has led to so much devastation and loss of life in Gaza," which is a tepid acknowledgment of the tens of thousands of innocent civilian deaths in Gaza, and no mention of the decades of systematic oppression of Palestinians and the denial of their own state.

I would posit that the majority of Americans, and the vast majority of people worldwide deplore both the terrorist violence of Hamas and the excessive reprisal violence of the Likud-led Israeli government. Both sides are truly culpable for this human tragedy.

What irks me is that despite this moral condemnation, we are not making serious efforts to stop the violence, and more importantly, not attempting to understand how we got here.