A Message from President LeBlanc: Conflict in the Middle East

Posted on October 13, 2023

The news coming out of Israel and Gaza has once again shaken the world. While I do not expect my voice to change the events unfolding before us, I have encountered many SNHU colleagues pained by events now underway. I am compelled to reach out to our community. 
 
I recoiled at the stories of civilian massacres, kidnapping, and atrocities when the terrorist group Hamas invaded Israel. The cycle of violence that has resisted peaceful resolution for generations has begun anew.  
 
What happens next? Innocent Israelis and Palestinians will now pay an exceedingly high price. Civilians always do. It is one of the oldest lessons for humanity, and yet the one we seem incapable of mastering: Violence begets violence. I am reminded of the lines Cassandra speaks at the start of the Trojan war in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida: 
 
“Virgins and boys, mid-age and wrinkled old, /Soft infancy, that nothing canst but cry,” to weep in protest at the “mass of moan to come.” 
 
Many members of our community have family and cultural ties to the Israeli and Palestinian communities now engulfed in yet another awful conflict. We recognize that this is a very difficult time for them and we have resources available.
 
For the rest of us, we can only hope and pray that peace may be restored as soon as possible. And when so, that peacemakers on both sides of this intractable and bloody divide, leaders with imagination and courage, emerge and together forge a lasting reconciliation for the sake of the Israeli and Palestinian peoples. Until we do, borrowing again from Shakespeare, the innocent will be murdered into patience. We have seen it in Syria, Afghanistan, Congo, Sudan, Iraq, Ukraine, countless wars before stretching to the Homeric times, and now in Israel and Gaza. It is a high price to pay while the men with guns exhaust themselves, as they always do, and mothers bury their sons and daughters. 
 
I feel only sadness. 
 
Paul