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On Monday, the Kennedy School community, like the rest of the world, looked back on a year of war that seems to have no discernible end. The Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and the Middle East Initiative, based at the , organized a panel that reflected on the pain and moral complexity of the conflict, and its impact on the lives of those living amid war and on those affected at a distance. “What gathers us here at this moment is tremendous, almost incalculable death and human suffering—the suffering of Israelis, the suffering of Palestinians, the suffering of Lebanese ,and, increasingly, we fear, the suffering of an entire region,” said Tarek Masoud, the Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Governance and the director of MEI, and co-moderator of the panel with Mathias Risse, the Berthold Beitz Professor in Human Rights, Global Affairs, and Philosophy and director of the Carr Center. “And as we learned over the last year,” Masoud continued, “that suffering compounded upon suffering isn't a distant phenomenon, it is one that is felt intensely on our campus. ... This kind of gathering is the only way we know of to be part of the eventual alleviation of pain.” Masoud and Risse were joined on the panel by Edward Djerejian, a senior fellow at MEI and former U.S. ambassador to Israel and Syria; Romy Neumark, a fellow at Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies and a former anchor for Israel’s public television station; and Yasmeen Abu-Fraiha MC/MPA 2022, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, a medical doctor and researcher, civil society leader, and MEI fellow. Read some of their remarks, lightly edited for clarity, from the event.

Romy Neumark

“I must say, honestly, that coming to speak here today was not an easy decision. ... This horrible, bloody war and the long-lasting conflict is so important, so defining, so deeply emotional, so ancient. And sitting here as an Israeli is not easy and quite complicated, especially today. But I can still smile when I remember how friends and family, while sitting in a bomb shelter last fall, saw the news about the events at Harvard here and sent me messages saying, ‘Take care.’”

Yasmeen Abu-Fraiha

“[On October 7] I spent 15 hours in this very, very busy emergency room, really treating people in the most terrible situation. ... And I understood something that was deep inside me even before that, but then it was so strong. This is not an Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a Jewish-Arab conflict, this is not a Jewish story. This is a conflict between people who believe that violence is the answer and those who believe that we need to save lives and we need to prioritize humanity. That's the divide. That's how I see it.”

Edward Djerejian

“I think the most important definition of ‘between the Jordan River and the Eastern Mediterranean’ is that you have 7.2 million Palestinian Arabs and approximately 7.2 million Israeli Jews living on this piece of land. Neither one is going to go anywhere. There is no military solution to this conflict. ... There's only a political solution. And yet what we're witnessing today is the military solution unhinged, unhinged with all the devastation and the suffering on all sides. ... Now, it's almost an illusion and dreamlike to talk about a peaceful settlement on the current circumstances, but that's my bias as a former professional diplomat.”

Mathias Risse

“Many awful things have happened at Harvard in the past year. Even more awful things have occurred in and around Gaza, and obviously we are talking about magnitudes of difference now. ... The way forward is to acknowledge the full humanity of all people in this conflict and to see that they have claims to dignity and a flourishing life. I hope we can all find ways, no matter how limited, of contributing to this cause, which I think is one rather minimal way of articulating the human rights perspective on this situation.”

Tarek Masoud

“Our pain is very hard to put aside, and many of you were chosen to be part of this community because you are capable of feeling deep pain and then acting on that pain to improve the world around you. So it makes very little sense for me to ask you to care less about the things you care about. ... But right now in this space, we're going to [...] try to think about this conflict that many of us feel so deeply about. We're going to do that because we don't actually know any other way that we as an institution can be part of the solution to this struggle that has consumed far too many lives and wasted so much human potential.”

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Banner image: Mathias Risse, Tarek Masoud, Yasmeen Abu-Fraiha MC/MPA 2022, Edward Djerejian, and Romy Neumark

Photos by Benn Craig