If you wander the arts quad today, you'll see the patch of grass to the left of A.D. White covered in small flags. The display was created in remembrance of the Holocaust, with each flag representing 4,000 killed through the genocide. The flags are not only representative of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, but are also in memory of any minorities that suffered at the hands of the Nazis, including homosexuals and the mentally challenged. Each maligned group is represented by a different colored flag (e.g. Yellow flags represent Jewish victims)

This past Sunday evening I sat perched in Libe Café poring over Titus Andronicus and The War Between the Tates, and in the failing light I watched as half a dozen students lined the quad’s walkways with over a thousand black flags.

Witnessing these young people brave Ithaca’s brutal winter twilight warmed my heart, for in my naïveté I thought they were paying tribute to Black History Month.

Perhaps each black flag represented a fallen African American soldier in the Civil War or each African American imprisoned and murdered in the struggle for civil rights.

Unlike most Cornell students, I have witnessed the current debate on the Gaza conflict and the vandalism controversy from abroad. Based on the fragments I can understand from friends and The Sun, it looks as though we are confronting a set of issues much broader than ourselves, but in which we are nevertheless implicated. I want to provide the perspective of a student who cares deeply about our campus politics vis-à-vis the Middle East — but who is currently in the region.

It’s been one heck of a week for us at H&V. While outside the birds were chirping and the sun was shining, things here at the batcave are heating up as usual. People are angry. They’re waving flags and throwing shoes and passing resolutions to stop resolutions to pass moratoriums … does that make sense to you? Yeah, us neither.

On Monday morning I found myself running breathlessly up to campus, on my way to Clark Library to finish a long overdue electrodynamics problem set. When I arrived on the Arts Quad, I was greeted by 1,300 black flags and a host of signs displaying statistics from the Battle of Gaza.

Later in the day, detractors would remove the signs from the Arts Quad. They would stow away statements made by the U.N., Amnesty International and the BBC. They would stamp out the statistics — houses destroyed, children murdered and war crimes committed. But they wouldn’t uproot the flags.

There were simply too many flags. In the 15 minutes between classes, who could uproot all 1,300 of them?