Gary Kent has worked in Parliament for 34 years. He is Director of
Labour Friends of Iraq and Secretary of the All-Party Parliamentary
Group on the Kurdistan Region in Iraq. He is a regular writer on
Kurdistan and a visiting fellow at Soran University. He writes in a
personal capacity.
Our Voice of the Fortnight is from the Times of Israel's 'Wartime Diaries' podcast. In the immediate aftermath of October 7th, Shai Davidai – an Assistant Professor at Columbia University – became an unlikely public defender of Israel. And truthfully, even he was surprised by this turn of events: As a committed left-wing Israeli, he had spent years criticizing the government, and often took to the streets to demonstrate against its policies. But the atmosphere he witnessed on college campuses (and specifically on his own campus at Columbia), compelled him to speak up and speak out.