Student protests about the Palestine-Israel conflict may interrupt numerous college and university graduations that usually symbolize spring in America. The Gaza conflict has taken centrestage, with Columbia University in New York being the hub of protests. Fifty six years ago, also in a national election year, the focus of discontent was American involvement in the Vietnam War
By Kenneth Tiven
Mid-week, Columbia University said students were breaking windows and doors to take control of Hamilton Hall, a campus building. Twenty hours after that invasion, the university called New York police to clear it. Columbia said the arrested students face expulsion. Thousands of students and faculty are not participating in any of these actions. The University said: “This is about responding to the actions of the protesters, not their cause… disruptions on campus have created a threatening environment for many of our Jewish students and faculty and a noisy distraction that interferes with teaching, learning, and preparing for final exams, and contributes to a hostile environment… The safety of our community remains our top priority.”
All of this is happening as civilian deaths in the Ukraine and the Middle East, along with coverage of political conflict in the USA, have become a staple of news media content. Frustrations and anxieties with domestic and international policies are animating US college students to demonstrate support for a Palestinian state. Understanding this requires remembering that this generation of students, born in the late 1980s or early 1990s, has little historical sense of the unstable Middle East situation since the end of World War II and the establishment of Israel in the late 1940s. Opinion surveys in America confirm that people under age 30 support what students are doing, while older Americans tend to favour the Israeli position regarding the aims of Hamas, the political leadership in Gaza.
From New York to Washington DC to Texas and the West Coast, thousands of students are demonstrating against what they consider the imperialism of Israel’s response to the Hamas atrocities of October 7. It appears American students do not fully grasp the moral relevance of the Hamas terror tactics in taking hostages and killing civilians, but explain this as the result of Palestinians in Gaza growing up in what they say amounts to a prison.
There are some similarities to what happened on many US campuses in the late 1960s because of opposition to American involvement in a war in Vietnam. Politicians in the US then considered Vietnam critical to stopping Communism in Asia rather than an indigenous dispute to create one Vietnam.
In today’s situation, students say that American foreign aid and military support to Israel is outrageous in light of the needs in America, especially when a right-wing government in Israel conspicuously violates agreements regarding the West Bank Palestinians. They see this situation as a form of apartheid to suffocate the Palestinian aspirations for statehood. Any historical facts related to the Palestine Liberation Organization’s role in the status of the situation are considered irrelevant.
At George Washington University in the nation’s capital, the pro-Palestinian encampment was quiet Monday morning—no bullhorns, no speeches, no chanting. This reporter was a young journalist in the 1960s at The Washington Post as was Eugene Robinson, who became a renowned columnist for the Post. He visited the George Washington University campus and reports: “A handful of campus police officers watched from the periphery, because the Washington police declined a request from university officials to forcibly clear the area. Many of the tents were unoccupied. A few protesters, books in hand, appeared to be cramming for finals. The hateful antisemitism that has animated some of the campus protests across the nation is outrageous and appalling. I saw none of that … I also saw no acknowledgment that Hamas had started the Gaza war with a terrorist attack on Israeli civilians— the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust…. no displays of sympathy for the scores of brutalized hostages, including five Americans, that Hamas still holds. The student protesters are selective in their outrage.”
Antisemitism is a learned attitude. Separating religion from politics is not easy, and since the 19th century, Zionism has been a subset of Jewish thinking. Israel is there. The future has to be worked out in ways that accommodate population realities. If the pro-Palestinian student movement loses the antisemitic elements, then resistance to their message will diminish in the very population and organizational milieu they need to make change happen.
Most students in these tent villages are not antisemitic. Many do seem ignorant of critical historical events. Robinson and I had fathers and uncles who served in World War II. The Holocaust was natural history for us growing up. The current generation of students knows little about it. They understand that many Palestinians were dispossessed of their homes and property, initially by the war Arab nations launched against the creation of Israel. Today, much of the world recognizes that the Israeli government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shows no interest in a just peace and that tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians killed in Gaza are considered collateral damage. Robinson states that young adults grow up to be middle-aged adults with money and authority, suggesting in the coming years, the Palestinian cause will likely have more powerful supporters in the United States than ever.
Student protests involve calls for their schools to disinvest in Israel, which is more complicated than it sounds. A common mantra is: “Disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest.” It is not as easy as it sounds. Schools with endowments invest in various companies with ties to Israel, including Google, Amazon, and Airbnb. Other protests target universities with defense-related or energy investments. Divesting doesn’t change corporate behaviour, but provides an enormous moral and symbolic victory for protesters. However, most analysts agree that it can have the opposite effect on students, faculty, or alums who support Israel.
Another columnist with a memory of student demonstrations in the 1960s is Charles Pierce. Nothing has changed he reports: “this time it is militarized Boston Police, acting to enforce Boston’s no-camping law, who raided the Emerson College encampment.
It did not go well as students explained: “It was terrifying. They beat students to the ground. I was pushed to the ground. That statue right there, they pressed me up against it, and I was like, ‘We’re being peaceful’.” A second-year Emerson student, who was arrested and also asked to remain anonymous said: “They had knees on the backs of students’ backs. They used zip ties on me instead of handcuffs because they didn’t have enough handcuffs—and it really, really hurt. They had black batons and wooden sticks that looked like it could be a chair leg that they were using to beat students.” The student continued: “When I was taken in the cop car, there were students that had gashes on their face.”
Pierce asks: “What the hell are we doing? These citizens were rousted by warrior cops for the crime of sleeping in an alleyway? They were bloodied to the point of requiring that city crews were called in to wash the blood off the walls for the offense of being asleep in the wrong place at 1:38 in the morning. And this scene has been repeated, on one campus or another, all across the country. A protest movement again has encountered the warrior-cop mentality. Senators and mayors and pundits and the Speaker of the House of Representatives have called for ladling the National Guard on top of the riot squads. And what is the cause of this? A foreign policy issue regarding something our well-armed ally is doing far from our shores. Propaganda and disinformation abound. And now we’re unleashing the brutal power of modern law-enforcement—and, possibly, armed troops—against our fellow citizens on one side of the issue. We have learned nothing and our leaders, it seems, have learned even less. Jesus Christ, let them sleep on the lawn.”
Everything happening in the Middle East suggests that Biden’s support for Israel will hurt Democrats in the election. Biden has been trying to restrain Netanyahu. It helps to remember there is a reason Netanyahu all-but-openly campaigned for Trump against Biden in 2020. American policy in the Trump administration was a laundry list of gifts to the Israel and drafting a “peace plan” with zero Palestinian input that if implemented would have ended the possibility for a real Palestinian state.
Cutting Palestinians out of the negotiations over the so-called Abraham Accords, realizing the Israeli goal of severing diplomatic progress by Arab states towards a sovereign Palestine. Recognising Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, disputed territory with Syria taken during the 1967 six-day war. Shutting off funding for the UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees which Biden almost immediately restored and then temporarily suspended again amid a scandal about its employees participating in October 7. Abandoning the decades-old US position that West Bank settlements are a key barrier to a peace agreement and eliminating longstanding restrictions on spending US taxpayer dollars in them. Moving the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem while closing the US mission to Palestine in the same city.
Is it any wonder pro-Trump sentiment prevails in Netanyahu’s right-wing government? This will be back in the news when most high education resumes in September.
—The writer has worked in senior positions at The Washington Post, NBC, ABC and CNN and also consults for several Indian channels