By Karen Rubin, News-Photos-Features.com, editor@news-photos-features.com
Just had a zoom reunion with members of my college newspaper staff, reminiscing and waxing nostalgic about our coverage of the anti-Vietnam protests. In fact, I think about every year I attended Binghamton University, finals were canceled over some outrage.
I think the Columbia University students were also nostalgic for those glory days of campus protest – recalling 1968, and then the noble uprisings against South Africa’s apartheid. And to an extent, the protests that have been building across the country are more a reassertion of that campus tradition than a demand for specific resolution – because the demands that have evolved are unclear, unrealistic, and ineffectual.
But 2024 is not 1968. And amid this starkly divided black-and-white landscape, nuance or complexity just gets in the way.
Think about what the early protests were about – including the protest votes cast against Biden in the Democratic primaries. They were calling for the Biden Administration, which on October 8, after the most savage, brutal terror deadly attack against Israel and Jews since the Holocaust, had declared its unequivocal support for Israel’s right to defend itself – to pressure Israel for a ceasefire and increase humanitarian aid. And many American Jews joined.
And weeks into Israel’s campaign to eradicate Hamas and get back the 200 hostages, after thousands of Gazans had been killed and a million forced to flee south (where Israel said they would be safe).
Biden in fact did change his tone – much to the distress of many American Jews (but as many American Jews are also furious at Netanyahu, including me) – saying Israel had overreacted and urging restraint.. Majority Leader Charles Schumer, the highest ranking elected Jewish official, even called for new elections to replace Netanyahu, who credibly is responsible for October 7 and mishandling of the offensive which rather than achieve the stated goals of getting back the 200 hostages and eradicating Hamas, only has strengthened Hamas and the Palestinian cause.
Indeed, Netanyahu’s greatest failure, and why he must be replaced, is that he is responsible for Israel losing what little (but growing) support it had in the world. How Israel becomes the bad guy while Hamas and Palestinians, reviled in the Arab world, have now become the persecuted victims. (Netanyahu, like Trump, has been making his decisions to bolster Hamas in order to block any movement toward a two-state solution in order to keep himself in power and out of prison).
Though we are not privy to what goes on in the meetings at the highest levels of government, Biden began to openly criticize Netanyahu’s overreaction (yes, he used that word), and privately step up pressure on Netanyahu to use more restraint and proportional response and allow more humanitarian aid, going against Netanyahu’s strategy of basically starving the Gazans to surrender. Even now, Biden has been the singular force restraining Netanyahu from a massive assault against Rafah, where 2 million Gazans (including the 1 million displaced from the north) are massed.
Biden is responsible for Netanyahu agreeing to the first ceasefires, in which 100 hostages were released. Biden is responsible for getting more humanitarian aid to Gazans. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been going back and forth, negotiating an extensive 40-day ceasefire and the release of THOUSANDS of jailed Palestinian terrorists in exchange for a mere 33 Israeli hostages – “an exceedingly generous offer,” Blinken said. But Hamas, at this writing, so far has refused.
So what are the campus protests really about? They are no longer calling for a ceasefire or humanitarian aid. They are no longer even calling for a two-state solution, as the Biden Administration has been working toward, using this tragedy to force both sides to a practical solution that can actually be implemented, because there is no other choice.
What they are calling for is the eradication of Israel – “from the river to the sea” – picking up the anti-Zionist (anti-Semitic) crusade that has been nurtured and building within the Progressive movement and on college campuses for 20 years (they basically took over the anti-Iraq War protests against George W. Bush).
They are demanding colleges divest from Israel or any company that deals with Israel – a demand that has been in the works for years before October 7 and the Israel-Hamas War. They now are calling for an academic boycott of Israel – no more Israelis accepted, no more students doing their semester abroad in Israel, no more Israeli professors or lecturers – a way of isolating Israel and Jews as pariahs.
Those were among the demands they were making on Columbia University and other campuses, which they took over, building encampments that prevented the normal activities of the students, faculty and staff.
The demands are not only unrealistic, but think about it: how would any of those demands improve the situation for the Gazans, the lives of whom they claim (or rather use, just as hamas is using Gazans for human shields) they are trying to save?
How much of these protests are the result of group think, like the latest TidePod TikTok challenge catching fire. The thing to do. FOMO.
How much of demonstrating is to assert the right to protest for its own sake.
And then there is the fact that some of these protesters – apparently 40 percent of those arrested at Columbia and CCNY – were not students, but “outside agitators” and anarchists.
A tell is that there is no mention of October 7 massacre and the ongoing torture of hostages, and even language that suggests Israelis deserved what they got..
In fact, Hamas could end the hostilities in a day: agree to give up all remaining hostages along with the bodies they are holding of probably dozens of the original 200 no longer alive, give up the perpetrators of October 7, and agree to sit down to negotiate a real two-state solution. They won’t even agree to give back 33 hostages in order to get a 40-day ceasefire and the release of thousands of their agitators.
But Hamas, which deliberately mounted such a brutal, savage attack to provoke such a reaction (and not incidentally, derail the impending treaty agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and shake the existing Abraham Accord agreements with the other Arab states), doesn’t actually care to save Gazan lives. Every dead Gazan, every crying child, and orphaned baby is gold for their aim: to cut off support for Israel.
But back to the campus protests . No doubt idealistic students joined out of genuine, noble concern over the scale of death, destruction, imminent starvation in Gaza. But the stated demands which they insist must be accomplished for the protesters to disperse are in the first place un-doable, and secondly mostly destructive to the stated cause of saving Gazan lives.
This country (so far) protects free speech and free protest and assembly, but there is a difference between legal, protected free speech and free assembly, and what is illegal: vandalism, intimidation, threatening others, impeding other students from attending class, going to the library, or even having a graduation that this same Class was denied from their high school because of COVID.
I am thinking of those students and families. It goes beyond unfair, but is also unjustified to steal this once-in-a-lifetime experience that these families have worked so hard to achieve, for no practical purpose. It won’t save a single Gazan’s life.
College campuses are targets for this activity because of their mission to promote open exchange of ideas and positions (derided as “woke”, “liberal” in support of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and humanism and even increasingly prohibited).
And while one can justify extreme behavior if that is the only way to get the decision-makers to pay attention or act– the perpetrators have to accept the consequences, which could include arrest, suspension, expulsion from college, loss of opportunity to graduate).
But the extreme behavior cannot be justified because the Biden Administration is doing what they said they wanted: promoting a ceasefire, pressuring for restraint, increasing humanitarian aid, and moving to a two-state solution, otherwise known as “Free Palestine”.
But it is clear these protesters aren’t interested in a two-state solution (never were), and certainly not interested in the peace and security of Israelis. Among the slogans during the protests through New York City: “Intifada intifada. Long live the intifada!” referring to a pledge to continue the terror against Israel. “We don’t want no two-state, we want 48!” a reference to a return to the 1948 United Nations Partition Plan, which created the modern State of Israel.
“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” – which is largely regarded as an antisemitic slogan that implies the decimation of Israel. “From Gaza to Jenin Revolution until victory,” blanking out the state of Israel that’s between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
And they attack companies who they claim are “complicit” in “genocide,” like Starbucks.
As President Biden said on the morning when Los Angeles police broke up the encampment at UCLA (after being attacked for failing to protect the protesters from the assault by counter-protestors the night before), taking on the nuanced issue directly and forcefully: “There’s the right to protest but not the right to cause chaos.”
He affirmed both the right to dissent as essential to democracy, but so is the Rule of Law.
“Dissent is essential to democracy. But dissent must never lead to disorder or to denying the rights of others so students can finish the semester and their college education.”
And dissent is no excuse for threats, nor free speech an excuse for hate speech. “There should be no place on any campus, no place in America for antisemitism or threats of violence against Jewish students. There is no place for hate speech or violence of any kind, whether it’s antisemitism, Islamophobia, or discrimination against Arab Americans or Palestinian Americans...There is no place for racism in America...It’s un-American.”
It is widely believed that the anti-war protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968 handed the presidency to Richard Nixon, who kept the war going another five years and the majority of 56,000 American lives lost.
Now think about what voting against Biden would mean if Trump (or any Republican) takes the White House: the end of the right to free protest and assembly (Trump is chastising Biden for not calling out the National Guard, as he did during the George Floyd protests, applauding a marshal who killed a protester, but has said he wants to pardon the January 6 insurrectionists), the end of an scintilla of concern to save Gazan or Palestinian lives, the end of any support for a democratic regime (Ukraine, China) trying to save itself from a hostile invader like Russia or China. And that’s only the start of the rights we would lose.
See also:
Hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters — including A-list actress — shout ‘Long live the Intifada!’, pass out maps of pro-Israel locations to target in NYC
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