I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to find out what’s really going on with campus protests.
I have met students at Berkeley, where I teach. I visited the faculty at Columbia University. I spoke on the phone with young people and professors from many other universities.
My conclusion: Protest movements are often sparked by different triggers and attract different people with different motivations, but this protest is focused on one thing only: It is moral outrage at the slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent people, most of them women. And children – in Gaza.
To interpret these protests as anything else, such as anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist, anti-American, pro-Palestinian, etc., is to miss the essence of what is happening and why it is happening. .
Most students and faculty I spoke to found the October 7th Hamas attack abhorrent. They also feel that Israel’s current government is morally bankrupt in its disproportionate response to Hamas attacks.
Some demonstrators are focusing their anger on Israel, with some directing their anger at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli government and Joe Biden’s failure to stand up to Netanyahu. , some have focused their anger on what they perceive to be Biden’s condescending response to the protests.
Like other protest movements, this action attracted a minority of people from the margins. I have heard scattered reports of anti-Semitism, but I have never seen or heard anything that could be construed as anti-Semitism. In fact, a significant number of the protesters are Jewish.
It is also inaccurate to describe the protesters as “pro-Palestinian.” Most people don’t support Palestine per se. They do not know enough about Israeli and Palestinian history to make moral judgments.
But they have a deep and abiding sense that what is happening in Gaza is morally wrong and that the United States is complicit in that immorality.
Many people told me they planned not to vote next November. This is a clear danger to Biden’s reelection campaign, which in turn increases Trump’s chances.
When I tell them that if they don’t vote for Biden, they’re effectively voting for Trump, they say they can’t in good conscience vote for either candidate.
Quite a few people say to me, “The lesser of two evils is still an evil.” I tell them Trump is going to be much worse for the world, really evil. Many people are still not convinced.
I vividly remember an anti-Vietnam War demonstration I participated in about 55 years ago.
I remember being appalled by the unnecessary slaughter in Vietnam. I was outraged that white, wealthy people in the First World were indiscriminately murdering mostly non-white, poor people in the Third World. As an American, I felt morally complicit.
I was angry at university administrators who summoned police to remove protesters, using tear gas, stun guns, and mass arrests. This response only added fuel to the fire.
The anti-Vietnam War movement became fodder for right-wing politicians like Richard Nixon who called for “law and order.” This scene also appalled many non-college working-class people who viewed students as spoiled, selfish, anti-American, and unpatriotic.
I vividly recall the anti-war demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and the brutality of the Chicago Police Department and Illinois National Guard in what was later described as a “police riot” by the National Committee for the Prevention of Violence. .
Network television broadcast footage of the riot to the world as anti-war demonstrators chanted, “The whole world is watching.”
I spent months working for anti-war presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy. Hubert Humphrey was nominated at the convention. In November of the same year, the people elected Richard Nixon as president.
As the saying goes, history does not repeat itself. It just rhymes.
Mistakes made at one point have an eerie way of reappearing two generations later as memories fade.
