As an ancient but still truculent member of the anti-establishment, I nearly always side with protesters against the institutions that provoke and suppress them (the D.C. riots of Jan. 6, 2021, were a notable exception), as long as the protests don’t veer into violence and mob hysteria. But this tidal wave of pro-Palestinian campus protests, coast-to-coast and spreading internationally, has left me trapped between surprise and déjà vu.
I’m no stranger to campus protest, or the Columbia University landscape where much of the media attention has been centered. In 1968, as a stringer for Time magazine, I covered some of the Columbia demonstrations against the war in Vietnam and interviewed a group of students presented to me as the “war council” of the SDS. I probably got the assignment because my editor assumed that a recent graduate of the university’s Journalism School would at least know the campus buildings and bypaths and waste no time finding his way.
It was a radicalizing experience, especially when I witnessed a violent police riot and saw one officer break a tenured professor’s nose and eyeglasses with a billy club. I was a small-town person barely acclimated to the big city, and until that moment I had never doubted that people wearing badges were all on my side.
My sympathies were with the protesters; a draft board was actively tracking me down. But their militant tactics— occupying buildings, taking deans hostage, firebombing faculty offices — were a little too Bolshevik for my taste. I remember the posters of Che Guevara and Malcolm X on the walls of occupied buildings. I met the later-notorious Mark Rudd, whose career as a radical fugitive included years of hiding and a prison term. Rudd and company, even when I agreed with their principles, were alarmingly more intense and excitable than any campus dissenters I had encountered as a student. The part of the Sixties that we all remember best was well underway, and 1968 was a critical year.
The energy and idealism of college students is a precious resource I always applaud. A privileged group not yet weighed down by jobs and families, they often are—- and ought to be—-in the risk-taking vanguard of major political movements and changes. Problems occur when youthful enthusiasm is peer-pressured and ill-informed.
Protesting the slaughter in Gaza is an unobstructed moral high road, where angels hover. Supporting Hamas, on the other hand, is a dark track to moral trainwreck. It pains me when well-meaning “liberals” waste their idealism shouting intifada slogans and celebrating terrorist murderers as freedom fighters.
These heroes are the bloodstained butchers who on Oct. 7, 2023, sank to unimaginable depths by filming the rapes and massacres of Israeli civilians. And it’s not at all far-fetched to suspect that the whole point of that massacre was to trigger an Israeli counterstrike so violent that it would discredit Israel in the eyes of the world, those many thousands of sacrificed Gazans be damned. On that savage level Hamas has succeeded.
Like most one-size-fits-all ideologies, the anti-colonialist orthodoxy that sustains these campus protests is blind to nuance. No country is more guilty of winning its territory by near-genocide than the USA, which stole most of North America from indigenous tribes only because it could. A fair analogy to the Hamas atrocities on Oct. 7? Remember when the American Indian Movement occupied Wounded Knee in 1973? Imagine that Sioux warriors had raged out of their reservation to murder and rape hundreds of White South Dakotans. My guess is that the American government’s retaliation would have eliminated nearly every Native American south of the Canadian border.
Unlike the United States and South Africa, or the Belgian Congo and British India in the 19th century, the situation in Israel is infinitely nuanced, complicated far beyond that simple model of European oppressors and indigenous victims. To listen to some of these student moralists, you would think they’d never studied the basic history of the 20th century, where my generation lived most of our lives. Or even the biblical history that undergirds modern Jews’ claim to the land called Palestine or Judaea. I wouldn’t insult any reader by insinuating that he was ignorant of the Holocaust, one of the darkest chapters in the annals of humanity, when a culturally sophisticated “Christian” nation turned into a reeking slaughterhouse governed by madmen. Yet a recent survey found “a worrying lack of basic Holocaust knowledge” among millennial and Gen Z Americans. Eleven percent of them seemed to believe that Jews caused the Holocaust.
What happened to the Jews in Germany — aided by anti-Semite Christians in many other European nations — should set Zionist nationalism distinctly apart from colonialism and White power. Jews have enough problems with Christian fundamentalists and Muslims, without having to defend themselves from the academic Left. But Holocaust deniers — the nastiest bigots of all, haters who believe their own outrageous lies — still thrive on rightwing radio and in internet rats’ nests. Even while hundreds, maybe thousands of Auschwitz survivors are still available to be interviewed.
It would be arrogant and almost senile (“Why, in my day …”) to argue that these students are more naïve than we were in 1968. But the younger you are, the more easily you’re seduced by extreme polarities — Black and White, right and wrong, good guys and bad guys. In Israel and Gaza today there are no good guys, at least none in charge. As Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times, “I am intensely both anti-Hamas and anti-Netanyahu.” Friedman’s is the only sane position, and the only sane resolution to the current tragedy is the two-state solution that Friedman endorses and that both Hamas and Netanyahu’s reactionary coalition continue to reject.
There’s nothing wrong with detesting Benjamin Netanyahu, his government and most of his decisions. There are millions of Israeli citizens who agree with you. He’s a shifty, selfish, dishonest politician who has prolonged his unfortunate career by aligning himself with a militant right wing. (Does that remind you of any American politician now in the news? But Netanyahu isn’t stupid or incoherently deranged.) He’s a fair target, and any decent human being is appalled by the Gaza death toll and the spreading famine, and terrified that it may continue. The extremist fallacy that too many of these student demonstrators have fallen into is a denunciation of “Zionism.”
Cursing Zionism means agreeing with Israel’s enemies that the state of Israel has no right to exist. That after three-quarters of a century of wars, struggles and great successes building a modern democracy, Jews in the Middle East should go back where they came from — where their families were imprisoned and murdered for no crimes except their ethnicity. Does a Gentile sophomore at Duke or Columbia really believe that? Zionism is a movement with a long and tangled history that begins in the 19th century. European Jews were settling in Palestine long before the Nazis and the Holocaust. But the stunning thing about the establishment of the state of Israel — stunning because it’s so rare in history — is that it was a geopolitical fiat triggered by international compassion for a minority, one devastated by genocide. World leaders knew it would create a political hot spot, a resentful Arab minority and decades of conflict. When he was first presented with the idea in 1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt agonized that this Jewish nation “could only be established and maintained by force.”
While I question the commitment of the campus protestors of 2024 — not their sincerity but the depth of their research — another group of undergraduates just taught me something important I should have known. I’d carelessly assumed that many secular, assimilated American Jews were neutral or indifferent about Israel and the Zionist cause. But Jewish undergraduates at Columbia set me straight, with a well-conceived and carefully written manifesto that explains why “Zionism” is no foreign abstraction, even to middle-class American students with no direct links to the state of Israel.
“No, Judaism cannot be separated from Israel,” declares the document “In Our Name,” signed by 540 students. “Zionism is, simply put, the manifestation of that belief.”
After being “kicked out” of Russia, Libya, Ethiopia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Poland, Egypt and a long list of other nations, their statement continues, Jews realize that “Israel is the only place in the modern world where Jews can safely take ownership of their own destiny.” In other words, where their own people are truly in charge.
I get it. The history of antisemitism is a grim one, and empathy for its victims still seems to be a challenge for the kind of liberals who wave Palestinian banners. Arab lives matter — though clearly not to Hamas. But we can’t blame Jewish students for suspecting that an undercurrent of old-fashioned antisemitism may lurk beneath the humanitarian ideals of the current protests. The worst of us, the bottom-feeding swamp creatures, are always looking for an excuse to float to the surface and spit their venom. One Columbia student wearing a Star of David reported that she was cursed as “a Zionist murderer.” Other counter-protesters were confronted physically.
I also thought the protesting Duke students who walked out of a commencement address by the Jewish comedian Jerry Seinfeld were acting in poor taste, or worse. Seinfeld’s recent political comments, pro-Israel but moderate, indicate that he would have endorsed the sentiments of the Columbia students who drafted “In Our Name.”
The protesters, along with their faculty and media supporters, need to understand that they are playing with fire. If their demonstrations and encampments actually save lives in Gaza, God bless them. But President Biden and Secretary Antony Blinken have been scrambling desperately, in public and in secret, to broker a ceasefire before the whole world turns on Israel.
At this writing they’ve failed, even with an open threat to cut off arms shipments. Rather than saving lives, it seems more likely that the student demonstrations with their careless chants and rhetoric are opening wounds and creating divisions that won’t be easy to heal — in a nation that has never seemed more divided and confused. “This has been the most divisive story I’ve experienced in my more than three decades in journalism,” lamented New York Times executive editor Joseph Kahn. Kahn, whose reporters recently collected Pulitzer Prizes for their coverage, must be as well informed as any American about the crisis in Gaza. I trust him on this one, and share his alarm. How much more division can we tolerate, before the “U” in USA becomes a standing joke?
Hal Crowther is a longtime journalist whose latest essay collection, “Freedom Fighters and Hellraisers: A Gallery of Memorable Southerners” (Blair, 2018) won the gold medal for nonfiction at the Independent Press Awards, as well as the gold medal for essays at the Foreword Review Awards. A winner of the Baltimore Sun’s H.L, Mencken Writing Award, he is the author of “An Infuriating American: The Incendiary Arts of H.L. Mencken” (Iowa, 2015) and four previous collections of essays. Email delennis1@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, June 15, 2024
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