We should all be worried about the sudden swell and fervor of student protests on college and university campuses across the country. It’s terrifying, to be honest. Oh, I don’t mean the protest events or protest encampments themselves. I’m not scared that students are showing solidarity for Palestinians who are caught in the fight between Israel and Hamas. They are standing on principles that Palestinians in general should not be the target of Israel’s wrath. They are protesting against what they and many see as a genocide in Gaza.
I’m frightened by the response to the protests.
The threats of university administrators to punish students for exercising their free speech and speaking their minds—banning them from campus for protesting and promising in some cases to “do whatever it takes” to remove encampments and stop other protests actions.
And sending in police, often in riot gear, to harass, assault, and arrest students.
Not that we haven’t seen this before. Students protested the Vietnam War. They were right then and they may be right now in their calls for the United States to stop funding Israel’s war efforts, to call for universities to divest from investments and support related to Israel, and calls for ceasefires and more. I’m not going to get into who is more at risk here—Jews or Palestinians. I understand the existential dread that Jewish people, who are such a tiny percentage of the world population, feel they might be wiped away for good one day just like Hitler attempted to do last century. I understand how Palestinians feel at being an occupied and oppressed state. And so much more. But the issue is too complex for this post at this time, and subtlety is lost in passions about death and harm on both sides.
None of the complexities call for students to be silenced. I won’t go into the First Amendment free speech issue. The truth is that particularly on private campuses, the administrations can set the rules. Freedom of speech on a constitutional level is about keeping the government from interfering with free expression. There can be consequences for voicing one’s feelings even if one’s feelings are right and proper. That it’s legal in many cases doesn’t make it right, though.
But the government is involved, not just private university officials. Police. Police who are going far and above what they need to in order to “keep the peace” when students are overwhelmingly being peaceful. Yes, there have been instances of anti-Jewish hate just as there have been instances of anti-Palestinian hate, but these protests aren’t calling for harm to Jews or to Israeli citizens. Those hateful calls are the isolated actions; the protests aren’t about hate.
Older adults have a habit of saying past protests were OK. That those ones were right, but in those times the older adults of those eras also didn’t like the protests. They often wanted them quashed, whether the Vietnam War protests or protests against the Gulf War or apartheid in South Africa of the Black Lives Matters movement.
Remember Black Lives Matter? It was recent. Remember protestors who blocked highways or staged “die in” protests by laying down on the floors of busy shopping malls? People got sick of that. They hated being inconvenienced. But protest should be loud and messy and inconvenient. No one notices most quiet, controlled, brief marches. People notice when the issues are thrust into their faces. But people don’t like that. The government doesn’t like that. The police don’t like that.
Instead, the response is to pretend we were OK with past protests but that these ones are somehow beyond the pale. People claim that the students know too little (even though they’re probably more aware and educated about the issues than most older adults who simply crave a quiet status quo) and people claim that the current protests are wrong or worse or out of line.
And so they allow students and others to be assaulted by police and others, just like during Black Lives Matter. They point to a few rabble rousers and bad agents (some of them not even part of the protest but deliberate agitators seeking to get protestors harmed) and say that means all the protestors are anti-Jewish just by being pro-Palestinian. They claim that means they support Hamas and other terrorists when they are actually worried about average people caught in the crossfire.
We should be proud of students for standing up on principles and making their voices heard. Instead, we want to make them shut up and punish them, calling them anti-Jewish even when Jewish people are protesting right alongside them.
It’s madness, really. Not a new madness but one that we repeatedly embrace or ignore because we don’t want to be bothered to think about big and dangerous issues. Because we don’t want to be pulled into standing against something that seems beyond our control or too immense to stop.
It’s a sad repetition. And years from now, these protests will probably be celebrated or at least understood for what they are—decent people trying to promote a kinder world—as we gear up to squash the next inconvenient protests on the next big issues.
I completely agree with you. Getting infuriated, watching the media coverage of these protests … they are buying in and pumping up the discourse that these are anti-Semitic protests when they are, in fact, anti genocide/Netanyahu.
All too familiar to me.