Campus Unrest
I feel like I am reliving my youth. During high school in Rome in 1968-1970, I watched the United States wrack itself from afar over the issue of the Vietnam War. I watched students get shot at Kent State and radical blacks take over the Willard Straight Hall student union at Cornell, the closest thing I had to a family school, as the place where my mother had attended. The similarity of those times and these times is rooted in the fine line between protest and violence. Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi both advocated for peaceful protest and civil disobedience. It was in those spirits that many protests began. And unfortunately, that is simply not where they remained. They tended for one reason or another to shift from peaceful protest to violent turbulence, and violence has a way of quickly eradicating all the validation of the original civil disobedience and generating exactly what it sought to eliminate, more violence. This is such a typical slippery slope that it forces one to make the assumption that human beings (perhaps especially young ones) cannot congregate without the baser instincts coming through from one person or another. And when that happens, despite all the desire to turn the other cheek, all it takes is one person who cannot suffer that indignity for the violence to erupt.
I admire conviction in a person. Someone who has the strength of character to stand by their beliefs is noteworthy and admirable. The problem is where to draw the line between pragmatism and conviction. Since conviction is rarely shared universally and we have some obligation as members of society to seek compromise and know how to draw the line between free speech advocacy and anti-social behavior, meaning behavior that is deemed by the majority of society as being across the line of acceptability. That ill-defined barrier is the basis for almost all of the trouble we see in these situations of campus unrest. Young people are generally not known for their patience or ability to discern such fine lines when it comes to their own behavior relative to societal norms. Or if they are able, they sometimes choose not to care in favor of their cause. Their adrenaline and consequential indifference become the driving forces of unrest.
When I think about the Vietnam War protests, I am forced to remember that the moral majority of America was quite dogmatic about believing in supporting our government and especially so when it came to perceived national security interests. America, love it or leave it. The youth of the day only slowly gathered support from the mainstream, who had less of the philosophical objections to the war, having been hardened by WWII and the Korean conflict, and were more simply weary of a war that they saw themselves as disconnected with and unable to win. That desire to make an end joined forces with those against the war on broader principles and the result led to a swaying of the majority to an anti-war stance. Despite the disruptions and violence in between, the process of pragmatic reconciliation did occur over time.
The protests today are centered around Gaza and the Israeli retaliation to the Hamas attacks on October 7th. Just like Vietnam, there are those protesting who are taking a stand for peace and against the brutality of war as inflicted on Palestinian citizens. There are others that have been pro-Palestinian since long before October 7th and feel that the oppression by Israelis against Palestinians through their settlement programs and other constraints is a cause long overdue to be corrected. These people are more extreme in their anti-Zionist views, taking on the cause of the Palestinians in a more holistic way and taking the stand that whatever the reasons for extreme militancy of Israelis, it is all unfair to Palestinians. The explosive phrase of “From the river to the sea”, meaning all the lands from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean, are applied with equal fervor by Israelis and Palestinians. And that stand-off is bound to be tagged with antisemitic and Islamaphobic rhetoric and/or accusations. This is a fundamental difference between the Vietnam War protests and the Gaza protests. In Vietnam, the claim of the protestors was that America was pushing an imperialistic agenda and inflicting harm on non-Americans. There might have been some racial or ethnic issues suggested as a root of the conflict, but religion certainly was not in the mix. The Gaza issue is more fraught with racial and religious undertones because it is unavoidable that religious persecution of the Jews led to their relocation to the region and the establishment of the Israeli state to form a “never again” mantra for global Judaism. While some feel that the world owed this to the Jews as a people, its clear that the displaced Palestinians have reason to feel otherwise.
These campus protests bring awareness of the suffering being caused by the war, but they also bring along with that strong feelings of antisemitic and Islmaphobic feelings, real of perceived. This has caused the protest to gather strange bedfellows. It is less strange that progressives come down strongly on the side of the Palestinians, given their tendencies for supporting the underdogs and standing against the the military-industiral complex represented by Israel and its supporters, most notably the United States. The much stranger support comes from the conservatives who side squarely with Israel. That may seem consistent with their hawkishness and even their anti-Muslim leanings, but these are the same Christianity focused groups that usually want to stand as far away from Jews as possible. They have recently altered their commentary to say that their strength comes from their Judeo-Christian heritage, a convenient adjustment to their thinking to accommodate current events. These same people who are prepared to let Trump and his gang run roughshod over the rule of law on the theory of the primacy of the freedom of speech are now concerned about promoting law and order on campus in opposition to protests that they see as eclipsing free speech and leading to violence.
It is particularly funny to see people who would otherwise consider themselves liberals, coming down on the law and order side of the campus unrest issues. This whole situation confuses people. We are used to thinking about Jews in the context of the Holocaust and as oppressed people, but since 1948 things have changed, as well they should have. Part of putting a stake down in the Middle East holy lands is that Jews have positioned themselves right in the middle of a very large and militant Arab community. There are many reasons why the Arab world has so thoroughly adopted Islam as their religion, but one common reason is clearly that Islam appeals to economically poorer populations since it advocates for those in need to have a God-given right to assistance from their fellow man. This has pitted Arabs and Jews where they are otherwise more genetically alike than different. In any case, Jews now stand out as both different in religion and equally different in accomplishment. To put it bluntly, for one reason or another, since 1948 and without the inherent advantage of oil deposits, Israel has prospered more than any other Middle Eastern country. Whatever animosity preexisted has thus been exacerbated by differing levels of prosperity. Where Jews were bullied by Germans, Russians and others, Israelis are seen as the new bullies in the region. That all makes the issues at the heart of current campus unrest extra challenging.
Israel needs to bring this war with Hamas to an end, both for the sake of the Gaza civilian population and the humanitarian hardship it is inflicting on them, but also for themselves. They will always need to co-exist with their multiple Arab neighbors and that gets harder and harder the more they devastate the Palestinian populations. Like the Vietnam War protests, and yet as different as the underlying situations may be, Israel and the U.S. (it’s “big brother” in this conflict) must pay heed to the current protests somewhat because the cause for peace is always just, but also because it seems increasingly the case that it is the only path for a lasting peace. Campus unrest is never worth ignoring.