The Daily Escape:
Japanese Garden, Portland, OR – April 2024 photo via The Oregonian
On Tuesday night, hundreds of NYPD officers entered Columbia University in riot gear, one night after students occupied the Universityâs Hamilton Hall.
And in a âyou canât make this s__t upâ moment, Tuesday was exactly 56 years to the day when police cleared Hamilton Hall of Vietnam War protestors in 1968. The new clear out happened 13 days after students built their encampment and lit the match that started a student movement against the war in Gaza on college campuses nationwide.
The police crackdown at Columbia isnât an isolated event. There was a round of arrests at City College in Harlem (NY). And police responded to clashes between pro-Palestinian and counter-protesters at UCLA. On Monday, demonstrators at The New School took over Parsons School of Design. Meanwhile, police cleared an encampment at Yale. Nationwide, more than 1,000 students have been taken into police custody since the original encampment began at Columbia on April 18.
From John Dean:
âMore than four dozen colleges now have active protests against . . . against what? Signs demand an end to genocide in Gaza, disinvestment from Israel, and an end of US support for Israel. But Jewish students are also being attacked. For some protestors, Palestinians are the people fighting for freedom, and the Jews are the oppressors.â
As the protests continue, the story grows ever more complicated. House Republicans plan a series of hearings into what they are characterizing as antisemitism on college campuses. House Speaker Mike Johnson announced the hearings and also threatened the loss of federal funding:
âOver the last few weeks, weâve seen absolute lawlessness and chaos on college and university campuses across America. Itâs not right, and everybody in this country knows it. If they donât correct this quickly, you will see Congress respond in time, youâre gonna see funding sources begin to dry up. Youâre gonna see every level of accountability that we can muster.â
Columbiaâs leadership took the Republicans at their word. They invited the NYPD to campus to remove students from Hamilton Hall with force.
Before the Columbia students occupied Hamilton Hall and got ejected, and before the UCLA demonstrating groups decided to fight each other, these protests seemed familiar in that they were an echo of the Occupy Movement in 2012. Back then, the vast majority of the violence was caused by police, much like it is today, But it isnât clear that todayâs encampments have sufficient size or strength to achieve their goals. They are certainly not of the scale of 2012âs Occupy, let alone the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.
If the past tells us anything, we should be skeptical that these protests will actually lead anywhere. The 1968 Vietnam protests eventually fizzled out, particularly when it became clear that students would be shot and killed by police and the National Guard. Occupy ended with a 17-city crackdown by police that happened just two months after Occupy began. The George Floyd protests fizzled out, but not before significant property damage and police crackdowns.
One thing is very clear: The speed with which campus protestors have embraced Palestine is remarkable. These students have never shown interest in the slaughter of Muslim children in Syria, or women and teenage girls in Iran. To Wrongoâs knowledge, none have protested against genocide in Darfur. Is now what weâre seeing the power of TikTok to feed highly curated information to them?
Some might say that the students are expressing normal human empathy, possibly with a touch of ignorance regarding the history of the Palestinians and the Israelis. And certainly with a definite lack of understanding of the limits of free speech in America. Free speech does not permit extended protests on private property.
The purpose of free speech is the absolute freedom to speak your mind. The First Amendment does not grant the right for a person or group to occupy property that doesn’t belong to them. Freedom of speech does not include resisting arrest. Would any of us say that freedom of speech allows protesters to occupy their home? Free speech doesnât allow making threats to kill a person or members of a group.
In addition to the desire to draw attention to the Gaza carnage, the campus protests seem to be about the role of the US government and American companies supporting Israel. Doesnât that make their protests difficult to understand? Israel has been a US ally for more than 70 years. In that time, it hasnât been able to defend itself without substantial US aid. Most Israeli aircraft bombing Gaza targets today are American-made.
Does our support for Israel make the US complicit in the Israeli military action in Gaza? Â Of course, but should the US now end that support? If colleges divest from Israel, would that help Palestinians? Hard to say, but itâs unlikely to cause any meaningful change.
Wrongo doesnât think the studentsâ problems are with Israel the country or necessarily, with the Israeli people. Most of the heat is reserved for actions by Bibi, his cronies and the IDF. From The Economist:
âTwo areas where the IDF has fallen short are its responsibilities as an occupying power and its duty to minimize civilian deaths. Some 1.7m people have been displaced; many lack adequate food, water or medicine.â
More: (emphasis by Wrongo)
â…many armies would find Israelâs rules of engagement disproportionate and hence illegal. The IDF is reported to have set the threshold of civilian deaths in justifying decisions to strike a junior Hamas fighter at 20:1 and a senior leader at 100:1. For Saddam Hussein, Iraqâs dictator, America set a threshold of 30:1.â
The IDF appears to be failing in its goal of destroying Hamas. After six months, Hamaâs most senior leaders are still alive, and over 100 hostages remain in captivity. Most important, Israel appears to have no strategy to prevent Hamas from rising from the rubble. Without meeting their goal of destroying Hamas, Israel will remain subject to insurgency.
Israel is paying a high price both economically and diplomatically for its Hamas war. There has been a very real shift in support for Israel’s methods of conducting its war with Hamas. If the student protests were to energize America voters to reject supporting an unending conflict, a significant number of American politicians would eventually follow.
Today, Israel is in a doom loop where the operations designed to reduce the number of terrorists will likely attract recruits to replace them. Without a plan for peace, Israel will end up as an occupier or as in the past, repeatedly striking Gaza to tamp down the insurrectionists.
The story of the 2024 campus protests is still being written. The outcome remains difficult to predict. With the end of the academic year approaching, could the calendar be the deciding factor?
While the students have not generally shown much interest in muslims in pain, I suggest the Israel holds a very different place in US politics than any other place in the middle east. By that, I mean that for most of us, Israel/Palestine has been in the background for a long time, like a pain that never goes away. .
And if we look to the next generation so folks their 40s beginning to enter leadership, and younger folks entering the political arena, the issue of Israel/Palestine is seen within the narrative of anti-colonialism that the US is very much a party to. So US presidents from Wilson and FDR to Obama have understood how the non European world has reacted to the dominance of the West. And in our hemisphere – well our native Indians were subjected to western dominence.
And if you interact with folks whose heritage is not European – for example, Hispanics fron Central America (my town in majority Hispanic) or with African Americans, our siding with Israel is hard to understand without having a fuller history – and really for a person 30 years old, sorry WW2 was long ago. On top of which, Israel has been a bad actor – think of the settlements. Israel has basically acted as if the Palestinians ought to be absorbed into the rest of the region. This made sense and would have been a fine solution but no one could compel it.
So… the support for Palestinians is not so hard to understand.
I still remember being in class in NYC in cooper union (maybe 1970) and I mentioned the Palestinians and a Jewish kid in class shouted at me that there is no Palestine. Each side has shouted down their opponents for decades. For me well I am not engaged in either side’s bullshit. but the anti colonialism piece is genuine – even if manipulated.
Thanks for what appears to me (an anti-war activist of the ’60s) to be a clear-eyed and factual analysis. Activists are naturally prone to over-simplification. Moreover, their messaging almost requires something that can fit on a hand-carried sign. Still, these demonstrations seem unfocussed to me.
Let’s assume that ending the horrific humanitarian consequences of “destroying Hamas” is the goal. (It really isn’t consistantly clear, but that would be my hope.) On that assumption, WHO…exactly… is being pressured to do WHAT…exactly…? Effective pressure has very clear, highly specific objectives AND the entities targeted actually have the ability to directly effect the demanded changes.
In 1967/68, the goal was relatively clear: PRESIDENT JOHNSON was being pressured to WITHDRAW AMERICAN TROOPS FROM VIETNAM. Sure, there were those who muddied those goals and targets (persons/entities with the requisite power). But they were on the fringes. Almost everyone, activists and bystanders alike, could discern WHO was being pressured to do WHAT….even without the Wronologist.