Protests Become About The Protestors

 Paul  Campos compares the student protests over Gaza with student protests in 1968 over Vietnam. The similarity is that you have two surprisingly progressive and surprisingly effective veteran politicians as president who are seeing their re-election imperiled by a foreign policy issue.

It would seem self-evident to me that the most obvious distinction between the two is that in 1968, Americans were dying in Vietnam by the thousands and the Tet Offensive had exposed some of the lies that the military and the White House had been spreading about America's progress in Vietnam. The backlash to student protests often came from those Americans who - unlike privileged college students - could not keep their sons and brothers out of Vietnam. The famous hard hat riots were working class Whites venting their anger over the confusing narrative surrounding Vietnam at the protestors whom they saw as being un-American.

Now, I do think there's a real backlash towards a lot of these protests, as several have crossed lines from protesting to harassment. Many of the protestors are either pretty far to the left or Muslim, and it's easy for the same sort of person who supports Trump to see these people as fundamentally un-American, for both racist and ideological reasons. 

However, the real concern is that Gaza protests threaten to disrupt Biden's re-election campaign, including the convention which is in - gulp - Chicago. To me, the primary difference is one of numbers. There is probably a great many Americans who are horrified in the abstract by the civilian suffering in Gaza. It's genuinely awful, but like many international calamities, it is also remote. It is not remote for Palestinian-Americans, but it's unclear how much it's that one very specific ethnic group driving these protests. 

Instead, some of what we are seeing seems to be a form of protest chic. The Trump years, culminating in the George Floyd protests, were a great period for organizing and protesting very real and tangible injustices. Biden's election drained a lot of that energy, at least on the left-of-center. Gaza became a cause celebre for people who really need to belong to a cause. My guess is that a substantial number of non-Muslim protestors had no fucking clue about the situation in Gaza on October 6th. Even many non-Palestinian Muslims probably weren't that tuned into what was going on there or in the West Bank. 

One thing we have seen in the past quarter century is a decline in linkage institutions that bind people together into groups with common goals and values. The protest movement offers that. You're a part of something big and important and moral, and that has a lot of appeal to idealistic young people.

What it does not really offer is a solution.

In 1968, the goal of protestors was to end the war in Vietnam. It is worth noting that they really weren't able to achieve this; Nixon doubled down on the war and as many Americans and Vietnamese died after his election as before. It would be another 5 years before America finally threw in the towel. 

It's less clear what the goal is of these crop of student protestors. A "permanent ceasefire" isn't really a thing; that's called "peace".  What's more, it's unclear how you get peace with neither side able to achieve a strategic victory. Hamas cannot defeat Israel and Israel cannot eradicate Hamas. True, the more extreme protest voices call for the eradication of Israel, but that simply isn't going to happen. That's like coming up with a rhyming chant and thinking you've cured cancer or unlocked nuclear fusion. It's pretty to think you've solved something, but that simply isn't happening.

In the end, protests become about the protestors. The emotional high of belonging to a Glorious Cause needs more and higher doses to achieve the same high. The actions at Columbia and elsewhere are no longer about Gaza, really, they are about constantly needing to be more outrageous on order to retain "engagement" and attention. Gaza is the pretext (unless you're Palestinian yourself), but the real target is "the Man" and currently the Man is Joe Biden. 

Actually policy outcomes are irrelevant, beyond the paradox of "permanent ceasefire". 

I do think that Democrats are right to be worried about protests this summer and into the fall. As Trump faces a possible felony conviction and is apparently sharting into his Depends in the courtroom, the new media will need a bothsides angle to level their coverage, and a handful of egregious, transgressive protestors will allow them to write about Biden promised us a boring presidency, but look at these kids!

However, I also think that the recent decisions by Columbia and Yale to take firmer action means that for a lot of these kids, the Fuck Around period is ending and the Find Out period has begun. Students should absolutely be free to protest, but when that becomes threats and a consistent disruption to student learning and safety, then it's time for Find Out. Hopefully that will induce some reflection on the part of the bulk of these protestors. Hopefully, they will start asking what they realistically hope to accomplish. 

UPDATE: Chait, naturally, takes on this issue.

Some key passages:

It is true that most anti-Israel protesters do not engage in antisemitic harassment. It is also true that the formal demands associated with anti-Israel protests are legitimate (if not policies I’d endorse) and do not require the collective punishment of American Jews. But the reason incidents like these occur over and over is that they are part of the ideological character of the movements that give rise to them. Dismissing this pattern as the actions of “inflammatory individuals” is to evade the question of who is inflaming them.

And:

The main national umbrella group for campus pro-Palestinian protests is Students for Justice in Palestine. SJP takes a violent eliminationist stance toward Israel. In the wake of the October 7 terrorist attacks, it issued a celebratory statement instructing its affiliates that all Jewish Israelis are legitimate targets:

Liberation is not an abstract concept. It is not a moment circumscribed to a revolutionary past as it is often characterized. Rather, liberating colonized land is a real process that requires confrontation by any means necessary. In essence, decolonization is a call to action, a commitment to the restoration of Indigenous sovereignty. It calls upon us to engage in meaningful actions that go beyond symbolism and rhetoric. Resistance comes in all forms — armed struggle, general strikes, and popular demonstrations. All of it is legitimate, and all of it is necessary.

SJP likewise directed its members to join the struggle directly: “This is a moment of mobilization for all Palestinians. We must act as part of this movement. All of our efforts continue the work and resistance of Palestinians on the ground.”

When you consider this kind of violent rhetoric in the context of slogans like “Globalize the Intifada,” especially when you consider the lack of authentic Israeli military targets outside of Israel, then the pattern of harassment and violence that follows from this propaganda is inevitable.

And finally:

Many students were attracted to these groups because of the horrendous human toll inflicted by Israel’s counterattack in Gaza. But the groups themselves are very clearly not advocating for “peace.” They are for war. Their objection is not to human suffering but that the wrong humans are suffering.

More broadly, these groups reflect the influence of “settler-colonist” theory, a fashionable school of thought that is being taught at many institutions. (In this sense, the universities themselves are incubating the protests against their own administrations.) Settler-colonist theory is a left-wing version of blood-and-soil nationalism, positing that every ethnic group possesses an inherent attachment to certain lands and is inherently alien to others. The theory has some use in explaining European imperialism, but when applied to the Israel-Palestine conflict, it turns the Jews into a global alien subaltern class.

This ideological framework works in concert with a rhetorical approach that seeks to shrink the mental space between Gaza and the outside world, inviting activists to conceive of themselves as literal participants in the struggle. Their practice of accusing anybody who refuses to endorse their views of murder — hence the otherwise bizarre chants accusing figures like American university professors and administrators of “genocide” — reimagines any dissent from the movement’s demands as a form of literal violence.