10 tight takes on the present campus protests
The Quad is not the place to protest the War in Gaza
College students protesting The War in Gaza on their campus quads strikes me very much like big kids “playing protest” the way little kids “play house” — why? Because…
If you’d like to change how the levers of power are pulled by the United States government, you should be at the door of maybe a senator or congressperson? Maybe even the White House? Why at your school? Does leaving campus feel unsafe? Colleges do work really hard these days to make their students feel safe…
What’s sad, to me, is that if the camera-ready conflict of a few student protests at a handful of famous universities wasn’t happening, the lead story, instead, would be The War in Gaza — imagine it: our eyes and ears open to displaced families requesting international aid for essential food and clean water; but nope we’ve got US student FLAK in our eyes: well meaning “pro-Palestinian” college students in tents chowing down their Doordash, working on passive-aggressive word-burns, bickering with their local Army of Administrative Bloat, and occasionally responding to a police riot.
Students opposed to the actions of the Israeli government or the US relationship with the Israeli military should know: your fight is not with the president of your university or its board of trustees. This conflict is “above their pay grade.” But I also want to point something else out…
If you’re opposed to war on principle, but you’re LESS angry with the “side” that “started it” — broke the peace, no matter how strained, and started this round of retaliation and killing — your concept of pacifism is total fudgy nutballs to lots of people. Maybe you’ve rationalized it, and to you it makes sense, but you should at least know that from here it looks very inside-out.
Sometimes everyone’s just as right as everyone is also wrong, and we all just have to accept each other for how we are and live together in peace. I’m describing a kind of cosmopolitanism that is the foundation of free democracies and generally manifests itself in the lands surrounding Jerusalem through the phrase “two state solution.”
Judeo-phobia is real. Jewish people are treated like shit in the present and have been killed like crazy in the past. Pretending otherwise makes you seem like a… well, you know.
A couple last thoughts: don’t have heroes — they’ll turn out to be human.
Like Kipo said: You Can’t End a War by Fighting It.
And if you say “genocide” too much, it eventually means nothing.
And there you have it, 10 reasons to re-think things that no one who needs to re-think things will ever read! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Edit/Added 5.9.24
I appreciate the “likes” this post has received, but even more so I appreciate the one reader who took the time to write to me and express his doubts about what I wrote. I’m always uncomfortable when I find myself surrounded by people who agree with me, and I’m always comforted when someone is willing to take my ideas to task.
This reader was first, concerned that I was being disingenuous. And I think that is a valid concern: a LOT of discussion surrounding Israel and Gaza is not in good faith. And this post, let’s be honest, it’s a little flippant — it’s not my finest work. So I wanted to add part of my reply to him, my thoughtful reader:
This morning the student protests were top of the fold on my front porch paper-newspaper, the story that played on the tv at a Burger King for as long as it takes me to eat an entire croissanwich, and the entire top of the page when I looked at the NYTimes website.
What’s actually going on in Gaza was also IN the two papers, small articles lower down, but didn’t come on the tv at all. This annoyed me and was the impetus for writing this piece.
I didn’t mention to him that the tv news went from “student protests” to coverage of the “Met Gala” which is probably also part of what annoyed me. He responded by pointing out that media sucking at their jobs is the normal state of affairs, and we can’t assume that if the campus protests were not going on, the media would focus on the crises in the Middle East; they might just spend more time showing half-naked celebrities. This is a fair point.
My thoughtful reader also pointed out that protesting students are interested in getting their universities to “divest” in Israeli companies. I told him that:
I considered adding a footnote about the divestment idea, but I didn’t want [the post] to get too long. It seems to me that the whole divestment idea is really wrongheaded, ineffective, and serves to deepen the conflation of Israelis and their government. The Israeli government is encouraging illegal settlements and violence in the West Bank to an extent that is absolutely criminal, but how does trying to harm the businesses of Israeli farmers and beauty lines stop them? And since so much military funding in Israel comes directly from the US, you’d really have to divest in all US-taxpayer endeavors to cut at the root of Israeli military spending. See what I mean?
I’m not an economist, and I know you could put this question to ten economists and get ten different answers, but I just don’t believe this is an effective or meaningful ideology, unless your goal is to conflate the worst excesses of the worst governments Israel’s parliment has ever put together with all the normal people living their lives and doing their jobs in Israel. Why not boycott divest and sanction the US for the its uncountable crimes and the actual, undeniable genocide of the native peoples who lived on this continent when hypocrites like Thomas Jefferson penned that all men are created equal and endowed by virtue of their birth with inalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
This was the last point I discussed with my thoughtful reader, and this was the point upon which he said we would have to agree to disagree: genocide. What is it? Who has had it done to them? Who has done it to others?
I believe that War is Hell, but that Hell is not necessarily genocide. When the US firebombed Japanese cities to ash (and then dropped two nuclear warheads on two of them), those bombings were, to my mind, war crimes. Those bombings were excessive, disproportional, designed to destroy whole cities full of civilians just to get to the few military targets hidden within.
But those fire-bombings did not, as I understand the term, amount to genocide, because the bombings were not motivated by racial hatred against Japanese people, or a desire to eliminate all Japanese people, but by the escalation that took place in the Pacific after Japan shredded the US Navy at Pearl Harbor. What the US did to Japanese-Americans during those years, robbing them of their property and their freedom and interning them in camps, that was also a crime — but it also, still, wasn’t genocide.
Here’s a link, as a final thought, to an opinion piece by Thomas Friedman, who points out that he has:
lived in Beirut and Jerusalem, cares about people on all sides and knows one thing above all from my decades in the region: The only just and workable solution to this issue is two nation-states for two indigenous peoples.
If you are for that, whatever your religion, nationality or politics, you’re part of the solution. If you are not for that, you’re part of the problem.
He goes on to describe that:
…the thing I am most proud of in my 45-year career is my interview in February 2002 with the Saudi crown prince, Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz, in which he, for the first time, called on the entire Arab League to offer full peace and normalization of relations with Israel in exchange for full withdrawal to the 1967 lines — a call that led the Arab League to hold a peace conference the next month, on March 27 and 28, in Beirut to do just that. It was called the Arab Peace Initiative.
And do you know what Hamas’s response was to that first pan-Arab peace initiative for a two-state solution?
Of course you do, we’re still living it.
I keep coming back to a post on Bluesky made on October 8 of last year, which reads “The occupation is an intolerable crime and resistance to it is a fundamental right and murdering civilians is wrong and collective punishment of an entrapped population is immoral. We live in a world of ands, not ors.”
It’s possible, because we have seen many many people over the last 7 months now in particular but going back years just on this conflict make this argument, that Hamas and the Palestinians living in Gaza are not one and the same, just as the Israeli government and Israelis and more importantly, Jews are not one and the same. And yet a whole lot of people, many who should know better, insist on conflating those populations usually because they support the other side and need to feel righteous about their support.
This is not a case of both-sides-ism. Hamas is a terrorist organization that is responsible for the deaths of a whole lot of innocent people, no matter the rhetoric they use to justify it. The Netanyahu government is also responsible for the deaths of a whole lot of innocent people, no matter the rhetoric they use to justify it.
But there are a lot of people in that area who want this violence to stop, whether because they just want to live or because they want their government to stop murdering people in their name. And that alone is reason enough to differentiate between the groups who want to kill each other and the rest who are caught between them.
“We live in a world of ands, not ors.”
Brilliant Amy.