For the past few nights, my sleep has been severely disturbed by the loud noise of helicopters circling low before dawn over my New York neighborhood, Manhattan's Upper West Side.
Every day since then, I have traveled a few blocks north to the site of this extraordinary police activity, to the campus of Columbia University, where I have taught for many years, and which has recently been the birthplace of significant student protests. I headed over. .
As protests unfold on my school's campus, similar movements are becoming increasingly widespread on other campuses across the country. These, in turn, amplify the chain of reactions by university administrators, politicians, and law enforcement agencies to suppress, prevent, denounce, and police student demonstrations – in some cases violent The number of cases is increasing.
What this moment most clearly revealed to me was not so much a crisis in student culture or American higher education, as some have claimed, but rather a crisis in U.S. foreign policy, particularly that policy. This is a crisis in American politics. Longstanding close relationship with Israel.
Before I explain further, a few disclaimers. The content below does not advocate hate speech. Anti-Semitism, no matter its flavor or color, is deeply abhorrent, as is all forms of racism. This includes the deep institutional history of anti-Semitism that was once practiced at my university. Anti-Semitism historically limited admissions and employment, primarily to Jews. Protecting white Protestants from academic competition.
I have no doubt that the incidents of attacks, harassment, and insults against Jewish students and supporters of Israel that have occurred on American campuses in recent days are truly inexcusable and deplorable. However, from my own limited experience on campus, such occurrences are not particularly unusual.
My impression was after seeing the same footage shown on FOX News for a week of a menacing heckler yelling in support of Hamas in the face of a Jewish man emerging from a subway station just outside Columbia's main gate. It became even stronger. It is not clear that this abuser was a student. Additionally, my campus is surrounded by television stations that work long hours every day, so if incidents like this occur frequently, I'm sure we'll see many others instead of seeing the same incident over and over again. It will be.
What I saw inside the university gates was generally a scene of exemplary civility. For nine days, students have been camping out in an orderly manner on the vast lawn in front of Butler Library, Columbia's largest library.Most of the students are relaxing and chatting, and some have set up tents. there was. The students demonstrating have posted (and overwhelmingly appear to live by) an admirable code of conduct. Part of it reads: Please do not litter. No drug or alcohol use. Respect personal boundaries. Do not engage with counter-protesters. Let's return to the last of these for a moment.
On a recent day, as I have so many times before, I noticed the famous figures of Herodotus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Virgil, and others carved above Butler Library's porticoed neoclassical façade. I read the name. Then I asked myself. What are the threats to Western civilization, American democracy, and even higher education that the Colombian protests and others who have followed suit might pose?
The answer seems to lie less in the abuse of speech and more in the fear of speech among the protesting students. And the key seems to lie precisely in the passage of their code of conduct that I have just paraphrased. They forbade any association not only with any counter-protesters, but especially with “Zionist” ones.
Here's another disclaimer. I have no problem with many Jews expressing support for Zionism. Their time-honoured faith, one of the world's oldest, has underpinned one of humanity's greatest stories of identity, perseverance and survival. It is rooted in the Old Testament story of the Exodus, and many Jews claim to accept their ancient homeland called Israel as legitimate. For me, the large-scale extermination and persecution of Jews in Europe during the Holocaust naturally deepened many Jewish believers' attachment to Zionism, as well as the So too is the recent and largely unacknowledged class discrimination suffered. After the war.
But the ongoing campus movement that grew out of Columbia did not stem from anti-Semitism, as some believe. The incident stems from deep shock at the horrific and indiscriminate violence carried out by Israel against Palestinians following the October 7 terrorist attack by Hamas that killed an estimated 1,200 Israelis. The protesting students have been scorned and ridiculed as America's enemies in China and Russia, or as the dangerous, naive cat's paws of the most unruly Jew, George Soros. Worse, they have been falsely characterized by critics, including powerful US politicians, as promoters of anti-Semitic hatred.
More than 100 students were taken away in handcuffs by police early in the protests after Columbia University President Nemat Shafik called their encampment a “clear and present danger” and urged police action. It was done. Since then, on other campuses, students have been beaten and tear-gassed as the peace movement spread. Students at Indiana University and Ohio State University claimed to have seen snipers on campus, but an Ohio State spokesperson said they were “just like on a football game day. , a state trooper in a surveillance position.'' Support teachers are being assaulted, thrown to the ground, handcuffed, and taken away by police on a daily basis.
It's time for Americans to replace the topic of Israel and Palestine with other topics and ask: How would the United States react if student protests like this were occurring on such a large scale in other countries? . I can immediately imagine high-pitched denunciations from State Department spokespersons and cynical editorials in major American media about authoritarian intolerance and democratic decline.
There are many other pressing questions. For example, what is an appropriate public response to the scale of the horrors we are witnessing in Gaza?The US government does not fully support Israeli attacks on the ground and there are substantial constraints on their use. It has been supplying Israel with large quantities of new weapons with almost no knowledge, but it has simply been a blank slate. Nevertheless, some U.S. politicians treat demonstrators as a threat. Some, citing a phrase familiar from the student protests against the Vietnam War, warn that the protesters are disrupting the education of students who do not participate in the demonstrations, a sort of silent majority.
This is truly backwards. By peacefully protesting, students at Columbia University and a growing number of other campuses are providing American society, and indeed the world, with an education about democracy and citizenship. This was driven home to me in campside conversations with students from China and other countries who marveled at the ability of Columbia University students to push back on protests. Even in the midst of atrocities, they have enough to say, and for the most part, they do it peacefully. They argue that confronting fear requires more urgency than writing letters to legislators or patiently waiting to vote in the next election.
Gaza is not the only fear in the world. We could all use more of the moral urgency and civility of these students. They are pushing as far as they can most easily towards the institutions that, as students, form the very foundation of their communities. If we can't get the U.S. government to do something to stop the violence in Gaza and the largely ignored West Bank, we can at least get universities to stop supporting it. This is what the divestment requirement means. Deny institutional support through investment in Israel's war effort until peace is achieved. Many critics object that this is unrealistic and will never work. But what is the appropriate response from the public? Do you give up and sit backwards?
I would like to conclude with the issue of Zionism. For decades, public opinion in the United States and in many parts of the world has supported this concept, the special right of Israel to exist as the ethnic and religious homeland of the Jewish people. Personally, I watched my Jewish friends from high school eagerly go out to help build Israel on kibbutzim and in other capacities in more innocent times decades ago. I remember the excitement I felt for them. But the threat to Zionism in today's world does not come from students demonstrating on American campuses. I would argue that the greatest threat to Zionism does not come from Hamas, whose attacks on Israelis are abhorrent. No, the greatest threat comes from the blurring of the lines between Zionism and the squeezing of Palestinian lives and hopes for the future. As long as the students participating in the demonstrations are sending this message, they are friends of Israel.