Message from US campuses

Suppressing protests may be politically self-defeating

In a reprisal of student protests against the Vietnam War more than half a century ago, the Israel-hamas war is sparking demonstrations on campuses around the world. Signs of discontent with the Biden administration’s policies on the Israel-hamas war have been building for the past six months. Last week, Columbia hit the headlines when the university’s president called in the New York police to clear pro-palestinian protestors from campus. Following the arrest of 108 demonstrators, including professors, the protests have spread to at least 50 other campuses that include Yale; the University of Texas, Austin; the University of California, Berkeley; and Virginia Tech. Overall, some 900 students and faculty members have been arrested in the US over the past 10 days, raising questions about the democratic credentials of the world’s most powerful democracy. Since then, protests against the war in Gaza have erupted also in France (at the elite Sciences Po, Paris), Canada, Australia, and the UK, all countries whose governments are underwriting Israel’s war against Hamas.

The issue has been complicated by anti-semitic rallies, a hot-button issue in the US that prompted in January the resignations of the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania following pressure from donors, politicians, and the alumni over perceived inadequate responses to campus anti-semitism. The prosperous Jewish-american community has historically exerted a powerful influence on public life and politics, especially of the Democratic Party. Propalestinian and pro-israeli groups clashed in the University of California, Los Angeles. These campaigns have offered the administration a handle to paint all protestors as anti-semitic, which is not the case. In Columbia, where a tented encampment has sprung up, the protestors have a specific agenda: That the university cut financial ties with Israel and divest from Israeli companies. In the main, the protestors’ demands are generic rather than self-interested or politically driven. There have been calls to cut back military support for Israel and for the Biden administration to leverage its financial powers over Tel Aviv to intervene more meaningfully and decisively in its ally’s war against the Palestinians not just in Gaza but increasingly in the West Bank too.

Nevertheless, an effort to highlight a distinction between anti-semitism, which denotes racial prejudice, and anti-zionism, a settler colonial movement in Israel, would be constructive. Professor and student protestors would do well to draw on the experience of their predecessors more than a generation ago —people who organised “teach-ins” at protest sites to educate people on the iniquities of the Vietnam War. This helped expand the protests from self-interested resistance to the military draft to protests against Dow Chemicals, a prominent campus recruiter, for making Napalm, the destructive chemical deployed by the US military in Vietnam and, finally, against the morality of the war. With US Secretary of State Antony Blinken declaring, without irony, that Hamas should accept Israel’s “extraordinarily generous” ceasefire offer, US campuses are unlikely to revert to peaceful pedagogy anytime soon. One of America’s more successful presidents, Lyndon B Johnson, saw his popularity eroded by the campus protests over Vietnam. With polls showing a majority of Americans opposing Israeli action in Gaza, it is an open question whether President Joe Biden, in a neck-and-neck contest with Donald Trump, will suffer the same fate.