In campus demonstrations over Gaza, echoes of Vietnam-era outcry
Parallels seen as students reject Israeli response
Richard Flacks remembers the challenges of building a protest movement during the Vietnam War as a pillar of the leftwing political and antiwar group Students for a Democratic Society during the 1960s.
“The whole idea of SDS began with the idea of, ‘We need a new way of being on the left, a new vocabulary, a new strategy,’” said Flacks, who helped write the group’s manifesto, the Port Huron Statement, in 1962. “We knew we were right, and I don’t think we were arrogant about it.”
Sixty years later, Iman Abid sees similar challenges in the war in the Gaza Strip between Israel and Hamas. “For so long, we couldn’t get Palestine to be that issue for people to care about,” said Abid, the organizing and advocacy director at the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, which works with proPalestinian campus organizations. “But now people care about it because they’re seeing it. They’re watching it on their social media. They’re watching it on the news.”
It is too early to know whether the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will define this generation as opposition to the Vietnam War did for many young people more than a half century ago.
But to many who have studied or lived through the Vietnam era, the parallels to the Gaza protests are compelling: a powerful military raining destruction on a small, underdeveloped nonwhite land; a generational divide over the morality of the conflict; a sense that the war represented far broader political and cultural currents; an unswerving confidence — critics might say sanctimony — among students that their cause is righteous.
The differences can be glaring, too, beginning with the attack by Hamas that set this war in motion, for which there is nothing comparable in Vietnam. The Israel-Hamas war is not being fought by the US military, unlike Vietnam, where more than 58,000 Americans died and young men faced a draft.
Miles Rapoport, a former secretary of state of Connecticut, who joined SDS while studying at Harvard University in the 1960s, saw similarities but said the two movements and moments differ in a fundamental way: The United States waded into Vietnam in a show of superpower hubris. Israel, he said, is fighting for its existence after an attack that killed 1,200 citizens. The current war, he said, “has a lot more moral and philosophical nuance.”
That is reflected in pro-Israel marches and demonstrations to a far greater degree now than was common, particularly on campuses, for supporters of the war during the Vietnam era.
Still, both movements, Rapoport said, reflect “a kind of instinctive and initial solidarity with the underdog.” He added: “And related is a sense of solidarity with people who are fighting to have their own country and be freed from a kind of colonial existence.”
To critics of the Gaza protests, the current movement reflects the excesses, not the virtues, of the Vietnam protests, with chants now that to some suggest genocide against the Jewish people, much as some 1960s protests alienated many Americans by backing North Vietnam against US forces. And those critics also accuse the proPalestinian demonstrators of hypocrisy — saying that many of the rallies include side issues that would be antithetical to many Palestinians, like women’s issues and LGBTQ+ rights.
Many supporters of Israel view the movement with a mixture of horror and consternation. Kenneth L. Marcus, chair of the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, a Jewish civil rights institution that is not affiliated with Brandeis University, said the campus demonstrations began even before Israel’s invasion of Gaza occurred.
“There may be some people participating in these protests who think they’re supporting Palestinians, but the movement they are advancing is predominantly an antisemitic movement,” he said.
However, Larry P. Gross, an expert on media at the University of Southern California, said Israeli leaders had not adapted their message, much less policies, to a generation that views Israel not as a besieged Jewish homeland, but as the arbiter of freedom in the West Bank and Gaza. Support for Palestinians among the young, he said, “is going to last. I think it’s one of those generational shifts.”