What student protesters don’t get about Palestine

When I was an undergraduate student at Ohio University in the early 1980s, I was a member of a group called “Students for Peace.” During that period of my early adulthood, the world news was dominated by the nuclear arms race between the East and the West, the calls to end the Apartheid regime in South Africa, and the efforts to reach a peace agreement in the Middle East between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

I have fond memories from those years of activism at Ohio University and my involvement with Students for Peace. We staged sit-ins on the campus quad to protest the escalating arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States, invited experts to educate us about the brutality and injustice of the South African regime, and debated with each other (Christians, Jews, and Muslims) on how best to bring about peace in the Middle East. I and my peers in Students for Peace were idealistic, albeit naïve, but mostly we were a group of students committed to imagining and moving us toward a better world.

Given my favorable memories of engaging in student activism, I was initially hopeful when the protests broke out at Columbia and other universities a couple of weeks ago. Perhaps, I reasoned, these protests could bring additional focus to the crisis in the Middle East and even help revive the stalled negotiations for a cease fire in Gaza, which can potentially pave the way for a more permanent resolution of the conflict.

However, as more information began to emerge about the tactics of the protesters, the content of some of their chants, and their exclusionary practices, I gradually realized that my initial optimism about the current student activists was misguided. What became evident to me is that the protests that were taking place on campuses across the United States were less about protecting human rights in Gaza or expanding democracy in the Middle East and much more about promoting a pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist agenda.

For instance, in a recent opinion essay in The New York Times, Columbia University linguistics professor John McWhorter argues that the student protests on his campus are better characterized as a form of abuse than efforts to bring about justice. McWhorter opens his essay by describing a situation in which two of his students could not deliver part of their presentation on the composer John Cage because of the noise coming from the demonstrators outside the building. In addition, he was concerned that chants that could be heard that day such as “from the river to the sea,” which is referenced in article 2 of the charter of the terrorist group Hamas, would offend the Israeli and Jewish students that were taking his class.

The chants that could be heard outside of McWhorter’s classroom are not unique to Columbia University. Students at the University of Pittsburgh have reported seeing signs at their campus protests that stated “Don’t Talk to Zionists.” Lost on many of the protesters is the meaning of the word Zionist, which refers to someone who supports the existence of a home for the Jewish people. Unlike the Hamas charter, which specifically calls for taking arms against Israel, the Zionist movement of the late 19th and early 20th century never championed violence as a means of establishing a state for the Jews. Still, as Michael Powell has shown in an investigative report on the protests at Columbia, Zionism has become one of the most popular slogans used to mask antisemitic sentiments.

Pro-Palestinian protesters at Harvard and other universities have held up signs calling for a “global intifada,” the Arab word for uprising. Yet even a generous interpretation of the term intifada — as a nonviolent form of resistance to oppression — becomes misleading when you put the adjective global before it. Notwithstanding the protests of the Arab Spring, which lasted only a short time, we have not seen the citizens of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, or Egypt engage in an uprising against their Muslim oppressors.

In the case of Syria, evidence suggests the Assad regime is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of its own citizens, including the deployment of chemical weapons, and the displacement of half the population. Thus, the notion of global intifada is used as a catchphrase to try to get the public to believe the falsehood that the only entity that is oppressing Muslims around the globe is Israel and that we should all join the efforts to resist the “Jewish colonial state.”

Many of the pro-Palestine protesters who have set up tents on campuses across the country are well-meaning citizens that want their voices heard. Yet, if they were really concerned for peace and justice for the Palestinians, they would denounce the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7, 2023, call on its leaders to accept the latest ceasefire proposal, and advocate for the immediate revival of a two-state solution to the conflict. Rather than appropriating the rhetoric of Hamas, these protesters should educate themselves on the actual vision and record of this group, the origin of Palestinian identity, the internal struggles among various Palestinian factions, the history of the Arab-Israeli struggle, as well as the various efforts to mediate this dispute.