A thank-you note to the protesters

presidents.

But the problem with sharpening the contradictions is that the contradictions being sharpened are your own. For every student who became ardently pro-Palestinian during the protests, another one, perhaps a Jewish student with previously indifferent feelings about Israel, finally saw the connection between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. For every professor who’s shown up to your encampment to lend support, you’ve lost a fair-minded liberal with your Maoist-style sloganeering and your arrogant disdain for the genuine fears of some of your Jewish peers.

And for every commencement ceremony whose cancellation you’ve effectively forced, or which you intend to spoil, thousands of apolitical students — who didn’t get to have a proper high school graduation thanks to COVID — have taken an intense and permanent distaste to you and everything you stand for.

In short, if sharpening the contradictions is the game you’re playing, it’s paying bigger dividends for my side than it is for yours. It’s also nothing new. Those 1968 protests you’re trying to emulate? What they mainly helped achieve was the election of Richard Nixon followed by nearly 40 straight years of right-ofcenter governance in the United States.

Nor is this the only help you’re giving my side.

I am a Zionist not only because I support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state — an abstract point about another country. I am also a Zionist for the most personal of reasons: because I see Israel as an insurance policy for every Jewish family, including mine, which has endured persecution and exile in the past and understands that we may not be safe forever in our host countries. For anyone with a historical memory of France until Dreyfus, Germany until Hitler or Iran until Khomeini, that kind of insurance is one Jews can’t afford to lose.

What happened on Oct. 7 shook my faith in the quality of that insurance: What else does the Israeli state exist for, after all, if not to protect its people from the kind of butchery they endured that day?

But what happened on Oct. 8 — the moment your protests began — renewed that faith, because it gave me a glimpse into what America might yet become for Jews, at least if people like you were to gain real power.

Without knowing it, you are my daily reminder of what my Zionism is for, about and against. For that, if nothing else, thank you.

Bret Stephens is a columnist for The New York Times.