The Gaza Protests are a Mirror Image of MAGA
Dangerous rhetoric and disturbing scenes from Columbia and other campuses.
WITHIN THE PAST FORTY-EIGHT HOURS, student protesters occupied Hamilton Hall at Columbia University and then were forcibly removed by New York police. I knew that building well when I was undergrad there in the 1970s. Like most structures on campus, it had an air of shabby gentility.
Columbia, like most colleges, tended left in those days, but student demonstrations were out of fashion. The campus had become notorious in 1968 for occupied buildings (including Hamilton Hall), the burning of ten year’s worth of one professor’s research notes, and holding a dean hostage for twenty-four hours, among other things. By the time I arrived in 1975, things were quiet, but among some faculty and students, one could still detect a certain nostalgia for the Sixties—a sense that the students who turned the campus upside down back then were righteous and brave, whereas we, their successors, were careerist drudges.
That sentiment matters. Columbia’s current crop of revolutionaries didn’t spring fully formed from the head of Zeus. They were nurtured in a warm, supportive environment that extends beyond the university. The lionization of activism, transgression, and revolution has been like a fault line, quiet most of the time but always there and capable of grave harm.
Consider the Columbia faculty’s response to students setting up an encampment in the middle of campus, refusing to disperse after multiple warnings, and disrupting other campus activities. The university senate met—not to admonish the students but to condemn the university president’s decision to call in the police. Worse, a number of faculty members rallied alongside the students. Shana Redmond, a professor of English and comparative literature, hailed the students with a megaphone, proclaiming, “We salute you, we stand with you, and we’re so proud to be your professors.”
These campus Gaza protests are a weird amalgam of Portlandia and Reds. Columbia’s “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” featured expensive REI tents, body oils for sale, gluten-free bread, a counseling tent, an art corner, and a “People’s Library for Liberated Learning.” Completing the Portlandia vibe, during the siege of Hamilton, a student speaking on behalf of the protesters demanded that those occupying the building be provided with food and water. “I guess it’s a question of what kind of community and what kind of obligation Columbia has to its students. . . . Do you want students to die of dehydration and starvation?”
Doubtless they would have further insisted that the food be sustainably sourced, if they hadn’t been dragged out by police.
The Reds side of the ledger is less amusing. The protesters are disciplined to the point of seeming robotic. Protesting students usually love to spout off to reporters. Not these. When journalists attempt to interview students, they decline to speak and refer questions to the lone spokesperson. Protesting students tend to be an unruly lot. Not these.
As the Atlantic reported, dozens of the protesters repeat what the leader says word for word. When three Jewish Columbia students approached the enclosure, the leader, adorned like many at these protests in a black-and-white keffiyeh, announced, “Attention, everyone! We have Zionists who have entered the camp! We are going to create a human chain where I’m standing so that they do not pass this point and infringe on our privacy.”
By what logic does a public protest on an open space in the middle of campus require privacy? And by what standard are three Jewish students adjudged to be Zionists? They might be, but being Jewish doesn’t completely overlap with Zionist views, as the organizers are certainly aware since some of their fellow protesters celebrated Passover within the encampment. One of the barred students was wearing a star of David pendant and wondered if that might have been the thing that caused the leader to close ranks against them. Problematic, one would think, for a campus that jealously protects so many other identities.
These tactics reveal a disturbing authoritarian mindset that is antithetical to American principles and, one would have thought, utterly incompatible with the mission of a university. At UCLA, protesters attempted to block access to Royce Quad, Royce Hall, and Powell Library. Students were asked to identify themselves with wrist bracelets declaring that they were “anti-Zionist” before being permitted past a barricade. One student posted a video in which he asks the protesters: “So you won’t let me in because I’m Jewish?” The protester replies,“Ummm no . . . we have a couple Jewish students here. . . . Are you a Zionist?” The student affirms that he is. “Well yeah, we’re not gonna let Zionists in.”
Even leaving aside the arrogance of students who imagine they can violate university time, place, and manner restrictions on their protests with impunity (and hand-delivered food and drink), there is the disturbing confusion about individual rights. A little refresher: It is wrong to make assumptions about people based on group identity. Each person, under our system of laws and traditions, is to be judged only as an individual. That’s why it was so offensive in 2016 when Donald Trump impugned the integrity of a judge in his Trump University fraud case by saying “He’s a Mexican.” Most student protesters would probably have little difficulty identifying that as racist. Yet they don’t see that making assumptions about Jewish students’ beliefs—to say nothing of blocking Jewish or “Zionist” students’ movements—is just as offensive.
Most Jewish students probably are Zionists but that’s not the point. The protesters have no idea what any individual may think and it’s none of their business in any case. How dare they close public places to those who engage in wrongthink?
Imagine an encampment at a conservative Christian college in which students occupy the quad or library to protest their state’s gender-affirming model for trans kids. Suppose the protesters linked arms and forbade entry to students who looked gay. See the problem? Who knows what any person, gay or straight, thinks about gender treatment for minors, but the idea of blocking or singling out anyone for their presumed opinions is outrageous.
University administrators and faculty shouldn’t hesitate for a nanosecond to enforce their rules against these students, up to and including expulsion. Yet hesitate they do.
AN EQUALLY DISTURBING aspect of these student protests is their uncritical embrace of extremism.
Some students may be attending these protests because they’re upset by the images coming out of Gaza and want the suffering to stop. But the organizers and many of their enablers are not against violence per se. Not at all. They oppose violence only against certain victims. Not only did they not protest Hamas’s October 7 atrocities against Israelis, some celebrated them. At an October 8, 2023 rally in Times Square sponsored by a local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, while Israelis were still counting their dead, some rallygoers carried signs saying “Decolonization is not a metaphor” and “By any means necessary.” Other pro-Hamas protesters emblazoned their posters with images of the hang gliders Hamas terrorists used to infiltrate Israel. It’s not known whether the Columbia student leaders participated in that Times Square demonstration, but one Columbia protest leader, Khymani James, told a disciplinary hearing that “Zionists don’t deserve to live.”
Back in October, before Israel had fired the first bullet in retaliation, a Barnard student recalled that she received a notice from the president of a campus lesbian organization announcing that “Zionists” were disinvited to a group event. This was followed up by another email saying that “White Jewish people are today and always have been the oppressors of all brown people.”
These students are supposedly the cream of the crop in higher education, and yet they demonstrate no nuance, no appreciation of the complexities of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, and a shocking willingness to mouth the Hamas line. The slogan “From the river to the sea” implies that Israel will cease to exist. They chant “There is only one solution—intifada revolution!” When the students smashed the windows and occupied Hamilton Hall on April 30, they dropped a banner reading “Intifada” from a window. The intifadas featured random attacks against Israeli civilians—on buses, at pizza parlors, at restaurants. When Jewish students hear “Globalize the intifada!” they are right to assume a threat against Jews everywhere.
There are no calls at these protests, which have expanded to campuses around the country, for Hamas to accept a ceasefire or to release the hostages. There are no calls for the Houthis in Yemen to stop firing missiles at Israel and at ships in the Red Sea. There are no protests condemning Hezbollah for firing missiles into Israel’s north (causing 80,000 Israelis to be displaced). No, their “white oppression” and “settler colonialism” training has left them certain that they are taking a valiant stand against an apartheid regime that is committing genocide. That is a lie. Israel has problems, but 20 percent of its population is Arab. Arab citizens serve in the Knesset and on Israel’s Supreme Court. Certainty bleeds easily into arrogance and from there into cruelty. Certainty based on propaganda is disgusting.
It is fair to criticize Israel for not doing more to provide humanitarian aid to civilians in Gaza, as the Biden administration has done. Gazans are obviously suffering grievously in this war that Hamas started, but the cries of genocide are simply unhinged—even if they are echoed by South Africa before the International Court of Justice.
If students are upset by what is happening to the Palestinian people, where is their anger toward Hamas, which spent a fortune building a 500-mile network of tunnels complete with stockpiles of food, water, medical supplies, arms, ammunition, and command-and-control centers? Where is their outrage that before October 7—despite the infusion of aid from Qatar, Turkey, the EU, the United States, and others—50 percent of Gaza’s population was food insecure? Where is the rage at Hamas for diverting so much international aid to missiles and tunnels and war planning at the expense of its own people? Where is the outrage that Hamas places its fighters in hospitals, mosques, and schools? What do Columbia’s “Lesbians Against Genocide” and others make of the treatment of women by Hamas? What about the abuse and murder of homosexuals? Does having supposedly brown skin obliterate everything else in these kids’ moral imaginations? And speaking of skin color, more than 50 percent of Israelis are not of European extraction. Does that complicate the moral calculus?
Students at American universities ought to care about authoritarianism. They ought to show some humility about what they don’t know and some fairness in the way they evaluate complex conflicts. They ought to prize democratic systems, freedom, the rule of law, human rights, and human dignity. Something has gone very wrong when they think in absolutist categories—oppressor/oppressed, victim/victimizer, white/people of color—instead of the equal worth of every person. They are more like the MAGA crowd than they know.