2024 isn’t 1968: University protesters need more clarity about their goals

As someone who remembers when Columbia University students took over Hamilton Hall 56 years ago, let me say that 2024 is not 1968.

Back then, our whole country was engaged in debate over the justice of a Vietnam War that involved tens of thousands of American troops. Today, students are setting up tent encampments to protest a war that is not ours, but where U.S. weaponry is being used to kill thousands of Palestinian women and children — after Hamas murdered and kidnapped about 1,200 Israeli civilians.

Today’s cause is far murkier, since some of the demonstrators are “anti-Zionist,” which can be seen as wanting an end to the Jewish state. Some are also pro-Hamas, ignoring that terrorist group’s murderous pledge to kill all Israeli Jews.

But many other protesters — understandably aroused by videos of starving, maimed, or dying Gazan children — aren’t thinking that far ahead. They want their universities’ endowment funds to divest from U.S. companies involved in sales of weapons to Israel that accelerate civilian deaths.

So are the universities justified in calling in the cops? Are the demonstrators current or future antisemites? Or have they opened a debate that even strong supporters of Israel ignore at their peril?

Here are four points that lay out my thinking. Feel free to email me your thoughts.

It stuns, but does not surprise me, that student concern over civilian deaths and starvation does not extend to Vladimir Putin’s relentless and deliberate bombing of Ukraine’s schools, hospitals, markets, churches, and apartment complexes. This Russian terrorist campaign has turned dozens of Ukrainian villages, towns, and cities into ash and surpassed Israel’s destruction in Gaza many times over. The student outrage also ignores the massive and terrible civilian slaughter ongoing in Sudan, especially in Darfur.

I’ve concluded, after much reading, online videos, and talking with friends’ children and grandchildren at various universities, that the draw of the Israel-Hamas conflict is not necessarily antisemitic. It attracts many students who view it as the last white colonial project, where white people kill brown people.

Never mind that half of Israelis are brown or Black, having fled discrimination in Arab or African countries, and many of the rest are descendants of Holocaust survivors. And never mind that pre-1967 Israel was recognized by the United Nations. To undo its statehood by force (as Putin is trying to do to Ukraine) would delegitimize the borders of countless other post-World War II states.

But leaving those inconvenient realities aside, the colonial analogy has gained traction after negotiations failed over establishing a Palestinian state in the occupied West Bank and Gaza (virtually all of whose borders and economy are still controlled by Israel). Now that peace talks are dead, the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is dominated by right wingers who want Israel to annex the West Bank and Gaza, so the colonial analogy becomes more attractive to many students.

Out of that analogy comes the slogan, “from the river to the sea,” which has been projected onto buildings and shouted by many students on and off campus. This means one Palestinian Arab state that would include Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

Many demonstrators and key student organizing groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine, along with Jewish Voices for Peace, call themselves “anti-Zionist,” meaning they oppose the existence of the Jewish state. This cannot help but unnerve Jewish students, whether or not they have relatives in Israel.

I’ve heard students insist that theirs is only a search for justice, with equal rights for Palestinians and Israelis within one state. But no one has yet explained to me how 7 million Jews would be convinced, short of destruction, to dismantle a prosperous modern country.

I doubt that many campus demonstrators have thought through what the term anti-Zionist means or how to establish one Arab state from the river to the sea. The big question: Do those students who fly the Hamas flag even know how Hamas envisions that project? The terror group’s conception makes clear why Hamas can have no future role in ruling Gaza or negotiating over a Palestinian state. It also lays bare why student endorsements of Hamas are so ugly — even if they are protected speech.

The Hamas charter calls for killing all Jews in Palestine, with a later version merely calling for a temporary truce if a Palestinian state is established alongside Israel. In late 2021, at a Hamas-funded conference in Gaza, participants discussed how Israeli spoils would be distributed after Palestine was fully liberated “from the sea to the river,” and a new state established on the ruins. Jewish fighters would be killed, others might be given time to flee. But, said the concluding document, educated Jews and experts would be “retained” for some time to pay back for “the knowledge they had acquired while living in our land.”

It is time for pro-Palestinian demonstrators who call themselves anti-Zionists to clarify what they mean by that term, and how the concept differs (if it does) from the death and destruction that Hamas has in mind.

However, and I stress this, students have every right to speak freely and to demonstrate for a Gaza cease-fire, for more humanitarian aid, and for divestment. I have written on conditioning U.S. support on Israel permitting more humanitarian aid to flow into Gaza and on its safe distribution.

Of course, free speech — including speech some may find offensive — does not extend to blocking or threatening others, whether intimidating Jewish students at Columbia, or attacking pro-Palestinians at UCLA. Nor does it confer the right to disrupt the functioning or safety of the university, including the taking of finals and graduation ceremonies.

Permanent encampments, or occupations of buildings, provide magnets for outsiders and encourage radicalization. Mark Rudd, president of the Students for a Democratic Society who led the 1968 Hamilton Hall occupation, recalled to NPR in 2010 how another SDS student leader burned 10 years of research papers in the Hamilton Hall office of a faculty member who had annoyed him by trying to mediate with students.

Better if university leaders can negotiate a student exodus, as happened at Brown University, and avoid the viciousness of law enforcement at the University of Texas at Austin. But if repeated and final warnings are rejected, along with compromise proposals, the only option for administrators is to call in law enforcement.

Where the student mantra against occupation has legs is in the West Bank. While all eyes are on the Gaza war, Netanyahu’s far right ministers are encouraging settler violence against Palestinians on the West Bank and pushing for massive new Jewish settlements there.

The Israeli far right’s openly expressed goal is to make life untenable for Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza, and it hopes to drive many Palestinians into Egypt or Jordan. Enabled by Netanyahu, the far right’s written objective is a reverse parallel to the Hamas charter: one Jewish state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean, where reduced numbers of Palestinians can either submit to Israeli rule, leave, or die.

If the right wing succeeds, then future student demonstrations will be protesting against a true apartheid state.

The only way to block Hamas and Israel’s far right is to reach a humanitarian cease-fire, as the White House is urging. That opens the door for new Palestinian leadership in Gaza, rebuilding the strip, and a possible path to a two-state solution.

But (as of this writing) neither Netanyahu nor Hamas appear eager for such a U.S.-backed cease-fire because it could lead to the political demise of both. Hamas leader Yehya Sinwar says he would be willing to sacrifice 100,000 Palestinians for his goals. Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s prime goal is clinging to power.

Each will use the scenes of student demonstrations on American campuses to encourage his followers to hew to his destructive hard line. Students, beware.