College Students Show Us What Democracy is Supposed to Look Like
Brave students take a stand for Palestine despite vile smears and harsh repression...
The views expressed in this article are those of the author, expressed in an unofficial capacity, and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Navy, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.
Vietnam War historian Christian Appy has noted that no one ever gives enough credit to those who actively worked to bring that conflict to a close. “In the decades since 1980,” he wrote, “few, if any, prominent Americans have publicly praised the courage and determination of peace activists who opposed our most unpopular war.” Indeed, “how many times has Hollywood made a film in which Vietnam-era peace activists are cast as appealing characters?” They have mostly been portrayed, like they were in Forrest Gump, as “arrogant jerks.” In part as a result of all this, “several generations of American students came of age with only the vaguest idea of why so many people had opposed the Vietnam War, and thus it became all the easier to breathe new life into the myth that the peace movement was full of self-righteous and cowardly draft dodgers.”1
In reality, of course, the struggle was a highly noble one; it came about because “many Americans eventually found it intolerable that the world’s greatest superpower was bombing a small, poor, mostly agricultural nation that posed no threat to U.S. national security.” That so many people not only came to feel this way, but acted on it, remains somewhat incredible. The revulsion at what the US was doing to Vietnam “reflected a growing American empathy for Vietnamese civilian victims, a remarkable degree of emotional identification coming from a people that had never experienced the sustained bombing of its own homeland.”2 It was extremely important that so many Americans were able to overcome what I call the “empathy gap,” because their actions did end up having an impact on bringing the war to a close. Of course, the imagery and footage coming out of Vietnam – of children’s flesh melted by napalm, of American troops brazenly murdering scores of civilians – made it hard not to empathize, although Americans of a conservative persuasion remained unmoved, then as now.
The movement was heavily overrepresented by African American civil rights activists, women, and, notably, university students, supported by some radical faculty. Universities became hotbeds of dissent, with students demanding not just an end to the war, but an end to universities profiting off of the war, as well as providing research and development for weapons and other technologies that bolstered the war effort. In other words, students “figured out how the world worked,” so to speak, decided that it was fundamentally wrong, and took steps to change it. This is all extraordinarily relevant right now, since a similar movement has sprung up on college campuses across the United States for almost the exact same reasons.
Over half a year into Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, with about 35,000 Palestinians murdered, Americans have continued to register their strong disapproval of Israel’s conduct and their government’s support for it. This has not stopped the political class from continuing to provide a blank check to the Nazi-like Israel Defense Forces (IDF). American politicians have been alarmingly clear about their steadfast commitment to assisting Israel eliminate every last Palestinian life, often sounding as deranged as any Israeli. Congressman Chuck Fleischman (R-TN), in the midst of an unhinged rant, told a Palestinian American, to his face, “goodbye Palestine!” Representative Tim Wallberg (R-MI) told a town hall audience, “We shouldn’t be spending a dime on humanitarian aid…It should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Get it over quick.” And the President, who of course could stop all of this tomorrow if he chose, can’t seem to help announcing to the world that he’s a proud Zionist.
Meanwhile, Israeli society continues its degenerative spiral towards becoming a sadistic cult of mass death, with both the Israeli government as well as ordinary Israeli civilians actively working to physically obstruct humanitarian aid entering Gaza, while the population there faces mass starvation on top of everything else. A recent poll from the Israeli Democracy Institute found that almost 70 percent of Jewish Israelis oppose any aid reaching Gaza. Majorities of Israelis continue to support the actions of their military (with rare honorable exceptions) despite the nauseating things the IDF has been doing. The atrocities Israel has inflicted on Gaza are not only stomach-churning, but have been carried out so frequently, that it is impossible to convey their scope, let alone the savagery with which the Israelis have carried them out. The recent discovery of a mass grave containing three to four hundred corpses, around the remains of Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, is just the tip of the iceberg. Many victims bear the signs of torture, while others appear to have been buried alive, as evidenced by the fact that their bodies were still hooked up to medical equipment. More US aid for the “self-defense” of “the only democracy in the Middle East” is presumably on its way regardless.
All this has once again put the burden of doing the right thing on college students. The courageous actions of students at Columbia, Yale, Cornell, Georgetown, Emory, and elsewhere (the encampments continue to spread, and are now as far as Paris!) should be an inspiration to every person of conscience. Universities invested in weapons manufacturers and Israeli institutions are now being very publicly shamed over this – and it’s about time. Yet once again, as in the Vietnam era, the students involved are being smeared in the worst possible ways; portrayed in the press as violent, antisemitic monsters working for Hamas.
As is sadly to be expected, the Israeli government and its American lackeys are making absurd allegations that insult the intelligence of us all. Benjamin Netanyahu railed in a recent speech that “Antisemitic mobs have taken over leading universities. They call for the annihilation of Israel. They attack Jewish students. They attack Jewish faculty.” He labelled the demonstrations “reminiscent of what happened in German universities in the 1930s.” Anti-Defamation League (ADL) president and Israel Lobby appendage Jonathan Greenblatt has been making similarly ridiculous statements, claiming that “this is all about destroying the state of Israel, and this is all about menacing and threatening…Jewish classmates.” Evidence for such allegations is, you will be shocked to learn, sparse.3 To anyone not in the grip of Israeli propaganda, such lunatic statements appear to be exactly what the are – the panicked flailing of Zionists as they realize that their time is up, and that people are finally starting to see through their lies.
It's worth recalling that in 1973, Abba Eban, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, wrote in a leading Jewish publication that “One of the chief tasks of any dialogue with the Gentile world is to prove that the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is not a distinction at all. Anti-Zionism is merely the new anti-Semitism.” He went on to insist that the criticisms of Israel made by Jewish Americans (he specifically named the journalist I.F. Stone and the linguist Noam Chomsky) were the result of a “complex” caused by “guilt about Jewish survival. They feel themselves associated with our unpardonable audacity at not having been destroyed or eclipsed or, more accurately, at not having been merged into some homogenized universalist utopia.”
Put aside the fact that, like most such ad-hominem statements, this avoids the hard work of having to engage with what people like Stone or Chomsky were actually arguing. Focus, instead, on the fact that here we have evidence that over 50 years ago, leading Israeli politicians were encouraging the conflation of criticisms of Zionism with actual anti-Semitism, and insisting that any Jew who dissented from this was “self-hating.” Sound familiar?
These tired clichés have been the Israeli playbook for well-over half a century. Whole organizations (such as the ADL) exist entirely to promote them. And, sadly, the American mainstream press eagerly takes the bait. Of course, claims that the current protests are sites of unhinged antisemitism are laughable in the extreme. In most cases, it is Palestinian, Muslim, or other Arab students who have borne the brunt of the hatred (my own university’s Islamic center was recently broken into and vandalized). And every single student protest/encampment has a massive contingent of Jewish students, who continue to very publicly insist, time and again, over and over, that such lurid tales of mass antisemitism are ridiculous.
Yet a parade of imbeciles continues to take the claims seriously. Consider this woman, who apparently thought that publicly identifying herself as Jewish in the middle of the Yale encampment for Palestine would lead to her being assaulted.
The stupidity of believing this in the first place should not be overlooked. However, more breathtaking is the fact that, after being completely ignored by an entirely uninterested crowd, she and her husband thought that this nonetheless provided evidence of raging anti-Semitism at the Ivy Leagues, and that it would be a good idea to share the clip online as evidence of the hateful, violent nature of these protests. The clip immediately went viral, and the internet promptly eviscerated her and her infantile mindset. Other pro-Israel individuals have been more direct – they simply lie about the state of things. One woman, a Yale student, claimed that she was stabbed in the eye by a Palestinian flag at a protest. Fox News in particular has repeated this dozens of times as it attempts to whip up hatred against those standing in solidarity with Palestine. Unfortunately for the woman, video of this “incident” soon emerged, demonstrating fairly conclusively that she made the whole thing up. I’m not holding my breath for Fox to issue a retraction.
But it’s not all fun and games. Police have increasingly been called in to brutalize protesters and break up the encampments. A major demonstration against Israel held on the second day of Passover (“Seder in the Streets”) that had been demanding Chuck Schumer cut off US support for the genocide, was among those attacked by police. In this instance, police arrested hundreds of Jewish demonstrators. You can understand why such events must be shut down – from the perspective of the reflexively pro-Israel American government, especially that of New York state (whose previous governor once ensured that “if you boycott Israel, New York will boycott you”), the sight of crowds of Jewish people heaping condemnation on the entire Israeli project and its Zionist ideology is too much to handle. I particularly enjoyed Naomi Klein’s moving speech, where she remarked, “Zionism has brought us to our present moment of cataclysm, and it is time that we say clearly, it has always been leading us here!” [her emphasis]
And recent video of the shocking, brutal arrest of an economics professor at Emory University provides further evidence of my oft-repeated insistence that the United States has no right to call itself a democracy:
It’s remarkable that such appalling behavior is being meted out to students and (in the case of the above clip) professors attempting to call attention to an ongoing mass extermination of an entire people, and their university’s complicity in it. Many of these universities are indeed invested in Israeli apartheid, and peacefully demanding that they cease doing so is self-evidently justified.
It's also remarkable that figures like the white supremacist and Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes is apparently allowed free reign on the Columbia campus, whereas the administration is harshly cracking down on the presence of peaceful demonstrators in the name of “student safety.” Also revealing was the warm welcome given to Mike Johnson, the Christian extremist House Speaker, who took time off from monitoring his son’s porn consumption and accusing the Biden administration of appeasing Iran and undermining Israel, in order to make a belligerent speech criticizing the Gaza encampment as well as Columbia’s president Minouche Shafik.
Shafik, in the wake of a contentious appearance before Congress, senselessly called in the NYPD (against the wishes of the overwhelming majority of students and faculty) to rout the encampment, with 100 students arrested and suspended as a result. For Johnson, such brazen behavior was not enough; he called Shafik “weak and inept” and demanded her resignation. He also called for Biden to deploy the National Guard to Columbia, supposedly to protect free speech. Regarding the Gaza demonstrators, Johnson said, “My message to the students inside the encampment is go back to class and stop the nonsense. Stop wasting your parents’ money.” I would argue that the people “wasting their parents’ money” are people like Johnson, who continuously funnel billions of dollars to the Israeli genocide, but I digress.
Where all this goes, I don’t know, but given the history of the Vietnam protests, it could get worse, fast. In 1970, while he was still governor of California, Ronald Reagan gave his thoughts about how the government should respond to the increasingly vocal protests against the war: “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement.”4 A few weeks later, the Ohio National Guard murdered thirteen white students protesting the war in what has come to be known as the “Kent State Massacre.”5 Ten days later, Mississippi police killed two African American students protesting the war at Jackson State University. A few months after that, police essentially rioted in response to a peaceful Chicano anti-war demonstration in Los Angeles, with two participants killed as a result. That same day, the police almost certainly assassinated the legendary journalist Ruben Salazar, who had warned protest organizers the night before that he’d uncovered evidence “that the police and FBI provocateurs were planning to incite violence.”6 Given this history (and that’s just a small sampling), we should be worried about police escalation.
But at the end of the day, shocking as it is to see such crackdowns against relatively privileged people like Ivy League students and their professors, the focus has to remain on Gaza, where the real nightmare is unfolding. Everyone’s first priority should be getting the United States government to end its support for Israel, to impose a ceasefire, and to flood Gaza with humanitarian assistance. The protestors themselves insist that the crackdown on them not serve as a distraction from the travesty that they’re fighting against. With that in mind, I’ll give one of them the last word:
Christian Appy, American Reckoning, 266
Appy, American Reckoning, 157
We must recall, as the documentary film Israelism lays out, that many Jewish youth are indoctrinated from a young age to identify with the state of Israel, so any criticism of that state will be perceived, in adulthood, as a personal attack against them. This is not antisemitism, it just feels like it to people who have, for one reason or another, allowed their sense of self to be joined at the hip to the international reputation of a Jewish supremacist ethno-state.
Reagan quoted in Appy, American Reckoning, 186
Of note, ADL head Greenblatt, in the middle of making all sorts of unverifiable claims about the nature of the current protests, also called for New York governor Hochul to bring in the National Guard to break up the Columbia University encampment.
Appy, American Reckoning, 201-206