Tweeted by Assal Rad
It’s not the students we should be worrying about, Edward Luce wrote of US campus protests in the Financial Times - it’s the adults. From Columbia University in New York City, to the UCLA campus on the East Coast, university students in the US are protesting against the slaughter of Palestinians in the narrow, caged strip of Gaza.
Protest is the lifeblood of democracy, and the voices of the young a sign of its vigour. Priyamvada Gopal, history professor at Cambridge University, wrote in the Prospect magazine:
“Until very recently, gen Z, including students in western countries, were being lambasted as sheltered ‘snowflakes’ lacking in drive and ambition, too invested in safe spaces to engage with uncomfortable ideas or exert themselves in challenging directions. Now the problem seems to be that these same young people are not willing to be pacified by either comforting pap or complacent indifference to injustice.”
Indeed.
“It would be far more worrying if the young were indifferent to the deaths of thousands of children”, wrote Edward Luce.
Coming to the adults, what happened at UCLA is especially instructive. Pro-Palestine protests began on April 25th, with students setting up an encampment behind a barricade.
The New York Times did a detailed analysis of videos that tracked the protest, which took a nasty turn on April 30th, when:
“ ‘Counter-protestors’ tried to dismantle the encampment barricades. Pro-Palestinian protestors rushed to rebuild it, and violence ensued.”
The quote marks around ‘counter-protestors’ are mine, because a symmetrical counter-protest would have staged their protest on the opposite side of the street, set up their own encampment, raised their own slogans. The new-comers were a disruptive force, and if I were to use a term, it would be agents provocateurs, out to muddy the water and create a setting for violence, with which the protestors against slaughter could also be charged.
“Police arrived hours later, but they did not intervene immediately”
This, despite the categorical findings of the NYT research team that:
“The violence had been instigated by dozens of people who are seen in videos counterprotesting the encampment. The videos showed counterprotesters attacking students in the pro-Palestinian encampment for several hours, including beating them with sticks, using chemical sprays and launching fireworks as weapons. As of Friday May 3rd, no arrests had been made in connection with the attack.”
We’ve seen this movie before, in Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Jamia Milia. As in our Universities, UCLA campus security did nothing to protect their students from violence perpetrated by outsiders. It is unclear what UCLA’s Chancellor, Gene Block, was thinking while his security staff stood by, but he did later accept the reality that the violence was triggered by ‘instigators’.
At Columbia University, senior management tried to delegitimise protests at their campus early in the game, by suggesting that many, if not most, of the protestors were intruders. Teaching faculty, who actually engage with the students, were quick to contradict any such allegations. In a speech delivered from stairs in a doorway, Professor Rashid Khalidi reminded us that Columbia students
“protested against the Vietnam war in 1968, a genocidal, illegal, shameful war. Columbia University honours them. They are on the Columbia University website. One day, what our students did here will be commemorated in the same way.”
Meanwhile, many of them will have been brutalised by the police, who were summoned to the campus by its leadership. It’s strange how rapidly history is forgotten. When the 50th anniversary of the anti-war demonstrations was observed, in 2018, the President of Columbia University, Mr. Bollinger said that the administration’s decision to call in the police in 1968 was “a serious breach of the ethos of the university.”
Not to mention undermining the democratic right to protest. In Denver, Colorado, it was Police Chief, Ron Thomas, who twice declined requests by the administrators of the Auraria Campus to deploy forces - he had no legal authority, he believed, to prevent peaceful protest. The NYPD, meanwhile, had concrete proof, in the form of this book displayed on television by its Deputy Commissioner, that they were dealing with terrorists. Pity that it turned out to be an Oxford University history text, not a manual for violence.
NYPD Deputy Commissioner, Kaz Daughtry
The effort to discredit student protest is not limited to the police or university administrators.
Charges of anti-semitism are the most common, and make for a convenient slur, but as the Jewish student Ian Berlin wrote in CNN Opinion, are
“ a tired framework - supposedly antisemitic pro-Palestine activists pitted against Jewish pro-Israel activists… As a fourth-year Yale student, I find this characterization to be deeply frustrating, as it could not be further from the truth. At every turn, I have encountered a community of activists and organizers that is eager to listen, ready to learn and committed to including Jewish voices and perspectives.
“We were demanding that Yale call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and commit to protecting campus free speech after Columbia University banned pro-Palestinian protest groups. This semester, students have gathered weekly on Friday afternoons in Beinecke Plaza as Jewish classmates led even more singing and prayer in protest of the war in Gaza.”
The mood of America’s young is clear. According to a recent CNN poll, 81% of those between 18 and 34 do not approve of the way the current administration is handling the war in Gaza. Heavy-handed reactions by university management and city cops will do nothing to dampen their deep disturbance at the humanitarian disaster in Gaza.
The deflection that the authorities are only out to protect public property is best answered by this tweet:
Edward Luce: https://www.ft.com/content/19890269-fe64-429d-994a-e2002bac3443
Priyamvada Gopal: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/free-speech/65927/us-campus-protests-free-speech-gaza
UCLA Videos: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/05/03/us/ucla-protests-encampment-violence.html?campaign_id=190&emc=edit_ufn_20240503&instance_id=122358&nl=from-the-times®i_id=50668505&segment_id=165617&te=1&user_id=19510cccafd64d7d7efe44abcc2de9ad
Ian Berlin: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/04/27/opinions/yale-student-palestinian-protests-berlin/index.html
A lot of what we do makes no difference at the margin, just as expressing condolences makes little difference to the bereaved; but expressing empathy and solidarity aerates the collective soul, improves the human condition.
Thanks for collating various sources and writing this perspective .