From Vietnam to Palestine: Campus Rebellions, 1968-2024
In my last update I mentioned that I had been occupied by speaking and writing about the astonishing campus uprisings in solidarity with the Palestinian people and the complicity of many universities with the U.S. government’s support for Israel's massive slaughter of Palestinian civilians.
I’m continuing that theme here with a link to my essay, “From Vietnam to Palestine: Campus Rebellions, 1968-2024.” It appears on the website of Democracy for the Arab World Now, a Washington, DC-based NGO founded by friends of the late Saudi dissident journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, that promotes democracy in the Arab world.
Peter Beinart has also been speaking and writing about these issues. Two of his recent video newsletters “The Campus Protests Make Me Uncomfortable. And They Fill Me with Hope” and “The Campus Protesters Are Winning— and Why That Means Greater Repression to Come” highlight important aspects of the campus rebellions.
In the first, Beinart argues that “the organized American Jewish community has for many decades…wielded a lot of influence over the terms of debate on Israel, (and has) been able to circumscribe those debates.” This has created “a sense of security, of safety, that we have a certain influence, even a certain kind of control, that things are not getting out of hand…. And now…that’s changing, something really radically new is being born in progressive circles… in which those debates will not be… circumscribed by the American Jewish establishment in the way that they were.”
Significant changes in public discourse like this are always accompanied by contentious debates about language. People of a certain age will remember the acrimony and sense and betrayal felt by white liberals, among them many Jews, when African-Americans began to raise the slogan “Black Power.” Even the insistence on using the terms “Black” and “African American” rather than “Negro” provoked discomfort. (“Colored” became completely unacceptable despite the name of the venerable NAACP; but “people of color” and BIPOC are now widely used.) Insurgent movements commonly seek to replace language that has been deployed to define oppressed people and tame their political expressions with terminology that threatens constituted power.
The debate about the acceptability of slogans like “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free” or “Globalize the Intifada” is a normal part of the emergence of a new political sensibility. That doesn’t mean that every slogan and phrase used by student protestors is unproblematic.
The American Jewish establishment is an important element of constituted power in the United States. Therefore, with the full support from MAGA Republicans and corporate centrists in the Democratic Party, it has attacked the campus movement in solidarity with the Palestinian people as antisemitic. Peter Beinart acknowledges that there have been some very disconcerting expressions of antisemitism in the movement. But he insists (and I concur), that the main thrust of the campus protests, represented by “Muslims praying, and Jews praying; of Jews holding Kabbalat Shabbat and Passover Seders, being protected alongside people of every different background and race and religion” is “a vision of hope…that we desperately need.”
The second of Peter’s videos argues that the protests are succeeding, not because they will change U.S. policy towards Israel/Palestine in the immediate future, but because they herald a generational change in the terms of political discussion. Many of the young people involved in the protests were shaped by the Black Lives Matter protests when they were in high school. This is comparable to how some leaders of Students for a Democratic Society, the main student organization that opposed the Vietnam War, were first politicized by their participation in struggles against racial segregation in the South.
Peter notes two contradictory political motions: as the language and political culture of the campus protests spreads and becomes more acceptable among younger people, including many young Jews, wealthy, older, Jewish liberals, who have comprised a disproportionately prominent group of donors to higher education, may withdraw their financial support and thereby contribute to the decline of liberal education. This has been a goal of rightwing traditionalists for many years. At Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania threats by both Jewish and non-Jewish donors were factors contributing to the resignations of the university presidents.
The leaders of the establishment Jewish organizations are weaponizing claims of antisemitism and calls for “safety” of Jewish students in ways that serve the agenda of populist right wing forces whose ascendancy will surely make all Jews less safe. The violent antisemitic incidents that punctuated the presidency of Donald Trump - the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, VA; the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh; and the 2019 shooting at Chabad of Poway, CA - teach us about the provenance of the most dangerous forms of antisemitism in North America.
Masha Gessen highlighted the negative direction of political motion promoted by the campus protests in her comment at the May 19 panel discussion on “The Election After Gaza” hosted by Mehdi Hasan and sponsored by Jewish Currents and The Nation. The 90 minute discussion with Gessen, Peter Beinart, Layla Elabed, and Waleed Shahid contains many valuable insights. Towards the end of the event Gessen, who knows a few things about autocracy, told the audience, “It’s going to get worse….Under the Biden administration we have totally normalized using police to break up mostly peaceful student protests… which is terrifying and which I think signals a political emergency.”