Che Guevara 2024

1968 it most certainly ain't. Why does it seem like the students this time are just play-acting? The social justice warrior crowd having their moment in the spotlight. They've got no real skin in the game. Not like the 18-year olds who publicly burned their draft cards, declaring themselves conscientious objectors because they didn't want to be gunned down in the rice fields of East Asia like so many of their peers and siblings. The student protesters of 2024 - when they are not outside agitators taking advantage of the situation - are bourgeois customers of high-priced universities celebrating the spring camping season in pup-tents bought at Mountain Equipment Coop with spray-painted signs calling for Palestine to be free. It's doubtful many of them have any real idea about the history of the region, or grasp how "From the River To The Sea" explicitly implies the genocidal destruction of Israel. If true, how ironic that ignorance and lack of information should be a factor in these university protests, as much an indictment of our education system as anything else.  

Since the virus has now infected my alma mater McGill, I figure I'd have my say. When I was attending university in the mid-1980s the outrage du jour was apartheid in South Africa. It was my first taste of campus protest. Calls for the university to cut ties with South African academic and research institutions, to boycott South African goods (whatever they were), calls to Free Nelson Mandela, and rock concerts by Artists Against Apartheid. Everbody seemed to be getting into the game. I remember thinking to myself, sounds righteous, everybody seems to be onboard (was it even possible to come to the defense of apartheid which was a byword for evil?) But I still asked myself some basic questions: What the hell do I know about South Africa? What does it have to do with me? Yeah, of course racism is bad. But if I'm going to take an active political position, even a no-brainer like this one, I should at least know what I'm opposing and why. I certainly wasn't going to join the crowd for the sake of joining the crowd. 

Is that part of what's motivating the pro-Palestine protesters in 2024? The bandwagon effect? Alienated and lonely students seeking a sense of connection and community? 

The image of Che Guevara was still ubiquitous around campus in my years at McGill, on tie-dyed t-shirts and printed posters. I remember wondering what Che Guevara had to do with South Africa. Answer: nothing. I knew a little about Che because I'd been studying Latin American politics. His image as a revolutionary hero to the privileged white kids in the US and Canada always made me chuckle. The Marxist guerilla who'd advocated proletariat overthrow of the establishment was raised in an upper-class home in Argentina. He was a silver-spoon-fed, educated bourgeois through and through who had attended medical school. He was also an idealist with a romantic sense of violence - a toxic combination - convinced of his own righteousness. A perfect role model for North American university students (and some faculty) suffering from a sense of oppressor's guilt. 

The protests blossoming like lawn weeds on university quads these days are different from the 1980s, and also somehow the same. Images of the shanty town poverty and despair in Soweto were shocking, and ANC (African National Congress) demonstrations were being met with violence by the Apartheid government. But the anti-Apartheid movement that fostered global protests was not the expression of outrage against violence. It was opposition to a repressively unjust system of neo-colonial race-based oppression. It escapes no one, except the student protesters, how skillfully the Palestinian cause has  coopted the anti-Apartheid/ anti-neo-colonial lexicon and rhetoric for its own purposes. And why not, it worked once. Doesn’t matter that it’s utterly false. 

I understand the impulse (even the moral need) to express sadness and opposition to a lot of innocent people dying in war. I also understand the special attention being given to Israel. It's a far more important country than South Africa was. No one cares about the hundreds of thousands of innocents currently dying in conflicts in Syria or Sudan (fill in the blank of any African country), because they are unimportant countries. I'm not one who supports the position that Israel is subject to a double standard due to anti-Semitism. I think the attention it's given, and the standard it's held to, are commensurate with its importance. We have a powerful interest at stake in Israel. Western values are at stake.

It should be obvious to even those with only a rudimentary understanding of recent history that Israel-Palestine is extremely complex, and this complexity merits, at minimum, some humility. It would behoove the students to pause for a moment to reflect on the possibility that by taking part in a pro-Palestine protest, which in effect supports and justifies barbaric acts of terrorism, they might actually be prolonging the conflict. If indeed we have raised a generation of self-righteous attention-seekers on steroids (thanks to social media) and it's being leveraged by nihilist Jihadist agitators, then the students should at least have the critical wherewithal to consider the possibility that their protests make them complicit in the tragedy of Gaza. I keep asking myself, what would have happened if for the last 6 months the global protests were aimed at denouncing Hamas instead of Israel, and demanding the release of the hostages? How much sooner would there have been a ceasefire? How many innocent Palestinian lives would have been spared? It’s hard to know, but it is a question worth asking before trotting out the Free Palestine signs and setting up ersatz campgrounds on university campuses.