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.
4 comments:
As you might expect, I have been having very similar thoughts these days ... comparing the current campus "movement" to the movements I was partial to back in the 60s, 70s and 80s. Like you, I see the current pro-Hamas demonstrations as misguided and misinformed, not so much dangerous (although they are dangerous) as just plain stupid. I shuddered with horror and disdain when I heard Columbia student, Khymani James, say on X that "Zionists don't deserve to live". Who the hell are they (their pronoun of choice) to decide who deserves to live or die? Have they even done a thimbleful of unbiased research on the origins and history of Zionism? Or is their knowledge of Zionism limited to the biased media coverage of the current war? I want to shout back at them: "I AM A ZIONIST! I DESERVE TO LIVE! DON'T TELL ME THAT I DON'T DESERVE TO LIVE!" Thankfully and justly, they were expelled from Columbia.
But now that I am seeing things from the "other side," the "over 30 side" ... I look back at the anti-Vietnam protests (which the current protests are being compared to -- unbelievably!!) and I wonder if perhaps my identification with them back then was also misinformed and misguided. I was so proud to identify as a "peacenik," but maybe, I now concede, there was another way of looking at the situation. Americans going to fight a war in Southeast Asia to stop the spread of Communism turned out to be a bad idea, but it may not have originated as one. The older generation at that time must have been legitimately dismayed and disappointed with the youth of that time. I can see that now, now that I am from the older generation myself. Maybe the long hair and torn jeans -- the cool emblems of the times -- were only cool because they were self-proclaimed to be so. Maybe they were, objectively, just silly. There's a line in a Phil Ochs song -- "you're supporting Chang Kai-Shek, and I'm supporting Mao" -- which seemed clever and rebellious back then (I loved Phil Ochs), but now, on hindsight, seems kind of stupid and misguided. I mean, supporting Mao, perhaps the bloodiest tyrant in human history, was/is indeed kind of stupid. I am, in other words, second-guessing my own identification with the "revolution" of my youthful days. That is part of the effect that these current "protests" are having on me.
I know you will agree that there is no comparison between America's participation in the Vietnam War and Israel's legitimate war of defense, part of which occurred on it's own soil. The atrocities of Oct 7th were real, as opposed to the imagined fear of the spread of Communism or the self-serving concern for "American interests in Southeast Asia". Bottom line, to compare the war against Hamas with Vietnam is just wrong ... and to compare the anti-war protests of those times to the current anti-war protests is just wrong.
Thoughtful, honest and well-expressed comment. Thanks Kelp. My first impulse, like yours, when someone tells me I can't do something, is to do it. When I hear about the fear and intimidation Jewish students are feeling on campus, frankly, I don't understand it, because my instinct is to be a prouder and more outspoken supporter of Israel. We've had a big yellow sign on the front door of our house that says "Release the Hostages" since October. We won't take it down until the hostages are released. At first I considered that we may be inviting vandalism. A rock through our window or something. Especially since there's a bus stop in front of our house. But I said to myself screw it, I have a right to express my opinion on my property. Let them try. In more than six months, the sign has drawn two reactions. A little pink Post-It that said "And stop killing the women and children of Gaza." And one week the recycling truck conspicuously didn't take our recycling bag, the only one not taken on our block. I'm pretty sure it was an intentional political act, although my wife has her doubts. They picked our bag up the next week.
Seems to me that however you look at it, the Vietnam war was a bad idea from beginning to end. Misguided and fruitless in every possible way, from conception to execution. No comparison to what happened on October 7th - You express that exactly right. And not all protests are created equal. But most protests (whether in song or action) at times go too far to drive home their point. Some of what is said in the fervour of protest has to be taken with a grain of salt I think, (and prosecuted when it crosses the line into hate speech and violence). I am, as you are, and will always, be a peacenik. The path to peace must sometimes travel through conflict. I don't think what you are expressing in terms of your feeling about the current protest means you've gone to the dark side. But maybe it's actually a response to progressives who have crossed the line into hateful rhetoric, which takes us further from peace not toward it.
Not sure what you mean by going to the "dark side" ... but from where I'm sitting, it all looks pretty dark to me. I wish there was a proverbial "light at the end of the tunnel" but, unfortunately I don't see that either. Families are being ripped apart (as you can attest). Communities are being ripped apart (as the small reactions to your sign on your door attest). It's a sad state of affairs. I started to write a poem entitled "Kindness Endures" ... but the first line of the poem so far is "Or so we would like to believe." Not sure where to go with the rest of the poem.
Anyway, I am happy about our friendship, such as it is, and about the other friendships that I have managed to maintain in my life (including the one with my wife) ... that is about the least cynical thing I can come up with to say these days.
By the dark side I mean, the hawks, the warmongers, the cynics, the ones who believe might makes right. There is always a light at the end of the tunnel. There is always hope. And I believe you know that.
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