Class Protests

Not since the opening of the Ukraine war have the upper strata of money, politics, power, and media in the United States found such widespread agreement. Hamas briefly produced the same result, which the Israeli army undid by means of a ferocious assault that targeted residential areas, schools and hospitals, and civilians, purportedly in order to kill an occasional Hamas fighter. It took a new Big Lie to get everyone past this moment—that opposition to Israel’s genocidal policies in Gaza is a form of antisemitism. Democrats and Republicans, billionaires and college presidents, New York Times and Fox News journalists, Hillary Clinton and Marjorie Taylor Greene, and evangelists of every persuasion embraced this newfangled commonality.

These are the same folks who otherwise cannot agree about global warming, the efficacy of vaccines, the purpose of higher education, women’s right to control their own bodies, the availability of books at public libraries, gender and sexuality as matters of personal preference, Disney World as a land onto itself, the need to ban TikTok, or any of the dozens of issues that have paralyzed legislatures throughout the land. Several thousands of students clustered on campus lawns was sufficient to bring about an almost unprecedented degree of bipartisanship. Finally, something to cheer the Times’s columnist David Brooks.

The students’ demand: end university investments in Israeli companies and US firms that do business with Israel, especially armaments producers. As demands go, these are pretty mild. Even if widely adopted, it is not clear that they would have an appreciable impact. University endowments are not a major factor in the financial world (retirement funds are another story), and education-related investments in Israeli companies even less so. Nor do armaments producers have much to fear from an investment boycott. The largest sponsors of armaments manufacturers are the governments that purchase their products.

Reaction to the students, nonetheless, has been overwhelming. They have somehow put their fingers on a set of issues that make policy-makers and power-brokers extremely nervous. The role of new-found billionaires in the pushback against the students is also unprecedented.¹ We are in the midst of a transition as the super-rich learn to use their money for purposes other than making more money. Politics (once the Supreme Court got rid of laws and regulations that stood in the way) and social welfare initiatives (including higher education) came first; the Koch brothers are examples of the former, MacKenzie Scott of the latter, while George Soros spans both areas.

Big-money donors have always been active in academic settings, but mostly behind the scenes. When they have stepped forward, it has been to fund specific educational endeavors (such as transfer arrangements between two-year and four-year institutions). New is their openly-proclaimed leverage over university officials and university policies. The protestors provide them with a unique opportunity—but only if they can get the antisemitism accusations to stick. To their aid have come university presidents and much of the media. Students have gotten in everyone’s way, with false accusations of antisemitism a means to drown them out.

The ferocity of the response to the students is an indication of how difficult it can be for this system to introduce the most minimal of changes. That educational institutions have become dependent on outside donors is clear. The latter are wealthier, and thereby stronger, than anyone can remember. Why university presidents have buckled under is less obvious. Most still come from the faculty, whose role in the protests has been cautious, protecting (mostly verbally) the right to protest but not actually joining the encampments.² Students have been at the forefront, while the faculty continue to do what they are good at—using words instead of weapons, and in many cases, as types of anti-weapons. University presidents, though, have redefined contemporary liberalism: the suppression of free speech is now justified as a means to preserve free speech. The irony of this situation seems to be lost on them.

Far more radical in their tactics than in their demands, the students at first experienced six months of quiet, peaceful, respectful protests at institutions that pride themselves on their moral integrity but which got nowhere. A few scattered encampments took matters to a higher level. When the initial encampments were cleared by the police, students responded with newer and more densely inhabited encampments. And they spread from campus to campus, in one reckoning, to 150 or so in total.

For every repression, the students ratcheted up. There is a long tradition in the United States of responding to repression in this way. The Wobblies, during the early decades of the twentieth century, were involved in free speech campaigns, at the time as street corner orators. Arrests were met with calls for protesters (outsiders) to descend on the offending locality. The intent was to pack the jails and break the municipality’s budget. These aren’t realistic goals anymore—jails have been built with excess capacity and extra funding is always available from state and federal authorities. With the end of the academic year only weeks away, a sense of urgency propelled the students, with all sides in the conflict eager to reach closure. But while the students escalated their tactics, university hierarchies caved to the onslaught of criticism from politicians, donors, and the media.

This is a tale of David versus Goliath, except that David had been hugely transformed by the “identity politics” under attack by the right. Diversity on college campuses has meant a fine-tuned appreciation of and sensitivity to the many and varied backgrounds from which students originate. Even at elite institutions, where many encampments have been located, diverse populations characterize the student body. At Columbia University, for instance, over 20 percent of the students receive income-based Pell Grants that are intended for low-income students. Only one-third of the students identify as “white.”³ Similar demographics are true at other top-tier and elite institutions. Not just the population at large, but the ruling class too is in the midst of deep demographic change.

The protests have had widespread support among students across the country, even if relatively few took part in the encampments.⁴ Many commuting students work and attend school, and a full-throttled commitment would jeopardize their livelihoods as well as their standing as students. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t appreciate and support the actions taken by their better-situated schoolmates at residential colleges.

Besides, the majority of encampments where arrests have occurred were at public institutions, despite the media’s focus on elite, privately-governed liberal arts schools.⁵ Identity politics has fostered a sense of commonality that reaches in many directions—across race and ethnic boundaries, between social strata, and among the many personal, religious, sexual, and gender identities available within contemporary society.

The active and prominent participation of Jewish Voice for Peace among the protestors puts the lie to the accusations that conflate antisemitism with criticism of Israel. Still, as Charles Reeve has written in the Brooklyn Rail, every social movement of substance needs to deal with the bigotries that percolate in situations that bring forth a flood of emotions, urgent actions and reactions, and diverse opinions.⁶ Within the student protests, antisemitism was inevitable. Even overlooking the fierce bigotries that characterize both the Palestinian and Israeli populations in the Middle East, politicians and evangelists continue to equate Israel, Zionism, and Jewry as if they are one and the same.

It took some measure of conversation and consciousness-raising before protestors understood that their conflation was part of the problem. Besides, the Palestinians are also semitic, a circumstance that everyone has forgotten. Having lost their lands, the Palestinians have also been deprived of their access to language. Reclaiming language has been critical for the protestors, as in their repositioning of the refrain “from the river to the sea” to mean a liberatory aspiration on behalf of Palestinians rather than a statement of intended annihilation against Israelis.

That the protests have been a magnet for cranks, opportunists, and hardcore antisemites has been harder to deal with. True too is that deep-seated bigotry and antagonism is often a part of ethnic, racial, and religious communities—for example, racism within the Orthodox Jewish community, antisemitism within African American communities, racism and antisemitism among white Christian evangelicals, the mutual disdain of Haitians and Dominicans, Russians and Ukrainians, Nicaraguans and Costa Ricans—the list goes on.⁷ The engagement of “white” working-class people in politics can also bring forth intense levels of racism.

Differentiating left-wing from right-wing social movements is that the former discourages rather than encourages or passively accepts the bigotry within its own ranks. The confrontation with bigotry, internal and external to itself, is unavoidable. It has been a vital part of the student protests, although often unmentioned because of the media’s focus on presenting all sides of the conflict. Ongoing conversations within the encampments were aimed at a careful delineation of ideas and acceptable tropes.

Encampments, though, are precarious entities. During the 2011 Occupy movement, the police routinely transported the homeless to Occupy locations, knowing full well that the protestors had neither the resources (housing) nor mental health and addiction counselors on hand to deal with them. The homeless became a disruptive force because the protestors could not help them enough.⁸

A few weeks into the occupations, still another dynamic was at work ago at UCLA. University officials (upper administration and campus police) colluded with police (and, it seems, donors) to allow right-wing hooligans to attack the encampment without interference.⁹ How this came about is still unclear. The attackers were not students, otherwise they would have been recognized by the protestors. That mainstream Jewish organizations disassociated themselves from the violence is an indication of how extreme it was. When monetary incentives are a prerequisite for so many right-wing activities, was this also true of the provocateurs who attacked the UCLA encampment?

Part of the success of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, especially the part driven forward by college students, was its ability to repeatedly shift tactics. The bus boycotts led to media-savvy freedom rides, lunch counter sit-ins, Sunday after-church marches, walk-outs by high school students, mass arrests, literacy and voting rights drives, free breakfast programs for children, after-school and weekend free schools, and much more. Encampments, on the other hand, have a fixedness that is vulnerable to an opposition that is always stronger. The need to outthink and outwit the obstacles inevitably placed along the way is ongoing.¹⁰

For the Palestinians, two groups of thugs dominate their existence—Hamas and the Israeli government, both of whom have shown their willingness to sacrifice over two million people in order to further their own aims and domination. Hamas executed civilians without the pretense that they were hiding soldiers, whereas the Israelis prefer to justify their slaughter with military rationalizations. And while the Israeli armed forces have largely destroyed Gaza, Hamas remains mono-focused on swapping hostages for its fighters, not on the provisioning of a population in the throes of starvation.¹¹

A month after the first arrests in mid-April, the protests shifted from encampments to graduation ceremonies. Does a long, hot summer await us? Or perhaps a newly-awakened fall semester?

1. How Columbia University Lost Support From the Russell Berrie Foundation - The New York Times (nytimes.com); Calls to Divest From Israel Put Students and Donors on Collision Course - The New York Times (nytimes.com).
2. As an example of the cautious stance of faculty unions: Our Defense of Our Students’ and Members’ Rights to Free Speech - Rutgers AAUP-AFT. For the exceptional faculty member: Lawyer: UT Austin fired lecturer involved in protest (insidehighered.com).
3. The US Department of Education’s College Scorecard is the best source for such information: Columbia University in the City of New York | College Scorecard (ed.gov).
4. Survey shows college students largely support pro-Palestinian protests (insidehighered.com). For the overwhelmingly peaceful nature of campus protests: Report: Campus protests overwhelmingly peaceful (insidehighered.com), US Student Pro-Palestine Demonstrations Remain Overwhelmingly Peaceful | ACLED Brief (acleddata.com).
5. Where College Protesters Have Been Arrested or Detained - The New York Times (nytimes.com).
6. The Conspiracy Plot – The Brooklyn Rail; The Class Struggle in France – The Brooklyn Rail.
7. How Republicans Echo Antisemitic Tropes Despite Declaring Support for Israel - The New York Times (nytimes.com).
8. Anti-Wall Street camps lure U.S. homeless | Reuters.
9. How Counterprotesters at U.C.L.A. Provoked Violence, Unchecked for Hours - The New York Times (nytimes.com); As Seinfeld Receives Honorary Degree at Duke, Students Walk Out in Protest - The New York Times (nytimes.com).
10. No Encampment, No Tents, One Hunger Strike: Princeton’s Protest Found - The New York Times (nytimes.com).
11. “Hamas monitored political activity, online posts, and apparently even love lives. Palestinians were stuck between an Israeli blockade and a repressive security force”; Secret Hamas Files Show It Spied on Everyday Palestinians - The New York Times (nytimes.com).