The student left is the most reliably correct constituency in America. Over the past 60 years, it has passed every great moral test American foreign policy has forced upon the public, including the Vietnam war, the question of relations with apartheid South Africa, and the Iraq war. Student activists were at the heart of the black civil rights movement from the very beginning. To much derision and abuse, they pushed for more rights, protections and respect for women and queer people on their campuses than the wider world was long willing to provide. And over the past 20 years in particular, policymakers have arrived belatedly to stances on economic inequality, climate change, drug policy and criminal justice that putative radicals on campus took up long before them.
They have not always been right; even when right, their prescriptions for the problems they’ve identified and their means of directing attention to them have not always been prudent. But time and time and time again, the student left in America has squarely faced and expressed truths our politicians and all the eminent and eloquent voices of moderation in the press, in all of their supposed wisdom and good sense, have been unable or unwilling to see. Straining against an ancient and immortal prejudice against youth, it has made a habit of telling the American people, in tones that discomfit, what they need to hear before they are ready to hear it.
Only later, after the teargas clears and the leering and laughter subside, do we sit puzzled, in the filth of our own entirely avoidable mistakes, and look regretfully backward. Books are written. Documentaries are made. Plaques are installed. At Kent State, a plaza overlooking the university’s commons was constructed to honor the four students the Ohio national guard killed there in 1970. It’s bounded, the university’s website says, by “a jagged, abstract border symbolic of disruptions and the conflict of ideas.” There are daffodils. “Inquire, Learn, Reflect,” an inscription reads. One thing visitors might reflect on is that a Gallup poll taken not long after the shootings found that 58% of Americans believed that anti-war activists had, perhaps in the unrest of the preceding days, brought the deaths at Kent State upon themselves. Today, more than half a century after the fact, we mourn them. We have regrets.
What will we regret the most about the last few weeks? Which responses to the Gaza protests will linger the longest in our minds? CNN’s comparison of the campus protests to the persecution of Jews “during the 1930s in Europe”, perhaps? The University of Virginia changing its policy on tents to justify the deployment of more force against its students than it called for against the actual Nazis who marched on its campus and killed a woman seven years ago? The New York police department presenting to the press, as proof that outside agitators had organized the occupation of a building at Columbia, a book about the causes of terrorism written by a historian and a bike chain Columbia had been selling to its students? The outside funding actually raised by pro-Israel counter-protesters at UCLA who beat up and threw fireworks at students and faculty as campus and LAPD officers stood by?
Whenever all of this ends – whenever we find ourselves ready to survey what’s left of Gaza and its people and ask whether we could have done more to prevent the use of our weapons and our money in their destruction – what will we have to say for ourselves? When the talking heads are assembled to offer voiceovers atop footage of police grappling and tackling students and faculty whose voices, it will be painfully obvious to most by then, should have been heeded, what words of useless contrition will be offered?
There have been real instances of antisemitism on campuses since the protests began; here and there we’ve seen real instances of malevolence and idiocy. But to believe, on the basis of anecdata, that hatred and ignorance have motivated the vast majority of students who’ve set up encampments and other pro-Palestinian protests over the last month – in their many thousands at well over 100 colleges and universities in all but four states – is to believe what can only be described as an extraordinary propaganda campaign, one pushed by critics in the press and in office who can’t seem to agree on what the protesters are like. These students, we’ve been told, are both popular and unpopular among their peers. They are both ugly and chic. They are fragile and cold-blooded, pathetically soft and remarkably violent. They hate Jews. They are Jews who hate themselves. They’ve exercised both too little message discipline and too much caution with the press at demonstrations that are both laughably chaotic and suspiciously organized. And whoever they are and whatever’s spurred them into action, the students are, clearly, in need of either a good sock to the mouth or a good lay – the better to focus their attention away from politics and on their studies, on political matters close to home rather than halfway across the world, or political matters halfway across the world more deserving of their attention, like the plight of the suffering in China, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Sudan, Iran or Azerbaijan.
No one with their eyes on Gaza denies that there are many bad things happening in the world at any given time. None of those who’ve troubled law- and opinion-makers so with their insistence that the Palestinians are people would argue that the Palestinians are the only suffering people on the globe. But they are suffering largely as a consequence of American foreign policy. On Wednesday, President Biden announced that the United States will freeze the supply of offensive weaponry to Israel if it continues with the full invasion of Rafah, an announcement that follows admissions that the campaign being waged in Gaza, with our bombs, has thus far been waged with dubious military objectives and with insufficient regard for civilian life.
What the White House has yet to admit, though, is that the nearly 35,000 Palestinians who have been killed and the 1.9 million Palestinians who have been displaced over the last seven months are the victims not only of this particular war and the logic of collective responsibility for the massacres of 7 October being deployed by Israeli leaders, but the willingness of this country to sanction Israel’s denial of Palestinian human rights for decades. And the guilty parties here include not only our political leaders but our private institutions, our colleges among them, which, through the investments they have sustained in Israel and the arms manufacturers supplying its war, have rendered themselves complicit in wrongs that should trouble us as deeply as apartheid in South Africa now does. Nothing should surprise us about the fact that Israel now faces similar divestment campaigns; after weeks of moaning and groaning that the demands of student protesters have been unexpressed, unclear or impossible to meet, multiple colleges have, in fact, made certain concessions to them and announced plans to take further demands into consideration. Encampments at Brown, Northwestern, Rutgers and the University of Minnesota were voluntarily disbanded on that basis.
But it should also be unsurprising that far more colleges have responded to student demonstrators by calling in the authorities – an authorization of force prefigured by the remarkable crackdowns on pro-Palestinian speech we’ve seen at institutions across the country since October. One of the perversities of the situation is that despite all this, we probably haven’t heard the last about our “woke universities” – as they have for more than a hundred years, the right and centrists who share their contempt for college students will, against all available evidence, continue insisting that American campuses have been ideologically captured by the very people we’ve just witnessed campus administrators go to war against. They will do all they can to obscure it, but it should be plain now that all the shallow representation most visible to pundits – the diversity and equity teams, the minorities in high positions – hasn’t changed the fact that the majority of American universities are largely beholden to donors, trustees and, increasingly, politicians, well to the right of the most progressive voices on campus.
In the months ahead, many on the left will surely call upon universities to hold true to their commitments to open discourse and redress the censorship and harassment of Israel’s critics. They should. But we should also resist the flight to abstraction – dishwatery invocations of free speech, murky and lukewarm, that no one ever seems to really mean and that function chiefly as bulwarks against substantive debate. The dignity of the Palestinian people and their right to resist their oppression plainly aren’t chief among the dangerous and controversial ideas we’ve heard so much about protecting over the last decade; we cannot rely upon the putatively neutral authorities and institutions that have done so much to suppress them to act now in their defense on abstract grounds. So it goes. The job now, as the Israelis press into Rafah, is to change public opinion on the actual matter at hand – to make urgent arguments to the American public not about the plight of Palestine’s defenders on campus but the plight of the Palestinians. The students have done their part; they will be recognized in time. Now it’s up to the rest of us.
Osita Nwanevu is a Guardian US columnist
