[Previous: The First Amendment doesn’t have an Israel exception]
The pro-Palestine college protests all over the country feel personal to me. First, a BDS resolution passed at Binghamton University, which I attended as an undergraduate. Now, as you’ve probably heard, there’s a much bigger eruption at Columbia, where I earned a graduate degree.
When Columbia’s president Minouche Shafik rejected students’ demands to divest from Israel’s war machine, protesters staged a sit-in on campus. They set up a tent city and, later, broke into and occupied Hamilton Hall. Eventually, Columbia locked down the campus and called in an army of police in riot gear to arrest the protesters. It was an uncanny echo of the 1968 demonstrations against the Vietnam War.
I can’t in good conscience claim that Columbia students had an absolute right to set up an encampment on the university lawn, or to break into a building and take it over. They were engaging in civil disobedience, we all know that, and one consequence of that strategy is that you should expect to be arrested.
Of course, this in no way excuses violence by the police or excessively harsh punishment. For all the tabloid fearmongering, it seems clear that the Columbia protests were consistently peaceful. At worst, there were some angry exchanges of words and minor property damage. If anyone had been seriously hurt, much less killed, by one of the protesters, you can be sure that Israel’s defenders would be screaming at the top of their lungs about it. They aren’t, because they can’t point to any such incident.
It’s the same all over the country. As soon as students start demonstrating for Gaza, governors and university presidents panic and lash out with overwhelming force. Their knee-jerk response is to treat protests as a threat to be suppressed by any means necessary:
Last week, from New York to Texas, cops stormed college campuses clad in riot gear. They weren’t there to confront active shooters, thank goodness, or answer bomb threats. Instead, they were there to conduct mass arrests of students protesting the war in Gaza.
…After sending a phalanx of state law-enforcement officers into the University of Texas at Austin campus, for example, Governor Greg Abbott announced on X that students “joining in hate-filled, antisemitic protests at any public college or university in Texas should be expelled.”
(The district attorney immediately dropped all charges against the UT students, citing lack of probable cause.)
And more:
At Emory University, in Atlanta, police officers reportedly used tear gas and Tasers against protesters. State troopers with rifles directed toward protesters stood watch on a rooftop at Ohio State University. At Indiana University, administrators rushed out a last-minute, overnight policy change to justify a similar show of force from law enforcement, resulting in 34 arrests. It’s hard to keep up.
Students nationwide are watching how the adults who professed to care about free speech are responding under pressure. And they are learning that those adults don’t really mean what they say about the First Amendment.
All these denunciations and shows of force beg the question. If “from the river to the sea” is hate speech… if the word “intifada” is a threat… if BDS is “not allowed” and students who advocate it should be expelled… then what methods of protest are acceptable? How can we, as Americans, express disagreement with Israel in a way that its defenders would accept as reasonable and legitimate?
What Zionist groups say about this doesn’t have to be the last word. Obviously, no person or group has absolute authority to decree how it is or isn’t acceptable to criticize them. But it’s a starting point from which there can be a debate.
On the other hand, if their answer is “nothing” – if every opinion that’s not unswerving support of Israel is deemed hateful or antisemitic – then that would prove they’re not arguing in good faith; they’re only trying to silence dissent.
Protests aren’t meant to be nice. They’re supposed to cause discomfort and agitation among the people they’re targeting. That’s the whole point. If a protest doesn’t make anyone upset or uncomfortable, it failed to serve its purpose. There’s no reason to protest on behalf of an uncontroversial cause that everyone agrees with. Absent any actual violence, no one has the right to shut down a protest merely by claiming it makes them feel unsafe.
It’s a consistent theme across history that people protesting injustice and war always get told it’s not the right way, or the right time, or the right place. This advice is almost never offered in good faith. In almost every case, it’s nothing but a majority trying to shut down a message they don’t want to hear. If Zionists don’t want to be part of this illiberal tradition, they should prove it.