Discomfort with Campus Protest

Terry Schwadron
5 min readApr 29, 2024

Terry H. Schwadron

April 29, 2024

Can we at least agree that the blowback from campus protests spurred by the Israel-Hamas conflict has reached hysterical levels?

Of all the issues we face, discomfort about student protests — however they fit with your personal world outlook — hardly seem to rate the attention they are getting from Congress or from television cameras fixated on protests signs. For sure, there have been a very few instances in which shouted slogans and epithets have given way to physical altercations, but from all reports, those are rare. Columbia this weekend expelled a leader who had threatened to kill Zionists, there are reports of incidents involving campus outsiders, and there have been attacks on Palestinian students as well.

However “pro-Palestinian” rallies began, they seem more about discomfort and about dampening criticism of Israel and of U.S. support for military aid to Israel. Hey, I don’t like seeing hearing shouts of Hamas’ “From the river to the sea” slogans that reflect a desire to rid the Middle East of a Jewish state, but I can understand — and easily walk around — what drives the pushback against the results of Israeli policies. But most of the national attention has focused less on issues related to how Israel, backed by the U.S., is pursuing a war prompting widespread civilian hunger and chaos in Gaza and more on allegations that the protests are inherently antisemitic for criticizing Israel, or that specific antisemitic incidents have occurred.

From the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas on Israeli civilians, global sympathy for Israel to defend itself has been tattered by continuing efforts to destroy Gaza in pursuit of the terrorist fighters. The goal has been diffused by outsized, inhumane results among Palestinians. Logically, we would expect these same rallies to be demanding release of hostages to bring about a ceasefire.

But the protests are a blunt instrument that seek to stop the violence. The reaction to stop the protests confuse safety, free speech, and identity issues.

Labelling these university protests solely as “pro-Palestinian” feels an over-simplification of what we can hear amid the shouting. While some in keffiyehs are yelling supportive Palestinian slogans, there are many Jewish students and groups involved in protest of Israeli government policy, for example, with students in those televised tent encampments this week celebrating Passover seders. Most voices are about seeking dignity and food, release of hostages and the end of hostilities supported by this country.

In other words, those voices are very mixed in what they seek, and by who is doing the shouting.

What Are We Hearing?

Among calls for ceasefire, hostage release, an end to civilian attacks and starvation, mostly we’re once again witnessing evidence of generational anti-war voices who detest the racial division and indignity by dominant groups they see as fundamental to society. This time, the anti-war calls are tainted by what are perceived to be divided loyalties to Israelis and Palestinians.

In the zeal to paint labels, it is too easy to declare two sides, and mistakenly to assign calls for ceasefire as anti-Semitic. Out of expressed concern about stopping hate speech that there is a desire to send police onto campuses and shut down protest.

Despite the labels, there is a basic problem. Being Jewish and living by Jewish values just does not equate with required and necessary support for an Israeli right-wing coalition government — as evidenced by rallies in anti-government Israelis by the hundreds of thousands. Some Jews feel kinship with a Jewish state, but a lot do not, and even if they do feel some identity ties, they disown the kind of occupation policies that the Israeli government pursues or the military razing of Gaza that has results in 34,000 civilian deaths, mass homelessness and lack of food and medical care. They wonder, as does much of the world, why return of hostages has lagged as a priority well behind plans to destroy a hidden Hamas. Indeed, as reaction to the protests show, that same Israeli government that believes we should be shutting down any U.S. criticism, very much intends to keep on with its Gaza campaign.

That said, protestors have no place shaming, harassing, or otherwise making Jewish or Muslim students feel unsafe. The protests absolutely should target Hamas brutality as well as Israeli indignity.

The university administrators caught between calling in police in the name of safety and encouraging free speech seem hapless. The U.S. government certainly is not listening to student protest suggestions of how to conduct its foreign policy; the administration is not even listening to many in its own State Department who see inconsistency in not seeking to force a more humanitarian effort as part of the Israeli defense effort.

Enter Politics

For politicians to show up, whether through congressional hearings that are poorly veiled Republican attacks on college diversity programs or as Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., did at Columbia University this week, reflects a public desire to enflame an already tense situation with by politicizing it.

The Washington Post reported that the growing uprising has been supercharged by social media and smartphones, which has allowed students to quickly communicate with one another and replicate tactics quickly from campus to campus.

Spurred by calls for police and the arrival of politicians, the protests have taken on a life of their own with each new arrest spawning another campus to erupt. It feels much like the anti-war protests during the Vietnam era, an effort that finally grew to such proportions as to effect presidential policy making. Note to officials: History has not proved peaceful for calling out the National Guard to stop anti-war protests.

This time, it appears that none of this — the protests, the politicians, the government policy questions or any efforts to divest university investments in companies that make or send weapons — is going to be resolved by student gatherings on campuses.

For a rabbi associated with Columbia’s Orthodox Union Jewish Learning Initiative to recommend 300 mostly Orthodox Jewish students that they return home and stay there to avoid being on campus seems antithetical to the idea behind having a university at all. For university administrators to turn to police rather than to organize discussion groups to explore the issues seems to miss the opportunity for important dialogue, turning shouting into learning.

For Rep. Virginia Foxx, the Republican chair of the House Education Committee, to threaten university leaders with loss of federal aid for “continued failure to restore order and safety promptly to campus” misses the point entirely. Firing university presidents — the idea promoted by congressional Republicans — neither ends protests nor resolves U.S. foreign policy issues; instead it is a broadside attack on the perception that university learning is somehow leftist. Again, it is Republicans who are pushing programs towards the U.S. as a Christian nation without a thought for how such policies affect Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, or atheists. It’s Donald Trump who is dining with recognized white supremacist, anti-Semitic leaders. Who’s kidding whom?

Physical safety of students assured, maybe we should be shouldering the discomfort of seeing protest signs and shouts to celebrate the idea that students are engaging in the real world.

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www.terryschwadron.wordpress.com

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