Like a lot of you I’m trying to get my ahead around the Pro-Palestinian/Anti-Israel “student” protests and while I’m generally in favor of anything that pisses off the Establishment or challenges the status quo (I’ve made a pretty decent living doing both) as the above cartoon indicates, I have a hard time endorsing the current protests for a number of reasons.
(Buckle up, this flight might get a little bumpy.)
First up, here’s a story from ABC News about the outside agitators who are showing up at campus protests and urging the students to behave like dicks and teaching them violent tactics to be used against the police:
Apparently some of the same outside agitators show up wherever and whenever they can stir up some shit and have been seen at the Occupy Wall Street protests and the protests that followed the George Floyd killing and the protests at a police training facility in Atlanta and, according to a recent CNN story, one of the protesters recently arrested at Columbia University was also arrested at the violent G8 protests in San Francisco in 2005 and he’s 40 years old, so a long ways past his College-Student-Sell-By-Date.
Also according to CNN:
29% of the people arrested at Columbia were not affiliated with the university and at The City College of New York 60% of the people arrested were not affiliated with that college and at the University of Texas in Austin it was 57%.
So point Number One: A bunch of the people we see involved in the “student” protests aren’t students.
Next up…
According to the following story from USA Today, many of the protests have featured antisemitic rhetoric and Jewish students and faculty have been harassed and assaulted which is pretty hypocritical behavior when you’re protesting someone being mistreated.
After Hamas attacked Israel, killed at least 1,200 people, took hundreds of hostages and then hid among civilians, some students and faculty endorsed the terrorists and considered them liberators fighting their Israeli oppressors.
One of the protesters just arrested at The City College of New York recently lost her job at the New York Botanical Gardens when she said in a video she felt “proud” after the October 7th terrorist attack on Israel.
At Harvard, students have chanted “we are all Hamas” and “long live Hamas” and at Columbia University a student, Khymani James, said “Zionists don’t deserve to live” and “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.”
So point Number Two: While I doubt all the protesters are antisemitic, you definitely got some nasty antisemitism in the mix.
Imagine how you’d feel if after 9/11 some college students started a fan club for the hijackers.
Yale University is located in New Haven, Connecticut and if you google “what native American tribes first lived in Connecticut” the answer is: “Pequots, Mohegans, Paugussets and Schaghticokes.”
So to protest the Israelis occupying the Palestinians’ land, the students are occupying the American Indians’ land.
I’m from California and I don’t hear too many people saying we ought to give my home state, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, most of Arizona, most of Colorado and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas and Wyoming and all of Texas back to Mexico. And then Mexico would have to give it back to Spain and Spain would have to give it back to the Alabama-Coushatta Tribe who would have to give it back to the Clovis people who would have to give it back to the Paleo-Indians.
(OK, there’s about a 123% chance my timeline is off and I didn’t include everybody I should because all I did was google “who owned Texas before Mexico” and followed that rabbit partway down its hole to make a point; how far back do we go when determining property ownership and once you start Real Estate Time Traveling, why stop at whatever year somebody finds convenient?)
So point Number 3: We only want some land given back to the previous tenants, but are pretty happy to keep the land we stole from somebody else.
Also…
According to the United Nations, 1.9 million civilians have been forcibly displaced by the current Israeli military operations – which sounds bad and is – but according to the United Nations Refugee Agency’s 2023 planning figures, 44 million people in sub-Saharan Africa are displaced and if any college students are staging protests and sit-ins about their displacement I’ve yet to hear about it.
Possibly because we just don’t give a shit about Africans unless they’re 7 feet tall and can dunk a basketball.
Point Number 4: Our concern about displaced people seems intermittent at best and if I was a 5-6 non-basketball-dunking Black African I might think the lack of concern for my displacement had something to do with the color of my skin.
As I pointed out in a response to a reader, so most of you probably didn’t read it:
Throughout history countries have been formed and reformed and maps redrawn on a regular basis and that being the case, what year did we have everything right? Israel was created in 1948 so we do we go back to using the maps of 1947?
Which would mean the countries of: Algeria, Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cabo Verde, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Democratic Republic of Congo, Republic of Congo, Djibouti and Egypt would be illegitimate and that’s just Africa and we’ve only started in on the E’s.
And going back to 1947 wouldn’t do the trick because before Israel was created it was British Palestine and before that it was part of the Ottoman Empire.
Here’s a list of sovereign states and when they were formed and a bunch of them came into existence after 1948 and I’m guessing there were plenty of winners and losers and people pissed off because without moving an inch, they suddenly lived in a different country with a different government, but not all the pissed-off losers turned to terrorism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_date_of_formation
Right about here we could probably use some comedy relief because this is a serious subject and for the last four paragraphs I’ve been thinking about the comedy sketch The Treaty of Westphalia and the arbitrariness involved in drawing up maps, so here you go:
That sketch is probably way more accurate than we like to think.
Anyway…
If I were Jewish (which I’m not) or Jewish adjacent (which I am) I might be asking why the only country whose existence pisses off the protesters is filled with Jews?
As I’ve said before and am about to say again: a lot of us remain antisemitic or racist or sexist or homophobic, but have learned to hide those feelings because they’re no longer socially acceptable, right up until we have an excuse to let those shitty feelings out and then suddenly we’re once again pissed off at the Jews.
And while civilian casualties are clearly a bad thing, let’s not forget that we’re the country that dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and justified killing all those civilians by saying it was necessary to win WW2.
None of which excuses some of what Benjamin Netanyahu and his government have done, but it’s a pretty big leap from criticizing a government (which I do for a living) to saying that country doesn’t deserve to exist.
So for all the above reasons, while I endorse people’s right to protest even when I think they’re wrong, I don’t endorse antisemitism and hypocritical proclamations that Israel has no right to exist because the land originally belonged to someone else (which is also highly disputed), but it’s A-OK when we do it.
That’s what I got so far and if you find it helpful stuff to think about, you’re welcome and if you don’t, you can always protest and the chances are pretty good that an outside agitator will show up to help you.
You take your well being in your hands when you go against the approved opinions. Bill Maher lost his job just for noticing that flying planes that you are a passenger on into buildings took bravery and total commitment to the cause (with a generous dollop of fundamentalist fanaticism). No room for nuance in these matters.
God, I never felt older than recently when I was explaining to 20 somethings that Israel used to be the hapless victim.
Good stuff, Lee, and the perfect YouTube clip.