In September 1993 Shimon Peres, then Israel’s foreign minister, stopped by Princeton University for a speech after addressing the United Nations. That afternoon, barriers went up on the lawns outside the building where he was to speak, and by early evening, a small but extremely vocal group of people – who did not look like students – had gathered around the building bearing placards stating ‘Not one inch.’ In case we hadn’t read them, they started chanting as well. By the time Peres arrived and began to speak, at 8.30 pm, the chants had become ‘emotional’, in the words of the student reporter covering the event for The Daily Princetonian, Princeton’s campus newspaper.
I had arrived in Princeton the month before, and my dormitory was about 150 metres away from the venue, Alexander Hall. The chants continued without pause until Peres left, just before 10 pm. While Peres outlined a plan for peace in the Middle East based on the Oslo Accords, this group of Jewish demonstrators – who were from an organisation called Kahane Chai, an extremist group banned the following year in the US and Israel – shouted their opposition to his endeavours. I don’t know if any Princeton students joined in the demonstrations, but the protest went ahead, even though it was bad tempered, even mildly intimidating.
There were two lessons from this episode: one, like most other people, Israelis (and Jews, with or without Israeli citizenship) do not speak with one voice on their own politics; and two, free speech and the right to protest on campus are an important part of a college education. Recent events on US campuses, and especially the protests that have been sparked by the arrests at Columbia University earlier this month, seem to be testing both those lessons to destruction.
When, on April 18, Columbia sent in the New York police on their own students (rather than relying on private campus security, which each college has), it invoked memories of 1968 when the university called in NYPD on antiwar protestors. Then, students protesting the Vietnam war, the university’s links to weapons research and its plans to build a racially segregated gym, had occupied several buildings on campus. NYPD ended the protests forcibly – students were tear-gassed and seven hundred were arrested. That event has left such deep scars that the history department even offers a class on it, called ‘Columbia 1968’.
The Bust of April 30, 1968. Courtesy of Paul Cronin, photographer unknown, 1968. Photo: news.columbia.edu
More broadly, Columbia calling in the police on its students raised the ghosts of another trauma: Kent State University calling in the Ohio National Guard to disperse antiwar student protestors in 1970. Then, students protesting America’s military involvement in Southeast Asia and the draft had gathered in response to President Nixon’s April 30, 1970, announcement that the United States had invaded Cambodia despite having campaigned for the presidency two years earlier on a promise to end the war. Things spun out of control quickly. The Mayor of Kent requested that the Governor of Ohio send in the National Guard, who deployed quickly.
What happened next is still the subject of some debate, but the facts are that four students were killed and nine more wounded on May 4, 1970 when the National Guard suddenly fired on the crowd as they were dispersing after gathering to protest in the morning. The reaction to the killings were swift. Within days, students across America walked out in protest and universities were forced to temporarily close. It was a moment of reckoning.
We may be at another such inflexion point.
Also read: ‘Azadi For Palestine’: University Campuses Across the West Erupt in Protests Not Seen Since 1968
Once again, America’s foreign policy is causing deep disquiet. On trial is Washington’s handling of the Middle East as it tries – seemingly unsuccessfully – to moderate Israel’s response to the October 7 Hamas attacks. Until now, Israel has generally enjoyed bipartisan political support in the United States. That political support remains, but a generational faultline appears to be opening up. Some younger Americans are expressing deep unease with Israel’s actions in Gaza and asking that Washington rein in the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, especially as fears of genocidal actions by Israel (a charge that Israelis respond to with extreme anger) are percolating from the international community and the United Nations into American campuses. That unease is manifesting in protests and demonstrations.
Pitted against the pro-Palestinian demonstrators are supporters of Israel who allege that the demonstrations are antisemitic. Complicating matters is the fact that there are Jewish people on both sides of the divide – Jewish students, academics and activists have come out in solidarity with Palestinians to say that this Israeli government does not act in their name. Columbia and other universities are facing law suits brought by Jewish students who allege inaction on antisemitism. Other groups have accused the same institutions of Islamophobia. In all of this, right wing activists have weaponised claims of antisemitism – conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism and seeing threatening behaviour in protests that question the actions of the current government of Israel and those that support it. It is worth recalling that of a global population of 15.3 million Jews, 6.3 million live in the US. Yet, despite Israel apparently disregarding American calls for restraint as it responds to Hamas, the US appears to be solidly backing Israel with diplomatic and political support, with arms and with money.
The demonstrations in support of Palestine started almost immediately after Hamas’ October 7 attacks. At the time, universities were criticised for allowing the protests at all. Chants that invoke the geography of a Palestinian state led to complaints of antisemitism, for one interpretation of the chant sees it as a call to eliminate Israel – that is, genocide. Politics and money polarised communities even more. Late last year the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard and MIT came under intense pressure at a Congressional hearing on antisemitism. They tried to walk the tightrope between defending free speech and condemning antisemitism, and failed under hostile questioning. Within weeks, the presidents of Penn and Harvard had resigned. It may be no coincidence that the president of Columbia endured a tough Congressional hearing the day before she called in NYPD – to the horror of many of her faculty colleagues.
Politicians are using campus unrest to put pressure on President Biden in an election year. Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, found it necessary to travel to Columbia a week after the police were called in, to lecture the students and accuse them of ‘waving the flag for the very people [Hamas] who committed those atrocities [on 7 October during the Hamas attacks on Israel]’. If that were not enough, he called on President Biden to send in the National Guard. History may not repeat itself, but Johnson clearly wants it to rhyme. He ended, patronisingly, with a message to the students: “Go back to class and stop the nonsense. Stop wasting your parents’ money.”
The Columbia University campus. Photo: X/@ethan_k_eblg
Johnson is of course wrong. Wrong in his incendiary and false accusations. But also wrong to assume that the protestors are only entitled students. The students come from a wide range of backgrounds, and, crucially, are supported by faculty. Several members of Columbia’s faculty walked out in protest of the arrests, and history Professor Frank Guridy supported students with a ‘teach-in’ called ‘1968: Continuing the Fight’, a class that draws parallels between the Columbia protests of 1968 and today.
The student protestors and their supporters are up not just against politics, but also funding structures and investments at universities. Prominent donors to many of these universities have threatened to withdraw their support (often totalling millions of dollars) in response to the perceived failure to stamp out antisemitism – evidence of which was said to be pro-Palestinian gatherings before and after the 7 October attacks. Ross Stevens withdrew $100 million in funding to U Penn in the days after the infamous Congressional hearing that eventually claimed the scalp of Penn’s president. Others threatened to follow suit. Similar stories abound at Harvard, Yale, Columbia and others. Some law firms allegedly rescinded job offers to students who took part in pro-Palestinian protests or expressed anti-Israel sentiments online, and several prestigious law firms signed a letter to top law schools warning them to take action on perceived antisemitism or risk a recruitment boycott. Unhelpfully, a Berkely law school professor wrote an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal titled ‘Don’t hire my antisemitic law students’.
Against this backdrop, the body count in Gaza continued to rise as Israel pushed on with its military action against Hamas. Pro-Palestinian student organisations – which crucially include Jewish students – mobilised to put pressure on their institutions to divest from investments linked to Israel; call for a ceasefire in Gaza; call on Washington to stop supplying arms to Israel; and more broadly, to express support for the Palestinian cause. Occasionally, outsiders joined in. And, occasionally, tempers flared and threats were voiced. By and large, these were quashed immediately.
Until April, it was student activism, perhaps with a greater note of urgency, but still in the tradition of mobilisation that has characterised generations of student protestors.
The arrests at Columbia have marked a turning point. Within hours, faculty and students across the US rallied in support of the students and free speech. Campuses that had hitherto avoided confrontational demonstrations on the Middle East mobilised in solidarity. Until now, Princeton had largely contained the protests and counterprotests. Yet when students mobilised in solidarity on 25 April, two graduate students were arrested by police. On that day, faculty members were also present at the scene, speaking, lecturing, lending support. For these Princeton demonstrators, as for others across different campuses, these gatherings were a continuation a university’s mission to educate, to question, to raise awareness and to expose their students to different viewpoints.
Protests on their own are not illegal. Free speech is circumscribed by legality, and one hopes, in a community, by civility though that is of course not always the case. Conversely, a difficult conversation is not threatening just because it is difficult. Campus activism has almost been a rite of passage in American universities: it has moved the dial on civil rights, on American involvement in foreign wars, on racial equality. And all indications are that these protests and disruptions are set to continue – this could be a summer of discontent for the United States at a time when it has never seemed to be so politically divided.
Priyanjali Malik is an independent researcher who primarily focuses on security and politics in the Indian subcontinent.
