The Student Gaza Protests and Trying to Be Less Wrong
Over the next few weeks, the fall migration of students to their college campuses will take place across America. Earlier this summer, the reverse migration marked what many thought would be the end of the student Gaza protests. But there is reason to suspect that summer brought, not an end to the protests, but rather merely an interruption. Israel continues its assault on Gaza, and it feels reasonable to see the resignation of Columbia President Minouche Shafik on Wednesday as a sign of what is to come. As the students return, so will the protests and (as inevitably as night follows day) so will our self-obsessed insistence (very much against the desire of the protesters) to talk about the protesters more than the subject of their protests.
If you want to have the experience of being wrong about something, you could pick no better topic than Gaza or, more broadly, Israel and Palestine. I suspect that no other result is even possible, no matter how well intentioned or how well informed one might be. Any position that one would advocate for must stand atop the contradictions and oppositions and exceptions that are inherent to Israel and Palestine – building an argument about Israel and Palestine is something like trying to erect a structure atop a mountain of pebbles.
And, of course, a lot of what is being said is neither well informed nor in good faith. To pick but one of a legion of possible examples, I turn your attention to Republican Virginia Foxx, who represents the 5th District of North Carolina in the U.S. House of Representatives. She helped lead the charge by Republican members of the House of Representatives to argue that the student protest movement (and elite universities more broadly) are a hotbed of antisemitism. But her nose for antisemitism hasn’t managed to pick up on Mark Robinson, the Republican nominee for governor in her state, whose fetid sink of public statements includes holocaust denials and admiring quotation of Hitler.
Worse, perhaps, has been how some critics of the protests have applied two very different standards when deciding what the protests stand for versus what Israel stands for. When these critics describe the protests, they sweep into the description (in fact, seek to define the protests through a reference to) the most extreme or absurd person or statement that they can find. But when they look to Israel, they disregard similarly extreme people or statements, even when they come from actual members of the government. If someone is telling you both that the protests are defined by the Hamas sympathizers and that Israel isn’t defined by the likes of Ben Gvir (a genocidal maniac who also holds the post of Security Minister within the Israeli government), then they are either too ill informed or too lacking in good faith to be taken seriously.
And so, before I say too much about the subject of the student protests, let me at least do the work necessary to address the student protests in good faith. Here is what I understand to be their views and objectives:
They see in Gaza a level of catastrophe that, not only demands action, but also justifies actions that would otherwise be considered extreme. They seek an immediate cease fire in Gaza.
They see Israel and Palestine, not merely through the lens of European Colonialism and South African Apartheid, but rather as a paradigmatic example of the former and a mirror image of the latter. They seek a future in which Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank are replaced by a single, democratic, non-theistic state of Palestine.
To be clear, here is what I am defining out of the protests:
It does not include those who believe that Jews are a cabal that secretly controls the world (compare with Republican Gubernatorial Nominee and Republican Presidential Nominee dinner guests).
It does not endorse or advocate for violence against anyone (compare with Republican Gubernatorial Nominee and Republican Presidential Nominee).
That work done, let’s turn our attention now to the protests, as so defined.
The most important thing is that the student protests have gotten the most important thing right: the terror, pain, and death that have been inflicted (and are, right now, still being inflicted) on the civilian population of Gaza must be stopped.
At which point, an informed person might in good faith say (and, in fact, many have said): “Israel has a right to defend itself.” And I agree – Israel has a right to defend itself. But there is no right that exists without a limit, without a boundary beyond which it cannot be morally exercised. We know, intuitively, that this limit exists – if a depraved murderer attacked a crowd of people and was chased from the scene of the crime into an apartment building filled with innocents, we would not stand by while the crowd set the building on fire and the terrified and tortured screams of women and children escaped through the heat-shattered windows. And yet, many otherwise well intentioned and well informed people have been unable to detect the crossing of this boundary in Gaza. Let me see if I can articulate the crossing of that boundary in a way that resonates.
The total number of those killed already is shocking – some 40,000 dead, and (no matter whose accounting you decide is most trustworthy) the majority of the dead have been women and children. But we are now sadly accustomed to the idea of massive numbers of the dead, and the total does not speak as directly to the unprecedented nature of what is happening in Gaza. For that, we need to better understand the arithmetic of military actions in civilian populations.
In March, writing for Just Security (housed at the NYU School of Law) Larry Lewis (who advised the U.S. State Department in its own efforts to set policies on unacceptable levels of civilian harm in military actions) published an analysis of the civilian deaths wrought by Israeli attacks in Gaza. To understand his findings (and to place what Israel is doing in Gaza in the proper context), we need to look at an earlier military operation carried out by the coalition of forces that were fighting ISIS. The battle in Raqqa, Syria, in October 2017 was (similar to the battle in Gaza) conducted in a city that had not been evacuated of its civilians. In that battle, civilians died at a rate of 1.7 civilian deaths per 100 attacks. It was a rate that was deemed so unacceptable that the Department of Defense commissioned an independent study and created a new action plan in an attempt to prevent such a thing from happening again.
Knowing that 1.7 civilian deaths per 100 attacks caused such alarm within the U.S. Department of Defense, what would you imagine to be the ratio of civilian deaths per 100 attacks in Gaza?
1.5? … 2? … 4? …
The actual number (using Israel’s own figures) is 54. Civilians in Gaza have been killed at a rate that is over 30 times the prior benchmark for unacceptable levels of civilian death. I will not claim to know exactly where to draw the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable ratios of dead children to dead terrorists, but I am quite confident that – wherever it should be drawn – Israel has crossed it.
The defense justification also suffers from incoherence on the other side of the ratio. I will readily concede that, if we remove all other considerations, Israel would be safer if everyone who committed the atrocity of October 7th were dead and Hamas’s materials of war were destroyed – I would cheer both results. But I am not at all convinced that either of these are actually necessary to defend Israel from a future attack. It appears that the attack of October 7 did not take place because Hamas had suddenly developed some new capability. Instead, it took place because the Israeli government left its border with Gaza less defended than it should have been — indeed, less defended that it previously had been. If that is the case, then Israel could be defended from a future attack by adequately defending its border, without ever setting foot inside Gaza.
And I can understand the inevitable objection to that argument – “How can we ask Israel to allow Hamas to exist next door?” But the idea of having an enemy across your border is neither inconceivable nor intolerable. That seems to be especially so in this case, where Hamas is not – and has no path to becoming – a threat to a well defended Israel. Nor can Hamas be destroyed through an attack on Gaza. Yes, fighters can be killed and materials can be destroyed, but both can be replenished, and the attack itself helps to create a supply of fighters with a reason to hate Israelis.
I can also understand the inevitable reminder that Hamas continues to hold hostages. The taking of hostages by Hamas is an ongoing atrocity, and we should also be using every measure to end their captivity. But the war in Gaza is not a means to that end. Nobody is seriously arguing that Israel’s war in Gaza is intended to directly rescue hostages – in direct actions, Israeli forces have rescued seven hostages and accidentally killed three hostages. The most one could reasonably argue is that the war might put pressure on the captors to release their hostages, but that hypothesis was proven wrong long ago.
And so, on the first point of the student protests – that the innocent deaths in Gaza are a catastrophe that must be stopped immediately — the students are right. And they are right at a time when many others are wrong – either wrong in their analysis of the situation or (as I have been) wrong in their failure to take actions that treat the death in Gaza like the historical emergency that it is. I suspect that this is what we will ultimately remember about the student protests, and it will be the lone bright spot in a shameful national memory.
The tragedy of the student protests has been that, although they have been getting the most important thing right, the things that they have been getting wrong have rendered their protests unproductive (and perhaps even counterproductive).
It is possible to imagine an incredibly powerful student protest, focused narrowly on saving innocent lives in Gaza. If the students assembled every morning on the quad, carrying images of the children of Gaza and chanting “No more dead children!” I think they could focus – and change – the minds of Americans. But that isn’t what the student protesters have done.
Instead, the students have wrapped this element of their protest in the rhetoric of genocide. The problem isn’t that the students are wrong in their analysis of what is happening in Gaza. They may be wrong, but - even if they are – they certainly aren’t completely wrong. There are clearly elements within Israeli society and literally senior members of the Israeli government who are for whatever version of genocide that they can get away with. In fact, the first of the guiding principles published by the governing coalition states it plainly: “the Jewish people have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas of the land of Israel,” which is to say that Jews have the exclusive right to all of the land (see if this sounds familiar) from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean sea.
I can understand why the students would reach the conclusion that we are witnessing genocide in Gaza. And I suspect that they also believe that the charge of genocide helps win support for the cause of stopping the killing of civilians in Gaza – the thinking is something along the lines of “The world may not care about dead Palestinians, but they have to care about genocide.” But my sense is that people don’t actually respond that way. My sense is that it is far harder to rally people to stop an abstraction (genocide) than it is to rally people to stop an actual thing (dead children). Moreover, the charge of genocide raises the stakes for anyone who would want to add their voice to the students’ calls for an end to the violence. That is, rather than just being able to say something like “too many innocent children are dying and this must stop,” people are being asked to say “Israel is committing genocide.” No matter how clear the case for genocide may seem to the student protesters, it simply isn’t clear — and can’t be made clear based on the available evidence — to the mass of Americans whose voices are required in order to actually stop the violence. And so, people don’t rally to the cause and (worse yet) are distracted by a conversation about what counts as genocide.
We see a similar structure in a worse mistake being made by the student protests – forcing the emergency of the attacks in Gaza to sit alongside (if not behind) the intractable challenges of contested history and statehood. The two causes – ending the attack in Gaza and creating a just approach to statehood in this contested land – are very different from one another. The first is an emergency of this moment (innocents are dying right now) and is tractable (to end it, we just have to convince people that too many innocents are dying right now). The second has been a chronic condition for generations precisely because it is intractable.
To be clear, the issue isn’t that the students are wrong on the merits of the second cause. They may be wrong, but – even if they are – they certainly aren’t completely wrong. The European colonial powers did set in motion the creation (or re-establishment) of the state of Israel. And the design of those powers clearly favored the Zionists (who had, for the most part, immigrated from Europe) over the Arabs – allocating 56% of the land for a Jewish state notwithstanding the fact that the Arab population was over twice the size of the Jewish population.
And Israel has acted like a colonial power – it is obviously engaged in the slow colonization of the West Bank, and its current government has essentially stated a colonial (if not genocidal) aspiration to establish a state that is exclusively for Jews in all of the land from the river to the sea.
But the students are wrong — and, I think, obviously so — to assert that the immigration of European Jews to Palestine (and then Israel) is indistinguishable from European colonization. In the first instance, to define these immigrants as European ignores the fact that they were not people who had a secure home in Europe. In the second instance, to define these immigrants as European and the Palestinians as indigenous ignores the fact that the land that was Palestine in the early 20th century had once been Israel.
At a minimum, we can say that the students have a much longer, harder path to walk if they want to rally people to their view of the history and the just future of Israelis and Palestinians. And yet, the colonization argument has been given the place of prominence in the protest.
This is why the student protests take the form of an encampment – they are “occupying” campus to reflect Israel’s occupation. But that is too clever by half. People aren’t going to make that connection, so it just reads like entitlement and insularity.
And this is why the student protesters chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” But that is something that almost nobody outside of the protest interprets as a call for a democratic, non-theistic state for everyone who lives between the river and the sea, so it just reads like a call for violence against Israelis.
And this is why the student protesters have at times used the question “Are you a Zionist?” to distinguish friend from foe. But, again, that is something that almost nobody outside of the protest interprets as a screen for European colonialism, so it just reads like antisemitism. And it is this element of the protests that puts the problem into sharpest relief – one is not allowed to join the student protest against the attack on Gaza unless one is also willing to describe Israel as an example of European colonizers bent on subjugating (if not destroying outright) the indigenous population.
By conjoining these two causes (and by giving the latter primacy in the rhetoric of the protest) the students have made it much harder for people to join the cause of ending the Israeli attacks on Gaza. I can understand why the students would look at the region and decide that Israel is engaged in an act of European colonialism that must be opposed. But – as with the insistence on arguing that the deaths in Gaza are genocide – the students’ insistence on making this argument is making it harder to achieve the goal of stopping those deaths.
As I said at the outset of this piece, I suspect that being wrong about something is inevitable for anyone who takes on this topic. And I don’t think that I am the exception — I’m sure that I’m wrong about something (maybe many things) that I‘ve argued here. So let me close by returning to the place where I think I have the best chance of being less wrong than I have been in the past. Innocent children in Gaza are experiencing terror, pain, and death. We should stop it, and we can. And it shouldn’t be up to our youngest adults to make that happen.