Umm...from which river to which which sea?
Do student protestors understand what, or even why, they are protesting? And is there a free-speech double standard on college campuses?
Yup — at it again, writing about the anti-Israeli protests overwhelming some college campuses. Events over the weekend, including a New York Times interview with an Israeli opposition leader, convinced me that there’s more that needs to be said.
In addition to the interview with Yair Lapid, a former Israeli Prime Minister, the Times reported that more than 200 students were arrested over the weekend “as colleges across the country struggle to quell growing pro-Palestinian demonstrations and encampments on campus.”
College protests are nothing new. In the 1960’s and 70’s I vividly recall demonstrators shouting “Hell No, we won’t go,” and “Hey, Hey LBJ, how many kids have you killed today.” And like today’s protests, those also began on college campuses. But even the anti-war protests of the Vietnam era were no match for the organized, coordinated, and intentionally disruptive protests happening now.
Today’s campus revolts are sinister — the targets of their enmity are the Israeli people and the very idea of the state of Israel itself. They are a catharsis of latent antisemitism and anti-Zionism — long lurking just beneath the surface of what even many progressives had heretofore considered politically out-of-bounds.
Mindlessly (or maybe not) chanting slogans like “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will free,” or “There is only one solution, intifada revolution” are NOT calls for a ceasefire, or for peace. They are instead calls for a unilateral Israeli ceasefire, denials of Israel’s right to exist as a nation, and demands that American political and academic leaders disentangle from Zionism.
But if the real objective is peace, why haven’t these same protestors refused to hold Hamas accountable for rejecting numerous ceasefire proposals — and for failing to release any more hostages taken during the October invasion? (You might want to read my earlier post on why I believe they won’t)
I don’t understand it — but I’m for it…or am I?
Do most of these protestors even understand what these slogans actually mean? The scary answer to that question would be, they do.
“It is horrifying to me to see this footage of young people marching on American campuses, shouting, ‘From the river to the sea.’ And then you ask them, Do you know what river it is or what sea it is? And they have no clue,” Lapid said in an interview in Sunday’s New York Times. “They’re putting us on the side of the bad guys without even knowing what happened, what we have been going through.”
“It is horrifying to me to see this footage of young people marching on American campuses, shouting, ‘From the river to the sea.’ And then you ask them, Do you know what river it is or what sea it is? And they have no clue.”
“We are,” Lapid said, “fighting an existential war.”
A political science professor at the University of California, Ron E. Hassner, also wondered if the protestors understood what they were so enthusiastically, and as it turns out cluelessly, screaming. Not unsurprisingly, most don’t.
Hassner hired a survey firm to poll 250 college students, most of whom he reports supported the chant. But, as he wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “only 47% of the students who embrace the slogan were able to name the river and the sea.”
Unfortunately, this wasn’t the extent of their ignorance. Only 25% knew who Yassir Arafat was (10% thought he was the first prime minister of Israel), and about 3 out of 4 knew nothing about the 1995 Oslo Accords — where Palestinian leaders agreed to a two-state solution and then backed out of the agreement.
“There’s no shame in being ignorant,” wrote Hassner, “unless one is screaming for the extermination of millions.”
If many of the protestors would only look at a map, they would see that the “river” is the Jordan River, the easternmost border of Israel. The “sea,” the Mediterranean Sea, Israel’s westernmost border. Chanting “From the River to the Sea” literally means all of what is now Israel belongs to Palestinians — and that Israel, the nation, has no right to exist.
When shown a map 75% of the students “changed their view.” Overall, according to Hassner, “67.8% of students went from supporting ‘from the river to sea’ to rejecting the mantra. These students had never seen a map of the Mideast and knew little about the region’s geography, history or demography.”
Where does blame lie? Turns out, in lies.
During the interview Times reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro asked Lapid who he thought was to blame for the failure of protestors to understand the dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian relationship..
“Well,” Lapid responded, “blame is complicated. First and foremost, I blame it on a cynical radical Islamic movement that is using the lack of knowledge from American youngsters, who are buying this as part of an ongoing struggle between the oppressors and those who are oppressed, or between white privileged people and people who are not. We keep telling them: Anne Frank was not a white privileged kid.”
“And the story,” Lapid elaborated, “is not what you are told, and how come you’re marching in favor of people who want to kill Jews because they’re Jews? Because this is the way Hamas, Hezbollah and the Islamic Jihad are. And they’re supporting them against the democratic country. This is, to me, unbelievable in so many ways.”
On Saturday I wrote about the double standard that has enabled the pro-Palestinian (or anti-Israeli, depending on your point of view) protests. On Sunday, New York Times columnist David French wrote about another troubling double standard.
“There is profound confusion on campus right now around the distinctions between free speech, civil disobedience and lawlessness,” French, a lawyer, wrote. “At the same time, some schools also seem confused about their fundamental academic mission.”
Despite what the protestors on college campuses believe — shouting down others, or using your “speech” to drown out, or silence, others is not free-speech. “What we’re seeing on a number of campuses isn’t free expression, nor is it civil disobedience. It’s outright lawlessness,” according to French. “No matter the frustration of campus activists or their desire to be heard, true civil disobedience shouldn’t violate the rights of others.”
This double standard of tolerating, even enabling, disruptive protests is crippling some campuses and reveals an ugly institutional hypocrisy that favors the supposed free-speech “rights” of some students over the right of others to pursue their education or to feel safe on campus.
Colleges “punish” all kinds of speech and behavior. For example, at Harvard it’s a violation of the university’s code of conduct to knowingly fail to refer to someone by their preferred pronoun. Yet protestors on some campuses shout antisemitic slogans or harass other students with impunity.
There are college leaders willing to stand up to the mob. Vanderbilt University, for example, has embraced an aggressive response to protests that veer to the unlawful and disruptive. After a protest at Vanderbilt got out of hand, and a campus security guard was injured, the university shut it down.
“The message was clear,” says French, “every student can protest, but protest has to be peaceful and lawful. In taking this action, Vanderbilt was empowered by its posture of institutional neutrality. It does not take sides in matters of public dispute. Its fundamental role is to maintain a forum for speech, not to set the terms of the debate and certainly not to permit one side to break reasonable rules that protect education and safety on campus. every student can protest, but protest has to be peaceful and lawful.”
And with the crackdown on campus protests, questions have been raised about just who is protesting. At Northeastern University, for example, more than 100 protesters were arrested on Saturday. A university spokesman told the New York Times that the demonstration had been “infiltrated by professional organizers” and someone had used “virulent antisemitic slurs.” Of the 100 arrests made at Washington University in Saint Louis over the weekend only 23 were students and four were employees, the university said in a statement on Sunday.
So where does that leave us? “Universities should not protect students from hurtful ideas,” French concludes, “but they must protect their ability to peacefully live and learn in a community of scholars. There is no other viable alternative.”
Before YOU start protesting — that’s my last post about the protests…for now.