Scott Gurvey's Public Offerings

Embed from Getty Images, David Dee Delgado.

Today, Holocaust Remembrance Day, Columbia University, reacting to the continuing protests on campus, capitulated and cancelled its main graduation ceremony. Small, school-level ceremonies will still be held. In this Columbia follows a pattern already set by USC. Other schools will be heard from in the days ahead.

I have noted among the chattering crowd a tendency to romanticize the current campus protests, ostensively in support of the Palestinian people and in reaction to the war in Gaza. There have been many references to past campus demonstrations. Some going all the way back to demonstrations in support of civil rights in the 1950s and in particular demonstrations against the Vietnam war in 1968.

I find nothing romantic about today’s crop of protesters. They are not peaceful and pro-Palestinian. They are violent, anti-American, and pro-Hamas.

What distinguishes these protests from previous demonstrations is that in many cases these target members of the campus community. They use language specifically directed at Jewish students, faculty, and staff.

I never expected to hear that kind of language used in the United States. I never expected to hear it used anywhere in the 21st century world except coming out of the mouths of a handful of Islamic radicals. It is corrosive and dangerous.

I admit I paint with a broad brush. The degree of hostility varies from campus to campus. I have degrees from three Ivy class universities and teach at a fourth. I have visited two of the campuses since the protests began. I have close connections to the other two and have heard firsthand descriptions and seen videos I am convinced are true. I am worried.

Some of the demonstrators are calling for something categorically different from an end to the Netanyahu government or even the Gaza war. Some of them are suggesting, implicitly, that there is no place for Jewish life between the river and the sea. I have heard protesters chant “Brick by brick, wall by wall, Israel has to fall” and “Intifada Revolution.” In the intifada Israel saw buses blown up by suicide bombers and mass shootings in city centers, terrorist attacks that killed many innocent civilians in the name of an “Intifada Revolution.”

Recently, a video surfaced of a student leader at Columbia saying, “Zionists don’t deserve to live.” On campus, an individual stood in front of Jewish students with a sign reading “Al-Qassam’s next targets.” In the encampment itself, before Columbia had the New York Police Department clear it out, signs hung with small red triangles. Hamas uses that icon to indicate Israeli targets.

I know most of the student protesters are peaceful and some Jews are participating in the demonstrations. But most is not all. And what’s significant is that many students on campus minimize or ignore extreme or violent rhetoric.

The romanticized view tends to emphasize the positive aspects of past protests, such as the commitment to social change and the fight against injustice. However, it’s important to note that these events were also marked by serious confrontation and at times, violence. The Columbia protests in April 1968, for example, were a significant and contentious event, with students taking over buildings and the administration calling in the police, resulting in over 700 arrests and more than 100 injuries.

There is also a double standard being employed in these protests. Consider the reaction if, instead of Jews, the protesters were wearing white robes and directing their rage at Black Americans? Consider the reaction if, instead of Jews, the protests were directed at the LGBTQ community? There would be general outrage. For some reason, you don’t get the same reaction when Jews are involved. There are fewer than sixteen million Jews in a world of eight billion people. Israel occupies 0.02% of the world’s land. It occupies, in its 1973 borders, 7.8% of the original British Mandate territory. Why is this tiny minority not protected as such?

After talking to many, my impression is that this current generation of protestors see themselves as having the best of intensions. They believe they are expressing moral outrage at perceived injustices playing out on the world stage. The current Gaza protests have galvanized student activists decrying the civilian suffering and loss of life, particularly among Palestinians. Likewise, the 1968 anti-war protests were fueled by draft-age students denouncing the Vietnam conflict as an immoral, imperialistic overreach that was claiming too many lives through misguided policies.

But I am equally impressed by the pure ignorance of most of the demonstrators. That does not mean just the students. I heard some incredible falsehoods coming from professors as well. They know little of the history of the people of the Mideast or the land they occupy. Few understand the meaning of the words they chant. Or the hurt those words cause. Their schooling has been woefully neglected. Among the protesters I never see a reference to the massacre of Jews on October 7, 2023, when Hamas started this war.

I saw many wearing the black-and-white keffiyeh, the headscarf made famous by the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who twice turned down an offer of an independent Palestinian state. Some wore the scarfs over their faces, others wore medical masks, a majority hiding their faces. I saw two cute young women sporting their keffiyehs along with a crop top showing some bare midriff. I wondered if they knew the morality police would separate their body from their head if they walked that way in the streets of Gaza?

Both the keffiyehs, and the tents, seemed to be mass produced, a bulk order. Someone was organizing this. Nobody seemed to know the meaning or history of the headscarves. Or explain their need for anonymity. Perhaps the universities have allowed their curriculum to focus so sharply that one can study the history of the Palestinians and study the history of the Jewish people without having to confront the shared history of both. They should review their course of study.

When I review the current campus climate 1968 is not the year which comes to mind. I think instead of 1938. That’s the year the Germans escalated their persecution of Jews, writing a series of laws to implement their cleansing process. It began with words, blaming the small Jewish population for the nation’s ills. It moved on to laws expropriating Jewish property, invalidating Jewish passports, forcing Jews without one to adopt “typically Jewish names,” deporting Jews from Poland, torching synagogues in Germany and Austria, and blocking Jewish emigration. The termination program, the “Final Solution,” followed.

It began with words.

#####