It's Not 2020 Anymore

BLM, Israel, and the changing posture of the institutional superpower

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On Friday, Columbia University announced they were suspending two student groups, Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. The university stated, without going into further detail, that both groups “repeatedly violated” university policies related to holding campus events, culminating in an “unauthorized event” that went ahead “despite warnings and included threatening rhetoric and intimidation.”

According to the Columbia Spectator, the student newspaper, the unauthorized event was a walkout that drew hundreds of students and included a “die-in” on the main plaza, where pro-Palestinian signs were waved, speakers denounced Israel’s killing of Gazan civilians, and the protesters laid down across the plaza to symbolize the deaths. At one point, an unidentified person began screaming “antisemitic and anti-Black statements, then attempted to instigate fights with numerous students. The individual climbed over chains blocking off a grass area and continued yelling obscenities,” the Spectator reported. “Students at the walkout booed the unidentified individual, and five confronted the individual while the speaker on the megaphone denounced antisemitism.”

This, along with the groups’ failure to apply for permits at least 10 days in advance of any demonstration or protest, apparently triggered the suspension, which will last the rest of the fall term. In the interim, both SJP and JVP lost funding from the administration.

This decision, depending on your view of world events, is either commendable or an abomination. It is, at the very minimum, proof that the Israel-Hamas war is not done roiling American institutions, which have shed their appetite for radical chic—and adopted a relative conservatism that was, until 2020, their default.

The immediate question to be asked is whether either of these organizations should have been suspended. If they continued to violate a school policy of not applying for a permit, there are certainly consequences that must be meted out. But any pro-Palestinian activist is going to wonder whether Columbia University, an elite institution funded by the wealthiest and most powerful families in America, would have willingly shut down a Hillel organization or any pro-Israel group that held a large, peaceful demonstration and didn’t apply for permits. While an anti-Semitic protester showed up at the Columbia die-in, the protest itself was not anti-Semitic—and it was, most importantly, devoid of violence. Students marched, spoke, and lied down. No one was punched, no windows were broken, no groups of people were followed and harassed. Jewish students do feel unsafe on college campuses today and that fear must be taken seriously, but it can’t be an excuse to shut down protest against the Israeli government. As much as unwavering Zionists and genuine anti-Semites strain to conflate Judaism with Israel, they are not, in fact, the same thing. Opposition to the policies of a nation-state is not opposition to an ancient religion. It’s not as if everyone who follows Christ has to be accountable to the Papacy.

What is striking about this moment is how much it differs from the peak of 2020. In a little over three years, the wealthiest and most influential institutions in the worlds of academia, the arts, and multinational finance have evolved from fully genuflecting in front of young, zealous activists to trying to silence and crush them. The difference, obviously, is the cause these activists have taken up. In 2020, the police killing of George Floyd, a Black man from Minneapolis, sparked the largest mass protests since the Civil Rights movement. Marches for Floyd morphed into a general outcry against police brutality, and once marginal causes like defunding the police or exposing white fragility permeated the mainstream, championed by activists and institutions alike. It was the season of Amazon and Nike issuing tortured anti-racism statements and Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer kneeling for almost nine minutes while wearing African kente cloth scarves. It was the season of the powerful being afraid, in some form, of the activist class, or at least feeling pressure to conform to their dictates. Much of it hasn’t aged well, but some of it was well-meaning enough: America really does incarcerate more people than anyone on Earth, the police do abuse the working class and poor, and racism hasn’t vanished from this country. Enforcing new language norms in corporate boardrooms and Ivy League schools won’t solve any of these problems, and when material needs are ignored, movements fail. Unlike the civil rights era, the uprisings of 2020 didn’t lead to sweeping policy changes. Today, few Democrats are campaigning on slashing police budgets.

If corporations and colleges felt a willingness to give ground on racial justice, they have not done the same for the Palestinians. Foreign conflicts can be more fraught than the domestic, but the reality is that there were few influential interest groups American institutions fretted about offending when they denounced Floyd’s killing or printed anti-racism statements. It’s not like Fox News or police unions have much purchase at Columbia. The donor class, pallidly liberal in their social outlook, can endorse justice for Floyd without fearing, in some form, their bottom line will be impacted. Israel is another matter entirely. It is easy enough to understand why a Jewish donor, Democrat or Republican, would be invested in Zionism, and defending the Israeli government at all costs. Non-Jewish donors and administrators care too, in part because they view support for Israel as a bulwark against anti-Semitism—again, assuming the Netanyahu government is a stand-in for Judaism—and believe the ultimate aims of the Palestinian activists are too fringe. The Overton window moved much faster for defunding the police than supporting the pro-Palestinian activists. Calls for a single, multinational state, a democracy in the Middle East not predicated on upholding a majority of one religion or ethnicity, will not be humored by Columbia, Amazon, or anyone else.

Not all pro-Palestinian activists are asking for this explicitly or know, even, what it means to demand one state. Many are simply calling for a ceasefire—for Israel to stop, in retaliation for the 1,200 Israelis killed and the hostages seized, bombarding Gaza. The carnage is stunning. More than 11,000 Palestinians are dead, survivors are starving, and the physical infrastructure of the Gaza strip has been obliterated. Hamas, meanwhile, has not been defeated. Benjamin Netanyahu has talked of occupying Gaza indefinitely, waging a continuous war on the scale of the horrors America visited upon Iraq. This is all worth protesting, applying whatever pressure is possible on the Biden administration to bring Israel, effectively an American client state, to heel. Students at universities like Columbia do not have a direct line to the Biden White House. They can only do what their predecessors did during Vietnam: march and organize and protest until progress is made. Some protesters do, in fact, oppose Zionism, and anti-Semites will always graft onto the anti-Zionist cause. But this doesn’t mean every person marching for Palestinian dignity and an end to war hates Jews. In fact, leftist Jews are marching with them. There are Jews who are not Zionist at all.

Will speech rights survive such an anti-Palestinian onslaught? In 2020, it was the Left ignoring the tenets of free expression to enforce conformity around a rigid conception of racial justice and identity. Corporations were happy to play along. Now, critics of Israel face an even harsher crackdown, with the formerly woke and the Zionist anti-woke trying to stamp them out for good. College administrators and corporate titans don’t care to posture for the Palestinians. BLM will not translate into PLM. And this makes the clashes of 2023 far more bitter, in a number of aspects, than anything that came to the fore in 2020, when a certain unanimity was forced into being. The generation gap is very real. If you are under 35, your only serious memory is of right-wing Israeli governments, various coalitions fronted by Netanyahu and the ultra-Orthodox, the sort of Jews who want to not just displace and annihilate Palestinians but to ensure the Labor tradition is entirely erased. These governments want the West Bank occupied and the Rabin-endorsed Palestinian state to never even have a whisper of a chance of coming into being. Hamas, which openly longs for the destruction of Israel, is a convenient foil, every bit as maximalist as they are.

A 50 or 60 or 70 year-old might remember Golda Meir or a friendly kibbutz or even the concept of the leftist Zionist—once, such a thing could exist. And they might remember the collections for Israel, planting a tree, the promise of making aliyah. They do believe defending the Jews means defending Israel. For them, the youth, with their calls for BDS and liberation from the “river to the sea,” are a true horror. They must be silenced. There is no compromise with them—just as the youth see no compromise, now, with their elders. Again, Vietnam comes to mind. The pro-war side recalled the glory and moral clarity of the Second World War, believing all of it could be transposed to any era. The baby boomers, then relative children, saw the dead Vietnamese babies. Israel was attacked first—the Vietnamese did not maraud through New York and Chicago, slaughtering with impunity—so this analogy can only go so far. Hamas, certainly, does not dream of the secularized democracy many activists hope for. Hamas is enjoying Israel’s savage overreach. But Israel’s defenders should consider the untenable position they will soon find themselves in, absent any moral high ground. Shutting down JVP and SJP is a battle won. The war, for the Israel hawks, will be much uglier. When these student groups return, they will be larger than ever before. They will be unbowed. They will believe, for all time, history is on their side.