What Are They Afraid Of?

On the Palestine left and Columbia University

I begin with a confession: I have not been to the pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel protests at Columbia University. For the last few days, I’ve been out of the country on vacation and I’ll be traveling again into next week. Therefore, I cannot offer any firsthand account on what’s happening uptown. Everything I write will be filtered through the lens of media coverage and prior experience with the Palestine left, especially since Oct. 7.

Students and faculty set up tent encampments on the campus of Columbia in Manhattan last week. More than 100 people were arrested after the Ivy League school’s embattled president, Minouche Shafik, called on the NYPD to break up the encampments on the grounds of criminal trespass. Predictably, the police crackdown did not squelch the protests, which have spread to other college campuses in recent days. Most of the influential Democrats in New York defended the NYPD raid and condemned the protests as anti-Semitic because some Jewish students on campus haven’t felt safe to go to class. President Biden himself, a staunch supporter of Israel who has been largely unwilling to counter their ferocious bombing campaign in Gaza—more than 33,000 dead since October—railed against anti-Semitism and the Columbia protests.

What have the protesters actually done, beyond chant loudly and refuse to leave certain parts of campus? The most damning evidence of anti-Semitism comes from video of protesters and counter-protesters facing off, with one unidentified person—the New York Times doesn’t make it clear if the person was a student or not—holding up a sign that said, “Al-Qasam’s Next Targets,” referring to Hamas’ armed faction. A video posted on X showed a masked protester outside the Columbia gates carrying a Palestinian flag who appears to chant “Go back to Poland!” One Columbia student wrote on social media that some protesters had stolen an Israeli flag from students and tried to burn it, and that Jewish students were splashed with water.

All of this is troubling. But why, exactly, are heavily-armed police hovering around Columbia and arresting students? Are these students joining with outside agitators to shatter windows, light objects on fire, or beat up anyone wearing a kippah? Are students even occupying buildings in a reprise of 1968? Columbia has gone to a remote schedule for the remainder of the semester, citing the alleged threats to students. If the protests had grown violent or even come to echo the worst of the 2020 marches—the rioting and looting—the pivot to remote schooling would be understandable.

But almost all of the complaints about the encampments at Columbia—and the anti-Zionist protests in general, dating back to October—boil down to speech. Defenders of Israel do not like what the pro-Palestine cohort says. They don’t like the chants. If it were up to them, such hatred of Israel would be deemed illegal for all time.

They are, like the affluent college students they decry, immensely coddled.

It was only a matter of time before the charged rhetoric of the social justice set was wielded against them. For more than a decade, speech was equated to violence, and free discourse was increasingly stifled. In June 2020, a New York Times opinion piece from a conservative Republican senator was deemed a literal threat to the lives of staffers there; this absurdity was an outgrowth of a blinkered worldview that would, after George Floyd’s death, reach its apotheosis. The concept of open debate, for a period at least, was deemed reactionary. As left-liberals abandoned free speech, some conservatives self-styled themselves as champions of the First Amendment. It was easy enough to do four or five years ago, when much of the left argued resistance to Donald Trump—and safeguarding various marginalized groups—was more important than ensuring differing viewpoints weren’t actively suppressed. A whole cottage industry of anti-woke commentators and publications sprung up in the early 2020s in reaction to liberal overreach. The Oct. 7 attacks and the war in Gaza have scrambled this dynamic. It is now the pro-Israel conservatives (and liberals) who talk the language of woke, who strain to silence their enemies because select words, phrases, and ideas are too awful to contemplate. Identity concerns trump all.

Palestinian activists in the U.S. have faced crackdowns on their right to protest for decades. It is only in the last few years that segments of the mainstream left have embraced the pro-Palestinian cause. This is the last generation of Democrats who will be reflexively supportive of Israel. In another election cycle, most center-left Democrats will embrace conditioning military aid to Israel and applying far more pressure on the Jewish State to negotiate with the Palestinians. Until then, there will be institutions like Columbia and presidents like Biden who are not willing to countenance the Palestine left. There will be Republicans in Congress fulminating against all Palestinian activism, doing their best to outlaw all the nonviolent protests they don’t like. Again, the crux of the Columbia tempest is speech. Even Michael Bloomberg, a former Republican who spent his mayoralty trampling on civil liberties in New York, gave Occupy Wall Street two months before he deployed the NYPD to break apart the encampments. Columbia begged for police in a matter of days. Young achievers milling about in makeshift tents were apparently too terrifying for the administration to manage on their own.

Here I’ll wedge in my own standpoint epistemology: I am a Jew. I don’t wear a yarmulke and I don’t keep Shabbos. I understand, fully, the Orthodox carry burdens I do not—that they can be singled out for anti-Semitic attacks while I can assimilate and skate by. What I do have is experience growing up in a decidedly non-Jewish part of Brooklyn where, if certain Catholics learned you were Jewish, ugly bits of language could be hurled your way. Playing for church baseball teams, I heard every Jew and Holocaust joke in the book. What’s the difference between a Jew and a pizza?? Only one screams in the oven! I’ve been told to get excited at the sight of a penny. You know, Jews and their money. I’ve been asked if I lived in a Sukkot tent year-round. I’ve been asked if I have sex by poking a hole in a sheet. I have no doubt, among the anti-Zionist protesters at Columbia and elsewhere, there are people who hate Jews. And I have no doubt that many more do not—that they are directing their rage at Israel which, as a nation-state, cannot ever speak for the entire Jewish diaspora. A nation founded in 1948 conducting a savage military campaign in the 2020s will never be analogous to a faith that predates the founding of Rome. The anti-Semites, once upon a time, were most hungry to link Israel with Jewry, to imagine every American Jew was most loyal to a nation thousands of miles away.

Hamas slaughtered more than 1,000 civilians and took several hundred hostages. Israel retaliated with a ground and air war that has no discernable endgame beyond ceaseless bloodshed and keeping Benjamin Netanyahu in power. Hamas has no interest in peaceful governance—it cannot be the steward of a functioning Palestinian state—and the right-wing politicians who control Israel do not want any outcome that results in a new Palestinian nation. In this way, Hamas is a useful foil for Likud and its hard-right allies. Liberal Zionists long for what cannot be—the two-state solution—and anti-Zionists ask for the fantastical, the end of Israel as a Jewish State. Israel will no sooner surrender its Jewish majority and share land with the Palestinians than the American government will sell back the land beneath New York City to the indigenous.

Throughout history, Jews have been endangered. My ancestors were killed in pogroms and genocides. As the killing went on—and even after it stopped—a casual anti-Semitism pervaded the United States. Conspiracy theories took root. Colleges maintained their quotas. Much of this doesn’t happen anymore, but it would also be silly to argue all Jew hatred has vanished. Rather, I’ll make a more straightforward argument—Jews at Columbia, Harvard, Stanford, and every other exceedingly wealthy university are safe and will be safe and they should go to class. If they don’t like pro-Palestinian protests, they can look the other way. Campuses are large. Not to sound too crass, or like one of my old baseball coaches—Coach Tommy, a tanker of a man, comes to mind—but a lot of these students, and the Columbia administration in general, should suck it up. There is nothing new or unusual about mass protests. They broke out during the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, and they swallowed up Manhattan for several months in the Occupy era. They will keep coming. If the pro-Palestinian students are saying things you do not like, you have the right to counter-protest. You also have the right to ignore them. This is what makes the United States, for all its world-historical failings, such a lovely place. Speech is not illegal.