When I was growing up, much of what I learned about my parents’ college experience centered on their time in the anti-Vietnam War protest movement.
As students at Berkeley in the late ’60s, demonstrations against the war were a fixture of campus life for them — as was brutal repression against protesters.
Some of the most notorious examples of that repression were at People’s Park, where then-Gov. Ronald Reagan sent in hundreds of police and national guard to quash demonstrators. They used nightsticks, tear gas and buckshot against protesters, ultimately killing one and sending 128 to hospitals.
Last week we watched echoes of the 1960s play out on college campuses nationwide. Nearly six decades later, police are not — so far — firing shotguns on students, but the images of hundreds of riot gear-clad police swooping in to dismantle student encampments protesting the war in Gaza were eerily familiar.
From Columbia University to UCLA, by last week, over 1,700 people had been arrested in crackdowns against student demonstrators. Two encampments were established last week at the University of Washington, demanding the school financially divest from Israel and Boeing, which has armed Israeli’s military for decades.
As with everything today, how the campus demonstrations are perceived has become something of a Rorschach test. For those who support the U.S.-backed Israeli war in Gaza, the protests are the result of outside agitators leading a naive and ill-informed student population to support a cause they don’t understand. For those who support a permanent cease-fire, the cause of ending the war is as just as the effort to end the Vietnam War or stop apartheid in South Africa, and the militarized response against students is a violent and disproportionate escalation.
I’m not advocating tolerance for threats, violence or hate speech. And I admit the distinction between those things and a noisy demonstration can be hard to parse.
I also oppose the targeting of Jewish students, Muslim students or any students based on their religion or identity.
But people should be able to peacefully express their views on U.S. foreign policy on college campuses without the kind of response we saw last week.
Despite the effort to paint the anti-war movement as composed of a radical fringe, public opinion has shifted.
According to a March 27 Gallup poll, a majority of the U.S. public now opposes Israel’s war in Gaza. Up from 45% in November, now 55% believe the war is wrong. Opinion was split along political lines, with more Republicans supporting the war and more Democrats opposing it.
Driving that shift is the war’s terrible toll on Palestinian civilians. As of last week, Israel’s war in Gaza killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, two-thirds women and children, according to Gaza health officials. Israel’s restriction on humanitarian aid has left Palestinians on the verge of a totally preventable famine. A much-publicized Israeli strike on a World Central Kitchen relief team on April 1 killed seven aid workers and caused the group to temporarily pull out of the region, though they announced plans to resume operations last week.
Since the ground offensive of Gaza began in late October, 263 Israeli soldiers have been killed, including 43 reportedly by “friendly fire” or accidents, according to the Times of Israel last week.
Critically, an estimated 133 people are still held hostage in Gaza by Hamas, who violently captured civilians in violation of international law during a horrific attack on Oct. 7 that left 1,200 mostly Israeli civilians dead and led to Israel’s latest attack on the enclave.
While most campuses are taking a zero-tolerance approach to campus protests, some have taken a different tack. Brown University students, for example, came to a deal with administrators to dismantle their encampment in exchange for a future vote on divestment with Israel. Closer to home, students at my alma mater, The Evergreen State College in Olympia, also took down their protest encampment after reaching an agreement with administrators to create task forces to look at “divestment from companies that profit from gross human rights violations and/or the occupation of Palestinian territories.”
Just like during Vietnam, while campus administrators might hope they are quelling dissent by stamping out protests, they will likely find the opposite will happen. Repression will breed more resistance, not less. As New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow wrote on April 24, the student sentiment is firmly and deeply held.
“The protesters and many voters are upset about something more than a regular matter of foreign policy. Many believe that they are witnessing a genocide aided and abetted by an American president they supported,” Blow wrote. “They feel personally implicated in a conflict in which the death toll continues to rise, with no end in sight. This is a moral issue for them, and their position won’t be easily altered.”