An overreaction to student protests

Manoj Joshi

Distinguished Fellow, Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi

THE growing intensity of pro-Palestine protests by students in the US has led to an aggressive crackdown by administrators and the police in the form of arrests, suspensions and class cancellations.

President Biden has backed the students’ right to protest, ‘but not the right to cause chaos’.

The demonstrators, who set up encampments in over 120 universities and colleges across the US, have been galvanised by the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and have called on their institutions to divest from Israeli firms. However, some Jewish students have called the protesters anti-Semitic and expressed concern about their safety. In the election year, politicians have stepped in to term the protests ‘anti-Semitic’ and demanded a crackdown.

The protests are against the policies of the Israeli government, but somehow it is made out that they are against the Jewish community. In India, it is easy to understand the difference, but in the West, with its terrible history of murderous anti-Semitism, public opinion is often manipulated on the issue by the powerful Jewish lobby in the US.

The protests reflect that young Americans are more likely to oppose Israel’s actions than the older ones. A Gallup survey in March found that 55 per cent of the Americans disapproved of the Israeli military action in Gaza, with 63 per cent of them in the age group of 18-34.

Student protests can be sometimes immature, are always impassioned and often over the top. Indeed, students and protests often go hand in hand and are a hallmark of a flourishing democracy. But American adults, from the President downwards, seem to be failing their country. President Biden, under pressure from the left wing of the Democrats, has backed the students’ right to protest, “but not the right to cause chaos”.

American students have a six-decade-old tradition of protest. They were at the forefront of the anti-segregation movement in the 1950s and 1960s; they protested Free Speech limitations in Berkeley in 1964, thereafter the Vietnam War, apartheid in South Africa and so on.

The scale of destruction unleashed on Gaza as retribution for the Hamas terrorist attack of October 7 has been wildly disproportionate. There has been little evidence that Israel has sought to apply discriminate force in its battle with the Hamas. Even its mentor, the US, has raised the issue of its humanitarian conduct with Israel.

The International Criminal Court has been conducting hearings on the Israeli actions in Gaza. Separately, the International Court of Justice is hearing a case filed by South Africa, alleging Israel’s violation of the international law by committing and failing to prevent genocidal acts.

The US has a certain vanity about its traditions of free speech and expression, but when push comes to shove, there is a tendency to overreact. And this is what seems to have happened on many campuses. College and university administrators have not handled the issues very competently. The University of Southern California, for example, cancelled a valedictory speech by a top student who happened to be a Muslim girl, leading to an uprising that prompted the university president to call the police. The University of California, Los Angeles, had adopted a liberal approach and allowed an encampment, but summons by a Republican-led congressional committee probably panicked it into calling the police, who came in along with a group of non-student counter-protesters, triggering violence.

Prestigious universities like Harvard, Columbia and Indiana have floundered in dealing with the protests and have hastily called in the police to tackle the situation. Some non-student provocateurs from the right and the left have promoted violence, but even the New York Police Department acknowledged that the protests had been non-violent. In many instances, the students have been joined by faculty members, who have criticised their administrators for mishandling the protests.

While US colleges and universities like Brown University, Northwestern University and the University of Minnesota have brokered deals with the students, others like University of California (Berkeley) and Wesleyan College have allowed protest encampments.

The allegation of anti-Semitism in colleges has been taken up by the right wing in Congress. Acrimonious hearings by a House Committee have put college administrators on the back foot and forced some of them to resign. Two weeks ago, the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, himself descended on Columbia University and met Jewish students. At a press conference there, he called on the president of the university, Minouche Shafik, to resign and suggested that the National Guard be summoned to deal with the demonstrations.

More than two dozen Republican senators signed a letter calling on Biden to restore order to the campuses by using federal laws against “the outbreak of anti-Semitic, pro-terrorist mobs”. Such labelling of protesters, most of whom have been motivated by the humanitarian concerns arising out of the deaths of around 35,000 Palestinians, more than half of them children, indicates the moral vacuum in the hearts of many contemporary American politicians.

Johnson has probably forgotten history in suggesting a militarised response to deal with peaceful protests. In 1970, the Ohio National Guard fired at and killed four unarmed students and wounded nine who were protesting against the Vietnam War at Kent State University. There is, of course, the irony of someone like Johnson calling for a ‘law and order’ crackdown, considering his support to the January 6, 2021, insurrection which attempted to violently overturn the results of the 2020 American elections.

In a recent column, Edward Luce, US commentator for Financial Times, noted that while student protests could be “foolishness — or worse”, it was American adults “who are making the biggest dunces of themselves”. They are, he lamented, displaying “traits of hysteria and dogmatism they deplore in the young”.

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