Why the Gaza protests are worrying

As the weather has warmed, it’s time for that time-honored tradition — protest season. Because everyone knows the plight of the disenfranchised is best solved at 70°F. Setting up winter camp in a college quad seems unpleasant — the revolution will take place at a time, place and temperature that’s convenient for America’s poetry graduate assistants.

Campus protests are nothing new in America. They’ve been a feature of university life since at least the Vietnam War and beyond. And sure, it’s fun to get wrapped up in a romantic cause you only just learned about and of which you have only a surface-level knowledge. It might give your life meaning at a time when you’re trying to figure out what the point of all of this is. Like you’re part of something greater than yourself. Plus, it used to be a great way to meet girls. (Nowadays, these girls are all enbies. Ask your teenager.)

But a more worrying kind of activism is rearing its head on campuses across America. These new protests all tend to carry the same characteristics — encampments, silly demands, militant checkpoints stopping students from moving freely about campus, violent chants and buildings being taken over. But these eruptions have a distinguishing characteristic: the protesters don’t seem to be very fond of Jews. If you attend protests to meet girls, these may not be the types you want to meet your parents. Unless your parents happen to be actual Nazis — then boy, these are the protests for you!

These encampments are remarkable not by their tactics — we’ve seen this sort since the WTO protests in the Nineties and Occupy Wall Street in 2011 — but by what’s being said. Calls for intifada are the norm, and chants of “From the river to the sea,” a call to wipe Israel off the map, are de rigueur. Jewish students are being targeted, and in some cases attacked. Calls for genocide against Israelis and Zionists run rampant. The antisemitism on display is startling, even for those of us used to stumbling on the worst segments of the internet: it’s like a 4chan messageboard come to life. Maybe more surprising — to people who only started paying attention to politics last year, anyway — is that it’s coming from the political left.

Campus administrators have no one but themselves to blame — not only because they most likely sympathize with the pro-Palestine crowd and helped to create this environment over the last decades, but also as they’ve steadfastly refused to protect their students from these often violent, terrorist-coddling protesters. They’ve turned policing of campus over to a vile contingent of lawbreakers turned antisemitic vigilantes — policing campus and declaring certain parts off-limits to Jewish students. One recent video from UCLA showed a Jewish student, after trying to gain access to a part of campus that had been forcefully militarized, being chased, hunted and beaten by the pro-Hamas students. Campus security and police were nowhere in sight. Fed up, counter-protesters arrived later that night to deliver some vigilante justice of their own. The rioting and fighting lasted for three hours before security did something about it. When your home, city or campus is being occupied, and the authorities won’t offer help, the impulse to do something and protect your community runs strong.

This isn’t a free speech issue. We would never call for protests to be stopped or people arrested for what’s coming out of their mouths. Students should be able to protest anything and everything. We’re free-speech absolutists. And if they want to be antisemitic, that’s their right. The Nazis won their right to march and spew antisemitic bile in a landmark Supreme Court case in 1977 — this new brand of Jew-hater is more than free to do likewise.

But what’s spreading across the country doesn’t just amount to protests. These are militant acts, carried out by Hamas sympathizers, that put Jews and gentiles alike in danger. As a student, when you can’t walk through your campus unmolested and free without attesting your support for an ideology you disagree with, then we’ve lost the plot. If left to their guerrilla gambit on campus, it’s only a matter of time before their Gestapo tactics spread elsewhere as well. Administrators, elected officials and police need to enforce our laws and protect the citizenry. Not from speech, but from true, actual violence. Please, go protest — wear a sandwich board in Times Square declaring your hatred of Zionists, hire a skywriter and tell everyone of your odious views. But when you cross the line from free speech and protest to violence, there should be consequences. Otherwise, soon enough, the rest of the country will start to look a lot like the campuses — protester and counter-protester alike.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s June 2024 World edition.