Coop Scoop: Campus Protests. The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

Effective politics beats performative self-righteousness

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April 29, 2024

By Marc Cooper

When I was in college from early 1968 until I was expelled for organizing anti-Vietnam war protests 1in 1971, I obviously participated in numerous demonstrations on and off campus that share some certain aspects with the current wave of pro-Palestinian encampments now sprouting up on about 50 US campuses and likely to spread more this week.  I incurred a number of arrests, a couple of baton whackings from our beloved LAPD, and was part of a group of 19 students arrested on two misdemeanors for shouting down the South Vietnamese Ambassador – an incident that resulted in the longest trial in LA County municipal court (45 days) and concluded in universal acquittal.

Some 50 years later, now as a cranky retired boomer instead of a wide-eyed youthful militant for change (actually for revolution), I clearly retain some real sympathy for the current crops of demonstrators – but not blindly and not without some apprehension and even a hint of alarm.  Also, as a very young reporter during the 1973 Middle East War I spent some time in Beirut interviewing some of the the-then top Palestinian resistance leadership and have ever since followed the situation on the ground rather closely allowing me a certain sense of security in better understanding the conflict.

First, I will start with the supportive part.  As a general rule I think massive dissent is almost always healthy, especially in the current political atmosphere aggravated by an authoritarian Trumpism, a runaway Supreme Court, and a Democratic administration supplying bombs and bullets to a rogue Israeli regime that is threatening to become a global pariah thanks to the mountain of innocent corpses it is building in Gaza.  I share the outrage and anger they feel watching a US government keep mumbling about restraining its Israel allies while doing nothing concrete to end the savagery.   I am also supportive of the protesters call for their respective universities to disinvest from Israel.  That’s a position that has taken me some time to adopt.  Not because I was concerned about the effect on Israel (they deserve the boycott) but I thought it was a case of sort of “selective prosecution,” if you will.

The overall plight of Palestinians is abhorrent. But so are the lives of tens of millions of other Arabs who live in miserable conditions under repressive regimes who pay good lip service to the Palestinians but who have not lifted a finger to materially support them. Just to cite one example, the military dictatorship in Egypt is completely complicit with Israel in sealing off the Gaza border and in the meantime treats it own domestic population as dogs –on a good day.  While I have come around to sympathize with BDS, I wish there were more American concern for the other 150 million Arabs oppressed by their own brutal regimes. There is even a pocket of Idiot Leftists around the conspiratorial Grayzone mag that actually supports the Syrian dictatorship. And Medea Benjamin of Code Pink had no problem attending a “peace” conference in Iran hosted by the then-president who was a Holocaust denier some years back and more recently wrote a book essentially defaming Ukraine’s resistance to the barbaric Russian invasion.

I also give credit to the demonstrators for contributing, albeit unwittingly, to a tectonic shift in the official US rhetoric about Israeli that has seen such pro-Israeli establishment figures as Nancy Pelosi finally finding her voice to chide Netanyahu.  It’s not enough.  But these are the first significant cracks in the hold Israel has had over the US political class since its inception. And it is a healthy development that will take years to develop but it is definitely in progress for the first time in history.

My support also goes to the demonstrators versus their schools as the usual stupidity and clumsiness of disparate university administrations comes into bold relief.  An epidemic of quick trigger finger has infected various university executive offices where police are being immediately called in to clear completely peaceful and relatively small (100-300) students encampments that pose no real threat to anybody or anything, thereby guaranteeing further escalation. The plight of Jewish students, who are pointed to as possible and probable victims of these unruly protesters, is being greatly exaggerated by university officials and, of course, by the Republican ghouls in congress who are now calling for armed troops to be deployed on several campus quads.  This is no surprise to me.  As a student activist in the 60’s and someone who has taught occasionally on campuses since 1981 and then full time from 2006-2015, I have never seen anything but nervous jellyfish occupy the top tiers of university administrations.  Their top concern is always to please the oligarchic funders of private schools and state legislators in public schools. The students are always a very low priority and are by default seen as untrustworthy adversaries.

Now, the not-so-supportive part of my view.

Like anybody else, I am appalled by the few (and I believe they are only a few) who are voicing affirmative support for Hamas as if they were romantic and heroic freedom fighters. In reality, they are an obscurantist, misogynist, religious fundamentalist force who think it’s just fine to murder and kidnap civilians (“Zionists”) and launch barrages of untargeted rockets into civilian population areas. If you like the Mullahs of Iran, hell, you will plain love Hamas as they are even a more pure incarnation of Islamo-fascism and they have done a bang-up job of imposing a highly repressive one-party dictatorship when they controlled Gaza (and were encouraged to do so by succeeding Israeli administrations).

I am extremely uncomfortable with the protester chants of Genocide Joe and I think I have figured out why that has become so popular.   Once you qualify and define the object of your protest, (in this case the Biden admin) as  some kind of inhuman monster, like perpetrators of genocide, you simultaneously release yourself of ANY obligation to engage in discourse or dialogue or discussion with them or the “other side.”  Same goes for the wholesale labeling of anybody who disagrees with the protesters’ position as “Zionists” a term now used strictly as an epithet.

Nauseating is not too strong a term I felt reading about how my friend, UC Berkeley Law School dead Erwin Chemerinsky was singled out by, sorry to say, at least a few deranged protesters last week.  While he was hosting a traditional backyard BBQ dinner at his home for law school grads, one of them stood in a chair, whipped out a bullhorn and began a loud harange about Israel and Erwin. When asked to leave, the protester refused and Chemerinsky’s wife then tried to take the mic from the hand of this Social Justice Warrior.  The snowflake SJW, predictably, now claims she was assaulted. Yawn.

In the hours before the incident, a series of posters appeared around campus depicting Erwin as a bloodthirsty Jew holding a bloodied knife and fork (right out of the annals of Blood Libel).  Understand that Professor Chemerinsky has an unblemished 44 year record as one of the most militant defenders of free speech in America and to my knowledge has made no statements regarding Israel and Gaza.  He was singled out only because he was Jewish.

I encourage you to read his account of this deplorable incident here.

I’m a non-Zionist Jew. I’m an anti-Zionist Jew. But I am nowhere near believing that most people being branded as Zionists who therefore deserve no serious hearing, even know much about the history and reality of Zionism.  Calling somebody out as a Zionist in order to erase them or their right to be heard or listened to is as appalling as the term “outside agitator” now being used by some reactionary MAGA Congressmembers to discredit the integrity of the campus protests.  And it is this sort of Zionist name calling that led to the poster attack on Chemerinsky, a tactic copied from virulent KKK racists.

The underlying issue, the biggest error that many protesters are committing, where their strategy is truly mistaken, is in their insistence that they are supporting some sort of war of liberation which simply is NOT true.  This is a one sided war of collective punishment by a greatly overpowered Palestinian population and the only ones among them talking about a war are groups like Hamas.  Hamas has clearly demonstrated it does not give one hot damn how many Gazans are killed by response to their acts of terror as in in their diseased minds they believe the mass slaughter of their fellow Palestinians will eventually produce something good.

My great friend, my blogather, my original editor at The Nation, Micah Sifry, who is no friend of BiBi’s and who has been writing about and visiting the middle east for decades, outlines in his latest Substack edition the dispiriting evening he had recently at a New York meeting of about 40 pro-Palestinian activists.  He writes in part:

“[W]hat I heard both appalled me and gave me a powerful feeling of negative nostalgia. I was appalled because these people, as they made clear in their own words, are not seeking peaceful co-existence between Israelis and Palestinians. They say, instead, that they are fighting for the liberation of Palestine from Israeli Jews, who they prefer to call Zionists, as a form of moral distancing from the implications of their words. They have as much chance of achieving this as they would demanding that the 8.3 million people of New York City move out and let the descendants of the Lenape tribe and other indigenous inhabitants of the tristate area take over. [emph: his]But that thought never seemed to cross their minds, so sure were they of the righteousness of their cause..”

And the more you claim that Biden and all “Zionists” are engaged in genocide you really do not have to factor them in other than as devils. I mean, who wants to dialogue with Hitler?

Sifry continues:

“I don't think people who are attracted to groups like PYM or SJP understand very well what it would actually mean to get seven million Israeli Jews to acquiesce in the radical transformation of their lives. It’s not very realistic to think they will do so voluntarily—especially when they are told they have no legitimate claim to be living where they live. (But hey, some of them want New York Jews to move back to Poland, so at least we seeing consistency here!) Far better, in my mind, to try for a two-state compromise than to expect that this generation of Israeli Jews will accept the elimination of their society. After listening to the panel, I found myself agreeing with Noah Smith, the economist who recently dissected the Palestine protest movement as “not a peace movement in any meaningful sense of the term [but rather] a movement in support of violent, armed struggle against Israel and any country in support of Israel.”

As mentioned above, this is the strategic nut of the problem.  Declaring this a war of liberation with which you are in solidarity means that, at some level, you are also at war with those with whom you disagree.  It’s this closed, isolated, extremely self-righteous, aggressive and closed-to-dialogue posturing of much of the protests that I am sorry to say will eventually lead to their fading away and disappearance.  Just as Biden reportedly told Netanyahu after Israel’s latest tit for tat retaliation, “take the win” and call of anymore reprisals.  To the demonstrators, they have also scored a win in helping to break down the historic rhetorical wall of 100 percent US approval of anything Israel wants to do no matter the moral cost.

That’s a BFD. And the Pro-Palestinian movement needs to bolster, exploit and expand that win, not squander it in acts of ongoing juvenile self-righteousness.  Winning to protect the  lives of Palestinians is not going to happen by blocking freeway traffic in major cities.  It’s not going to be won by trying to intimidate some of our leading civil libertarians. It’s not going to be won by conjuring up an imaginary war of liberation when the current war is one of Palestinians so overpowered it has become a turkey shoot for the IDF. t’s not going to be won by protesters sealing themselves off in self-supporting enclosed encampments rather than fanning out on campus and In the Real World , engaging others not yet involved and, God Forbid, trying to find any piece of common ground with Jews just as will have to eventually happen in Israel/Palestine if peace if ever to be reached. The latest Marist polls ranks Gaza as number 15 on the list of political priorities among college aged youth meaning the demonstrators are a very small minority who have a lot of work to do if they want to build a more inclusive, more effective movement. That means embracing and persuading those on the side and not alienating and satanizing them and certainly not be claiming they have blood on their hands.

And certainly nothing is going to be won by helping to elect Donald Trump by taking the performative step of not voting for Joe Biden. That would be about as stupid as you can get. It would only mean MORE war over there and, politically, here at home. Voting for Biden is not to endorse Genocide.  It is rather a defensive act to prevent an authoritarian takeover of America that will only lead to even more carnage in the Middle East – and on their campuses. ++