Fantasies of Limitless Energy in the Student Protesters' Imagination
Free Palestine, Abolish Israel, and Other Modest Goals
At first glance, the cause and goal of the protests sweeping American campuses might seem obvious. Headlines call them pro-Palestinian and anti-war, so the protesters must be driven by Palestinian suffering in Gaza, with the aim of ending the Israel-Hamas war. How declaring campus lawns to be “liberated zones,” conducting interpretive dances for decolonization, and occupying and vandalizing buildings results in the just resolution of a foreign conflict is an open question. Nevertheless, empathy for innocent victims and a desire for peace are sentiments most of us can relate to, regardless if we think war is sometimes necessary and its toll on civilians is distinct from genocide. But even the casual observer now increasingly sees that the protesters have goals much greater than an end to the current war, and motives much more sinister than simply empathy for human suffering.
Ending the Israel-Hamas war (presumably through pressure on the American government, which would then pressure Israel into a lasting cease-fire) would be a sizable enough goal for student protesters. Going further, and calling for an end to Israel’s presence in the West Bank and the establishment of a Palestinian state, would be an even bigger goal, but still well within the realm of the politically feasible. A student-led push for Palestinian independence, coupled with condemnation of Hamas, could even draw widespread support from American Jews, the majority of whom believe in a two-state solution. Even a minimal rhetorical acknowledgment of suffering, and legitimate political claims, on both sides of the conflict would do much to allay concerns about antisemitism. Practically speaking, such an acknowledgment would also allow students to broaden their support to better achieve actual results for civilians suffering in Gaza.
Yet the protesters consistently signal a much grander, decidedly megalomaniacal, ambition: the abolition of Israel, which they view as a European colonial project, “from the river to the sea.” Students for Justice in Palestine, a key group behind the protests, issued a “toolkit” after October 7 stating “the existence of Israel is not peaceful; there is no ‘maintaining the peace’ with a violent settler state.” Within Our Lifetime, another anti-Israel protest organizer, declares as a “point of unity” that “we stand against the entirety of the zionist [sic] settler-colonial project and for the national liberation of all of Palestine.” At Columbia University, students chanted, “No peace on stolen land. We want all the land. We want all of it!” At George Washington University, signs were put up reading “Students will leave when Israelis leave” and “Students will go back home when Israelis go back to Europe, US, etc. (their real homes).”1 Needless to say, the students don’t mean “when Israelis leave Gaza” (which they, in fact, did back in 2005).
In 1947, Jews accepted, but Arabs rejected, the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine. Neighboring countries attempted to undo partition by force, resulting in mass displacement and the diminution of Arab-held territory. Subsequent Arab-launched wars only added to the tally of military failure and civilian loss. October 7 was a particularly brutal, though ultimately futile, continuation of a losing strategy that has led to increased Palestinian suffering. The default American student position is actually more extreme than that of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who has called the initial Arab rejection of partition a “mistake.” By emphasizing delusions of total conquest over practical concern for Palestinian lives, the protesters are play-acting a repeat of that same mistake. If students plan to squat on campuses until Israelis “go back where they came from,” we can expect the protests to continue forever.
And that is precisely the point. The students prefer revolutionary posturing to cogent, achievable goals that might actually ease the Palestinian plight. Nicholas Kristof wrote a very gentle, well-reasoned, hopelessly naive open letter to protesters in the New York Times. About divestment: “Ending relations with Israel doesn’t help Gazans, and, on the contrary, it’s useful for universities to have exchanges with a broad range of places, including those whose policies we disagree with.” About Hamas: “Hamas has been a catastrophe for Gazans, and it’s hard for me to see why anyone supporting Palestinians would condone it or violence.” Instead of performative activism, he suggests protesters raise funds for Save the Children and volunteer with human rights organizations in the West Bank. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the Times, students themselves are interviewed in all their Hamas-excusing, reality-defying, performative activist glory.
The interviews make clear that for the students, even abolishing Israel is not an ambitious enough goal. Because intersectionality means that every tangentially related cause is connected, the protesters seek (rhetorically and ineptly, of course) to solve every problem all together at once. One student, whose preferred pronoun is apparently the royal we, says, “As an environmentalist, we pride ourselves on viewing the world through intersectional lenses. Climate justice is an everyone issue. It affects every dimension of identity, because it’s rooted in the same struggles of imperialism, capitalism — things like that. I think that’s very true of this conflict, of the genocide in Palestine.” Things like that, indeed. Another student “acknowledged not having followed the conflict in Gaza especially closely, but said there was considerable overlap between the movement for greater justice in policing and pro-Palestinian sentiment.” If acknowledging not having followed the issue you’re protesting becomes as mandatory for progressives as land acknowledgments, that would indeed be progress.
Contrary to Kristof’s practical advice, “many students declined to engage when asked about Hamas.” One student, “raised Jewish” (perhaps it didn’t take), offered a tortured appraisal: “What happened on Oct. 7 was a test of my politics, as someone who is committed to liberalization and decolonization. It’s hard to not condemn all of the violence being committed by Hamas.” Hard, but apparently not impossible, since “I also know that the violence of the Israelis and the violence of U.S. imperialism and the conditions cultivated by those actors are responsible for breeding terrorism.” October 7 was more than just a test of her politics: it was a test of whether her humanity would allow her to transcend ideology and condemn indiscriminate murder, rape, and kidnapping as unequivocally evil. She, like most of her fellow protesters, failed and continues to compound that failure by remaining silent, or worse, cheering on Hamas.
One of the protest leaders at Columbia, the inimitably named Johannah King-Slutzky, is writing her dissertation on “fantasies of limitless energy in the transatlantic Romantic imagination from 1760-1860.”2 If it’s not too late to update her thesis next year, I’d suggest writing about “fantasies of limitless energy in the student protesters’ imagination from 2024-2025” instead. She could recount how the mad “anti-colonial” dream of abolishing Israel, grandiose attempts to combine disparate causes through the lens of intersectionality, and a penchant for activist theater over concrete solutions had the cumulative effect not of freeing Palestine, but of contributing to an anti-leftist backlash culminating in Donald Trump’s second inauguration. After all, as Kristof notes in his doomed-to-be-unread open letter: “Leftist activists in 1968 didn’t achieve their goal of electing the peace candidate Gene McCarthy; rather, the turmoil and more violent protests helped elect Richard Nixon, who pledged to restore order.” All fantasies, no matter how seemingly limitless, eventually come crashing down into cold, hard reality.
Inconveniently for the European colonization theory, the largest Jewish ethnic group in Israel are the Mizrahim, whose ancestors were largely forced out of neighboring Middle Eastern countries after the founding of Israel. Perhaps protesters realized that “Students will go back home when Israelis go back to Iraq, Yemen, etc. (their real homes)” doesn’t quite fit their narrative. Or, just as likely, they lack any baseline knowledge about the region and its history.
The royal King-Slutzky will best be remembered not for her unreadable PhD thesis, but for her cri de coeur “that students illegally occupying university property could ‘die of dehydration and starvation’ if they were not given supplies.”
I am not any kind of Communist or socialist and yet I have great respect and appreciation for the workers' movements of a century ago, even if they often veered into ideological obscurity or paeans to revolutionary violence—when the smoke cleared these movements helped achieve major tangible improvements in people's lives, from union reps to worker's comp to fair wages etc.
But what the Left has devolved into in the 21st century is a grotesque shameful lobotomized parody that would make Marx's ghost blush.
Most of the blame goes to the theorist class of academia, cosseted cowards all who fling Molotov cocktails while hiding safely on campus, and whose only talent is crafting dogmatic thought-terminating jargon, the most current popular product being the new secular Original Sin, "settler-colonialism", where anyone not "indigenous" (which oddly enough excludes Israel and its 3k-year history) becomes the new kulaks (and/or Nazis) marked for extermination.
And of all the evils, misery and bloodshed in the world the theorist class and their disciples of the campus INFANTada have focused all their rage and hate at the Jewish state, deliberately ignoring the massive upheavals of the first half of the last century, the Jewish genocide, the fact that Israel is half composed of Mizrahis who were expelled from Arab capitals, not to mention all the many peace plans Israel has offered, while the Palestinians in 75 years have yet to acknowledge the right of the Jewish state to exist.
The saddest most grotesque irony here is that by turning the Palestinians into a Cause and fetishizing and commodifying their pain, the Western Left has made sane politics and peaceful co-existence almost impossible, as that would be disappointing for the true believers in the Cause, who demand cleansing apocalyptic bloodshed so they can feel the frisson of righteousness and pretend their hatred is for a "good cause". If the Palestinians had been treated like a normal people involved in an unfortunate land dispute with both sides having valid claims that needed to be worked out, instead of a Cause (aka a global stage for various lost souls, sadists and opportunists to perform moral pageant plays), there would have been 2 states long ago.
The Western Left and its campus Red Guard and the state-subsidized priests of Permanent Revolution posing as professors have become a threat to the country and the world. Their project has devolved into one of total negation, destruction and an endless infantile tantrum against all that is beautiful, successful, sane or a settled norm. There will be no peace until they are defanged.
San Jose is known for its massive homeless encampments, its sub-par university, great cheap food, losing MLS team, and being largely left out of the tech success of Silicon Valley. Oh and piece of shit progressive Ro Khanna, whose achievement (like AOC) is running to the left of a liberal in a deep blue district, and heading one of the most divisive own-goal producing group in the Democratic Party - the How Can We Lose Purple Districts With Insane Progressive Ideas Caucus.