Critics of Campus Protests are Weaponizing Anti-Semitism to Undermine Student Resistance

BY DANIEL FALCONE

College campuses and universities across the country have organized
some of the largest peace activities and anti-war protests since 1969.
As the social movement points in specific directions in calling for
Palestinian liberation, over 100 schools scattered across the United
States from American to Yale University have participated and issued
their own sets of “Five Demands.”

College students especially are utilizing and expanding their
educational experiences and cutting their activist teeth on campus in
the form of teach-ins, demonstrations, lectures, speeches, and
creative art, largely on their own but also with facilitation and
professors in solidarity. Further, it’s not lost on young people
elsewhere, as news of the movement reached the Gazan children along
with families expressing their gratitude.

A common reaction to the widespread nature and success stories on the
part of the student activists has been for naysayers to label and
paint the demonstrators and demonstrations as antisemites engaging in
antisemitic activity. Perhaps a tool and offshoot from the modern
hasbara playbook. Its purpose is to draw suspicion over a real and
authentic concern of historical and current antisemitism.

There are several ways critics and campus protest skeptics have
constructed their own reality to undermine student resistance. The
methods include counter-protesting, the calling of police, message
distortion, flimsy polling data, and the utilization of the mainstream
press.

From the look of the counter-protesting, the goals look fairly
obvious. First, counter-protesting presupposes that the Mideast world
was a tidy and peaceful place on October 6th and that Iranian and
Lebanese proxies simply created a need for power and dominance to
defend “good states” (US, Israel, Saudi Arabia) from “bad states”
(Yemen, Iran, Syria) on October 7th.  As reported by journalist Joshua
Frank, one Columbia professor’s motivation to counter-protest wasn’t
based on any intellectual argument at all but rather significant
familial ties to arms manufacturing.

Secondly, counter-protesting invites people to think that Israeli
force and Palestinian resistance present a “both sides” argument (bad)
and this ranges to counter-protesting that characterizes Netanyahu
policy as self-defense (worse). Another motivation of
counter-protesting is to draw ire and/or elicit a slip up in words or
actions from budding activists in a further effort to categorize them
as antisemitic. Hecklers of the encampments have tried to test random
students with gotcha questions regarding geography (re: from the
Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea), to sending in staged
distractions to enhance the possibility of media spectacle. These
techniques haven’t amounted to much but the proposition alone that
they are feasible is enough to warrant a concern regarding perhaps the
ultimate goal of counter-protesting – to necessitate a presence for
law enforcement.

The idea and symbolic presence of law enforcement in the face of the
encampment promotes the idea that the cops are there to catch bad
people and to ensure that good kids can safely get to class (they
always could) when in fact the role of the police hasn’t changed since
the days of ancient societies. That is, the main roles of the police
are to protect private property and concentrations of wealth and power
from well-organized outside forces of resistance. Often, it is the
police force’s duty to make sure that mass movements and mobilization
techniques are struck down while maintaining a highly stratified
society based on law and order. Universities are complicit businesses
that must carry on undisturbed just as free enterprise must remain
steady.

It does not help the students either that almost all of New York
City’s political class, as an example, is tied to the established
order and Biden’s bipartisan consensus when it comes to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Although they differ from Republicans,
Eric Adams and Kathy Hochul are poised to undermine the student’s
resistance just as they are to cut public resources whenever their
respective donor classes apply economic or political pressure. When a
mayor or governor cannot deviate very far from the established order,
the police become willing combatants against the students and
professors. The misinformation on the part of the police was best
illustrated when the NYPD Commissioner held up a copy of Oxford’s Very
Short Introduction Series (Terrorism) believing it was a student’s
“how to” book. It served as a microcosm for how the entirety of the
encampments have been misunderstood by people with authority.

One of the more bizarre aspects of the politics of encampment are how
the detractors purposefully change the meaning of protest rhetoric as
a scare tactic. In response, it reached a level of such carelessness
that a Peace Action Group in New York went out of its way to prohibit
signs, slogans, and chants at one of their pro-Palestine rallies. They
feared that saying such words as “decolonize,” “intifada,” and
“revolution,” (even when Jewish activists wanted to use these words)
all constituted terms beyond their control. This form of liberal
respectability unfortunately played into the hands of the forces
attempting to “other” the campus protests. This wasn’t liberal
rationality to eliminate infantile leftism as a knee jerk reaction,
but servility to power and privilege to protect their organization.

It gets worse. In a recent Hillel Poll, it found that 61% of college
students surveyed cited antisemitism on campus in the wave of protests
and encampments. If that wasn’t bad enough, they also concluded that
intimidation and assault were increasing because of the protests,
while disrupting the ability to attend class (as if student engagement
is not a part of higher educations’ purpose). Sociologist Eman
Abdelhadi has documented the dialogue and mutual respect found in the
encampments that counters Hillel’s forms of cooked data that frames
hand selected polls to intentionally distort specific points of view.

Although Hillel’s polling might be more of a political reaction to the
reality that many campus demonstrators are in fact Jewish, and not
antisemites, it nonetheless sounds convincing, especially when you do
not wish to deny a student’s experience or feelings on the matter.

International relations scholar Richard Falk indicated to me that
Hillel polls are suspect for a variety of reasons. First, the polls
serve as ways to discourage activism that a strong majority of Hillel
students may have previously opposed on its merits. Second, facts get
in the way of the polls. 15 of 17 ICJ judges (of the two dissenters,
one was the ad hoc Israel judge, the other a juridically deviant
Ugandan judge with poor prior reputation) have views aligned with the
student protests, and not the government. And on an urgent issue of
genocide, they support the right of protest. Falk posited further,
“Would we accept a comparable argument that anti-Nazi protests in the
late 1930s should be suspended because they made German students
uncomfortable? Would anyone dare make such an argument?”
“Deconstructing the polls is an important issue,” Falk asserted,
“given their manipulative role in the present context as justification
for encroaching upon the core role of academic freedom in a democratic
society.” Middle East historian Lawrence Davidson stated that
historically, white students said similar things when schools
attempted integration.

Professor and author Stephen Zunes explained to me that Hillel
potentially reaches out to students that reinforce their
organizational mission. Since Hillel has moved to the right over the
last ten years or so, “[they are] essentially saying non-Zionist
Jewish students are unwelcomed.” He continued by stating, “even if
they did reach out to a more representative sampling, non-Zionist
Jewish students might not want to respond if they knew it was from
Hillel.” Zunes also pointed out to me: “If [students] are being told
repeatedly that ‘River to the Sea’ is not a call for a democratic
secular state but the killing/expelling of Israeli Jews and that
‘globalize the intifada’ is not a call for civil resistance but for
terrorism against Jews, it would not be surprising that they would say
they encountered language that was ‘antisemitic, threatening or
derogatory toward Jewish people.’”

Collectively it seems, the goals of the counter-protestors, police,
politicians, polls, and corporate media, are to conflate student
support for Palestine with the center-right Hamas (who won with less
than 50% of the vote in 2006) while categorizing them as a single
entity without social, political, economic, or military wings. Perhaps
no journalist is more skillful in this enterprise as New York Times
reporter Bret Stephens. In his recent “What a ‘Free Palestine’
Actually Means,” he points out that “Israeli settlers have run riot
against their Palestinian neighbors,” but cynically asserts it’s all
for naught since “under Hamas” there will simply be no democracy for
LGBTQ+ people, thanks to college students. He also oversimplifies and
cites corrupt Arab leadership to lessen the burden on Western human
rights abuses, as his underlying goal in the piece is to delegitimize
any view outside of the political center. Stephens further presumes
that the student protestors’ only choices are reactionary forms of
ethnic nationalism on either side but to avoid the side they don’t
know, Palestine. It reads as an unfortunate concoction of patronizing,
gaslighting, and victim blaming.

In this writing, I looked at the ways in which campus protest skeptics
have developed methods to disparage the encampments. To label them,
detractors have crafted an alternate reality or, “big lie” to make the
students look hateful, unorganized, unknowing, and disruptive, when
they have in fact been the exact opposite. On all counts, the students
have been effective in carrying out one of the prime educative
examples found in many school mission statements – making extensions
beyond the classroom – a feature that institutions advertise, but fear
happening because it involves young people questioning the legitimacy
of authority and the abuses of power.

Daniel Falcone is a teacher, journalist, and PhD student in the World
History program at St. John’s University in Jamaica, NY as well as a
member of the Democratic Socialists of America. He resides in New York
City.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/05/27/critics-of-campus-protests-are-weaponizing-anti-semitism-to-undermine-student-resistance/