The Students Throwing Their Bodies on the Gears

The Gaza solidarity protesters embody the best tradition of militant American activism, but don't lose them in Vietnam-era nostalgia.

[Community Guidelines for the protest encampment at George Washington University. Photo via this right-wing Twitter account worried about these pro-Hamas values.]

I’ve been watching the student protests overtaking college campuses with the admiration and sense of missed opportunity of someone who was a naive, liberal 18-year-old freshman when George W. Bush invaded Iraq in March 2003. I was a student at Emory University, where last week Georgia cops arrested 20 students and professors, tased people, and “released chemical irritants into the ground” — a violent response that the university’s president summoned within hours of a Gaza solidarity encampment being erected.

In the spring of 2003, there were anti-Iraq War protests at Emory, but living in a dorm far from the main campus and having developed not much of a political sensibility beyond “this seems wrong,” I was oblivious to them. I had no sense of collectivity. I remember someone running down the hall whooping as the shock and awe campaign began to decimate Baghdad. I felt a televised sense of dread and helplessness — feelings that would come to define opposition political culture in the Bush years. Beyond that, I had nowhere to direct my inchoate political energy. Maybe there was a book I could read. But I was late for English lit class and a guy on my hall had just gotten Halo.

Today’s students are thankfully different. Enough of them are sufficiently plugged in to the informational stream and morally astute to understand the genocidal horror that Israel is inflicting on more than two million innocent Palestinians in Gaza. They see it every day on their phones, and they do not accept the shopworn political narratives around Israeli righteousness and Palestinian perfidy. Gaza is being annihilated, and they refuse to remain passive about it. The war must stop.

[Photo of Occidental College encampment demands]

So they’re in revolt and doing a pretty good job of it. The student protests are overall disruptive to the normal order of university operations but disciplined, make specific demands (divest, ceasefire now), and activate a political cadre that is often seen as apathetic or marginal in our plutocratic politics. For seven-figure college presidents surveying their increasingly corporate domains, that can’t be tolerated. Hence the immediate crackdown.

Precisely because US colleges are so expensive and are incubators for the ruling class to reproduce itself, college students are expected to be frivolous and politically unthreatening. They should be studying or having more sex or making TikToks about their anxiety disorders. They should be accumulating debilitating amounts of personal debt. It's an indictment of the university system that, rather than partying every night and working toward their inevitable sinecures at McKinsey or Sullivan & Cromwell, Columbia students agitate for Palestinian liberation. The hysterical Ackman donor class can't stand it.

[Photo of Mario Savio, Berkeley, Oct. 1, 1964]

Yes, their actions recall the spirit of Vietnam War protesters who shut down (and inflicted property damage on) their schools in the 1960s and early 70s. But they are doing it at a different kind of peril to themselves. They don’t fear being drafted. Like the student-led movement to divest from apartheid South Africa, they fear being morally delinquent at a time of historical urgency. They fear that they care more about grades or consulting jobs or clerking for a Robert Bork disciple than people being killed with US bombs and the support of US elites, including their parents.

Boomer politics lionize Vietnam War college protests while supporting every war that came after. These students are saying that campus protest can't just be a nostalgic bauble for their parents and grandparents. Today’s scolding pundits were once proud in revolt, and so are they, because the cause is just. They will disrupt the operations of their schools until their demands are met. They will try to stop the odious machine.