Graduation season is beginning in the US, a lively period when gowns are donned, mortarboards and parties are thrown, and students celebrate stepping out into the world. This year, though, a number of campus events are being cancelled due student protests against Israeli military action in Gaza. Some convocations have been disrupted by pro-Palestinian protests.
When public morality needs a course correction, students often step in while politicians cling to geopolitical investments. The Biden administration has the leverage to avert or downscale Israeli defence operations against civilians, but it has chosen not to. Inaction protecting an old ally has now alienated young people.
After October 2023, when Hamas attacks started the current cycle of violence, criticism of Israeli backlash was anathema in the US. American Jewish groups launched publicity campaigns equating opposition to Israeli action with anti-semitism. The Harvard University campus was circled everyday by a propeller plane trailing a banner that read: “Harvard hates Jews.” Today, the same campus is the site of an Occupy-like movement favouring Palestine. Harvard Yard, the university’s old core, is a tourist attraction for families from all over the world who want to place their kids. Today, it is sealed off in fear they would swell the numbers in the tented field. Surveillance choppers circle overhead.
President Joe Biden seems to be alert to this change among youth. On Thursday, he said a full-scale attack on Rafah by the Israel Defense Forces would cancel US military aid to the country. That’s saying a lot because the relationship between the two countries has been unconditional, not least because of the significant presence of Jewish professionals and entrepreneurs in the US economy, academia and arts.
But this concession to domestic sentiment came after weeks in which it was open season on students’ movement. It was accused of being disorganised. Actually, from California to New England, the movement is held together by a demand for universities to disinvest endowments and fees from Israeli interests, and for the government to stop financing military action with tax dollars. “Not a penny, not a dime” is the slogan heard most frequently on the streets, though “From the river to the sea” is quoted most frequently in the coverage.
Ironically, the movement was also disparaged for being too organised. All tents in student encampments look the same, people complain, which apparently suggests that organised interests, perhaps political parties, are backing the movement. This is no argument at all. In India, leaders from across the spectrum, from former finance minister Arun Jaitley to CPI(ML) Liberation general secretary Dipankar Bhattacharya are products of student politics backed by parties. It’s normal.
The students’ demand for divesting has its problems. The authorities would argue it is impossible to implement, unlike sanctions against a single product like Russian oil (and that didn’t work either). Global finance is too deeply intermeshed for investors to identify and reject every Israel link. But disinvestment is effective. A decades-long movement on US campuses to disinvest from South Africa, which came to a head in the 1980s, played a role in ending apartheid. It isn’t just about money. In India this week, students at Ashoka University urged authorities to cut ties with Tel Aviv University. The sundering of institutional links accompanying divestment would put Israeli campuses beyond the pale.
Research has become hugely collaborative and dozens of people from multiple countries may share credit for a single paper. In 2015, a paper closely estimating the mass of the Higgs boson had 5,154 authors, the current world record. But consider a very narrow field, like research on ribosomes using X-ray crystallography, for which Venki Ramakrishnan won a Nobel in 2009. Very few people work in this area, but nevertheless Ramakrishnan shared his prize with Ada Yonath, an Israeli. It is absurd to imagine Israel can be excluded from current research without reducing its scope.
Given such disincentives, disinvestment and blackballing would probably stop at just a couple of shots fired across the bows of Israel. But it will remain an election issue in the US. The 1968 presidential election provides a rough parallel. It was dominated by a difficult external issue—the persistence of Vietnam war, plus uneasiness about the domestic situation (hippies on the loose, Woodstock ahead). Richard Nixon won as he was able to associate his competitor, former Democrat vice president Hubert Humphrey, with all that was awry and promised to withdraw troops from Indochina. At the same time, Ronald Reagan became governor of California by promising to clean out Berkeley, whose campus was the epicentre of antiwar protests.
Two years later, Ohio National Guards opened fire on student protesters at Kent State University; the deaths became a tipping point. A foreign affairs debacle followed, when Nixon and Kissinger ignored the ‘Blood telegram’ from Dhaka, which warned of an army-led genocide in East Pakistan and Bangladesh was born when Indian forces intervened in 1971. Today, the students’ movement against Israel’s militarism awaits such a tipping point, and sadly, the conservatives could be beneficiaries. That means Donald Trump, after the current Storminess has passed.
Pratik Kanjilal
For years, the author has been speaking easy to a surprisingly tolerant public
(Views are personal)
(On X @pratik_k)