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STUDENTS ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF HISTORY – THE DISTORTION OF CAMPUS
PROTESTS OVER GAZA  
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Helen Benedict
May 2, 2024
TomDispatch
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_ The protesters, are mostly undergraduate women, along with a
smaller number of undergraduate men, 18 to 20 years old, standing up
for what they have a right to stand up for: their beliefs. The
encampment was blocking nobody’s way.... _

Photo after first arrests at Columbia University, April 18. (AP
photo),

 

Helicopters have been throbbing overhead for days now. Nights, too.
Police are swarming the streets of Broadway, many in riot gear. Police
vans, some as big as a city bus, are lined up along side streets and
Broadway. 

Outside the gates of the Columbia University campus, a penned-in group
of pro-Israel demonstrators has faced off against a penned-in group of
anti-genocide and pro-Palestinian protesters. These groups are usually
small, often vastly outnumbered by the police around them, but
they _are_ loud and they are not Columbia students. They’ve been
coming every day this April to shout, chant, and hold up signs, some
of which are filled with hateful speech directed at the other side,
equating protests against the slaughter in Gaza with being pro-Hamas,
and calls to bring home the hostages with being pro-genocide.

Inside the locked gates of the campus, the atmosphere is entirely
different. Even as the now-notorious student tent encampment there
stretches through its second week, all is calm. Inside the camp,
students sleep, eat, and sit on bedspreads studying together and
making signs saying, “Nerds for Palestine,” “Passover is for
Liberation,” and “Stop the Genocide.” The Jewish students there
held a seder on Passover. The protesters even asked faculty to come
into the encampment and teach because they miss their classes. Indeed,
it’s so quiet on campus that you can hear birds singing in the
background. The camp, if anything, is hushed.

THE REAL STORY ON CAMPUS

Those protesters who have been so demonized, for whom the riot police
are waiting outside — the same kinds of students Columbia
University’s president, Minouche Shafik, invited the police
to arrest
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zip-tie, and cart away on April 18th — are mostly undergraduate
women, along with a smaller number of undergraduate men, 18 to 20
years old, standing up for what they have a right to stand up for:
their beliefs. Furthermore, for those who don’t know the Columbia
campus, the encampment is blocking nobody’s way and presents a
danger to no one. It is on a patch of lawn inside a little fence
buffered by hedges. As I write, those students are not preventing
anyone from walking anywhere, nor occupying any buildings,
perpetrating any violence, or even making much noise. (In the early
hours of April 30th, however, student protesters did occupy Hamilton
Hall in reaction to a sweep of suspensions the day before.)

As a tenured professor at Columbia’s Journalism School, I’ve been
watching the student protests ever since the brutal Hamas attack of
October 7th, and I’ve been struck by the decorum of the protesting
students, as angry and upset as they are on both sides. This has
particularly impressed me knowing that several students are directly
affected by the ongoing war. I have a Jewish student who has lost
family and friends to the attack by Hamas, and a Palestinian student
who learned of the deaths of her family and friends in Gaza while she
was sitting in my class.
 

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Given how horrific this war is, it’s not surprising that there have
been a few protesters who lose control and shout hideous things, but
for the most part, such people have been quietly walked away by other
students or campus security guards. All along, the main messages from
the students have been “Bring back our hostages” on the Israeli
side and “Stop slaughtering Gazan civilians” on the antiwar and
pro-Palestinian-rights side. Curiously enough, those messages are not
so far apart, for almost everyone wants the hostages safe and almost
everyone is calling for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to
take a different direction and protect the innocent.

Unfortunately, instead of allowing students to have their say and
disciplining those who overstep boundaries, Columbia President Shafik
and her administration suspended
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of the most vocal groups protesting Israel’s war on Gaza: the
student chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in
Palestine. This only enraged
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galvanized students and some faculty more.

THE RIGHT SEIZES AND DISTORTS THE NARRATIVE

Then the right got involved, using accusations of widespread
antisemitism
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take eyes off the astronomical death toll
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Gaza — more than 34,000 reportedly dead as I write this, more than
14,500 of them children — while fretting about the safety of Jewish
students instead.

The faculty of Columbia takes antisemitism seriously and we have
methods in place to deal with it. We also recognize that some of the
chants of the protesters do make certain Jewish students and faculty
uncomfortable. But as a group of Jewish faculty pointed out in
an op-ed
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the student newspaper, the _Columbia Daily Spectator_, it’s absurd
to claim that antisemitism, which is defined by the Jerusalem
Declaration [[link removed]] as “discrimination,
prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews,” is rampant
on our campus. “To argue that taking a stand against Israel’s war
on Gaza is antisemitic is to pervert the meaning of the term,” we
wrote. “Labeling pro-Palestinian expression as anti-Jewish hate
speech requires a dangerous and false conflation of Zionism with
Jewishness.”

Sadly, that’s exactly what the right has succeeded in doing. Not
only is the slaughter in Gaza getting lost in the growing fog of
hysterical speech about antisemitism on American college campuses, but
so is the fact that Arab and Muslim students are being targeted, too.
Some students even reported they were sprayed
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a mace-like material, possibly manufactured by the Israeli military,
and that, as a result, several protesters had to go to the hospital.
My own students told me they have been targeted with hate mail and
threats over social media. I even saw a doxxing truck sponsored by the
far-right group Accuracy in Media driving around the Columbia
neighborhood bearing photographs of Muslim students, naming them and
calling them terrorists. Again, it’s important to note that most of
the harassers have been outsiders, not students.

No, the real threat to American Jews comes not from students but from
the very white nationalist MAGA Republicans who are shouting about
antisemitism the loudest.

Then came the Republican hearings.

THE CONGRESSIONAL HEARINGS

Having watched the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of
Pennsylvania stumble and fall in the face of MAGA Representative Elise
Stefanik’s bullying
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of antisemitism in December, Columbia President Shafik did all she
could to avoid a similar fate when it was her turn. But when she
submitted to four hours of McCarthyite-style questioning in Congress
on April 17th — one Republican even asked if there were Republicans
among the faculty — Shafik cringed, evaded, and caved.

“I agree with you” was her most frequent phrase. She never pushed
back against the characterization of the Columbia campus by Republican
Representatives Virginia Foxx and Stefanik as riddled with
antisemitism. She never stood up for the integrity of our faculty and
students or for the fact that we’re a campus full of remarkable
scholars and artists perfectly capable of governing ourselves. She
never even pointed out that who we suspend, fire, or hire is none of
Congress’s business. Instead, she broke all our university rules by
agreeing to investigate and fire members of our own faculty and to
call in the police when she deemed it necessary.

The very day after the hearings, that’s exactly what she did.

Meanwhile, the death toll in Gaza was never even mentioned.

A PANDORA’S BOX

Shafik’s craven performance in front of Republican lawmakers opened
a Pandora’s box of troubles. The student protesters swelled in
numbers and erected their encampment. Faculty members wrote
outraged opinion pieces
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Shafik’s behavior. And when she called in the police to arrest
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more students than ever joined the protests all over the country.

Then, on April 24th, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson visited
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with Republicans Mike Lawler, Nicole Malliotakis, and Anthony
D’Esposito (and even Foxx from North Carolina), acting as if some
kind of terrible riot had gone on here. Standing at the top of the
steps in front of the grand facade of Low Library, a century-old
building meant to symbolize learning and reason, and surrounded by
heckling students, Johnson declared
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students had told him of “heinous acts of bigotry,” characterized
the protesters as “endorsed by Hamas,” and called for Shafik to
resign “if she cannot immediately bring order to the chaos.”

“What chaos?” said an undergraduate standing next to me on the
steps as we listened.

“He’s saying a bunch of 20-year-old American college students are
in cahoots with Hamas?” another asked incredulously.

Johnson then escalated the threats, claiming the National Guard might
be called in and that Congress might even revoke federal funding if
universities couldn’t keep such protests under control
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I looked behind me at the encampment on the other side of campus. In
front of the tents on the grass, the students had erected a sign
listing what they called “Gaza Encampment Community Guidelines.”
These included: “No desecration of the land. No drug/alcohol
consumption. Respect personal boundaries.” And most significantly,
“We commit to assuming the best intentions, granting ourselves and
others grace when mistakes are made, and approaching conflict with the
goal of addressing and repairing.” Designated faculty and students
stood at the entrance to make sure no outsiders got in, and that
nobody entered the encampment unless they had read and agreed to that
list of commitments. The noisiest people on campus were the thronging
media. But _nobody_ and _nothing_ was out of control.

THE WEAPONIZATION OF ANTISEMITISM

Sadly, despite the reality on the ground at Columbia, the right’s
wild narrative of virulent antisemitism here has been swallowed whole,
not just by Republicans but by a long list of Democrats, too,
including President Biden and Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck
Schumer, not to speak of New York Representatives Hakeem Jeffries,
Jerry Nadler, Dan Goldman, and Adriano Espaillat. They have
all publicly condemned
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supposedly rampant antisemitism on campus without, it seems, bothering
to check their facts.

Meanwhile, MAGA Christian Nationalist Sean Feucht
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X that “Columbia has been taken over by radical Pro-Hamas
protesters.”

Back in the real world, the right’s hysteria over such supposed
antisemitism hasn’t really been about protecting Jews at all, as
many faculty members (including us Jewish ones) have written
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Rather, the right is weaponizing antisemitism as a way of furthering
its campaign to suppress the kind of freedom of thought and speech on
campus that threatens its authoritarian goals of turning this country
Christian, conservative, straight, and white — not to mention their
urge to suppress support of Palestinian autonomy.

WHEN STUDENTS DON’T FEEL SAFE

My students tell me they feel perfectly safe on campus. They may not
like some of the chants they sometimes hear. I myself have caught a
few that chilled me as a Jew. I’ve also heard chants that sicken me
on behalf of my Muslim friends. But those have been rare. And campus
is a place where everyone should be free to debate, disagree, express
their opinions, listen, and learn. We have to remember that free
speech does not mean speech we agree with.

No, where my students do not feel safe is out on Broadway, where
extremists on both sides gather. They don’t feel safe when the false
narratives of Republican politicians draw far-right angry mobs to the
campus gates, something that is happening
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this piece. Most of all, they don’t feel safe when police arrive on
campus with guns in their holsters and zip-ties hanging from their
belts.

I stood and watched that day the police came. Four huge drones hovered
overhead, along with those eternally buzzing helicopters. Dozens of
police buses were lined up on West 114th Street on the south side of
campus as if prepared to deal with some massive, violent riot. Then,
in came the police, some in riot gear, to tie the hands of more
than 100 students
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their backs and march them onto police buses.

Not a single student resisted. Even the police were quoted as saying
they presented no danger to anyone. As NYPD Chief of Patrol John
Chell said
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“To put this in perspective, the students that were arrested were
peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they
wanted to say in a peaceful manner.”

Not long later, those arrested students were suspended and the ones
who attend Barnard were locked out
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their dorms. Faculty and friends had to offer their couches and spare
beds to save those young women from being homeless on the streets of
New York. One of them is in my building staying with a colleague
downstairs. “Nobody told our parents that we were being evicted,”
she told me in my lobby.

FACULTY RESPONSE

Many faculty were so shocked by these events that on Monday, April
22nd, some 300 of us gathered
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the steps of Low Library, holding up signs that said, “Hands Off Our
Students” and “End Student Suspensions Now.” Several professors
gave impassioned speeches praising those students for their courage,
demanding that academic freedom be protected, and castigating Shafik
for throwing us all under the bus.

Still, Gaza was not mentioned. It seemed as if the genocide occurring
there was disappearing in the fog.

“I’m worried that the message of our protest is getting lost,”
that suspended student told me as we spoke in the lobby.
“Everyone’s talking about academic freedom and police repression
instead.”

Indeed, not only is the protest against Israel’s pathological spree
of murder in Palestine and on the West Bank being drowned out in this
debate, so are the student protesters’ demands, so let me reiterate
them here:

_That Columbia divest of all investments that profit from Israel’s
occupation and bombing of Palestine._

_That Columbia sever academic ties with its programs at Tel Aviv and
other Israeli Universities._

_That the policing of the campus be stopped immediately._

_That the university release a statement calling for a ceasefire in
Gaza._

The other day, on New York’s National Public Radio station, WNYC, I
heard a caller who had been a campus protester in 1968 say something
like, “It’s funny how the protesters of 50 years ago are always
right, but the protesters of today are always wrong.” The people who
demonstrated for civil rights then were demonized, beaten, even
murdered, but they were right, he pointed out, as were the people who
demonstrated against the Vietnam War. (I would say the same for those
who protested against the Iraq War and for the #MeToo and Black Lives
Matter movements.)

One day, the students who are protesting the genocide in Gaza and the
persecution of Palestinians today will be seen as on the right side,
too. History will prove it. Until then, let’s turn the discussion
back to where it belongs: an end to the war on Gaza.

FINAL NOTE: This piece was written before the president and trustees
of Columbia called in the riot police on the night of April 30th,
against the advice of many faculty, to arrest the students in the
encampment, as well as those who had occupied Hamilton Hall. Videos
show considerable police violence against the students. What happens
next remains to be seen.

_[HELEN BENEDICT, who is a professor of journalism at Columbia
University and the author most recently of the novel The Good Deed
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has been writing about war and refugees for more than a decade. A
recipient of the 2021 PEN Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History
and the Ida B. Wells Award for Bravery in Journalism, she has also
written 13 other books of fiction and nonfiction.]_

_Copyright 2024 Helen Benedict. Cross-posted with permission. May not
be reprinted without permission from TomDispatch
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_Follow TomDispatch on Twitter
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Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from
America’s Wars: The Untold Story
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* Student protests
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* campus activism
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* Gaza protests
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* Israel-Gaza War
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* Divestment
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* Columbia University
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* student movement
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* Genocide
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* police repression
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* Mayor Eric Adams
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* Police assaults
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* university failure
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* apartheid
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* Anti-apartheid
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* Israel
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* Palestine
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* Gaza
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* Hamas
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* Hostages
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* zionism
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* Anti-Zionism
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* anti-Semitism
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