Vietnam To Gaza, U.S. To The World — Campus Protests, Across Time And Space

-Analysis-

PARIS — June 1967: We were on the eve of the Six Day War. On Boulevard Saint Germain, Sciences Po Paris students were demonstrating their solidarity with and concern about the small Jewish state. Was Israel going to survive? The forces of the Arab countries seemed — at least on paper — formidable.

Remembering that moment 57 years later seems almost surreal. Sciences Po Paris — designed on the model of American universities — has become one of the leading centers for solidarity with Palestine and for denouncing Israeli policies, if not for challenging its right to exist.

A break with the past at Sciences Po, change with continuity in the United States? As a Sachs Scholar at Harvard University, I arrived in September 1971, like Fabrice Del Dongo at Waterloo, “after the battle” — Nixon had just signed the end of the draft for the Vietnam War.

Gaza’s children

But seeing the images from American campuses today makes me feel more than 50 years younger. The photos and sounds from America have an almost Madeleine nostalgic flavor to them. I feel the same indignation at the weight of these images: From the little girl stripped naked by a napalm bomb yesterday, to the lost gaze of the children of Gaza in the ruins of their destroyed cities today.

Scenes of violence contributed to the victory of the Republican candidate. Does this scenario risk being repeated in 2024?

There’s the same commitment — natural for young people — to the side perceived as the victim. And just as in 1968, the protest movement began at Columbia University in New York. And police repression is without a doubt becoming a weapon once again, used to their advantage by protesting students.

In August 1968, during the Democratic Party convention held — as will be the case this year — in Chicago, scenes of violence between students and police contributed to the victory of the Republican candidate, Richard Nixon. Does this scenario risk being repeated in 2024?

Against the white male colonizer

There are, of course, major differences between the war in Gaza and the war in Vietnam. The students protesting today are not risking conscription, as was the case a half-century ago. In this respect, wouldn’t a more accurate comparison be with the demonstrations against apartheid in South Africa in the late 1980s and early 1990s?

Have the Palestinians — through the suffering of the Gazans — become, in the imagination of young people on campus, the equivalent of what black South Africans were then? Is this the ultimate expression of a wider struggle against the colonizing white man, which goes far beyond themselves and the future of their country?

How did we go, in less than 80 years, from the Analysis of a Miracle, to use the title of an essay by Arthur Koestler published in 1949 on the birth of the State of Israel, to what we can sum up as the Analysis of a Catastrophe: A Jewish state that has become the preferred target of U.S. and European campuses?

Return of the “universal scapegoat”?

It would be too simple and schematic to simply say that the main, if not the only, explanation for this process is the return of anti-Semitism: even if anti-Zionism and the denial of Israel’s right to exist are one of the contemporary expressions of anti-Semitism.

As has been the case throughout history, has the Jew once again become the “universal scapegoat?”

It was inevitable that the relative protection afforded to Jewish people by the memory of the Holocaust would fade.

What is almost surprising is that this return did not happen sooner. Some Jewish students may well show their empathy with the suffering of Palestinians by wearing a kippah on their head and a keffiyeh on their shoulders, but it is increasingly as if all the Jews in the world were responsible for the policy pursued by the current Israeli government.

The images of the massacre of the Oct. 7 have disappeared from our minds, as if erased by the more numerous images, spread out over a much longer period, of Gaza.

It was inevitable that with time, the relative protection afforded to Jewish people in the West, by the memory of the Holocaust, would fade. But it’s certain that, in the age of social media, the images of the war in Gaza have been a crucial factor in accelerating this process.

Political repercussions

How can we at the same understand young people’s sincere emotions for the Palestinian cause, and denounce and fight the outrageous excesses of those who glorify the monstrous acts committed by Hamas? Some banners floating around American campuses are astonishing: “Homosexuals for Palestine.” Do their authors know what would happen to them if they had the misfortune to fall into the hands of Hamas?

Just as during the Vietnam War, ignorance often competes with intolerance: even if, unlike the Maoism in vogue at the time, Islamism only appeals to a tiny minority of non-Muslims.

The episode we are currently experiencing on the campuses is likely to have major political repercussions. In the United States, even if President Joe Biden speaks and acts correctly, the voices of young people are likely to fail him in November. Donald Trump, for his part, is demanding the utmost severity on the campuses, even as he promises — not for the first time in a long line of contradictions — impunity for those who assaulted the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

How can we respect free speech and the expression of sincere indignation, while also punishing calls for violence and racial hatred?

The path is narrow for the camp of democracy and reason.

How can we find the right balance between the temptation to give in to the demands of the demonstrators, even the most extreme — through an explosive mixture of ideological complicity and institutional cowardice — and the temptation to resort to force and thus fall into the trap of the most radical protesters who dream of having martyrs?

The path is narrow for the camp of democracy and reason. In the long term, it requires the existence of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.