Ari Allyn-Feuer argues we are shrinking from the gravity of the situation: a violent mob is once again trying to segregate an American educational institution.
If Columbia in fact calls in law enforcement to its campus, and they in fact clear out the Palestine encampment on its lawn and restore order to the campus, so that in-person classes can resume and its graduation ceremony can take place, what previous event from US history will this most resemble?
The national guard clearing segregationist protesters to allow the Little Rock Nine to attend Little Rock Central High School on 23 September 1957.
I do not mean this metaphorically, I mean that these two events, in 1957 and 2024, will be literally the same type of event: law enforcement removing a mob trying to segregate a school.
The encampment now operating on and around Columbia’s campus is literally a movement to segregate Columbia by removing Israelis and other Jews.
Within Our Lifetime and Students for Justice in Palestine, organisers of this camp and protests, state explicitly and in writing that they support an ‘anti-normalisation’ effort that would see ‘Zionists,’ including Jewish Israelis in general, marginalised from every place antizionists are capable of marginalising them, and explicitly Columbia.
The protest encampment leaders described their aims in an article in the Columbia Spectator, and they include cutting ties with all Israeli academic institutions solely on account of nationality.
The main leader of the encampment personally believes that ‘Zionists do not deserve to live,’ and has repeatedly engaged in public threats of violence against ‘Zionists,’ including at a university disciplinary hearing.
This same leader personally led the students in the encampment to chant for ‘Zionists off campus,’ repeating the demand for segregation, and then to physically assault Jewish students in order to expel them from the protest camp.
The students in the camp, as well as other protesters off campus, have engaged in harassment and intimidation of Jewish students on campus even outside the camp, as they attend their classes, dining halls, and dormitories.
While many of the worst examples of threats and violence against Jews have taken place immediately off campus, there is no hermetic seal between the on-campus and off-campus protest movements. They have have coordinated, including the on-campus movement acting to smuggle protesters with no legal right to enter the Columbia campus into their encampment.
This environment has escalated to such an extent that Jewish leaders on campus are advising Jewish students to stay home.
The university administration itself feels that these concerns are sufficiently founded that it has both made all classes hybrid-remote, and even banned an Israeli professor from the campus, avowedly for his safety, when they found out he was going to enter the protest camp.
Many Jewish students at Columbia have followed the advice of their Jewish leaders and the university administration by leaving campus.
That is, this encampment has been a campaign of illegal harassment, intimidation, and assault against Israeli and Jewish students and professors, has been undertaken with the express declared intent of segregating Columbia, and has proceeded so far as to actually create segregation in fact.
If it is cleared out forcibly by police, the event will be a virtual carbon copy of the events of 23 September 1957. Put them on facing pages in the history books.
Counterarguments are unconvincing.
First it is said Jews are generally not segregated in the USA, while black people generally were in 1957. Well, yes, luckily Jews haven’t been systematically segregated for a long time. But it’s still outrageous for anyone to try to do this, and that is what the encampment at Columbia is trying to do.
Second, it is objected that most of the protesters don’t hate Jews and don’t think their encampment and protests are a movement to segregate Columbia. But they still are, even if they don’t realise it. The camp leaders said so, the camp inhabitants have been trying to enact it, and they are succeeding. Why should we privilege the alleged private innocent intent of many at the protests over the formal content of their leaders’ declared intent, their group’s actual conduct, and the effect it has had in the real world?
Third, it is said the protests are not just about educational segregation, but have legitimate external political goals about justice for Palestinians. While this is true, that doesn’t change the facts about what these activists have chosen to do and the effect it has had. And segregationists in the 1950s had ostensibly related ‘issues’ in mind too; see e.g. the famous ‘race mixing is communism’ signs. Anticommunism and pro-Palestinian activism are each legitimate political causes in their own right, but neither can legitimise racism, segregation, and crime.
Fourth, it is objected that the protests have wide support on and off campus. Yes, but this is no protection against being an illegal movement for education segregation. The backlash against school desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s had wide popular support too.
Fifth, clearing the encampment would involve large and ugly use of force. Yes. Much like when the 1957 clearance required an executive order to federalise the Arkansas national guard.
Sixth, one hears the retort ‘How can this be? The press isn’t telling me about it in these terms.’ But the Southern newspapers didn’t put it like this in 1957 either. The press doesn’t always get things right, especially not right away. CNN even ran an article entitled ‘What the pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses actually want,’ in which they interviewed Khymani James about his threatening remarks…but omitted mention of them until later edits to the article after publication! In some cases, the press, while aware of the segregationist aims of protest organizers, have omitted mention even in articles about the aims of the protests.
Perhaps the largest reason this manifest reality is more widely noticed is not that people are rationally convinced of a specific counterargument, but that they are shrinking from the gravity of the situation. This is an understandable impulse; a violent mob trying to segregate an American educational institution is an extremely unusual situation. But that is the situation we face.
Columbia will soon be facing this issue squarely in court, not only with the US Department of Education civil rights investigation which has been ongoing since November, but in multiple lawsuits from Jewish and Israeli Columbia students, including a class action lawsuit filed this week.
Final point: The more that Palestine activism takes on the odour of a racist criminal conspiracy, the harder it will be to convince Americans to support it. Everyone who wants peace, freedom, dignity, and prosperity for Palestinians, and doesn’t want persecution of Jews in the United States, should be doing their utmost to distinguish their beliefs and actions from the encampment at Columbia.
They should speak clearly and consistently that they oppose the attempt to segregate Columbia, and believe that Israelis and American Jews, including Zionist Jews, should be welcome and safe on US college campuses.
They should speak this way not merely to the public at large to clear their own names, but to other Palestine advocates, to convince them.
They should engage in protest and activism for Palestine separately from, not cooperatively with, the people and groups who are trying to segregate education in the USA.
And everyone, regardless of their own feelings about Palestine, should take care to distinguish between different Palestine advocates by their views and behaviour, so long as they distinguish among themselves, and to distinguish between the inherent rights of Palestinians and justice of Palestinian coexistence with Israel, and the grotesque antisemitism parts of the Palestine movement are currently displaying.
