Written by Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus
Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. At this point, is anyone surprised?
Since October, and especially in the last few weeks, college campuses across America have been the site of large, student-led demonstrations in support of the Palestinian people. The conservative response has been nothing short of political and moral malfeasance. The situation is being fundamentally misunderstood and subsequently egregiously mishandled.
First, it must be said that community leaders have a duty to protect their constituents. They can’t allow violence. But antisemitic “hate speech” is not violence. Peaceful protest, even when it gets a little rowdy, is not violence. It is necessary that a safe community is maintained, but there is no reason to escalate by cracking down on the free expression of students.
When the police dismantle the encampments on campus, they are turning themselves into the enemy. The same can be said about the frat boys and counter-protesters involving themselves in the situation at schools like UNC and ASU; though they have noble intentions, and I don’t wish to blame them for their actions, they are, in fact, undermining their own long-term interests. There is an irreconcilable rift within the left-wing coalition, and when your opponents are fighting there is no need to insert yourself into the situation. Police and frat boys shift the ire of the protestors; no longer is the enemy “Genocide Joe” but the “straight white males.” Left-wingers who support Israel can point to those on the right and call them the true enemies. Conservatives, being as impulsive and reactionary as ever, are bailing progressives out of their most serious internal conflict in recent memory.
But beyond the tactical error, there is a deeper, philosophical problem motivating the right’s boneheadedness: a conflation of support for America with support for Zionism. Conservatives ought not be committed to ideology but must pragmatically promote the good of the American people. It is a rigid dogmatism which leads people on the right to deny obvious facts—just to name a few: thousands of Palestinian civilians have been killed, civilian infrastructure has been targeted, and critical foreign aid has been deliberately obstructed. Even if you continue to support Israel despite the crimes committed or argue that they are justified given the circumstances—as is your prerogative—the downright denial of reality does you no benefit. Being obstinate, in addition to being bad for its own sake, is also a rather heinous tactical error.
Conservatives, aware of their lower social status, are desperate to take on the political framing of the left. This is why they’re so quick to grasp on to Jewish Americans as “their” oppressed minority. Adopting the frame of your opponents is to fight hard for the mere goal of second place. The right must not be so reactionary but be an order unto itself. There is no reason to countersignal one’s opponents unless doing so is beneficial for its own sake. It is perfectly legitimate to draw attention to other conflicts—to question the particularly myopic attention received by the Israel-Palestine conflict—but you need not impulsively defend whatever your opponents attack.
The counter-protesters at UNC were shouting “USA! USA!” as they sought to reestablish the American flag at the center of campus. While defending the flag of one’s country is perfectly right, Israel is not the United States, and when the interests of the two diverge, we must always affirm the latter over the former. It must be again reiterated that the hearts of the intervening frat boys were in the right place; I’m quite glad that they love their country before any other. But as unpleasant as it may be to hear for those with the natural impulse to love their home and their people, a love of the political apparatus ruling over one’s people should be anything but unconditional; you must ask yourself whether your country and your leaders love you back—whether they have your interests at heart.
A clue to answering such a question may be gleaned by analyzing the response to pro-Palestinian protesters vis-à-vis the response to protests in past election cycles. Despite being vastly more destructive, the riots from the summer of 2020 received a mere fraction of the hard power exerted in order to suppress recent demonstrations. What does this tell us? Two things.
First, it tells us that any failure to maintain an orderly polity is a deliberate decision. Those in power are fully capable of—and express little remorse in—cracking down on the protests of American citizens. That conservative political leaders did not intervene in the past to protect their constituents demonstrates that they are ashamed to represent and defend their constituents unless it can be spun to fit a left-wing political narrative. Conversely, that many liberal political leaders didn’t intervene in 2020 but are calling for action now demonstrates that they care little for the right to protest perceived injustices but only affirm such movements when they can be cynically used for political advantage.
Some may recall that last November, before Xi Jinping and other world leaders were slated to meet in San Francisco, there were rapid efforts made to improve the presentability of the city. Admittedly, many of the changes were merely cosmetic, but there were also investments in city infrastructure. The upshot of this story is that streets can be clean, roads can be smooth, and districts can be safe when people worth attending to are present; unfortunately, to most government officials, the average American citizen is not a member of such a set.
Somehow, any proposal to help address homelessness or medical debt is too expensive, but billions of dollars can be found for Israel or Ukraine at the drop of a hat. The United States Government is perfectly capable of making things happen, and yet rarely can they muster the effort to care for the needs of the American people.
A second upshot of analyzing the pro-Palestinian protests vis-à-vis other movements is a very instructive lesson in the efficaciousness of popular demonstrations. Direct action is precisely as powerful as those in power want it to be. An easy example for grasping this fact is by considering how the legal impact of the Civil Rights Movement was as much as—and little more than—the effects of the Civil Rights Act. Calls for socialism or an end to the Vietnam War, by contrast, gained little traction in the halls of power and were largely scrubbed from popular imagination until recently.
The same police officers who were pepper spraying pro-Palestinian protesters were kneeling with BLM protesters only a few years ago. Despite their clear ideological differences, the mechanics of the pro-Palestinian protests actually much more closely resemble the Trucker Convoy in Canada or even the January 6th protesters rather than the BLM marches. (I’m a little surprised not to see those supporting the Palestinians labeled as conspiracy theorists more frequently.) The first three movements lacked elite support and subsequently their participants became targets of the state. The impact of popular demonstrations has been vastly over-exaggerated to Americans—frequently correlating with but rarely causing changes in governance—and so it is presumably quite jarring for those who have been taught to believe in popular demonstrations to find themselves on the wrong side of power. What, in the minds of a pro-Palestinian demonstrator, ought to have merely been the next step in the society’s progress towards civil rights, actually brushed up against power and is being suppressed accordingly.