What Columbia’s Protests Reveal About America

For the last several nights, my sleep has been seriously disturbed by the loud chopping sounds of helicopters that have circled low before dawn in the skies of Manhattan’s Upper West Side, my New York neighborhood.

Each day that has followed, I have made my way a few blocks north to the site of the object of this extraordinary show of policing, the campus of Columbia University, where I have long taught, and the recent birthplace of a momentous student protest movement.

As protests on my school’s campus have unfolded, they have spurred increasingly widespread emulation on other campuses across the country. And these, in turn, have inspired a growing chain of reactions by university administrators, politicians, and law enforcement, respectively, that have sought to curtail, prevent, denounce, or crack down on student demonstrations—in more and more cases, violently.

What this moment has revealed most clearly to me is not so much a crisis of student culture or of U.S. higher education, as some have claimed, but rather a crisis of politics in the United States that centers on the country’s foreign policy, and specifically its close, long-standing relationship with Israel.

Before explaining further, a couple of disclaimers are in order. What follows is no defense of hate speech. Antisemitism is deeply repugnant, as are all forms of racism, no matter what flavor or color they come in. This includes the deep institutional history of antisemitism once practiced by my own university, which historically restricted the admission and hiring of Jews largely in order to shield white Protestants from academic competition.

I have no doubt that instances of attacks, harassment, and insults against Jewish students or any supporters of Israel have occurred on U.S. campuses in recent days, and they are truly and inexcusably deplorable. But the limited experience I have of my own campus tells me that such occurrences are not especially commonplace.

My impression has been bolstered by seeing the same footage aired on Fox News for an entire week of a menacing heckler screaming in support of Hamas in the face of a Jewish man as he emerged from the subway stop just outside of Columbia’s main gate. It is anything but clear that this abusive person was a student. Furthermore, my campus has been surrounded by television crews working long shifts every day, so if incidents like this were rife, it seems likely that we would be seeing many others instead of replays of the same encounter over and over.

What I have seen inside the university’s gates has generally been a picture of exemplary civility. For nine days now, there has been an orderly encampment of students, most of them chatting relaxedly, some of them with tents, occupying an expanse of lawn in front of Butler Library, the biggest of Columbia’s libraries. The demonstrating students have even posted (and overwhelmingly seem to be living by) an admirable code of conduct. It reads in part: Don’t litter; no drug or alcohol use; respect personal boundaries; do not engage with counter-protesters. I will return to the last of these momentarily.

On a recent day, as I have many times before, I read the storied names chiseled above Butler Library’s colonnaded neoclassical façade: Herodotus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Vergil, and the like. Then I asked myself: What is the threat to Western civilization, to U.S. democracy, or even to higher education that the Columbia protests and others that have followed them are supposed to pose?

The answer seems to lie more in a fear of the protesting students’ speech than in their abuse of speech. And the key seems to lie precisely in a line from their code of conduct that I’ve just paraphrased: They forswore engaging not just with any counter-protesters but specifically with “Zionist” ones.

Here comes another disclaimer. I have no issue with the support that many Jews express for Zionism. Their venerable faith, one of the oldest in the world, has sustained one of humanity’s greatest stories of identity, perseverance, and survival. It is rooted in Old Testament stories of exodus and claims that many Jews take as legitimate to an ancient homeland called Israel. To me, the extermination and persecution of Jews on a monumental scale in Europe during the Holocaust understandably deepen the attachment to Zionism for many Jewish faithful, as does the more recent, and largely unacknowledged, rank discrimination that Jews suffered in Western societies even in the postwar years.

Yet the ongoing campus movement that sprang forth from Columbia arose not out of anti-Jewishness, as some would have it. It grew out of profound shock over the hideous and indiscriminate violence that Israel has visited upon Palestinians in the wake of the Oct. 7 terrorist attack by Hamas that killed an estimated 1,200 Israelis. The protesting students have been scorned and ridiculed as the dangerous and naïve cats’ paws of the United States’ enemies in China or Russia, or, wildest of all, of George Soros, himself Jewish. Worse, they have been mischaracterized as anti-Jewish hatemongers by critics, including by leading U.S. politicians.

In the early days of their protests, more than 100 students were carried off by the police in handcuffs after Columbia’s president, Nemat Shafik, spoke of their encampment as a “clear and present danger” and invited police action. On other campuses since then, as this peace movement has spread, students have been beaten and tear-gassed; students at Indiana University and Ohio State University claimed to see snipers stationed on campus, though an Ohio State spokesperson said they were “state troopers in a watching position, similar to football game day.” Day after day, there have been scenes of supporting faculty members roughed up, knocked to the ground, handcuffed, and carted off by the police.

It is time for Americans to ask, swapping out the topic of Israel-Palestine for another, if a student protest movement like this were happening on such a scale in other countries, what would the U.S. response be? What I readily imagine are high-toned condemnations from State Department spokespeople and tut-tutting editorials in the leading U.S. press about authoritarian intolerance or the decay of democracy.

There are many other pressing questions. For instance, what is the appropriate citizen’s response to the scale of horror that we are seeing in Gaza? When Washington has not been outright supportive of the Israeli offensive there, supplying enormous quantities of new weapons to Israel with few real constraints on their use, it has simply been impassive. Despite this, some U.S. politicians treat the protesters as a threat. Others warn that demonstrators are interfering with the education of non-demonstrating students, a kind of silent majority, to invoke a phrase familiar to student protests against the Vietnam War.

This is exactly backward. By peacefully protesting, the students at Columbia and on a growing number of other campuses are providing U.S. society and indeed the world with an education in democracy and citizenship. This has come home to me in encampment-side conversations with students from China and other countries who have marveled at the ability of Columbia’s students to push back through protest. Amid atrocity, they are saying enough, and almost always doing so peacefully. They are saying that standing up to horror requires more urgency than letter-writing campaigns to members of Congress or patiently waiting to vote in the next election.

Gaza is far from the only horror in the world, and we could all use more of these students’ moral urgency and civility. They are pushing where they most readily can, on the institutions for whom, as students, they form the very bedrock of community. If they can’t get the U.S. government to do something to stop the violence in Gaza and increasingly in the West Bank, which goes largely ignored, they can at least get their universities to stop supporting it. This is what the demand for divestment means: denying institutional support through investment in Israeli war efforts until there is peace. Many critics object that this is unrealistic and can never work. But what is the proper citizen response? Sitting on one’s hands in resignation?

I wish to close on the question of Zionism. For decades, public opinion in the United States and in much of the world has supported this concept, the notion of Israel’s special right to exist as an ethno-religious homeland for Jewish people. Personally, I recall the excitement I felt for them, seeing Jewish friends of mine in high school eagerly going off to kibbutzim and in other capacities to help build Israel on this basis in a more innocent era decades ago. But the threat to Zionism in today’s world doesn’t come from the students demonstrating on U.S. campuses. I would argue that the greatest threat to Zionism doesn’t even come from Hamas, whose attacks on Israelis are an abomination. No, the greatest threat stems from the blurring of any line between Zionism and the crushing of Palestinian lives and hope for the future. To the extent that the demonstrating students are sending this message, they are Israel’s friends.