I’ve been reading a number of opinion essays about the student protests going on at so many of our nation’s most prestigious colleges and universities. They read like customer complaint letters or maybe “one star” Yelp reviews.
“I’d give these protests zero stars if I could. They don’t know history. In my day we had more coherent protests with achievable goals. And we showed our faces! How many of them are just outside agitators? One star.”
The more complaints I hear the more I suspect the students are basically correct in what they’re doing, that they have sophisticated understanding of the history, politics at home and abroad, as well as the context of the politics and economics of higher education. I don’t think I’m very far out on a limb on that because these are “kids” who are attending Harvard, Yale, Brown, Columbia, but also not just colleges in this country. The protests are happening around the world, in the US and Canada, the UK, France, Lebanon, Jordan, and Australia.
I have to wonder, are all of these just misguided naive kids? Or is it possible they are smarter, better educated, more sophisticated and more in tuned in to realities of life today, not life as it was decades ago when all the critics went to college, or possibly didn’t.
Yesterday was Holocaust Remembrance Day. It is held yearly so that we don’t forget. And we don’t forget, but sometimes it seems like we don’t remember. Like what we are never to forget requires an asterisk. Never Forget*
*(very fine print) Never Forget does not necessarily apply equally to all oppressed people. If some can gain political or economic advantage by forgetting certain oppressed people Never Forget does not apply and if you call attention to this seeming contradiction you will be labeled antisemitic and shunned.
Reparations and Nakba.
79 years is a long time. That’s how long it’s been since WWII ended.
104 years ago is longer. That’s when the British colonial empire took control of what they called British Palestine from the Ottomans as spoils, or “reparations,” at the end of WWI. Basically it was just a title transfer and most everyone who lived there continued living their lives in their homes, doing their work.
91 years ago Hitler became chancellor of Germany.
85 years ago a ship carrying Jewish passengers seeking shelter from persecution by Hitler was turned away from safe harbor in the United States. That made it pretty hard for us to deny that there was a serious problem going on in Germany, but we feigned ignorance.
77 years ago the Nuremberg trials established a system of accountability for war crimes and crimes against humanity, such as genocide and collective punishment.
76 years ago a new State of Israel was created to give Jews who had been persecuted in Europe a home.
76 years ago 700,000 Palestinians who had been living in British Palestine lost their homeland and became stateless people.
76 years is 54 years before many of the “kids” protesting on college campuses today were born. 76 years before I was born (1907) the Spanish American War was 9 years in the rear view mirror, US entry in WWI was 11 years in the future.
When I was a kid we all knew lots of people who had served in WWII, most of whom were born after 1907. I didn’t know anyone who had served in WWI. We knew people who served in the Korean War, and we knew people who were serving in Vietnam or hoping not to be drafted to go to Vietnam. There were a lot of college campus protests against the Vietnam War. The National Guard was called out to suppress a protest at Kent State and they fired live ammunition at student protesters. 4 students were shot dead. I don’t know the exact reasons each of those dead students had for protesting that day but I do know they weren’t wrong.
There’s been a lot of conflict between “Arabs” and Israel since the initial founding conflict in 1948, major conflict in 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, 2006, and 2023, and lower grade military and terrorist activities as well. On both sides.
There have been attempts at a peace process. In 1978 Jimmy Carter succeeded at Camp David in bringing peace between Israel and Egypt ending tensions of the 1973 Yom Kippur War with Egypt. It was a major step toward peace. There were some other major attempt such as the Oslo Accords of 1993/95, and another Camp David in 2000, but all efforts have failed to greater or lesser degrees, most utterly.
Since 1995 when an orthodox Jewish fanatic assassinated Yitzhak Rabin who was a strong proponent for finding peace it seems like there has been little interest by political actors in concerted efforts to make peace despite Clinton’s 2000 Camp David and talks in 1997, 1998, 2001, 2003, 2005, 2007, 2010, and 2013. Israel and what passes for leadership among the Palestinians have been at an impasse since Rabin was murdered. “Both sides” point fingers at the other. There’s been no serious effort made in 11 years, since before the college kids protesting today were really paying attention to world affairs. It’s a lifetime to them.
Meanwhile for 76 years millions of Palestinians have lived as stateless people and every day they lose a little bit more of lands they still hold to “settlers” who don’t seem to be settling anything, certainly not conflict. Nobody in historic British Palestine seems to forget anything that supports their own animus, and nobody seems to remember the necessity of being human toward other humans. and when I say “nobody” you know what I mean.
The CBS sitcom “One Day at a Time” ran from 1975 to 1984 starring Bonnie Franklin, Valerie Bertinelli, Mackenzie Phillips, and Dwayne Schneider who, in the show, was a building super at the apartment complex where the women lived. Schneider had a laugh line, “always remember, and please, never forget.”
It seems to me college student protests are all about what they’ve been told to do, to never forget, but they’re also always remembering. I think we should stop denigrating their protests, their admonitions. We should remember that college protesters have been shown again and again to be prescient, to be our nation’s conscience.
I think they’re tired of always remembering and never forgetting, and they just want the violence to end, and for everyone to have the right to live as free people on their own lands.