Campus Protests Reflect Impatience With U.S. Foreign Policy

Throughout the academic year that is now concluding on U.S. university campuses, there has been a contentious debate about the language used in protests over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One of the most hotly disputed terms is the Arabic word intifada, which in a political context means “popular uprising.” As students have chanted slogans such as “globalize the intifada” at protests against Israel’s offensive in Gaza, commentators have alternately denounced their language as antisemitic, defended it as an anodyne statement of support for Palestinian resistance, and sought to parse its meaning through linguistic and historical interpretation.

Yet even amid this battle over slogans, the students have achieved something momentous: Their protest movement—to an unprecedented degree—has globalized the cause of protecting Palestinian lives from the onslaught of Israeli bombing and securing statehood for Palestinians. Evidence of this abounds, from the spread of protests to campuses in Europe and elsewhere to the powerful criticism of U.S. weapons aid to Israel that was conveyed in a speech given in President Joe Biden’s presence at last weekend’s baccalaureate ceremony at Morehouse College, one of the United States’ most prestigious historically Black colleges.

The Cannes Film Festival also become a backdrop for protest, with Australian actress Cate Blanchett wearing a gown that appeared to incorporate elements of the Palestinian flag. More recently, Spain, Ireland, and Norway recognized Palestinian statehood, adding three wealthy European states to a list of more than 140 countries that recognize Palestine—a list that is dominated by the global south. And on Friday, the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel must immediately stop its military offensive in the Gaza city of Rafah.

Historically, certain positions in U.S. foreign policy have enjoyed such strong bipartisan support that they seldom generate fundamental national debate and are rarely reexamined by the mainstream media. Throughout most of the Cold War, the premier instance of this kind of consensus was Americans’ treatment of competition with the Soviet Union as an existential matter. Until former President Donald Trump’s administration, other examples of these positions included U.S. support for NATO and, albeit less often discussed, Washington’s Asian alliances, especially with Japan.

As pillars go, Washington’s longtime and largely unquestioned support for Israel has been on a level commensurate with commitments such as these: so deep and solid that they are nearly impervious to discussion and debate.

Like nothing before, the protests that have recently roiled U.S. campuses have changed this.

Here comes the moment for some sincere throat clearing. I have no difficulty whatsoever condemning Hamas’s sickening attack on Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, 2023. I also readily accept the premise that Israel has the right to defend itself, along with the unfortunate reality that no conceivable response could have fully avoided the death of innocent civilians in Gaza. This cannot be taken, however, as a license for mass casualties. I also support Israel’s right to exist as a state. What that means in practice is complicated; how Zionism should be defined, how Israeli laws should be written and applied, and what kind of dispensation is reserved for non-Jewish citizens of that country are all topics that Israelis and Jews worldwide actively debate. They are all beyond the scope of this column.

Where student protesters have rendered a tremendous service is in saying that with the offensive in Gaza—with its possibly underestimated 35,000-person death toll; its destruction of housing, hospitals, schools, and infrastructure on an almost unimaginable scale; its repeated displacement of the population to clear the way for further offensives; its attacks on relief workers and journalists; its restrictions on the press; and its vice-like control on humanitarian food deliveries to the point where mass starvation now threatens—Israel has gone too far.

Washington’s failure to find a strong voice on these topics has driven citizens to action. So has the associated reticence or timidity of much of the U.S. media, where the leading newspapers (some of which have issued guidelines discouraging the use of the word “Palestine”) are far more comfortable obsessing over the daily theatrics of Trump’s ongoing legal battles.

In a democracy, action does not and should not only take place at the ballot box. Student protests are part a tradition of citizen activism in the United States, and putting aside the very occasional incidence of violence and hate speech (each from a variety of directions), the demand for action to relieve the plight of Palestinians falls within a venerable and necessary heritage.

Unfortunately, the U.S. establishment’s disavowal of the current movement and refusal to hear protesters’ concerns—or in the case of canceled graduation ceremonies and student speeches, the refusal to even allow students’ words to be spoken publicly—have only made things worse.

Here, Biden has led in the precisely wrong direction. In response to the announcement on Monday that the prosecutor for the International Criminal Court (ICC) would seek arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials, Biden angrily rejected the notion of any “equivalence” between the leaders of Hamas, for whom warrants were also requested, and Israel’s leaders. In saying this, Biden revisited details of some of the most gruesome charges against Hamas for its Oct. 7 attack.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has alarmingly gone one step further than Biden, undermining U.S. claims to support a rules-based international order by saying that the administration would support a push in the U.S. Congress to sanction the ICC for its pursuit of arrest warrants. France, by contrast, quickly stated support for the ICC in its “fight against impunity.” Even the chancellor of Germany, one of Europe’s most stalwart supports of Israel and closest allies of the United States, said that his country would arrest Netanyahu if the ICC issues a warrant against him.

Many problems arise from Biden’s statement. First, the ICC made no equivalence between Israel’s leaders and those of Hamas, other than the principled claim at the heart of its filing, which asserts that the leaders of both parties are responsible for crimes for which they must answer before international law.

Secondly, by revisiting the warranted horror of Hamas’s butchery of Israelis, Biden is inviting the very sorts of parallels that he claims are unwarranted. As someone who covered catastrophic, revenge-driven wars in Africa earlier in my career, I learned long ago that comparative moral claims amid abominations are dubious exercises. But throughout this crisis, Biden has found the time and passion to conjure details about the suffering of Israelis to a degree that he has simply never shown himself willing or capable of doing with regard to unthinkably devastated Palestinians.

And this has been the key problem that campus demonstrators have sought to crack: Complaints about the fate of Palestinians—whether amid the present conflict or more existentially, in terms of the resolution of their enduring statelessness—are treated like undeliverable mail, returned to sender, as administration after administration provides blanket support for Israel, even as its settlements grow, while blithely mouthing formulaic and unactionable theoretical support for a two-state solution.

With his nearly unreserved capacity for public support of Israel—which is led by a cabinet that, even beyond Hamas, appears to be opposed to working with the Palestinian Authority, and some of whose members support emptying Gaza or annexing it outright—Biden appears to be incapable of understanding just how tight a corner he is backing himself into. It is right and proper to denounce antisemitism, but in raising his voice in anger about the ongoing protests in general, he risks losing a great deal of the youth vote that he appears to desperately need in the upcoming electoral battle with Trump, the presumptive Republican Party nominee.

There are, of course, bad apples in every crowd, but these are not protests driven by animosity or hatred toward Jewish people. They are an expression of refusal to accept killing on such a large scale, and of impatience with a U.S. foreign policy that has long claimed a moral right to lead the world, and yet has proved ineffective in achieving more just outcomes in a part of the world that the United States has long treated as a top priority.