Harry Campbell was a few weeks from graduating in the spring of 2024 when he decided to join hundreds of demonstrators at the encampments at Washington University in St. Louis. He wanted to support the Palestinians suffering under Israel’s bombardment of Gaza — a cause that he and other students linked to the global struggle for the oppressed.
Today, he’s not convinced the protests did much good, even now with a cease-fire agreement that has brought a fragile peace to the region.
For young pro-Palestinian activists like Mr. Campbell, the truce is welcome, if bittersweet and long overdue.
But some of them recalled the boisterous protests on campuses and in the streets — and the often overwhelming backlash — with a certain ruefulness, saying that they had absorbed sobering lessons about power and politics.
More Americans have come to agree with the activists about Israel’s war conduct. But some of those protesters worry the blowback has been so severe — and the criticism against them so resonant — that the American belief in the concept of civil disobedience to achieve political ends has been eroded.
In interviews with a dozen activists and academics across the country, they described a pro-Palestinian movement that is chastened, wary and worried about the future of political dissent. If they still demonstrate, most continue to wear masks to conceal their identities, fearing they might jeopardize their degrees or hiring prospects. They described feeling anxious and somewhat powerless. Most did not want to be named.
“We spent a year thinking about what went wrong,” Mr. Campbell said, reflecting on conversations he has had with other activists.
“We thought we’d all get arrested, and then everyone would rise up and stop the United States from aiding Israel.”
Now out of school, Mr. Campbell says, his political passion remains, but his days of protesting are behind him.
Not all activists are deterred. There continue to be demonstrations, but certainly not at the high pitch that existed last spring.
That is a turnabout. For a time, the Gaza protests seemed to have the ingredients to grow into the next mass political movement for young Americans. The cause — which adherents saw as a struggle between a marginalized and dispossessed people and an oppressive global power — connected with university students, many of whom were already drifting to the left and had experienced their political awakenings during the racial reckoning in the summer of 2020.
Many of them, in fact, started calling the Palestinian suffering “the moral issue of our time.”
At first, the protesters mustered a remarkable display of strength by taking over campus lawns and clogging city streets. They forced university administrators to negotiate with them about aiding Palestinian students whose universities were destroyed in the bombing and about severing financial ties with Israeli companies. For a generation that often lamented its own powerlessness, the tables seemed to have turned.
Indeed, recent polling has shown that the public opinion has dramatically reversed, with large shares of voters expressing starkly negative views about the Israeli government’s management of the conflict.
At the same time, the pro-Palestinian protests troubled many Americans. The organizers proved unable to reign in occasional acts of violence and, at times, seemed indifferent to complaints from Jewish students that some chants and other acts felt antisemitic. With the Trump administration slashing federal funds from universities it deemed too lenient, college administrators moved quickly to crack down.
Today, campuses are tense, but mostly quiet.
Protest activity at American universities has been in decline over the last two years, said Tyler Coward, lead counsel for government affairs for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
While some may welcome the relative quiet, Mr. Coward worries that the pendulum has swung too far.
“There are threats both from the government and from within the university itself that are really damaging the climate for open debate and free inquiry,” Mr. Coward said.
Some states have tried to put new restrictions on campus speech that are testing the limits of the First Amendment. Last week, a judge blocked a Texas law that would forbid protest activity at public universities during nighttime hours and would limit noise, among other restrictions.
FIRE, which sued to block the Texas law, expects the climate for free speech on campus to get only worse. Since the killing of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk, schools have fired or disciplined staff who criticized him, Mr. Coward noted. At the same time, the Trump administration has said it is revoking the visas of foreign students who “celebrated” Mr. Kirk’s death.
“There has been a pretty significant chilling effect,” Mr. Coward added.
Youssef Hasweh, who graduated from the University of Chicago last year, had his degree temporarily withheld after he was arrested on charges of trespassing during a sit-in. He was allowed to participate in the graduation ceremony, but did not receive his degree until the university cleared him of wrongdoing.
Now that he is trying to make a living as a social media consultant, Mr. Hasweh is worried that his past activism will cost him work.
“If I got that much of an insane, disproportionate reaction for what I said on campus, I can only imagine what would happen to me now,” Mr. Hasweh said.
“I am scared to talk about Palestine and I’m Palestinian,” he added. Given what happened to him for participating in a nonviolent protest, Mr. Hasweh, a U.S. citizen, said he was concerned for the student activists who are younger.
“What scares me the most,” he said, “is we gave the school the blueprint on how to silence us.” Lately, he has been focusing his desire to effect political change closer to home by supporting Zohran Mamdani’s candidacy for mayor of New York.
Older leaders of the pro-Palestinian movement said the current political climate of fear had made it much harder to speak out today. After the protests erupted on campuses, a group of federal judges declared they would not hire law clerks from Columbia University because of the way it handled campus demonstrations prompted by Israel’s war in Gaza. Business figures such as Bill Ackman publicly discouraged employers from hiring certain pro-Palestinian student activists.
“I don’t think anyone can fault them for pulling back,” said William Youmans, who teaches at Northwestern University’s Qatar campus and was a member of the group Students for Justice in Palestine at the University of California, Berkeley, in the early 2000s. “It’s hard enough to find a job without being on someone’s list.”
Given the truce, the demonstrations may have eventually withered on their own. But some protesters expressed fear that the plight of the Palestinian people — a cause they helped elevate — would fall off the radar for most people.
“Our attention span is so small that it’s like people can’t pay attention for more than a few days on something,” said Armand Aviram, a freelance videographer in New York who attended pro-Palestinian protests.
News of the cease-fire, he said, left him with mixed emotions.
“There’s definitely no element that I can see where I feel at all like celebrating,” he said. “Just a relief that hopefully just the killing will stop, you know, especially the children.”
Mr. Campbell, the Washington University graduate, now works as a barista in St. Louis — a job, he dryly noted, that does not require a political science degree from one of the nation’s top universities.
He may not be out on the streets, but his political commitment is undiminished. He is focused on ways he can be effective beyond protest, even as hundreds of thousands participated over the weekend in “No Kings” demonstrations against Donald Trump.
“These ‘No Kings’ marches, these ‘How dare you, sir’ comments, they’re not going to do anything,” he said.
He is channeling his energy instead into unionizing his workplace, because he believes organizing is where the real power lies.
“The only way we prevent another Palestine from happening is to have power,” he said.
Tim Balk and Anna Kodé contributed reporting.
Jeremy W. Peters is a Times reporter who covers debates over free expression and how they impact higher education and other vital American institutions.
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