Emma Ashford: Hi, Matt, how is your week going? It’s the end of the semester, and I’m sure things on campus must be peaceful and tranquil as the students prepare for their exams.
Matt Kroenig: I assume that is sarcasm? Things have actually been pretty quiet at Georgetown, but campuses across the United States have been rocked by protests against Israel’s war against Hamas.
EA: You got me; it’s sarcasm. I haven’t seen protests this widespread on a foreign-policy issue since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Encampments are springing up on university campuses across the United States, leaving administrators scrambling to figure out how they can both manage the students and appease their donors.
In a few places—most notably at Columbia University in New York City—the university administration called in the cops to clear out their students, even though the protests were largely peaceful. It all seems to be a huge overreaction to some pretty milquetoast civil disobedience.
MK: Well, as usual, you and I see this differently. The problem is that administrators at Columbia and other places badly mismanaged things before it got to this point.
The principles at stake are simple: Universities should permit free speech; and they should enforce policies to keep campus open for all students, especially those who want to learn, go to class, and study for exams—which, after all, is the primary mission of a university.
It was a mistake for Columbia to negotiate with a loud, disorderly minority over long-held university policies, like prohibitions against students building encampments on campus. Administrators, like Ben Sasse at the University of Florida, who simply upheld university policy from the start, including suspending students who violated the rules by setting up anti-Israel camps, provided a much better example of effective university leadership.
EA: Well, first, I think it’s a mistake to lump together all the different protests. At UCLA, a small minority of students apparently set up barricades or were arrested for carrying materials to build them. There was also violence instigated by pro-Israel counterprotesters, who tried to dismantle the encampment there. At Columbia, some of the protesters occupied an administrative building.
The former is clearly a problem; as you point out, it prevents other students from learning and accessing classes. It isn’t speech; it’s a barricade. The latter is clearly against university policies and is civil disobedience, although it’s not uncommon for students to occupy academic buildings during protests, usually with limited repercussions. At Columbia, too, protesters were likely trying to draw parallels to prior occupation of the same building by anti-Vietnam War demonstrators back in 1968.
But at a variety of other schools, these protests were entirely peaceful, didn’t disrupt classes, and yet were still broken up by police. I’m particularly ashamed of my own alma mater, the University of Virginia (UVA). As the local Charlottesville newspaper the Daily Progress described it, “Days of quiet, peaceful protest came to a chaotic and violent end Saturday afternoon as Virginia State Police stormed an encampment of anti-war protesters at the University of Virginia.”
The only reason these students were even violating university policy was that the policy was quietly changed over the weekend to end an exemption allowing “recreational tents.” It’s utterly ridiculous. Students have a First Amendment right to protest peacefully, just like everyone else.
MK: The New York Times reports that the protesters at UVA were violating policy by, among other things, using megaphones. That sounds like a sensible policy to me. It is hard to study—which, after all, is the main point of a university—when fellow students are causing a ruckus outside.
Moreover, I am not sure these protests really represent meaningful “free speech.” When I started at Georgetown, a faculty mentor taught me never to underestimate our undergraduate students’ intelligence, but never overestimate their knowledge. He was right. These protesters are in their late teens and early 20s. They don’t really understand what they are talking about—I certainly did not at their age. If they put down their megaphones and engaged in curious intellectual debate with others, they might actually learn something.
EA: I was pretty dumb at that age, too. But I think you’re doing these young men and women a disservice by implying they don’t understand what they’re talking about. Maybe they don’t know all the ins and outs of the Israel-Palestine situation. Perhaps they don’t know who Arthur James Balfour was, or about the Nakba, or the domestic politics of Israel. But they are protesting the violence and cruelty that they see on the news, and I think it’s laudable that they are willing to do that when it doesn’t directly impact them.
And let’s be honest, Israel remains a hot-button topic, and one where there’s a lot of pressure from big donors on university administrators. That’s why these encampments are being treated as anything more than a nuisance. If these students were protesting in support of the Uyghurs in China or for women’s rights in Iran, the crackdown wouldn’t be nearly so bad. Honestly, Matt, if these were anti-regime protesters on the streets of Tehran, you’d be applauding them and probably arguing for U.S. support!
MK: So we are comparing American college students, blessed with First Amendment rights but who choose to engage in disorderly conduct that infringes on the rights of others, to genuinely oppressed people demanding basic human rights from an evil, autocratic regime? My head hurts just trying to disentangle the analogy.
Let me turn it around. Why are there not disorderly protests against egregious violations of international humanitarian law, like China’s genocide against the Uyghurs, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un’s labor camps, or Russian President Vladimir Putin’s abduction of Ukrainian children? Instead, the only disorderly protests are against a U.S. democratic partner fighting a violent terrorist group. It again reveals that these students don’t really understand the issues, and they seem to be motivated by something other than universal justice.
EA: Well, I’d say the reason that students aren’t protesting those other conflicts is that the U.S. government isn’t arming China and North Korea or funding Putin’s war in Ukraine. Congress just sent Israel another $17 billion, and Washington acts as a shield for its actions at the United Nations. This is Americans’ war, too, and although I understand why Israel felt it had to go into Gaza after the horror of the Hamas attack in October last year, I’m still utterly appalled that the U.S. government is supporting what is becoming an open slaughter of much of the population of the Gaza Strip.
MK: That doesn’t fully hold up. The United States government could be doing more to counter China’s genocide and stop Putin’s war crimes in Ukraine. Why not protest the inaction?
The answer is, in part, that an unhealthy fixation on Israel, antisemitism, and anti-Americanism are pathologies of left-wing activism.
Still, putting the merit of the protests aside, they are already having a political effect. Many progressives sympathize with the protesters, while many conservatives just see chaos. President Joe Biden is in a tough spot as he doesn’t want to be seen as supporting a crackdown on peaceful protesters, but he also doesn’t want this to become a “law and order” election, which tend to benefit conservatives. Recall that anti-Vietnam riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention were a major factor propelling Richard Nixon to victory in the presidential election that fall.
EA: You might be right on that point. Conservative media is already treating these protests as a rerun of the Black Lives Matter protests, some of which turned violent back in 2020, providing footage later used in campaign ads for former President Donald Trump.
Perhaps the bigger problem is that no one is trying to defuse this situation. Biden appears largely unwilling to criticize Israel, though his recent steps toward withholding arms supplies from Israel if they continue into Rafah are promising. But it’s probably more relevant that campus administrators across the country are simply calling in the police rather than engaging with the protesters at all. In the places where they did engage the protesters—for example, at Brown and Rutgers—things have mostly ended peacefully.
It’s worth thinking about what the protesters are actually trying to do here. As our fellow FP columnist Adam Tooze pointed out in his podcast episode on the crisis at Columbia, protesters are mostly trying to raise the salience of the issue and force their universities to take a stand.
MK: That is the problem. Universities should not take a stand on the Israel-Hamas war, or any other political matter disconnected from their core missions of research and teaching. Universities can’t simultaneously be forums for free speech and at the same time take an official stand on one side of the debate. They should practice institutional neutrality.
EA: Top universities are elite institutions and run massive endowments more akin to the wealth of top hedge funds. They are more than mere education institutions, as much as I might wish it were otherwise; they make investments with those endowments, hence the calls for divestment from companies linked to Israel. I personally think it would be smarter for protesters to be targeting the Biden administration directly, but you can’t deny that the universities are public actors.
Anyway, perhaps it’s time we talked about the conflict itself? Things have gotten even worse on the ground since we last debated this. We seem to have avoided regional escalation with Iran, but the Israelis have now begun operations in Rafah, the last big population center in the Gaza Strip, and one that currently houses hundreds of thousands of refugees displaced by prior operations farther north. The scope of the operations remains unclear, but Israel has instructed refugees to leave the area. The Biden administration, in response, has paused one arms shipment and threatened to withhold further deliveries of bombs and artillery shells if Israel enters Rafah’s most populated areas.
MK: The suffering of the Palestinian people is tragic. But Israel needs to go into Rafah to achieve its stated war aims of eliminating Hamas.
EA: Again, I’ll refer you to our column several months back, when we discussed whether that aim is even achievable. I’m sure there are still Hamas militants in Rafah—reportedly several battalions’ worth—but whether you can destroy them without also killing most of the civilians is an open question. And, obviously, that won’t destroy Hamas’s leadership or ideology.
MK: We’ve debated this before, and I still disagree. Capturing or killing every Hamas militant in Gaza would be a victory for Israel and a defeat for Hamas. Even Hamas seems to agree, or it wouldn’t be insisting on a cessation of hostilities as part of a hostage deal.
But the war continues. Israel has begun a limited military operation in Rafah. So, it seems that it is trying to thread the needle of eliminating Hamas, while limiting civilian casualties and the corresponding international pressure.
We will see if it works.
EA: Two things here. First, it’s interesting that you mention negotiations, because by all accounts, Hamas has accepted an agreement that would free some more hostages in exchange for a pause in hostilities, eventually leading to a permanent cessation. Israeli leaders seem opposed to it, though they’re still considering it.
But second, it’s impossible to see how one could mount even a limited operation in an environment like Rafah without killing significant numbers of civilians. The Israelis just took control of the border crossing between Gaza and Egypt, which had been the only remaining way out of the strip for civilians. They’re also reportedly preventing civilians from returning to homes in the north. So what are civilians in that situation meant to do?
They’ve been moved from area to area for six months, with the constant threat of bombing and raids, insufficient food and medical care, and no proper facilities. Now tens of thousands of Gazans are being instructed to evacuate to a small tent camp outside the city that isn’t remotely sufficient to support them. Israel is just not taking adequate care to protect civilians here. Biden is right to withhold arms—at a minimum, until the Israelis find a better plan.
MK: Hamas’s proposal, as you point out, requires a permanent cessation of hostilities. In other words, it wants the war to end so it can continue to rule over Gaza and go on to attack Israel another day. That is unacceptable to Israel because it is contrary to its goal of eliminating Hamas.
I agree that the suffering of the Palestinian civilians is heartbreaking. But the fault lies exclusively with Hamas. It could surrender immediately and zero additional Palestinians would perish. But it clearly doesn’t care about the Palestinians. Instead, innocent Palestinians are a tool in the group’s genocidal plans to wipe Israel off the map. Hamas chooses to continue to fight Israel, using civilians as shields.
The Israelis have gone to great lengths to minimize civilian casualties, but they are at war, and their understandable goals are to defeat the enemy, while also following the law of armed conflict.
There were some theoretical alternatives. Egypt could have created a refugee camp in the Sinai Peninsula, for example, but Cairo did not want to deal with the Palestinian issue, either.
If you have the ideal solution, I would love to hear it.
EA: I don’t have a good solution. There are no good solutions here.
But it worries me a lot that many of these proposed solutions are in practice war crimes. Displacing the Palestinians into Egypt, for example, is ethnic cleansing. And given the experience of Lebanon and particularly Jordan with Palestinian refugees in the past, I can’t blame the Egyptians for saying no to that.
Blaming Hamas for civilian deaths? Morally, you may be correct. But there’s a reason we don’t say that civilians whose governments don’t surrender are complicit (also a war crime!). What if Putin suddenly announced that because the government in Kyiv didn’t surrender to him, Russian forces would do their best to avoid civilian casualties but were ultimately justified in killing any unfortunate Ukrainian civilians who happened to be in the way? Would Putin be abiding by the law of armed conflict in that case? Of course not! So why is Israel given this leeway?
MK: I reject your comparison. Israel is following the law of armed conflict and going to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties. Putin is purposely targeting Ukrainian civilians. As you know, international law does not require zero civilian deaths in war. It requires following the principles of distinction and proportionality, which Israel is doing and Putin is not.
EA: I fully acknowledge that Israel is operating under difficult circumstances in Gaza. But Washington should not encourage or condone it violating these norms of conflict, unless the U.S. government wants others to start doing the same. This conflict is already doing a lot of reputational damage to the U.S., as countries rightly call the Biden administration hypocritical for focusing on atrocities in Ukraine or Syria, but aiding and abetting them in Gaza. Who’s going to take U.S. calls to push back on China arming Russia seriously when we do the same for Israel?
MK: The United States can and should stand on the side of both Israel and international law, by backing Israel’s legitimate war aims, so long as Israel continues to follow the law of armed conflict.
EA: You know as well as I do that you could drive a truck through the “proportionality” loophole in the law of armed conflict. Israel may say that it is considering civilian casualties in its decision-making process, but the numbers of dead suggest that might not be accurate. I’m also extremely concerned about reports that Israel is using AI targeting, and that there might be evidence of potential mass killings in Gaza. I still think the reputational risk to the United States—not to mention the domestic unrest—for backing Israel further is pretty severe. That’s especially true if Israel rejects a reasonable cease-fire deal in the coming days and weeks.
But before we wrap up, there have been a few developments in Ukraine that I wanted to mention. You may recall arguing, when we last debated the topic of Ukraine, that escalation risks in the conflict are overblown. But this week, we saw several indicators that Russia is escalating—reports of planned sabotage of weapons production in Western Europe, and military drills that simulate nuclear use. Both suggest that Russia is escalating in response to Western steps to send, for example, long-range weapons to Ukraine.
MK: The nuclear threats are largely a bluff at this stage. Putin has learned that when he says “nukes,” the West says that it fears “escalation” and then restrains its war effort. You’re right that Putin wants the West to curtail aid to Ukraine, but he is not literally going nuclear over it.
EA: So he’ll just set some German factories on fire? It doesn’t have to be nuclear to be a problem. But I suspect that Ukraine will continue to lose media attention as the war in Gaza grinds on. That’s bad for the Ukrainians—and probably bad for Biden. The longer the war in Gaza remains in the spotlight, the worse it looks for his reelection chances. The U.S. public remains broadly pro-Israel, but Arab Americans are clearly turning against Biden on this issue. One recent poll found that Arab American support for Biden had dropped from 59 percent in 2020 to just 17 percent today. In swing states like Michigan, that could be a problem for his campaign.
MK: Well, at least the media attention on the protesters is likely to die down. The semester is almost over and one thing kids care about more than cheugy Gaza protests is slaying a totally lit summer break.
Speaking of which, I look forward to a poppin’ time away from campus—once I finish this cringy grading.
EA: Oh, why did you remind me? There’s something we do agree on: Grading papers is the worst. Maybe I’ll go join a protest encampment instead.
The post Are Campus Protesters Heroes or Hypocrites? appeared first on Foreign Policy.
