On April 17, Columbia University students launched the anti-Gaza war protest heard around the world. They established encampments on the campus to demand an end to Israel’s war and university divestment from Israel and US companies arming Israel. The protest spread to scores of universities and colleges from, as they say, “from sea to shining sea,” and to universities in more than half a dozen other countries.

Protest opponents claim they back Palestinian Hamas and Lebanese Hizbollah, both dubbed “terrorist” groups rather than legitimate anti-occupation organisations by the US and some Western countries. While critics claim protesters are antisemitic (anti-Jewish), many are Jewish students who have joined Muslims, Christians, Whites, Blacks, Latinos, Asians and indigenous colleagues to call for an end to the war.

An attack by pro-Israel thugs on the protest camp at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles rompted armed police backed up by armoured cars to arrest protesters, evict the rest, and demolish their tents.

While echoing the anti-Vietnam war protests in the 1960s and 1970s, the ongoing protests more closely resemble the US student demonstrations during the 1980s against the apartheid regime in South Africa which did not end until Washington ceased its backing for apartheid and the racist regime fell. Many student protesters see a parallel between White-dominated South Africa and argue apartheid has been imposed on Palestinians by Israel’s occupation.

This protest movement has demonstrated that the Gaza war appears to have energised the somnolent younger generation penned up at home during covid and given students a cause. While previous protests were largely mounted by Whites, those taking part in the current movement come from all racial and ethnic communities.

They see themselves taking a principled stand on a war raging on the other side of the world. Many have followed the course of the conflict through satellite television or social media where they witnessed horrifying events in real time. They have been shocked and traumatised seeing children who have lost limbs, men digging family members from under the rubble of their homes, and women crooning over the white shrouded corpses of husbands, sons, and daughters.

Some students may regard pro-Palestinian protests as a means to revolt against the stultifying stasis in Washington which is dominated by lobbies, oligarchs and the military-industrial complex. Others may regard the Gaza war as representative of a cruel range of widely disproportionate assaults taking place across the US and the world.

With little in common in their backgrounds, US youths now share the experience of solidarity against the Gaza war. Solidarity is powerful and gripping, particularly when aimed at The Politico-Economic Establishment which cares nothing about the interests of current and future generations on existential issues like race, climate change and the environment.

Protests can also be enlightening. During the occupation of campuses there are teach-ins by students who know something of the history of the 75-year-old Palestinian-Israeli/Arab-Israeli conflict. Many of those involved will be better informed, take further interest in world affairs, and judge US politicians on what they do about Gaza and other crucial foreign and domestic policy issues.

Gaza war activists will be marked for life like those, including Senator Bernie Sanders, who remains proud to have protested the Vietnam war. For many, those protests were their first political expression. Some of Sanders’ generation have pursued an enlightened career in politics.

President Joe Biden neither fought in Vietnam nor chose to protest that war. When asked in 1987 why he took this decision, he replied with a flippant remark, “I wore sports coats. You’re looking at a middle-class guy. I am who I am. I’m not big on flak jackets and tie-dyed shirts and — you know, that’s not me.”

While dismissing the defining dissident movement of his generation, he appears to be dismissing the protests which could deny him re-election if enough 18, 10, and 20-year-olds decide not to vote for him in the predicted match-up with Donald Trump. Trump has called for the National Guard to use force to break up protests with force.

Some university administrators have waited-out the protests, listened to the students and promised to consider their demands, preventing confrontation. Others have suspended or expelled students and called in armed cops in helmets and flak jackets so they look like Israeli troops invading Gaza. Administrators who have taken the second option have deepened the existing generational divide afflicting the US.

A YouGov poll released on May 4 showed that 53 per cent of adults felt that college administrators who took a tough stand were “about right” or “not harsh enough.” That number reached 68 per cent for respondents of 65 and above.

Today there are over 15 million undergraduate students in the US. White students comprise 41 per cent, Latino students 18 per cent, Black students 11 per cent and Asian students 6 per cent, the rest were of mixed race, indigenous, and Pacific islanders. Women outnumber men by 58 to 42 per cent.

It is interesting to note that whites are 61 per cent of the US population of 335 million, Latinos 18.5 per cent, Blacks 12.2 per cent, and Asians 5.6 per cent. While Whites are underrepresented on college campuses, Latinos, Blacks and Asians account for almost the same percentages as in the population as a whole.

Significantly, more than half of Whites belonging to the 20 per cent of Whites who did not go to university are Trump’s core voters. Some are associated with supremacist White organisations and favour harsh treatment of protesting students. The latest polls show Trump, with a 46 per cent approval rating , is leading Biden, with 44 per cent, in the presidential election race. Students protesting Biden’s backing for Israel’s Gaza war will have to chose between two bad options in November.

Photo: TNS