foto: Alisdare Hickson / Flickr/Propalestine protest in London in 2018 (illustrative image)
In the past few months, a many videos and photos showing pro-Palestinian protests on American universities have appeared in the media and on social networks. The strikes take place in slightly different ways at each university, but they all share a common victim: gullible students.
Protests at universities are usually characterized by marches through campus, camping on campus and sometimes violent attempts to break into campus buildings. While some smaller universities have hundreds of students taking part in these activities, Ivy League universities have thousands who do so - and dozens of arrests from these. In addition to left-leaning and Arab students, the protests also involve members of various political, religious, and radical groups. Indeed, the demonstrations do not only feature anti-colonial, anti-Israeli or pro-Palestinian views, but the participants also criticise US policy and, above all, and it's extensive investment in the war effort and armaments.
Israel, and especially the idea of Zionism as the return of the Jewish people to their ancient homeland and the establishment of an independent state, is in the eyes of the protesters a product of European colonialism. According to the demonstrators, the Palestinian Arabs, on the other hand, are the original inhabitants of the land and the European Jews who came to the country in the first half of the last century colonized it. However, the history is much more complicated, as Jews lived in Palestine in small numbers after the forced Roman exodus of them from the land in the first century, even before the Islamic conquest of the land in the seventh century.
The problem of these students, however, is not simply their ignorance of the history of the Jews, Zionism, Arab-Jewish coexistence in Palestine, or the general background of the conflict, but their highly superficial familiarity with the issue they are protesting about. This problem is apparent in many videos that show interviews with protesters. When asked what their chants of "Intifada" and "from the river to the sea" mean or which area is being discussed, the protesters usually have no idea where Israel, Gaza or the West Bank is located. Indeed, the Gaza war serves more as a case study on which to reflect anti-colonialist theories and, above all, the frustration associated with the ongoing stigmatisation and discrimination of certain groups in American society.
Pro-Palestinian protests, who are they against?
Protests that seek to show solidarity with the Palestinian people have been taking place since the beginning of the war in Gaza, which erupted as a result of the attack on Israeli kibbutzim by thousands of Hamas terrorists and other Islamist radical groups in the early hours of Saturday 7th of October 2023. Israel responded to this attack with a retaliatory operation in the Strip, where according to sources from the Al-Jazeera television station more than 43,000 Gazans have been killed. It is precisely the videos and photographs of the victims in Gaza that are rapidly spreading around the world thanks to social media, which act as an avalanche triggering a multitude of emotions and solidarity towards those who are suffering.
The visual record of the disaster in the Strip is usually enough to bring upon a humanistic desire amongst people to help the oppressed and to show compassion from their own perceived privileged and Western position. However, an initially noble gesture full of good intentions can easily turn sour in the psyche of the crowd of demonstrators. As a result, we can often see protesters wearing Hamas headbands chanting genocidal slogans against the Jewish people. The romanticization of the struggle for the freedom of the oppressed can easily turn into the support of terrorism and racial hatred due to ignorance of the nuances of the conflict.
According to the independent organization ISGAP, which maps the growth of anti-Semitism around the world, Another possible reason why pro-Palestinian ,or mainly anti-Israel protests at universities have intensified is also the particular manner in which American universities are being funded. In their research, which has been systematically conducted since 2012, researchers from ISGAP have demonstrated a financial flow in the form of billions of dollars between some Arab states, especially Qatar, and American universities. However, these information has not yet been revealed by the US Department of Education. According to ISGAP, these funds have been demonstrably used for a long time to support the anti-democratic and anti-Semitic ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood on university campuses across the country.
Whether the main reason to protest would be a sense of solidarity, frustration concerning the poor political, social and health state of the US, an ideological belief or rather, the result of idea-centered manipulation, it is necessary to look at these demonstrations as a complex of facts that are all interconnected. However, only a handful of these demonstrators would probably eventually support the building and sustainment of a viable Palestinian state. Yet ,no other factor can impact the world and the future more than strong-visioned young people, so it is paramount for them to change it for the better.
Tagy