On a sunny afternoon in Manhattan last month, the noisy chants and drumbeats of the Columbia University demonstrations faded as I walked down toward Riverside Drive, where tulips were in bloom and Norway maple were budding. In the city no less than here Upstate, spring is enlivening, and nature is comforting in its regularity.
So are certain markers on the calendar, like the academic year. Administrators at Columbia and at the dozens of other campuses where demonstrations about the Gaza conflict have spread are hoping that passage of time and the end of the semester will lower the volume and urgency of the protests, and maybe bring peace to their campuses.
If that’s happens, it will be no thanks to so many of our political leaders, who are elbowing for advantage in the unrest of the moment – mostly by claiming that the loud pleas for attention to the suffering in Gaza are in fact dangerous expressions of antisemitism and markers of the dominance of the radical left in higher education. Nowhere is a nuanced and thoughtful analysis more needed – yet less apparent – than in our response to what is arguably the most morally complex issue in global affairs today.
The brutal conflict in Gaza is a dispute with a long history, of course – rooted in the early Zionist movement of the late-19th century, or perhaps in the time of Kings Saul and David, or maybe even in the events remembered in last month’s Passover seders, which depicted the flight of Israelis from Egyptian slavery. In all that history, as in today’s conflict, there is nothing less at stake than justice for the oppressed. What is argued among thoughtful people nowadays is where the line lies between justice and oppression.
Raw partisanship, clearly, is not a useful tool for drawing such a distinction.
Those ancient tensions present issues nearly impossible to fully resolve today. Yet that doesn’t excuse the misplaced focus of those who are eager to distract us from that task. Instead, they draw our attention to what is usually the protected environment of American college campuses — a place where young people should be free to question and argue and even make dumb mistakes as they grow. Students shouting loud and sometimes ugly words shouldn’t be overlooked, certainly – and vandalism and abusive behavior should be punished – but the offenses ought to be considered in scale.
But no. “Just look at that,” the politicians insist, “those unruly kids calling for violence!” Rather than joining in what should be a bipartisan effort to help bring peace to a torn land where each side has committed awful atrocities on the other, the politicians are taking an easier course: finding a bright place for themselves as they draw a spotlight to the campuses. In that, they are only exacerbating domestic divisions. In that distortion of what’s truly important, we are served up what amounts to a lie.
The irresponsibility is bipartisan, and it is transparently transactional. House Speaker Mike Johnson, somehow concluding that his presence would be useful, stood at the center of the Columbia campus with a band of fellow Republicans and demanded the resignation of the university president, Minouche Shafik. Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo wrote in The Wall Street Journal of what he called “threats, terror tactics and menacing conduct” at the university – a “disgrace,” he said, that was “criminal conduct.”
Might this focus be explained because of the desire to please the outsized clout of the Israeli lobby in Washington, and the power of the money behind it in political campaigns? Or is it because Republicans see a chance that their attacks on higher education might underscore the anti-elitist current and class warfare that helped propel Donald Trump to the White House eight years ago?
To be clear, antisemitism cannot be tolerated – not on college campuses in 2024 any more than in the streets of Charlottesville in 2017, where Donald Trump ignored chants of “Jews shall not replace us!” by declaring that there were “good people on both sides.” But the three days I spent on the Columbia campus during last month’s demonstrations — while I was attending an alumni event — convinced me that rather than exhibiting antisemitism, most demonstrators were speaking up for what they perceived as justice, which is of course a key tenet of Judaism.
Yet demonstrators are attacking university administrations from the left even as Republican politicians blast them from the right. Not for nothing is a university presidency considered one of the worst jobs in the country just now.
But any sort of even-handedness — including finding fault with both Israel and its critics — doesn’t play well at the extremes of American politics, which is where campaign energy and financial support reside. Maybe it’s naïve to imagine avoiding this sort of division, because that would assume a measure of good will on the part of all players in society. And that is often sacrificed on the altar of political opportunity, claiming as victims even those who try to avoid partisan pitfalls, as university presidents must, whether they’re in New York City or New Orleans or New Paltz.
Perhaps our best hope in the face of the over-simplification of issues and the manufacture of easy targets by politicians is to resist the urge ourselves: to recognize that issues as fraught as the conflict in Gaza will not be solved by demonizing one group or another, nor will tensions surrounding hard topics diminish by imposing repression.
Spring, a time of loosening the bonds of cold and welcoming the flow of nature, is an apt moment for such an awakening.