The Real Issue with Campus Protests

And why ignoring it will leave everyone at an impasse

Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash

The Illinois Marathon 5K was cancelled last night because the police who would have otherwise minded the race route were called away to help contain the pro-Palestinian protests taking place on campus. By around midnight, the university administration and the protestors were able to come to a temporary agreement that involved both pressing pause until morning on the protests and relocating the encampment. As the Chancellor noted in his email, it was a solution that would please no one.

The reasons such a move would likely anger both sides are worth understanding.

In some ways, it seems fairly straightforward to think through why such a step would frustrate the protestors and their allies. I imagine it would feel like giving in or compromising on an issue they feel warrants strength and tenacity.

So, why might supporters of Israel be upset by the administration moving, instead of shutting down, the encampments? Are they callously indifferent to the thousands of lives lost in Gaza? Do they view Palestinian lives as simply worth less than Israeli ones? If you see the answer to these questions as obviously “yes” and “yes,” you might want to ask yourself why you came to that conclusion. Especially, given there’s another possible explanation.

For starters, someone who supports Israel might feel that the country is being unfairly treated as the aggressor, while the Palestinians are seen as the victims. Seeing Israel as the obvious aggressor is, in some ways, a natural extension of the idea that counting casualties is the right way to figure out the moral tally of responsibility. However, reasonable people could probably disagree on this point.

There’s another reason supporters of Israel might be angry with the Chancellor’s decision. One of the main demands of the protestors, on my campus as well as others, appears to be divestment. To someone who sympathizes with Israel, what might such a decision mean? By rolling the mental playbook forward slightly on the thought experiment, we can get a glimpse into what such a world might look like.

If Israel were cut off from the support of the United States in a significant way, their military power would likely suffer. Not only that, but such a move would be a blow in the court of public opinion that would be difficult, if not impossible, to recover from. Given these two factors, it seems likely that, whether through violence, international pressure, or some combination of the two, Israel would likely cave. Caving, in this case, whether it’s through a one-state solution, granting the right of return, or something similar, ultimately has a specific implication. That is: Israel would cease to exist as a Jewish nation-state.

Now, a Palestinian supporter might think, great, that’s exactly the outcome that we want and need. To which a supporter of Israel might respond by pointing out that the Jewish nation state was itself set up as a safe haven after the atrocities of World War II.

Earlier, we mentioned the idea of a moral tally. If counting bodies isn’t the only way to think about moral culpability here, then suddenly there’s a world where Israel could cease to exist as a Jewish state having done nothing to warrant its dissolution [For careful readers, this is not necessarily the same thing as having done nothing wrong. A separate conversation could be had about what, if anything, would actually warrant the dissolution of a nation-state and who would decide.]

The upshot is this: This single question—Does Israel have the right to exist as a Jewish nation-state?—sits at the heart, not only of much of the conflict itself, but of the broader way we think and communicate about it. And until or unless campuses engage with this point, co-existence on this topic will probably remain out of reach.

Engagement won’t be easy. After all, most campuses have avoided dealing with moral complexity on heated issues for years—they’ve instead pretended that there was a position that good people held and a position that bad people held on issues around race, gender, and the like. The thing is, the answers weren’t simple then and they aren’t simple now.