Campus protests: Back to the '60s, but with a nasty twist

Most American universities will mercifully be entering “finals week” within the next fortnight, which means the end of the spring semester.

Mercifully? Because the end of the semester means most students will be going home for the summer, and that means the anti-Israel protests on campuses will peter out.

Fewer students on campus means no need to occupy the quad area and shout slogans calling for Israel’s destruction – “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”; for the killing of Israelis – “Intifada, intifada”; and for the erasure of Jews from public spaces – “We want to say it clear, we don’t want no Zionists here.”

The uniform pup tents to house the student protesters that sprouted up the last couple of weeks on campuses across the country – from very prestigious ones to community colleges – will fold up, not because the administrators are taking a hard line against protesters shouting racist slogans and intimidating Jewish students, although at some universities they have started to do just that, but because summer vacation beckons.

Or, as Alice Cooper screamed in his iconic 1972 song: “School’s out for the summer.” Granted, some students are enrolled in summer semester programs, but their number is far fewer.

The lyrics to Cooper’s song “School’s Out,” according to a Wikipedia entry, “indicate that not only is the school year ended for summer vacation, but ended forever, and that the school itself has been literally blown up.”

Here are some of those lyrics: “Well, we got no class/And we got no principals/And we got no intelligence/We can’t even think of a word that rhymes/School’s out for summer/School’s out forever/School’s been blown to pieces.”

Some radio stations, according to Wikipedia, “banned the song from their airwaves, saying it gave the students an impression of rebelliousness against childhood education.”

This song was a minor anthem of rebelliousness, reflecting the antiestablishment, anti-war spirit of the times. The ’60s, so romanticized in popular culture and in the minds of many people who lived through them, bled into the early ’70s when this song was written.

It is that spirit of the ’60s that seems to be animating many of the fellow travelers on campuses protesting against Israel – in their eyes, the symbol of the established order they want to tear down. It’s the new radical chic.

TOM WOLFE, who coined the phrase radical chic, did so in a 1970 magazine story lampooning conductor Leonard Bernstein and his wife for holding a fundraiser for the Black Panthers in their luxurious Park Avenue apartment. The term refers to the well-off and elitists endorsing radical leftist causes because it is fashionable, to assuage white guilt, and as a form of virtue signaling.

If Wolfe found Bernstein hosting a Black Panther fundraiser incongruous, he would have had a field day at an event hosted by “Queers for Palestine.”

Among some of the elites today, or at least those on elite campuses, the fashionable cause now – believe it or not – is Hamas. While, at first blush, this may seem unfathomable – how could idealistic youth find their heroes in murderers and rapists supported by Iran? – this should not surprise anyone. Just think of the lionization of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro by the radical chic set in the past.

Social media are currently inundated with clips from protests at universities, where demonstrators, attending institutions costing upwards of $75,000 a year, seem to have little understanding of why they are demonstrating, what they are protesting, or who is who in the Middle East.

Those starring in these videos seem to be rebels without a cause, rebels looking for a cause, and rebels grasping onto this one because it is there and it is hip.

Who are the protestors?

This, of course, does not explain all those at those demonstrations. You can’t paint the whole crowd with one brush.

Among the protesters are Palestinians and Arabs who hate Israel and want to see it disappear; minorities projecting the difficulties they face in America onto the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; social justice warriors who genuinely believe that Israel is committing atrocities; woke foot soldiers who believe the Jewish state has what is coming to it; random antisemites; and radical left-wing token Jews whose presence at these protests is spotlighted in the American media, which, by contrast, view blacks or gays at Donald Trump MAGA rallies as aberrations at best and turncoats at worst.

And then there are those along for the ride, looking for a cause, wanting to relive their grandparents’ hippie/yippie/revolutionary days – and this cause allows them to do it.

Sit-ins in the university president’s office, bullhorns on the quad, the takeover of Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall, solidarity behind a cause – heck, Woodstock must be just around the corner. It’s the ’60s all over again.

Just that it isn’t.

Gaza is not Vietnam; the Vietcong never tried to destroy America; Hamas terrorists are not freedom fighters; and these are not anti-war protesters.

THE STUDENTS and outside agitators who took over Columbia’s campus this week are not against war. No, they are only against a war that the Jews win. The slogan heard at these protests, “We don’t want no two states, we want 1948,” is not an anti-war slogan. Rather, it is a pro-war slogan where the Arabs are the victors, and the Jews are the vanquished.

The ubiquitous “From the river to the sea” chant is not John Lennon’s “All we are saying is give peace a chance.” Instead, it is a call for the overthrow of the Jewish state. And how do the chanters think that is going to come about? Through peaceful means, by throwing a tea party?

The primary aim of Hamas and nearly every Palestinian national group that has arisen since the dawn of Zionism has never been the creation of a Palestinian state, but, rather, the prevention of the existence of a Jewish one.

Einat Wilf, a former MK and coauthor of the book The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace, quoted in a recent lecture the words British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin said to the British Parliament in 1947 explaining why Britain was returning its mandate over Palestine to the United Nations.

“His Majesty’s government have thus been faced with an irreconcilable conflict of principles,” said Bevin, who was no friend of the Jews or the Zionist cause. “For the Jews the essential point of principle is the creation of a sovereign Jewish state. For the Arabs, the essential point of principle is to resist to the last the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine.”

That is the meaning of the chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” – that the area from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea will be free of a Jewish state. The establishment of a Palestinian state is but a secondary aim, one that the Palestinians could have had several times in the past, had that been their objective.

All of that, however, is lost on those protesters who are along for the ride, who are adopting this as their cause because it is the intersectional flavor of the month.

Why the colleges were not in an uproar over the death of two million Sudanese in a civil war there from 1993-2005, or when Syria’s President Bashar Assad killed half a million Arabs, or when Russia invaded Ukraine, or when the Chinese locked up Uyghurs in concentration camps is a question that needs to be asked. But – for a variety of reasons – “Palestine” resonates, and for some college students, this is their ’60s moment.

Those who believe that it is, indeed, their ’60s moment need to ask themselves why so many of those protesting with them are wearing masks. Why are they covering their faces? One would think that those marching for a just cause would not be ashamed to show their faces. Ku Klux Klan members wore hoods to hide their faces; the civil rights marchers did not.

Some will reply that protesters wear masks so as not to face reprisals from the police, current or prospective employers, or neighbors. The Klansmen, however, could have given a similar reply.

AS SUMMER recess begins, much of the momentum will be taken out of these protests – at least on campus. That in itself is a good thing since the protests are now hourly features on the 24/7 news, creating a distorted picture of masses of Americans turning on Israel. It is a vocal, photogenic few, not the masses, and as campuses shut down, those protests will fade from the television screen.

The protests, however, will surely reemerge elsewhere. But when they do, when demonstrators block the roads to Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, or the Golden Gate Bridge, or the Brooklyn Bridge, the local authorities may take a firmer hand in removing them than college administrators, some of whom said they were concerned about the chilling effect dismantling the anti-Israel encampments on campus would have on free speech.

Much may change in the three months before campuses across America come back to full life in late August with the start of the fall semester. The hostages may be released by then; the IDF may have entered Rafah; the war in Gaza may be over, and a new one in Lebanon may be under way.

Nevertheless, the issue of Israel, Palestine, and the Mideast is not going anywhere and will likely flare up with ferocity at the Democratic National Convention to be held in Chicago from August 19 to 22.

For those using this conflict as a vehicle to relive the ’60s, this will be the perfect moment, and organizers of anti-Israel protests who will seek to bring demonstrators to Chicago will undoubtedly conjure up the image of the chaotic 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention.

At that convention, held in the shadow of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the Democrats nominated Hubert Humphrey, while outside the hall the Chicago police unleashed its fury against anti-war protesters led by Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, and Jerry Rubin.

That was vintage ’60s, the quintessential ’60s. Those who think being anti-Israel today is the newest incarnation of being against the Vietnam War yesterday will pour into Chicago en masse. Expect it.

Ironically, however, one of the most memorable moments at that convention will be reversed.

On the third day of the four-day convention, Connecticut senator Abraham Ribicoff, who was Jewish, nominated George McGovern as president and, going off script, denounced police “Gestapo tactics” in the streets of Chicago. The cameras then panned to Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, who could be seen shouting and, according to numerous reports, said: “F*** you, you Jew son of a b****, you lousy m*****f*****, go home!”

It’s a safe bet that some of the anti-Israel protesters that will gather in Chicago in August will be using similar language to express a similar sentiment. However, their vile imprecations will not be aimed at one Jewish senator but rather at an entire Jewish state.

Welcome back to the ’60s, but with a very nasty twist. •