The Self-Defeating Rhetoric of Student Protest
On Wednesday, protestors chained themselves to campus gates and espoused chants that isolate fellow students from joining their cause.
How do you get people to listen to you?
This is a question I’ve been asking myself since the beginning of what can only be described as a turbulent semester at Columbia. As the Trump administration continues to target pro-Palestinian student protestors across the nation, Columbia’s activist groups have become rightfully outraged, even more so than in prior months.
But with outrage comes a blinding fog.
As I walked across Columbia's Law Bridge on Wednesday afternoon, I noticed that members of Columbia/Barnard JVP (Jewish Voice for Peace) were gathered outside St. Paul’s Chapel (on Amsterdam Avenue) in protest of Mahmoud Khalil’s detention by ICE. Around 4:20pm, several protestors continued the demonstration by chaining themselves to the Earl Hall gate on Broadway (opposite side of campus) using bike locks. “There is only one solution, intifada revolution!” the crowd chanted.
Instead of shifting gears to focus on developing any sense of legitimacy as a derecognized campus organization, JVP-affiliated protestors remained laser-focused on promoting their maximalist, ineffective, and rigid divestment demands that have never and will never work.
Let me be clear: I wholeheartedly sympathize with pro-Palestinian activists who are outraged by the carnage in Gaza. As human beings, we should all feel the pain of Palestinian suffering that many of us have become completely numb to. And truthfully, there were some chants at the protest that I agreed with. For example, “Free Mahmoud Khalil now” is a no-brainer for me.
That said, when student protestors demand that their peers “enroll in revolution” and call for the destruction of Israel, I’m not so inclined to join that cause. Where JVP loses me—and many of my peers—are their calls for “revolution” that do not promote a two-state solution or peace in any form. You will hear campus activist groups such as JVP talk about “intifada,” “from the river to the sea,” and “f*ck Israel.” What you will never hear them talk about, ironically enough, is peace.
Indeed, sometimes it feels as though student protesters are trying to find every way to isolate those who are critical of Israel but not keffiyeh-bearing. As I watched the protest unfold, I heard something that reaffirmed my stance on the intellectual mediocrity of many student protests: “NYPD KKK, IOF they’re all the same!” they chanted repeatedly (IOF stands for “Israeli Occupation Forces” and is how activists refer to the IDF in protest of Israel’s actions).
To some students, this rallying cry is simply a way to protest the NYPD’s recent physical confrontations with student activists. But these protestors chose to take it ten steps further: They equate our city’s police force with the lynchings, arsons, and insidious terror of the Ku Klux Klan. It is intellectually lazy and blatantly offensive to conflate the NYPD—a police force that is majority people of color—with a multi-decade campaign of racial violence. JVP has made it so that it’s not enough to sympathize with Palestinian suffering: To be a true advocate, you must blindly accept the pseudo-intellectual conflation of every historical power struggle into one messy, counterfactual narrative.
I want to take a step back for a moment and acknowledge that I don’t expect JVP to miraculously find a way to convince the Trump administration to stop dubiously abducting non-American pro-Palestinian activists, or to stop supplying the IDF with American weapons. That said, if pro-Palestinian student groups want even a chance of having genuine negotiations with Acting University President Shipman’s new administration—or even if they want the respect of students who don’t agree with the “intifada revolution”—they must reevaluate their messaging.
At this moment, groups like JVP are doing everything they can to shut out students like me, who still have no true outlet to advocate for Palestinian life without engaging in overly-simplistic and tactless rhetoric.
It’s unclear if JVP and its allies will realize that they can only benefit from a less historically reductive and more inclusive brand of activism. Ultimately, their legacy will depend on whether they can see past their blinding anger, which has only detracted from the cause of alleviating Palestinian suffering. The choice is theirs.
Mr. Nagin is a junior in the Trinity College Dublin Dual BA program studying political science. He is the deputy editor of Sundial. Follow him on Substack @alexandernagin.
Any group slanders the NYPD like that and my first instinct is to do everything I can to actively oppose their cause.
Sorry but it seems the JVP can’t accommodate people who want to have it both ways - to support a righteous cause AND support an apartheid state.
They don’t seem to want to change the subject from divestment to their being banned by the admin.
It’s not just about them.