Student sit-ins are back in fashion. The war between Hamas and Israel has reinvented them.
All the old favourites are making cameo appearances: students who say they are merely expressing their constitutional rights, critics who dismiss these students as dupes of professional agitators, the professional agitators themselves.
What has brought about this reprise is the Israel-Hamas war. It is not a new war. The Middle East conflict has been going on in one form or another for years.
All the storylines are well-known. There is the Israeli version, which presents the Jewish state as a plucky little country which, by some miracle of history, has been able to survive in a sea of hostility.
And there is the Palestinian version, which presents Palestine as nation betrayed, a quasi-state to whom much is promised but little given.
Whatever the Palestinians do it is never enough. If they resists Israel’s establishment of Jewish settlements on Palestinian lands, they are called terrorists. If they don’t, they are mocked as weak and ineffectual.
The current conflict in Gaza, say the Palestinians, is a reiteration of this familiar story. In this story, Israel is not just a racist state but an apartheid one that, like its South African namesake, is inherently immoral.
A familiar story. But the sheer brutality of the war in Gaza has given it greater relevance for a new generation of student activists.
From California to New York, students are echoing the Palestinian critique. In Canada, the Palestinian cause has currency at McGill University, the University of Ottawa, the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia, all of which have played host to sit-ins or occupations.
Those who oppose the new emphasis on Palestinian rights call it antisemitic. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has warned that the new sit-ins might make Jewish students at McGill feel less safe.
In the U.S., some legislators want to prevent students from supporting the Palestinian cause in any form, arguing that it is intrinsically antisemitic.
But the student demonstrators refuse to accept that definition. The Gaza war, they say, is not about antisemitism. It is about basic human rights. The demonstrators have resurrected the strategy of divestment, calling on universities to cut all economic ties with Israel.
They want universities world wide to shun Israel.
In normal times, such demands might be deemed extreme. But in a world which is watching Palestinian babies dying in real time, they appear much more palatable.
In that sense, today’s student activists are the logical result of Israel’s current extremist government. They are, in a perverse way, the spiritual heirs of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
But they also carry the moral clout of previous generations of student activists. In the U.S. and Canada, such activists are credited with taking positions on issues like Vietnam War that eventually became accepted wisdom.
Already, some newscasts refer to pro-Palestinian student activists critical of Israel’s war in Gaza as “anti-war” demonstrators. If these demonstrators keep their heads, they could become a moral force in the world’s approach to the fraught issue of Palestine.
