Memo to Campus Protesters: It Isn't Working

 

Memo to campus protesters:  I am not quite sure what you are trying to achieve, but if it is anything more than just draw attention to yourself, it isn't working.  Certainly you are not achieving anything in terms of ending the war.

So far as I can tell, most of the campus protesters have given up on actually ending the war and are focusing on getting their colleges to divest from any companies that do business with Israel.  Needless to say, the impact of such divestment on the immediate humanitarian crisis will be essentially zero. Nor will divestment lead to the destruction of Israel, which appears to be the end game.  So what is the point?  If the point is to avoid being complicit in moral evil -- well there are a whole lot of moral evils left in the world that you will still be complicit in.

The usual response of protesters to any criticism whatever is that whatever conduct you are criticizing is trivial compared to "genocide" in Gaza.  And just for the record, I actually agree that it is not inconsistent or hypocritical to protest this war and not numerous other wars going on in the world today.  Other wars may have a higher total death toll, but that is out of a larger baseline population, and over a longer time span. The damage to housing has been described as "unseen since WWII."  And certainly it is fair and reasonable to focus more effort on a war being fought with US weapons and funding that we have considerable leverage to stop than one where our role and our leverage is minimal.

But these protests are less than worthless and ending the carnage.  Before the student protests, there were numerous stories about the suffering in Gaza, Israel's obstructive inspections of humanitarian aid and the like.  The protests have moved the focus here and taken it off the actual war.

Underlying the whole escalation is a flawed assumption that the more extreme the measure, the more effective.  If marches and demonstrations don't turn public opinion against Israel, try camping out in the quad. If that is not effective, then seize buildings. If that doesn't work, bar access to the school to anyone who does not support your cause and block traffic. The assumption seems to be that being in a miles-long traffic jam will finally alert people that the war is wrong.  Sorry, dudes, it doesn't work that way.  It just makes you, rather than the war, the story and makes people angry about the disruption.

At this point, protesters may ask what do I suggest as an alternative.  What could they have done?  Well, so far as I can tell, while the rank and file protesters are ill-informed newbies who were recently focused on some other cause de juer, the leadership of the movement seems to consist of actual Palestinians -- mostly women.*  This gives the movement a real authenticity and refutes people dismissing it as mere "cosplay."

So here is my suggestion.  Why not hold teach-ins and give these women the chance to tell their stories. Palestinians in the US, whether citizens or students on visas, invariably have family members killed in the war, homes destroyed, people who fled their homes, only to be bombed in supposed safe refuges, and so forth. With today's instant communications, these family members have presumably sent photographs and videos to relatives in the US.  So tell their stories, show the pictures and videos, bring this war home to people., make it real. Make this an exercise in citizen journalism.  Invite the college newspaper to attend and publish the stories.  Invite your local newspapers to do the same.  Publish this on social media -- Twitter, Tik-Tok, Facebook, You-Tube, podcasts, etc.  Set up websites and old-style blogs.  Urge readers/viewers/listeners to contact their members of Congress and call for an end to funding of the war.  Provide a link to find who your member of Congress is.  

These actions may be of limited value.  Evidence suggests that the real secret to reaching a large audience is to tape in to one of the major communications nodes that draws large numbers of viewers.  But that is where being part of an elite institution really matters.  Presumably at least some of these students have the sort of elite connections that give them an inside line to major communications nodes.  Use them to contact these nodes and get your story out.  That is how you build the sort of political pressure that might actually force our government to stop supporting this war.

PS:  The latest word on negotiations is that Netanyahu is telling Hamas that if they will release hostages, he will delay a few weeks before he moves in to finish them off.  Needless to say, this is just another way of saying he has no desire for a negotiated end to the war.

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*So where are the Palestinian men?  I don't know, but my guess is they are the ones harassing Jews on the street.