Opinion: Why student protests against Israel are so painful, polarizing and complicated

Editor’s Note: Nicole Hemmer is an associate professor of history and director of the Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Center for the Study of the Presidency at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s”and cohosts the podcasts “Past Present” and “This Day in Esoteric Political History.” The views expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.

As the situations in Israel and Gaza grow more dire — both for the Israeli hostages and Gazans under bombardment — American discourse surrounding the growing crisis increasingly has locked in on one sliver of US life: the university. There have been plenty of opinion pieces in national outlets, with headlines like “The War Comes to Stanford” and “Students for Pogroms in Israel.”

But there have also been more material criticisms. After several Harvard student groups announced that they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence” following the Hamas attack on the country that left at least 1,500 dead, billionaire hedge fund CEO Bill Ackman and others called for the students’ names and details to be made publicly available in order to blacklist them from future jobs — essentially also calling for them to be doxxed. A nonprofit founded by Victoria’s Secret billionaire Leslie Wexner, and his wife Abigail, announced that it was breaking ties with Harvard, alleging the school has been “tiptoeing” over the Hamas’ attack.

At the University of Pennsylvania, the Huntsman Foundation (led by former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman) withdrew its promised multimillion-dollar donations this week, arguing that the university’s delay in commenting on the attack amounted to “silence in the face of reprehensible and historic Hamas evil.” And as Huntsman, also a former ambassador and former Penn trustee, wrote in his email to Penn’s president, “silence is antisemitism.”

Historical context matters here, because harsh reactions among the American establishment to college students and their political activism are not new to the current crisis. Student radicals have been targets of condemnation since at least the early 1960s, when they experimented with new forms of protest against anti-Black racism, the Vietnam War, poverty and censorship. “I think they oughta shoot ‘em if they’re carrying the Vietcong flag,” actor John Wayne said of the protests.

Though they were part of pivotal movements for social change, the students themselves wielded much less power than most other people in society — certainly less than politicians, business leaders and university presidents. So why do these students receive such outsized attention?

In part, no doubt, it’s a question of fear: fear that a rising generation will fundamentally transform the country, rewriting its politics in ways that appall the people currently in power. That has yet to bear out in reality; the 1980s and 1990s, for instance, were not decades of left-wing radicalism by middle-aged Boomers (many of whom had fought the Vietnam War), but rather an era of marked conservatism in US politics. There were, of course, cultural changes, but on the political front, it would have been difficult to guess that, say, the Democratic Party that voted for the Iraq invasion in 2003 had, 30 years earlier, been torn apart by antiwar protesters opposed to US actions in Vietnam.

It’s fair (and important) to note that the students being criticized now for their protests are by far in the minority of their peers, in part because social media and news outlets have highlighted the most incendiary and shocking voices, muting the more nuanced discussions that define many of the conversations and positions held by student activists. But watching this all play out in recent days, it seems like there is a more important dynamic at play, a different lesson derived from the 1960s. People with real power have learned, over the decades and most acutely in the last few years, to use student protests and youth-driven radicalism as a political tool, pointing to the content of protests to delegitimize entire parties and movements.

Students can be at times ham-fisted, doctrinaire, blinkered and strident in their protest. In the 1960s, student radicals occasionally waved the Viet Cong flag to show solidarity with the people of Vietnam. Others flashed the Little Red Book of Mao Zedong, a Chinese leader whose policies led to millions of deaths. Such symbols became important touchstones for some students who were working to make sense of, and oppose, American imperialism, a political stance with few other outlets in the US (certainly the two-party system had little to offer them).

Such techniques also made students tempting targets at a time when US soldiers were dying in firefights with the Viet Cong, and when sympathy for the millions of Vietnamese killed or displaced by the war was hard to find. An image of a student with a Viet Cong flag allowed supporters of the war to argue that the entire antiwar movement was actually anti-American. As a bonus, the sight of such students made it easy to dismiss young people across the country, and leftism more broadly, as uninformed, unpatriotic and unworthy of support, without ever having to engage with the students’ critiques of American power.

There was no need to engage, because the students themselves had little power of their own. Universities could, and did, suspend and expel student protesters. Police could, and did, brutalize and arrest them. Political parties could, and did, ignore and overrule them (although the Democratic Party would ultimately reform its practices to allow greater representation of young people, a reform that did not dramatically change the party’s politics in the years that followed).

But students did have the power to disrupt, to grab camera time and to create the iconic imagery of an era. For that reason, it was easy to imagine they had far more power than they did, easy for people with actual power and material resources to imagine themselves to be victims of these students. President Richard Nixon invoked the “silent majority” in 1969, suggesting that US politics had been hijacked by the unruly, unrepresentative protestors that dominated the nightly news, that patriotic Americans had to take their country back. President Ronald Reagan railed against student protestors as governor of California in the late 1960s, building himself a platform to eventually become president. The students may not have gotten their revolution, but conservative politicians found them useful for gaining power of their own.

A similar dynamic appears alive and well today. Students at a number of schools across the US have rallied for Palestinians, at times blaming Israel for Hamas’ attack as part of a broader denunciation of the treatment of Palestinians in Gaza. Critics in particular have called out National Students for Justice in Palestine for its “day of resistance” that explicitly celebrated the attacks and sought to lay blame for the violence entirely on Israel. That position is offensive for most, especially for fellow students who may rightly feel alienated or horrified by their colleagues’ efforts, but nothing coming from US universities has, at this point, moved the needle on national support for Israel, which appears to be strengthening.

But it has earned many students swift retribution, in the form of lost jobs, broad condemnation and the threat of industry blacklists. It has also been used to discredit the left more broadly. For some, that’s precisely the point. Christopher Rufo, a right-wing activist who has built a career on attacking universities (and for explaining in detail how he carries out his propaganda), laid out his plan on social media, arguing that, by connecting Hamas, Black Lives Matter, Democratic Socialists of America and academic discourse, the right can “attack, delegitimize and discredit” universities and the American left, turning them into “political untouchables.”

Such a maneuver requires most Americans to believe that students have outsized power, that they have the potential to orchestrate the nation’s politics and so must be shut down at any costs by those who disagree with these students’ political causes. That simply isn’t the case. You may hate these student activists’ words and actions, but they’re not the ones with the power here. We should be focused on the people who do have that power, and on how they’re using it.