You know you’re succeeding when your drama is turning into an American psychodrama. As students in the United States continue to protest Israel’s slaughter in Gaza and its destruction of wide swathes of the territory to make life there impossible, the plight of the Palestinians is becoming a central moral issue for a generation of young Americans who can’t bear to see this obscenity continue.
Israel wanted its retaliation to be unforgettable, so that Palestinians would never again attempt an attack like that of October 7. But there are two consequences here. The more the Israelis continue to mercilessly bomb Gaza’s population, the more embarrassing it becomes for those American institutions that oppose divesting from Israel—with Columbia University expressing such a refusal on April 29.
As a consolation, Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, offered to “make investments in health and education in Gaza, including supporting early childhood development and support for displaced scholars.” How revealing that Shafik, in that one sentence, seemed to admit that three of the things Israel has most wantonly destroyed in Gaza are the health and education sectors, and small children.
The second result is that the more destruction the Israelis visit on Gaza, the more Hamas will gain in popularity. Supporters of Israel underline, perhaps rightly, that many Arab states would welcome Hamas’s defeat. But Arab leaders also know that their populations’ outrage with Israeli viciousness in Gaza will have a chilling effect on their behavior down the road, limiting their margin of maneuver toward Israel.
Condemnation of protesting students has come in many forms. The students have been accused of “anti-Semitism” and of supporting terrorism, and have even been described by a pro-Israel American conservative as “self-pitying and entitled children of [U.S.] and foreign elites demonstrating on behalf of the political interests of anti-[U.S.] and anti-Israel regimes.” The elisions in this quote are remarkable, but so too is a fundamental truth it highlights but whose implications the author appears to have missed. Evidently, the student protests have not only hit a raw nerve among Israel’s defenders, but have also affected their judgment.
If anything can be said about America’s special relationship with Israel it’s that it has been sustained by American political and military elites, which have defended it as being beneficial for U.S. interests. What the pro-Israel critics of the students cannot stomach is that what they are actually witnessing today is a betrayal by younger, university-based elites, those who should have been in the bag. The smug certainties of the past are being called into question by tomorrow’s decisionmakers, officials, and people of influence, so that sympathy with Israel, which was close at hand in the past, is no longer guaranteed. This has widened the generation gap, with the students affirming that the views of their parents on Israel no longer carry much weight in the shadow of what they regard as a genocide in Gaza.
My colleague Aaron David Miller, a Middle East negotiator for years, touched on the implications of this in an interview with Isaac Chotiner of the New Yorker, when he observed: “Oh, if you’re asking me: Do I think that Joe Biden has the same depth of feeling and empathy for the Palestinians of Gaza as he does for the Israelis? No, he doesn’t, nor does he convey it. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that.”
Implicit in Miller’s remarks was Biden’s detachment from the new reality. His reply came after Chotiner suggested that the president had an inability to conflate the Palestinians’ losses with the personal losses he had suffered in his own lifetime, which was very different than how he reacted to the Israeli victims on October 7.
This disconnect between elite opinion and the public was visible soon after the Gaza war began. Whereas the Biden administration and European leaders were quick to defend Israel after the Hamas attack, their societies were more reluctant to give the Israelis a blank check. Seven months into the war, as Palestinian deaths have risen to over 30,000, according to Gaza health officials, as U.S. government agencies acknowledge that Israel has blocked food supplies into Gaza, causing “inevitable” famine, as the Israeli government continues to insist it will enter Rafah, where 1.5 million people are sheltering, it is the skeptics who were proven right, while U.S. and European officials are now reversing themselves in a hurry.
Few things are more nauseating than watching politicians flip a switch and expediently shift direction. To hear Ursula von der Leyen go from saying, on October 14, “Europe stands with Israel [a]nd Israel has a right to defend itself; [i]n fact, it has the duty to defend its people” to her statement earlier in March that “Gaza is facing famine and we cannot accept this,” is to see pure hypocrisy in action. If anything prompted Israel to commit war crimes in Gaza, it is the wholehearted embrace it received from the likes of the European Commission president.
Similarly, to hear Biden describe Israel’s bombing of Gaza as “over the top,” only for his administration to subsequently approve $17 billion in aid to the Israeli military, shows why the students are right to be so scornful of their leaders.
One has to compliment the protesting students in U.S. and European universities for having refused to be browbeaten by their craven administrations, or by the duplicitous politicians who have spent months readapting their positions on Gaza to be in line with the mood of their electorates. As the students see it, there are no deep subtleties in the mass murder they are witnessing daily. A Yale student, Chisato Kimura, expressed this view on the CNN show One World, saying:
But in terms of understanding what’s happening, the violence that’s happening against Palestinians in Gaza [i]s genocide… the [International Court of Justice] has said that there is a plausible case, which is the highest determination they could have made at this point, that there is genocide happening. You know, [the] international community of legal experts, human rights lawyers, academics [and] many, many folks have come together and recognized correctly that what is happening is genocide. And I think that’s really important in grounding why we’re here, because we see the violence live broadcasted across social media, across media. And I think it’s impossible to ignore.
Particularly illuminating in that segment was the comment of one of the interviewers, Bianna Golodryga, who reminded Kimura, “[T]he Biden administration, as early as this month, said they have no evidence of genocide being committed in Israel or by Israel.” One could plainly see how CNN felt it had to shoehorn that doubting comment into the discussion, to water down Kimura’s remarks, as if an administration that has been supplying Israel with the weapons to kill tens of thousands of Gazans could be a credible independent voice on anything pertaining to the pulverizing Israeli military operation in Gaza.
Elites in the United States remain very much locked into their connection with Israel—refusing to consider divestment, resisting use of the term “genocide” to describe what is taking place, and frustrated with the unwillingness of students to bend to the weeks-long threats directed against them. But what’s happening in Gaza is too obvious to hide at this stage, and all moves designed to bolster the official line on Israel are failing. The students’ admirable instinct of revolt may or may not lead to major change, but it marks a new period in how Americans view the Palestinians, and indeed how the students view themselves and their country in the world.
