University students across the country have sounded the alarm on the devastation of Israel’s war on Gaza, and on Palestine more generally. The campus protests have drawn public attention to the extremism of Israel’s response to the awfulness of October 7, and its designs on Palestinians’ future. Israel’s unconditional supporters have found themselves having to defend this extremism. Their rationalizations have ranged from self-defense in the face of threats of Jewish extinction to an historical right to all of “Judea and Samaria”. Campus protestors have faced calls by the likes of Canary Mission—an organization based in Israel with reported links to Israel’s “Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Shin Beth Security Agency”--for their suspension and expulsion, but also for their murder and rape. “Gaza” is a machinic death-making Event, one being experienced by all its residents, witnessed by us all in real time. It is the “corpsing” of a people, to borrow Samuel Beckett’s term.

With Gaza’s destruction, attacks on Israel have increased, coinciding with a rise in the targeting of Jewish individuals in numerous countries too. So Israel’s war on Palestine hardly makes Israelis, and Jews globally, safer, as Israel’s representatives and supporters often claim. The student protests have put on notice even Israel’s most ardent defenders that business as usual will come with escalating cost. We’re already seeing ICC calls for Netanyahu’s indictment alongside Hamas leaders, European calls for Palestinian statehood, UN recognition of Palestinian representation, and Israel’s gathering international isolation. Even Germany, to date Israel’s most committed European supporter, is now declaring that its attack on Rafah is “likely a violation of international law”. It does seem like a turning-point, not unlike the public opinion shift in the Vietnam War opposition. Vietnam was televised. The Gaza retribution is being “cell-ivized.”  This renders the devastation much more immediately and ubiquitously palpable.

The Authoritarian (Re)Turn

Another undercurrent of concern has been surfaced by the student protests alongside that about Palestinian life. Authoritarianism and its weaponization are now on full display. They have been spotlighted by the violent responses and militarized policing unleashed by many campus administrations, egged on by some politicians, social commentators, and institutional leaders. Numerous campuses—Columbia, USC, UCLA, UC Irvine, Emory, Yale, Indiana, among others—have ordered police to arrest protesting students. The authoritarian turn is an undeniable tendency marking major American institutions today. The students have ripped the covers off, if not always elegantly. But then elegance is hardly the most effective technique for unveiling the arrogance of powerful institutions and the all too ready reach by its principals for authoritarian power. We are observing the flailing social dispositions in leading our dominant organizations, from university administrators to the White House, politicians and police on the ground to wealthy businessmen and donors barking orders from their suites. “Managerial Israelism” and funding appear to be the currency fueling this institutional drive. 

Israel’s leaden boot in response to October 7, then, has highlighted our own society’s increasingly repressive instincts. This has already been in play, if less so self-evidently, regarding racial justice and climate change. While the student protests see a liberated Palestine as a prototype-in-the-making for freedom more generally, they have identified Israel as the driving model of increasingly repressive social life. This includes the weaponization of authority and the consequent violent disciplining of those who resist. Gaza undeniably, and Palestine more generally, is the predictable consequence of this model, its inevitable endgame. Our students are so done with it. 

Done with the world they are otherwise being forced into inheriting. Done with racially spiraling inequality, the product of four neoliberalizing decades. With the deep debt with which they are consequently being saddled, personally, socially, but also morally. With segregated lives, with living cocooned at home in worlds so deeply intertwined. Done with Israel’s intransigence, its impact on militarizing, weaponizing, and surveilling across much of the world, and in turn the war’s significant contribution to environmental degradation. Done with its impact on further illiberalizing American politics and life. With politics as usual, with its voice of Authority. And so done with the infantilizing admonition to grow up.

The students will not be misdemeanored out of their doneness. Nor are there enough prisons to lock ‘em all up, in  carceral institutions or shrunken sites of learning. They will not be undone by banning books before getting to college, nor by suspensions, expulsions, and evictions once there. The turning point is very much in motion, already well-oiled in their assessments and now entering the public forum. This is not hand-me-down analysis from radical faculty. They are more than capable of thinking trenchantly for themselves, making decisions collectively by consensus than led by one or two dominant voices. Indeed, they have brought alongside a good deal of faculty writhing beneath the quickly narrowing constraints of their own institutional hierarchies. The students want no part of the futureless futures being bequeathed them.

What has brought us to this point?

The Road to Hell . . .

The reach for repression has long accompanied the principled commitment to liberty, equality, and a life of happiness for all. Free expression, after all, is accompanied with barely a breath between by a right to bear arms deemed now to be all but limitless. Used or not, weapons have been brandished as threat or deterrent. Wars have come to define social life—from actual wars and civil wars, to those on poverty and crime, and now on CRT, DEI, even science and the truth. The “culture wars” since the 1990s have morphed into a civil war of (or on) ideas, contestations over how to live in society.

This season of discontent emerged with the founding of Black Lives Matter following Trayvon Martin’s killing to combat racism and police brutality. The militarization of American policing, and Israel’s growing hand in it, was first on full display in the 2014 protests prompted by Michael Brown’s killing by a Ferguson policeman. It provided the initial public inclination that Israel’s military was helping to train militarized police forces around the U.S., as they had apartheid South Africa’s military in the 1970s and 1980s, and Myanmar’s military more recently. Palestinians had already drawn the connection between their plight and Black life in America, offering Ferguson protestors advice on how best to stave off the effects of tear gas. 

Between then and Gaza/Palestine today, millenial and GenZ students have grown into adulthood witnessing floods and fires. As their worlds burned and drowned, they watched in disbelief how calls for bold responses to the urgency of climate change and gun control were politically slow-walked, the science surfacing the causes denied with only religious counter-account.

The students today are the generation of the connected learning turn so lauded in the techno-sophistication of their century. They learned to figure things out with and from each other facilitated by teachers and technology with whom and which they are in constant conversation. As soon as their free thinking challenged authority, the “Do as I say” brigade screamed back. This is the very turn being targeted for reversal by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and  its “Christian nationalist” calls along with supporters on the ground like Moms for Liberty (whose liberty, exactly?). Students perfectly capable of reading and discerning for themselves will hardly be inspired to place their confidence on matters of life and death in those belittling them and restricting their freedom. 

The chilling attacks of October 7 and the almost limitless response effected with massively destructive bombs and support marked unconditionally American have fanned the impassioned flames. The driving student interest today is in being heard, not silenced. Engaged, not sidelined. Taken seriously in their own terms, not ridiculed. They don’t meekly swallow threats of discipline or doxing. They desire dialog and consultative deliberation towards a better tomorrow, one in the production of which they seek an effective voice, at home or more globally. Hence the call for and in some cases engagement in negotiations with campus officials. This is their future they are concerned about. Once engaged and the scripts, cliches, and performativities on all sides are set aside, these are thoughtful, insightful young folk, plugged into the world they are inhabiting and inheriting. They want change, not admonished to chill. 

Authoritarian Anti-anti-Semitism

Moved by Palestinian commitment, resolve, and courage protesting students are rightfully confused by the contradictions at the heart of unconditional U.S. support for Israel. They largely understand the historical and current hurts of antisemitism, but also its repeated weaponizing. There are no doubt unfortunate bald antisemitic expressions. As bad as they have been, they are hardly all-consuming. It is telling that the extreme campus-based examples offered are the same small handful of instances on repeat play. The dramatic statistical increase in antisemitism cited—up by approximately 140 percent over the past year—depends on what is reported as such. The increase indeed has been palpable. But current criticism of Israel’s brutalism is not as such antisemitic, as it is too readily taken by Israel’s unconditional supporters and political opportunists to be. This mobilization to damn a whole movement while effectively excommunicating the not insignificant numbers of Jewish students among the protestors and refusing even them the mandate to ensure the safety of Jewish life simply fans the flames of skeptical discontent. 

The IHRA definition identifying criticism of Israel, or Zionism for that matter, as antisemitic has been put to work for disciplinary purposes too. Kenneth Stern, credited as the principal author of the IHRA definition, has explicitly rejected this equation. Republicans like Rep. Stefanik, now so theatrically incensed about campus antisemitism, were and remain silent in response to the 2017 white supremacist chanting in Charlottesville that “Jews will not replace us”. They fell into lockstep with then-President Trump’s insistence that the chanters included some “good people” too. They said nothing when Marjorie Taylor-Green attributed the 2018 California wildfire to a “secret Jewish space-laser”. And they have remained buttoned up when George Soros, a Jewish survivor of Hungary’s occupation by the Nazis, has been repeatedly attacked as the magister dei funding leftist causes in the country, shades of the Rothschilds.

Biblical retribution has proportionality built into it, even if often unbounded in practice, including in some biblical exemplifications. Today, a society and its supporters fueled by self-rationalizing limitlessness are tethering themselves to endless cycles of violence, massive militarized destruction, and rampant authoritarianism to sustain the lack of restraint. Retributive justice ignoring the restrictions of proportionality, however, very quickly becomes limitless retribution. Had the British engaged in indiscriminately wiping out Jews in Palestine as the means to “destroy” Begin’s Irgun after it murderously bombed Jerusalem’s King David Hotel in 1946, the appropriate response would surely have been horror and charges of extended genocide. So how many times must Netanyahu dismiss the senseless bombing of Palestinian women and children taking tent refuge in Rafah and aid workers delivering food as “tragic accidents” before official condemnation of the entire enterprise becomes warranted?

What then, students are asking, the limits to retribution, both regarding Palestine and now more limitedly to their own campus treatment by police? What enough, or too much? What will result in exhaustion, too much to bear, to live with, to be endlessly burdened by? Is retributive proportionality wiping out nearly 15,000 children, more than ten times all the people erased by Hamas that fateful day? Is this an eye for an eye? Is the sliding of more than a million people quickly and preventatively into desperate famine a just response to Israeli suffering? The rendering of 1.8 million people homeless for the foreseeable future? All this more readily enflames the recycling of resentment and retribution than self-limiting deterrence. Here, Palestinians are little different than most Israelis. Protestors have recognized all of this.

For more and more of those even for whom retribution is an option, the point of “Enough!” is long passed. Actually, the scale of “much too much” is already far exceeded. Even the International Court of Justice is affirming this, in issuing an order to Israel’s government to cease its attack on Rafah and to guarantee delivery of food to Gaza. U.S. institutional leaders seem barely concerned with these considerations, if at all. They appear more consumed by condemning campus antisemitism. Jewish students, like all, should not feel unsafe or verbally abused, to be sure. To date, however, there have been no reports of their being physically attacked, beaten by oppositional “agitators” or violently thrown to the ground and arrested by police, as Israel’s critics have been. That leadership continues mostly to ignore, deny, or refuse critics’ concerns increasingly imperils our collective futures.

Living Together?

A way through the impasse of endless retribution draws from a commitment in Jewish thought, today eclipsed completely by the stress on securitizing violence: How to live productively and peacefully with the neighbor? Neighborliness requires a basis of trust, treating others with respect for their dignity, now completely pulverized beneath Gaza’s rubble, the almost limitless settlements in the West Bank, and increasingly rampant settler devastation of Palestinian life. The latter has included expanding expropriation of West Bank land, destruction of olive groves and homes, and killing of Palestinians (more than 500 since October 7). The very embrace of the title of “settler” renders explicit the arrogantly colonizing logic at work. Israel’s national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has recently revealed that Israel’s post-war plan for Gaza is limitless settlements there also, while encouraging Palestinians to take what’s left of their existence to any unidentified elsewhere.

Palestinians are exhausted with having the course of their lives, and deaths, ripped completely from them. Should Hamas survive Israel’s mass destruction, it would be—as Rashid Khalidi poignantly puts it—a “pyrrhic victory”, given how many lives have been lost and how much infrastructure destroyed.

American students and their supporters are likewise linking the reach for authoritarianism at home to the bear hug of support for Israel’s extreme actions in Gaza and the West Bank. Like people across Palestine, the protestors understand the relation between Israel’s limitless destruction and the authoritarian reach in American society of late. That they want a different way of being in the world is revealed by sharing cultural heritages in the student encampments. For example, the not insignificant proportion of Jewish protestors on numerous campuses have readily celebrated Passover seders and shabbat dinners with their non-Jewish encampment colleagues, Palestinians included. And practicing Muslim participants have openly engaged in daily prayer, respected by all around them. Some might too quickly dismiss this as naïve romanticism. It behooves us rather to recognize in this a vision of living together not just with but through difference.

It is telling that U.S. institutional leadership, some exceptions notwithstanding, has largely condemned the campus protests or expressed neutrality in the face of Gaza’s killing field. This revels how deeply these leaders have fallen away from Edward Said’s emphasis on “humanism and democratic criticism” vested in the recognition of the dignity of all. The intellectual, Said insists, speaks “truth to power”, bears “witness to persecution and suffering”, offering “dissenting voice in conflicts with authority”.

These efforts are exactly what the student protestors and their faculty supporters are engaged in. The call commonly heard on campuses of late—“We want it all”—is not the urging to eliminate Jews, as Israel’s supporters would have it. Rather, it is the reach for freedom, equality, and justice for all—after all, foundational American values--in a common society. Academic authorities’ professed institutional commitment to universal liberty and life, inclusive diversity and equity including freedom of expression more and more depends on their protecting Said’s principles for students and faculty alike, as Columbia University leadership rightly did for Said himself in October 2000. By contrast, the Israeli state’s intransigent extremism has been exempted as the exceptional limit case.

In seeking to appease donors and conservative politicians, too many campus administrators are siding with social authority over and against their own constituencies and colleagues. This surfaces the authoritarian inclinations at work, their expressions of commitment ringing more desperately hollow. The protesting students today are as much challenging the authoritarian inclinations of campus, corporate, and political leadership as they are the horrifically corpsing actions of the Israeli state.