Don't let them turn Palestine into a free speech debate, Episode 2
The anti-war movement is getting drawn into the same old trap.
I can hardly check in on the news right now without seeing some update on the plight of advocates for Palestine at Columbia University. The school’s administration has been ruthlessly cracking down on protesters since the war began, Columbia professor Shai Davidai spends every waking minute hysterically trying to ruin their lives, and now the NYPD has gotten involved. Even as campus crackdowns on pro-Palestinian sentiment go this one has been unusually ferocious, and the protesters, for their part, have shown remarkable principle and bravery in their refusal to back down.
And yet here I have to ask the same question I always asked during my own anti-war organizing days: how does any of this actually end the war? Because in Palestine and Ukraine alike, our anti-war strategy seems to have become something like this:
By setting up camps in public spaces, marching through streets, signing petitions, writing articles, casting inconsequential “ceasefire” votes in the Democratic primary, and maintaining a campaign of complaining on social media, we loudly make our opposition to these wars known.
???
Congressional majorities vote to end military financing / arms transfers to Israel and Ukraine, or a future president overrides them with vetoes, and the future president also declines to do these things with unilateral executive action.
And I have to admit, I have no idea what step two is even supposed to be at this point. If I had to guess it would be something like “public awareness increases until enough people put irresistable pressure on politicians through lobbying and voting,” but this seems so profoundly at odds with how the national politics of military policy actually works that it’s hard to take it seriously. The Biden administration is already abetting in Israel’s genocide even though a majority of the nation and 75% of his own party oppose it. People hate this war, but since we do not live in a meaningful democracy, the ruling class that is carrying it out can just ignore us.
Shortly after the war started, I urged the left not to let the right turn Palestine into a free speech debate. Looking at the discourse surrounding Columbia it’s hard to deny that this is exactly what has happened. Instead of talking about the atrocities that are still being carried out by the IDF every day, a whole lot of the discourse has now segued over to pointing out the petty hypocrisies and open tyrannies of elite campus Zionists. The popular fixation on Davidai illustrates this point perfectly. On one hand, he is a truly odious man who would presumably carpet-bomb Israel’s critics if it were legal, and who has certainly posed a real threat to the reputations and careers of far too many students. On the other hand, if partisans for Palestine simply ignored him, the damage he could inflict on the anti-war cause would be quite limited. He is not a policymaker or an arms executive or even particularly influential in Washington; he’s just a menace on a particular campus.
Left activists and journalists have promised to hold Davidai accountable for his disgusting behavior over the past few months, and I wish them well; he deserves everything he gets. But we all understand that this won’t end the war, right? If you could Thanos fingersnap the man out of our universe right this instant it wouldn’t stop a single bomb from dropping or save the life of a single Palestinian child. The much more likely outcome is just that Israeli state propagandists and Zionist lobbyists would signal-boost another combative troll to prominence; men like this are such energy sinks for activists that I wouldn’t be surprised if Davidai’s whole performance is proceeding with that in mind.
I am not going to pretend to have an alternative strategy for ending any of these wars, or that we even can; but if we do come up with a better plan, it’ll begin when we acknowledge that this one isn’t working.