Had those students who established opposing enclaves on college campus in the aftermath of Hamas’ murder, rape, kidnapping spree of October 7th, 2023, somehow had it in their minds they would recreate and update the 1960s and 70s Days of Rage?
Having learned the lesson of history, did they do so having misunderstood it?
Years on, decades before this current youthquake generation first saw light, that black & white past must hold them in a certain thrall. Back then, agitators and protesters fought for overall change and against societal strictures which slotted Americans in roles. And buried us there.
Naturally the Vietnam War formed the big canvas. But ancillary details throughout it enriched the portrait.
The 60s were the first time the nation’s youth not only questioned its elders in authority, but called them to account. From the unnecessary Southeast Asian war sprouted vigorous prosecution for civil rights, women’s rights, as well as the general easing of everyday repression in life.
The 60s were the first time Americans started leading less fettered lives.
To this Generation Whatever/Whoever it must seem a romantic era. People then coalesced and made their demands known, their voices heard. Regarding successors to the Boomers, they eased into a complacent collectivism that would’ve been unfathomable for their parents. Grandparents, too.
Generations succeeding Boomers have increasingly taken fewer chances throughout their lives. And those rare instances they did deviate, their parents appeared as deus ex machina who saved or spared them from developing skills needed to escape circumstances life sometimes dumps at our feet.
The generations which emerged after Boomers shall never be known as adept problem-solvers. Muddlers? Yes. Escape artists? No.
So, when the slaughter of Israelis on October 7th and subsequent retaliation against Hamas terrorists developed, it must’ve seemed one golden occasion for supporters of either side to be valiant for a cause. This would be their moment to stand for something meaningful instead of their ages’ facile pursuits. It would’ve been preferable and far more beneficial to the United States if the fury engaging each side had instead pushed our country forward rather than expending itself upon ancient tribal combat occurring elsewhere.
Right now, the United States could desperately use the energy being diverted on foreigners and their causes into preserving the ideas of our Republic.
As written in This Deranged Freight Train Has No Brakes, the uncivil conflagrations which roiled campuses nationwide could’ve been wholly avoided if academic pooh-bahs had forbidden each faction from marring campus malls with camps. Marching would’ve been fine. Even letting speakers orate their damn fool heads off in order to rouse fellow students to the urgency over there would’ve been acceptable. Not only might’ve loud, impassioned public speechifying have wrenched the handheld dependent from their devices but also could’ve renewed interest in articulation within the student bodies.
The kind of talk that plants ideas which move masses.
Who else has noticed Boomers’ successors lack much ability to spring points as well as cite references to validate them? Jeff Spicoli could’ve presented his case better than most students on either side of October 7th imagining themselves firebrands.
For Jewish students Hamas’ assault against Israel must’ve been received as nothing less than existential threat. After all, as many have either forgotten or never been taught, Israel exists because Jews needed one safe spot on earth for themselves. Despite assimilating in every nation into which the Diaspora has driven them, almost everywhere have Jews been one incident away from persecution or proscriptions.
Formation and recognition of Israel was to be the redoubt where the whole populace knew what was at stake, what could be lost, thereby assuring mutual defense. While there have been numerous attacks on Israel since its founding, October 7th represented an invasion that shattered its solidly held notions of safety.
Or perhaps Israel had thoroughly convinced itself the closest threats had completely cowed. Really? Or had Israel lulled itself into believing such? That’s one constant about restive populaces. They’ll wait. Then strike at the most vulnerable hour.
To Israel, it must’ve appeared Hamas had fully bowed to what overwhelmed against it. While the terrorists will always intrigue, somehow Israel must’ve thought Hamas’ prolonged quiet represented tense acquiescence. Enough to take Hamas for granted, to ease vigilance.
That’s probably what frightened then infuriated Jewish students and other pro-Israel on-campus supporters most. The one place “safe for Jews” had been ravaged. The rhetorical question best serving this: “If Jews aren’t safe in Israel, where can they be?”
Few of us here in the West will ever be hounded as have Jews. Although we can discuss it, imagine it, we’ll never know. That’s why most Americans, at least, have given Israel such latitude in dealing with its neighbors. We must all agree theirs is one tough neighborhood. Though we recoil at certain measures Israel uses to repulse what lurks beyond its borders – and we should – we nonetheless intuit the reasons making them necessary.
It’s difficult explaining that here in fairly impenetrable, nearly invulnerable, almost impervious America. Americans don’t have millenniums of memory woven into our beings.
From the outset, pro-Palestinian supporters organized in the United States got off on the wrong foot. Immaterial how the Israeli government has treated residents in the Occupied Territories, rejoicing at the murders, rapes, and slaughters which occurred on October 7th could only worsen mainstream America’s view of Palestinians.
It pains me to point out the obvious. Civilized people shouldn’t need being told this. But here they are.
The effusions begun on and continuing from that morning until now ought to have had people allied with the Palestinian plight reassessing their backing. Ostensibly, before that morning Palestinians could’ve fairly worn the “victim’s shredded garment.” Since the Six-Day War, Palestinians are the ones who’ve become de facto displaced persons, whose human rights have been truncated, whose land has been incrementally seized.
In 1967 after humiliating the combined Arab Muslim forces amassed against it, Israel should’ve returned most of the land they conquered. Most? Yes. But there are sites which are intrinsic to Jewish identity and heritage. These are meaningless to those having been dispossessed. Consequently, since Israel cherishes them, they must mean plenty. Therefore, rather than make minor concessions which might deescalate major hostility, keep the pot simmering for nothing.
Keep tensions high. Keep hate bubbling near the rim of the pot.
Again recalling This Deranged Freight Train Has No Brakes, Palestinian supporters, abetted by anybody who just despises Jews in general, gleefully added to the misery of families and friends of Israelis murdered and kidnapped through the coldest vandalism possible. By their actions, berserkers intended further erasing victims and captives from our consciouses.
Defacing posters of hostages blackened whatever could’ve been judged just about the aggrieved side. If suffering of acquaintances could be increased manifold, by all means mindless pro-Palestinian advocates applied it mercilessly.
Yes, the pro-Palestinian contingent will reply that the pain given had been earned across decades. That’s the problem with opposites assigning guilt collectively. Both sides are implacable and intractable. Those who gave birth to the conflict, who first nurtured it, are dust, yet generations of inheritors project grievances that are just as fresh.
But let’s admit there wasn’t any way American college administrations could’ve foreseen both sides rushing to their respective extremes. Nor could anyone have seen the eye for an eye that emerged here becoming volcanic. Other than Vietnam, when had our nation’s prior popular collegiate protests taken on such vehement dimensions of those occasioned by October 7th?
Vietnam was so long ago it’s become a discipline in doctoral studies.
It’s easy to blame administrators for letting actions get out of hand. Yet the last several decades of matriculating students have been docile, so malleable, the presumption they could rouse themselves into furies marring campuses ought have been seen as most unlikely. And that arousal tangential to America.
Shouldn’t that energy, its attention, have been targeted on the loss of American women’s bodily autonomy and higher education’s soaring expense nationwide?
If anyone had been paying attention, pro-Palestinian support has grown across US campuses. No, it’s not so much antisemitism or anti-Zionism as turning away from the usual narrative pressed regarding that portion of the Levant.
Since Israel’s founding the storyline has been the Jewish State was Fort Apache, the lone civilized spot amid Indian Territory. Man, that description runs roughshod over so many tropes, readers outraged at its conciseness and absolute clarity probably just don’t know where to start fuming. Nonetheless, there it is. And that’s how it’s been.
For the longest, “the savages,” uh, Arabs and Muslims have wittingly or otherwise filled their parts. At least parts assigned them by Western eyes.
It helped immensely the Israelis somewhat came across in the Western vein, mostly promoting Western virtues. Representative governments, an open culture of no-holds barred discourse which let dissent ring without sanctions, and women who were full participants in society contrasted quite favorably against hostile forces besieging them.
Let’s face it, the common perceptions of Arab Muslims for the most part were updates of those crowd scenes of African natives in Golden and Silver Age movie serials. Think “bwana.” Should those have been similar caricatures Western audiences digested of those peopling the North African through Southwest Asian swath, no wonder the prevailing view of that arc’s inhabitants was guttural speakers or sinister savants.
Nothing better than stereotypes to simplify then solidify all the wrong impressions.
Though many will dispute this, we have been fortunate curiosity and greater willingness to accept others’ interpretations of themselves have opened our eyes. Now if only our minds could accept what’s presented.
Much of the Occidental world has harbored animus against the Jews throughout history. Under Western eyes, Jews have too often been chastised or chased or crushed. Bad as pogroms were, the industrial extermination pursued against them during the middle of the 20th century may be considered the nadir of their persecution.
At best, the founding of Israel from the Palestine Mandate was a grudging acknowledgement of Jews’ plight. Certainly, left to what remained of the Old World after World War II even this might’ve been begrudged.
Here in the States, at least, the newly formed Israel resonated with most Americans. Although selective about it, just ask the Vietnamese, Iranians, almost any African on that continent, and Guatemalans, Americans admire subjugated people fighting for their independence and freedom. We see ourselves in their reflections. The good parts, never those that complicate the sagas.
The Ashkenazim who survived near extermination in Europe, and Sephardim who’d otherwise integrated throughout Muslim lands, were perfect fits for postwar Americans looking to make sense of our nation’s leap of faith from isolationism to global colossus. Though they had borne a burden which had resulted in empire, what good was it? How had the toil and sacrifice been worthwhile?
Simple people of the Book as too many Americans then as now falsely claimed themselves, that they had a hand in saving descendants of the ancient Israelites from eradication validated the Great Crusade. Yes, they’d saved “decadent” Europe, and that was swell, but rescuing progeny whose lineage harkened to the Old Testament, well, that was something!
Indeed, it was. It was something that never explained how foreign Jews an ocean distant could almost be revered, yet our own Jewish citizens faced all sorts of discrimination in America. After all, didn’t their lineage also spring from the Old Testament?
Who knows? Maybe what European Jews endured burnished them in American eyes, whereas American Jews were just neighbors. Ah, well, depending on the neighborhood. Or country clubs.
Anyway, understanding how most Americans considered Muslims and Arabs, if ever at all, Jews returned to their ancestral homes made sense. After all, didn’t the Bible confirm it?
Nor did it help the Arab Muslim image in American eyes when the indigenous populaces everywhere else chafed and grew restive under colonial masters. Hadn’t the British and French tried instilling passable civilization into “those people”? Immersed in our own racial strife here, with blacks agitating for the measures of justice, equality, and fairness that had formed the American ideal, reports of other brown and black complected masses vying to yank off white yokes must’ve lent a further shine to the Israelis.
Not only did biblical blood course in their veins, citizens of the newly founded Israel also nurtured what passed for Americans took for culture. Back then through American eyes seemingly steeped in beliefs and habits regarded as alien without spaceships, Muslims and Arabs had little chance of getting fair shakes from mid-century Americans.
We were predisposed to slot them as “lesser.” Which was easy to do because Anglo Americans for the longest have inherently lumped brown- and black-skinned persons together as “inferior.”
And so there the mostly disregarded people remained throughout much of the middle 20th century. It comforted mainstream America to keep the slightly, if at all, considered as out of sight as much as possible. Certainly, there were countless individual instances of personal gaps closed where those ordinarily neglected connected enough to register as fully human. Outside these exceptions, though, the whole was discounted.
Thankfully for Boomers our parents inadvertently raised us better than they had been. While too many of our mothers and fathers held many of the same views of their elders, the Depression followed immediately by World War II and that introducing the Nuclear Age rocked firm and fast beliefs. Maybe the same might’ve reshaped Americans’ perspectives during the Great War, but the Jazz Age sped directly into and smashed against the Depression.
The 1930s wasn’t a decade that promoted outward thinking.
The Second World War shook a good deal of what had been internalized as characteristically “American” since its colonial founding. It opened the door a crack to the nation’s historically marginalized as well as challenged ideas of the world.
In America, it meant second-class citizens stepped into the mainstream. Once there, they announced seeking and attaining long delayed fulfillment in the promises of our nation.
Anyone who’s aware of our nation’s civil rights epoch knows the era’s clashing produced spilt blood and fatal blows. These injuries opened paths to those this nation had denied since its founding. Almost at the same time, visions of released Americans mirrored elsewhere among other excluded populaces.
Yearnings to lead one’s own life as one prefers is universal.
Mightn’t it astound young Americans to learn that nations now roiling with ethnic and secular strife first sought freeing themselves from shackles of colonial masters? That people then sought forming their own versions of “more perfect unions.” Yes, those hopes frequently went awry when altruistic movements detoured into harsh regimes. How many of them haven’t devolved into fiefdoms, the idealists succumbing to opportunism, the egalitarianism sought after forgotten?
Seeing America at present, we can observe the same transformation nearly took 250 years. Indeed, didn’t we believe in our ideals for the longest before electing the least of ourselves?
Anyway, the Palestinians. For the longest Palestinians were lost in the fog of emergence. When not ignored, they were dismissed then further ignored. The postwar arrival of European displaced persons among them surely added further precariousness to their conditions.
There Palestinians would’ve stayed, regional footnotes in the Levant, hadn’t curious Westerners enflamed by world liberation movements “discovered” them. Made Palestinians their “cause.” If that appears patronizing, okay, it is. Because left to their brethren co-religionists and other Arabs, Palestinians may never have been thrust into the wider world’s consciousness.
No Muslim or Arab would’ve troubled him- or herself with the “Palestinian plight.” It took Jews returning to their birthright, and, yes, displacing Arabs, before Palestinians became visible.
Growing up American, sacrosanct was the horror of the Holocaust. After that, those who survived had an unarguable right, no, responsibility, to guarantee Jews were never again put in position of complete destruction, Therefore, the formation of Israel. Theodore Hertzl’s desire had come to fruition. A Jewish State.
There was never any debate about this through most Americans’ youths into adulthoods. Not fait accompli, it was necessary. Period. Few things in life were indisputable. Israel’s existence was one of them.
If we somehow needed further persuasion, aside from the mountains of archival evidence that preserved the atrocities, perhaps a classmate or two had relatives who’d survived the camps’ inhuman misery. At a Quarropas junior high there was an instance when an uncle graciously attended a class of ours. He told his odyssey without any embellishment. Listening to him, those of us born 14 years after his extreme jeopardy were jarred. His call we remain vigilant against future such possible perils propelled many of us.
Uncle concluded by rolling up a sleeve and showing us his tattoo. The scrawl of monster intended to erase his humanity, the faded numerals branding him “a thing.” “Subhuman.” Aside from his niece, each student in our class ran fingers across his skin bearing those figures. Uncle’s skin was warm, shirred, not that of “a thing.”
In the decades afterwards, ears bombarded by yells of “Hoax!” from Holocaust deniers, I wish there were ways not only to Twilight Zone them back to that class but further, say, as a camp prisoner in 1944. Surely an existence in gray, endless brutality, and perhaps random death waiting with every breath should suffice to convince such hurtful skeptics otherwise.
But who knows? Can such people be convinced? Isn’t there a greater chance that they’ll wake up believing the terror “experienced” a dream, not a nightmare which had once been real?
Aiding deniers, the ranks of survivors thin as does that of combatants who witnessed what remained of the unspeakable. Once irrefutable evidence now yields to doubt. Former iron-clad certainty of the past becomes brittle. It can crumble. Thereby permitting malicious skeptics to germinate minds. As if this history could be manipulated.
What manifested on campuses after October 7th, developed from a younger public’s sense of Israel having lost its urgency. In many ways, Israel is now just another country. Also, younger generations lack the immediacy of its formation. Today’s youthquake is mostly unfamiliar with Holocaust survivors and great- or great-great-grandparents who served during the conflict or maintained the homefront. While vivid tales can be told, these being related by 3rd and 4th parties may dull them.
And finally, owing to mass media, social media, and propaganda packaged as “news,” the Palestinian story has become compelling. Right or wrong, it’s easy to sway Westerners that descendants of former victims have become even bigger victimizers than their ancestors faced.
The last became precariously so whenever pro-Palestinian campus protesters compared Israeli security forces with the SS. Twenty-five years ago, a miniscule few at most would’ve dared made that similarity. Then, the slander would’ve been extinguished through sharp outrage.
Now, such accusations have better than even chances of taking hold through masses of shameless figures purporting to speak “the truth.” Dubiously backed by tweaked statistics and everything.
None should disagree the agonies being suffered by Gazans and Occupied Territory residents are calamitous. Only the brave and trusting within both camps and Israel may find any kind of workable solution to the near damnable containment of the Palestinians. But after nearly 78 years of hate-stoked suspicion, none of the parties can summon any boldness required for that elusive state known as “peace.”
Until the marauding that occurred on October 7th, Palestinians had benefited from wider-sourced objective reporting clarifying their plight. But this was a tough slog against lifetimes of reportage which reduced the situation into black and white. “Israel good/Palestinians bad.”
Not much gray in that.
Yes, the reactive violence of Palestinian factions in the Levant did nothing to endear them in Western eyes. Intifadas, random terrorist attacks, undid whatever positives old-fashioned, deliberately-paced moral suasion had lightened. And, yes, all of it lost from tooth for tooth responses provoked by Israel Defense Force incursions or West Bank settlers giving into vigilantism.
For the longest Westerners have been disposed to unquestioningly accept the Israeli version. After all, “Palestinians are bad.”
Thankfully for better or worse, or even for the sake of improving balance, media these last two decades has delved into the “lairs.” Just on the prospect of maybe the “demons” aren’t as fearsome or why they are so fearsome.
Sure. This infuriates “Israel is always right” proponents. Understood. But it often presents Palestinian motivations. Their views. Why they did what they did. Why they’re doing what they are. Why they’ll do what they believe must be done. By this, increasing numbers of Westerners have concluded were they under the same guns, they’d react in the same manners as Palestinians.
Who among us might see that differently?
Nonetheless, it’s one thing to empathize. Even to advocate. It’s a whole ‘nother thing to bring distant strife to American campuses. Impassioned as pro-Palestinian supporters are, their examples of disorderliness and vandalism so undercut their arguments these are delegitimized.
As they should be.
Splashing red paint on administrators’ residences fails promoting the issue. Storming then blockading class buildings does not advance the case. And above all, accepting an invitation to join fellow collegians to sup at a hosting professor’s table does not permit a guest to interrupt the fete with a screed best suited for villainy, not a dining room.
There are times and places for everything (under the sun). Rabid sloganeering in the wrong instance at the wrong site, rendering structures unenterable, and marring walls are the best ways for messages to fall apart, to fall short. To vanish.
Shouldn’t college students be learning this in classrooms?
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