I asked Martin if he might be willing to put together a guest post related to institutional responses to the protests, and he graciously agreed. This is a smart, thoughtful take, and I am better for having read it. Read it for yourself and see what you think! And then maybe we can have a conversation.
The Country Was in a Mood For Protest
by Martin
If you watch any retrospective on the Vietnam War protest movement, it’ll probably offer up a line like that, as if the protest were gas filling up a space just waiting for a spark to ignite it – that is, the essence of the protest existed before the war did. I worked as an administrator in various roles for nearly 30 years where Muslim/pro-Palestinian vs Jewish/pro-Israeli interactions were a common occcurance. And while I’m now retired and not in a position to interact with students as I previous was, I think some of our previous lessons learned apply well here.
I never had primary responsibility for managing these interactions, but I did provide some of the input on how we would respond, and I did work closely with the students on many occasions. Over that period of time, the interactions would ebb and flow, increasing and decreasing in size and intensity, and in terms of the focus. Sometimes we had encampments, and sometimes not.
Setting some context, the Muslim/Pro-Palestine groups were always characterized as ‘protests’. The Jewish/Pro-Israeli groups were ‘rallies’. Sometimes one group set up first and the other countered, and sometimes the reverse. Sometimes they turned out together. The terminology was a combination of self-selection by the students but also by the press, other students, and so on. If both groups were present it was always a Pro-Palestine protest. There was always a clear ‘these oppose the status quo, and these defend it’ framing even though the actual things being discussed were effectively identical – some combination of how they get treated in the US (not great for either group) and what life is like in Israel/Palestine due to the presence of the other (also not great for either group).
I think the most charitable explanaion for the difference in perception is that Israel is a formally recognized nation and Palestine isn’t and therefore one is more ‘valid’ than the other. But this interaction started not that long after 9/11 so there was an unquestionable bias against the Muslim students at least in the beginning and that may have just stuck.
The ask was straightforward – the Jewish/Pro-Israel students wanted an end to suicide bombings or rocket attacks (whatever the prevailing hostitlity at the time was), and the Muslim/Pro-Palestine students wanted an end to settlements, to checkpoints, (also the prevailing hostility) but also a larger structural ask – a 1 state solution or a 2 state solution, and a smaller structural ask – divestiture. The geopolitical ask is what would get the press or community attention, and the divestiture ask was directed at the administration. Purely local asks don’t get much attention from the press. This is effectively how things looked to the outside, and you can probably recognize all of these elements to some degree in the various events in the news now.
But things are not this simple. There are times when the activities are ‘on’, when they are most performative, and when they are ‘off’, when things are quiet. The quiet times are the more important. Students talk about the events, they plan, but they also talk about other stuff. Increases in student fees, a change in policy, parking availability, all kinds of stuff. This is usually where you find the essence of the demonstration that existed before the spark. This is the grievance that allows the anger about the thing on the banner to surface so quickly and passionately. The emotional tank is full and doesn’t take much to spill over. I’m not the first to observe this:
Guest Post: The Country Was In a Mood for ProtestPost + Comments (192)