A s Morningside Heights goes, so goes the Levant.
This is the childishly self-dramatizing conceit that’s been driving the pro-Hamas protests at Columbia University, with similar ideas playing into protests elsewhere.
It allows students living privileged and coddled lives at some of the best universities in the world to believe that they are on the front lines of fighting so-called genocide, and that what happens at their schools — and to them — is exciting, dangerous, and determinative of geopolitical events half a world away.
This is not to say that what’s happening at Columbia isn’t important — to Columbia, in terms of who’s really in charge and whether the rules apply to pro-Hamas protesters or not. (On Tuesday, some students began to be suspended.)
But that doesn’t come close to matching the world-historical significance that the students want to attribute to their sloganeering and sleepovers.
According to the statement issued by the Columbia protesters at the outset of this episode, Israel has undertaken a “brutal onslaught” against the Palestinian people for 75 years — “funded by U.S. taxpayer dollars, and further enabled by financial investments made by institutions like Columbia University.”
The Israeli–Palestinian dispute has been a focus of international attention, intense news coverage, and extensive academic research for decades now, and yet no one to this point has realized Columbia University’s role in multiple wars, terror attacks, and refugee crises.
Has anyone in the Middle East ever paused before taking any decision to ask, “I wonder what President Minouche Shafik thinks?”
So how does Columbia pull the strings in a conflict that, to the uninitiated, seems to be a function of the priorities and decisions of major geopolitical players in the region and around the world?
Well, according to the Columbia students, “the University’s weaponization of policy to silence students enables the atrocities that Israel has subjected Palestinians to for decades.”
As if Israel’s pursuit of the war in Gaza depends on whether there’s an illegal pro-Hamas encampment on the quad of Columbia University or not.
Ah, and then there’s the tremendous influence of . . . Columbia University emails.
“The Columbia administration,” the students complain, “has set a dangerous precedent by erasing the Palestinian struggle through one-sided decisions and emails that threaten and suppress the voices of students who support justice for Palestine.”
There are a couple of things about this. One, the “Palestinian struggle” isn’t subject to erasure by anything anyone says or does at Columbia University. As a real-world event, it actually exists and will continue to exist even if the word “Palestine” is never uttered at Columbia again.
Two, even if the decisions and emails are indeed, for the sake of argument, “one-sided,” this doesn’t suppress or threaten anyone. This is safe-spacism in behalf of people who want to violate the rules with impunity in the course of supporting a hideous terror group that rapes and kills Jews and deliberately endangers Palestinian civilians.
The threatening nature of those decisions and emails, though, can’t be underestimated, according to the Columbia students. They supposedly are “enabling a violent, repressive environment that puts Palestinian students, as well as all their Arab, Muslim, Jewish, and BIPOC peers, at risk through surveillance and policing.”
If only Columbia cared enough about the fate of its BIPOC students to issue less one-sided emails.
And who is ultimately behind the potential repression of all these endangered populations at Columbia? Yes, the Zionist entity. “We reject,” the students intone, “the violence of the Israel Defense Forces–trained, police-industrial complex that chokes our communities and disproportionately enacts brutality against people of color.”
The impulse to consider themselves quasi-Gazans is also evident in students comparing the administration’s paper notices of possible disciplinary procedures to “the flyers the Israeli army launched from the sky to Gazans.”
At the core of the case that Columbia is “complicit” in genocide is the old BDS agenda that demands that Israel be treated as an apartheid state and that attributes moral responsibility for Israel’s supposed sins to any institution that doesn’t divest. This campaign is based on a lie. That aside, it’s preposterous to think that Columbia is responsible for the Gaza war because index funds in which it invests might own shares in Israeli solar or high-tech firms.
Of course, the larger point is that people who won’t condemn a terror group or the horrific pogrom it carried out on October 7 — who never demand that Hamas release the hostages, who single out for condemnation a democratic society beset by profoundly illiberal forces all around it — are presuming to lecture everyone else about “complicity.”
To the extent that they really are engaged in a great moral struggle, they are on the wrong side.