Campus Protests for Gaza: The View From the Resistance Axis

American college protesters supporting Gaza receive recognition from Iranian professors, Lebanese students, Yemeni demonstrators, and Palestinian factions.

Yemeni demonstrators for Gaza hold up banners supporting American students. Source: Ahmed Hassan

The past week and a half has been nothing short of a whirlwind for many. In the past, organizing for Palestine on American campuses was far more difficult, oftentimes ignored by other students, and having little leverage to exercise over their administrations. Now, circumstances have changed.

Protests initially at Columbia University calling for divestment of the institution’s money from Israel have exploded into a nationwide movement, spurred by the university’s president calling in the New York police to forcibly dismantle the encampment that students had built on campus. As of the time of this writing, campuses from coast to coast continue to sprout up with new encampments for Palestine of their own every day, and hundreds upon hundreds of students have been arrested, as police forces continue to be sent in to stop any semblance of pro-Palestine sentiment from remaining visible at American institutions.

Unlike student movements of the near past, the rapid and almost immediately violent response from colleges, with police departments being called in with armored vehicles and police officers with guns drawn, and many times involving the violent arrest of faculty, combined with an uncommon level of message discipline and consolidation from the protesters (with encampments such as Columbia’s having their own media spokesperson), has made the movement’s momentum so far unable to be stopped, not by campus police departments, not by university administrators, not by President Biden.

While it’s not unusual for Israel to become publicly incensed over college campus issues that may seem normally outside the purview of a Western state, the degree in which the Israeli government has been angered by these protests has proven striking. Diplomats in the Israeli Foreign Ministry have compared the protesters to “criminals and terrorists”, demanding to know why they wear masks to conceal their identities. The Israeli consulate in Chicago went to the level of condemning Northwestern University for coming to an agreement with campus protesters, calling it an “appeasement agreement”, leveling language one might use for Neville Chamberlain and Hitler. Former diplomats also took to Israeli TV to express their incredulity that American students were allowed to protest Israel on campus, with Israel’s former ambassador to France remarking on i24 News, “It's incredible nobody is doing anything [about it].”

President Herzog, when made aware of the news of the campus protests in America, called for “firm and strong” action, initially calling the protesters at Columbia University anti-semitic and saying there was a “clear and present danger” to "the very lives of Jews on campus,” despite Jews making up a considerable portion of those Columbia students in the pro-Palestine encampment.

As the protests spread nationwide, Prime Minister Netanyahu went even further, making a speech in English that called the demonstrators calling for divestment from Israel “anti-semitic mobs” that attack Jewish students and Jewish faculty, and moreover that these events were “reminiscent of what happened in German universities in the 1930s. It’s unconscionable. It has to be stopped.”

While Israel has evidently taken note of the wide and sweeping demonstrations against them among young people in the United States, another view, away from the editorials of American newspapers and congressional offices, has been left almost entirely unaddressed in the Western media: how does the Middle East, outside Israel’s walls, see these protests? Does the coalition of states and factions that oppose Israel even acknowledge it? Most importantly, how do the Palestinians themselves see this movement?