By Theo Baker March 26, 2024 One of the section leaders
for my computer-science class, Hamza El Boudali, believes that
President Joe Biden should be killed. “I’m not calling for a civilian to
do it, but I think a military should,” the 23-year-old Stanford
University student told a small group of protesters last month. “I’d be
happy if Biden was dead.” He thinks that Stanford is complicit in what
he calls the genocide of Palestinians, and that Biden is not only
complicit but responsible for it. “I’m not calling for a vigilante to do
it,” he later clarified, “but I’m saying he is guilty of mass murder
and should be treated in the same way that a terrorist with darker skin
would be (and we all know terrorists with dark skin are typically bombed
and drone striked by American planes).” El Boudali has also said that
he believes that Hamas’s October 7 attack was a justifiable act of
resistance, and that he would actually prefer Hamas rule America in
place of its current government (though he clarified later that he
“doesn’t mean Hamas is perfect”). When you ask him what his cause is, he
answers: “Peace.”
I switched to a different computer-science section.
Israel
is 7,500 miles away from Stanford’s campus, where I am a sophomore. But
the Hamas invasion and the Israeli counterinvasion have fractured my
university, a place typically less focused on geopolitics than on
venture-capital funding for the latest dorm-based tech start-up. Few
students would call for Biden’s head—I think—but many of the same young
people who say they want peace in Gaza don’t seem to realize that they
are in fact advocating for violence. Extremism has swept through
classrooms and dorms, and it is becoming normal for students to be
harassed and intimidated for their faith, heritage, or appearance—they
have been called perpetrators of genocide for wearing kippahs, and
accused of supporting terrorism for wearing keffiyehs. The extremism and
anti-Semitism at Ivy League universities on the East Coast have
attracted so much media and congressional attention that two Ivy
presidents have lost their jobs. But few people seem to have noticed the
culture war that has taken over our California campus.
For
four months, two rival groups of protesters, separated by a narrow bike
path, faced off on Stanford’s palm-covered grounds. The “Sit-In to Stop
Genocide” encampment was erected by students in mid-October, even
before Israeli troops had crossed into Gaza, to demand
that the university divest from Israel and condemn its behavior.
Posters were hung equating Hamas with Ukraine and Nelson Mandela. Across
from the sit-in, a rival group of pro-Israel students eventually set up
the “Blue and White Tent” to provide, as one activist put it, a “safe
space” to “be a proud Jew on campus.” Soon it became the center of its
own cluster of tents, with photos of Hamas’s victims sitting opposite
the rubble-ridden images of Gaza and a long (and incomplete) list of the
names of slain Palestinians displayed by the students at the sit-in.
Some
days the dueling encampments would host only a few people each, but on a
sunny weekday afternoon, there could be dozens. Most of the time, the
groups tolerated each other. But not always. Students on both sides were
reportedly spit on and yelled at, and had their belongings destroyed.
(The perpetrators in many cases seemed to be adults who weren’t
affiliated with Stanford, a security guard told me.) The university put
in place round-the-clock security, but when something actually happened,
no one quite knew what to do.
Stanford
has a policy barring overnight camping, but for months didn’t enforce
it, “out of a desire to support the peaceful expression of free speech
in the ways that students choose to exercise that expression”—and, the
administration told alumni, because the university feared that
confronting the students would only make the conflict worse. When the
school finally said the tents had to go last month, enormous protests
against the university administration, and against Israel, followed.
“We
don’t want no two states! We want all of ’48!” students chanted, a
slogan advocating that Israel be dismantled and replaced by a single
Arab nation. Palestinian flags flew alongside bright “Welcome!” banners
left over from new-student orientation. A young woman gave a speech that
seemed to capture the sense of urgency and power that so many students
here feel. “We are Stanford University!” she shouted. “We control
things!”
“We’ve had protests
in the past,” Richard Saller, the university’s interim president, told
me in November—about the environment, and apartheid, and Vietnam. But
they didn’t pit “students against each other” the way that this conflict
has.
I’ve
spoken with Saller, a scholar of Roman history, a few times over the
past six months in my capacity as a student journalist. We first met in
September, a few weeks into his tenure. His predecessor, Marc
Tessier-Lavigne, had resigned as president after my reporting for The Stanford Daily
exposed misconduct in his academic research. (Tessier-Lavigne had
failed to retract papers with faked data over the course of 20 years. In
his resignation statement, he denied allegations of fraud and misconduct; a Stanford investigation
determined that he had not personally manipulated data or ordered any
manipulation but that he had repeatedly “failed to decisively and
forthrightly correct mistakes” from his lab.)
In
that first conversation, Saller told me that everyone was “eager to
move on” from the Tessier-Lavigne scandal. He was cheerful and upbeat.
He knew he wasn’t staying in the job long; he hadn’t even bothered to
move into the recently vacated presidential manor. In any case, campus,
at that time, was serene. Then, a week later, came October 7.
The
attack was as clear a litmus test as one could imagine for the Middle
East conflict. Hamas insurgents raided homes and a music festival with
the goal of slaughtering as many civilians as possible. Some victims
were raped and mutilated, several independent investigations found.
Hundreds of hostages were taken into Gaza and many have been tortured.
This,
of course, was bad. Saying this was bad does not negate or marginalize
the abuses and suffering Palestinians have experienced in Gaza and
elsewhere. Everyone, of every ideology, should be able to say that this
was bad. But much of this campus failed that simple test.
Two
days after the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, Stanford
released milquetoast statements marking the “moment of intense emotion”
and declaring “deep concern” over “the crisis in Israel and Palestine.”
The official statements did not use the words Hamas or violence.
The
absence of a clear institutional response led some teachers to take
matters into their own hands. During a mandatory freshman seminar on
October 10, a lecturer named Ameer Loggins tossed out his lesson plan to
tell students that the actions of the Palestinian “military force” had
been justified, that Israelis were colonizers, and that the Holocaust
had been overemphasized, according to interviews I conducted with
students in the class. Loggins then asked the Jewish students to
identify themselves. He instructed one of them to “stand up, face the
window, and he kind of kicked away his chair,” a witness told me.
Loggins described this as an effort to demonstrate Israel’s treatment of
Palestinians. (Loggins did not reply to a request for comment; a
spokesperson for Stanford said that there were “different recollections
of the details regarding what happened” in the class.)
“We’re
only in our third week of college, and we’re afraid to be here,” three
students in the class wrote in an email that night to administrators.
“This isn’t what Stanford was supposed to be.” The class Loggins taught
is called COLLEGE, short for “Civic, Liberal, and Global Education,” and
it is billed as an effort to develop “the skills that empower and
enable us to live together.”
Loggins
was suspended from teaching duties and an investigation was opened;
this angered pro-Palestine activists, who organized a petition that
garnered more than 1,700 signatures contesting the suspension. A
pamphlet from the petitioners argued that Loggins’s behavior had not
been out of bounds.
The
day after the class, Stanford put out a statement written by Saller and
Jenny Martinez, the university provost, more forcefully condemning the
Hamas attack. Immediately, this new statement generated backlash.
Pro-Palestine
activists complained about it during an event held the same day, the
first of several “teach-ins” about the conflict. Students gathered in
one of Stanford’s dorms to “bear witness to the struggles of
decolonization.” The grievances and pain shared by Palestinian students
were real. They told of discrimination and violence, of frightened
family members subjected to harsh conditions. But the most raucous
reaction from the crowd was in response to a young woman who said, “You
ask us, do we condemn Hamas? Fuck you!” She added that she was “so proud
of my resistance.”
David
Palumbo-Liu, a professor of comparative literature with a focus on
postcolonial studies, also spoke at the teach-in, explaining to the
crowd that “European settlers” had come to “replace” Palestine’s “native
population.”
Palumbo-Liu
is known as an intelligent and supportive professor, and is popular
among students, who call him by his initials, DPL. I wanted to ask him
about his involvement in the teach-in, so we met one day in a café a few
hundred feet away from the tents. I asked if he could elaborate on what
he’d said at the event about Palestine’s native population. He was
happy to expand: This was “one of those discussions that could go on
forever. Like, who is actually native? At what point does nativism
lapse, right? Well, you haven’t been native for X number of years, so …”
In the end, he said, “you have two people who both feel they have a
claim to the land,” and “they have to live together. Both sides have to
cede something.”
The
struggle at Stanford, he told me, “is to find a way in which open
discussions can be had that allow people to disagree.” It’s true that
Stanford has utterly failed in its efforts to encourage productive
dialogue. But I still found it hard to reconcile DPL’s words with his
public statements on Israel, which he’d recently said on Facebook should
be “the most hated nation in the world.” He also wrote: “When Zionists
say they don’t feel ‘safe’ on campus, I’ve come to see that as they no
longer feel immune to criticism of Israel.” He continued: “Well as the
saying goes, get used to it.”
Zionists,
and indeed Jewish students of all political beliefs, have been given
good reason to fear for their safety. They’ve been followed, harassed,
and called derogatory racial epithets. At least one was told he was a
“dirty Jew.” At least twice, mezuzahs have been ripped from students’
doors, and swastikas have been drawn in dorms. Arab and Muslim students
also face alarming threats. The computer-science section leader, El
Boudali, a pro-Palestine activist, told me he felt “safe personally,”
but knew others who did not: “Some people have reported feeling like
they’re followed, especially women who wear the hijab.”
In
a remarkably short period of time, aggression and abuse have become
commonplace, an accepted part of campus activism. In January, Jewish
students organized an event dedicated to ameliorating anti-Semitism. It
marked one of Saller’s first public appearances in the new year. Its
topic seemed uncontroversial, and I thought it would generate little
backlash.
Protests
began before the panel discussion even started, with activists lining
the stairs leading to the auditorium. During the event they drowned out
the panelists, one of whom was Israel’s special envoy for combatting
anti-Semitism, by demanding a cease-fire. After participants began
cycling out into the dark, things got ugly.
Activists,
their faces covered by keffiyehs or medical masks, confronted
attendees. “Go back to Brooklyn!” a young woman shouted at Jewish
students. One protester, who emerged as the leader of the group, said
that she and her compatriots would “take all of your places and ensure
Israel falls.” She told attendees to get “off our fucking campus” and
launched into conspiracy theories about Jews being involved in “child
trafficking.” As a rabbi tried to leave the event, protesters pursued
him, chanting, “There is only one solution! Intifada revolution!”
At
one point, some members of the group turned on a few Stanford
employees, including another rabbi, an imam, and a chaplain, telling
them, “We know your names and we know where you work.” The ringleader
added: “And we’ll soon find out where you live.” The religious leaders
formed a protective barrier in front of the Jewish students. The rabbi
and the imam appeared to be crying.
Saller avoided
the protest by leaving through another door. Early that morning, his
private residence had been vandalized. Protesters frequently tell him he
“can’t hide” and shout him down. “We charge you with genocide!” they
chant, demanding that Stanford divest from Israel. (When asked whether
Stanford actually invested in Israel, a spokesperson replied that,
beyond small exposures from passive funds that track indexes such as the
S&P 500, the university’s endowment “has no direct holdings in
Israeli companies, or direct holdings in defense contractors.”)
When
the university finally said the protest tents had to be removed,
students responded by accusing Saller of suppressing their right to free
speech. This is probably the last charge he expected to face. Saller
once served as provost at the University of Chicago, which is known for
holding itself to a position of strict institutional neutrality so that
its students can freely explore ideas for themselves. Saller has a
lifelong belief in First Amendment rights. But that conviction in
impartial college governance does not align with Stanford’s behavior in
recent years. Despite the fact that many students seemed largely
uninterested in the headlines before this year, Stanford’s
administrative leadership has often taken positions on political issues
and events, such as the Paris climate conference and the murder of
George Floyd. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Stanford’s Hoover Tower was
lit up in blue and yellow, and the school released a statement in
solidarity.
When
we first met, a week before October 7, I asked Saller about this. Did
Stanford have a moral duty to denounce the war in Ukraine, for example,
or the ethnic cleansing of Uyghur Muslims in China? “On international
political issues, no,” he said. “That’s not a responsibility for the
university as a whole, as an institution.”
But
when Saller tried to apply his convictions on neutrality for the first
time as president, dozens of faculty members condemned the response,
many pro-Israel alumni were outraged, donors had private discussions
about pulling funding, and an Israeli university sent an open letter to
Saller and Martinez saying, “Stanford’s administration has failed us.”
The initial statement had tried to make clear that the school’s policy
was not Israel-specific: It noted that the university would not take a
position on the turmoil in Nagorno-Karabakh (where Armenians are
undergoing ethnic cleansing) either. But the message didn’t get through.
Saller
had to beat an awkward retreat or risk the exact sort of public
humiliation that he, as caretaker president, had presumably been hired
to avoid. He came up with a compromise that landed somewhere in the
middle: an unequivocal condemnation of Hamas’s “intolerable atrocities”
paired with a statement making clear that Stanford would commit to
institutional neutrality going forward.
“The
events in Israel and Gaza this week have affected and engaged large
numbers of students on our campus in ways that many other events have
not,” the statement read. “This is why we feel compelled to both address
the impact of these events on our campus and to explain why our general
policy of not issuing statements about news events not directly
connected to campus has limited the breadth of our comments thus far,
and why you should not expect frequent commentary from us in the
future.”
I
asked Saller why he had changed tack on Israel and not on
Nagorno-Karabakh. “We don’t feel as if we should be making statements on
every war crime and atrocity,” he told me. This felt like a statement
in and of itself.
In
making such decisions, Saller works closely with Martinez, Stanford’s
provost. I happened to interview her, too, a few days before October 7,
not long after she’d been appointed. When I asked about her hopes for
the job, she said that a “priority is ensuring an environment in which
free speech and academic freedom are preserved.”
We
talked about the so-called Leonard Law—a provision unique to California
that requires private universities to be governed by the same First
Amendment protections as public ones. This restricts what Stanford can
do in terms of penalizing speech, putting it in a stricter bind than
Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, or any of the other elite
private institutions that have more latitude to set the standards for
their campus (whether or not they have done so).
So
I was surprised when, in December, the university announced that
abstract calls for genocide “clearly violate Stanford’s Fundamental
Standard, the code of conduct for all students at the university.” The
statement was a response to the outrage following the congressional
testimony of three university presidents—outrage that eventually led to
the resignation of two of them, Harvard’s Claudine Gay and Penn’s Liz
Magill. Gay and Magill, who had both previously held positions at
Stanford, did not commit to punishing calls for the genocide of Jews.
Experts told me that Stanford’s policy is impossible to enforce—and Saller himself acknowledged as much in our March interview.
“Liz
Magill is a good friend,” Saller told me, adding, “Having watched what
happened at Harvard and Penn, it seemed prudent” to publicly state that
Stanford rejected calls for genocide. But saying that those calls
violate the code of conduct “is not the same thing as to say that we
could actually punish it.”
Stanford’s
leaders seem to be trying their best while adapting to the situation in
real time. But the muddled messaging has created a policy of neutrality
that does not feel neutral at all.
When
we met back in November, I tried to get Saller to open up about his
experience running an institution in turmoil. What’s it like to know
that so many students seem to believe that he—a mild-mannered
71-year-old classicist who swing-dances with his anthropologist wife—is a
warmonger? Saller was more candid than I expected—perhaps more candid
than any prominent university president has been yet. We sat in the same
conference room as we had in September. The weather hadn’t really
changed. Yet I felt like I was sitting in front of a different person.
He was hunched over and looked exhausted, and his voice broke when he
talked about the loss of life in Gaza and Israel and “the fact that
we’re caught up in it.” A capable administrator with decades of
experience, Saller seemed almost at a loss. “It’s been a kind of roller
coaster, to be honest.”
He
said he hadn’t anticipated the deluge of the emails “blaming me for
lack of moral courage.” Anything the university says seems bound to be
wrong: “If I say that our position is that we grieve over the loss of
innocent lives, that in itself will draw some hostile reactions.”
“I find that really difficult to navigate,” he said with a sigh.
By
March, it seemed that his views had solidified. He said he knew he was
“a target,” but he was not going to be pushed into issuing any more
statements. The continuing crisis seems to have granted him new insight.
“I am certain that whatever I say will not have any material effect on
the war in Gaza.” It’s hard to argue with that.
People tend to blame
the campus wars on two villains: dithering administrators and radical
student activists. But colleges have always had dithering administrators
and radical student activists. To my mind, it’s the average students
who have changed.
Elite
universities attract a certain kind of student: the overachieving
striver who has won all the right accolades for all the right
activities. Is it such a surprise that the kids who are trained in the
constant pursuit of perfect scores think they have to look at the world
like a series of multiple-choice questions, with clearly right or wrong
answers? Or that they think they can gamify a political cause in the
same way they ace a standardized test?
Everyone
knows that the only reliable way to get into a school like Stanford is
to be really good at looking really good. Now that they’re here,
students know that one easy way to keep looking good is to side with the
majority of protesters, and condemn Israel.
It’s
not that there isn’t real anger and anxiety over what is happening in
Gaza—there is, and justifiably so. I know that among the protesters are
many people who are deeply connected to this issue. But they are not the
majority. What really activates the crowds now seems less a principled
devotion to Palestine or to pacifism than a desire for collective
action, to fit in by embracing the fashionable cause of the moment—as if
a centuries-old conflict in which both sides have stolen and killed
could ever be a simple matter of right and wrong. In their haste to
exhibit moral righteousness, many of the least informed protesters end
up being the loudest and most uncompromising.
Today’s
students grew up in the Trump era, in which violent rhetoric has become
a normal part of political discourse and activism is as easy as
reposting an infographic. Many young people have come to feel that being
angry is enough to foment change. Furious at the world’s injustices and
desperate for a simple way to express that fury, they don’t seem
interested in any form of engagement more nuanced than backing a pure
protagonist and denouncing an evil enemy. They don’t, always, seem that
concerned with the truth.
At
the protest last month to prevent the removal of the sit-in, an
activist in a pink Women’s March “pussy hat” shouted that no rape was
committed by Hamas on October 7. “There hasn’t been proof of these rape
accusations,” a student told me in a separate conversation, criticizing
the Blue and White Tent for spreading what he considered to be
misinformation about sexual violence. (In March, a United Nations report
found “reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual
violence,” including “rape and gang rape,” occurred in multiple
locations on October 7, as well as “clear and convincing information” on
the “rape and sexualized torture” of hostages.) “The level of
propaganda” surrounding Hamas, he told me, “is just unbelievable.”
The
real story at Stanford is not about the malicious actors who endorse
sexual assault and murder as forms of resistance, but about those who
passively enable them because they believe their side can do no wrong.
You don’t have to understand what you’re arguing for in order to argue
for it. You don’t have to be able to name the river or the sea under
discussion to chant “From the river to the sea.” This kind of
obliviousness explains how one of my friends, a gay activist, can
justify Hamas’s actions, even though it would have the two of us—an
outspoken queer person and a Jewish reporter—killed in a heartbeat. A
similar mentality can exist on the other side: I have heard students
insist on the absolute righteousness of Israel yet seem uninterested in
learning anything about what life is like in Gaza.
I’m
familiar with the pull of achievement culture—after all, I’m a product
of the same system. I fell in love with Stanford as a 7-year-old, lying
on the floor of an East Coast library and picturing all the cool
technology those West Coast geniuses were dreaming up. I cried when I
was accepted; I spent the next few months scrolling through the course
catalog, giddy with anticipation. I wanted to learn everything.
I
learned more than I expected. Within my first week here, someone asked
me: “Why are all Jews so rich?” In 2016, when Stanford’s undergraduate
senate had debated a resolution against anti-Semitism, one of its
members argued that the idea of “Jews controlling the media, economy,
government, and other societal institutions” represented “a very valid
discussion.” (He apologized, and the resolution passed.) In my dorm last
year, a student discussed being Jewish and awoke the next day to
swastikas and a portrait of Hitler affixed to his door.
David Frum: There is no right to bully and harass
I
grew up secularly, with no strong affiliation to Jewish culture. When I
found out as a teenager that some of my ancestors had hidden their
identity from their children and that dozens of my relatives had died in
the Holocaust (something no living member of my family had known), I
felt the barest tremor of identity. After I saw so many people I know
cheering after October 7, I felt something stronger stir. I know others
have experienced something similar. Even a professor texted me to say
that she felt Jewish in a way she never had before.
But
my frustration with the conflict on campus has little to do with my own
identity. Across the many conversations and hours of formal interviews I
conducted for this article, I’ve encountered a persistent
anti-intellectual streak. I’ve watched many of my classmates treat death
so cavalierly that they can protest as a pregame to a party. Indeed,
two parties at Stanford were reported to the university this fall for
allegedly making people say “Fuck Israel” or “Free Palestine” to get in
the door. A spokesperson for the university said it was “unable to
confirm the facts of what occurred,” but that it had “met with students
involved in both parties to make clear that Stanford’s nondiscrimination
policy applies to parties.” As a friend emailed me not long ago: “A
place that was supposed to be a sanctuary from such unreason has become a
factory for it.”
Readers
may be tempted to discount the conduct displayed at Stanford. After
all, the thinking goes, these are privileged kids doing what they always
do: embracing faux-radicalism in college before taking jobs in fintech
or consulting. These students, some might say, aren’t representative of
America.
And
yet they are representative of something: of the conduct many of the
most accomplished students in my generation have accepted as tolerable,
and what that means for the future of our country. I admire activism. We
need people willing to protest what they see as wrong and take on
entrenched systems of repression. But we also need to read, learn,
discuss, accept the existence of nuance, embrace diversity of thought,
and hold our own allies to high standards. More than ever, we need
universities to teach young people how to do all of this.
For so long,
Stanford’s physical standoff seemed intractable. Then, in early
February, a storm swept in, and the natural world dictated its own
conclusion.
Heavy
rains flooded campus. For hours, the students battled to save their
tents. The sit-in activists used sandbags and anything else they could
find to hold back the water—at one point, David Palumbo-Liu, the
professor, told me he stood in the lashing downpour to anchor one of the
sit-in’s tents with his own body. When the storm hit, many of the
Jewish activists had been attending a discussion on anti-Semitism. They
raced back and struggled to salvage the Blue and White Tent, but it was
too late—the wind had ripped it out of the ground.
The next day, the weary Jewish protesters returned to discover that their space had been taken.
A
new collection of tents had been set up by El Boudali, the
pro-Palestine activist, and a dozen friends. He said they were there to
protest Islamophobia and to teach about Islam and jihad, and that they
were a separate entity from the Sit-In to Stop Genocide, though I
observed students cycling between the tents. Palestinian flags now flew
from the bookstore to the quad.
Administrators
told me they’d quickly informed El Boudali and his allies that the
space had been reserved by the Jewish advocates, and offered to help
move them to a different location. But the protesters told me they had
no intention of going. (El Boudali later said that they did not take
over the entire space, and would have been “happy to exist side by side,
but they wanted to kick us off entirely from that lawn.”)
When
it was clear that the area where they’d set up their tents would not be
ceded back to the pro-Israel group willingly, Stanford changed course
and decided to clear everyone out in one fell swoop. On February 8,
school officials ordered all students to vacate the plaza overnight. The
university was finally going to enforce its rule prohibiting people
from sleeping outside on campus and requiring the removal of belongings
from the plaza between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. The order cited the danger
posed by the storm as a justification for changing course and, probably
hoping to avoid allegations of bias, described the decision as
“viewpoint-neutral.”
That didn’t work.
About
a week of protests, led by the sit-in organizers, followed. Chants were
chanted. More demands for a “river to the sea” solution to the Israel
problem were made. A friend boasted to me about her willingness to be
arrested. Stanford sent a handful of staff members, who stood near
balloons left over from an event earlier in the day. They were there,
one of them told me, to “make students feel supported and safe.”
In
the end, Saller and Martinez agreed to talk with the leaders of the
sit-in about their demands to divest the university and condemn Israel,
under the proviso that the activists comply with Stanford’s anti-camping
guidelines “regardless of the outcome of discussions.” Eight days after
they were first instructed to leave, 120 days after setting up camp,
the sit-in protesters slept in their own beds. In defiance of the
university’s instructions, they left behind their tents. But sometime in
the very early hours of the morning, law-enforcement officers
confiscated the structures. The area was cordoned off without any
violence and the plaza filled once more with electric skateboards and
farmers’ markets.
The
conflict continues in its own way. Saller was just shouted down by
protesters chanting “No peace on stolen land” at a Family Weekend event,
and protesters later displayed an effigy
of him covered in blood. Students still feel tense; Saller still seems
worried. He told me that the university is planning to change all manner
of things—residential-assistant training, new-student orientation, even
the acceptance letters that students receive—in hopes of fostering a
culture of greater tolerance. But no campus edict or panel discussion
can address a problem that is so much bigger than our university.
At
one rally last fall, a speaker expressed disillusionment about the
power of “peaceful resistance” on college campuses. “What is there left
to do but to take up arms?” The crowd cheered as he said Israel must be
destroyed. But what would happen to its citizens? I’d prefer to believe
that most protesters chanting “Palestine is Arab” and shouting that we
must “smash the Zionist settler state” don’t actually think Jews should
be killed en masse. But can one truly be so ignorant as to advocate
widespread violence in the name of peace?
When
the world is rendered in black-and-white—portrayed as a simple fight
between colonizer and colonized—the answer is yes. Solutions, by this
logic, are absolute: Israel or Palestine, nothing in between. Either you
support liberation of the oppressed or you support genocide. Either
Stanford is all good or all bad; all in favor of free speech or all
authoritarian; all anti-Semitic or all Islamophobic.
At
January’s anti-anti-Semitism event, I watched an exchange between a
Jewish attendee and a protester from a few feet away. “Are you
pro-Palestine?” the protester asked.
“Yes,”
the attendee responded, and he went on to describe his disgust with the
human-rights abuses Palestinians have faced for years.
“But are you a Zionist?”
“Yes.”
“Then we are enemies.”
Theo Baker is a sophomore at Stanford and the winner of a 2022 George Polk Award in Journalism.
