(Originally posted on May 3, 2024)
By Michael F. Duggan
I used to work on The Hill and still go back every five or six months to have lunch with a few former colleagues. One of those lunches was yesterday, May 2. With stories about clashes between police, protestors, counterprotestors, and outside agitators at Columbia, Dartmouth, and UCLA, I decided to take the long way home on the Washington Metro and stopped by The George Washington University. In the words of Mick Jagger, I went down to the demonstration.
I got off at the station one stop before my destination, at Farragut West, and walked a few blocks to the university. May is a summer month in Washington, and the day was around 90 degrees. It was the middle of the day, around 1:30 or a little after, and downtown, everything seemed so normal, a typical warm Thursday afternoon. As I walked down 21st Street, I heard them from less than a block away, the protestors, and chants over a sound system to a drumbeat. I had a two-page list of questions to ask participants, but when I got there, I decided to let the event speak for itself and allow the impressions to flow over me.
Ah, GW, I thought. Why wouldn’t they protest at a school named for a revolutionary leader who, more than anybody, won the War of Independence and who presided over the constitutional convention that gave us our First Amendment rights of free speech and peaceful assembly? It was the eighth day of demonstrations on campus.
The protest and encampment are on the University Yard, a small square mall and possibly the closest thing to an actual campus on a university made up of city blocks. I entered the square through its northwest corner. There were well-identified GW faculty members and some law enforcement officers and people came and went as they pleased. There were a few field crews from the broadcast media. The first placard I saw read, “Anti-Zionism, not Antisemitism.” The protest was smaller than I thought it would be, perhaps a couple hundred people. Perhaps fewer (I assume that many students were in class). But in the small commons, it was crowded and seemed like more. I walked down the west side of the square.
The encampment of what I imagine were several dozen tents took up most of the Yard, with only the paved walkways and side areas being clear of them. The atmosphere was festive, like an outdoor music festival minus the drugs and booze. At least I didn’t see any. Yet even with a certain lightness, there was an undertone of seriousness and moral purpose. I was clearly an outsider, and yet the feeling was raucous but unthreatening. Outside of the square, university life seemed to go on undisturbed with students in shorts, tee shirts, and bare midriffs. In the Yard (and to some degree outside), young women and some men wore the keffiyeh, the Palestinian headscarf, whose simple pattern looks like a wire fence to me. Some of the students, especially those I took to be organizers, wore facemarks, presumably to preclude recognition and retribution, should the university crack down (it seems unlikely that they were a lingering COVID-19 precaution).
In front of Lisner Hall on the south side of the yard, there was a platform on which various students led loud, at times unintelligible, cheers and chants to a pronounced drumbeat. The crowd cheered and chanted along. The most threatening thing I heard was the now-famous “From the river to the sea” chant, which has inspired both benign and ominous interpretations. At one point there was a vague call for “revolution,” and I saw a handbill reading “GW Revolutionaries Support Revolution” (this plea for revolution, presumably by kids paying 65K a year to attend classes there, struck me as redundant, absurd, and a bit juvenile).
There was one defiant chant about taking down barricades and putting up a flag.* There were chants of “We’re not leaving…” and “The students united will never be defeated.” There was one chant of the classic, “What do we want? [fill in the blank] When do we want it? Now!” (thank goodness there were no “Hey-hey, ho-hos”). Although I do not put much stock in direct action protests, what I saw on placards, tee shirts, and scrawled in colorful chalk on the Yard’s brick walkways was humanitarian in tone (see list of chants and slogans below).
What I did not see or hear were appeals to antisemitism. To the contrary, GW has a sizable Jewish student population, and what I did see, were signs that said “Jews for a Free Palestine,” “Jews Say Cease Fire Now,” “Zionism: Misrepresenting Judaism for Over 100 Years,” and “This Jew is With You.” There was a Moslem prayer invoked at around 2:05, but from where I was sitting, the crowd did not seem especially interested.
Sure there was some of the humorless, theatrical, self-importance of youth. But the protests are in response to what the demonstrators and much of the world see as the official violence of a state against civilians. What could be less humorous? The vibe was positive, chill, as they say, if noisy. In my polo shirt, Tilley hat, and jeans, and with steno pad and pen in hand, I must have looked like a 1970s undercover narc agent, and no youthful eyes met mine. But nor was there any hostility (frankly, I don’t think anyone noticed me at all).
I was only there for a half-hour or so—a brief and incomplete glimpse—and it is possible that GW’s protests are more focussed, peaceful, and disciplined than those at some other U.S. colleges and universities. As far as I could see, there was no threat to life, limb, or property, and pleas by Republican lawmakers for more aggressive law enforcement seem unwarranted. If the protests of the 1960s taught us anything, it should be how to deescalate events rather than ratchet them up.
If there are outside agitators, foreign agents, extremists, bigots, or bad apples whipping things up among the peaceful, good faith protestors, they should be held accountable if they break the law. But we should not blame Americans exercising their rights within the law. If the students themselves violate university rules or indulge in bad behavior, like blocking access to buildings, or engage in intimidation, violence, or vandalism, they too should be held accountable. Again, I did not see any bad behavior.
There is a distinction to be made between objections to the actions and policies of a nation, and bigotry against a people, and from what I saw, I believe that the protestors make this distinction and fall on the side of the former. From the extremely thin slice of the protest I saw, the student protestors at GW seem to have gotten it right.
Antisemitism must never be tolerated. But there is a difference between criticizing the policies and actions of a government or political group on the one hand, and being prejudiced against an ethnicity, nationality, race, or religion on the other. When the IRA planted bombs that killed civilians, I called it murder. That doesn’t make me anti-Irish. Indeed, as a historian of ideas, I can only stand in awe of a tradition or traditions that gave the world the Old and New Testaments, Brandeis, Chomsky, Einstein, Feynman, Freud, Gershwin, Kafka, Marx, Mendelssohn, Oppenheimer, Popper, Simon and Garfunkel, Spinoza, and 214 Jewish Nobel Prize winners, among the multitudes of others. But this impressive list has nothing to do with the current policies of Israel in Gaza.
And of course, behind policy, politics abides, and all of this underscores that in an increasingly diverse nation, foreign affairs may resound in domestic politics. A policy in which a nation provides bombs to Israel while air-dropping humanitarian relief to Palestinians in the war zone makes no sense outside of the context of the electoral count of swing states. As it is, President Biden is caught between Israeli interests and a few hundred thousand Arab-American voters in Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin in an election year. Either side (or both) could determine the outcome of the election.
Note
Some of the statements and slogans I heard or saw at the protest on May 2, were:
“Stop funding genocide”
“End Genocide”
“Divest Now”
“Alumni: Stand for Divestment”
“Free, Free Palestine”
“GW Funds Genocide”
“From D.C. to Palestine”
“Occupation is a Crime”
“Stop the Invasion”
“Hands off Rafah”
“Our Tents are Home for Liberation”
“End all U.S. Aid to Israel”
The strongest statements I saw were:
“Dear Zionists, Nothing Blooms on Stolen Land”
“Support the Intifada”
*When I was at the University Yard, I saw a U.S. flag on one flagpole in front of Lisner Hall, and a Palestinian flag on another. This morning (May 3) I heard a news story that there police took down the Palestinian flag and that the students put it back up, or attempted to. This apparently happened after I was there.