I've been thinking about the protests of the war in Gaza a bit lately (how could I not, given the inescapable media coverage?), but I haven't written anything about them. In part, that's because of what I said in my last post -- I lose my desire to write about serious things once the weekend rolls around -- but also it's because I don't have much to add.* Anything that could be said about the protests has already been said. They are a topic the media seems obsessed with, even if the general public is not. As Nate Silver lays out in a recent (and very good, in my opinion) Substack post, the Israel/Palestine conflict ranks among the least salient issues to Americans today, even young Americans.
*Although, I'm about to write a post on them anyway.
It's not near the top of my list either. Although, of course, I find the entire thing tremendously sad. The brutality and disregard for human life... there are no words for it. To me, it's a true moral conundrum -- there is no totally right side, no morally satisfying position, no just outcome. It's just so much hate and violence. And I worry that we are importing the hate and violence to our country. We are supposed to the country where Arabs and Jews can live together in peace. We're the place people go to flee the violence and hate. And we should be thanking our lucky stars everyday that this is the case. We should be eternally grateful that we happen to living at a time and a place that isn't beset by senseless death and destruction. We should not be recreating here the conditions of the places people want to escape.
But maybe that's not what's going on. It's not clear to me what exactly the protestors want, or, more to the point, what they realistically hope to accomplish, how camping on college campus in the US will change anything in Gaza. So, it could be a lot of the participants just want to protest more than they want to achieve an actionable end. I wonder if I was in college right now if I would be part of the protests. I don't think I would because I kinda hate sleeping in a tent. I certainly would not have understood anything about the conflict, so it would have come down to my love of a bed.
Regardless of why students are protesting, however, I support their right to do so. This type of speech should absolutely be permitted and tolerated on college campuses. It's been funny to watch each side completely invert their positions on free speech since the start of the protests. Suddenly, a whole bunch of the "fuck your feelings" people, the ones who decry things like safe spaces and trigger warnings, are calling on college administrations to do more to make Jewish kids feel comfortable. And the ones who think it's harmful to ask somebody where they're from are cool with accusing people displaying Star of David iconography of supporting genocide.
The universities really have egg on their faces here. They've been so protective of every other minority community -- allowing students to shut down invited speakers who don't have the exact "correct" views on race or transgenderism or policing or what have you, and doing so in the name of student safety -- that it does look a wee bit antisemitic when that same standard isn't applied to Jews who support Israel. It's such an egregious self-own. I've been saying it for a long time -- if you limit speech you don't like when the tide is on your side, you are going to look extremely foolish when the tide turns, which it will, because it always does.
So, I almost always favor more speech. I say "almost," because, in speech, as in every other facet of life, there are exceptions. And I think I've come up with a good way to encapsulate these exceptions: The right to ignore. Just as we have a right to speak; we also have a right to ignore. If you speak in such a way that it denies others their right to ignore, then it becomes harassment. So, for example, you have a right to say what you want on TV because people could always turn the channel; you have a right to speak in an auditorium because nobody is forced to attend; but you don't have the right to stand in front of somebody's house at 3:00 am with a bullhorn and scream insults at them. This violates my right to ignore principle.
In the case of the protestors, they should have the right to peacefully assemble and say basically whatever they want, short of direct threats. But if they are, say, preventing others from moving through campus (as I've seen in several videos) or disrupting lecture or graduation ceremonies or otherwise stopping students from accessing aspects of their campus and their education, then they are not within their rights, in my view. And, in this case, it is not wrong, and it is not anti-free speech, for campus administration to shut them down, even if that means calling in the police (although I wouldn't recommend that except as a last resort).
Let people speak, but let people ignore. More empathy, not less.
Until next time...
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