Fighting Words

Earlier this month, the unregistered student-activist group Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) — through which, according to The New York Times, members of the suspended campus groups Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace remain active — did an about-face on the subject of Khymani James. James is a Columbia undergraduate who filmed himself in January declaring, during a virtual disciplinary hearing, that the public should “be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists” and that “Zionists do not deserve to live.”

James himself posted the video to social media, although it didn’t reach the attention of the wider public until April. At that point, CUAD condemned him. The group has since decided that that was a mistake. “We, as CUAD organizers, want to apologize first and foremost to Khymani,” CUAD’s recent post read. “By issuing a so-called ‘apology,’” it went on, “CUAD exposed Khymani to even more hatred from white supremacist and queerphobic liberals and fascists, along with the neo-liberal media.”

Quite a mea culpa. This rhetoric is so unlikely to win anyone to its cause, and so alienating to those otherwise sympathetic to protests against Israel’s conduct of its war in Gaza, that my first thought was: “Perhaps it’s a psy-op by some group hoping to undermine the protesters.”

It wasn’t, as I should have known. From the very beginning of the war, after all, some campus activists have shown themselves willing to embrace language and imagery guaranteed to appall much of their audience, not just by stubbornly insisting on the plausibly ambiguous chants “Intifada, intifada!” and “From the river to the sea” but by displaying heroic iconography of Hamas paragliders, singing rhymed ditties saluting Houthi militia actions, and celebrating October 7 as “a historic act of resistance,” in the words of the Brown University chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. CUAD, for its part, celebrated an October 1 terrorist shooting at a light-rail station in Tel Aviv as “a significant act of resistance": “The shooting serves as a reminder that the struggle is not confined to Gaza or Lebanon but has now reached deep into the heart of settler-colonial territory, further destabilizing the Zionist regime’s claims to security and control.” Seven people were killed, including a mother shielding her infant.

The sacrifice of political utility to the satisfactions of radical invective was emblematized in an encounter at Columbia between students at a protest rally and the scholar Norman Finkelstein, a longtime critic of Israel. Regarding “From the river to the sea,” Finkelstein counseled his young charges thus: “You have a very large constituency that potentially and realistically you can reach. You have to adjust to the new political reality that there are large numbers of people — probably a majority — who are potentially receptive to your message.” Some slogans, Finkelstein said, are effective only within the closed world of a “political cult” — but counterproductive outside of it. “If for no other reason than for the people of Gaza,” Finkelstein concluded, “one has to exercise maximum responsibility.” In answer, the rally’s student leader took the mic and intoned, “From the river to the sea!” Her audience took up the chant.

Many on the left are reluctant to criticize student protest language and eager to disaffiliate themselves from those who do. One strategy is simply to refuse to acknowledge the protesters’ more outré declarations. In a recent analysis of free speech on campus, the Columbia English professor Bruce Robbins revisited the first congressional hearing on antisemitism, at which Columbia’s then-president, Nemat (Minouche) Shafik, testified. Protest language characterized by legislators as “genocidal” was the main focus of the hearing. “Shafik could have told the House sternly that there is indeed no place for genocidal discourse on her campus,” Robbins writes, “but that the Gaza protesters were neither antisemitic nor genocidal.” Robbins’s essay is subtle and incisive, but CUAD’s considered refusal to condemn the sentence “Zionists do not deserve to live” suggests that his description is incomplete.

Still, a general discomfort is sometimes discernible. When Ta-Nehisi Coates, for instance, compared the student protesters’ moral certitude favorably to what he sees as the media’s illegitimate emphasis on complexity, he nevertheless took care to indicate that he does not personally endorse everything the students say. “That kid up at Columbia,” Coates said, “whatever dumb shit they’re saying, whatever slogan I would not say that they would use, they are more morally correct than some” people — he used a vulgar epithet — “that have won Pulitzer Prizes and National Magazine Awards and are the most decorated and powerful journalists.”

Darker interpretations are available. Paul Berman, an expert on the campus left of the 1960s, suspects that underlying the protesters’ penchant for rhetorical excess is a fantasy of violence, specifically the violent elimination of the state of Israel. Such slogans as “Globalize the Intifada” are, Berman said in a recent interview in our pages, “horrifying.” “People will say that the chants are calls for the human rights of Palestinians. And people will say that in chanting those slogans that’s what they mean. But this is an example of bad faith.”

Berman’s analysis of “bad faith” identifies a kind of coy two-step. “The students want to chant these things, of course, because these slogans are transgressive.” But the reason they’re transgressive is that they are, indeed, celebrations of violence and murder — a fact which most protesters, Khymani James notwithstanding, prefer not quite to acknowledge. “So we’re having a mass-euphemism event: Horrible things are being advocated by people who deny that they’re advocating it.”

By reversing their initial condemnation of James’s hypothetical murderousness, CUAD can be credited with refusing the bad faith Berman observes. From here on out, they imply, they will say no less, and no other, than they mean. If you’re worried that “We support liberation by any means necessary, including armed resistance” (CUAD’s words) might mean “Zionists do not deserve to live” (James’s), CUAD will not disabuse you. As The New York Times reported, James thanked the group for its reaffirmed support and joined them in the hard-edged refusal of euphemism: “Anything I said, I meant it.”

So far, so militant, and what you might expect from a group that celebrates slain Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. But what about CUAD’s insistence that attacks on James were “queerphobic”? Or its conviction that distancing itself from his statements imperiled James’s “mental and physical safety”? “We deliberately misrepresented your experiences,” CUAD tells James, though they don’t say how. The merger of therapeutic identity politics with a far more militant discourse — in CUAD’s case, one drawing directly on Hamas’s own rhetoric — might seem a cartoon plucked from a conservative culture warrior’s exaggerated campus visions.

Indeed, it would be unfair to suggest that CUAD’s rhetoric is the dominant expression of campus opposition to Israeli policy. And it has not gone unchallenged. At Columbia, for instance, the Columbia Palestine Solidarity Coalition recently rebuked CUAD for “hav[ing] alienated and abandoned Palestinian students in the name of pursuing ideology.” But nor is CUAD just some freakish sideshow, ancillary to the main thrust of campus activism. Its particular tone of inflamed conviction is everywhere. Where did this brand of therapeutic extremism come from?

The romantic enlistment by American campus protesters into what Paul Berman, in his A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968, calls “the cult of hard” — a posture of pitiless militancy celebrating such small-scale terroristic insurrections as bombings, bank robberies, and kidnappings — began in the late 1960s, as the student movement against the war in Vietnam lurched into the militant phase in which it dissolved. A few years earlier, portions of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) — the most important of the left-wing student groups — had begun the love affair with totalitarianism (“Before I’ll be fenced in,” a 1965 SDS mailer read, “I’ll vote for Ho Chi Minh / and go back to the North and be free”) that finally doomed its most dedicated members to, at best, hard-line orthodoxy, and, at worst, the violence of the Weathermen. By 1970, SDS had for practical purposes disintegrated, supplanted by a panoply of guerrilla-chic splinter groups.

Naïveté about the Communist third world was a keynote of the period, ruefully recalled by some of its veterans. Michael Kazin, the Georgetown historian and erstwhile ’60s campus communist, remembers having written “a three-part series about the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea — the tyrannical state then ruled by Kim Il Sung. Depending solely on books and pamphlets produced by the North Korean government, I wrote several thousand words, full of thoughtless falsehoods, about the glories of the regime.” Tom Hayden, a principal author of SDS’s moderate, liberal 1962 Port Huron Statement, had by the early ’70s joined the “Red Family,” devoted to Kim Il Sung. (He would eventually relax into a centrist Democratic politician.) To the tune of West Side Story’s “Maria,” Weathermen would sing: “The most beautiful sound I ever heard / Kim Il Sung, Kim Il Sung, Kim Il Sung.” At the 1969 national SDS convention, Bernardine Dohrn of the Revolutionary Youth Movement criticized a rival radical group, the Progressive Labor Party, for its failure to support North Korea. A realistic assessment of faraway revolutionaries has never been a strong suit of the student left.

Then, as now, they were drawn to a Manichean “division of right and wrong as stark and dazzling as anything to be found in the medieval tales of El Cid and Roland,” as Berman puts it. Moral absolutism, as it has in earlier periods of social ferment, became a kind of fetish. They reveled in the thrilling possibility that violence might make straight what was so culpably crooked. For the privileged students of the American campus, as former SDSer Steven Kelman, now a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School, writes in his memoir of the period, the attraction of such a worldview was essentially a matter of “psychological self-interest.”

Kelman perceived that what he called “the therapeutic value” of student radicalism could always unravel into something very messy, a “crazy conglomeration of generational animus, tribalistic cultism, fearful neurosis, paranoiac feelings of grandeur and conspiracy, and other psychopathological phenomena.” That a general breakdown within the culture of student activism occurred at the end of the ’60s is undeniable. But by the 1970s, despite such off-campus dementias as the Symbionese Liberation Army, the campuses returned to quiet.

Israel and Palestine were hardly the central concerns of the ’60s student left, but nor were they entirely ignored. “Israel’s role as linchpin of world imperialism,” Berman writes, “was an unquestioned postulate everywhere in the guerrilla revolutionary movement,” and that presumption did sometimes filter on to campus.

Consider, for instance, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s 1967 newsletter discussing “The Palestine Problem” a month after the Six-Day War. Accompanying a list of slanted factoids about the region was a crude cartoon showing Muhammad Ali and Gamal Abdel Nasser hanging from a rope held by a hand on which is imprinted a Star of David and a dollar sign. In the background, a muscled arm wields a scimitar, presumably with the intention of freeing the two men. The words “THIRD WORLD LIBERATION MOVEMENT” are etched alongside the arm and on the blade of the sword.

That old cartoon had a surprising second act earlier this year when Harvard’s Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee, along with the African and African American Resistance Organization, posted it to Instagram. The image was then reposted by the Harvard Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine.

An outcry followed; all of the groups involved apologized; the image was taken down. But the gaffe is symptomatic, a return of the maddest aspects of the ’60s, which, in its Substack missives, Columbia University Apartheid Divest seems determined to revive. Just as the SNCC newsletter puts “State of Israel” in scare quotes, so CUAD refers to “so-called Israel” and “the Zionist entity.” And just as the SNCC newsletter interprets all regional conflicts in terms of a grand drama between imperialists and the colonized, so CUAD can only understand groups like Hamas and the Houthis — both avowedly theocratic — as objectively left-wing movements: “Assessing whether a military force is progressive or reactionary requires an examination of whether it is advancing or impeding the destruction of imperialism, respectively, which correlates with the strengthening or weakening of the national liberation and working-class movements internationally.”

All of this is decked out with a full complement of Maoism. “For our last reading group,” an October 17 post explains, “we read several articles analyzing the rationale and impact of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood to commemorate its anniversary. We also read Chairman Mao’s ‘On Guerrilla Warfare, Ch. 1' to ground our discussion in military theory.” An edifying discussion ensued:

Such self-serious study sessions bespeak a need for doctrinal certainty that is almost touching. This is one face of the therapeutic function of student radicalism noted long ago by Kelman — locating, in a rudderless world, a source of guiding authority, here in a musty theoretical Communism from the old days when Western Maoists were, at least on American and European campuses, a thing.

Interestingly, the newsletter continues in a vein that suggests, perhaps, a dawning suspicion that a wrong choice has been made somewhere. “An event or action might seem like a good idea, but that is not enough to pursue it. We must analyze how this serves our goals and consider potential positive and negative outcomes.” Might actions like doubling down on the assertion that “Zionists do not deserve to live” have more negative outcomes than positive ones? CUAD doesn’t say so, but surely someone among their number has wondered.

When asked recently about CUAD’s rhetoric, including its defense of Khymani James, the Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi said: “They don’t talk to us, they don’t ask for our advice.” Maybe they should.