Campus protests over Gaza echo echoes of outrage over Vietnam

Richard Flacks recalls the challenges of building a protest movement during the Vietnam War as a mainstay of the left-wing political and anti-war group Students for a democratic society during the sixties.

“The whole idea of ​​SDS started with the idea of, ‘We need a new way of being left, a new vocabulary, a new strategy,’” said Mr. Flacks, who helped write the group’s manifesto, the Port Huron Statement. , in 1962. “We knew we were right, and I don’t think we were arrogant about it.”

Sixty years later, Iman Abid sees similar challenges in the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas. “For so long, we couldn’t make Palestine the issue that people would care about,” said Ms. Abid, director of organizing and advocacy at the American campaign for Palestinian rights, which works with pro-Palestinian campus organizations. ‘But now people find it interesting because they see it. They watch it on their social media. They see it on the news.”

It is too early to know whether the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will define this generation the way opposition to the Vietnam War did for many young people more than half a century ago.

But for many who have studied or lived through the Vietnam era, the parallels with the protests in Gaza are compelling: powerful military devastation from the air on a small, underdeveloped, non-white country; a generational divide over the morality of the conflict; the sense that the war represented much broader political and cultural trends; an unwavering confidence – critics might say sanctuary – among students that their cause is just.

The differences can also be striking, starting with the Hamas terrorist attack that sparked this war, for which there is nothing comparable in Vietnam. The war in Gaza is not being fought by the US military, unlike Vietnam, where more than 58,000 Americans died and young men were drafted into military service.

Miles Rapoport, the former secretary of state of Connecticut who joined the SDS in the 1960s while attending Harvard, saw similarities but said the two movements and moments differ in a fundamental way: The United States waded into Vietnam in a show of superpower hubris. Israel, he said, is fighting for its survival after a terrorist attack that killed 1,200 civilians. The current war, he said, “has many more moral and philosophical nuances.”

That is now reflected in pro-Israel marches and demonstrations to a much greater extent than was common, especially on campuses, for supporters of the Vietnam-era war.

Yet both movements, Mr. Rapoport said, reflect “a kind of instinctive and initial solidarity with the underdog.” He added: “And associated with that is a sense of solidarity with people who are fighting for their own country and to be freed from a kind of colonial existence.”

American campuses have protested for countless reasons since Vietnam, most notably against apartheid in South Africa and against racial injustice following the police killings of black men and women in 2014 and 2020. But sustained anti-war protest like that against the invasion of Gaza has never happened before. decades.

Loan Tran, a 28-year-old Vietnamese American who is national director of the left-wing advocacy group Rising majority, draws a straight line between Vietnam and Gaza. Mr. Tran’s grandfather, whom he never met, was an American soldier during the war; His grandmother’s friends fought for North Vietnam against American forces.

“When I hear Palestinians making comparisons to Vietnam and the role of the US and colonialism, it’s really striking to me, and it’s a very poignant connection,” he said. “I feel it in my body, and many people in our Vietnamese community feel it in our bodies, to resist war, to resist occupation.”

For critics of the Gaza protests, the current movement reflects the excesses, not the virtues, of the Vietnam protests, with chants that to some suggest genocide against the Jewish people, just as some protests of the 1960s alienated many Americans by North -To support Vietnam against the US. forces. And those critics also accuse the pro-Palestinian protesters of hypocrisy — saying many of the rallies include side issues that many Palestinians would find counterintuitive, such as women’s issues and LGBTQ rights.

Many of Israel’s supporters view the move with a mixture of horror and consternation. Kenneth L. Marcus, the chairman of the Brandeis Center for Human Rights under the Lawa Jewish civil rights institute not affiliated with Brandeis University, said campus demonstrations began before Israel’s invasion of Gaza.

“There may be people who participate in these protests and think they are supporting the Palestinians, but the movement they are promoting is overwhelmingly an anti-Semitic movement,” he said, adding that it has its roots in the celebration of violence. Instead of showing moral strength in the face of protests on campus, he said, many university administrators “have reacted with weakness and cowardice.”

Those protesting the war in Gaza owe their Vietnam-era forerunners one legacy: the tactics, from die-ins to chants like “How many children did you kill today?” that sanctioned both movements. “Students in 1960 didn’t have much to emulate,” says Mr. Flacks, now a professor emeritus of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “Many of the tactics that were invented at that time became part of the toolkit for campus activism.”

The extent to which Israel, rather than the United States, is leading the fight creates a different dynamic than the protests over Vietnam.

“It’s not a clear-cut conflict that you and I have an interest in,” said Daniel Millstone, a retired New York City lawyer who was one of SDS’s early anti-war crusaders. More students today have seen Israel firsthand, or know students from the region. “But at the end of the day,” Mr. Millstone said, “even though I have family in Israel — and I do — it’s not my show. It’s their show.”

Certainly, the logistics of organizing protests are much more manageable today than they were sixty years ago. Mobile phones and social media have simplified the tasks of recruiting and deploying advocates for a cause; To take just one example, a crowd of anti-war protesters recently descended on New York’s Grand Central Station, flash mob style, after receiving an electronic warning.

“I compare that to the demonstrations we organized against the war in Vietnam and many other issues, which required a tremendous amount of planning from the top down,” Mr Millstone said. Modern campus activism is organized via WhatsApp and iMessages. While the major groups protesting Gaza have national offices, the movement is largely decentralized.

Universities – and the overall makeup of protesters – have also changed enormously, as have political pressures and demands on university presidents.

The anti-war movement in Vietnam was predominantly white, as were most campuses in the 1960s. But campuses in 2023, especially urban ones, will contain far more students of color, many of whom empathize with the Palestinians’ status as a contested population under the control of a more powerful force. And non-students make up a larger share of those protesting now.

“Movements don’t come out of nowhere,” says Michael Kazin, a historian at Georgetown University who wrote both member of SDS and, in short, his violent stepchild, the Underground weather. For the demonstrators in Vietnam, he said, the precursors were the 1960s The Sharpeville Massacre in South Africa and the civil rights movement. For the protesters in Gaza, the antecedents extend from the anti-Muslim backlash after the September 11 attacks to recent protests against racial injustice.

When young protesters descended on Ferguson, Missouri, after police officers killed an unarmed black man in 2014, Palestinians on social media offered advice on how to handle tear gas. Today at the University of California, Santa Barbaraand elsewhere, black and Latino students are among the leaders of the pro-Palestinian movement, said Professor Flacks.

And both eras reflect the influence of deeply polarizing political leaders, most notably Vietnam-era Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, whose hardline conservatism has fueled campus support for the Palestinian cause.

“Those of us my age have immediate memories of why Israel was a morally positive framework. It was a refuge for people who wanted to escape the worst oppression,” said Professor Flacks. But “what the kids in college now see about Israel is a government led by Benjamin Netanyahu,” whom they view as a repressive force supported by established Jewish organizations.

Larry P. Gross, a expert in the field of media and culture at the University of Southern California said that Israel’s leaders had not adapted their message, let alone their policies, to a generation that sees Israel not as a besieged Jewish homeland but as the arbiter of freedom in the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza.

“The Israelis and their PR department fundamentally misunderstood the extent to which they were losing young people,” he said. “They reflexively played the Holocaust card over and over again,” he added, even as “we went from seeing pictures of Russians bombing Ukraine as a war crime to pictures of Israel bombing Gaza.”

Support for Palestinians among the youth, he said, “will continue. I think it’s one of those generational changes.”

The last time an antiwar movement faced a generational divide, many young people attended the 1968 presidential election between Mr. Nixon and Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Mr. Nixon won the Electoral College by capturing four states by a total of fewer than 88,000 votes.

Professor Kazin recently an article published in the liberal magazine The New Republic wondered whether history could repeat itself there too.

“People like me were against Humphrey and in a way were happy to see him lose,” he said. “Now many people say they will never choose Biden. And it is not clear who they are voting for, if they are voting at all.”

Alain Delaqueriere And Sheelagh McNeill research contributed.