To understand where the political debate is going in the United States, and where it falls apart, you have to look at university campuses. Such a struggle between students and academic authorities had not been seen for almost six decades. In 1968, anger was directed against the Vietnam War; Today, from New York to Los Angeles, young people denounce the massacre of the Israeli army in Gaza. In addition to the ceasefire, they ask their universities to disassociate themselves from companies and individuals related to the attacks carried out by Israel and to readmit their expelled colleagues. Their protests are essentially peaceful, but in some centers such as Columbia and the University of Texas the police have repressed them harshly.
This drift has two main ingredients. The first is money: American universities depend on donors who pump them billions of dollars a year. Some have threatened to withdraw funds if the camps continue. The second is the bias of Washington elites in favor of the Netanyahu government. Not only Republicans demand a strong hand; some Democratic congressmen had asked the Columbia council to dismantle the “unauthorized and inadmissible encampment of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish activists.”
That bias causes many politicians, including President Biden, to embrace a false premise: that the protests are anti-Semitic, when there are also Jewish participants. A few days ago, three of them wrote a letter in the newspaper The Hill. It was titled: “We Are Jewish Students at Columbia Arrested for Protesting Israel’s War.” Instead of looking forward to their graduation, these kids are looking for legal advice in case the arrests hinder their future work. They feel they are heirs of a progressive Israeli tradition and said that some Israeli students, not knowing that they also speak Hebrew, had called them “animals” as they passed by (in reference to when the Israeli Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant, called “ “human animals” to the Palestinians of Gaza).
We have become accustomed to talking about polarization, but this is something else. The institutions themselves are violating constitutional freedoms when they allow police charges against peaceful demonstrations, dismiss public officials for political reasons and cancel events such as the graduation speech of the best student at the University of Southern California, a Muslim who has publicly supported the Palestinians. Six months before the elections, university students are taking the colors out of American democracy, which in practice does not guarantee the freedom of expression that it claims to promote on paper.
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