The mainstream media on both sides tend to cover the protests in a way that serves a selection of the facts that yields confirmation bias among their watchers. While much of the mainstream media portray the protests as Muslim versus Jewish students, this is not the case. There are Jews and Muslims on both sides of the issue, which the protesters are the first to point out.
So what really divides the protesters from the counterprotesters? Ultimately, it is support, or not, for the right of the State of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. Given the ongoing war against Israel by Iran and its proxies, the refusal of Hamas to release hostages, which should be a precondition for talks, the protesters’ demand for a ceasefire and divestment from Israel despite historical anti-Jewish attacks, and Israel being the only Jewish state in the world, the protesters are really serving the aims of Iran, Hamas, and cultural conformity, not of peace and diversity.
To allow these anti-Semitic actors to do ongoing violence against Israel and then to say that Israel cannot defend itself by attempting to return the hostages, including through force, is to deny the right of Israel’s self-defense, which, given the constant drum of anti-Semitic violence in history right up to the present, is its right to exist. To deny the only Jewish state in the world its right to exist is ultimately anti-Semitic. That some misguided Jewish students do so at Columbia University only means that internalized anti-Semitism exists in the highest ranks of higher education.
Palestinians and Arab states surrounding Israel rejected the United Nations partition of 1947 and chose the path of violence instead. This led to Israel’s 1948 independence and its war of self-defense, known as its war of independence against Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Up to 700,000 Palestinians fled Israel in the process, which they call the “Nakba.” Protesters tend to focus on the Nakba as the cause of the current conflict, but this is a selective use of history to prove their point, not an unbiased understanding of the source of the conflict, which is regional antisemitism that extends almost uninterrupted to as far back as the Roman era.
Calling Israel’s self-defense from Oct. 7, 2023, and other such repeated attacks over the years a “genocide” is backward. Iran and its proxies are targeting Jewish civilians directly with weapons meant to kill. Israel’s defensive response is to target Iranian military, proxy, and terrorist elements. Yes, there are too many civilian casualties caused by the more technologically sophisticated Israeli weapons. However, Israel would not exist without these weapons, used almost exclusively in self-defense.
The number of mortalities supplied by Hamas’s “health ministry” is unreliable and, in any case, not equivalent to genocide, which, according to the U.N. definition, requires intent on the part of a state to destroy an entire people. This is what Iran and its proxies are doing and what protesters ignorantly support when they carry signs such as “from the river to the sea.”
A few hundred misguided protesters should not impede the freedom of the press, cause the blocking of traffic on the public streets of New York City, or be able to unilaterally determine university policy on such an important issue as the Israel–Palestinian conflict. There are other opinions that deserve to be heard, and this is exactly what the Columbia University administration is attempting to ensure.
The arrests were the right choice for Columbia and higher education as a whole. They were pro-free speech, not the other way around. Let’s hope they were enough to bring the students to their senses and back to their books, where they clearly belong.
