Campus protests and the battle over ethical universalism

The campuses may be quiet now, during summer recess, but once school resumes in the fall we’re likely to see a revival of last spring’s uprisings, when university students throughout the country gathered to protest their schools’ complicity in Israel’s military assault on the population of Gaza. As the weather warmed, students at dozens of universities set up outdoor encampments, where they slept, ate, sang, held teach-ins, and issued demands that their schools divest from programs that support the occupation of Palestine. University administrations tried to quash the demonstrations, often in ways that were harsh, excessive, and detrimental to academic freedom, but the protests continued until the school year came to an end. 

Congressional representatives on the right jumped into the act, seeing an opportunity here to advance their repressive agendas. Draping themselves in the cloak of moral rectitude, members of the House Committee on Education and the Work Force painted the protesters as antisemitic agitators. They called on university officials to come to Washington for hearings, humiliated them in public, and demanded they crack down even harder on the encampments, which they accused of endangering Jewish students. 

The conflict between the protestors on one side, and the university officials and congressional representatives on the other, brings to light two contrary interpretations of the same fundamental ethical stance, the ethic of universal human rights. As expressed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, this ethic holds that all people everywhere have the right to life, liberty, and personal security. The ethic rejects discrimination against the members of any group because of their distinctive ethnicity, race, religion, or national origin. Its provisions evoke special resonance with the concerns of Jews, who for centuries have been victims of bigotry and hate and whose collective memories are scarred by the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust.

In their dispute over Israel’s decimation of Gaza, both student protestors and their critics in Congress and university administrations ground their positions, explicitly or implicitly, in a commitment to the imperative of universal human rights. Though the two groups facing off over the protests profess a commitment to ethical universalism, they see our obligation to uphold human rights as entailing different responses to the crisis in Gaza. The protestors see the commitment as entailing an end to Israel’s mass extermination of Palestinians, especially the genocide in Gaza. At the practical level, this requires their universities to cancel all programs that support the Israeli occupation, specifically divesting from those programs linked to Israel’s weaponry, surveillance systems, and militarism. 

The congressional representatives and university administrators draw a different conclusion. Although they don’t explictly invoke the ethic of universal rights, they depict the protests as a manifestation of antisemitism, and thus as an infringement on the right of Jewish students to be free from harassment. Their views correspond to the alarmist message of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “What’s happening on America’s college campuses is horrific. Antisemitic mobs have taken over leading universities…. It has to be stopped. It has to be condemned unequivocally.”

While both sides claim the moral high ground, I would argue that their claims are not equally tenable. In reality, the student and faculty protestors oppose Israel’s assault on Gaza from a genuine commitment to the ethic of universal rights, while the congressional officials who attack them advance their concern with the safety of Jewish students in bad faith, from devious and disreputable motives. They are, I would maintain, opposed to antisemitism not from an earnest desire to protect a vulnerable group, but as a cynical and sinister ploy to undermine free inquiry, denounce the system of liberal humanistic education, and advance their regressive policies. 

If we strip away the veneer of moral righteousness that they present to the undiscerning eye, what we would find among the congressional officials is just the opposite of a concern with universal human rights. We would see, rather, those in positions of political authority using—we might even say exploiting—the anxiety of the Jewish students as a pretext to proscribe the right of other students to protest against the wholesale decimation of the lives, territory, culture, and support systems of the Palestinian people, both in Gaza and the West Bank. While the hearings were focused on events taking place here in the U.S., far from the Middle East, the Republican congressional caucus has been in effect giving Israel a green light to continue their extermination of the whole population of Gaza.

It’s true that antisemitism has spread in this country and has infiltrated college campuses, an alarming development. But the demonstrations and encampments that sprang up on campuses this year were not galvanized by hostility toward Jewish people as such but by opposition to Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza and the West Bank. To deliberately conflate the two is to engage in an act of deceptive misrepresentation. While focused on the people of Palestine, the underlying moral consciousness from which the protests sprang was a commitment to the protection of human life from rampant destruction and obliteration. For such a consciousness, all hatred, all violence, all attacks on human dignity are repugnant, whether the victims be Palestinian, Jewish, or members of any other group. 

This should be obvious enough from the fact that a significant number of the student protestors and their faculty allies were Jewish; it should also be obvious from the fact that progressive Jewish groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace played major roles in organizing the encampments and other forms of protest, such as the demonstrations at Grand Central Station and the Statue of Liberty. Jews who participated did so not from self-hatred, as their critics sometimes allege, but from their firm faith in the ethical values of Judaism, which they believed were being violated by Israel’s response to Hamas’s atrocities of October 7. 

It is not the protestors against Israel’s actions—the students and their allies on the faculty—who have been violating the decree of ethical universalism. The protestors are the ones adhering to this decree. Their diversity of race, religion, and ethnic background, converging in a shared desire to uphold the rights of the Palestinian people, shows that they subscribe to the dictum that every human being is endowed with inherent dignity. 

The students have seen the images that are available to all of us when we look beyond the commercial media, the same images that most politicians have tried to ignore as they mouth empty platitudes about “standing with Israel” and extol Israel as “the one state in the world where Jews can be safe.” They have seen the images of mothers in Gaza grieving the loss of their children—three, four, or five children obliterated by a single strike, their young bodies blasted into shreds of flesh. They have seen the children with emaciated bodies, their eyes sunk deep into their sockets and their legs as thin as toothpicks. They have read about the relief shelters hit by rocket fire; about supply trucks detained at the crossings until the food turns bad; about doctors arrested, tortured, and killed; about universities and libraries wiped off the map. They were shocked by the story of the six-year-old girl, Hind Rajab, killed by Israeli forces along with her family members and two paramedics coming to her rescue. They know these stories, and they can’t forget them.

All these images and reports have burned deep holes in their youthful, bright, receptive minds, arousing a surge of emotion in which moral outrage merges with heartfelt compassion. They have united around the need to stop the devastation of Gaza, to end the carnage, the deliberate starvation, the irrational cruelty, and to call out their institutions for their complicity in this genocidal campaign that challenges our platitudes about “Never again.” They take this maxim seriously, and realize it applies to everyone, not just to one selected group.

It is in compliance with this sense of universal responsibility, stretching across oceans and continents, that they stand against Israel’s actions and demand that their universities uphold the rights and dignity of the Palestinian people. Their demands may be highly specific—that their universities disclose their investments, divest from projects that support Israel’s military operations, and stop collaborating with Israel in ways that reinforce the occupation—but they stem from an expansive sense of human identity that sees no divisions between the suffering of others and one’s own suffering, between the denial of freedom to others and a denial of one’s own real freedom. 

Their demands are grounded in an unwavering empathy with the yearning of Palestinians everywhere for life, security, and relief from oppression, for the freedom to determine their own destiny. They see Palestinian lives to be just as precious as their own lives. They see Palestinian aspirations to be just as compelling as our own. It is from this ability to identify with others—a facet of the universal moral consciousness—that they oppose any policies of their universities that trample on these aspirations.

Now compare this courageous moral stance with the shrill, belligerent tone of the Republicans on the Education Committee, their sly attempt to score political points, and the hunger for power that lies just behind their posturing. Compare it, too, with their histrionic expressions of concern for Jewish students and the evasive responses of the university administrators forced to cower before their interrogators as if they were heretical theologians called up at the Inquisition. When we compare the two sides with respect to their moral integrity—the student protestors and sympathetic faculty on one side, and the congressional inquisitors and university officials on the other—it is immediately clear which side can claim to be the true proponents of ethical universalism—the ethic of justice, compassion, and respect for all human lives—and which side has been using concern for Jewish safety as a cloak to hide an agenda that justifies the suppression of critical inquiry, the squashing of free speech, and the annihilation of a people who, for decades, have seen their traditional homelands ripped away from beneath their feet.

In striking contrast to the students, we don’t see the Republican members of the congressional committee showing any concern for the lives of the Palestinians. The very people who have been berating university presidents for their failure to crush campus protests are the same ones who have urged Israel to continue its annihilation of Gaza, equipping its militarist regime with billions of dollars in weaponry. And, sadly, it is the congressional leaders from both parties—and in both houses of Congress—who stood up and shamefully applauded Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the architect of Israel’s genocidal policy, when he addressed Congress and asked the U.S. to continue supporting Israel in its quest to achieve “total victory.”

We can see here, in the starkest contrast, how the universalist imperative of combating hatred—the hatred manifest in antisemitism—is being used as a knife to shred the banner of ethical universalism that requires all people, both Jews and Palestinians, to live in safety and in peace. Instead, the task of fighting antisemitism has become a distraction from the true moral demand that the crisis in Gaza presents us with. This is the call for an end to Israel’s aggression, for a genuine ceasefire, and for a viable solution that will uphold the long-standing aspirations of both Palestinians and Israelis to live safely and in peace.