Five reasons anti-Israel protests on US campuses are destined to fail
Excessive coverage of anti-Israel protests at American universities is part of the media's entrenched anti-Israel bias. These protests matter far less than is supposed and are sure to fail.
American university students seem not to have spent any time introspecting over the summer break. They are back protesting against Israel, obviously unaware that their demonstrations will change nothing in the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
Demonstrations rarely succeed. People remember protests that did, but forget about the vast majority that failed, so they overstate the chances of success greatly. These campus protests look especially likely to fail.
Here is why.
They lack widespread support: Saturated news coverage has created the illusion that the protestors’ anti-Israel position enjoys widespread support. This is false. Polling shows most Americans support Israel, think that it has valid reasons for fighting, and think that the country is conducting its war appropriately.1
The protestors are a vocal and extremist minority, but extensive news coverage has made them appear as more. It is an example of the mainstream media’s well-documented bias against Israel and of why public trust in American journalism is at an all-time low.2
Far from enjoying popular support, most people find the ceaseless protests and the disruption they cause irksome, and their repetitive “Free Palestine” chants tiresome.
The protestors have no skin in the game: Not being Palestinians or Israelis, these protestors have no stake in the conflict. They just hate Jews, which is why they are indifferent to all other wars and why only this one animates them. There is no reason Israel should pay attention to them or allow them to influence policy and security decisions.
It is pure narcissism that makes these students think their views matter.
Even demonstrations where protestors do have a direct stake and can influence decision-makers directly rarely succeed. Lest any aging Lefties start reminiscing about the US Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, remember the long list of failed protests. These include the Tiananmen Square Protests in Beijing in 1989, the failed Arab Spring from 2010-2012, the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, and the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong in 2014. I could go on, even back to the Chartist Movement in Britain in the 19th Century, but you get the idea.
At most, US campus protestors can influence the US Government to pressure Israel. Yet, while Israel values American diplomatic and military support, it is a sovereign state.
Israel faces existential threats - stakes too high for these pimply students to grasp - so it is fantasy to think Israel will not defend itself just because its main ally is sometimes weak-kneed. Jewish sovereignty is the whole point of a Jewish state.
These protestors also do not understand that the US supports Israel out of pure self-interest. Not doing so would be a major foreign policy overhaul that would reduce US influence in the region, hand greater power to Iran and Russia, and weaken US credibility and power projection greatly. This betrays the fact that the anti-Israel position is really a near treasonous anti-American position, one that many Far-Left members of Congress share.
If you were willing to risk getting lice, it would be interesting to walk around one of these campuses and ask these protestors what a credible alternate US foreign policy would look like. You would be more likely to see a sasquatch than hear a coherent answer.
They are pressuring the wrong side: The only solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict is that the Palestinians and their Islamist backers, such as Iran and Qatar, stop attacking Israel and agree to live peaceably alongside Jews. That is it. If that happened it would not matter much if it was one state, two states, or some other constitutional arrangement.
Until that happens, what Israel does is irrelevant in terms of achieving peace. Over the decades Israel has gone to war, tried trading land for peace, negotiated for a Palestinian state, and unilaterally withdrawn from territories such as Gaza. Each response has been met with Jihadist terror from the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, and a myriad of other deranged Islamist terror groups.
Pressuring Israel will achieve nothing because it is the Palestinians making war on Israel and, before Israel’s recreation, making war on Jews in the Holy Land. Anyone serious about peace should be pressuring the Palestinians, not Israel.
The Palestinians want to destroy Israel. Israel wants to survive. It is insane to think Israel could be pressured into accepting its own destruction. That makes protesting pointless.
Their goals are evil: Islamists who want to wipe out Israel, murder Jews, and destroy the West, are indubitably evil. Anyone complicit in their sick agenda, which includes many left-leaning Western governments and the antisemitic toads at the United Nations, is likewise evil.
I confess that sometimes I cannot decide if these protestors are ignorant, stupid, or evil.
Initially, I thought they were just ignorant. That is okay. We are all ignorant of many things. I am ignorant of jazz piano chords. However, once the facts have been outlined, many times and in ways that even a retarded orangutan could understand, stupidity seems a more apt description.
It is politically incorrect to criticize the “intellectually challenged”, but as the great American comedian George Carlin quipped, "Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that."
However, the truth is worse. Some of them are not ignorant or stupid; they are evil. Calling for the destruction of a whole nation and people is beyond wicked, as is a willingness to achieve that “by any means necessary”, as the popular “pro-Palestinian” banner states.
It is the ignorant and stupid who cannot see that the Islamist agenda is unadulterated evil.
Fortunately, the protests will fail because most Americans are morally sane and have no desire to be involved with such a hideous movement or with such despicable people.
The protests are not about Israel or the Palestinians: For those who feel aggrieved at my last point, I concede that not all of the protestors are ignorant, stupid, or evil. In fact, some do not care about Israel or the Palestinians at all. This is why, even with Google Maps, they cannot find the Jordan River or the Mediterranean Sea.
For these people, attending protests is about establishing their in-group credentials. They have descended into what psychologists call a “purity spiral”.
Purity spirals involve people demonstrating loyalty to their group, and gaining status within it, by performing extreme acts of commitment. Nothing shows commitment or loyalty more than professing things that are untrue or calling for acts that are unacceptable. Anti-Israel protestors do both, such as accusing Israel of war crimes (untrue) and calling for genocide against Jews (unacceptable).
It is a performative in-group monkey dance.
Students who protest every day earn more group status than the uncommitted loafers who turn up only weekly. Protestors who risk paying a social price for their group loyalty gain the most status. This partly explains why people are targeting Jews, being racist, and even calling for genocide. Given how evil these things are, only the most committed could do them.
This dangerous dynamic has contributed to the normalization of antisemitism and calls for violence. University administrators unwillingness to tackle these ugly protests is partly because they, too, are caught in this spiral.
The protestors pose a threat: The protestors are an unholy alliance of Islamists and Woke folk with mutually incompatible worldviews. Each loathes Israel, America, and the West, and wants to destroy it. They just want to do so in different ways and for different reasons.
The Islamists, inspired by the twisted teachings of the vile Muslim Brotherhood, an Egyptian terror organization, want to do away with nation states, and even Muslim kingdoms, in favor of a Caliphate. Their aim is to destroy Israel, conquer the Middle East and impose Shariah law on the West. The Muslim Brotherhood has a 100-year plan to achieve this.
The Woke or Far Left are Marxists who, having failed to destroy capitalism and the West through conventional communist means, are now trying to do so under the Woke framework. They have replaced communism’s capital-versus-labor ideology with Wokeism’s oppressed-versus-oppressor framework.
While the mainstream media is complicit in this madness, most Americans can see the threat these people pose to Western culture, democracy, and the US. They rightly want nothing to do with these movements and would like them stopped.
What gives me less confidence is that America’s chattering political class - the so-called progressive Left - are not blind to the threat, but actively part of it.
https://www.pewresearch.org/2024/03/21/majority-in-u-s-say-israel-has-valid-reasons-for-fighting-fewer-say-the-same-about-hamas/
https://news.gallup.com/poll/512861/media-confidence-matches-2016-record-low.aspx