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SIGNAL & NOISE: 5/14/24

The have recently fixated the attention of the big media. Thus far, the toll stands at protests at 80 schools, with roughly 2,500 arrests and several cancelled graduations. As antiwar protests go, they are not a big deal—hardly comparing, as we shall see below, with the protests against the Vietnam War.

Still, they are not without consequence. They are dividing the Democratic Party and uniting the Republican Party over an issue—support for allies abroad—that earlier worked the other way (uniting Democrats and dividing Republicans). They reveal a remarkable contrast in attitudes toward Israel by generation: Older voters are much more pro-Israel than younger voters. And they could affect the outcome of a close presidential election, negatively for Joe Biden.

If the protests do tip the election, it won’t be because most Americans care deeply about the Israel-Hamas war—they plainly don’t—but rather because Biden has failed to exercise leadership by presenting any compelling vision of what American interests are in the Mideast and why America has extended or should extend (as he claims) an “ironclad commitment to the security of Israel.” After seven months of war, most Americans remain supportive of Israel. But another large share, especially of younger Americans, remains “unsure” why we are involved. That failure rests on the President.

So this is what I want to discuss: What do Americans really think about the Israel-Hama war? I’m going to proceed in three installments. First, in this installment, I’m going to discuss the campus protests, not because these protests are representative of public opinion (they are not), but because they differ from Vietnam-era antiwar protests in remarkable ways that the media have largely ignored.

Next week, in the second installment, I’ll move on to discuss the opinions of Americans in general about the conflict—by party, religion, race, gender, and age. Finally, in the third installment, I’ll conclude with some observations on the President’s failure to clarify why America should be, or should not be, supportive of Israel in its campaign against Hamas.

Campus Protests… Then and Now

In their coverage of the campus protests, both the protest leaders and the media make frequent references to the last time a significant antiwar movement gripped American campuses, the Vietnam War demonstrations at the end of the 1960s. In fact, many of the protests seem like deliberate cosplay, with kids re-enacting the “Vietnam Summer” of 1967: Activists mark off “liberated zones,” chant invectives against colonialism, dress like indigenous freedom fighters, and issue vast and defiant manifestos.

Enough, already. Let’s identify a few clear contrasts between now and yesteryear.

The most obvious contrast is in the scale and violence of the protests. Here there is simply no comparison. The successive surges of antiwar fury that gripped American colleges in 1968, 1969, and 1970 turned student life inside out. During the May 1970 Student Strike, over in raucous demonstrations at nearly 900 colleges—that’s roughly 15% of the entire U.S. student population. Classes were boycotted. Whole semesters (and all exams) were cancelled. Fraternities were turned into revolutionary “teach in” centers. What’s more, those “days of rage” frequently triggered serious violence between students and police (or soldiers)—including live ammo, bombs, billy clubs, pepper-spraying armored vehicles, brutal beatings, many deaths, and burned-down buildings. I personally witnessed several such episodes.

The Gaza War camp-in protests? Well, using recent media estimates, I count . That’s less than two students in every thousand. Per student, we’re talking about a participation rate that is roughly 75X smaller. At the vast majority of colleges today, students would never notice the protests until they start scrolling through social media. “In truth,” , “the current protest movement is minuscule in comparison with the one a half-century ago.”

Indeed, I may be overcounting student protesters, because it turns out that a large share may not be students at all. (After arresting protesters at Columbia University and City College of New York, the NYCPD reported that 48% of the arrestees with either school.) Many of these noncollege protesters appear to be older political organizers (veterans, you might say) who have long favored leftist causes, including the BDS movement against Israel, and who see the current war as a ready spark with which to light a new fire. Their current challenge is a tough one: getting enough kids really fired up. They’ve got lots of organizers, but at many rallies not a lot of organizees. Sure, the Vietnam War demonstrations also included plenty of older leftist organizers—some of them “Old Left” socialists or even communists. But they were small dots lost in a sea of protesting students.

As for disruption and violence, again, there’s simply no comparison. During the Gaza War protests, sure, there has been the occasional takeover of a library or building, the taunting of “Zionists,” and the maddeningly repetitive chants and drums. But to me, most of it looks pretty tame and mannerly. Instances of shoving, glass breaking, or worse . Protesters even have the money and taste to spare us any ugliness by erecting North Face tents and wearing Patagonia vests. When police arrive on campus, safety-minded college administrators thoughtfully broadcast a “‘shelter in place” alert. Ditto for the law enforcement response. The police are mostly polite and methodical. Do those zip ties feel a bit uncomfortable? Be grateful that your head isn’t being bashed in by Mayor Daley’s cops. Or that you’re not facing a live volley by the Governor Rhodes’ Ohio National Guard.

Why did the Vietnam War elicit protests of an utterly different scale—in numbers, passion, and violence—than the Gaza War protests? Because back then American male youth were, literally, under the gun. There was universal male conscription. Student deferments were being phased out. Most young conscripts had to serve a one-year “tour of duty” in Vietnam against grizzled NVA veterans who weren’t going home until they liberated Saigon. And during this service a whole lot of US soldiers were getting killed (). Many Americans of all ages, both liberal and conservative, were beginning to doubt the wisdom of fighting a “limited war” in Vietnam. But for college-age Americans, the question wasn’t just about policy. It was about life or death.

Today, by contrast, college students have nothing personal at stake. America has no military personnel fighting in Gaza nor has any US leader proposed sending any there. If America were to send them, they would be volunteers, not conscripts. And even if, in some crisis scenario, America suddenly was to require conscripting college students, you can be certain that—by then—what happens in Gaza will be the least of our worries. How America responds to the Gaza War may have long-term geopolitical consequences that will impact the future of these students. But the protests invite little discussion of these.

Other Differences: Age and Gender

A couple of other differences are worth noting. One is of senior (Boomer) faculty and administrators at these campus rallies—among the planners and manifesto writers, among the protesters, and .

The fact that many activist youth collaborate so well with older adults is itself is remarkable. One explanation is that today’s youth are personally very close to their parents and thus, in general, relate easily to people their parents’ age. Young Boomers were (famously) not so close. After high school, they rarely lived with their parents and even then only under duress. They had, we would now say, a more “distant” emotional relationship with people their parents’ age. of a pro-Palestinian encampment told the media that, in preparation, “we took notes from our elders, engaged in dialogue with them and analyzed how the university responded to previous protests.” Such expressions of earnest deference would have been unthinkable from the likes of the Chicago Seven.

But there’s also something more deeply generational that may account for the rising willingness of today’s senior “authority figures” to themselves challenge authority.

When these Boomers were young, the older generation, who had come of age with depression and total war, were cautious about radical challenges to a postwar establishment that had prevented the nation from sliding back into total crisis. During the Vietnam demonstrations, few of them wanted to threaten violence, break the law, or get dragged off to jail. Back then, even gritty old Marxists (perhaps I should say, especially gritty old Marxists) were comfortable with rules and authority: They wore suits and ties and dreamed of a workers’ paradise in which all the windows remained unbroken.

Boomers have aged differently. When they were young, they viewed antiwar protests as a way to tear down a guns-and-butter Great Society that was growing repressive, brutalizing, conformist, and soul dead. And, as the decades passed, many have aged into gray champions in whom that inner fire still burns. On campus, they continue to speak truth to power, even if it means disorder or rule breaking and especially if it means they can set a defiant personal example for the rising generation. Well into their 60s and 70s, , “they are pushing back against university presidents… and warning against a wave of authoritarianism some say has been creeping onto campuses for years.”

Now let’s turn to another difference: the drastically altered gender ratio among protesters. To be sure, the gender ratio of the overall college student body has changed markedly over the years. Back in 1970, college students overall were nearly 60% male; today they are nearly 60% female. But the gender shift among protesters has been much more dramatic. Fifty years ago, the great majority of protesters were young men, especially when the protesters knew there was a clear risk of violence. (Not many coeds thought it would be cool to dodge rubber bullets or throw back tear gas canisters.) Today, though I haven’t seen any rigorous gender counts, the great majority of protesters—in particular, the leaders and spokespeople—appear to be young women.

Reason? Probably because young women are today more politically progressive than young men by a sizeable margin and because that margin has been widening steeply over the past five years. (See “.”) And, yes, it helps that most of today’s protests are well behaved. It’s probably no accident that groups of “counter protesters” against the Gaza War encampments, when they appear (for example, at , , or ), are overwhelmingly young men. And, young men being what they are, these counter protesters seem much more prone to use or threaten violence.

So What Do the Gaza War Protesters Want?

Here is a broader question to ponder. Reflecting on the Vietnam War protests, astutely recalls that, back then, many older Americans said to the youth protesters, I agree with your ends but not your means. What they meant was that they agreed that America should stop the loss of US soldiers’ lives by ending the Vietnam War, but that they objected to the widespread disruption and violence triggered by the protests because they threatened to make reasonable discussion impossible. Berman looks at the Gaza War protesters today and says he and his peers often have the opposite reaction: They agree with the protesters’ means, but not with their ends. Their means usually allow for reasonable discussion. But their ends make discussion pointless.

What Berman and others seem to have in mind is the vast gap between the challenge at hand in the Gaza War and the proposed remedy. To most Americans who sympathize with the protesters, and to many of the protesters themselves, the central outrage is the death and suffering of thousands of Gaza Palestinians. So the challenge at hand must be how to end it. Yet the solutions, as outlined in the manifestos (and chants) of the protest leaders and sponsors, do nothing to address this challenge—indeed, the leaders and sponsors were already promoting them for years, even decades, before the Israeli Defense Forces invaded the Gaza Strip after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack.

Some of the protesters’ more limited solutions, such as persuading colleges to “disclose” and “divest” their Israeli-related investments, would take years to implement even after most colleges agreed to do so (hardly any have thus far) and in any case would have little if any impact on Israel’s economy or government. No remedy for the sufferings of Palestinians here. As for the protesters’ more radical solutions, especially their boycott or sanctions campaign (the “B” and the “S” in BDS), they are aimed at compelling Israel to grant millions of Palestinians the right to migrate to Israel and become full citizens there (the so-called Palestinian “right of return”). These solutions seem even wider off the mark.

The full BDS agenda is based on the dubious premise that the region would become more peaceful by persuading Israel, the only democracy in the entire Mideast (according to , , and the ), to essentially dismantle itself. Even if it were attempted, the project of transforming Israel into a majority-Arab state would take years to implement—that is, after Israel agrees to it, and the odds of that happening has to be close to absolute zero. What’s more, as we will see in my next installment, very few Americans support this agenda. A “one state solution” led by a Palestinian government is not even supported by many Muslim-Americans—only about one in five.

We might think that the protesters would have second thoughts about a remedy that few Americans support, Israel would never accept, would take years to implement, and seems likely to destabilize the entire region, perhaps even plunging it into a horrific civil war. It certainly won’t help anyone living in the Gaza Strip this year or next.

The protesters may be hoping that, perhaps in time, they can persuade a larger share of ordinary American voters to join their cause. If so, they’re going to have to find better wordsmiths. Here’s a sample of the bleak pedantry issued by , supported by ninety-four student groups: “We know that antisemitism, Islamophobia, and racism—in particular racism against Arabs and Palestinians—are all cut from the same cloth: Western colonization, imperialism, white supremacy, and anti-Blackness.”

As for the factual content we find in these manifestos, it is so thoroughly slanted that it reads like something written by Hamas, Palestine Islamic Jihad, or the Al-Aqsa Martyrs. The manifestos claim that the goal of Israel’s military actions is to destroy the Palestinian Arabs. That’s a claim readers can judge for themselves. But they have nothing at all to say, literally nothing, about the repeated and explicit promises by the leaders of neighboring governments to destroy the Israeli Jews, to say nothing of their periodic invasions and attacks—most recently the Hamas massacre last fall, the ramped-up Hezbollah barrage over the winter, and the Iranian aerial assault last month.

These manifestos include abundant references to “the rights of indigenous peoples.” But the protest organizers should know that indigeneity is a perilous rabbit hole in which to go hunting for political solutions. Everyone agrees that most Palestinian Arabs and some Palestinian Jews were native to the region when it was part of the Ottoman Empire and the British mandate. After that, it gets complicated. Once Israel gained recognition as a new state in 1947, newly immigrating Jews began to make the historical claim (one they have repeated to each other at Passover for over two millennia) that they too are native—to ancient Judea.

And for further complexity, consider this: Half of all Israeli Jews today, roughly five million people, are not of European origin—a fact that undermines the “western imperialism” narrative. They are Mizrahi or Beta Jews—that is, Jews of Mideastern, North African, or Ethiopian origin. Most of these Jews came to Israel after being expelled by Arab governments, typically after being dispossessed of their land and property. So do they have “native” claims on Arab nations? No campus group, to my knowledge, has ever mentioned their “right of return.”

I’m not raising all these issues about nativity and right to return and war guilt and imperialism in order to settle them. They certainly lead to interesting discussions, helping us appreciate the multi-layered complexity of people and their history. Rather, I’m raising them to point out how disconnected they are from real-world decision making—that is, how little they help us to adjust our hopes to the facts on the ground.

Here are the facts on the ground. Israel isn’t going anywhere. It’s a democracy, and Israeli voters are overwhelmingly committed to eliminating (not just deterring) the threat from Hamas. Beyond that, they are open to any option that doesn’t threaten them with further invasion. The Palestinians aren’t going anywhere. Pretty much all Americans hate to see thousands of Palestinian civilians killed and injured. They hope and expect that Israel is trying to avoid civilian casualties. (What share of all Americans believes Israel is in fact trying to do this? About two-thirds; see my next installment.) Also, they would like to see the war stop as soon as possible—and, beyond that, to see the Palestinians enjoy the fruits of peace, political stability, economic opportunity, and possibly even democracy and civil rights. (I say “even” because it would be a wonderful first for an Arab state.)

What happens in the near term will depend on military and diplomatic events over which America does not have much control. What happens in the longer term—for example, whether Palestinian Gaza will remain occupied by Israel, revert back to PA governance, establish its own government, or set up a government under the supervision of neighboring Arab states—may be more amenable to American influence. Israel’s ability to work constructively again with the Arab states may in turn depend on Iran, a nation that seems bent on doing everything it can to unglue the Abraham Accords. Yet Iran’s behavior may itself be influenced by American policy.

These are the facts, the hopes, and some of the realistic options. And I lay them out here simply to show that the Gaza War protest agenda offers nothing that realistically engages with any of them.

Back in 1968, when US leaders heard “hell no, we won’t go!” they knew exactly what young protesters wanted—for the US military to start pulling its troops out of Vietnam—and this was a very real policy choice that President Johnson and his advisors regularly weighed and that President Nixon ultimately embraced.

In 2024, on the other hand, the protest message is strangely garbled. “Cease fire now!” is clear enough, but of course it’s not within America’s power to accomplish. Threatening to slow US military aid will not turn any nation away from pursuing its perceived vital interest: It is no more likely to persuade Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to pull out of Gaza than it has been to persuade Egyptian President el-Sisi to hold free and fair elections.

As for “Free Palestine” and “Justice for Gaza” and “Down with Zionism,” these messages are simply baffling. Where is Palestine? What does justice in Gaza mean—swift tribunals for the Hamas prisoners? As for killing Zionism, well, what then is to be done with that “Zionist describes me accurately”? The word Zionist would if they could only agree on exactly what it meant. And that’s the problem here. We don’t know what most of these words mean.

I am hardly alone here. Many have been struck by the incoherence of the Gaza War protesters’ agenda. It is heavy on emotion, but light on clarity of message or depth of knowledge.

Prominent Republicans, of course, have every reason to play this angle hard. “How many of them have actually studied history?” asked , “Very few… I think a lot of these people that are just spouting nonsense, they don’t know what they’re talking about.” announced, with incredulity, “I too want Palestinians to be free—from their oppressor, Hamas.” “If you are a protester on this campus, and you are proud that you’ve been endorsed by Hamas, you are part of the problem,” added . He said this in reference to for the American protesters—support they have extended presumably because many Ivy League protest leaders .

But it’s not just Republicans. Hillary Clinton and Tom Friedman are two mainstream Democrats who are deeply knowledgeable about Mideast diplomacy, Clinton as a US Senator and Secretary of State and Friedman as a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner for his journalism on Lebanon and Israel. At times, they have both been severely critical of Israel’s foreign policy. And they too have expressed dismay at what the Gaza War protesters are asking for.

Clinton has bluntly criticized the protesters for their uncritical acceptance of “willfully false… incredibly slanted, pro-Hamas, anti-Israel” propaganda sources. She’s amazed they think that siding with rejectionists like Hamas is a road to peace. And she reminds the “Cease Fire Now” chanters that Gaza did have a ceasefire agreement that was in effect for years—until October 7, when Hamas murderously violated it. “I have had many conversations with a lot of young people over the last many months,” , sounding remarkably like DeSantis. “They don’t know very much at all about the history of the Middle East or frankly about history in many areas of the world, including in our own country.”

Friedman checks off similar points. “What bothers me about the protesters,” , is their failure to understand that “the only just and workable solution to this issue is two nation-states for two indigenous people.” It’s unhelpful to argue that Israel has no right to defend itself. It’s equally unhelpful to give a free pass to Hamas, which will never accept a two-state solution and which “was ready to sacrifice thousands of Gazan civilians to win the support of the next global generation on TikTok. And it worked. But one reason it worked was a lack of critical thinking by too many in that generation—the result of a campus culture that has become way too much about what to think and not how to think.”

Replying to these attacks with irritation and eyerolls, most young protesters fault the older Democrats for their habitual deference to the Israelis and their blindness to the oppression of Palestinians. Their response is not so much to reflect more deeply on what they are trying to accomplish, but rather to double down on moral indignation.

Have Young Progressives Been Triggered?

This leads me to suggest yet another generational dynamic driving the Gaza War protests: that their purpose is not really about solving the Palestinians' suffering; it is really about therapy for the campus protesters' own suffering. Because these kids (late-wave Millennials and early-wave Homelanders) have been raised in such intensely sheltered home and school environments, they have trouble processing bad news about the world—leading to steeply rising rates of anxiety, loneliness, and depression.

Where do we see the highest incidence of emotional distress in young people? Among youth who go to college. And among these? Young women who go to college. And among these? Young women who go to college and who come from progressive families. See for a full exploration of these differential trends. Here’s a graphic (drawn from surveys of graduating high-school seniors) illustrating them.

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Youth councilors and psychologists tell us that the types of emotional problems they now notice most often are the so-called internalizing disorders. These refer to negative mood shifts (anxiety, depression, self-harm), and they have always been more prevalent in girls. What they’re noticing less are the externalizing disorders, which refer to negative behavior shifts (anger, violence, law breaking) and which have always been more prevalent in boys.

In this context, it should not surprise us that the youth protest activity we see today is not driven all that much by aggressive opposition to heavy-handed authorities (as it was, arguably, fifty years ago). Instead, it is driven mostly by a mood of helpless despair over injustices that weak authorities seem powerless to rectify. When I talk to young people who are upset about the Gaza War, I am struck by how much more they talk about how it makes them feel than what anybody can actually do about it.

Like others, I am also struck by their blinkered outlook. Few of them are aware that much of the world has always been a rather brutal and violent place. ( tracks fifty major and/or chronic conflicts currently raging in five continents, many of which have much higher cumulative civilian death and refugee tolls than the Gaza War.) This reality in no way justifies the taking of anyone’s life. But it should help us adjust our expectations about social behavior so that we aren’t emotionally crushed when we learn about a deadly war, especially when it happens in a region with a long history of deadly wars.

Judging by who watch and pass around TikTok videos of Gaza war casualties, I think many of them have been (in today’s parlance) “triggered”—which, by definition, renders them anxious and overwhelmed. For some, the best way to self-treat emotional triggering is to gather with others who feel the same way, to validate each others’ feelings, and to tell the world all about it. On campus, all it takes is a tent and a bit of grass.

Jonathan Haidt, who has written two excellent books on today’s youth (, coauthored with Greg Lukianoff, and ) explains that lying near the root of this generation’s growing unhappiness are three self-defeating lessons that have been taught to them by their sheltering parents and teachers. These he calls the three great “Untruths”—the three perfect ways to guarantee you misery in life. They are (one) that you should strive to avoid unpleasant experiences at all costs; (two) that you should always trust your emotions over your reason; and (three) that you should see the world as a black-and-white battle between good people and bad people.

In the Gaza War protests, I think it’s fair to say that all three Untruths are at work.

Summing Up and Coming Up

How important are the views of Gaza War protestors? Quantitatively, as we have seen, not very important at all. They are a tiny share of the college student body and an even tinier share of all college-age youth. Still, they are worth examining for at least two good reasons.

First, they do point to some important differences—albeit in an exaggerated, radicalized fashion—between young Americans and older Americans in how they view Israelis, Palestinians, the American role in the Mideast, and foreign policy more generally. In my next installment, I will take a close look at what all Americans of all ages think of the Israel-Hamas war. Along the way, I’ll be subdividing the population every which way: by party, religion, race, gender, and (yes) age. Here we will disclose some very significant generational contrasts.

Second, they could affect the outcome of the 2024 presidential election. Clinton’s and Friedman’s complaints about the views of the campus protesters reflect a serious (and clearly generational) rift that is much stronger within the Democratic party than within the GOP. And that rift is setting off alarm bells among the party’s moderate leadership. As we shall see in the next episode, the views of young protesters are an extreme version of a milder Democratic tilt (toward Hamas and against Israel) that could force Biden to choose between trying to rally his progressive youth base and trying to reach out to undecided voters.

According to , the Gaza War protesters threaten to split the party this year as badly as Vietnam War protesters did in 1968 when they undermined the candidacy of Hubert Humphrey and handed the election to Richard Nixon. Carville apparently fears that these protesters will once again disrupt the Democratic nominating convention in Chicago (we just can’t shake off those Vietnam-era comparisons!) or maybe will persuade some voters on the left to stay home. I think these fears are misplaced for reasons I’ve already touched on: The protests and students then are very different from the protests and students now. For most Americans, young Americans especially, the Mideast is nothing close to the emotional flashpoint in 2024 that Vietnam was in 1968.

I do, however, see another sort of danger facing Biden. The threat isn’t coming from young leftists who don’t like his Mideast policies. The threat is coming from young people across the board, and many older voters too, who simply don’t understand his policies. Biden’s day-to-day utterances on Mideast policy appear to be mostly reactive, zigging back and forth depending on events, with really no vision at all of what America is or should be trying to accomplish. Using survey data as evidence, I will make this argument in my third and last installment.

Coming Next… Part 2 of 3: What All Americans Think and Whose Side They Are On

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