This essay is not a defense of the pro-Palestine protests which have swept U.S. universities in recent weeks. But it is an attempt to render them coherent to those who find them unintelligible, and it is a defense of the cause for which they are protesting.
Campus protesters are a stereotypically unsympathetic bunch. They are frequently portrayed, with some justice, as fair-weather radicals who support niche causes using jargon that few understand and fewer like. It is not surprising, therefore, that when videos of the increasingly violent protests against university involvement with Israel surfaced on social media feeds and were subsequently beamed across cable news networks, they were interpreted by many on the right as demonstrating leftist conquest of American campuses —Marxism finally ascendent. There is something to this interpretation: much of the protesters’ discourse is couched in terms of critical theory and postcolonial theory. There are hammers and sickles present in encampments at universities spanning the nation. But the protests are more eclectic than that critique suggests. There have also been acts of real moral courage, fascist slogans and antisemitism, harassment of Jewish Pro-Palestine protesters, students bravely facing down police in riot-gear, and students complaining about not being provided free food.
Others have claimed that the protesters protest out of ignorance. If they only knew the real history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, it is suggested, they would realize their grievous error. And to no one's surprise, interviews with protesters have circulated in which certain unfortunate individuals prove themselves to be almost comically unschooled, lacking basic knowledge of the reasons for their protest, up to and including the concrete demands that their particular protest is making on its university.
But there is a third reason for these protests, which is arguably one of the more important for understanding why it is at this moment, rather than in decades past, that we are seeing such sustained pro-Palestinian sentiment on college campuses. This is the first generation of fully Americanized Middle Easterners in real numbers, of MENA-Americans who are politically active and who grew up in the dark shadows cast by memories of destroyed skyscrapers. The examples of Syria, Egypt, and Iraq, give some sense for this phenomenon more broadly. Middle Eastern immigration to the U.S. began in the late nineteenth century, and for several decades most Middle Easterners who immigrated were Syrian Christians, particularly Maronites, Melkites, and Orthodox. Arab, and especially Arab Muslim, immigration to the United States began in larger numbers in the second half of the 20th Century. Syrian-Americans now number just under 200,000 people, Egyptian-Americans now number in the several hundreds of thousands, and Iraqi-Americans number over 200,000. All-told, there are over 3.5 million MENA-Americans, which means we constitute around one percent of the population of the United States.
Following the paths beaten by other immigrant communities, perhaps most notably Asian Americans, parents and grandparents in the various Middle Eastern immigrant communities kept their heads down, dedicating themselves to professional achievement and providing for their children materially. Second- and third-generation MENA-Americans are, by contrast, American enough to be politically active, but owing to the so-called war on terror, sufficiently alienated from mainstream foreign-policy discourse to have strong anti-establishment sensibilities. And there are sufficient numbers of us to render us politically potent.
Our numbers lead to a second reason why, I suspect, college campuses feature a great deal of protest: younger Millennials and members of Gen-Z simply know more MENA-Americans than their parents and grandparents did. And that means they know more people whose historic and contemporary communities, not least Christian communities, have been harmed by U.S. foreign policy across the Middle East, including by the U.S.’s staunch and no-strings-attached support for Israel. To make this concrete: in part by virtue of working at a university, I know multiple Palestinians, all of whom are Christian, and three of whom are Americans, multiple Egyptian-Americans, and multiple Lebanese-Americans.[1] One of my Palestinian friends knows Christians in Gaza whose church was bombed by Israel. Another was born American because his family fled Israel as refugees in 1948 and subsequently immigrated to the United States. Of my Lebanese acquaintances, the Christian has been very active in campus protests, and the Muslim had family living near Lebanon’s border with Israel who were evacuated to Beirut. My Geddo (“grandfather” in Cairene Arabic) worked for the UNRWA in Gaza in the 1950s as a surgeon. I have an uncle who died in infancy who is buried in Gaza. American foreign policy is personal for many of us; we have a stake in it.
But U.S. policy for the last several decades has not only not reflected our concerns but, in many cases, has actively worked to harm and weaken our nations of origin. The Biden Administration, panicked over Arab-American defections from the progressive coalition over what many Arab-Americans consider morally indefensible policy choices with respect to Palestine, has attempted to triangulate, particularly courting MENA-Americans in crucial swing-states. At the same time, some on the right, including Senator J.D. Vance and Tucker Carlson, have recently become vocal about the rotten fruit of U.S. foreign policy in Iraq, Syria, and Palestine, particularly for Christians there. That said, few of any political persuasion have been able to reckon fully with the consequences of American foreign policy, particularly for diasporic Palestinians in Lebanon, Jordan, and elsewhere.
But Americans of Middle Eastern descent know, and we are bearing witness to what has happened and is happening. Let us start with the context of the last two decades. According to U.N. data, between 2008 and Oct. 6th, 2023, Palestinian terrorists killed 328 Israelis and injured over six thousand. By contrast, in that same time period, Israel killed 6,893 Palestinians, over two thousand of whom were women and children. In addition, Israeli forces injured 158,406 Palestinians, nearly nineteen thousand of whom were shot with live ammunition.[2] In 2005, Israel was condemned by the U.N. for flying military planes over Gaza with the express purpose of creating sonic booms so powerful they shattered windows, cracked building walls, caused panic attacks in children, and increased Palestinian women’s miscarriages by 40%.[3]
Israel has a well-documented history of illegally forcing Palestinian civilians to participate in military operations.[4] In one of the more egregious examples, two Israeli soldiers forced a nine-year-old Palestinian boy to open a bag they believed was booby-trapped with a bomb. Thankfully, they were mistaken, and the boy survived. The soldiers’ punishment came two full years later and consisted in a three-month conditional sentence and demotion to the rank of private. This failure to discipline IDF soldiers for severe misconduct is not isolated. In 2018, Israeli snipers recorded themselves shooting Palestinian protesters, cheering as one “flew through the air” and laughing as his friends rushed him to safety. Senior Israeli officials celebrated the shooting, and then-Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman said, “The Gaza sniper deserves a decoration.” Examples could be multiplied indefinitely.
More recently, since the terrorist attack on Israel on October 7th, Israeli politicians have spoken openly of their callous disregard for civilian life: The Deputy Speaker of the Israeli Parliament, Nissim Vaturi, said, "Now we all have one common goal — erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth." Likud party member and former Israeli Public Diplomacy minister Galit Distel Atbaryan said Israel’s energy must be focused on "Erasing all of Gaza from the face of the earth." These and other statements at least indicate by rhetoric that some powerful people in Israel do not want special care to protect civilian lives to be taken. Vaturi doubled down, saying, "I stand behind my words... It is better to burn down buildings rather than have [Israeli] soldiers harmed. There are no innocents there." Not to be outdone by their Israeli counterparts, sitting American congressman Brian Mast claimed, when asked whether Palestinian babies deserved to die, “these are not innocent Palestinian civilians”, and Ron DeSantis used Hamas’ horrendous actions on October 7th as justification for opposing allowing Palestinian refugees into this country—implying all Palestinians constitute terrorist threats.
With this rhetoric in mind, there are compelling reasons to think that the Israeli military has not taken special care to protect civilian lives, in part owing to the utilization of a new AI system for choosing combat targets and tolerating far higher civilian casualties in attacking such targets. Comparisons with the civilian death tolls in other conflicts do not reflect favorably, either: the New York Times reported in November that "Even a conservative reading of the casualty figures reported from Gaza shows that the pace of death during Israel’s campaign has few precedents in this century…. More children have been killed in Gaza since the Israeli assault began than in the world’s major conflict zones combined—across two dozen countries—during all of last year, even with the war in Ukraine, according to UN tallies of verified child deaths in armed conflict." In other words, as of November 2023, Israel's bombing and infantry campaigns had killed more children since the war in Gaza began than had been killed in all other major conflicts combined in 2023 including the Russia-Ukraine war.
But that is not all: while our media outlets and talking heads were telling us that the IDF has the highest standards in the world for protecting civilian life, U.S. Intelligence had determined that half of the bombs being used by the Israeli military are not highly targeted smart weapons but "dumb bombs," which have much higher rates of civilian casualties associated with their use.[5] Gen. Joseph L. Votel, a retired four-star general in the U.S. Army and former commander of United States Central Command, recently stated that he was not convinced Israel was trying to separate Gazan civilians from Hamas.
We have heard incessantly that it is unfair to call what is happening in Gaza “ethnic cleansing,” but according to Israeli reporting, PM Netanyahu has indicated interest in reducing the population of the Gaza Strip "to a minimum,” expelling Palestinians from Gaza altogether. U.S. State Department documents reveal that the United States has been using legal workarounds to continue sending weapons to Israel because we have laws forbidding the sending of weapons to military units credibly accused of human rights violations.
Palestinian civilians detained and interrogated by the IDF have reported treatment of the most horrific kinds: women have been stripped in front of men and sexually assaulted, men have been tortured with nail guns and sodomized with electric probes. According to Israeli media, Israeli medical professionals have confessed to amputating Gazan detainees’ arms and legs because they have been constantly cuffed by all four limbs, causing irreparable damage.[6] Multiple mass graves have been found filled with Palestinians, including women and children, bearing signs of torture and evidence of being buried alive; the United States refuses to call for independent investigations.
This is all made more egregious by the fact that America’s conservative Christian communities, especially evangelicals, have ignored or downplayed the suffering of their fellow-Christians in Palestine and reaffirmed their historic position that war is just when Israel wages it, no matter what happens, not least because Israel is “a rare example of democracy in the region.” Evangelicals have derided the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem and Pope Francis as they release statements detailing the assassination of Catholic parishioners in Gaza and advocating for peace, suggested the united call by Christian Patriarchs of Jerusalem for a cease-fire is naïve, and pathologized those Palestinian Christians and priests who speak of the regular indignities of being Palestinian.
American media and politicians downplay the severity of Israeli military action; they tell us Israel does its utmost to protect civilian life; they tell us Israel treats Palestinian civilians with respect; they tell us Israel has not collectively punished Palestinians; they tell us Israel is doing all it can to get aid safely into Gaza; they tell us Israel is beleaguered even as it receives a no-strings-attached supplies of U.S. weapons; they tell us protesters at American universities across the country are uniformly antisemitic and pro-terrorist; they tell us Arab deaths are justified, that it is necessary for thousands of beautiful Palestinian children to spend their final moments in the dark, utterly alone, choking to death on rubble. If this state of affairs cannot justify protest, nothing can.
They tell us it isn’t happening, but it is.
Editor's note (May 17, 2024): The words, 'In other words, as of November 2023,' were added to a sentence above in the paragraph addressing the civilian death toll in Gaza. The words "which has casualties numbering in the hundreds of thousands," in reference to the Russia-Ukraine war have also been removed in order to make the intended meaning more clear.
[1] I also know several Israeli-Americans, including those who have served or who have family members currently serving in the IDF.
[2] As opposed to rubber bullets, which are included in a separate casualty category.
[3] When one such sonic boom was, owing to a military mishap, heard dozens of miles into Israel, it awakened thousands of Israeli citizens in the night, some of whom called the police and fire departments worried they were being bombed. Israel would cause sonic booms over Gaza dozens of times per month, and in one five-day stretch, it created over twenty.
[4] One more polemically inclined might be tempted to characterize this as using “human shields.”
[5] Such dumb bombs are better at degrading Hamas’ tunnel network but far worse for civilians. According to the New York Times, “Lt. Gen. Mark C. Schwartz, a retired U.S. Special Operations commander who served as the American security coordinator for Israel and the Palestinian Authority,” said in an email that “We would not have been dropping 2,000-pound and even 500-pound bombs in and amongst the civilian population.”
[6] In some cases, the cuffs are not removed for days at a time. Detainees have their heads covered, are fed through straws, and are made to defecate and urinate directly into diapers.