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Writer's pictureThe San Juan Daily Star

In campus protests over Gaza, echoes of outcry over Vietnam



Students from the Black Students Organization protest Columbia University’s suspension of the Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace group in New York on Nov. 14, 2023. (Bing Guan/The New York Times)

By Michael Wines


Richard Flacks remembers the challenges of building a protest movement during the Vietnam War as a pillar of the left-wing political and anti-war group Students for a Democratic Society during the 1960s.


“The whole idea of SDS began with the idea of, ‘We need a new way of being on the left, a new vocabulary, a new strategy,’” said Flacks, who helped write the group’s manifesto, the Port Huron Statement, in 1962. “We knew we were right, and I don’t think we were arrogant about it.”


Sixty years later, Iman Abid sees similar challenges in the war in the Gaza Strip between Israel and Hamas. “For so long, we couldn’t get Palestine to be that issue for people to care about,” said Abid, the organizing and advocacy director at the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, which works with pro-Palestinian campus organizations. “But now people care about it because they’re seeing it. They’re watching it on their social media. They’re watching it on the news.”


It is too early to know whether the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will define this generation as opposition to the Vietnam War did for many young people more than a half century ago.


But to many who have studied or lived through the Vietnam era, the parallels to the Gaza protests are compelling: a powerful military raining aerial destruction on a small, underdeveloped nonwhite land; a generational divide over the morality of the conflict; a sense that the war represented far broader political and cultural currents; an unswerving confidence — critics might say sanctimony — among students that their cause is righteous.


The differences can be glaring, too, beginning with the terrorist attack by Hamas that set this war in motion, for which there is nothing comparable in Vietnam. The Israel-Hamas war is not being fought by the U.S. military, unlike Vietnam, where more than 58,000 Americans died and young men faced a military draft.


Miles Rapoport, a former secretary of state of Connecticut, who joined SDS while studying at Harvard University in the 1960s, saw similarities but said the two movements and moments differ in a fundamental way: The United States waded into Vietnam in a show of superpower hubris. Israel, he said, is fighting for its existence after a terrorist attack that killed 1,200 citizens. The current war, he said, “has a lot more moral and philosophical nuance.”


That is reflected in pro-Israel marches and demonstrations to a far greater degree now than was common, particularly on campuses, for supporters of the war during the Vietnam era.


Still, both movements, Rapoport said, reflect “a kind of instinctive and initial solidarity with the underdog.” He added: “And related is a sense of solidarity with people who are fighting to have their own country and be freed from a kind of colonial existence.”


To critics of the Gaza protests, the current movement reflects the excesses, not the virtues, of the Vietnam protests, with chants now that to some suggest genocide against the Jewish people, much as some 1960s protests alienated many Americans by backing North Vietnam against U.S. forces. And those critics also accuse the pro-Palestinian demonstrators of hypocrisy — saying that many of the rallies include side issues that would be antithetical to many Palestinians, like women’s issues and LGBTQ+ rights.


Many supporters of Israel view the movement with a mixture of horror and consternation. Kenneth L. Marcus, chair of the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, a Jewish civil rights institution that is not affiliated with Brandeis University, said the campus demonstrations began even before Israel’s invasion of Gaza occurred.


“There may be some people participating in these protests who think they’re supporting Palestinians, but the movement they are advancing is predominantly an antisemitic movement,” he said, adding that it has its genesis in a celebration of violence. Rather than showing moral strength in the face of campus protests, he said, many university administrators “have responded with weakness and cowardice.”


Those protesting the war in Gaza owe their Vietnam-era forerunners for one legacy: the tactics, from die-ins to chants like “How many kids did you kill today?” that energized both movements. “Students didn’t have much in 1960 to emulate,” said Flacks, now a professor emeritus of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “A lot of the tactics invented at that time became part of the tool kit for activism on campuses.”


The Vietnam anti-war movement was overwhelmingly white, like most campuses of the 1960s. But campuses in 2023, particularly urban ones, contain far more students of color, many of whom empathize with Palestinians’ status as an embattled population under the control of a more powerful force. And nonstudents are a bigger part of those protesting now.


“Movements don’t come out of nowhere,” said Michael Kazin, a Georgetown University historian who in the 1960s was both a member of SDS and, briefly, its violent stepchild, the Weather Underground. For the Vietnam protesters, he said, the precursors were the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre in South Africa and the civil rights movement. For the Gaza protesters, the antecedents stretch from the anti-Muslim backlash after the Sept. 11 attacks to recent racial injustice protests.


When young protesters descended on Ferguson, Missouri, after police officers killed an unarmed Black man in 2014, Palestinians offered advice on social media for coping with tear gas. Today, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and elsewhere, Black and Latino students are among the leaders of the pro-Palestinian movement, Flacks said.


And both eras reflect the influence of deeply polarizing political leaders, particularly Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon in the Vietnam era, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, whose hard-line conservatism has given oxygen to campus support for the Palestinian cause.


“Those of us who are my age have direct memories of why Israel was a morally positive framework. It was the haven for people escaping from the worst oppression,” Flacks said. But “what the kids in college now see about Israel is a government led by Benjamin Netanyahu,” which they view as a repressive force supported by established Jewish organizations.


Larry P. Gross, an expert on media and culture at the University of Southern California, said Israeli leaders had not adapted their message, much less policies, to a generation that views Israel not as a besieged Jewish homeland, but as the arbiter of freedom in the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza.


“The Israelis and their PR arm fundamentally didn’t understand the degree to which they were losing young people,” he said. “They reflexively played the Holocaust card over and over again,” he added, even as “we went from seeing pictures of Russians bombing Ukraine as a war crime to pictures of Israel bombing Gaza.”


Support for Palestinians among the young, he said, “is going to last. I think it’s one of those generational shifts.”


The last time an anti-war movement faced a generational divide, many young people sat out the 1968 presidential election between Nixon and Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Nixon won the Electoral College by capturing four states by fewer than 88,000 total votes.


Kazin recently published an article in the liberal journal The New Republic wondering whether history could repeat itself there, too.


“People like me were opposed to Humphrey, and were happy, in a sense, to see him lose,” he said. “Now, a lot of people are saying they’ll never go for Biden. And it’s not clear who they vote for, if they vote at all.”

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