Schooled in ‘social justice,’ more students flock to Palestinian cause

When campus police removed Selena Lacayo from a pro-Palestinian sit-in on the night of Oct. 25, it was her first arrest. She was one of 56 students and one employee at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who were later charged with trespassing outside the chancellor’s office.  

But it wasn’t Ms. Lacayo’s first protest. Last spring, she marched with fellow students under the banner of prison abolition to call for the eviction of the university’s police force from campus. 

To Ms. Lacayo, a first-generation college senior whose major is women, gender, and sexuality studies, resisting the “prison-industrial complex” and Israeli military actions in Gaza is part of the same struggle. The common enemy is “Western imperialism” that, as she sees it, oppresses people in formerly colonized countries and those living in marginalized communities. 

Even students in the United States have “been directly affected by war and militarism” and need to organize to defend their rights, she says.

Her protest was part of a wave of Israel-related student activism that has roiled campuses across the U.S. since Oct. 7, when Hamas militants massacred 1,200 civilians in southern Israel and took more than 200 hostages. While some young people have voiced solidarity with Israel and supported its retaliation against Hamas, the plight of Palestinians in Gaza, where 17,000 have been killed according to Gaza officials, has galvanized many more students to join rallies, marches, and sit-ins. 

To these students, U.S. support for Israel is complicity with a punitive military campaign that compounds the suffering of Palestinian civilians under Israel’s thumb. Polls show a generational divide on the issue, with younger voters more sympathetic to Palestinians than older voters are – a divide that threatens to undermine President Joe Biden’s reelection bid. 

To conservatives, the surge in anti-Israel student activism, including the willingness of some students and faculty to condone the Oct. 7 attack as an act of resistance to occupation, is evidence of antisemitism incubated by progressive educators. Liz Magill, the president of the University of Pennsylvania, resigned on Saturday after a firestorm of criticism over testimony she gave at a congressional hearing last week on antisemitism on campus. 

Republican lawmakers on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce had grilled Ms. Magill, along with the presidents of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, on whether protests calling for the genocide of Jews constituted harassment. None offered a definite yes, responding that it depended on context and free speech protections. On Tuesday, Harvard’s governing board reaffirmed its support for President Claudine Gay’s leadership.

Rep. Virginia Foxx, a Republican from North Carolina who chairs the committee, blamed a rise in antisemitism on a “race-based ideology of the radical left” that sorts society into “classes of oppressed and oppressor” in college curriculums. “Institutional antisemitism and hate are among the poisoned fruits of your institutions’ cultures,” Representative Foxx said. 

Still, the influence of the academy on pro-Palestinian activism isn’t clear-cut. Relatively few undergraduates enroll in classes dealing directly with postcolonial politics or anti-racism; experts say many arrive on campus with political opinions already formed, and that they are more likely to be influenced by social media than seminars. 

“I think people get their politics more from their home and their parents than from what they’re taught at the university,” says Robert Cohen, a historian and professor of social studies at New York University. ”The fact that the universities are a center of controversy – it’s a good thing,” he adds. “What I would worry about is if people aren’t speaking out.”  

A generation schooled in “social justice”

The college-age cohort that entered adulthood during the pandemic’s disruptions and economic anxieties and was swept up into the 2020 racial justice protests – the largest since the 1960s – seems primed to see global conflicts through a similar lens. Today’s student body is also more racially and ethnically diverse, and includes Arab Americans and international students attuned to Middle East politics. A cross-pollination of progressive groups on campus has cast the struggles of Palestinians as mirroring those of Black victims of police violence. Israel is accused of “settler colonialism” and “structural racism” in its occupation of Palestinian territories, language that evokes European imperial rule in Africa. 

At a recent pro-Palestinian rally held in Manhattan, a woman held a handmade sign that read, “We can’t breathe since 1948,” referring both to the 2014 chokehold death of Eric Garner in police custody and to the mass displacement of Palestinians after Israel’s founding in 1948.  

Natasha Sortland, a freshman at Northeastern University in Boston, joined a daylong sit-in on Dec. 1 to call for a cease-fire in Gaza. She’s also written several letters to her representatives in Congress. She says that while any civilian deaths are “horrendous,” focusing on the Hamas attack on Oct. 7 misses “the bigger picture” and doesn’t justify Israel’s deadly bombardment on Gaza. 

An environmental science major, Ms. Sortland became interested in social justice in high school in Zumbrota, Minnesota. She joined a youth-led movement in 2020 after George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis, 70 miles away from her home. “It definitely strengthened my beliefs, just being around similar-minded people,” she says. 

Student support for Palestinian rights also may reflect a reaction to the partisan climate in Israel, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has led successive, increasingly extreme right-wing governments. Left-leaning students see Israel “being militaristic and led by someone who’s Trump-like, which is Netanyahu. So their sympathies are with the Palestinians,” says Professor Cohen, the author of several books on 1960s student activism. 

While older Americans recall Israel as the underdog in a hostile region, fending off Arab armies in the 1960s and ’70s, college-age voters came of age in a different era. “I think for a lot of younger activists, they’ve seen Israel mostly in the context of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Israel is seen as just a much stronger actor,” says Thomas Zeitzoff, an associate professor of public affairs at American University, who studies political psychology and political violence. 

Pro-Palestinian or pro-Hamas?

Many student protesters say their support for Palestinian civilians shouldn’t be construed as pro-Hamas, despite their adoption of chants like “from the river to the sea,” a slogan that many hear as a call to expel millions of Jews from what is now Israel. 

Some, however, do express open support for Hamas’ actions. Hatem Teirelbar knows which side he’s on. A senior at the University of Colorado Denver, the Egyptian national joined pro-Palestinian protesters last month outside a Global Conference for Israel held by a U.S. Zionist group that was planned before Oct. 7. Tensions over the war in Gaza led to heightened security at the event, held at a downtown convention center. 

“Being pro-Palestinian really does require supporting the Palestinian resistance, because they are the ones actually fighting for liberation and independence,” says Mr. Teirelbar, a political science major, as he gripped the pole of a large Palestinian flag in his gloved hands. 

An organizer for the Students for a Democratic Society in Denver, Mr. Teirelbar expressed support for the Oct. 7 attack on Israeli Jews. To disavow armed resistance, he says, is to ask “Palestinians to just submit to genocide.”

Luna, another student who came out to protest the next day, and who declined to give her surname, says she understands the plight of Palestinians in Gaza because her family is from Afghanistan. “We know what it’s like to have our country occupied,” she says. She wore a Palestinian kaffiyeh and a mask as she joined others shouting slogans like “Zionism is terrorism” at Jewish conference attendees.  

“I am not against Judaism. I’m against Zionism,” says Luna, who is enrolled at Metropolitan State University of Denver. 

A Harvard-Harris poll in October found that half of respondents of ages 18-24 sided more with Hamas than with Israel, compared with 16% of the public overall. But that finding has been challenged; other polls have reported much lower levels of support for Hamas among Generation Z, though still more than among older generations. 

Palestinians make up a slice of a growing Middle East and North Africa demographic in the U.S. In 2020, the Census Bureau broke out this category for the first time, recording around 3.5 million residents, including mixed ethnicities; of these, 371,887 were of ages 18-24, according to the bureau. That means a greater presence on college campuses of students with roots in a region where opinion is broadly sympathetic to Palestinians, not Israelis. 

Jews make up a larger share of the U.S. population at 7.6 million. Most vote Democratic; many Jews were prominent in 20th-century civil rights movements and other progressive causes. But there’s also a generational divide over Israel among American Jews: In a 2021 poll by a Jewish organization, 38% of Jews under 40 agreed that Israel was an apartheid state, compared with 23% of those over 64. One-third of under-40s agreed with the statement that Israel was “committing genocide” against Palestinians, while only 15% of over-64s concurred. 

Still, many Jewish Democrats feel betrayed by young progressives’ embrace of anti-Israel rhetoric and their failure to forcefully denounce Hamas. In a Nov. 29 speech on the Senate floor, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, the highest-ranking elected Jewish official, said that “young people who yearn for justice” for Palestinians were being manipulated by “antisemites” and warned that liberal Jews no longer felt welcome on the political left.

Senator Schumer urged young Americans to learn the history of antisemitism and to understand the “scar tissue” that Jews carry from the Holocaust, which, he said, informs their fear of Hamas and other groups that seek the annihilation of Israel. “Can you blame us for feeling vulnerable only 80 years after Hitler wiped out half of the Jewish population across the world while many countries turned their back?”

Dividing Democrats 

While the wave of student activism protesting Israel’s military offensive has drawn national attention, Professor Cohen of NYU doubts it will become as significant as the protests against the Vietnam War in the 1960s. The anti-apartheid protests in the 1980s aimed at South Africa, he notes, were also on a larger scale. 

One significant difference is that those protests didn’t have many voices on the other side. The Palestinian cause isn’t “going to unite the campus, because it’s polarizing,” Professor Cohen says. “It’s something that’s been divisive all along.” 

That divisiveness runs right through the electoral coalition that elected President Biden in 2020 and that Democrats will need to win again next year. Hence what looks like a protest movement over U.S. foreign policy and Mr. Biden’s leverage over Israel is also a domestic political battle in which the progressive wing of his party is trying to assert its own leverage. “It’s not just about the conflict there. It’s about broader issues and struggles within the Democratic coalition,” says Professor Zeitzoff of American University.

Back at UMass Amherst, Ms. Lacayo says she won’t stop protesting until the university divests from all Israeli-related assets and condemns Israel’s military offensive in Gaza. “Lives are being lost. It just feels, on a human level, to do nothing is not an option,” she says. 

She says some of her classes have informed what she calls her “politics of liberation,” but that she learned far more from her interactions on campus and by joining social movements. “I think most of what I’ve learned has been outside the classroom,” she says. 

Asked if she felt politically at home in the Democratic Party, Ms. Lacayo laughed. “I do not belong in that party, to be honest,” she says. 

On its website, UMass Amherst tells students, “Be bold. Be true. Be revolutionary.” Ms. Lacayo intends to do that, even at the risk of another arrest. “I think the UMass administration expects things to die down and next semester to be brand new. But we’re going to continue our actions until our demands are met,” she says. 

Mackenzie McCarty contributed to this report from Boston.