IT was about two weeks ago that students at Columbia University in New York City set up an encampment on the campus’s South Lawn. Students for Justice in Palestine, along with other affiliated groups, said that it was establishing a ‘liberated zone’ and a ‘People’s University’ in protest against the fact that all universities in Gaza have now been destroyed. Everybody knows what happened in the days that followed: Columbia’s president, the Egyptian-born Manouche Shafik, sent in the New York police to clear the encampment.
It was a move that backfired, mostly because the subsequent images showed heavily armed police officers in kevlar vests dragging teenage girls in keffiyas. The youngsters had been peacefully protesting. Since then, the encampments have spread like wildfire across the US. Over the weekend, hundreds of people were arrested at campuses all across the country.
The obvious discussions around the protests have centred on how they show a groundswell of support among young Americans for those suffering in Gaza. However, the protests represent something more than just that in terms of what they say about the American political system and the place of young people in it. In a superficial sense, the tenacity of the protesters and the fact that they are so many of them present a conundrum for both the Republican and the Democratic parties. In the case of the former, right-wing politicians from Senator Lindsey Graham to ex-Trump adviser Steve Bannon have made elite universities, in fact universities in general, a........