Trudy Rubin

As someone who remembers when Columbia University students took over Hamilton Hall 56 years ago, let me say that 2024 is not 1968. Back then, our whole country was engaged in debate over the justice of a Vietnam War that involved tens of thousands of American troops.

Today, students are setting up tent encampments to protest a war that is not ours, but where U.S. weaponry is being used to kill thousands of Palestinian women and children — after Hamas murdered and kidnapped about 1,200 Israeli civilians.

Today’s cause is far murkier, since some of the demonstrators are “anti-Zionist,” which can be seen as wanting an end to the Jewish state. Some are also pro-Hamas, ignoring that terrorist group’s murderous pledge to kill all Israeli Jews.

But many other protesters — understandably aroused by videos of starving, maimed, or dying Gazan children — aren’t thinking that far ahead. They want their universities’ endowment funds to divest from U.S. companies involved in sales of weapons to Israel that accelerate civilian deaths.

So are the universities justified in calling in the cops? Are the demonstrators current or future antisemites? Or have they opened a debate that even strong supporters of Israel ignore at their peril?

Here are four points that lay out my thinking. Feel free to email me your thoughts.

Why only Gaza?

It stuns, but does not surprise me, that student concern over civilian deaths and starvation does not extend to Vladimir Putin’s relentless and deliberate bombing of Ukraine’s schools, hospitals, markets, churches, and apartment complexes.

This Russian terrorist campaign has turned dozens of Ukrainian villages, towns, and cities into ash and surpassed Israel’s destruction in Gaza many times over. The student outrage also ignores the massive and terrible civilian slaughter ongoing in Sudan, especially in Darfur. I’ve concluded, after much reading, online videos, and talking with friends’ children and grandchildren at various universities, that the draw of the Israel-Hamas conflict is not necessarily antisemitic. It attracts many students........

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