On Protests

A conversation on campus protests, Israel-Gaza, oppressors and the oppressed, and other topics

May 17, 2024

The following is a conversation with Prof. Michael Lens. We started talking about the campus protests and veered quickly into other areas. I am grateful to him for having this conversation—which I hope will continue—and for being willing to share it here. Note: Mike and I happen to be faculty at UCLA, but we have also been friends for over a decade. This conversation is solely in the latter capacity.

Tom Vondriska: In the 24 hours since we began this conversation by text, the competing protests on the UCLA campus turned violent overnight. I have been thinking incessantly about the somewhat conflicting instincts around my personal views on the current situation in Israel and Gaza, and my views on the manner in which these events have been responded to by the US media and, more recently, students on college campuses. I found the events of October 7^thabhorrent and see the massive loss of life in Gaza that has resulted as a tragedy, the blame for which I assign mostly—although not exclusively, and perhaps we will get into this—on Hamas. Yet as I told one of the Pro-Palestinian protesters yesterday, although I fundamentally disagree with his views on the situation in Israel/Gaza, I admire the fact that he cares about the world he lives in and wants to change it.

Mike Lens: I know our plan is to get into the role of nonviolent protest, but this is definitely one of those crises where how you see protest has a lot to do with how you see the belligerents in the conflict. I strongly support the idea and essentiality of the Israeli state. I am not religious, and I do not pay much attention to ancient history, so this story largely starts with the Holocaust for me. This means I am woefully unqualified to get into who has some kind of ancient claim to the various holy lands of Israel/Jordan/Gaza/etc. I helicopter in way later. What this means is I have inevitably a very Eurocentric or Western perspective that boils down to ohhhhhh no I cannot believe what they did to Jewish people they need a home of their own because that damn continent will not stop trying to exterminate them.

So I think it is essential that the Israeli state works in some form, but things get complicated for me. First, it’s clearly a colonial enterprise. In 1947 the U.N., Britain, etc. just displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from a British-controlled state. Wars and violence between the Israelis and various neighboring states have frequently flared up ever since. Due to its substantial armament by its allies, chiefly the United States, the Israelis are able to protect themselves (with some tragic caveats) and maintain. I reluctantly support this armament. But, because of their tenuous position, the Israelis have had (chosen)1 to guard against these threats by protecting these borders with extreme militancy. This leads to the second major problem or complication. That the Gazans are living in an open air prison. Their borders with both Egypt and Israel are heavily guarded and goods and people cannot travel freely. As a result, people are trapped in a deeply impoverished society that is not even recognized as an autonomous state.

Desperation breeds shitty leaders, and here we have Hamas. They—not the Palestinian people—bear responsibility for the abhorrent acts on October 7. But the response is on Israel. They are not going to be able to obliterate Hamas. Their current war has no realistic endgame. It feels like anger and vengeance lashing out.

You probably want us to get back to the topic at hand, which is more about the students and their theory of change. But are there details I laid out that you disagree with?

TV: When they met with Bill Clinton in 1993 to hash out what would become the Oslo Accords, Yitzhak Rabin set the stage by telling Yasser Arafat a story. Two thousand years ago, Rabin said, my Jewish ancestors walked down to the Mediterranean to swim. As they frolicked in the waves, they saw with dismay that some Palestinians had come to the beach and thrown their clothes in the water. An indignant Arafat interjected: there were no Palestinians two thousand years ago! Exactly, Rabin said. Now we can begin negotiations.2

You got a key piece of history correct: the UN mandate (accepted by the Jews, rejected by the Arabs) and the British divided the land in question, leading to the relocation of Arab populations. This act is often portrayed as Israel having ‘stolen land’, which is inaccurate. Soon thereafter, pogroms began across the Middle East, driving Jews from Iraq, Iran, Syria and other countries. Israel accepted all of these people (to this day, Arab countries often do not accept Palestinians as full citizens). In 1948, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Lebanon and Iraq declared war and attacked Israel. A country that had existed for ~1 year. I am also not a historian–some would say what is the role for two dilettantes to discuss world events…to which I would counter: if only history professors and politicians try to understand these issues, how can we expect change–but there is one other piece of the recent history of this region I think is relevant to responding to your question about Gaza, which is the 1967 war. Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Iraq, with tacit support from other Arab nations, were preparing to again attack Israel. In what became the Six Day War, Israel struck first. At the end of those six days, Israel occupied what is now known as the West Bank, the Golan Heights, most of the Sinai Peninsula (subsequently returned to Egypt in a peace deal) and Gaza.

This is relevant because of your use of the word colonial. Jewish Israelis did not come to the Middle East from another country to set up a colonial outpost. In fact, from a historical standpoint, I wonder if Jews may be the longest extant society that has never colonized any other people. Jews came to Israel in 1947-48 fleeing for their lives, most of them desperately poor. And the Jewish people have lived in modern day Israel for thousands of years–this part of the above story is not a joke.

I do not fault Gazans for supporting Hamas. If someone holds a gun to your head, to the head of your wife or your child, good luck forfeiting reason and drawing on a deep wellspring of morality and righteousness to resist, while watching your family slaughtered.

I do fault the Arab world for not converting Gaza–which Israel has not occupied since 2005 and which receives billions in aid from nations all over the world (including the USA), used by Hamas to build tunnels to protect themselves–into a Hong Kong or Dubai.

Also at fault is the Israeli leadership of the past two decades (and here we are talking mostly about Netanyahu) for failing to aggressively seek peace with the Palestinians. I also fault the settler movement in the West Bank, which helps prop up the PA. Thus, to your question of whether Israel must treat Gaza this way, I would say no. It would be in both parties’ interests if the current war were to come to an end. The only solution I would accept if I were a leader of a country beset by constant terrorism from my neighbor would be a complete change of the leadership. In the current situation, I think this means Israel has to destroy Hamas (no one else is stepping up to do so) and someone, ideally notIsrael (probably the UN and Saudi Arabia and Egypt), needs to occupy and administer Gaza for the foreseeable future. As far as the responsibility for the nature of the response being on Israel: I agree. What if after October 7th Israel had rallied the Arab and non-Arab world into coalition military action to dislodge Hamas?

Many Americans view the conflict in the Middle East through a lens of colonizer versus colonized. Oppressor versus oppressed. I am curious about your thoughts on the conflation of issues like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, policing in America, race and gender in a framework of oppressor versus oppressed? I sense this is a kernel at the center of how many people respond to current events.

ML: I really like this question you pose. It allows me to pivot away from historical and geopolitical details that are not my specialty and toward both the connections to domestic politics that I understand a little better and our conversation’s central topic, which is the nature of the University protest movement.

And on the details, I’ll consider myself corrected on my misuse of the word colonial.

Your framing of this being about oppressor versus oppressed is spot on. I don’t think it’s too simplistic to say that’s generally the driving force behind the progressive movement in the United States, where they literally see the world as a battle to some extent between the oppressors and the oppressed. The one percent versus the rest of us, the police versus African-Americans, Colonizers and colonized, and so on. Whether or not you know the ancient or modern histories of the Israeli state, and who has claims to various holy lands, it’s pretty easy for anyone to see that one side in this conflict has a 21st century military infrastructure and the other does not. One side tragically lost hundreds in October and the other side has tragically lost upwards of 30,000 since. Racial and ethnic minorities, those with LGBTQ status, women mourning the loss of abortion rights, etc. and progressive allies of all of these groups find it easy to see which side needs urgent defense. I think the protest movement draws its strength from those connections. As someone who is older and more centrist than my students, I see way more gray in this conflict, and honestly have trouble understanding why others don’t.

TV: Most of the discussion I have heard about the oppressor versus oppressed framework has been pejorative. I’ve heard plenty of shrill talk, but also a fair bit of sober, cogently argued deconstruction of the philosophical basis (I know I’m supposed to know Marx and Fookoe and some other fountainheads of this movement better, but I don’t) for–and I’ll just go ahead and say the radioactive word–wokeness. There’s a (small) slice of these arguments that I take seriously and frankly that resonates with me. But kvetching about wokeness in 2024 ought to be classified with the borderline euphoric state to be achieved by devouring a double quarter pounder with cheese, 6 piece nugget with mayo, large fries and a chocolate milkshake: it feels totally amazing, but afterwards, deep down, you know it can’t be that simple. You can’t keep going on like this. What I’m saying is: I haven’t heard a cogent argument for why the red hot core of the modern progressive movement is worth fanning. For why the modern iteration of progressivism is worth saving. And I just don’t believe that such an argument cannot be made.

ML: Matt Yglesias gave the positive case for the left recently on his Substack, which is obviously way less good than your Substack. Although it’s his primary income source so he is way more prolific. Anyway, his post was intentionally one-sided--I believe there will be a case against the left coming from him as well. And the left ≠ progressives. But I draw on his post as some easy fodder for the case, and I will begin with two bits of framing of my own. First, I think any political movement should be evaluated at least in part on its ideals, not just on its current manifestation (although I will make a case that the manifestation is fine too). Second, these evaluations should be made in light of the alternatives.

A key point that Yglesias makes, and which I think gets to the heart of the progressive movement is that the left productively pushes us all to embrace egalitarian principles, whether or not egalitarianism benefits you. I think of this as progressives essentially embracing the Rawlsian view of justice, where you try to craft a society based on your ignorance about where your place in the hierarchy will be. Progressives push us all to build that society. In the extreme, this becomes socialism and even open borders. And some strategic progressives are probably closet socialists (I think socialism is a miserable infringement of all types of liberty). But the vast, vast majority of progressives are just trying to dismantle as many unjust hierarchies as they can, and get us to a less self-interested politics and set of policies. In the wealthiest country in the history of the world, that seems super doable without going full commie.

I see wokeness as an often overwrought arm of the progressive movement, but not its molten core. It’s often well-intentioned (let’s call people what they want to be called!) but can also be absurd (I identify as a wolf) and ineffectual (we acknowledge that this was once the land of the Tongva…etc.). Most obviously, it can also be bad strategy. Land acknowledgements and language policing do not poll well. But anti-wokeness is quite a bit worse, isn’t it? The attempts to whitewash (pun intended, I guess) the nation’s history so that white people can feel a lot better about our historic but extremely violent experiment in multiracial democracy is ultimately what wokeness is pushing against.

This gets me to my other bit about evaluating progressivism against the alternative(s). The conservative project is a dubious political philosophy for me, with its fealty to existing social and economic hierarchies. But more obviously, the modern manifestation of conservatism, not only in the U.S. but the U.K., Hungary, Israel, and many other societies, is absolutely bankrupt. I’ll kick it with some naive do-gooders who can’t stop telling me about gender-inclusive restrooms thank you very much.

TV: I will from this point forward refer to you by your preferred canine pronouns.

“Fealty to existing social and economic hierarchies [is dubious]”...I find it hard to disagree with this statement. Your dissection into theory and practice is also instructive. The slur against hard core progressive thinking is that its practice always leads to totalitarianism. But this is a category error, I hear you saying. We should be looking at the purest ideas driving a political movement as separate from their case-by-case instantiation. It is helpful for me to view wokeism in such a light, as an arm (perhaps in need of amputation…or at least some aggressive antibiotics, IMO) rather than the core of the modern progressive movement (I confess I still do not fully grasp the difference you draw between the Left and progressivism). If I wish to espouse and defend aspects of “small l” liberalism–which I in fact very much do–I can do this with less cognitive dissonance if I can just ignore the morons. This of course is also true for the morons calling themselves conservatives–back to this in a second.

I really do think your point about egalitarianism is spot on. That this principle would be controversial is bizarre, in my view. And that a society should be built without concern to where you will fall in the resulting social hierarchy sounds…appealing. But then my question is: according to which concept of morality? This is where the “yelling stop at progress” aspect of conservatism comes to mind. Call it social Luddism or old guy syndrome. Let’s be really really sure before we go and change this thing that has been working, albeit with flaws, for some time.

If the personal is always political, then I can endure no single criticism against the guy I voted for, no matter how giant a Snozzwanger I, in my private heart, recognize him to be. This is why the present political instantiation of one’s values invariably gets compared to the other party’s current offering. Your second point. A terrible symptom of soundbite journalism and social media has been a degradation of debate. And a near absence of reasoned argument. Our politics have been transformed into a sporting event.3

I do want to directly respond to your question, which I take to be: isn’t egalitarianism better than fealty to existing hierarchies? I think it is. The version of Conservativism that is currently in vogue in America (see: reversing Roe v Wade, voting restrictions, and questioning aspects of even first wave feminism) I can see as logically cohesive, yet culturally bankrupt. There is also a fair bit of anti-enlightenment thinking and flirtation with totalitarianism (the latter by both parties, I would argue) which I find neither conceptually coherent nor practically defensible. “Small c” conservatism is a lost cause in modern American politics. These folks are in the wilderness, and not the wilderness that many of them–if I am honest, I must include myself here...sometimes–romantically envision themselves fighting for survival in a brutal world. There is no place for conservative values in the modern Republican party, which has succumbed to takeover by a man that few would argue is bound by a principle other than fealty to his own ego. But I think a charitable view on the hot core of conservatism ideals would be meritocracy, self reliance, personal freedom. This I would like to fan. Some people probably need more fanning than others. We should try to recognize this and act accordingly at the societal but also at the personal level. Society does not need to recognize an act as virtuous for it in fact to be so.

How is this relevant to the current unrest on our college campuses (what got us chatting in the first place)? I will note that since we began this discussion, the encampment/protest was violently attacked and subsequently disbanded (also fairly violently) by the police. Yet while the situations on the ground locally have changed, similar protests continue around the country and promise to be a feature of this year’s commencement ceremonies for many students and their families.

I am wary of the conservative, old guy, frankly smug inclination I have to view these protests as the timeless acts of young people finding themselves. Of young people reacting to the neon HERE AND NOW, ahistorically, full of passion and rage. Because thinking this way gets me back in line at the drive-thru. My gut tells me I should be paying very close attention.

ML: “The Left” seems to me the most socialist-adjacent wing of the liberal tent. 21st century progressives are more a response to the rise of neoliberalism in the way that the 19th/20th century progressives were a response to the patronage-laced government and robber barons of that time. More market-friendly than the Left but on the lookout for market failures and ways to rein in the private sector. I don’t think we need to be super precise on these distinctions, because other people rarely are, but it may be that this distinction is useful in thinking through what it means to “change this thing that has been working.” Many on the left are kind of always in full-on revolution mode. Various inequalities, violence and climate change has them in despair and thinking that the flaws vastly outweigh the virtues. So they want to overturn the entire system, Bolshevik-style. I think a progressive, like a conservative, wants to see a meritocracy flourish, but that, in a lot of areas of American life, the hierarchies overwhelm meritocratic outcomes. I.e. smart kids grow up in the hood, Appalachia, and the reservation all the time and don’t reach anything close to their potential. At a minimum, for a progressive, is a need to significantly alter the system to level the playing field.

The current moment seems special for having mobilized enough of the system-alterers to join the Bolsheviks. I guess it’s pretty cool when a lot of people want to push for less death. But I don’t know if there’s much impact to be had here. Most directly, some universities are going to have some of their investments directed away from Israel and/or war profiteering. I’m guessing the eventual sums of money will be trivial. Indirectly, Biden and the Democrats are now more cognizant of not alienating this group in November. But I think the administration has been doing a lot of what the protesters are asking for, albeit stopping well short of turning off the arms and cash spigot.

In spite of the many incredible successes of nonviolent civil disobedience, I’m really not sure whether our students are spending their time productively in their dogged pursuit of divestment, cease fire, and the like. There are the usual questions about whether this is really so simple and if the end of Israeli belligerence would actually be a more peaceful result. In other words, if Israel gives up on its Hamas obliteration project, is that going to save lives in the long run? But also there are questions for me about how our students can be the most productive toward effecting positive change and alleviating suffering.

About two hours ago, we got word that UAW 4811, which represents all of the graduate student employees on the ten campuses of the University of California system, voted to authorize a strike. It’s likely that by early next week we will again be without graduate student researchers and teaching assistants for some period of time. They voted on this strike because they claim the violence they experienced in the protest constituted an unfair labor practice. To put it mildly, I disagree with that…erm…logic. But the strategy makes some sense. This is the path through which the students can get their demands (primarily divest and put Gene Block’s head on a pike) heard.

But is this the most productive path for social and economic justice for any individual grad student? I doubt it. Six of the 10 UCs are in the top 100 of universities in their share of freshmen receiving Pell grants (and our campuses are much larger than most in that top 100). Research at the UCs does quite a lot of public good as well. If the question were whether it’s more important to stop people from being bombed or grade papers, I’d usually side with the bomb-stopping. But our students have so little influence over that. Gene Block ain’t Anthony Blinken. Maybe the UCs shouldn’t be investing in weapons manufacturing companies, but will pulling that money out do much difference in this conflict?4 Will there be unintended consequences?5

Our individual grad students have a lot of influence over whether they or the students they grade get degrees. And the grad student researchers have influence over the projects they are working on. If you’re a graduating senior at UCLA campus, here has been your last five years of education:

2019-20 - remote high school graduation

2020-21 - remote first year of college

2021-22 - second year of college in hybrid mode

2022-23 - first quarter submarined by TA strike

2023-24 - protest craziness, looking like a TA strike to throw graduation into a tailspin

If a grad student asks me, and they won’t/don’t (all they do is send me demands and petitions), I’d tell them that having a direct impact on the 30 or whatever students you work with this quarter has to be more impactful than having a miniscule impact on the suffering in Gaza. But hey, maybe this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to be a part of a world changing event. Like a lot of things, sure as hell beats grading papers.

Tom’s Substack

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