Thousands of students at many of the nation’s most noted universities are demonstrating, as I write, against the Israeli government’s killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
In many ways it’s a painful case of deja vu all over again, as the great American philosopher Yogi Berra said, of the campus demonstrations of the 1960s and ‘70s opposing the U.S. war in Vietnam, including then and now the condescending assertion by authorities blaming the unrest on “outside agitators.”
There are differences, of course. But the followers of Ho Chi Minh were leading a revolt against a century of France’s colonial occupation of their country, as Hamas has led a rebellion of Israel’s half-century occupation of portions of the former state of Palestine.
That doesn’t forgive Hamas’s brutal attack into Israel of Octoer 7, 2023, but there is context.
And, as Senator Bernie Sanders has been reminding us, it was the failure to extract the U.S. from the Vietnam War that cost the Democrats the 1968 presidential election. Further, it is the failure of the U.S. to moderate Israeli’s war policies that is likely to be a contributing cause to a Biden loss to Trump this coming November — with much more dire consequences.
Sanders also pointed out this week that to criticize the Israeli government’s war policy isn’t being anti-Semitic; it’s free speech.
Israel has had 50 years to get right a humane relationship with Palestinians and has failed miserably. And killing more than 30,000 civilians and destroying 80 percent of Gaza’s infrastructure has likely set back any possible reconciliation for a couple of generations.
A longtime resident of Isla Vista, Carmen Lodise was a member of the steering committee that campaigned to erect the only known monument to the anti-war movement of the Vietnam War era in Isla Vista’s Perfect Park.