Rock Bottom
The Student Protests and the Future of Israel
The recent student protests at my alma mater, Columbia University, and around the nation, give me hope. Perhaps Generation Z has the balls that the vast majority of Boomers and Millennials have lacked since 9/11. If nothing else, the student protests have forced Americans to question the collapsing paradigm that has crippled U.S. foreign policy for more than 20 years: blind, unthinking support for Israel’s failed leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his American enablers.
After 9/11, Netanyahu’s “Clean Break” strategy merged with America’s ill–fated campaign of imperial wars and equally imperialistic nation–building efforts. Not only did our attempts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya fail to “secure the realm” for Israel, they also cost the U.S. incalculable amounts of blood, treasure, and international credibility. Today, America is the Steinbeckian Lennie of international politics. The paper tiger that does not honor its word and abandons its allies is now being challenged all over the world.
Contrary to popular opinion, it is possible to believe two things at the same time. Just as it is refreshing to see our failed foreign policy finally questioned, it is also refreshing to see protests, counter protests, and law enforcement crack down on Old Left agent provocateurs and Black Bloc lumpen proles. The new bare-knuckled, full-throated student activism is preferable to the carefully orchestrated campus “conversations” adjudicated by higher ed’s Cultural Commissars and their passive–aggressive and ever-changing definitions of “comfort” and “safety.”
The most recent occupation of Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall was a pale imitation of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and Student Afro Society’s (SAS) takeover of the same building in1968.
During that occupation, 700 students were arrested, and 132 students, 12 police officers, and 4 faculty members were injured.
One of the casualties was my PhD advisor, James P. Shenton, who was clubbed by NYPD’s “tactical squad” and left bloody with a broken arm.
The optics of the elite Ivy Leaguers screaming “NYPD-KKK” at the minority-led, multiracial New York police officers were not good. Student protest leader Johannah King-Slutzky’s demand that university officials provide food and water to the students barricaded inside Hamilton Hall so they wouldn’t “die” of dehydration and starvation, won her no hearts or minds.
The contemporary Protest Left have painted themselves into the same corner that the New Left did after their political riots of 1967-1968. Former SDS leader and historian, the late Todd Gitlin, put it best, “But our giddiness kept us from reckoning with the majority of the ‘whole world’ that, watching, loathed us.” While I share the Gen Z students’ outrage over Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, and did long before the recent war in Gaza, I do not support the keffiyeh–clad cultural appropriators who ape Yasser Arafat circa 1978. Wittingly or unwittingly, these cosplaying students with their facile chants of “From the river to the sea” provide support not just for Hamas and Hezbollah, but the global spread of fundamentalist Islam whose leaders make Donald Trump look like AOC.
What those on both sides of this emotional political debate fail to realize is that Israel v. Palestine is merely the start of a much larger geopolitical conflict that has already begun: Israel/U.S. v. Palestine/Iran/Russia/China. This is the bitter harvest of two decades of U.S. foreign adventurism that grew out of the arrogant myth that America was a “unipolar power.” Immune to reality, U.S. and Israeli leaders believe they can turn Carl von Clausewitz’s most important maxim on its head. By ignoring this fundamental geopolitical fact, our battlefield wins since 9/11 have been rendered meaningless because we can’t translate them into lasting policy victories. To them, policy is an instrument of war and every political problem has a military solution.
I am not optimistic about America’s prospects for victory in this coming conflict. Not only are the Department of Defense’s ammunition stores dangerously depleted by the ongoing war of attrition in Ukraine and escalating conflict in the Middle East, but the bloated, top-heavy U.S. military is so demoralized that it can no longer meet its recruiting numbers. As long as our government makes the needs of illegal migrants a higher priority than those of our badly used War on Terror veterans, this situation will only grow worse.
Our foes, on the other hand, are more motivated than ever. From Ukraine, to Sudan, to Belarus, to Niger, to Yemen, they see weakness and smell fear. If the U.S. can’t even project sufficient military force to defeat and deter the ragtag Houthi pirates who now rule the Red Sea, how can they expect to fight a two-front war against Russia and China? America in 2024 is a textbook example of Paul Kennedy’s “imperial overstretch.” This problem is further exacerbated by the reigning neoliberal economic paradigm because it forces sovereign nations to be subservient to multinational monopoly capitalists. Even today, with perfect military and political storms on the horizon, the U.S. continues to pimp out production of strategically vital military resources like microchips and satellites to the private sector. If we need to put a man in space, we need Elon Musk’s permission to borrow his SpaceX rockets.
Israel should be nervous because the United States is not an ally; we are a rich uncle. Until recently, we indulged our poor, but spoiled, nephew irrespective of the political and military costs. However, now Israel’s spoiled cousins, the elite young American students protesting at universities and colleges across the nation, are questioning this relationship. They are the very people who are set to inherit the American empire, but a growing number of them no longer want it. Family feuds, as F. Scott Fitzgerald pointed out in Babylon Revisited, are extremely “bitter things. They don't go according to any rules.”
Listening to conservatives bluster about “wiping out Hamas once and for all” and saber rattle about “The Sampson Option,” is like listening to an old drunk at a bar blaming his failing liver on everything but the glass of whiskey in his hand. There is no viable military solution to Israel’s present quandary. Until Netanyahu and his American enablers are ousted, and Israel reigns in their settlers and genocidal right, the anti–Israel contagion will continue to spread. Maybe the U.S. and Israel need to hit “rock bottom” in order to change course. One Alcoholics Anonymous member put it best: “Hitting rock bottom is a gift because it forces you to change and move forward or die.”
