By David Helvarg
“Pigs off Campus,” is what none of the thousands of pro-Palestinian anti-war student protestors have shouted at the police as they’ve been arrested on campuses from New York to Texas to California in the last weeks. But that is what many of us shouted during a 1970 nationwide student strike when things got meaner and college administrators – under pressure from politicians - repeatedly called the cops and national guard onto campuses, escalating whatever peaceful protest or confrontation we’d started, until students were killed and maimed at Kent and Jackson State. Apparently, today’s college administrators don’t believe they have much to fear from that history or to learn from the Berkeley ‘Free Speech’ on campus fight that proceeded it.
I dropped out of college to become a full-time anti-war organizer and was in Flamingo Park in Miami Beach preparing for Nixon’s 1972 Republican convention when two old Jewish men in their 70s approached. “Mahbles” one of them said. “Excuse me,” I replied. “Mahbles,” the one with the heavier New York Yiddish accent repeated. “When the police horses charge trow mahbles under their hooves. It’s a very effective tactic we used in Union Square in 1934.” (Full disclosure - Animal Rights was not a big part of the radical movement of the 1960s).
Protests that disrupt have always been a part of our history and of the American fabric however which is what’s driven most social progress. And, it has continued through the generations. Recently a lifelong friend in New York texted me a picture of his wife Emily chained to the White House fence along with other ‘Jewish women elders for peace.’ “I’m shocked,” I texted back. “Em is an elder?”
So, as an old new leftie elder I’m not going to presume to offer tactical or strategic advice to today’s campus activists heading into a summer of protest. I hope they will simply continue to do whatever they have to in ever larger numbers and despite the closure of their protest camps, to remind us that killing thousands of kids while using food as a weapon of war is unacceptable and immoral and unworthy of U.S. support.
Also killing unarmed civilians be it at a rock concert in Israel or on the streets of Gaza or on the West Bank has to be opposed on the same human rights principle that all civilians are off limits regardless of “historical context.” There are some student protestors who don’t want to hear that and insist that Hamas was justified in their October rape and murder spree. We had some similar people in our movement about whom I used to say, “If they’re not FBI provocateurs they’re missing a good source of income.”
I’d add a few suggestions for the majority of protestors gleaned from more than one youthful encounter with police initiated blunt force trauma starting at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968. My first suggestion is don’t support just any Robert Kennedy running for President. The one who got assassinated in June of 1968 was the real deal for peace and justice. More seriously, continue to stay as non-violent as possible in the face of localized provocations, police pepper spray, rubber bullets and global madness. The first time I ever saw sympathetic mass media coverage of our anti-war protests I was 17 and watching amazed after a day of being brutalized as CBS’s Walter Cronkite (“the most trusted man in America”) condemned the police attacks on peaceful demonstrators and bystanders on the streets of Chicago.
Every time we later expressed our rage with fists, rocks and bottles (or the Weathermen with bombs), we lost not only our battles but more importantly public support. When we kept the focus on our objectives like stopping the war in Vietnam and freeing Black Panther political prisoners with non-violent though sometimes disruptive tactics we succeeded.
That may sounds like a ‘Boomer’ Ad Hominem but remember, just as back then, it’s not about you or us, it’s about stopping a war. The anti- war students of my day were also disliked and disdained by many – though more likely to be called ‘commie Jews’ than ‘antisemites.’ Still, our message (and returning body bags from Vietnam) turned much of the public against the ongoing conflict.
Today Joe Biden is pushing harder to get Netanyahu to accept a ceasefire agreement in Gaza, and a solution that works for Palestinians as well as Israelis (though continuing to send bombs to Israel). One reason is, because young people are making it clear that defending the 2 million civilians of Gaza is the least he has to do to win enough votes in November’s presidential election to stop another major threat to global society, the uniquely American specter of celebrity fascism under Donald Trump.
I don’t’ know if our anti-war protests at the ’68 democratic convention were really responsible for Nixon’s election but hopefully by the democratic convention in Chicago this summer Biden will have found a way to get a lasting ceasefire in place and relief to the famine threatened in Gaza, those under siege on the West Bank and a greater sense of security to Israelis who’ll need it to begin moving from occupation to co-existence with their Palestinian neighbors despite October 7.
With 7 million Israeli Jews and 7 million Palestinians (2 million of them with 2nd class Israeli citizenship) neither side can win a war that gives them exclusive control “from the river to the sea.” I began my reporting career in 1973 covering “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland. – Over 50 years later Catholics and Protestants (the “colonial settlers”) still have their sectarian divisions but also live at peace with each other while working towards a political outcome that might yet unite Ireland.
Along with a ceasefire and food Palestinians also need resistance leadership they can believe in which is why their most popular and uncompromised leader, Marwan Barghouti, who has now spent decades in Israeli prisons, needs to be released for any real post-ceasefire negotiations to begin. If Biden can achieve any of this no one will attribute it to today’s student protestors but they’ll have played an important, perhaps a pivotal role, nonetheless.