A View of Princeton’s Encampment from a Counterprotesting Alum

Thank you Mr. Levy for your essay. I am all about free speech, and I think that should apply to everyone, not just a group of very well organized and very loud protesters whose motivations frankly aren’t clear to me at all. Most recently, these protesters for Palestine disrupted the Denver Pride Parade, which I was attending, as I do every year, as an ally of a dear friend. The organizers later responded with an apology to attendees that included:

“The mission of The Center on Colfax is to engage, enrich, empower and advance the LGBTQIA+ community of Colorado. We recognize that the pride movement was born in protest. We support the rights of free speech and assembly. Regarding Israel and Gaza, our position is simple. We support calls for a peaceful resolution to the conflict in the region. However, we cannot accept incidents of hate speech that occurred at the festival. Following the protests at the parade and festival, we received several reports of antisemitic language used by protesters. These incidents included statements such as ‘Jews and Zionists do not belong at PrideFest’ and worse, along with harassment of Jewish community members at their booth. To be clear: this is unacceptable. The Center does not endorse or condone the hateful language used by people in the protest group. Just as we would condemn homophobic or transphobic incidents, we condemn hate speech in any form, including antisemitism.”

I am not Jewish, I am not Muslim, and I am straight. What I am not, and what I don’t condone, is close-minded, loud usurpers of other people’s rights to a peaceful gathering. And I agree 100% with Howard Levy’s point that these folks don’t seem to care about genocide and oppression anywhere but in Gaza, and they seem to totally ignore that it was Hamas who started the conflict, and Hamas who show no concern for the well-being of their own people. Also, I agree that the list of demands these protesters put out are not relevant to humanitarian concerns. If they really care, they would learn to cooperate, not just disrupt.

In my opinion, it is time to stop enabling the bad behavior that is becoming so prevalent in the public forum these days. Rights come with responsibilities, and the right to free speech comes with the responsibility to shut up and allow other folks to speak as well, and to honestly consider what they say and work to actually solve the problem at hand.

Howard Levy’s essay has some thoughtful moments, but he quickly devolves into the standard tropes engineered generations ago to stifle criticism of Israel (accusations of antisemitism, the bizarre notion that Israel is being singled out for special condemnation, the self-serving charge that such protests are counterproductive, etc.). He seems to altogether miss the point of such protests. They are political theater, not policy papers, and their purpose is to act as the conscience of a nation and a university that unabashedly contribute to what I view as the ethnic cleansing of Palestine’s indigenous population. (Imagine the shame of a college campus where nobody raised a peep about 36,000 civilians killed with our weapons and our blessings.) 

He rightly laments that none of the protesters engaged him to get his perspective on things. Did he consider that perhaps he might have something to learn from the protesters? He could have learned, for instance, what chants such as “from the river to the sea” mean to them, rather than assuming the worst.  He could have learned why collective punishment, starvation as a weapon of war, torture and indefinite detention, the targeting of journalists and doctors, etc., have so upset this generation of students. Though why that wouldn’t already be obvious to him is a bit puzzling.

After reading the reports of protesting on the Princeton campus, I have only a feeling of sadness for my alma mater. That those protesting on behalf of the Palestinians did so in such a clumsy, anarchial manner, so beneath the expectations for Princeton students, is mortifying. Intimidating classmates and campus employees, barricading Clio, and shouting crude epithets only shows the protesters don’t have sufficient knowledge of the history of the Israeli-Palestinian lands to make an intelligent argument, resorting to disruption to make up for their ignorance. 

In times of controversy, I always believed Princeton would find a higher ground. But, instead of taking an elevated discourse of the issue, Princeton has opted to remove a rung of its stature. Princeton becomes just another copycat protester.   

At this point, I don’t recognize the students, the faculty, or the administration of the Princeton I attended.

Bravo to Howard Levy for exposing the shallow, counterproductive sloganeering of the protesters on Princeton’s campus. It contains the arguments that many of us have been making over this long hard spring that most often seem to fall on deaf ears and makes us worry about the failure of Princeton’s education to recognize fairness and facts when faced with simplistic dichotomies.

It was so good to read this well written, thoughtful piece. It deserves to be seen in many more publications, online and in print.

Howard Levy’s balanced analysis and assessment of the situation on the ground in Israel and Gaza provides the necessary historical and real-time context that is sorely lacking from much of the protests. His assessment of the situation on the ground at Princeton makes me sad. While I imagine some protesters mean well, “intellectually weak, inaccurate” and demonizing rhetoric have no place on our campuses; especially those like Princeton that pride themselves on diversity, depth of knowledge, intellectual rigor, and a spirit of inquiry. I thank Howard for his quiet counterprotest, and hope that at least a few students will engage in dialogue with him, forgoing blind hatred in favor of productive understanding.

I am an Israeli living in the U.S. and teaching at Adelphi University. I applaud your thoughtful, clear, and so relevant lens in the issue. I wish there would be more like you and many more would listen to your words of wisdom. Thank you.

For this conflict it seems to me it is more important to watch for what criticisms are unspoken more than what criticisms are stated. I am only willing to spare my attention to those who are willing to criticize their own side. Otherwise I cannot distinguish the intentions for genuine dialogue from manipulative propaganda.

I view the fact that you were holding up a poster of hostages, and not the Israeli flag, as a sincere sign of peace. Thank you for your contribution.

Kudos to Howard Levy. Well written article and excellent viewpoint on this complex situation. It’s very distressing to see disruptions of normal academic activity without even a hint of an attempt at intellectual discourse on the difficulties in finding a reasonable solution to an extraordinarily complicated issue. The hope is eventually, prudent discussion to finding a workable solution can emerge from the chaos.

Thank you for saying and writing this. The lead story was all about support for the demonstrators, but this needs to be said. These questions need to be asked of those in the encampment and their supporters. I’d like them to watch the movie “Screams Before Silence” and get their reactions.

Q: What’s in a name?

A: A great deal.

The current wave of protests on American campuses provides an example: The war in Israel, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran is between Israel and its western allies and Iran and its terrorist proxies — Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Houthis. Its origin was an unspeakable massacre by Hamas of everyone in the path of thousands of its terrorists who crossed the border between Gaza and Israel last Oct. 7. In addition to murder and rape, these marauders kidnapped over 200 people, some of whom are believed to be buried, dead or alive, in tunnels in Gaza. 

The attack was in the spirit of al-Qaida’s mass murders of 9-11. Israel launched its forces to destroy Hamas in the spirit that the U.S. sought to kill the all the terrorists and their leaders, who were then entrenched in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I recall no protests aimed at saving al-Qaida and its entourage of camp-following supporters. I believe this was the case because, unlike Hamas’ kill-fest, those Jihadists’ mass murder was not disingenuously called pro-anything. It was just what it was — anti-American slaughter of innocents.

Returning to the importance of a name, I ask why the protesters flooding our campuses are called “pro-Palestinian.” They are obviously primarily anti-Israeli; in addition, their actions indirectly (and on some campuses, directly) support and excuse the terrorist methods of Hamas, Hezbollah, and their masters in Tehran. We need a new name for these folks.

I share your disappointment in the protestors seemingly wishing to simplify issues into either/or dichotomies and employ “emotional reasoning” rather than thoughtful, problem-oriented discussion and solutions. Hopefully, in and out of class conversations among students and faculty will dive more deeply into the complexities and surface solutions to these issues that we have not yet been wise enough to imagine or implement.

Thanks for this thoughtful account based on your lived experience. I so hope we can move past this spread of conflict. Your words are rational and informed. We need that.