IT was about two weeks ago that students at Columbia University in New York City set up an encampment on the campus’s South Lawn. Students for Justice in Palestine, along with other affiliated groups, said that it was establishing a ‘liberated zone’ and a ‘People’s University’ in protest against the fact that all universities in Gaza have now been destroyed. Everybody knows what happened in the days that followed: Columbia’s president, the Egyptian-born Manouche Shafik, sent in the New York police to clear the encampment.

It was a move that backfired, mostly because the subsequent images showed heavily armed police officers in kevlar vests dragging teenage girls in keffiyas. The youngsters had been peacefully protesting. Since then, the encampments have spread like wildfire across the US. Over the weekend, hundreds of people were arrested at campuses all across the country.

The obvious discussions around the protests have centred on how they show a groundswell of support among young Americans for those suffering in Gaza. However, the protests represent something more than just that in terms of what they say about the American political system and the place of young people in it.

In a superficial sense, the tenacity of the protesters and the fact that they are so many of them present a conundrum for both the Republican and the Democratic parties. In the case of the former, right-wing politicians from Senator Lindsey Graham to ex-Trump adviser Steve Bannon have made elite universities, in fact universities in general, a target of their criticism. To enhance the Republican appeal to a rural population, a large section of which does not attend university, they have criticised the institutes for promoting socially liberal ideas and suppressing conservative speech. Ironically, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, who visited Columbia last week and demanded that pro-Palestinian speech be suppressed, is one of the people to have criticised the lack of free speech at universities.

The Democrats do not know what to do with the pro-Palestinian protesters either. This is because both party politicians have long taken huge caches of cash from Jewish lobbyist organisations such as the AIPAC to run their campaigns. However, to come to power, many Democratic politicians, President Joe Biden chief among them, have relied on young voters. So while they would like to ignore the protesters and young people in general, the fact that two-thirds of the 18-29-year age group, polled by the New York Times in 2023, said that Israel should stop its killing of Palestinians, is threatening their hopes of staying in power. Forty eight per cent of the same age group said that Israel was intentionally killing civilians.

The fear in the American political system is indicative of the shifting demographics of leadership, for which Washington is largely unprepared.

Neither party has a plan as to what to do about it and it is reflected in their hand-wringing over the protests.

The fear in the American political system is also indicative of the shifting demographics of leadership, for which Washington, D.C., is largely unprepared. The students who are protesting at the campuses reveal the racial and intellectual demographics of the future. They are a mix of Asian, South Asian, Middle Eastern, African American and other minority groups, who are inching out white students with lower test scores and less dazzling resumés.

Generationally, they could not be farther from the make-up of the current politicians in Washington, who are on average over 60 years old and have little idea of the inclusive worldview that these students have. The fear of both Democratic and Republican politicians relates to what to do about Gaza on one level, but on another level, it is about what will happen when this generation, graduating from the world’s top universities and expected to lead both politics and business, is in power.

In this sense, the student protests and the politics they reveal are indicative of the end of an era. For a long time, US foreign policy prided itself on its ruthless realpolitik whose architect Henry Kissinger died last November. Now a younger generation is calling into question the blatant hypocrisy that has been visible to the rest of the world for decades. What is the logic of saying we should support Ukraine where an indigenous population is fighting against Russia, but not Gaza whose native population is being bombed and starved asked one student protester on TikTok. As a new era of realisation dawns, it is clear that it will become increasingly difficult for America to maintain its nonchalant attitude towards international law.

As for those who say that the students’ demand that their respective universities divest from businesses that support Israel and its war on and occupation of Arab land will never prevail, there is the case of Portland State University. The university has decided to pause donations from military contractor Boeing in line with students’ demands. Israel has reportedly bought arms from Boeing. While such successes are unlikely to be frequent, it does reflect that at least in some cases the encampments may force universities to, in the words of the protesters, “divest and disclose” their ties.

The protests, and the fact that so many minority students at elite American universities are pro-Palestine and willing to risk arrests and suspensions for the cause, reveal that a shrinking number of white Americans will make up the leadership of the future. Not only will the American future be more racially diverse, it is also likely that it will have a politics that will be remarkably different from the worldview that currently prevails in Washington. The furore on campuses is likely to spread in the next few weeks leading up to college graduations, which will likely be disrupted as well. Generation Z it appears, has had it with the aging remnants of realpolitik and may succeed in ushering in a new era in US foreign policy.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.

rafia.zakaria@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, May 1st, 2024