Commentator

Campus Protests, Rafah, Sahel

11 WAYS OF LOOKING AT THE CAMPUS PROTESTS

- Of course protestors have the right to protest. As far as I’m concerned, that includes chanting “from the river to the sea.”

- Of course schools have the right to clear illegal encampments. And it’s fanciful, by the way, to believe that a school like Columbia would never summon the NYPD in a clear instance of law-breaking.

- The basic rift here is between liberalism and progressivism. I’ve written about this before. As Mondoweiss, a pro-Palestine site, puts it, “These scenes symbolize a profound political crisis that has laid bare the fractures within the Democratic Party.” It turns out that liberals and progressives have fundamental differences of worldview that were papered over in decades of sharing a big tent on the left and which diverge above all in a fundamentally incompatible understanding of the Israel/Palestine conflict.

- Within progressivism a strong anti-Israel strain has developed. Anti-Semitism isn’t exactly the point, although anti-Semitism may well be in the mix. It’s more a concerted stance against the existence of the state of Israel — as is encoded in the now-ubiquitous phrase “anti-Zionist.” This would have been a totally inadmissible position in US public space a year ago. Now it seems to be a standard talking-point of progressives. My understanding is that the hardline position of a group like Students for Justice in Palestine —“National liberation is near — glory to our resistance, to our martyrs, and to our steadfast people!” was how they greeted the news of 10/7 — drifted over into the more impressionable progressive students.

- That anti-Israel position has its roots in a vision of a world that’s dichotomized between oppressors and oppressed. It’s a far-reaching position, with strength in its simplicity, and taken to its logical conclusions — as many of the protestors are clearly doing — it calls into question the legitimacy of the American state as well. As one of the UCLA protest leaders said, “Given the fact that the University of California is founded on colonialism, it’s inherently a violent institution.”

America in 2024: counter-protestor at UCLA

- The protests have had a certain efficacy. They make it that much harder for the Biden administration to give its assent to the Rafah offensive, and in the frenetic discourse between the US and Israel, the US side surely is deeply aware of the costs to the Democratic Party and to America’s social fabric if Israel carries out the attack.

- If the Rafah offensive happens — as it almost certainly will — the protests will accelerate to a completely different level.

- The chief beneficiary of all of this is of course Donald Trump. As New York Magazine puts it, “The campus protests, with their ragged encampments and radical chants, enhance the image of chaos that Donald Trump claims has overtaken the country.” It is naive to think that the protests will have only a marginal impact on the November elections. Unrest like this is exactly how Nixon won in ’68. The Democrats, unable to control the party’s left, seem to be walking into the same sort of electoral crisis. As Andrew Sullivan writes, “There’s a feeling, some say, that overwhelms you in a car crash. Suddenly the world slows down and you’re suspended in mid-air; you can see the collision coming but have no way to stop it….If that’s what you’re currently experiencing with respect to the 2024 presidential election, I feel you.”

- There is an uncanny parallel in all this to 1968, and liberals of a nostalgic bent are eager to point that up. As Robert Reich, for instance, writes, “I was incensed that the First World — white and rich — was randomly killing Third World people — non-white and poor.” But Vietnam and Gaza are very different. By 1968, the United States had been in Vietnam for over a decade — and with troops on the ground. Israel is a sovereign state and its offensive is only several months-old. What’s been completely missing from the perspective of the protestors is any notion of what Israel is supposed to do — not respond to 10/7? not deal with Hamas’ war-making potential? Of course, the majority of the protestors aren’t really thinking. They have a hazy parallel in mind between Israel/Gaza and Vietnam, and their remedy, as much as anything, would be to prefer that Israel doesn’t exist.

- So we’re left with demands that cannot be met (“from the river to the sea”; “end the Zionist apartheid state”) and the left ripped apart at the worst possible time.

- I’m not sure that, in some deep way, we will ever really recover from this.

RAFAH

And, meanwhile, in Israel/Gaza itself, we’re at one of these curious lulls in the war — a bit like in the weeks after 10/7. But that silence is deceptive. A few days ago, it looked as if Israel and Hamas might actually find a workable ceasefire plan, based on a fairly straightforward prisoner swap. But, already, that seems like a distant memory. Talks in Cairo have broken down, with “Hamas and Israel shifting gears to playing a blame game,” as a US official put it; with Yoav Gallant informing the US that Israel “has no choice left” except to launch the operation in Rafah; and with Israel sending its evacuation notices to thousands of Rafah civilians.

That operation will have vast and incalculable consequences: Israel assuming almost permanently an international status as a pariah state; the social fabric in the US coming close to fraying; Biden electorally on the hook both for the social disorder in the US and for his administration’s evident inability to control Israel; and a tremendous uptick in civilian casualties in Gaza. As analyst Aaron David Miller put it, “Rafah is a microcosm of every challenge, every risk and every complication that has played out in this war.”

Rafah civilian

The voice of reason at the moment is former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, who, in a blistering op-ed in Haaretz, claims that there is every reason to think that Israel has already attained all of its manageable military objectives in the war and that it is time to call it a day. “At this point, we have achieved the same level of deterrence in Gaza that we had at the end of the Second Lebanon War,” Olmert writes. “It’s possible to conclude that the bulk of Hamas' military power has been dismantled.”

That seems to be the shared view of most Israeli military analysts. “The benefits are very few, especially if you compare it to the negative effects,” said Tamir Hayman of the Institute for National Security Studies.

But that’s clearly not the calculus of the Netanyahu administration. It’s almost taken for granted at this point that the continuation of the war is the responsibility of Yahya Sinwar and Benjamin Netanyahu, who both benefit from it. Sinwar knows that he is more likely to be assassinated following some sort of partial ceasefire and Hamas negotiators accordingly passed on the offer that Israel put on the table. Netanyahu, meanwhile, seems to have played his own part in torpedoing the negotiations — and knows that a ceasefire means the fracturing of his government.

Nobody else is acquitting themselves particularly well either. The US, as far as I can tell, is in fantasy land, trying to orchestrate a grand bargain for the entire Middle East that includes normalizing Israel-Saudi relations in exchange for concessions from Israel — which seems to include, cough-cough, a Palestinian state. “A U.S.-brokered breakthrough in a normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia would do a great deal to cement this emerging coalition [of Arab countries],” two veteran US foreign policy figures write in Foreign Affairs. But, as Foreign Policy icily puts it, that’s “more like a Hail Mary than a real plan.” There simply is no way, given the mood of the Netanyahu administration or of Israel in general, that a two-state solution would be acceptable so soon after 10/7 — it would be understood as a concession to Hamas and its violent methods — and for Israelis that consideration far outweighs such diplomatic minutiae as relations with Saudi Arabia.

And, meanwhile, nothing apparently has been done in the humanitarian sector to prepare for the possibility of the Rafah offensive. As Der Spiegel reports, "The Israelis hoped that international aid organizations would cooperate to provide shelter for people in other areas, but so far, no NGO wants to be seen as complicit in the expulsion from Rafah.” The Der Spiegel article, one of the better human-first articles I’ve seen on the war, depicts the utter breakdown of daily life in the midst of the war — homes in tents, belongings in cardboard boxes, children wetting themselves from the accumulated stress, the smell of waste unbearable in refugee camps.

Even without the Rafah offensive, the situation in Gaza is of course untenable. Some ceasefire agreement is necessary for aid to reach those who need it, but both Hamas and Israel appear to have walked away from the table, the Netanyahu administration has its mind made up on Rafah, and it looks as if everything will get far worse before it gets even marginally better.

COLD WAR IN THE SAHEL

There are, actually, other issues in the world other than Israel/Gaza — although it often doesn’t feel like it. The New York Times has a terrific piece on the ongoing war in Myanmar — which, “mystifyingly,” has failed to garner any interest from the international community. The basic issue, of course, is that there is no clear narrative to latch onto: the decades-long struggle between a military junta and a loosely-knit resistance advocating for “federal democracy” fails to activate pre-existing narratives.

A recent development that does, however, ignite old memories is the collapse of the US’ strategic position in the Sahel — a highly-dramatic development that has played out well below the fold in international press coverage. The attempts to spin it — in The New York Times and The Intercept, among the few outlets that are paying attention — are somewhat unconvincing. For The Intercept, the presence of US military in the region seems somehow to have exacerbated terror: “all the massacres committed by the jihadists were committed while the Americans were,” a Nigerien analyst said. While, for The New York Times, the focus on security has been at the expense of democratization. The Intercept points to a pair of massacres carried out in Burkina Faso in February by governmental forces as proof of the bankruptcy of US policy in the region. “The eyewitnesses said the soldiers went door to door, rounding up locals before gunning them down,” Human Rights Watch reported. And, almost needless to say, Burkina Faso’s military had been the recipient of hundreds of millions in funding from the US.

Protesters in Niger call for US expulsion

But the governments of the Sahel have kicked out the US (and, alongside them, the French) not out of concern for human rights or an excess of attention to security but because those governments have chosen to align themselves with Russia. As an official in the Central African Republic told Roger Cohen in 2022, “We have calm thanks to the Russians. They are violent and they are efficient.” And Niger’s government said as much in a statement, contending, “Niger regrets the intention of the American delegation to deny the sovereign Nigerien people the right to choose their partners and types of partnerships truly capable of helping them fight against terrorism.”

The best way to understand what’s going seems to simply be in terms of hardball, imperialistic politics. The United States has quietly had its outposts in the Sahel for a long time, as part of the somewhat threadbare pretext of the Global War on Terror. As The Intercept puts it, the recently-closed base in Niger “serves as the linchpin of the U.S. military’s archipelago of bases in North and West Africa and a key part of America’s wide-ranging surveillance and security efforts in the region.” The US has recently fewer resources and less elbow grease into the region than Russia has, and governments all across the region have simply switched their security partnerships from the US to Africa Corps/Wagner Group. As The New York Times puts it, the expulsions from Niger and Chad “represent a genuine strategic loss for Washington.” It’s very reasonable for The Intercept to ask what the US military was doing in the Sahel in the first place, but in simple political terms the developments are a real setback — an indication that Russia is emboldened while the US hegemonic system is riddled with holes.