“Is a puzzlement,” the King of Siam muses in the musical play “King and I,” as he tries to reconcile his traditional beliefs about what he knows to be “so” with a changing world where “some things are nearly so, others nearly not.”
The fictional king could have been describing the conundrum being created by student protests over the Gaza War occurring at college campuses across the country — more than 80 to date — ranging from noisy rallies to tent cities to the takeover of administration buildings.
These protests pit fundamental American values against one another – the importance of permitting assembly and free speech to protest injustice versus respect for the rule of law. At first glance, there appears to be no middle ground, but, with a more thoughtful approach, there can be.
A balanced approach is suggested by the Declaration of the Rights of Man, a famous charter of human liberty adopted by France’s National Assembly in August 1789 at the start of the French Revolution. Article 4 of the Declaration states: “Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. These limits can only be determined by law.”
Presidents of some of our country’s most prestigious private and public universities have recently been hauled before congressional committees and pilloried for permitting Gaza War protestors to use speech, slogans and symbols that are either expressly or implicitly anti-Semitic. Given their institutions’ Diversity, Equity and Inclusion bureaucracies, charged with snuffing out the tiniest ember of gender bias, they’ve been hard pressed to explain themselves.
Reacting to public embarrassment and pressure from their major donors, a number of universities, including Columbia, UCLA and George Washington, have whip-sawed in the opposite direction, calling in large-scale police intervention to break up unauthorized protest rallies, regain control of occupied buildings and dismantle tent cities.
Clearly some protestors have crossed the line, breaking laws, disrupting university operations, threatening or harassing other students and physically assaulting counter-protestors or police.
A Jewish Bates College student, for instance, was exposed to a barrage of harassing campus social media posts after spending a week volunteering in Israel over February break, including one which sneered, in a thinly disguised reference to the Holocaust, “Big nose mafia going to cancel me but man you know who should’ve finished the job.”
For miscreants such as these, there’s a price to be paid, and they should pay it, whether by way of school suspension, expulsion or criminal prosecution. On the other hand, legitimate protests should not be quelled, however unwelcome their message.
Peaceful protest has a long and distinguished history in the U.S. The abolitionist, female suffrage, Civil Rights, anti-Vietnam War, environmental, and gay rights movements all sparked extensive protests, which eventually caused seismic shifts in public opinion leading, in turn, to political change. Idealistic college students are often the loudest voices protesting injustice and serving as the catalyst for change.
There’s little doubt that Israel had a justifiable reason to launch an invasion of Gaza. It was responding to Hamas’ Oct. 7 armed incursion into Southern Israel, which resulted in the killing of nearly 1,200 and the taking of about 250 hostages. And Hamas, from its inception, has been clear about its ultimate goal — the apocalyptic destruction of the Israeli state.
The extremely destructive and lethal manner in which Israel has conducted its military campaign, however, is fair game for criticism.
I discussed the rationale for the fierceness of Israel’s reaction to the Hamas attack in my Jan. 14 column. That said, the Israeli government and Defense Forces have been accused, with justification, of failing to take adequate precautions to spare the civilian population of Gaza and of not allowing a sufficient flow of humanitarian aid to reach that population.
Based on satellite data analysis, it’s been estimated that between 50% and 60% of the buildings in Gaza have been destroyed. Most of the population lacks shelter, access to medical care, potable water and adequate food supplies. The Gazan ministry of health claims that some 35,000 Palestinians, a large percentage of them civilians, have been killed, while Israel claims its military operation has cost the lives of only 16,000 civilians, still a staggering number.
Daily news footage of the carnage in Gaza over the past seven months have eroded American public support for Israel, especially among young adults. Nowhere is this attitude more evident than on college campuses, which often serve as the canary in the public mine.
It’s certainly legitimate for college students to protest Israel’s conduct of the war. Many American and Israeli Jews, disillusioned with the political cynicism and religious extremism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing ruling coalition, share similar views.
But when protestors, regardless of the justice of their cause, injure, threaten, harass, or infringe the rights of others, they exceed the “limits” of “liberty” and should lose their “freedom to do everything.”
Elliott Epstein is a trial lawyer with Shukie & Segovias in Lewiston. His Rearview Mirror column, which has appeared in the Sun Journal for 17 years, analyzes current events in an historical context. He is also the author of “Lucifer’s Child,” a book about the notorious 1984 child murder of Angela Palmer. He may be contacted at [email protected]