Palestine

Cockburn wasn’t sure how he would occupy his time after the season finale of The Bachelor aired last month. As it turns out, following daily updates from the pro-Palestinian encampment on the University of California, Los Angeles campus is better than anything on TV. The latest scene — banana warfare —is particularly absurd. The encampment, which began on April 25 with 100 students, has swelled to over 400 protesters. Organized by UC Divest, the activists are demanding that the university system divest from companies associated with the Israeli military, cut ties with Los Angeles Police Department and academically boycott Israeli universities.

New York I’m on Columbia’s campus today. Sorry, I mean, “The People’s University for Palestine.” I graduated from the university in May 2020. My alumni ID allows me access. A couple of days ago, student protesters started occupying the South Lawn, in front of Butler Library. The police force was called in. Some arrests were made. The police were able to clear the eastern half of the lawn, but the western half remains occupied. Students have pitched tents. Hand-painted signs hang from clotheslines that stretch around the lawn. “Welcome to the People’s University for Palestine.” “Free All Palestinian Prisoners. Ceasefire Now.” “While You Read Gaza Bleeds.” “Admitted Students Enroll in Revolution.” Palestine flags and keffiyehs are everywhere.

Undoubtedly the best moment in the testimony of Minouche Shafik, the President Columbia University, before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce last week was elicited by Representative Jim Banks. Why, he wanted to know, was the word “folks” spelled “folx” throughout an official guidebook for the School of Social Work? Shafik coyly suggested that perhaps the authors did not know how to spell, which might well be the case. But you cannot watch her squirming response without feeling the hot, sticky, and slightly nauseating air of disingenuousness wash over the proceeding.  “Folx,” as Shafik must be aware, is just the latest instance of weaponized orthography disseminated by the academic left. Think “Latinx” and you are on the right track.

“I am enormously sad that we have students who are so rude as to come into my home, in my backyard, and use this social occasion for their political agenda,” said hapless University of California Berkeley Law dean Erwin Chemerinsky. Last week, Chemerinsky and his wife, Berkeley law professor Catherine Fisk, were humiliated at a home dinner they hosted for third-year law students when Malak Afaneh, a Palestinian-American student who is co-president of the Berkeley chapter of Law Students for Justice in Palestine, produced a microphone she had brought with her and launched into a speech protesting the dinner and, apparently, her host.

Harvard University has borne the brunt of the backlash for the antisemitism of its student protesters in the last few months: their president had to step down over her mismanagement of the issue and a plagiarism scandal. But Harvard is far from the only elite school in the nation in botching their approach to pro-Palestinian activists. It's not even alone in its city. Boston University sits just over a mile away, across the Charles River — and its administration has avoided the same level of backlash for its failure to tackle open hatred of Jews and Israelis on campus.

As a left-wing sympathizer to the Palestinian cause, I cringed when I heard reports that college students around the country, including at Columbia University, my alma mater, had expressed support for Hamas’s murder of Israeli civilians on October 7. My first thought was that “woke” students had lost their minds — confusing the perfectly legitimate defense of Palestinian rights with the usual laundry list of “resistance” clichés that pay little attention to history, morality or the subtleties of the English language.