Despite facile similarities there is no real comparison between pro-Palestinian protests among college students and those of the Vietnam era

Hamas' extensive and shadowy global network of funding and influence might possibly be a factor also

The outbreak of anti-war protests – some violent, some peaceful - on college campuses over the past week has inflamed the minds of our progressive neoliberal punditry with enticing visions of the Vietnam era.

“Today’s protests bear an undeniable similarity to the anti-Vietnam war student movement of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s,” one commentator for a New York-based digital rag gushed.

The Middle East Monitor proclaimed the arrest of 100 protesters on the Columbia University campus at the beginning of the week as “reminiscent of police crackdowns on students protesting the Vietnam War”.

The comparisons, which started within a few months after Hamas’ surprise slaughter on 1200 Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023, have proved all too seductive for journalists with only the vaguest sense of actual history.

For example, last December The New York Times asked its readers:

The war in Vietnam ignited a protest movement that helped define a generation. Is the war between Israel and Hamas doing the same thing?

The article then went on, however, to cite all sorts of dissimilarities between the two wars, including quotes from anti-Vietnam protest veterans who couldn’t see any meaningful resemblances.

As one of those “veterans”, I would like explain why history is not only not repeating itself, it isn’t even really rhyming.

The most fundamental and persistent argument of the anti-Vietnam War movement was that we should withdraw our troops because it was not in any way America’s concern.  Vietnam was by and large an internecine conflict between two domestic factions that had already been fighting and bloodying each other for over two decades.

The official narrative at the time was that America needed to intervene in the melee in order to curb the global “spread of communism”, a familiar canard arising from the expansionist policies of Stalinist Russia following the Second World War. 

Even though the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese were Communists, there was little evidence, even sixty years ago, that they had any designs beyond unification of the northern and southern portions of the country.  The division between north and south had resulted from the prior struggle against French colonialism in the 1940s and 1950s.

When it comes to the Israel-Hamas war, however, the differences are altogether striking.  First, and most obvious, American troops are not stationed, let alone fighting, in the Levant (the technical name for the region).

Second, the United States has leverage through arms provisions over Israeli foreign policy, but no American President has the power to dictate how any other country prosecutes their own war. 

Even if the United States were to cut off all arms supplies to Israel, it is doubtful it would affect Israel’s determination to eliminate Hamas at this point. The U.S. would, in effect, have to take the side of Hamas, even join in with them, which of course is never going to happen.

The anti-Vietnam protests were also a matter of American youthful self-interest.  Approximately 2 million Americans were drafted between 1965 and 1973, and over 50,000 of them were killed in combat.

That is not the case at all today.

Although polls in recent months have shown that young Americans are less likely than their elders to back Israel in the current conflict, very few of them are willing to go so far as to support the sentiment behind the incessant “From the River to the Sea” chant of the protesters, which obviously entails the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Palestine, perhaps even their mass murder.

There is significant evidence that much of the pro-Palestine agitation at Columbia is, in truth, pro-Hamas as well.   Protesters, for instance, have been caught on video shouting “we are Hamas”, or “we’re all Hamas”.

That is not to say that the majority of college students who demand “justice for Palestine” are conscious and committed Hamas supporters.  Most are blissfully ignorant of the fraught and complex history of what has gone on in that part of the world for the last seventy-five years.

They have heard been steeped in the faux-Marxist rhetoric of “oppressor” and “oppressed” and instinctively side with whomever they believe is the “underdog,” even if the latter happens to be a genocidal as well as totalitarian movement inspired by, and shot through with, explicitly Nazi ideology.

Earlier this year I asked my class of 30 undergraduate students what they knew about the circumstances and happenstances that shaped the current Israeli-Palestinian strife, including the partition of 1947, the war in 1948, and the Six Day War of 1967.

Most of them had virtually no idea about what these events remotely signified, and many were actually of the opinion that there were no Jews in Palestine before the Second World War.

Fact: There were at least 55,000 Jews, or about one-seventh of the population, in Palestine when the first wave of Zionist settlment began in the 1880s.

Most of the Jews, known as the old yishuv, were descendants of the inhabitants of Biblical times, who lived long before the Arab conquests in the seventh century.

Such blatant ignorance is as much the fault of higher education as it is the students themselves.  Most universities do not in fact provide anything resembling a balanced perspective on Israeli-Palestinian relations, and even if they did, it is rarely included in the mandatory core curriculum.

One more sinister factor possibly contributing to this imbalance is the outsize amount of funding that American colleges and universities have received from foreign interests such as the government of Qatar, which hosts Hamas’ leadership.

From 2001-2021 Qatar contributed $4.7 billion in funding to numerous institutions of post-secondary learning throughout the U.S., according to a 2022 study.

Almost a third of that amount went to Cornell University, which along with Columbia and Harvard was the site last fall of some of the most virulent antisemitic demonstrations.

Another study by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) argued that “as funding from Middle Eastern countries increases – and becomes less transparent to the public – certain campuses experience campaigns to silence academics, an erosion of democratic values, and a lack of response to attacks on students’ freedom of expression.”

That, of course, belies the question, which no one seems to have the courage to ask, of how much of this funding is designed, whether directly or indirectly, to flow to Hamas. 

According to a recent report by the Association of Certified Financial Crime Specialists on Hamas’ mechanisms “should be viewed as a multi-layered process involving a broad selection of both seemingly mundane and dangerous items from a variety of sources to many recipients through multiple channels for different uses.”

The report also notes that the Iranian footprint looms very large in the same tangled and shadowy web of covert terrorist funding. 

An brief written by George Washington University researcher Lorenzo Vidino points out that “internal Hamas documents and FBI wiretaps introduced as evidence in various federal criminal cases clearly show the existence of a nationwide Hamas network engaged in fundraising, lobbying, education, and propaganda dissemination dating back to the 1980s.”

In a similar piece, which Vidino co-authored with Sergio Altuna, the two scholars mention “multiple investigations” by the FBI into Hamas financing from U.S. soil, disclosed in bureau director Christopher Wray’s testimony in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks.

All things considered, the present turmoil on college campuses bears far less resemblance to what was going on from 1968-72 than meets the eye.  The war is entirely different, and so are the major players.

The moral calculus is entirely different as well, unless one is willing to succumb to the flagrant and hideous lies of a an underground terrorist-financed propaganda machine.