Ethan Swope/AP Photo
Police advance on pro-Palestinian demonstrators on the UCLA campus, May 2, 2024, in Los Angeles.
There’s a vast literature on the learning curve of college students. On the learning curve of colleges themselves, not so much.
During first-year students’ orientation week, they often get a presentation on their college’s history. When I entered Columbia in the fall of 1968, a venerable Columbia history professor recounted to the entering freshmen (Columbia was then still all-male) the upheavals that had rocked Columbia (then named King’s College) during the American Revolution.
No such orientation, apparently, is required for incoming university presidents, as Columbia’s current president, Minouche Shafik, still in her first year of encountering American college students, has made abundantly clear. I’m not referring to her calling the cops to clear out Hamilton Hall, but her earlier call from the previous week to have the cops arrest protesters occupying half of the South Lawn, who seemed to be violating no known law or university regulation. The cops were a good deal less prepared and less decorous in that first dispersal than they were this week, and Shafik’s decision to call them in at that point led, predictably, to the escalation of the protesters’ ire and their subsequent move to occupy Hamilton Hall.
By contrast, officials at the one university system with a track record of student protest that even puts Columbia’s to shame—the University of California—clearly had learned from their storied, raucous past, at least until this week. The chancellors at Berkeley and UCLA had decided to let outdoor occupations be. Unfortunately, they failed to anticipate quite how polarizing the Israel-Palestine issues had become. When anti–Vietnam War demonstrations swept their campuses (and many, many others) in the late 1960s, the overwhelming majority of their students, whatever they may have thought about the demonstrations, opposed the war. Today, if virtually every poll is to be believed, a clear majority of students also oppose Israel’s war on Gaza. That viewpoint, however, is anything but consensual once you go off-campus.
This week, while it was clear that UCLA’s administrators understood the history of their campus’s demonstrations, it was also clear that they hadn’t been schooled in the history of Los Angeles’ Jewish far right, which constitutes a very small share of the city’s Jewish community, but has a violent and intolerant past.
Herewith, then, some of that history. In the 1980s and ’90s, Los Angeles was home to a small chapter of the Jewish Defense League, which was steeped in the bigoted ideology of Meir Kahane, an ultranationalist whose Israeli political party, Kach, was actually banned by the Knesset for its advocacy of violence against Palestinians, Arabs, and the occasional stray liberal. In Los Angeles, three members of the JDL were the chief suspects in the 1985 pipe-bomb murder of Alex Odeh, who headed the Orange County branch of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and was a civil rights activist who worked with mainstream Jewish groups as well. (The murder remains unsolved, but one of the three JDL suspects was later convicted of another murder.)
The JDL was also active in opposing efforts by the first group of American Jews to begin a modus vivendi with Palestinians. In the late 1980s, Los Angeles activist Stanley Sheinbaum (following up some preliminary work by Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, with whom Sheinbaum was close) led the first delegation of American Jews to meet with Yasser Arafat, initiating a process that led to the Oslo Accords and the handshake between Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at the behest of Bill Clinton, with whom Sheinbaum was also close.
Sheinbaum’s initial visit with Arafat was something of an earthquake within the American Jewish community, but only in Los Angeles was it met with right-wing violence. Shortly after Sheinbaum returned, he was scheduled to report on his meeting to an open meeting on L.A.’s Westside, but as he began to speak, JDL members arrived and forcibly disrupted that meeting (I was there) to the point that it was discontinued, with some in the crowd compelled to flee.
The JDL itself is long gone, but the thuggish subset of Jewish ultranationalists retains its presence in Los Angeles and emerged from its particular sewer to attack UCLA’s pro-Palestinian protesters on Tuesday night. Having made a point of not calling the cops in to bust outdoor protesters, UCLA administrators, and city officials, were absurdly slow to send in the police to stop the mayhem.
We’re in the kind of era of Bad Feelings that tend to have Bad Results. I note that Fox News is covering campuses—and hyping the pro-Palestinian disruptions—nearly 24/7, while MSNBC, not only unlike Fox but also unlike CNN, is covering it only scantily. Disorder, each network has apparently concluded, can only help Trump, especially when student demonstrators instigate it.
Earlier today, President Biden delivered a speech affirming the right to protest the Gaza war but condemning it—and also condemning those who seek to disrupt those protests—when the action spills over into violence and property destruction. That was all well and good, but if Biden is serious about curtailing disorder that can only help Trump, he needs to start conditioning aid to Israel: no more offensive weapons, and no aid at all if the government doesn’t accept and act on a two-state solution. Israel’s current government, after all, is the direct descendent of Meir Kahane and the JDL.
