“War in Gaza” has become the misnomer of 2024. From its inception in the wake of the October 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas, this has been an indiscriminate, all-out assault on the population of Gaza by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), one of the world’s most powerful armies. Of course there have been confrontations between the IDF and armed Hamas fighters, but those have been side shows to brutal aerial attacks on noncombatants.
The savagery of the Hamas attacks on October 7 triggered deep generational trauma among many Jews inside and outside of Israel. It is not, therefore, hard to see why most Israelis support the effort to destroy Hamas in the wake of these attacks. Less clear is why the Biden Administration has seen fit to provide massive support to the Israeli military as it carries out these attacks.
Sold as an attack on Hamas and an effort to gain the release of hostages, the assault has not destroyed Hamas and only a minority of the hostages have been released. While thousands of Hamas fighters have been killed, those deaths have been a small minority of the casualties of the conflict.
Palestinian society, in the difficult state in which it existed in Gaza before October, has been battered beyond recognition, with nearly 40,000 people killed, the vast majority civilians uninvolved in any attacks on Israel. One need not condone the Hamas attacks in any way to condemn the Israeli response as disproportionate collective punishment of the Palestinian people.
When the true nature of the “war” began to become obvious to the world and the U.S. public, the Biden Administration began to cautiously remind Israel of its responsibilities under international law to protect the civilians of Gaza and allow humanitarian aid to reach them. Israel has remained defiant in the face of these reminders, pointedly repeating that “no force on earth can prevent Israel from achieving our goal of destroying Hamas.” If Israel has not crossed Biden’s “red line” with its attacks on the city of Rafah, it has certainly made a mockery of the legal principle of protecting civilians in armed conflict.
Domestic opposition to the Biden policy emerged almost immediately, even within the Administration. Large crowds took to the streets in many U.S. cities demanding an immediate ceasefire and an end to uncritical U.S. support for Israel. But unsurprisingly, groups of university students were the ones who took the most disruptive direct actions to demand a change in both University and national policies toward Israel. As protests mounted, pro-Israel students also mounted their own public actions, and the level of conflict over the issue increased on many campuses. One group of students had a particular effect on my own attention to this issue.
I am a graduate of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. My years at the University changed my life and many of my closest friends are still people I met at UMass. Last fall, both my son and my daughter were students at the University (one online, one on campus). I remain proud of my alma mater (and now, that of my daughter), despite the terribly disappointing behavior of its leadership in the face of the moral challenge of the carnage in Gaza.
Within days of the initiation of the Israeli bombing campaign in Gaza, students at UMass/Amherst began organizing to demand that the University support an immediate ceasefire between Israel and Hamas and sever its ties with the Raytheon Corporation (now officially “RTX”) a Massachusetts defense contractor with close ties to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Two student organizations, Students for Justice in Palestine and Dissenters had been working separately on aspects of these issues. The situation in Gaza quickly brought the two groups together around joint concerns.
My daughter’s involvement meant that I paid close attention to this organizing. I was both proud of the student activists and nervous about how pro-Zionist students and administrators at the University might respond. Pro-Palestinian students were widely condemned as antisemitic. Antisemitism certainly exists and is a huge problem, in this country and elsewhere. Nevertheless, while I cannot defend every action taken by every protesting student, it is simply wrong to see antisemitism as the driver of student demonstrations to end Israeli attacks on Gaza.
On October 24, while traveling outside the U.S., my wife and I received a call from our daughter in Amherst. Students had called on their peers to walk out of class the next day and march to the Whitmore administration building to demand a meeting with the school’s new Chancellor, Javier Reyes, to discuss student concerns. If the Chancellor refused to meet with them, the students were going to sit down in the building. Some of them were willing to risk arrest for their convictions. They thought that this action--along with a few others happening elsewhere--might trigger a surge in similar actions at campuses across the country. They were correct, just a few months ahead of the curve.
Our call was not a consultation about whether the caller should risk arrest. It was a matter of informing the parents as a courtesy, so that we wouldn’t return to Boston clueless, only to discover that our daughter was in police custody. We appreciated the notice and gave typical parental advice about being careful.
The demonstration happened, as planned. A few hundred students abstained from classes and marched peacefully, if loudly, into Whitmore. The Chancellor said he would meet with them, but only at some unspecified time in the future, after they left his office. You can imagine the students’ response to that offer. Those who had not been trained for nonviolent arrest were asked to leave the building and the University Police arrested the 57 students still in the building (soon to be known as the” UMass 57”).
Most of the UMass 57 were processed and released quickly, pending an appearance in court the next day. Those who the police could not process were held overnight for their court appearance. The University Police were woefully unprepared. The female overnight guests were held together in an unpleasant locked conference room. The small number of males who spent the night reported being handcuffed to the wall of a police garage for the night, with no explanation of what was going on. Seriously?
It didn’t need to be that way. This was a choice by the Chancellor, presumably with the full support of UMass President, Marty Meehan. It would not have been easy to reach an accommodation with a student group incensed by what it saw as University complicity in genocide, but we’ll never know if it was possible. Eschewing dialogue, Chancellor Reyes turned immediately to a “crime and punishment” approach, rather than dialogue with the students. At other universities dialogue with equally angry students ended in at least a temporary accommodation.
The arrests were only the beginning of a series of events in which the UMass Police did not bathe themselves in glory. They made several serious errors in their handling of the student protests, such as publishing on their website the names and addresses of arrested students who had recently reported being harassed and threatened on campus by pro-Zionist students. To be fair, however, the University Police were under the command of a chancellor who apparently saw this as his opportunity to show the world that his university was not going to be overrun by students supporting Palestinian rights.
The students appeared in court the day after the arrests and were charged with criminal trespass. They were given a hearing date in the middle of fall semester finals. The court officer negotiated the appearance date with the attorneys of all other clients that morning but when it came to the UMass students, the court date was not up for discussion.
An attorney who works as a lecturer in the University’s Social Thought and Political Economy (STPEC) program—the program that gave me my degree—defended all 57 students on a pro-bono basis. For her trouble, she received her own cascade of threats and harassment. That attorney is a true hero of this story.
Chancellor Reyes took the heat for the University in this conflict, but he may well not have been the decision maker. He, too, has a boss. Just a week before the arrests at UMass, President Meehan, joined 100 other U.S. university leaders in a pledge entitled, “We Stand Together with Israel against Hamas.” Meehan, a former U.S. Representative who happens to have represented a congressional district in which Raytheon had significant presence, was listed as a “Coalition Founder.”
Universities are free to take public positions on controversial issues, but most are careful about doing so. This very visible public stance put the UMass administration on a collision course with vocal members of their university community. Stay tuned, the story doesn’t end here.
Great reporting, Kevin! You two raised your children well ... you must be so proud of your daughter (and son). I continue to fail to understand why these universities are so stupid and hard-lined — I guess I’m still naive after all these years. But they blow the useful, decent, productive response every time and go for the inhumane overreaction— when they could so easily gain respect and trust by treating the students as adults. I’m not even talking about the underlying politics of it all.
AIPAC and other Jewish billionaires have made “anti-Zionism equals antisemitism” the law of the land. And politicians and university presidents bow to the money. Bless the young who see through all the propaganda to the genocide in plain view. They are supported by a growing number of older generations who beseech our administration and elected officials to respond and act. I hope the narrative is changing for the better.