What are the “pro-Palestinian” protesters actually fighting for?

From University of Michigan to Columbia, protests over the war Israel-Hamas conflict continue to rock campuses across the US. And now, it’s moving to England & the University of Cambridge.

But this is not their war. Where are the demands for the return of the remaining hostages? What about demanding that the perpetrators of Oct 7 atrocities be brought to justice? Nope ... didn’t think so. 

There has been a huge outpouring of antisemitism amid these protests — Jewish students being barred from their own campus by pro-Palestinian activist thugs, told to go back to Poland and to the gas chambers, a Jewish student being beaten unconscious in UCLA, Jews told they were the next target for terrorists. When they shout ‘globalise the intifada’, it reminds me of the Brownshirts.

Today’s Cambridge pro-Palestine camp’s spokesman refused to condemn Hamas or describe them as a terror group when questioned by The Telegraph (reported at 3:26pm).

All civilian deaths are abhorrent; but we shouldn’t lose sight of the basic proposition: Hamas’s declared intention is to annihilate Israel and its population – whilst Israel is fighting against a fanatical fascist enemy who prop their own citizens as human shields and then cynically and gleefully propagandise the inevitable collateral casualties. 

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So what are they fighting for?

1. A narcissistic game of pretending to be a revolutionary and pretending to be part of something bigger than oneself. Protesters in the 60s were fighting for CND, Vietnam, gay rights, animal rights, environmentalism etc. Today’s protesters are positioning themselves against the progress made in the 60s onwards. I.e. with Hamas.
2. Antisemitism — Where were these protesters when Syria was wiping out its citizens? Where were they when Iraqi women were protesting against the killing or girls and women? There are no protests against the War in Yemen with over 150k+ direct casualties in that conflict. They only can be bothered to protest against the Jews. 
3. To isolate Israel from the global economy. They want the West to adopt the old “Arab boycott” against Israel in which any kind of business with Israel/Jews is banned. No oil, no gas, no electricity, no food. Essentially, they want to turn Israel into North Korea. This is ironic as they claim that Israel banning of trade with Gaza amounts to “genocide”.
4. They don’t want ceasefire. They want intifada. “Students for Justice” in Columbia — and people like Norman Finkelstein — have endorsed Hamas on October 7 arguing their “resistance” was justified. There is enough toxicity among this “underbelly” that a non-insignificant pro-Hamas sentiment can be easily found. Some are no better than their Holocaust-denying fellow travellers.
5. Decolonisation “settler-colonial” dialectical narratives — At recent protests, they were shouting that Israel are white colonialists oppressing brown people. This offshoot of Marxian traditional class-conflict presents itself in the post-modern “identity-politics” “decolonization” framework which leading universities (whose academics are overwhelmingly left-wing) have been pushing for years now. This shows a serious lack of understanding about Middle Eastern demographics. There are Lebanese & Palestinians who are the whitest people you can see. Meanwhile, there are Israelis who are black, and every shade in between. Essentially, projecting US racial dynamics onto this conflict. 
6. And some are genuinely well-meaning students, albeit mistaken, about the conflict; and have imbibed the media tropes about “genocide” etc. They are decent and would probably be shocked if they knew enough about their comrades. I suspect that most pro-Palestine supporters probably didn’t even know where the Gaza strip was before Oct 7. 

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Some interesting articles:

Michael Powell, in “The Unreality of Columbia’s ‘Liberated Zone’” (The Atlantic). He writes, about the protests at Columbia University:

As the war has raged on and the death toll has grown, protest rallies on American campuses have morphed into a campaign of ever grander and more elaborate ambitions: From “Cease-fire now” to the categorical claim that Israel is guilty of genocide and war crimes to demands that Columbia divest from Israeli companies and any American company selling arms to the Jewish state.

Many protesters argue that, from the river to the sea, the settler-colonialist state must simply disappear. To inquire, as I did at Columbia, what would happen to Israelis living under a theocratic fascist movement such as Hamas is to ask the wrong question. A young female protester, who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution, responded: “Maybe Israelis need to check their privilege.”

 John McWhorter, in “The Columbia Protests Made the Same Mistake the Civil Rights Movement Did” (NYT), also writes:

What happened this week was not just a rise in the temperature. The protests took a wrong turn, of a kind I have seen too many other activist movements take. It’s the same wrong turn that the civil rights movement took in the late 1960s.

Beyond a certain point, however, we must ask whether the escalating protests are helping to change those circumstances. Columbia’s administration agreed to review proposals about divestment, shareholder activism and other issues and to create health and education programs in Gaza and the West Bank. But the protesters were unmoved and a subgroup of them, apparently, further enraged … Who among the protesters really thought that Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, and the board of trustees would view the occupation of Hamilton Hall — and the visible destruction of property — and say, “Oh, if the students feel that strongly, then let’s divest from Israel immediately”? The point seemed less to make change than to manifest anger for its own sake, with the encampment having become old news.