Passing the resolution is seen as symbolic, as the US is likely to use its veto in the Security Council.

Resolution does not give Palestine full UN membership, but recognises them as qualified to join and extends rights.

On May 10, all member states should vote to admit the State of Palestine as the 194th member of the United Nations.

If you want to gauge whether a protest chant is genocidal or anti-Semitic or disagreeable in any other way, you have to pay attention to more than the words. A chant is a performance, not a text. A leader initiates a call-and-response or else yells into a bullhorn, eliciting roars from the crowd. Hands clap, feet stomp, drums are beaten. The chanting creates a rhythm that can induce a sort of hypnosis, fusing individuals into a movement. The beat should be no more sophisticated than Bum-bah bum-bah bum-bah bum-bah, as in, “There is only one solution! Intifada, revolution!” To claim that a chant means only what it says is like asserting that a theatrical production is the same as a script.

You can start with the words, though. Take the chant about intifada revolution. Etymologically, intifada denotes a shaking-off, but in contemporary Arabic, it means an uprising: For instance, a 1952 uprising in Iraq against the Hashemite monarchy is referred to in Arabic as an intifada. But in English, including in English-language dictionaries and encyclopedias, the word refers primarily to two periods of sustained Palestinian revolt, the First and Second Intifadas. The first, which ran from 1987 to 1993, involved protests and acts of civil disobedience and was relatively peaceful, at least compared with the second, from 2000 to 2005, which featured Palestinian suicide bombings and targeted reprisal killings by Israeli forces; more than a thousand Israelis died in 138 suicide attacks. These intifadas received so much international press coverage that surely everyone in the world to whom the word means anything at all thinks of them first. The more general idea of insurrection can only be a poor second.

If that’s the association, then intifada is not a phrase that would indicate genocidal intent. Total casualties on both sides during these earlier periods of conflict run to somewhere between 6,000 and 7,000. At its most innocuous, though, it still implies violence. In the context of this particular chant, it might imply much more than that. Revolution doubles and intensifies intifada—an uprising is the beginning of a fight; a revolution is the wholesale destruction of a social order. “There is only one solution”: This has been deemed offensive on the grounds that “solution” evokes the Final Solution, the term used to describe the German decision to kill all Jews during World War II. The more salient point, it seems to me, is that the declaration rejects the idea that there is a political path to peace. It says that diplomacy is not an option, and compromise is not a possibility.

Of course, that’s just the chant on the page. The chant on college campuses is one slogan among many, taking on meaning from those that come before and after it. And, at the same time, it may be uttered by people who don’t care what they’re saying. At any given march or rally, some number of participants will have shown up in order to show up, to signal membership in a movement that they identify with much more than they agree with. When the protesters aren’t directly affected by the matter they’re protesting, the politics of identity frequently supersede the politics of ideas, as Nate Silver pointed out in his Substack newsletter last week. Participating in a political action becomes a way of fitting in, and a chant is the price of admission. As the police enter campus after campus, I’m guessing that the chants also channel rage at the authorities. “Free Palestine!,” sure, but also, Free my friends!

And yet, the plain meaning of a chant has an impact, even if the chanters aren’t fully aware of it. A chant is particularly effective when its message echoes and explains the overall mise-en-scène. “Globalize the Intifada!” is an ironically apt chorus for students marching through an American campus under Palestinian flags, their heads shrouded in keffiyehs, their faces covered in KN95 masks. “We don’t want no Zionists here!” has the ring of truth when chanted at an encampment where students identified as Zionists have been forced out by a human chain.

The other day, I stood outside a locked gate at Columbia University, near a group of protesters who had presumably come to support the students but couldn’t get inside. From the other side of the gate, a bespectacled student in a keffiyeh worked them into a rage, yelling hoarsely into a microphone and, at moments of peak excitement, jumping up and down. She had her rotation: “Intifada revolution,” then “Palestine is our demand; no peace on stolen land!” Then “Free, free Palestine!” Then “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” Finally, “Intifada, Intifada!” No one stopping to watch could fail to get the message. The young woman wasn’t calling for a cease-fire or a binational confederation of Palestine and Israel. She was calling for war. Is that anti-Semitic? It depends on whether you think that the violent eradication of the state of Israel is anti-Semitic.

Chants may feel like spontaneous outbursts of political sentiment, but they almost never are. So where do they come from? Social media, of course—most chants are rhyming couplets; repeated a few times, they’re just the right length for an Instagram Story. Another source is the political-organizing manuals that are sometimes called toolkits. These function more or less as a movement’s hymnals.  

The “rally toolkit” of the group Within Our Lifetime, a radical pro-Palestinian organization with connections on American campuses, lists 40 chants. I’ve heard almost half of them at Columbia, including “Say it loud, say it clear, we don’t want no Zionists here,” which, I learned from the toolkit, is a translation of a chant in Arabic. A fall-2023 Palestine Solidarity Working Group toolkit contains chant sheets from the Palestine Youth Movement and the U.S. Palestinian Community Network. (This word salad of names is in no way nefarious; political organizing is the art of building coalitions.) The lists overlap, with minor differences: The Palestinian Youth Movement’s sheet, for instance, includes several “Cross Movement Chants” that connect the Palestinian cause to others, such as “Stop the U.S. War machine—From Palestine to the Philippines.”

Some observers believe that one toolkit in particular reflects outside influence. A lawsuit claiming that Hamas is working with the national leadership of two organizations, National Students for Justice in Palestine and American Muslims for Palestine, has just been filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern Division of Virginia on behalf of nine American and Israeli plaintiffs, including six victims of October 7; it specifically cites NSJP’s Day of Resistance Toolkit as evidence. The chairman of AMP, Hatem Bazian, who was also one of NSJP’s founders, denies the claim, and told The Washington Post that the lawsuit is a defamatory “Islamophobic text reeking in anti-Palestinian racism.” The question remains to be adjudicated, but it is safe to say that the toolkit makes NSJP’s ideological affinities clear. The toolkit, released immediately after October 7, advised chapters to celebrate Hamas’s attack as a “historic win for the Palestinian resistance” and to lay the groundwork for October 12, “a national day of resistance” on campuses. Student groups across the country did in fact hold rallies and walkouts on October 12, two weeks before Israel invaded Gaza.

The Day of Resistance Toolkit is an extraordinary artifact, written in stilted, triumphalist prose that could have been airlifted out of a badly translated Soviet parade speech. “Fearlessly, our people struggle for complete liberation and return,” the document states. “Glory to our resistance, to our martyrs, and to our steadfast people.” NSJP includes graphics for easy poster-making; one of these is a now-notorious drawing of a crowd cheering a paraglider, a clear allusion to the Hamas militants who paraglided into Israel. And under “Messaging & Framing” come several bullet points; one group of these is preceded by the heading “When people are occupied, resistance is justified.” Under it, one finds the entire state of Israel, a recognized member-state of the United Nations, defined as an occupation, rather than just the West Bank, and its citizens characterized as “settlers” rather than civilians “because they are military assets used to ensure continued control over stolen Palestinian land.” If Israelis are not civilians, of course, then murdering them could count as a legitimate act of war. That heading, inverted (“Resistance is justified when people are occupied”), was soon being chanted by thousands of people around the country. The phrases did not originate with the toolkit, but it surely gave them a boost.

Many protest chants come across as unoriginal, but lack of originality is actually desirable. The more familiar a chant’s wording and cadence, the easier it is to pick up. A chant modeled on a much older one may also subtly advance a geopolitical argument. “Hey hey, ho ho! Zionism has got to go!,” which is an echo of “Hey hey, ho ho! LBJ has got to go!,” suggests a link between Gaza and Vietnam, Israeli imperialism and American imperialism. I don’t think that’s a stretch. The 1968 analogy is everywhere. Last week, I watched a Columbia protest leader praise a crowd by saying that they’re continuing what the anti-war protesters started. That night, dozens of today’s protesters did exactly that by occupying Hamilton Hall, also occupied in 1968.

I’m guessing that the Houthis—another Iranian-backed terrorist group, which controls a part of Yemen—provided a template for at least one chant. Around February, Columbia’s protesters were recorded chanting “There is no safe place! Death to the Zionist state!,” which struck me, in this context, as a taunting reply to Jewish students’ complaints about safety, followed by what sounded like a version of the actual, official Houthi slogan “God Is Great, Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse Upon the Jews, Victory to Islam.” And indeed, a month earlier, the crowd had openly chanted in support of the Houthis, who had been firing missiles at ships traveling through the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. The U.S. and Britain had just begun bombing them to stop the attacks, and the students sang, “Yemen, Yemen, make us proud, turn another ship around!”

Does support for the Houthis and alleged support for Hamas mean that the students also support the groups’ sponsor, Iran? I doubt that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the student groups exchange messages on Signal. But at the very least, the chants raise the possibility that some of the more extreme radicals on campus align themselves with the Iranian government’s geopolitical orientation more than with America’s, and have somehow persuaded their followers to mouth such views.

One slogan, however, has become emblematic of the debate over the possible anti-Semitic content of pro-Palestinian chants. Its stature can be attributed, in part, to Republican Representative Elise Stefanik, who infamously insisted, during hearings on campus anti-Semitism, that it amounted to a call for genocide. The slogan, of course, is “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Israel’s supporters hear it as eliminationist: From the Jordan to the Mediterranean, which is to say, across the land that had been under British control before it was partitioned by the United Nations in 1947, Palestine will be free of Jews. Where are they supposed to go? Many Jews find the possible answers to that question very disturbing. Palestinians and their allies, however, reject the Jewish interpretation as a form of catastrophizing. They say that the chant expresses the dream of a single, secular, democratic nation in which Palestinians and Jews would live peacefully side by side, in lieu of the existing Jewish ethno-nationalist state. (It is hard to dispute that in this scenario, Jewish Israelis would lose the power of collective self-determination.)

Before “From the river to the sea” caught on in English, it was chanted in Arabic. It is not clear when it first came into use, but Elliott Colla, a scholar of Arabic and Islamic studies at Georgetown University, believes that it emerged during the First Intifada—or rather, two versions of it did. One was nationalist: “Min al-maiyeh lel mayieh, Falasteen Arabiya”: “From water to water, Palestine is Arab.” The other was Islamist: “Falasteen Islamiyyeh, min al-nahr ila al-bahr”: “Palestine is Islamic from the river to the sea.” At some point during the Oslo peace process, Colla says, a third chant appeared: “Min al-nahr ila al-bahr, Falasteen satataharrar,” or “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” “It is this version—with its focus on freedom—that has circulated within English-language solidarity culture from at least the 1990s,” Colla writes in a recent article.

Therefore, Colla writes, “Palestine will be free” should be considered a new chant expressing the ideal of a more inclusive state, not merely a translation of the older, more aggressive chants. It gives voice to a “much more capacious vision of a shared political project.” The problem with Colla’s benign reading of the slogan, however, is that the more nationalist or Islamist Arab-language chants are still in circulation; they share airtime with the English-language variant at American protests. In January, I started seeing videos of American students chanting “Min al-maiyeh lel mayieh, Falasteen Arabiya.” The menace implicit in the Arabic chant bleeds into the English-language version.

If a chant’s meaning changes according to the other ones being chanted at the same event, the signs being waved, the leader’s general affect, and so on, then today’s chants of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” are not beautiful messages of peace. A voice breaking the calm of a neoclassical quad with harsh cries of “Intifada, Intifada” is not a harbinger of harmonious coexistence. “We don’t want two states! We want all of it!” seems especially uncompromising when sung next to snow that’s been stained blood-red with paint. (I imagine that the red snow was meant to allude to the blood of Gazans, but sometimes a symbol means more than it is intended to mean.) Student protesters often say that all they want is for the killing to stop. That may well be true. But that is not what they’re chanting, or how they’re chanting it.

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Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Kevin Townsend, a senior producer on our podcast team. He currently works on the Radio Atlantic podcast and has helped produce Holy Week—about the week after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination—and the Peabody-winning Floodlines, which explores the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.

Kevin enjoys reading Philip Levine’s poems and visiting the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C., where he can sit with Mark Rothko’s large-scale works. He’s also a Canadian-punk-music fan—Metz is one of his favorite bands—and a self-proclaimed Star Trek nerd who’s excited to binge the final season of Star Trek: Discovery.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

Amanda Knox: “What if Jens Söring actually did it?” How Daniel Radcliffe outran Harry Potter The blindness of elites

The Culture Survey: Kevin Townsend

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: In college, I developed a steady rotation of quiet songs that didn’t distract me while I was studying. Artists such as Tycho and Washed Out were some of my favorites.

Recently, I’ve been into Floating Points, the moniker for Samuel Shepherd, a British electronic-music producer. I could recommend his Late Night Tales album or Elaenia, but the one that stands out most to me is his collaborative album, Promises, featuring the saxophonist Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra. It’s a gorgeous, layered work that’s best listened to all the way through—but if you’re pressed for time, “Movement 6” is an exceptional track.

As for a loud song, one of my favorite bands is the Canadian punk trio Metz. I’ve had “A Boat to Drown In” on heavy rotation for the past year. It doesn’t have the thrumming precision of their earlier singles such as “Headache” and “Wet Blanket,” but the song is a knockout every time. Metz just released a new record, Up on Gravity Hill, that I’m excited to get lost in.

The last museum or gallery show that I loved: “Mark Rothko: Paintings on Paper,” an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, showcased some of the abstract painter’s lesser-known works. The show closed recently, but the museum’s permanent collection features a good number of his works, including some of his famous color-field paintings. The National Gallery is also home to many pieces from the collection of the now-closed Corcoran Gallery of Art, and they’re worth a visit—especially the Hudson River School paintings, which must be seen in person in all of their maximalist glory.

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: A few months ago, on my honeymoon, I reread No Country for Old Men. It’s far from a romantic beach read, but few writers are as tersely gripping as Cormac McCarthy. The Coen brothers’ film adaptation is fantastic, but the novel—published in 2005, two years into the Iraq War—encompasses a wider story about generations of men at war. It’s worth reading even if you’ve seen the movie.

I also brought with me a book I’d long meant to read: Lulu Miller’s Why Fish Don’t Exist. Part science history, part memoir, the book is mostly a biography of David Starr Jordan, Stanford University’s first president and a taxonomist who catalogued thousands of species of fish. It’s a unique and remarkable read that I can’t recommend highly enough. Fundamentally, it’s about our need for order—in our personal world, and in the natural world around us.

Miller’s book reminds me of a recent Radio Atlantic episode that I produced, in which Atlantic staff writer Zoë Schlanger discusses her new book, The Light Eaters, about the underappreciated biological creativity of plants. Miller and Schlanger both examine and challenge the hierarchies we apply to the natural world—and why humanity can be better off questioning those ideas.

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: My favorite poet is Philip Levine. His work is spare and direct, alive with love for the unsung corners of America and the people who inhabit them. Levine lived in Detroit during the Depression and spent more than three decades teaching in Fresno. Having grown up in Pittsburgh and moved to California as a teenager, I connected easily with the world he saw.

“What Work Is” and “The Simple Truth” are two of his poems that I often return to, especially for the final lines, which feel like gut punches. [Related: An interview with Philip Levine (From 1999)]

Speaking of final-line gut punches, the poem (and line) that I think of most frequently is by another favorite poet of mine: the recently departed Louise Glück. “Nostos,” from her 1996 book, Meadowlands, touches on how essential yet fragile our memories are, and there’s a haunting sweetness to its last line: “We look at the world once, in childhood. / The rest is memory.”

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: It’s May, so, honestly: the NHL playoffs. (And it’s been a great year for hockey.) But when it comes to actual television, I’m excited to binge the fifth and final season of Star Trek: Discovery.

It’s bittersweet that the series is ending. Sonequa Martin-Green gives an Emmy-worthy lead performance, but for all of the show’s greatness, it can lean a bit too much into space opera, with the galaxy at stake every season and a character on the verge of tears every episode. Trek is usually at its best when it’s trying to be TV, not cinema. (And that’s including the films—Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan succeeded by essentially serving up a movie-length episode.) [Related: A critic’s case against cinema]

Being a friend of DeSoto, I want to give another Trek-related recommendation: The Greatest Generation and Greatest Trek podcasts, which go episode by episode through the wider Trek Industrial Complex. The humor, analysis, and clever audio production elevate the shows above the quality of your typical rewatch podcast. I came to The Greatest Generation as an audio-production and comedy nerd, and it turned me into a Trek nerd as well. So be warned.

Something I recently rewatched, reread, or otherwise revisited: The Hunt for Red October. Somehow, it gets better with every watch. “Give me a ping, Vasili. One ping only, please.”

The Week Ahead

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, an action sci-fi movie about a young ape who must face a tyrannical new ape leader (in theaters Friday) Dark Matter, a mystery series, based on the best-selling novel, about a man who is pulled into an alternate reality and must save his family from himself (premieres Wednesday on Apple TV+) First Love, a collection of essays by Lilly Dancyger that portray women’s friendships as their great loves (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Source: Courtesy of Elena Dudum.

I Am Building an Archive to Prove That Palestine Exists

By Elena Dudum

My father collects 100-year-old magazines about Palestine—Life, National Geographic, even The Illustrated London News, the world’s first graphic weekly news magazine. For years, he would talk about these mysterious documents but rarely show them to anyone. “I have proof,” he would say, “that Palestine exists.”

His father, my paternal grandfather, whom I called Siddi, had a similar compulsion to prove his heritage, though it manifested differently. Siddi used to randomly recite his family tree to my father when he was a child. As if answering a question that had not been asked, he would recount those who came before him …

Although my American-born father didn’t inherit Siddi’s habit of reciting his family tree, he did recite facts; he lectured me about Palestine ad nauseam in my youth, although he had not yet visited. Similar to his father’s, these speeches were unprompted. “Your Siddi only had one business partner his entire life,” he would say for the hundredth time. “And that business partner was a rabbi. Palestinians are getting pitted against the Jews because it’s convenient, but it’s not the truth.”

Read the full article.

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How do you make a genuinely weird mainstream movie? The godfather of American comedy The sci-fi writer who invented conspiracy theory Hacks goes for the jugular. “What I wish someone had told me 30 years ago” Will Americans ever get sick of cheap junk? The complicated ethics of rare-book collecting The diminishing returns of having good taste When poetry could define a life

Catch Up on The Atlantic

What’s left to restrain Donald Trump? Democrats defang the House’s far right. America’s colleges are reaping what they sowed, Tyler Austin Harper argues.

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Shed hunters unpack their haul on the opening day of the Wyoming shed-hunt season. (Natalie Behring / Getty)

Take a look at these images of devastating floods across Kenya, a pagan fire festival in Scotland, antler gathering in Wyoming, and more.

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The Saturday Night Live cold open is usually a place for the series to do its most topical, often political, material. But an awkward sense of obligation hung over last night’s sketch, about campus protests surrounding the conflict in Gaza. The activism at colleges across the U.S. has been dominating the news, especially as the university and police responses have led to arrests. SNL seemed compelled to acknowledge this in some way, but all it gave its audience was uncomfortable, limp material that failed to make any real point about the urgent subjects animating protesters.

The show opened with a fake NY1 community-affairs panel featuring parents of New York City college students. Even the cast seemed ill at ease. Heidi Gardner’s Hunter College mom spoke of the strain the protests had put on her relationship with her daughter. Mikey Day’s New School dad said, “I want to let my son make his own choices, but to be honest, it’s a little scary.” Kenan Thompson, playing a Columbia dad named Alphonse Roberts, appeared to be fully supportive of the protests—“Nothing makes me prouder than young people using their voices to fight for what they believe in”—until it was implied that his daughter might be out there. “I am supportive of y’all’s kids protesting,” he said; “not my kids.”

Thompson’s delivery is routinely one of the most delightful things SNL has to offer, and that was the case here. Yet the sketch was underdeveloped, with little discussion of the reason students are demonstrating, and that tension hung in the air. There was some loose commentary on class and race in the divide between the concerned white parents and Alphonse, a Black man who works multiple jobs to pay Columbia’s exorbitant tuition. It turned out that Alphonse didn’t really care about the protests, as long as his daughter “had her butt in class,” pursuing the degree he was paying for. By the time Thompson got to the close and yelled, “Live from New York, it’s Saturday night!,” he looked both surprised and relieved the moment had come.

It was as if the writers felt moved to say something but ended up reaching for the most potentially inoffensive angle. The ultimate joke was less about the protests and more about how expensive it is to attend college—a fact probably anyone in the audience would agree with. The sketch certainly didn’t have the boldness of Ramy Youssef’s opening monologue earlier this season, a deft stand-up set about how “complicated” his prayers are these days, in which he also said, “Please free the people of Palestine, please,” and “Please free the hostages, all the hostages, please.”

In general lately, SNL seems to be struggling with the most newsworthy material. Regarding Israel and Gaza, that makes sense. The war is nearly impossible to joke about, especially for a program trying to be broadly appealing. But even in a sketch last night on a lower-stakes topic—the ongoing beef between Kendrick Lamar and Drake, featuring host Dua Lipa as a clueless southern morning-show reporter with limited knowledge of Black culture—the gags were labored.

The sketches that hit were the most bizarre and absurdist: Sarah Sherman’s riff on The Elephant Man, titled “The Anomalous Man,” in which a 19th-century woman, played by Lipa, falls for Sherman’s monstrous playwright, who turns out to be a major player and is cheating on her; and “Sonny Angel,” in which Bowen Yang played a tiny, naked doll hooking up with Lipa’s character, a woman with a fixation on her “little boyfriend” toys.

One sketch late in the night perhaps unintentionally captured SNL’s predicament. In a fake ad for the “Teeny Tiny Statement Pin,” the writers mocked celebrities who were too afraid of taking a stand to wear a normal-size pin on the red carpet. “It’s wrong to stay silent, but it’s also wrong to say too much,” Gardner said. “I just wish there was a way to split the difference.” The joke was supposed to be on wishy-washy famous people—but SNL might as well have been sending up itself.

Despite all the coverage of the protests over Israel’s war in Gaza, it can be remarkably difficult to understand what the players are actually saying. On social media, partisans on both sides cherry-pick extreme comments or incidents as a way to suggest that their opponents are comprehensively rotten. Others invoke broadly held values—free speech, peaceful protest, human rights—without explaining how they apply in specific circumstances. And many of the media stories have only worsened the confusion, by employing imprecise and euphemistic language that obscures more than it illuminates.

As a result, the American public remains badly informed about both the war itself and the movement against it, a dynamic that has steadily grown worse as campus protests—and the rate of (sometimes violent) arrests—has intensified. This lack of clarity may be especially damaging to people who both oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza and want to see long-term peace—a group long marginalized by Israel hawks and expansionists—but who may also find themselves surprised and troubled by the stated objectives of many of the groups leading the protests. And there is a growing risk, as the backlash to the protests grows both more violent and more litigious, that the extreme claims, demands for ideological purity, and rejection of nonviolence advanced by some of the protest leaders will undermine a movement that many liberals agree is morally urgent.

Here is a sadly typical example of the phenomenon I’m seeing: The Washington Post recently published an article headlined “They Criticized Israel. This Twitter Account Upended Their Lives.” The story, by the reporter Pranshu Verma, looked at the organization StopAntisemitism, which, according to the Post’s summary, “has flagged hundreds of people who have criticized Israel’s actions in Gaza. Many were swiftly fired.”

But that’s not actually an accurate description of the reality that the Post is reporting. The people featured in this article did not simply criticize Israel or its actions in Gaza. One woman was fired from her job at a branding firm for a video in which she declared that “radical solidarity with Palestine means … not apologizing for Hamas.” (Refusing to say a bad word about a U.S.-designated foreign-terrorist group is undoubtedly not the way her firm wanted to be branded.) Another person, a therapist, was caught on video ripping down a poster of Israeli hostages. She subsequently promoted the conspiracy theory that the Israelis taken by Hamas on October 7 were actually kidnapped by their own country. (She said later that she hadn’t meant what she’d said, but that she’d torn down the poster because it used the term “Hamas terrorists,” which undermined the Palestinian cause. Her clinic, the Post reported, fired her.)

[Iddo Gefen: What ‘Intifada Revolution’ looks like]

The story mentions just two other people whose lives were “upended” because they “criticized Israel.” StopAntisemitism “has flagged people for a variety of statements the organization considers antisemitic,” the Post reported, “including a college instructor who called Israelis ‘pigs’ and a high school basketball coach who wore a shirt with a watermelon, a symbol of solidarity with the Palestinian cause, to a game.” The coach is the most sympathetic person in the story, although the Post fails to mention that he wore the shirt to a game in which his team was playing a Jewish school. Those who were—in my opinion, unjustifiably—angry about the shirt seem to feel that the symbol wasn’t a general expression of support for Palestinians, but targeted at a group of Jewish high schoolers. Either way, the coach was suspended, and apologized. The college instructor, who is no longer employed by her school, did not, but “called Israelis ‘pigs’” does not quite capture her comments, which included, “Israelis are pigs. Savages. Very very bad people. Irredeemable excrement,” and, “May they rot in hell.”

The Post story raises important questions: Should these people, or others whose views are unpopular in a particular community or workplace, have been fired from their job? What are the ethics of reposting their social-media comments or footage of their public acts on an account devoted to making private citizens face personal or professional consequences? How much do we want to rely on viral social-media posts to police ugly behaviors and comments? But these questions are much more difficult to answer when the situations that gave rise to them are fundamentally mischaracterized.

News outlets have a duty to both accurately report the news and include the context necessary for readers to understand it. The Post article not only casts the whitewashing of Hamas and the murders it committed as “criticism” of Israel; it also fails to explain Hamas’s aims—which include the complete destruction of Israel by any means, including the mass murder of innocent civilians. What happens to public discourse around the most controversial issues when media outlets don’t talk about what we’re actually talking about?

Campuses across the country are seething over Gaza. On social media, in Congress, and in the media, debates rage over whether these protests are admirable, gatherings of idealistic young people voicing their dissent over a war that has reportedly killed more than 30,000 Palestinians, many of them innocent children and women, or whether the protesters are entitled, terrorism-excusing rule-breakers who should face consequences when they intentionally flout the law.

Much of this conversation has been carried out in bad faith, such as when grandstanding Republicans decided to haul university presidents before Congress for a public dressing-down. And the decision of administrators at several schools—including Columbia University, NYU, UCLA, and the University of Texas at Austin—to ask law enforcement to break up student encampments and demonstrations represented a dramatic, and inflammatory, escalation.

Part of the debate turns on whether the protests are anti-Semitic. And it has been easy to find examples of blatant anti-Semitism, some of it from standard-fare lunatics and much of it from actual pro-Palestinian protesters; some of it on college campuses, and much of it part of other protests held off-campus and comprising many people who are not students. One problem, though, is that campus higher-ups and the broader public can’t agree on what anti-Semitism is. There are obvious examples: Yelling at Jews to “go back to Poland,” for instance. But the waters get murkier when it comes to anti-Zionism: Are chants calling for the destruction of Israel anti-Semitic, or merely anti-Zionist? What about chants cheering on Hamas? Who gets to draw the line: Jewish students who say they feel threatened, observers who are upset and offended, protesters (some of them Jewish), or critics who say feelings aren’t facts and even stringent anti-Zionism isn’t anti-Semitism?

The question of anti-Semitism is an important one, especially because colleges and universities have long made it their business to police on-campus bias and discrimination (and are obligated under federal law to ensure that all of their students can access an education). But it is not the only relevant question. More salient, and less explored even by major media outlets, is this: What do the protesters actually stand for?

According to some news outlets, the protests are best characterized as “anti-war.” And that’s true insofar as the groups leading the protests do oppose Israel’s war in Gaza, and no doubt many of the demonstrators show up because they’ve watched horror after horror unfold, sympathize with a long-oppressed population that is now being killed by the thousands, and want to voice their desire for the violence to cease. But the protests—both on college campuses and those led by broader, noncampus groups—have articulated demands and ideologies. News outlets have a responsibility to report what those are, and are largely failing.

Many of the protest groups agree with that critique of the coverage. National Students for Justice in Palestine posted on Instagram, “Do not cover our protests if you will not cover what we are fighting for.” On-campus demands vary from college to college, but generally include that the university divest from companies doing business with Israel, cut ties with Israeli universities and academics, offer amnesty to all student and faculty protesters who have broken laws or campus rules, and implement total transparency for all university investments and holdings.

[Michael Powell: ‘We want all of it’]

But those demands are not the sum total of the protest groups’ aims. Two of the student groups coordinating the encampments at Columbia, for example, published a guide answering the question “What principles must one align with in order to sign onto our coalition?” and clarifying “the cause we are fighting for.” The core principles include the Thawabit, originally published in 1977 and characterized as nonnegotiable Palestinian “red lines” (albeit ones from which many advocates for peace and statehood who actually live in Palestine have since deviated). Those include a right to Palestinian statehood, making Jerusalem the capital of Palestine, the right of return, and the right to resistance, even armed resistance, or “struggle by all available means.”

These groups have also routinely refused to condemn the Hamas attacks of October 7 that led to the Israeli incursion, even while they have found time to condemn far less egregious acts. (An October 12 statement from Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine and Columbia Jewish Voices for Peace lambasted those calling for peace and issued five separation condemnations of Columbia, including two for emails that voiced sympathy for Israelis without sufficient recognition of Palestinian suffering.) Some protest leaders and professors have explicitly said that they will not condemn Hamas, or that requests to do so are a distraction; others have overtly embraced the organization.

Similar ideologies and goals have taken center stage at off-campus protests as well, with banners pledging to secure Palestinian freedom By Any Means Necessary and chants cheering on Hamas and rejecting a two-state solution in favor of the end of Israel (“We want all of ’48”). Protesters should be free to gather and make their demands, of course, but these particular demands are not, by any reasonable definition, “anti-war.” Protesters who endorse these ideas are against Israel’s war in Gaza, but do not seem to be opposed to bloodshed if it’s in the service of extinguishing the world’s only Jewish state. (What else does “by any means necessary” connote if not an embrace of any means necessary, no matter how vicious?) These groups are not calling for all combat to end. Too many support any self-styled “resistance” group that, like Hamas, uses violence against civilians to achieve its ideological and theological aims.

This does not make every protester a terrorist or terrorist sympathizer, as some have claimed. Contrary to what National Students for Justice in Palestine itself argues, showing up at a protest does not and should not require pledging allegiance to the maximal demands of its organizers. Nor do those demands, in my view, negate the moral urgency of the protests, which in the aggregate—if not at their organizational core—are about ending a bloody war. And although there are no polls or data on what the many protesters who are not aligned with the major pro-Palestinian groups think, my personal sense is that the majority are horrified by the brutality they see Palestinians enduring and believe this war is a moral atrocity. They protest because they want to see it end—not because they have any sophisticated understanding of the “intifada revolution” that the organizers often champion, or because they are “pro-Hamas,” as so many conservative outlets claim.

If the public is to understand the protests, then journalists need to give a sense of proportion, and at least attempt to cover what average demonstrators think and why they show up. But they also need to do exactly what protest organizers ask, which is to clearly articulate those organizers’ demands and positions. And for people who are horrified by the war but do not support Hamas or like-minded groups and who do not champion the destruction of Israel (or the mass expulsion and murder of millions of Jews that they fear would come with the end of the state), it’s especially important to understand and take seriously what protest leaders are saying.

If you disagree with the organizers—and I imagine a lot of people who oppose this war, including many who are protesting, do—then the decision becomes whether to participate anyway because the stakes are so high, sit it out because the disagreements run so deep, attempt to wrest control and put forward goals that are much more popular with the American public, or attempt to make the existing movement a big-enough tent to allow in “Zionists” who oppose violence of all kinds and support an independent Palestinian state alongside an Israeli one.

None of that is possible when conservative news outlets tar all of the protesters as pro-Hamas, while more liberal ones suggest they are merely anti-war.

This same failure has emerged in the coverage of the counterprotests. Just outside the Columbia gates, well-known Trump-affiliated Christian nationalists were among the organizers of a pro-Israel rally—if you can call a group whose apocalyptic religious aims require the return of Jews to Israel so that they might all convert or die when Christ returns “pro-Israel.” And there has been remarkably little reporting on the ideologies, affiliations, and goals of the counterprotesters, despite reports that they have also been making threats and shouting bigoted comments, including “go back to Gaza.” At UCLA, counterprotesters are widely reported to have fomented serious violence against the pro-Palestinian activists in an encampment and to have brutalized student journalists. Are these demonstrators, who seem to have grown more aggressive in recent days, really merely “pro-Israel”? Or are their more expansive ideologies, and perhaps other connections, at play?

[Conor Friedersdorf: Columbia University’s impossible position]

Although many observers and commentators invoke the right to protest or the right to free speech, the student protesters seem disinclined to make free-speech or assembly claims to justify their actions, perhaps realizing that many of the tactics they are using are outside the First Amendment’s protections. And even as student protesters stand accused of making their fellow students feel unsafe with their anti-Zionism and with their allegedly anti-Semitic behaviors, those same protesters do not shy away from claims that their safety is being threatened by people whose ideas they oppose, or from demands that those people be removed from campus. To try to parse the protests using generally applicable standards of free speech or content-neutral campus rules is to misunderstand what many of the protesters are asserting, which is less about any particular norm and more about moral clarity. Israel, many protesters argue, is conducting a genocide, and they need to stand in opposition. It could not be clearer.

The protesters’ simple argument is that their cause is righteous and should therefore be supported, and that their schools should enable their protests. These schools are communities, as administrators continuously remind them. Non-righteous causes and individuals, the protesters believe, should not be allowed. A community’s norms are set not only by the law, but by what that community deems acceptable, moral, and desirable. But, from the other perspective, college campuses that receive federal dollars are required to ensure that all students can access an education safely and without discrimination—an obligation that some Jewish students and political leaders say is being compromised by anti-Israel protesters.

And so the protests also raise a question of content, not just one of content-neutral norms. Or at least, this has been the position of the protesters, who do not believe that content-neutral time-place-manner restrictions on protest should apply to them. If these protests were about a less popular campus cause—say, in opposition to Donald Trump’s criminal trials, or to petition their schools to end affirmative action, or to demand that their school do more to support Israel’s war in Gaza—it is hard to imagine such a full-throated demand that students be permitted to violate generally applicable protest rules. But the rules seem to be considered broadly irrelevant here, in light of the stark moral claims.

In the protesters’ defense, they do have a stark moral claim in their generalized opposition to a grotesque ongoing war. And their actions echo those of Vietnam War protesters, who also took up a righteous cause, shook the nation, used unpopular and disruptive tactics, and were widely criticized, before being ultimately vindicated in their belief that the deployment of U.S. troops to Vietnam was tragic, immoral, and unnecessary. One has to wonder if that movement, and the leftist movements that developed in its aftermath, would have been more successful in achieving a variety of goals had it not devolved into the maximalism of chanting “One side’s right, one side’s wrong, victory to the Vietcong,” engaging in bombings, and offering support for the murderous Khmer Rouge.

Of course, one does not have to wonder if college administrators feel proud of their decision to call in law enforcement. In the Vietnam era, when they did so, some students were killed, many were arrested, and schools, including Columbia, have for decades considered their response a badge of shame.

Today, a clear line of argument has emerged from many progressive commentators: First, the overwhelming majority of the protesters are peaceful and not anti-Semitic. Second, it undermines and mischaracterizes a vital movement to focus on a few bad actors who spout anti-Semitic vitriol, or to emphasize a few chants that glorify Hamas or call for the destruction of Israel. Third, the obsessive coverage of these protests is coming at the expense of the much more important story, which is the war itself. And in many respects, this is a sensible position. A war costing tens of thousands of lives, conducted by a key U.S. ally following a horrific terrorist attack, is a much more important story than whatever college students are doing in the United States. The violent crackdowns on these protests strike many, myself included, as far more troubling than the protests themselves. And it isn’t fair to conflate what a handful of protesters do or say with a much broader movement.

But again, many news outlets, journalists, and commentators are sidestepping the content of the protests and the demands of the protesters, both on and off college campuses. The content and demands shouldn’t have any bearing on whether the police are called in (or on whether the National Guard should be called in—an appalling and deeply illiberal and authoritarian suggestion). But progressives who oppose violence on all sides should have a clear sense of what those who claim to speak for this movement are advocating, so they can decide where to participate and where to push back—protest movements are dynamic things, and can be reshaped by those invested in their outcome. And the public should understand protesters’ demands and aims, as well as those of the counterprotesters. The only way that happens is if media outlets forgo euphemism and are clear on what individuals and leaders actually say. And on that much, at least, even the protest organizers seem to agree.

Students in the UK are setting up camps to show solidarity with Palestine and their post-secondary peers globally

Why is the student-led movement for Palestine met with military-style crackdowns in the United States?

Hundreds of protesters expressed solidarity with Palestine mimicking protests across US university campuses.