So I passed the night in the dismal Manhattan jail known as the Tombs, in the dankest of cells with a morose group of other criminal trespassers, among the nearly 700 of us who had been rounded up for arrest by the New York Police Department. And in the morning, when I returned to my campus dormitory, I discovered a further residue of the police raid, beyond the mass arrests, which consisted of large dark bloodstains coagulated on the walkway.
Those were large experiences, the bloodstains especially. And today those experiences cause me to observe Columbia’s new student rebellion through a lens of curious and strange emotions — amused at first, almost happy in a paternal spirit, for a deluded half-minute, and then, half a minute later, horrified, first on a simple level, in solidarity with Columbia’s harassed Jewish students, then on a deeper level.
Sympathetic adults used to say to us student radicals in 1968, “I agree with your ends but not with your means.” By this they meant to applaud our lofty ideals and to deplore our raucous and too-raucous riots and mayhem. But these days, I discover that my own views have taken an opposite turn. The raucous aspect of student protests seems to me only a secondary problem even now.
The students want to take over the lawn? It would not be so terrible, if some of them did not insist on persecuting Jews. But I recoil at what are plainly the ends.
In the weeks after my return to the Columbia campus from the Tombs, back in 1968, I raced around the quads helping to foment our mighty student strike. And, as I did so, one professor after another accosted me on the brick walkways to harangue me with lectures about politics and the past. Robert Gorham Davis, the respected literary critic, upbraided me repeatedly, and so did David Sidorsky, my philosophy professor, such that, after a while, I realized that I was in extended debate with those distinguished people. It turned out to be a debate about Germany in the 1930s.
The professors were haunted by Germany and its history, which might seem odd in the context of a student strike in 1968 in New York. But nothing was odd. In 1968, the defeat of the Nazis was only 23 years behind us, and the era of World War II and the catastrophe of the Jews had not yet definitively disappeared into the past — at least, not in the professors’ eyes. They wanted me to understand that Germany’s leftists in the 1930s had failed to understand Nazism’s danger. Foolish left-wing radicalism had helped undermine the German universities, which ought to have been a place of anti-Nazi resistance. They wanted me to understand, all in all, that what people think they are doing might not be what they are actually doing, and, in the name of high ideals, society might be weakened, and the worst of disasters might be brought about.
Today a memory of those walkway debates floods back on me because, in my own eyes, it has become impossible to mistake that, historically speaking, the era of World War II and the catastrophes of those times have still not come to an end. And in my eyes, it is impossible to mistake that, among the student radicals, things have taken a wrong turn.
The students — the students of today, the best of them — will defend themselves by explaining that, if they are occupying Columbia’s South Lawn and chanting and drumming, it is because extremist Israeli settlers are oppressing the West Bank Palestinians, which is a right and worthy point to raise. The students will emphasize that, in launching its riposte in Gaza, Israel’s army has ended up killing immense numbers of civilians, which is also incontestable. And the Israeli effort to crush Hamas has ended up imposing famine-like conditions and one dreadful thing after another, all of which is true and horrific and enraging.
And yet it has to be acknowledged that ultimately the central issue in the war is Hamas and its goal, which has lately seemed more realistic than anyone among Israel’s friends has imagined in recent years. The goal is and has always been the eradication of the Israeli…
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