I went to the Rutgers encampment in New Brunswick Thursday morning, expecting to sympathize with the protesting students who had spent three nights in tents on Voorhees Mall to protest the slaughter and starvation in Gaza.
Because I agree with most of what they say: Israel has gone way overboard in its response to the horror of Oct. 7. America is complicit and should cut offensive arms. The Netanyahu government’s inexcusable theft of Palestinian land in the West Bank makes peace impossible. Plus, I felt some kinship because when I was their age, I slept in the president’s office at my university for three days in a protest against investments in apartheid South Africa. It’s a truism that young people sometimes see with a moral clarity that fades with age.
By the end of the day, though, I wondered if these students were doing more harm than good to their cause. This was not about winning and hearts and minds.
For one, some of the slogans painted on tents in the encampment were hateful, like opposing a two-state solution, as if students were trying to match Netanyahu’s extremism with their own. Another banner called the United States a “fascist police state.” And if there was any sympathy for the Jewish victims of Oct. 7, I couldn’t find it.
When I asked one of the student leaders about Oct. 7, she declined comment. When I asked about a social media post showing a fellow protester chanting “Israel must fall!” in front of a poster of a known terrorist, Hamad Sa’adat, the head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, she again declined comment.
Some of the tactics were arrogant, especially the decision to disrupt finals, forcing 1,000 Rutgers students to miss their exams Thursday morning. The Voorhees Mall is a beautiful lawn about the size of a football field, in the heart of the New Brunswick campus. It’s surrounded by old buildings full of classrooms that were disrupted by the drums, the chants, and the megaphones. That ruckus started early Thursday, after the Rutgers chapter of the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) posted this message late Wednesday night, even as negotiations were underway: “F..k Finals!”
The spokeswoman, a member of SJP and a Palestinian who declined to give her name, said she has family in Gaza who have been killed. “My people are dying,” she said. “I want to continue to focus as a student, but I can’t.”
Heartbreaking, and understandable. But it’s one thing for protesters to boycott the exams themselves. It’s quite another to force everyone to join that boycott, even students who may disagree. They have rights, too.
And the protesters’ harassment of the press was worthy of a Trump rally. They were on public land, this is America, the press has a right to be there -- but somehow these students missed that memo. They hassled me all day, not just telling me to leave, over and over, but physically getting in my way, over and over. One opened an umbrella in front of me to block my view of a speaker, while several students and one faculty member kept insisting that I leave, making it impossible to hear. (It didn’t help that a nearby frat was blasting music to disrupt the protest.)
It was worse for a fellow journalist, Chuck O’Donnell, of TAPinto New Brunswick, who says he was surrounded by seven or eight protesters at about midnight on Monday, when the encampment began. They put their hands in front of his camera, and tried to grab it, he said. When they insisted that he leave, he backed off, wanting no part of violence. “I felt threatened and outnumbered,” he says.
Rutgers President Jonathan Holloway drew his line Thursday morning when Rutgers was forced to cancel those final exams. From the start, he had this just right: He supported the protests, as long as they didn’t “interfere with university operations or with the ability of their fellow students to learn.”
The protesters knew where his red line was when they stepped across it Thursday morning. In the end, Holloway denied their two main demands, to disinvest from “Israeli apartheid, colonialism and genocide” and to terminate the university’s partnership with Tel Aviv University. He made smaller concessions, mostly on educational issues like providing scholarships to students from Gaza, and to beef up scholarship on the Middle East. And he agreed to not punish protesters over the encampment.
That sounds just right to me. He defused the crisis, avoided violence, and the minor concessions seem constructive. And do we really want non-violent students to be expelled? They made mistakes. They’re young. We’ll survive.
But some are objecting. Dov Ben-Shimon, CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWestNJ, said he and many of his members were “shocked by the shameful, disgraceful, pathetic and reprehensible capitulation to lawbreaking Jew-haters at Rutgers.” But he was unable to site incidents of antisemitism at Rutgers, beyond one offensive tweet. For the record, I saw no expression of hatred towards Jews, and neither did a Jewish professor I spoke with at the protest who held a sign saying, “Another Jew against Bombing Children.”
I keep wondering how Martin Luther King Jr. or Gandhi might protest this moment. Because their intention, always, was to change hearts and minds, to appeal to the larger audience. A march to Washington under some unifying message?
A group of students at Princeton announced a hunger strike on Friday, a promising tactic that is likely to generate more sympathy, and to focus discussion on Israel’s excesses in Gaza. What if students chained themselves to a fence at the Israeli embassy? Or the gates at General Dynamics factories where those 2,000-pound bombs are made? What if they made sure to condemn Hamas’ murders as well?
One thing seems clear: Disrupting finals is unlikely to convince anyone to join their cause. Just the opposite. Here’s hoping they try something very different come September.
More: Tom Moran columns
Tom Moran may be reached at tmoran@starledger.com or (973) 986-6951. Follow him on Twitter @tomamoran. Find NJ.com Opinion on Facebook.
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