How the Met Gala became a target for Gaza protests – and revealed a civil war on the left

The celebrity crowd in attendance would sooner fly commercial than vote Republican. How did they become the enemy of the pro-Palestine movement?

Forget the red carpet, this year the real action at the Met Gala was on the streets.

In New York, pro-Palestine protesters held a “day of rage” to coincide with the big event, complete with protesters burning the American flag, defacing a World War I memorial along Fifth Avenue, and spray painting the famous bronze statue of Sherman at the southern end of Central Park.

As the party went on inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Twitter/X was filled with vision of protesters storming barricades, confronting cops, and punching on with ordinary New Yorkers and occasionally each other.

In one clip, a pair of smartly clad young hijabis chant at cops like they are cheering on their footy team: “Oink! Oink! Piggy! Piggy! We’re here to make your lives sh-tty!”

In another, protesters are seen running towards and sometimes through police barricades, playing a cat-and-mouse game with NYPD officers trying to stop the mayhem from reaching the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

A pro-Palestine protester writes Gaza on a memoriam near Central Park during a march on the outskirts of the Met Gala in New York City. Picture: Alex Kent / AFP

In a third, guys with keffiyehs tied around their heads and faces terrorist style can be seen setting off flares and smoke bombs along Park Avenue’s famous traffic islands, picking up on a trend started by local Sydney yahoos at the Opera House last October.

On the face of it, this is bizarre behaviour.

Police arrest a pro-Palestinian demonstrator near the Met Gala. Picture: AFP

The Met Gala is nowadays more ideologically pure than Stalin’s Kremlin.

The celebrity crowd in attendance would sooner fly commercial than vote Republican.

How did they become the enemy of the pro-Palestine movement, which has been the absolute darling of the fashionable Hollywood left for years, particularly since China opened its chequebook and got everyone to stop saying “Free Tibet”?

And, beyond the Met Gala, what is making mostly young people chant and scream and brawl and occupy in streets and campuses across Australia and America and much of the Western world?

Certainly, it is no secret that there is big money being fed by hard left wing interest groups to feed the protests.

An analysis by Politico.com this week found that big Democrat philanthropic names like George Soros as well as the Rockefellers and Pritzkers have also quietly bet big on the protests.

Establishment types on the left for whom the State of Israel, broadly speaking, was always considered deserving of support are now pitted against mostly younger radicals who call the president “Genocide Joe” and chant for the Jewish people to be removed “from the river to the sea.”

This internal conflict was summed up by New York Mayor Eric Adams, himself a fierce Democrat, who last week fretted about “outside agitators” working to “radicalise our children” and described himself as “horrified and disgusted” by the antisemitism on display at many of the protests.

Australian actress Nicole Kidman and Australian singer-songwriter Keith Urban arrive for the 2024 Met Gala. Picture: AFP

But even with money behind it, every movement requires dry tinder to catch fire.

And here we must also not forget two of the oldest drivers of social movements: Boredom and fear.

Those aged under 30 or even 40 are often terrified about their economic future, and not without cause.

They see their parents’ or grandparents’ lifestyle increasingly looking as unattainable as that of one of those aforementioned Rockefellers.

Meanwhile today’s university students grew up in an oddly stultifying world of helicopter parenting and came of age during the hypersafetyism of the Covid pandemic.

Our supposedly permissive society is shot through with a strong puritanical streak that makes everything it touches dreary and political.

And, when it comes to protests, we have been here before.

There have been plenty of comparisons of today’s Gaza protests to the anti-war movement of the 1960s.

But don’t forget that the peace movements of the 1960s were, around the world, much more about rebelling against the supposedly stultifying and conformist 1950s. The war in Vietnam was just the spark.

Radical leftist students who occupied Paris’s Sorbonne in 1968 adopted the slogan “it is forbidden to forbid”.

This impulse can go both ways.

After the January 6 riot at the US Capitol by Donald Trump supporters, singer Lana Del Rey got in a bit of trouble when she said “I think, for the people who stormed the Capitol, it’s disassociated rage.”

“They want to wild out somewhere … and it’s like we don’t know how to find a way to be wild in our world.”

Today’s protests, which unlike January 6 are all but officially sanctioned with their excesses to be papered over and forgotten, may be awful and ugly and shot through with vile anti-Jew and anti-West hatred.

But they also did not emerge out of nowhere.

Do you have a story for The Daily Telegraph? Message 0481 056 618 or email [e-mail]

Originally published as How the Met Gala became a target for Gaza protests – and revealed a civil war on the left