University protests: Oh to be glamping in the quad now the ‘revolution’ is here

Students and staff at Melbourne University during a protest for Palestine. Picture: Mark Stewart

My campus, like many others across the West, has been under tented occupation for weeks by an assortment of anti-Israeli, anti-Semitic and anti-anything else protesters. The great majority of staff and students hope for cold and rain and, when they come, better locks on our buildings.

“Anti-racism” has become a powerful force on university campuses across the West. But one of the longest contemporary displays of the most ancient and universal racisms – anti-Semitism – has been elided. Jews don’t count, apparently. On Wednesday evening last week I watched as 20-year-olds sang the anti-Semitic anthem “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be (Jew) free”; the racist animus is implicit in the Hamas lyric.

As dawn broke on IDAHOBIT day, our campus was under occupation by students determined to eradicate the only Middle East nation where LGBTQI+ rights can be exercised; Israel offers sanctuary to (and programs for) those fleeing Arab homophobia.

This bizarre situation, where progressive students denounce the only oasis of Western progressivism in a desert of autocracy, is the result of identity politics. The silence of these youngsters, when regimes in Syria, Afghanistan, Iran and Sudan kill Muslims in numbers that make Israel Defence Forces actions seem meagre, is deafening.

According to Amnesty International, China’s “crimes against humanity” against Muslims “remains entrenched”. Nothing to see here. But when the “Zionist entity” is so accused? “Outrageous!” “For shame!” “Divest!”

When governments of colour kill people of colour, identity politics trains the left to not care – or to find blame in “white supremacy”. Across the Cold War, mass killing was a leftist monopoly. There is simply nothing on the Western side that matches the horrors of Mao Zedong’s famines, Pol Pot’s killing fields and the Soviet gulags.

Israel’s conduct has been a model of multiculturalism in comparison, then and since. But it is Hamas, sworn to Israel’s destruction, that commands left-wing adulation. Again, it is identity politics that explains this double standard. Identity politics insists on the division of people into one of two groups: oppressor and oppressed. The former must be resisted, the latter liberated.

The bifurcation informs the mundane (from hiring practices of US universities) to the profound (the legitimacy of war). There are few grey areas. The oppressor can atone and “lean in” but history will eventually wash them aside. The oppressed, marshalled by those who understand the science of history, will inherit the earth.

From campuses to the US congress, the resort to identity is killing our understanding of history and capacity for empathy.

A decade of anti-racism, diversity, equity and inclusion, and intersectionality, and we are neither more equal nor our societies more just. Rather, the intellectual engines of Western life, the universities, are under occupation by political children.

ID politics derives from some dubious theory. Some ideas are so ridiculous, only academics would believe them. Step forward, Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979). The German-American philosopher lived in a state of permanent disappointment with the working class. Its failure to live up to the revolutionary potential Karl Marx predicted for it meant finding new groups to re-educate it and, if this failed, to replace it.

If workers were derelict, other groups should be drafted into the struggle against capitalism and, of course, against Zionism. Draftees included people of colour, the “global south”, the gender fluid, women, Islamists, Indigenous people, prisoners, “the ghetto”, the radical intelligentsia – that is, any “catalyst group” that could plausibly be called oppressed, drawn from the wider culture (hence “cultural Marxism”), was now part of a new revolutionary vanguard. “Use them!” implored Marcuse.

Activist-thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Edward Said and Angela Davis imbibed Marcuse’s seductive prescriptions. He endowed a slither of the educated elite with the imprimatur of “revolutionary”. This minority – well-heeled, propertied, endlessly acknowledging “stolen land” (they never quite get around to returning) – have been the chief cheerleaders of the student protests.

The upshot is a New Left theory of liberation that makes the rape and murder of Jewish women at rainbow-flag-waving musical festivals a legitimate form of resistance. The fate of Shani Louk and Amit Buskila (whose bodies were returned to their families last weekend) exposes the unsettling logic of intersectionality: Hamas men killing progressive Israeli women and Australian progressive women supporting Hamas in return are what “a culture of resistance” looks like, apparently.

So, why does identity politics remain so attractive, despite the moral contortions it obliges? Two reasons, I think. First, it is essentially performative, requiring little sacrifice. Glamping in university quads is a great lark. Good coffee is close by. April and May have been sunny and mild. What better way to transcend a childhood of Covid lockdowns? Opposing Israel is a “luxury belief” for which the protesters derive radical chic without ever having to live under the barbarities of Israel’s enemies.

Second, identity politics is so banal (despite much academic jargon) that anyone can practice it – and they do. Victimhood is an enervating human trait. “A cult of unrelieved victimisation,” observes constitutional scholar Daniel Mahoney, “makes almost everyone whiny and resentful when they are not violent and aggressive.” If we raise young people to see status in victimhood, we don’t build their intellectual self-confidence. Instead, we foster students who see power in grievance. What kind of society will they build?

A note of caution for their opponents: If the left started the weaponisation of identity, it is the right that has learned its vocabulary. The US is leading the way on this. Witness the feuding between representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). Both think their identities give them power. When AOC speaks for her preferred oppressed, MTG finds her own. Tit-for-tat. Zero-sum. Civil war. This is how identity politics ravages liberal democracies.

But there is cause for some muted optimism. If the poverty of the soft anti-Semitism on our campuses is depressing, consider just how niche this world view is. Most staff and students, after weeks of disruptive identity politics, here and in the US, remain unpersuaded by the protesters’ cause. The collective sigh of relief when the protesters drift away will be louder than all their chanting.

Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne.