The tents came down under riot police this fortnight, and the encampments have been narrated almost entirely in a single vocabulary: antisemitism, intimidation, the campus made unsafe. I want to examine that vocabulary rather than swallow it, because it is being offered as a description of what the protests were, and it was in truth the instrument used to destroy them, and the distance between those two things is the whole of what this fortnight was about.
Let me say first what I concede, because I will not build an argument on a denial. Antisemitism is real, it is a genuine evil, and it exists on the left as everywhere else; among tens of thousands of protesters there were individuals who crossed from opposing a state's war into something uglier, and a movement that will not name and expel that ugliness in its own ranks fails both its cause and the many Jewish students marching inside it, who oppose this war as fiercely as anyone and deserve better than to be conscripted, by their own last name, into the case for a slaughter they are protesting. I hold that without hedging, and I have said it to comrades who did not want to hear it. But naming the real thing is exactly what earns the right to name the larger one: that the charge of antisemitism, this fortnight, was overwhelmingly not a response to that marginal hatred. It was a weapon, deployed deliberately and at scale, to convert a mass protest against the killing of my people into a story about the discomfort of the people who preferred not to hear about it, and thereby to make the protest itself unspeakable.
Here I reach not for a theorist but for a letter, written from a jail cell in 1963 by a man now safely carved into the national mythology, who observed that the great obstacle to justice was never the outright bigot but the moderate, more devoted to order than to justice, who agreed the cause was just but found the timing wrong, the methods too disruptive, the tone too loud, and who preferred a negative peace, the absence of tension, to a positive peace, the presence of justice. King wrote that about people who applauded him in principle and called the police on him in practice, and every line of it describes the reception of these encampments by the respectable centre that assured the students it shared their concern for Gaza, just not this noise, not this way, not now. The demand that the protest be quiet, orderly, and comfortable was the demand that it be ineffective, and it has been made against every protest the same centre now claims to honour.
The serious objection deserves its hearing, and it is this: real antisemitism did appear, the movement's failure to police its worst edge handed the crackdown its pretext, and a protest that genuinely frightens any student has a problem it must answer. I grant every clause of the premise and refuse the conclusion, because watch how the frame is applied, and watch whose fear counts. The failure of a margin was used to indict the whole; the conflation of opposing a state with hating a people was performed deliberately, so that a chant against a war became evidence of bigotry; and the tender concern for frightened students was extended with a selectivity that gives away its purpose, because the students who were doxxed, blacklisted, assaulted, stripped of job offers and hunted by trucks carrying their faces and the word terrorist, the Muslim and Arab students whose fear was not metaphorical, were not the students whose safety organised the national response. Their fear was real and it was ignored, because it was not useful to the people invoking safety. A concern for student safety that sees only one kind of frightened student is not a concern for safety. It is a side, wearing safety as a costume.
I have some standing here, and I will use it once. I came of age when my own presence on a campus was itself treated as a security question, when to be visibly Muslim was to be a problem to be managed, when the comfort of everyone else was invoked to constrain me before I had said a word. So I know the instrument from the inside of my own life: the way the safety and feelings of the powerful are made the measure of what the powerless are permitted to say, the way a demand for justice is reliably re-described as a threat the moment it grows loud enough to cost something. That is what was done to these students, and the fact that it was done in the name of fighting antisemitism, a real evil that deserves better than to be spent as a tactic, only makes it more corrosive, because it burns the credibility of the charge for the day it is genuinely needed.
So I will not join the chorus that has decided the lesson of this fortnight is that the students went too far. Some individuals did, and the movement should say so itself, unprompted, because it is right and because the cause deserves discipline. But the students, in the main, did the thing that every generation is told not to do and later honoured for doing: they refused to be quiet about a mass killing their own institutions were funding and their own government was arming, and they paid the standard price for it, which is to have their protest renamed as hatred by the people who could not answer it. They were right to refuse to be quiet. The naming of their refusal as bigotry is the oldest way there is of declining to hear what a protest is actually saying, and a century from now it will be the students, and not the batons, that this fortnight is remembered for.