Last year, as protestors flocked the streets of Niamey in support of the Nigerien General Abdourahamane Tchiani, an unlikely banner was raised above the black-skinned throngs: the tricolor flag of the Russian Federation, whose median citizen is about as physically and culturally dissimilar from the median Nigerien as two homo sapiens can be.
Incumbent President Mohamed Bazoum was coasting through the third year of a moderately successful first term, which saw Nigerien standards of living improve and birth rates recede to more sustainable levels. General Tchiani, not to be deterred, launched a coup on the basis of Bazoum’s supposed inaction in the face of Islamist terrorism in Niger—despite the conflict data suggesting that jihadist violence was declining under Bazoum’s tenure.
In truth, Tchiani was invoking an old, ugly, and lindy force of postcolonial demagogy and anti-whiteness, impugning the United States and Europe for the misfortunes of the developing world. His rhetoric told a familiar story of rapacious white plunderers and the righteous black-skinned subaltern, a political formula which somehow has retained its appeal despite decades of failure, violence and destitution. Regardless, Tchiani’s gambit worked, and the rogue general continues to rule Niger to this day despite the impotent threats of neighboring nations and NATO powers.
The incidence of several thousands of Nigeriens waving the tricolor of Peter the Great was not enitrely without reason. The Wagner Group maintains a significant presence in Niger and is deeply enmeshed in numerous domestic conflicts, and Tchiani immediately sought the support of the group to entrench his power after seizing executive authority.
However, as last year’s abortive coup attempt made clear, the Wagner Group operates distinctly (and sometimes adversarially) to the Russian state helmed by Vladimir Putin, and the presence of these mercenaries did not entail any deep or uncomplicated geopolitical affiliation. While the connections were non-arbitrary (as opposed to, say, the Thai national obsession with merchandise bearing the image of Adolf Hitler), the fundamental significance of the Russian flag was not attributable to any material or political origin but rather derived from a simple maxim: The United States is the bastion of white neo-imperialism, and Russia is an adversary of the United States; ergo, Russia is the enemy of neo-imperialism and the righteous protector of black-skinned peoples in the dark continent. It is a formula as simplistic as it is powerful as it is destructive.
When we consider the current outbreak of campus protests on behalf of Palestine, we ought to view these events in much the same way as the Nigerien appropriation of Russian nationalism. As American universities are swept by a wave of pro-Palestine (or anti-Israel, depending on one’s perspective) protests, we should understand these protests not as genuine engagement with the geopolitics of Israel’s war on Gaza, but rather as reflective of an internal power struggle, for which Israel and Palestine serve as useful but somewhat ill-fitting mythological entities.
While censorious groups such as Canary Mission are funded in part by the State of Israel, the university donors opposing the protestors’ demands is not comprised mainly of Israeli citizens with an immediate personal stake in the conflict but rather Jews and philosemites with merely ideological and ethnic affinities for the Jewish state. It is chiefly on account of these donors that the universities have not submitted to protestors’ demands, and it is not out of concern for the grievances of Palestinian students but rather due to the demands of bandwagoneers that these demands are so powerful.
With that said, the actual content of the demands of the protestors seem altogether superfluous, and I find it probable that the great majority of demonstrators assembled on Columbia’s lawn are completely unaware of the specifics their own entreaties. A recent viral video depicts an endearingly ditzy, septum-pierced New York University undergraduate in Washington Square Park giddily confessing that she doesn’t know “all of what NYU’s doing,” or seemingly any of what NYU’s doing, while the girl to her side admits that she wishes she was “more educated”—yet there they are, facing a real danger of arrest or academic censure for their participation in this event, for a cause of which they confess they do not understand the most basic tenets.
While it is easy to ridicule the candid ignorance of these earnest women, I suspect their lack of specific understanding is non-unique among the protestors: Demonstrations of this sort must necessarily be comprised of low-information followers, as detailed information-seeking about such conflicts is both labor-intensive and dependent on rare personality traits, while the call of uninformed participation is deeply human and near-universal. Nonetheless, it remains to be explained how such a large group can mobilize despite significant personal risk, all ostensibly for a cause which they do not understand.
What, then, are the actual demands of the protestors? Narrowing in on Columbia University’s Apartheid Divest (the most notable among the various campus protests to emerge in recent weeks), the protestors are in fact calling on the university to divest from “companies and institutions that profit from Israeli apartheid, genocide and occupation in Palestine.” Namely, the Columbia group calls on divestment from three familiar companies: Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet (the parent company of Google, providing a service which is certainly used by nearly every activist on an everyday basis).
The group’s basis for singling out these stocks essentially reduces to their providing technical services on behalf of the Israeli state, which contracts constitute a minuscule portion of their global business. The shares held by Columbia constitute a similarly tiny fraction of the market cap of these three . It is exceedingly difficult to imagine a chain of events proceeding from student demonstrations, to Columbia’s divestment from these tech companies, to these tech companies terminating their contracts with the State of Israel, to the overwhelming defeat of Netanyahu’s purported fascism. Such a chain of events is utterly fantastical, given the scale on which these companies operate and the lucrative value of their Israeli contracts. The activists are essentially grasping at straws, singling out massive corporations whose involvement with Israeli constitutes a trivial share of their total enterprise.
There is yet another aspect which suggests a fundamental incongruity between the ideological pretext of the protests and the war which is their ostensible subject. The dominant third worldist narrative of colonial resistance to white oppression is a poor fit for Palestine, not in the least because the Palestinians are essentially “whiter” than their Israeli adversaries. Though Israel was founded by ambitious Ashkenazim, it is now comprised of a growing plurality of Jews from Arab states, the Sephardim and Mizrahim, who in sum are ethnically dominant in the Jewish state and participate disproportionately in the nation’s military.
While Israel’s outward face is that of the European-descended Ashkenazi, the culture on the ground has been thoroughly Arabized by these Middle Eastern and North African immigrants. Though these swarthy Jews of the Islamic world may insist that they are not Arabs (and may indeed hold in contempt the Arab nations which expelled them in the 20th century), in physical appearance and culture they are indelibly marked with characteristics typical of the Islamic world. While the Israel of 1950 was essentially an island of European customs in a sea of alien cultures, the Israel of 2024 is far more continuous with neighboring polities than almost anyone seems to acknowledge.
The fundamentally Arabized character of Israeli culture is seldom discussed, as both political sides of the conflict find it unflattering to their preferred narratives, yet it is a remarkable and increasingly relevant fact of the matter. While Palestinian activism internationally is tied in with a third worldist opposition to the supposed evils of whiteness, this narrative translates awkwardly to a situation in which a blue-eyed, blonde-haired Levantine Palestinian might be bombed by fleets of hirsute, swarthy Israel Defense Force (IDF) soldiers of recent Iraqi and Yemeni descent.
Given how tenuous are the connections between the war in the Levant and the activist hordes assembled on university lawns, what then is the real motivation behind these outbreaks of solidarity with Palestine? I contend that the demonstrations are in fact symbolic battles for narrative and ideological control of the institutional consensus-forming apparatus, the nebulous web of ideological authorities which my benefactor has termed “The Cathedral.” Palestine is a symbolic rallying point for a new crop of elite students, for whom the conflict has a certain utility in allowing them to usurp power from the previous generation of academic elites.
To better understand the dynamics of these protests, we might consider their antecedent in the student demonstrations of the late 1960’s, still unsurpassed in their mythological significance to progressivism. An underappreciated aspect of these demonstrations is how . The G.I. Bill of 1944 extended an offer of higher education to middle and lower class military veterans who might otherwise have never considered college, while the National Defense Education Act of 1958 and the Higher Education Act of 1965 greatly expanded access to student aid. These policies brought to elite American universities throngs of outsiders to the cliquish and stodgy WASP elite whose grip on these institutions had been heretofore unchallenged, and the demonstrations of the late 1960’s were at the center of a power struggle between the old and new guard of academia. As it typically does, the new guard won this conflict: The WASP elite of yestercentury is dead, and it is now unremarkable that a university administrator might have a last ending in a vowel, or perhaps a suggestive suffix such as “-berg” or “-stein.”
Indeed, it is these cohorts with distinctly non-Anglo surnames who form the stalwarts of conservative opposition to the current student demonstrations, occupying the role of their WASP adversaries in the 1960’s as they stubbornly cling to power against the battering force of entropy. The current groundswell of ostensibly pro-Palestinian activism similarly ensues a generation after a radical transformation in the demographics of elite American universities. While the roots of the current demographics of elite institutions are contemporaneous with the student demonstrations of the late 60’s, these fruits of these policies ripened at a decades-long lag from the planting, attributable to the slow but insistent progress of civil rights legislation throughout the latter half of the 20th century. The 21st century has seen elite universities welcome previously marginal populations of second-generation Africans, South Asians, and Hispanics, while the superlative academic competence of East Asians ensures their disproportionate representation in these institutions despite the best efforts of the powers that be to curtail their dominance.
These student populations are numerous, and they are invigorated by narratives of their oppressed status within the dank stairwells of the ivory tower, which mythology inspires a zealous (though fundamentally understandable) rapaciousness for power. For these elite newcomers, the time is ripe for revolution, and the conflict in Gaza presents the perfect opportunity to challenge the previous generation of academic elites. They are battling not over the future of a small land strip along the Eastern Mediterranean, but rather over who controls the levers of power in the universities themselves. The demands for divestment and other symbolic gestures are merely the pretext for seizing institutional control.
Just as some minority of donors to elite universities are American and Israeli dual citizens, so too is some small portion of the demonstrators constituted of ethnic Palestinians (Columbia, the academic home of Edward Said, has long operated as a nexus of pro-Palestinian activism). They act out their righteous ethnic grievance in a way which is not altogether distant from the conflict on the ground—yet they are also participants in the intra-university power struggle, a conflict which overwhelms their own ethnic priorities. Neither the minority of Palestinian-descended student activists nor the minority of Israeli university donors is sufficient to explain the scale and significance of these protests: Like most protests, these demonstrations are not truly about what they are about. While the triangle-penetrated tricolor of Palestine and the six-pointed blue-and-white banner of Israel may ever yet wave above the cohorts of adversarial students clashing at American universities, we should recognize these flags as symbolic rallying points rather than sincere assertions about the geopolitics of the Levant. They are as related to the war in Gaza as last year’s Nigerien demonstrations were to the war in the Donbas. In both cases, the conflict which is nominally at the heart of the matter is a distant and mythological crusade, whose stories are appropriated and used by factions only vaguely related to the fashionable causes they promote.
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Author: Nicholas Dolinger
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