Why protest about divestment when that is so tangential to the war itself? Perhaps for the sake of protesting?
One of the things which has really struck me about the ongoing university protests in the US is the demands the protesters have made: divesting from Israel. The idea of divestment is fairly arcane for the average person; I doubt most people ever consider that university endowments invest through the capital markets, let alone the specific investments they make. It is also quite unclear what, if any, effect divestment would have on the Israeli economy and the Israeli state’s ability to wage war. The only real point divesting from Israel would have is its value as a statement. But a stronger, clearer, and simpler statement would be to demand an end to the war and the establishment of a Palestinian state.
This got me to thinking about student protests in the context of current US political culture. It seems to me as though the progressive wing of the Democratic party and their supporters see the current protestors as the heirs to protests past like the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement of the 60’s. Protesting is a sign of being politically active, and is a way to signal one’s commitment to the progressive cause. Add to that the fact that more well remembered protests are for progressive rather than conservative causes and it becomes easy to conflate the ideas of protesting for a good cause being inherently good and protesting itself being inherently good. There are obviously counter-examples – the progressives occupying campuses would not consider protesting against vaccines or the January 6 riots to be inherently good – but I wonder if the student protestors see conservative protests as mobs and riots instead of protests. Sure, many of the conservative protests turned violent, with January 6th being the prime example, but so too did many progressive protests.
This model goes some way to explain why the student protests are so popular and widespread when the demand is so arcane to most people and so tangential to the core issue of the Israel-Hamas war. If being a protester is seen as morally virtuous then some people will take the opportunity to protest even if the protests themselves are not the most effective. To be clear, I don’t mean to say that there is nothing to protest about, or that the people protesting are somehow disingenuous in their views, only that the current wave of protests lack the sort of unifying and actionable goal which has formed the core of previous protest movements.
If you liked this post you can read a previous post about student protests here or the rest of my writings here. It'd mean a lot to me if you recommended the blog to a friend or coworker. Come back next Monday for a new post!
I've always been interested in politics, economics, and the interplay between. The blog is a place for me to explore different ideas and concepts relating to economics or politics, be that national or international. The goal for the blog is to make you think; to provide new perspectives.
Written by Karl Johansson
Cover photo by Amine M'siouri from Pexels, edited by Karl Johansson
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