Good morning. It’s only student politics, you might say: a collection of undergraduates staging protests on campus, making demands of university administrators, and registering a futile objection to a faraway crisis. Why should anyone else be interested?
But the protests over Israel’s invasion of Gaza that have convulsed Columbia University in New York are becoming harder and harder to dismiss, reminiscent to some of the anti-Vietnam war demonstrations of 1968. They have set off a wave of similar protests across the US, and now even in the UK. They have drawn attention to the extent of US support for Israel, and lent credence to claims that college administrators listen more closely to hostile Republicans than their own students and faculty.
