Why Protests Happen

I can’t find the Palestine protest. I’ve been walking in circles. Shouldn’t I be able to hear people chanting? Drumming? Shrieking?

It’s cute downtown, but I’m at a strange intersection. The bookstores proselytize for wokeness. The student cafes have updated their rainbow flags again, this time with a hollow purple circle to represent the “historically oppressed intersex population”. At the crosswalks, I tell several panhandlers, who stagger in a drug-crippled daze, that I don’t have change, despite the jingle in my pockets.

I give up on finding the protest with my senses and pull out my phone. “Where is the protest at the University of Michigan?” At the Diag, which is short for “The Diagonal Green,” an open space at the center of U-M’s campus. It’s only a few hundred feet from where I am standing.

The encampment is underwhelming. A few tents pitched in the main square on a floor of concrete. On the north side of the encampments, a few photographers for mainstream media are standing on a mound with their cameras, laughing and chatting, paying no attention to the protest. On the south side, on the steps of the Hatcher Graduate Library, construction workers are putting up scaffolding. The laborers and protesters occupy the same square; livestock grazing on the same grasslands.

The few signs along the borders of the protest seem to be doing all the work. LIBERATED ZONE. ENCAMPMENTS FOR GAZA. DIVEST NOW! LONG LIVE THE INTIFADA. Most tents are green and seem to have been bought fresh for the protest. Slogans sprayed on rainflies. Less than one hundred people. Mostly women. The others are…well, not exactly men.  

Keffiyehs, N95 respirators, cloth masks. It’s not to protect against viruses circulating in the warm spring air, but to conceal identities. Many students are afraid of being doxxed because reprisals could be severe. Suspensions or expulsions, degrees and careers in jeopardy. Others are worried about their families being targeted by mere association. In any case, for most students, it’s better to remain anonymous. The few who decide to go mask-off seem to be organizers. For them, the protest is not a risk to their reputation; it’s a chance to build one.  

As I walk through the encampment, I notice that several cloth masks have been dyed rainbow. There isn’t much going on, besides some people sitting on lawn chairs. Cold dry falafel and decent-looking tabouli on folding tables. At the center of the protest, near the tabouli, two white men in their 60s have a discussion. The tall one with the ponytail tells the short bald one: “It wasn’t until I got back to Engels and the dialectic that I truly understood.”  I giggled loud enough to draw their glares.

People are looking at me. I am conspicuously without a mask, the fellaheen tea-towel, or any other congenial symbol. I decide that I need some kind of in-group signal to assuage suspicion. Back on Google: “Middle Eastern food in Ann Arbor.” Pita Kebob Grill, which inside, to my surprise, has no protesters in line and only three hood rats shouting on speaker phone.  Music-blasting, blunt-rolling street urchins saturate Ann Arbor, who knows how that happened.

Returning to the protest, and ostentatiously waving my wrap in the air with garlic sauce dripping down my chin, I’m excited to see that something is happening. Arab women in headdresses stand on a platform surrounded by a captive audience. But I can’t hear anything. Their megaphone is broken. Instead, a black man on a small bicycle emits deep ebonic grunts. Music blares out of headphones wrapped around his neck. 

More Palestinian protesters arrive. Two hunched-over octogenarians on walkers slowly shuffle towards the square. They each have hand-drawn Palestinian flags sticking out of the tubing of their handlebars.

Then the counter-protesters arrive. They can’t hear the Arab women either, and they match the low-energy activism by standing around and impishly waiving the Israeli flag. The only person showing any real effort is a conservative political vlogger. His expensive camera rig gyrates around him like a halo brace. He skitters around the encampment, weaving through protesters, recording himself while hysterically yelling, “This is how you get dead Jews!”

One of the counter-protesters, a tall student with a miniature Israeli flag subtly poking out of his backpack, wedges himself between me and the black cyclist. His bag is right at eye level. His backpack displays a button which reads: STOP ACID RAIN. A series of chants play in my head, 

“Bring them home now and … STOP ACID RAIN”

“Denounce Hamas and … STOP ACID RAIN”

“Turn Gaza into a parking lot and … STOP ACID RAIN”

*

There are over 130 protests at colleges and universities across America. Even if you want to dismiss these events as ridiculous, you shouldn’t, because there is something deeper going on.

What’s interesting about these events is what’s behind the slogans and signs. It’s not as simple as the Middle Eastern war—ceasefire vs. hostages, reclamation vs. self-defense, Palestinians vs. Israelis. These are only the outward expressions of varied, often subconscious and many times conflicting, political sentiments. I traveled to multiple Palestinian encampments in North America to see what I could find. The counter-intuitive realization is that these are not really pro-Palestinian protests. They are instead pro-Progressive protests with Palestine as the pet cause.

At U-M, the protest was organized by the TAHRIR Coalition. TAHRIR—a cumbersome acronym of Transparency, Accountability, Humanity, Reparations, Investment, Resistance—states on its website that they want to “decolonize the university.”They list over 80 Progressive clubs on campus as member organizations. On their Telegram channel, they refer to the protestors as “comrades.”  

For the U-M protest, TAHRIR offers a full day of scheduled events, such as: Revolutionary Reading Circle; Urban Wordsmith Open Mic; Environmental Militarism Teach-In; Words from Black Revolutionaries; Class Consciousness and the Genocide in Gaza; Unlearning White Supremacy Culture in Organizations.

And it’s not only in Michigan. Across North America, such organizations list their enemies, which are, in no particular order: heterosexuality, colonialism, whiteness, men, capitalism, hierarchy, the police, and many other predictable “sources of oppression.” These shibboleths then combine to represent the greatest enemy of all—the West.

At different encampments, I lied my way into speaking with the organizers, telling them I worked for Mother Jones and Vox. I was curious why they were protesting for Palestinians and not against the catastrophes in Sudan, Yemen, or other places where lesser known POCs are disappearing. The organizers were often stumped by such questions, or they would profess equal concern for the regions I mention.

Indeed, the Israel-Palestine conflict is attractive to American activists because of the conflict’s symbolic value. It’s suffused with a very romantic revolutionary feeling that’s absent from other wars and disasters. This is why these protesters identify with specifically anti-Western revolutionaries such as Che Guevara, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela, and more generally with radical feminists, subversive gays, and outraged BIPOCs. 

Other places, like Sudan and Yemen, feature conflicts between people who are too foreign, whose perceptions and ideology are too alien. The Palestine-Israel conflict is different, because Israel is perceived as the West and Palestine as the West’s oppressed victim.

The protesters might have thawabit scribbled at the entrance of their encampments, or they might retch out the vowels of Gaza—“Guh-zuh”—for cosmopolitan flair, but they refuse to engage with any history that distracts from their greater mission of promoting communism.

And events such as this are great opportunities for the Left to build coalitions, because of their inclusivity of anyone sharing the West as the archenemy. 

It also provides a strategic advantage of leveraging the special rights of other protected minorities. At the University of Toronto, several Native Elders started a sacred fire at the center of the encampments. A savvy move. Both Natives and Palestinians share the indigenous narrative and an anti-colonial persuasion. But more cunningly, if the police break up the protest and put out the sacred fire, it will become a Canadian PR nightmare.

But leftist cooperation is also very fragile, and more internal fractures appear as the protests go on. At the University of Toronto, a group of women shared their stories of trauma, hosted by an anti-colonial aboriginal woman. As the microphone was being passed around, a black woman gave her autobiography. When it became obvious that she was going to be giving a long monologue, the host asked her to finish. The black woman then dramatically stormed off, accusing the aboriginal woman of anti-black racism. The aboriginal then accused the black woman of co-opting the narrative and “taking up space” of victims originally colonized by Europeans. Both women then ran to separate corners of the encampment and started crying. You will see this type of lefty purity spiraling in virtually every protest or organized “direct action”—perhaps the most famous being the viral “Point of Personal Privilege.” 

Women seem especially drawn to pro-Palestinian protests. You will notice in videos of the recent Palestine protests that the chants are sung by a collective female voice. Whatever their motivation—girls will be girls—their commitment to democratic fairness prevents a charismatic leader from emerging. They want to accommodate everyone and ignore obvious contradictions. These women also want to be subversive while simultaneously complying with the most kindergarten-like rules. On the University of Toronto campus, the protesters have zero tolerance for alcohol in the encampment. They do not permit smoking. 

On the one hand, such pleasures are prohibited by the university, and the students do not want to give administrators a pretext to clear the encampments. On the other hand, such prohibitions result in no parties and zero levity. You’d think that protests would need to be fun to keep people committed, especially as they go on all night, night after night.  Boomers assume that these protesters have the same free-love mentality as they once did. They are wrong. They are pinched, severe, orderly. Remember, everyone wears COVID masks. The soixante-huitard might have been fueled by sex, drugs, and alcohol, but this younger generation is instead driven by mental illness, resentment, rebellion against their parents, and a craving for religion. “They’re just here to get laid” is what boomers repeat. But at these protests, the men seem so afraid of flirting with women, thereby committing the crime of heterosexual lust, the atmosphere becomes very tense. The girls often have countless tattoos, a grotesque number of piercings, and wrist and thigh scars. The latter is particularly horrifying, as self-inflicted scars appear to be increasingly worn as a badge of honor.

Conservatives think the counter-protesters are “based” because they face off against the pro-Palestinian protesters. The irony is that, until the American frat boys demonstrated gleeful irreverence at Ole Miss, the pro-Israel counter-protesters were also animated by the same essential leftism: Pro-Palestinian protesters wave graphic images of dead children; Pro-Israelis show the headshots of civilians kidnapped, killed, and raped on October 7. The message of both sides is the same—no, we are the bigger victim; yes, you are the evil ones. 

*

Western universities suffer from an autoimmune disease, and one that they created for themselves. For years, American institutions were the first to promote “Social Justice” and the policies of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” at the expense of academic qualification and general competence. U-M has a webpage dedicated to self-incrimination, in which they shamefully confess to sins against equity. U-M proudly supports the institutional struggle session, such as through land acknowledgements which preface most department homepages, including some that admit the “recognition of Indigenous sovereignty.” 

And this insistence on racial and gender equity continues fervently. Last year, U-M publicly rebuked the Supreme Court’s overturning of race-based college admission, while recommitting to affirmative action and announcing their “next strategic plan, DEI 2.0.” At the same time as praising affirmative action for increasing diversity, U-M has also encouraged other American universities to drop legacy enrollments, explicitly because it favors white admission. 

Such policies may be local to campus, but they represent Western nihilism and self-destruction. Even the demands for divestment are not unprecedented. Despite the recent statement in which U-M declared, “we will continue to shield the endowment from political pressures and base our investment decisions on financial factors such as risk and return,” the university has a history of divesting for political reasons and student agitation. U-M has officially divested twice. The first time was in 1983, when they divested from companies operating in South Africa because of anti-apartheid protesters. The university divested nearly 12% of their endowment. The second time was in 2000, when they withdrew investments from tobacco companies, since tobacco was “antithetical” to the university’s core values.

Unofficially—in fact, divesting without using the word—administrators at U-M have also removed money from fossil fuel companies and from Russia.

So how can U-M respond, when they have provided all the ammunition students need?

Hand-tied by such commitments, they must play games.

To remove U-M’s encampments, the University President Santa Ono had to resort to trickery. With a reputation for DEI initiatives, Ono used a fire safety inspection as the pretext to clear the protesters. Ono can now hide behind the university’s fire marshal, who determined “were a fire to occur, a catastrophic loss of life was likely.” This can only be seen as deception, especially after students were pepper sprayed in the name of complying with a fire code.  

But tricks and other temporary solutions ensure the reappearance of anti-Western ideology, only further emboldened. Because even though the encampments are now cleared, the university will compensate by promoting other DEI initiatives, if only to regain trust from students and liberal faculty. They can also reconcile themselves with their Jewish donors, who have helped grow the college. But such duplicity leaves everyone with a bitter taste. Nothing is resolved.  Ultimately, the students and protesters will continue agitating for decolonization, while waiting for the next cause célèbre or scandal to coales their allies around a symbolic event. 

The fact is that American universities, which should have been the palladiums of the West, have become radicalization centers that pit students against them. Higher education is due for a reckoning, and despite their impressive credentials and stacked libraries, they must learn a simple lesson. When the sheep raise wolves to feast on lamb, the sheep are eventually served for dinner.

Mitch Miller is an adventure writer and conflict journalist. He’s more than happy to join in on any extreme activity, and can be reached at mitchenjoyer@gmail.com. Follow him on X at @funtimemitch.