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Pro-Palestinian protesters clash with law enforcement as officials clear demonstrator encampments on UCLA's campus on May 2, 2024 in Los Angeles, CA.
From mission creep to political creep
What started as a reaction to the Hamas-orchestrated massacre of Oct. 7 and the extent of the deadly counteroffensive by the Israeli military has now grown to encompass wider, more amorphous issues. These include everything from the validity of Zionism to the viability of a two-state solution and now, depending on where you go, climate justice, over-militarized policing, and even capitalism itself.
In the military, this would be called mission creep. That’s when a mission starts with a specific goal, but over time the scope widens so much that the initial objective is lost and the new goals become too complex to be attainable. This usually ends in failure.
“Mission creep” was coined by a Washington Post columnist in 1993 to describe the disastrous American-supported UN intervention in Somalia — the famous Black Hawk Down incident in which 18 US service members were killed. It became more prominent after 9/11 when the initial objective of wiping out al-Qaida spread into overthrowing Saddam Hussein and the Taliban, which morphed again into the idea of setting up stable democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq. Mission creep is a trap, setting impossible goals that erase the possibility of an exit strategy.
This is starting to happen with the campus protests as well. It’s not mission creep exactly. Call it protest creep – where the scope of subjects now being debated is so vast that it is starting to undermine the very real issues the demonstrators wanted to bring to light.
Protests are spreading to campuses throughout the US and to a few schools in Canada.Luisa Vieira
Whatever position you hold, the right to ask uncomfortable questions about Hamas’s attack or about Israel’s response is what a democracy is all about. Is the Israeli invasion of Gaza a justified response to a terror group’s massacre, as some say, or has it morphed into a genocidal war on Palestinians, as others argue?
Should universities boycott, sanction, and divest from any company doing business with Israel or support the defeat of a genocidal terror group like Hamas? These questions rightly evoke passionate responses and make some people feel uncomfortable. Of course they do. But democracies are not built to protect people from feeling uncomfortable; they are built to protect individual and collective civil liberties. Being exposed to and living with ideas you disagree with is the foundation of an open society – and frankly, one of the purposes of going to university in the first place.
That doesn’t mean there should be no red lines. For example, the space between support for the people of Gaza and criticism of Israel’s response has moved into a full debate about Zionism itself – and whether anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism. On April 26, the office of the president of Columbia University issued a letter acknowledging “the antisemitism being expressed by some individuals,” going on to say, “Chants, signs, taunts, and social media posts from our own students that mock and threaten to ‘kill’ Jewish people are totally unacceptable, and Columbia students who are involved in such incidents will be held accountable.”
Some students have pushed back, arguing that most demonstrations are not antisemitic and that their views are being willfully mischaracterized by some politicians who are cherry-picking bad moments to justify a heavy-handed police response to peaceful protests about the Palestinian people.
It’s naïve to pretend that political manipulation is not a factor here, and much of this is also being filtered by the US presidential campaign. But it’s also naive to suggest that there’s not a disturbing element of dynamics like anti-semitism as well. But that’s not what protest creep is about.
As Jeremy Peters wrote in the New York Times, many student demonstrators are not only motivated by the events in Gaza, but have linked those to “policing, mistreatment of Indigenous people, discrimination toward Black Americans, and the impact of global warming.”
It’s not surprising to see acts of solidarity among groups, but is it helpful? What about when the protests veer into issues like Zionism itself? If the debate is now so wide that it includes asking if Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state–and that is common–should there be debates around the right of Muslim countries, theocracies, or kingdoms to exist? Will there be debates about Jordan’s right to exist, a country carved out of the British mandate in 1946, two years before Israel was founded? What about countries like Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria, or others whose lines were randomly drawn on a map by Western governments after the war?
These are interesting questions, but are they helpful for the current crisis? At best, they force an endless regression into debates about settlers and nationalism – questions that have no simple answers. At worst, they suggest a double standard of morality and accountability.
Canada, the US, and Australia, for example, all struggle to find answers to painful and real questions about Indigenous rights and land claims, but outside of some basic sense of solidarity, is blending these with the crisis in Gaza useful? Do these debates bring clarity, or is the chaos today being used opportunistically by some radical elements to amplify any cause?
Finally, who is responsible for protest creep? Part of it lies with the media for using loose terms to lump disparate groups together and blurring messages so nuanced distinctions get lost. Part of it lies with the protesters, who are caught in their own momentum and are losing control of the narrative. And lastly, part lies with the politicians and the authorities, who label groups and torque up fears to bolster their agendas. It’s a mess, and it looks like there is no way out.
No way out.
That’s always the problem with mission creep – and now with protest creep. There’s no exit strategy. The aims become so big, so endless, that the whole idea of a peaceful, practical solution is lost. The fight itself has become the whole point.
NYPD officers arrive at Columbia University on April 30, 2024, to clear demonstrators from an occupied hall on campus.
Chaos erupts overnight on US campuses. What’s next for student protesters?
The crackdown at Columbia came alongside chaos at other campuses. There was a round of arrests at City College in Harlem late Tuesday, and police were responding this morning to clashes between pro-Palestinian and counter-protesters at UCLA. On Monday, demonstrators at The New School took over Parsons School of Design. Meanwhile, police cleared an encampment at Yale that protesters have vowed to reoccupy, and an NYU student has reportedly chained themself to a bench and begun a hunger strike, vowing to continue until the demands of student protesters are met.
Nationwide, more than 1,000 students have been taken into police custody since the original encampment began at Columbia on April 18.
Protesters in support of Palestinians in Gaza at UCLA help one another get their eyes rinsed at an encampment on May 1, 2024. REUTERS/David Swanson
What are the protesters’ demands? The movement aims to isolate and put pressure on Israel to stop its bombing campaign in Gaza by forcing universities to divest from companies with ties to the Jewish state or that profit from the war. While protests on US campuses are being driven by the war in Gaza, their impact is transcending the conflict. Some of the demonstrations have featured antisemitic and intimidating chants and posters, while politicians on both sides of the aisle have made visits to college campuses to either support or condemn them.
Schools are striving to restore order before commencement season to avoid becoming the next University of Southern California, which canceled its main graduation ceremony after arresting more than 90 students last week. Columbia has asked the NYPD to stay on campus until at least May 17 to ensure there are no more demonstrations until after graduation.
But protesters aren’t concerned about graduation ceremonies. At Columbia, a new chant “no commencement until divestment” was heard yesterday from the occupied building. Ali, a senior at The New School who was involved in the takeover of Parsons and requested anonymity, laughed when I asked if he was worried about missing graduation. “We are all pushing as hard as we can to get divestment before the end of school. That’s the priority,” he said.
He was optimistic they would succeed, at least on his campus. But the overarching goal of getting the largest university endowments to divest from Israel is certainly not going to happen before students go home for summer.
So what comes next?
Hamilton Hall, the building Columbia protesters occupied Monday night, was also taken over exactly 56 years ago to the day, in the spring of 1968, during the Vietnam War. Demonstrators back then went home for the summer, only to resurface in the thousands at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and, long story short: Things gotugly. The gathering erupted into violence, leading to the activation of the National Guard and the arrest of hundreds of protesters.
This August, the DNC is also in Chicago, so could history repeat itself? When I asked students whether the movement would shift from university endowments to political events, the question took them off-guard.
“People aren’t really talking about what this is going to look like during the 2024 election," said Ali. “But what I do know is that people in this movement aren’t committed to voting for a certain party.” His statement echoed the disillusionment with political parties that I have heard again and again from student protesters.
“I don’t know how Joe Biden doesn’t realize he’s lost us,” said Julia Ye, a senior at NYU.
Cornel West and Jill Stein, two left-leaning third-party candidates, have both visited the Columbia University encampment in hopes of picking up the liberal youth vote. But it remains to be seen whether students will vote for either of them, especially if doing so makes it more likely that Donald Trump wins.
What’s clear is that students are confident the movement isn’t going on vacation. “Right now, all our focus is on university divestment,” said Ye, “but this energy isn’t going anywhere. It will just take a different shape over the summer.”
Students reported that throughout this year of university protests, they have seen their activist networks strengthen and expand, especially between schools. They have coordinated sending excess food donations between encampments in New York City, live-streamed the programming from different encampments across the country on their own, and been catalyzed by each other’s encounters with law enforcement.
“It was cool to see us moving in sync with the Columbia protests yesterday, even if it wasn’t officially organized,” said Gabriella, another senior at The New School who requested anonymity. “We are all watching each other on social media. We all want the same things. This movement is exploding, whether one person is calling for it to or not.”