"Show us the kids who have lost their arms and their legs. Show us the suffering."
Sometimes the distance gives you a perspective. Maybe it's inaccurate - but when people ask about the Gaza-inspired US campus occupations I see one generation who get their media online unchecked, unfiltered and an older generation who get their media fact-checked filtered by "the media".
Each unable to relate to how the others 'feels'.
One side watches 15 second bites of bits of babies, smoking bodies, and wailing women.
The other side sees endless slow loops of smouldering ruins, lines of men desperately digging, and wailing women.
One generation sees something utterly unacceptable that demands action.
The other sees footage that they have seen many, many times before. It's like a single facet of the splitscreens multiverse that Americans exist in.
The appropriate reaction, and response, probably depends which truth you are exposed to. It looks, from here, like an activated youth manipulated by experienced activists who have been at this protest for decades sided against a disinterested majority manipulated by politicians who are equally experienced in turning situations to political advantage.
The conflict is like the 1960's a standoff between establishment and anti-establishment. The proxies are the youth and the police. This time the innocent bystanders are the Jewish? Yeah, Netanyahu is in there somewhere as well. But Hamas, Palestinians, Israelis? Are they really part of this?
..and the student demand of divestment in global corporations is quite reasonable. But not original. It's like asking for human rights. It's a lovely idea and it's not going to happen.
..and the outcomes! We've seen a negotiated agreement at Brown, other encampments peacefully dispersing, and Columbia University (the one in the news). And then opinions on the news.
My perspective is that this doesn't make sense. What's the motivation? Not that it isn't real - I just wonder if it's really important? Like, how did rubber bullet pantomime become the lead?
But I do like this guy:
"Maybe it's time to not simply worry about the violence we are seeing on American campuses, but focus on the unprecedented violence in Gaza which has killed 34,000 Palestinians and wounded more than 77,000 Palestinians – seventy percent of whom are women and children.
So, I suggest to CNN and some of my colleagues here, take your cameras off of Columbia and UCLA. Maybe go to Gaza and show us the emaciated children who are going to die of malnutrition because of Netanyahu's policies. Show us the kids who have lost their arms and their legs. Show us the suffering."
Bernie Sanders - on the Nationwide Student Protests and the Ongoing Humanitarian Disaster in Gaza - May 2, 2024