Gen-Z sees the Gaza protests as their 1968 moment: ‘We built this on their legacy’
Historical comparisons between the mass protests of 1968 and today’s student demonstrations in solidarity with Gaza are both imperfect and hard to avoid.
It’s been just ten days since Columbia University students pitched the first tent on the campus lawns, and already the protests have galvanised a generation of college students much in the same way the Vietnam War did 56 years ago — spreading from coast to coast.
It is not just the scale of the protests that have drawn comparisons, but the tactics. That is no accident: The protesters say they studied that generation-defining movement, methodically, before launching their own.
“We were only able to do this because the student organisers went into the archives of ‘68 and learned from what the older generation wrote about their experiences. A lot of organisers spent time and looked at how they did everything,” Majd, a Columbia undergrad who asked for their full name not to be published, told The Independent at the protest camp on Friday.
“We completely built this on their legacy,” Majd added.
While planning for their encampment, the Columbia protest organisers learned about how the ‘68 protesters dealt with security and how they navigated communications. Later, they invited several participants of the historic protests to visit the encampment and speak.
“Even the idea of a solidarity camp at Columbia was based on the 1968 anti-Vietnam war protests,” said Ava Lyon-Sereno, a fellow Columbia student and protester. “It really feels like we’re continuing a tradition.”
Student protests over the war in Gaza have been common across college campuses since the war broke out in October, following a surprise Hamas attack that killed 1,200 in Israel. The resulting conflict has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, and aid blockages have resulted in famine conditions in northern Gaza, creating a humanitarian disaster. Hundreds of schools, and all of Gaza’s 12 universities, have been damaged or destroyed since the Israeli attacks began.
The Columbia protesters of today may seem tame compared to their historical forebears. During the Vietnam War protests, a dean was briefly taken hostage and five buildings were seized. Then, as today, Columbia’s president called in police to break up the protests. Around 1,000 officers flooded onto campus, some on horseback, and made 700 arrests.
Despite a media campaign to tarnish the camp as dangerous radicals, the students of Columbia today are hyper-focused and strategic — their primary aim is to convince the university to cut ties with Israeli academic institutions and divest from Israel-linked companies in protest over the war. Organisers hosted de-escalation training and media training for the protesters. There are encampment monitors in yellow clearly-marked jackets to handle the press. The encampment even has a designated “nut zone” to protect students with allergies.
Students in the 1960s were horrified by the filtered and selective images of Vietnam that appeared on their television screens, while Gen Z now wakes up every morning to videos of death inches from their faces. If Vietnam was America’s first television war, Gaza may be the first time many young Americans have so intensely consumed a live-streamed war. They read headlines and see images every day about the horrors caused by US weapons and are asked to be silent and study.
“You know, when I wake up in the morning and see a video of a parent carrying bits of their child in a plastic bag, that should not be normal, that should not be acceptable,” said Lyon-Sereno.
Changes in technology have made the protesters’ mission even harder today than in ‘68, too.
“It’s a whole new terrain now,” said Aidan Pari, a Columbia student and protester. “We have digital security that we need to look at — people trying to take pictures of people’s faces and dox them online. We have face detection software in the cameras at Columbia and the next morning you wake up and you’re suspended.”
- For more: Elrisala website and for social networking, you can follow us on Facebook
- Source of information and images “independent”“
