Why Kansas City students are joining nationwide protests supporting Palestine

Protests, kindled by livestreamed images from Palestine and set ablaze by university crackdowns on demonstrators, rage at colleges and universities across the country.

Students have pitched encampments and occupied campus buildings while calling for an end to violence in Gaza — and demanding their institutions divest of companies they believe support the war there.

“We are standing with the people of Palestine,” Rashed Shawabkeh said this week, waving a large Palestinian flag at a protest outside the Miller Nichols Library at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Despite little support from college or political leaders, student protesters in both red and blue states are becoming the loudest voices calling for an end to the war and an end to U.S. involvement.

The conflict started after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 people and kidnapping more than 200. More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed in the aftermath.

The college campus protests, which started at Ivy League schools before spreading to public and private institutions across the country, have drawn sharp criticism from some politicians — and some other students — who see them as anti-Semitic.

But students who have joined the cause, many risking arrest or college expulsion, say they just want the attacks on Palestinians to end.

Their movement, which has been the subject of congressional hearings and a constant stream of news stories, have driven debate about whether the United States should continue its financial and political support to the far-right Israeli government.

College students should get credit for that national conversation, said Elizabeth Esch, an associate professor of American studies at the University of Kansas.

“They feel it is an emergency,” she said. “They’re saying, ‘We’re joining the rest of the world in saying this is unjust. This destroys any possible future for peace in the region.’ … The scale of this is as big as anything we’ve known in our lifetimes.”

Wednesday morning, pro-Palestine protesters had established an encampment at KU. Pro-Israel supporters gathered nearby holding signs with the names of hostages kidnapped by Hamas.

Why the students’ cause caught fire, how universities are reacting and why the language of the current movement is seen by some as so problematic are all good questions with complicated answers.

Did TikTok help these protests take off?

It’s hard to glance at social media without hearing about the conflict in Gaza. And that may be part of the reason so many college-aged students have gravitated to this issue.

Online, they find grassroots campaigns urging boycotts of retail giants like Starbucks and McDonald’s for perceived missteps related to the conflict. There are history and political science lessons about the decadeslong Middle East conflict. There is endless political commentary. And there are images and stories directly from Palestinians living in Gaza.

“Young people have different information sources than older people,” said Samuel Hayim Brody, associate professor of religious studies at KU. “They’re getting news from sources that they sort of vet and that they trust. Social media has a big impact on that. And they spread that news to their trusted circles.”

That means they may look at the situation in a different way from their parents and grandparents.

Just as images of the Vietnam War broadcast into American homes on televisions fueled protest and dissent, the current generation of college students gets stories firsthand from the people caught in the middle of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

During Vietnam, “everyone was able to see gruesome images of what was being done,” said Esch. “In the age of the digital era, there are livestreams.”

At the same time, she said, the situation in Palestine has long been on the agenda of many American college students and has long sparked protests. College students also rallied against the Vietnam War and during the fight for civil rights.

“They didn’t have TikTok,” she said.

But it’s probably true that social media is helping propel the current surge in college protests.  Uprisings were streamed and restreamed. So were the sometimes heavy-handed responses by college officials and police.

That could have a lot to do with the current wave of protests, Brody said. A lot of people may be sympathetic to the protesters’ stance, but not ready to jump in themselves.

“But when they see a heavy-handed armed response, it makes them angry,” Brody said. “They want to express their support and solidarity by taking action themselves.”

Mahmoud Kutmah, a medical student who was an organizer of the UMKC protest, said he thinks students are standing up because they can’t stand by and see suffering without doing something.

“It’s impossible to open up social media without seeing what’s happening in Palestine,” he said. “And when we’re calling out (the U.S.) for it, we’re getting repercussions for it.”

What has been the response of college administrations?

The New York Times reports that more than 1,000 people have been detained on U.S. campuses since April 18, when the New York Police Department entered the Columbia University campus in New York and arrested more than 100 protesters.

Student demonstrations, including the one this week on the lawn outside the Miller Nichols Library at UMKC, have multiplied since. So have the colleges’ punitive responses.

Just at the start of this week, police reportedly arrested students at Columbia, City College of New York, California State Polytechnic University, the University of Texas, Tulane University, the University of Utah and the University of Georgia.

At Washington University in St. Louis on Saturday, police arrested some 100 students and other demonstrators, including Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein.

Stein, who has made President Biden’s handling of the situation in Gaza central to her campaign, called Washington University’s decision to arrest students and use force against demonstrators “shameful.”

“It’s a really bad look for the university,” she told a St. Louis TV station. “This is about … freedom of speech on a very critical issue that needs debate and dialogue.”

Monday, Stein joined the UMKC protest organized by the college’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. Student protesters said the university’s response there was also unnecessarily aggressive.

As Stein spoke to some 100 gathered for the event, campus workers, flanked by university police, removed tents that protesters had erected. Organizers said the tents were meant to symbolize the Palestinians who had been left refugees and without homes.

UMKC officials, however, said students must follow the university’s protest policy , which forbid camping or the use of temporary shelter. Tents, a spokesperson said, are against the guidelines even if they are being used as a political symbol.

Witnesses at the UMKC protest said university police dragged one tent away as a protester clung on. Afterward, university staff, including police officers, stood by. A handful of protesters stood facing them, yelling and training phone cameras in their direction.

“These institutions want to dictate how we want to speak,” Kutmah said.

Are the protests anti-Semitic?

Republican U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri sent a letter to President Biden asking him to mobilize the National Guard “to protect Jewish students.” He called the protests anti-Israel and pro-terrorist.

“On college campuses across the United States,” he said in the letter, “Jewish Americans are at risk.”

Hawley said Columbia University students had “engaged in shocking displays of antisemitism.”

Student protesters who oppose the war in Gaza reject that characterization, arguing that there’s a difference between being anti-Semitic and rejecting Zionism, the call for an independent Jewish state.

Protesters at UMKC are calling on the administration to make it clear that there is a distinction and that students involved in the protests are not anti-Semitic.

“Anti-Semitism is a real issue,” Kutmah said. “It is on the rise in the United States and we have to combat it on campuses and in day-to-day life everywhere. However, it is not to be conflated with anti-Zionism, which is a criticism of the Israeli state.”

But many Jewish students say they have felt threatened by the heightened protests in support of Palestine. The University Daily Kansan, KU’s student newspaper, reported in January that KU Hillel, an organization that supports Jewish students, was helping students cope with a rise of anti-Semitism nationally.

In February, the Kansas City Jewish Chronicle reported that student protesters connected with the KU chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine interrupted a presentation by a survivor of the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel. The student protesters had demanded the event be canceled, saying it “glorifies an Israeli settler while ignoring the over 36,000 Palestinians killed since Oct. 7 … and endangers the well-being of Palestinian students on campus.”

The publication quoted Ben Novorr of KU Hillel, saying that many students were concerned and uncomfortable.

“Many were on the verge of tears,” Novorr said.

‘From the river to the sea …’

A video posted on Instagram shows protesters at KU chanting, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

The chant, which is common at the college protests, troubles many people who see it as a call against Jews and for the end of the Jewish state of Israel. The American Jewish Committee defines it “a rallying cry for terrorist groups and their sympathizers.”

But Brody, the KU professor who studies Jewish history, said the phrase has different meanings to some people, including some Jews.

“There are many college students who use this phrase,” Brody said, “and they mean that everyone from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea should have equal rights. … When they say it, they’re thinking about it being a single binational state.”

The same conflicting understanding can be applied to the saying “never again,” he said. Some see it as applying specifically to the Holocaust, the murder of millions of Jews during World War II. They understand the phrase to mean the Holocaust should never be repeated.

Others, including many Jewish students involved in the Palestinian protests, see it as meaning the same mass execution should never again happen to any group of people.

“The Holocaust is deeply on the minds of everyone who is on both sides of this debate,” Brody said. “But they understand it differently and they understand what it means differently.”

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