Deja Vu, 1968, 2024

The current campus protests over the war in Gaza have me scratching my head about why so many people in politics, the media, academia, and the general public act as if campus protests are something new that we’ve never seen before in this country. Those of us who lived through the 1960’s and ‘70’s have no excuse for such ignorance of recent history.

Demonstrations and protests against the Viet Nam war and others opposed to systemic racism happened in cities and universities all over the country in those two turbulent decades. University campuses were closed at times by the civil disobedience, and much like today the forces of law and order arrested and tear-gassed those who refused to end their occupation of campus property.

When carried to its extreme those who valued order and property over human lives led to the tragic killings in May of 1970 of students at Kent State University in Ohio and the much less well-known deaths of black students at Jackson State University in Mississippi. Nothing seems to have been learned by campus administrators or law enforcement officers from those recent history lessons. Authorities still show up en masse in riot gear and turn otherwise peaceful gatherings into violent confrontations.

My alma mater, Ohio State University, has made the national news for arresting protestors, including a state legislator who was there trying to protect students. Very little meaningful dialogue about important issues can occur under those kind of conditions.

Do such demonstrations and protests ever accomplish anything? The lessons of the 20th century would say yes to that question. It took years, but the case can be made that the campus unrest of the ‘60’s and ‘70’s contributed significantly to bringing the unjust Viet Nam war to a conclusion and helped secure monumental legislation to advance the cause of civil rights, but at great cost.

I find it hard to imagine that any objective observer of the devastating death and destruction in Gaza could deny that the calls for a cease fire and cutting off U.S. military aid to Israel is a just cause worthy of civil disobedience. If the cruel and unusual punishment Israel has inflicted on Gaza in retribution for the October 7 massacre does not rise to the level of war crimes I don’t know what would. Yes, the October 7 attack by Hamas was beyond brutal and horrific, but Netanyahu’s 20-fold death toll on mostly innocent women and children is beyond any justifiable response, no matter how terrible the original crime. 30,000 wrongs can never make a right.

But there are other interesting political parallels between what is going on in 2024 and the 1968 presidential election in the midst of the Viet Nam and Civil Rights protests. President Lyndon Johnson inherited the Viet Nam War along with the Presidency after the JFK assassination in1963. After easily winning reelection in 1964 his chances for reelection in 1968 were greatly diminished by the war and protests against it. Johnson did not want to be the first U.S. President to lose a war and kept digging himself into a deeper whole to avoid that blemish on his legacy. Eventually the protests became so loud that Johnson was forced to withdraw from the race for President, and that decision resulted in the election of the second worst president in American history, Richard M. Nixon of Watergate fame/shame.

In a similar situation this year Joe Biden is increasingly harming his reelection chances by refusing to withdraw his lifelong support of Israel. Supporting Israel’s right to exist has been a noble position for the United States for over 75 years, but continuing to support the war crimes of Benjamin Netanyahu is not only morally wrong at this stage of history it is also risking American democracy by helping the re-election of the worst President in U.S. history. If Biden’s choice is between supporting Israel at the terrible cost of putting Donald Trump back in the White House, then sacrificing Israel and/or Netanyahu is clearly the choice to make.