Today in Alliteration: Pyrrhus and Pro-Palestinian Protests

Pyrrhus in happier times

Curmie struggled to find a hook for this piece.  He first toyed with a baseball analogy—trying to stretch a single into a double and getting thrown out at second base.  But that didn’t quite work.  Maybe something from playing cards—overplaying a hand?  No, that isn’t exactly right, either.  “First, do no harm,” the famous line (probably inaccurately) attributed to the Classical Greek physician Hippocrates?  Again, close… but no cigar.

Ultimately, we’re going to go with the notion of a Pyrrhic victory.  The term comes from the Greek king Pyrrhus of Epirus, who ruled in the early 3^rd century BCE.  He is best known today not for his apparent brilliance as a general, but for winning consecutive battles against Roman armies, only to have his forces so depleted in the process that he could not continue his campaign.  Given that this is yet another post about demonstrations on university campuses concerning the situation in Gaza and Israel, the military terminology makes some sense.  And there are parallels between the actual conflict and the unrest on American campuses. 

The events of last October 7 were certainly a win for Hamas in the short term.  They inflicted far more casualties and far more damage than they incurred.  But they, and especially the everyday Palestinian people they purport to represent, have not seen a lot of wins since then.  Tens of thousands of Palestinians, including an estimated 14,000 children, have been killed by the Israeli military, and that figure does not include the imminent deaths from starvation or the displacement of over a million Palestinians.  There have been deaths and displacements on the Israeli side, too, but the numbers are significantly smaller.

On the “winning the hearts and minds” front, the process has been quite different.  There, the initial reaction across this country to the barbarity of the events of October 7 was predictably anti-Hamas.  There were pockets of dissent to that consensus, however, especially among student groups at major universities like Harvard, Columbia, UCLA, and the University of Pennsylvania. 

Things get complicated from there.  Curmie has made a number of points in the past, arguing that whereas the Hamas attacks in Israel cannot be excused, the frustration of the Palestinian people is readily comprehensible, and Israel’s response to the attack was disproportionate to say the least.  Yeah, yeah, it’s war, and there will inevitably be collateral damage.  It’s funny, though, how that’s unavoidable when it’s our side inflicting it and an offense against God and the universe if we’re on the receiving end. 

The life circumstances of the average Palestinian weren’t unknown a year ago, but, like apartheid in the ‘80s, they had long since ceased to be news, and a good number of people were shocked, not into reality, but into a consciousness of it.  The protests both helped and hurt the pro-Palestinian cause.

On the plus side, we were reminded that such events—the storming of the Bastille, the attack on Fort Sumter, the Easter Rising, and on and on—never happen in a vacuum; there’s always a rationale.  Not everyone, certainly not those in power, regard that rationale as compelling or even reality-based, but it’s there. 

But the downside is demonstrable and significant.  First, the initial rhetoric about Israel being the sole cause of the attack is sufficiently daft that it alienates potential allies.  And whereas Curmie has argued repeatedly that in the absence of aggravating factors (e.g., “true threats”), chanting slogans like “from the river to sea…” is protected speech, that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.  Using phrases that even could be interpreted as a threat not merely to Israeli dominance in its occupied territories but to the lives of Jews worldwide is unlikely to win friends and influence people.

It opens the door for those—especially but not exclusively right-wing pols and pundits—to conflate Palestinians with Hamas and the Likud government of Israel with Jews in general.  This is, of course, a lazy and anti-intellectual construct, which is why it appeals so much to some of the dimmer bulbs in the GOP.  But it is also the stuff of headlines, largely because “lazy and anti-intellectual” is also a rather apt descriptor of the majority of so-called journalists. 

Still, there have been victories for the pro-Palestinian side, and they haven’t always come in the form of sympathy for the protesters in the wake of over-reaction from politicians, university officials, or law enforcement.  Deals—often including amnesty for protesters, consideration of divestment proceedings, creating cultural centers and Middle East Studies departments, etc.—have been struck on a number of campuses, including Northwestern, Rutgers, and Brown.  (Curmie won’t bother to link to all these stories, Gentle Reader, as he is well aware of your ability to operate the Google machine.)

But these triumphs, such as they are, have come at a price.  Negotiated settlements involving immunity for having violated either the law or at least university policy suggest a weak administration rather than a legitimate argument on the part of the protesters.  It is not unreasonable to suggest that breaking the law is breaking the law, and there is no question that some of the demonstrators did so.  Blocking access to campus, holding university workers de facto hostage, even violating reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions cannot be countenanced.  The fact that the demonstrators “got away with it” engenders resentment from those not already on their side.

More to the point, the cancellation of commencement ceremonies at the University of Southern California and the elimination of a university-wide exercise at Columbia are not going to sit well with the general public, which is already much more likely to be Islamophobic than antisemitic.  Why else would Republican pols who saw nothing wrong with a gang of neo-Nazis chanting “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville a couple of years ago be eager to claim that criticisms of the Israeli government are now inherently antisemitic?  And those cancellations will be blamed on the protesters, whether they’re actually at fault or not.

Curmie is reminded of standing in the May 4 Museum at Kent State University, watching tapes of the TV coverage of the 1970 shootings on that campus.  Particularly memorable was a local woman, perhaps in her 60s, who proclaimed that the events of the day had been unfortunate, “but if that’s what it takes to restore law and order…”  Student protesters are always going to be the bad guys in the public’s eyes precisely because they are suggesting that all is not right in the status quo, and those who benefit from the current system like it just fine.  Sometimes the protesters are “right,” sometimes not.  Sometimes they are the perpetrators, sometimes the victims.  But they will always, always, be blamed.

It is also a fact of life that those who oppose Group X, whoever Group X might be, will take the stupidest member of that group as representative of the entire organization.  Just as not all Republicans are as vulgarly hypocritical as Lauren Boebert, as dishonest as George Santos, or as Machiavellian as Mitch McConnell, not all campus protesters are as self-entitled as Malak Afaneh. 

She’s the woman who barged into a private event on the property of Cal-Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and his wife, law professor Catherine Fisk, a month or so ago.  She then proceeded to use a microphone to interrupt the proceedings to yammer about Ramadan (she was stopped before she could get to what one presumes would have been the real content of her screed), claiming that the National Lawyers Guild says that such an intrusion is protected by the 1^st Amendment.  The National Lawyers Guild needs, as Popehat’s Ken White might say, to stop recruiting its membership out of the back room of a bait shop. 

Professor Fisk, not unreasonably, demanded that Afaneh leave her home, and attempted to wrestle the microphone from her.  Now the university is initiating a civil rights investigation against Fisk, whom Afaneh claims was trying to silence her because of her pro-Palestinian views.  No, she was “silenced” because she’s an entitled brat (Curmie refrains from using a different monosyllable beginning with the same letter).  The intrusion was, of course, planned and choreographed in advance—hence the video documentation that begins right on cue.

But a prospective lawyer, of all people, ought to know the basic principles of persuasion—things Curmie taught in a freshman-level speech course back in the day: realize that the audience might be hostile to your views and structure your message accordingly; understand, also, that the more sophisticated your audience, the more you need to acknowledge the legitimacy of at least part of their position; and for God’s sake, stay on message!

If you’re trying to convince a Trump supporter to vote for Biden, you don’t go screaming about how their guy says outrageous things.  Rather, you say “look, I know my guy makes his share of verbal gaffes, but have you really listened to the word salads your guy spews out?”  And you don’t do anything at all if they’re just trying to finish their breakfast at the local diner.

Malak Afaneh will no doubt be cheered by the true believers.  She got what she wanted: national attention.  But she unquestionably did her cause more harm than good by intruding into a private space, using a microphone to disrupt a gathering that had nothing to do with her speech, and generally being condescending to a pretty intelligent group of people.  Anyone not already firmly on her side of the controversy just moved further away from her cause because of her antics.  A small win is not worth a larger loss.

Curmie understands that.  Curmie’s students from 40 years ago understood that.  Pyrrhus definitely understood that.  Ms. Afaneh, for better or worse, does not.