The long, hot spring season of 2024 has passed into history, and along with it the most heated of the university campus protests in the United States and other countries over the state of Israel’s ongoing war with Hamas, the politico-military organization of Palestine. This summer’s record-high heat wave in many parts of the world provided a break in university student demonstrations against the Israel-Hamas war, but it also gave both sides — higher education officials and student protesters — an opportunity to regroup and to solidify their strategies for the autumn school semester that is now upon us. The prospect of even more campus protests over Israel-Palestine looms on the horizon.

Were the students wrong to demonstrate, disrupt and protest at universities? The situation in Gaza over the summer has only worsened and given protesters no real reason to let up in their pro-Palestine demonstrations. The death toll of Palestinians killed by Israel in Gaza since the war’s onset topped 40,000 over the summer, and rises daily. In the meantime, the U.S. government under president Joe Biden has recently approved additional military aid to Israel — a core issue of the student protests — to the tune of $20 billion.

An estimated 90 percent of Palestinians in Gaza, about two million people, remain displaced (that is, homeless). The first case of polio in Gaza in 25 years has also since appeared; the United Nations and other aid agencies have been battling to prevent an outbreak of the contagious disease in an area where water and sewage systems have been all but destroyed. As of press time, the Israeli military continues targeting civilian infrastructures such as schools, residences, hospitals and shelters in Gaza and the West Bank of Palestine — actions that normally would be considered war crimes under international law — with aerial bombing and ground attacks.

Pro-Palestine protests on university campuses in the U.S. and other countries started in late 2023 and drastically escalated around April of this year following mass arrests at the New York-based Columbia University campus. There, occupying protesters demanded that the university disinvest from Israel over its alleged genocide of Palestinians. In the U.S. alone, more than 3,000 student protesters had been arrested, along with some professors and faculty members, on more than 60 college campuses. Protest encampments sprang up on more than 130 U.S. campuses. In early May, protests began spreading across Europe with mass arrests taking place in the Netherlands; an estimated 20 pro-Palestine encampments had been set up by students in the United Kingdom, as well as at universities across Canada and Australia. The student protests in all the countries effectively ended as universities closed for this past summer break.

Were those university student demonstrations in support of Palestine the first time such protests have ever taken place? Hardly. Institutions of higher learning around the world have always been places where young people stand up and make their voices heard on issues that concern them. At the height of the American war in the southeast nation of Vietnam in 1968, for example, more than 1,000 students of that very same Columbia University occupied five buildings on campus, protesting racial discrimination and war-related issues. The weeklong student occupation at Columbia University was broken up by a thousand New York City police officers who violently attacked the university students, injuring scores of them and arresting hundreds more.

Just a couple of generations ago, the big issue among university students in the United States and other countries was the official political and economic support — under then-U.S. president Ronald Reagan, among others — for the nation of South Africa and its system of racial segregation/slavery known as apartheid (or apart-ness). In much the same way that students recently set up tent encampments in support of the Palestinian people, university students back in the 1980s erected on campus mock “shanty towns” of the squalid kind that the majority of Black South Africans were being relegated to in ghetto townships by the white minority regime of South Africa. The anti-apartheid protests in the U.S. were a way to show solidarity for the Black liberation struggle then being waged by the late Nelson Mandela and others. A graduation ceremony at Harvard University, no less, was targeted by anti-apartheid student protesters in 1985 — just one of many protests around that time.

And looking back a little farther in time to 1960, it was African-American university students, acting on their own, who sat down at whites-only lunch counters at department stores in the American South, demanding to be served, thus sparking a new wave of sit-ins and demonstrations. Whether facing down white racist mobs, white police with their snarling police dogs or the force of firehoses aimed at them in the streets, it was these young people — not the established Black civil rights organizations or leaders at the time — who had the true courage of their moral convictions to risk life and limb for the cause and change the course of history.

So, dissent by university students in the USA certainly is not a new phenomenon. And neither is protest against the government of Israel and what many people around the globe see as Israel’s own decades-long version of apartheid being inflicted on the Palestinian people.

But why have the university students gone through all this trouble for the people of Palestine lately? Exactly what were they demanding? If you depended on the American news media as your prime source of information on international issues, you had to search long and deep to find the answers to such basic questions. A few months ago, The Guardian newspaper of London, one of the major daily papers in Europe, published an exposé of sorts detailing how the CNN cable television network in the U.S. was coming under fire from its own editorial staff over in-house policies, which, they claim, have led to a recycling of Israeli government propaganda and the censoring of Palestinian voices in the cable TV network’s coverage of the war in Gaza. And CNN stands on the “liberal” end of the political spectrum, mind you.

No, you’d have much better luck scanning various social media for the answers as to why university students have been demonstrating — and those answers, it turns out, were quite straightforward and understandable.

Just as university students did back in the day with South African apartheid, students today are calling for an end to political and economic support for Israel’s version of apartheid. They are demanding that universities publicly disclose and sever financial ties with the government of Israel and Israeli universities. They are demanding that schools divest from businesses with links to Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories. They are demanding that institutions of higher learning publicly call for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war. And in some cases, the students are demanding that universities revise their strict policies on campus demonstrations and allow legal amnesty for student protesters.

The current university protests have their roots in the “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions” (BDS) movement, a nonviolent, nonproft organization launched in 2005 by Palestinians to hit Israel where it hurts most — in the pocketbook. The BDS movement is clearly modeled after the South African anti-apartheid movement of decades earlier, with the Palestinians’ plight under Israel often compared to that of apartheid-era Black South Africans under a white European oppressor. The government of Israel has long denied that anything resembling South African apartheid is happening within its national boundaries with regard to Palestinians, despite much evidence to the contrary.

A point that is often overlooked by the American news media and their blathering talking heads: U.S. president Joe Biden and Russian president Vladimir Putin, to some degree, are to be thanked for the “sudden” arrival of the university protests over Palestine. When Putin’s army invaded Ukraine in 2022, the world could see the sheer destruction and death that an aggressor nation inflicted on a neighboring country and its civilian population. Biden, unlike his immediate predecessor, the Great Orange One, rightly sided with Ukraine over Russia.

But when similar scenes of destruction and death were playing out on the same split-screen between Israel and Palestine, young people could clearly see the contradictions and hypocrisy in U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East: strong, unwavering support for Israel and even silence when innocent Palestinians were getting slaughtered versus condemning and isolating Russia for killing innocent Ukrainians. Israel, after all, is a geo-strategic ally and America’s “beat cop” in the Middle East, while Russia is the old Evil Empire, a lingering ghost from America’s Cold War years. See the hypocrisy and contradictions in terms there? Young people at colleges and universities in the U.S. and beyond certainly did, and they made their moral concerns heard loudly and strongly.

The university students were not wrong to take this stance on Gaza — in fact, they were in the right. They saw an injustice happening right before the eyes of the world, and they called it out. And as the new autumn semester begins and the possibility of renewed protests once again arise, the students are still right to do this.

Predictably, there has been backlash from several quarters claiming that the university protests over Palestine are nothing but anti-semitism in action, that any protest against the government of Israel is automatically a slur against all Jewish people. That does not appear to be the case here, with many of the campus demonstrators reportedly focusing their demands on the situation in Gaza and distancing themselves from any anti-semitic actors in their midst.

In any case, let us be very clear: Anti-Semitism must never be allowed to rear its ugly head in any social movement, anywhere. When you target our Jewish brothers and sisters solely for being Jewish, you can count on being denounced in the strongest possible terms. Likewise for the terrorist attacks that Hamas committed against nearly 2,000 Israelis and others back in October 2023 that led Israel to embark on this war in the first place. Terrorism is terrorism, no matter who commits it — be it armed resistance fighters or a government army. Hamas and the state of Israel both stand accused of mass murder of innocent civilians in the eyes of the world, and both sides should be held accountable by an international court of justice.

And in fact, such calls are being made as we speak: The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, based at The Hague in the Netherlands, has recently called on a panel of ICC pretrial judges to urgently act on the requests he filed in May for arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant, and three leaders of Hamas (two of whom have since been killed by Israel) on charges of war crimes.

The London-based human rights organization Amnesty International, releasing the results of a new investigation, is demanding international bodies conduct an inquiry into what Amnesty called the “wanton destruction” wrought by Israel in its war in Palestine: “Using bulldozers and manually laid explosives, the Israeli military has unlawfully destroyed agricultural land and civilian buildings, razing entire neighbourhoods, including homes, schools and mosques.”

So, the university students are not alone in their protests against the government and military of Israel concerning human rights violations in Palestine. This situation has been going on for decades now, and criticism of Israel has spanned the globe.

But if the current university students, especially in the U.S., thought it would be easy to get things changed, they may have underestimated the power of the strong pro-Israel lobby in the United States. There are “anti-BDS laws” in place in 38 American states. These are states that have passed bills or executive orders designed to discourage boycotts of Israel. The anti-BDS laws have taken one of two forms: (1) investment-focused laws, which mandate that public investment funds avoid any organizations that are boycotting Israel, and (2) contract-focused laws, which require government contractors to promise that they are not boycotting Israel.

For years, there has been vigorous debate — and more than a few court challenges — as to whether or not such anti-BDS laws at the state level violate the constitutional right to free speech in the USA. Both houses of the U.S. Congress, the Senate and House of Representatives, with bipartisan support, passed a bill and a resolution in 2019 that stand staunchly against any boycotts targeting Israel as a nation. No anti-BDS law has yet been passed at the federal level in the U.S., but that could well change in the future depending on which way the political winds blow in Washington DC.

In the meantime, university student protesters in the U.S. are now coming back to campus after the long, hot spring and summer seasons, and are no doubt busily organizing for the road ahead where Palestine and Israel are concerned this autumn. University administrations, for their part, are reportedly tightening rules and regulations to make it much harder for pro-Palestine demonstrations to continue on college campuses as before. At Columbia University, like elsewhere, fencing has been erected on campus to keep large numbers of pro-Palestine student protesters from erecting more tent encampments.

Protesters have already been arrested on at least a few campuses since the start of the new semester. Hardly a day has gone by day without some Palestine solidarity action occurring on a university campus somewhere in the USA.

But as long as the university students stay on the moral high ground from here onward, they are to be commended for speaking out on Gaza, standing up and adding their own imprint to the pages of history. The students are not wrong in following what their collective moral conscience tells them is an immoral war and unacceptable human suffering in the world. The students are right, and we would all do well to listen to their voices of outrage, try to comprehend where they are coming from and to support them.