In Campus Protests Over Gaza, Echoes of Outcry Over Vietnam

Richard Flacks remembers the challenges of building a protest movement during the Vietnam War as a pillar of the left-wing political and antiwar group Students for a Democratic Society during the 1960s.“The whole idea of S.D.S. began with the idea of, ‘We need a new way of being on the left, a new vocabulary, a new strategy,’” said Mr. Flacks, who helped write the group’s manifesto, the Port Huron Statement, in 1962. “We knew we were right, and I don’t think we were arrogant about it.” Sixty years later, Iman Abid sees similar challenges in the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas. “For so long, we couldn’t get Palestine to be that issue for people to care about,” said Ms. Abid, the organizing and advocacy director at the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, which works with pro-Palestinian campus organizations. “But now people care about it because they’re seeing it. They’re watching it on their social media. They’re watching it on the news.” It is too early to know whether the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will define this generation as opposition to the Vietnam War did for many young people more than a half century ago. 

But to many who have studied or lived through the Vietnam era, the parallels to the Gaza protests are compelling: a powerful military raining aerial destruction on a small, underdeveloped nonwhite land; a generational divide over the morality of the conflict; a sense that the war represented far broader political and cultural currents; an unswerving confidence — critics might say sanctimony — among students that their cause is righteous.

The differences can be glaring, too, beginning with the terrorist attack by Hamas that set this war in motion, for which there is nothing comparable in Vietnam. The Gaza war is not being fought by the American military, unlike Vietnam, where more than 58,000 Americans died and young men faced a military draft.

Miles Rapoport, a former secretary of state of Connecticut, who joined S.D.S. while studying at Harvard in the 1960s, saw similarities but said the two movements and moments differ in a fundamental way: The United States waded into Vietnam in a show of superpower hubris. Israel, he said, is fighting for its existence after a terrorist attack that killed 1,200 citizens. The current war, he said, “has a lot more moral and philosophical nuance.”

That is reflected in pro-Israel marches and demonstrations to a far greater degree now than was common, particularly on campuses, for supporters of the war during the Vietnam era. Still, both movements, Mr. Rapoport said, reflect “a kind of instinctive and initial solidarity with the underdog.” He added: “And related is a sense of solidarity with people who are fighting to have their own country and be freed from a kind of colonial existence.” American campuses have protested over countless causes since Vietnam, notably to oppose apartheid in South Africa and racial injustice after police killings of Black men and women in 2014 and 2020. But a sustained antiwar protest like the one against the Gaza invasion has not been seen for decades. Loan Tran, a 28-year-old Vietnamese American who is national director of the leftist advocacy group Rising Majority, draws a straight line between Vietnam and Gaza. Mr. Tran’s grandfather, whom he never met, was an American G.I. during the war; his grandmother’s friends fought for North Vietnam against American forces. “When I hear Palestinians making comparisons to Vietnam and the role of the US and colonialism, it’s really striking for me, and it’s a really poignant connection,” he said. “I feel it in my body, and a lot of people in our Vietnamese community feel it in our bodies, to be resisting war, to be resisting occupation.” To critics of the Gaza protests, the current movement reflects the excesses, not the virtues, of the Vietnam protests, with chants now that to some suggest genocide against the Jewish people, much as some 1960s protests alienated many Americans by backing North Vietnam against US forces. And those critics also accuse the pro-Palestinian demonstrators of hypocrisy — saying that many of the rallies include side issues that would be antithetical to many Palestinians, like women’s issues and L.G.B.T.Q. rights. 

Many supporters of Israel view the movement with a mixture of horror and consternation. Kenneth L. Marcus, the chairman of the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, a Jewish civil rights institution that is not affiliated with Brandeis University, said the campus demonstrations began even before Israel’s invasion of Gaza occurred. “There may be some people participating in these protests who think they’re supporting Palestinians, but the movement they are advancing is predominantly an antisemitic movement,” he said, adding that it has its genesis in a celebration of violence. Rather than showing moral strength in the face of campus protests, he said, many university administrators “have responded with weakness and cowardice.” Those protesting the war in Gaza owe their Vietnam-era forerunners for one legacy: the tactics, from die-ins to chants like “How many kids did you kill today?” that energized both movements. “Students didn’t have much in 1960 to emulate,” said Mr. Flacks, now a professor emeritus of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “A lot of the tactics invented at that time became part of the tool kit for activism on campuses.” Certainly, the logistics of staging protests are much more manageable today than 60 years ago. Cellphones and social media have simplified the tasks of recruiting and deploying advocates for a cause; to cite just one example, a crowd of antiwar demonstrators descended recently on Grand Central Station in New York, flash-mob style, after getting an electronic alert.

Universities — and the overall makeup of the protesters — are also vastly changed, as are the political pressures and demands on university presidents. 

The Vietnam antiwar movement was overwhelmingly white, like most campuses of the 1960s. But campuses in 2023, particularly urban ones, contain far more students of color, many of whom empathize with Palestinians’ status as an embattled population under the control of a more powerful force. And nonstudents are a bigger part of those protesting now. 

The New York Times