U.S. campus protesters press on as Palestinian support swells among youth, but impact at ballot box uncertain

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As the wave of pro-Palestinian encampments at U.S. universities rolls into its third week, the country faces a question with reverberations far beyond the 100 or so American schools now with tent cities.

How deep does support for the protesters run among their peers, a generation of young Americans with markedly different views on the Israel-Gaza conflict than their forebears?

For President Joe Biden, the question is particularly urgent as he struggles to win back badly needed younger voters ahead of a tight election this fall without sacrificing his long-held support for Israel.

Despite threats to the momentum of the protests from police crackdowns, in which nearly 2,000 demonstrators have been arrested and some have been pepper sprayed or fired at with rubber bullets, students are vowing to carry on.

“We intend on having our demands met. This isn’t for a photo-op. We want to see change,” said Reagan Riffle, a protester, as she stood amid an encampment at George Washington University, a few blocks from the White House. “We will be demonstrating indefinitely.”

At the centre of the demonstrations, which began with an April 17 encampment at Columbia University, are demands that schools pull their endowment money from investments in Israel or companies backing the Israeli military. More broadly, they are pushing for an end to U.S. support for the country, including a US$26-billion military aid package Mr. Biden signed last month.

On Thursday, the President admonished the protesters for disrupting university life. “There is a right to protest but there is not a right to cause chaos,” he told reporters. Asked if the demonstrations would make him change his policy on Israel, he replied “No.”

While the demonstrators’ demands are decades old, they have gained broader support since Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack last year.

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“The participants in these protests are a much broader group and a more diverse group than the small minority of pro-Palestinian activists in the past,” said Dov Waxman, a political scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It is a large and growing movement.”

In addition to students galvanized by the mounting death toll in Gaza, he said, many demonstrators are motivated by freedom-of-speech concerns after schools tried to shut the camps down.

Police cleared out UCLA’s encampment in the predawn hours Thursday, firing rubber bullets. It followed a police raid earlier this week that ended the Columbia camp and took back a university administration building occupied by protesters.

At other campuses, protesters were undaunted. Salma Hamamy, an organizer for the camp at the University of Michigan, said she felt a moral imperative to stay in the fight for the long run.

“We understand that as citizens of the United States, we are direct financial contributors to this ongoing genocide and we have a responsibility to take risks and to disrupt the very functions of society, so long as this society is complicit,” she said.

Polling has consistently shown a rise in Palestinian support among young adults in the U.S. The Harvard Youth Poll, released last month, found that Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 want a ceasefire in Gaza by a five-to-one margin.

A Pew Research Center survey found that the percentage of people in their twenties who sympathize more with Palestinians than with Israelis was double the total for the population as a whole.

Wa’el Alzayat, the head of Emgage, a Muslim-American organization that runs voter-turnout drives, credits persistent protests over the past few months with pushing legislators to at least talk about making military support for Israel contingent on the treatment of the Palestinians.

“You’re seeing more people talking about the need to condition aid and not support human-rights violations. Student protesters are already changing the norms of the conversation,” Mr. Alzayat said.

Whether this will translate into a wave at the ballot box is yet to be seen. In Harvard’s survey, Israel/Palestine ranked 15th on a list of young voters’ most important issues, far behind inflation, health care, housing and gun violence. While Mr. Biden has dramatically lost support among young voters, it has been hard to be certain which issues specifically have driven them away.

It is also unclear whether pro-Palestinian voters will vote against Mr. Biden when doing so could elect Donald Trump and his Republicans, who are even more pro-Israel. At a rally, Mr. Trump described pro-Palestinian protesters as “raging lunatics and Hamas sympathizers.” Republican members of Congress have characterized the protesters’ rhetoric as antisemitic and repeatedly pointed to the camps as evidence of a breakdown in law and order under Mr. Biden.

By coincidence, Mr. Biden is set to be renominated in Chicago, the site of 1968 protests against the Vietnam War outside the Democratic National Convention.

Demonstrators themselves are well aware of this historical cadence. They frame their protests as a continuation of that anti-war legacy, as well as of protests against apartheid in South Africa. The Columbia building they occupied this week, Hamilton Hall, was the site of student takeovers in 1968 and 1985, respectively, on those issues.

Ned Lazarus, an international-affairs professor at George Washington University, said Mr. Biden doesn’t have much room to manoeuvre politically in any event: older voters, who are more likely to cast ballots, overwhelmingly favour Israel.

“If Biden were to change his policy to meet the demands of the pro-Palestinian movement, that would not help him electorally. That would lead to a larger shift against him,” said Prof. Lazarus.

Some Palestinian voices, meanwhile, have worried that students are limiting the potential influence of the movement by adopting unrealistically sweeping positions, such as dismantling Israel and giving all its territory to a Palestinian state.

Ahmed Alkhatib, a Palestinian-American Atlantic Council fellow with family in Gaza, argued in a social-media post this week that such “maximalist” demands empower right-wing pro-Israel forces.

“Turning people against the just and urgent Palestinian aspirations for freedom and statehood is precisely what many pro-Palestine activists are currently doing, instead of seizing on a historical, once in a lifetime opportunity to reach a mass audience,” he wrote.

At GW, near the centre of the country’s political power, the camp has become increasingly organized, with a food tent, a medical tent, media training for protesters and guidelines on not engaging with counterprotesters.

Standing near a statue of George Washington around whose neck protesters had tied a keffiyeh and a Palestinian flag, Maria Blanc said she and her fellow demonstrators were still hoping to bring the school to the negotiating table.

“We have not been getting responses the way we need to,” she said amid sweltering afternoon heat. “They have been very stagnant in terms of next steps, complacent in terms of solutions.”

With a report from Jack Rayner, special to The Globe and Mail, in Ann Arbor, Mich.