Last Thursday, I stopped by the newly established encampment at my former school, the University of Toronto. These encampments, which have popped up at what feels like nearly every North American university at this point, have been variously described as “pro-Palestine” or “anti-Israel.”

I think both labels are fair and accurate, although it’s been fascinating seeing which descriptor each news outlet chooses. Surely sussing out media bias has never been easier than it is right now.

Honestly, I’m surprised it took U of T as long as it did to hop on the bandwagon. As soon as the protestors set themselves up, I walked down to the King’s College Circle lawn for a vibe check.

What are the goals of the student protestors? According to one flyer I saw, the goals are:

• Disclose all investments held in endowments, short-term working capital assets, and other financial holdings of the university.
• Divest the university’s endowment, capital assets, and other financial holdings from all direct and indirect investments that sustain Israeli apartheid, occupation, and illegal settlement of Palestine.
• Terminate all partnerships with Israeli academic institutions.

One thing I’ve been wondering is if the termination of partnerships with Israeli academic institutions implies ending visas for Israeli international students, or even kicking out the ones who are here. Logically, I can’t see how this would not follow, if not immediately then eventually.

Another thing I’ve been wondering: If it turns out that the university won’t divest from Israel, will these students divest from the university? Will they drop out, on principle, to prevent their tuition money from funding what they consider to be genocide? After all, you can buy a lot of missiles for the price of a degree!

Alright, I’ll tone down the snark. I, too, think the death and destruction in Gaza is horrific and worth opposing. Since this conflict began, Israel has murdered tens of thousands of people, and I am under no illusion that every last one of them has been a legitimate Hamas target. My real opinion is that there are no good guys in war.

What strikes me about these protestors, though, is that they aren’t so much anti-war as they are, indeed, pro-Palestine. There’s a difference. Anti-war, I can get behind. I can sympathize with civilians who don’t want bombs dropped on their homes. But that’s the question, isn’t it? How many of these protestors are anti-Israel because they’re anti-war and how many are anti-Israel because that country exists in the first place? How many people are pro-Palestine but anti-Hamas? That’s what I was trying to figure out for myself when I visited the encampment.

I want to be careful not to put words in others’ mouths. I did not interview anyone directly. I didn’t attempt to queue up in the long line in front of the gatekeepers, who interrogated each person’s bona fides before deciding whether to allow them into the encampment. As a participant in a certain other Canadian protest movement, I know what it feels like to have a majority of polite society slander your character or motives based on egregious, willful misinterpretations of what you actually stand for. I can imagine the exasperated frustration when protestors see, for example, a Fox News chyron saying something like “Anti-Semites Take Over College Campuses” superimposed over footage of protestors holding signs that read “Jews Against Genocide.” I’m well aware that plenty of Jews and even Israelis oppose the Israeli military and government at the moment, and that being anti-Zionism isn’t in and of itself anti-Semitic.

I can also say that in the limited time I walked around the encampment, I did not witness any scenes of direct violence. It was peaceful.

My impressions of the U of T encampment are based on what I saw and heard with my own eyes and ears, reading signs and listening to chants.

That said, my sense is that the student protestors can be broadly divided into one of two groups: the True Believers and the Useful Idiots.

The majority of the slogans and the signs I saw further the cause of the True Believers, but my suspicion is that most of the people parroting them (and most of the students at the encampment) fall under the umbrella of Useful Idiots.

The Useful Idiots are those people who chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” without being able to tell you which river and which sea, nor what should happen to all the LGBT people who live between those two points once Hamas takes over.

The Useful Idiots are those posting signs declaring “Long Live the Intifada” without any clue of what happened during the first two intifadas.

The Useful Idiots are those who want to bring “Glory to the Martyrs” or to “Globalize the Intifada” without understanding that this implies October 7-style massacres again and again and again.

Right, so October 7. Again, I don’t want to put words in anyone’s mouths. But I have seen video interview evidence that in some of these encampments – perhaps not at U of T but elsewhere – there is a part of the crowd that considers the October 7 attacks as justified resistance or outright denies that they happened at all. Charitably, it seems most people fall somewhere along the lines of, “October 7 may have been bad, but can you blame them?”

Personally, I’m not really interested in sifting through the nuances of every last chant and slogan. It’s like asking a supporter of the Confederacy, “Yes, but why do you want ‘states’ rights’?” I don’t recall anyone scrambling to give a nuanced interpretation of Unite the Right protestors when they donned khakis and tiki torches and chanted “Jews will not replace us.” That line almost seems tame compared to what’s on the campuses right now. All the Richard Spencer college visits combined never achieved the effect of cancelling in-person classes or commencement ceremonies because the administration couldn’t guarantee the safety of Jewish students. The University of Toronto is not at that point yet, but I have not seen any meaningful difference between the ideologies underpinning its own encampment vs. the one at Columbia University to suggest to me that U of T isn’t on that same path.

How will the University of Toronto encampment end? I see it going one of two ways:

1. bouncy castles go up, terrifying the police enough to initiate a violent takedown, or
2. the movement purity spirals out of control.

A third option – the university acquiescing to protestors and divesting from everything Israeli – doesn’t seem realistic to me. Divestment, in the eyes of the most hardcore participants, means not only ending investments in any Israeli company but also ending investments in any index fund that includes an Israeli company. That’s about as realistic as these students’ parents divesting from the index funds that funded their kids’ tuitions. Good luck.

Nah, I think this leftist movement will inevitably meet the same fate as most leftist movements before it. The most radical elements will elbow their way into positions of leadership and everyone else will lack the rhetorical ammunition (or, frankly, the moral courage) to push back. Things will become extreme, too many former supporters will feel alienated, and then all of a sudden it will fizzle out.

The adjunct professor who raises her fist in the air to a call for cutting partnerships from Israeli universities won’t be able to formulate an argument as to why she shouldn’t cut partnerships from Israeli students.

The activist who wants to liberate land stolen by Israelis from Palestinians won’t see any reason why he shouldn’t also liberate university buildings that occupy land stolen by settlers from indigenous folx.

The student who is told “all Zionists are racists” won’t feel particularly compelled to step in when one of her comrades suddenly decides to bludgeon a counter-protestor draped in an Israeli flag. And so on.

This ideological expansion can go in other directions, as well. Progressives will expand the focus of the protest movement to the point that it “includes” everyone yet no longer stands for anything in particular, thereby destabilizing it: the Gazan refugees will start to wonder why they have to dedicate a whole day of their encampment to “Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls and Two-Spirited People.” The students zip-tied by the cops will start to view their comrades who fled with bitterness and resentment. Someone will finally tell Queers for Palestine what happens to queers in Palestine.

As large as these encampments have become, we can’t forget that the university student bodies are even larger. Protestors make up a fraction of the total students. Most students will agree with “genocide is bad,” but will most agree with “commencement must be disrupted”? That campus buildings be taken over? That classes be forced online? Why, so that Hamas and their apologists can “globalize” this?

Who knows? Go ahead and find out. 😉

I’ll thank you come the next election.