Luke Black is the Chairman of the LGBT+ Conservatives and founder of the Tory youth organisation Blue Beyond.
“So handy we didn’t leave our tent at Glasto”, a member of a group called ‘Cambridge for Palestine’ said in a now-deleted tweet on about the sturdiness of Decathlon’s camping products.
Yes, Glastonbury Festival came one month early for the city of Cambridge, as ‘Cambridge for Palestine’, a group comprised mostly of students from the University of Cambridge, set up a pro-Palestine ‘encampment’ outside of King’s College, to protest the university’s links to the State of Israel and demand the termination of any business contracts it has with organisations that may or may not have customers in Israel.
This follows what has now been weeks of demonstration and the vandalism of several Cambridge colleges, including Trinity College, in which activists have accused it of being “complicit in mass murder, war crimes and genocide”.
Except now, like the protests in the USA and Canada, the activists are physically camping on the usually spotless lawns, in and amongst the cloisters and chapels of the university colleges. This is just one example of the types of demonstration and disruption being organised at universities across the Netherlands, Canada, and United States over the last few months.
Now, protests at university are hardly a novel concept. From protesting issues as small as local changes to bus schedules, or against bigger topics such as government policy or wider international topics, they are part and parcel of university life. As Conservatives, we should welcome students who wish to participate in political life, even if we won’t always celebrate the means or message.
So long as they are lawful and – if university protests when I was a student are anything to go by – over by 3pm, or at least relocated to the student union’s bar on campus, it sounds harmless enough.
If only it was such across the pond. At Columbia University, Jewish members of staff were barred entry to buildings and told they could not come onto campus for fears of their own safety. At McGill University in Canada, students with Israeli heritage have been targeted by protestors on campus, barred entry to lecture halls and followed around campus, with videos of protestors pushing against doors to prevent students leaving and hurling antisemitic abuse within 50 metres of synagogues.
At UCLA, students have reported being assaulted with blunt objects, shoved into the road, and spat on by protestors. Tensions are running so high that graduation ceremonies are being cancelled country-wide, and rabbis openly instructing Jewish students to stay away from campuses.
The fact that Jewish students – whether supportive of the Israeli government or not – are being told to go back to Poland, and left unable to access education should frighten us all. Yet in the eyes of the protestors, it is they who are the real victims here.
Insisting on what they described as ‘humanitarian aid’, demonstrators demanded access to moisturiser, food delivery services, and gluten-free bread – so long as it didn’t include bagels. Adorned with $40 keffiyeh scarves and accusing the police of using “chemical weapons” (pepper spray) on them, the sense of victimhood here is pervasive.
It’s an absurd form of roleplay for these students – Comicon, but for woke left identarians. Hailing from universities which cater to America’s highest socio-economic groups, these students will in large not have experienced the adversity and struggle that they read about and campaign against.
Their understanding of oppression is idealistic, verging on the glamourous, as they decorate their tents with depictions of Che Guevara and Gandhi. It’s a rosy, romantic depiction of class struggle, contained within the safe parameters of a university campus, where the worst thing that will happen to them is they’ll be forcibly removed from a building they’ve barricaded themselves into (or pepper sprayed for assaulting a policeman).
For these students, they’re able to try on the costume of an oppressed person, and play soldiers in the war between Hamas and Israel. To them, the best role in the cast is the Gazan Palestinian – a group of people who have suffered for decades under the despotism and authoritarianism of Hamas, and live in fear every day and are used as human shields by their terrorist rulers.
They will never experience the hardship of someone just trying to go about their life in Gaza. But they can try it on for a few weeks at UCLA. They can wear the scarf, wave their flags, and even pretend to be a Muslim for a week by praying to Mecca, something which has rightly offended many Muslims who see their religion being used as a fashion statement.
It is a form of make-believe or child’s play. Some of the USA and Canada’s most privileged people, attending their respective countries most exclusive and elite institutions, indulging in voyeuristic poverty porn: issuing statements to the press, describing their experiences of attacks (police enacting the law) on their homes (their tents), and being abducted ( arrested for breaking the law).
Behind the crocodile tears and surgical masks, they are loving every minute of it. It’s a gross affair, and trivialises the real and genuine hardship both of Gazans who live under a terrorist regime and the innocent hostages who were kidnapped from Israel.
But it also fits a theory I have had for some time: that some of society’s most impassioned activists feel that their lives and achievements are mediocre or mundane in the absence of a story of personal adversity and struggle.
If you believe that the system is rigged against the most vulnerable and yet you, a left-wing activist, manage to get through it all and still attend the country’s most prestigious universities, get the highest-paid jobs, or write by-lines in the country’s most-read newspapers, are you not a product of the very regressive regime you fight against?
Or is structural inequality more complex than you make it? I know what I think.
Aaron Bastiani, of all people, recently quipped about Labour’s parliamentary candidates, and their desperation to find tenuous family links to miners or make out that their lives were like 8 Mile. If you can’t frame your life’s achievements in a story of adversity, then why not try it on for a few weeks before your uni exams?
