The mainstream media, anti-intellectuals on the right, and enemies of Israel on the left would have us believe that the youth of America is exploding in anti-war activism. Scenes of campus encampments full of students demanding that their universities “divest” from the Jewish state and breathless reports of young voters angered over the American-Israel alliance have dominated the news cycle for weeks and have only begun to taper off now that school’s out for summer. Many pundits have speculated that youthful disaffection with Biden over his aid of Israel’s war against Hamas will lead to an electoral disaster in November.
Daniel J. Boorstin would understand the inordinate focus on a relatively small number of violent campus protests as a “pseudo-event” that exists for the sake of being reported. In examining how the press makes rather than breaks news, Boorstin posited in his 1962 classic The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America that “We are haunted not by reality, but by those images we have put in place of reality.” In an act of haunting itself, Boorstin’s analysis has grown only more applicable since the rise of social media.
It isn’t that the encampments aren’t real, but they are far from representative of the typical college campus, young voter, or even the American position on the Middle East.
There are approximately 1,500 four-year colleges in the United States. Encampments, walkouts, protests, and sit-ins took place at almost 140 campuses—most of them poorly attended and alienated from majority opinion. To that point, The Washington Monthly’s Marc Novicoff and Robert Kelchen recently ran the numbers that suggest that the Gaza protests were primarily an elite school phenomenon.
However, even in elite institutions, the protests did not necessarily reflect campus sentiment. Columbia University has 37,000 students. At its peak, perhaps a couple of hundred participants created the campus melee, and many came from outside the school. Meanwhile, in February, Columbia elected Maya Platek, an Israeli immigrant who had denounced the protests, as student body president at the School of General Studies, one of the university’s four undergraduate colleges. At nearby New York University, another Manhattan-based campus blocks from major media, protestors also numbered in the low hundreds. NYU has over 29,000 students.
The Institute of Politics at Harvard University announced poll results that were inconvenient and, for that reason, largely ignored by cable news and the rabid anti-Israel left hoping to seize the moment. The Harvard Youth Poll surveyed 18 to 29-year-olds about what political issues they consider most important. Out of 16 options, the conflict in the Middle East ranked 15th.
Actual events, as opposed to the pseudo-variety, bear much closer resemblance to what I experienced in the spring semester at the commuter school where I teach—Indiana University Northwest in Gary, Indiana. Home to 3,600 students, the campus remained quiet from October 7 to spring commencement. There was a grand total of one event protesting Israel—a panel discussion in a small theater with between 20 and 30 people in the audience.
Every month or so, I saw a flyer posted outside a bathroom or near a doorway demanding “solidarity with Palestine.” Once, I walked by a student wearing a T-shirt with the controversial slogan, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free.”
Indiana University Northwest did invite Rosalie Levinson, a retired law professor and human rights advocate, to give a presentation about her parents, both of whom survived the Holocaust, and the dangers of contemporary antisemitism. Her lecture drew a large audience, but in a sad twist, she needed armed security at both entrances because of antisemitic threats that came from outside the university.
In response to the threats, Indiana University Northwest offered a webinar for all students and staff on how to identify and combat antisemitism in the classroom and workplace.
I had one student with family residing in the West Bank. He pursued passionate conversations with me after my writing class. There were matters on which we agreed—the indefensible outrage of the Israeli settlements, the incompetent and ruthless leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu—but there were others where we differed with respect and civility despite our respective vehemence, such as successive Palestinian leaders’ responsibility for the lack of a Palestinian state, whether or not Israel is committing “genocide,” and the centrality of Hamas to the current conflict.
My student never pitched a tent, threw a brick, or attempted to “decolonize” an administrative building. The vast majority of college students are not invested in the Israel-Palestine debate, and of those who are, the vast majority are not enlisting in shambolic protest movements with antisemitic rhetoric.
By amplifying a relatively marginal group of campus protestors to a deafening volume in the discourse, the prestige media risks encouraging Americans to perceive the “divestment” campaign as transformative. If the small group gains large media stature, perception will become reality. The distorted lens can create a rigid MAGA-like hard left wing within the Democratic Party, helping to further degrade and dumb down American politics.
Senator John Fetterman, an ally to Israel, stated the obvious in his response to the media’s many stories on the students who “walked out” of Jerry Seinfeld’s commencement speech at Duke University in a show of contempt for the comic’s support of Israel: “30 out of 7,000 students walked out. That’s 0.0043 percent. Why does the media habitually platform this fringe?”
The prioritization of pseudo-events over reality is a media vice. Unable to resist the high ratings or quick clicks it offers, the media has already enlarged the Trump cult, giving the impression that it represents “half of America,” encouraged fear of immigration with alarmist coverage of the “crisis” at the border, and is now indulging its worst impulses with the anti-Israel protestors.
The catastrophic consequences of the first two examples should act as a warning against the third.
