IT'S LIKE 1968 ... NO, IT'S NOT
I was there, were you?
The comparisons were inevitable. As this headline in the British newspaper the Independent’s website on 27 April demonstrates
There is not world enough nor do you have the time for me to explain in detail why comparisons to 1968 are not just inexact but fruitless. But as someone who was there and active in the political protests then here is a quick precis.
To begin: a half century is a very long time. In 1968 we did not look back to 1918 for a protest legacy to build on. The only thing reflecting the World War 1 era that filtered into those days of hope and rage was a revived interest in the life of labor organizer Joe Hill via Joan Baez’s re-recording of the Depression era song about him. Hill was executed in Utah during World War 1 and told his comrades
DON’T MOURN. ORGANIZE!
Spontaneity is important in protest, obviously, but organization is necessary to have a protest movement achieve something. By 1968, organizations like SDS had been working and recruiting on campus for years. The coming together with the Civil Rights movement went back to the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964.
People knew political and economic writing of Marx and others. The question is can you build a political movement, achieve anything political at all, based on the writing of psychiatrists: Frantz Fanon and Michel Foucault.
It may not be that a political movement is what the demonstrators, mimicking scenes they’ve watched in documentaries or badly recreated in Hollywood films, are trying to create. They may just want the war in Gaza to end NOW! if not sooner. In any case, someone should tell them that demonstrations on campus or at the Democratic convention in Chicago didn’t really achieve much.
What needs to be stated over and over again is anti-Vietnam war protests did very little to end the war. North Vietnam won that conflict on the battlefield. It overcame superior technology and firepower of the US military because it out-manned American troops on the ground and the North Vietnamese Army was fighting on its home turf. It won because its goal was clear—unifying its country—and because it had been fighting to achieve that goal for decades.
The 1968 moment lasted through May 1970, up to the Kent State Massacre. I made this program for BBC radio on the 50th anniversary of that event. Give it a listen and if you know someone who is camped out on a quad or wishes they were, share it with them.
A final thought: one of the main demands of the protestors is for the Biden Administration use its leverage over the Gaza fighting by not “re-arming” Israel. For many on the Left it is an article of faith that Israel survives only because it is armed by the US. This is simply not true.
Historically: The US did not arm Israel in the 1948 War of Independence. In fact it imposed an arms embargo. Yet Israel won. In the 1967 Six-Day war, the US provided no direct military aid. Israel won. In October 1973, the Yom Kippur war, the superpowers—the US and the Soviet Union—were in constant communication about the fighting between their Middle East proxies. The US directly re-supplied Israel with weapons in response to the Soviet re-supply of Egypt. That war cannot be considered an Israeli victory even though at its end the IDF was 40 kilometres from Damascus and 101 from Cairo. Call it a draw.
As part of the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt in 1979 both countries were given increasing amounts of military aid.
But large-scale military backing from the US to Israel didn’t really start until the following decade.
So even without American aid, Israel has been able to win wars, not just against Palestinians but combined Arab forces.
Why?
During the years after 9/11 when I reported on radical Islam from Egypt to Saudi Arabia to Iran to a 15 minute walk from my front door in north London, I heard over and over and over from wannabe Jihadis: “we will win because we love death more than you love life.” There was a lot of braggadocio in that but also an element of truth. Martyrdom is a part of the jihadi mindset.
Israelis will die for their country but they would prefer to fight, kill the enemy, and live. In war, where death is all around, going out to become shaheed is actually not a tactic likely to lead to victory.
Despite the blandishments from the campus tent cities that Israelis go back to Poland, that’s not an option. The land is all they have and even if you took all their weapons away the Israelis I know, all but one very much on the left, who have spent the last 55+ years seeking to get to a two-state solution roughly on the lines of UN 242, would fight with knives and their bare hands to defend their country.
And they would win because they love life even more than Hamas loves death.
The most thoughtful words on the subject this week were published in the quarterly magazine Salmagundi. They were spoken in an interview with NYU journalism professor Susie Linfield. The whole article is worth your time but here are some thoughts that jumped out at me.
“Since October 7, Hamas spokesmen have openly, indeed brazenly, asserted in the New York Times and other venues that they bear no responsibility toward Gazan civilians, that they are proud to create “martyrs,” and that the tunnels are meant to protect only the group’s fighters. Pause for a moment to consider this. Think of the countless thousands of Gazan lives, especially those of children, that could have been saved had Hamas shielded its population from the bombs, which it could certainly have done. What kind of “liberation movement” purposely wants its people to die? Can you imagine the African National Congress having done this in South Africa? The National Liberation Front of Vietnam? The Sandinistas? Anyone? Most liberation movements want their people, and especially their children, to survive. Children are the future. In contrast, Hamas wants its people, including and perhaps especially its children, to die. And it wants those deaths to be photographed, and to circulate throughout the world. The depravity of this is difficult, perhaps impossible, to comprehend. Hamas is a death cult, for Palestinians and Israelis alike. All those signs demanding “Free Palestine” should also demand freedom from Hamas—though frankly, I’ve never seen one of those.”
And this,
“The job of an intellectual is to listen to the history that is being made all around you and to respond in new ways by re-assessing your previous beliefs. This is what the founding generation of Zionists did; this is what Nelson Mandela and the ANC did. Far from hewing to static master projects, they were forced, time and again, to accommodate themselves to shifting realities. This is what a thinker like Fred Halliday, who went from being a Third World anti-colonialist to being a Left universalist grounded in human rights, could do; this is what a thinker like Noam Chomsky, whose solution to every problem is to castigate U.S. imperialism, can’t do. The one-state Left, the boycotters, the decolonialists drone on, as all dogmatists do; they reject Arendt’s concept of bringing newness into the world, which she saw as the essence of politics and the essence of freedom. It’s as if they can hear only what’s in their own heads. But there’s a whole world outside, and that’s where history, and the future, are being made. You can deny the reality principle, but it won’t deny you. It will always catch up.”
For more on 1968 read the late Todd Gitlin’s The Sixties, Years of Hope, Days of Rage or visit my other substack (because one is not enough) History of a Calamity and read
Thank you, Gillian
Thanks. I do value your informed voice of reason.