May 1, 2024 - 7:00pm

Student protests have erupted across numerous elite American campuses over the past two weeks, pitting administrations against student activists. What accounts for the energy of the movement?

The Israel-Palestine issue is complex, with a good case to be made that Israel should have acted with more restraint. Palestinian motivations are understandable. What is harder to explain, however, is the exceptional focus of white progressive student protesters on this question.

Violence committed in Syria, Yemen, Ethiopia, Ukraine and other trouble spots elicits little response. Uganda meting out the death penalty to homosexuals occasions a shrug. These offending governments are not allies of the West. But the West invests in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, who armed those who committed atrocities in Yemen. It trades with China, which is currently imprisoning half a million Uyghurs in re-education camps. Where are the analogous movements to boycott and divest?

Some argue that antisemitism underlies anti-Zionism. Indeed, Jewish students have been targeted, barricaded and harassed by protesters on several occasions while chants have included paeans to Hamas and Hezbollah.

But there is another possibility: that Left-activists only get excited when an issue can be framed as white versus nonwhite. Israel-Palestine becomes an allegory for white supremacy and settler colonialism. Consider the fact that a Harvard-Harris poll in October showed American 18-24s evenly split between supporting Hamas and Israel. Around the same time, 44% of Gen-Z respondents to a Skeptic Research Center survey agreed with the statement, “The Israeli government advocates for white supremacy.” It can reasonably be argued that the emotional energy behind support for Hamas comes from viewing the conflict as part of a wider white-on-BIPOC morality play.

According to Jeremy Carl, author of a new book entitled The Unprotected Class, this anti-white animus underpins the worldview of the western Left, and, by extension, American institutions and elite culture.

Carl’s impeccably researched book makes the argument that the elite institutions of post-Civil Rights America have been engaging in open discrimination against white people. As a result, white Americans must organise as a group, along with nonwhite allies, to defend their right to equal treatment under the law.

This is a provocative thesis. And yet, a majority of white respondents in surveys in the US, UK and Britain positively identify with being white. As with minorities, I find that the strongest predictor of racial identity is whether a person identifies with their ancestry: white Americans who are attached to being Irish or Italian are much more likely than other whites to identify as white. Likewise, those who identify strongly as Chinese identify strongly as Asian. Yet only one pan-ethnic entity is prohibited from expressing itself and mobilising as a group, and must obliquely argue its case by appealing to liberal universalists.

It would be healthier for all if those who identify as white could speak openly and moderately in defence of their group interests, marshalling support from the many fair-minded non-whites who abhor anti-white discrimination. Only in this way can we rebalance our culture and institutions toward colourblind justice.

This might lead campus activists toward a less Israel-centric view of the world, focusing more attention on regimes which currently fly under the radar while viewing Israel’s misdeeds in a less totalising manner.


Eric Kaufmann is Professor of Politics at the University of Buckingham and author of Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Led to a Cultural Revolution (Forum Press, 4 July).

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