The Second Gaza Commencement Season
What Courage Looks Like
During NYU's undergraduate commencement ceremony recently, a quivering young person named Logan Rozos who had told friends he’d been "freaking out about this speech" stood up before classmates and the world and called Israel’s Gaza assault “genocide,” speaking, he said, for “all people who feel the moral injury of this atrocity.”
Students cheered. NYU decided to withhold his diploma.
A few hundred miles to the south, a few days later, George Washington University commencement speaker Cecilia Culver denounced the institution’s investments in Israel: "I cannot celebrate my own graduation without a heavy heart, knowing how many students in Palestine have been forced to stop their studies, expelled from their homes, and killed for simply remaining in the country of their ancestors.”.
Her audience erupted in cheers. GW announced it was barring her from campus.
At Columbia University, former journalist and stand-in President Claire Shipman recently sicced the NYPD on protesting students, allowing city cops to go inside the private university library and arrest them.
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Welcome to commencement season in America, where, for the second year in a row, university administrators are earning MAGA merit badges in cracking down on speech. The crackdown now belongs to the broader Trump era assault on dissent and the greater MAGA project to crush compassion, to inure Americans to cruelty, to weaken the First Amendment, to reward passivity, and to, more broadly, break any and all progressive energy.
We know this is their strategy because they are not even hiding it. The utterly shameless, right-wing Heritage Foundation even published a point-by-point plan to crush resistance last year. The Esther Project, plotted in conjunction with Israel hard-liner allies in the U.S., calls itself “a blueprint to counter anti-semitism in the U.S. and ensure the security and prosperity of all Americans.” It accuses anyone who opposes the Israeli government’s decisions involving their war against Hamas in Gaza – which has included massacres of civilians and destruction of hospitals and schools – of being “part of a global Hamas Support Network” or “HSN.” The “HSN” is supposedly “dedicated to destroying capitalism and democracy.”
One can be anti-Hamas and opposed to civilian slaughter in Gaza. One can support Israel’s right to exist and oppose the savagery in Gaza. Plenty of Israelis do: see today’s editorial in Haaretz.
Tarring people who publicly oppose high-tech murderous ethnic cleansing as anti-semitic, anti-American operatives is at best a tactic from the old neocon Middle East policy playbook and, at worst, a vile slander. (For the record, I am no friend of some of the Islamists. I have personally interacted with them in the Middle East over the years and written about their treatment of women here, here, and here.)
Does anyone really believe that American students are manipulated by or active members of a well-financed shadowy international network? Does such a network even exist?
The online world has been saturated for the last 18 months in real-time video of amputee children (one in ten Gazan children have had a limb removed), cement-dusted bloody women and children crawling out of bunker-bombed homes, survivors living in tents, incessantly fleeing IDF evacuation warnings, transporting dwindling possessions, and the elderly and sick on carts pulled by scrofulous donkeys, and now on the brink of death by starvation – all while the very latest in AI, drone, and fighter jet tech rains hellfire on them.
I once researched and wrote an article about a Veterans Administration test of MDMA therapy to treat PTSD in Iraq and Afghan war vets. The most memorable thing I learned was that warfighters who suffer from PTSD are less likely to be traumatized by the violence they survived, and more likely to be haunted to the point of madness by having helplessly or willfully witnessed trauma inflicted on other humans and having done nothing to stop it. Turns out that empathy is a deep and necessary human instinct.
Last year, I moderated a panel of university deans at a conference of the Scholars At Risk project, an NYU-based global effort to assist academics and researchers faced with state pressure on their speech and work. The panel was titled “Lessons from Gaza: Is the U.S. Exporting a Bad Model?” The only “lesson” to be learned from Gaza is to recognize and refuse to repeat the decisions made by the people who lived during the murderous ethnic cleansing operations of the 20th Century - and did nothing. That is history that can and must never repeat itself in any part of this world.
History will judge us by the moral stain, just as we judge the Germans of the 1930s and the Turks of the early 20th Century.
Our college graduates, the best and brightest of America’s children, our moral and intellectual future, are now supposed to pretend the savagery in Gaza is beyond our collective control, like an earthquake or a tsunami – an act of God about which they and the world can do absolutely nothing. But every sentient American knows that the U.S. has shipped tens of billions of dollars of weapons into Israel since the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023. Over the course of Israel’s existence, since its founding in 1948, U.S taxpayers have paid $300 billion.
Michael Roth is the first Jewish president of Wesleyan University. Roth, almost alone among American university administrators, has called out the Trump administration’s Esther Project-esque effort to paint dissenters broadly as anti-Semites. He recently said that the White House is "using antisemitism as a cloak" and threatening to defund universities to get them to "express loyalty to the president.”Last week, PEN America, an organization that defends speech here and abroad, gave him a “Courage Award.” While accepting it, he said, “I’m scared to death to accept a Courage Award.”
Mark Twain said, “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward, it is not a compliment to say it is brave.” We have an opportunity in this dark time to see what real courage looks like - in the quivering hands of student speakers holding their written pages, using the verboten word “genocide,” at the very real risk of losing not just their diplomas, but future employment.
And still they come forward, and still they speak.
Your last sentence reduced me to tears. I wish there was a way to tell these brave students that we are standing with them. Thank you for telling their stories. If any of them were my child, I would be so proud.
The weird thing is that, in this intra semitic horror show, universities are calling those who are against the slaughter of semitic people antisemites. And punishing them.