American campuses have not looked like this in more than 50 years, and never for the reasons they do now. The foreign war that students protested in the 1960s and ’70s was one that, even amid draft deferments, threatened their own lives. What has stirred students to risk their safety, enrollment, and future careers on hundreds of campuses this spring is the deaths of others–the 34,000 Palestinians killed in the Gaza Strip since Israel launched its retaliation for the Oct. 7 Hamas attack that killed 1,200 and took 240 hostage.
The protesters’ point of reference is the 1980s campaign for divestment from apartheid South Africa. In their campaign, aimed at what they see as financial complicity in Israel’s actions, the activists—many swathed in kaffiyehs and living in tents, if they haven’t already been forced out by their universities—embody a generational divide previously visible only in polling: young Americans who have known Israel only during its occupation of the West Bank and blockade of Gaza are more disposed to the Palestinian cause than are those old enough to remember it first fighting, in the shadow of the Holocaust, to create a safe place for the world’s Jews.
Read more at TIME Magazine.