Max Boot: Gaza protests in US colleges are a victory for self-regarding student radicals, not Palestinians

Pro-Palestine protestors outside the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, on Monday, as student demonstrators demand divestment from Israeli military ties. Photo: Vincent Ricci

Max Boot
© Washington Post

Visiting Columbia University last week to see the pro-Palestinian protests took me back to my student days at the University of California at Berkeley, from 1987 to 1991.

As a journalist for the Daily Californian, the university’s independent, student-run newspaper, I covered a lot of protests for causes as varied as divesting from South Africa, ending US proxy wars in Central America and staying out of the 1991 Gulf War. But underlying all of the transitory passions of the day, I detected a powerful nostalgia for the 1960s. It often felt as if the students of my generation were re-enactors of past glories for whom the act of protest was more important than the causes for which they protested.