Student Protests Against Gaza Genocide: More Heat Than Light?

By Winslow Myers\ PeaceVoice Photos: Wikimedia Commons\YouTube Screenshots Civil disobedience, the willingness to break a law and endure the consequences for the sake of a greater moral good, enjoys a pedigree extending back through King’s civil rights movement, Gandhi’s passive resistance to India’s British colonizers, and even back to Thoreau, who went to jail for a night rather than pay a tax that was being used to fund the Mexican war of 1846-48.  Students risking arrest for calling their institutions to stricter account should be commended.  University endowments can grow quite nicely without investment in the arms trade or fossil fuels. But universities are mostly wasting opportunities to fulfill that part of their mission centered upon dispassionate inquiry. Those Jewish and Palestinian college students shouting slogans that some of them might not even understand generate plenty of heat, but as to light—not so much.  Absent the active listening that ought to be a skill that colleges require of all students, angry shouting itself, though a quantum leap better than shooting, is a form of futile violence. The same fanatic certainty, self-righteousness and lack of humility we deplore in both Netanyahu and the Hamas leader Yahyah Sinwar can be seen in...