Signal Flares

Last Thursday, in a side room of the Swarthmore Intercultural Center, we clustered around a table of kosher-for-Passover snacks, listening to an elderly history professor give a lecture about the lives of Jews in tsarist Russia. The audience was mostly old. The professor spoke in just over a murmur. We all fought to hear him over the distant commands of the bullhorn: free, free, free Palestine… What we were listening for, I can’t say; the talk was mostly insubstantial.

At the end of the Q&A, discussion turned to the encampment that had recently sprung up on Swarthmore’s main quad. There was general nodding approval of a certain New York Times op-ed by a certain Columbia professor. In the back of the room, the handful of student attendees—none of us Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) “core” members, or Chabad acolytes—made eye contact. Like siblings at the dinner table: here dad goes again. In tug-of-the-lip codes, we exchanged something. Exhaustion at the old professors’ stubbornness, maybe, or acknowledgment that the protesters are both more and less naïve than the older crowd imagined. Elsewhere, we might criticize SJP. But in the back of a room full of seventy-year-olds, we students were, briefly, on their side.

These are the silos I gravitate toward. Side-room lectures, during which we halfheartedly ignore the ambient noise of the encampment that drifts through the open window. Free, free, free… joins with happy shouts from freshmen walking a slackline that someone in SJP set up, the sounds of eternal youth. The distant smack of frisbee meeting open hand: firm and satisfying as indisputable fact.

Unlike at Columbia, NYU, Emory and several other universities, our administration seems content to quietly wait out the demonstrators. No one is getting arrested. So protesters sell used copies of Illuminations and sit in circles of ten to fifteen, alternately deep in discussion and joyously cartwheeling. Strangers from Philadelphia bring huge boxes of snack food. As far as I know, no one in the tents has a plan past tomorrow afternoon. As the list of encamped schools grows, perhaps ours starts to mean something after all, amassed with the others. Or so my friends in SJP tell me.

After the lecture the rabbi distributed takeout boxes to us students and we collected the leftovers: defrosted lox, matzo, slack purple grapes. As I filled mine, I chatted with a couple of professors. They asked how are you, in serious tones. These are some of the professors who make frustrated, pedantic criticisms of the protester set. I think that many of their criticisms are basically correct. Over the past few months, SJP has published countless graceless articles in campus magazines, full of jargon and pride. They’ve chanted shame at students and at speakers, in protest of any lecture that appears to disagree with them. Their knowledge of history is deep in some places and empty in others. So at times I’m paralyzed with horror at SJP’s chants that seem to call for violence (smash the settler Zionist state! for example), at their impulse to simplify every story into one of “oppressor” versus “oppressed,” at their rhetorical militancy, at their contempt for nuance. But mostly, I’m horrified by the news from Gaza.

In between writing papers, I read the news obsessively. More and more of it, now, is about universities. And I watch and rewatch videos of police officers, of chants, of teenagers, I spin through reposted Instagram infographics about anti-Semitism, about how anti-Semitism is not anti-Zionism, about how this student at that school said this thing about Jews, and, always, about this many deaths. All my fellow students spend hours spinning around their own information abysses. Then we return to one another, more scattered, more upset, more aware that the wandering eye of the national media could, at any point, land on us. And this time, it might mean… something.

And so my own criticisms of SJP begin to feel more and more pedantic.

To go to the encampment, not to go. Is this a moral question? Of what sort? Does anybody care? Why does the national media care so very much? I want to go to the encampment to show—who? someone—that the atrocities in Gaza need to end. I want to stay in side rooms to show the sophomores with bullhorns that distinctions should matter, that historical accuracy should matter, that discussion and dialogue should matter, on college campuses most of all. We are turning our bodies into signal flares for various causes. I don’t like this. But I am sick of doing nothing. I want some kind of feeling of moral clarity. I want there to be some kind of right thing to do.

So I eat my matzo and grapes from my takeout container while sitting on the grass at the encampment: surrounded by sun, tents, eternal youth, righteous beauty. By possibility. By free, free, free…