Comparisons of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment movement with 1968 and 1985 have been everywhere, helping to raise the confidence of the protests and serving as convenient arguments against the hypocrisy of the colleges. A special symbol of this hypocrisy is CCNY President Vincent Boudreau: the case of the university head who once faced arrests as a student protester and now, forty years later, orders arrests. The comparisons, especially to the Vietnam War period, have without a doubt played their role: as the means by which people all over the world, including in Gaza itself, have made sense of the US student protests of the past month.
At the same time, it must be added that the “Ghosts of ’68” bring with them a certain dimming and obscuring of the present. Thus, at Forrest Hylton’s final note of optimism in NLR Sidecar (“Nor can militarized police raids … vanquish the ghosts of ’68.” “Following a forty-year eclipse, might we see the rebirth of … the revolutionary socialist project …?“), one might refer instead to the discussion on “ghosts” at the start of The 18th Brumaire: not that which cannot be vanquished, but that which is somehow inadequate to the new situation.
What do the widespread comparisons, by themselves, not help us see?
First, they obscure the circumstances in which the national war of resistance in Gaza has been developing: the Abraham Accords, the process of Israel-Saudi normalization, and the relatively recent choice by the states involved to “decouple” the Palestinians, with expectations of minimal repercussions. As one author wrote in the July/August 2023 edition of Foreign Affairs, summing up this calculation, “The last time masses of Arab citizens rallied for the Palestinians was never.” There is also the longer background of the disappointments associated precisely with multiple political trends that were prominent in the 1960s in the region.
Second, the comparisons obscure what is new in the international situation: already two years of ground war in Europe as well as the US pivot to Asia, an orientation that has conditioned the resemblance between Trump and Biden in the Middle East. Seen in this light, the pro-Israel jingoism, the university president hearings, the mass arrests on campuses, and the clumsy interventions by city politicians into foreign policy look like rehearsals for worse: the difference between the mobilization of society for a war fought by a distant gendarme state versus for war that creeps up on the “homeland.”
Third, the level at which the comparisons are being made, reflected for example, in the widespread circulation of that one 1970 speech by Peter Camejo, suggests an imaginary picture of the Left: a Left that has resolved the most fundamental questions of its understanding of the world has only strategy and tactics to discuss, but a Left that has not resolved such questions has other things it needs to do. One might start by asking “What happened?” between then, when revolution seemed to many to be just around the corner, and today.
May Day Student Organization 