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A few weeks ago, I was standing on a little triangle of clumpy, unkempt grass between two plastic garbage cans and an electrical transformer on a street corner in Brno, the second-largest city in the Czech Republic.
Before World War II, this little patch of grass was the site of the Café Esplanade, a fancy coffee shop designed by a celebrated modernist architect, where the cream of Brno’s once-thriving Jewish community would go to read the papers, chat, and smoke. Later, they would begin to speak in hushed voices about what was going on next door in Germany and Austria.
One afternoon, in August 1939, a few months after the Nazis had taken full control of Czechoslovakia, a mob of Czech fascists, eager to impress their new Aryan overlords, stormed the cafe. They ransacked it, savagely beating the Jews they found there, killing at least one of them. Two years later, most of the survivors would be rounded up and deported to their deaths.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the story of the Esplanade, as a growing number of influential voices tell us that the current situation on American college campuses – where student-run Gaza Solidarity encampments and their supporters have clashed verbally and in some cases physically with some Jewish students and professors – is “like the 1930s.”
Last week, Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu said it. This week, CNN anchor Dana Bash echoed it. Lots of less prominent voices are making the same comparison now. A woman at the recent United for Israel March at Columbia University told me the school itself had become “like 1939 Germany, and I don’t say that lightly.”
I don’t say this lightly either: Get a hold of yourselves.
There have certainly been incidents of overt antisemitism on college campuses. Some of them have been violent. This tracks a broader rise in antisemitic hate crimes in America, a trend matched by rising Islamophobic and anti-Palestinian violence as well. (Why should we distinguish between Islamophobic and anti-Palestinian violence? Read my friend Hani Sabra’s superb essay on that.)
But the “1930s?”
Let’s take a look at what was actually happening around the time that those Czech fascist goons showed up at the Esplanade.
A fanatically antisemitic government had, for six years already, been in control of the largest country in Europe. It had passed laws to discriminate against Jews, extended those laws to two other countries that it annexed (Czechoslovakia being one of them, Austria the other), and had already begun mobilizing paramilitary forces to destroy Jewish businesses and murder their owners.
There was a massive refugee crisis as hundreds of thousands of Jews tried, mostly in vain, to flee the Third Reich. In Berlin, meanwhile, the government was already readying plans to expel or murder millions more.
Does that really seem like an accurate comparison for 2020s America, where state and local authorities have, by contrast, deployed police to clear and arrest thousands of pro-Palestinian protesters who broke campus rules and, in some instances, harassed Jewish students? Are we really two or three years away from fanatical antisemites taking control of our country and sending the armed forces to beat, rob, and kill Jews? The US House of Representatives this week passed, with overwhelming bipartisan support, a bill to combat antisemitism that is so vaguely worded that it has raised First Amendment concerns. This is not the 1930s.
Many Jews are understandably alarmed and upset by what is happening on campuses across America. The sight of Jews encountering antisemitic discrimination or violence of any kind can trigger a deep fear, rooted in real historical experience. To deny or minimize any of that is its own form of anti-Jewish bigotry. Columbia and other schools are already facing a number of lawsuits over their alleged failure to adequately protect minority groups – including both Jews and Palestinians – during this period.
But the problem with the 1930s comparison isn’t just that it’s historically inaccurate, or that it trivializes and exploits the oppression and murder of millions of people, or that it’s an exaggeration that risks draining words of their urgency and their meaning.
It’s that it further poisons an already toxic, zero-sum discourse and deliberately opens the way to more violence. After all, if we are really in the anteroom of a second Holocaust, don’t existential threats call for extreme measures?
If you think so, let me invite you for a coffee at the Esplanade.
Protests against a controversial “foreign agent” bill in Georgia this week have led to violent police crackdowns in the capital, Tbilisi. The bill will require organizations that receive more than 20% of their funding from abroad to register as foreign agents.
The ruling Georgian Dream party says the measure — which was advanced in parliament on Wednesday — will improve transparency. But opponents say it is identical to a law the Kremlin has used to crush dissent.
The EU warns that the bill harms Georgia’s aspirations of joining the bloc – rhetoric that is expected to ramp up in the coming weeks, according to Tinatin Japaridze, a Georgian-born regional expert at Eurasia Group.
Still, Georgian Dream is expected to get the bill passed, Japaridze says, after shelving it in the face of similar protests last year. The legislation, which must go through another reading, could become law by the end of May.
In the meantime, protests are expected to continue. What began as a demonstration against the bill is morphing into a much broader, youth-led movement against the ruling party and its Kremlin-inspired politics — and in favor of strengthening ties with the West.
“This is a generation that did not grow up under repressive Soviet rule,” says Japaridze. “They’re a lot bolder.”
If the protests spread nationwide, it could “exacerbate the growing rift between Georgian Dream and the public,” Japaridze says, and make “their work and their role very difficult.” Growing public discontent could also signal that Georgian Dream will face serious challenges in crucial parliamentary elections set for October.
As police ramp up efforts to dismantle pro-Palestine encampments and demonstrations on US campuses, the student protests are going global.
Students at four universities in Australia have jumped onto what they call a “global wave” of pro-Palestinian activism, vowing to occupy areas of campus with encampments until their schools cut financial ties with Israel.
In the Middle East, student protests are raging from Kuwait to Egypt to Lebanon, where students occupied central locations on campuses on Monday and Tuesday, calling for divestment and an end to the war in Gaza.
Tensions are also rising between students and authorities inFrance, a country with a history of protest and the largest Jewish population in Europe. Students in Paris at the Sorbonne and Sciences Po began occupying parts of their institutions last week. On Saturday, Prime Minister Gabriel Attal said his government “would not tolerate the actions of a dangerously acting minority trying to impose its rules and an ideology coming from North America,” while the president of the Île-de-France regionsuspended funding for Sciences Po until “calm and security have been restored.”
Encampments have also popped up at universities in the UK, Canada, Turkey, Germany, Japan, India, and Argentina. For many protesters, fighting for a cease-fire has taken on a larger meaning. They continue to call for divesting from Israel, but they also tie the plight of Palestinians to global structures of oppression and link the war in Gaza toissues like police brutality, the mistreatment of Indigenous people, racism, and climate change.This weekend, Panamanians will elect a president after a roller-coaster campaign period that has featured a dog with an X (formerly Twitter) account and a popular former president hiding in the storage room of a foreign embassy.
The country’s most popular politician, Ricardo Martinelli, is a charismatic populist supermarket tycoon known as “the crazy one” who oversaw a mini economic boom in Panama when he was president from 2009 to 2014.
But he’s currently holed up in the Nicaraguan Embassy in Panama City, where he’s avoiding arrest on money laundering charges he says are bogus.
That rap disqualified his candidacy in February, but Martinelli (and his social media-savvy dog, Bruno) has endorsed his one-time Veep candidate José Raúl Mulino, a somewhat drier figure who nevertheless leads polls by double digits with the support of about 30% of Panamanians.
In a fragmented field, that’s enough to win, as Panama’s single-round system rewards the top outright vote-getter.
“This election is about discontent and nostalgia,” says Yael Sternberg, an expert at Eurasia Group, who sees a paradox in Panamanians’ preferences.
Although they list corruption as a top concern, they also remember the Martinelli years fondly and are upset with the current government’s shortcomings.
“People feel totally failed by the government,” she says, “and people’s economic situations were just better under Martinelli.”
The election comes at a fraught time for Panama. Once the envy of its neighbors for its gleaming skyscrapers, rapid growth, and overall stability, the small Central American country is facing big challenges.
The pension system is nearing insolvency, and two of the biggest sources of foreign currency are in trouble: Low water levels in the Panama Canal’s reservoirs have crimped shipping volumes, and mass protests over corruption and environmental issues last year led to the closure of one of the world’s largest copper mines.
As a result, GDP growth is set to fall from a heady 7% last year to less than 3% in 2024, the third straight year of declines, and in March, one of the three main ratings agencies cut the country’s debt rating to “junk.”
All of which means that even if Mulino carries a strong mandate into the presidency, in a region where incumbents have enjoyed strikingly short honeymoon periods in recent years, Martinelli’s man in Panama will have to act fast, says Sternberg.
“He could probably keep support up for a bit, but he will probably be hated at some point if he’s not able to address these heavy, heavy tasks.”
Editor’s note: Bruno the dog was unavailable for comment.
Hard Numbers: Manila’s many protests, US views of China, Kenya floods, Germany’s baby bust
20: Manila filed a diplomatic protest on Thursday — its 20th in 2024 — against Chinese harassment of its vessels in the South China Sea. That’s a rate of more than one a week, as Beijing seems little deterred by US and Japanese efforts to bolster the Philippines’ military capacities.
42: A new Pew survey shows 42% of Americans consider China an “enemy,” up from 25% two years ago. The mounting mistrust is largely driven by Republicans, among whom 59% describe China as an enemy, compared to only 28% of Democrats.
188: At least 188 people in Kenya have died in floods caused by weeks of torrential rains across East Africa. Another 90 people are believed to be missing, and over 165,000 have been displaced by the natural disaster.
693,000: The number of babies born in Germany is approaching record lows, with just 693,000 bouncing bundles welcomed in 2023. The trend looks likely to continue, as the number of marriages has also dropped — to its lowest level since 1950 — and government support for childcare and parental leave is weakening in an economy that has hardly grown in four years.In response to roiling campus protests, the House of Representatives passed the Antisemitism Awareness Act on Wednesday. It attracted both bipartisan support and opposition — and now the Senate has a hot latke on its hands.
What does the bill do? It provides an official definition of antisemitic conduct that the Education Department could theoretically use to crack down on universities. If schools tolerate protesters who engage in what the bill defines as antisemitism, they could lose valuable federal research grants.
What’s the definition? It’s based on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s “working definition of antisemitism,” which runs to over 500 words when contextual examples are included. It would condemnn not only threats against Jewish people but also certain criticisms of the state of Israel as antisemitic.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) framed the bill as a way to crack down on perceived antisemitism on campus, as Republicans attempt to use the campus protests to burnish their “law and order” credentials. The bill passed 320 to 91, but it attracted opposition from strange bedfellows.
Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), a practicing Jew and self-described Zionist, said the bill goes too far in stifling free speech: “Speech that is critical of Israel alone does not constitute unlawful discrimination.”
Meanwhile, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) said she voted nay because the legislation could punish people who say Jews killed Jesus — itself a deeply antisemitic trope that has been used to target Jewish people for millennia.
What’s next? The bill is now in the hands of the highest-ranking Jewish official in US history, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who is under pressure to bring it to the floor speedily. He was cagey on Thursday when talking to reporters about next steps. Ceding the “law and order” position to Republicans would be politically costly, but members including Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Jon Tester (D-MT) expressed concern over restricting free speech.
Early today, police in riot gear moved against protest encampments at UCLA, taking down tents, arresting people, and removing demonstrators from campus. This came after similar actions on campuses ranging from Columbia to Dartmouth.
Where is this headed?
What started as a reaction to the Hamas-orchestrated massacre of Oct. 7 and the extent of the deadly counteroffensive by the Israeli military has now grown to encompass wider, more amorphous issues. These include everything from the validity of Zionism to the viability of a two-state solution and now, depending on where you go, climate justice, over-militarized policing, and even capitalism itself.
In the military, this would be called mission creep. That’s when a mission starts with a specific goal, but over time the scope widens so much that the initial objective is lost and the new goals become too complex to be attainable. This usually ends in failure.
“Mission creep” was coined by a Washington Post columnist in 1993 to describe the disastrous American-supported UN intervention in Somalia — the famous Black Hawk Down incident in which 18 Marines were killed. It became more prominent after 9/11 when the initial objective of wiping out al-Qaida spread into overthrowing Saddam Hussein and the Taliban, which morphed again into the idea of setting up stable democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq. Mission creep is a trap, setting impossible goals that erase the possibility of an exit strategy.
This is starting to happen with the campus protests as well. It’s not mission creep exactly. Call it protest creep – where the scope of subjects now being debated is so vast that it is starting to undermine the very real issues the demonstrators wanted to bring to light.
Protests are spreading to campuses throughout the US and to a few schools in Canada.Luisa Vieira
Whatever position you hold, the right to ask uncomfortable questions about Hamas’s attack or about Israel’s response is what a democracy is all about. Is the Israeli invasion of Gaza a justified response to a terror group’s massacre, as some say, or has it morphed into a genocidal war on Palestinians, as others argue?
Should universities boycott, sanction, and divest from any company doing business with Israel or support the defeat of a genocidal terror group like Hamas? These questions rightly evoke passionate responses and make some people feel uncomfortable. Of course they do. But democracies are not built to protect people from feeling uncomfortable; they are built to protect individual and collective civil liberties. Being exposed to and living with ideas you disagree with is the foundation of an open society – and frankly, one of the purposes of going to university in the first place.
That doesn’t mean there should be no red lines. For example, the space between support for the people of Gaza and criticism of Israel’s response has moved into a full debate about Zionism itself – and whether anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism. On April 26, the office of the president of Columbia University issued a letter acknowledging “the antisemitism being expressed by some individuals,” going on to say, “Chants, signs, taunts, and social media posts from our own students that mock and threaten to ‘kill’ Jewish people are totally unacceptable, and Columbia students who are involved in such incidents will be held accountable.”
Some students have pushed back, arguing that most demonstrations are not antisemitic and that their views are being willfully mischaracterized by some politicians who are cherry-picking bad moments to justify a heavy-handed police response to peaceful protests about the Palestinian people.
It’s naïve to pretend that political manipulation is not a factor here, and much of this is also being filtered by the US presidential campaign. But it’s also naive to suggest that there’s not a disturbing element of dynamics like anti-semitism as well. But that’s not what protest creep is about.
As Jeremy Peters wrote in the New York Times, many student demonstrators are not only motivated by the events in Gaza, but have linked those to “policing, mistreatment of Indigenous people, discrimination toward Black Americans, and the impact of global warming.”
It’s not surprising to see acts of solidarity among groups, but is it helpful? What about when the protests veer into issues like Zionism itself? If the debate is now so wide that it includes asking if Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state–and that is common–should there be debates around the right of Muslim countries, theocracies, or kingdoms to exist? Will there be debates about Jordan’s right to exist, a country carved out of the British mandate in 1946, two years before Israel was founded? What about countries like Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria, or others whose lines were randomly drawn on a map by Western governments after the war?
These are interesting questions, but are they helpful for the current crisis? At best, they force an endless regression into debates about settlers and nationalism – questions that have no simple answers. At worst, they suggest a double standard of morality and accountability.
Canada, the US, and Australia, for example, all struggle to find answers to painful and real questions about Indigenous rights and land claims, but outside of some basic sense of solidarity, is blending these with the crisis in Gaza useful? Do these debates bring clarity, or is the chaos today being used opportunistically by some radical elements to amplify any cause?
Finally, who is responsible for protest creep? Part of it lies with the media for using loose terms to lump disparate groups together and blurring messages so nuanced distinctions get lost. Part of it lies with the protesters, who are caught in their own momentum and are losing control of the narrative. And lastly, part lies with the politicians and the authorities, who label groups and torque up fears to bolster their agendas. It’s a mess, and it looks like there is no way out.
No way out.
That’s always the problem with mission creep – and now with protest creep. There’s no exit strategy. The aims become so big, so endless, that the whole idea of a peaceful, practical solution is lost. The fight itself has become the whole point.