Zionism Is In Its Flop Era

The hysterical reaction to the student protests is proof.

Photo: me

As a New York City resident, I take an interest in where my tax dollars are spent. Yesterday, at least some of those dollars were being spent to pay NYPD cops to hang around—in riot helmets—outside the locked gates of Columbia University. (Presumably, Columbia paid for the festive balloons on the gates.)

The vibes at Columbia were exactly as strange and slightly ridiculous as that picture when I swung by on Sunday. I’m on record as saying that I don’t think we should spend much time as a society stressing about what happens on fancy college campuses, but the Columbia leadership’s wildly over-the-top reaction to the decision by some students to sit in tents on the quad as part of a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” had turned the school into a national news story, and the students are being very courageous in the face of the full repressive force of both Columbia and New York City. Besides (looks down shamefacedly) I am technically a Columbia alum, so I was intrigued.

Even two blocks away, you wouldn’t have known anything was going on. Morningside Heights was its usual placid self. At 116th and Broadway, a small clutch of protesters was penned in by barricades and chanting, watched over by yet more cops. It’s no slight on the protesters to say that this hardly seemed like a national security crisis.

But I suppose that’s in the eye of the beholder. As I strolled past the protesters, I passed a guy screaming into his phone, “I don’t fucking care! There’s a riot on campus! People are in danger!” Reader, there was no riot on campus. There wasn’t even much noise.

Chilling scenes!

I didn’t stay long; you couldn’t get into the campus without a student ID and there wasn’t actually that much to see. But within hours, both New York Mayor Eric Adams and the White House (lol) had issued statements portraying the protests as dangerous bastions of antisemitic hate. (As far as I can tell, a couple of people who showed up to support the students said some stupid shit. The students themselves, many of whom are Jewish, have pointed out that this has nothing to do with them.)

Why is the president of the United States involving himself in this situation? Why are the cops parked in riot gear in front of a locked gate where basically nothing is happening? Why, for that matter, did Columbia President Minouche Shafik treat a peaceful encampment on the lawn as a declaration of war? Why did Columbia’s own security force try to shut down the student radio station that was reporting on the protests? Why, in other words, are these people freaking out so much?

Obviously, they want to nip all of this protest stuff in the bud. They want to show students, and Columbia’s donors, and the fanatical politicians hounding them, that they will make it dangerous to step out of line. And to do that, they are willing to go way, way overboard.

But there is something else you can sense in all of this—another current running through the crackdown. That current is desperation. This is the kind of wild swing you take when you sense your grip on things slipping away—when you are trying to contain something that is becoming stronger than you ever imagined possible.

We’ve all been there. We all know what it feels like when you’re in your flop era—when you’re throwing everything at the wall and nothing is sticking. And Zionism is going through a flop era in America.

The White House, and Eric Adams, and Columbia University are all looking around and noticing that the old rules about Israel and Palestine are no longer working like they used to. A majority of Americans oppose the genocide in Gaza, and have for months. Young people like the Columbia students strongly oppose it. They are not listening to the likes of Joe Biden anymore about this stuff.

How can I be sure about this? Well, since Columbia moved to shut down the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, similar protests have sprung up at universities across the country. Just this morning, Yale followed Columbia’s lead and forcibly cleared a student encampment. This student movement is growing, not fading. It turns out that a lot of people want to stand against genocide. It turns out that a lot of people think that Israel slaughtering children day after day is a bigger threat to a stable and just world than college students sitting in a tent. And because Columbia, and Eric Adams, and Joe Biden have no real answer to that reality, they are instead choosing to pretend that Kristallnacht II is upon us—to smear the Palestinian flag as the equivalent of a swastika, to turn young people protesting genocide into symbols of evil.

It’s not working.

Update, 4:12 pm ET: FLOP! ERA!

Hannah Gais

Eric Adams is now saying there is “no credible threat” at Columbia. Do you know how insane you have to be acting to make Eric Adams look more reasonable than you??? FLOP ERA.