A little over a month ago, I wrote a post here called “Against Trespass,” intended mostly for campus activists for Palestine. It’s tempting, I argued, to want to engage in forms of direct action that involve trespass, and morally speaking–abstracting entirely from considerations of cost or consequence–it can be justified to do so. But once we re-introduce matters of cost and consequence into the equation, as we have to, trespass strikes me now as mostly pointless and self-defeating. For one thing, more often than not, it puts the activists who engage in it out of commission. For another, it doesn’t effectively do what most needs doing: generate widespread public support for Palestine. So on the whole, it can’t accomplish the good that activists want or need. It’s more likely to subvert it. 

There are, no doubt, exceptions to this rule. I can’t really argue with the disruptions made by activists to Maersk’s operations, for instance. Those have worked out just fine, in Spain if nowhere else. And if Bob Vylan’s “Death to the IDF” chant at Glastonbury ends up being treated as “trespass” by the British authorities (or “incitement” or “terrorism,” or whatever), well, I’m going to have to make an exception for that one, too. I don’t consider Vylan’s chant “trespass,” whatever a bunch of “appalled” English twits have to say about it.  We should in fact have more of that sort of thing. “Death to the IDF” is about as anodyne a sentiment as runs through my head on any given day. 

But those are the exceptions, not the rule, particularly on university campuses. What we need on campus are fewer sit-ins and building occupations, and more specifically intellectual challenges to the reigning assumptions of academic life. We need more challenges to institutional neutrality, more divestment proposals, and more push-back against the false accusations of anti-Semitism that have now become a Pavlovian reflex among Israel’s campus defenders and the craven administrators who appease them. Put somewhat differently, we need less chanting and disruptions on campus, and more flyering, tabling, guest speakers, and conferences (whether press conferences or of the conventionally academic kind). Above all, we need a greater proliferation of high-quality writing: zines, blogs, op-eds, essays, book reviews, journal articles, books. We need to start using our words, not just our lungs. 

This is not to say that we should dispense altogether with direct action or play “nice.” If you can do direct action without getting arrested or suspended, go for it. But if there’s a good chance you’ll get arrested, suspended, or expelled, think twice before you do, and dismiss any regrets you have if you refrain. 

Beyond this, alumni have a bigger role to play at a lot of institutions than they so far have. For starters, they should absolutely cut ties with universities unreceptive to calls for disclosure or divestment from Israel: no monetary contributions, no friendly gatherings, no friendly chit-chat, no more business as usual. Alumni Councils should now be on the receiving end of a solid wall of hostility from alumni tired of the smiling, head-in-the-sand-cocktail-in-hand approach epitomized by these pathetic redoubts of moral complacency. And alumni should stop responding so affirmatively to University requests for assistance against the anti-academic assaults of the Trump Administration. These cry-baby calls for assistance–as in Princeton’s “Stand Up” campaign–should be met with open, explicit, verbalized contempt. Universities that were happy to throw the Gaza protesters under the bus should be met with a response in kind. The best way to unlearn the belief that might makes right is to get your ass kicked. Let the unlearning begin. 

Frankly, university officials (and trustees) should themselves be met with contempt, up to and including outright abuse when they deserve it (as in some cases, they do). If you see these people in the street, walk right up to them (at a distance that wards off frivolous charges of assault or battery), and tell them what you think. Don’t feel sorry for them; they’re paid enough to be able to handle it. And if, like Rutgers president Jonathan Hollander, they’re not able to handle it, they should feel free to resign and find new employment elsewhere–advice that administrators like them are only too happy to give when they themselves hold the cards.

Additionally, university police departments and offices of “public safety” should come in for much sharper scrutiny than they so far have, and demands for public records from them should become a way of life. No arrest or even threatened arrest should ever go uncontested. We need to start paying far closer attention than we have to who is threatening arrest on campus, and by what evidential standard. Far too many of these campus “law enforcement agencies” have become habituated to some very strange and legally dubious practices. Too many suit-and-tie administrators, for instance, have started threatening arrest as though they were sworn law enforcement officers, and too many arcane university rules have now come to have the status of criminal law by virtue of being enforced by university police departments. It’s long past time to shine some light on these perennially dark places, and call them to account whenever and to whatever extent is feasible. 

In short, what we need is a turn away from trespass and disruption to a new sort of discourse–blunt, direct, and even rude, but not trespassory. And what we need is a different conception of activism as well, one capable of working within a bureaucracy without being co-opted or derailed by the C-Suite. 

The same logic applies to the commission of felonies, whether on or off campus, and particularly to violent ones. It’s tempting to want to resort to violence in defense of Palestine, and to be absolutely blunt, there are cases in which the targets fully deserve it. Above a certain threshold (itself up for debate), no one engaged or complicit in genocide can claim innocence or immunity from violence intended to respond to that genocide. The use of violence against active participants in genocide is an exercise in self-defense, or if not literally self-defense, then a defense of those in need of it. 

That said, it’s irrational to turn a political movement into a crusade to give the deserving all that they deserve, particularly when doing so involves making fine distinctions, on the fly, between the guilty and the innocent, and then having to apply those distinctions by violent means to a coarse-grained world. There are too many possibilities for mistake there, too many ways of making them, and too many psychopaths willing to hijack the best of causes for the worst of reasons. 

All things considered, then, setting aside the immediate battlefields of the Near East (and also setting aside cases of immediate personal self-defense), the use of violence in defense of Palestine is even more pointless and self-defeating than mere trespass, for the same reasons, but to a greater degree. There’s no viable route that gets us from attacks like those in New Orleans, Washington DC, or Boulder to the liberation of Palestine or even to the end of the Israeli genocide. The only predictable result of attacks like these will be chaos, corpses, and ill-will. Killing this or that deserving target won’t stop the genocide. Killing this or that undeserving target not only won’t stop the genocide, but will deplete the moral capital that’s been built up over time. In general, violence will only unleash a backlash that will wreck whatever’s been accomplished so far, leaving us worse off than we would otherwise have been.

None of what I’ve said here is intended in a spirit of pacifism, surrender, or even compromise. No one can, at this point, expect any of those things from us. And as the Bob Vylan case makes clear, it’s one thing to refrain from violence, and another to keep one’s counsel about its proper uses. Don’t expect that. We have no reason to stop saying what we candidly think should happen to, say, the IDF or its various partners in crime. A genocidal army offended by a chant at the Glastonbury Festival is really not our problem. 

It is, at this point, hard to hear calls for “civility” without wanting to slap the faces of those calling for it. After almost two years of mendacious nonsense about Hamas’s use of Gazans as “human shields,” what we now confront in the West are fully militarized institutions directly in our midst, guilty of the worst crimes imaginable, all pretending to a “civilized” innocence they all too obviously lack. There are debates to be had about how to define “non-combatant,” who has immunity in combat, who can be targeted and who can’t. I’m the first to insist that those debates should be had, and had in full candor. But we can only have them if we start with the assurance that we’ll leave our guns outside the seminar room as we do. It is, at best, a quid pro quo. But at this point, sad to say, quid pro quos are all we’ve got.