Democrats associate Donald Trump with chaos: his presidency driven by controversy, his combative oratory, the campaign to stay in the White House despite losing the 2020 electionsthe assault on the Capitol by a mob of his followers, the four criminal trials he faces… The New York billionaire and his Republican allies are now taking advantage of an opportunity to endorse the label of chaos on their rivals: the pro-Palestinian protests that have spread to dozens from US universities, accompanied by anti-Semitic episodes, police interventions, riots and arrests.
‘Stop the protests now,’ Trump shared this Monday on his social network, in a message in capital letters and several exclamation points. The student mobilizations have generally been peaceful, but they have not been able to escape criticism of their anti-Semitism. In addition to episodes of harassment and verbal attacks on Jewish students (the leaders of the mobilizations associate them in many cases with external radical activists), the protests often have a tone, at least, not at all peaceful: the chants of ‘Long live the intifada’ and ‘From the river to the sea Palestine will be free’ (for some, a call for the destruction of the state of Israel) are common, as this newspaper has seen in the protests at Columbia University – the germ of the mobilizations – or at New York University.
Trump and the Republicans know that these protests, especially if they are accompanied by anti-Semitic or violent episodesare a candy in an election year: they occur in elitist universities, the paradise of ‘woke’ culture that many voters detest, they reinforce the Republican message of ‘law and order’ and link their rivals with disorder.
Since the mobilizations and protest camps began, many Republicans have opted for a tone of extreme harshness. Some, like Senators Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton, demanded that Biden and Democratic officials send the National Guard to campuses. Another Republican senator, JD Vance, has defended that those who camp at universities suffer from “mental illness” and that these camps cannot be allowed.
Last week, in one of his days in the New York courtroom during the first of his criminal trials, Trump sought to excite his people and defended that the 2017 protests in Charlottesville “are nothing” compared to the current ones on campuses. . It is an unbalanced comparison: those were violent protests, with white supremacists walking around with Nazi-style torches and shouting slogans like “Jews will not replace us” and in which a leftist protester died.
Democrats, for their part, are trying to contain the political crisis that the university protests are producing. This Monday, 21 deputies of the House of Representatives They demanded that Columbia “act decisively” and break camp. The university took steps in that direction and warned the students that if they did not leave the camp at two in the afternoon – eight in the afternoon in Spain – they would be suspended.
In the morning, the university president, Minouche Shafik, announced that Columbia would not accept the students’ main demand: suspend their investments with companies related to the Israeli occupation of Palestine. An assembly of students voted against abandoning the camp despite the threat of suspension and it remains to be seen what the university’s next steps will be to dismantle it.
Blinken assured in Riyadh that the intermediaries have presented Hamas with a “very generous proposal from Israel”
Negotiations in the Middle East
While political tensions over the war in Gaza continue to grow in the US, the country’s head of diplomacy, its Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, was in the Middle East this Monday in a new push to reach a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas and for the release of the hostages still in the hands of the Palestinian terrorist group.
Blinken assured from the capital of Saudi Arabia, Riyadh, that the intermediaries have presented Hamas with a proposal that is “extraordinarily generous on Israel’s part.” The proposal, designed by Egypt, has two phases: in the first, Hamas would release between 20 and 33 hostages over the next few weeks. in exchange for an Israeli pause in its military operation and the release of Palestinian prisoners. The second phase, which negotiators define as “restoration of sustainable calm,” would seek to free the rest of the hostages, including Israeli soldiers, the return of hostage bodies, in exchange for more handovers of Palestinian prisoners and a sustained truce.
“Right now, the only thing separating the people of Gaza from a ceasefire is Hamas,” Blinken said. “They have to decide and they have to decide quickly,” he said of the terrorist group. “I hope they make the right decision.”
