Recently I was asked to compare and contrast the Anti-Vietnam War Protests of the mid to late 1960’s and early 1970’s with the current Pro-Palestinian, Pro-Gaza, and Anti-Israel protests, largely on college campuses. I was very active in activities against the War in Vietnam while in college and graduate school. I have some regrets at some of the stupid things I said and did. Therefore I try to understand the current demonstrators. I had a ox being gored—fear of being drafted. Thus, I had a personal stake in the actions. Today’s students have no such stake. It is especially notable that most of the groups opposing Israel’s stance in the Gaza War have no stake whatsoever in that part of the world.
I am not currently participating in any of the current demonstrations, but have instead written and published on new approaches to combatting antisemitism. I have been critical of the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) heavy-handed approach to the war in Gaza. I have written on the subject of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and proposed a variety of solutions, including something like Cold War, détente, and peaceful coexistence.
The Communist North Vietnamese did indeed eventually win the Vietnam war, and did indeed subjugate millions of South Vietnamese, tens of thousands of whom fled to the U.S. We don’t know what the outcome of the current demonstrations will be. A desire to cut off military aid from the U.S. to Israel has been supported, even by formerly pro-Jewish congresspeople like Rep. Don Beyer of Northern Virginia and Rep. Jamie Raskin of Montgomery County, Maryland. These are not members of “The Squad,” but solid moderates and progressive Democrats. Ending the Vietnam War finally got enough U.S. government support through key Senators shifting from a traditional anti-communist stance to a pragmatic one.
There are parallels and differences between the two sets of protests, even though we do not yet know the outcome of the current ones. The Vietnam War could be characterized as a civil war. The Israel-Gaza situation is not. Some of the parallels and differences are discussed below.
Both sets of demonstrations focused on wrong places—universities. During the Vietnam War, some universities had defense contracts, but they were minor compared to all the other work that universities do. Today’s universities have barely any connection to Israel; what connection there is is mostly through investments in companies that do business in Israel. This is the subject and object of the Boycott and Divestment Movement. However, universities are where a lot of activist young people are.
There were not religious issues in the Viet Nam War. Rather, then, Buddhists opposed both sides. The Communists were accused by anti-communists of being athiests. Indeed, Lenin said that religion is the opiate of the working class. In one famous incident, a Buddhist immolated himself in South Viet Nam in protest of the War. Recently, a man immolated himself in the U.S. in protest of the War in Gaza. There were conscientious objectors in the U.S. to being drafted to fight in Vietnam. Draft boards granted exemptions primarily to those young men who had been raised in pacifist households and cultures, such as Mennonites and Quakers.
In the Vietnam War, the US official policy was that it was opposing the spread of communism. Today, it might be said that US official policy is to oppose the spread of fundamentalist Islam, as expressed through terrorism. The US was, after all, attacked by fundamentalist Islamists on 9/11 and thereafter, in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. These attacks continue in Syria and Iraq. The Hamas Charter clearly states that the entire Middle East should be ruled by its brand of fundamentalist Islam, with no room for any other religion. Its is also true that there is one member of the Israeli Cabinet, Ben-Gvir, who believes in ethnically cleansing Palestinians. Neither side has the moral high ground. Something similar could have been said about the South Vietnamese government, which was corrupt and authoritarian.
Speaking of democracy, the Gazan people voted Hamas into power in 2007, knowing exactly what the Hamas Charter said. This raises the question of how innocent they are. A war does not become morally correct only in victory. The Gazan people put themselves in harm’s way. In both South Vietnam and Gaza, there were collaborators and cooperators of non-militarized people for the authoritarian governing bodies, the Communist Party and Hamas and its allies. Gaza received billions of dollars in foreign aid, but chose to use it for military instead of economic development purposes. North Vietnam similarly impoverished itself to become a military power.
In Vietnam, the North had the proxy backing of China, and safe havens in China, Cambodia, and Laos. In Gaza, Hamas and its allies et al have the proxy backing of Iran, and safe havens in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Qatar.
The major distinguishing features of opposition to the Gaza War include the fact that Jews are involved, and the small magnitude of the tragedy compared to the much larger tragedies in other parts of the world. Let me be clear that what is happening in Gaza is a tragedy, but magnitudes matter. For example, in the entire hundred year history of Jewish and Palestinian Arab conflict, fewer than 160,000 people have been killed on both sides. This pales in magnitude compared to the Armenian genocide, the Rwandan genocide, the seven million killed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the tens of millions of Chinese who died in Mao’s Great Leap Forward, the Holomoldar in Ukraine, Stalin’s forced famines, the Native American genocide, etc. For example, it has been estimated that just from 1945 to 1956, Vietnamese communists killed 242,000 to 922,000 people in Vietnam. In total about 3,760,000 Vietnamese probably died due to political violence during over the forty-two year period of the conflict between North and South. Thus, in terms of a rationale for demonstrations against war, the War in Vietnam provides a much better foundation than Gaza.
But Jews were not involved in the War in Vietnam. This Jewish connection provides a nexus which supports the argument that undue attention to the misdeeds of Israel is indeed antisemitic. We have also seen and read overtly antisemitic slogans spoken, shouted, sung, and placed on placards and graffiti in the current demonstrations. These include slogans like “From the River to the Sea.”
Similarities between the wars include the fact of asymmetric warfare by the Viet Cong and Hamas and its allies. In asymmetric warfare, it is very difficult to separate combatants from non-combatants. In both, the instigators hid out in tunnels, for example, and both used human shields and non-combatant institutions like hospitals and schools as cover.
Both Israel and South Vietnam were fighting for their survival as political entities. South Vietnam lost, and was subsumed by North Viet Nam. If Iran and its proxies prevail, Israel will cease to exist. This is Iranian national policy. Iran is on the verge of becoming a nuclear power. In the Vietnam War, China was already a nuclear power.
In both the Vietnam and Gaza War situations, the sponsoring powers, China and Iran, did not even like the groups they were supporting, the North Vietnamese and the Palestinians. Vietnam and China have been at loggerheads for a thousand years. If Iran uses a nuclear weapon on Israel, it will also kill most of the Palestinians given the size of the area.
Most Americans have no idea how complex the Middle East and Southeast Asia are. There are not just two sides to every question, there are multiple sides. For example, almost no Americans know that the population of Jordan is half Palestinian. If Jordan had a democratically elected government, that government would be Palestinian. Jordan could be the independent state of Palestine that many Palestinians say they want.
The spectre of genocide hangs over both the Vietnam and Gaza Wars. In both cases, there is precedent for genocide by Communists in Russia and China, and against Jews by the Nazis. Israel’s acts can thus be considered “trauma-informed.” This means that past trauma affects current decision making. South Vietnam’s acts were not trauma-informed at the time, but there were clear precedents for genocide by Communists. When people make trauma-informed decisions, their judgment is clouded.
In both the Vietnam War and the Gaza War, the United States was trying to uphold democracy. As noted above, democracy is not always pretty. Israel has a vibrant democracy. Attacks on Israel’s actions are an attack on democracy. The current demonstrations against Israel’s actions in Gaza are support for nihilism and anarchy. In the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, they were effectively support for communism.
In both North Vietnam and Gaza, there are no human rights provided by the governing entities, the Communist Party of North Vietnam, and Hamas and its allies. In Palestine, there are no women’s rights, LGBT rights, or freedom of speech or religion. Demonstrators against the Vietnam War and the war in Gaza forgot or chose not to know that they would not be able to carry out such demonstrations in North Vietnam or in Gaza. If most of the demonstrators were to try to do the same thing in Palestine, they’d be attacked, imprisoned, and probably killed. But Israel has strong human rights, rule of law, and due process protections.
In some respects, the acts of Hamas and its allies are also similar to the acts of the Vietnam Communist Party, in terms of education of the youth to hate and murder the alleged “enemy.” In the case of Hamas and the Gaza public schools, children were being taught (with the help of UNRWA) to hate and murder Jews (NOT “just” Israelis).
Israel is the America’s only reliable ally in the Middle East. The U.S. had other reliable allies in Asia, including Japan, South Korea, the Philipines, and Australia.
The population of Palestinians has increased six fold since 1948. Nowhere else in the world is an increase in population called a genocide. There was actually a genocide in Southeast Asia, that of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge against the Cambodian people in 1975. About 1.6 to 3 million Cambodians were killed. See the discussion elsewhere in this article about disproportionate attention paid to the Palestine-Israel conflict in terms of magnitude of tragedy. Where were protests by U.S. young people against the Cambodian genocide?
Many U.S. progressives want Israeli settlers to stop seizing land and orchards from Palestinians. However, they forget that their ancestors seized land and resources from Native American tribes. To avoid hypocrisy, European-Americans who oppose Israeli land seizures should give back their homes and land to the nearest Native American tribe. When I say this, I am often told that the Native American land seizure was “a long time ago.” But this is not entirely correct. Such land was still being seized as late as 1927.
Today, Vietnam is almost an ally of the U.S. against the rising hegemony of China. Were the U.S. protesters right to effectively be on the side of North Vietnam? Will today’s protesters be “right” in the long development of history by supporting Iran and its proxies? Amazingly, there are a substantial number of young Jews in the U.S. who can contemplate a world in which Israel does not exist. Is this yet another form of self-harm, which has become such a driving force in American society and politics? What if the U.S. ceases to be a safe haven for Jews? Through the shell of the egg of the snake, we can see the outline of the developing snake. Today’s demonstrators are already making life very uncomfortable for Jewish students on campuses. Threat is in the ear of the beholder. Are we facing the possibility of a New Babylonian Exile, where Jews are cast out of the Middle East?
The modern precedent has been set in the living memory of many Jews. From 1948 to the 1960’s, approximately 1.2 million Jews were expelled from Arab countries. Populations move, and today’s conflict in Palestine may be just another example of such movement. Diasporas are not always unhappy. For example, the 2020 U.S. census reported that 519,001 Americans held full or partial Armenian roots either alone or combined with another ancestral origin. Various organizations and media criticize these numbers as an underestimate, proposing 800,000 to 1,500,000 Armenian-Americans instead. There are about 3 million people in Armenia. It is estimated that over 6 million Irish have emigrated to the US since 1820. The peak of Irish emigration resulted from the Great Famine of 1845-1852. It has been estimated that nearly two million people – about a quarter of the population – emigrated to the U.S. in a ten year period.
Lebanon and Palestinian areas like Gaza are the only places in the world where UN-supported camps for Palestinians have held people for so long, since 1948. It is almost as if the UN determined long ago, long before four wars between Israel and the surrounding Arab world, that Palestinians would remain in these areas to be used for sacrificial purposes by political groups such as Iran and Hamas. Hamas leaders stated shortly after the attack of Oct. 7, 2023, that they were willing to sacrifice two million Palestinians to achieve their goals. Sometimes the universe perversely grants evil wishes.
Photo by Shalom de León on Unsplash
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I am a student writing a research paper on how the efforts of student activism in the U.S. impacts political development. Students are often at the forefront of social change, advocating for relations such as reproductive rights, civil rights, environmental and sustainability movements, and yet I don’t think much of it has impacted institutional innovation or national policy shifts. I am reading a lot about the anti-war protests and civil rights of “The Sixties”, and if anything, that is the only time I have found proof of student activism heavily shifting policies at a national level. As I started to write this essay, students across the United States are launching Gaza protest encampments, calling for their universities to separate themselves from companies advancing Israel’s military efforts in Gaza, amongst many other demands. For example, at my school, the Coalition for Mutual Liberation, who has been leading the Free Gaza movement on campus, have called for a scholarship fund for Palestinian students that cannot attend the universities that have been destroyed in Gaza and financial transparency and divestment from Israeli corporations identified as “contributors of systems of human rights abuse” and have set up an encampment. It has not gained much traction besides local news. I came across your article because after reading some news articles about the encampments across campuses this week, experts are saying that the growing protest movement on university campuses could help shift U.S. policy on Israel in the long term and might pose a risk for Joe Biden’s re-election (Harb 2024). One sociologist is quoted as saying “I think there’s a real disaffection with the older generation, but more importantly with the system that they’re running” and that “In American history in general, usually the big shifts in public opinion have either coincided with or been triggered by large student movements”. Some are even comparing it to the Sixties, but I find it very hard to believe that these protests will ever reach such magnitude. Your article answers a lot of that for me, but I was wondering if you had any further thoughts on this and in particular the question of if you foresee any policy shifts in the future because of this activism. Thank you so much!