The Curious Global Copycat Gaza Protests
8th May 2024
Much has been made in recent weeks, and especially in recent days, about the degrees of ignorance often displayed by those protesting for the people of Gaza and Palestine. To put it pithily, many don’t seem to know from which river and to which sea they chant about with such passion. Such ignorance has prompted some to conclude that these protests are less about showing solidarity with beleaguered Palestinians and more an excuse to vent incoherent anti-Western sentiment, or, more sinisterly, old-fashioned antisemitism.
Similarly, the cosplay in evidence at American college campuses has also cast doubt on the authenticity of these demonstrations. In their fondness for pretending to be starving refugees in a war zone, bedded down in tents right opposite cafes and restaurants, many of these cosseted, affluent students appear to be grotesquely detached from reality — less bothered about Gaza and more concerned with self-indulgently “feeling their pain” in these ostentatious, ersatz displays of solidarity.
Yet the recent emergence of copycat protests and “encampments” in the UK, first at red-brick universities and more recently at Oxbridge, indicates that there’s something stranger going on. Just as some critics of radical trans ideology regard the rapidity in which that fashion took hold as an example of social contagion, what we are witnessing here could be seen as something similar: an example of low-level, mass hysteria.