This wasn’t the same as other protests, as it pitted one group of students against another rather than the government. It was students who embraced the lie that Israel was the oppressor and the Palestinians were the oppressed. It was students who believed the deluge of propaganda pictures and videos that rarely showed what they claimed to show, rarely held up to scrutiny, all designed to play their shallow emotion and feigned claim to be on the side of morality. It was students who claimed to hate Zionists, but not be antisemitic, without the slightest clue how those two things were inherently intertwined.

It was students whose twisted, childish grasp of facts turned terrorists into freedom fighters, who made excuses for why rape was, this time, justifiable.

And they did so at the expense of their fellow students, whose concerns were secondary to their cause because their cause was more important. Their cause is always more important, but it went so far as to physically block students who failed to profess devotion to their cause from access to campus, harassing them, abusing them, calling for the death and destruction of the only Jewish homeland that exists, after they were driven out and put to death for being Jewish.

And they refused to see any connection because they didn’t want to. They wanted to belong to the rebellious mob, the woke fighting for what they believed to be justice as if every woke battle was somehow tied to the plight of Palestinians. After all, wouldn’t the Palestinians fight for gay justice, trans justice, racial justice, gender justice, all justice, just like them because that was what the woke orthodoxy proclaimed?

And they could prove they were on the right side of history because there were Jews in their camp. If they were antisemitic, then why would Jews choose to join them? The answer is sad, pathetic, but clear: The Jews, whose identities were melded with progressive ideological orthodoxy, needed to belong, and the way to belong was to believe as their tribe believed, do as their tribe did.

Then they would be the “good Jews,” the ones that the woke mob accepted, if not embraced because they gave cover to the lie that their called for the eradication of Israel didn’t make them anti-semitic. They could all feel good about themselves by believing they were the moral ones, the ones on the right side of history who stood for the oppressed and marginalized identities against the evil, genocidal Israeli villains who deserved what they got on October 7th because of their stealing the Palestinian homeland and putting Palestinians into an open-air prison, killing their babies and destroying their homes.

There is nothing surprising about any of this. These are sad, pathetic children with a hole in their lives that needs to be filled with purpose. And so they invent one and it gives them a reason to exist. That it’s wrong, false, misguided and contrary to reality doesn’t concern them. Everybody in the encampment agrees with them and supports their belief, and that’s the only thing that matters.

They believe, so they belong. If not, they would have no reason to exist. It’s just a way to fill that huge empty space in their soul that, in earlier generations, was filled by family, religion, by patriotism, by having an identity that provided shallow minds an explanation for why they wake up in the morning. The difference this time is that they do so at the expense of their fellow students rather than some faceless militaristic bureaucracy that brings boys home in a box. But that’s the price of being accepted by the tribe and belonging. Nothing matters more than belonging, and so they believe.