Bothered by pro-Palestinian activists? Most Americans didn't like civil rights, Vietnam War protests either.

Many Americans got choked up in the summer of 1989 watching the defiant young man block a line of army tanks in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square a day after the Chinese government massacred hundreds of student protesters calling for democracy.

The Arab Spring uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa also drew similar admiration and praise two decades later.

And in 2022, women in the West, including the U.S., flooded social media sites to stick up for their counterparts in Iran who shed their headscarves en masse after a 22-year-old accused of flouting the country’s hijab laws died in police custody.

That heaping dose of adulation hasn’t been extended to the throngs of Americans who’ve spilled into our nation’s streets demanding a cease-fire in Gaza these last four months. Some people just want the keffiyeh-draped pro-Palestinian protesters to shut up or go away for daring to question Israel’s response to the grisly Oct. 7 Hamas attack, as well as the Biden administration’s compliance with the merciless bombardment.

None of this behavior should come as a surprise. Americans generally tend to wax eloquent about activists engaging in “good trouble” overseas, but bristle and vilify dissent in their own backyards, especially during wartime, according to a 2014 analysis by Cornell University’s Roper Center for Public Opinion Research.

Most social justice movements, like Black Lives Matter, take years to take hold, and protests against our government’s military actions are only embraced in guilt-ridden retrospectives decades later. Very few Americans warmed up to protesters during the Vietnam War, and a mere 16% of respondents in a national Gallup poll had a favorable opinion on the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom before the historic event was held in 1963, the Roper Center study pointed out.

Martin Luther King Jr. is only hurting the “Negro cause of civil rights,” half of white people agreed in another poll taken three years after King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech.

I’ve heard the same jeopardizing-their-cause grumblings aimed at protesters who have obstructed traffic to draw attention to the nearly 29,000 Palestinians — mostly civilians — killed in Israeli airstrikes so far. A delayed commute is frustrating, but these protests aren’t designed to comfort and excuse apathy toward an assault that a high-ranking United Nations official recently described as “unparalleled in its intensity, brutality and scope.”

Compassion for Palestinians and Israelis

More troubling than the inconvenienced whiners are the narratives that color all pro-Palestinian protesters as misguided Jewish-hating terrorist sympathizers, when most of them just want the death and destruction to stop, along with a cessation of Israel’s systemic discrimination and human rights violations against the Palestinian population.

Caring about the loss of Palestinian lives does not mean lacking compassion for Israeli and other lives lost in October.

“As any protester might tell you: This is not a zero sum game, but a quest for freedom and justice for all, not freedom for some at the expense of Palestinians, as is the status quo,” said Dima Khalidi, the founder and director of Chicago-based Palestine Legal.

“Conflating advocacy for Palestinians and criticism of Israel with antisemitism” is not only “dishonest” but it is “dangerous because it aims to distract us from the facts of what Israel is doing ... while obfuscating what is actual bigotry against Jewish people for being Jewish. It is also anti-Palestinian because it denies Palestinians the right to oppose our own oppression.”

Palestine Legal, which has staff and volunteers all over the country, has fielded over 1,370 reports of suppression of Palestinian advocacy since Oct. 7. The nonprofit, which is dedicated to protecting the civil and constitutional rights of those who speak out for Palestinians, only received 350 to 400 similar reports in all of 2022.

Over 500 of the recent cases involve people who dealt with consequences at work for expressing solidarity with Palestinians, Khalidi said. But most of those who have sought Palestine Legal’s help got into hot water for their campus activism, including two Black Northwestern University students who were slapped with criminal charges for distributing pro-Palestinian parodies of the student-run paper. Those charges have since been dropped, but the calls keep coming.

Most elected officials aren’t listening to their constituents who are protesting the unconditional support of Israel’s actions and “genocidal anti-Palestinian language” used by Israeli leaders, Khalidi said.

The protests may seem futile when so many lives have been erased in such a quick time span while those who have survived in Gaza are “staring death in the face,” per the U.N.

Still, the more voices cry out for justice, the better.

“It is always mass social movements that spur the change that is so desperately needed,” Khalidi said.

How long that shift will take is anybody’s guess.

Rummana Hussain is a columnist and member of the Sun-Times Editorial Board.

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