TRINITY

I haven’t written anything about the encampments, the ones that have sprung up seemingly over night, like springtime mushrooms, on the lawns of so many campuses across the West. Why is that? I dunno.

Maybe it's because all that noise, so much noise from so very few, is so silly and so consistently composed of combinations of the ugliest and most obvious of ancient anti-Semitic tropes and threats (“Khaybar, Khaybar, ya yahud!”) And maybe I've been trying to tune out more of that and the persistently terrible reporting of it all.

Or maybe it's because if you’ve been in school (doubly so if you’re at an elite college), it's unlikely you've had enough time: time to read almost any relevant material, time to sit through enough podcasts, time to visit any relevant sites, or speak with anyone knowledgeable. And then from that place of unknowing you probably lack the life experience to have an opinion that could possibly matter anyone outside your circle of friends. (As far as I'm concerned, all of that is not so much ageism as it is physics, but I could be wrong.) And, I mean, without some of those prerequisites, what’s left? Youth, beauty, conviction, and, what, ferocity? Well, as they say, those are not accomplishments, nor are they even traits inaccessible to our orangutan or ostrich cousins...

Regardless, something worth noting, something that feels representative of the whole campus protest movement, did go down today:

Today, folks were eagerly sharing the above headline from The Guardian that reads “Trinity College Dublin agrees to divest from Israeli firms after student protest.” The subheading explains “Five-day encampment in university grounds that caused a major loss of income ended in victory for campaigners.” The accompanying image is an aerial photo of the encampment, showing a section of a campus lawn covered with maybe 50 colourful tents and with them fewer than a dozen people standing about. 

We’re assured by those passing on the news that the students of Trinity College executed a remarkable victory. The student union president, László Molnárfi, is quoted in the piece explaining how the student’s resounding success “shows the power of grassroots student and staff fighting for a just cause of Palestinian liberation and to end the complicity with Israeli genocide, apartheid, and settler colonialism [sic].”

IS THAT WHAT HAPPENED?

While those responsible (those 70 students who were said to have been actively engaged in the protest, out of a student body of 19,000) fill their resumes and social media profiles with declarations of this sort about their masterful takedown of a “genocidal apartheid regime,” The Guardian, alternatively, attempts to spell out just some of what actually took place. For example, correspondent Rory Carroll reports that Trinity College agreed to “complete a divestment from investments in Israeli companies that have activities in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and appear on the UN blacklist.” And that “Trinity will endeavor to divest from investments in other Israeli companies.”

Of course, none of that suggests for a second that the college has significant investments in questionable Israeli entities. And it doesn’t suggest, not for one second, that the school has or will divest from said entities, if those exist: only that, if possible, the school will commit to attempting to do so. Right. Then if we go just one line further down the page in this same article we also find the following: “Trinity’s supplier list contains just one Israeli company, which will remain until March 2025 for contractual reasons...” Dang!

That's right, as spelled out in the very article shared by the proclaimed victors, Trinity College (a tiny school, about the size of Douglas College in New Westminister) had effectively nothing to divest in the first place (and exactly nothing at all unless this one business in question turns out to fit the category of problematic, according to a handful of squawky students.) And, further still, if that one business does meet the criteria, AND the divestment occurs, that action will not take place for another year, ensuring no possible impact on anything at present whatsoever.

And then we might also notice that these intrepid students only just began their protest. That's right, they decided to start their encampment long after so much of the violence from this war took place. Long after. 10,000 unknowns (were they Hamas leadership, military, combatants, civilians?) were said to have died in Israel’s opening bombardment of Gaza. However, that level of killing was not sustained. Every week since then has seen only the tiniest fraction of those numbers. So all of this protesting and would-be divestment, the sum total of it across the planet, will very likely be too late to have any meaningful impact on this conflict.

That said, of course, some time after Israel achieves the war aims Hamas gifted themselves and the population of Gaza with, any one of a dozen determinately genocidal governments or militant groups in the region (or a conspiracy of all, as is constantly promised) could point their guns, just one more time, at half of all the world's Jews. In which case the world's only Jewish state could certainly have their ability to defend themselves or respond impacted. Obviously. And that, apparently, is the aim of the world's most vocal second-year kinesiology students and Marxist Romanticist PhD candidates.

But the situation is far more ridiculous than those surface details. Another report on this encampment at Trinity explains that, as a result of the disruptive protests, ones that saw most of the campus (and its amenities, venues, and popular tourist attractions) shut down or blocked (during exams), Trinity College has issued the student union a fine of €214,000 ($315,500 CAD) to cover some of the losses the school accrued. Wow. Is there any doubt that fine will amount to a significant debt that current students (and their outgoing president) will be walking away from just a week from now? Sounds about right.

Learning that, I wondered more about the responsible character: this László Molnárfi guy. Turns out the self-described Socialist was born in Austria to Hungarian parents (both of whom work in the EU Commission, the executive branch of the EU), but was schooled in Belgium, where he attended the posh European School (whose notable graduates include Boris Johnson and Ursula von der Leyen). Rich kid torn with class guilt seeks to bring down capitalism, destroy the West (and achieve recognition as the saviour of the working class and the world's oppressed.) Hmmm, where have we seen that before?

So how does this work, exactly? Molnárfi describes the Irish school he attends as "an imperialist institution, complicit in war crimes and racist border control." That's his school. It's clear he could have gone to any school. One wonders why he didn't attend an autonomous revolutionary school aligned with his beliefs and aims but instead voluntarily poured many thousands of euros into this traditional Irish one, making himself so very obviously complicit in what he says are "imperialist war crimes."

And isn't that what all these folks are up to by their own terms? I mean, geniuses of this sort throughout the world are keen to personally boycott Starbucks (withholding the cost of a bad cappuccino for no good reason anyone can articulate, that is, aside from bald anti-Semitism) but are mysteriously and helplessly compelled to annually hand over, and encourage others to hand over, the price of, what, a car to this "horrific" institution bent on destroying the world?

To whom, I would love to know, is all of the above sensible or even coherent?

UPDATES: May 14, 2024

Trinity College Dublin has seen a bursary revoked as a result of the protest and the university's capitulation:

The Maurice Abrahamson Bursary, a law scholarship for disadvantaged students, has been withdrawn following College’s commitment to divest from Israel. Dr Edwin Abrahamson, a UK-based consultant paediatrician who helped to establish the bursary in memory of his late father, said that College has “yielded to mob rule” in its decision to divest, according to the Irish Times. In a letter to Provost Linda Doyle, Abrahamson added that Trinity has become a “no-go zone for Jews, with terrorist flags flying openly, racist placards and a culture of fear to prevail”. “There is complete shock in our community”. The bursary was set up by Abrahamson and his mother last year, with three inaugural recipients announced in November. Abrahamson said that the “terrorist flag” he was referring to was the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a flag waved by students during last weeks encampment run by Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union (TCDSU) and Trinity BDS. Abrahamson has also said that the rhetoric used by student protesters in recent months has been “pure anti-Semitism”.

Relatedly, the University of Queensland has sprung an anti-Israel protest. Students there tell us they are seeking to remove the “Zionist influence” on campus. But, given the university has virtually no ties with Israel, like the rest of Australia, the closest thing to a Zionist influence on campus is a Boeing aerospace engineering research hub. So that's what's being protested and smashed. And what are they up to at the research hub? Mostly they help model disease transmission in airplane cabins. That’s what these students are protesting; over, say, a drone or munitions factory, which would have the virtue of being vaguely coherent. Too, the anti-Boeing protests at the University of Queensland targeting "foreign interference" occurs in front of the Bao Steel Research Centre in the same engineering research hub... But we shouldn't be bringing that up.

Because I was curious, I looked up what the broader economic relationship between Australia and Israel looks like. Turns out major Australian exports to Israel in 2022 were cows, goats, and sheep, rice, self-adhesive plastics, and footwear. All exports to Israel that year totaled $250 million of Australia's $424 billion in exports in 2022 (or 0.05%). Imports from Israel at that same time totaled $687 million (of Israel's $76.9 billion in exports or 0.9%) the largest of which were cement articles, medical instruments, and diamonds, followed by pesticides and fertilizers, broadcasting equipment and liquid dispensing machines, and plastics.