The debate over Israel’s war with Hamas has been unusually heated in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where pro-Palestinian activists have vandalized, spat on, and threatened what they see as Zionist targets. At the University of Michigan’s graduation ceremony, on a cold Saturday morning in front of 70,000 spectators—including me, my wife, and our parents—historian and faculty senate chair Derek Peterson. directed a crowd of people whose moral and justice position in this conflict was completely one-sided. That side, surprisingly, is responsible for nearly all of the threats in Ann Arbor.
“The greatness of this university also depends on the courage and faith of the student activists who have pushed this university on the path of justice,” Peterson said, citing “the pro-Palestinian student activists, who for the past two years have opened our hearts to the injustice and brutality of Israel’s war in Gaza.”
If the activists have opened their hearts to their position or had the opposite effect (the possibility that at least some evidence), is a matter of debate. But debate is exactly what Peterson wants to prevent. In her short speech, she recounted how women, Jews, and African Americans pushed for the social change needed on campus, and described today’s Palestinian activists as a continuation of this noble history. The theme was that progressives hold to the right side of history.
This is a common view on the left, which sometimes leads progressives who shy away from specific activist positions or actions to disapprove. The left’s reverence for activism is a disease that can enable the movement’s worst ideas and instincts to escape scrutiny.
Despite this, Peterson walked the Michigan Stadium crowd through a narrative that is familiar to any liberal and to almost any recent graduate of a famous university. Equality was not given by benevolent leaders, he suggested, but demanded by brave activists who defied social condemnation. Their critics may have underestimated their reasons and perhaps their methods at the time, but history has proven them right. Therefore, it follows that their modern successors will eventually be seen as equally righteous. I’ve had versions of this argument thrown at me almost every time I’ve criticized any progressive activist group.
One flaw in this account is that it is selective. Over the past two years, many Michigan students have marched or chanted in support of Israel, but Peterson excluded them from his list of activists blessed with a legacy of fair-minded protests. The real point made by Peterson and others is for respect not for student activists in general but specifically for progressive student activists. And even this one-sided bias is subject to some kind of survival bias. Activists believe that activists are on the right side of history, because they choose to remember the causes that succeeded. But activists on the left have not always acted with wisdom and foresight: Left-wing protesters also marched against aid to the Allies in the 1940s, against nuclear power in the 1970s, and in defense of authoritarian regimes during the Cold War.
The assumption that progressive activists are inherently on the side of justice elevates them above the category of mere political actors into a kind of priestly class that others can only learn from, and never criticize. It redirects any examination of their positions to a general admiration for their idealism and enthusiasm.
The concern and sympathy for the suffering of the Palestinians and the anger against Israel’s excessive aggression is admirable, but the ambition of the movement does not stop there. Michigan’s pro-Palestinian movement is primarily organized by Students Partners for Freedom and Equality, which is the local chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, a national network. The national group and its Michigan chapter have has been approved the attacks of October 7, 2023. The insistence of developing adults in viewing their activities as idealizing youth makes it possible to question those positions.
Activists themselves have taken up the historical-justice narrative, and concluded that they have the right to take whatever steps they see fit to advance their cause. Many university chapters have taken common space to themselves, a move that no group is allowed. If a crew, a fraternity, or some local MAGA fans took a piece of grass that belongs to the entire community, they would be quickly kicked out. Michigan activists did this, and also repeatedly threatened their targets in their homes, including throwing a bottle filled with urine through the window of Democratic representative Jordan Acker’s home in the middle of the night.
Many causes have followers who are taken. But not every cause does so with the encouragement of professors who make them angels of justice just because of the kind of action they take. Peterson was addressing an audience of graduates and their families. Like the activists he praised, he was leading a collective space intended to belong to the entire university community on behalf of a narrow, contested segment of it. In doing so, he showed how a belief in the immutable right of one’s own side can be a license to abuse power.
