The debate over Israel’s war with Hamas has been unusually vicious in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where pro-Palestine activists have vandalized, spat on, and menaced targets they deemed too Zionist. At the University of Michigan’s graduation ceremony on an unseasonably chilly Saturday morning in front of some 70,000 spectators—including me, my wife, and our parents—the historian and faculty senate chair Derek Peterson instructed the crowd that the moral and just position in this dispute belonged entirely to one side. That side, ironically, is the one responsible for nearly all the intimidation in Ann Arbor.
“The greatness of this university rests also on the courage and the conviction of student activists who have pushed this university down the path towards justice,” Peterson said, citing “the pro-Palestinian student activists, who have over these past two years opened our hearts to the injustice and inhumanity of Israel’s war in Gaza.”
Whether the activists have opened hearts to their position or had the opposite effect (a possibility for which there is at least some evidence), is a matter of debate. But debate is the very thing Peterson wishes to preclude. In his brief speech, he recounted how women, Jews, and African Americans pushed for needed social change at the university, and he described today’s Palestinian activists as a continuation of this virtuous history. The theme was that progressive activists inherently occupy the right side of history.
This is a common view on the left, one that sometimes leads progressives who recoil from activists’ specific positions or actions to withhold disapproval. The left’s reverence for activism is a pathology that can enable the movement’s worst ideas and instincts to escape scrutiny.
Despite that, Peterson walked the Michigan Stadium crowd through a narrative that is familiar to any liberal and to nearly any recent graduate of a prestigious university. Equality was not handed down by benevolent leaders, he suggested, but demanded by brave activists who defied social condemnation. Their critics may have disparaged their causes and perhaps their methods at the time, but history has proved them correct. It follows, therefore, that their modern heirs will eventually be seen as equally just. I’ve had versions of this argument thrown back at me nearly every time I’ve criticized any progressive activist group.
One flaw with 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 litany of activists blessed by the legacy of righteous protest. The actual argument made by Peterson and others is for deference not to student activists in general but specifically to progressive student activists. And even this one-sided deference suffers from a survivorship bias of sorts. Progressives believe that activists are on the right side of history, because they choose to remember the causes that fared well. But activists on the left have not always acted with wisdom and foresight: Left-wing demonstrators also marched against aid to the Allies in the 1940s, to block nuclear power in the 1970s, and in defense of totalitarian 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 whom others can only learn from, and can never criticize. It redirects any scrutiny of their positions to general admiration for their idealism and passion.
Concern and empathy for Palestinian suffering and anger at Israel’s excessive counterattack are admirable, but the movement’s ambition is not limited to that. Michigan’s pro-Palestine activism is primarily organized by Students Allied for Freedom and Equality, which is the local chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, a national network. Both the national group and its Michigan chapter have endorsed the October 7, 2023, attacks. Adult progressives’ insistence on viewing their activities as mere youthful idealism makes it impossible to question those positions.
The activists themselves have absorbed the historical-justice narrative, concluding that they are entitled to take whatever steps they see fit to advance their cause. Many campus chapters have seized common space for themselves, an action that no group is allowed. If the crew team, a fraternity, or some local MAGA fans occupied a chunk of grass that belongs to the whole community, they would be evicted quickly. Michigan’s activists did this, and also repeatedly intimidated targets at their homes, including throwing a jar filled with urine through the window of the Democratic regent Jordan Acker’s house in the middle of the night.
Most causes have adherents who get carried away. But not every cause does so with the encouragement of professors who cast them as angels of justice by mere dint of the category of action they are taking. Peterson was lecturing an audience of graduates and their families. Much like the activists he praised, he was commandeering a common space intended to belong to the entire university community on behalf of a narrower, contested segment of it. In so doing, he demonstrated how a belief in the immutable righteousness of one’s own side can be a license to abuse power.
