'Smokescreen': 'Outside agitator' claims seek to delegitimize movement, say US Gaza protesters

By Michael Hernandez

WASHINGTON (AA) - For weeks, anti-war protests have erupted on college campuses across the US with students, academics, and their allies demanding universities condemn Israel's ongoing assault on the besieged Gaza Strip and divest from Israeli firms.

Many of the demonstrators have been met with outright allegations or insinuations from law enforcement, university administrators, politicians, and others that they are being externally run or manipulated.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams and the New York Police Department (NYPD) have repeatedly claimed that protests in America’s largest city are being co-opted by what they vaguely describe as “outside agitators.”

"I have been saying for days, if not weeks now, that what should have been a peaceful protest, it has basically been co-opted by professionals, outside agitators," Adams told a news conference at the end of April as police began to forcibly dismantle campus encampments.

"We were well aware, based on a series of observations, that what should have been a peaceful protest that is part of the constitutional rights of Americans has clearly been co-opted, a right which this administration supports and defends to voice your concern," he said. "We have sounded the alarm numerous times before about external actors who are attempting to hijack this protest."

He did not elaborate on who or what this external force is.

These claims, which others have echoed against demonstrators far from New York, are nothing new, according to Mike Golash, an 81-year-old veteran protester. He says they are more than merely reminiscent of charges levied against demonstrators during the 1968 antiwar civil rights demonstrations.

They are "exactly the same thing," he said on George Washington University's (GWU) campus, a focal point of the student demonstrations in the US capital before law enforcement cleared out the pro-Palestine encampment there overnight on Tuesday.

"These rebellions that occurred on the campuses were, you know, supposedly manipulated by the Vietnamese, the Cubans, etc. The riots in the cities were manipulated by radical Black activist," he said, recalling charges that were leveled against him and other demonstrators at Columbia University in 1968 to discredit the protest movement.

"The reality is that the conditions of life for millions of people in the 60s were horrendous. Racism was widespread and opposition to the war was massive. It was those conditions which motivated people to action, not one or two radicals here there or elsewhere," he added.

The "outside agitator" trope is not at all unique to the Gaza demonstrations, either. It has been used for decades in attempts to discredit other popular movements, including the Black Lives Matter demonstrations against police killings of Black Americans, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Civil Rights movement, and the Vietnam War demonstrators.

For Michael, a demonstrator who declined to provide his last name out of fear of reprisal, the "outside agitator" label being leveled against the protest movement is a "smokescreen" intended to "distract" from and "delegitimize the legitimate demands."

"I think with the Kent State news coverage at the time, you would hear a lot of the same kind of smokescreen about outside influencers and things, and it's just the same kind of thing all over again,” he added.

He was referring to the student-led protests that were met with violent repression by the Ohio National Guard on May 4, 1970. Dozens of rounds were fired in rapid succession by guardsmen that day, killing four students and injuring nine others.

Kent State had been a flashpoint of campus protests against the Vietnam War, and student demonstrators there and elsewhere had been painted in the public eye as being manipulated by "outside agitators," a thinly veiled reference at the time to left-wing revolutionary and communist groups.

Sam, a Jewish grad student who also declined to provide their full name for fear of reprisal, said that during his repeated visits to the GWU encampment, he saw zero evidence of the protests being manipulated by external forces. Instead, he maintained, "these protests have been student-run since the beginning."

"Students are the organizers. You can see them all around in the yellow vests, students are the ones who are making the decisions. And those of us who aren't students here, we follow those directives and are fighting for peace alongside students," he said.

Asked why the allegations continue to be lodged against protesters from the highest levels of power in the US, Sam said, "at the end of the day, they're scared of the fact that young people are waking up and saying, 'this can't happen here,' and scared of the fact that, you know, we see what's happening, we see our taxpayer dollars being used for violence against children and against people who have been living their whole lives under an apartheid regime. And we want that to end."

Meanwhile, thousands of students have been taken into police custody after crackdowns on college campuses from coast to coast. At GWU, 33 protesters were arrested early on Wednesday morning.

But while some have been met with often violent repression, other demonstrations have seen protesters reach an agreement with campus administrators.

At Brown University, officials agreed to hold a vote on divestment from Israel in October in exchange for protesters voluntarily leaving their encampment. At nearby Rutgers University in New Jersey, administrators agreed to review divestment and agreed to accept 10 displaced Palestinians to study at the school on scholarship.

Other deals were reached with protesters at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities and Chicago's Northwestern University.

It remains unclear where the wider protest movement will go now as the semester draws to a close. But with an election year soon to hit high gear, and with no end in sight to Israel's war on Gaza, many are bracing for a continued season of protest.