The news is full of reports of students arrested while protesting responses to the Israel/Palestine conflict, particularly while occupying tent encampments or campus buildings. Is it ethical for students to protest in this way?
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Ethical Decisions 
As someone who attended college during the massive student protests of the 1960s, I have some experience with this issue. Here is my take on the ethics of it. A fuller ethical analysis of protest in general can be found in my post Are street protests ethical?
First, let’s make clear that recent protests are not a threat to the nation, as some politicians seem to suggest. A few hundred students setting up tents on campus lawns, or occupying two or three buildings, are not going to sink the republic—particularly since most will go home after exams in a few days.
Second, the protesting students are not naughty children who must be punished for irresponsible behavior, as some politicians have also claimed. They are serious people who are deeply concerned about the horrors they are witnessing in the Middle East, where many have family members. Many also feel they are involuntarily complicit in the violence, due to the billions of dollars in military aid their country is dispatching to one side of the conflict. They want to make clear that they are strenuously opposed.
Third, antisemitic threats and intimidation are obviously wrong and should not be permitted. That is a different question from whether tent occupations and the like are ethical.
I will focus here on the ethics of student actions, as opposed to the response of university administrators. Suffice it to say that some of these administrators scarcely occupy the moral high ground. There is no need to call in police to rough up peacefully protesting students for “trespassing” on a campus they have paid tens of thousands of dollars to access. University administrations have learned over the years how to deal with student demonstrations in a more measured fashion. Some are doing so now, although they receive much less attention in the media. I will also focus on students rather than “outsiders,’’ a tiresome trope that is regularly used to distract attention from the core issues of student protest.
Discussion of student protest often revolves around whether it is ethical to promote a cause by breaking campus rules, ignoring demands to vacate, disrupting operations by occupation of campus buildings, and so forth. These issues require careful applications of the generalization and autonomy principles, but there is probably no need to resolve them in this particular case. It is enough to show that the current protests violate the utilitarian principle due to their failure to achieve their ultimate purpose, which is to help bring about a reduction of violence and suffering.
It is impossible to know in advance whether protest will be effective, of course. But ethics demands that one be rational about it. Specifically, it must be rational for one to believe that no greater benefit could be achieved by replacing disruptive protest with other methods of persuasion. This, in turn, requires research into the most effective forms of public persuasion. It is a good opportunity for students to exercise their research skills.
Students are likely to point out that U.S. media ignore protests unless they are violent or involve arrests. My observation over the years is that this is largely true. For example, the media ignored peaceful protests in hundreds of U.S. cities against the Iraq war, while focusing on a few disruptive ones. I learned this only because I was in Europe during part of this period, where the media gave more complete coverage. On the other hand, it is hard to find evidence that anti-war protests in the U.S. are ever effective, regardless of the level of violence or the number of arrests. Students and others tirelessly protested against the war in Vietnam for years, with no discernible effect. Ditto for the Iraq war.
Furthermore, we have ample evidence that violent or illegal protests can be counterproductive, because they are politically polarizing. They may have a positive effect in some cases, as in the Black Lives Matter movement, but on matters of war and peace they seem invariably to fail. During the Vietnam era, televised scenes of raucous protests on campuses and at the Democratic convention inspired a powerful backlash. As a result, the anti-war presidential candidate George McGovern suffered the worst electoral defeat in U.S. history, losing every state in the nation but one. In our own day, public disgust with pro-Palestinian protests could help usher in a political regime that is anathema to the protestors. Given even these few observations, it is clear that those who favor disruptive protest have the burden of proof.
There are other, arguably more effective ways for students to exert influence. One is to vote. Another is to harness the power of social media, at which young people are acknowledged masters. Public opinion can be swayed by an intense experience of the reality on the ground, even if it is vicarious. Students can make sure that videos of the atrocities they abhor go viral. They can keep in mind that a third of TikTok users are 35 and older, and they can figure out how to defeat the algorithms that hide their posts from these users. If their organizations have a budget, they can hire marketing experts, and if not, they can do their own research. Some faculty may do this for free. As for protests, they are probably less effective, but nearly all universities permit them in some form. Students can take advantage of this by marching peacefully en masse as incessantly and persistently as students now occupy their tents. The national media will look for juicier stories, but 60% of adults get their news from social media.
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