Trauma Envy and the Campus Intifada

By Seth Mandel

Thursday, February 27, 2025

 

Last night, as a large pro-Hamas contingent at Columbia’s Barnard College assaulted a university employee and then occupied a building, a Jewish student approached a security guard who wasn’t letting any of the non-Hamasnik kids into the building: “You’re catering to them… We all have to go to class. You’ve got to cater to the normal students.”

 

The school official briefly seemed taken aback, likely at the suggestion that there were “normal students” at Columbia University. But then there was recognition in his eyes: The kid asking to be let into the building wanted to get an education, just like kids used to in past generations.

 

What happened, exactly, to a lost cohort of American teens and young adults? How do their formative years swerve into a general rebellion against the very idea of knowledge that leaves them ripe for recruitment into Hamas-Jugend?

 

First let’s review what actually took place on the Barnard campus last night.

 

A group of keffiyeh-clad, masked students and supportive faculty stormed a building and, according to the university, brought in trespassing outside agitators to help wreck school property while shutting down classes. They were protesting the expulsion of two students who held an Israeli history class hostage while tossing fliers with death threats at Jewish students. They were told to leave by 9:30 p.m. and refused, so the university gave them another hour and promised them amnesty from disciplinary action for their lawbreaking activities. They accepted this offer of “do whatever the hell you want with no consequences as long as you eventually stop doing it.”

 

Along the way, the Barnard administration sent messengers to humiliate themselves and prostrate themselves and the school before the Hamas-Jugend. It is now unclear who, if anyone at all, runs the college.

 

All this happened because students at Columbia and elsewhere have been allowed to form anti-Semitic street mobs to segregate buildings and to assault employees with barely a reprimand since the Hamas pogrom of Oct. 7, 2023.

 

In other words—and this is the key point in understanding the escalation—these students at Columbia University and other expensive universities have been the most pampered young adults in the history of the universe. Though of course there will be individual exceptions, as a group these folks have been handed more and asked to do less than anyone who walked the earth before them.

 

The students themselves unintentionally acknowledged this generality last night. After they left their occupation, many of them made a circle outside and cultishly chanted a bunch of slogans, including: “We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

 

I don’t know how people who have actually been kept in chains would feel about this kind of appropriation by the ultra-privileged, but it tells us something important about the mindset of the comfortable elite: They find themselves and their lives utterly boring.

 

These activists’ anger at previous generations isn’t for withholding opportunity, it’s for the opportunity itself. There are two kinds of Columbia students who talk unironically about losing their chains: those who know they are privileged and pretend otherwise as a form of escapism, and those who actually think being told to go to class at their expensive private institution is what everybody in history has meant by “chains.”

 

In the past, this kind of progressive trauma envy took the form of poverty tourism. A trip to Cuba to gawk in admiration at the victims of your own ideology, before getting on a plane and going back to your Manhattan apartment, has long been practically a rite of passage, the closest thing the American left has to a bar mitzvah.

 

But the mixing in of Palestinian nationalism adds a new and escalatory element to this worldview.

 

Palestinian advocacy too often teeters into trauma envy. The most obvious example is the obsession with claiming that Jews are perpetrating a Holocaust against Arabs in the Middle East, a lie whose overuse is entirely intentional on the part of anti-Zionists. Holocaust envy has only become more explicit: We see Palestinian journalists and activists calling themselves a “Holocaust survivor” or saying “everyone in Gaza is a Holocaust survivor” and declaring they “will proudly wear the Palestinian Keffiyeh to work, especially during the Palestinian Holocaust, just as I would have worn the Star of David during the Jewish Holocaust.”

 

To underline the point, “pro-Palestinian” activists in the West routinely vandalize Holocaust memorials, protest Holocaust museums, and fetishize the appropriation of Anne Frank to an uncomfortable degree. Last month, the UK’s Islamic Human Rights Commission went so far as to explicitly say Holocaust commemorations that do not include ceremonies for Gaza should be boycotted.

 

But it isn’t just the Holocaust. In the early part of the 20th century, Arab leaders openly acknowledged the Jewish connection to the land. When that morphed into Palestinian nationalism, suddenly it became obligatory to deny that history and to perform a sort of Replacement Theology whose writers embarked on an ambitious appropriation project: The Wandering Jew became “The Wandering Palestinian,” Palestinian rewrites of iconic novels like The City Without Jews appeared, Golda Meir’s quotes were repurposed against the Jews.

 

Trauma envy, a direct outgrowth of progressive grievance culture, is warping minds at a rapid clip, spreading far and wide. But like most other forms of anti-Semitism, it’s just easier to see at Columbia.