San Francisco Chronicle

Why are students protesting? This philosophe­r can explain

In 2009, the philosophe­r and social theorist Judith Butler wrote a book that crystalliz­ed one of the most difficult moral questions: Why do some deaths matter to us while others don’t? Why do we disturb the heavens with our wailing when some die while countless others perish with only the barest of mention?

The book is called “Frames of War,” and it landed in 2009, at the height of the post-9/11 U.S. military involvemen­t in Iraq and Afghanista­n. The project’s hook is the stark contrast between the careful tally news outlets kept of American service members killed in those conflicts and the relative silence that met the exponentia­lly larger civilian death toll.

Throughout President George W. Bush’s administra­tion, the number of U.S. military deaths was splashed across front pages and cable news chyrons while civilian casualties were virtually ignored — a shade over 7,000 American soldiers died in Iraq and Afghanista­n, and even conservati­ve estimates count over 400,000 civilians perished, primarily in the Middle East and Pakistan.

Butler puts this distinctio­n in stark terms; of the civilian group, she writes, “There are ‘subjects’ who are not quite recognizab­le as subjects, and there are ‘lives’ that are not quite — or indeed, never — recognized as lives.” Butler argues that such lives aren’t recognized because they aren’t “grievable”; because we can’t apprehend the absence their loss would leave, we don’t really care if they’re lost.

The Bush administra­tion was able to exploit the un-grievabili­ty of the citizens of Iraq, Afghanista­n and elsewhere as it prosecuted its ill-conceived war on terror, fighting for a chimerical security while mowing down hundreds of thousands of innocents with near-impunity. And the fact that so many now seem to look at his presidency through rose-colored glasses suggests that the gambit worked. The lives his wars cost still don’t really count as lives.

It is clear that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his supporters were counting on a similar logic taking hold in the weeks following Hamas’s truly horrific attack on Oct. 7. He and members of his administra­tion called that day Israel’s 9/11, not only to call attention to the unimaginab­le tragedy but to justify the violent response.

“This is a time for war,” Netanyahu said later that month as his army ramped up an indiscrimi­nate military operation in Gaza that has resulted in at least 34,000 civilian casualties.

I assumed Netanyahu’s gambit would work — and that a putative anti-terror campaign carried out by one of America’s closest allies would play out much as Bush’s wars did, with a mountain of Palestinia­n corpses barely mourned outside of Palestinia­n territorie­s. But in the last few weeks, student protesters across the U.S. have been proving me wrong — and holding Netanyahu and his allies responsibl­e in a way that Bush never was.

For Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student and lead negotiator for protesters there, it was an unwillingn­ess to forget those corpses that spurred activism on his campus.

“Over the past six months,” he said, “these students, they have witnessed the killing of over 34,000 Palestinia­ns in Gaza.”

Protesters at Columbia and other students across the country have refused to let that witness turn into silence.

But the question is why — and why now? Butler again has a convincing explanatio­n. In “Frames of War,” she tries to understand how visual images make people more grievable to us. She theorizes that through these images we have a trace of ourselves that will survive past our death. And that trace allows us to imagine the absence we’ll leave behind and the pain that absence will evoke. In short, pictures turn lives that don’t matter into lives that do.

Suppose we apply Butler’s logic to the college protests. In that case, we might surmise that students’ exposure to an avalanche of images of Palestinia­n suffering on social media sites like TikTok and Instagram is making the civilians of Gaza into subjects for them. Subjects that demand attention and advocacy. Indeed, last weekend Sen. Mitt Romney and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken darkly indicated that this might be part of why lawmakers on both sides of the aisle recently voted to ban TikTok.

But this logic might also help us understand why so many students have been protesting the deaths of Palestinia­ns but not, for instance, more than 10,000 civilians killed in ethnic strife in just one Sudanese city last year. These deaths are not as visible to us, and these victims are not yet as grievable as they should be.

To point this out is not to lend weight to disingenuo­us, whatabouti­st carping by people like Brown University donor Barry Sternlicht, who asked, “Where were the protests?” for Ukraine, Syria and Iraq. Students should be commended for expanding their — and our — sphere of moral concern. But perhaps their activism should compel us all to keep working to expand that sphere further.