I can't say that I really followed all the campus protests in great detail, so I am sure I am weak on the facts on the ground, but then who isn't?
Clarity is the thing we lose very quickly in the social media age. There are videos that circulate instantly, with little context and with no good way to confirm their veracity, which quickly become fertilizer for one position or the other. Someone got poked in the eye with a flag somewhere. If there is anything that sounds more like an accident, I don't know what it would be. But then this anecdote immediately turned into "proof" that pro-Palestinian protestors are violent. Were they really? How did that incident play out in real life? No word on that, and you won't find out. All you'll get is how the fish that the guy caught gets larger on every retelling.
There was a video circulating about some pro-Israel person being "beaten unconscious" by pro-Palestinian protestors at UCLA. There is a video. Did it really happen? Yeah, I'm sure something happened, was it the way it was depicted? Not everyone can record everything happening at every corner. It is equally likely the whole thing was staged. There were also claims that some pro-Palestinian protestors yelled "kill the Jews". Well I saw a video taking place at some east coast college campus where pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian protestors are literally ribbing on each other, maybe heated, but not ill-intentioned, and one of the pro-Israeli protestors sarcastically says "Kill the Jews" in passing. Was that the incident that quickly turned into pro-Palestinian protestors screaming "Kill the Jew"? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Who knows. "From the river to the sea" Is it about Palestinian liberation or is it about killing Jews? It's taken as both. Maybe it is either and both, depending on who's hearing it.
This is where I part ways with today's youth and the students who I believe are acting with all the right intentions, with their hearts in the right place, and I hate to be the old guy telling the youngs this, but ... these students are somehow still working inside the 20th century paradigm of protest. The sit-ins, encampments, marches were all effective tools when the flow of information was much more disciplined and you could count on teh fact that it would be handled by professionals who may have been biased, but at least tried to keep to some journalistic standard. That is not how information flows these days. You have no control over how your movement will come across, or any guarantees that the counter-narrative on your movement will not be better funded, better organized, and will gather more social media views. There is a professional class out there who have mastered all the intricacies of online emotional manipulation and story-telling who can turn anything into its opposite without breaking a sweat. You step into this arena, you will lose every time.
So guess what happened at the end? The issue of 34.000+ dead civilians in Gaza, the starvation, the methodical demolition of cities, schools, universities taking place in real time over there were all pushed to the background in favor of stories that villified you as what is really wrong with the world right now. That's right, kids. You gave the American public a chance to look away from the horror going on over there in Gaza and focus on the here and now, and make you the face of the problem. That is how you lose the battle. You may not be old enough to realize how significant it is that an average American was beginning to think that Palestinians were perhaps also human beings after all, and now, because you offered yourself up as the next bad guys, they will go straight back to shrugging off starving children. Because "any caused supported by no-good stinking students who don't even have a job and want my tax dollars to pay off their student loans is worth fighting against."
I don't know what would have been a better form of protest. My guess is that it would have been one that kept the human misery in Gaza the center of attention, not your reaction to that. If you keep playing the 20th century game in 2020s, you will lose every time (also note how Occupy Wall Street pissed away a favorable zeitgeist about 15 years ago). It's time to learn lessons from these incidents and get creative about how you bring about the change you seek. The whole world is relying on that.
Soapbox mode off.