The biggest thing to be concerned about in all these student protests is not the students, but the severity and strength with which the police are entering the fray. A police officer fired a gun on the Columbia campus. Tear gas is being used on multiple campuses. In multiple cases (including Indiana and UVA), universities have pre-empted the fact that these protests were legal and within the rules by changing the rules in response to the protests in order to render them illegal without notice.

The outrage over protests is a useful way for the news cycle to evolve, in a way, because the story has become about the protests about the killing rather than the killing itself. But while this outrage has been playing out, the death toll in Gaza has risen to 34,500 people and Netanyahu has threatened to invade Rafah whether there’s a deal or not. It’s a bloody, horrific situation for ordinary people in Gaza — who have been in wretched conditions at the hands of political machinations for generations now — to be in. The outlook doesn’t look good for them.

It seems logical that Americans would be upset that their money is being used to fund this killing, and to fund the annexation of Gaza. None of this is about support for Hamas; it’s about support for the human beings and respect for the sanctity of human life.

There are small numbers of instigators at the fringes, as there are at every protest. There are right-wing counter-protesters, as there are for every progressive protest movement. But this looks like an anti-war moment to me: one that values peace, dignity, and human life. While there’s certainly a huge amount of diplomatic complexity behind the underlying situation, the military activity in Gaza recently is less complicated. There’s no umm-ing and ahh-ing needed with respect to the idea that the mass slaughter of human beings is wrong. It just is. I support the protesters whole-heartedly.