On May 4, 1970, around 300 students at Kent State University in Ohio staged a protest against the presence of the National Guard on the campus during an ongoing demonstration against the Vietnam War and its extension into Cambodia. Guard members shot dead four of the protesters and wounded nine others.

Fifty-four years later, Mike Johnson, the Republican Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, visited Columbia University in New York in the midst of another student protest, against another war, Israel’s ongoing bloody military assault on Gaza. Johnson’s solution: call out the National Guard, he urged President Joe Biden.

Though Johnson was born two years after the Kent State tragedy, he ignored its lesson. “If this is not contained quickly and if these threats and intimidation are not stopped, there is an appropriate time for the National Guard,” Johnson said after his visit.

The White House responded that the governor must make that decision. New York’s Kathy Hochul earlier chided the Speaker for “politicizing” the protest and “adding to the division.” She told reporters, “A Speaker worth the title should be trying to heal people and not divide them, so I don’t think it adds to anything.”

By Monday, Republican Senators Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Josh Hawley of Missouri were demanding that the President deploy the Guard to Columbia University. Hawley, in a social media post, likened the protests to the racist demonstrations against school integration in Little Rock, noting that President Dwight Eishenhower had sent the Guard to the Arkansas city, Rolling Stone noted.

The Kent State protest was sparked by President Richard Nixon and other officials’ ignoring the demand to end what was perceived to be an unjust war. So, too, with the protest against Israel’s ongoing assault on the Gaza Strip, the 140.9-square-mile territory that is home to more than two million Palestinians. Biden has pledged total support for Israel that includes a substantially expanded flow of weapons, aided by the Congress, and continuing a decades-long U.S. diplomatic cover.

By now, the cause of the war should be well known. Hamas, an armed Palestinian group based in Gaza, staged a surprise raid into Israel on October 7, killed more than 1,200 people and seized around 200 hostages. That attack drew understandable condemnation worldwide and Israel faced little criticism for launching a military response. But the brutality of the offensive, especially as it has worsened over the months, along with a total blockade, including of food and medicine, has turned understanding into outrage.

More than 35,000 Palestinians have been killed, most of them women and including 15,000 children, according to the Gaza health ministry. Most of the buildings, including hospitals, schools and homes, has been destroyed, Gaza is in ruins and bleeding but still Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has promised even more assaults in his campaign to destroy Hamas.

Aid workers, including seven members of World Central Kitchen, were killed by Israeli drones. Starving Palestinians have been shot while scrambling for food aid. Mass graves have been discovered at hospitals that included more than 300 bodies at the Nasser Medical Complex and more at the al-Shifa Hospital. The United Nations human rights office reported that the hands of some of the bodies found at al-Nasser were tied.

The United Nations Security Council’s effort to order a ceasefire has been blocked by the United States and no country has intervened to force Israel to halt what has turned into a slaughter of civilians.

That is the background to the widening student protests on at least 20 campuses in states as varied as California and New York, Florida and Texas. University officials have been responding with tactics that include calling in the police, who have fired rubber bullets and teargas at some protesters and arrested hundreds of them, to closing campuses and strict new guidelines for student behavior.

The University of Florida (UF), now headed by former Republican Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska, issued new rules that include a ban on using bullhorns, protesting in campus buildings, littering, camping or using tents, sleeping bags or pillows, sleeping on campus and blocking anyone’s path, The Fresh Take Florida news site reported.

Gov. Ron DeSantis called for expulsion of protesters and revoking visas of international students who join them. State Rep. Randy Fine of Palm Bay, the only Jewish member of the Florida House, writing on social media, dubbed the demonstrations “Muslim terror campus takeovers” and said UF’s counter-demonstration plan provides “severe consequences for those Muslim terror supporters who refuse to comply.”

But there is still some sanity. At the University of Central Florida in Orlando, under its president, Alexander N. Cartwright, a researcher and scholar and first-generation college student, protesters were escorted by police officers — on bicycles, the Orlando Sentinel reported.

The anti-Vietnam War protesters were dubbed traitors and communists. Today’s demonstrators are labeled anti-Semitic — even though many of them are Jews — by those who conflate criticism of Israel, the state, with being anti-Jews, thus invoking the horror of the Holocaust. However, a faculty survey of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences found that a majority of respondents do not believe that antiSemitism is rampant on their campus, the Harvard Crimson student newspaper reported.

The demonstrators are demanding that Israel end the war, that universities divest from companies that are profiting from financing its war machine, that they become transparent in how they spend endowments and other funds and that a Palestinian state be established. They are risking the wrath of university officialdom and of potential employers to represent people in a distant land in a movement they say is informed by the experience of past protests and driven by technology.

Those demonstrations, as Al Jazeera has noted, also took on the causes of distant peoples – the Vietnamese, Africans under the heels of apartheid in South Africa; Arabs in the Gulf War in 1991 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Those protests “provided a background against which the pro-Israeli demonstrations are taking place,” The Washington Post reported. Students, especially at Yale University in Connecticut, carefully studied them and today’s confrontation with power is, according to The Post, “the culmination of months of activism and earlier tensions on campus.” It started with the divestment call and “steadily escalated throughout the spring as students employed increasingly aggressive tactics after saying they got little or no response from administrators.”

The Independent, a British online newspaper, also pointed to careful planning that resulted in the first protest tent being pitched at Columbia. The demonstrations “have galvanized a generation of college students much in the same way the Vietnam War did 56 years ago – spreading from coast to coast,” The Independent reported. “It is not just the scale of the protests that have drawn comparisons but the tactics. That is no accident. The protesters say they studied that generation-defining movement, methodically, before launching their own.”

Students confirmed that a lot of planning and networking did take place. Majd, a Columbia undergraduate who asked to be identified only by first name, told The Independent, “We were only able to do this because the student organizers went into the archives of ’68 and learned from what the older generation wrote about their experiences. A lot of organizers spent time and looked at how they did everything. We completely built on their legacy.”

Added Ava Lyon-Sereno, also a Columbia student, “Even the idea of a solidarity camp at Columbia was based on the 1968 anti-Vietnam War protests. It really feels like we’re continuing a tradition.” She added, “You know, when I wake up in the morning and see a video of a parent carrying bits of their child in a plastic bag, that should not be normal, that should not be acceptable.”

Ariela Rosenzweig, a senior at Brown University in Rhode Island, told The Post, “We all have our phones, and we all know each other. We have friends at other schools and the youth of our country feels … our institutions, whether they be our government or our universities, cannot be complicit with occupation, apartheid and genocide.”

Another generation of young people has become the conscience of America.