Amid fears of violence, pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli demonstrators recently converged on the University of California, Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza. There was good reason to worry. The April 9 rally, organized by the campus group, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), was scheduled as part of a “National Day of Action for Palestinian Rights” to protest the recent Israeli offensive in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and call for University “divestiture” in Israel. Whether by accident or design, the protest also coincided with both Holocaust Remembrance Day and the annual Palestinian commemoration of the 1948 “Deir Yassin Massacre,” an event in which more than 100 Palestinian civilians were killed by Zionist irregulars.

Tensions on campus ran high in the days leading up to the protest. Angered by the SJP’s refusal to change the date of the rally, members of the Israel Action Committee, a pro-Israeli student group, promised to turn out for it in force. UC-Berkeley Chancellor Robert Berdahl, meanwhile, hastily organized a news conference in which he urged “civil debate and reasoned discourse” and promised to punish anyone found to have engaged in acts of vandalism or violence.

Berdahl deserves credit for his timely intervention: The protest, though ugly, never degenerated into violence. Flanked by a ring of uniformed police officers, pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian demonstrators waved the flags of their respective camps while chanting slogans and trading slurs. 500 Palestinian supporters then occupied Wheeler Hall, a central campus building, where they disrupted classes until eventually expelled by the UC police. By day’s end, 79 protesters had been arrested. Except for a protester who had bitten a police officer, all those arrested were released after being issued citations for trespassing.

For once, however, the University is not stopping with a slap on the wrist. In retaliation for their disruptive takeover of Wheeler Hall, administration officials last week announced that they would no longer recognize Students for Justice in Palestine as an authorized student group. There has also been talk of possible suspension for students arrested during the Wheeler takeover. In both of these moves, the University is setting a much needed example: though students are entitled to express their opinion on campus, college administrators must draw the line (but rarely do) at disruptive and threatening behavior.

Most students seem to be in favor of the administration’s crackdown on the SJP. As to the protest itself, responses were varied. Many in the UC administration, relieved that the predicted violence never materialized, called the protest a “success.” Most students were more partisan in their assessments. Pro-Palestinian demonstrators, delighted to find themselves in the spotlight of national media coverage, promised further protests until the UC divested itself of its holdings in Israeli-owned companies. Pro-Israeli groups, meanwhile, decried their opponents’ tactics and warned of the growing anti-Semitism of the campus left.

Ronald Radosh, writing for FrontPageMagazine.com, took a similar line. According to Radosh, the pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Berkeley and other campuses belong to “a new and dangerous student anti-war movement, one that seeks to confuse its audience by the rhetoric of peace and human rights, while in fact seeking to organize a new anti-capitalist and anti-Israel campus activism. It is truly a coalition of the leftover Left — a group seeking anxiously to create a new umbrella cause that they hope can be for their generation what Vietnam was for that of their parents.”

Radosh is right to link the recent pro-Palestinian demonstrations with the anti-war movement that emerged in the aftermath of Sept. 11. Since early last fall, the new anti-war movement has opportunistically sought to enter into coalition with any group that will have it. Those who participate in the movement — an improbable collection of globalization opponents, minority-identity groups and superannuated hippies — often have little more in common than a shared enemy: U.S. policy, domestic and foreign, everywhere and always. Students for Justice in Palestine participate in this movement and their strong showing in Berkeley on April 9 was in no small part due to the help of their anti-war allies.

For Radosh and those who think like him, it is a question of guilt by association: Since Students for Justice in Palestine and similar groups are wrong about Sept. 11, they must also be wrong about Israel. But there is a problem with this view. Opposition to retaliation for Sept. 11 — the basic premise of the anti-war movement — is one thing. Opposition to Israeli policy in the territories of the Palestinian Authority — the basic premise of the pro-Palestinian movement — is something else altogether. By conflating the two, both Radosh and those he criticizes in the anti-war movement have succumbed to the mirage of solidarity, the crude political instinct that counts as a friend whoever is my enemy’s enemy.

What is lacking here — and was lacking at the protests — is any notion of specifically American interests. This isn’t to say that you can’t build an argument that the U.S. should tilt one way or another in the Middle East. (Most conservatives favor Israel, though some feel otherwise.) But any such argument should be based on a calm assessment of our country’s legitimate interests. What worries me is how seldom that’s happening. Instead, much of our debate on the issue resembles Berkeley, characterized by the sort of passionate, often-vehement partisanship that we see (in more extreme form) in the Middle East itself.

As the founding fathers well understood, the peace and prosperity of our nation depends upon creating and fostering a national idea, one that would distinguish us as Americans and provide us with a criterion for negotiating foreign policy. In his 1801 inaugural address, Thomas Jefferson famously remarked that the United States should follow a policy of "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations — entangling alliances with none.” George Washington made a similar point, urging that the U.S. should “act for ourselves and not for others” and that, to do so, we must have an “American character wholly free of foreign attachments.”

The founders' concern reached beyond foreign policy; they wanted to ensure that Americans thought of themselves as Americans. They knew that to identify closely and personally with a people engaged in longstanding bloodshed was to risk importing the same sort of anomosity into our own country.

The idea that Americans should put their legitimate interests as Americans first — indeed, the idea that there is any such thing as a specifically American interest — has become a rarity, especially on our campuses. One reason for this has to do with the idea of diversity. For years now, we have been told that diversity — in our society, our schools, our culture — is a good and necessary thing. But the idea behind the current concept of diversity, the idea that ethnic and cultural difference of whatever sort is a good in itself, has come at a cost. As ever-larger numbers of Americans come to identify with their tribal, racial or ethnic origins, the idea that all of us, as Americans, have something greater in common fades from view.

The results are sure to be disastrous. Now that we have given up on the American idea, it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between our national interests and those of the various identity groups who are constantly exerting pressure on our government to side with them and against their enemies in this or that corner of the world. Domestic policy is becoming foreign policy. As this happens, those with the greatest voice in Washington are increasingly those who can shout loudest.

In this respect, the April 9 protests at Berkeley and other campuses across the nation presented, in miniature, a disturbing portrait of our own nation’s potential future. On the one hand were the pro-Palestinian groups, who claim innocent-victim status and demand international action in their favor. On the other hand were the pro-Israeli groups, who represent the Palestinian movement as little more than dressed-up terrorism and demand that the Israeli conflict with the Palestinian Authority be recognized as an extension of the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

Between the two, there was no middle ground, no nuance, and no compromise. There were many flags on Sproul Plaza two weeks ago; none of them were American.