She backed Israel; her son led a protest. Could they withstand war?

She backed Israel; her son led a protest. Could they withstand war?

One Tuesday night last fall, Emily Strong’s teenage son called and said he planned to be arrested the next day.

Emily’s head spun. Eric had never been in trouble. He was the oldest of her three children, a gentle boy with deep empathy for others. He’d gone on mission trips with their church, and he’d earned straight A’s his first semester at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

“Back up,” Emily told him. “What’s going on?”

Eric told his mother he had rallied in support of Palestinians a week earlier, and now, he and several hundred other students planned to stage a sit-in at the university. He’d followed the conflict since he was in high school, and he’d watched online in recent years as some Palestinians lived in Gaza as refugees with limited food or work.

“I’m furious,” Eric said. “I can’t stand what’s going on, and I feel a need to do this.”

Emily told herself not to freak out. She had followed the conflict, too — albeit the way many upper-middle-class suburban moms with three children, a job and ailing parents do. She skimmed the news. But she came away from those reports with a different reaction than her son. She’d been horrified when Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, and she’d felt proud of President Biden’s promise to protect the Jewish state.

Around 1,200 Israelis had died in the attack, Emily reminded her son.

“People are grieving,” she said. “This is such a horrible, traumatic thing that happened. Are you acknowledging their pain?”

Student Eric Strong on campus on May 3, 2024, in Amherst.

The protests that would eventually spread to campuses in nearly half of U.S. states had yet to become a well-known movement, but Emily lives near Boston, and she’d read about pro-Palestinian protests at Harvard University. She knew some people found the demonstrations antisemitic, and she worried her own Jewish friends would think her son was antisemitic, too. Her church had always had strong ties to a local temple. The rabbi came every other year to speak, and she and Eric had gone to the temple, too.

“Mom,” he told her. “There are Jewish kids in this protest with me.”

Emily, 49, worried he’d get hurt. She feared he’d ruin his job prospects. She wanted to talk him out of it, but he was 19 and old enough, she supposed, to make his own decisions.

She told him she loved him. He promised to update her throughout the day. They hung up, and Emily felt so uncomfortable, she didn’t sleep at all.

***

Eric first learned about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict four years ago, when he was a sophomore at Andover High School. That year, he took an elective called The Modern Middle East, and in it, he read articles that the Palestinian-American Edward Said wrote about Jerusalem.

“I thought people being displaced from their homes was awful,” Eric said. “From then on, I broadly aligned myself as pro-Palestinian.”

Still, he didn’t do much with those feelings. He was a teenage boy, and he spent much of his time watching sports or playing video games. He monitored news of the conflict on Twitter, and once, in May 2021, as violence erupted over the pending eviction of several Arab families from East Jerusalem, he posted a pro-Palestinian article on his Instagram story.

“I thought I was woke at the time,” he said. “I cared about it, but I didn’t have a way to get super involved.”

Eric became more politically active after he enrolled at UMass-Amherst in 2022. He signed up for classes on American imperialism, and in the spring of 2023, after some students were unable to secure on-campus housing, he and others set up tents on the school lawn to protest.

When Hamas-led forces stormed Israel’s barrier fence and rampaged 20 residential communities on Oct. 7, Eric didn’t feel surprised. He didn’t support the attack, but he’d learned in classes that oppressed people around the globe have historically used violence to resist occupation. That was, at its core, how he saw the Israeli-Palestinian dynamic.

The attack was the deadliest aggression against Jews since the Holocaust. More than 250 Israelis were dragged into Gaza as hostages, according to Israeli officials. Two days later, Israeli officials declared a complete siege of Gaza.

UMass students march across campus following a walkout and a rally.

Later that week, roughly 300 UMass students gathered in front of the Student Union to support Palestinians. Eric joined them. The students marched and chanted, and they demanded the chancellor release a statement “in solidarity with Palestinians.” They also asked the school to cut ties with the defense contractor Raytheon Technologies, which produces missile components for Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system. (As a partner to a number of university programs, Raytheon recruits UMass students for jobs and funds research opportunities.)

UMass-Amherst has a long history of protest. Until recently, the college even included the phrase “be revolutionary” in its marketing materials. In 1986, 60 people were arrested after former president Jimmy Carter’s daughter led a protest there against the CIA. Another two dozen went to jail in 2016 after they protested the university’s investment in fossil fuels. That demonstration was successful: A month later, the university’s foundation unanimously decided to divest the school’s endowment from fossil fuel holdings.

But little happened after the pro-Palestinian rally last October. The school didn’t cut ties with Raytheon, and the chancellor didn’t side with Palestinians. Eric and the other students decided they needed to do what Jimmy Carter’s daughter had. They would take over a building.

They settled on the Whitmore Administration Building, a three-story structure where the chancellor and other high-level employees have offices. Legally, students are allowed to protest in Whitmore when it’s open, and campus officials say hardly a week goes by without someone marching down the halls in favor of one cause or another. But those protests don’t make the news, and they often don’t end in meetings with the chancellor, so Eric and others decided they would stay even after the offices closed at 5.

Campus officials consider after-hours sit-ins to be trespassing, so the night before the protest, Eric called to give his mother a heads-up. He didn’t want to surprise her with a late-night call from jail, but more than anything, he hoped she might give him her blessing. She was his hero. He wanted her to tell him he was doing the right thing.

On the call, Eric reminded his mom that she had taught him to fight for social justice. She’d taken him to Washington, D.C., when he was 8 to protest the Keystone Pipeline. Two years later, they’d gone to New York City to participate in the People’s Climate March.

Emily Strong at her community garden on May 3, 2024, in North Andover, Mass.

But those weren’t the same, Emily thought. She’d taken him to sanctioned marches — permitted events where people sang and went home after. Most Americans believe Israel has valid reasons for fighting Hamas, and Emily had heard that people doxed and rescinded job offers from the Harvard students who protested. She worried Eric was taking a big irrevocable step that might follow him the rest of his life.

“This could affect your future,” she told her son.

Eric paused. She was right, he thought. A controversial arrest could hamper his job prospects.

“But Mom,” he said. “I don’t think I want to work anywhere that won’t hire me because I protested for Palestine when I was 19. I don’t want to live a life where I have to sacrifice my moral convictions to get by.”

As she tossed around that night, Emily thought of her Jewish friends and her son’s future, and somewhere between dusk and dawn, she considered her own convictions. She had felt profound empathy for Jewish people since her parents took her to visit the Dachau concentration camp when she was 13. As far as she understood it, Jewish people created Israel after the Holocaust because they needed a place to be safe from persecution. They deserved that, she thought. But what did she know about Palestinians?

***

Emily runs a small farm an hour and a half from Amherst, and late October can be a crucial time. She had to harvest peppers and squash, then plant garlic before the first frost hit. But she felt anxious as she worked the half-acre. She kept checking her phone. Eric hadn’t texted. By the end of the workday, she was a mess.

Soon after 6 p.m., Eric told her the police had arrived. Emily’s heart beat faster. What if someone provoked the officers? What if Eric got hurt? She walked aimless loops around the house, but she didn’t want Eric to worry about her feelings, so she thanked him for texting and asked him to be respectful of the police.

“Everyone is being very cool,” he wrote. “Just playing music and talking.”

Officers arrested a group of women and trans people first. Hours passed, and Eric remained in the building. Later, both Eric and Emily would say parts of the sit-in reminded them of his church youth group days. The protesters ate pizza and played the game Mafia. Eric used his cellphone to watch the Boston Celtics beat the New York Knicks.

A member of the University of Massachusetts Police Department asks a protester to stand up and walk with him out of the building.

Shortly after 11 p.m., Eric texted Emily to say the police had told the protesters who remained that they wouldn’t arrest them if they left the building now.

Okay, Emily thought, he’d made his point. She hadn’t told him how nervous she was or how badly she didn’t want him to be arrested, but now, she sensed an opportunity. Local news outlets had written about the protests early that evening. He’d done what he set out to do, and now he could leave without hurting his future.

“I’m not sure getting arrested will bring any more publicity,” she told him.

“We’re not leaving till they meet our demands,” he said.

***

Everything inside Emily felt shaken up, but she told Eric she loved him, then somehow, she went to sleep. The next morning, she read in the Boston Globe that 57 people had been arrested. She hadn’t heard from Eric.

“Good morning,” she texted him. “Please send an update when you can.”

Hours went by. She was at work, leading a group of volunteers around the farm, but she could barely focus. She checked her phone every chance she could, and finally, a little before noon, Eric responded.

Police zip-tied his wrists behind his back, then escorted him out of the building a little after midnight, he told her. The jail clerk had gone home for the day, so he spent the night in a cell with eight other protesters. He went back to his dorm around 6 a.m.

“I just woke up rn,” he texted.

Emily was relieved. In that moment, she had no energy to weigh the consequences of Eric’s arrest. He was safe. That was all that mattered.

Eric was groggy that day, so they didn’t talk much about Israel or the Palestinian territories, but in the days that followed, Emily tried to learn. She listened to Ezra Klein podcasts, and she read in full articles she once might have skimmed or ignored.

A week later, in early November, Eric called while Emily was moving compost at the farm. She told him she disagreed with Hamas, and she wanted Eric to condemn them, too. They were a terrorist group, she told him. They wanted to remove the state of Israel. That was awful, unequivocally wrong, and she didn’t support it.

Eric assured her he didn’t support Hamas. As a Christian, he could not in good conscience say Oct. 7 was a good thing. It was wrong to kill innocent civilians. But ultimately, he told his mother, his opinion on the group itself was irrelevant. Israel, he felt, had been problematic since its inception. He and his friends wanted a place where Jews and Palestinians could live in harmony, but he didn’t believe that place was Israel.

From his point of view, Israel had long been to blame for the conflict. He empathized with Palestinians displaced by the war that broke out in 1948 after Israel declared independence. And he was frustrated by what he saw as a series of assaults against the Palestinian people. Palestinians had tried a largely peaceful protest in 2018, he told his mom, and Israelis responded with what many considered excessive force and violence.

Eric Strong listens during a teach-in on campus on May 3, 2024, in Amherst.

To drive home his point, he mentioned a talk he’d seen on campus earlier that week. The controversial historian Norman Finkelstein had compared Hamas’s actions to the revolts that the enslaved preacher Nat Turner led in 1831. That insurrection left roughly 60 White people dead. Afterward, Finkelstein explained, some abolitionists refused to condone or condemn the violent uprising.

“The root of this violence is the subjugation,” Eric told his mother. “My view is, like, if you want to stop the conflict in Gaza, stop the Israeli occupation. Give the Palestinian people self-determination because ultimately it’s their decision to make, not ours.”

Emily and Eric talked for two hours, and eventually, she sat in the middle of the orchard, exhausted. She felt such dissonance. She’d always held strong convictions — it was one of the things her husband most loved about her — but now she doubted them.

***

That winter, Eric took a plea deal that lowered his charges to a civil penalty, and administrators punished him with a warning. He had planned to apply to study abroad in China, but because of the sanction, he no longer could. In the spring, as protests cropped up at Columbia University and other schools, he applied for off-campus housing and found that some landlords wouldn’t rent to him because of his sanction.

Emily continued to try to learn. She read articles about the other protests happening across the country, and she felt sick when she spotted antisemitic signs in some crowds. And she didn’t agree with her son about the state of Israel. The only reasonable and equitable path toward peace, she thought, was a two-state solution.

Still, she felt proud of his calls for a cease-fire. She watched footage from Gaza, and she no longer felt unwavering pride for Biden’s response. Increasingly, she believed Eric and the students were right: The U.S. needed to stop sending weapons to Israel.

As the number of protests nationwide more than doubled, Emily found herself feeling grateful to the young people, but then, in late April, Eric called to say he planned to protest again.

Members of law enforcement form a line on May 8, 2024, on the University of Massachusetts campus in Amherst.

This time, Emily and her husband, David, felt more afraid. Protests in other states had turned violent, and they worried someone might attack Eric. In April, the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights opened an investigation into UMass after 18 students complained that they’d been harassed and assaulted after the October protests. (In a statement, university officials said they condemn hatred of all forms and are cooperating with federal officials.)

Eric sounded exhausted but excited when he called. The protest was a spinoff of the housing rally he’d done a year earlier. Students would set up tents on the lawn, and they’d host a variety of events — everything from a professor-led teach-in to an on-site library for people who wanted to learn more. University officials had allowed the housing protest with tents the year before, and he didn’t expect to face penalties this time.

After the call, Emily and David went to Town Meeting, an Andover event where voters cram into the high school to debate, make motions and approve the local budget. The meeting turned a bit angry, so Emily pulled out her phone to distract herself. Two Facebook posts alarmed her. One parent had posted about the protests, and another had responded, “arrest them all.” Another parent shared an email the chancellor had sent. The students who planned to protest didn’t have permission to set up tents, he wrote. If they didn’t take them down, the university would have them arrested.

Emily closed her phone. Eric was still on probation. If police arrested him again, he could spend up to 90 days in jail, and the university might expel him.

By then, more than 34,000 Palestinians had died, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, and 2,000 students had been arrested for protesting on American campuses. Emily started to feel angry in a new way. Every article she read seemed to treat the demonstrations as a problem. But the students weren’t the problem, she thought. War was the problem.

Still, she felt nauseated as Eric rallied every day and night for a week. One night, officers arrested more than 130 people, and Emily spent hours unsure if her son was among them.

Finally, late the next morning, he called to say he’d gone home before midnight on his own volition. He didn’t want to be arrested again, he assured her. One night in a cell felt long enough, and he had no interest in spending another three months inside one. Plus, he didn’t want to be expelled.

Emily Strong in her son Eric’s room at her home on May 3, 2024.

She was relieved. There was so much they still didn’t agree on, but they listened to each other, and they talked more than they ever had. What the country needed, she thought, was a national conversation similar to the one she and Eric had been having, one with space to acknowledge the pain and historic suffering both Israelis and Palestinians had endured.

One night in early May, while Eric protested outside Amherst, Emily wrote an email to her congressman. Her son had shaken her awake, she explained.

“I believe universities have a responsibility to act as a bridge between the students and a complacent and uninformed public (myself included),” she wrote. “We should be calling for universities to help us in this national dialogue, not calling in the police.”

She ran the email by Eric, and she suspected he might be disappointed that her note was far blander than one he might have written. But that was okay, she thought. They were allowed to disagree.