Great essay Eric, to which I would add two more crucial points. College students aren’t out there protesting Sudan or Syria or Myanmar with the same fervor with which they protest Israel because:

1) they aren’t implicated in those other conflicts, whereas our society (and the universities funded by their tuition) makes Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians possible with its endless blank checks and refusal to hold Israel accountable for using our assistance responsibly; and

2) those other countries aren’t democracies and they don’t claim to share our values, so the protesting students (and most of the rest of us) wouldn’t see the point of appealing to those values, nor any prospect that such appeals would ever work.