The campus is coming for Joe Biden

A connoisseur of radical chic can find plenty to catalogue these days while observing pro-Palestine protests on Ivy League campuses: the black or red keffiyehs, the conga drums, the folk songs, the kitschy signs (“Dykes 4 Divestment”) and the showy Arabic pronunciations of “Gaza”, so reminiscent of the Spanish-ish inflection given to “Nicaragua” by pro-Sandinista activists back in the 1980s.

And then there are the dainty intersectional gestures of the protesters: “We recognise our role as visitors and, for many of us, colonisers, on this land,” reads the third of nine “community guidelines” scrawled on a whiteboard in the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment”, the bivouac of domed tents on Columbia University’s south lawn. Not only was the land once inhabited by native Americans, but Columbia was guilty of “complicity in the displacement of the Black and Brown Harlem community”.