Podcast: Gaza Protests and North Carolina

The main quad at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is normally a place of academic repose, but in the spring, it was a political battleground.

Dozens of students protesting Israel’s military campaign in Gaza set up tents, demanding that the school divest itself of companies tied to the war. Officials cleared the quad. The demonstrators took down the Stars and Stripes and put up the Palestinian flag. Administrators put the American flag back, and a standoff ensued. As news of the standoff reverberated beyond campus, so too might its political impacts.

I traveled to North Carolina for the latest installment of The Wall Street Journal’s “Chasing the Vote” podcast series. Click here to get to the episode online, or find it in the “What’s News” feed wherever you get your podcasts. You can also check out this photo essay from the trip that I made with Cam Pollack, assembling images from Cornell Watson.

Some highly engaged students, including those who joined the protests, said they are unhappy with both former President Donald Trump’s and Vice President Kamala Harris’s positions on the conflict in Gaza. Israeli forces have bombed and invaded the area after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel that left about 1,200 people dead—most of them civilians—and around 250 taken hostage. More than 41,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the war began, according to health authorities there. They don’t say how many were combatants.

Logan Kaelin, a 21-year-old senior from Raleigh, N.C., joined the protest because of that loss of life. He said he disagrees with Harris’s part in the Biden administration’s support for aid and weapons sales to Israel, even as it works toward a cease-fire and seeks the return of the hostages.

“I think two things can be true. I think that I can recognize that the Biden-Harris administration's stance on Israel is not something that I support… and also recognize that there's a vast number of other things that are also impacting my vote in this election that there is a major difference on,” Kaelin said.

Despite the fever pitch of protests at Chapel Hill and other campuses this past spring, I found many students are now focused on other issues when they think about the presidential election. But there are some single-issue voters who previously backed Democrats and said it’s worth punishing the party over its policies.

“If Donald Trump is elected, we understand that there's a chance that we are going to be blamed, and we're very comfortable with that at this point,” said Pooyan Ordoubadi, a lawyer who represented some of the UNC protesters and co-chairs the Abandon Harris campaign in North Carolina.

TRIP NOTES: I was in North Carolina during the last days of September, and flew out just as the floodwaters of Hurricane Helene were devastating communities in the western part of the state. So, we weren’t able to roam as much as on other trips.

++ The UNC Chapel Hill campus is quite beautiful, and it dominates its home community.

++ We got fantastic barbecue at The Smoke Pit in Concord.

THE QUESTION: What is the nickname of UNC’s college sports teams? (An easy one, I know.)

Know the answer? Drop me a line at jimmy.vielkind@gmail.com. Or just write with thoughts, feedback or to say hi.

THE LAST ANSWER: Hurricane Andrew in 1992 prompted Florida officials to update many building codes.