There is but one word to hand over to both the protesting students and those few professors who have rallied to protect them: brave.

The war in Gaza presents critical thinkers with keen and complex dilemmas, many brought to the fore by fierce anti-Israel student protests in New York City and elsewhere.

For those who worship at the tribal altar of alternative information — propelled in part by a plethora of incendiary podcasts and rage-rapt personal posts — all such insurgencies are ploys against Judaism generated by the largest elephant in the largest room, anti-Semitism. Web preachers prefer percussion to nuance. The student protesters are branded neo-Nazis in disguise, precisely what Vladimir Putin said of Ukrainian leaders after launching his invasion. Give young radicals tinder, and they’ll burn down every synagogue in the land.

The reality, at least as I perceive it from a distance, falls well short of iPhone hyperbole. And it comes with a modest degree of experience, since I was a student at Columbia when many of its buildings were occupied by students protesting the intensification of the war in Vietnam in 1972 and 1973.

The protesters at the time were Jews and Gentiles, but conservative media wasted no time labeling the upstart students Communists or anarchists, the latter a leftover from a time when anyone who seemed to support socially progressive views was by nature an anarchist, and very probably a Jew.

The student protesters are branded neo-Nazis in disguise, precisely what Vladimir Putin said of Ukrainian leaders after launching his invasion.

This glib labeling failed to include positions, such as my own, which were less specifically political than moral, if not simply humane. Watching images of giant planes bombing a largely agrarian country in the latter stages of a war all had come to consider unwinnable was simply too much. The choices of American policymakers were at best wrong and at worst morally reprehensible. This did not make the United States a bad country. It did make the undeclared war it had embarked on nearly a decade before 1973 something worth ending. So it was that we at Columbia took to occupying campus structures.

That was then. So, what about now?

First a word on the police. When the scale of the violation is large, and a student occupation invariably is, police reaction can be zealous and ugly, as if strangely mirroring the behavior of those the students oppose. This collision has been little different from those of the past. Police and student protesters are worse than oil and water.

The larger and more pressing question is whether these opponents of the seemingly endless Israeli assault on Gaza are anti-Semites. Some might be, of course, but that does not seem to be the animating instinct of these protests. Instead, as was the case half a century ago, the students seem at war, literally, with injustice, attempting through their actions to demonstrate disdain for the too-muchness of the war.

Few appear to dispute the legitimacy of the war’s origin — payback for a murderous attack and the taking of hostages — but many now believe the Israeli response has turned cruel and opportunistic, using the Hamas attack as the pretext to exterminate that organization at any cost and without regard to those many Palestinians caught in the middle of what has become a ceasefire-less conflagration.

Even among stalwart Jews, the Israeli action produces uncomfortable debate and only conditional justifications. Both Jewish and Arab teachers have openly backed the demonstrators or, more to the point, have backed their right to dissent from the “Establishment” position, which is one of unconditional support for Israel, including its systematic rearming.

This matter of the flow of weapons appears to trump accusations of anti-Semitism. As in December 1972, when students chafed at the sight of flotillas of B-52 bombers parked unchallenged over Hanoi, today some students shout, accurately, that the killing in Gaza is a joint project, since Israel would struggle to keep up its military pace without weapons authorized by Washington.

Like it or not, agree or disagree, there is a David-versus-Goliath side to the protests in which Gaza’s Palestinians have been cast in the role of besieged underdogs (ironically) held hostage by hostage-taking Hamas and thus made witness to their own carnage.

Is there another perspective on this story? Of course. But protests exist to sweep aside that very same other side, the perspective held by some as the legitimate one and focused entirely on Israel’s right to defend itself at any price.

Some opponents of the protests say the students are misguided, that they should instead be directing their wrath against Iran, which has long sponsored Hamas and is a sworn enemy of the United States. The idea is accurate but silly. The matter at hand concerns a war being waged by Israel in a strip of land it asserts as its own but which many others, including displaced residents, see as theirs.

Students shout, accurately, that the killing in Gaza is a joint project, since Israel would struggle to keep up its military pace without weapons authorized by Washington.

Again, seen from a critical distance the protests are cogent, legitimate (that word comes up time and again), and sincere. They represent the troubled voices of young students who, appalled by civilian casualties, find something very wrong with what’s happening in Gaza, just as the established order finds something very wrong with what Putin has wrought in Ukraine.

Are these angry kids Jew-haters?

No. Some opponents of Israeli policies are themselves Jewish. As a whole, most appear to believe absolutely in what they’re doing — so much so, they’re willing to risk arrest and permanent police tainting in this age of authority and security. That’s quite a chance to take.

As important, the protesters are (hurrah!) willing to put down their all-knowing mobile phone appendages and act in a way all can see and hear, both domestically and internationally.

Some nonetheless call the outcry foolish and naïve. Public protest might be cathartic but yields no actual results.

Others say it’s ill-advised, a blight on students, city, college, police. Best to leave dissent where it belongs: online.

Still others insist the students, by now active at a nationwide level, are but tools of those who wish to destroy Israel, Hamas surrogates in the halls of elite academia. The offending students should be identified and summarily expelled, they cry. Their shrill anger leads me to title this essay “For What It’s Worth,” the haunting ballad that would become a protest anthem in the late 1960s.

For my part, I have but one word to hand over to both the protesting students and those few professors who have rallied to protect them: brave.