“We Don’t Want to Trade in the Blood of Palestinians”: Voices of Students & Profs at Columbia Protest
Nearly 300 peaceful protesters were arrested over the weekend as student-led Gaza solidarity encampments across U.S. university and college campuses face an intensifying crackdown. Democracy Now! spoke with Columbia University professors and students Monday as they were threatened with suspension but voted to continue the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, which began almost two weeks ago. “Hundreds of our students have been disciplined in the past six months on unfair premises,” said Sueda Polat, a Columbia student organizer who is studying human rights. “We are willing to put a lot on the line for this cause. My right to education shouldn’t come before the right to education of Gazans.”
Campus Protests: The Kids May Not Be Alright, But They Are (Mostly) Right
I’m too young to remember the campus convulsions of the 1960s, but older friends who were there tell me that the growing campus protest movement against US support for Israel’s war in Palestine bears a striking resemblance to those days.
I happen to support that movement’s goals, at least to the extent of wanting to see the US government butt out of other people’s arguments.
I’m told by some “pro-Israel” friends that the student protesters are all “anti-semites” and “supporters of Hamas,” and that if I support them I must also hate a particular ethnic group and support terrorism as a tactic.
But I don’t hate any ethnic groups, nor do I support Hamas any more than I support the Israeli Defense Forces.
I don’t doubt that SOME of the student protesters fall into the “hater” category, simply because the protests are a convenient bandwagon for “haters” to ride on. The next large political event I attend that doesn’t have a least a few weirdos hanging around, trying to grab a little unearned credibility by association, will be the first.
I just want a government that claims it works for me to stop handing out weapons and cash to other governments. Especially, though not only, to crybully regimes that constantly play the victim while also occupying territory outside their borders for decades on end, imposing apartheid regimes on the inhabitants of those occupied territories, murdering anyone who resists (along with many who don’t), etc.
To the extent that the kids on campus are seeking the same thing, they’re doing God’s work and have my full support.
Heck, I may even make myself a sign, see if I can find my old gas mask (just in case), and go hang out at the university campus nearest me this weekend if I’m feeling nostalgic (I’ve attended protests on and off for about 40 years, but not lately).
I consider the protests a positive sign to the extent that campus movements tend to be bellwethers.
The protests against the US war in Vietnam didn’t end the war, but they did presage wider popular opposition to the war, and 15 years or so of a general “well, let’s not do THAT again” temperament in America after it ended.
The campus movement to end US support for apartheid South Africa was also broadly successful and contributed to the fall of that vile regime.
Whatever your opinion of the Black Lives Matter movement, those protests (on and off campus) put cops on notice that they might finally be held accountable when they murder citizens.
These protests are probably the beginning of the end for a US foreign policy offering unconditional support to Israel. That’s a good thing.
Letters of Protest: Colleges Suppress Dissent While Closing Their Eyes to Genocide
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
As Israel began its genocide in Gaza, those who manage U.S. colleges and universities also commenced to issue statements of outrage at what Hamas had done. And as campus protests erupted in condemnation of the slaughter of Gazans, and especially children, and the destruction of homes and every major institution, including hospitals, these same institutions of higher learning began to disrupt these protests and bring them to an end. As a former college teacher, one who witnessed the attacks on those who protested against the War in Vietnam and who studied the repression on campuses during the McCarthy period, I became so appalled at what was being done to our brave and courageous college students that I began to write letters to the leaders of what are, in reality, academic enterprises.
University of Pittsburgh
Immediately after the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas and other Palestinian groups, on October 10, the chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh, Joan Gabel, sent a message to the Pitt “community” decrying Hamas’s violence and offering University services to students traumatized by this. She wrote:
“Another wave of darkness has emerged in the violence taking place in Israel and Gaza. These heinous acts are antithetical to our values. We are compassionate. We are givers and doers. As such, we recognize the deep impact of these events across our community. Many of us are struggling with what we have seen, including members of our university family who face the unimaginable burden of grief for fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, brothers and sisters, friends, and loved ones. For those hurting — for those grieving — we have resources available including Pitt Global, the University Counseling Center for students, and LifeSolutions for faculty and staff. We encourage all students, faculty and staff to use them. As more resources become available, we will share them.
Given her wording, she was almost certainly addressing mainly Jewish members of the “community.” In response, I sent the following email to her the same day:
Yes, the killings were terrible. But will you send another note about grieving as the Israelis bomb hospitals and kill many innocent people?”
Michael D. Yates, Pitt PhD and Pitt professor emeritus
I sent a follow-up note on December 11, when it was clear what Israel was doing:
Still waiting but not holding my breath for you to tell us (your colleagues, Pitt family, take your pick) that you are horrified, or at least a bit disturbed, by the wanton slaughter of children in Palestine, and that Pitt will help anyone traumatized by this. I suspect that you will be like every other University CEO (which is what you are) and say nothing or agree that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. International law will not be something you will refer to unless the culprit is an enemy of the US in the eyes of the US government.
Yours in peace,
Michael Yates, Professor Emeritus and Pitt PhD
ps Monthly Review Press, of which I am Director, published a book titled A Land With a People. The introduction, written by 80-year-old Rosalind Petchesky (a Jewish anti-Zionist), is worth reading. If your flack catchers, by some rare chance, let you see this, read it, and I am certain you will learn a great deal.
Again, no response was forthcoming. To date, there is a Palestinian solidarity encampment at the University, but the university has not attempted to have it dismantled.
Hobart and William Smith College (HWS)
On April 9, 2024, HWS Professor Jodi Dean wrote an essay titled, “Palestine Speaks for Everyone,” which was published on the Verso Press Blog. It is a moving piece, and it begins with this paragraph:
The images from October 7 of paragliders evading Israeli air defenses were for many of us exhilarating. Here were moments of freedom, that defeated Zionist expectations of submission to occupation and siege. In them, we witnessed seemingly impossible acts of bravery and defiance in the face of the certain knowledge of the devastation that would follow (that Israel practices asymmetric warfare and responds with disproportionate force is no secret). Who could not feel energized seeing oppressed people bulldozing the fences enclosing them, taking to the skies in escape, and flying freely through the air? The shattering of the collective sense of the possible made it seem as if anyone could be free, as if imperialism, occupation, and oppression can and will be overthrown. As the Palestinian militant Leila Khaled wrote of a successful hijacking in her memoir, My People Shall Live, “it seemed the more spectacular the action the better the morale of our people.” Such actions puncture expectations and create a new sense of possibility, liberating people from hopelessness and despair.
The president of Dean’s college, Mark D. Gearan, took great offense to her article. Here is the opening paragraph of his letter to the HWS “community,” sent on April 13, 2024:
Earlier this week, Professor of Politics Jodi Dean wrote a piece for Verso on the war in Israel and Gaza. She spoke about feeling exhilarated and energized by the paragliders on October 7, an event that has led to so much brutality against civilians in Israel and Gaza. Not only am I in complete disagreement with Professor Dean, I find her comments repugnant, condemn them unequivocally, and want to make clear that these are her personal views and not those of our institution.
He then suspended Dean from her teaching duties. His letter and actions offended me, and I sent him this message:
Dear President Gearan,
I read your letter about Professor Jodi Dean’s essay, “Palestine Speaks for Everyone,” which was posted at versobooks.com. I found your letter to be an excellent example of a false commitment to academic freedom and free speech. Taking Professor Dean out of her classroom is outrageous. Her essay speaks to a truth that cowards like you will never face. Israel is an occupying colonial power, with no right under any international law to do what it has done since the Nakba in 1948. It has violated untold UN resolutions, and it has murdered untold numbers of people with abandon. What it has done since Oct. 7 has shocked most of the world, but apparently not you. Hamas and the other Palestinian resistance groups have every right under international law to resist Israel’s brutal and illegal occupation with violence, and Israel has no right to defend its colonial regime in Palestine. This is all not to mention that Israel’s current leadership, following it the footsteps of some of its founding fathers, are open fascists. What your letter does is whitewash this past and assert a sickening superior morality under the pretense that you are opposed to all violence. Please, spare us your tears. And your self-righteousness. Your students might be afraid and troubled!! Of what, pray tell. It is the people in Gaza who are afraid, because they are being killed by the tens of thousands. And if you have been following the news outside of the cowardly mainstream US Press, you would now know that most of the most outrageous acts Israel claimed Hamas and the other groups perpetrated on Oct. 7 have been shown not to have happened. The Nazis would have been proud of Netanyahu and company for their skill in lying and their willingness to murder women and children. Just as the US would not even take orphaned Jewish children into the United States during the late 1930s, because they might someday become Bolsheviks, so too the Israelis can’t have Palestinian kids grow up t be “terrorists.” or mothers giving birth to them.
You must put Professor Dean back in the classroom. I doubt you will, perhaps in fear that you will be called before Congress and declared an antisemite. Or more likely because you are simply not a very good human being.
Yours,
Michael D. Yates, Professor Emeritus, University of Pittsburgh-Johnstown
Illinois State University
Since just after October 7, Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC’s popular “Morning Joe” program, has been railing against the campus protests. He typically refers to students (presumably privileged) at elite (as in Ivy League) colleges. However, the campus encampments that have been growing in number by the day, have been set up in many colleges and universities that are certainly not elite. One such college is Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois. I have had correspondence with a teacher there, one whose students are by no means elite. When the president of the university, Aondover Tarhule, began threatening the protesters with punitive actions, the organizers asked people to write to him. I wrote this letter on April 30, 2024:
Dear President Tarhule,
Students around the United States are courageously protesting the open genocide being committed by the Israeli government in Gaza. That it is a genocide is widely known, and members of the Israeli state openly admit it, even declaring themselves to be fascists. Now, your students are protesting. And what does your administration do? Like many other institutions of higher learning, you threaten them with suspensions and police violence. Your duty is to protect your students. Colleges claim to be in favor of critical thinking and socially responsible actions. Yet, as soon as they take you at your word, they see that it is all a mirage.
I was a college professor for 45 years. I saw the protests against the war in Vietnam and the way that college administrators dealt with them. I know about how your predecessors condemned and blacklisted professors during the McCarthy period. Today, the world is watching. Your students are watching. What lessons will they take from your actions? The answer is up to you. Do the right thing. Do not allow police on your campus. Protect the right of your students to protest.
Sincerely yours,
Michael D. Yates, Professor Emeritus, University of Pittsburgh
Princeton University
The more students have protested, the stronger and more violent the response by university administrators. The stormtroopers we erroneously call police were invited to put down the protests, and this they did, with fascist-like zeal. This was combined with a propaganda campaign, with full media participation from CNN and the New York Times, “reporting” that not only were the student voices rife with antisemitism, but there were nefarious outside agitators invading the campuses making trouble. Order had to be restored. At UCLA, anti-protestors did enter the college grounds by force, assaulting those who were condemning genocide. Campus security and LA police stood by while this was happening. Ultimately, the encampment was dismantled. It would hardly be surprising if these true outside agitators, like those at other universities, had close ties to the Israeli state’s multiple operation inside the United States.
Journalist Chris Hedges wrote an essay about what has happened at Princeton (The Chris Hedges Report, “Revolt in the Universities.”) After reading it, I wrote to Rochelle Calhoun, Vice President of Campus Life:
Dear Rochelle Calhoun,
Like most of the nation’s universities, Princeton is showing its true colors as an active agent of the suppression of free speech and academic freedom. Your treatment of students protesting the genocide Israel is perpetrating in Gaza is appalling and makes a mockery of your supposed values of critical learning. As Vice President of Campus Life (note the corporate titles now ubiquitous in academe), you bear responsibility for the reprehensible treatment of student protestors, who have been arrested, handcuffed with zip ties, treated as trespassers in the place they in fact live, and unceremoniously booted off campus, unable even to take all of their possessions with them. I hope you are proud of yourself.
By doing what you are doing, you are drawing attention away from the heart of the matter, namely the callous and intentional slaughter of Gazans, including thousands of children. As Chris Hedges reports, “Not one university president has denounced Israel’s destruction of every university in Gaza. Not one university president has called for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire. Not one university president has used the words “apartheid” or “genocide.” Not one university president has called for sanctions and divestment from Israel.”
As happened during the McCarthy period and the protests against the War in Vietnam, our universities now show us how deeply they are embedded in the oppressive nature of our economic system and the national security state. As Thorstein Veblen noted more than 100 years ago, universities operate as businesses and their commitment to academic freedom and civil rights is a ruse. And as your behavior shows, as soon as a person becomes part of the corporate university, they begin to behave in ways that keep the enterprise going, no matter how liberal they think they are. Just doing their jobs, like the good Germans who gave aid and comfort, in one way or another, to National Socialism. You, like those who do the same work in other colleges and like your and their superiors, are, in truth, giving aid and comfort to genocide. It’s that simple. History will not look kindly upon you.
I was a college professor for 45 years. Not much surprises me anymore. But this does, because the Israeli genocide is perpetrated openly and some members of the Netanyahu government have declared themselves fascists. Perhaps you should take some time to grasp this and think about what you are doing.
Sincerely yours,
Michael D. Yates, Professor Emeritus, University of Pittsburgh—Johnstown.
It would be foolish to imagine that my letters will have any effect on what the officers of these colleges and universities will do. Yet, it is necessary for each of us to do what we can to raise our voices against any and all complicity in genocide. No matter how small. If many speak out, the students will gain more confidence and courage. It is what they are doing that is important and has a chance of bringing about real change.
The Iron Heel of the State at UCLA
MAY 3, 2024
Image by Ed Rampell.
“Biden Biden, Whattaya Say? How Many Kids You Kill Today?”
This was one of the militant chants of hundreds of students on May 1 at UCLA. I went to the university after covering the May Day rally in Hollywood, arriving around 4:00 p.m., and this is what I witnessed at the frontlines of the class struggle in Westwood:
I made my way on foot across the sprawling campus towards the epicenter of the unfolding action, the UCLA Palestine Solidarity Encampment, led by Students for Justice in Palestine and UC Divest Coalition at UCLA. The first thing I noticed was the sound of helicopters hovering overhead and a heavy security presence. The latter included the LAPD, the LA County Sheriff’s Department, California Highway Patrol, UCPD and CSC, a private firm specializing in crowd management. Upon reaching Dickson Plaza, the rather large area was cordoned off with metal barricades.
In the distance, flanked by august collegiate buildings, I could see the encampment and hear speeches being made with bullhorns (although I couldn’t make out what speakers were saying). In the foreground, I could see a jumbotron flying two Israeli flags in front of the nearby tent city behind plywood walls, from which pro-Zionist propaganda had been blared but was at that time quiet. When I approached yellow vest-wearing CSC guards controlling checkpoints, they refused to allow me in without an official press pass (which, by the way, are issued by LAPD and/or the Sheriff’s Department), and refused to consider stories I’d written under my byline as proof that I was, indeed, a journalist.
Determined to cover the students, I kept walking around Dickson Plaza; CHP vehicles lined the street. At another checkpoint, I asked to speak to a media liaison for the UCLA Palestine Solidarity Encampment, and pro-Encampment individuals summoned a young woman who appeared after a few minutes, calling herself “Mona.” To prove my bona fides, I showed her articles I’d written, including an interview with independent presidential candidate Cornel West (wherein he called for a ceasefire in Gaza as far back as early November). Mona was friendly and disputed that police had given the occupiers a legally valid dispersal order to abandon their “tent-in” (my term) by 6:00 p.m. She gave me a print out of the Encampment’s five bullet-pointed “demands” to the university, including:
“Divest: Withdraw all UC-wide and UCLA Foundation funds from companies and institutions that are complicit in the Israeli occupation, apartheid, and Genocide of the Palestinian people.” The demands went on to call for UCLA to: “Disclose… full-transparency to all UC-wide and UCLA Foundation assets including investments, donations, and grants.” “Abolish Policing: End the targeted repression of pro-Palestinian advocacy… and sever all ties with LAPD” and “Boycott” ties to Israeli universities. The antiwar students also demanded that UCLA “call[s] for “ceasefire and end to the occupation and Genocide in Palestine.”
I gave Mona my business card (I haven’t heard back from her as of this writing – Mona, if you read this, LMK how you’re doing) and proceeded to the southern end of Dickson Plaza. There I encountered hundreds of multi-racial students with locked arms blocking the steps leading up to the Encampment, which I had a better – if not close-up view – of. Walls of protective plywood surrounded a village composed of tents and tarps, with Palestinian flags.
Many of the unarmed demonstrators on the steps wore helmets, hijabs and keffiyehs and flew the Palestinian flag. They seemed disciplined, determined, resolute and unafraid. Their chants included: “Israel Bombs, USA Pays!”; “Israel Israel, Whattaya say? How many kids you kill today?”; “Ho ho, hey hey, We will not stop, We will not rest: Disclose, Divest!” “Stop Bombing Gaza Now!”
There was no anti-Semitic sloganeering per se; absolutely no ethnic slurs or demeaning of Judaism or specifically pro-Hamas statements. The students did, however, chant: “Palestine will live forever, From the Sea to the River.” Some in the pro-Zionist camp do read into this a threat to wipe out Israel’s Jewish population. Pro-Palestinian activists, on the other hand, regard this as a call for full human rights for Palestinians, all the way from the West Bank and East Jerusalem across what is now Israel to Gaza. (During Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Sept. 22, 2023 speech to the U.N. General Assembly, he displayed a regional map that did not demarcate any Palestinian territory.)
The crowd kept growing up to about 1,000 protesters and someone with a bullhorn announced that a 6:00 p.m. “dispersal order was only for the encampment. It is not for us on the outside… If you stand on the steps, you defend the encampment.”
I walked around hilly ground slightly west of the steps with the multitude of linked-arm demonstrators. On the other side, a young man with a bullhorn announced: “If you’re not willing to be arrested please leave. A dispersal order has been given.” I could see some young people filing down a flight of stairs to the guarded entry point to depart the Encampment on my right. But to the left, astonishingly, were hundreds of protesters lined up in order to join their comrades upstairs at the frontlines, inside the Encampment.
Down the hill, in a parking lot, as it was still sunny, I could clearly see law enforcement vehicles arriving and parking, preparing their entrapment of the Encampment. But as 6:00 p.m. came and went without a police invasion, it seemed to me that the solidarity of masses of demonstrators defying the authorities and their order to run with their tails tucked between their legs prevented the police from acting as their deadline came and went. Courageous antiwar students – armed only with their sense of righteous outrage – boldly faced down five heavily armed if outnumbered law enforcement entities, creating a standoff that lasted until about 3:00 a.m., May 2, when armed police finally assaulted, dismantled the tent city and busted reportedly 200-plus resisters, just days before the 54th anniversary of the Kent State shooting of anti-Vietnam War protesters.
The steadfast moral stance of students bravely opposing the carpet bombing of civilians that has murdered 35,000 people, mostly civilians, women, children, and babies (Yes! “And babies” too, as a famous poster decrying the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War put it) reminded me of Mario Savio’s 1964 speech on the steps of Sproul Hall during the Free Speech Movement at another University of California campus, Berkeley:
“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus civil disobedience. There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part! …and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it – that unless you’re free the machine will be prevented from working at all!! …One thousand people sitting down some place, not letting anybody by, not [letting] anything happen, can stop any machine, including this machine! And it will stop!!”
Earlier that May 1 I went to the May Day rally at Sunset Blvd. where hundreds of pro-union demonstrators, many of them Latino, listened to speeches from leftists and labor activists. The throng was beneath a huge sign for Paramount Pictures, and after about an hour of pro-working class, pro-immigrant and antiwar remarks, they marched up to Hollywood Blvd. and down the Fabled Walk of Fame, joined by colorful Indigenous Aztec dancers and an African drum group.
In 1952, Hollywood showman Cecil B. DeMille directed the blockbuster The Greatest Show on Earth, which was produced by Paramount. But in fact, that day, the greatest show on Earth was taking place far below Paramount’s sign – on streets filled with marching workers, and across town at a college campus, where undaunted students stood up against a U.S.-funded war as the conscience and consciousness of America.
When I left UCLA around 6:30 p.m., there were still helicopters hovering overhead, and I wondered: How long would it be before they played “The Ride of the Valkyries” and the Iron Heel of the State attacked pro-peace pupils at the barricades?
It’s More Than Just Protests for Palestine, It
is Existential Hope for the World
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Nobody wants to know how the sausage is made. We don’t really want to know how America came to be in its current form—to the extent that some states have openly tried to ban essential accurate history from being taught.
Americans have been told that Israel is their only true ally in that region of the world. But nobody wants to know how that situation came to be, not to mention it isn’t even accurate and anyway, with friends like that……
It’s comforting to think in simplistic terms, to avoid confronting the ugliness of history and actively opposing that same unhinged supremacy that created this world that we currently live in. A world of massive inequality, increasing existential threat, and a misery index on the rise. To bring about something radically different for humankind would be to address the violence inherent to settler colonialism and, in a clear-eyed manner, address the very much ongoing philosophy that the deranged ruling elite have decided is worth continuing at the cost of the vast majority of humanity.
The young on our campuses are exhibiting bravery beyond compare. They have been strong enough to look into social media and instead of following and repeating knee-jerk red tribe/blue tribe memes, they have used it to watch the lives of others with incredible clarity. They have used the technology at hand to connect with empathy to individuals half a world away. The very best use of technology, and most likely why they want TikTok to be banished since that has been an effective medium for this type of sharing. The oung have used common sense to understand that they are witnessing an ongoing genocide taking place in our time as well. They have learned history and for many Jewish protesters instead of learning it as a “never us again”, they learned it as a “never again”–the distinction that means everything. The bravery those protesters are showing is next level, to be called antisemitic as a Jewish person must be a mindfuck of the first order.
The tools of the colonists are many and varied, hywith pocrisy, violence and gaslighting being the supreme triad. The students are wise however, more wise than the old and rusting regime of colonialism and perversion that those in power want to go on forever (or at least until they kill us all off with their depravity).
Hypocrisy comes in the notion that a settler taking over another human’s home is just natural and right and that person who occupied it previously is to quietly and nonviolently go away or more preferably die. Property rights are paramount in the rhetoric, but ultimate property rights exist only for the few and for those who facilitate the industrial complex they represent. The notion that Great Britain could step in and give some of Texas to a random group for an essentially racist reason (as in put ’em over there we don’t want ’em here) and that those same Texans would be displaced and murdered should they be a little ticked off about it…..and then have the entire world gaslight them and perform a massive guilt transference (as in– Germany did the holocaust, but let’s push that antisemitism onto the Palestinians)–well it all starts sounding insane. It sounds that way because it is. But more and more of the youth are understanding the baffling nonsense of this and that clear-eyed understanding is what it will take to change the world.
Often people can’t conceptualize the difficulty others face in their lives without having it put in terms they understand. It’s a terrible limitation most people have. This would be like men who can’t fathom protecting women’s rights until they realize “well I have a daughter so this isn’t okay.” They can’t feel strongly about a situation unless it is their own life being attacked or if the situation can have effects on people close to them. Another broad example would be something along the lines of not being against the war in Vietnam back in those days until you had your draft card come up. I’d say it’s the most enormous and troubling aspect of the human psyche that it takes an immediate threat to change a belief system. The enormous issue is that our deranged rulers are functioning at a global level at this time. In times past the horror was definitely there, but even the heights of Empire in terms of Rome, Great Britain, Spain….there was no existential threat to all humans in the world from their behavior. Now there most certainly is.
The consciousness of the majority has to enlarge in a similar manner or that discord will be the end of us. You can’t have only personal and up close morality on a planet that now has technological capabilities to murder so many from afar. So often our leaders aim for short-sighted profit over having a life sustaining planet. The irony inherent is that if you don’t care about others far away, eventually this will come to your doorstep and then it’s probably too late to stop.
This is why the young who are protesting give off such hope. For many of these protesters, this is not an issue that will hit them directly any time soon (well maybe in terms of our nation sending so many funds that way it does, but in the more direct sense, it doesn’t change their day to day). Yet these brave young people are risking it all for others. In short, they have broadened their empathy and consciousness to the full extent that technology has allowed. They care about others far away as they care about those close to them. This is what will be required if this world of humans has a chance to continue. You can’t have global and instantaneous destruction possible paired with a care only for yourself or your family. This is what comes from such a discord in technological advancement paired with no true broadening of care for our other companions on this short life journey. Wouldn’t we scoff at someone who lived 6,000 years ago making a distinction that they were in the “Green Valley Subtribe A”, led by Konner with a K, not an idiot 3 miles away in the “River Path Subtribe G” led by Jim-Who-Whines. Why, those monsters over there don’t even know how to make pottery with geometric shapes. They deserve to die, says Konner.
The thing is, we do have the capacity to rise above it and care about others in far-flung regions, but our society makes not caring the norm. This successfully steals the oxygen needed to allow more individuals to relate to the world in a more kind manner. A greenhouse full of toxic gas won’t thrive. We are a nature/nurture creation (I’d say much more heavy on nurture) and when all of our nurture has been that of a normalization of violence, then it’s not a shock when the culture is violent. But at some point that normalization needs to end, and these students are very much a part of that change. It’s heartening that these young, technologically adept individuals are in some manner connecting to the more egalitarian ethos that seems to have been more prevalent in “primitive” society of the past. Sometimes the world is cyclic, not linear. We require the kind of thinking that considers what decisions will look like multiple generations forward. Certainly not the kind of decision making we see in our world leaders who are doing a good job if they can read a teleprompter, not shit in court, and can keep from having any blackmail tapes released.
Those of us who are older need to be the best allies we can be, to shame those in our age groups who simply don’t care or actively oppose the students–we need to assist in any way possible. In short, we need to not be a tool of a rotting Empire and a hindrance to a better future. We have been part of the violence nurturing culture and we need to very much be a part of its unraveling.
Today, on college campuses in the U.S., and around the world, there is a powerful student/faculty/staff/community movement supporting the self-determination of the people of Palestine. It is winning the battle of ideas by challenging the murderous state of Israel, long a proxy for U.S. and British imperialism as these anti-Semitic countries claim to “love the Jews—or in fact, those Jews who support settler colonialism and carry out their objectives.
The protests against the daily mass murder of Palestinian civilians, and freedom fighters, is challenging the entire ideological and institutional structure of U.S. imperialism. Like Israel, the system’s idealization of the “university” as a neutral site of intellectual discourse covers up the university as a defense contractor, police trainer, CIA and Defense Department strategist, agribusiness, and toxic polluter think tank, while it tries to recruit its students as the next generation of mass murderers—U.S. imperialism’s willing executioners.
The heroic movements at Columbia, UCLA., USC, Columbia University, Emerson College, Harvard University, NYU, Brown, Spelman, Howard, Ohio State, Cornell, Emory, University of Georgia, University of South Carolina, McGill University, Johns Hopkins, University of New Mexico—and every college campus in the U.S.— are in the traditions of the Harlem, Black Community, Black Liberation and Anti-Vietnam war campus revolution that we built in the 1960s and 1970s. And like the Black students at Jackson State and white students at Kent State—where students were murdered by police and national guardsman in 1970, and hundreds of thousands of student fighters were beaten by police, vilified by the system, suspended, and expelled, we understood that no victory is possible against this brutal imperialist system without “putting your body on the line.”
I hope that some of today’s dedicated fighters for the right of Palestine’s self-determination and protection of the Palestinians in Gaza against Israeli and U.S. imperialism, can find encouragement from your many allies. I hope my detailed sum-up of our successful campaign against Columbia University in 1968 can be of use.
The Historic 1968 Struggle Against Columbia University
How a Black United Front in Harlem, the Students’ Afro-American Society, and Students for a Democratic Society took on the Columbia University Ruling Class, Mayor John Lindsay, the New York Times, the NYPD—and won!
In 1968, three forces joined hands in a pitched battle with the Columbia University ruling class—the Black, Puerto Rican, and Dominican residents of Harlem, the Black students led by the Students’ Afro-American Society (SAS) and the white, radical Students for a Democratic Society. I was asked by S.D.S. to come down from Boston to join the team of “outside organizers.” The Movement made three structural demands—that Columbia, on stolen land from Black Harlem that the white settler state stole from the Indigenous people, stop the construction of a racist, gentrifying gym, GYM Crow, and expel the Institute for Defense Analyses, a university-sponsored “think tank” for genocide against the people of Vietnam. We also demanded amnesty for all demonstrators—a critical demand today as the system says, “you should suffer the consequences” of protesting against our genocide in order to intimidate and suppress the movement.
As our movement grew, the repression from the system was brutal and systematic and radicalized and revolutionized its participants including me. Every liberal institution turned against us with a vengeance. The N.Y. Times, about which I still had some romantic illusions turned into a mouthpiece for Columbia University and a hit piece against our movement. Mayor John Lindsay, who had done some good work in Harlem, turned against us to prove his reactionary credentials. The NYPD, serving Columbia and the U.S. ruling class, raided the campus and beat up and arrested hundreds of students. In one of my most naïve and incorrect assessments, I argued in front of our leadership group of more than 100 people, “OK. The brutal March 27 police raid against our movement was predictable. But it also dramatically expanded our ranks. But we can’t expect them to make the same mistake again. Then on May 7, “The Second Bust” the police, armed to the teeth, came back with a vengeance and inflicted far more brutality than the first one. I had already been a field secretary with CORE, a community organizer with the Newark Community Union Project, and an anti-imperialist regional organizer with SDS in Boston/New England. Yet, I had to confront my own illusions about the system as they were smashed before our eyes. The systematic attack on our movement led us to hate the system even more. It radicalized and revolutionized a generation as most continued the struggle for years and decades, and for many of us, a lifetime.
The collective Voice of the System told us, “You are violent, destroying property, dupes of the Viet Cong, enemies of the state, arrogant privileged students who have nothing better to do with your lives, enemies of the Democratic Party that is your friend, ungrateful, Black students. You should know your place, ,you are terrorists, communists, hateful anti-Americans, you hate the G.I.’s, you violate the civil rights of the establishment and the sanctity of the university—the shit did not stop. And yet, we found it more revelatory than upsetting. The System showed itself as so ugly, unattractive, fascist, duplicitous, racist, obnoxious, and pathetic, that it heightened our confidence and resolve. H. Rap Brown and James Baldwin came to support us. “Outside” Harlem helped to lead the struggle. And just as they called in the NYPD, SAS and SDS called in reinforcements from all over the country. I was one of them. I came the day after the first bust and spent 2 months there working with the campaign.
To the courageous students, faculty, and community members, especially the Palestinian groups that are leading the struggle, you are making and moving history. The system is moving against you because you are moving against it. So, what began as a human rights struggle to stop U.S. and Israeli Genocide Against the people of Gaza and Palestine, to call for a cease-fire and an end to all U.S. aid to Israel, to stop the mass murder of more than 30,000 Palestinian human beings in Gaza, out of self-defense, becomes a struggle against the Democratic Party, Republican Party, NY Times, corporate media, the white settler NYPD police state, Mayor Eric Adams, and Columbia and all universities that are little more than think tanks for genocide. Thank you for your leadership. Thank you for moving the revolution forward—the whole world is watching and the Third World and people of conscience all over the world are on your side. Free, Free, Palestine.
As I send in this article, I am going to our Strategy and Soul Movement Center in South Central L.A. to pick up copies of my Columbia article, food, and books and then to join the courageous students leading the U.S.C. Divest from Death Encampment.
Eric Mann is the co-director of the Labor/Community Strategy Center. He is a veteran of the Congress of Racial Equality, Students for a Democratic Society, and the United Auto Workers New Directions Movement. He is the host of KPFK/Pacifica’s Voices from the Frontlines. His forthcoming book is I Saw a Revolution with my Own Eyes: History, Strategy, and Organizing for The Revolution We Need today. He welcomes comments at Eric@Voicesfromthefrontlines.com
The Politics of Student Protests and Their Unintended Consequences
The current pro-Palestinian student protests may influence President Biden’s policies towards Israel, but the protests may also be used by Republicans as part of their law-and-order platform. If Newton’s third law of motion states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, a first law of protest may be that for every protest there is an equal and opposite backlash. If the protests continue up to and at the August Democratic Convention in Chicago, a possible repeat of the chaotic 1968 Convention will help Republicans and Donald Trump just as they helped Republicans and Richard Nixon get elected in 1968.
Should protesters think about how politicians and voters will use them?
Republicans and Donald Trump will certainly use current student protests on campuses to appeal to voters wary of “woke” and “critical theory.” As Louis Menand observed in The New Yorker after the 1968 election: “To liberals who believed in the righteousness of the civil-rights demonstrations and the antiwar protests, the disruption and violence that accompanied them was caused by the overreaction of the authorities. For most voters, though, the disruption and violence were the fault of the demonstrators. Most people don’t like righteousness in others.” So while the current pro-Palestinian protests may have short-term benefits, previous experience shows that they may have negative long-term unintended consequences.
There are indications of a relationship between violent protests and shifts to the Right. Scientifically, Omar Wasow, currently an assistant professor of politics at UC Berkeley, observed that following the violent protests after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in April 1968, “we can then claim a causal relationship between violent protests and the shift away from the Democratic coalition” in the November election.
The relationship between the current student protests and the upcoming November election may not be as causal, but there could be a correlation. The 1968 massive protests certainly influenced U.S. policy, but they also led to the unintended consequence; Richard Nixon was elected president in November.
How did Nixon do that? He used the civil rights/anti-Vietnam War protests as the basis of his law-and-order campaign. “Nixon…relied on television, crafting an ad campaign which offered soothing hope that Nixon would end the riots and disorder,” Jeremy D. Mayer wrote in The Historian. “The most memorable Nixon ad featured a middle-aged white woman walking alone down a dark urban street, while the announcer recited bleak statistics on the frequency of violent crime.” Mayer noted; “Nixon privately praised one of his law and order because ‘this hits it right on the nose… it’s all about law and order and the damn Negro-Puerto Rican groups out there.’” Substitute Trump for Nixon. Substitute students, lefties, woke and critical theorists and here we go again.
What does this mean for the actual protesters? Should they change their protests because of possible future consequences about how the protests will be used? Should one stop protesting Biden’s continuing sending arms and money to Israel because Trump and his followers will use the protests negatively in November?
There are three levels here. The first is the reason for the protests. The second is how politicians react to the protests. And the third is how voters react to the way politicians use the protests.
To go back to 1968; did any of the violent protesters at the Chicago Convention see the relationship between their actions and Nixon’s election? Did they regret what they did?
At the end of the film of the trial of the legendary leaders of the Convention protesters, The Trial of the Chicago 7, Judge Hoffman says to Tom Hayden before sentencing; “If you make your statement brief, if you make it respectful, if you make it remorseful and to the point, I will look favorably upon that when administering my sentence.”
Hayden replies, “We have no choice. We had no choice in Chicago. We had no choice in this trial,” somehow echoing Martin Luther’s 1521 response “Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise.” when Luther was questioned about his heretical views before the emperor and the princes of the Church at the Diet of Worms.
(Columbia University President Nemat Shafik recently used similar language. In a statement justifying calling in the police, she said: “After the university learned overnight that Hamilton Hall had been occupied, vandalized and blockaded, we were left with no choice.”)
Did the leaders of the 1968 Convention protests have no choice? At a reunion of the remaining survivors of the 1969 Chicago conspiracy trial, Tom Hayden was reported to have said; “It’s not over.” And Lee Weiner, when asked if he would do it all again, didn’t hesitate; “I’d do it better.” No remorse from either. No feelings of guilt that they were responsible for Nixon’s election.
On the level of the Convention protesters, they believed their protests were justified. “We had no choice.” They felt they had no responsibility for Nixon’s election, we surmise, because they had no control over how the protests would be used by politicians. And, they had no responsibility for how voters would be influenced by how politicians used their actions.
Grumpy seniors will certainly echo George Santayana’s “Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it,” as a warning to students that today’s protests will help Trump get elected in November. Today’s protesters will undoubtedly echo Tom Hayden; “We have no choice.” Some religiously oriented protesters resisting the police may even use Luther’s defiant; “Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise.”
The same grumpy Baby Boomers will also wonder how the excitement of the 1960s, levitating the Pentagon, Woodstock and all, has gotten us to where we are today with Trump’s MAGA, Barbie, riot police on campuses, and all that. Watching the current protests is more than merely observing polarization and generational conflict. It’s about wondering how momentary protests in a good cause have had and could have negative long-term unintended consequences.
