It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
College campuses and universities across the country have organized some of the largest peace activities and anti-war protests since 1969. As the social movement points in specific directions in calling for Palestinian liberation, over 100 schools scattered across the United States from American to Yale University have participated and issued their own sets of “Five Demands.”
College students especially are utilizing and expanding their educational experiences and cutting their activist teeth on campus in the form of teach-ins, demonstrations, lectures, speeches, and creative art, largely on their own but also with facilitation and professors in solidarity. Further, it’s not lost on young people elsewhere, as news of the movement reached the Gazan children along with families expressing their gratitude.
A common reaction to the widespread nature and success stories on the part of the student activists has been for naysayers to label and paint the demonstrators and demonstrations as antisemites engaging in antisemitic activity. Perhaps a tool and offshoot from the modern hasbara playbook. Its purpose is to draw suspicion over a real and authentic concern of historical and current antisemitism.
There are several ways critics and campus protest skeptics have constructed their own reality to undermine student resistance. The methods include counter-protesting, the calling of police, message distortion, flimsy polling data, and the utilization of the mainstream press.
From the look of the counter-protesting, the goals look fairly obvious. First, counter-protesting presupposes that the Mideast world was a tidy and peaceful place on October 6th and that Iranian and Lebanese proxies simply created a need for power and dominance to defend “good states” (US, Israel, Saudi Arabia) from “bad states” (Yemen, Iran, Syria) on October 7th. As reported by journalist Joshua Frank, one Columbia professor’s motivation to counter-protest wasn’t based on any intellectual argument at all but rather significant familial ties to arms manufacturing.
Secondly, counter-protesting invites people to think that Israeli force and Palestinian resistance present a “both sides” argument (bad) and this ranges to counter-protesting that characterizes Netanyahu policy as self-defense (worse). Another motivation of counter-protesting is to draw ire and/or elicit a slip up in words or actions from budding activists in a further effort to categorize them as antisemitic. Hecklers of the encampments have tried to test random students with gotcha questions regarding geography (re: from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea), to sending in staged distractions to enhance the possibility of media spectacle. These techniques haven’t amounted to much but the proposition alone that they are feasible is enough to warrant a concern regarding perhaps the ultimate goal of counter-protesting – to necessitate a presence for law enforcement.
The idea and symbolic presence of law enforcement in the face of the encampment promotes the idea that the cops are there to catch bad people and to ensure that good kids can safely get to class (they always could) when in fact the role of the police hasn’t changed since the days of ancient societies. That is, the main roles of the police are to protect private property and concentrations of wealth and power from well-organized outside forces of resistance. Often, it is the police force’s duty to make sure that mass movements and mobilization techniques are struck down while maintaining a highly stratified society based on law and order. Universities are complicit businesses that must carry on undisturbed just as free enterprise must remain steady.
It does not help the students either that almost all of New York City’s political class, as an example, is tied to the established order and Biden’s bipartisan consensus when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Although they differ from Republicans, Eric Adams and Kathy Hochul are poised to undermine the student’s resistance just as they are to cut public resources whenever their respective donor classes apply economic or political pressure. When a mayor or governor cannot deviate very far from the established order, the police become willing combatants against the students and professors. The misinformation on the part of the police was best illustrated when the NYPD Commissioner held up a copy of Oxford’s Very Short Introduction Series (Terrorism) believing it was a student’s “how to” book. It served as a microcosm for how the entirety of the encampments have been misunderstood by people with authority.
One of the more bizarre aspects of the politics of encampment are how the detractors purposefully change the meaning of protest rhetoric as a scare tactic. In response, it reached a level of such carelessness that a Peace Action Group in New York went out of its way to prohibit signs, slogans, and chants at one of their pro-Palestine rallies. They feared that saying such words as “decolonize,” “intifada,” and “revolution,” (even when Jewish activists wanted to use these words) all constituted terms beyond their control. This form of liberal respectability unfortunately played into the hands of the forces attempting to “other” the campus protests. This wasn’t liberal rationality to eliminate infantile leftism as a knee jerk reaction, but servility to power and privilege to protect their organization.
It gets worse. In a recent Hillel Poll, it found that 61% of college students surveyed cited antisemitism on campus in the wave of protests and encampments. If that wasn’t bad enough, they also concluded that intimidation and assault were increasing because of the protests, while disrupting the ability to attend class (as if student engagement is not a part of higher educations’ purpose). Sociologist Eman Abdelhadi has documented the dialogue and mutual respect found in the encampments that counters Hillel’s forms of cooked data that frames hand selected polls to intentionally distort specific points of view.
Although Hillel’s polling might be more of a political reaction to the reality that many campus demonstrators are in fact Jewish, and not antisemites, it nonetheless sounds convincing, especially when you do not wish to deny a student’s experience or feelings on the matter.
International relations scholar Richard Falk indicated to me that Hillel polls are suspect for a variety of reasons. First, the polls serve as ways to discourage activism that a strong majority of Hillel students may have previously opposed on its merits. Second, facts get in the way of the polls. 15 of 17 ICJ judges (of the two dissenters, one was the ad hoc Israel judge, the other a juridically deviant Ugandan judge with poor prior reputation) have views aligned with the student protests, and not the government. And on an urgent issue of genocide, they support the right of protest. Falk posited further, “Would we accept a comparable argument that anti-Nazi protests in the late 1930s should be suspended because they made German students uncomfortable? Would anyone dare make such an argument?” “Deconstructing the polls is an important issue,” Falk asserted, “given their manipulative role in the present context as justification for encroaching upon the core role of academic freedom in a democratic society.” Middle East historian Lawrence Davidson stated that historically, white students said similar things when schools attempted integration.
Professor and author Stephen Zunes explained to me that Hillel potentially reaches out to students that reinforce their organizational mission. Since Hillel has moved to the right over the last ten years or so, “[they are] essentially saying non-Zionist Jewish students are unwelcomed.” He continued by stating, “even if they did reach out to a more representative sampling, non-Zionist Jewish students might not want to respond if they knew it was from Hillel.” Zunes also pointed out to me: “If [students] are being told repeatedly that ‘River to the Sea’ is not a call for a democratic secular state but the killing/expelling of Israeli Jews and that ‘globalize the intifada’ is not a call for civil resistance but for terrorism against Jews, it would not be surprising that they would say they encountered language that was ‘antisemitic, threatening or derogatory toward Jewish people.’”
Collectively it seems, the goals of the counter-protestors, police, politicians, polls, and corporate media, are to conflate student support for Palestine with the center-right Hamas (who won with less than 50% of the vote in 2006) while categorizing them as a single entity without social, political, economic, or military wings. Perhaps no journalist is more skillful in this enterprise as New York Times reporter Bret Stephens. In his recent “What a ‘Free Palestine’ Actually Means,” he points out that “Israeli settlers have run riot against their Palestinian neighbors,” but cynically asserts it’s all for naught since “under Hamas” there will simply be no democracy for LGBTQ+ people, thanks to college students. He also oversimplifies and cites corrupt Arab leadership to lessen the burden on Western human rights abuses, as his underlying goal in the piece is to delegitimize any view outside of the political center. Stephens further presumes that the student protestors’ only choices are reactionary forms of ethnic nationalism on either side but to avoid the side they don’t know, Palestine. It reads as an unfortunate concoction of patronizing, gaslighting, and victim blaming.
In this writing, I looked at the ways in which campus protest skeptics have developed methods to disparage the encampments. To label them, detractors have crafted an alternate reality or, “big lie” to make the students look hateful, unorganized, unknowing, and disruptive, when they have in fact been the exact opposite. On all counts, the students have been effective in carrying out one of the prime educative examples found in many school mission statements – making extensions beyond the classroom – a feature that institutions advertise, but fear happening because it involves young people questioning the legitimacy of authority and the abuses of power.
Daniel Falcone is a teacher, journalist, and PhD student in the World History program at St. John’s University in Jamaica, NY as well as a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. He resides in New York City.
US: Why Protesting Genocide is Dubbed as ‘Anti-Semitism’
Weaponising 'anti-semitism' is another face of new McCarthyism linked to the rise of the Right and ascendancy of neo-fascism in the capitalist world.
(Photo: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)
The current protests in US university campuses demanding “divestment” from firms linked to Israel’s military machine, are reminiscent of the protests that had swept these campuses in the late sixties and early seventies demanding an end to the Vietnam war. There is, however, a major difference: the US had then been directly involved in the war, while today it is not. This had meant a draft then in the US while today there is none, which makes the current student protests completely free of even a shadow of self-interest.
By the same token, direct US involvement in that war and hence the daily loss of lives of US personnel had invested the calls within the US establishment for ending the Vietnam war with a seriousness that is sorely missing in all such calls today. The fact of the US not being a direct combatant, therefore, makes the protests of the students much more principled and serious, while it makes the pronouncements on peace of the establishment much less principled and serious.
The students, in short, are moved by a pure sense of humanity. Their protests are motivated by an abhorrence for genocide, for settler colonialism, and for imperialist complicity in an apartheid Zionist regime; they are an expression of humanity’s quest for peace and fraternity.
The US establishment, on the other hand, indulges in double talk: while paying lip service to peace it does everything to prolong the conflict, and while professing opposition to the inflicting of cruelty on innocent civilians, continues supplying arms for inflicting such cruelty.
The humanity on one side, the side of the students, is in stark contrast to the chicanery on the other side. If the first is the harbinger of hope for the future, the second represents the frantic dishonesty of a tottering imperialism.
This dishonesty is manifest at every level. For years now, the metropolitan countries have been committed to a “two-state” solution to the Palestinian issue, that is, to having a Palestinian State alongside the State of Israel. The point is not whether a “one-State” solution, that is a single State with its central executive elected through universal adult franchise, and within whose boundaries the Palestinians and the Israelis live together, is better than a two-State one; the point is that a two-State solution has been accepted for long by international opinion and also by the imperialist countries.
A corollary of the two-State solution is that a Palestinian State should come into being immediately and be recognised as a full-fledged member of the United Nations. And yet whenever the issue of admitting Palestine as a full member of the UN has come up, the United States, despite being apparently committed to the idea, has exercised its veto at the Security Council which has the final authority in the matter.
This is what happened on April 19. The Zionist State of Israel does not want an independent Palestinian State for that would put an end to its settler colonial project; and the United States, despite its public posturing, goes along with this Zionist project whenever matters come to a head.
On May 10 again the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly (with 143 in favour, nine against and 25 abstentions) for full membership of Palestine, and requested the Security Council to reconsider the matter. While the US, along with some of the arch right-wing regimes of the world like Argentina and Hungary voted against, other metropolitan countries (with the exception of France alone which voted in favour) abstained. The US, when the matter comes again before the Security Council, will no doubt exercise its veto once more to thwart not only any prospect of peace, but also the will of the overwhelming mass of the people of the world to resolve the problem.
The same dishonesty is visible in the manner in which the US establishment treats the student movement. Police have been sent to several campuses to break up the encampments set up by the students and hundreds of student protesters have been arrested, despite the fact that the protests have been peaceful.
The use of strong-arm methods to deal with peaceful protests constitutes an assault on the freedom of expression; but it has been justified by the entire American establishment, from Donald Trump to Joe Biden to Hilary Clinton. Donald Trump has talked of “Radical mobs taking over our college campuses” and accused Biden of being complicit with such “mobs”.
Biden in turn who has openly supported police action against students, as at Columbia University, in conformity with “liberal” opinion in general, has charged protesting students with “anti-semitism”, a bizarre charge given the fact that student protesters have included a large number of Jewish students!
Hilary Clinton has accused the students of being ignorant of the history of the middle east, as if awareness of such history could condone the perpetration of a genocide!
The anti-Vietnam war movement had at some point acquired the support of important American public figures like Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy, but that again was because of America’s direct involvement in the war. In the present case the entire phalanx of establishment politicians has lined up in favour of the war and against the students.
Similar student protests have broken out elsewhere in the metropolitan world and similar strong-arm tactics have been used in many campuses. But there have also been instances of opposition to strong-arm methods. In Britain, for instance, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s advice to vice chancellors of universities that have seen such protests, to use the State machinery to break them up has not gone down well with all vice-chancellors; some have even refused to attend a meeting called by him. But in America there has been no such opposition; university heads who have sought to assert their own judgement on how to deal with the protests, have been forced to resign.
It is this suppression of thought on campuses that has brought the charge of a new McCarthyism being unleashed in the US. Then, as now, it is a group of Right-wing lawmakers that are in the forefront of the attempt to suppress independent thinking on campuses. But the question arises: in the 1950s the context for McCarthyism was provided by the Cold War and the fear of communism; what is it in the present context that is driving this new McCarthyism?
There can be little doubt that the new McCarthyism is linked to the rise of the Right and to the ascendancy of neo-fascism in the capitalist world in the context of the crisis of neo-liberal capitalism. What the rise of neo-fascism has done is not just to thrust fascist elements that had hitherto occupied the political fringe to the centre-stage, but also to let such elements hegemonise the so-called “liberal” political forces, to create a more or less unified Right-wing consensus that beats down all efforts at a revival of the Left.
It is noteworthy that when Jeremy Corbyn had been elected the leader of the Labour Party in Britain and had mounted a challenge against the establishment that had threatened to “get out of hand”, a conspiracy had been mounted against him by dubbing him “anti-semitic” (because of his sympathy for the Palestinian cause) and even removing him from the Labour Party itself.
Students and teachers in universities still constitute in the metropolis an independent source of thought, and hence a moral force that poses a threat to this Right-wing consolidation. Control over universities, therefore, becomes an important item on the agenda of this Right-wing consolidation. Independence of thought must be destroyed, every trace of humanity must be destroyed, if this Right-wing consolidation is to have its way. What we are seeing in the United States today is this brazen
Hundreds of Palestine solidarity organizations are gathered in the People’s Conference for Palestine held in Detroit, MI.
Yara Shoufani delivers keynote speech at first day of People's Conference for Palestine (Photo: Zoe Alexandra)
With 3,000 people and hundreds of pro-Palestine organizations converging in a metropolitan area with the largest concentration of Arab Americans, amidst the largest movement for Palestine in US history, the People’s Conference for Palestine feels nothing short of historic.
“Eternal glory to our martyrs, speedy recovery to our wounded, and freedom for our steadfast prisoners,” Mohammed Nabulsi, leader in the Palestinian Youth Movement in Houston, Texas, opened the conference with these explicitly revolutionary invocations on the first day on Friday, May 24. “In the last eight months, we, the Palestinian people, have demonstrated to the entire world, that the only way we can author our own history, and transform our present reality, is the path of unity through resistance.”
Nabulsi, in his capacity as an organizer, is invoking the global nature of the Palestine solidarity movement, which extends far beyond the Arab diaspora of the world and has in fact touched the hearts and minds of every person who stands against the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
The Palestinian Youth Movement has been at the forefront of the Palestine solidarity struggle across North America, alongside key conveners of the conference, which include National Students for Justice in Palestine, the ANSWER Coalition, Healthcare Workers for Palestine, among others. This is a movement that has ignited the consciousness of millions across the continent, moving hundreds of thousands to cast protest votes against an incumbent president who they voted into office, moving students to set up Gaza Solidarity Encampments that bring them in direct confrontation with police and violent Zionists, and moving all major cities across North America in mass mobilization after mass mobilization.
“Gaza has ushered us into a new era: an era where Palestine has become unavoidable,” said Yara Shoufani, a leader in the Palestinian Youth Movement in Toronto, Canada, said during the opening keynote of the conference. “Gaza stands at the center of the world: waging a heroic battle not only against the Zionist enemy and its backers, but in service of world revolution.”
On the first day, conference attendees heard from key figures of the global Palestinian movement, including British-Palestinian surgeon Ghassan Abu-Sittah, who worked as a doctor at the Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza in the early weeks of the genocide. He provided a first-hand account of the horrors of Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people, as well as dispatches he had received from medical workers on the ground in Rafah, where Israel is waging a brutal offensive.
“The wounded are so malnourished when they are wounded, that their wounds cannot heal,” Abu-Sittah described. “As a killing machine, malnutrition and the manufactured famine is not just taking the lives of children, but also taking the lives of the wounded, whose bodies are no longer able to heal from their wounds and from the surgeries,” Abu-Sittah described.
Mustafa Barghouti, physician, secretary general and co-founder of the Palestinian National Initiative, member of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), and president of the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees, also spoke at the opening of the conference, at the plenary entitled, “The War on Palestine”.
“And during the last seven, eight months, Israel committed terrible crimes. Up to now, we’ve lost 45,000 Palestinians, if we count the 10,000 people under the rubble,” Barghouti outlined. “If this had happened in the United States of America, you would be talking about 18 million people killed or injured in less than eight months. And these are not just numbers. Each one of the 125,000 Palestinians killed and injured, each one is a person, a family, a history, a dream.”
But Barghouti also reflected a level of revolutionary optimism that is present in the global movement for Palestine. “Today, the roads are open for reunifying all the efforts of all Palestinian people, whether they live in 1948 areas, whether they live in the occupied territories in West Bank and Gaza and Jerusalem, or whether they live like you do in the diaspora,” he said. “Our future is one and our struggle is one, and we have to all be unified.”
The conference continues until the final day on Sunday, May 26. On the second day, May 25, the conference will open with a plenary on “Palestinian resistance and the path to liberation,” and will also feature plenaries on “The movement for Palestine in North America” and “Zionism and US imperialism” later on in the day. The day will end with a cultural performance by Palestinian vocalist Sanaa Moussa.
At 4:45 am on May 8, the University of Chicago Police Department arrived at the UChicago Popular University of Gaza, a Gaza solidarity encampment organized by a coalition of student organizations called UChicago United for Palestine, and destroyed it.
Within 15 minutes, the most beautiful, abundant, diverse iteration of university life many of us had ever experienced was gone. All the participants in the encampment — including me, an assistant professor — were left to wonder, did we win?
By now, many of the almost 200 encampments that sprung up across the country have been raided and destroyed by police. How do we make sense of the legacy of the encampments? This question is fundamentally about how we process the rise and fall of revolutionary moments within reactionary times.
First, we must celebrate the triumph of revolutionary thinking and practice — even when its material manifestations are brief. The encampments already won something simply by existing.
Liberal and centrist forces within U.S. politics are always working to co-opt and defang social movements in the United States by pushing them into silos of reformist single-issue campaigns. Too much of the energy of the movement for gay liberation got poured into the campaign for gay marriage for this reason. And too much of the energy associated with the movement for women’s liberation got poured into distilled milquetoast logics of white, middle-class feminism. Everywhere, movements of power and liberation have too often fizzled into bids for representation in compromised institutions or within more narrow spaces, and little more.
The liberal forces that seek to co-opt radical grassroots energy into the logic of single-issue campaigns usually try to persuade us that fundamentally the world is moving in the right direction. They argue that the institutions that rule our world — the government, the university, the market etc. — are replete with justice at their core and only need small tweaks to reach their equitable potential. They try to persuade us that to win those changes, we need to work only within our identity groups and stay within the system. Eventually, those who embrace this strategy may eke out some limited progress, usually in the form of increased representation. And this is held up as a promise that all will be well because the people in power will look like us, and the wealthy and privileged of our group will have all the benefits to which the wealthy and privileged are generally entitled.
The recent wave of student-led Palestine solidarity encampments at universities across the U.S. rejected these liberal logics. Students, faculty and organizers recognized the devastation of Gaza as a direct result of the capitalist world order under which we all live, a world order whose core logic is profit over people, that protects us so long as we are profitable and discards us when we are not.
Many encampments paired demands for divestment from Israeli apartheid with demands for repair of their university’s harms to local communities. For example, the UChicago United for Palestine coalition demanded reparations for members of the South Side community and a halt to the ravenous expansionism to which the university has long subjected the neighborhood. Demanding these reparations acknowledges the simple fact that the same logic that displaces Palestinians also works to displace the University of Chicago’s Black neighbors.
The encampment was not only a triumph of revolutionary thinking, it was also a triumph of revolutionary practice. In a reactionary present whose days are clearly numbered, each encampment was a practice run for a revolutionary future. Every time we seize a space in this world and decide to run it for ourselves, decide to feed ourselves, to shelter ourselves, to keep each other safe — we beckon to a revolutionary horizon. We open a window and look out onto a liberated future. We practice the hope that fuels our movements, wave after wave.
The encampments have been revolutionary, but they have not been the revolution itself. At the UChicago Popular University for Gaza, campers had to face the difficult work of debate and consensus building over strategy and tactics. Some questioned whether students should negotiate with the administration at all, while others debated what material gains would feel acceptable. After long discussions with the camp, students negotiated with the administration. These negotiations would come to naught when the administration suspended them on Sunday. In the processes of decision-making, many were eager to live out the abolitionist ideal for which the Popular University stood — an ideal where every voice in the camp had equal weight. But of course, we were not in the revolution. We were still on the campus of the University of Chicago, a private institution with a large and violent police force. We could act horizontally within the camp, but different people had different stakes in the outcomes of the encampment. Some could lose hundreds of thousands in tuition dollars or their livelihoods, others could walk away unscathed.
We must not mistake revolutionary moments for the revolution. If we do, then defeats — an unmet demand or a dispersed encampment — begin to feel like the end of the road. We have to treat every revolutionary moment as that — a moment. Moments are, by definition, ephemeral. It is in their nature to pass. But they matter because they leave us transformed in their wake. They give us a taste of freedom. Once we taste freedom, we hunger for it for the rest of our lives.
I learned civil rights activist and revolutionary Assata Shakur’s chant at a police abolitionist encampment in New York a decade ago named Liberation Square. I recited it again with my students at the UChicago Popular University for Gaza, then again with students at the University of Arizona’s Gaza solidarity encampment while in Tucson on a visit.
It is our duty to fight for our freedom.
It is our duty to win.
We must love each other and support each other.
We have nothing to lose but our chains.
Liberation Square in New York did not win its direct aims, nor did many of the encampments demanding dignity for Black lives that proliferated across the country. Along the way to liberation, we always suffer many defeats. For my generation, some defeats have included watching the Arab Spring turn into a winter, or watching the fall of Occupy Wall Street or watching the police continue to kill Black people despite the uprising in Ferguson, Missouri. But this generation of uprisings has the imprints of everything we learned during these earlier waves of movement, just as our uprisings had lessons from our elders imprinted within them. We never lose in struggle. Every action we take toward liberation plants a seed, but sometimes harvests take a long time.
Irish poet Seamus Heaney said:
History says, don’t hope On this side of the grave. But then, once in a lifetime The longed-for tidal wave Of justice can rise up, And hope and history rhyme.
We must practice hope until hope and history rhyme. As we move through seasons of struggle, we practice hope by creating revolutionary space, by continuing to sample freedom and continuing to feed our hunger for it. In doing so, we beckon to our liberated future, the future we deserve. We have a world to win, and truly, we have nothing to lose but our chains.
Eman Abdelhadi is an academic, activist and writer who thinks at the intersection of gender, sexuality, religion and politics. She is an assistant professor and sociologist at the University of Chicago, where she researches American Muslim communities. She is co-author of Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052 – 2072.
'Stop It. Stop It Now, Joe.’
Even though fascist Donald Trump is still worse, just look at the latest polls in the swing states and recognize where we are heading. A true leader doesn't zig and zag when innocent people are being killed.
May 26, 2024 Source: Common Dreams U.S. President Joe Biden onstage during the 2024 140th Morehouse College Commencement Ceremony at Morehouse College on May 19, 2024 in Atlanta, Georgia.
As the keynote speaker at Morehouse College in Atlanta last week, Joe Biden listened to the class Valedictorian’s call for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. The President nodded and applauded with others in the assembly. In contrast, he had just approved another billion dollars in killer weapons for the genocidal Netanyahu regime to blow up what’s left of the Death Camps in Gaza. “Stop it, stop it now, Joe,” declared his wife, Dr. Jill Biden months ago.
Countless times Joe Biden has publicly urged Netanyahu to allow the waiting trucks carrying – food, water, and medicine – blocked at the Egyptian and Israeli borders to deliver this humanitarian aid. But Biden declined to demand sanctions and an end to the Israeli military blocking hundreds of trucks, paid for by the U.S., into Gaza to help the dying population. He could have draped American flags over these trucks and dared the Israeli state terrorists to stop them. Biden showed lethal weakness from an unused position of great presidential power. “Stop it, stop it now, Joe,” implored his wife Dr. Jill Biden as thousands of children are being killed who could have been saved.
When Biden took his oath of office, he swore to uphold the laws of the land. That oath requires action.
Biden asked early on that Netanyahu comply with international law. His government commits daily overt numerous war crimes targeting civilians, homes, schools, markets, hospitals and health clinics, ambulances, fleeing refugees, and even Mosques and Churches. The Israeli regime also violates the international law that requires the conquerors to protect the civilian population. Biden, Blinken and Austin have refused to condemn such “crimes against humanity,” halt arms shipments and thereby obey five federal laws prohibiting the U.S. from sending weapons to countries that are violating human rights or being used for offensive purposes.
When Biden took his oath of office, he swore to uphold the laws of the land. That oath requires action. His State Department, in a required compliance report this month to Congress, disgracefully punted. “Stop it, stop it now, Joe,” beseeched Dr. Jill Biden.
From the beginning, Biden has backed a two-state solution publicly and in private conversations with Netanyahu. These words support a peaceful settlement. Yet whether under Obama as vice president for eight years or since 2021, as president, Biden has not connected to any action advancing the two-state proposal. Worse, he has never called out Netanyahu, with consequences, for bragging year after year to his Likud Party that he has been supporting the Hamas regime and helping to fund it because Hamas, like Netanyahu, opposes a two-state solution.
Biden is still rejecting the recognition of a Palestinian state by 143 of the 193 member states of the United Nations. This week Spain, Norway and Ireland said they would recognize a Palestinian state. Biden bizarrely insists statehood be negotiated with Israel. He knows, of course, how many Israeli colonies (so-called settlements) exist in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Israel rejects outright any such Free Palestine. Weak Joe Biden is okay with that brutal occupation. “Stop it, stop it now, Joe,” says Dr. Jill Biden.
Joe Biden is always condemning anti-semitism against Jews, while he spends billions of dollars weaponizing Netanyahu’s violent anti-semitism against Arab semites in Palestine. This “other” anti-semitism has been violently inflicted, with very racist epithets, on defenseless, subjugated Palestinian families for over fifty-five years. The violence includes U.S. fighter planes bombing, ground troops smashing homes, and refugee camps, blowing up homes, imprisoning and torturing thousands of men, women and children, without charges, and hundreds of dictates, checkpoints, and other maddening harassments. (See the New York Times Magazine Sunday, May 19, 2024 piece “The Unpunished: How Extremists Took Over Israel”). Biden and Netanyahu are arm-in-arm anti-semites against Arabs. (See the “Anti-Semitism Against Arab and Jewish Americans” speech by Jim Zogby and DebatingTaboos.org).
It’s the ongoing massacre of these little innocents—in their mother’s or father’s arms or in crumbling hospitals that led Dr. Jill Biden to admonish: “Stop it, stop it now, Joe.”
Throughout his fifty-year political career, Biden has never said that “Palestinians have a right to defend themselves.” Only the overwhelmingly more powerful, occupying Israelis have this right, as he has repeated hundreds of times. “Stop it, stop it now, Joe,” advises Dr. Jill Biden.
Biden has expressed doubt about the Hamas Health Ministry’s fatality count in Gaza – itself a huge undercount. (See my column March 5, 2024 column: Stop the Worsening UNDERCOUNT of Palestinian Casualties in Gaza). His actions enabling the Israeli annihilations (“over the top” he once blurted) are moving the real fatality toll, especially with the Rafah invasion and starvation, to the fastest rate ever recorded in 21st century conflicts, according to experts. This includes the bloody, accelerating deaths of babies and children.
It’s the ongoing massacre of these little innocents—in their mother’s or father’s arms or in crumbling hospitals that led Dr. Jill Biden to admonish: “Stop it, stop it now, Joe.”
Still, Joe Biden conveys weakness to Netanyahu, to Netanyahu’s Congress and its omnipresent “Israel-can-do-no-wrong” lobby. Being weak on such a high visibility and protested genocide in Gaza is bad for your re-election, Joe. Even though Der Führer Donald is worse. Look at the latest polls in the swing states! A true leader doesn’t zig and zag when innocent people are being killed. “Stop it, stop it now, Joe.”
Calls for Divestment From Apartheid South Africa Gave Today’s pro-Palestinian Student Activists a Blueprint to Follow
These students, whose actions build on years of organizing spearheaded by the Students for Justice in Palestine, are part of a long history of radical student organizing.
There are echoes of both the protests against the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s and, more recently, of South African apartheid in the 1980s.
In the 1980s, U.S. student activists worked to make higher education “South Africa Free.” They urged institutions of higher learning to commit to divest all assets held in endowments that were tied to doing business in or with South Africa.
By calling out complicity on the part of colleges, corporations and the government in South Africa’s system of apartheid, student activists were able to show that demands for divestment could be a concrete and effective form of protest.
Segregationist laws and land seizure policies created a captive, impoverished Black population, whose exploitation and disenfranchisement supported the economic prosperity of the governing white minority.
Originally, the idea to push for the sale of assets tied to corporations doing business in South Africa stemmed from the directives of the South African liberation movements, which called for a total economic, cultural and diplomatic boycott of the country’s white minority government.
Following the 1976 Soweto uprising, in which South African police massacred at least 150 children, some U.S. workers began to demand that their pension funds be “South Africa Free,” and students at U.S. colleges and universities organized some of the first protests calling for the divestment of their schools’ endowments.
The 1977 formation of the Committee to Oppose Bank Loans to South Africa made economic withdrawal a centerpiece of the U.S. anti-apartheid movement, one that grew stronger both on and off campus in the decade that followed.
Whether they were enrolled at historically Black colleges and universities, liberal arts colleges, Ivy League schools or public universities, students coordinated a national divestment movement, pushing the issue of U.S. investment in South Africa to the center of American intellectual and civic life.
Students assembled blockades, organized “sit-outs,” occupied buildings and built “shantytowns” – made to resemble the makeshift dwellings in which many Black South Africans lived under apartheid – at more than 100 universities.
These shantytown protests marked the culmination of nearly a decade of campus anti-apartheid organizing. Thousands of students at hundreds of campuses erected encampments to try to “stop business as usual,” as student groups put it.
University backlash ended up only amplifying support for the movement as media flocked to the shantytowns, while faculty, parents and alumni rallied around the students.
Students, in turn, rebuilt their encampments. Joining them were supporters from beyond the university: musicians, politicians, and New Left and Black Power activists. The presence of feminist political activist Angela Davis, counterculture activist Mario Savio, poet June Jordan, writer Amiri Baraka and Pan-Africanism organizer Kwame Ture helped draw further national attention to student demands.
Many of the activists and student protesters were arrested. But by calling out specific corporations doing business in South Africa and popularizing corporate ties to anti-Black violence, oppression and massacres in a foreign country, students succeeded in making investments in those stocks riskier and unattractive.
After two years of sustained militant organizing and demonstrations, the student anti-apartheid movement claimed to have gotten colleges and universities to divest about US$3.6 billion – or $10.3 billion in today’s dollars – from their endowments.
Revisionist history
In 1990, after 27 years of imprisonment, African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela was released from prison.
By then, South Africa’s system of apartheid was crumbling. The reinstatement of the liberation movements in 1990, the repeal of segregationist laws in 1991 and the first democratic election of 1994 signaled the official end of apartheid, though discrimination and inequality persist in South Africa to this day.
In the collective memory of the U.S., anti-Vietnam and anti-apartheid movements are generally seen as righteous struggles that U.S. institutions couldn’t help but get behind.
Perhaps that’s why, after the death of Mandela in 2013, the University of California, Berkeley, administration claimed to be at the forefront of student divestment protests for South Africa.
This was revisionist history.
In fact, at Berkeley and across many campuses, administrators called the police on protesters, threatened to revoke their scholarships, took others to court and ordered custodial staff to demolish the shanties.
Nonetheless, I believe divestment from companies doing business with Israel is still possible – and can be an effective demand. Several college administrations have agreed to consider divestment, including Brown University, Northwestern University, Evergreen State College and the University of Minnesota.
The U.S. anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s helped topple South Africa’s apartheid government. Back then, campus anti-apartheid occupations placed students at the forefront of changing the national consensus on U.S. complicity with injustice in South Africa.
Time will tell whether today’s students can do the same with regards to Israel’s systematic oppression of the Palestinian people.
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