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)
ZIONIST HUBRIS Netanyahu vows to invade Rafah ‘with or without a deal’ as cease-fire talks with Hamas continue Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged Tuesday to launch an incursion into a Gaza city sheltering hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged Tuesday to launch an incursion into the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are sheltering from the almost 7-month-long war, just as cease-fire negotiations between Israel and Hamas appear to be gaining steam.
Netanyahu’s comments came hours before U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrives in Israel to advance the truce talks — which appear to be one of the most serious rounds of negotiations between Israel and Hamas since the war began. The deal is meant to free hostages, bring some relief to the population and avert an Israeli offensive into Rafah and the potential harm to civilians there.
Netanyahu said Israel would enter Rafah to destroy Hamas’ battalions there regardless of whether a truce-for-hostages deal is struck. His comments appeared to be meant to appease his nationalist governing partners but it was not clear whether they would have any bearing on any emerging deal with Hamas.
“The idea that we will stop the war before achieving all of its goals is out of the question,” Netanyahu said, according to a statement from his office. “We will enter Rafah and we will eliminate Hamas’ battalions there — with or without a deal, to achieve the total victory.”
Netanyahu has faced pressure from his governing partners not to proceed with a deal that might prevent Israel from invading Rafah, which it says is Hamas’ last major stronghold. His government could be threatened if he agrees to a deal because hard-line Cabinet members have demanded an attack on Rafah.
Netanyahu met on Tuesday with one of those partners, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, according to the minister’s office, who said Netanyahu promised him that “Israel will enter Rafah, promised that we are not stopping the war and promised that there won’t be a reckless deal.”
With more than half of Gaza’s 2.3 million people sheltering in Rafah, the international community, including Israel’s top ally, the United States, has warned Israel against any offensive that puts civilians at risk.
Netanyahu on Tuesday was addressing the Tikva Forum, a small group of families of hostages that’s distinct from the main group representing the families of captive Israelis. The forum has indicated that it prefers to see Hamas crushed over the freedom of their loved ones. Most families and their supporters have demonstrated in the thousands every week for a deal that would bring the hostages home, saying it should take precedence over military action.
Netanyahu’s coalition is made up of ultranationalist and conservative religious parties, and critics of the Israeli leader say his decision-making during the war has been driven by political considerations rather than national interests, a charge Netanyahu denies. His government could collapse if one of the parties opposed to a deal pulls out, a scenario Netanyahu would try to avoid considering his support has plummeted in opinion polls since the war began, although it has seen a slight gradual uptick.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who heads the ultranationalist Religious Zionist party, said Monday that he was seeking “total annihilation” of Israel’s enemies, appearing to refer to Hamas, in a recorded portion of his remarks at an event marking the end of the Passover holiday which were aired in Israeli media.
“You can’t do half a job,” he said.
The current deal being discussed, brokered by the U.S., Egypt and Qatar, would see the release of dozens of hostages in exchange for a six-week halt in fighting as part of an initial phase, according to an Egyptian official and Israeli media. Hundreds of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel would also be released, including some serving long sentences.
Blinken, who was meeting with regional leaders in Saudi Arabia and Jordan before landing in Tel Aviv later Tuesday, urged Hamas on Monday to accept the latest proposal, calling it “extraordinarily generous” on Israel’s part.
But a sticking point remains over what happens next. Hamas has demanded assurances that an eventual release of all hostages will bring a complete end to Israel’s nearly seven-month assault in Gaza and a withdrawal of its troops from the devastated territory. Israel has offered only an extended pause, vowing to resume its offensive once the first phase of the deal is over. The issue has repeatedly obstructed efforts by the mediators during months of talks
The war in Gaza has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, according to local health officials. The war has driven around 80% of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million from their homes, caused vast destruction in several towns and cities and pushed northern Gaza to the brink of famine.
Monday, April 29, 2024
Being Jewish In a Time of Mass Hysteria
The “never again” faction loudly worries that Palestinian liberation is incompatible with Israeli survival and sees growing American antisemitism behind every picket sign. But support for Netanyahu and his government contradicts everything valuable in Jewish tradition and divides Jews from their historic allies in this country and worldwide.
“UT Austin, where Texas state troopers are barring students from accessing the other side of the campus.” (@balagonline, Twitter)
Hi, my name is Dan.
My pronouns are he and him.
I went to Hebrew school for a year when I was 10 and was bored out of my mind.
I am REALLY outraged by Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack and want to see the hostages freed.
May I proceed?
***
The student protests happening across the U.S. are the best thing that has happened in America in years. What’s even better is that they are happening at USC, the University of Texas, and Arizona State. Special thanks are due to the university presidents and politicians for their efforts to suppress the protests. Their failure to learn the lessons of the 1960s and ‘70s guarantees that the protests will continue and grow. Maybe Biden, Blinken, et al. will be faster learners than JFK, LBJ, and Nixon and will force Israel to end the genocide in Gaza before the death toll doubles again.
The complaints of antisemitism from my Brethren in the Jewish community and their new friends on the right are growing more hollow by the day. Fewer and fewer people remain confused by the blatant sophistry of those who try to equate antisemitism with opposition to Netanyahu, the Israeli government, or Zionism, either as a political movement or as manifested by the State of Israel. I have heard fewer antisemitic statements in the scores of pro-Palestine events I have attended than during a typical week at my Long Island junior high school.
If anyone wonders whether much of America’s Jewish community has been overcome by a mass psychogenic illness, events at a dinner for graduating Berkeley Law students a few weeks ago week should answer the question definitively. A group of students associated with the school’s chapter of Law Students for Justice in Palestine politely disrupted the celebration as one of them, Malak Afaneh, attempted to speak about their outrage with conducting business as usual while the death toll in Palestine was creeping up to 35,000.
Within seconds, one of the dinner’s hosts, law professor Catherine Fisk, had an arm around Ms. Afaneh’s neck while trying to take her phone, from which she was reading, with her other hand. Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, Fisk’s husband, quickly joined the fray, insisting that Ms. Afaneh leave their home. Professor Fisk pointed out that she paid the mortgage on the property.
Ms. Afaneh and a group of supporters soon departed. The uproar that followed was at once predictable, disappointing, and yet even a little surprising. The chairman of the University’s Board of Regents and Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ denounced the protest, describing it as an inexcusable disruption of a private event at a private space. Much of the public debate over the incident has focused on the arcana of free speech, specifically whether the dinner, paid for by the university, should be considered a public forum, a limited public forum, or no forum at all. Litigation is likely.
More interesting is what this event says about the Jewish community. Edwin Chemerinsky is not the average law school dean. He is deservedly respected for his scholarship and advocacy for the Constitution, especially on free speech issues. So it was especially disappointing that his response to the dinner disruption quickly devolved into assertions of private property rights.
But Dean Chemerinsky is not alone. Events in Palestine and Israel since Oct. 7 have heightened the longstanding conflicts among American Jews who have otherwise consistently fought for the humanitarian and democratic values at the heart of Jewish tradition. One could easily make the argument that Judaism would not have survived in a hostile world for over 3,000 years if it had not united its followers around the progressive principles that explain why, even today, such a large proportion of those supporting Palestinian rights and condemning Israel are Jewish.
I have never been uncomfortable as a Jew supporting Palestinian rights. My grandfather Max grew up in Belarus in the late 1880s in a Jewish community split over whether Zionism or socialism offered a path to Jewish liberation. Max was sent from his small town to Minsk to study to become a rabbi. Instead, he joined the Jewish Workers Bund and supported the 1905 Revolution before emigrating to New York during the repression that followed.
My father became a cadre in the Communist Party, U.S.A, although he developed a soft spot for Israel late in his life. As a small child growing up in the Bronx in the late 1940s and early 1950s, I have no memory of my parents, who discussed politics constantly, ever talking about Israel. Much later, our family’s Passover seders emphasized Jewish solidarity with the oppressed and exploited people of the world and recognized the similarities between the Hebrews’ struggle to escape slavery in Egypt and modern liberation struggles.
The anger of many in America’s Jewish community towards protesting students and critics of Israel is both understandable and confounding. The Holocaust was the 20th century’s effort to eradicate the Jewish people and the continuation of European efforts since at least the Crusades. The attraction of a Jewish homeland in Palestine is easy to understand for refugees unwelcome elsewhere in the world. Unfortunately, it became easy to ignore the fact that those pesky Palestinians already lived there and unsurprisingly reacted to the arrival of the Jews similarly to the reaction of the indigenous people of the Americas to the arrival of the Europeans 450 years earlier.
Splits in the Jewish community are not new. As far back as the seventh century before the birth of Christ, the Old Testament prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel condemned the hypocrisy, dishonesty, and materialism of the Jewish establishment and predicted its defeat.
Small wonder at the psychological crisis this history has created for American Jewry. The “never again” faction loudly worries that Palestinian liberation is incompatible with Israeli survival and sees growing American antisemitism behind every picket sign. But support for Netanyahu and his government contradicts everything valuable in Jewish tradition and divides Jews from their historic allies in this country and worldwide. People who have spent decades supporting the civil rights movement and efforts for peace and justice throughout the world are now alienated from their traditional values and beliefs.
Does anyone wonder where Einstein and Freud would stand in this debate?
Illegal settlers enter Al-Aqsa Mosque complex from Mugharbah Gate, perform provocative rounds, Talmudic rituals, says Jerusalem Islamic Endowments Authority
Ikrame Imane Kouachi |28.04.2024 - U
Fanatic Jewish settlers gather in front of the gates of Al-Aqsa Mosque to perform rituals during the Passover under the protection of Israeli police in East Jerusalem on April 26, 2024.
JERUSALEM
More than 500 illegal Israeli settlers forced their way into the flashpoint of Al-Aqsa Mosque complex in occupied East Jerusalem on Sunday to celebrate the Jewish Passover holiday.
"More than 500 settlers stormed Al-Aqsa from the Mugharbah Gate and carried out provocative rounds and performed Talmudic rituals in its courtyards," the Islamic Endowments Authority in Jerusalem said in a statement.
The authority added that the settlers' incursions were carried out under the protection of police, who tightened military measures at the gates of the Old City and Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Settler incursions into the Al-Aqsa Mosque are expected to continue until afternoon prayers on Sunday, it added.
Since the first day of Passover, which began on Monday evening and lasts a week, hundreds of illegal settlers have been storming the Al-Aqsa Mosque complex daily under tight police measures, causing severe tensions in various parts of Jerusalem's Old City.
On Thursday, nearly 1,700 illegal Israeli settlers forced their way into the Al-Aqsa Mosque complex in groups to celebrate Passover, the Islamic Endowments Authority in Jerusalem had said.
Right-wing Israeli extremist groups have previously called for widespread incursions into the mosque on the occasion of Passover.
Palestinians accuse Israel of taking rapid measures to Judaize Jerusalem, including the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and erase its Arab and Islamic identity.
Passover, which commemorates the Israelites' exodus from Egypt during the time of Prophet Moses, is considered one of the most important holidays on the Jewish religious calendar.
Since 2003, Israel has allowed illegal settlers into the flashpoint compound on an almost daily basis with the exception of Fridays and Saturdays.
Al-Aqsa Mosque is the world's third-holiest site for Muslims. Jews call the area the "Temple Mount," claiming it was the site of two Jewish temples in ancient times.
Israel occupied East Jerusalem, where Al-Aqsa is located, during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. It annexed the entire city in 1980 in a move never recognized by the international community.
The Gaza solidarity encampment at the Columbia University's campus
Students at more than 40 universities and colleges in the United States and around the world have lit a fire under the Palestine solidarity movement by setting up encampments on their campuses. They are demanding that their universities end their complicity with Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the occupation of Palestine more broadly.
While the first and longest-running student takeover has been at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, it was Columbia University that lit the fuse for a widespread student movement and drew global attention. The administration’s decision at the elite New York City school to sic the repressive New York Police Department on peacefully protesting students led to a global movement and gave hope for the first time in months to countless people. As of April 26, student occupations extended to France and Australia in addition to dozens of campuses in the United States.
Police repression at other sites besides Columbia has been fierce as well. At Emerson University in Boston, Massachusetts, the Boston Police Department was livestreamed manhandling protesters in the early hours of April 25. At Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, the police threw Caroline Fohlin, an economics professor who attempted to intervene in arrests of students, to the ground, her head hitting the concrete. The University of Southern California allowed officers to fire rubber bullets at students, and the University of Texas–Austin had local and state police on motorcycles, horseback, and on foot arresting students.
But the police didn’t always have the upper hand. At Cal Poly Humboldt, students successfully barricaded themselves in a building. And, at the City University of New York’s City College, protesters pushed the police back and maintained the integrity of their encampment.
Through it all, students have grounded the protests in what matters: conditions in Gaza and their universities’ ties to Israel. Even as establishment figures hemmed and hawed in the face of the student uprising—President Joe Biden tried to link them to “antisemitism”—two mass graves were uncovered in Palestine, which was from the aftermath of terroristic Israeli raids on two hospitals in Gaza. About 400 doctors, patients, children, and others were found dead, in some cases buried alive.
The higher-ups on campuses, in boardrooms, and in presidential palaces around the world appeared to have nothing new to say about Israel’s horrifying and murderous tactics. The Zionist state’s genocide in Gaza has already reached its 200th day, with at least 34,000 dead and an invasion reportedly imminent in Rafah, the southern city and place of last refuge for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.
While some have claimed that the mainly U.S. student movement is a distraction, movement figures like Harsha Walia have noted the connections between racist state violence in the United States and in Israel and elsewhere. And, if nothing else, the student movement in advance of both the launch of the aid-carrying “Freedom Flotilla” and International Workers’ Day has given countless Palestinian solidarity activists something concrete to do beyond doomscrolling horrifying images from Gaza for hours or attempting to carry on with their daily lives in the face of ongoing genocide.
Moreover, with billions of dollars in endowment money, social capital, and, in some cases, direct links to the state of Israel, universities are an important site of struggle for the advancement of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. For example, Columbia University maintains a campus in Tel Aviv.
The United States proves increasingly inhospitable to free speech, a cornerstone of democracy; and it seems nearly every private and public institution has been corporatized, militarized, or both. Reprising the historical role of universities as centers of knowledge and public interest as students are doing now could offer a site for pushback to not just the genocide in Gaza, but much more.
In the coming days, there may be many more encampments in an ever-widening range of sites around the world. The protesters are united in their purpose; as a common chant, “Disclose, divest; we will not stop, we will not rest!” is heard across the globe.
We have let life go on, let business go on as usual, while a genocide has been broadcast to us for months. Meanwhile, MIT has received OVER $11 MILLION in research funding from the Ministry of Defense of Israel since 2015. Multiple labs on this campus are performing sponsored research for the material benefit of the Israeli Occupation Forces. As recently as March 2024, such funding has been renewed.
It is unconscionable. It is immoral. It reflects a gross disdain for human life and human dignity that this institution, MIT, has chosen to embody.
To MIT, we charge you in the brutal genocide of the Palestinian people for your explicit role in providing scientific and technological support for the Israeli Occupation Forces’ and their crimes. The students and workers of this campus have made our demands CLEAR. In the last month, undergraduates in the Undergraduate Association and grad workers in the Graduate Students Union PASSED referendums demanding that MIT stop accepting blood money from the Ministry of Defense of Israel, the same entity enacting the genocide in Gaza. We have shown that we are with the Palestinian people, and now is the time to act.
We are what make MIT the place that it is. They use our labor to advance their prestige. They use our student culture to improve their image. We are so much stronger as a community, and if you have ever wondered what YOU can do, this is it. The students of Columbia, Yale, Rutgers, and countless other schools, with the resilience of their Gaza solidarity encampments, have shown us what it means to resist the powers of our complicit institutions and fight collectively. Come support the encampment. Come now.
Ask yourself what it would take to compel us to act. Then ask yourself if the tens of thousands of Palestinians killed in this genocide are enough for us to act. Ask yourself what business this institution has to maintain ties with a genocidal state after six months.
Today, we say that we refuse to give our labor to genocide. We refuse to make space on this campus for genocide. We will not rest until MIT cuts research ties with the Israeli military.
Our people at MIT have shown that we stand in solidarity with our steadfast siblings in Palestine. We rebuke the complicity of our institution, and today, we take the next step together in fighting for what we believe in.
I Am a Jewish Student at Columbia. Don’t Believe What You’re Being Told About ‘Campus Antisemitism’
Image by Columbia University Apartheid Divest coalition
“Reprehensible and dangerous.” “Terrorist sympathizers.” “It’s not 1938 Berlin. It’s 2024, Columbia University, NYC.”
The White House, Congressional Republicans, and cable news talking heads would have you believe that the Columbia University campus has devolved into a hotbed of antisemitic violence – but the reality on the ground is very different. As a Jewish student at Columbia, it depresses me that I have to correct the record and explain what the real risk to our safety looks like. I still can’t quite believe how the events on campus over the past few days have been so cynically and hysterically misrepresented by the media and by our elected representatives.
Last week, the Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) coalition, representing more than 100 student organizations, including Jewish groups, organized the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, a peaceful campus protest in solidarity with Palestine. CUAD was reactivated after the university suspended Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace in the fall. On Wednesday morning, hundreds of students camped out on Columbia’s South Lawn. They vowed to stay put until the university divests from companies that profit from their ties to Israel. Protesters prayed, chanted, ate pizza, and condemned the university’s complicity in Israel’s attacks on Gaza. Though counter-protesters waved Israeli flags near the encampment, the campus remained largely calm from my vantage point.
Columbia responded by imposing a miniature police state. Just over a day after the encampment was formed, university President Minouche Shafik asked and authorized the New York Police Department to clear the lawn and load 108 students – including a number of Jewish students – onto Department of Corrections buses to be held at NYPD headquarters at 1 Police Plaza. One Jewish student told me that she and her fellow protesters were restrained in zip-tie handcuffs for eight hours and held in cells where they shared a toilet without privacy. The NYPD chief of patrol John Chell later told the Columbia Spectator that “the students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner.”
Since then, dozens of undergraduates have been locked out of their dorms without notice. Barnard College, an affiliate of Columbia, notably gave students just 15 minutes to retrieve their belongings after returning from lockup and finding themselves evicted. Suspended students cannot return to campus and are struggling to access food or medical care. Students who keep Shabbat, and do not use electronics on the Sabbath, were forced to rely on technology in order to secure food and emergency housing. This crackdown was the most violence inflicted on our student body in decades. I implore you, as our Jewish Voice for Peace chapter does, to consider whether arresting Jewish students keeps us and Columbia safe.
Smears from the press and pro-Israel influencers, who have levied charges of antisemitism and violence against Jewish students, are a dangerous distraction from real threats to our safety. I saw politicians compare student organizers to neo-Nazis and call for a National Guard deployment, apparently ignorant of the lives lost at Kent State and in Charlottesville, and with very little pushback from national media. This is a repulsive form of self-aggrandizement that I can only assume is intended to preserve relationships with influential donors. Calls to more heavily police our campus actively endanger Jewish students, and threaten the regular operations of the university far more gravely than peaceful protests.
It’s true, the fact that CUAD organizers fundamentally reject bigotry and hate has not stopped unrelated actors from exploiting opportunities to shamefully harass Jewish students with grotesque or antisemitic statements. I condemn antisemitism – which should seem obvious since I have experienced it many times myself. (This likely won’t keep controversial Columbia Business School professor Shai Davidai from calling me a kapo.) But the often off-campus actions of a few unaffiliated individuals simply do not characterize this disciplined student campaign. The efforts to connect these offensive but relatively isolated incidents to the broader pro-Palestinian protest movement mirror a wider strategy to delegitimize all criticism of Israel.
As this national discourse over “campus antisemitism” reached a boiling point over the weekend, the Gaza Solidarity Encampment saw CUAD organizers lead joint Muslim and Jewishprayer sessions and honor each other’s dead. This is wholesome, human stuff – it doesn’t make for sensationalist headlines about Jew-hating Ivy Leaguers.
On Monday, I joined hundreds of my fellow student workers for a walk-out in solidarity with the encampment; we listened respectfully as a similarly sizable group of Columbia faculty held a rally on the library steps. Frankly, it didn’t feel much different from the environment during my union’s most recent strike on campus – I felt inspired again by my colleagues’ commitment to making Columbia a safer and better place to work and study.
Later that night, a Passover Seder service was held at the encampment. Would an antisemitic student movement welcome Jews in this way? I think not.
Here’s what you’re not being told: The most pressing threats to our safety as Jewish students do not come from tents on campus. Instead, they come from the Columbia administration inviting police onto campus, certain faculty members, and third-party organizations that dox undergraduates. Frankly, I regret the fact that writing to confirm the safety of Jewish Ivy League students feels justified in the first place. I have not seen many pundits hand-wringing over the safety of my Palestinian colleagues mourning the deaths of family members, or the destruction of Gaza’s cherished universities.
I am wary of a hysterical campus discourse – gleefully amplified by many of the same charlatans who have turned “DEI” into a slur – that draws attention away from the ongoing slaughter in the Gaza Strip and settler violence in the occupied West Bank. We should be focusing on the material reality of war: the munitions our government is sending to Israel, which kill Palestinians by the thousands, and the Americans participating in the violence. Forget the fringe folks and outside agitators: the CUAD organizers behind the campus protests have rightfully insisted on divestment as their most important demand of the Columbia administration, and on sustained attention to the situation in Palestine.
And so, it is my hope that we can all learn from their examples to remain clear-eyed about the stakes of this crisis and focus on the actual violence being perpetrated in all of our names.
US campuses: Gaza horror sparks rage and repression
University campuses in the United States have long been ideological battlegrounds in the nation’s ‘culture wars’, but since last October the reality of Israel’s unrelenting war on Gaza and its people has fuelled passionate protests on a scale not witnessed since the height of the movement opposing the US war on Vietnam.
On 17th April students at Columbia University in New York City established a miniature tent city on a lawn outside a main campus building. They set up the encampment as an expression of solidarity with the people of Gaza and to back demands for an immediate ceasefire and divestment of Columbia’s Israel-linked investments.
Within 48 hours Columbia’s already embattled president, the Egyptian-American economist, Minouche Shafik, who had previously been vice-chancellor at the London School of Economics and a deputy governor at the Bank of England, had asked New York’s police department to intervene and evict the campers. The cops, many clad in riot gear, duly obliged and arrested over 100 including several Jewish students. All those taken into custody are currently out of jail, but the university administration has suspended many of the students and evicted some, if not all, of those who had student accommodation. In-person classes have ceased for the remainder of the academic year with teaching once more online.
Since the initial police raid, a new encampment has sprung up elsewhere on the Columbia campus, while dozens of protests inspired by the Columbia student activists have taken place across much of the US, with nearly two dozen other campuses witnessing the erection of makeshift camps by 24th April. In addition to Columbia, five (Brown, Cornell, Harvard, University of Pennsylvania and Yale) of the other six elite Ivy League institutions have now seen encampments. Several other universities have seen demonstrations. While still concentrated in the northeast, the wave of protests has become national.
The movement is far from homogenous, with precise demands varying from campus to campus. Some have simply demanded an end to investments in corporations supplying weaponry to the Israeli military such as Lockheed-Martin, the principal manufacturer of US fighter jets for which BAe is a contractor, and RTX, formerly Raytheon, producer of Tomahawk Cruise missiles. Others have gone further and called for divestment from all shareholdings in companies complicit in the occupation of Palestine, including the likes of Airbnb, along with the termination of exchange programmes with Israeli universities.
At least 15 campuses have seen protesters arrested since 17th April. Police broke up encampments and made mass arrests at New York University and Yale in New Haven, Connecticut on 22nd April. Later in the week, police in Los Angeles dismantled an encampment at the University of Southern California (USC).
The USC authorities had earlier fuelled anger after cancelling a speech by the class of 2024 valedictorian, Asna Tabassum, a student in biomedical engineering and a Muslim woman of South Asian heritage. A pro-Zionist group on the campus, Trojans for Israel (USC’s sports teams carry the “Trojans” moniker), had trawled her social media posts and found pro-Palestinian tweets. The panic-stricken university management has now cancelled the main graduation ceremony and withdrawn invitations to all commencement speakers including the ground-breaking tennis star, Billie-Jean King.
In Boston, police descended on an alleyway encampment by students at Emerson College Wednesday (24th April) night, arresting 108 protesters, with documented allegations of grossly excessive force. The city’s Democratic mayor, Michelle Wu, widely seen as a progressive, has so far backed the cops’ actions. Another protest camp has since sprung up at the city’s Northeastern University.
Demonstrators at Atlanta’s Emory University claim that police used tear gas and even rubber bullets in clearing a ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampment’, which had also become a focal point for opposition to the construction of ‘Cop City’, a police training centre spread across 171 acres on the city’s outskirts.
Brutal reactions to student protests have also come in Texas where at the state university’s main campus in Austin both local police and state troopers were deployed to smash a peaceful student protest. Local media reported the arrest of 34 students and alumni along with two journalists including a Fox News employee. The police action had the public backing of Governor Greg Abbott, frequently mentioned as a potential Trump running mate.
Abbott is hardly alone among Republican politicians in urging harsh crackdowns on pro-Palestinian protest. A group of 27 Republican senators led by Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Josh Hawley of Missouri have published a letter to the Biden administration’s Education Secretary and Attorney General calling for the restoration of “order to campuses that have been effectively shut down by anti-Semitic mobs that are targeting Jewish students.” Cotton and Hawley have explicitly called for the deployment of the National Guard, evoking for some memories of the killing of protesting students by Guardsmen at Kent State in Ohio in 1970.
The Republican Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, whose own job security seems precarious, went to the Columbia campus to denounce the student protests and even suggested that Minouche Shafik should resign from the university’s presidency if she could not “restore order.” The previous weekend, Johnson had helped steer a series of “foreign aid” bills through the House of Representatives including some $17bn (£13.7bn) for Israel’s military with a further $9bn earmarked for “humanitarian” relief.
The day following Johnson’s grandstanding, the Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar appeared at Columbia to accompany her daughter, one of the student protesters arrested the week before. Omar, who represents a Minnesota district, is a member of “the Squad” and a forthright opponent of Israel’s war. While hardly typical of Congressional Democrats, Omar was far from alone in voting against the release of still more money for Israel’s war machine. Three dozen other Democrats also said “no” to the package, a figure which would have been almost unthinkable six months before.
The still small, but significant, shift among Democratic Party politicians partly reflects the impact of months of unprecedented protest both on campuses and far beyond, with a transformed stance among several US unions, not least the United Autoworkers, also exercising some influence. Opinion polling suggests a clear majority of US voters and an overwhelming 77% of Democrats back a ceasefire, with an unprecedented level of public sympathy. The April Democratic primary in Pennsylvania’s 12th Congressional District saw a first-term “Squad” member score an easy victory despite prominent attacks on her stance against Israel’s war.
While Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu may brand the campus protests as “anti-Semitic” and even compare them with the atmosphere at German universities in the 1930s, an increasing number of Jewish Americans reject such rhetoric. Fissures in the once monolithic support for Israel among 7.6 million Jewish people in the US had already developed before last October. The growth of groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace, founded in 1996, and the more recent IfNotNow, which opposes Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza, which preceded the current war, highlight the rejection of the pro-Zionist narrative among a substantial layer of younger Jews.
So far, the Biden administration has had little to say about the student protests and maintains that it is attempting to exercise a restraining hand on the Netanyahu war cabinet even as it continues to pour billions to the IDF. Biden has paid a modest political price to date with campaigns in Democratic Party presidential primaries persuading many voters to cast “uncommitted” ballots. As in August 1968, Chicago is the host city for the Democrats’ convention, where Biden will doubtless be confirmed as the party’s candidate. Whether or not the spectre of the ’68 protests and their savage suppression haunts Joe Biden is unknown, but the very real prospect of mass abstention or votes for third party candidates just might cost him re-election and ironically propel Donald Trump back into the White House.
George Binette is a Massachusetts native. He is a former Hackney North & Stoke Newington CLP Trade Union Liaison Officer and writes in a personal capacity.
Najla Said, daughter of the late Edward Said, arrive at Columbia’s solidarity encampment in support of the US student movement (Picture: @NationalSJP on Twitter)
A militant movement for Palestine is spreading across campuses in the US. Protests, occupations and encampments have spread to more than 40 campuses after students at Columbia University and Barnard College took action.
The occupation at Columbia was still standing strong after ten days on Friday, despite the police trying to smash up the encampment.
The protests have forced university management to enter negotiations with students, who are pushing for the university to divest from all companies that fund and support the Israeli apartheid state.
“We want to stay visible,” said Columbia student protester Mahmoud Khalil. “The university should do something about what we’re asking for, about the genocide that’s happening in Gaza. They should stop investing in this genocide.”
The movement is gathering steam fast, with students on more campuses springing into action every day.
In New York, hundreds of protesters set up an encampment at Gould Plaza at New York university earlier this week. They ignored orders from university bosses who said they’d face punishment if they stayed.
As cops tried to remove them from Gould Plaza, they chanted, “We will not stop, we will not rest. Disclose. Divest.”
At the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in New York, students were furious on Thursday that university bosses were trying to ban their group from campus. The FIT Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) said they wouldn’t leave the Goodman Centre until their demands were met, which they have renamed the People’s Museum.
The strength of the protests at the University of Southern California forced university management to cancel its commencement ceremony, fearing protesters would disrupt it.
On Wednesday, students at Brown University in Rhode Island said they would not move their tents despite university bosses saying they were breaching university policy.
Niyanta Nepal, president-elect of the student body, said, “What we’re putting on the line is so minimal in risk compared to what Gazans are going through. This is the least we can be doing, as youth in a privileged situation, to take ownership of the situation.”
The lengths to which the US state would go to stop the protest were on display throughout the week. Protesters and students spotted and photographed snipers on the roof of buildings pointed at crowds at Ohio state university and Indiana University Bloomington.
State troopers, some on horseback, charged students at the University of Texas on Wednesday. Lines of cops in military attire marched onto the university campus to try and intimidate students.
In total 34 protesters were arrested by the cops and almost 100 detained. And the cops fired rubber bullets at protesters at the University of Southern California, reportedly hitting a student.
Students do not face repression alone; workers stand by the students they teach. Hundreds of workers at Columbia University walked out this week in solidarity with their students.
A group of workers at the University of Texas wrote a statement stating that they would be taking part in “No classes, No grading. No assignments. No work” while the cops occupy their university.
The group added that there could be no “business as usual” until they left. Others stood in front of their students to protect them from police repression.
Steven Thrasher is an assistant professor at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. He said, “Once we heard that they were going to be doing this encampment, we wanted to be here as a presence to help protect them and support them.”
He explained that workers and students were using a colour code system to identify whether they are willing to be arrested. The assistant professor explained that red indicates you are willing to risk arrest.
“And I’m a level red,” said Thrasher. “I was horrified to see students around the country being assaulted by cops. So I wanted to put my body on the line before they could touch our students.”
Students worldwide are inspired by the protests in the US. There were solidarity protests on university campuses in France, Turkey, Italy and Australia.
And pro-Palestinian students occupied the centre of the University of Warwick to hit back at the universities’ ties to the Israeli state. Students and workers here in Britain must follow the lead of those fighting in the US.
Jews Must Raise Voices for Palestine, Oppose “False Idol of Zionism”
Hundreds of protesters were arrested in Brooklyn on Tuesday when Jewish New Yorkers and allies gathered for what they called a “Seder in the Streets to Stop Arming Israel” on the second night of Passover. The demonstration, held one block away from the home of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, came just hours before the Senate overwhelmingly approved a $95 billion foreign aid package that includes about $17 billion in arms and security funding to Israel. “Too many of our people are worshiping a false idol,” said award-winning author and activist Naomi Klein, one of several speakers at Tuesday’s rally. “They are enraptured by it. They are drunk on it. They are profaned by it. And that false idol is called Zionism.”
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Among those who addressed the crowd during the seder was award-winning author and activist Naomi Klein. This is some of what she had to say.
NAOMI KLEIN: My friends, I’ve been thinking about Moses and his rage when he came down from the mount to find the Israelites worshiping a golden calf. The ecofeminist in me has always been uneasy about this story. What kind of god is jealous of animals? What kind of god wants to hoard all the sacredness of the Earth for himself? But there is, of course, a less literal way of understanding this story. It is a lesson about false idols, about the human tendency to worship the profane and shining, to look to the small and material rather than the large and transcendent.
What I want to say to you this evening at this revolutionary and historic Seder in the Streets is that too many of our people are worshiping a false idol once again. They are enraptured by it. They are drunk on it. They are profaned by it. And that false idol is called Zionism.
It is a false idol that takes our most profound biblical stories of justice and emancipation from slavery, the story of Passover itself, and turns them into brutalist weapons of colonial land theft, roadmaps for ethnic cleansing and genocide. It is a false idol that has taken the transcendent idea of the Promised Land, a metaphor for human liberation that has traveled across faiths to every corner of this globe, and dared to turn it into a deed of sale for a militarist ethnostate.
Political Zionism’s version of liberation is itself profane. From the start, it required the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and ancestral lands in the Nakba. From the start, it has been at war with collective dreams of liberation. At a seder, it is worth remembering that this includes the dreams of liberation and self-determination of the Egyptian people. This false idol of Zionism has long equated Israeli safety with Egyptian dictatorship and unfreedom and client state. From the start, it has produced an ugly kind of freedom that saw Palestinian children not as human beings, but as demographic threats, much as the Pharaoh in the Book of Exodus feared the growing population of Israelites and thus ordered the death of their sons. And as we know, Moses was saved from that by being put in a basket and adopted by an Egyptian woman.
Zionism has brought us to our present moment of cataclysm, and it is time that we say clearly it has always been leading us here. It is a false idol that has led far too many of our own people down a deeply immoral path that now has them justifying the shredding of core commandments — “Thou shall not kill,” “Thou shall not steal,” “Thou shall not covet” — the commandments brought down from the mount. It is a false idol that equates Jewish freedom with cluster bombs that kill and maim Palestinian children.
Zionism is a false idol that has betrayed every Jewish value, including the value that we place on questioning a practice embedded in the seder itself with its four questions asked by the youngest child. It also betrays the love that we have as a people for text and for education. Today this false idol dares to justify the bombing of every single university in Gaza, the destruction of countless schools, of archives, of printing presses, the killing of hundreds of academics, scholars, journalists, poets, essayists. This is what Palestinians call scholasticide, the killing of the infrastructure and the means of education.
Meanwhile, in this city, the universities call the NYPD and barricade themselves against the grave threat posed by their own students asking them —
CROWD: Shame!
NAOMI KLEIN: — students embodying the spirit of the seder, asking the most basic question, asking questions like “How can you claim to believe in anything at all, least of all us, while you enable, invest in and collaborate with this genocide?”
The false idol of Zionism has been allowed to grow unchecked for far too long. So tonight we say it ends here. Our Judaism cannot be contained by an ethnostate, for our Judaism is internationalist by its very nature. Our Judaism cannot be protected by the rampaging military of that ethnostate, for all that military does is sow sorrow and reap hatred, including hatred against us as Jews. Our Judaism is not threatened by people raising their voices in solidarity with Palestine across lines of race, ethnicity, physical ability, gender identity and generations. Our Judaism is one of those voices and knows that in this chorus lies both our safety and our collective liberation.
Our Judaism is the Judaism of the Passover Seder, the gathering in ceremony to share food and wine with loved ones and strangers alike. This ritual, light enough to carry on our backs, in need of nothing but one another, even with — we don’t need walls. We need no temple, no rabbi. And there is a role for everyone, including especially the smallest child. The seder is portable, a diaspora technology if ever there was one. It is made to hold our collective grieving, our contemplation, our questioning, our remembering, and our reviving and rekindling of the revolutionary spirit.
So, tonight — so, look around. This here is our Judaism. As waters rise and forests burn and nothing is certain, we pray at the altar of solidarity and mutual aid, no matter the cost. We don’t need or want the false idol of Zionism. We want freedom from the project that commits genocide in our name. We want freedom from the ideology that has no plan for peace, except for deals with the murderous, theocratic petrostates next door, while selling the technologies of robo-assassinations to the world. We seek to liberate Judaism from an ethnostate that wants Jews to be perennially afraid, that wants our children afraid, that wants us to believe that the world is against us so that we go running to its fortress, or at least keep sending the weapons and the donations.
That is a false idol. And it’s not just Netanyahu. It’s the world he made and the world that made him. It’s Zionism. What are we? We, in these streets for months and months, we are the exodus, the exodus from Zionism. So, to the Chuck Schumers of this world, we do not say, “Let our people go.” We say, “We have already gone, and your kids, they are with us now.”
AMY GOODMAN: Award-winning journalist and author Naomi Klein, speaking at what was called the “Seder in the Streets to Stop Arming Israel” on Tuesday at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, a block from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s home. Special thanks to Hana Elias, Eric Halvarson and Ishmael Daro of Democracy Now!Email
Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author. She is Senior Correspondent for The Intercept. In 2018 she was named the inaugural Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair at Rutgers University and is now Honorary Professor of Media and Climate at Rutgers. In September 2021 she joined the University of British Columbia as UBC Professor of Climate Justice (tenured) and co-director of the Centre for Climate Justice.
Friday, April 26, 2024
Illegal Israeli settlers storm Joseph's tomb in northern occupied West Bank
Joseph's tomb in eastern Nablus city, revered by both Muslims and Jews, long served as flashpoint for clashes between Palestinians and illegal Israeli settlers
Qais Abu Samra |26.04.2024 -
RAMALLAH, Palestine
Palestinians on Friday clashed with illegal Israeli settlers who raided the Joseph's tomb in the northern occupied West Bank.
Local sources told Anadolu that illegal settlers were protected by the Israeli forces during their raid on the tomb site in eastern Nablus city.
Witnesses indicated that confrontations broke out between dozens of Palestinians and the Israeli army.
The Israeli army raided a number of eastern Nablus neighborhoods and searched homes before withdrawing, witnesses added.
Joseph's tomb, revered by both Muslims and Jews, has long served as a flashpoint for clashes between Palestinians and Israeli settlers.
Jews believe the site is the resting place of the biblical patriarch Joseph. Muslims, on the other hand, dispute this claim, saying Sheikh Yussef Dawiqat, an Islamic cleric, was buried there two centuries ago.
Since Monday, the first day of the weeklong Jewish Passover, hundreds of illegal settlers have stormed archaeological sites in the West Bank.
Passover, which commemorates the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt during the time of Prophet Moses, is considered one of the most important holidays on the Jewish religious calendar.
Meanwhile, the Israeli army carried out a series of raids on Friday, targeting the governorates of Jenin, Qalqilya, Tulkarm, and towns in the governorates of Bethlehem and Hebron.
The Israeli army also carried out incursions into the Jalazone refugee camp in the north of Ramallah.
Witnesses indicated that the forces arrested at least three Palestinians from the camp including a woman.
Tensions have been high across the occupied West Bank since Israel launched a deadly military offensive against the Gaza Strip, which killed more than 34,300 people following a Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023.
At least 485 Palestinians have since been killed and over 4,800 others injured by Israeli army fire in the occupied West Bank, according to the Health Ministry.
Israel stands accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice, which in an interim ruling in January ordered Tel Aviv to stop genocidal acts and take measures to guarantee that humanitarian assistance is provided to civilians in Gaza.
* Writing by Ikram Kouachi.
Thursday, April 25, 2024
Students protested for Palestine before Israel was even founded
And for decades, schools have tried to crack down on their activism.
Fabiola Cineas covers race and policy as a reporter for Vox. Before that, she was an editor and writer at Philadelphia magazine, where she covered business, tech, and the local economy.
Last week, the country watched one of the biggest escalations in campus unrest this year unfold, when dozens of New York City police officers clad in riot gear entered the grounds of Columbia University and, on the orders of university president Minouche Shafik, arrested more than 108 student protesters who had built a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” on campus. The students are calling for the school to divest from companies and organizations with ties to Israel amid the ongoing war in Gaza.
Though Shafik said at a congressional hearing she had taken the steps to make all students feel safe amid a reported rise in antisemitic rhetoric on campus, students said the administration put them in danger by authorizing a “notoriously violent” police unit to forcibly remove them, and NYPD Chief of Patrol John Chell later described the arrested students as “peaceful.”
At schools across the country, including the University of North Carolina, Ohio State University, University of Michigan, Boston University, and University of California Berkeley, students and faculty have launched marches, walkouts, and other demonstrations in solidarity with students at Columbia and to bring attention to the 34,000 Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks in the months since Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis and took more than 200 hostage on October 7.
New Haven police arrested nearly 50 people on Yale University’s campus early Monday on the third day of an encampment demonstration, while Columbia announced that classes would be held virtually as a campus “reset” and be hybrid for the remainder of the semester. Monday night, police arrested students on New York University’s campus, where about 400 people protested, after administrators called their demonstration “disorderly, disruptive and antagonizing.”
These campus crackdowns have gone hand in hand with a long history of US student activism for Palestine that began even before Israel’s founding in 1948. Pro-Israel groups and students have doxxed and surveilled student activists, the media has sometimes mischaracterized their demonstrations, and administrators and law enforcement have punished the students with probations and suspensions or long legal fights and threats of jail time.
“In the current moment, we’re seeing an exacerbation of a longstanding strategy of suppression of pro-Palestine organizations on college campuses,” said Dylan Saba, a staff attorney at Palestine Legal, the organization defending pro-Palestinian students in court, last fall, as tensions on campuses were rising.
“Instead of allowing debate to take place on campuses — and allowing student organizations to highlight what’s happening to Palestinians — school leaders have taken the approach of trying to squash out the organizing and expression altogether,” he said.
Students’ pro-Palestine protest — and its suppression — has long been a locus of debate over the bounds of criticism of Israel and Zionism on campuses, the definition of antisemitism, and who is and isn’t allowed to fully exercise freedom of expression and assembly.
The early roots of US student activism for Palestine
US student activism for Palestine predates the Nakba — the 1940s expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians and the destruction of villages by Zionist militias amid a war to establish the state of Israel — by decades.
Arab medical students and doctors in the US formed the Palestine Anti-Zionism Society (later known as the Palestine National League and then the Arab National League) as early as 1917 to protest the Balfour Declaration, the British government’s statement that called for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people’’ in Palestine.
The group published 1921’s “The Case Against Zionism” (a text that, it’s worth noting, contains antisemitic views) and also testified before Congress against the establishment of a Zionist state. The students also battled the negative depictions of Arabs that were spreading across the country alongside the Zionist movement.
More than 100 years ago, two members of the group told Congress what pro-Palestinian students across America are saying today: “Palestinians are not as backward as the Zionists portray them. They are entitled to a chance to build their own homeland…”
Larger-scale collective action increased as more Palestinians immigrated to the United States through the 1930s and ’40s “as the combination of colonial British rule and Zionist immigration made their lives unbearable,” San Francisco State University professor Rabab Abdulhadi wrote in “Activism and Exile: Palestinianness and the Politics of Solidarity.”
Student activism for Palestine grew with the student movement against the Vietnam War, among other struggles. Images of last week’s arrests at Columbia have even been juxtaposed with those from 1968, when about 1,000 police officers, some on horseback and carrying nightsticks, stormed the Columbia campus to arrest students protesting the war and US foreign policy.
“Palestine liberation organizing was very much a part of the anti-establishment, antiwar counterculture of the 1960s,” author and journalist Nora Barrows-Friedman wrote in the 2014 book In Our Power: U.S. Students Organize for Justice in Palestine. The 1967 war between Israel and its neighbors brought a new wave of uprooted Palestinians who couldn’t return home, students who were “politically conscious” and wanted to maintain their Palestinian identity, according to Abdulhadi.
The next few decades saw the formation of different pro-Palestinian groups, including the Organization of Arab Students, the Association of Arab American University Graduates (created by the late Palestinian American scholar Edward Said), and the General Union of Palestinian Students. Many of the organizations faded after the Oslo Accords, the American-led effort to broker peace between Israel and Palestine, in the early 1990s.
The modern face of pro-Palestinian student activism
Students for Justice in Palestine is one of the key groups currently leading protests for Palestine across US campuses. The group organized some of the encampments that have sprouted up at campuses in the last week.
Since October 7, some campus SJP chapters have been banned or suspended by administrators who say their demonstrations, slogans, and protest chants violated school policies. For example, George Washington University’s president suspended the school’s SJP chapter after students projected slogans including “Divestment from Zionist genocide now,” “Glory to our martyrs,” and “Free Palestine from the river to the sea,” on the side of the library. The president called some of the phrases antisemitic, though students and activists say the slogans call for Palestinian liberation.
SJP reignited activism for Palestine when it was launched at the University of California Berkeley in the early 1990s, as talks to dismantle the racialized apartheid regime in South Africa were underway and students drew parallels to Palestine. But it was the group’s actions amid the Second Palestinian Intifada — the uprising that began in 2000 in which Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel resisted the Israeli occupation — that have come to define the organization today.
At UC Berkeley, aside from organizing teach-ins and showing films to educate fellow students about Palestine, SJP members reenacted Israeli checkpoints across campus, temporarily blocking students at various campus gates. They built mock refugee camps on campus, occupied administrative buildings, disrupted classes, and chained themselves to the main administrative building.
Initially, the group “prioritized the spectacle with the aim of radicalizing our audiences and thrusting them into mobilization. The purpose was to avoid inertia,” wrote former UC Berkeley SJP member and Rutgers professor Noura Erakat in the forward to In Our Power.
But SJP found stronger direction in its divestment and “right of return” campaigns. When a vast coalition of pro-Palestine groups announced an official movement in 2005 to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel, or BDS, the group at Berkeley focused on pushing for the right of Palestinian refugees to return home and the need for Israel to comply with international law.
The new platform allowed the Berkeley chapter to find broader solidarity with Palestinian organizers across the country as those groups embraced BDS. SJP grew between 2003 and 2008 as students formed new SJP chapters, expanding to the East Coast, while activity ebbed and flowed based on conditions in the West Bank and Gaza.
“Media accounts, political analysts, and most observers noted the nascent movement with interest but dismissed it as idealistic and naïve,” wrote Erakat. Members, founders, and alumni told Vox that SJP’s staying power has come from its ability to draw in students of all backgrounds, including Jewish students.
“Historically, SJP was very dynamic because of its diversity. It wasn’t a Palestinian student organization or an Arab or Muslim one,” said William Youmans, an associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University who helped resuscitate UC Berkeley’s SJP chapter in 2000 and started Law Students for Justice in Palestine at Berkeley’s law school. Youmans spoke with Vox last fall as protests erupted on campuses.
As SJP chapters formed, members developed new protest strategies and signature events, some of which continue today. Students at the University of Toronto, for example, launched Israel Apartheid Week to bring attention to the BDS movement, among other issues. Students told Barrows-Friedman that the week was formed to show that Israel’s occupation was not an “intractable conflict” or “of equal burden held by both Israel and the Palestinians” but an “unequal situation in which a US-supported government with an occupying military force rules over the displaced, confined, excluded, and occupied.”
When intensified violence broke out between Israel and Hamas in 2012, SJP members at UC Riverside constructed large coffins to conduct mock funerals. Around the same time, members at San Diego State University, University of New Mexico, and University of Arizona created 10-foot-tall “apartheid walls” to draw attention to the restrictions Palestinians face. Students boycotted products with connections to Israel, like the SJP members at DePaul University who organized a movement to boycott Sabra, the hummus company.
When campuses invited Israeli soldiers to deliver speeches, SJP students protested and walked out at schools including the University of Kentucky, Rutgers University, George Mason, and San Diego State University. In violation of speech and conduct regulations, some students disrupted speakers mid-speech.
Pro-Palestinian student activists have faced pushback and consequences
As students organized, they faced counterprotests from pro-Israel student groups, backlash, and shifting rules from university administrators, and have been subjected to death threats, legal fights, and surveillance, doxxing, and targeting by pro-Israel organizations. The crackdown on student organizing after 2000 coincided with the George W. Bush administration’s “war on terror” following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which included the passage of the Patriot Act that made it easier for the government to carry out domestic surveillance that often targeted Muslim communities.
When SJP members at Boston University planned the school’s first Israeli Apartheid Week, BU Students for Israel formed “Israel Peace Week” and scheduled it for the week before. When students planned a Right of Return Conference there in 2013, a student reported that the conference “received a lot of pushback from Zionists who called the administration in an effort to stop the conference from happening.”
After students at Florida Atlantic University spoke out and walked out of a speech given by an Israeli soldier in 2013, they were put on administrative probation barring them from holding campus leadership positions, and forced to attend an anti-bias training created by the Anti-Defamation League, the pro-Israel organization that tracks hate crimes.
In a rare criminal prosecution, 10 students who heckled then-Israeli ambassador Michael Oren during a talk he gave in 2010 at the University of California Irvine were found guilty of misdemeanors for “disrupting a public meeting,” and were sentenced to three years of probation, 56 community service hours, and fines.
Northeastern University suspended its SJP chapter in 2014 and threatened students with expulsion after they handed out mock eviction notices during the group’s Israel Apartheid Week. That same year, university administrators at Barnard quietly removed an SJP banner with the words “Stand for Justice, Stand for Palestine” with no explanation.
When SJP passed resolutions through student governments to have their institutions stop investing in companies that support Israel, universities condemned the votes. SJP activists have reported being contacted, interviewed, or followed by the FBI over their organizing.
Individual students have also worked with pro-Israel groups on a few occasions to file claims under Title VI of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, alleging that SJP activism at UC’s Irvine, Berkeley, and Santa Cruz campuses created a “hostile environment,” with “harassment, intimidation, and discrimination” for Jewish students and amounted to antisemitism.
Since October 7, pro-Palestinian students have struggled to strike the appropriate tone, critics said. The national SJP, which is not affiliated with any campus chapters, released a five-page instructional toolkit that called for chapters across the country to “resist” as part of Hamas’s attack, which was described as a “historic win for the Palestinian resistance.” The document, condemned as antisemitic, featured paraglider imagery in its graphics, reminiscent of the Hamas militants who descended on Israel during the attack. The state university system of Florida swiftly deactivated its SJP chapters after the toolkit’s release, arguing that the students were providing material support for a terrorist organization.
“October 7 was a unique moment because the scale of Hamas’ attack is unprecedented in Palestinian history. The scale of the atrocity, the spectacle of violence against civilians — it was a horrific attack,” said Youmans. “That put a lot of student organizers in this complicated position. On the one hand, the US media was focusing on the horror of it and a lot of Palestinian solidarity activists were saying that it was the natural outcome of constant bombardment of Palestine by Israel every two to three years for a decade and a half. There was this violence and traumatization that was happening for years.
“But instead of explaining that, a lot of SJP chapters used slogans or others had a celebratory tone. It was so out of touch with the larger mood in the country.”
Student organizers who spoke to Vox said that they denounce antisemitism and take time to welcome their Jewish peers at protests. At the Columbia encampment last week, students held Shabbat and sang prayers, and for the first night of Passover on Monday, students held a seder at the tents. But other Jewish students have reported feeling unsafe.
The focus on their protest strategies, their mistakes, and the discipline they’re facing, student organizers told Vox, only detract from the reality that Israel has killed 34,000 Palestinians and has destroyed nearly 70 percent of homes in Gaza.
“There’s a respectability politics that we are forced to constantly hold ourselves to, not just as an organization, but also as students who are Arab American, or Muslim, or Palestinian on campus,” said a George Washington student who spoke to Vox last fall on the condition of anonymity because they fear for their safety, including fears that their personal information could be posted online without their permission. “We have to play into this idea of a respectful Arab who uses demure language and [act] like liberation is not at the forefront of our demands. It’s just a way to suppress the movement. The conflation with antisemitism is aggressive.”
As students approach finals season, with commencement ceremonies on the horizon, many across the country, supported by some faculty members and alumni, say they won’t stop protesting until their demands are met. “Cracking down on student protesters has only made us louder,” Columbia SJP wrote in an Instagram story. “We will not be silence[d] until Columbia divests from genocide & palestine is free.”
Clarification, April 25, 12:20 pm ET: This story has been updated to include more context about “The Case Against Zionism” and its sources, and to remove the link to the pamphlet.