by Franklin Dmitryev

Students have poured out into protests and encampments, in many cases risking their scholarships, tuition, job prospects and even housing, because they see a genocide going on in Palestine, enabled by their governments and universities. In the case of Jewish students, many are appalled that this is being perpetrated in their name. The situation is so shocking and horrific that one cannot help but be moved to cry out or protest—if one’s critical thinking is not blocked by ideology, denial, disinformation, and if one is not the kind of psychopath that tends to rise to the top in politics, government, business, and the media, especially of the right wing and the Putin-friendly left wing.

Already in May, the situation in Gaza was on the brink of becoming “apocalyptic,” warned Martin Griffiths, the UN under-secretary general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator. The UN said then that it had run out of food and tents to distribute in southern Gaza. The UN and relief groups have issued dire warning after warning, and even the Biden administration called on Israel to let in much more aid and not to invade Rafah, but Netanyahu’s government called their bluff.

ATROCITY AFTER ATROCITY AFTER ATROCITY

In one of the most recent atrocities, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) bombed al-Mawasi in southern Gaza, which they had designated an “evacuation zone” safe for civilians. Tens of thousands of people had fled there after being forced out of their homes by the IDF’s relentless attacks, and more than 90 were killed in the July 13 attack, about half of them children and women, according to The New York Times. More than 300 were wounded. Although the stated target was Muhammad Deif, a high-ranking Hamas commander, witnesses reported that two civilian encampments were bombed with what The Times concluded was a 2,000-pound bomb.

Then the IDF launched a second strike that “exploded directly in front of two vehicles clearly marked as belonging to Gaza Civil Defense, an emergency services agency, spraying them with shrapnel and apparently killing and injuring first responders.” According to the IDF’s calculus, the chance of killing one high-level military enemy justifies all the civilian carnage—even though it is not clear whether Deif was even there.

The following day, 31 Palestinians were killed in airstrikes, including one “near a UN-run school being used as a shelter for displaced people in Nuseirat.”

These atrocities are not exceptions but rather the reality of the IDF’s genocidal war against the population of Gaza, repeating one after another.

The Israeli government, for its part, justifies its atrocities by pointing to those committed by Hamas and allies on Oct. 7. That, however, is a justification of collective punishment, as if every person in Gaza was part of the Oct. 7 attack, including the children who make up half the population of Gaza, and even the babies! Which is what Israeli President Isaac Herzog said when he howled, “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible.” We will not allow our principled denunciation of the Oct. 7 horrors committed and led by Hamas to be used to justify genocide, as we made clear in our initial statement last year.

The devastation does not end with the incredible death toll of about 40,000, most of which counts civilians, many of them children—or more than 186,000 if we count those buried under rubble and people who have been or will be killed by disease and starvation. What is life like for those who still survive? As Sabreen, a 28-year-old mother of three who, by May 15, had already been displaced four times, told The Guardian:

“This is not the life of any normal human being. There is nothing: no water, no food, no health care, not even a toilet.”

The UN estimated that 90% of Gazans have been displaced since Oct. 7, many of them multiple times. How will the survivors recover in the future, not only in terms of physical reconstruction of the area but in terms of the mental anguish, trauma, PTSD? These questions are callously disregarded by those like U.S. President Joe Biden who keep portraying this as Israel’s self-defense against Hamas.

HOW TO MEASURE REALITY

The reality of U.S. policy is measured in weapons shipments, and in the refusal to act on the State Department’s own internal findings, refusing even to suspend aid to Israeli military units in the West Bank whose atrocities they fully documented. The commanders of this abuse just keep getting promoted. The reality is measured in the cutoff of funding for the UN relief agency serving Palestinians, bringing the U.S. alongside the Israeli terrorist mobs who burned the agency’s East Jerusalem headquarters, forcing it to close, and alongside the West Bank settlers who are tipped off by Israeli soldiers and police when an aid convoy for Gaza is coming through so that they can attack, block the trucks and destroy the food.

The horrifying suffering, combined with the impetus from the student movement, continues to cause ripples within the administration. Lily Greenberg Call, a special assistant to the chief of staff in the interior department, became the first Jewish Biden appointee to resign in protest of U.S. support for the Gaza war. She accused Biden of using Jewish people to justify U.S. policy.

Lawyers from two dozen federal agencies sent an open letter stating that “weapons transfers to Israel likely violate our own domestic laws….There is ample evidence that the Israeli government has been engaged in war crimes, grave breaches of international humanitarian law, and plausible acts of genocide in the Gaza Strip. We implore the U.S. Government to cease provision of weapons to Israel immediately and without condition.”

Despite Biden’s stubborn insistence to keep supporting Israel’s genocide with only token complaints—and that is one reason he has been struggling in the polls and had to end his campaign for re-election—the pressure on him only heated up with the International Court of Justice’s July 19 ruling that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories is in violation of international law and “of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination” and must be ended “as rapidly as possible.” Netanyahu’s response essentially admitted that the Court was correct in calling out “annexation and an assertion of permanent control over the occupied Palestinian territory.”

THE SECOND WORLD WITHIN ISRAEL

Within Israel, dissent is being stifled with threats, harassment, arrests, and physical violence, but it still exists. That includes Tal Mitnick and Sofia Orr, two teenagers in prison for refusing military service, who wrote a letter to Biden that said in part:

“Your unconditional support for [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s policy of destruction, since the war began, has brought our society to the normalization of carnage and to the trivialization of human lives. It is American diplomatic and material support that prolonged this war for so long. You are responsible for this, alongside our leaders. But while they’re interested in prolonging the war for political reasons, you have the power to make it stop.”

Since that letter, 42 more reservists signed a letter refusing to serve in Gaza, and “The Great Peace Conference” brought thousands of Palestinians and Jews to Tel Aviv to work towards building a new beginning for the battered peace movement.

As we wrote in the Draft Perspectives of News and Letters Committees for 2024-2025:

“What is becoming clear is that the new generation of radicals activated during the Trump reign of reaction and repression—especially in the Black-led revolt after the police murder of George Floyd, on top of the attacks on immigrants, women, workers, Trans people, Indigenous people and climate activists as well as the cold-blooded, negligent handling of the pandemic—has not gone away but is undergoing new growth and radicalization. Young protesters are asking how a genocide can be actively supported by a government claiming to act in their name, when they have already seen the powers that be fritter away their future in the face of climate chaos, school gun violence, precarious employment, women’s further loss of bodily control, surveillance and the specter of mass incarceration. At the moment college students are at the forefront of organized actions, but opposition to the genocide has spread widely, especially among young people.”

REBELLING AGAINST ALIENATION

In the pamphlet The Free Speech Movement and the Negro Revolution, Raya Dunayevskaya, the founder of Marxist-Humanism in the U.S., dug into the meaning of the student revolt in the 1960s, showing the inseparability of the dialectic of revolt and the dialectic of ideas. Participating in and supporting the civil rights movement in the South led to questioning and rebelling against the alienation in education and in the whole society, against what Mario Savio in that pamphlet called “factory education.” He equated that with University of California President Clark Kerr’s concepts of “the knowledge industry” and “the multiversity,” which produces both research and graduates as inputs for corporations, the Pentagon, and the government.

Dunayevskaya deepened the theory to criticize concretely “the bankruptcy of bourgeois thought,” relating it to the violent police repression of the nonviolent student protesters, and bringing in the whole question of alienation as being at the heart of the students’ struggle “for freedom of thought….They rejected Kerr’s concept of the ‘multiversity’ along with its IBM cataloging of students as if they were mere numbers….

“Just as the continued struggle for equality has exposed the hollowness of American democracy, so the student revolts have exposed the hollowness of academic freedom in the U.S. The seal of bankruptcy of contemporary civilization is the seal of bankruptcy of its thought.”

So today, while bourgeois politicians and commentators like Hillary Clinton are determined to smear the student protesters as “ignorant” while they themselves repeat ideological declarations that omit the actual realities both in Gaza and in the besieged protests, the students have done the factual research and exposed the continuity of the multiversity concept, showing how intimately their universities are embedded in the military-industrial complex that is arming Israel’s genocidal attack, and how the universities are run by boards including—and in most cases dominated by—delegates from the corporate and financial elite. They showed how the universities have multi-billion-dollar endowments and operate tax-free, even including research institutes that directly serve corporate capitalism for both technological development and ideological cover. More than two dozen of them pay their top administrators over $1 million a year (each), while many of the staff subsist on less than a living wage.[1]

The students know all this. From most media reports, you wouldn’t know that the students are even talking about it. So when they demand (1) transparency about the university’s investments, (2) divestment from companies arming Israel and (3) for their institutions to call for a ceasefire now, they see it as only natural for those demands to be linked with demands regarding the other exploitative and repressive enterprises these institutions are involved in. The Draft Perspectives mentioned a few of these.

STUDENTS MAKE CONNECTIONS WITH OTHER FREEDOM MOVEMENTS

Students at Emory University traced a connection between Cop City, the project linked to the police murder of Tortuguita, and Israeli repressive forces—especially the way Israeli police, experienced in repressing Palestinians, are brought to the U.S. to train militarized police forces here, and U.S. police are sent to Israel. Last year, Emory’s president sent the cops against a protest camp that students had set up to oppose Cop City.[2]

The fact that students are making these kinds of connections helps explain why they have received so much support from faculty and staff, including the strike at several University of California campuses, which was shut down by a judge at the university’s request. There have been other labor actions in solidarity with Gaza, from dockworkers trying to stop weapons shipments to current and former Google employees joining the picketing of a Google conference featuring many AI products.[3]

Violent, vicious repression of the protests swept the country, and it is not only the police. The UCLA encampment was attacked by a mob—while police stood by and watched—but it turned out that they were not all Zionists but featured a collection of local far-right militants often attracted to Trump rallies. Their violence was used to justify sending the violent police against the students.

The impunity of the mobs in L.A. and other cities and the police attacks on students are part of a trend of criminalizing and repressing protests that also includes harsh laws passed in many states to clamp down on environmental protests, and selective repression by courts and police when fascists have attacked Black Lives Matter protesters, like the Texas governor’s despicable pardon of a man who murdered a protester there in 2020.[4]

ANTI-SEMITES PRETEND AND CONGRESS BUYS THEIR LIES

Ideological repression is closely linked to physical repression. There is a concerted effort, from Biden on down, to smear the protests as antisemitic and violent, and even incited by “outside agitators,” which was a favorite name of Ku Klux Klan supporters for white Northeners who came to the aid of the Black freedom movement in the South in the 1960s. Congressional Republicans who pander to the antisemitic far Right pretend to oppose antisemitism by lying about the student protests.

Several observers have pointed out that this is only the latest chapter of the right-wing assault against universities and academic freedom. When Democrats get on board with this, as many have, they are abetting the rise of fascism that will be ready to take them down later on. It is also part of the far-Right push to indoctrinate students at all levels of school and outlaw the teaching of what they label “critical race theory” and “gender theory,” by which they mean any true accounting of freedom movements and oppression in U.S. history.

The protest camps have almost entirely been cleared from campuses, which are quieter during this summer break. But the student movement is likely to arise again with the fall term. This movement must be defended, supported and encouraged to develop, and, as we have said from the beginning, solidarity movements draw power from a vision of a new, human society. What becomes an absolute necessity is the banner of genuine liberation, and a philosophy of liberation. That cannot be left for later as we engage in resolute solidarity with the Palestinian people, and in the U.S. and allied countries struggle against the support given to Israel, its occupation, and its military.

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[1] Universities have shifted much of their faculty hiring to lower-paid adjuncts with no job security and, like many businesses, some have outsourced functions such as cleaning and food service. While their multi-billion-dollar endowments thrive, administrators lick the boots of rich donors who demand reactionary policies and reject divestment from fossil fuel and military industries. Columbia University’s President Minouche Shafik is the epitome of the university administrator, asking only how high when reactionary donors and politicians demand a jump, and spewing Orwellian doublespeak about nonviolent demonstrators threatening safety to justify calling in a violent, destructive police raid.

[2] You can find many more such demands in the statements issued by the encampments or in reports like one by The Guardian from May 13 titled, “‘Our struggles are connected’: Atlanta protesters link Cop City to Gaza war.” They want Emory University to disentangle itself from Cop City. By now, there are hundreds of first-person written accounts, videos, and podcasts from the occupying students, faculty and community members, many of which are thoughtful. For example, see “Why the student encampments worked” by Atef Said; “Five weeks into encampment, Liberated Zone has established an autonomous society” by Anushka Ghosh Dastidar; “Our Gaza Encampments May Fall, But They’ve Already Radicalized a Generation” by Eman Abdelhadi; “How the Media Failed the College Student Encampments” by Sarah Baum; and a series from Critical Inquiry at the University of Chicago: Adam Almqvist’s “I Taught Israel/Palestine This Quarter – Right Now, There Is No Free Speech”; Eman Abdelhadi’s “Recognition Is Solidarity”; Itamar Francez’s “Freedom of Association”; Jessica H. Darrow’s “First, We Faced White Nationalists; UCPD Was Worse”; Christopher Iacovett’s “Institutional Neutrality in a Time of Genocide”; Hoda El Shakry’s “Palestine and the Politics of Imagination”; and Kim Kolor’s “The Chicago Tactics.”

[3] Ariel Koren, a former Google worker who says she was pushed out of the company for speaking out against Project Nimbus, which supports the Israeli government and military, said:

“We are here to say that we cannot stand by while this company fuels this genocide and profits off of it. [Google] not only creates the infrastructure for the Israeli military to scale out their crimes against humanity, but these tools are being tested and trained in Palestine to be exported out to militaries around the world, who can then commit the same types of violence. We might be seeing the world’s first AI-enabled genocide. But what Google is trying to do is to ensure that this is not the world’s last.”

In April, Google fired over 50 workers for participating in occupations at Google campuses in New York City and Sunnyvale, California, in solidarity with Gaza.

[4] The trend is international; for example, in May German prosecutors charged members of the climate group Last Generation with “forming a criminal organization” just because of their nonviolent protests.