SAN FRANCISCO, USA, Sept 06 (IPS) – With nearly 18 million students on American college campuses this fall, the defenders of the Gaza war don’t want to hear any counterarguments. Silence is complicity, and Israel’s allies love it.
For them, the new semester brings renewed threats to the status quo. But for those who support human rights, it’s a new opportunity to take higher education beyond its comfort zone.
In America, the scope and arrogance of the oppression of the rising universities is literally breathtaking. Every day, people die for the crime of breathing as Palestinians.
The death toll in Gaza is equivalent to more than one Kristallnacht per day. It has been going on for over 333 days and there is no end in sight. The destruction of the entire infrastructure of society is horrific.
A few months ago, ABC News reported, citing data from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, that “25,000 buildings have been destroyed, 32 hospitals have been put out of service, three churches, 341 mosques, and 100 universities and schools have been destroyed.”
This does not mean that taxpayers and elected leaders should disturb the peace on campuses in a country that made all this possible. Top university officials speak eloquently about the sanctity of higher education and academic freedom while suppressing protests against policies that have destroyed countless universities in Palestine.
The main reason for suppressing dissent is that anti-Israel protests make some Jewish students uncomfortable. But the purpose of a university education should not always include making people feel comfortable. How comfortable should students be in a country that allows mass murder in Gaza?
What should we say about the argument that Northern students with Southern accents should not feel uncomfortable because of civil rights protests and denunciations of Jim Crow on campus in the 1950s and 1960s? Or about white South African students studying in the United States who felt uncomfortable because of anti-apartheid protests in the 1980s?
The basis of the suppression of speech and the virtual thought police is the long-standing attitude that equates criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. Likewise, the Zionist ideology that seeks to justify Israeli policy must pass no matter what, while opponents, including many Jews, are likely to be accused of being anti-Semitic.
But polls show that younger Americans are more supportive of the Palestinians than Israelis. The ongoing atrocities in Gaza, where Israeli “defense” forces kill an average of more than 100 people a day—mostly children and women—have prompted many young people to take action in the United States.
“Protests erupted on American campuses at the end of the last school year,” a front-page New York Times story reported in late August, adding that “many administrators were shocked by the thousands of arrests across the country in camps, building occupations and clashes with police in the final week of the spring semester.” (The phrase “clashes with police” is generally a euphemism for police violently attacking nonviolent protesters.)
In the hazy ivory towers and corporate suites where university presidents and boards of trustees reside, the Palestinians are an abstraction compared to far more realistic priorities. The Times’s understated sentence sheds some light: “The strategy that is becoming public suggests that some administrators at schools large and small have concluded that tolerance is dangerous, and that a harder line may be the best option. Or it may be the option least likely to provoke a backlash from elected officials and donors who have called on their universities to take stronger action against protesters.”
A new Mondoweiss article by activist Carrie Zaremba, a researcher in anthropology, makes this much clearer. “College administrators across the country have declared indefinite states of emergency on their campuses,” she writes. “Schools are enacting policies to suppress pro-Palestinian student activism this fall and reconfigure their policies and campuses to accommodate this new situation.
“Many of these policies share a common formula: more militarization, more law enforcement, more criminalization, and more consolidation of institutional power. But where did these policies come from, and why are they so similar on every campus? The answer lies in the fact that these policies come from the ‘risk and crisis management’ consulting industry, with the tacit support of boards of trustees, Zionist advocacy groups, and federal agencies. Together, they use the language of safety to camouflage a deeper logic of control and securitization.”
To counter this bottom-up movement, intensive grassroots organizing is needed. A sustained pushback against campus repression is essential to continuing to assert the right to speak out and protest as guaranteed by the First Amendment.
It is essential that progressives remain committed to gaining knowledge while gaining power. That is why this week the RootsAction Education Fund (which I help lead) launched a national Teach-In Network under the banner, “Knowledge is Power — and our grassroots movement needs both.”
The elites who were appalled by the moral uprising on college campuses over Israel’s Gaza massacre are now doing everything they can to prevent a recurrence. But the mass killings continue with the support of the US government. When students insist that true knowledge and ethical behavior are necessary for each other, they can help make history, and not just study.
Norman Solomon He is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, was published in paperback this month and includes a new review of the Gaza War.
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© Inter Press Service (2024) — All rights reservedOriginal Source: Inter Press Service
