Chicago (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Pitching Pro-Palestine protest encampments on their campuses, students risk their futures and physical safety by putting their bodies on the line, demonstrating against their Universities fueling the Israeli war machine. Administrators have responded with consequences not imposed en masse for decades: suspensions, expulsions and arrests.
These brave anti-genocide protestors have taken to heart the words of Berkeley Free Speech leader Mario Savio, who said in 1964: “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus — and you’ve got to make it stop!”
With moral conviction as the foundation of its outrage, the movement against the Vietnam massacre — the U.S. exterminated over a million Vietnamese civilians — began on college campuses, sustained its energy for years, and eventually grew, by 1969, into a majority of Americans who opposed the war.
Infuriated by their universities profiting off the Israeli genocide that has killed over 34,000 Palestinians with 2 million people at risk of starvation, protestors have called on their schools to divest from companies that support or profit from the Israeli military. For example, at Brown University, students insist that the school divest from eleven corporations, including RTX corporation — a weapons manufacturer and Northrop Grumman — a military company that makes air-launched missiles, interceptors, submarine-launched systems and hypersonic missile systems.
Opposition to the Vietnam war on college campuses initially took the form of an attack on universities’ complicity with the murderous assault in Vietnam. The U.S. committed war crimes on an industrial scale. Along with the use of carpet bombing, the US dropped napalm — liquid fire that clung to human bodies and melted flesh. The use of toxic herbicides, such as Agent Orange, defoliated over 7 million acres of forest while destroying crops. This ecocide resulted in 400,000 deaths caused by a range of cancers and 500,000 children born with serious birth defects.
The producer of napalm and Agent Orange was Dow Chemical. When the company came to the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus in 1967, students seized the campus building where Dow was recruiting and demanded the University stop cooperating with Dow. Dozens of students were beaten bloody as Madison police brutally ejected and arrested them. Nevertheless, the boldness of the demonstration and the repressive violence of the police politicized thousands of previously apathetic students and helped to transform the Madison campus into one of the nation’s leading anti-war communities.
As one of the earliest examples of students stopping their University’s complicity in war-making, the occupation of the UW building became a protest model utilized since then, most famously at Columbia University in 1968 and now in 2024. The current protest encampments — that occupy a small section of the campus — echo those building take-overs while also evoking the image of the squalid tent camps in Rafah where homeless Palestinians have been forced to live.
Just as the anti-Vietnam war peace movement was charged with being terrorist apologists and Communist sympathizers, the current student movement against Israel’s genocide is smeared as Hamas supporters and antisemitic oppressors.
This current vilification began in earnest when Columbia University president Minouche Shafik appeared before Congress in mid-April. Currying favor with the House committee led by MAGA stalwart Elise Stefanik — who has been known to float antisemitic conspiracy theories, Shafik defamed protesting students and two faculty as antisemitic for using chants like “From the river to sea, Palestine will be free.”
The transparently phony outrage of Republicans against antisemitism is part of a tactic to reinforce their decades-old racist attack on higher education with campaigns against critical race theory and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. In its war on education and its ostentatious displays of grievance against “woke” universities, the far right is hostile to academic freedom, peaceful protest, and vast swaths of progressive speech.
Colluding with the congressional goon squad, Shafik invited New York police to attack and destroy the Pro-Palestine, protest encampment on her campus. She proved herself a willing ally of rightwing politicians who want to suppress politically disfavored speech that challenges Christian supremacist authoritarianism.
Treating demonstrating students as a terrorist-level threat, the police arrested more than a hundred students and booked them for trespassing — on their own campus. Despite sacrificing her faculty on the congressional altar and unleashing state violence on peaceful students, Shafik was denounced. House speaker Mike Johnson unsurprisingly demanded her resignation while calling out students as terrorist-supporters and asserting, “the virus of antisemitism is spreading across other campuses.” Capitulation does not work with MAGA fanatics like the Christian Nationalist, Zionist puppet Johnson.
This police attack was followed up in May when Shafik again called in New York cops. In an echo of Columbia 1968, anti-genocide students had once again occupied Hamilton Hall and re-named it “Hind’s Hall” in honor of six-year-old Hind Rajab, who was killed alongside her family by Israeli soldiers in Gaza. Mayor Eric Adams sent a small army of militarized police to forcibly remove the protestors. Calling law enforcement did not work at Berkeley in 1964, at Wisconsin in 1967, at Columbia in 1968, or at Kent State in 1970.
TRT World Video: “Jewish student calls anti-Semitism claims ‘distraction from Gaza genocide’”
Shafik’s grotesque reenactment of her predecessors’ strong-arm tactics was weakly justified by alleged concerns about the safety of Jewish students. Images of keffiyeh-wearing students smashing windows provided the media with visuals that could recast the protest as violent, terrorist anarchy. Comparing protestors to “ISIS fighters” because of their garb, Anti-Defamation League (ADL) head Jonathan Greenblatt — a ubiquitous presence on cable news — falsely equated protests against Zionism with antisemitism. Greenblatt has also called for the National Guard to control campus protests — as have several US senators such as Zionist stooge Tom Cotton — both know full well that the last time that happened, at Kent State in 1970, four students were killed.
As with the University of Wisconsin in 1967, the Columbia University encampment as well as its authoritarian repression have inspired a mass uprising of students across the country. As of May 3, galvanized by the Israeli slaughter and the imminent invasion of Rafah, more than 80 schools report protest encampments. Though some schools such as Brown University, Northwestern University, and Rutgers have negotiated with protesters, others have called out police who have arrested more than 2500 students on 50 campuses nationwide. Most recently, on Monday night, the University of Chicago — self-described as a free speech bastion — called out cops to destroy a Pro-Palestine encampment based on vague “policy violations.” Social media has been filled with horrifying images of students and professors being violently dragged away by the police.
Rightwing media have relentlessly played up any and all claims of antisemitism at Pro-Palestine protests, in total disregard for the most basic standards of evidence. The Wall Street Journal incited a moral panic about young people daring to criticize Israel’s horrendous bloodbath in Gaza, writing “Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and others are grooming activists in the U.S. and across the West.” A critical conversation about U.S. support of genocide gets twisted into bizarre and unsubstantiated directions.
Looking backward, we remember the anti-Vietnam war protests as pure and untainted. Our memories elide some of the extreme tactics. During Vietnam era protests, some people broke windows, carried North Vietnamese flags, and voiced support for the National Liberation Front (NLF) insurgency that America wanted to destroy, chanting “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win.” Used to stigmatize war protestors, this sentiment did not represent the peace movement.
Likewise, a tiny handful of Pro-Palestinian protesters, full of outrage at decades of brutal occupation, defend Hamas’s brutal October 7 attack against civilians. A Christian outlet breathlessly reported hearing pro-Hamas chants: “Burn Tel Aviv to the ground” and “Hamas, we love you. We support your rockets too.” As during the Vietnam era, such unrepresentative chants cannot be used to smear the vast protest movement.
However, they do make some Jewish students uncomfortable, even fearful. Yet the encampments are less a danger to Jewish students than the police crackdown. As one Jewish student said, “I was raised as a Jewish person to call attention to injustice whenever I see it. Palestinians should be the focus, not my safety on campus. The only threat to my safety comes from the administration.” Further, a large minority — 34 percent — of young American Jews told pollsters, in 2021, that Israel is an “apartheid state,” while 22 percent agreed that “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians.”
Many encampment videos show peaceful, even joyful demonstrations or feature Jewish students who support the pro-Palestinian protests and declare that they feel safe on campus. As administrators call SWAT teams onto campuses to smother a new peace movement, we should keep in mind why we have forgotten the ugliest aspects of the Vietnam protests: Those memories have been replaced by an enduring horror and revulsion at what the U.S. did.
Every level of education in Gaza has been devastated by seven months of war. More than 80 percent of Gaza’s schools have been severely damaged or destroyed by fighting, including every one of its 12 universities. As Juan Cole said, in Informed Comment, “No president of a major American University has deplored the Israeli Destruction of all Gaza Universities.” Israel has made a comprehensive effort to destroy the Palestinian education system, an action known as “scholasticide” according to a group of 25 U.N. experts. While Gaza’s schools lie in ruins, it is notable that Israel’s universities are quiet. “Without protest here,” writes the Jewish newspaper Haaretz, “Israel’s ostensibly enlightened academia will remain identified with Israel’s government.”
Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu lambasted the U.S. protests as “horrific” antisemitism even equating them to anti-Jewish, Nazi rallies in Germany. This apparently led CNN’s Dana Bash to solemnly denounce the “destruction, violence and hate on college campuses across the country.” Her voice dripping with hostility, Bash ominously described protest encampments as “hearkening back to the 1930s in Europe” obviously referring to Nazi rallies.
Tension between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students does exist. But equating Judaism with the state of Israel makes it possible to label all opposition as antisemitic. Thus, any time a student with an Israeli flag is shouted down, this is painted as an act of antisemitism. This conflation has the effect of portraying Jews as a monolithic group that supports the bombing, torturing, and starving of tens of thousands of people.
While berating the protests as threatening to Jews, the media and American officials ignore the fact that white supremacists are the biggest threat facing the Jewish community, as reported by the ADL. When neo-Nazis marched through the streets of Charlottesville and shouted, “Jews will not replace us,” racist president Trump downplayed it. The anti-American traitor Trump, who dined with white nationalist Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, recently called that deadly Charlottesville rally a “peanut” compared to the “antisemitic” demonstrations happening across the U.S.
Meanwhile, pundits and politicians want to make the wave of protests fodder for grinding various culture-war axes about privileged Ivy League students — ignoring all the protests at non-elite campuses — or “wokeness,” or some brand-new form of left-wing insanity. Others mock these protestors as privileged students cosplaying as resistance fighters, while camping out in expensive North Face tents. One pundit worries, “These proud anti-fascists are agitating against a country on another continent and abominating the only alternative to the fascist Trump.”
The simple reality is that students now are protesting for the same reasons students took over the building at Madison in 1967 and Columbia in 1968, and the same reason there was a massive wave of student strikes and demonstrations around the country when Richard Nixon announced his illegal invasion of Cambodia in 1970. They’re horrified to see their country and their universities participate in crimes against humanity.
To be clear, the protests of today do differ in significant ways from yesteryear’s protests. No protester is motivated by the fear that they could be drafted to fight in Gaza. Many students faced conscription during the Vietnam era. Further, the ethnic diversity and social inclusiveness differs from the predominantly white person protests of 1960s. On many campuses, Arab, Muslim, Jewish, Black, Native American and White students are standing shoulder to shoulder with their Palestinian peers in a unified stance.
“The campus protests fill me with hope,” said Peter Beinart, Jewish author and journalist. “At the Columbia encampment, we saw Muslims praying, and Jews praying; of Jews holding Kabbalat Shabbat and Passover Seders alongside people of every different background and race and religion. This is a vision of hope that we desperately need.”
“Amid these dark times, what is happening across U.S. campuses fills me with inspiration and hope,” said Palestinian law student Ahmad Ibsais. “This is what a Palestinian future can look like: Jews performing Passover rituals along with Muslims praying Maghrib; people of all backgrounds taking part in collective liberation – a Palestine that existed before the British Mandate.” The encampments imagine and rehearse a peaceful future for Palestinians and Jews.
In 1968, the campus protests ended when the semester did and students dispersed. But our opposition to the war did not end with the academic year. In the months leading up to the August 1968 Democratic convention, organizers planned a major protest, intended to be held regardless of whether it was allowed, drawing students from around the country. Before the convention, one of the organizers Rennie Davis said, “No denial of a permit is going to prevent the tens of thousands of people who are coming to Chicago from expressing their convictions on these issues.”
This is all playing out again. Students will leave for the summer, allowing more time and energy for their efforts to be focused on the August Democratic convention in Chicago. Antiwar groups are already planning large protests at the convention. Hatem Abudayyeh of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network recently told The Chicago Tribune: “We’ll be marching with or without permits. This D.N.C. is the most important one since 1968, also in Chicago, when Vietnam War protesters and the Black liberation movement organized mass demonstrations that were violently repressed.”
The Biden campaign seems to believe that it can simply wait the protesters out, that passions will eventually fade and that Democratic voters will fall in line when we get closer to Election Day and the choice between Biden and Donald Trump becomes more stark. That is a reckless gamble. Many believe that a president they supported is abetting a genocide. Their position will not easily be altered.
The current student uprising evokes the moral outrage of the anti-Vietnam War movement. As the past peace movement was proven right about Vietnam, the current one will also be favored by history. Like Vietnam in the 1960s, Palestine is the human rights issue of our time.
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