SAN FRANCISCO, USA, Sep 6 (IPS) – With nearly 18 million students on American college campuses this fall, defenders of the war in Gaza want no dissent. Silence is complicity, and that’s how Israel’s allies like it.
For them, the new academic term is yet another threat to the status quo. But for human rights advocates, it is a renewed opportunity to transform higher education into something more than a comfort zone. In the United States, the scale and arrogance of the emerging repression at the university level is, quite literally, breathtaking. Every day, people die for violating the breathing space while being Palestinian. The death toll in Gaza has been more than one Kristallnacht a day — for more than 333 days and counting, with no end in sight. The devastation of the entire infrastructure of a society has been horrific.
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 shut down, and three churches, 341 mosques and 100 universities and schools have been destroyed.” Not that this should disturb the tranquility of the country’s campuses, whose taxpayers and elected leaders make it all possible. College executives wax eloquent about the sanctity of higher education and academic freedom, while suppressing protests against policies that have destroyed dozens of universities in Palestine. A major reason for suppressing dissent is that anti-Israel protests make some Jewish students uncomfortable. But the goal of a university education shouldn’t be to make people feel comfortable all the time. How comfortable should students feel in a country that enables mass murder in Gaza? What would we say to claims that students in the North with Southern accents shouldn’t be made uncomfortable by civil rights protests on campus and condemnations of Jim Crow in the 1950s and 1960s? Or white students from South Africa, studying in the United States, who were made uncomfortable by anti-apartheid protests in the 1980s? A foundation for the edifice of suppression of speech and virtual thought policing is the old, familiar way of equating criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. Likewise, the ideology of Zionism that seeks to justify Israeli policies should be given a free pass anyway — while opponents, many of them Jews, are likely to be labeled anti-Semites. Yet polls show that more young Americans support Palestinians than Israelis. The ongoing atrocities by the Israeli “defense” forces in Gaza, which kill an average of more than 100 people a day — mostly children and women — has galvanized many young people to take action in the United States. “Protests rocked American campuses as last academic year drew to a close,” a front-page story in The New York Times reported in late August, adding, “Many administrators are still reeling from the final weeks of the spring semester, when encampments, building occupations and clashes with police led to thousands of arrests across the country.” (Generally, the phrase “clashes with police” served as a euphemism for police violently attacking nonviolent protesters.) From the hazy ivory towers and corporate offices that house so many university presidents and boards of trustees, Palestinian people are little more than abstractions compared with far more real priorities. A modest line from the Times sheds some light: “The strategies now on public display suggest that some administrators at schools large and small have concluded that permissiveness is dangerous, and that a tougher line may be the best option — or perhaps just the option least likely to provoke a backlash from elected officials and donors who have demanded that universities take stronger action against protesters.” Much more clarity comes in a new Mondoweiss article by activist Carrie Zaremba, a researcher trained in anthropology. “University administrators across the United States have declared an indefinite state of emergency on college campuses,” she wrote. “Schools are enacting policies to prepare for a crackdown on pro-Palestinian student activism this fall semester, while also reshaping regulations and even campuses to accommodate this new normal. “Many of these enacted policies share a common formula: more militarization, more law enforcement, more criminalization, and more consolidation of institutional power. But where do these policies come from, and why are they so similar across campuses? The answer lies in the fact that they have been delivered by the “risk and crisis management” consulting industries, with the tacit support of trustees, Zionist advocacy groups, and federal agencies. Together, they use the language of security to disguise a deeper logic of control and security.” Countering such top-down movements will require intense grassroots organizing. Sustained resistance to campus repression will be essential, to continually reaffirm the right to speak out and protest as guaranteed by the First Amendment. Insisting on acquiring knowledge as progressive forces gain power will be vital. That’s why the RootsAction Education Fund (which I help direct) launched a national Teach-In Network this week under the banner “Knowledge is Power — and Our Grassroots Movements Need Both.” The elites who were shocked by the moral uprising on college campuses against the Israeli massacre in Gaza are now doing everything they can to prevent a revival of that uprising. But the mass murder continues, subsidized by the U.S. government. When students insist that true knowledge and ethical action need each other, they can help make history, not just study it.
Norman Solomon 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 released in paperback this month with a new afterword about the war in Gaza.
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© Inter Press Service (2024) — All rights reservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service
