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campus protest
Three Simple Tests to Weigh the Protesters’ Legitimacy
For example: The Israeli government is murdering tens of thousands of innocent, defenseless women and children. Is that acceptable? If it is not, then the students’ protests are legitimate.
May 05, 2024
The media is doing all it can to de-legitimize the students protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and the U.S.’ complicity in it. It is a sign of just how fragile, and threatened, is the existing order that promotes the genocide.
Besides diverting attention from the genocide itself, the media is calling the protests “Pro-Palestinian,” instead of “Anti-genocide.” That framing, itself, is revealing of the need to obfuscate. The media are also suggesting the students are being led by outside agitators, that they are antisemitic, even “terrorists.” Anything except the fact of the genocide.
There are three simple tests we can conduct to answer whether the students’ protests are legitimate. They start with this: “Does a government—any government—have the right to murder tens of thousands of its own innocent, defenseless women and children?” Because that is undeniably what is happening in Gaza.
The Israeli government is murdering tens of thousands of innocent, defenseless women and children. And it is doing so without any remorse and with the seeming conviction that it is going to get away with it; impunity. Is that acceptable? If it is not, then the students’ protests are legitimate.
A second simple test of the students’ legitimacy is this: “Should a government be able to ethnically cleanse millions of people from land their ancestors lived on for 2,000 years so that it (the government) can steal that land and keep it as its own?” Because that is undeniably what is happening in Gaza.
Israel was granted 55% of Palestine by U.N. resolution 181, in 1948. It took 78%, making itself immediately in violation of international law. And then, in 1967, it took the rest. That’s why the Palestinians now live in what are termed “occupied territories:” Gaza; the West Bank; East Jerusalem. Those were all seized by an illegal—and still illegal—military occupation. Is that acceptable? If it is not, then the students’ protests are legitimate.
A third simple test of the students’ legitimacy is this: “Should the U.S. government be assisting in this, the most open and notorious ethnic cleansing and genocide of the twenty-first century?” Because that is undeniably what is happening in Gaza.
The U.S. government is doing everything it can—providing money, weapons, diplomatic cover, military cover, media cover—to help the government of Israel murder tens of thousands of innocent, defenseless women and children and ethnically cleanse millions more so that the Israeli government can steal the land and keep it as its own. Is that acceptable? If it is not, then the students’ protests are legitimate.
Those are the only three tests you need to ask to determine whether the students’ protests are legitimate.
The reason the students are being savaged in the media is because their protests are spotlighting, as the media itself will not, the horrific immorality of what Israel is doing, the craven complicity of the U.S. government in helping them do it, and the deep entwinement of so much of U.S. society in those immoral, craven acts: the government; the universities; the military-industrial complex; the media; and more. And, to be clear, it is not antisemitic to say this.
It is not antisemitic to say that a government cannot murder tens of thousands of innocent, defenseless women and children. It is not antisemitic to state that no government has the right to ethnically cleanse millions of native people from their land so that it can steal that land and keep it for itself. It is not antisemitic to say that the U.S. government should not be helping a government—any government—commit such savagery.
The students are one of the few classes of actors remaining in the society that are not bought, or sold out. Congress is laughably, tragically bought by money from the American-Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC). The travesty is that everybody knows this but is not supposed to say it, and most do not. But it is not antisemitic to say it. It is simply a clinical description of how money and power works in a society that has abandoned its ideals and principles and worships only money and power.
The universities are bought by their dependence on large donations from wealthy Jewish donors, which we saw when the presidents of Harvard and Penn were run out of their jobs because wealthy Jewish donor demanded their heads. And no, it is not antisemitic to say that. It is simply a clinical description of how money and power works in a society that has abandoned its ideals and principles and worships only money and power.
In these ways, as it was in the Vietnam War, the students may yet be the society’s salvation. Back then, the U.S. government was “bombing back to the stone age” a society of pre-industrial-age rice farmers who simply wanted to be left alone to choose their own form of government, which the U.S. government was determined they would not be allowed to do.
Four million Vietnamese were killed against 58,000 Americans. That’s a 69-to-1 kill ratio. That’s not a war. That’s an industrialized slaughter. It’s the same in Gaza, today, except worse.
The Israeli government has herded the Palestinians into what is called “the largest open-air concentration camp in the world” and is massacring them with surgically targeted, industrial abandon. It is the Holocaust redux, lacking only the gas chambers. And, this time, all the world is watching.
The problem the students pose to the Powers That Be is that they will not submit to and recycle the Officially Sanctioned Narrative, which holds that “Israel has the right to defend itself.” Israel does have the right to defend itself—within its internationally recognized legal borders. Gaza is not within those borders. It is an illegally occupied territory, so that “right to defend itself” does not apply.
Let’s be clear. Israel is the fourth mightiest military power in the world. For more than seven decades it has been carrying out the ethnic cleansing which it is now hoping to finish. Its actions have nothing to do with defense. It is simply slaughtering tens of thousands of innocent, defenseless women and children so that it can steal their land.
Thank God for the students back in the Vietnam era. They pulled the U.S. back from an abyss of apocalyptic violence, suicidal immorality, and industrialized genocide. We can only hope that the students, today, can do the same. But that depends on our willingness to listen to simple truths, and the courage to abide by the obvious answers.
Whether we have such willingness, and the courage to do what the answers compel, is not at all clear. What is clear is that the media will do everything it can to prevent us from arriving at the right answers, and the right action.
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Student Protests Present Biden With Chance to Do the Right Thing on Gaza
The Biden camp continues to dismiss polls showing the President losing support among young and “minority” voters. This is a dangerous miscalculation.
Apr 29, 2024
University student protests against US support for Israel’s war in Gaza have spread like wildfire. At last count, there have been sustained demonstrations on over 200 campuses. More recently, students have taken to establishing protest encampments in the center of some campuses. This began last week at Columbia University in New York. Ten days later there were encampments at almost four dozen universities.
What’s been most striking is not only the way this effort has spread, but also the amazing diversity of the students involved in the demonstrations. There are Arab American students, to be sure, who’ve been joined by fellow students of every race and creed.
The leadership of the protesting students have been disciplined and eloquent in their demands for a ceasefire and an end to the genocide in Gaza. Many have also called on their universities to divest funds from entities contributing to the Israeli war effort.
The protesters have been peaceful, though purposefully disruptive. At times they’ve occupied central locations on campus. They’ve also chanted, as demonstrators are wont to do. Yet, as noted by respected observers who’ve visited the protest sites, the protests have been peaceful and orderly.
As primary elections in several states have demonstrated, there is a hemorrhaging of support for the President’s reelection. And as repression against student demonstrators continues, that opposition is solidifying.
Goaded by Republican congressional leadership and a few pro-Israel Jewish organizations, there’s been an effort to paint these demonstrations as antisemitic and a threat to the safety of Jewish students. The members of Congress have latched onto this, exploiting it as a wedge issue and portraying the protesting students as liberal elites, captive to anti-Israel groups.
Both the Republican leadership and the small but influential group of Jewish leaders have used their respective platforms to repeatedly argue that chants used by some of the students are inherently antisemitic. For example, they’ve said that “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is actually a call to commit genocide against Jews in Israel. They recently passed a Congressional resolution making that very point. Using such deliberately distorted interpretations of the slogans used by the students in support of Palestinians, they've pressured some university presidents to resign and have made life uncomfortable for others.
What’s been ignored is that in most of the encampments a disproportionately large number of the protesters are Jewish students. Ironically, while one Jewish leader was advising Jewish students at Columbia University to stay home and not come to campus because it was unsafe for them and was urging New York’s governor to call in National Guard units to restore order on campus, the Jewish students in the encampment were holding an interfaith Passover Seder.
Later, New York City police were ordered onto campus to disband the encampment. This was followed by similar police actions in Texas, California, and Georgia where disturbing levels of violence (tear gas, rubber bullets, tasers, and baton beatings) were used against the peaceful protestors.
Instead of dampening the students’ commitment to continuing these protests, the actions by the police, elected officials, and university administrators have hardened the protesters’ resolve. And so the day after the encampments were forcibly disbanded, the students returned, reestablishing their protest sites.
With the ire of the students directed not only at Israel’s genocidal behaviors in Gaza, but also at how the Biden administration has enabled this war to continue, the way these campus protests are playing out does not bode well for the President during this election year.
Comparisons are being made to the 1968 anti-Vietnam war protests and the role they played in costing Democrats the presidency. Having been a participant in the protest politics both in that period and the current one, I can attest to the similarities, as well as some important differences.
Vietnam was the first war that was televised, bringing it into American homes. We saw the impact of napalm on civilians and learned of the use of torture against prisoners. In addition to opposition to the war for moral or political reasons was the more personal and unsettling concern with the national draft that required young people to register for military service.
The Vietnam era was also a time of broad national ferment that witnessed the emergence of several other protest movements: civil rights, environmental concerns, women’s rights, etc. There was limited overlap in the participation in these diverse movements.
Today is different. There is a significant overlap in the movements for women’s rights, Black empowerment, environmental justice, and now opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza. And because of the impact of social media, today’s young people, whom my brother John Zogby calls “the first globals,” are experiencing the war in Gaza non-stop, up close and personal, and are deeply disturbed by what they are seeing.
There were no Vietnamese students on campuses in the 1960s, but today empowered and organized Arab American and progressive American Jewish students have taken the lead in mobilizing opposition to Israel’s Gaza war—with the former saying “Not to our people” and the latter saying “Not in our name.” Because they have found allies in the other movements in which they too were participants, the anti-war effort has grown.
Through it all, the Biden White House has demonstrated only limited concern, apparently convinced that they’ll weather this storm and still defeat Donald Trump in November. They dismiss polls showing the President losing support among young and “minority” voters. This is a dangerous miscalculation. As primary elections in several states have demonstrated, there is a hemorrhaging of support for the President’s reelection. And as repression against student demonstrators continues, that opposition is solidifying.
Should the war continue for several more months and the scene at this summer’s Democratic Convention in Chicago be as ugly as it was in 1968, many young voters will be hard pressed to vote for Mr. Biden. They won’t vote for Mr. Trump. Most likely they’ll either vote for a third party or not vote at all.
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Gaza, Campus Protest, and the Fierce Urgency of Now
Beyond the horrors in Gaza and the long tragic history of the oppression of Palestinians, student protestors are trying to save their own nation from its death-dealing spiral.
Apr 26, 2024
As more campuses join the protests against Israel’s continuing engagement in war crimes in Gaza, one common thread runs through the student demands. It's this: divest from supplying the Netanyahu government and the IDF with weapons of mass destruction.
What compels many of these youthful demonstrators to occupy the public spaces and offices of their universities is the complicity of college portfolios with investments in U.S. weapon manufacturers. They know that the products of defense contractors, like Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighterjet and General Dynamics' MK 84—a 2,000-pound bomb—are slaughtering tens of thousands of innocent civilians throughout Gaza.
They also understand that the U.S. government, from President Joe Biden to the Congress, is opposed to legislative efforts to hold Israel accountable to its violation of various on-the-books prohibitions for governments “engaged in gross human rights abuses” (Section 502 B of the U.S. Foreign Assistance Act). Instead, they see the Biden Administration exploiting every loophole in any restrictions to supply Israel with unending transfers of bombs and military equipment. While countries, like Canada and numerous others, have stopped shipping weapons to Israel, the U.S. seems oblivious to the suffering and devastation caused daily by the IDF in Gaza.
They are aware that Israeli state propaganda spreads constant disinformation about its war crimes in Gaza, from rationalizing its attacks on the staff and patients in hospitals to the murder of over 200 aid workers. They know that countless human rights agencies have condemned these kinds of war crimes in Gaza. (These same human rights agencies have also condemned the brutal killing of 1,200 Israeli civilians and the taking of hostages on October 7). In order to justify the murder of so many innocent civilians, the Netanyahu government has insisted that they have actually killed 9,000 Hamas militants. However, if they read one of the recent articles in the Israeli newspaper, Ha’aretz from March 31, they understand this figure is reflective of what the IDF calls “kill zones” (think “free-fire zones” in the U.S. war on Vietnam) where anything in those zones, including women and children, were legitimate targets to then be counted as Hamas militants.
They are surely aware of what Netanyahu cabinet members have said about the Palestinians in Gaza and on the West Bank that they are just “human animals.” The Israeli Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, has bragged about destroying the “electricity, food, and fuel” in Gaza. One of his advisers, a former IDF General, reflective of the targeting of aid workers, including those murdered seven from World Central Kitchen, acknowledged that “in order to make the siege effective, we have to prevent others from giving assistance to Gaza.” Such mass murder and wanton destruction of property in Gaza is part of a campaign of killing that one UN official has cited as “probably the highest kill ratio of any military killing anybody since the Rwandan genocide of 1994.”
When students see and hear about all of this, they are obviously motivated to express their moral outrage. On one hand, these expressions may not always comport with so-called civility. On the other hand, they are not prepared to remain silent and/or passive in the face of an unfolding genocide. In their adherence to Dr. King’s reference to the “fierce urgency of now,” they are committed, as Dr. King was, to disturbing the peace.
Indeed, we need to be reminded of another quote from Dr. King that was central to his famous Riverside Address (“A Time to Break Silence”) from April 4, 1967. He warned prophetically that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Beyond the horrors in Gaza and the long tragic history of the oppression of Palestinians, these student protestors are trying to save their own nation from its death-dealing spiral. What their protest ultimately signifies is their commitment to an authentic advocacy for peace and justice abroad and at home.
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