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scholasticide
Bowdoin College Students Launch First Gaza Solidarity Encampment of Trump Era
"As Israeli aggression obliterates Palestinian homes and guns down children in Jenin, as unspeakable suffering continues in Gaza, and as America descends further into fascism, we ask—what type of institution does Bowdoin want to be?"
Feb 07, 2025
Activists at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine have launched what is believed to be the first Palestine solidarity encampment since President Donald Trump took office, occupying the first floor of the liberal arts school's student union to protest the U.S. leader's proposal to take over the Gaza Strip and expel its native Palestinian population.
Bowdoin Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) occupied the first floor of Smith Union on Thursday night and erected tents there, The Bowdoin Orientreported. They named the encampment after Sha'ban al-Dalou, a 19-year-old computer engineering student at al-Azhar University in Gaza who burned alive in a refugee tent encampment bombed by Israel last October.
The protesters—who reportedly number around 50—acted in response to Trump's Tuesday press conference with fugitive Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, during which the president floated U.S. ownership of Gaza, the ethnic cleansing of its Palestinian population, and the construction of the "Riviera of the Middle East" there following 15 months of Israel's genocidal war on the coastal enclave.
Demonstrators also condemned Israel's ongoing assault on the illegally occupied West Bank, where the killing and injury of thousands of Palestinians since October 2023 has been overshadowed by the annihilation of Gaza.
"As Israeli aggression obliterates Palestinian homes and guns down children in Jenin, as unspeakable suffering continues in Gaza, and as America descends further into fascism, we ask—what type of institution does Bowdoin want to be?" Bowdoin SJP said in a statement Thursday. "One that cowers to authoritarianism, that chooses cowardice in the face of injustice? The choice is Bowdoin's."
The Orient reported that a Bowdoin College security official began asking student protesters to identify themselves around 1:00 am on Friday morning while Dean of Students Michael Pulju informed students about the disciplinary repercussions of their action, including the possibility of expulsion.
On Friday morning, more Bowdoin students showed up outside the student union to protest and try to enter the building, chanting, "Open Smith!"
According to the Orient:
The encampment... comes nearly a year after Bowdoin students voted in favor of the SJP-organized Bowdoin Solidarity Referendum, a resolution demanding that the college take an institutional stand against the scholasticide and stop future investments in defense-focused funds. At the beginning of the fall semester, the college established its Ad Hoc Committee on Investments and Responsibility in response to the referendum but has yet to alter its investment practices or offer an institutional statement.
Lead SJP organizer Olivia Kenney told the Orient that the protesters plan to occupy Smith Union "until the demands of the Bowdoin Solidarity Referendum are met" by the school's Board of Trustees.
Staff and students at Birzeit University in the occupied West Bank recorded a message of solidarity with the "beautiful and wonderful" Bowdoin encampment.
"We woke up this morning to... the news of your encampment, and we've been following the news of the solidarity encampment at Bowdoin and Students for Justice in Palestine," they said in the message, which was posted on Instagram. "We see you, we love you."
"Thank you, from occupied Palestine in the West Bank, where students and faculty and employees alike can barely if at all get to campus because of the checkpoints and roadblocks," the message continued. "From all of Palestine, from the river to the sea, all of the universities that were actively destroyed in 471 days of genocide. Universities throughout the occupied West Bank, which are being surrounded and isolated."
"We are in this together," the message added. "We see you and thank you for raising your voices and screaming loudly that the space of a university is our space. It is a space where knowledge is exchanged. It is the space where we imagine and work to achieve the world that we want to live in, not the world that has been thrust upon us."
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American Historical Association Slammed for 'Craven' Veto of Gaza Scholasticide Resolution
"Academics will make careers out of writing about past atrocities while ignoring the ones happening in real time," said one critic.
Jan 17, 2025
In what one observer decried as an "absolutely shameful" rebuff of American Historical Association members' overwhelming approval of a resolution condemning Israel's annihilation of education infrastructure in Gaza, the elected council of the nation's oldest learned society on Thursday vetoed the measure over a claimed technicality.
AHA members voted 428-88 earlier this month in favor of a resolution opposing Israeli scholasticide—defined by United Nations experts as the "systemic obliteration of education through the arrest, detention, or killing of teachers, students, and staff, and the destruction of educational infrastructure"—during the 15-month assault on the Gaza Strip.
However, the AHA's 16-member elected council voted 11-4 with one abstention to reject the measure, according toInside Higher Ed, which noted that the panel "could have accepted the resolution or sent it to the organization's roughly 10,450 members for a vote."
While the council said in a statement that it "deplores any intentional destruction of Palestinian educational institutions, libraries, universities, and archives in Gaza," it determined that the resolution does not comply with the AHA's constitution and bylaws "because it lies outside the scope of the association's mission and purpose."
Council member and University of Oklahoma history professor Anne Hyde told Inside Higher Ed that she voted to veto the resolution "to protect the AHA's reputation as an unbiased historical actor," adding that the Gaza war "is not settled history, so we're not clear what happened or who to blame or when it began even, so it isn't something that a professional organization should be commenting on yet."
However, Van Gosse, a co-chair and founder of Historians for Peace and Democracy—the resolution's author—told the outlet that "we are extremely shocked by this decision," which "overturns the democratic decision" of members' "landslide vote."
Lake Forest College history professor Rudi Batzell said on social media: "Shame on the AHA leadership for vetoing the scholasticide in Gaza resolution. Members voted overwhelmingly to support, and the resolution was written so narrowly and so carefully to meet exactly this kind of procedural objection. Craven."
The AHA council's veto follows last week's move by the Modern Language Association executive council, as Common Dreamsreported, to block members of the preeminent U.S. professional group for scholars of language and literature from voting on a resolution supporting the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement for Palestinian rights.
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MLA Members for Palestine Protest Denial of BDS Vote at National Assembly
"We feel that it is our responsibility as the largest North American organization of scholars of literature and language to protest and stand with our colleagues who are being murdered for their existence," said one organizer.
Jan 12, 2025
"The more they try to silence us, the louder we will be!"
That was the message that protesters at the Modern Language Association Delegate Assembly in New Orleans wanted to send Saturday after the executive council of the MLA—the preeminent U.S. professional group for scholars of language and literature—blocked them from holding a member vote on a resolution endorsing the international Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights.
Like the resolution recently passed by the American Historical Association, the declaration issued by MLA Members for Justice in Palestine accuses Israel of committing scholasticide in Gaza, where—in addition to killing over 46,000 Palestinians, wounding nearly 110,000 others, and displacing around 2 million more—15 months of relentless Israeli onslaught has obliterated the embattled enclave's education infrastructure.
The MLA resolution—which supports the initial 2005 BDS call issued by Palestinian civil society groups—also acknowledges that international law experts accuse Israel of genocide and that the International Court of Justice, which is weighing a genocide case against Israel, has "determined that Israel is maintaining a system of apartheid."
"The MLA's commitment to 'justice throughout the humanities ecosystem' requires ending institutional complicity with genocide and supporting Palestinian colleagues," the statement asserts. "Therefore, be it resolved that we, the members of the MLA, endorse the 2005 BDS call."
Karim Mattar, an associate professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder, took part in Saturday's demonstration, during which supporters of the resolution staged a die-in and walkout, chanted slogans, and held a banner that read, "MLA Is Complicit in Genocide."
"I consider the executive council's decision to be a cowardly one," Mattar told Common Dreams. "The MLA is a humanities advocacy organization, and by repressing a membership vote, a democratic process to deliberate on the necessity of institutional divestment with companies that profit from genocide, it's actively contributing to the problem."
"I think it's a fundamental contradiction in the MLA's values between these stated values and principles of advocacy for the humanities and the blocking of a mechanism by which such advocacy might be facilitated," he added.
Mattar—who is Palestinian American and whose relatives were among the more than 750,000 Arabs who fled or were ethnically cleansed from Palestine during the Nakba, or "catastrophe" during the establishment of the modern state of Israel—said Saturday's protest brought tears to his eyes.
"To see this protest, this movement emerging at the MLA, to see this national and international movement of solidarity with Palestine to emerge in the last year, has been incredibly moving for me," he said.
Protest co-organizer Neelofer Qadir, an assistant professor of English at Georgia State University, told Common Dreams that protesters "really wanted to draw attention to how institutions are being destroyed, like universities, like libraries, like archives, which makes certain that there is a deep commitment to genocide and why scholasticide is part of genocide because the Israeli government intends to destroy all possible evidence of Palestinian life, past, present, and therefore no longer in the future."
"And we feel that it is our responsibility as the largest North American organization of scholars of literature and language to protest and stand with our colleagues who are being murdered for their existence," she added.
Last month, the MLA executive council
explained that while it is "appalled by the continued attack on Gaza," it believed that "supporting a BDS resolution was not a possible way forward for the association to address the crisis" due to "legal and fiduciary reasons."
Qadir dismissed the council's excuse, saying she believes the MLA is "engaged in a formal program of organized abandonment that is part and parcel of fascist and neoliberal governance that's happening in the U.S., Canada, and across the world."
St. John's University associate English professor Raj Chetty, who also organized Saturday's action, told Common Dreams that "whatever the MLA has said about the 'fiduciary concerns' about this, we're like, you're going to find out some other fiduciary concerns as you notice that both intellectual work and membership dues are going to start evaporating."
As part of their effort, MLA Members for Justice in Palestine are urging supporters to not renew their MLA membership "until there's a meaningful substantial change in position," as Chetty put it.
"This [protest] is a real call to humanity, a real call to justice, a real call against complicity, and a real call to support Palestinian life and rail against Israeli actions that are ending Palestinian life in all the ways that Neelofer talked about," he said.
Disclosure note: Olivia Rosane reported from the MLA conference, which she attended as a member, and has signed the pledge not to renew membership.
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