THREAD: The eruption of protests in solidarity with the Palestinian people at numerous Western universities, and throughout the United States in particular, represents a pivotal moment.
College students are, to be sure, not an accurate reflection of public opinion or faithful mirror of their societies. But their activism often serves as a bellwether, an indication of the shape of things to come.
Therein lies the enormous political significance of the encampments that are now being established at dozens of universities, from the Ivy League to state universities.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s student uprisings not only contributed to, but also portended the failure of the US imperial project in southeast Asia and its defeat in Vietnam.
Student activists also played a prominent role in confronting the worst excesses of the racial hierarchy that dominates the United States. Similarly, campaigns, at times including the occupation of administration buildings, in numerous universities during the 1980s
to demand divestment from South African and related assets, portended the end of Western backing for that country’s white-minority regime. When student activism reaches a critical mass, in other words, it is often a fairly reliable indicator of where things are heading.
In the present context the protests across university campuses are sending multiple messages. Most obviously, a rejection of Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip and, no less importantly,
a rejection of their own governments’ complicity and support of Israel’s transformation of the Gaza Strip into a killing field and chamber of horrors.
While that is the proximate cause, it is either underpinned by or has developed into a broader opposition to Israel as a colonial apartheid state and to its policies towards the Palestinian people more generally.
Hence the demands that universities divest from assets implicated in Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians. In other words, this is a genuine solidarity movement that sees Palestinians as human beings with inalienable rights which go beyond the right not to be massacred.
Expressed differently, the solidarity movement has served to humanize the Palestinians. To understand the profound significance of this achievement,
recall that Israel and its apologists have spent decades engaged in a systematic campaign, ably assisted by the mainstream media, to dehumanize Palestinians.
It was within living memory an article of faith that Palestinians simply do not exist. That “Palestinian” and “terrorist” became synonyms. That Palestinians are motivated by anti-Semitism and nothing else in their opposition to Israel.
Opposed to this, Israel was presented as “a light unto the nations”, “the only democracy in the Middle East” possessing “the most moral army in the world” that fought only “wars of no choice” and did so with “purity of arms”.
Until the eruption of the 1987 popular uprising, or intifada, it was a commonplace that Israel’s was a “benign” and “liberal” occupation, one that selflessly gave more than it took.
More recently, in an update of Theodor Herzl’s “rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism” it became “the villa in the jungle”.
Yet within the past seven months the paradigm through which Western public opinion has traditionally viewed both Israel and the Palestinians has definitively collapsed. And nowhere more definitively than on college campuses.
The transformation of course did not happen overnight, and decades of struggle and hard work by innumerable individuals within the region and beyond were required to make this moment possible.
Israel’s lurch towards ever greater levels of violence and extremism, to the extent that it is today the darling of the Third Reich’s ideological heirs, has also played its part.
The outcome is clear. Israel has lost the battle for public opinion, and it knows it. And given that for Israel public opinion is as much a strategic asset as its nuclear arsenal it is, unsurprisingly, responding hysterically.
It’s a far cry from previous eras, where Israel and its apologists could either persuade audiences of the rightness of their cause, or sufficiently confuse them into passive neutrality.
Israel and its flunkies are today deploying the same playbook and tactics against university activists that they have for decades deployed against the Palestinians: discredit, delegitimize, defame, and demonize.
Thus, any student expressing any opposition to Israel’s genocidal campaign or solidarity with its Palestinian victims is immediately denounced as “Hamas”, “terrorist”, anti-semite”, and the like.
The foot-stomping toddler who passes for assistant professor at Columbia University, to give but one example, has made it his vocation to vilify students at his own university.
Among the worst offenders, predictably, is Jonathan Greenblatt of the Defamation League, that self-proclaimed civil rights organization that used to conduct espionage in the United States on behalf of South Africa’s white-minority regime.
Once again going full Goebbels, he recently – without being challenged by his MSNBC hosts – denounced Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace as “campus proxies” for Iran.
The audacity of knowingly placing a target on Jews while drawing a generous salary on the pretext of defend their rights is hard to beat.
The problem for Israel and its apologists is that they have devalued their favorite terms of demonization to the point of making them trivial and meaningless.
Most people no longer care about being denounced as anti-Semites, terrorists, or agents of a foreign government by the likes of the Defamation League, and are no longer intimidated by the Zionist Inquisition,
because they readily understand it bears no relation to the actual definition of these terms and that these are deployed for the sole purpose of defending a foreign state and its policies.
Speaking of demonization, Vietnam’s National Liberation Front was hardly the Vienna Boys’ Choir, and at the height of the divestment movement South Africans accused of collaboration were being literally burned alive with “necklaces” consisting of petrol-soaked tires.
Yet today any student opposing Israeli genocide is absurdly required to take responsibility for Hamas and every one of its actions. It’s a sign of desperation by those who know their cause is lost.
Because they realize theirs is also a Lost Cause, Israel and its apologists are increasingly resorting to extreme measures, like deposing university presidents, threatening individual students and their employment prospects,
deploying agents provocateurs, and mobilising the police and security forces. Principle unfortunately often comes with a cost, but the manner in which the student movement has responded to these challenges has been nothing short of inspirational. END
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