In Support of the Gaza Protest Movement

Student rebellion may be our best hope to prevent Palestinian genocide

The vitally important student protest movement against Israel’s policies has been met with a level of police suppression against middle class kids that we haven’t seen for decades. There are many stories nested within this story. One that interests me is how the experience of the encampments (which Republican Congressman Tom Cotton put down as “the little Gazas that have risen up on campuses across America”) provides students with a direct, if temporary, experience of an emancipatory state, as also happened during Occupy Wall Street. A Palestinian law student at Columbia says:

@palfolklore @palfolklore ♬ original sound - palfolklore

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

These types of direct experiences can be permanently radicalizing, as they reveal the alternative, egalitarian world as not just a delusion or fantasy but inherently possible.¹

A Columbia graduate student documented the over-the-top security response to the occupation of Hamilton Hall (famous site of occupations by Students for a Democratic Society in the late 1960s). But hey, according to Elon Musk, we’re not giving oppressors a fair shake. As he wrote in a recent Tweet: “The axiomatic error undermining much of Western Civilization is “weak makes right”. If someone accepts, explicitly or implicitly, that the oppressed are always the good guys, then the natural conclusion is that the strong are the bad guys.” Sometimes the “oppressed” need more oppression, apparently.

Meanwhile, the House of Representatives just passed a horrendous bill to “Combat Antisemitism on College Campuses,” which hopefully gets rejected by the Senate. According to The New York Times, “The bill would for the first time enshrine a definition of antisemitism into federal law.” A “broad range of statements” are covered by the new definition. This includes ““denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination” and claiming that Israel’s existence is a “racist endeavor.”” In other words, the bill conflates the nation of Israel and Judaism as the same. This would be a terrible law. It is something that wealthy Zionists are desperate to establish. The two — Judaism and support for Israel — need to be separated.

I see many Jewish friends and acquaintances still struggling with this dilemma, which took me a while to resolve for myself, as I expressed in past newsletters. I appreciated this interview with Simone Zimmerman, focus of the film Israelism and one of the founders of the If Not Now movement. Zimmerman notes:

The reason that there are so many young Jews fighting for Palestinian freedom is because we read the news and we see the horrors that are being committed against Palestinians.  We're asking questions about the mythologies that we were raised with and also just asking questions in the same way that other young people around the world are asking. We’ve been raised to to ask questions —  to want to learn, to want to seek deeper meanings . Also for many of us it's because of the Holocaust education that we were raised with learning about our own community's history of dehumanization and discrimination and and violence and displacement. We see echoes of things that we have been taught to oppose our entire lives happening in Gaza right now. It doesn't have to be direct comparisons; we can still know dehumanization when we see it. We can oppose state violence when we see it being committed on our phone screens every day. And those things for me are deeply Jewish values.

I agree with Zimmerman that the hyper-militarized neo-Fascism of Israel is far more dangerous to Jews around the world than protesting against this. The protests may be having some effect, but the clock is ticking, as Gaza is now experiencing a “full-blown famine,” according to CNN.

Journalist Jeremy Loffredo (who I met at my local East Village cafe) went to the Gaza border to document how Israelis — including illegal settlers on the West Bank — block trucks of food and humanitarian aid from reaching Palestinians in Gaza. They do this with support from the Israeli military, This is why Gazans are now facing starvation:

The blockaders express their belief, that, as one man says:

“The people of Gaza, the population, is deeply with the Hamas. There is no difference between Hamas and the population. The aim here is to bring the population to such a situation that they will just stand against Hamas and say, ‘Stop! We want to eat. We want to get our life back. Just release the hostages. Enough is enough.”

Other blockaders say that the Israel must take over Gaza and absorb it into Israel. Other protestors, including children, when asked what should be done with Palestinians in Gaza, say bluntly: “Kill them all,” so Gaza can be “civilized.”

Watching all of this helps to clarify the realistic global concerns about Israel committing a full-scale genocide against the Palestinians.