How Gaza is changing American campuses | Opinions

For more than five months now, students across the United States have been mobilizing in support of Palestinians facing genocide perpetrated by the Israeli army. It is increasingly clear that more and more young Americans view Palestine advocacy in the same way Angela Davis does, as a moral litmus test for the world.

Mobilization is not an easy task. Students supporting Palestinian liberation have been stabbed, shot, crushed and sprayed with chemicals used by Israeli occupation forces. They were suspended, arrested and sanctioned. They had to rely on their own labor and the limited funds they could raise for their protest actions.

In contrast, pro-Israel students have well-established donor networks, Hillels campuses, and mainstream media reach to amplify their complaints that pro-Palestinian activism is anti-Semitic.

University administrations, worried about donor money, have also bent over backwards to please powerful individuals and groups, who have denounced pro-Palestinian activism and have not hesitated to discipline students in their favor. name.

Largely under-resourced and under-protected, Palestine's defenders became savvy and creative, building alliances with communities of all races, classes, and religions and employing a wide range of tactics and strategies. Their actions range from long-term plans to spontaneous eruptions, and everything in between.

Some organizations have already borne fruit. In the University of California system, there have been notable successes. At the University of California, Davis, the pro-Palestinian campaign culminated in a historic student government vote on February 15 to respond to the call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS). As a result, the student body will refrain from spending any portion of its $20 million budget on a company on the BDS list.

The same day, the Graduate Student Association of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) called for divestment from Israel. On February 20, the UCLA student government voted unanimously to demand that the university eliminate tuition fees linked to apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide.

On February 29, UC Riverside Associated Students also passed a resolution to fully divest from companies complicit in Israel's genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. On March 6, the Associated Students of UC San Diego also voted in favor of a divestment bill.

Elsewhere, results have been mixed. At Stanford University, where I teach, students managed to maintain a 24-hour sit-in for 120 days, demanding that the university denounce apartheid and Israeli genocide, support Palestinian students, identify anti-Palestinian bias in teaching and research and implements divestment initiatives.

When the university abruptly demanded that the sit-in be dismantled, more than 500 students rallied to defend it, many spending the night, daring the university to stop them. Although some administrators privately expressed a degree of sympathy, no concrete concessions were made, so students continued to demonstrate and disrupt campus life, and mounted a campus-wide divestment campaign. campus.

Although Stanford's administration has yet to make any significant changes, student organizers are well aware of their accomplishments. Obviously it was ultimately a protest, but we also created a space for discourse. And it's ironic because the university has desperately wanted to create a space like that, they've desperately wanted to create this kind of conversation, which we've been admitted to by various administrators, including the president himself. What the sit-in did was do what the university had been trying to do, Farah, a Stanford student organizer, told me in a recent interview for my Speaking out of Place podcast.

What long-term campaigns and organic and eruptive takeovers have succeeded in doing is radically changing the campus environment. In addition to the passionate and vocal exchanges between people with different opinions that we observed during marches and protests, deliberate and methodical divestment campaigns and prolonged sit-ins fueled conversations, debates and discussions for months .

Each of these actions involves the participation of guest speakers (often prominent Palestinian activists, artists, and poets) who fill gaps in education that American universities are content to leave empty. Students therefore learn from a wider range of sources and contribute to educating others themselves.

In the months since October 7, the entire American academic landscape has changed with respect to Palestine. Some began to draw parallels with the student anti-war movement during the Vietnam War. A University of San Diego student newspaper article about a pro-Palestinian rally attended by more than 2,000 people said: Participation of this degree is unprecedented, even at protests students against the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s.

As a student at the University of California, Berkeley during the Vietnam War and a participant in those protests as well as current rallies for Palestinian liberation, I am struck by some obvious similarities.

First, in both cases, the student protests challenged the mainstream media's portrayal of the wars and the official positions of university administrations. Protest actions served to educate the public and expose the role that higher education institutions play in national and global power dynamics. University administrators faced their complicity in wars and their deliberate obstruction of certain types of knowledge and learning and could not hide behind sins of omission.

Second, these protests aligned Vietnamese and Palestinian liberation struggles with national and international struggles and gave rise to broad multiracial and multiethnic coalitions that bridge the local, national, and international levels. These connections mean that even those working in geographically isolated and small institutions do not feel detached or alone, but part of something much bigger.

At the same time, I am struck by an important and impressive difference. American students viewed their personal lives as inextricably intertwined with the Vietnam War. Many of us lost friends in Vietnam, some of us hid people who avoided the draft or federal investigation for their work in the movement. There was no lack of solidarity with the Vietnamese people, but there was not the same kind of attention to personal aspects that we see today with regard to the genocide in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.

I have never seen dozens and dozens of Vietnamese flags flying on campus, nor other national symbols displayed by students like we see today. With flags, keffiyehs and other Palestinian symbols, the students and other protesters embody Palestine in an extremely moving and powerful way.

Beyond the consequences that the Gaza genocide may have on them personally, American students express historically unprecedented solidarity, empathy and concern for the Palestinian people, and their outrage that the United States has been a facilitator of Israel's historic ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

There is no going back in terms of academic discourse on Palestine. The specifics of the struggle against genocide and apartheid in Palestine have gained strength and breadth precisely because the sensitivities that have developed in the United States and elsewhere since the Vietnam era regarding racism, police and state violence , and other forms of discrimination and cruelty, have become permanent parts of our cultural and political memory.

No right-wing attack on critical race theory, diversity, or inclusion will change that, and no silencing of critics of Israel under the charge of anti-Semitism will last.

On the contrary, the passion, energy and commitment of today's youth have reignited the spirit of political activism and made intergenerational alliances the new norm.

While it is difficult to predict with certainty whether these movements on college campuses will have an effect on the broader national political landscape, I think it is safe to say this: Each of these actions on campuses has not only attracted the attention of the local community. , he also drew his participation.

And the outside community is not just individuals, it also includes unions, religious groups, and other civil society groups to force political change. At this point, more than 100 municipalities have called for a ceasefire, and at least 85 members of Congress have done the same. Even if change is happening, it is happening far too slowly, which is why the next few months will see neither the end nor the decline of student activism for Palestinian rights.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.

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