At 4 am on the morning of Monday, April 22, students at New York University Palestine Solidarity Coalition set up a Gaza Solidarity Encampment in Gould Plaza in front of the Stern School of Business, announcing on their Instagram page: “We are committed to the fight for Palestinian liberation, and demand the University divest from all corporations aiding in the genocide and fear tactics generating manufactured consent in academic spheres.”
The peaceful student occupation of Gould Plaza continued all day until it was violently dismantled at 8.15 pm by the New York Police Department, at the request of NYU leadership. Around 128 protesters were arrested, including 19 NYU faculty members who had formed a cordon around the students.
I am one of those faculty members who will appear before a Criminal Court judge on May 10, facing the charge of “trespassing” on our own campus. The students have meanwhile set up another encampment, near another NYU building. They are working hard with countless other American college students to help end genocide in Gaza.
NYU faculty creating a ring around the Gaza solidarity encampment to protect their students after the school threatened mass arrest. So beautiful. pic.twitter.com/OgW21AM9nU
— Read Let This Radicalize You (@JoshuaPHilll) April 22, 2024
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Their work joins a long tradition of student activism, dating back to my student days in the 1960s, when we protested the war in Vietnam and the violent repression of the Black Panther Party. Students are still fighting to end American imperial wars and racial injustice. In every case, students and their supporters have faced repression, criminalisation, and violence by challenging the shifting boundaries that separate legal, licit, illicit, and illegal protest.
Working against the grain of the US mainstream, students’ movements have gained strength in the face of repression, had a positive impact on national politics, and provoked more forceful, sophisticated repression, which now includes a pervasive ideological media onslaught that seeks to discredit anyone who opposes military mass murder in Gaza.
We also face more militant university administrators, military police, and punitive judges.
The basic ideological scenario supporting the repression of student protests begins with the claim that people in Israel are fighting for the very survival of the Jewish state that protects Jews who have faced centuries of discrimination and violence, culminating in the Nazi Holocaust. That purported threat to Israel’s survival is said to come from Palestinian militants supported by Iran. After Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, the Israeli military tackled that supposed threat most forcefully, determined to end it forever, and Palestinian civilians have died, it is said, because Hamas hides behind them, commanding their support.
NYU and many other US universities have good financial, political, and intellectual reasons for their sympathy with that scenario. NYU has a department of Israel Studies, a department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, a Taub Center for Israel Studies, and now a new Center for the Study of Antisemitism. Its Middle East and Islamic Studies Department covers a vast region, while Israel stands alone as a region of knowledge production, framing knowledge about Israel with firm authority.
We thus live in an American-Israeli knowledge/power regime, where student protests calling for Intifada to liberate Palestine “from the river to the sea” are viewed as they are viewed in Israel. But here, in New York, they are directed at an American audience in the context of increasing repression here in the US, as well as in Palestine, and they are fueled by increasing anger at the experience of this particular moment, expressing solidarity with Palestinians who are being crushed against a wall where their backs have been pushed to the point of genocide.
Our protesting students are truly amazing. Their energy, cleverness, and perseverance are astounding.
Also read: ‘Azadi For Palestine’: University Campuses Across the West Erupt in Protests Not Seen Since 1968
University administrators and donors are nevertheless more sympathetic to claims by students who identify with Israel emotionally, politically, or religiously, saying that they are being personally threatened by protests supporting Palestinian rights. Those claims turn vocal anti-war chants into antisemitism, thus illegal discrimination and hate speech, turning support for human life in Gaza into criminal activity, not only in the minds of aggrieved students and others supporting Israel but also for college and university leaders who claim to be committed to keeping students safe.
NYU is facing a court case claiming that its toleration of free speech and support for academic freedom foster antisemitism. In the wake of a Congressional grilling of university presidents, based on those claims, NYU built a Center for the Study of Antisemitism.
The situation that student protesters face today is new not only because of the more repressive times we live in but also because now there is no clear line between domestic and foreign politics. In the past, anti-war and anti-apartheid activists’ protests aimed at US foreign policies. Civil rights and Black Lives Matter struggles focused on domestic issues. Today, the war inside Israel is also a conflict among Americans.
A useful Vietnam War analogy to the present situation begins with the official US claim that its war in Vietnam was in support of the government of Vietnam against alien communist invaders who sought to conquer and destroy the government of Vietnam. In that analogy, Israel now stands for Vietnam; Iran stands for North Vietnam; and Hamas (also Hezbollah, even Houthis) stand for evil commies. Anti-Vietnam war activists were often called commies, alien traitors to America, in the language of McCarthyism. The analogy to demonic Commies today is demonic Muslims – Islamophobia is like anti-communism. In the US mainstream, as in Israel, Hamas appears to be a band of Muslim terrorists, a very familiar and frightening image. Iran fits neatly into the Cold War demonic Soviet stereotype.
Also read: Pro-Palestine Protests in US Universities Are Both an Inflexion Point and a Rite of Passage
The misfit in this analogy is transnational ethnicity and global capitalism, which make the 2000s more complicated that the 1900s. Jewish Americans are very prominent in Israel and are very resourceful and active as Israel supporters in the United States, where their media depictions of Israel and Jewish Americans as victims of discrimination under an existential threat have wide influence, even as the Israeli military is killing 35,000 and counting residents of Gaza. Muslim Americans are in a weak aspirational situation; Palestinian Americans are a minuscule minority; and all Muslims in the US live under the cloud of Islamophobia. Meanwhile, American business is deeply and heavily invested in Israel in cutting edge economic sectors that profit mightily from US military expenditures that are killing people in Gaza.
The Vietnam analogy is more useful when thinking about current struggles inside the history of imperialism. US government support for Israel is not only deeply embedded in American politics, and in both major parties, but is fundamental for sustaining Israel’s military and economic power and protecting Israel from international censure.
Israel is an essential subordinate – a dependent US ally – while Iran is clearly the major oppositional force in the oil-rich Middle East. It is, therefore, reasonable to think of Israeli military mass murders in Gaza as an American policy default option, which the US government has done nothing to avoid. Preventing genocide has always been possible, but it is politically untenable.
The American political mainstream has thus produced conditions of possibility for this military default option and for its ongoing escalation into genocide. In that perspective, mass death in Gaza is as much a product of US imperial power, influence, and domestic politics as mass death in Vietnam. It has a similar but more vital purpose – to expand American control of a resource-rich region of the world where American businesses have massively more sunk investments than they ever had in Vietnam.
