The student protests for Palestine in America and their political significance

by Eunnuri Yi.

Earlier this year, nearing the end of spring semester as the weather finally warmed, university campuses across the United States were suddenly overtaken by a flood of encampments. It began on April 17 at Columbia University in New York City, when students pitched tents on the school’s South Lawn to create a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” as their University President prepared to testify in Congress on the purported problem of antisemitism at universities. In the following days and weeks, over seventy encampments sprang up in the U.S., with police and university administrations arresting more than three thousand protestors and cracking down on the encampments in a massive draconian reaction.

The images were striking: young students, often wearing keffiyehs, sitting and defiantly locking arms with their peers, and getting handcuffed or zip-tied by the police, often holding massive batons. The students were white, Black, Jewish, Arab, Asian, and every shade of brown. The videos showed students chanting, “Disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest!” — in reference to the demands for universities to disclose the investments of their endowments and to divest from Israeli apartheid, genocide, and war — and singing spirituals and protest songs like “We Shall Not Be Moved,” all while being met with violence and brutality from the police. 

Beyond college campuses there were other images, too, of massive marches containing thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people carrying colourful signs and banners with slogans, coming out of broad public demonstrations against the genocide in Gaza.

Many of these images have reached the non-Western world. From a distance, they may blur together to perhaps appear similar in form or in meaning to other protests in recent American history, such as the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests over the murder of George Floyd, which merged with protests against Donald Trump. The encampments may also be compared to other demonstrations involving students and youth in the U.S. and around the world — like the Hong Kong protests in 2019, the youth climate strikes in the West, and various LGBTQ marches. 

But as someone who has been witness to — and sometimes a participant in — many of these protests and so-called movements, there was and remains something qualitatively different about the student protests for Gaza this spring. 

The outer form taken by the encampments can be misleading or incomplete; it was this exterior form which the American mainstream media sought to distort. Students were cast either as well-intentioned but ultimately naive, or as maliciously terrorist and radically anti-American. But this was not merely a youthful, naive rebellion against authority for its own sake: it was something deeper, which must be cracked open and probed. The substance and the inner meaning of the encampments hold much greater political significance.

First, the protests threatened the American state, identifying it as a white supremacist, imperialist, and warmongering entity responsible for the deaths of over 40,000 people in Gaza, of whom 16,000 are children. The speed and desperation with which the encampments were attacked on all fronts revealed the intricate web of the state. Media outlets trivialized the encampments, distorting and cutting interviews to fit their narrative; career politicians at all levels of government, from the governor of Pennsylvania to the President of the United States, discredited and criticized the students, calling for “order” and encouraging the deployment of police; and university administrators denounced their own students, faculty and staff, despite the majority being in favor of ceasefire and divestment. 

It was not a revelation that politics, media, and corporations were conspiratorial arms of the state, especially regarding war. However, what was shocking was how brazenly the universities, especially the elite ones, dropped all pretense of being founded on ideals of truth, the pursuit of knowledge, and the education of young people to both self-actualize and to contribute to bettering society. Instead, the university clung to its secret investments and Department of Defense grants as determining its true ideals, cherishing its ties to Israel and the weapons industries over its own students and professors. 

Second, the true role of the university was brought to light. Israel and America proclaim themselves as protectors of the West and it is the elite university which functions as the defender of Western civilization in the world, to train young people in the ideological and technical prowess needed to sustain the American state. 

This university, representing the “enlightened” state of Western civilization, considers democracy and freedom not as living ideals to strive towards, but as fictions of language that can be weaponized against its enemies. The education of students in their chosen field or study is secondary to teaching the passive acceptance of war and the subsequent degradation of darker humanity. Once the students break or deviate from these priorities, an existential crisis must ensue: for the complicity and consent of the students is necessary to the continued functioning of the state towards war. 

However, students took a stand to say that despite the cost, they could not accept this relationship as law. In bearing witness to slaughter and genocide borne of hatred and inhumanity — in seeing the humanity of the Gazan child in the camp and under the rubble, the mother on the road and in the market, and the father grieving, holding his family — the students recognized a principle still higher: that this humanity binds the witness to history, and compels them to become a participant in history. It demands courage and sacrifice in return, to define humanity on collective and civilizational terms rather than individualistic terms. 

The police would often attack and sweep encampments in the early hours of the morning, while students slept and were most vulnerable. A student interviewed the morning after the destruction of the University of Chicago encampment said: 

“There are limits to when we continue following orders. When you talk about genocide visited upon a colonized population of two million trapped in a ghetto as long as a marathon and six miles wide, [with] every hospital, universities bombed, 40 thousand people murdered, the people on the brink of starvation... If our government and academic institutions are complicit in this, there comes a point where we say we’re not following orders, and it doesn’t matter what you do to us, because there are principles and there are human lives that matter more than our careers and our futures, and that’s what separates us from us and people like Paul Alivisatos [the president of the University of Chicago] and these coward administrators, coward cops that terrorize an encampment while people are sleeping.” 

Seeing the reality of Gaza, which went beyond the imagination in both horror and in heroism, allowed for students to develop new moral standards. They could not accept the civilizational assumptions or conclusions of the university: neither for their own lives, nor for the future. The epistemology of the university, and thus all its authority and influence, broke and snapped. Economic or technological divestment from Israel and war could only happen at an authorized, institutional level, but en masse, students began to personally divest: emotionally, intellectually, and ideologically.

The cowardice of so many false authority figures was easily eclipsed by the morality of the Palestinian people, who suffered immensely and yet struggled together. They extended kindness and bravery amidst inconceivable grief and trauma, and held firm to their essential humanity even as Israeli soldiers degraded themselves with the gleeful destruction of civilization. Indirectly and directly, the Palestinian people inspired the students to have more courage, more strength, more faith, and to keep turning their gaze curiously outward to the world that lay beyond their own.

It was clear that the people of Palestine were nurtured by a sense of civilization that was able to bear the weight of reality—its pain and tragedy—in order to nurture a sense of the future. This civilizational lifeworld was evidently much stronger than the lifeworld of white America, which denied all pain and tragedy, and would censor and jail those who spoke up seeking to correct the course of this country out of love and concern. 

The thousands of students of the spring who protested the genocide meaningfully, dedicatedly, and with willingness to sacrifice, declared themselves fundamentally incompatible with a morally intolerable, warmongering state. They did so hoping that the country could correct itself. They questioned the potential future of a country so committed to war and genocide. What could possibly be the future of a country so invested in death and destruction? Of one so determined to pursue such a course, even at the cost of harm to its own citizens and turning on its youth? Ultimately, the students’ efforts revealed two lies to the American public and to the world: the premise of the university as an institution for the truth, and the illusion of the United States as a democracy. 

Both the university and the state can only function with broad assent and cooperation. In their refusal to consent or give legitimacy to the university’s ideology of war, students, especially those at elite universities, are defecting and divesting from America’s elite, warmongering minority. This can only intensify the pre-existing crisis of legitimacy within American society. In rejecting the white supremacist world order, which is spearheaded by the American state, and ideologically divesting from the elite university and its claims regarding Western civilization, students want to join the world to fight with darker humanity as it moves to finally achieve its freedom. 

The students’ unfinished task is to fully join with the majority of Americans, who are discontented, want peace, and are increasingly immiserated — and to locate the central force of the Black proletariat as the anchor of any potential civilization to come in America. If they achieve this, then, in this American crisis, they may realize the possibility of achieving what the prophetic writer James Baldwin called the “last white country.”

“An old world is dying, and a new one, kicking in the belly of its mother, time, announces that it is ready to be born. This birth will not be easy, and many of us are doomed to discover that we are exceedingly clumsy midwives. No matter, so long as we accept that our responsibility is to the newborn: the acceptance of responsibility contains the key to the necessarily evolving skill…

People, even if they are so thoughtless as to be born black, do not come into this world merely to provide mink coats and diamonds for chattering, trivial, pale matrons, or genocidal opportunities for their unsexed, unloved, and, finally, despicable men—oh, pioneers!

There will be bloody holding actions all over the world, for years to come: but the Western party is over, and the white man's sun has set. Period.”