Students are returning to campus and little has changed in Gaza since the summer began.
Israel continues its genocidal assault on the population and the United States government continues to support the effort with caveats or anything resembling a red line.
This week we saw a potential foreshadowing of what this semester is going to look like. At the University of Michigan cops mobilized to shut down a demonstration in support of Gaza. Multiple people were arrested.
The action was a die-in organized by the Tahrir Coalition. “We will not celebrate back to school as UM invests in and funds genocide,” declared the group in an Instagram post before the event. “We are united in our demand for complete divestment.”
At The Intercept Natasha Lennard writes about some of the ways in which schools have prepared to crack down on the incoming protests.
New York University has updated its student code of conduct rules. This was allegedly done to combat campus bigotry, but it actually opens up the possibility that critics of Zionism will be punished for discrimination.
The updated conduct guide declares that speech and conduct targeting Zionists can now violate the school’s non-discrimination policy because Zionism can be “code word” for Jewish.
“The ironies of the approach abound,” writes Lennard. “On campuses and off, anti-Zionists have been vocally trying to ensure that ‘Zionist’ does not get used as a stand-in for ‘Jewish.’ Yet it is Zionists themselves who most often insist on the conflation, claiming that Israel as an ethnostate speaks for, acts on behalf of, and represents all Jews.”
“According to NYU’s guidance, then, Zionist and Zionism are either antisemitic dog whistles when invoked critically or a protected category akin to a race, ethnicity, or religious identity,” she continues. “Ethically committed and politically informed anti-Zionism — including the beliefs of many anti-Zionist Jews like myself who reject the conflation of our identity and heritage with an ethnostate project — is foreclosed, and the long history of Jewish anti-Zionism, which has existed as long as Zionism itself, is all but erased.”
The Forward published a list of other schools that have modified their rules to quell protests. Indiana University is barring protests within 25 feet of university buildings. Vanderbilt is banning protests that “require individuals to sleep or gather overnight.” The University of Virginia is banning tents on campus. The University of Connecticut has banned encampments and tools that amplify sound at outdoor gatherings. The University of South Florida is banning all protests after 5 o’clock. The University of California has banned encampments and face masks.
Beyond the schools, there are a number of pro-Israel lawmakers looking to stop activists from achieving any material gains.
24 state attorney generals recently sent a letter to trustees and fellows at Brown University warning them that the school could face legal ramifications if it divests from Israel.
Brown University students established an encampment on campus in April, but signed an agreement to end it in exchange for a meeting with officials, consideration of theor divest proposal, a vote on divestment, and a promise that no students would be retaliated against over their activism.
Schools and lawmakers have adopted an escalatory approach to the incoming protests in an alleged attempt to keep campuses safe, but these moves will probably have the opposite effect.
We’ll find out soon enough.
Pomona College
An important update from the opposite side of things. At Pomona College, the Department of Education Office for Civil Rights just launched an investigation into alleged discrimination against Palestinian, Southwest Asian and North African and Muslim students at the school.
Palestine Legal helped students file the complaint in April. It details the “college president’s anti-Palestinian bias, the college’s threats to unmask protestors at the behest of an Israel advocacy group, its failure to take action against a Hillel affiliate who pressured students to dox student activists, and its violent crackdown on student protestors.”
“The complaint was filed less than week after 25 police cars from local cities containing over 30 police in riot gear converged on the campus to arrest 19 students engaging in a sit-in in support of Gaza.
Earlier this year I spoke with Pomona College Sinqi Chapman, one of the students who was arrested and suspended over the action. She detailed how school President Gina Gabrielle Starr called the cops on her students and how the administration dealt with the situation.
Here’s what Chapman told me:
While we were in there Starr called on campus security to detain a student media member. Campus security physically put their hands on this student, pushed him outside the room, shoved him to the ground, kicked him in the face, and pushed him against the wall. This individual was never detained so they were actually just assaulted as a result of an order by Starr.
While we were sitting inside we were not not blocking any walkways. We were sitting and talking to each other, but most of the time it was silent. We kept a walkway for people because we didn’t want it to be a fire hazard at all. The secretary was sitting in there and didn’t feel threatened by our presence at all matter. In fact, Starr asked the secretary if she wanted to leave early and she casually said, “Oh, I’m just finishing up a few things.” It was very obvious that this person didn’t feel threatened by our presence or feel like it was unsafe.
While we were in there we got a school-wide email notification saying a lot of police were coming to campus but that there was “no threat” to our community. but there is no threat to our community.
Since then, President Starr has continued to say that we were the ones who created an unsafe environment when the reality is she ordered maybe twenty riot police from about five different departments to come in and violently arrest many black students, many brown, indigenous, and undocumented students. While we were in the office, I witnessed my peers get violently arrested by riot police with semi-automatic weapons. We were all taken one by one to the local police department. Rather than just citing us and releasing students, which is an option, Starr deployed riot police and sent 20 students to jail for more than five hours.
We were denied lawyers. We did not consent to being searched and we were searched anyway. There were students who were interrogated inside. In the jail, some students were denied medication. I was also one of the students that did not consent to being searched and was searched.
I think it’s important to bring up that students were actually held in jail longer than they needed to be because Pomona College and Claremont PD work as one unit. The head of campus security was walking in and out of the jail. Personally, I was not allowed to leave. I had already been booked, my fingerprints were taken, and they had all my information so I should have been released, but the jailers said they were waiting for my suspension letter from Pomona College. I was given my suspension letter by the head of campus security. I’m suspended indefinitely.
When we were released from jail it was past midnight, we received the suspension letters, and we were essentially evicted from our dorms. We did not have any housing. We did not have any food. Pomona College chose to respond to us in such a punitive and carceral way because they felt threatened by student dissent and students challenging their investments.
“For an institution that claims to be strongly rooted in its community yet global in its orientation, Pomona College’s treatment of students who are trying to end a genocide is appalling,” said Palestine Legal senior staff Zoha Khalili in a statement. “The college is betraying its own students while profiting off death and destruction.”
Odds & Ends
🫏 ‘I think we’ve reached a tipping point’: James Zogby on Uncommitted and the DNC
🇺🇸 Biden gives arms shipment proponent top Israel policy role
📺 Western media can be held legally accountable for its role in the Gaza genocide
🇺🇸 The Democratic Party rejects protests calling for a Gaza ceasefire and arms embargo
🏫 The Intercept: College Administrators Spent Summer Break Dreaming Up Ways to Squash Gaza Protests
🇮🇱 Counterpunch: Why are Liberal Zionists Cheering as Harris Echoes Biden on Gaza?
⚖️ Lookout Santa Cruz: Months after UC Santa Cruz Gaza protest arrests, formal charges still in limbo
🏫 NPR: ‘Institutional neutrality’: How one university walks a fine line on Gaza protests
🏫 Forward: How universities have changed their policies on protest because of the war in Gaza
🇵🇸 Responsible Statecraft: Kamala & Gaza: All words and no deeds make a divided party
🇵🇸 Jacobin: Palestine Protests Aren’t Going Away
📖 In These Times: Genocide and the English Language
⚽ BDS National Committee: FIFA Wants To Keep Its Vote on Banning Israel Quiet. Let’s Make Some Noise.
🎵 Pitchfork: Godspeed You! Black Emperor have announced a new album called “No Title As of 13 February 2024 28,340 Dead”. It arrives October 4 via Constellation. Below, listen to the album’s nearly seven-minute closing track, “Grey Rubble – Green Shoots,” and find the band’s upcoming tour dates.
The title of “No Title As of 13 February 2024 28,340 Dead” refers to a death toll of Palestinians, as reported by Gaza’s Health Ministry, in Israel’s war against Hamas. (More than 40,000 Palestinians have now been killed in the war in Gaza, according to the ministry.) In a statement with the album announcement, available in full below, the Canadian post-rock band said, “NO TITLE= what gestures make sense while tiny bodies fall? what context? what broken melody? and then a tally and a date to mark a point on the line, the negative process, the growing pile.”
🇺🇸 Common Dreams: Blinken Condemned for ‘Empty Words’ on Genocide as US Backs Israel’s Obliteration of Gaza
Laith Marouf: We see a major anti-colonial battle for the total liberation of the region
https://youtu.be/s3w7J-t9s20?si=tEKCmGRMxVupcuBS&t=1
If I were a student protesting the genocidal character of Israel’s war on Palestine, I’d consider asking the university to detail what first amendment rights could be exercised legally.
Could also appeal to Palestinian thought leaders to clarify political goals to be advocated for.
Equality? Independence?