We’re Doing This for Gaza

At the University of Pennsylvania where I teach, students launched a peaceful Gaza Solidarity Encampment on April 25. Students from neighboring Drexel and Temple are also part of this encampment, and it has the wide support of other groups and communities in the area. Like the more than 150 other such encampments across the country, these students are raising their voices (Thakker) against the genocide now taking place in Gaza with over thirty-four thousand Palestinians dead.

They are doing so by refusing to let their tuition dollars pay for Israel’s war machine, which is directly funded and supplied not only by the U.S. government, but also by the investment policies and practices of such universities. The students are therefore calling for the university to disclose its financial holdings and institutional and operational ties with the state of Israel, and to amend its investment policy to divest from companies that consistently, knowingly, and directly profit from Israel’s war on Gaza and the occupation of Palestinian territories (“Student Protesters Are Demanding”), and with the concurrent violations of human rights and international law there.

The names of such companies are widely available, but each university also has specific investments or programs that they need to be dismantled.1 For example at Penn, the encampment is demanding that the university immediately cut all financial and institutional ties with Ghost Robotics, housed in Pennovation labs and created by Penn graduates, which has developed drone-mounted robot dogs that the Israeli government purchased to be used in Gaza (Rinde).

The students are also protesting “scholasticide,” or the systematic destruction of the education system in Gaza (“UN Experts Deeply Concerned”). As Simona Sawhney puts it, “If capitalist ethno-nationalism functions mainly by hiding connections—between products and producers, investments and armaments, events and histories, words and meanings—then those who wish to resist its violence must constantly expose these very connections. Protesting students today, in the US and elsewhere, are showing us how to do precisely that.”

The world has been shocked by the violence with which so many of these encampments have been dismantled. Students (and faculty who support them) have been brutally beaten and arrested—over 2,500 as I write this. Many have been punished with suspensions. The scenes at Columbia and Emory have been particularly sickening, with the police violence against protestors turning the campuses into war zones. The students have also been attacked violently by counterprotestors (People’s City Council). We saw videos of how “the police stood aside and let a pro-Israeli lynch mob run wild at UCLA. They did nothing for two hours as violent Zionists assaulted students, launched fireworks into the encampment, and sprayed mace on students” (Levine). At Penn, there was an attempt to spray the camp with a chemical substance, and the encampment has faced abuse from counterprotestors at 4:00 a.m. shouting Islamophobic slurs and calling for a “UCLA 2.0” (Freedom School for Palestine). What is worse, Zionists have shouted antisemitic slurs near encampments in order to incriminate students in them.

At the Penn encampment, Up against the Law,2 a local collective of volunteers in Philadelphia who act as legal observers at protests and help protestors understand their legal rights, have conducted de-escalation trainings at the camp, aimed at teaching students how not to be provoked. They have warned students that violence by counterprotestors is a tactic designed to give the university an excuse to call in the police. Of course, there are also external pressures on the university to do exactly that—for example, billboard trucks have begun to once again to encircle the campus, playing horrific videos of the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023. Earlier, these trucks were one of the many ways that were used to pressure the university to disallow a Palestinian literary festival (Maruf). Rich donors pulled their money to force the university’s hand, which resulted in the resignation of the chair of the board of trustees, leading him to write an opinion piece (Bok) warning against the undue influence of donors on universities. 

As one Penn professor, one of the trichairs of the Faculty Senate, has recently written in the campus student paper, “The billboard trucks at Penn, just like the airplane that flew over the Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology campuses in early December 2023, are part of a concerted, external political campaign against higher education institutions, against academic freedom, against open expression, and, in the case of our University, against a peaceful protest of students, staff, faculty, and local community members” (Falleti 2024).

The hostility against these encampments comes not just from rich donors and university administrators but also from the U.S. government machinery. On May 3, U.S. Department of Education Secretary Miguel Cardona sent a letter to several university presidents, including Interim Penn President Larry Jameson, condemning “abhorrent” incidents of antisemitism on university campuses nationwide. As The Daily Pennsylvanian, Penn’s student newspaper noted, “While not directly mentioned in the letter, Cardona’s timing coincides with the ongoing pro-Palestinian encampment that has been set up in front of College Hall since April 25” (Bartlett). The more students protest what is happening in Gaza, the more we hear that Jewish students are feeling unsafe on campus, that antisemitism is on the rise on U.S. campuses, and that the encampments are to blame. This term “Jewish students” as used by critics of the encampments excludes hundreds of those Jewish students who are part of these protests. As Jewish Voices for Peace has categorically stated, the claim that “Jewish people, anywhere, hold unanimous opinions about the Israeli government and Zionism” is “blatantly untrue, and in and of itself treads dangerously close to propagating antisemitic tropes” such as the supposition that “Jewish people are more ‘loyal’ to the government of Israel than to their home nations and neighbors” (“Jewish Voice for Peace”). At Penn, as elsewhere, Jewish students and groups, including Penn Chavurah and Jewish community organizations, have supported the encampment, and condemned the ongoing genocide in occupied Palestine. Indeed, a large number of Jewish community members held a Passover Seder at the encampment (Piette). As more than one observer has pointed out, encampments have been marked by a close relationship between Jewish and Arab students, who have shown a joint commitment to confronting antisemitism.

While real antisemitism is not to be downplayed, what we are seeing is “a weaponization of the discourse around antisemitism—you can be a Jew only if you are a Zionist and only if you support Israel, that is, Israeli settler colonialism, that is, white supremacy” as Raz Segal, the eminent scholar of genocide and professor at Stockton University, pointed out in a talk on Penn’s campus on April 26. Segal’s argument is that Israel is now antisemitic because of its insistent reduction of all Jews to a single political stance. In the current discourse, the real threat to Jewish lives is obfuscated—as Jewish Voices for Peace points out, this threat emanates from right-wing movements. In contrast, Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu has practically called the student protestors Nazis: “What’s happening in America’s college campuses is horrific. Antisemitic mobs have taken over leading universities. They call for the annihilation of Israel. They attack Jewish students. They attack Jewish faculty. This is reminiscent of what happened in German universities in the 1930s” (Lyons and al-Ghoul). Although he didn’t go so far, U.S. President Joe Biden repeated the accusation that the protests are violent and threatening: “So, let me be clear, peaceful protest in America: Violent protest is not protected. Peaceful protest is,” Biden said. “Threatening people, intimidating people, instilling fear in people is not peaceful protest; it’s against the law.”

This tone goes down the chain of command, repeated by university authorities endlessly, with no evidence being offered for this claim. At Penn, an attack on Hillel last October was not perpetrated by any pro-Palestinian person, but rather from someone who was likely right-wing Christian supremacist; the university authorities never clarified this while insinuating that it was somehow connected to the Palestine Writes literary festival, or even to campus protests against Israeli actions in Gaza. Such sleight of hand, or downright obfuscation and misrepresentation, is widespread, and it is accompanied by a disregard for the actual doxing of, and violence against, Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students and faculty, as well as their allies. This has been a feature of nearly all the universities that have punished the protestors—a few have spoken too little or too late about protecting such students, but their neglect also points to the way in which there is a great imbalance between their attitudes to antisemitism and Islamophobia.

The tone was of course set by the congressional hearings at the end of last year. Since then, the more horrors we witness in occupied Palestine, the louder and shriller the accusations of antisemitism on college campuses become. As Segal put it, “And so, here we are today, after years of state discourses, from Israel, through Germany, to the United States, deepening the view that a struggle against a racist and violent state, Israel, now also engaged in what the International Court of Justice has described in a provisional ruling in January as plausibly genocide in Israel’s attack on Gaza—this struggle against what is in effect an antisemitic state is cast as antisemitic” (“Israeli Holocaust Scholar Omer Bartov on Campus Protests”). Segal also pointed out that the aim of this weaponization of antisemitism is to deflect attention from what is going on in occupied Palestine. Instead of decrying the destruction, death, and starvation there, talk about how out of line the student protestors are; instead of the violence in Gaza, talk about the way in which the protests are making some students “uncomfortable.”

It is now clear that the attack on the protests is also an attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives on U.S. campuses, and thus aligns neatly with the right-wing attacks on critical race theory and anti-racist movements. In a recent article, Michael Hudson rightly notes that the attempt to silence students and faculty is a new version of McCarthyism: “Just as the House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC) aimed to end the careers of progressive actors, directors, professors and State Department officials unsympathetic to Chiang Kai-Shek or sympathetic to the Soviet Union from 1947 to 1975, today’s version aims at ending what remains of academic freedom in the United States.” Further, he argues that the invective “Communist” has been replaced by “antisemite,” with the two terms being morphed into a single denunciation: student protestors are accused not simply of being antisemitic but also of being Marxists; we remember that BLM activists were characterized similarly (Gonzalez 2024, n.d.).

On the other hand, the student protestors are actively making the connections between their solidarity with Gaza and other issues such as the demands for public housing, divestment from fossil fuels (Noor), and racial and social justice. At Penn too, these connections are evident. Last year the students set up an encampment demanding that Penn divest from fossil fuels; as one local newspaper puts it, “Because Penn’s endowment is shrouded in secrecy, it is impossible to know where its $21 billion is being invested. However, it’s clear it is not being invested in the broader Philadelphia community” (Up against the Occupation). Labor activists such as the UAW (“Strike Authorization Vote Announcement”) and AAUP have supported the right of students to protest and decried the violence against them. The battle lines on both sides make it clear that the issue of Gaza is connected to a variety of movements for social justice, peace, and anti-colonialism. The protests reveal the nexus between the corporate takeover of education, and the structural connections between those who run universities and those who fund and support the war in Palestine. The students are displaying the multiculturalism, internationalism, anti-racism, and human empathy that universities declare it is their aim to foster. That is why these protests have inspired students in other parts of the world and sent a meaningful message of solidarity to Palestinians now living in the rubble of their former homes. 

Nicholas Kristoff writes that divestment “won’t hurt Netanyahu or help Gazans—but it may mean lower returns for endowments. So do students favor higher tuition to cover this, or less student aid for marginalized students?” This is an argument that willfully distorts both the history and the political thrust of the calls for divestment, and instead appeals to students to think only about themselves (the idea that lower profits from investments will lead to higher tuition is speculative at best). Instead of this selfishness, the students are clear that this is not about themselves. As one of the students at the Penn encampment has said, “We’re doing this for Gaza. . . . There is a lot of attention paid to the students in the encampment and on the university. But we are doing this for Gaza, to re-center the conversation on genocide and to re-center the conversation on Gaza and free Palestine” (Snyder et al.) As Rafah becomes the new target, we urgently need such clarity and tenacity.