Student Protesters Are Fighting For Gaza and For All Of Us

Supporters of Israel represent reactionary forces that are using spurious accusations of antisemitism to advance a much broader authoritarian agenda

May 02, 2024

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The abuse of the fight against antisemitism has reached new and dangerous heights amidst Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza. It has grown both more panicked and more dangerous in the face of the passionate student opposition to that genocide and to the Biden administration’s absolute complicity in it.

The danger at hand goes beyond the present moment, however. It threatens to undermine the very fabric of both classical Liberal democracy and progressive forces and values, such as they are, in the United States and other Western countries.

The use of spurious and even fabricated charges of antisemitism has been a favorite tool to defend Israel against criticism for decades. But now, it’s being utilized as never before by the white nationalist right, who have found not just willing but eager, albeit unwitting, collaborators among the pseudo-liberal, pro-Israel worlds of non-governmental organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League; lobbying groups like AIPAC and the Democratic Majority for Israel; and government itself, among both parties, and embodied in none other than President Joe Biden.

The danger is materializing before our very eyes. We can see it on the campuses across the country where students have set up encampments to protest Israel’s seven-month long massacre in Gaza. University leadership has completely abandoned any semblance of fairness or regard for the safety of their students and faculty. The police they have called in have, as always, escalated tensions, not resolved them. They have routinely initiated violence and, what’s more, have completely ignored the often violent counter-protesters. This should be a familiar pattern to anyone who has looked at the history of authoritarianism in in its many forms.

The overreaction to student protests at Columbia University and many other campuses didn’t come out of nowhere. For a sense of perspective of how quickly universities turned to violence, consider that, when anti-war protests began on college campuses in the 1960s, it took years before police began to act violently, with the first incident occurring in 1967 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Campus anti-war actions had been going on for at least three years before that.

This time, it only took days. So, what was the difference?

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There will doubtless be books written about this, but the most obvious difference between the reaction to student demonstrations in the 60s and today is Congress. Columbia University President Minouche Shafik was summoned before Congress, where she groveled, threw her students and faculty under the bus, and kowtowed to the bullying of a Republican-led hearing that used false accusations of antisemitism to spread anti-Palestinian hate, and to continue the far-right attack on higher education.

Shafik might have given the most shameful performance of all the university administrators who have faced this congressional kangaroo court, but she was not the first, and none of them have distinguished themselves. At least so far, Shafik’s self-debasement has allowed her to avoid the fate of two of her colleagues—Claudine Gay of Harvard University and Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania—who were forced to resign after their “gotcha moments” in Congress.

The day after her testimony, Shafik brought the New York Police Department in to destroy the encampment student demonstrators had erected while Shafik was prostrating herself before Congress. The shocking overreaction and attack on her own students’ person as well as their right to free speech and expression was clearly prompted by Shafik’s crucifixion in Congress, and this was equally obviously just what the Congressional Committee headed by white nationalism supporter Elaine Stefanik hoped for.

This is what must be clarified. Stefanik, an adherent of QAnon and the antisemitic “Great Replacement Theory” is certainly no friend of Jews. But she has found common cause in using the cudgel of antisemitism to impose authoritarianism with pseudo-liberal drivers of anti-Palestinian hate from Jonathan Greenblatt to Joe Biden.

This cadre of useful idiots is a virtual who’s who list of right-wing and mainstream figures in the Jewish community. Yet, behind them, are the same forces of white supremacy that are driving the distorted, racist, and propagandistic attacks on strawmen like Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), which have been turned into the latest iteration of white supremacist boogeymen.

Using bogus accusations of antisemitism to defend indefensible Israeli policies is a well-worn tactic. While most people do understand, at least in the abstract, that criticism of Israel, and honest discussion of the right and wrong of an ethno-state that was created by the dispossession of the people already living in that space are not antisemitic, the tactic has still had enough of an effect to keep the key institutional support for Israel rock solid even while public opinion has shifted dramatically.

That same tactic is now being expanded and institutionalized in a way it never had been before. By codifying into law the idea that criticism of Israel is tantamount to antisemitism if it is deemed as “unjust” or “crossing a line”—as the House of Representatives just voted to do on Tuesday—there is now a legal tool for stifling speech critical of not only Israel but of U.S. policy. This is a precedent that can obviously be expanded to other issues.

But it’s not merely a matter of legislation. Joe Biden himself has declared that support for Palestinians on their own terms is antisemitic. The word “intifada,” which literally means “shaking off” but is used for the very concept of resistance to Israel’s dispossession and occupation has been deemed antisemitic by the President. So has the phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

In a perfect example of classic bigotry, everyone EXCEPT for Palestinians has been given license to decide what Palestinians “really” mean when they use those phrases. Unsurprisingly, the tandem of the ignorant and the malicious have won the day in determining what Palestinians “really mean” with those words, and never mind that they are as wrong as they can be about the common uses of the term.

Moreover, Biden, just as he did after October 7 when he whipped up public fury by repeating complete fabrications about what Palestinians who attacked Israel that day had done (something done solely to justify extreme Israeli actions as the reality of those attacks are more than awful enough), Biden is again lying about what’s happening on campuses across the United States.

The President claims that the protests are violent when it is the police and counter-protesters who have almost exclusively employed violence. Biden is declaring war on American citizens, on students, on the young people who, bizarrely, are generally the difference between Democrats winning or losing elections, all to defend a foreign country’s atrocities. And he is doing so using Jews and the real hostility we increasingly face to do it.

Historically, this ends very badly for Jews every single time. Reactionary forces pounce on perceived favoritism from elites shown to Jews—whether that favoritism really exists or not—and, when those elites feel threatened, they remove their defense of Jews and allow populist antisemitic rage, which those elites themselves engendered and nurtured, to swallow us in a river of blood. It’s happened over and over throughout the history of Europe, and it is playing out again in the United States. Look at this video and see how this endgame is already starting to take root on the American far right, the very place that this attack on universities in the name of “protecting Jews” comes from.

When determinations like Biden’s are made by the powerful, are we to be surprised that defenders of Israel turn violent? Whether that is by delegating that violence to the police, or, as we saw so sickeningly at UCLA in a scene all too reminiscent of the behavior of Israeli settlers, by taking direct, violent action with complete impunity, that violence is all supporters of Israel’s actions have. They have no rational argument to defend the slaughter of over 35,000 people including over 14,000 children.

The bogus charge of antisemitism against activists standing for human and civil rights is not going to stop with Palestine. That’s why Jew-haters like Elise Stefanik, Donald Trump, Mike Johnson, John Hagee, and so many others have taken up the mantle of “fighting antisemitism.” Because it is the perfect shield to energize their white or Christian nationalist movements and allow it to assert itself with force. Its perfection lies in the collaboration of people like Greenblatt and Biden, people like Ritchie Torres and Nancy Pelosi. Because those people are perceived as “moderates” or even “liberals,” although they are nothing of the sort.

Doubtless those esteemed Democrats have no idea of what they are doing. Some, like Biden and Pelosi, are blinded by a romantic notion of Israel mixed with a boundless anti-Palestinian bigotry. Others like Torres are simply political shills bought and paid for by AIPAC. Still others, like Greenblatt, are so consumed with a self-serving nationalism that their pursuit of Israel’s supremacist and ethnocentric interests, which must include ethnic cleansing and apartheid lest the entire structure of the state of Israel collapse, that nothing else matters.

But whatever the motives, the result is the same: the advancement of a white supremacist and white/Christian nationalist agenda that brooks no criticism regardless of the magnitude of the crimes that are committed. That doesn’t stop with Palestine and Israel. And it certainly doesn’t spare Jews. On the contrary, as we have seen to our sorrow all too often, when we make alliances like these, we Jews are digging our own graves. It is only solidarity with other marginalized and “otherized” groups that provide hope for security and justice.

And while white nationalist and their faux liberal allied forces help Israel slaughter tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians, they are also working to undermine academic institutions and what little justice we have been able to wring out of an oligarchical American system. That’s what the student protesters are standing against. They deserve all the help, support, and solidarity we can offer them.

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Student Protesters Are Fighting For Gaza and For All Of Us

Supporters of Israel represent reactionary forces that are using spurious accusations of antisemitism to advance a much broader authoritarian agenda

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