Jewish students have been in the lead of the current anti-genocide campus protests. Here a Jewish student at Columbia clearly explains the difference between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, a distinction that our corporate media, as well as Congress, is working hard to erase.
Tag: Student Protests
Israeli Holocaust Scholar Discusses Gaza, Student Protests and Antisemitism
Professor Omer Bartov is a long-time Israeli scholar of genocide and
Holocaust studies. One of his recent books is titled Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis, where he compares the Nazi holocaust with the Palestinian Nakba (the violent Israeli displacement of750,000 Palestinians in 1948).
Today he was interviewed by Amy Goodwin on Democracy Now. They talked about Gaza, student protests and antisemitism:
“Why Young American Jews are Turning on Israel”
One important fact that the mainstream media will not tell you about the current anti-war protests condemning Israel’s assault on Palestinians in Gaza is that many of the leaders and participants are Jewish Americans.
Two important Jewish organizations — If Not Now and Jewish Voice for Peace — are leading the way in these student protests.
Remember this the next time you hear someone accuse these protests of being “antisemitic.”
They are not anti-semitic. That is a standard Zionist lie used to distract from the real issues.
Rather, they are anti-war, anti-genocide, pro-Palestinian, pro-humanity.
Simone Zimmermann is a young Jewish woman, and cofounder of the Jewish organization IfNotNow, who is also one of the creators of the important, recent film Israelism. I encourage everyone to watch this story of how an increasing number of young Jewish Americans are turning away from Zionism and embracing the just cause of Palestinian liberation.
Why Are American Police So Violent Without Provocation?
I have experienced unnecessary, unprovoked police violence myself. I was marching in a perfectly peaceful anti-NATO rally in Chicago.
For no reason other than a chance to flex their muscles, hundreds of Chicago policemen attacked the crowd and arrested dozens of people for nothing more than exercizing their Constitutional rights to freedom of assembly and freedom of speech.
We see this happening now across the country as police violently assault college students gathered together in peaceful demonstrations.
One of the reasons this happens — but only one reason out of many, which I will address in future posts — is because many US law enforcement agencies have outsourced their police training programs to the state of Israel.
But here is the outrageous catch: It you have watched any of the recent anti-Netanyahu marches in Israel’s cities over the past six months, you will notice a sea of Israeli, Jewish humanity protesting the current government without a police officer in sight.
The only time Israeli police really clamp down on protests or demonstrations is when they are carried out by Palestinians. And all Israeli security forces always treat Palestinians as The Enemy.
And the Palestinian Enemy always “deserve” the harshest, most brutal treatment prior to their arrest, no matter how peacefully they behave.
It is these brutal tactics in “crowd control” that American police bring back with them from their Israeli training. (Often Israeli security forces come to the US to train entire departments here.)
The result is that American demonstrators are treated as if they, too, were The Enemy. Thus, protesters are literally attacked for no reason.
Our civil rights are trampled underfoot. Innocent people are beaten, tasered, handcuffed and jailed simply for speaking out and exercizing their civil liberties.
This Israeli-like behavior is a very large part of “the violence” reported now on US campuses. The students are not out of control, folks. It’s the police.
Watch Kim Iversen’s video explaining it all below, titled “Shocking IDF Link Exposed”:
Chris Hedges: “Revolt in the Universities”
The journalist Chris Hedges recently posted the following article at his substack page. It’s titled “Revolt in the Universities.”
I wish he had said “Peaceful Revolt” because the vast majority of anti-war demonstrations now occurring on American campuses are peaceful.
Sure, there are always a few exceptions. But the vast majority of the “violence” you see on the reports carried by mainstream media are due to:
- rare exceptions to the rule, often by non-students
- violent attacks instigated by the police
- outside instigators, often connected to pro-Israel, Zionist agitators
I ‘ve searched for but cannot find any student protests of this sort happening in my part of the country, unfortunately. If I could find one, I would be chanting and carrying signs to stop the slaughter in Gaza right beside them.
These young people and their moral sentiments are the future hope of American civil society.
The fact that many Christian evangelical leaders are standing with Israel in vilifying these young men and women is a spiritual disaster of epic proportions.
Below is an excerpt of Chris’s article:
PRINCETON, N.J. — Achinthya Sivalingam, a graduate student in Public Affairs at Princeton University did not know when she woke up this morning that shortly after 7 a.m. she would join hundreds of students across the country who have been arrested, evicted and banned from campus for protesting the genocide in Gaza.
She wears a blue sweatshirt, sometimes fighting back tears, when I speak to her. We are seated at a small table in the Small World Coffee shop on Witherspoon Street, half a block away from the university she can no longer enter, from the apartment she can no longer live in and from the campus where in a few weeks she was scheduled to graduate.
She wonders where she will spend the night.
The police gave her five minutes to collect items from her apartment.
“I grabbed really random things,” she says. “I grabbed oatmeal for whatever reason. I was really confused.”
Student protesters across the country exhibit a moral and physical courage — many are facing suspension and expulsion — that shames every major institution in the country. They are dangerous not because they disrupt campus life or engage in attacks on Jewish students — many of those protesting are Jewish — but because they expose the abject failure by the ruling elites and their institutions to halt genocide, the crime of crimes. These students watch, like most of us, Israel’s live-streamed slaughter of the Palestinian people. But unlike most of us, they act. Their voices and protests are a potent counterpoint to the moral bankruptcy that surrounds them.
Not one university president has denounced Israel’s destruction of every university in Gaza. Not one university president has called for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire. Not one university president has used the words “apartheid” or “genocide.” Not one university president has called for sanctions and divestment from Israel.
Instead, heads of these academic institutions grovel supinely before wealthy donors, corporations — including weapons manufacturers — and rabid right-wing politicians. They reframe the debate around harm to Jews rather than the daily slaughter of Palestinians, including thousands of children. They have allowed the abusers — the Zionist state and its supporters — to paint themselves as victims. This false narrative, which focuses on anti-Semitism, allows the centers of power, including the media, to block out the real issue — genocide. It contaminates the debate. It is a classic case of “reactive abuse.” Raise your voice to decry injustice, react to prolonged abuse, attempt to resist, and the abuser suddenly transforms themself into the aggrieved.
Princeton University, like other universities across the country, is determined to halt encampments calling for an end to the genocide. This, it appears, is a coordinated effort by universities across the country.
The university knew about the proposed encampment in advance. When the students reached the five staging sites this morning, they were met by large numbers from the university’s Department of Public Safety and the Princeton Police Department. The site of the proposed encampment in front of Firestone Library was filled with police. This is despite the fact that students kept their plans off of university emails and confined to what they thought were secure apps. Standing among the police this morning was Rabbi Eitan Webb, who founded and heads Princeton’s Chabad House. He has attended university events to vocally attack those who call for an end to the genocide as anti-semites, according to student activists.
As the some 100 protesters listened to speakers, a helicopter circled noisily overhead. A banner, hanging from a tree, read: “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free.”
The students said they would continue their protest until Princeton divests from firms that “profit from or engage in the State of Israel’s ongoing military campaign” in Gaza, ends university research “on weapons of war” funded by the Department of Defense, enacts an academic and cultural boycott of Israeli institutions, supports Palestinian academic and cultural institutions and advocates for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire.
But if the students again attempt to erect tents – they took down 14 tents once the two arrests were made this morning – it seems certain they will all be arrested.
“It is far beyond what I expected to happen,” says Aditi Rao, a doctoral student in classics. “They started arresting people seven minutes into the encampment.”
Princeton Vice President of Campus Life Rochelle Calhoun sent out a mass email on Wednesday warning students they could be arrested and thrown off campus if they erected an encampment.
“Any individual involved in an encampment, occupation, or other unlawful disruptive conduct who refuses to stop after a warning will be arrested and immediately barred from campus,” she wrote. “For students, such exclusion from campus would jeopardize their ability to complete the semester.”
These students, she added, could be suspended or expelled.
Sivalingam ran into one of her professors and pleaded with him for faculty support for the protest. He informed her he was coming up for tenure and could not participate. The course he teaches is called “Ecological Marxism.”
“It was a bizarre moment,” she says. “I spent last semester thinking about ideas and evolution and civil change, like social change. It was a crazy moment.”
She starts to cry.
. . . There are many shameful periods in American history. The genocide we carried out against indigenous peoples. Slavery. The violent suppression of the labor movement that saw hundreds of workers killed. Lynching. Jim and Jane Crow. Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. Libya.
The genocide in Gaza, which we fund and support, is of such monstrous proportions that it will achieve a prominent place in this pantheon of crimes.
History will not be kind to most of us. But it will bless and revere these students.
You can read the entire post here, though it may be behind a paywall.