Pro-Palestine demonstrations have spread across US college campuses in recent days as students denounce Israel’s ongoing military operation in the Gaza Strip. Often led by people of Palestinian descent, the protests have attracted demonstrators of diverse backgrounds including Jewish students, who conducted a Passover Seder ceremony at Columbia University’s encampment Tuesday evening.
Students throughout the country have taken up the cause this week, with some reports suggesting at least 33 campuses now host pro-Palestine demonstrations. Protest tactics have included sit-ins, hunger strikes, class walkouts, and interfaith prayer as demonstrators call on universities to divest from financial interests connected to weapons manufacturers and the Israeli occupation.
Protestors have faced police repression in some instances, with encampments in Texas and at Columbia being targeted with mass arrests. Tennessee’s Vanderbilt University reportedly became the first school to expel students last week for participation in the acts of civil disobedience.
The crackdown has brought light to the work of late Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said, who once warned that repression of the pro-Palestine cause was giving rise to a new form of McCarthyism on college campuses. Independent journalist Jim Kavanagh joined Sputnik’s The Critical Hour program Thursday to discuss Said’s work and the implications of the spreading student protest movement.
“I knew Edward Said, I met him and socialized with him,” said Kavanagh. “A very great man and his work has been formative. He was a professor at Columbia and he was under attack from the Zionists and Columbia University supported him, when they still had integrity. This is a situation – I'm just amazed by how quickly it spread.”
“[Said] saw how difficult it was to get any kind of message across that the Palestinian narrative was impossible to articulate, that liberals and radicals are unable to overcome their Zionist beliefs, their commitment to Zionism,” he added. “It's an almost total absence of historical knowledge from non-Zionist sources, and that has been overcome very quickly because of the availability of knowledge. That's why they want to ban TikTok and control the internet.”
The protests have drawn frequent comparisons to the social movements of the 1960s, when college students engaged in mass protest against the Vietnam War. Famously, four students were killed at Ohio’s Kent State University in 1970 after National Guard troops were sent to quell protests there. Ten days later, two students were killed under similar circumstances at Jackson State University, an historically Black school in Mississippi.
The threat of deadly police violence against demonstrators looms over the current protests, but such history has not prevented House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) from calling for a National Guard presence at Columbia’s Upper Manhattan campus. Student leaders of the protest there have claimed the school’s administration has threatened to call in the National Guard during talks with demonstrators.
“I was actually on the Columbia campus in 1968 and knew people who were part of the Students for a Democratic Society… and gave hell to the Democrats at the Chicago convention,” said Kavanagh. “It's wonderful to see this, and it's really kind of terrifying at the same time. These students are taking real chances. I mean, they're bringing in the cops right away. They're not even making any pretense anymore of waiting for some kind of disruptive protest.”
“They're bringing in the cops just to prevent any kind of gathering of students on campus. It's really quite amazing. It's the worst thing I've seen since the '60s,” the journalist said.
Fear has grown that Israel will conduct a military operation in the Gazan city of Rafah, where some 1.5 million Palestinians are sheltering. Observers have warned an invasion of the city could result in mass civilian casualties and the forcing of thousands of Palestinians into neighboring Egypt.
The Israeli military has stepped up airstrikes in Rafah in recent days as a spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insists the country will “move ahead” with a ground operation.
“The kids have seen what's going on,” said Kavanagh. “This is a slaughter. This is genocide. Israel killed 22 people a couple of nights ago in one raid. There are mass graves with 700-800 people in them, hands tied behind their back, children being sniped, children dying of starvation while the food sits in a truck spitting distance away.”
“The students here are the pride of the world right now. They're standing up for intellectual and ethical integrity and the universities that are supposed to represent them are crushing them on behalf of Israel, on behalf of Zionism,” Kavanagh highlighted.