( Tomdispatch.com ) – Helicopters have been throbbing overhead for days now. Nights, too. Police are swarming the streets of Broadway, many in riot gear. Police vans, some as big as a city bus, are lined up along side streets and Broadway. 

Outside the gates of the Columbia University campus, a penned-in group of pro-Israel demonstrators has faced off against a penned-in group of anti-genocide and pro-Palestinian protesters. These groups are usually small, often vastly outnumbered by the police around them, but they are loud and they are not Columbia students. They’ve been coming every day this April to shout, chant, and hold up signs, some of which are filled with hateful speech directed at the other side, equating protests against the slaughter in Gaza with being pro-Hamas, and calls to bring home the hostages with being pro-genocide.

Inside the locked gates of the campus, the atmosphere is entirely different. Even as the now-notorious student tent encampment there stretches through its second week, all is calm. Inside the camp, students sleep, eat, and sit on bedspreads studying together and making signs saying, “Nerds for Palestine,” “Passover is for Liberation,” and “Stop the Genocide.” The Jewish students there held a seder on Passover. The protesters even asked faculty to come into the encampment and teach because they miss their classes. Indeed, it’s so quiet on campus that you can hear birds singing in the background. The camp, if anything, is hushed.

The Real Story on Campus

Those protesters who have been so demonized, for whom the riot police are waiting outside — the same kinds of students Columbia University’s president, Minouche Shafik, invited the police to arrest, zip-tie, and cart away on April 18th — are mostly undergraduate women, along with a smaller number of undergraduate men, 18 to 20 years old, standing up for what they have a right to stand up for: their beliefs. Furthermore, for those who don’t know the Columbia campus, the encampment is blocking nobody’s way and presents a danger to no one. It is on a patch of lawn inside a little fence buffered by hedges. As I write, those students are not preventing anyone from walking anywhere, nor occupying any buildings, perpetrating any violence, or even making much noise. (In the early hours of April 30th, however, student protesters did occupy Hamilton Hall in reaction to a sweep of suspensions the day before.)

As a tenured professor at Columbia’s Journalism School, I’ve been watching the student protests ever since the brutal Hamas attack of October 7th, and I’ve been struck by the decorum of the protesting students, as angry and upset as they are on both sides. This has particularly impressed me knowing that several students are directly affected by the ongoing war. I have a Jewish student who has lost family and friends to the attack by Hamas, and a Palestinian student who learned of the deaths of her family and friends in Gaza while she was sitting in my class.

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Given how horrific this war is, it’s not surprising that there have been a few protesters who lose control and shout hideous things, but for the most part, such people have been quietly walked away by other students or campus security guards. All along, the main messages from the students have been “Bring back our hostages” on the Israeli side and “Stop slaughtering Gazan civilians” on the antiwar and pro-Palestinian-rights side. Curiously enough, those messages are not so far apart, for almost everyone wants the hostages safe and almost everyone is calling for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to take a different direction and protect the innocent.

Unfortunately, instead of allowing students to have their say and disciplining those who overstep boundaries, Columbia President Shafik and her administration suspended two of the most vocal groups protesting Israel’s war on Gaza: the student chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine. This only enraged and galvanized students and some faculty more.

The Right Seizes and Distorts the Narrative

Then the right got involved, using accusations of widespread antisemitism to take eyes off the astronomical death toll in Gaza — more than 34,000 reportedly dead as I write this, more than 14,500 of them children — while fretting about the safety of Jewish students instead.

The faculty of Columbia takes antisemitism seriously and we have methods in place to deal with it. We also recognize that some of the chants of the protesters do make certain Jewish students and faculty uncomfortable. But as a group of Jewish faculty pointed out in an op-ed for the student newspaper, the Columbia Daily Spectator, it’s absurd to claim that antisemitism, which is defined by the Jerusalem Declaration as “discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews,” is rampant on our campus. “To argue that taking a stand against Israel’s war on Gaza is antisemitic is to pervert the meaning of the term,” we wrote. “Labeling pro-Palestinian expression as anti-Jewish hate speech requires a dangerous and false conflation of Zionism with Jewishness.”

Sadly, that’s exactly what the right has succeeded in doing. Not only is the slaughter in Gaza getting lost in the growing fog of hysterical speech about antisemitism on American college campuses, but so is the fact that Arab and Muslim students are being targeted, too. Some students even reported they were sprayed with a mace-like material, possibly manufactured by the Israeli military, and that, as a result, several protesters had to go to the hospital. My own students told me they have been targeted with hate mail and threats over social media. I even saw a doxxing truck sponsored by the far-right group Accuracy in Media driving around the Columbia neighborhood bearing photographs of Muslim students, naming them and calling them terrorists. Again, it’s important to note that most of the harassers have been outsiders, not students.

No, the real threat to American Jews comes not from students but from the very white nationalist MAGA Republicans who are shouting about antisemitism the loudest.

Then came the Republican hearings.

The Congressional Hearings

Having watched the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania stumble and fall in the face of MAGA Representative Elise Stefanik’s bullying accusations of antisemitism in December, Columbia President Shafik did all she could to avoid a similar fate when it was her turn. But when she submitted to four hours of McCarthyite-style questioning in Congress on April 17th — one Republican even asked if there were Republicans among the faculty — Shafik cringed, evaded, and caved.

“I agree with you” was her most frequent phrase. She never pushed back against the characterization of the Columbia campus by Republican Representatives Virginia Foxx and Stefanik as riddled with antisemitism. She never stood up for the integrity of our faculty and students or for the fact that we’re a campus full of remarkable scholars and artists perfectly capable of governing ourselves. She never even pointed out that who we suspend, fire, or hire is none of Congress’s business. Instead, she broke all our university rules by agreeing to investigate and fire members of our own faculty and to call in the police when she deemed it necessary.

The very day after the hearings, that’s exactly what she did.

Meanwhile, the death toll in Gaza was never even mentioned.

A Pandora’s Box

Shafik’s craven performance in front of Republican lawmakers opened a Pandora’s box of troubles. The student protesters swelled in numbers and erected their encampment. Faculty members wrote outraged opinion pieces condemning Shafik’s behavior. And when she called in the police to arrest students, more students than ever joined the protests all over the country.

Then, on April 24th, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson visited Columbia with Republicans Mike Lawler, Nicole Malliotakis, and Anthony D’Esposito (and even Foxx from North Carolina), acting as if some kind of terrible riot had gone on here. Standing at the top of the steps in front of the grand facade of Low Library, a century-old building meant to symbolize learning and reason, and surrounded by heckling students, Johnson declared that some Jewish students had told him of “heinous acts of bigotry,” characterized the protesters as “endorsed by Hamas,” and called for Shafik to resign “if she cannot immediately bring order to the chaos.”

“What chaos?” said an undergraduate standing next to me on the steps as we listened.

“He’s saying a bunch of 20-year-old American college students are in cahoots with Hamas?” another asked incredulously.

Johnson then escalated the threats, claiming the National Guard might be called in and that Congress might even revoke federal funding if universities couldn’t keep such protests under control.

I looked behind me at the encampment on the other side of campus. In front of the tents on the grass, the students had erected a sign listing what they called “Gaza Encampment Community Guidelines.” These included: “No desecration of the land. No drug/alcohol consumption. Respect personal boundaries.” And most significantly, “We commit to assuming the best intentions, granting ourselves and others grace when mistakes are made, and approaching conflict with the goal of addressing and repairing.” Designated faculty and students stood at the entrance to make sure no outsiders got in, and that nobody entered the encampment unless they had read and agreed to that list of commitments. The noisiest people on campus were the thronging media. But nobody and nothing was out of control.

The Weaponization of Antisemitism

Sadly, despite the reality on the ground at Columbia, the right’s wild narrative of virulent antisemitism here has been swallowed whole, not just by Republicans but by a long list of Democrats, too, including President Biden and Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer, not to speak of New York Representatives Hakeem Jeffries, Jerry Nadler, Dan Goldman, and Adriano Espaillat. They have all publicly condemned the supposedly rampant antisemitism on campus without, it seems, bothering to check their facts.

Meanwhile, MAGA Christian Nationalist Sean Feucht posted on X that “Columbia has been taken over by radical Pro-Hamas protesters.”

Back in the real world, the right’s hysteria over such supposed antisemitism hasn’t really been about protecting Jews at all, as many faculty members (including us Jewish ones) have written and spoken about. Rather, the right is weaponizing antisemitism as a way of furthering its campaign to suppress the kind of freedom of thought and speech on campus that threatens its authoritarian goals of turning this country Christian, conservative, straight, and white — not to mention their urge to suppress support of Palestinian autonomy.

When Students Don’t Feel Safe

My students tell me they feel perfectly safe on campus. They may not like some of the chants they sometimes hear. I myself have caught a few that chilled me as a Jew. I’ve also heard chants that sicken me on behalf of my Muslim friends. But those have been rare. And campus is a place where everyone should be free to debate, disagree, express their opinions, listen, and learn. We have to remember that free speech does not mean speech we agree with.

No, where my students do not feel safe is out on Broadway, where extremists on both sides gather. They don’t feel safe when the false narratives of Republican politicians draw far-right angry mobs to the campus gates, something that is happening just as I’m writing this piece. Most of all, they don’t feel safe when police arrive on campus with guns in their holsters and zip-ties hanging from their belts.

I stood and watched that day the police came. Four huge drones hovered overhead, along with those eternally buzzing helicopters. Dozens of police buses were lined up on West 114th Street on the south side of campus as if prepared to deal with some massive, violent riot. Then, in came the police, some in riot gear, to tie the hands of more than 100 students behind their backs and march them onto police buses.

Not a single student resisted. Even the police were quoted as saying they presented no danger to anyone. As NYPD Chief of Patrol John Chell said, “To put this in perspective, the students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner.”

Not long later, those arrested students were suspended and the ones who attend Barnard were locked out of their dorms. Faculty and friends had to offer their couches and spare beds to save those young women from being homeless on the streets of New York. One of them is in my building staying with a colleague downstairs. “Nobody told our parents that we were being evicted,” she told me in my lobby.

Faculty Response

Many faculty were so shocked by these events that on Monday, April 22nd, some 300 of us gathered on the steps of Low Library, holding up signs that said, “Hands Off Our Students” and “End Student Suspensions Now.” Several professors gave impassioned speeches praising those students for their courage, demanding that academic freedom be protected, and castigating Shafik for throwing us all under the bus.

Still, Gaza was not mentioned. It seemed as if the genocide occurring there was disappearing in the fog.

“I’m worried that the message of our protest is getting lost,” that suspended student told me as we spoke in the lobby. “Everyone’s talking about academic freedom and police repression instead.”

Indeed, not only is the protest against Israel’s pathological spree of murder in Palestine and on the West Bank being drowned out in this debate, so are the student protesters’ demands, so let me reiterate them here:

That Columbia divest of all investments that profit from Israel’s occupation and bombing of Palestine.

That Columbia sever academic ties with its programs at Tel Aviv and other Israeli Universities.

That the policing of the campus be stopped immediately.

That the university release a statement calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.

The other day, on New York’s National Public Radio station, WNYC, I heard a caller who had been a campus protester in 1968 say something like, “It’s funny how the protesters of 50 years ago are always right, but the protesters of today are always wrong.” The people who demonstrated for civil rights then were demonized, beaten, even murdered, but they were right, he pointed out, as were the people who demonstrated against the Vietnam War. (I would say the same for those who protested against the Iraq War and for the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements.)

One day, the students who are protesting the genocide in Gaza and the persecution of Palestinians today will be seen as on the right side, too. History will prove it. Until then, let’s turn the discussion back to where it belongs: an end to the war on Gaza.

Final Note: This piece was written before the president and trustees of Columbia called in the riot police on the night of April 30th, against the advice of many faculty, to arrest the students in the encampment, as well as those who had occupied Hamilton Hall. Videos show considerable police violence against the students. What happens next remains to be seen.

Copyright 2024 Helen Benedict

Helen Benedict, who is a professor of journalism at Columbia University and the author most recently of the novel The Good Deed, has been writing about war and refugees for more than a decade. A recipient of the 2021 PEN Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History and the Ida B. Wells Award for Bravery in Journalism, she has also written 13 other books of fiction and nonfiction.

Via Tomdispatch.com

This week, the police moved in again, arresting the student protesters. (They were all students, with no outsiders.)

I was one of the people arrested in the Math Building in 1968. I am cheering on the students who are calling Columbia to account for it’s support of the US/Israeli war machine. Sadly, I’ve heard a lot of people distance themselves from today’s actions by focusing on differences between then and now.

Duh . . . the world is vastly changed. . . and many books and PhD theses will be written to explore and understand those differences . . . but for me, there is something fundamental which connects our actions in 1968 and those of the students today — Taking a Stand Against Injustice, in solidarity with oppressed people on the other side of the world and in our own backyard.

MSNBC Video: “‘Students were crying in despair’: Columbia professor slams school calling NYPD”

The important dividing line isn’t between 1968 and 2024. Rather it’s between those who refuse to “take sides” and those who understand that in times of war, there is no defensible “middle ground.” At the end of the day, the “liberal” position which finds fault with both the Zionist and Palestinian positions is a function of privilege and fundamentally ends up supporting the status quo.

To the students who had been Hamilton Hall at Columbia and to the young people all over the world who are taking action . . . THANK YOU. I promise to do everything I can to marshall support for your courageous efforts on behalf of the Palestinian people

Bob Stein was at Columbia University in 1967 and came down from Harvard in 1968 to be with protesting friends at the Math Building. He was arrested when the police barged in soon thereafter.

Arabic words have a proud and positive history in the English language. Consider a few:

Magazine is one of my favorites. It comes from the Arabic word for storehouse, makhzan. In French, it was borrowed as magasin, which just means “store.” From the mid-1600s, books in English that listed things of interest to particular groups of people started using it in their titles, so it gradually took on the meaning of a special interest periodical.

Or how about sequin, a small disk used as an ornament on clothing. It came through the French and Italian from the Arabic sikkah, a die for coining.

Then there is mattress, from matrah a cushion or rug that you lie on. In modern Arabic taraha can mean to broach (a subject) or to posit, since the root has to do with laying things out.

Or what would a nice room be without an alcove, a recessed or arched section or opening? It is from the Arabic al-qubbah, meaning a dome or vault.

And of course we could go into chemistry, algebra, alcohol and a host of other scientific terms, since medieval Muslim science was way more advanced than the European and so was borrowed with alacrity.

But then there are the recent borrowings that have been endowed with negative connotations. Our English word “agony” comes from the Greek for struggling or striving, agonizomai. The Olympic games in modern Greek are called Olympiakoí agónes, So our idea of being in excruciating pain comes originally from the idea of striving hard in a contest. Striving hard in Arabic is jihad. It can be an internal struggle to do the right thing or discipline oneself, or a public struggle to give charity to the deserving. In some contexts it can mean to struggle violently, but that is only one of its meanings. A famous soccer club is called “Nadi al-Jihad,” the “struggle club” or “competitive club.” But in the US the FBI has begun putting the word jihad in indictments for terrorist activity, which is not the connotation of the original. In fact, people give their sons the name “Jihad,” not because they are glorifying violence but because they are naming them for “virtuous struggle.” It is similar to the German girl’s name, Wylda, which means “strive.”

The most recent Arabic word to be demonized is “intifada.” The horrid Elise Stefanik (R-NY) lambasted university administrations for allowing the word to be said on campuses. Since Congress is forbidden to police our language by the First Amendment, they put pressure on private universities and corporations to do it for them.

Congresswoman Lisa McCain in Michigan’s 9th District knew she disliked the word, but didn’t seem to actually know what it was, and kept demanding that Columbia University President Minouche Shafik “denounce the infantada.”

Since it sounded like the Spanish food empanada, her malapropism provoked a good deal of mirth on the internets. I think it would be great if the infantada ended up on the menu in Michigan restaurants.

Since McCain lives in Michigan, which has one of the largest Arab and Muslim populations of any state in the country, I suggest she come to Dearborn for the truly magnificent Lebanese, Yemeni and other food, and talk to some locals about what intifada actually means to them. Alas, she won’t find infantada on the menu, though.

Then on Tuesday a spokesman for President Biden’s White House actually denounced the term “intifada” as “hate speech” and hinted that using it was a form of antisemitism. But Arabic is a Semitic language, so how can a Semitic word be “antisemitic”? I’m confused.

Al Jazeera English Video: “Arrests at Columbia University: Police enter hall where students barricaded”

Intifadah derives from the three-letter root n-f-D. The verb nafada means to remove or to clean. Thus you use it for getting dirt off clothing. “His two hands nafada from something” means he gave up on it.

Arabic verbs are based on three-letter roots, as in Hebrew, and are then put into “molds” to create further meanings and connotations. In Form 7 you slip the equivalent of an “i” before the root and insert a “t” after the first letter.

That gives you intafada, a verb which has many meanings but can denote to “rise,” or “rise up,” or “revolt.”

Intafada al-shay’ means “the thing moved or was disturbed.”

Intafada al-karm means the vineyard became succulent.

Intafada al-sha`b means “the people rose up or revolted.”

It is this last sense that seems to have infuriated the members of Congress. But uprisings aren’t all bad.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has an Arabic website. On one of its pages it explains the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The word for “uprising” in the title of the article is — you guessed it — “intifada.”

The Nazis forced Polish Jews into one section of Warsaw in 1940, isolating them from the outside world. Some 400,000 were crowded into small apartments in squalor. Then in September of 1942 the Nazis began deporting them to death camps like Treblinka. Some organized to make a stand and there was a skirmish in January of 1943. In April a full-scale rebellion of the remaining Jews broke out, the Jewish Ghetto Uprising. They engaged in an intifada against the Nazis. Doomed though the effort was, I think we’d all agree that it was a noble intifada.

Al-Ittihad [Unity] newspaper in Arabic did a retrospective on the youth demonstrations in France and elsewhere in Europe in May, 1968. You guessed it. They called it an intifada. So does the Arabic service of France 24.

The Arab Spring youth revolt against dictator Hosni Mubarak in Egypt? An intifada.

Jordan’s al-Ra’i [Opinion] newspaper, ironically enough, refers to the U.S. campus demonstrations against Israel’s Gaza campaign as, yes, an intifada, as do many other periodicals.

Of course, the object of the ire of the US Establishment is two particular moments of popular push back against oppression, the first and second Palestinian intifadas in the Palestinian West Bank against Israeli colonization, in the late 1980s and again at the turn of the century.

This PBS site explains of the first that “The First Intifada was a largely spontaneous series of Palestinian demonstrations, nonviolent actions like mass boycotts, civil disobedience, Palestinians refusing to work jobs in Israel, and attacks (using rocks, Molotov cocktails, and occasionally firearms) on Israelis.” It was largely nonviolent, though, so people denouncing it aren’t denouncing violence but the failure of the Palestinians to acquiesce in their own oppression and slow-motion ethnic cleansing.

In short, the paroxysm of anti-Palestinian bigotry that has swept the United States, no doubt deriving in some large part from a bad conscience over our complicity in their genocide, has now advanced to the point where an attempt is being made to outlaw perfectly ordinary words such as “uprising.”

I predict that it will fail, and that what the Arab world is applauding as the “intifada” of the American universities will only derive further energy from the attempt to suppress them.

On April 24, a diverse coalition of students assembled at Alumni Park to protest several things. Chief among them were:

1. The administration’s unprecedented decision to deny the valedictorian of the graduating class, this year a Muslim woman of South Asian heritage, the opportunity to make an address at commencement and

2. The ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza by Israel. Students protesting accordingly made several demands of the USC administration, which included calls for divestment and steps to improve campus climate. Students’ plans for the day included yoga sessions, a series of teach-ins about Palestine, and inter-faith activities, all leading to a vigil for the dead at sunset. Protesting students were joined by faculty and other members of the university community. This included several people from our own department, including numerous undergraduate and graduate students. At least four faculty members also joined those gathered at Alumni Park both to protest USC’s complicity in genocide and to ensure the safety of our students. Students were in fact peaceful; they posed no plausible threat to any other member of the university community; their actions were confined to a small part of campus; and they were in no way, shape, or form disruptive to the university’s mission or its day-to-day activities.

Despite these facts, the university administration decided to invite the LAPD onto campus, armed with batons, shields, armor, rubber bullets, and tear gas. In so doing, the administration escalated unnecessarily and introduced violence and weapons into a situation where there had been none.

The actions of USC administration:

· Needlessly and irresponsibly subjected students, faculty, and the wider university community to violence

· Led to the unjust arrest of 93 individuals for trespassing in the place where they work and study; among those arrested were two members of the History Department faculty

· Activated tools of state coercion to suppress free speech and free assembly on campus Like any institution of higher learning, USC’s mission commits the university to developing, cultivating, and applying new knowledge through teaching and research. It is our job as faculty to produce new knowledge, transmit that knowledge to our students, and then help them apply it ethically and morally for the betterment of our communities. We have a duty of care to our students and an ethical commitment to the pursuit of free inquiry. The university administration is therefore obligated to create and maintain a safe space where students and faculty may enjoy the intellectual, social, and material conditions under which teaching and research can flourish. On April 24, learning and exchange did continue. Due to the administration, this was sadly moved from the safety of the classroom and the university commons to police wagons and jail cells. Under no circumstances is any of this acceptable.

On these points, the university administration’s failure is total. By resorting to authoritarian methods, the university has created an environment where inquiry cannot be pursued and ideas may not be freely exchanged. In subjecting our students and colleagues to arbitrary violence, the administration has forfeited its right to lead. We accordingly demand:

· The immediate resignation of President Carol Folt, Provost Andrew Guzman, Senior Vice President Errol Southers, and Chief Lauretta Hill

· That the university drop all charges against the 93 individuals it had LAPD unjustly arrest and reimburse them any and all expenses incurred due to needless detention

· That the university refrain from further intimidation of students involved in peaceful protest or other forms of campus activism, whether it be threatening expulsion, suspension, the loss of scholarships, fellowships, and employment, or other punitive actions

Signed:
*Richard Antaramian, Associate Professor of History
Alice Baumgartner, Associate Professor of History
Marjorie Becker, Professor of History and English
Philip Ethington, Professor of History, Political Science, and Spatial Sciences
*Joan Flores-Villalobos, Assistant Professor of History
Jason Glenn, Associate Professor of History
*Josh Goldstein, Professor of History and East Asian Languages & Culture
Wolf Gruner, Professor of History, Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies, and Founding
Director of the Center for Advanced Genocide Research
Sarah Gualtieri, Professor of American Studies & Ethnicity and History and Middle East Studies
Alaina Morgan, Assistant Professor of History
Jay Rubenstein, Professor of History and Religion and Director of the Center for Premodern
World
George Sanchez, Professor of American Studies & Ethnicity and History
Laura Isabel Serna, Associate Professor of History and Cinema & Media Studies
Nayan Shah, Professor of History and American Studies & Ethnicity
Francille Rusan Wilson, Associate Professor of American Studies & Ethnicity, History, Gender &
Sexuality, and Director USC Black Studies Initiative/Emerging Center
Benjamin Uchiyama, Associate Professor of History
*Aro Velmet, Associate Professor of History
*statement co-author

Relevant video added by Informed Comment:

ABC 7: “LAPD arrests more than 90 people after pro-Palestinian protest at USC”

‘We’re making more money off the blood of people overseas’

By: Jon King and Susan J. Demas –

( Michigan Advance ) – While student encampments at New York and Texas colleges protesting Israeli military action in Gaza have generated confrontations with police, similar protests at Michigan universities have so far remained peaceful.

At the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, more than 120 students are camped out on the Diag, the open space at the heart of the main campus. That has grown from about 50 students who turned out on early Monday morning to set up the encampment directly in front of the Hatcher Graduate Library.

Amid Palestinian flags and banners that call on the university to “Divest Now!,” sit more than 40 tents, most facing toward the center of the encampment where food tables and information boards sit, as well as a small staging area for organizers to address fellow students.

The Friday morning announcements began with an update on similar protest encampments across the country, reminders to not engage with any counter-protestors and Shabbat services and dinner planned for the encampment later Friday night.

Alifa Chowdhury, a junior studying political science and one of the student organizers, told the Michigan Advance that they have one demand for the university’s board of regents. 

“Our only demand is divestment, and we’re here to stay until divestment demands are met,” said Chowdhury, who is also a member of the TAHRIR Coalition, a student-led alliance of more than 80 organizations “fighting for divestment from Israel and the military-industrial complex and reinvestment in our education and our community.”

Specifically, Chowdhury said “weapons manufacturing and war profiteering companies” are connected to about a third of the University of Michigan’s $18 billion endowment.

The student encampment on the University of Michigan campus. April 26, 2024. Photo by Jon King.

“During times of war, like right now, they make more money because obviously people are buying more weapons,” she said. “And that just doesn’t make sense to us as students because that’s just not ethical because we’re making more money off the blood of people overseas. So the ask really is to take that $6 billion out and reinvest it into communities and really ethical things.”

The conflict between Israel and Hamas broke out on Oct. 7, after a surprise Hamas terrorist attack on southern Israel killed about 1,200 people and resulted in the taking of more than 250 hostages. The resulting Israeli retaliation has killed more than than 34,000 Palestinians, according to the Hamas-controlled Gaza health ministry.

In a news release issued Monday by the TAHRIR Coalition announcing the encampment, the group said, “We are not leaving the Diag until we achieve full divestment. Power to our freedom fighters, glory to our martyrs. All eyes on Gaza, the Thawabit is our compass.”

Colleen Mastony, the university’s assistant vice president for public affairs, told the Advance that their investment policy has been in place for nearly 20 years and shields the university’s investments from political pressures. 

“Much of the money invested through the university’s endowment, for example, is donor funding given to provide long-term financial support for designated purposes,” she said. “The Board of Regents reaffirmed its position on this issue earlier this year.”

A March 28 statement by Regent Michael Behm said the university’s endowment had no direct investment in any Israeli company. 

“What we do have are funds that one of those companies may be part of a fund,” Behm said. “Another statement that was made was that $6 billion dollars or roughly one third of our endowment is invested in these Israeli companies. I asked the endowment team about that and, in actuality, less than one-tenth of 1% of the endowment is invested indirectly in such companies.”

Chowdhury, however, says the regents and university are hiding behind a policy that has been flexible in the past.

“The university has made it known that they will not divest because they don’t make investment decisions and financial decisions based on political pressure, but we know that’s not true,” she said. “They divested from Russia in a week, they divested from South African apartheid, they divested from fossil fuels, and those are inherently political decisions they had to make. So we’re here when we’re going to push for it and we know it’s going to happen.”

The protestors have also demanded that University President Santa Ono meet with them by at 8 p.m. Sunday. 

“Many of you have expressed interest in meeting with the TAHRIR coalition; here is your opportunity to do so,” stated an email sent by the group to the university and its board of regents.

“We stand in solidarity with our brave students occupying campus until our demand for divestment is met in full,” the email continued. “We reject any attempt to surveil, criminalize, or otherwise punish them for their activism. As members of the University of Michigan community, we firmly and proudly demand divestment now.”

Earlier in the week, the Anti Defamation League (ADL) of Michigan, posted a picture from the encampment of a banner that read “Long Live The Intifada,” a reference to the Arabic word for uprising and a term often used to describe Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation.

“We are dismayed to see anti-Israel protests at colleges and Universities like this one at the University of Michigan, using terms like Intifada, which refers to two periods of indiscriminate violence directed at Jews in Israel, resulting in the loss of thousands of innocent lives – Palestinian & Israeli. Simply put, Intifada is a call for violence that only stokes fear, anger and division,” stated the ADL. “Protests that use these terms don’t alleviate suffering nor bring about lasting peace in a global or local setting.”

The banner was not visible on Friday. As to claims that their protest is antisemitic, Chowdhury insists that is a false accusation that seeks to undermine legitimate criticism of the Israeli government and its policies, and has nothing to do with the Jewish religion.

“I think if people spent more than ten minutes at this encampment, there’s so much community and love and joy, music and art builds and open poetry and open mics,” she said. “This is also co-led by the Jewish Voices for Peace students, and so no, we don’t foster antisemitism here. It really is a place of love. Anti-Zionism and anti-Zionist rhetoric should not be conflated with antisemitism. They’re not the same thing. They’re not interchangeable.”

Meanwhile, Michigan State University students set up their “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” early on Thursday morning in “The People’s Park” — the site of a similar protest against the Vietnam War decades ago.

By 1:30 p.m. Thursday, about 50 students were gathered at the site in back of Wells Hall along the Red Cedar River, where roughly two dozen tents were set up amid Palestinian flags, a “Free Palestine” chalk drawing on the sidewalk and banners that read, “Stop Funding Genocide” and “Trustees: Divest Now.” 

The protest also featured a well-stocked snack table with cookies, fruit snacks, drinks and more, with students periodically trekking in more supplies, like green foam sleeping pads.

The protest was still going strong on Friday after protesters spent their first night camping out. MSU spokesperson Emily Guerrant told the Advance that the protesters applied for a permit Thursday afternoon, requesting to camp/tent on campus through Sunday. The Board of Trustees Office approved the permit around 5 p.m. Thursday.

Fliers posted at the camp for “Encampment Norms/Expectations” included the following:

• Practice kindness and treat others with respect.
• Keep alert for marshalls’ instructions. Marshalls are wearing high-vis orange vests and are here to keep us safe.
• Avoid interacting with police. If you see police, inform a marshall.

There was no sign of a police presence at that time, although students said MSU police had made several stops earlier in the day telling them to disperse. 

Just a couple blocks away, dozens of MSU students donning green caps and gowns were busy taking photos outside Spartan Stadium and the Sparty Statue, the day before the start of spring graduation ceremonies.

Guerrant told the Advance on Friday that “graduation has gone extremely smooth today.”

Most students, many who wore masks, deferred to student leaders to talk to reporters on Thursday.

One of those who did speak was Camille Duvernois, a third-year student in world politics and journalism, who told the Advance the MSU students also seek divestment. The encampment was a joint effort by about 20 campus groups, she said.

“We are here to get the university to divest from weapons manufacturers, to divest from Israeli aid. They have millions of dollars vested in weapons manufacturers,” she said. “Students and community members are uncomfortable with our tuition money going to not only profiting off of genocide, but also funding it. We are paying our tuition and then that tuition money is going back into investments that kill children, that are bombing children senselessly, that are bombing innocent civilians in a land that has been occupied for decades illegally by settler-colonialist forces.”

Duvernois said the protestors would also like to see a ceasefire in Gaza that allows Palestinians “displaced recklessly” by Israel to return to their homes.

“But the attempts for a ceasefire have been continuously rejected by the Israeli Knesset [Parliament]. They’ve been repeatedly rejected by [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu. He has repeatedly refused any sort of peace attempts from Palestinians,” Duvernois said. “Israel has refused for decades to allow Palestinians to exist in peace. And whenever there’s retaliation of any sort, people resisting their occupiers, it turns into genocide and it turns into senseless murder, and we don’t want our tuition money going to that.”

When asked whether the remaining hostages taken by Hamas should be returned as part of a ceasefire, Duvernois said it was absolutely a concern, although she continued to place blame on Israel.

“Of course. We don’t think that there should be any sort of violence or loss of life,” she said “But ultimately this violence is caused by the settler colonial ethnostate that is Israel. I mean, they are the reason that there are hostages. There’s the reason that there is violence.”

Duvernois said their protest would last as long as it took to achieve success.

“We will not end this stuff until the university decides to stop using our money for this sort of violence. They said in their last board trustees meetings that they would not be reconsidering their investments, that they would not be considering divestment. And when [new University President Kevin] Guskiewicz just talked to us, he said they were considering it. So that’s progress in some manner. I mean, they said it would be too chaotic to divest, but this is chaotic.”

However, Guerrant relayed a different version of the meeting with Guskiewicz on Thursday.

“The president did stop by the encampment yesterday around noon, but he did not say the university would divest,” Guerrant said in an email on Friday afternoon. “Rather, he reiterated what was said at the April board meeting — that MSU will not be divesting. The university is committed to safeguarding its investment portfolio from political influence. We currently have no direct or indirect investments in gun manufacturers nor in the three publicly traded civilian firearm manufacturers. MSU does not own an Israeli-issued security bond.” 

Eli Folts, who just finished his junior year at MSU, is a member of the Young Communist League on campus part of the encampment. He said on Thursday that divestment was not an impossible goal.

“We need divestment. We’ve done it in the past and we were a leader then,” he said referencing divestment in the 1980s from the then apartheid-nation of South Africa.

“I mean, if you think about it, look at the timeline,” he said. “It took eight to 10 years. It took a long time, but once it kind of hit that critical mass where we had that cooperation between faculty and students, it was very powerful. And I think that’s far from impossible. We can do it. We have the people; we have faculty support. We just really need to push this and we need to engage community members. We need to engage alum.”

 

 

Jon King

Jon King is the Senior Reporter for the Michigan Advance and has been a journalist for more than 35 years. He is the Past President of the Michigan Associated Press Media Editors Association and has been recognized for excellence numerous times, most recently in 2022 with the Best Investigative Story by the Michigan Association of Broadcasters. He is also an adjunct faculty member at Cleary University. Jon and his family live in Howell.

Susan J. Demas

Susan J. Demas is a 23-year journalism veteran and one of the state’s foremost experts on Michigan politics, appearing on C-SPAN, MSNBC, CNN, NPR and WKAR-TV’s “Off the Record.” In addition to serving as Editor-in-Chief, she is the Advance’s chief columnist, writing on women, LGBTQ people, the state budget, the economy and more. For almost five years, Susan was the Editor and Publisher of Inside Michigan Politics, the most-cited political newsletter in the state. Susan’s award-winning political analysis has run in more than 100 national, international and regional media outlets, including the Guardian U.K., NBC News, the New York Times, the Detroit News and MLive.

Michigan Advance is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.

Via Michigan Advance

Published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

 

Interrogations of university leaders spearheaded by conservative congressional representatives. Calls from right-wing senators for troops to intervene in campus demonstrations. Hundreds of student and faculty arrests, with nonviolent dissenters thrown to the ground, tear-gassed and tased.

We’ve been here before. In my book “Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America,” I detail how, throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, conservative activists led a counterattack against campus antiwar and civil rights demonstrators by demanding action from college presidents and police.

They made a number of familiar claims about student protesters: They were at once coddled elitists, out-of-state agitators and violent communists who sowed discord to destroy America. Conservatives claimed that the protests interfered with the course of university activities and that administrators had a duty to guarantee daily operations paid for by tuition.

Back then, college presidents routinely caved to the demands of conservative legislators, angry taxpayers and other wellsprings of anticommunist outrage against students striking for peace and civil rights.

Today, university leaders are twisting themselves in knots to appease angry donors and legislators. But when Columbia University President Minouche Shafik called in the NYPD to quell protests, she was met with a firm rebuke from the American Association of University Professors.

If the past is any indication, the road ahead won’t be any easier for college presidents like Shafik.

Lawfare from the right

Throughout the 1960s, students organized a host of anti-war and civil rights protests, and many conservatives characterized the demonstrators as communist sympathizers.

Students spoke out against American involvement in the Vietnam War, the draft and compulsory ROTC participation. They demanded civil rights protections and racially representative curricula. The intervention of police and the National Guard often escalated what were peaceful protests into violent riots and total campus shutdowns.

11Alive: “Over 20 taken into custody at Emory University after explosive protests”

From 1968 into the 1970s, conservative lawyers coordinated a national campaign to sue “indecisive and gutless” college presidents and trustees whose approach to campus demonstrations was, in conservatives’ estimation, too lenient.

The right-wing organization Young Americans for Freedom hit 32 colleges with lawsuits, including private Ivy League schools like Columbia, Harvard and Princeton, as well as public land-grant universities like Michigan State and the University of Wisconsin.

The legal claim was for breach of contract: that presidents were failing to follow through on their end of the tuition agreement by not keeping campuses open and breaking up the protests. Young Americans for Freedom sought to set legal precedent for students, parents and broadly defined “taxpayers” to be able to compel private and public institutions to remain open.

Conservative students further demanded that their supposedly communist peers be expelled indefinitely, arrested for trespassing and prosecuted.

Expulsions, of course, carried implications for the draft during these years. A running joke among right-wing activists and politicians was that protesters should be given a “McNamara Scholarship” to Hanoi, referencing Robert McNamara, the U.S. secretary of defense and an architect of the Vietnam War.

Meanwhile, right-wing activists hounded college leaders with public pressure campaigns by collecting signatures from students and alumni that called on them to put an end to campus demonstrations. Conservatives also urged donors to withhold financial support until administrators subdued protesting students.

Cops on campus

Following the massacre at Kent State in 1970, when the National Guard fired at students, killing four and wounding nine, nearly half of all colleges shut down temporarily amid a wave of nationwide youth outrage. With only a week or two left of the semester, many colleges canceled remaining classes and even some commencement ceremonies.

In response, conservatives launched a new wave of post-Kent State injunctions against those universities to force them back open.

With protests ongoing – and continued calls from the right to crack down on them – many university administrators resorted to calling on the police and the National Guard, working with them to remove student protesters from campus.

In fact, this very moment brought about the birth of the modern campus police force.

Administrators and lawmakers, afraid that local police could not handle the sheer number of student demonstrators, arranged to deputize campus police – who had historically been parking guards and residence hall curfew enforcers – with the authority to make arrests and carry firearms.

State and federal lawmakers attempted to further stifle student dissent with reams of legislation. In 1969, legislators in seven states passed laws to punish student activists who had been arrested during protests through the revocation of financial aid, expulsion and jail sentences.

President Richard Nixon, who had excoriated campus disruptions during his successful White House run in 1968, encouraged college presidents to heed the laws and applauded them for following through with expulsions.

Is ‘antisemitism’ the new ‘communism’?

As the U.S. presidential election approaches, I’ll be watching to see how the Trump and Biden campaigns respond to ongoing student protests.

For now, Trump has called the recent protests “antisemitic” and “far worse” than the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville. Biden has similarly condemned “the antisemitic protests” and “those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.”

Both are repeating the false framework laid out by GOP Reps. Elise Stefanik and Virginia Foxx, a trap that university administrators have fallen into during House inquiries since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.

There indeed have been antisemitic incidents associated with pro-Palestinian demonstrations on university campuses.

But in these hearings, Stefanik and Foxx have baited four women presidents into affirming the right’s politicized framing of the protests as rife with antisemitism, leading the public to believe that isolated incidents are instead representative and rampant.

Like their association of civil rights and peace demonstrators with communism throughout the Cold War, politicians on both sides of the aisle are now broadly hurling claims of antisemitism against anyone protesting Israel’s war in Gaza, many of whom are Jewish.

The purpose then, as it is now, is to intimidate administrators into a false political choice: Will they protect students’ right to demonstrate or be seen as acquiescent to antisemitism?

Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, Instructor, School of Education, University of New Orleans

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

MESA Board Joint Statement with CAF concerning escalating repression of protest on campuses

The Board of Directors of the Middle East Studies Association and its Committee on Academic Freedom view with increasing alarm the growing number of attempts to intimidate, repress, and criminalize campus protests against the ongoing Israeli state violence against Palestinians and the US diplomatic, military, and economic support for it. Federal, state and local government officials—from the president, to congressional members, to governors and mayors—have exacerbated the threats on campuses by encouraging university administrators to violate basic commitments to freedom of expression, while casually smearing overwhelmingly peaceful protesters with unsubstantiated claims of violence or discriminatory speech. University leaders should constitute the first line of defense for students and faculty in the face of forces seeking to vilify, harass, and silence them. Instead, we regret that several university boards of trustees, presidents, and their administrations have acquiesced in the ugliest of campaigns targeting their students and faculty for engaging in what have been peaceful protests, joined by a wide cross-section of their campus community.

As Palestine solidarity and anti-war demonstrations have proliferated and intensified, sweeping characterizations of them as violent, dangerous, and antisemitic have been deployed as part of a campaign that has weaponized the language of “safety” to delegitimize, intimidate, and forcibly disperse legal, peaceful dissent. University administrations, most egregiously at Columbia, New York University, and Yale have—in some cases, in violation of their own university policies—called in the police to break up protests and arrest tens of students, some of whom have been summarily suspended and evicted from university housing. At NYU, faculty, too, were arrested. The University of Southern California cancelled the valedictorian’s commencement address after a slanderous hate campaign was launched against her for her pro-Palestinian views; the University of Pennsylvania revoked Penn Against the Occupation’s status as a registered student group; Harvard has now banned that university’s Palestine Solidarity Committee. Given the developments of the past several weeks, we are extremely concerned about what these disturbing events portend as commencement season approaches.

Attempts by universities to limit or suppress Gaza war-related speech and protest have been all too common since shortly after the 7 October attack. But the growing securitization and outright repression on campuses have reached levels not seen since the 1960s. We are witnessing a situation in which, in the name of security, it is university leaders themselves who have become the primary threat to the rights and safety of members of the campus community. The appeasement of malign forces seeking to destroy academic freedom, faculty governance, and curricular diversity, in which Columbia’s president Nemat Shafik so willingly participated during her 17 April congressional hearing, must not be allowed to metastasize. Today the goal is to suppress speech on Palestine, but the battle over free speech and academic freedom on our campuses did not begin, nor does it end, there.

We therefore call upon college and university boards of trustees, presidents, and administrations across the country immediately to clearly and forcefully recommit themselves to the freedom of inquiry, expression, and protest on campus that have been pillars of the US academy for decades. As the massive killing and destruction in Gaza continue, we also demand that you fulfill your responsibility to your profession and your campus community to defend peaceful protesters, uphold academic freedom, and reject all pressures seeking to criminalize peaceful encampments and demonstrations against this horrendous war—and our government’s complicity in it.

Charges that these peaceful on-campus rallies are antisemitic in character are bad faith propaganda by hard line ethno-nationalists who have long striven to equate criticism of Israeli government policy with bigotry toward Jews — a ridiculous proposition. If accepted, this strategy would imply that criticism of the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico is a form of bigotry toward Chicanos. If so, no one has more racialist prejudice toward Chicanos than Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. The only documented antisemitic slurs have been shouted in the street in New York beyond the Columbia University campus, by outsiders rather than students and faculty. Any bigotry toward Jews is completely unacceptable and wholly contemnible.

The campus demonstrations are instead being driven by outrage at six months of war crimes committed by the fascist government now in power in Israel, which includes ministers who are the Israeli equivalent of neo-Nazis.

It is bad enough that presidents of major American universities are having their students and faculty arrested for “trespassing” on their own campus, with many of them suspended and forced out of their dorms (for which they paid and the rental terms of which they had not violated).

Those same presidents of leading institutions of higher education in the U.S. have stood completely silent as the extremist government in Israel has destroyed every last university in Gaza, leaving 88,000 students stranded and their education interrupted, for who knows how long. Many of them may forever be deprived of their degree.

The Israeli military has also murdered from the sky 5,479 students and 261 teachers .

Reliefweb notes,

“As of 30 March, the Education Cluster estimates that 87.7% of all school buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. 212 school buildings have had a direct hit and could be severely damaged and a further 282 have sustained moderate, minor or likely damage. Previously 503,500 children attended, and 18,900 teachers taught at the school buildings which have now had a direct hit or sustained major or moderate damage. Every university in Gaza has been destroyed.”

The dead include hundreds of undergraduates and over a hundred professors, as well as three presidents of universities.

Wesleyan President Michael S. Roth is the only one I know of to have publicly denounced this situation (thanks to Laila Lalami for tipping me to this piece).

Apologists for Israel’s total war on the innocent civilians of Gaza, blinded by their ethno-nationalism, may attempt to maintain that these universities were part and parcel of the Hamas government that has ruled Gaza since 2006. This allegation, however, is laughable. Hamas military cadres only come to 37,000 persons by Israel’s own reckoning. None of them were undergraduates or professors of literature.

About 19 institutions of higher education, including 12 universities, in Gaza served 88,000 students and employed 5200 staff and faculty before October 7, since which time they have all been closed and several have been demolished.

As I wrote last winter, the buildings of the al-Azhar University in south Gaza have been largely destroyed by Israeli shelling.

The following footage from TikTok shows the bombing of al-Azhar University in Gaza in November.

@pandapunk303 The sad part is they wont face any punishment. #freepalestine🇵🇸❤️ #alazhar #alazharuniversity #freepalestine #palestine #gaza #istandwithpalestine #foryou #fyp #crime #university #school #speakup #tiktoknew #wow #sad #messedup ♬ سبحان الله – Ali Dawud

The footage below says it shows the state last winter of al-Azhar University in Gaza:

“Destruction of Al-Azhar University in Gaza”

Al-Azhar University in Gaza was established in 1991 by the Palestine Liberation Organization, the secular rival of Hamas. It is not related to the al-Azhar in Cairo. It had 14,391 students and 387 faculty members, though some of these are now dead and none of them have any buildings in which to learn or teach. It had been ranked around 171 out of 200 among Arab regional universities, and it is amazing that it wasn’t at the bottom given that it functioned in an occupied territory under economic siege since 2007.

This was AUG’s medical school.

AU Gaza Kulliyat al-Tibb

That medical school is now not graduating doctors, to say the least.

This scholasticide is not an accident and it has nothing to do with a “war on Hamas” or “self-defense.” It is the typical gutting of a colonized people’s consciousness by a settler colonial state. These actions are intended to cripple Palestinian education and Palestinian culture in Gaza. Israeli leaders have made no secret of their hope to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians from the Strip entirely.