Read Part I of this article here, which reports on the violence different Palestine solidarity encampments on US campuses have experienced at the hands of both the police and far-right Zionist agitators.
Why this violence now?
Violence is being driven from the top, with politicians condemning imaginary violence by the students and lauding real repression by police. Mitch McConnell was one of 27 GOP senators who signed a letter saying President Biden “must act immediately to restore order” on university campuses, calling demonstrators “antisemitic, pro-terrorist mobs.” Christian nationalist House Speaker Mike Johnson went to Columbia and called for the National Guard to stop pro-Palestinian protests. Donald Trump has said he would deport non-citizen students who took part in the protests.
These calls have by no means come only from Republicans. In addition to Biden’s statements, the ranking Democrat on the House armed services committee, Adam Smith of Washington state, called the protests “leftwing fascism” or “leftwing totalitarianism.” The Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, pressured the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia to shut down the encampment just before police in tactical gear entered. Despite the police violence at Emerson, Boston’s “progressive” Democratic mayor, Michelle Wu, has backed their police, as did New York Democratic mayor Eric Adams.
When Columbia called in the cops to violently attack anti-war students in 1968 the tactic backfired spectacularly. The university then established rules not to rely on NYC police on campus. Despite many protests and occupations since, this April was the first time they broke their own rules. Across the country, attacks on Palestine encampments were more violent and involved more police (and counter-protesters) than the shantytowns built on US campuses in the 1980s against Apartheid South Africa.
The active Palestine solidarity movement has grown to realize that US support for Israel is not due to an “Israel lobby” (despite how pernicious AIPAC is) that could be easily countered by lobbying on the other side. The US ruling class, and both major parties, are wedded to the US imperial project, in which the oil-rich strategic Middle East plays a crucial role, and where Israel serves as the “watchdog” and “aircraft carrier” of US imperial interests. This means breaking ties with Israel is an even harder task than was the case with divestment from apartheid South Africa. It also means the struggle is inherently radicalizing.
American attitudes towards Israel and the Palestinians have been changing for decades, but the recent explosion of solidarity with Palestine, including among a generation of Jewish people, has threatened the engineers of American imperialism. This is why all levels of US government and many rich donors to universities have opted towards severe repression. The leaders of neoliberal universities, which are themselves often deeply implicated in the technologies of occupation and genocide, are more than willing to go along.
The physical violence against encampments has gone hand in hand with a “New McCarthyism” on campuses, utilizing false charges of antisemitism (some manufactured wholesale). We are now seeing “liberal” (read: neoliberal) university administrations essentially supporting a trend started by the far-right attack on education using wedge cultural issues of trans rights and Black history.
At some campuses we have also seen the dangerous next step of the state allowing far-right thugs to run rampant against protesters. So far, encampments have been able to hold their own, and it has taken mobilizations of official police to clear them. But when the far-right thugs prove their usefulness to the state against a growing left-wing movement, we will have come a dangerous step closer to fascism in this country.
What is violence?
One may say that violence of any kind is bad, or that students are just as responsible as the police and far-right thug/Zionist alliance. They would point to destroyed windows in New York from certain Columbia students or graffitied walls in both New York and Los Angeles. But (1) one person or few people does not equate to an entire movement. And (2) to denounce the students for damaging private property without further denouncement—or at least equal denouncement—of police beating people’s skulls causing concussions and permanent injuries misses the reason people do disruptive things in the first place: that being resistance against violence committed by the state.
Genocide Joe Biden himself attacked students as violent. “Destroying property is not a peaceful protest” he said in May. “It’s against the law. Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancelling of classes and graduations —none of this is a peaceful protest.” He of course did not mention the attacks on protesters, much less the 36,000 killed in Gaza to date, or the mass displacement and famine truly amounting to genocide. This includes the destruction of all college campuses in Gaza. Thousands of students, and hundreds of teachers and university professors, have been killed, with some scholars explicitly targeted.
As Karl Marx wrote in response to liberal denouncements of Parisian workers in the Paris Commune of 1871 regarding the destruction of buildings and statues by the oppressed and exploited workers of Paris; “The bourgeoisie of the whole world, which looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre after the battle, is convulsed by horror at the desecration of brick and mortar!”
This is very relevant in understanding the nature of the violence of the students and workers in the encampments, occupations, and strikes right now. This is in stark contrast to the violence of the police that are doing everything they can to suppress freedom of expression by the most exploited of the country, all to sustain the larger state of affairs and reproduce them through violence on the behalf of the ruling class. This is the function of the state under capitalism and why it ought to be opposed, and in order for it to be opposed and to see a truly free Palestine, one must oppose capitalism as a whole as the root for America and Israel’s imperialism over Palestine.
Strategy in the face of repression
While the threat of violence is very real and should be taken extremely seriously, there is another emerging risk to the movement: an overemphasis on security culture. Certainly, participants need to protect each other, and encampments should be, and have been, defended when possible. Students understandably want to take precautions to limit their conversations, plans, and actions leaking to the university, police, or violent agitators.
But a focus on secrecy can often limit new people getting involved, generate paranoia and mistrust between activists, and create an unnamed, unelected, and unaccountable leadership policing who can say what. As the end of the academic year draws closer and students leave for the summer, it is important that the encampments don’t collapse in on themselves, leaving only a tiny militant core detached from the wider movement.
A zine by CrimethInc is circulating among encampment activists that warns against any form of de-escalation, discouraging engaging in negotiations with university administrations, and to ignore the conditions around them, including how much support the encampments have from the student body. If followed, this advice tells students they must continue to escalate the disruptiveness of their actions regardless of whether they have strength in numbers, which in reality only exposes the encampments to more violence — the police can remove 10 people far more easily than 1,000.
The article also encourages students not to win concessions or demands around divestment. The article is reminiscent of arguments made by some during the Occupy Wall Street movement a decade ago. Instead of seeing the encampment as a tactic for building a wider movement to free Palestine, the encampment itself becomes the goal — as if it is a permanent “liberated zone” that exists outside of society.
Our side needs to continue with militant action, patient explaining, and mass activity as this bipartisan repression threatens to get worse. The more the occupations on the campuses and the actions in the streets can spark workplace actions and union involvement, the more power we will have to confront their violence, to break US support for Israel, and to win a better world.
By Nathaniel Hort in Arizona, with additional reporting from Eric Fretz in New York and Clare Fester in Los Angeles
Marx21 US 