by Harley Schlanger
June 1 -- The explosion of campus protests against U.S. support for Israel's scorched earth policies against Palestinians continued last week, with demonstrations at graduation ceremonies at many universities. While the mainstream media has attempted to minimize the actions as "disruptions" of the annual spring festivities, U.S. elected officials have continued with angry denunciations of protesters as "pro-Hamas, pro-terrorist anti-Semites" engaging in "violent" actions, demanding that university officials crackdown on them, with arrests, expulsions, and deportation of any foreign students involved. The U.S. House of Representatives went to the extreme of redefining anti-Semitism as opposition to the policies of Israel, threatening universities with the loss of federal funds unless there is vigorous monitoring, i.e., spying, to "combat anti-Semitism" on campuses.
Comments made by House Speaker Mike Johnson on the Columbia University campus typify Congressional reaction. In calling for a crackdown against protestors, Johnson said, "We just can't allow this kind of hatred and anti-semitism to flourish on our campuses." President Biden and his opponent in November, Donald Trump, joined the chorus in denouncing the protests, while expressing support for Israel's killing of Palestinians and destruction of Gaza.
In reality, the "violence" on campuses has resulted primarily from campus officials calling in police to remove demonstrators and tear down their encampments. There have been more than 3,000 arrests so far, and measures are being put in place to limit the freedom of speech of students. There is fear that the protests will move off campus, as polls show a growing number of Americans reacting against the support for Israel's brutal actions in Gaza and the West Bank by the Biden administration and a bipartisan majority in Congress.
Most disturbing for university administrators and Board of Trustee members is the persistence of the demand that the colleges reveal where their large endowments are invested, and divest from firms of the Military-Industrial Complex and businesses with ties to the Israeli military and corporations. The threat of exposure of the profitable relationship between colleges and the war machine was used to provoke officials to move aggressively against the protests, to silence opposition to their complicity in war crimes.
PROTESTS AGAINST GENOCIDE, NOT AGAINST JEWS
The decisions in the last week targeting Israel's leaders for war crimes, including "plausible" charges of genocide against Palestinians, announced by the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice, were undoubtedly on the minds of students who protested at graduation ceremonies from coast-to-coast. More than 1,000 students walked out of Harvard's ceremony to protest the school's refusal to hand out diplomas to 13 student-protestors, while UCLA grads cheered the speaker who was denied the right to address her graduating classmates, due to the allegation that her support for justice for Palestinians was "anti-Semitic."
The student actions at Harvard were especially troubling for those committed to suppressing dissent. One large banner carried by students said "Harvard out of occupied Palestine." Another said simply "Stop the genocide." Sruthi Kumar, in her commencement address, stated she was "deeply disappointed by the intolerance for freedom of speech and their right to civil disobedience on campus." The main speaker at Harvard, Maria Ressa, a journalist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, called out university officials, saying "Harvard, you are being tested....[protests] are testing everyone. Protests give voice, they shouldn't be silenced."
Protests are continuing at some campuses after graduation. Unionized academic workers at the University of California system are conducting rolling strikes, with members walking off the job at UCLA and University of California-Davis on May 28. They are protesting violence deployed against peaceful protesters, and their demands include divestment from Israel and ending efforts to limit student's freedom of speech and right to protest.
The narrative of violent anti-Semitic protesters was exposed by an article in {Politico} on May 3, "What's Really Happening on College Campuses", in which student journalists from 13 campuses were interviewed. They were asked "how support for Palestine has surged over the last seven months, how their peers define antisemitism and what the political consequences of these protests might be." The article reports that "collectively, the group [of student journalists] painted a picture of students fighting to be heard by leadership — both on campus and nationally," and that violence on their campuses came from what one called "excessive use of force by police."
They also confirmed that in addition to demands for a ceasefire in Gaza, an end to U.S. military/financial aid for Israel, and recognition of a Palestinian state as part of a two-state solution, the demand for "complete divestment" from Israel had become the leading issue.
DIVEST FROM THE WAR MACHINE
Student protests have brought to public attention that universities, through investment of their endowment funds, and grants they receive from the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), are fully integrated into what was once known as the "Military-Industrial Complex (MIC)." There are 135 universities with endowments of at least $1 billion, which invest in military contractors and the tech sector corporations incorporated in the MIC. The DOD, for its part, is providing $23.98 billion in contracts to universities for fiscal year 2024.
Harvard's endowment is the largest in the country, at $53.2 billion. Trustees at Harvard initially refused to discuss where the endowments have invested, but responded to protests by agreeing to "discuss" the disbursement of funds, as have trustees at a number of other schools, including Brown University and University of California at Berkeley.
Columbia University, which brought in the New York Police Department to remove students from its administration building, with more than 100 arrests, continues to resist the demand for transparency. Students have called for divestment from Amazon and Google, which have a $1.2 billion contract to provide cloud computing to the government of Israel; from Microsoft, which provides services to Israel's Ministry of Defense and civil administration; and from Lockheed Martin, a leading defense contractor with a Board member, Jeh Johnson, who serves as an influential member of Columbia's Board of Trustees. Columbia's endowment has more than $13 billion to invest.
Meanwhile, campus protests are spreading in Caifornia. After midnight on May 31, police in riot gear, including California State Troopers, arrested at least 80 demonstrators who were blocking an entrance to the University of California-Santa Cruz campus. Video taken from the scene showed a line of police with raised batons standing at the encampment, face to face with protesters, who linked arms.
Students joined with hundreds of striking workers at UC Santa Cruz. The workers are part of a rolling strike/work stoppage at several UC campuses, of researchers, teaching assistants and other employees. They allege that the University of California’s response to pro-Palestinian demonstrators has violated their free speech rights. Even after the arrests, students remained, asserting their rights to free speech and protest.
In addition to calling for an end to U.S. support for Israel and an independent Palestine, free from occupation, the students and striking workers are demanding an end to the financial ties of the University of California system to the U.S. and Israeli military. The university president told the media that police had been called in because the students were blocking access to the campus and had refused to leave
As much as those in the pro-war establishment who serve on university boards fear exposure of their institution's integration with the war machine, the larger fear is that the passion for justice motivating youths will inspire activism in the population at large. {Politico} reports that Democratic National Committee (DNC) officials are "growing increasingly apprehensive about protests." A pro-Palestinian protest at the Democratic Party headquarters in Washington in November ended violently when police arrived to remove the demonstrators. A follow-up story on May 10 reported that DNC officials, worried that "the ghosts of 1968 may haunt [this year's] convention", are coordinating with the U.S. Secret Service and the Chicago Police Department to avoid a repeat of the 1968 anti-Vietnam war riots, which doomed the party in the presidential election that year.
What should concern them is not that students are "pro-Hamas" and "anti-Semitic" -- slanders which are completely untrue -- but that Biden's support for Israeli extremists' ethnic cleansing of Palestine is isolating the U.S., and pushing humanity closer to a nuclear World War III. This is what is guiding increasingly the student protests, and represents hope that the present trajectory of the war machine can be ended.
