Students moving
The global protests against the Israeli government’s genocide in Gaza have been given renewed energy with the growing US student movement for a ceasefire and end to the occupation. For months individuals and organizations worldwide have been giving public voice to calls for a ceasefire in every imaginable way. Public statements, petitions, vigils, marches, blocking highways and bridges, swarming airports, demonstrating at sporting events, resisting taxes, following legislators, and occupying public spaces have all been designed to demonstrate a growing demand an end to the killing. Soon a ship with volunteers from over 40 countries is hoping to deliver 5,000 tons of aid to Gaza, breaking the Israeli blockade.
Now universities across the country are exploding. The careful efforts of university administrators to control and suppress student protest is being swept aside by students determined to make their voices heard. In an article entitled “Revolt in the Universities” Chris Hedges reports:
“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.”
The moral clarity that is emerging from these protests is critical as we are all learning that the issues at stake here go far beyond the killing fields of Gaza.
We are witnessing the rapid exposure of how much the US empire depends upon the manufacturing, marketing, and use of weapons of war. And we are coming to understand how intimately involved all of our institutions are in the pursuit of wars.
For decades right wing forces in the US have sought to criminalize the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) movement. Now, as in the struggles against apartheid, university campuses are rallying to demand that economic pressures be brought to bear to stop the capacity of Israel to kill and to occupy Palestine.
Our own Wayne State University Board of Governors is facing a demand for disinvestment by students, faculty and alums based on a resolution passed by the Student Senate nearly 5 months ago. The resolution calls for “the Board of Governors to develop socially responsible criteria for our university's investments to ensure that we are not complicit in war profiteering and investing in companies that knowingly contribute to or benefit from human rights violations in Palestine and around the world.”
Versions of this kind of action are emerging not only on campuses but in labor and religious organizations that have evaded the questions of what their investments support.
Now we are all faced with how deeply tied our daily lives are to military machines. This week the Muslim Grassroots Movement, MPower, called for actions directed at Citi Bank, asking people to cut up their credit cards. The Cut Ties With Genocide Campaign states, “Since October 2023, City has supported Israel’s war machine by financing $500 million bond to Israel and billions of dollars in bonds to war profiteers Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.”
This movement is calling upon us to look at our collective responsibilities and to face the questions of what we need to do when our leaders and institutions fail. Often it is the courage of students standing in places like Selma, Berkley, Chicago, Tiananmen Square, Cairo, or Wall Street that have given voice to our best hopes of what we can yet become.