Can They Shut It All Down?

Over the last few weeks, as student protests and encampments have erupted on college campuses across the US, trepidations have risen, especially among younger supporters of the Palestinian cause. One messaged me: “Congress will pass their new antisemitism law, everyone will be silenced, foreign students will be deported, visas will be cancelled, new ones will be denied. They will shut it all down.”

There is no paranoia in such forebodings. Over the past seven months, university presidents have been lashed or fired, donors have rescinded pledges, students have been doxed, liberation slogans have been slapped and censored as hate speech, firms have withdrawn job offers, students and professors have been beaten and arrested, and TikTok is being forced to sell to a “government approved-buyer” or be banned.

Police wrestling to the ground Emory Economics Professor Caroline Fohlin

For some of my older American friends, noise aside, the tides appear to have barely shifted. They suspect that the campus demonstrations and sleep-ins are much smaller in the real world than in the social media one and, to many students, more a nuisance than a call to action. Worse, the polls they’re looking at haven’t budged. Overall American support for Israel remains very solid, the American Jewish one even more so. We are all overestimating the weight of the moment, they warn, and underestimating the system’s ability to shut it all down.

Campus encampments in a snapshot

Countries like Germany, France, and England have offered their own version of coercions and clampdowns, which in due time may well be taught as a masterclass in politics as farce. In the latest twist, reconstructive surgeon and Rector of Glasgow University Ghassan Abu Sitta, whose work in Gaza has been Herculean, was denied entry into Germany to participate in a conference on Palestine that the authorities had later cancelled, and then denied entry into France, where he was actually due to speak before the French Senate.  

Had Abu Sitta’s destination as a volunteering surgeon been, say, Ukraine’s hospitals and his witness account been of Russian butchery, he most probably would be the hero bowing now to Western accolades, Nobel statue in hand. 

It all shows how heedlessly ready the West’s ruling class has been to sacrifice an entire body of progressive values and laws painstakingly reconstructed and enhanced in the aftermath of world wars and appalling colonial legacies to rehabilitate a civilization that committed the worst atrocities. And here’s the meanest irony: to do so for the sake of an Israel born out of this villainy and, from inception, hellbent on repeating it with the Palestinians.

This is not Western hypocrisy in the service of cynical foreign policy interests, but outright betrayal of democratic canons and norms well within the confines of supposed democracies. A betrayal that, remarkably, is supported by an elite consensus that transcends fields, divides, parties, and institutions, public and private.

All so very disheartening from one lens. And momentous from another.

Because they are so many, I can’t cite the number of articles that have referenced the antiwar movement of the 1960s when analyzing the current campus scene. Almost all juxtapositions meant to celebrate or debunk the similarities between this one and that.

But I think the comparisons are misguided. Palestine was always destined to be unique, precisely because of the uniqueness of Israel itself–to the West. The affinities and complicities between these two are deep, robust, and colored by a long history of anti-Semitism that is at once searing and self-serving.

Moreover, the strong Jewish presence in the US and Europe has imbued the Israel-Palestine issue with a gnarly domestic dimension that didn’t burden the fight to end the war in Vietnam or, for that matter, actuate the isolation of Apartheid South Africa. True, these two causes had to contend with a hostile or indifferent public and antagonistic states. But they were relatively easy picks for Western liberals, including Jews, and eventually rather ideal rallying cries through which regimes could launder their sins.

Not so, Palestine. When it came to Western atonements, the cause célèbre would naturally be Israel and Palestine the outcast.

A better context for today’s furor, therefore, is the silence of old. I remember it when I was a student in the US in the 1980s. The loneliness of us, of Palestine. I remember the few champions–so few you could count them on your hands–we clung on to as intellectual companions or saviors: Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, Ibrahim abu Lughud… The even fewer mavericks on the political right and left, like Patrick Buchanan, Robert Novak, Anthony Lewis, and Jesse Jackson, whose criticism of Israel and its US patron occasionally pierced the dead calm in the echo chamber.

It’s hard to describe to younger generations how exposed we felt, how outnumbered and outmatched. How rare it was to read a sympathetic piece or watch a balanced program anywhere in the mainstream media, how impoverished our grassroots presence was, how small and scattered our organizations were, how few the listeners, old and young.

It is against this backdrop that I place the current moment and its resilience. And the truth is it may have been totally unexpected but there is nothing sudden about it. Israel, though very coddled and secure in the West’s corridors of power, had long been losing sheen and reputation in the rest of a very fluid world, partly because of its own egregious behavior and partly because of the patient, hard slug of progressive and pro-Palestinian forces.

In this always asymmetric battle, it has been stunning to see extraordinary resources invested over decades and vast efforts mobilized since October 7, all on behalf of Israel, encounter such resistance and even galvanize it across constituencies, continents, and arenas. It’s the stuff of case studies: a teachable failure.  

But it is not a victory for the Palestinian struggle yet. Not in the West, and certainly not on those burning Palestinian landscapes. The aspirations are not one, the leaders are treacherous on both sides, the search for scapegoats in the human shape of Netanyahu is incessant and desperate, the feuds are many, the false promises even more so.  

And then there is my young friend’s fear that Israel and its supporters will shut it all down. Can they?

As I contemplate this question, I am thinking of the protests on 57 US campuses. I am thinking of the professors demonstrating, marching, and getting arrested with their students. I am thinking of leading democratic senators calling for a halt in military aid to Israel; of Taylor Swift attending a fund raiser for Gaza, of rapper Macklemore singing for Palestine; of the ICJ ruling that Israel is plausibly committing genocide; of the majority of Democratic voters who agree with that; of the professionals in news organizations and foreign ministries openly calling out their administrations…

I am thinking of Gaza’s people in whose tragic shadow Palestine rose again to tell its story to a listening world. Finally!

So, in answer to the question: I think not.

****

On Another Note

In 2021, Nathan Thrall, whose writings about Israel-Palestine are unfailingly exquisite, penned a piece for the New York Review of Books titled “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama.” Through a heart wrenching day that Abed spends desperately searching for his five-year old son, who died in a school bus accident, Thrall lays out the labyrinth of Israeli apartheid in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and its pernicious effect on Palestinian life.

The piece grew into a book that was published in 2023, and Thrall deservedly has just won the Pulitzer Prize for it. Here’s an excerpt from the original piece.

In Gaza, Israel was intent on removing Palestinians from the territory in order to annex it. Future prime minister Golda Meir, then the head of Mapai, the precursor of the Labor party, said Israel should retain Gaza while “getting rid of its Arabs.” Minister of Labor Yigal Allon said, “I am prepared to encourage emigration of non-Jews in general.” Israel forcibly expelled three thousand people from Gaza in the weeks after the war. Tens of thousands more left in the year after, some of them taking Israeli financial incentives to emigrate to South America. Prime Minister Eshkol expressed hope that, “precisely because of the suffocation and imprisonment there, maybe the Arabs will move from the Gaza Strip.” He added, “Perhaps if we don’t give them enough water they won’t have a choice, because the orchards will yellow and wither.” Even the Palestinian citizens of Israel were not spared from these schemes: at a 1967 cabinet meeting, Minister Allon recommended “thinning the Galilee [inside the Green Line] of Arabs.”

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