After his death, Alareer became widely known as the author of the poem ‘If I Must Die’, which asks its reader to build a kite in his memory and to fly it before a child whose father has been incinerated by a bomb, so that the child might imagine ‘an angel is there/bringing back love’. The day after the students set up their encampment at UCLA, it was announced that Alareer’s daughter Shymaa had been killed in an airstrike along with her husband and three-month-old son.
Among other things, the camp was a rebuke to the notion of doing business as usual when such brutality is being perpetrated on an enormous scale against human beings whose displacement, torture, unlawful detention and murder is bankrolled by the United States. Because they often invest their funds in weapons manufacturers whose missiles are falling on Gaza, or in companies with factories in the occupied West Bank, American universities are perceived as supporting Israel’s objective, which appears to be the wholesale extermination of the Palestinian people.
Students protesting against the war on Gaza on campuses across the US, from Columbia, where the encampments began, to California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, have been clear that their primary aims are to pressure the US government to secure an immediate and permanent ceasefire, and to pressure their universities and colleges to divest from any financial holdings with links to Israel. When it comes to divestment, they are drawing from a playbook established in the 1980s, when students convinced their schools to cut ties with companies operating in apartheid South Africa. As an antiwar campaign, the encampments recall protests against the Vietnam War, including the Student Strike of 1970, which grew significantly after the murder of four students at Kent State University by the Ohio National Guard.
The encampments are also a parody, in Alareer’s sense: emerging from within the university, they offer another possibility for what the university might be. One of the more potent images circulating from the encampments has been of a student holding a sign that reads ‘Columbia, why require me to read Prof. Edward Said If you don’t want me to use it?’ The protests have revealed that the American university, which operates more and more as a high-cost degree factory where humanities departments squirm on the chopping block, is still a place where people can learn what is true, and act on their knowledge. You cannot, in other words, expect young people to memorise and regurgitate history, economics, political science, moral philosophy and so on for their exams while prohibiting them from taking their education on the road.
Over the weekend, following the formation of the encampment, a large group of counter-protesters, few to none of whom appeared to be UCLA students, arrived on campus. They screamed, hurled racial slurs and sexual threats (‘I hope you get raped’) at the students, and opened a sack full of live mice – swollen, seemingly injected with some substance – on the ground near the camp. When the counter-protesters dispersed, they left behind a Jumbotron – a massive flat-screen TV, about ten feet high – in the middle of campus facing the encampment and surrounded by metal barriers. Paid security guards remained inside the barriers to protect the screen. For the next five days, the Jumbotron played, on a loop, footage of the 7 October attacks along with audio clips describing rape and sexual violence in explicit terms. Mixed in among the clips were speeches by Joe Biden vowing unconditional support for Israel and ‘Meni Mamtera’, a maddeningly repetitive children’s song that went viral earlier this year when IDF soldiers posted a video of themselves using it as a form of noise torture on captive Palestinians.
When I arrived on campus on Tuesday morning, to lead a class on Byron’s Don Juan, the sound from the Jumbotron was so loud it was impossible to hear myself think, let alone teach. I walked over with a colleague to take footage of the footage. You couldn’t ask for a better allegory: on one side, the encampment, full of young people risking their degrees, their future employment prospects and their physical and mental health to draw attention to the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza; on the other, a costly media machine, financed by D-list celebrities (who proudly posted their contributions on Instagram), unmanned except for a trio of hired guards who, when questioned, admitted they had nothing to do with the Zionist cause. (...)
At 11 p.m. on 30 April, a large group of men, mostly middle-aged, many wearing Halloween masks, arrived at the encampment carrying knives, bats, wooden planks, pepper spray and bear mace, which they used to attack the unarmed students. They shot fireworks into the camp and used its plywood barricades to crush students into the ground. Footage from ABC News shows half a dozen counter-protesters punching and kicking a student. Videos from independent journalists and people on the ground captured calls for a ‘second Nakba’.
On the ABC newsreel you can hear a reporter shouting in disbelief: ‘Where are the police? Where is security? Where is authority here?’ The answer to the first two questions is clear: the police, as well as campus security forces, were there, but they did not intervene. Rather, for roughly five hours, they stood at a comfortable distance, laughing and occasionally chatting amicably with the mob, which was made up not only of self-professed former IDF soldiers but also several white nationalists, including members of the far-right Proud Boys, whose former leader was sentenced to 22 years in prison for his role in the 6 January attacks on the US Capitol. Since white nationalists are, as a rule, hostile to Jews, it is worth asking why their assault on the encampment – which included a large number of Jewish students – has yet to be ruled antisemitic by the university administration. (...)
Most disturbing, however, are images that circulated on X (formerly Twitter) of snipers on the roof of Royce Hall, the building next to the encampment. The superintendent of the Indiana State Police confirmed that a sniper was called in for a pro-Palestine protest at Indiana University, and the New York Police Department has confirmed that an officer fired a gun – with real bullets – inside Hamilton Hall at Columbia University during its raid on the building, which students had renamed Hind’s Hall in honour of six-year-old Hind Rajab, murdered by the Israeli military in early January. The general sentiment on campuses across the US is that it is only a matter of time before a student is killed, as at Kent State in 1970. This is a price that both the students and their universities, for very different reasons, seem prepared to pay.
The students, as they will tell you, are there for Gaza, where 90 per cent of schools, and all universities, have been destroyed. The university, meanwhile, is forced to confront the moral vacuity of its policies, which have in the end protected no one except extremists willing to join forces with neo-Nazis to safeguard Israel from criticism. It has no principles and no plan; it has ceded its authority to the mob. The students, along with the staff who have supported their cause, are now in a position to direct the future of an institution whose stewards have abandoned it.
by Anahid Nersessian, London Review of Books | Read more:
Image: Amy Katz/ZUMA Press Wire/Alamy
[ed. See also: Ghosts of ’68 (NLR):]
What explains the scale of this response? The semester ends sometime between late April and mid-May. Why not wait the encampments out, negotiating and offering symbolic concessions to buy time? This is partly a reflection of the changes that universities, like many other institutions, have undergone during decades of neoliberalization. In the mid-1970s, Republicans identified public universities as a crucial source of anti-authoritarian sentiment and demanded a complete institutional overhaul. The subsequent process of privatization, which has made tuition prohibitive for most prospective in-state students, has been catastrophic for democratic principles and practices. With massive, untaxed endowments running into the tens of billions, universities have slowly morphed into public-private police-carceral states, catering to ‘customers’ and answering to benefactors and politicians, not students or faculty.
At Columbia, whose endowment is $13.6 billion, students must pay $90,000 per year plus travel expenses – a dramatic rise since the 1980s. Administrative posts and salaries have increased relative to faculty ones, and the number of non-tenured staff has grown steadily. Nationally, three-fourths of faculty are non-tenured and therefore do not have academic freedom. The privileged minority of tenured faculty did nothing to fight this trend, nor did they participate in adjunct efforts to unionize, since the current system enables them to take research leave and sabbatical. Now tenure itself – under attack from Republican politicians, trustee boards and university administrations – seems unlikely to survive. Recent years have seen an upswell of labour activism among graduate students and adjunct faculty, some of whom have managed to win collective bargaining rights, but they are a long way from re-democratizing the academy.
Another crucial factor is the influence of so-called ‘shot callers’: a donor class of billionaires, often working through politicians or board members, with the power to force institutional changes or get people fired by threatening to withhold funding. As universities have become more like corporations, whose primary duties are to their shareholders, administrators have become increasingly pliant before donors and their representatives. Presidents can be forced to resign even when they have strong support from students and faculty, as at Harvard; or, conversely, they can ignore significant internal opposition because they have outside backers, as at Columbia. (One of the main shot callers there is Democratic donor Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, who responded to the protests by revoking a donation and taking out full-page advertisements in major newspapers which denounced ‘antisemitic hate’ and demanded greater ‘protection’ on campuses.)
