Elliott Colla is an associate professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University. He is the author of "Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity," and essays on modern Arab literature, culture and politics.
You might not know it given most liberal media coverage, but the demands of the campus occupations by students protesting Israel's war in Gaza are remarkably clear, focused and consistent. They are calling for a permanent cease-fire in Gaza now; an end to U.S. military support to Israel; and to boycott, divest and sanction Israel. The students are speaking clearly and with a unified voice about solidarity with Palestinians. They support the notion that Palestinians, no less than Israelis, deserve to be treated with the dignity owed to everyone.
Meanwhile, in an alternative reality, liberals and centrists in academia, the media and the Democratic Party have hitched their wagons together and circled themselves around the Israeli flag, while trying to discredit these young protesters as "pro-Hamas" and antisemitic because they are criticizing Israel. Poll whisperer Nate Silver claims that students are protesting due to social pressure and the applause effect. Writing in The New York Times, Columbia linguist John McWhorter condemned the peaceful student protest on campus as incoherent noise and "a form of abuse" to Jewish students and others who don't agree with the protesters. Not to be outdone, Scott Galloway, a professor at NYU's business school and a cable news talking head, absurdly claimed that these student protests are motivated by sexual frustration.
It could be that they simply cannot hear what the students are saying—just like the worst college administrators, such as President Minouche Shafik of Columbia, President Jay Hartzell of the University of Texas at Austin and President Walter E. Carter Jr. of Ohio State University, who have all ordered police onto their campus to violently arrest students. But it is more likely that these university presidents see themselves as guardians whose role is to make sure that people off campus don't hear what the students are actually saying on campus. They are suspending and expelling students, while cordoning their campuses before this movement of Palestinian solidarity spreads any further.
University presidents are suspending and expelling students, while cordoning their campuses before this movement of Palestinian solidarity spreads any further.
- Elliott Colla
These protests, and the brutal overreaction to them, have exposed an obvious generational divide. Older elites have remained tuned to establishment media that are good at presenting sympathetic stories of Israeli suffering and parroting Israeli officials, but have a terrible record of portraying Palestinians as fully human. Rarely do they show their audience dissenting voices, whether they are American or Israeli, and especially if they are Palestinian.
In contrast, students have a more independent and varied news diet that includes Palestinian perspectives, as well as dissident Jewish and Israeli voices. They have been watching and hearing ghastly reports from Gaza, where the International Court of Justice has found it "plausible" that Israel is committing acts of genocide. They have seen the footage of Israeli bulldozers running over Palestinian bodies. They have seen the pancaked faces, piles of bones, and the zip-tied limbs of doctors, nurses, and patients in the rubble of al-Shifa Hospital. They know the story of Hind Rajab. They are haunted by the stories of the Flour Massacre and famine. They know about the targeted killing of Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer.
They know that this slaughter is paid for with American tax dollars. They know that Zionism and Judaism are separate things and that to conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism is to empty the latter of all meaning and put Jewish life at risk. They know that to call Israel an apartheid state is not a slogan but a description based on international law and facts on the ground, according to the human rights groups that would know best, including B'Tselem, Israel's leading human rights organization.
They know that their universities hold investments in lucrative arms corporations, like Lockhead Martin and Northrup Gruman, which profit from the manufacture of the Hellfire missiles and other U.S. weapons that have killed so many Palestinians in Gaza. They know university endowments support technology companies, like Google, Intel and Elbit Systems, which Israel uses to surveil, detain and kill Palestinians.
They watch their universities boast of close ties and exciting exchange programs with Israeli universities that have well-documented histories of racial discrimination against Palestinians. They know that these same universities play a central role in maintaining Israel's occupation of Palestinian territory—for example, by collaborating with Israeli military industries to research and develop new technologies and advanced weaponry for Israel's military to use against Palestinians.
Students have learned a new word in the past few months: educide. They know that Israel has destroyed or severely damaged all 16 universities in Gaza since October. They know that hundreds of Palestinian scholars, teachers and staff—including university presidents—have been killed in Israel's total destruction of the besieged territory. They know that thousands of Palestinian students in Gaza will not be graduating this May because they were killed by American bombs.
They have watched all this destruction and killing take place, and have waited for the leadership at their colleges and universities to say something. They know that, with the notable exception of perhaps only President Michael S. Roth of Wesleyan, no other university president in this country has publicly expressed any concern about the matter.
Instead, they have watched university presidents sic riot police on peaceful gatherings; the president of Indiana University even allowed police to deploy snipers on the roofs of campus buildings. They have watched other university presidents, of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and now Columbia, sell their campuses out to a new incarnation of congressional hearings on "un-American activities." These leaders are either as ignorant about their own campuses as they are about the history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, or they are lying. With a straight face, they have regurgitated the talking points of right-wing provocateurs and once-respectable liberal Jewish organizations like the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee. With surprising confidence, they insist that only they, and not the students, can decipher the messages of Palestinian solidarity. They claim that calls for "cease-fire" mean support for Hamas, that "from the river to the sea" is code for an anti-Jewish pogrom rather than a call for equal rights for Palestinians, that intifada is "abhorrent" hate speech. Whatever their motivations or goals, the mission these university presidents serve is not that of education or academic freedom.
Not surprisingly, the students know what their own words mean. They know what violence is, and they want none of it. They sometimes say things I wouldn't say, or say it in a style that grates. But I'm not the one they're singing for, and in any case, I find even their clunkiest and most misguided slogans truer than the deafening silence about Gaza emanating from the upper echelons of our university administrations, mainstream media and the Democratic Party.
Students are not going to unlearn what they know to be true about apartheid and ethnic cleansing because a politician, or their own college president, smears them.
- Elliott Colla
All this foment makes me remember a core dynamic of my experience as a student trying to study the Palestinian-Israeli conflict at the University of California, Berkeley—that supposedly liberal bastion—during the late 1980s. While there were multiple courses on the history of Zionism and Israel in various departments, there was not one course where Palestinian history or culture was taught by itself or part of a larger subject. I took virtually every Middle East studies course that was offered during my time at Berkeley, and I cannot recall a single lecture where Palestine was mentioned, except insofar as it was a problem for Israel.
To study the history of the conflict in a way that included Palestinian perspectives and scholarship, I had to enroll in one of the student-led courses taught under Berkeley's DeCal program. Typically, DeCal courses had a faculty advisor who supervised the students as they developed the syllabus and the grading rubrics. But not one Berkeley faculty would take up that task for Palestine. It was left to a local high school instructor, the indefatigable Jock Taft, to play that role.
Our textbook was filled with articles and essays from MERIP, the socialist journal Khamsin and publications by Zed Press. Each week, a different scholar—but notably no Berkeley faculty member—would visit our class. I remember being electrified by the lectures of Noam Chomsky, Joel Beinin, Zachary Lockman, Christopher Hitchens (yes, even him) and others. We were forced to go to off-campus venues to hear Hitchens and Chomsky, because they'd been blackballed by a group of high-profile Berkeley professors in the social sciences and humanities who effectively controlled the teaching of Israel-Palestine on campus. This embargo meant that no Palestinians lectured on campus during my years as an undergraduate. While I attended multiple Hillel-sponsored lectures by Israeli politicians and even Meir Kahane—the radical American-Israeli rabbi and militant whose ultranationalist party in Israel was later designated a terrorist organization by the United States—I had to wait to leave Berkeley before I heard a lecture by the likes of Edward Said.
During the First Intifada, students and local peace activists mobilized serious solidarity initiatives at and around the Berkeley campus. A coalition of groups, including the Middle East Children's Alliance, helped to pass Measure J, which created a sister-city alliance between Berkeley and the Jabalya refugee camp in Gaza. In my senior year, a coalition of progressive Jewish, Muslim and Arab student groups, including the Committee for Academic Freedom in the Israeli Occupied Territories (CAFIOT), Progressive Muslim Alliance (PMA), International Jewish Peace Union (IJPU) and Network of Arab and American Students (NAAS), passed a resolution to create sister-school ties between Berkeley and Bethlehem University. In the summer of 1989, I was part of a small delegation of Berkeley students who arrived in Bethlehem to meet with faculty and students. I remember a Palestinian student telling me gently, "Okay fine. You'll go back to Berkeley, but will there be any follow up?" There wasn't any. Student activists graduated and moved on. The university administration, who wanted nothing to do with the fruits of this initiative, let them wither on the vine. But some of the students involved in these earlier struggles would go on to establish Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace.
What do these old experiences tell me? On Palestine, students have always led at the universities I know. Now, as when I was an undergraduate, students are hungry for knowledge about their world. They are eager to connect their daily lives with the bigger picture and reject the commandment to cordon, compartmentalize and forget.
When it comes to Palestine, what that knowledge teaches the typical American student is that history did not begin on Oct. 7. It didn't begin in 1967 or 1948 either. The mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza is not solely Benjamin Netanyahu's crime. Nor is it an aberration. It's the culmination of a century-long project to subjugate, expel and eliminate the native Palestinian population from lands coveted by Jewish ethnonationalists—what leading Palestinian scholar Rashid Khalidi calls "the hundred years' war on Palestine." Unlike previous rounds of mass violence against Palestinians, this time the violence is bare naked and undeniable, though at the top of our universities, denialism continues unabated.
One difference between now and then is that scholars of Palestine teach at universities across the United States today, so many students are not forced to leave their campus to learn about the history of Palestine. Yet, most university leadership remains stuck where things were in the 1980s, convinced that the subject is too controversial. Afraid of alienating off-campus constituents, such as alums and donors, they sacrifice the hunger for knowledge on campus in order to serve the status quo. Only now, when the brutal facts of Israel's history are so widely known, that status quo is no longer tenable.
Like me in the 1980s, many of today's students have had to educate themselves about Palestine—and America's complicity in the suffering of Palestinians—with no help from faculty or their university administrations. They have had to learn in the face of constant media gaslighting and against the backdrop of daily violent provocations from mainstream Zionist organizations and now, the local police. Still, they remain amazingly calm, measured and steadfast.
What these students are wielding is not mere opinion or faddish notions, but rather hard-won knowledge. Their understanding of their campuses is well-founded: They see how our institutions are complicit in Israel's wars. They understand the role that the United States plays in the world, and the forms of violence that sustain the current despair, especially the devastation in Gaza. They are not going to unlearn what they know to be true about apartheid and ethnic cleansing because a politician, or their own college president, smears them.
Let the students build a thousand camps. Let them occupy the buildings of every university administration that has shown itself incapable of fostering a place of free inquiry and learning.
