The past year witnessed a powerful, inspiring upsurge against the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide on over a hundred campuses across the U.S. (and beyond). These protests—which included many Jewish students—inspired people around the world.

The students exposed the illegitimacy of the U.S.’s political, financial, military and diplomatic support for Israel's genocide of the Palestinian people. This caused many more to seek out and learn the truth about the state of Israel: that it was and is above all a neocolonial settler state, which today serves the interests of U.S. imperialist domination of the region.

To stop this protest, defiance and questioning, the hammer of repression and political attacks came down hard. Simultaneously, a coordinated attempt was made to paint any and all protests against Zionism as being the same as anti-Semitism. This lie conflates political opposition to a state based on Jewish supremacy with hatred of the Jewish people as a people.

Now, as Israel’s genocide has intensified, protests on U.S. campuses have been met with a renewed, and escalated wave of suspensions, blacklisting, brutal police repression, detentions and arrests. And now a Trump regime is coming to power promising even worse.

While some of the students and teachers under attack have bravely resisted, this repression has too much been met with silence, passivity and acceptance on the part of people who should be speaking and acting.

The time for everyone to get off the sidelines and resist is NOW—before the fascists are able to fully shut down opposition to Israel’s genocide, and along with that, turn campuses into political, moral and intellectual dead zones.

Imposing a More Chilling Clampdown

Let’s look more at the pattern of intensifying repression of pro-Palestine protest, dissent, and critical thinking on campuses. 

Take Columbia University in New York City. Early in the wave of campus uprisings against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Columbia banned the school’s chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. Now, Columbia has further moved to silence dissent by issuing arbitrary, contradictory, and extremely repressive rules for how and when protests must be scheduled and approved by school authorities, essentially banning meaningful and timely responses to world events.

And in what can only be called a lockdown, Columbia has banned “outsiders” from campus. This ban was explicitly announced as a way to ban protest. According to the University’s Interim President, the reason for closing the campus was “increasing evidence that the… campus is a major focus for protest and other activity.” 

Or you could travel downtown to New York University. On December 12, dozens of student protesters were issued persona non grata status (banned from campus) for participating in a demonstration the day before at the main NYU library. According to NYU officials, the banning was because they were disrupting “our academic operations at a particularly critical moment in the semester” (as finals start). Eight protesters were arrested, including at least two faculty members, even though the protesters did not prevent students who had finals from entering the library.

In what kind of world, in what kind of university that is supposedly open to critical thinking, is challenging genocide in Gaza just cause for banning from campus?! Further, NYU prevented the banned faculty members from accessing their offices or teaching their classes. 

There are examples from all over the country—take George Mason University in Virginia, where more than 12 police—including one with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force—broke down the door and raided the family home of two Palestinian American students. The cops seized the students’ phones and computers (which prevented them from communicating with friends and supporters, as well as continuing their studies). The students were told the raid was because they are accused of painting graffiti on a floor. And the two students have been banned from campus for four years, essentially preventing them from continuing their studies.

A massive crackdown is being imposed. Yet the outcry against it has been utterly insufficient!

Fascists Are Moving to Make This Much, Much Worse

Trump is all-in in the support of Israel and has threatened that Israel should "finish the problem.” This is not a statement out of concern for the Palestinian people but a call for, and threat of, faster and more “final” genocide of Palestinians. It is in this context that people appointed to his regime have made clear they will bring down even more repression against those standing up to Israel's genocide.

An article in the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz titled “How Trump and the GOP Plan to Dismantle the U.S. pro-Palestinian Movement” paints a chilling picture. 

• Both Marco Rubio, who Trump is nominating for Secretary of State, and Elise Stefanik—the nominee for UN ambassador—have called for deporting pro-Palestinian protesters who have student visas. 
• Pam Bondi, Trump’s nominee for attorney general, not only threatened international students but declared that anyone saying “I support Hamas… whether they’re here as Americans or if they’re here on student visas… need to be taken out of our country or the FBI needs to be interviewing them right away.” (Whatever you think of Hamas—a reactionary Islamic force—merely expressing support for them is constitutionally protected speech.)
• Trump ordered congressional Republicans to install Rep. Brian Mast as chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Mast is a Christian fascist who says at his website that he fought with the Israeli military. Mast said, "I don't think we would so lightly throw around the term 'innocent Nazi civilians' during World War II.... It is not a far stretch to say there are very few innocent Palestinian civilians." By that, of course, he is justifying the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinian people, including children and even babies by Israel, with U.S.-supplied bombs.

And on May 14, Trump himself threatened, “One thing I do is, any student that protests, I throw them out of the country. You know, there are a lot of foreign students. As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave.” And he said protest at Columbia “has to be stopped now.”

STOP Passively Accepting This Assault on Dissent and Critical Thinking!

Over these last months, the intensified repression has been met by too much normalization and capitulation. Institutions "of higher learning" have been locked down, without this being defied. Teachers have been fired and this has not been met by mass protest. 

Yet the necessary resistance to this repression has been largely confined to those who are targeted, or to legal challenges. And while challenging all this legally is important, the scale, range, diversity, and determination of resistance is not at all commensurate with the situation and the dangerous stakes. 

This cannot be accepted. Everyone everywhere needs to stand up against this. And if you don't act to stop this, you are complicit. Complicit with the closing down of critical thinking and academic freedom by suffocating repression; and complicit with the U.S.-supported starvation, mutilation, burning alive and outright genocide of the Palestinian people.

Bob Avakian, BA, the revolutionary leader and architect of the new communism, has said:

There is a place where epistemology and morality meet. There is a place where you have to stand and say: It is not acceptable to refuse to look at something—or to refuse to believe something—because it makes you uncomfortable. And: It is not acceptable to believe something just because it makes you feel comfortable.

But this is not only a moral question. BA has more recently said, in the face of the looming inauguration of Trump, that this “is not a time for turning inward and attempting to ‘take care of self’ as the juggernaut of Trump/Maga fascism gains momentum and crushes masses of people. This is a time for reaching out to all the others who feel the same outrage at Trump/Maga fascism—a time for collective action and self-sacrificing struggle for the greater good; the greater good of defeating this fascism.”