Across the country, righteous students protesting the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide of Palestinians are being met with vicious, illegitimate repression! At Columbia University, 108 students were arrested, suspended and thrown out of student housing for nonviolently occupying their campus lawn. It matters that in the face of this, more students stepped out to resurrect their encampment! It matters that from Michigan to Minnesota to Texas and California and beyond, students set up sister encampments protesting the genocide in Gaza!

Now these brave young people face slander, suspensions, brutality and more than 400 arrests! This comes on the heels of fascist Congressional witch-hunts that drove out the presidents of Harvard and UPenn and drove Columbia’s president to step up her vicious crack-down.

What is driving this outrageous repression?

And more, why is the U.S. government—both ruling parties—hellbent on backing the intensifying genocide in Gaza which has claimed more than 34,000 lives and driven 2.3 million Palestinians to the brink of starvation?

In speaking of the repression now going on against pro-Palestinian students on U.S. campuses, the revolutionary communist leader Bob Avakian (BA) has said:

Why is this happening? Because fundamental interests of U.S. capitalism-imperialism are at stake. Because Israel plays a “special role” as a heavily armed bastion of support for U.S. imperialism in a strategically important part of the world (the “Middle East”). And Israel has been a key force in the commission of atrocities which have helped to maintain the oppressive rule of U.S. imperialism in many other parts of the world.

And this repression is happening because representatives of the ruling class in this country have a definite sense that if youth especially at “elite” universities begin to seriously question and act against what this system is doing—if the system “loses the allegiance” of large numbers of those students—that can be a big factor in creating a real crisis for the system as a whole, as happened in the 1960s: a crisis that, now more than ever, this system really cannot afford, when the whole country is already being torn apart by deep divisions, with bitter clashes right among the ruling powers. So, at the same time as they are bitterly divided, the ruling powers of this country are firmly united in their determination to punish and intimidate especially students at elite universities who have stepped forward to protest the genocidal slaughter of Palestinians. The ruling class is desperate to prevent opposition to its fundamental interests from spreading and involving masses of people, from all parts of society.

All this reveals, more “nakedly” than in “normal situations,” the actual dictatorship behind the outer shell of “democracy” of this country—and it shines a light on the strategic weakness of this system, when it does lose the allegiance of major sections of the people and this has the potential to spread to all parts of society, including among the dominant institutions of this system.