Update, October 23—Since the article below was published on October 14, there have been some important further developments in the repression of voices supporting Palestine and criticizing Israel.
- In Berlin, Germany, on October 16, police attacked “unauthorized pro-Palestinian demonstrations,” arresting at least 174 protesters and using water canon against them. Germany, like France, has imposed “a nationwide blanket ban on protests in support of Palestine altogether.” Only two protests have been allowed under the ban—both “silent vigils.” German education authorities are also considering banning students from wearing Palestinian kaffiyeh scarves or “Free Palestine” stickers. France has already specifically banned nine protests. Hungary and Austria have also banned protests.
- At Columbia University in New York City, Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine held a protest on campus. According to the organizers, they “faced unprecedented resistance from the administration.” For the “first time in recent history, Columbia closed its gates, only allowing people carrying Columbia ID to enter campus.” A massive presence of NYPD was brought in, apparently to intimidate the pro-Palestinian demonstrators, because they (NYPD) did nothing when pro-Israel reactionaries “harassed and interfered” with the protests, called for genocide against Palestine, and said things like “I hope every one of these people [the protesters] dies.” Students Supporting Israel—the pro-Zionist group—actually nailed it when they posted on their Instagram “The NYPD will be protecting us.”
- In Israel itself (according to +972 Magazine), repression is intensifying, including for social media posts. Around 50 Palestinian students at colleges in the Haifa area have been have been “summoned to disciplinary committees in recent days on the basis of social media posts seen as supportive of Hamas—and some of them notified that they have been suspended from their studies.” A Jewish professor in central Israel posted a Facebook profile photo with the caption “The Gaza Ghetto will be liberated”; he also referred to what Israel was doing as “genocide.” He received a letter from his school stating that “In view of the seriousness of your posts, you are suspended pending a disciplinary inquiry.”
And this is not limited to possible loss of jobs or suspension from school: As of October 18, 170 Palestinians had been “arrested or brought in for questioning” by the police “on the basis of online expression.” The Attorney General’s office announced that it had “instructed some of the heads of higher education institutions, who contacted it following cases of students who published words of praise for terrorism, to forward the details to the Israel Police, so that their case could be dealt with as soon as possible at the criminal level, beyond the disciplinary level handled by the educational institution.” Popular Palestinian singer Dalal Abu Amneh, who has over a million followers on social media, was arrested for a social media post in Arabic that read: “There is no victor but God.”
Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi on October 16 brought to the Knesset’s security cabinet new legislation that would give him the authority to take broadcasts off the air and confiscate broadcasting equipment if a program is seen as damaging national security or public order, or as contributing to “enemy propaganda.” Karhi is also reportedly working to shut down Al Jazeera’s local bureau on similar grounds.
(See also “Pro-Israel Clampdown Hits the World of Books and Ideas.”)
We are told, again and again, that “defending freedom and democracy” is the very heart of U.S. foreign policy, including the lie that this is what drives their war-making. And when the U.S. allies with openly vicious dictators, they say it’s still “justified” because “that’s what it takes to defend our freedom at home.”
But if you want to know the reality, and not some imperialist fairy tale, just check out what has been happening this past week to people who publicly disagreed with what the U.S. and Israel are doing to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
Hamas’ attack on Israel involved the criminal killing or abducting of civilian noncombatants, shocked and horrified much of the world, as did the growing realization that Israel was going to respond to this with mass slaughter on a vastly greater scale against the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip. This laid bare to a certain degree the reality that as reactionary and fucked up as Hamas is, the deeper root of the endless violence in Israel/Palestine is the original dispossession and ethnic cleansing of millions of Palestinians to “make way” for a Jewish state of Israel 75 years ago, and the continued apartheid-style oppression and terror directed at them and their descendants in Gaza and on the West Bank of Israel.
This brutal reality is sharply at odds with the mythology of “tiny democratic Israel” with its “Western values of concern for human life,” amidst people who are outright portrayed as subhuman. And so the U.S., Israel and other reactionary forces have simply tried to rule any discussion of what Israel has done throughout its history down to today as “out of order.” To hear them talk, the only problem, the sole cause of violence, is Hamas. And they’ve ratcheted up rhetoric: first Hamas was “evil,” then they added “like ISIS,” then they added “like the Nazi Holocaust. ”1 The point of this is to shut down any real debate or discussion because as soon as you disagree with the U.S./Israel, you’re a Hamas-ISIS-Nazi terrorist.
Nonetheless, around the world, supporters of the Palestinian people began to speak out. And when they did, the hammer came down, fast and hard, and particularly in the places that are supposedly “models” of “democracy” and “free inquiry.”
For instance, in France the national Interior Minister ordered local authorities to ban all pro-Palestinian demonstrations! And on October 12, “Paris police used tear gas and water cannon to disperse pro-Palestinian protesters” who defied the ban and demonstrated against the Israeli government. Meanwhile, pro-Israel demonstrations took place without interference, and the iconic Eiffel Tower “was lit up with a Star of David and the blue and white of the Israeli flag.”
In England, Home Secretary Suella Braverman told the nation’s police that waving a Palestinian flag may be a criminal offense, and literally said that what may be permissible in peace time may not be permissible during war time. (See “Waving Palestinian flag may be a criminal offence, Braverman tells police,” Guardian.)
In the U.S., meanwhile, a massive campaign is going on to drive people who take a sharp stand against what Israel and the U.S. are doing out of public life and to ruin their careers. On October 10, Ryna Workman, the president of the Student Bar Association (SBA) at New York University, wrote a letter in the group’s bulletin saying that “Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life. … This regime of state-sanctioned violence created the conditions that made resistance necessary.”
By that evening, the powerful Winston & Strawn law firm had withdrawn a previous offer to hire Workman. The SBA reported that many of its members were being “doxxed” and receiving online “harassment and death threats.” The SBA board initiated a process to remove Workman as president. And the Dean of the Law School hinted that Workman “may be under investigation” and “subject to appropriate disciplinary action.”
An even sharper example: On Monday, the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Support Committee (PSC) issued a letter about the violence in Israel, co-signed by 34 other campus groups. This letter foregrounds the tremendous historic oppression and current danger facing millions of Palestinians:
Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum. For the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison. Israeli officials promise to “open the gates of hell,” and the massacres in Gaza have already commenced. Palestinians in Gaza have no shelters for refuge and nowhere to escape. In the coming days, Palestinians will be forced to bear the full brunt of Israel’s violence.
While the letter has its shortcomings, the thrust of it is completely and unarguably true, and urgently needs to be part of the roiling debate over the now-ongoing war against Gaza.2 And in any case, this is a letter, the most basic and simple form of the supposed “free speech” that the U.S. brags about.
So what happened?
PSC’s Instagram was temporarily suspended by Meta.
Harvard Computer Science professor Boaz Barak called on the University to remove the organizations’ school affiliations. The Harvard chapter of Hillel (a campus Jewish organization) denounced the letter as “anti-Semitic,” although there is not a trace of anti-Semitism in it.
2,100 “Harvard-affiliated” people had, as of Monday evening, signed statements denouncing the letter, including nationally significant Democratic and Republican politicians Rep. Ritchie J. Torres (D-N.Y.), Rep. Elise M. Stefanik (R-N.Y.), and former NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio.
To clarify their position, a PSC spokesperson wrote that it “reject[s] the accusation that our previous statement could be read as supportive of civilian deaths … To restate what should be obvious: the PSC staunchly opposes violence against civilians—Palestinian, Israeli, or other.” She also rightly noted that “It is unacceptable that Palestinians and groups supporting them are always expected to preempt their statements with condemnation of violence.”
But this did nothing to slow the growing frenzy of attacks. On Wednesday, “Billionaire hedge fund CEO Bill Ackman and several other business leaders [demanded that] Harvard University release the names of students whose organizations signed on to a letter.” Ackman “said he wanted to ensure his company and others don’t ‘inadvertently hire’ any students belonging to Harvard groups that signed the letter.”
Think about this—any student who belonged to any of the groups that signed a letter against the slaughter of Palestinians faces being blacklisted for the rest of their life!
Also on Wednesday, “A billboard truck drove near Harvard’s campus Wednesday displaying the names and photos of Harvard students whose organizations” signed the PSC statement. The banner over the photos read “Harvard’s Leading Anti-Semites.” Now not only the jobs and possible careers, but even the lives of students in any way connected with supporting Palestine were being placed under threat.
Faced with this, CNN reported that eight of the original 34 signatory organizations withdrew their support. And PSC felt compelled to remove the list of signatories from the letter, close their website to the public, and to postpone a vigil “to mourn all the civilian lives lost” that had been planned for October 10.
So let’s look at our “freedom scorecard”: the U.S. is arming and supporting “tiny” Israel which exerts armed terror (i.e., dictatorship) against millions of Palestinians in Gaza and on the West Bank, and is currently in the process of establishing fascist rule even over its Jewish opponents. And as part of doing that, the U.S. is creating a situation where other countries, including the U.S. itself could be dragged into a wider, more major and devastating war, which—to state the obvious—the masses of people are not being “consulted” on. And they are lying with straight faces about what they are doing, and why.
And if you don’t like all this and say so publicly? The system’s attitude is “Sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up or we will crush your prospects like a bug before you even get a chance to get out in the world.”
As Bob Avakian put it:
The essence of what exists in the U.S. is not democracy but capitalism-imperialism and political structures to enforce that capitalism-imperialism. What the U.S. spreads around the world is not democracy, but imperialism and political structures to enforce that imperialism. (BAsics 1:3)
Got it? Good, ’cause now is the time to fight like hell to get rid of it.
