On Friday, I spoke to author and activist Ashley Dawson. Like me, Dawson is a professor at the City University of New York, which has a bunch of campuses around NYC. Unlike me, he had been to the Gaza war protest encampment at the City College of New York, which is a CUNY school. The encampments have sprung up at universities around the country (and the world) as part of an outcry against Israel's massacre of civilians in its war on Gaza, as well against the United States's role in funding that massacre.
What Dawson described to me at CCNY sounded very much like the set-up at Occupy Wall Street, the protest that took up residence on a block in Lower Manhattan in Fall of 2011 and was beloved and supported across the board on the American left. He said of CCNY, "The encampment was a pretty amazing space. There were upwards of 40 tents, which included not just places for people to sleep but also a large and well-stocked people's kitchen, a people's library, and a medical clinic."
In fact, at this college, the primary activity at the camp seems to have been, well, education. Dawson saw speakers talking about their personal stories, as well as their own insights on Palestine and Israel. He said there were speakers who are professors and students, including Jewish speakers (and that one of the most radical groups was an anti-Zionist ultra-orthodox Jewish organization, which, yes, does exist). As befits a protest movement, there were calm voices and angry voices, defiant voices and compromising voices. There were voices who want a two-state solution and voices who want one state with Palestinians and Israelis living together equally. Of course there was a diversity of opinions. That's the way this goes. Every movement has extremists, too, on every side, and sometimes you hear from them. Welcome to the political world.
Dawson didn't see any signs or hear any speech that could be considered antisemitic, except for what you may think about the slogan "From the river to the sea." I know that phrase has been called "hate speech" by people who need something to condemn, but its meaning is really context specific. What do I mean by that? For example, when a group of people chant, "USA! USA!" how you hear that, as pride or a threat, maybe, depends on the circumstances and you. What Dawson did see, and what has been erased by much of the media, were the number of Jewish students and others who were at the encampment and support the Palestinian people. As a Jewish student from Columbia told Democracy Now!, "I think it’s really important to recognize that there is a large anti-Zionist Jewish voice on campus."
This doesn't excuse incidents of antisemitism that have occurred on campuses since the war's start last year, but it also doesn't even get into the anti-Muslim hate speech that has been directed at the protesters.
Like me, Dawson doesn't believe the official accounts of why the encampment at CCNY was raided. What he saw was a peaceful protest with students who wanted to engage with their administrators about the direction of CUNY. If there were "outsiders" at CCNY, as media reports keep parroting the NYPD in saying, they included alumni and people from other CUNY schools, said Dawson. So, yeah, technically, they weren't members of the college itself, but CCNY is part of the landscape of Harlem, which is way up in Manhattan. Like all of CUNY, it's for students from working class families, many of whom work and have families themselves (so keep your remarks about privileged college kids to yourself). And it's also for the communities where the schools are. Community members are welcomed on the campuses for all kinds of events. Why not protests?
Over at Columbia University down the street, a school spokesperson said some of those arrested were "non-affiliates," which means not students or employees, which still leaves a ton of people affiliated with Columbia who could have been there. Or maybe journalists and a grandmother. One other thing: The NYPD didn't say how many people were arrested outside CCNY during its raid of the encampment late Tuesday night. So those outsiders might have literally been outside.
I'm not going to get into what I agree and disagree with on all of the demands of the students at CCNY and elsewhere, many of which are fairly specific to their schools. I've been pretty clear about my opposition to Israel's savage retaliation against Gaza for the horrific attack by Hamas on Israel. There should be a cease fire and withdrawal. And I was part of the movement to divest colleges from South Africa in the late 1980s. I have nothing but contempt for the transformation of schools into capitalist machines, and back then I had righteous anger about my tuition money supporting apartheid in even the tiniest way.
But I will say that the response to the protests by leaders at the school and in government at various levels has been, across the board, enraging. I can get into the heavy-handed approach taken at New York City schools, at Columbia, at the New School, and at CCNY. You wanna know why things got crazy? It's simple: Escalation by the administrators and police inside and outside the universities blew this up. The first police raid at Columbia was on April 18, and that was done to crush the movement that was growing there in defiance of a ban on political demonstrations on campus. This oppressive action was an electric jolt to a movement that was starting, and that's when you saw the surge in encampments, almost all of which were peaceful, even if they were against school policies (I mean, that's what civil disobedience is, which has a long tradition in America, going back to, oh, hell, let's say the Boston Tea Party). But they were also on guard against police action and against pro-Israel groups on the campuses, which is going to lead to cautious, if not a little paranoid behavior when confronted.
Things could have been handled differently in so many cases. At Brown University, administrators negotiated an end to the encampment by agreeing to some of the demands, including a vote on divestment of the school from companies with ties to Israel. At the University of Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia police and district attorney have said that they don't want to get involved unless there is a real threat. At Northwestern, an agreement between the protesters and the university allows for protests but ends the encampment, an action that led to immediate condemnation by pro-Israel groups, calling on the president of NU to resign. Free speech is supposed to lead to more speech. Even if you hate the speech, you allow the speech, as long as direct violence is not being called for (like, say, "Kill all [name a group]").
Of course, things can also go the way of UCLA, where pro-Israel counter-demonstrators attacked the encampment and police watched for hours before finally intervening with a ludicrous amount of force.
There's so much more to say here, and I'll be saying it. But let me end with this: I keep hearing people on the left condemning the encampments, infantilizing the students, wondering, "Why this? Why now?"
I dunno. Maybe if you lived your entire life during a period where the so-called adults did fuck-all about the climate crisis and ensuring that the planet continues to exist, maybe if you watched as the country slid backwards on civil rights for non-whites and for LGBTQ people and for women, maybe if your introduction to politics was a presidency that was so incompetent and vile that it allowed a global pandemic to fuck up the world and your life, maybe if you marched because you wanted the police to stop murdering Black people and the only response was more oppression by the police, maybe if you've been told you have to get a university education to get anywhere in this world but the only way to do that is to go deeply into debt, maybe if you've come out of a public education system that has been contorted away from learning and only gives a shit about outcomes assessments related to how well you take a fucking test, maybe if you are told you're not allowed to learn about the racist history of the country or the complicated nature of gender and sexuality, maybe if you watch as the richest country in the world can't come up with a way to get health care and food and homes to the needy, maybe the final fucking straw might be knowing that, instead of providing health care and food and homes, not only is your fucking government providing most of the weapons for a war that if it isn't genocide is sure as fuck genocide-adjacent, but the school you're going into a lifetime of debt to attend is also, directly or indirectly, using the money you are borrowing to fund the foreign country that is slaughtering women and children by the tens of thousands, and then when you protest this, finally, at last, when you say, "Enough!" and you put your voice and your future on the line, which is more than the so-called "adults" are willing to do for you, you're called "hateful" even though you're the one who wants the killing of children to stop and your groups are banned and your speech is silenced and you're threatened with expulsion and you're doxxed by assholes and you're beaten and arrested and so that all those nice things that you were taught about freedom in this alleged land of the free by the so-called "adults" is bullshit. Yeah, maybe you'd be fucking done, too, and ready to go to the wall on one goddamn thing.
(Note: If it's not the thing you'd like the students to go to the wall on, if you're saying, "Why not abortion rights?" or "Why not Ukraine?" or whatever you support, well, that's on you. You start the movement. They're doing this.)
(Note 2: It shouldn't matter, but I feel I always need to say that I'm Jewish when I write this stuff. I had family die at Auschwitz. It's a card I am forced to play to fend off accusations of antisemitism.)
