Almost 11 months after 7 October, Gaza’s Ministry of Health says Israeli attacks have killed over 40,000 Palestinians. Two-thirds of them are women and children.
Unicef claims thousands of children are dying due to starvation and lack of treatment of those who have been maimed and wounded.
According to a study published in the Lancet, the cumulative effects of Israel’s war on Gaza – due to deaths under the rubble, lack of treatment, denial of food and water – could mean that the real death toll is about 186,000!
Perhaps this is why the International Court of Justice (ICJ) declared Gaza a case of “potential genocide”!
And yet, Israel’s PM Benjamin Netanyahu was invited to address both Houses of the US Congress on 25 July. The senators and representatives applauded him repeatedly, as though he was their war hero. But he had killed mainly women and children!
Perhaps this was to be expected since all US presidents, including Joe Biden, have boasted they are staunch supporters of Zionism and the state of Israel.
When Barack Obama was President, he received Congress support to allocate some $38bn in military aid to Israel, to be spread out over a decade – about $3.8bn annually. In fact, several hundred million dollars more in ’emergency aid’ was rushed to Israel after the Hamas attacks last October.
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No doubt, the US has been an accomplice of Israel in its occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. So it is complicit in the deaths of tens of thousands and the genocide in Gaza. Sad, sad.
The only good news
Thankfully, a small silver lining has emerged in recent months amid the destruction and killings. Students in American campuses began standing up against their university administrators and political leaders.
Small groups like Jews for Peace and those advocating for solidarity with Palestine had already been active. They promoted boycott, divest and sanction (BDS) activities on campus. They asked their universities to stop investing in companies that were part of the military-industrial complex and profiting from arms sales to Israel. These groups also cancelled student exchange programmes and other joint research projects with Israeli universities.
But the stakes grew higher when Israeli forces threatened to invade Rafah in the south. This meant they were targeting the very people they had warned to flee from north and central Gaza.
This prompted students in the US to camp on their campuses, as though to say, in solidarity with the refugees, “We refuse to be moved from our camp once again.”
So, the opposition to an Israeli offensive in Rafah turned into a rallying point for many others on American campuses. The students now called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and for their university administrators to adopt BDS measures now.
Let’s talk about these protests, analyse and learn from them, and reflect on the youth’s role in history. We can draw hope from this review of the youths standing up against the ongoing genocide.
Speaking Truth to Power
My focus is more on the US than Palestine. I look at the power elites in Washington, who lecture others worldwide on freedom and justice. They talk about why the American and Western system of rules is necessary for a world of peace. They practise American exceptionalism and do-goodism, and tout the ‘good’ values Americans practise.
As this review will show, these Power elites are supported by Business, University and Media elites.
Alas, what is happening in Gaza is completely at odds with what these American elites have been preaching.
It is in this context that a group of students and youths dared to speak Truth to Power. They told these elites they had lost their moral compass, that “the emperor had no clothes”, that they were doing the exact opposite of what they had been preaching. Or, as we say in Malay, “Cakap tak serupa bikin.”
The outside world only got to hear about this youth challenge to the power elites because the student protests coincided with university “commencement” or graduation ceremonies.
Often, in the most prestigious universities, dignitaries like US political leaders, film stars and top athletes are invited to deliver the commencement speech.
These graduation exercises are a rite of passage for the youth involved – they pass from youth to adulthood, from full-time students without responsibilities in lovely campuses to wage earners earning small salaries (at least in the beginning) while saddled with large study loans.
They now have to maintain steady jobs to support their families and pay the rent or mortgage. Henceforth, they have rights and major responsibilities to family and society.
The protests were widespread, big and small, with or without encampments, in hundreds of universities throughout the US. The flashpoints were in UCLA (University of California Los Angeles) on the west coast and in Columbia and New York University.
In both places, state or city police forcibly removed students from their protest camps. Tear gas was fired. Officers with batons drawn, some riding horses as in New York, beat and arrested people.
And we witnessed all this happening in real time! For about six weeks, the mainstream media covered these protests extensively.
We also had access to these events on YouTube, TikTok, X and Instagram. Students on US campuses posted video footage of what was happening on social media. These eyewitness accounts then went viral and reached us in Malaysia and the rest of the Global South.
Biased mainstream media coverage
The mainstream media’s coverage of the conflicts on US campuses in May and early June was as bad as – if not worse than – their coverage of the genocide in Gaza. These media were completely biased and complicit!
Yes, the students had set up encampments on campuses. They were told these protests were disallowed. But they ignored such directives because they thought they had the right to protest on their own university campuses.
In the universities, they had been taught to stand up and speak out for their rights, especially in America, “the land of the free”.
In the event, they conducted themselves peacefully. Speakers conducted teach-in sessions about the Palestinian problem. The protesters sang rousing songs, shared their meals and performed skits.
Then, the Columbia University president sensed, for reasons known to herself, that the protesters were posing “a clear and present danger”. So, she called in the New York City Police, sparking an escalation of the conflict.
The police then moved in, using force to break up the encampment. They tackled, wrestled and beat up the students.
In several places like UCLA, teargas was fired, as so often happens in incidents of street violence – except that this was on campus and the students were protesting peacefully. Thousands were arrested in the hundreds of campuses.
What were the complaints against the students by the Columbia University president and other chief executives? Invariably, the university heads claimed the students were spreading “hate” because their demonstrations were anti-Israel. To these heads, this meant the protests were “antisemitic”.
Why, CNN presenter Dana Bash claimed the demonstrations had “created fear among Jewish students” who did not dare to go to campus. Without any proof or investigation, she attributed “Kill the Jews” chants to pro-Palestinian protesters.
However, social media revealed that the chants of hatred had come from counter-protesters – not the student protesters.
Bash even likened the situation in New York City in 2024 to the threats against Jews in 1930s Germany!
Another presenter, who had interviewed the leader of the Anti-Defamation League, a pro-Israeli organisation, alleged that the campus protesters were Hamas proxies, likening them to Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in south Yemen.
Clearly, the mainstream media were involved in trying to create a sense of moral panic in their reporting. They appeared to be trying to whip up popular opposition to the student protesters and attempting to justify police brutality and the intolerant decisions of the University elite.
The mainstream media also ignored or minimised Jewish students joining the protesters. Among them were Jews for Peace whose rallying cry was “Not in our name”. These Jewish groups took part in the encampments and protests and called for an immediate ceasefire.
Fortunately, the alternative social media filled in the holes in reporting. Eyewitnesses posted video clips of Naomi Klein, the Canadian writer and scholar, a Jew herself, speaking at a rally in New York, where she proudly celebrated the Passover seder with protesters, Jews and non-Jews, on a street. In her address, she objected to Zionism becoming an icon of the Jewish faith when it actually was not.
Imagine, MSNBC, a Democratic-leaning news network, compared the student protests to the 6 January 2021 riots by Donald Trump supporters which sparked mayhem at the Capitol. This was absurd!
Thanks to social media and Columbia journalism students, the public got a lot of alternative news about what was happening in New York. Placed in the eye of the storm, these trainee-journalists reported a different truth. They exposed the biased and shallow reporting of their mainstream media seniors, some of them famous globally.
In UCLA, a counter-demonstration by right-wingers took place on the night when protesters were removed by city police. These louts broke into and started pulling down tents and chasing the protesters out of their encampment. Yet no police were in sight to prevent this violence.
But when the student protesters started to resist, the police suddenly appeared and pulled down the tents.
Take a look at these videos to verify all this. Read the articles below. Get a flavour of how those in power in American were treating their own youth who dared speak Truth to Power.
For me, this event explains why the power elite have been so heartless in allowing the killing of over 40,000 people in Gaza, two-thirds of them women and children.
The problem with the coverage of the US campuses – Listening Post, Al-Jazeera
American intifada for Gaza: What we should expect – https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/05/02/american-intifada-for-gaza-what-should-we-expect/
The battle of UCLA: Inside the class struggle – https:///www.counterpunch.org/2024/05/14/the-battle-of-ucla-inside-the-class-struggle/
UIC student delivers Gaza solidarity speech
Dartmouth professor arrested – https://www.wmur.com/article/dartmouth-professor-arrest-protest-5224/60674677/
At Harvard and Dartmouth
At the commencement of Harvard College, over 1,000 students walked out in protest in support of 13 fellow students who had been arrested and disallowed from graduating – despite a majority of the faculty of arts and sciences voting for the students to have their degrees conferred. One of these students was Asmer Safi, a Rhodes scholar, put on probation for 12 months.
Shruthi Kumar, the valedictorian for English, went off script and upbraided Harvard over the university’s treatment of its students: “I am deeply disappointed by the intolerance for freedom of speech and the right to civil disobedience on campus.
“The students had spoken. The faculty had spoken…. Harvard, are you listening?”
At Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire (where I completed my undergraduate studies 50 years ago), state police also broke up an encampment.
The new president of this Ivy League college had invited state troopers to enter campus to break up the encampment, to “prevent them [the protesters] from denying rights to others”.
According to Prof Annelise Orleck, a 60-year-old who heads the Jewish studies programme and is herself a Jew, the protest was peaceful until police in riot gear arrived. Orleck was tackled to the ground by a police officer and arrested when she and other faculty member tried to protect her students from riot police. Given her bail conditions, she wondered how she would be able to continue teaching her course!
Contradictions made evident
All these acts of violence and bullying against peaceful youths on US campuses can be likened to the climax of a drama or movie, when conflict erupts and the contradictions in that drama are revealed.
In this case, we have the Political Elite, the administrators of the top Universities and the Media bosses on one side. They are lined up in support of the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestine, the genocide in Gaza and the military aid to Israel.
On the other side are the students who have called for an immediate ceasefire, no entry into Rafah, freedom and a state for the Palestinians. They are calling for Life and Hope and a future for all the children of Palestine.
For me, this confrontation on American campuses, together with the elite’s support for Israel, reveals how biased, how unjust, how authoritarian and how hypocritical the US power elite is.
It completely shatters the image of the US as the defender of free speech, of justice, of the so-called “rules-based global order”. This hidden contradiction has also been revealed in the drama that erupted on American campuses.
It’s reassuring to know that youth in the US still possess a sense of justice and compassion, of what is right and wrong – indeed, a soul. Journalism students managed their student newspapers and used the internet to publish reports that challenged the mainstream media’s narrative. All power to them! They acted like Al Jazeera and the citizen journalists in Gaza (over 100 of them now killed).
Perhaps even more endearing was the sight of young Jewish men and women in the US, standing up against Israeli Zionism, which has propped up the Israeli regime and triggered the genocide.
Do not for a moment allow yourself to be influenced by the pro-Israeli lobby, or the American Power Elite, who have labelled these young people as “self-hating Jews”. In fact, they are heroes and heroines!
Not the first time
This is not the first that the youth on campuses have stood up for Justice and Truth.
The student protests took me back some 50 years ago when, with fellow students, I learnt about the evils of war, about the American military-industrial complex, about US imperialism – not only in Southeast Asia but elsewhere in the world too.
Suddenly awakened, we came out to protest the war in Vietnam. Back then, students in hundreds of campuses throughout the US protested the occupation of Vietnam, followed by the invasion of Laos and escalation in Cambodia. Planes rained bombs on the Indo-Chinese unceasingly – not just with the usual TNT but with napalm and Agent Orange.
But there is one key difference between then and now.
Back then, American youths were drafted into the army. My classmates were among those sent to Vietnam – some of them never returned.
Today, there is no longer a draft. The US has a volunteer military instead. Nowadays, the army is made up of poor youths, many of them African Americans and Latinos.
The 2024 protests took place despite American youth not being sent to fight in Gaza. Rather, the young protesters were moved by their inner sense of humanity.
Another occasion when American campuses sprung alive with protests was in the 1980s, when the youth became increasingly aware of the evils of apartheid in South Africa. The US and its Western allies were the last to withdraw support for the apartheid regime. So, young people rallied behind the struggles of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu for a rainbow nation to replace apartheid South Africa.
Today, South Africa stands out as the country that has taken Israel to the International Court of Justice – and for good reason too. South Africans have experienced apartheid firsthand and it is crystal clear to them that Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank amounts to the same.
In past decades, the eco-socialist-feminist movement also captured the imagination of the youth on campus. This is a topic for another occasion.
Francis Loh
Co-editor, Aliran newsletter
30 August 2024
This piece was first presented at a webinar “Unpacking the Gaza Invasion” organised by the International Movement of Catholic Students (IMCS) held on 19 July.
The others speakers were Rev Dr Mitri Raheb, a distinguished Palestinian Christian based in Bethlehem who he spoke on the settler-colony of Israel; Sr Immaculate Muthoni, who spoke on the ICJ’s case against Israel; and Anil Netto, Aliran president, who spoke on the Catholic Church’s stance on the Israel-Palestinian Conflict.
- Tegakkan maruah serta kualiti kehidupan rakyat
- Galakkan pembangunan saksama, lestari serta tangani krisis alam sekitar
- Raikan kerencaman dan keterangkuman
- Selamatkan demokrasi dan angkatkan keluhuran undang-undang
- Lawan rasuah dan kronisme
For a change, there must be protests all over the world against the civil war in Sudan and the Ukraine war too.
Thousands have been killed in the civil war in Sudan and the situation there is as dire as Gaza.
Same too with Ukraine where the indiscriminate bombings by Russia has killed thousands of Ukrainians. Even children’s hospitals have not been spared.
Please be fair in your coverage.