It has been an intense few weeks on college and university campuses. Courageous students across the world have been so moved by the news of an ongoing genocide against Palestinians they have set up solidarity encampments on 174 campuses, a number that keeps growing. Across all these encampments, faculty have (mostly) stood with students. Where I teach, at CUNY, the chant has been: “If you want to get to students, you have to go through us!” Some faculty have been arrested, assaulted by police, and harassed, but it is the students who are taking the biggest risks in these protests.
This is no abstraction. Students in these encampments are responding to the very real suffering of Palestinians - - horrific images of children buried in rubble, of entire families wiped out, of military drones that play the sounds of babies crying to lure people outside and then assassinate them. One story, the story of Hind Rabab, a six-year-old Palestinian girl, has come to symbolize the specific kind of cruelty of the Israeli military. Hind was from the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood in Gaza City. She escaped a bombing along with six of her relatives. Then they were all killed in a car bombing but she survived for days afterward. Little Hind was surrounded by the dead bodies of her family as rescuers looked for her. In a phone call with emergency dispatchers, you can hear her little girl voice saying, "I'm so scared, please come. Come take me. Please, will you come?" Rescuers were unable to reach Hind in time, and she too was killed by Israeli forces.
This is why the students at Columbia University renamed the building they took over “Hinds Hall,” and why the Macklemore anthem has the same name (no apostrophe, not sure why). I did not have this white boy rapper coming out with the movement anthem on my bingo card but he delivered a song that we needed:
Actors in badges protecting property
And a system that was designed by white supremacy (Brrt)
But the people are in the streets
You can pay off Meta, you can't pay off me
Politicians who serve by any means
AIPAC, CUFI, and all the companies
You see, we sell fear around the land of the free
But this generation here is about to cut the strings
You can ban TikTok, take us out the algorithm
But it's too late, we've seen the truth, we bear witness
Seen the rubble, the buildings, the mothers and the children
And all the men that you murdered and then we see how you spin it
Who gets the right to defend and who gets the right of resistance
Has always been about dollars and the color of your pigment, but
White supremacy is finally on blast
Screamin' "Free Palestine" 'til they're home at last.
Like the students protesting against the Vietnam War, the students in this movement are clear about their goal of stopping the U.S. funding of this genocide. College students in this generation, in part because they have been raised on active shooter drills and are coming of age in a world without much opportunity for them and a planet that is on fire, are clear about who is funding this genocide. It is us, the U.S., and they are not having any of the mythologies my generation was raised on, of American exceptionalism or of Israel as the “only democracy in the Middle East.” What is plain to see, is that Israel is, like the U.S., a settler colonial state propped up by our government to protect “our interests in the region” (mainly fossil fuels).
If you’re not familiar, AIPAC is a pro-Israel lobbying group that makes large donations to U.S. Senators to make sure that they stay in line with the apartheid regime. Once you see who their biggest recipients are, lots of things in the political landscape become clearer (source: Open Secrets).
The students in the movement for a free Palestine are clear about this taking it directly to President Biden who, just yesterday, explained what’s happening as “driven by an ancient desire to wipe out the Jewish people off the face of the earth.” This is blatant Islamophobia from a sitting president and I find it disgusting. But this kind of rhetoric is no longer working on younger generations who grew up in the shadow of post-9/11 Islamophobia.
It is as if the old paradigm of pro-U.S., pro-Israel, pro-government propaganda is breaking down before our eyes. Some people, and I have to say, mostly people of my generation and older, are confused. I think I know why.
We’re at the stage of this thing where if you tell me your views on Palestine, I can tell you where you get your news. A friend and I were chatting yesterday about someone else’s views on the genocide, and when I asked, “Where is she on this?” my friend simply raised her eyebrows, leaned in, and said, “She only reads the New York Times.” “Ah-ha,” I understood immediately the extra work my friend had to do.
There is extra work involved to get someone out of what I’ve come to call the Mainstream News Delusion. The genocide in Palestine has coincided with a very real collapse in journalism, and a series of revelations about how the NYT, NPR, CNN and MSNBC are in the bag for Israel. This is difficult to hear, especially for some of my aging, queer friends who have been so cathected with Rachel Maddow (and her ilk) that they cannot imagine a world beyond white liberalism.
I saw this when, at a political meeting about Project 2025, a younger queer person stood up and said, “I can’t vote for Biden. I won’t survive.” The older gays in the room listened politely, but later said to me some version of, “Oh, they just need to grow up and vote blue, no matter who” (very similar to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s response when asked about people who are upset about the two presidential candidates on offer in 2024: “Get over yourself.”)
I’ve said this before but it bears repeating: something like 70% of 18-to-34 year olds are not voting for Biden. And before you say the orange guy is worse, I’m gonna stop you right there and ask, For whom? Hind and her family would like a word. This is Macklemore (I know, I can’t believe it either) again:
Destroyin' every college in Gaza and every mosque
Pushin' everyone into Rafah and droppin' bombs
The blood is on your hands, Biden, we can see it all
And fuck no, I'm not voting for you in the fall (Woo)
Undecided, you can't twist the truth, the people out here united
Never be defeated when freedom's on the horizon
Yet the music industry's quiet, complicit in their platform of silence (Hey, woo)
I'm more than heartened by the student protests and encampments, I am grateful to these brave students for their leadership and showing us what’s possible. At the same time, I’m appalled, outraged, angry-as-hell about the police state being sicced on students by college administrators. What I’m also angry at is the disinformation, which makes it almost impossible to find an accurate account of what’s happening on campuses. When I searched to find information the day after police raids on New York-area campuses last Tuesday, ALL the first page of results with headlines had a copaganda lie about outside agitators.
The other set of facts it is hard to find online now is that our precious CUNY students - more likely from immigrant and working-class backgrounds than students across town at Columbia or NYU — got detained longer after arrest and received more serious charges (felonies!) than their counterparts at other campuses.
So, if you’re still supporting Israel, if you still think Israel “has a right to exist and defend itself” and you think the protestors on college campuses are really “outside agitators,” if you didn’t know about Hind Rabab, then I have to ask you: Are you in a filter bubble? It might be time to reassess where you’re getting your information and how you might divest from systems that oppress all of us.