The Students Are Right

By Jerome Roos - The Rift, May 23, 2024

It’s been quite a sight. Over the past month, students have been rising up against Western support for the Gaza war and in solidarity with the Palestinian people from California to Kyoto. They’ve had enough: no longer will they allow their governments and universities to be complicit in war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The first protest camp was set up at Columbia University in mid-April, in the historic cradle of the 1968 student protests against the Vietnam War and the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s. Since then, the demonstrations have spread across the United States. For weeks now, the same chant has been echoing through the “hallowed halls” of academia all over the country: “Disclose, divest! We will not stop, we will not rest!”

In the first week of May, the solidarity encampments crossed the Atlantic and began to spread like a wildfire through Europe as well. I was in London when the first tents went up at UCL and SOAS earlier this month. When I arrived in Cambridge for a conference a few days later, students there had just started another solidarity encampment in coordination with their peers at Oxford. Once I got back home to Amsterdam, I found students there still seething with anger over a violent police crackdown on a series of attempted encampments. Last week, students at my own university, the London School of Economics, launched an occupation as well.

The protest camps and solidarity actions have now spread to at least 247 universities worldwide. There have been demonstrations on campuses in Canada and Australia, in Mexico and Argentina, in Egypt and South Africa, in Lebanon and India, in New Zealand and Japan. What unifies them is a simple set of demands: that universities end their involvement in human rights violations by cutting ties with Israel’s system of apartheid and divesting from the military-industrial complex more generally.

For this, the students have been widely vilified. In the US, President Joe Biden sternly lectured the younger generation that “dissent must never lead to disorder”—as if a few broken windows at Columbia hurt his sensibilities more than the destruction of twelve universities, 280 government schools and 65 UNRWA-run schools in Gaza. Hillary Clinton went even further in her condescension of the students, saying that young people “don’t know very much at all about the history of the Middle East, or frankly about history in many areas of the world, including our own country.”

The situation in Europe has not been much better. In France, the regional council of Paris briefly suspended its funding to Sciences Po after accusing students there of US-style “wokisme.” In the Netherlands, far-right leader Geert Wilders interrupted the formation of his new coalition government to denounce the protesters as “antisemitic scum.” And in Britain, where university leaders have generally taken a more de-escalatory approach, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is needlessly inflaming the tensions with his repeated calls on vice-chancellors to quell the peaceful demonstrations.

Despite this widespread demonization, most students have actually been remarkably reasonable in their demands.

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Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author.