Two major stories have unfolded in the past week, both relating to Palestine. One story has spread like wildfire, dominating headlines, capturing the attention of elected officials, and leading to dozens of arrests and increasing outrage across the country. The other story involves the discovery of multiple mass graves in Gaza. As the attention of many Americans is naturally drawn to the ongoing campus protests and the disproportionate police crackdowns involved, it’s important to remember that our attention should instead remain directed at the source of all this conflict.
As mentioned last week, at university campuses across the country and indeed around the world, students and workers continue to establish their individual shows of solidarity with Gaza. After Columbia University helped publicize the efforts, schools including Harvard, Princeton, Yale, UT Austin, UCLA, USC, UNC and MIT (among many, many others) have established encampments demonstrating their opposition to the institutional funding and normalization of an active genocide.
At Emory University, activists and students came together to clearly and unequivocally demand that the university disclose and divest its endowment from anything benefiting the apartheid state, and the response from the university was swift and chilling. Police swept through like a drunken mob, assaulting students and causing mayhem. Caroline Fohlin, a professor of economics at Emory, was seen on video being thrown to the ground and handcuffed by a local police officer for expressing her concern at the violent arrest of another protester on campus. Fohlin was subsequently jailed for 11 hours and charged with battery against a police officer. You can watch her arrest and judge for yourself.
At the University of Texas in Austin, protesters were met with police in riot gear, with dozens of students being detained by the pigs. It would appear that Texas law enforcement officers can’t be bothered to muster up any courage when there’s an active shooter in an elementary school, but when given the green light to assault and arrest nonviolent student protesters, suddenly these cowards think they’re Rambo. The 57 students that were arrested on campus all had their charges subsequently dropped, which is both a relief and an ominous example of exactly how protests will continue to be policed in the future.
At Virginia Tech, campus and local police worked together to crack the case of the protesting assistant professor, arresting Dr. Bikrum Gill, who teaches political science. Gill was taken in for peacefully standing in solidarity with students demanding the divestment of the universities funds from corporations supporting the genocide in Gaza. He has written the following in his analysis of the context of Palestinian resistance:
“Unable to defeat the Palestinian armed resistance in successive battles, Israel has turned instead to intensifying its genocidal violence against unarmed Palestinians as the means to restore its necessary equation of material and ideological force. There are, thus, two logics of war at play in Palestine today: the logic of a war of liberation versus the logic of a colonial war of genocide.”
-Bikrum Gill, Two Logics of War: Liberation Against Genocide
At Arizona State University, police collaborated with some frat boys to clear out the solidarity camp that had been set up on campus. In this instance they enlist the assistance of unsympathetic members of the campus community to do their dirty work. With each growing protest, the fascist police response has only grown in its fervor and brutality. But while these campus protests have been dominating the headlines, the devastation in Gaza continues day after day.
Disturbing reports continue to emerge about multiple mass graves in Gaza, in which some Palestinian victims were reportedly found stripped naked with their hands tied. Hospital patients were found naked with catheters and IV’s still attached, and doctors still wearing their scrubs and surgical gloves with their hands zip-tied and shot in the head. These development follow the recovery of hundreds of bodies “buried deep in the ground and covered with waste” at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. Another grave was discovered near Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City in the north. A total of 283 bodies were recovered at Nasser Hospital, of which 42 were identified.
“Among the deceased were allegedly older people, women and wounded, while others were found tied with their hands…tied and stripped of their clothes.”
Ravina Shamdasani, spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights
There is no shortage of horrifying updates as this genocide creeps closer to its seventh month. Shaimaa, the eldest daughter of the beloved and recently-murdered Palestinian poet and academic Refaat Alareer was also recently murdered along with her husband, engineer Mohammed Abdel Aziz Siyam, and their newborn baby Abdul Rahman. The family was targeted in their apartment and killed in an airstrike from the apartheid state, a devastatingly familiar method of execution. The defenders of apartheid assassinated the author of a poem about a form of political immortality, and then they assassinated the person he addressed the poem to, along with an entire branch of his family tree.
The Nation published this extraordinary story of a 14-year-old named Lujayn in Khan Younis, and what happened when the occupying Israeli military came to destroy her house. I’ll give you a hint, dear reader, it’s nothing good.
It’s easy to forget, amid all this violence and repression, that we are also living in a time of unimaginable courage. Many of these college students are risking their academic futures by daring to speak out for their beliefs. There are countless stories of brave faculty and school administrators stepping up and putting their bodies on the line to defend their students, risking personal injury as well as professional repercussions. It’s equally important to seek out and recognize these instances of bravery to find hope anywhere we can. For example, enjoy this video of an adorable little Palestinian child celebrating his birthday in a refugee camp, finding joy wherever possible. Keep showing up and speaking out my pals. Don’t give up hope.