April 28, 2024
Image: Al Mayadeen
The slogans proposed these days in the demonstrations in the United States goes beyond calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and improving the living conditions of the residents of the Strip, and goes so far as to call for redrawing the world differently and imposing a new reality on the superpower that dominates it.
Perhaps it is a remarkable paradox that a single country brings together the most corrupt and destructive political systems expressing injustice, domination and interference in the destinies of peoples, although this system is actually a series of successive administrations belonging to two political parties, and a student movement that has a history of revolutionary consciousness in addressing humanitarian and political issues within and across borders.
Perhaps the relationship between the two issues is more causal than paradoxical, since the policy followed by the United States for almost a century, specifically after it alone inherited the colonial West after World War II, forces its students to be at the forefront, and gives their movement more importance than others anywhere in the world.
But this student movement, which historically has expressed itself in specific stages, from the Vietnam War to the aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq, expresses itself most clearly in the present in the face of the US-Israeli annihilation in the Gaza Strip.
The U.S. student movement in solidarity with Gaza acquires its exceptional significance from the importance of the moment and the continuing massacre that history has never witnessed, then from the intensity and its size, then from the global interaction with it in recent days, and then the awareness of the U.S. and “Israel” of its danger and then its superior ability to influence the scene.
Will the U.S. student movement change the course of the war in Gaza? Or is Gaza, as it represents today the spearhead of Palestinian rights, changing the reality on campuses in the U.S. and around the world?
From Vietnam to Gaza… an effective student movement
In the 1960s, a student movement emerged in the United States to demand “free speech” on college campuses, defend the rights of students of African descent, and demand that college curricula include content related to the history and culture of African Americans and Native Americans.
The most prominent protests occurred in 1968, when more than 1,000 students took control of the main administration building at Howard University, where African American students make up the majority of its students.
Following in the footsteps of their Howard colleagues, other students subsequently took control of buildings on their campuses to demand the cancellation of contracts linking the university to weapons research centers and the halting of plans to build gymnasiums inside public parks in locations inhabited by African Americans.
With the U.S. military’s involvement in the Vietnam War, the fight against aggression became the main focus of student protests, after huge U.S. spending on military adventures outside the borders caused a huge increase in the budget deficit and led to the deterioration of the economic situation within the country.
The great role of the student movement in the universities in confronting the Vietnam War led some to consider it one of the main reasons for ending this hostility, coming on the heels of the steadfast and fierce resistance of the Asian people.
Student protests spread from the United States to other parts of the world, led by European countries, and under multiple titles linked to the priorities and issues of each country, exactly similar to what is happening today in support of Gaza.
The Vietnam War scenario was later repeated with every U.S. military adventure outside the borders, as American universities were a starting point for student protests against the aggression in Afghanistan under the justification of responding to the September 11 attacks and eliminating Al Qaeda and its ally, the Taliban movement, and against Iraq under the pretext of searching for weapons of mass destruction.
Beyond solidarity with Gaza… a sense of responsibility
In this context, the student movement in northern universities can be understood as an extension of a consciousness of struggle that always has always had a principled position on crucial issues, which on the one hand have a global character, on all war and military adventures the US government is involved in, and on the other hand, which compels students to shout out their word on the matter.
Since the US involvement in the aggression against Gaza is no less clear than the involvement in Iraq, Afghanistan or Vietnam, the students’ coming out this time stems their feeling of their country’s responsibility for the ongoing war of genocide against the Palestinian people for 204 days, whose casualties have amounted to some 34,500 martyrs and 77,500 wounded to date.
Perhaps the significance of the current US student movement for Gaza compared to previous similar events is that it emerges after a long period of hibernation during which the so-called “free world” thought it fully succeeded in mesmerizing the new generations while creating the world it wanted.
The demands proposed today in the demonstrations in the United States goes beyond a ceasefire in Gaza and improving the living conditions of the residents of the Strip, and goes so far as to call for redrawing the world differently and imposing a new reality on the superpower that dominates it.
The Washington administration understands these facts well and approaches the demonstrations according to this understanding, which explains the use of excessive violence.
At this point, the demonstrators are accused of being anti-Semitism, an accusation that is no longer accepted worldwide because their fragility was exposed, or of demagogy and call for violence, something that also proved to be false by the participating teachers and students who repeatedly affirmed that their movement is peaceful. Not to mention the large number of student protestors who identify themselves as Jewish.
The most striking paradox is that the universities that are now at the forefront of the scene, such as Columbia and Yale, are known in U.S. academic circles as elite Houses of Higher Learning.
This is not only to deny the accusation of “demagoguery” against their students, who often come from specific classes of American society, but, on the other hand, confirms the enormity of the loss, since these institutions were preparing to graduate future tyrants, not those who rebel against them.
Suffice it to know that Columbia graduates include 30 senior officials in President Joe Biden’s administration, led by his Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, and that Yale graduates include National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, as well as Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, plus Special Presidential Envoy for Climate Affairs John Kerry and USAID Administrator Samantha Power.
Palestine is the global cause. “Al-Aqsa Flood” reshuffles the world.
Will universities in the U.S. and around the world triumph over Gaza? Or will they themselves win by supporting Palestinian law? The answers to both questions are so intertwined that it is difficult to separate them.
While recognizing that Gaza benefits from all the free voices in the world rejecting the continuation of genocide, the restoration of the student movement in the United States is one of the blessings of Gaza and its outpouring of resistance, blessings that have previously included countries and peoples in Latin America, Africa and elsewhere, and produced internal political transformations in them, or transformations in the relationship with Washington and their position on “Israel.”
Moreover, the moral exposure of the occupying entity after the epic of the Al-Aqsa Flood extended to include the West, which has always supported it, and today is forced to do so in a blatant manner, with its people waking up to reject what their powerful media machine tried to teach them.
This means that Gaza is helping the world to cleanse itself of the stain of “Israel” that marked decades of its history that began after the Nakba, in which the entity was nothing more than the spearhead of an indirect Western colonial project that is frankly Western colonialism.
After the popular movements that have sowed real fear in the hearts of the owners of this project, this time it was the turn of the student movements, as the most influential and bearers of hints of a social revolution, and from the heart of the American universities before others, which are the universities are supposed to be the showcase of the Western civilization that is intended to be exported to the world.
A civilization based on diluting valid human issues and creating a human being concerned with his or her individual achievements, pursuing the empty concept of civilization and indifferent to what is happening around him.
If the “Al-Aqsa Flood” was the most important event in the world in decades, then the “University Revolution” can be considered the most prominent event in the United States in recent years, especially since it is likely to expand and continue, and its results are still open a confirmed by experts and observers.
Source: Cuba en Resumen, taken from Al Mayadeen.