Colorful sprays of ripstop nylon tents are arrayed across verdant university quads the country over. These “liberated zones” are buttressed by Palestinian flags and handwritten signs calling for the end to genocide, while others bear a grim count of the war dead. Anywhere between 36 to 40 thousand* Palestinians, the vast majority women and children, decompose under chalky rubble or have been blown apart in targeted strikes against mass tent camps. Included in this count are those that were zip tied, summarily executed and then casually tossed into mass graves after the latest Israeli assault on Al Shifa Medical Complex. Medical workers, pre-pubescent youth and immobilized patients all served as machine-gun fodder.

At a time when 60% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, those same paltry earnings are captured and bled for taxes before being released to workers. A large portion of those taxes are then routed to Israel, a foreign ethnostate engaged in perpetual aggression against its indigenous neighbors. While Americans anxiously scrutinize spiraling grocery prices, billions of greenbacks are funneled toward the purchase of weapons systems to be deployed in the restive streets of Gaza. Why? Because Israel has the right, nay the obligation, to defend itself against the savage natives. The Zionists are the good guys in a decrepit barrio. They are the sword in the darkness. These are the lies that form the connective tissue of America’s diseased fealty to the Zionist project.

Exhausted and disgusted by the United States’ complicity in the world’s first live-streamed genocide, university students have rejected the political legerdemain engulfing Capitol Hill. Politicos are snatching the scalps of university presidents in a series of bizarre public hearings on antisemitism in academia. The hearings are a way to police speech and smother college liberation movement behind the smokescreen of “protecting Jewish students.” Never mind that many Jewish students stand in solidarity with the call for a Free Palestine. Nationally televised inquests on specious allegations of campus antisemitism and the resulting high-level resignations are evocative of medieval public executions. Representative Elise Stefanik and her Republican wolf pack use the hearings to create a public spectacle about the consequences of politically inconvenient campus speech. The obvious intent is to discourage Americans from questioning the moral legitimacy of a state that murders the native civilian population by the tens of thousands.

The hoi polloi, primed by Fox News to demand a sacrifice amongst the elites, are temporarily sated with each resignation letter released to the press. The hearings are designed to make slogans like “Free Palestine” badspeak. Americans like to delude ourselves into believing that we’re for free speech. But who actually gets to speak without a price? As children we are drilled in the mythology of the common man and his soap box. We are reminded in our entry-level history courses of the American ethos of free inquiry. In the land of the free, even the lowliest man may stand upon his splintered soap box and beseech the public to his cause. Post-October 7^th, such juvenile notions have been obliterated at institutions as disparate as UCLA, Ohio State, and Columbia.

Student activists, facing pro-Israel attackers, snipers and a militarized police force, continue to be brutally dragged into the very adult reality that speech and action for the cause of freedom is a treacherous battlefield. The criminalization of student-led dissent, and it’s violent suppression, runs like a radioactive throughline in American history. Our social media-bred micro attention spans have handicapped our sense of the past as prologue. Let it not be forgotten that in the ’60s Black youth in the South faced down powerful fire hoses and frenetic police dogs when peacefully agitating for civil rights. A decade later in 1970, four students at Kent State were massacred for calling for an end to the war in Vietnam. Another theme present in the history and culture of campus resistance is students’ willingness to reject the facade of safety and put their bodies on the line to illuminate the stakes of remaining silent in the face of bald injustice.

This is not a thesis or tense debate in oak paneled lecture halls. Instead, these protestors have offered their bodies up to radically transform spaces designed for inquiry into the arena of action. Lush courtyards endowed by millionaires have been seized and transformed into a theater for grassroots activism. The protests for a free Palestine have been a study in collective organizing, small d democratic mores and mutual aid. The absence of a charismatic (typically male) leader seems to have broken with a historical pattern weaved into the history of 20^th century American protest politics. This current wave of activism with decentralized leadership is an outgrowth of a more recent organizing logic observed during the Occupy Movement and Black Lives Matter. This decentralization has obviated the ability of Israel’s allies to target a putative figurehead for co-optation and/or suppression.

Did you know there are no universities left in Gaza? Israel is continuing to enact a systematic scholasticide to cripple the prospects of those Gazans that remain after IOF withdraws from the strip. We must always remain cognizant of the international linkages often found in systems of oppression. Israel responds to Palestinian resistance by destroying centers of education and advancement. American university administrations respond to campus resistance by banning students and cancelling commencement services. The outcomes, in both Palestine and America, are largely the same. Access to the socioeconomic benefits of higher education is revoked for those that dare to put their bodies on the line and resist. Although American universities still stand, disciplinary actions, arrests, and revocation of access has obvious deleterious effects on students’ future. Their prospects are arbitrarily constrained because they dared hold institutions to the challenge of freedom.

Another linkage can be witnessed in the overwhelming police response to activists populating campus lawns. Keffiyehs and Palestinian flags have apparently presented such a threat that militarized local police outfits swarm encampments and inject thunderheads of violence into clusters of restive liberal arts majors. Unarmed professors that dared stand guard in an effort to protect their charges were singled out for particularly brutal assaults. In one example, a 65 year old professor based in St. Louis was attacked so brutally by officers that he was hospitalized with 9 broken ribs. Similarly, in Gaza and the West Bank, the IOF routinely carries out violent raids, random stops and assaults against unarmed Palestinians as a prelude to mass arrests. Men and women are spirited to secret facilities where they are tortured, denied legal representation and held without charge. Israel says the objective is to root out those with terrorist ties. Although the pretext doesn’t really matter. The state uses its monopoly on violence to snuff out the embers of resistance.

The ideal outcome of a world-class American education would be for alumni to expeditiously move from theory to praxis. The quad is the symbolic forum for those toddler-like steps into a self-actualized movement. A place to refine one’s politics, clash against divergent stances and fortify the will to stand ten toes down against the inevitable backlash politics and attempts at retrenchment. At least that’s the dream. The reality is more abstract. The reality is that an undercurrent of hysteria about real and imagined instances of antisemitism has been stoked into a fever pitch.

Thoughtful, historically informed critique of Israel’s history of settler colonialism and it’s natural outgrowth, Zionism, has been deemed a third-rail in our campus political discourse. Students highlighting the atrocities in Gaza have been doxxed and otherwise tarred as “terrorist sympathizers”. In service of cynical political expediency, organizations aligned with the Israeli lobby have thrust Jewish students into the foreground as victims of woke university administrations that remain obstinate in their unwillingness to protect the feelings of Jewish and Israeli students on campus. In this uniquely American moment, the speech of students and faculty are constantly calibrated against a standard that equates impassioned critique of Israel with antisemitism. The intent is to cast a weighty pall on collective movement to support Palestinians. The message: shut the fuck up or we’ll come for your degree and if you already have it, kiss your career goodbye asshole!

One final linkage. The Gazans buried alive under the rubble can’t breathe and can’t speak. Students standing in radical solidarity with Palestine across the United States are in a dog fight against states’ and college administrators’ attempt at silencing their chants for liberation. Institutions may achieve pyrrhic victories here and there, but the word will continue to be passed.

Stakes is high.

Track List

• American Requiem (Beyonce)
• Levels (BigXTha Plug)
• Backseat Freestyle (Kendrick Lamar)
• No Love Dubplate (Queen Omega & Little Lion Sound)
• Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst (Kendrick Lamar)
• Killa Mode (Westside Boogie)