Meet Students at 4 Colleges Where Gaza Protests Win Concessions, Incl. Considering Israel Divestment
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
MAY 08, 2024
As students around the country set up Gaza solidarity encampments on their campuses, many universities have called in police who have arrested students and dismantled the sites. But students at a number of colleges have managed to negotiate agreements where administrators have acceded to some of their demands, including considering divestment from Israel. We speak with four students who have been involved in pro-Palestine protests on campuses at Middlebury College in Vermont, Evergreen College in Washington state, Brown University in Rhode Island and Rutgers in New Jersey.
“Being an American complicit in this and being a student at an institution complicit in this genocide directly, I couldn’t imagine standing by and not acting,” says Duncan Kreps, who is graduating from Middlebury.
Aseel, a Palestinian student at Rutgers who is only using her first name out of safety concerns, tells Democracy Now! that nearly 100 of her relatives have been killed in Israel’s assault on Gaza. “The Gaza that I once knew is essentially gone, but I am more than confident, along with my family, that we will return and that we will rebuild it,” she says.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: College campuses around the world have ignited in a global uprising of students protesting Israel’s assault on Gaza. From New York to Berlin, San Francisco to Sydney, students have set up Gaza solidarity encampments to call for a ceasefire and to demand that their schools disclose and divest from companies with ties to Israel.
Many universities have responded by calling the police onto their campuses to violently break up the encampments. In the U.S. alone, over 2,000 students, faculty and supporters have been arrested at dozens of universities over the past three weeks.
But as the campus crackdowns continue, students at a number of universities have managed to negotiate agreements where administrators have acceded to some of the protesters’ demands. One of the first was Pitzer College in California on April 1st.
Today we’re joined by students from four universities where school administrations have agreed to a number of key demands, such as publicly calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and exploring divestment from Israel.
At Brown University, which came to an agreement last week, we’re joined by Rafi Ash, a sophomore majoring in urban studies, part of Brown Jews for a Ceasefire Now and Brown Divest Coalition. He’s joining us from Providence, Rhode Island.
At Middlebury College, which struck a deal on Sunday, we’re joined by Duncan Kreps, a graduating senior at Middlebury, where he’s majoring in mathematics. He was part of the pro-Palestinian Middlebury solidarity encampment, and he joins us from Middlebury, Vermont.
At Evergreen State College in Washington, which came to an agreement last week, we’re joined by Alex Marshall, a third-year student, joining us from Olympia. Evergreen is the alma mater of Rachel Corrie, the American peace activist killed by an Israeli military bulldozer in Gaza March 16th, 2003.
And at Rutgers University in New Jersey, we’re joined by Aseel, a Palestinian student at Rutgers who has family in Gaza. She’s part of Students for Justice in Palestine.
We welcome you all to Democracy Now! Let’s begin at Brown. Rafi Ash, you are a sophomore in urban studies at Brown. Can you talk about the encampment that was set up and then what ensued?
RAFI ASH: Yeah. So, we set up an encampment last — two weeks ago at this point, and our encampment was on the Main Green, our central quad on campus. And we set up for seven days. And while the administration raised its disciplinary threats over the course of those days, that really did not, you know, sway students. And as the administration was trying to start setup for commencement, the pressure grew on them to actually begin to, you know, either force us out or come to the table. And we were able to force them to the table on Monday of last week, and that led to a multiday negotiations process.
And, you know, I think these negotiations didn’t really seem like a possibility before these encampments began, but through them, we were able to actually push to force a vote on divestment, and that’s a vote that’s never happened before at Brown, and that’s something that we’ve been pushing for for a long time, that our Board of Corporation will first have a more informational session on divestment without a vote, but then followed by, at the meeting after, a guaranteed vote. And, you know, that’s not the end of the story. We still have so much more work to do, and we need to make sure that that vote is a yes for divestment. But that was a huge step that came out of an escalatory encampment.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, a while ago, there were a number of arrests on campus. There were protests after Hisham Awartani, who is the Brown student who was shot in Burlington, Vermont, when he and two of his best friends from the Friends Academy in Ramallah, who had come to the United States to go to college, where their families thought it was safer, was shot by a white man off his porch when they were taking a walk on the way to his grandmother’s house. Hisham is now paralyzed. Can you talk about what happened after that and the number of arrests that took place and the administration’s response to that? And are there — the quashing of those charges also a part of this discussion with the administration?
RAFI ASH: Yeah. So, we had, last semester, 61 arrests on campus, 20 of them in early November, before the shooting, and then another 41 in the weeks after Hisham’s shooting. And I think there’s a — it brings it very personal and directly to home that the violence against Palestinians is — that our university is currently complicit in through its endowment. Yes, that affects — that is not only affecting Palestinians in Palestine, but it also incites violence against Palestinians here and against Brown’s own Palestinian students.
AMY GOODMAN: So, at this —
RAFI ASH: And —
AMY GOODMAN: Go ahead.
RAFI ASH: Well, that this makes it very, very personal and very essential to so many Brown students to stand up against the administration’s violence.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring Duncan Kreps into the conversation, a senior at Middlebury College at Middlebury, Vermont. Duncan, talk about setting up the encampment and what happened next.
DUNCAN KREPS: Yeah. We set up our encampment, I guess, early morning two Sundays ago and then started engaging with the administration on Tuesday of that following week and had negotiations from there. I think a notable part of our experience is the atmosphere of relative calm that we existed in. We didn’t experience the counterprotests of many other college campuses, and also our administration decided to not send the police in on students, which we want to clarify we believe is the bare minimum for any administrative response to student activism and free speech.
AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about the demands in the negotiations and who is on the team, on both sides, administration and students.
DUNCAN KREPS: Yeah. We met with the four administrators, consistently, representing kind of different aspects of the institution, and then we sent a rotating team of students to kind of spread the burden of those negotiations and also to ensure that various voices are being heard in that room. But all decisions were brought back to the camp and made as a collective.
AMY GOODMAN: And the students took down the encampment?
DUNCAN KREPS: I’m sorry?
AMY GOODMAN: The students took down the encampment?
DUNCAN KREPS: Yes. So, we voted to accept an agreement, after six rounds of negotiations, that came down on Monday, in exchange for significant progress on all five demands. Our administration agreed to call for a ceasefire. And we also made progress on divestment.
The decision to bring down the encampment was a strategic one. We believed that we could assign resources in other ways to continue to put pressure, especially on divestment, and hold the administration accountable to their comments. And we now look towards an upcoming Board of Trustees meeting where divestment will be discussed.
AMY GOODMAN: Why do you care about this issue, Duncan? You’re a graduating math senior at Middlebury College in Vermont.
DUNCAN KREPS: Yeah, I don’t know how I couldn’t. I mean, we see what’s happening. We see the invasion of Rafah happening before our eyes. This feels like the — in many ways, the most horrific thing I’ve seen happen in my lifetime. And being an American complicit in this and being a student at an institution complicit in this genocide directly, I couldn’t imagine standing by and not acting.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to Alex Marshall, who’s across the country, a third-year student at Evergreen State College. Now, Evergreen State College is in Olympia, Washington. It’s the home city of the parents of Rachel Corrie. In fact, it’s the alma mater of Rachel Corrie. She was set to graduate from Evergreen in 2003 and went to Gaza and stood in front of a pharmacist’s home as an Israeli bulldozer was moving in to demolish it, and she was crushed to death by that bulldozer. Alex, can you talk about the protest encampment, when it was set up, and then what you negotiated with Evergreen authorities, the administration?
ALEX MARSHALL: Yeah. Thank you for having me.
So, our encampment was established on Tuesday the 23rd. And negotiations began with administration on the following day, Wednesday the 24th. There was initially a rotating team of negotiators, but then a second team was established to step in on Sunday the 28th. And I was a part of that new team.
Our demands were formulated through a process of consensus within the encampment. And we focused on divesting from companies that are profiting off of the Israel — off of Israel’s occupation of Palestine, changing Evergreen’s grant acceptance policy to no longer accept funding from Zionist organizations that support stifling students’ free speech, as well as a Police Services Community Review Board structure to be created and the creation of an alternative model of crisis response. Evergreen also agreed to prohibit study abroad programs to Israel, Gaza or the West Bank, until the day comes when Palestinian students would be allowed entry. And they also agreed to release a statement calling for a ceasefire and acknowledging the International Court of Justice’s genocide investigation.
AMY GOODMAN: And who were the people who negotiated on both sides, Alex?
ALEX MARSHALL: Well, I was on a team of four. And on the administrative side, it was the vice president of the college and the dean of students.
AMY GOODMAN: And what do you think was different about your school than places like Columbia, where they called in the police twice?
ALEX MARSHALL: Well, it being Rachel Corrie’s alma mater, I think, is significant. She’s been gone for 20 years, but her memory lives on amongst the student body and the Olympia community at large. Craig and Cindy Corrie came to one of our rallies to speak. And I think her memory — you know, I have learned about her. I’ve read her emails to her parents in multiple classes that I’ve taken at Evergreen, and her memory being so inspiring in that way.
I believe also that Evergreen has an interest in maintaining its image as a college that highly values diversity and equity, working across significant differences and advocating for students’ voices and students’ abilities to exercise their rights to freedom of speech, freedom of protest. And Evergreen is a small college. We’ve had — the college has had a rough few years after the media storm that occurred in 2017. And administration knew that there would be serious repercussions to Evergreen’s image if police were called in.
We are extremely grateful that all of our students were safe and we had no arrests and no students have been written up for policy violations. And I think that that really speaks to Evergreen’s — the culture of Evergreen’s student body as one that really emphasizes taking care of each other and fighting for the struggle for justice.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to end with Aseel, who is a Palestinian student at Rutgers University in New Jersey who has family in Gaza. We’re only using Aseel’s first name because she is concerned about doxxing. Aseel, can you talk about what happened at Rutgers after students set up the Rutgers encampment?
ASEEL: Yeah. Hi. So, last Thursday, we ended our encampment. It was a four-day encampment. And as a result of our collective efforts, we were able to have Rutgers, the Rutgers administration, agree to commit to eight out of 10 demands, which we are like really, really happy about. And I just also want to note that this encampment came in like the span of three weeks, where we did a — like, it was our second encampment, because we revived Tent State University. That’s one.
And another thing, as well, is we are very excited that part of our demands is, number one, that we are going to welcome 10 Gazan students, some of whom we anticipate to be our family members. Another thing is that we are going to finally have Palestinian flags hung, and Holloway is finally going to acknowledge his Palestinian students, finally, and name Palestine and Palestinians in his statements, instead of like the “Middle East region” and “the Gaza region.” And then, not only that, but we are also going to hire additional professors of Palestinian studies, because apparently everyone thinks that this started on October 7th. So, I think that’s pretty important. Another thing is that we are finally going to have an Arab cultural center. “Why didn’t we have one before?” is the real question. We are also going to finally get a Middle Eastern Studies Department. Again, why did we not have one before? Another thing is that we are going to be granted, hopefully — hopefully Rutgers commits to this — amnesty and no suspensions for our encampment. And yeah, I hope I’m not missing anything, but it’s eight demands.
AMY GOODMAN: One of the standard calls for — at these campus encampments has been to disclose and divest. Was that an issue for Rutgers students?
ASEEL: Yes, that was our main reason why we came. We demanded to divest from Israel, from Israeli apartheid and settler colonialism. And also, our second most important demand was to end our relationship with Tel Aviv University and close down the construction of the HELIX Hub, which is right next to the New Brunswick train station. It should also be noted that Tel Aviv University is not just any university. It is a like very prime component of Israeli apartheid and settler colonialism. They manufacture weapons that basically kill my family in Gaza. Not only that, but they also hold the corpses of like 60 to 70 corpses of Palestinians. Just to like also illustrate how close this hits to home is that one of these corpses is the cousin of our beloved professor Noura Erakat. And they basically refuse to give back these corpses, these bodies, to Palestinian families.
We, unfortunately, were not able to get these agreements. However, we did get an agreement to have a meeting with the Joint Committee on Investments, with the Board of Governors, with President Holloway, for divestment, which is a process to divestment. So, this is incredible progress, in our eyes, and to everyone’s eyes, I think, because we had been asking for a meeting for five years, and we finally got one. And that’s why we decided to not get arrested, to not — to leave, basically, the encampment and shut it down, because we got the meeting, we got the eight demands, and we believe that these are just like increment steps towards divestment. But it should be noted that we were more than willing to get arrested. We were actually prepared for it. But we decided not to. And —
AMY GOODMAN: Aseel —
ASEEL: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: — you mentioned your family. I wanted to end by asking about your family in Gaza. How are they?
ASEEL: Yeah. So, they are not OK. A hundred members of my — nearly like a hundred members, I think — we don’t know exactly, because of Netanyahu’s psychological warfare of cutting down the electricity and cellular devices to be able to, honestly, reach them. But nearly a hundred of my members were martyred.
And obviously, I still have family left. I am still in contact with them. But they are all displaced. Our family home’s basically destroyed. Even photos, like, just show that, like, on the walls say “Blame Hamas.” And it should be noted that none of my family members are in Hamas, have nothing to do with them. And yeah, like, even the photos of Gaza are just unrecognizable. I can’t even tell, like, where anything is anymore. Photos on my phone of, like, so many memories I had don’t even exist anymore. The Gaza that I once knew is essentially gone. But I am more than confident, along with my family, that we will return and that we will rebuild it.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Aseel, deepest condolences on the death of so many family members in Gaza. Aseel is a Palestinian student at Rutgers University in New Jersey. I want to thank you for being with us; Rafi Ash, a sophomore in urban studies at Brown University; Duncan Kreps, a graduating senior at Middlebury College; and Alex Marshall, a junior at Evergreen State College in Washington.
Coming up, we’ll stay with Rutgers and speak to a professor there, one of 60 journalism professors around the country who have signed a letter to The New York Times calling for it to commission an independent review of a controversial December article alleging Hamas systematically weaponized sexual violence on October 7th. Back in 20 seconds.
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AMY GOODMAN: RISD, Rhode Island School of Design, students singing at a vigil last night while they barricaded themselves inside a campus building which they renamed Fathi Ghaben Hall after the acclaimed Palestinian artist who died after being unable to get care in Gaza. Special thanks to Democracy Now! fellow Eric Halvarson.
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60+ Journalism Profs Demand Investigation into Controversial NYT Article Alleging Mass Rape on Oct. 7
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
MAY 08, 2024
Transcript
A group of more than 60 journalism professors has written to The New York Times calling on the paper to commission an independent review of its report that members of Hamas committed widespread sexual violence on October 7. Numerous media outlets, as well as some of the paper’s own staff, have raised questions about the December 28 article headlined “Screams Without Words,” reported in part by a freelance Israeli journalist who had liked multiple posts on social media advocating for violence against Palestinians. The Times has even published subsequent reporting undercutting some of the key elements of the article, which was used by Israeli leaders and Western allies as justification for the brutal military campaign in Gaza that had already killed tens of thousands of Palestinians up to that point. “It was very troubling to professors of journalism to see such a shoddy article be published without a retraction or an investigation,” says Rutgers media studies professor Deepa Kumar, one of the signatories, author of Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire. She also says that as an academic, she is troubled by the mainstream media’s depiction of student encampments as places of hate and violence. “For those of us who have been to these encampments, we know that the atmosphere there is peaceful until the police show up and start to create chaos. … These are fantastic spaces of learning.”
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
More than 60 journalism professors around the United States have written to The New York Times calling on the paper to commission an independent review of its report that members of Hamas committed widespread sexual violence on October 7th. Numerous media outlets have raised questions about the paper’s reporting, which was written in part by a freelance Israeli journalist, or reported by her, who had liked multiple posts on social media advocating for violence against Palestinians.
Last week, Democracy Now!'s Juan González and I spoke to one of the letter's signatories, Rutgers University journalism and media studies professor Deepa Kumar, author of Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire: 20 Years after 9/11. I began by asking her what prompted the letter.
DEEPA KUMAR: Basically, after this particular article, “Screams Without Words: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7,” came out, there have been numerous reports that have debunked its primary claims. And several journalism professors started to talk about what it means for The New York Times to run a piece like this even though its key claims have been debunked. And so, a group of journalism professors got together and crafted this letter to The New York Times to, as you say, set up an investigative — an independent investigation of how the story was reported, written and published.
And at the center of the controversy, really, is how the two freelancers who were recruited, particularly Anat Schwartz, who’s not a journalist at all — she’s an Israeli filmmaker and an intelligence officer for the — former Israeli officer for the Air Force, and she has no experience doing journalism. She’s recruited to do this story. And what The Intercept, for instance, and Jeremy Scahill — you’ve had him on the show to talk about this story — what they have shown is how she went around trying to find evidence for the claim that there was systematic violence against women on October 7th and couldn’t find any. She phones Israeli hospitals, rape crisis centers, rape crisis hotlines, and she couldn’t find any evidence, and so she turns to more dubious sources in order to actually create this story. And this is in her own words, right? They are quoting Anat Schwartz in her own words. And I encourage viewers to go check out that story.
And so, it was very troubling to professors of journalism to see such a shoddy article be published without a retraction or an investigation. And so it became important for us to write this letter and to send it to The New York Times.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Deepa, The Intercept had a recent story about how journalists at The New York Times were encouraged to, quote, “restrict the use of the terms 'genocide' and 'ethnic cleansing' and to 'avoid' using the phrase 'occupied territory'” when describing Palestinians. Your response to these kinds of guidelines?
DEEPA KUMAR: Absolutely. I mean, I actually wrote an open letter back in November to The New York Times really criticizing the very skewed way in which this genocide, this war on Gaza, was being represented. And I had a problem with the way in which the key tag is the “Israel-Hamas war.” That’s deeply problematic for a number of reasons, not least that Hamas is not a country. Gaza is not a country. Gazans do not have an army, a navy, an air force or nuclear weapons in the way that Israel does. This is a wholesale slaughter of Palestinian people, a genocide in the works. And unfortunately, that has really — that right from the get-go, right? And I’m so glad that these memos are showing that this was intentional, right? This was not an accident, that, in fact, it’s been very skewed in its coverage of what is going on. So, what’s wrong with that phrase is also that by focusing on Hamas and repeatedly putting a spotlight on the tragedy of October 7th, what happens is it suggests that there was no history before October 7th. And the paper is actually justifying the actions of Israel in Gaza from then on. And that’s just, you know, completely one-sided, and it’s not what journalism is supposed to be.
I’ll just say one more thing about the “Screams Without Words” article. And that is that I don’t want to come off saying that there was no sexual violence on October 7th. I think that would be a problem. And in fact, The Intercept story does not say that. What it says is that there wasn’t systematic — there wasn’t a campaign of systematic sexual violence. And that is important, because, in fact, if there was one, that is horrific, isn’t it? And in the climate that we’re in today, where the gains of the #MeToo movement are being rolled back, most recently with the sentence being overturned for Harvey Weinstein, it’s very important to take women seriously.
But I will say this, that this is also a piece of propaganda, right? Because it draws from a narrative that has a much longer history in settler-colonial societies, where sexual violence, alleged sexual violence, against particularly white women becomes the basis for genocide. This is true in the United States. Scholars have documented this and researched this quite well, how the alleged rape of white women became the basis from which to slaughter Indigenous people, to slaughter Native Americans. This was used also against African Americans. Frederick Douglass talks about the myth of the Black rapist, where, you know, alleged sexual violence by Black men was used to justify mass lynchings. And, unfortunately, this piece in The New York Times is really the latest iteration of this longer narrative that then serves to justify violence.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to a piece in The New York Times. They retracted a part of their December story on March 25th, though, to be clear, they didn’t issue a correction. But this is what they wrote: “New video has surfaced that undercuts the account of an Israeli military paramedic who said two teenagers killed in the Hamas-led terrorist attack on Oct. 7 were sexually assaulted. The unnamed paramedic, from an Israeli commando unit, was among dozens of people interviewed for a Dec. 28 article by The New York Times that examined sexual violence on Oct. 7. He said he discovered the bodies of two partially clothed teenage girls in a home in Kibbutz Be’eri that bore signs of sexual violence. … But footage taken by an Israeli soldier who was in Be’eri on Oct. 7, which was viewed by leading community members in February and by The Times this month, shows the bodies of three female victims, fully clothed and with no apparent signs of sexual violence, at a home where many residents had believed the assaults occurred. Though it is unclear if the medic was referring to the same scene, residents said that in no other home in Be’eri were two teenage girls killed, and they concluded from the video that the girls had not been sexually assaulted.” Again, I was reading an article from The New York Times on March 25th. Professor Deepa Kumar, if you can respond?
DEEPA KUMAR: Yes. Thank you for mentioning that article, Amy. And I also want to reference that the podcast of The New York Times, The Daily, was actually going to do a full episode on the “Screams Without Words” article, but when they put it through their standard fact-check, it didn’t pass. So, within The New York Times itself, this story did not pass the basic fact-check. And then, since then, there have been articles, like the one you just mentioned, as well as some corrections, if you will, that have taken place.
But in response to our letter, we have heard nothing from the editorial board of The New York Times. And I understand that a New York Times spokesperson told The Washington Post that they stand by the story. So, it’s pretty clear that they are not interested in actually holding an independent investigation and moving away from this really shoddy piece of journalism.
AMY GOODMAN: I also wanted to read from Ynet, the news source in Israel, with a headline, “New York Times cuts ties with Israeli reporter over alleged policy violation: American newspaper ends Anat Schwartz’s employment after liking pro-Israel posts on social media, including one that called to turn Gaza 'into a slaughterhouse,' sparking calls from pro-Palestinian groups to review her employment.” Again, she was one of the authors of this December 28th New York Times piece, Deepa Kumar.
DEEPA KUMAR: Yes, she was in fact the key person gathering the information, along with her partner’s nephew, on the ground, and Jeffrey Gettleman is the one who actually — he’s a New York Times journalist, award-winning, I might add — who actually wrote the story. And I’ll just say very quickly something about Gettleman, which is that at one interview with Sheryl Sandberg, he actually questioned what evidence was, saying that evidence is a legal term, and it’s not something that journalists apparently look for, which is just bizarre. These are the basics of any — you go to a J school, and this is what they teach you. You have to have evidence. You have to fact-check. And so, you know, it’s just shocking.
We’ve also heard from journalists inside The New York Times saying how happy they are that this letter was sent, because they describe the climate inside The New York Times as a very stifling environment, one which is very tightly controlled. You know, so much for free speech. So much for the newspaper of record.
And I just want to say that the reason that many of us argue and criticize The New York Times is not because we think that The New York Times is worse than the New York Post or, you know, Fox News or whatever. You know, those news media outlets don’t even pretend to be neutral, to be objective and so on, whereas The New York Times does. The New York Times says it adheres to the standards of professional journalism. And here we have such an out-and-out propaganda story that, you know, they have just dug their heels in around in terms of allowing for an investigation, much less retracting the story.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Deepa, what about the current student protests and the push at all these campuses for divestment from Israel of the university endowments, how the Times has been covering these student movements, from your perspective?
DEEPA KUMAR: Yeah. I mean, I’ll first say that these movements are incredible. This is the largest protest movement, solidarity movement with Palestine that I have seen in my lifetime, in over 30 years of being an activist. And this is probably the biggest movement in support of Palestinians in the history of the United States. And for those of us who have been to these encampments, we know that the atmosphere there is peaceful until the police show up and start to create chaos.
So, for instance, I was at the University of Pennsylvania encampment last Friday, where two Israeli-born scholars, Omer Bartov and Raz Segal, were speaking about what is antisemitism. And there was a fantastic discussion going on. The people at the encampment were so diverse — Black, Brown, white, Muslim, Jewish and so on. The only disruptor that I saw was a person identified as a rabbi, who came with a sign saying “Mein Camp,” right? This is a play on Hitler’s famous book, calling those at the encampment, you know, Nazis by extension. And he tried to shut it down, and he was gently told to leave. I mean, Raz Segal actually asked him to come and speak, but he preferred to actually, you know, scream at the protesters. So, that’s our experience of going to encampments. These are fantastic spaces of learning, and not just, you know, talking about the history of the region and talking about antisemitism, but as growing as human beings, of being decent human beings with empathy and solidarity with the oppressed. I mean, that’s what a university is for, right? There’s been music. There’s been dancing. There’s been poetry reading. And none of that spirit is captured either in The New York Times or in other newspapers, who, you know, “if it bleeds, it leads.” That’s what we’re seeing.
And I want to say, though, also, that what is particularly troubling is that the Times, as well as other newspapers, are going with the charges coming from politicians, from congressional figures, that these encampments are antisemitic. That could not be further from the truth. There is so little evidence presented to actually validate this point. Instead, what they turn to is that the protesters have slogans which say, “From the river to the sea, Palestinians will be free.” Now, some have chosen to interpret this as a call for genocide against Jewish Israelis. The only way you could actually reach that conclusion is if you actually have a settler-colonial mentality. Remember, of course, that in 1977, in their election platform, the Likud party had exactly such a slogan. They want an Israeli state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. And for them, that means genocide. It means displacement. It means ethnic cleansing. That’s not what the protesters are saying. What the protesters are saying is that we want freedom for Palestinians, we want human rights and democracy, from the river to the sea. Because what occurs to me when people oppose the slogan is: Where exactly do you want Palestinians to be unfree, from the river to the sea? So, central to this slogan, which is not at all antisemitic, is really the charge to end apartheid. It is to create a free, democratic, whatever you want to call it, Israel-Palestine in this region, where Israelis and Palestinians can live side by side. And this is possible.
AMY GOODMAN: Rutgers University journalism and media studies professor Deepa Kumar, speaking to us from Philadelphia.