There Is No Excuse For Genocide— None, Ever
On Thursday, Bernie released a statement in response to Netanyahu’s spurious and entirely self-serving claim that the campus protests in America are anti-Semitic. Bernie's statement is worth reading:
No, Mr. Netanyahu. It is not antisemitic or pro-Hamas to point out that in a little over six months your extremist government has killed 34,000 Palestinians and wounded more than 77,000— seventy percent of whom are women and children.
It is not antisemitic to point out that your bombing has completely destroyed more than 221,000 housing units in Gaza, leaving more than one million people homeless— almost half the population.
It is not antisemitic to note that your government has obliterated Gaza’s civilian infrastructure— electricity, water, and sewage.
It is not antisemitic to realize that your government has annihilated Gaza’s health care system, knocking 26 hospitals out of service and killing more than 400 health care workers.
It is not antisemitic to condemn your government’s destruction of all of Gaza’s 12 universities and 56 of its schools, with hundreds more damaged, leaving 625,000 students with no education.
It is not antisemitic to agree with virtually every humanitarian organization in saying that your government, in violation of American law, has unreasonably blocked humanitarian aid coming into Gaza, creating the conditions in which hundreds of thousands of children face malnutrition and famine.
Mr. Netanyahu. Antisemitism is a vile and disgusting form of bigotry that has done unspeakable harm to many millions of people. But, please, do not insult the intelligence of the American people by attempting to distract us from the immoral and illegal war policies of your extremist and racist government. Do not use antisemitism to deflect attention from the criminal indictment you are facing in the Israeli courts. It is not antisemitic to hold you accountable for your actions.
Nor is Netanyahu the only right-winger doing exactly that. Virtually every conservative in America is doing likewise— from MAGA Mike and Mike Lawler to conservative Democrats like Josh Gottheimer, who hopes it will help his run for New Jersey governor, and Ritchie Torres, who helps it will help his fundraising.
Last week, with some reluctance, I wrote about the comparison between these protests and the ones during the 1960s (genocide in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos). Friday, the [Jewish Daily] Forward published a piece by filmmaker Tom Hurwitz, I was arrested protesting at Columbia in ’68. Today’s student encampments carry on a proud, brave tradition. “Almost exactly 56 years ago, in 1968,” he wrote, “I was engaged in the occupation of one of five buildings on campus with hundreds of my fellow Columbia University students. I was helping to occupy the Mathematics Building, known as the home of the strikers with the strongest convictions. We wanted Columbia to cease its research into weapons for the war in Vietnam, a war that had already killed more than a million Vietnamese and tens of thousands of Americans, and was tearing out the heart of our country.” 700 people were arrested; he was one of them. If you were in college during the Vietnam War and didn’t get arrested, there was something wrong with you, seriously wrong with you.
“There are differences between then and now,” wrote Hurwitz. “Our demonstrations posed a much greater challenge to the university’s normal operations: The ensuing unrest blew the roof off the campus, effectively stopping the regular functioning of the university for the rest of the spring. Today, the students have set up tent encampments on the lawns of the campus, out of the walkways, impeding nothing. We were proudly militant, they are proudly non-violent. Yet there are many similarities between us. The Gaza war is characterized by killing at a massive, almost industrial scale, as was Vietnam before it. Both led to an explosion of anger around longstanding issues of race and colonialism, and set a fire in the hearts of young people. And while most students at American universities are not at risk of being roped into war— as many of us were, with the draft looming over us in ’68— for many, the war in Gaza hits home in personal and sometimes unexpected ways. Across the country, the pro-Palestinian demonstrations are full of Jewish students. On the first night of Passover, Jewish pro-Palestinian demonstrators held a Seder at the tents on Columbia’s South Lawn. Young people who grew up learning of Israel as a democratic and peace-loving haven for Jews now see hypocrisy in that image, held against the treatment of Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. The horrifying death of more than an estimated 34,000 people in Gaza during Israel’s assault has turned that transformation of perspective into a profound drive to protest.”
Working together in ’68, as we built our almost six-day-long society in our “communes”— named after the Paris Commune of 1871 — the ’68 protesters lived out a vision of what a fully cooperative, non-alienated community might be. We slept on hard floors and ate food contributed by the neighborhood, held endless meetings, and grew to love one another. The demonstrators on today’s campuses are doing the same. They are learning to live together, the competitive academic culture falling away in the heat of collective struggle for higher ends. They are held together by their common cause, their bravery and their sacrifice.
Both then and now, the university administration has leaned on procedural regulations, such as limiting where demonstrations are allowed to take place, to repress student groups and discipline leaders it wants to silence for political reasons. Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace were embargoed last October, as if Shafik and her advisors were reading from the disgraced playbook of Grayson Kirk, the former Columbia president who called in the NYPD on me and my peers. The administration has since kept applying discipline, without recognizing the legitimacy of the issues raised by the students, and without negotiating or treating them as reasonable adversaries.
It should have been no surprise that the unlistened-to students of our current era reacted like those in ’68, by slowly escalating their protests. But it’s a surprise that, in nearly six decades, the administration hasn’t learned that calling in the cops doesn’t quell protests; it helps them take on a brilliant life of their own.
Now, as it was in our day, the campus is divided. Critics of our movement used buzzwords, like “communists,” “anarchists” and “hippies,” to reduce us protesters to enemies to be feared and dismissed. They tried to obscure the demands we made on a blameworthy institution.
Today, charges of “antisemitism” and students “feeling unsafe” are used in an attempt to cloud real issues and grievances.
At first the university was split, for and against us. Only the brutality of the NYPD as it cleared the campus exposed the sclerotic authority of the administration that called them in. Then, as now, that action prompted a wave of new solidarity. In ’68, Columbia students rallied together around our cause; today, encampments inspired by Columbia have sprung up around the country.
The criticism of today’s protest movement is more complicated than that in 1968. Allegations of antisemitism, in particular, carry even more baggage than the specter of communism, in part because of the visceral emotional reaction they can spark in Jews: Even a vibration of antisemitism, real or imputed, can lead to immediate fear. And it’s true that in several videos making the rounds online, random partisans in the streets outside Columbia can be seen using anti-Jewish insults. Yet there have been vanishingly few real examples of on-campus antisemitism at Columbia that originated from demonstrators.
That doesn’t make the fears some Jewish students feel less real. But it does call into question their validity. This situation demands the question: Why should we guarantee an academic culture with no challenges to long-held beliefs, for instance, that the State of Israel and being Jewish are synonymous?
This tension brings into question the narrative that various officials have spun around those fears. The demonstrations, the public is told, have been beset by antisemitic threats and rhetoric. From the first days of the protests, media stories across the country led with that assumption. Wealthy university funders have withdrawn contributions. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and his cohort descended on the campus to command the cameras while masses of students, who refute his claims, are pictured as a faceless mob. (Other politicians, like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have visited not to grandstand, but to get to actually know the protesters now shaping our national discourse.)
Both now and in ’68, attacks of name-calling seek to stop the public from taking the protests seriously. The cries of antisemitism have been militarized by those speaking about them on national television. It is the old red-baiting pattern that uses a fear-producing buzz-word as a smokescreen to obscure real issues and justified protests.
Now, here we are. Rejecting officials’ condemnation, the student protests have spread like a storm across the United States and around the world. Just like in 1968, Columbia University has become the seed of a vast outpouring of student feeling that gives voice to an even more vast sentiment among the youth that a terrible injustice must be redressed. In our day, our protests hastened the end of the Vietnam War and continued to raise the issue of racism. We will see if these students also help to change the world that they have inherited.
Yesterday, Mike Siegel, a candidate for the Austin city council, wrote about how inspired he was by the UT student protestors, “lifting their voices for a ceasefire,” as they “suffered a brutal crackdown by state police… The indiscriminate violence by Texas Department of Public Safety officers against students, bystanders, and media was unprecedented— and shocked the nation. At the same, the courage, perseverance, and moral clarity of the UT students has been an inspiration, to me personally and to so many in this community. What started as a modest action, with a couple hundred people joining together on a Wednesday morning, has now turned into a movement of thousands, including students, faculty, and community allies, who have shown up to resist the intimidation of Greg Abbott and his armed forces and to reinforce our collective demand to end this war.”
Mike wasn’t at the protests, but he made himself “useful that evening by going to the county jail where dozens of arrested protesters were being held. What I saw there was only more inspiring— hundreds of people, including family members of the student protestors and community allies, sharing food and encouragement and waiting for people to be released. And with them a team of volunteer lawyers and legal workers who were working tirelessly to get people out of jail. I was able to join the legal team and visit protestors who were being held. I met with a young man who had been arrested by state troopers for ‘trespassing’ on his own college campus. He hadn’t been warned in any way; only roughly taken into custody. He had red marks on his wrists where the ‘zip tie’ cuffs had been tightly fastened and had been denied access to a bathroom for hours. And yet, he still had a smile on his face when I met him. His spirit was strong.”
I was also inspired by the defense lawyers and public defenders and civil lawyers who showed up to help. Very few of us were dressed for “work”— we just came to the jail as soon as we heard there was a need. The experienced criminal lawyers helped those like me who were inexperienced in the workings of the jail. There was a strong esprit de corps, that we were part of something bigger.
I also saw this spirit among the judges who were at the jail that night. It was definitely an “elections have consequences” moment for me. I saw a county judge who had come in that evening just so she could expedite the release of arrested protestors. I saw magistrate judges who were actively pressuring law enforcement to produce necessary paperwork and keep the process moving. And a little after midnight, I saw the county attorney and these judges come to a decision to dismiss the charges against my client and 45 others for lack of probable cause.
… Sometimes we find hope in the toughest of circumstances. Right now in Austin, I see that hope. It’s among these young people, who have so much love for humanity, that they are putting themselves on the line to stop an unjust war. I’m honored to be doing this work with them.
I’m glad that Mike and the students at UT experienced friendly judges. It isn’t always that way— not by a long-shot. Greg Sargent spoke with a pro-democracy conservative judge, J. Michael Luttig who told him that he believes “that it is unlikely Trump will ever be tried for the crimes he committed in attempting to overturn the 2020 election.” Will that lead to more protests? It wouldn’t surprise me.
Sargent wrote that “Luttig lacerated the right-wing justices for harboring a ‘radical vision’ of the American presidency, and pronounced himself ‘gravely’ worried that Trump will never face accountability for alleged crimes committed in attempting to destroy U.S. democracy through extensive procedural corruption and the naked incitement of mob violence. Luttig’s fear that Trump may very well skate centers on the lines of questioning from the court’s right-wing majority about Special Counsel Jack Smith’s ongoing prosecution of Trump. As many observers noted, those justices appeared largely uninterested in the question before them— whether Trump’s alleged crimes related to the insurrection constituted official presidential acts that are immune from prosecution after leaving office. Instead, the justices dwelled on the supposed future consequences of prosecuting presidents for crimes, and seemed to want to place some limits on that eventuality. That suggests the justices will kick the case back to lower courts to determine whether some definition of official presidential acts must be protected (and whether Trump’s specific acts qualify). Such a move would almost certainly push Trump’s trial until after the election, and if he wins, he can simply cancel prosecutions of himself. Luttig fears that outcome. But he also worries that even if Trump loses the election, there may well be five Supreme Court votes for siding with Trump’s demand for immunity. Both outcomes would functionally end his prosecution.”
What campuses besides Columbia and UT have serious protests now? It’s hard to imagine that any legitimate college campus doesn’t. Protests at Yale, Brown, Stanford, FIT, University of Michigan, UC Berkeley, Emory, Rutgers, Cornell, Rice, the University of Minnesota, Tufts, CUNY, Northeastern, MIT, the University of Pittsburgh, UCLA, the University of Cincinnati, Harvard, Swarthmore, and McGill in Montreal have made the news. Last week, I gave a lecture at my old campus, at Stony Brook. It was an inter-departmental class— history, economics and political science. When I briefly alluded to the Gaza protests I didn’t notice any response, although I was relieved to later find out that students had occupied the administration building, just as we had, almost 60 years earlier. Tradition is alive.
