38.1: Evaluating Texts as Potential Sources Reading by T Nowacki- “Back to School, Back to Protest- US Student Protests and the BDS Movement”

“Back to School, Back to Protest: US Student Protests and the BDS Movement”

By T Nowacki

September 2, 2024

CC BY-NC-ND 

The spring of 2024 was flooded with media coverage of student protests from colleges and universities across the US: images of encampments; videos of hundreds of students rallied together calling for a ceasefire, calling for an end to the genocide in Gaza, in Rafah; canceled college events and classes; allegations of violence; statements from administration; more statements of administration; then canceled graduations; faculty and administration quitting or being removed from their posts. And then there was Macklemore’s Hind’s Hall—the first new protest song we’ve heard in a long, long time, which explicitly celebrates student protests: “What is threatenin' about divesting and wantin' peace?/The problem isn't the protests, it's what they're protesting/It goes against what our country is funding.” Media on the right often blamed the “radical left” for indoctrinating the youth with anti-American values of violent protesting and antisemitism, and mainstream media on the left sometimes did the same, but instead blamed youthful ignorance rather than radicalization.  Both are woefully wrong: the pro-Palestinian student protests are so far overwhelmingly non-violent, being against Palestinian genocide isn’t at all antisemitic, and, despite our country’s best efforts, the youth are not ignorant.

But since the spring, we haven’t heard much. Obviously, the spring semester ended. Students graduated (with or without ceremonies), and summer happened. And a lot happened over the summer, including President Joe Biden stepping down as the democratic presidential nominee and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for the role, who, like her predecessor, unequivocally stands with Israel. The US is deeply enmeshed—economically, socially, religiously, and from the perspective of military defense strategies in the middle east—with Israel. While the US is the mightiest of world powers, breaking its BFF status with Israel would prove to be disastrous on a few fronts. The question is, is it more disastrous than the tens of thousands of dead Palestinians, the mutilated and terrorized, the traumatized and dwindling generation of survivors? More disastrous than a clear and ongoing genocide? But for pro-Palestinian protesters and activists, that’s not even a question.

The reality is the protests never stopped; the movement never stopped, because the war didn’t stop. Other news took precedence, or at least our attention, whether by careful manipulation or just happenstance. 

And the reality is that the student protests started six months before the spring of 2024. Beginning just after the October 7^th attack by Hamas and Israel's subsequent numerous retaliatory assaults, students began protesting with encampments, rallies, and sit-its, to name a few, to demand that their colleges and universities, many with substantial endowments, financially divest from Israel. For protesters, divestment means completely ending financial relationships and all endowments with Israeli companies or any company that does business with Israel. They see this as a strategic way to pressure the Israeli government to stop the genocide of the Palestinian people they are currently conducting in, at the time, Rafah and Gaza. Protesters also advocate for their universities to end academic relationships with Israeli institutions. The movement is referred to as the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction movement, or BDS movement.

WHY ARE COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES HOT SPOTS FOR PROTESTS?

Historically, colleges and universities were understood as bastions of academic freedom, exploration, and debate. They are also primary centers of academic inquiry, where schools of thought and theories are developed and born into public use. The US Constitution protects the right to free speech and the right to express views through protest in public places. These two facts alone make it clear why colleges and universities in the US have long been places for protests. They seem like they should also perhaps be the safest, or at least the most inviting, places to do so. Unfortunately, that’s not necessarily true. The Vietnam War has long been regarded as America’s most unpopular war, and it occurred at a time youth movements in the US were gaining a new kind of popularity. To the chagrin of the local and state authorities, many student and youth protests erupted over the course of the Vietnam War, and only some of them ended with protesters injured by policy or other state forces. Most of the time, protests were broken up, deemed illegal, or protesters were rightly or wrongly jailed. The Kent State Shootings, however, are the darkest example of our country’s suppression of student protest. The Kent State University shootings occurred on May 4, 1970 when four unarmed university students were shot dead by the Ohio National Guard as they protested the Vietnam War’s expansion into Cambodia. All of the dead were either 19 or 20 years old. Five others were injured. It was dubbed an unjust massacre by many, an accidental tragedy by others, and still some others believed that those snobby anti-American college kids had it coming because they weren’t following the rules. The university’s oral history project to memorialize the massacre recorded many such sentiments:

After their son William had been shot and killed by Ohio National Guard troops at Kent State University …, Florence and Louis Schroeder received a letter at their Lorain, Ohio, home. “There’s nothing better than a dead, destructive, riot-making communist,” it read, “and that’s what your son was …. Be thankful he is gone.” … Kent State students returned home shaken by what they’d seen and experienced only to be cursed out by friends and family members who cheered the National Guardsmen’s treatment of protesters. “Oh, I wish I would have shot them,” one student recalled hearing from a relative. “If I’d been there, I would have shot them all.”

The shooters who murdered the four students were charged not with murder or even manslaughter, but with depriving the students of their civil rights. They were all acquitted.

Even though Americans have a constitutional right to peaceful public protest, and even though Americans ostensibly value education and the moral righteousness of standing up for the innocent and defenseless, the combination of these factors still seem to add up to an American public that confuse protests with riots, dissent with being unamerican, and high levels of education with elitism and snobbery.

One reason for this may be that the US doesn’t educate its citizens well. That’s a hard pill to swallow, but let’s look at some data: the US is 125^th in literacy—which includes basic reading and writing— among all countries. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development identifies the average US adult worker as performing generally “very low” in mathematics in particular, but also being “undereducated” broadly, when compared to workers in other industrialized nations. And it’s no surprise for anyone that the cost of a college education is prohibitively high for many: in the US, college costs at least two times, if not three times more than in countries with comparable post-secondary academic standards. Since a bachelor’s degree is no longer a ticket to a living wage job, for many it’s just more sensible to forgo the college education and the stifling debt and instead do their best to make it in the work world with just a high school diploma.

Even with that once-prized high school diploma, the average American may have a distorted understanding of history and their place in the world. In general, the American K-12 education system does not willingly provide an honest and thorough history and civics education to its students. K-12 education also teaches something vital to our work and cultural structures: compliance. While college is not without compliance-education, free and critical thinking are the cornerstones of any higher education. Because of this, and in support of this, our culture and policies mirror and echo the falsehoods and voids of the K-12 system. It’s only been in the past few years that many American institutions stopped celebrating an inept explorer (but first rate genocider) with “Columbus Day” and instead replaced the holiday with a vague hat-tip to the survivors of his victims with “Indigenous People’s Day.” Juneteenth, which celebrates the end of slavery in the US, has only been a federal holiday since June of 2021. And yet when these “new” holidays arose, they were derided by some as “woke” (which is actually accurate and not an insult as intended) or as “revisionist history” (quite the opposite). There are many generations of Americans, including the current generations in college today, that did not know the Holocaust of WWII was not the worst genocide in human history, or that the genocide of American indigenous people had been occurring in their home states since European settlers first stepped foot on the land and continues still today.

Some truths are indeed too brutal and cruel for young children, so it stands to reason that we don’t make first graders watch Amistad or third graders make dioramas of the middle passage. However, there’s no real debate that the American education system, particularly in some conservative states, intentionally revises history through the K-12 curriculum for the purpose of creating and maintaining national pride, and positioning America as eternally righteous:  for instance, the  inflammatory but highly accurate term “genocide” isn’t ever used to refer to the planned and systematic killing, reeducation, forced relocation, and forced sterilization of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, and most of these topics are never discussed at all in classrooms or in textbooks. Instead, the pre-college curriculum says there were “native American” and European treaties and settlements—sensible agreements between gentlemen— and of course there were wars—another activity of gentlemen— and of course there were misunderstandings, and of course somehow many, many indigenous people died, and treaties weren’t honored, and somehow indigenous people were left disproportionately poorer and deal with far greater disadvantages than white Americans, but that, of course, isn’t the g-word!

Therefore, while your experience may have (hopefully) differed, or will differ, for many Americans, the first time they started to learn the truth about history, and the truth about current world events, is when they first stepped foot into a college classroom. For those who didn’t have the privilege of stepping into a college classroom, sometimes, then, these college protests can look bizarre and radical, and based on falsehoods or the product of entitled, unpatriotic kids not minding their own business.

Social media—largely TikTok and YouTube—has also changed our access to information. TikTok in particular, between attractive flashes of cutesy dances and steamy celebrity gossip, has helped to awaken Gen Z and the oldest of Gen Alpha to what’s really going on in the world. Thousands of content creators have done the research and created impassioned and informed TikToks explaining what government-issued textbooks and mainstream media won’t. It’s exposed these generations to what’s really been happening in prisons across America, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and in the so-called Israel-Palestine conflict, and why we can’t seem to keep the water clean in certain US cities. Because, in part, of TikTok, some never need to have a college experience to understand the world is not what it seems, and that individuals, especially when strengthened by community and assembled into movements, really do have the power to create change,

The reality is the student protests never stopped. The media coverage died down. Summer came. But the BDS movement has been going strong since October of 2023, and the genocidal ambitions of Zionism are thus taking their toll on the Israeli economy. The Middle East Monitor reported that Eilat Port, Israel's only port on the Red Sea, has declared bankruptcy after months of a blockade by the Houthis. Since October 7^th, over 46,000 businesses in Israel have gone bankrupt. Of course, not all of those Israeli-owned companies are multi-million-dollar companies, but some of them are. What’s arguably more financially devastating is the pullout of major investment and financial deals with giant corporations across the globe: huge tech companies like Samsung are pulling out of Israel, and Intel just cancelled a 25-billion-dollar investment plan with them. The largest insurance company in France, AXA, has now completely divested from Israeli banks and Israeli arms manufacturers like Elbit systems. Israel's energy sector is in danger, too, because they rely heavily on coal imported from Colombia to meet demands, and Colombia recently just cut ties with them. Even Israeli universities aren't safe with scientists and professors reporting a steep decline in joint research opportunities. These are all signs that the Zionist project is starting to crumble, and even Israelis themselves are starting to see it. And all of this demonstrates the power of the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction movement, and how important it is combating the Israeli occupation. The student encampment protests in the United States, and around the globe, are directly a part of this success, but also indirectly in the awareness they create and as catalysts for protests and boycotts.

WHAT WE CAN ALL LEARN FROM THE COLLEGE KIDS

You don’t need to be in college to effectively protest or boycott, and you don’t need a college education to think critically about the world around you. Do a web search of any historical events that weren’t familiar to you in this piece, research the BDS movement, research the US’s historical involvement with Israel and Zionism. Question what you hear, what you see, what you read—including this.

If you’ve done the research and are ready for next steps, get ready to not spend money. As we all know, cash is king in this capitalist world. If we want change, we have to use (or, rather not use) our money to make it happen. It's why the Montgomery bus boycotts of the 1950s were so critical in ending US segregation. It's why the multi-decade global economic and sporting boycotts against South Africa were so instrumental in dismantling South African apartheid. It's because at the end of the day, when simple ethics and morality and the value of human life don’t persuade, money talks.

What can you do to push the BDS movement further along? Well, the first step is to continue, or start, to boycott any Israeli products or companies that are complicit in the Israeli occupation and ongoing genocide. Here’s the brief list: McDonald’s, Amazon, Burger King, Papa John’s, Pizza Hut, Google, WIX, Puma, HP, Chevron, Re/Max, AHAVA, Texaco, Siemens, SodaStream, Cat, Expedia, Airbnb, Disney, Teva, and Booking.com.

And while you can and should boycott as many brands as possible that are linked to the Israeli occupation, these are the ones that you should focus on because they can apply the most targeted pressure. For particularly large companies like Amazon or Google, that are very difficult to avoid, the key is to minimize our use of them as much as possible on a larger scale. We should all be pressuring our local communities and schools, including universities and colleges, and institutions, to divest fully from Israel, because our cities and our schools should not be profiting from genocide. Every single dollar we spend is a vote for the kind of world that we want to see: make sure you know where your money is going, and where your values are.