Those protesters have started a fire that’s going to burn straight through the whole system. 

Shahid Bolsen

Palestine has become the icon of freedom for the people of the world.       

Author Unknown

The protest movements — which have spread around the globe —are not built around the single issue of the apartheid state of Israel or its genocide against Palestinians. They are built around an awareness that the old world order, the one of settler-colonialism, western imperialism and militarism used by the countries of the Global North to dominate the Global South, must end. They decry the hoarding of natural resources and wealth by industrial nations in a world of diminishing returns. These protests are built around a vision, and the commitment to it, that will make this movement not only hard to defeat but presages a wider struggle beyond genocide in Gaza.  

Chris Hedges

The national security state is alarmed by recent student protests. Alex Karp, ardent Zionist and CEO of Palentir, an advanced data mining company whose customers include the CIA, NSA, FBI and Israel, recently shared this  fear: “We think these things that are happening across college campuses are a sideshow. No, they are the show. If we lose the intellectual debate, we will be unable to deploy the army in the West, ever.” 

We are indebted to Max Blumenthal at The Grayzone for interpreting  the elite’s penultimate nightmare as follows: If this model spreads  and succeeds, the U.S. will not be able to maintain its imperial army and  800 bases around the world and the U.S. will begin to resemble a normal country. This, of course, is impermissible because empathy devoid psychopaths like Karp and the rest of the parasitic elite would no longer be the recipients of corporate welfare at the expense of the rest of us. The students, and allies who agree with their demands, are an existential threat to the system because they’re hitting  the third rail. 

 Our ideological gatekeepers expend prodigious amounts of time and resources to create empathy-deficient cultural programming that dampens any public empathic engagement. As suggested above, the parasitic elite fear an empathy epidemic.  However, they’ve been overwhelmed by 24/7 images from Gaza and the campus protests. We see that the dominant cultural narrative is not hermetically sealed from efforts to produce counter-narratives that connect to other struggles. For example, at M.I.T., students stress that their Gaza protest is not a separate struggle but one struggle synchronizing resistance movements against white supremacy, patriarchy, and issues involving Haiti, Cuba, Puerto Rico and the exploitation of resources in the Congo. (Austin Cole, Black Agenda Radio, 5/24/24). Interviews with protesters across the country reveal that students have done their due diligence and frequently salted their explanations with “academic terms like intersectionality, colonialism and imperialism, all to make the case that the plight of Palestinians is the result of global power structures that thrive on bias and oppression.“

 Ilf Jones, a first year student at Emory University in Atlanta linked her activism to the civil rights movement in which her family had participated.  “The only thing missing was the dogs and the water, she said. Another student, Katie Rueff a first year student at Cornell, linked it to climate justice, saying “It’s rooted in the same struggles of imperialism, capitalism — things like that. I think that‘s very true of this conflict, of the genocide in Palestine.” (The New York Times, 5/2/24)

At Emory, protesters occupying the quad chanted “Free Palestine,” along with opposing the Atlanta Public Training Facility or “Cop City,” an enormous $90 billion dollar, 318 acre site just outside Atlanta.  It’s on land stolen from the Muscogees while Israel‘s “Little Cop City” is on land in the Negev stolen from the Palestinians. Emory students see a considerable overlap between greater justice in policing and what’s happening in Gaza as hundreds of police trainees are sent from the U.S. to Israel to train with their counterparts under the guise of “homeland security.”  Israel’s military connection to iAtlanta is emblematic of the partnership between the two countries in approaching unrest. Much of the cost of Cop City is being footed by corporations like Delta, Amazon, Wells Fargo, Waffle House, J.P. Morgan, UPS and Chick-fil-A.  

Further, revealing the widespread complicity of university research for the Pentagon is one reason for the swift and harsh response to the protests as this is something that can’t be negotiated away under the existing system. For example, in 2024,Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh had received more than $2.8 billion for research from the Pentagon since 2008, only the  Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Johns Hopkins University have received more, at  $18 billion and $15.billiion. MIT does research for the Israeli Ministry of Defense, a fact not lost on protesters there. 

One additional damning truth, and one that bears explication in the future, is the US empire manger’s longterm project for imperial primacy in the region. That is, the tripartite security pact of U.S., Saudi Arabia and Israel that was temporarily derailed by Hamas’ 7 resistance attack and Israel’s response. This grand bargain or “deal of the century,” a phrase coined by Egypt’s president Abdul Fatah al-Sisi, would entail Riyadh normalizing relations with Israel. In turn, the U.S. would turn on the spigot of offensive weapons heading to the Kingdom — a major boon to the American war industry.  Israeli officials estimate an eventual benefit of trade with Saudi Arabia amounting to $45 billion. For now, “Plan B” is that Israel be excluded from the pact until Gaza is resolved. If this arrangement occurs, it will mean more injustice for the Palestinians, including stepped up Zionist violence in the West Bank, and because the deal is so unpopular with the “street Arabs,” even more oppression of people under autocratic US allies in the region.

The1960s and 1970s witnessed powerful movements centered around racism and the Vietnam War. Many of us older folks were radicalized by this period and it has defined our lives  ever since. However, over time, powerful elites were able to reimagine these events as one-offs, in part, because we treated them as such and failed to identify them as endemic to the system of capitalism itself and required dismantling the empire. 

Ted Morgan, a scholar of the 1960s social movements, told me via an e-mail that “1960s activism was largely wiped out by a combination of distorted media coverage, a potent right-wing, corporate backlash, and  a cooptive narcissistic culture of consumption and entertainment. In 1968, the US war helped to trigger the global protest movement  — well documented  in Tariq’s Ali’s “1968.” However, 1968 was also the turning point for the rise of neoliberalism and the New Right in US politics. The neoliberal order was resisted again and again against the U.S. role in Central America, against the nuclear arms race, against the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the climate crisis and global warming and ecocide and by the Occupy Movement  and Black Lives Matter. However, it wasn’t until the rising global movement against the genocidal Israeli attack on Gaza and the West Bank— and US complicity in that assault — that the potential of 1968 has been revived.” (For more, see, Edward P. Morgan, What Really Happened in the 1960s, University of Kansas Press, 2011).

When the “student intifada” of campus encampments sprang up, we could say, along with The Electric Intifada’s Susan Abdulhawa, “This time is different from the uprisings of the 1960s and 1970s. There is a new sense of global interconnection, an emerging class consciousness and foundational political analyses predicated on post-colonial studies and intersectionality.”

We also know that members of Generation Z (18-29) are far more distrustful of the media than older adults and according to Gallup/Knight they pay close attention to an outlet’s transparency of facts and research . Students have been informed by information outside of mainstream sources like The New York Times, Washington Post and CNN, which act as the U.S. government’s echo chamber. Many have turned to Al Jazeera which has 1.0 million followers on TikTok and 4.6 million on Instagram. Cameron Jones an organizer with Jewish Voices for Peace at Columbia University told The New York Times ”There’s a fair amount of misinformation and just a clear bias when it comes to the Palestinian issue.” And Hussein Irish of the Arab States Institute in Washington, added that “There’s a third worldish, anti-imperialist point of view, that many college kids have adopted.” 

An encouraging sign for this summer and evidence that encampments are not the end, is the Coalition to March on the DNC in Chicago which already has 76 organizations on board and looks to have 200+ by August. Gaza is the catalyst bringing together  immigrant, women,  LGBT, union reps and opponents of police repression. This helps to cement the connection between domestic and international affairs. 

As suggested earlier, it’s this growing capacity of students, and allies who agree with their demands, to begin connecting the dots — and sharing that insight with clear, concise language — that constitutes  the real fear of the ruling class. It explains their hysterical response like attempts to ban TikTok, police state crackdowns, rending of the First Amendment, demonization of anti-war protesters, blaming “outside agitators,” and the media’s weaponizing of antisemitism. 

Given the above, the potential for identifying with “the other” has never been so auspicious. If combined with critical thinking, patience, ingenuity in communication and  Gramsci’s “optimism of the will,” we dare to say that the possibility for transforming Gaza into a broader class struggle lies before us for the taking. 

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