As of May Day 2024 students at hundreds of universities across the world have protested against their universities’ investment in and support for the Israeli mass killing machine in Gaza. In the United States where almost 2500 students have been arrested encampments have been the chosen vehicle for protest. These young comrades have often lost their seats at the university and been banned from the campus housing they depend upon. Many have been doxxed, publicly humiliated, and called anti-semites and Jew-haters on the internet and in the news media – for their opposition to the murder of nearly 50,000 Gazans. Many of those accused are practising Jews and people who identify as being of Jewish ancestry or descended from the historically Yiddish speaking peoples of the Tsar’s empire. The irony of this is not lost on us, but seems to be generally lost, ignored, or dismissed by most of the major news outlets – even those that have done stories on anti-Zionist Jews holding Passover seders in tent encampments.

The first thing that must be commented on is that it is no mystery that students are protesting. This is a generational cohort facing a growing crisis of capitalism, increased inter-imperialist conflict, declining standards of living, an unprecedented rise in labour militancy, and rapidly growing subjective socialist consciousness – even in the historically anti-communist US social formation. The pandemic seems to have been a catalyst or trigger event that has transformed quantity into quality, and made us acutely aware of the contradictions described by Antonio Gramsci’s famous quote “the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” The mass murder in Gaza manifests the work of monsters who have a long and unrelenting nationalist history of eliminationist abuse against Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, Amharic and Tigrinya speaking Jewish communities, and Yiddish speakers (the majority descent group in Israel) whose language was famously banned for public use during the first wave of migration to the new state. These facts can no longer be hidden from a generation that is conscious of Zionist disregard for rights and lives.

In addition to their youthful search for justice and answers, protesting students have the example of wider, deeper, and more overt opposition to imperial mass murder among ruling political parties than the tepid abstentionism of the Franco-German state(s) during the Iraq/Afghanistan war of 2001–2021. Across the planet, capitalist political parties on the left, right and centre are opposing the war, claiming to oppose it, or simply running for cover – sometimes all at once, and often while shipping lethal weapons to Israel. This is certainly the case for Joe Biden whose Democratic Party proxies, like Alexandria Ocasio Cortes, vacillate between voting war credits for Israel and speaking out against the slaughter in Gaza.

This is not the 2003 “coalition of the willing”, which only became fully willing after the North Atlantic powers, Korea and Australia proved they could completely ignore millions of anti-war protesters and later Barack Obama proved that he could soften, co-opt or otherwise diffuse their leaderships. The contradictions of this war – especially among North Atlantic powers—are nearly impossible to cover over. The question that animates this commentary is not, then why students are suddenly opposing an unjust war that cannot be hidden. The question is what is new (on campus and in the social formations within which we live) and what can be done?

We note a few things for reflection and discussion.

  1. 1)

    The people in power are using tear gas, rubber bullets, and violent siege tactics against non-violent and largely non-disruptive protests. During the last weeks almost 2500 students and their supporters in the United States and Europe, including presumptive Green Party Presidential candidate Jill Stein were arrested and subjected to police violence.

  2. 2)

    Due process seems to be out the door. University professors such as Jodi Dean, Abdul Kayum Ahmed, Abdulkader Sinno, and Danny Shaw, just to name a few, have been publicly slandered and humiliated on the internet and in mainstream daily newspapers and sacked or removed from teaching duties. Elite university administrators have been hauled up before Congress, pilloried on television and removed from office for not harshly disciplining student protesters for what we would describe as making Zionist students uncomfortable with their beliefs and what officialdom deems anti-semitism. This has created a state of paranoia that has generated absurd outcomes, such as police, armed with deadly weapons, entering the campus in numbers that nearly equal the protesting students at the second author’s university.

  3. 3)

    We cannot remember anything on this scale directed against students in the United States since the Spring of 1970 when National Guardsmen were shooting and bayonetting students who opposed the Vietnam war. Fortunately nobody has died so far in the current wave of student protest, but it appears that there is more consensus across the bourgeois political spectrum in favour of repression than during that period when a defeatist faction of the American ruling class, represented by the Democratic Party, emerged to argue that declaring a loss in the Vietnam War was the necessary price for preserving the deterrence of the US Army in the “European theatre.”

  4. 4)

    University administrators want to end occupations quickly, but do not typically use police against their own students. The authors of this commentary know this well as they both organised such events in the late twentieth century. In 1985 when a Columbia University building was blocked for three weeks by anti-apartheid protesters (including the first author) administrators sat back and let the students injure their backs sleeping on hard stone steps. At the City University of New York in 1989 & 1991 occupations shuttered multiple campuses for weeks before students and administrators made deals to reopen (Marcus 1991; McCaffrey et al. 2020). Similarly, the UNAM in Mexico City was paralysed for nearly a year in 1999 and University of Puerto Rico was shuttered for 60 days in 2010 without major police repression. The political factionalism and sense of isolation connected to holding ageing real estate that generates no surplus value and is of little importance except to professors and other students is often enough to implode even the most successful occupation. In contrast, Gaza encampments have been, largely non-violent, made use of tidy tents on campus greens, avoided shutting down key university functions, and at the University of British Columbia, protesters have their own dedicated Porta Potty. So why do contemporary US foreign policy concerns require the silencing of dissent and the construction of consensus through rubber bullets, tear gas, flash bang bombs, public humiliation, doxxing and other forms of political repression. What has changed, why and how?

  5. 5)

    We need more information, not just on what protesting students think and how they envision the line of march, but maybe more importantly what the line of march is for campus administrators, faculties, boards of trustees and institutions that provide a bridge between the universities, the government, and so called civil society organisations. The idea that these protesters are creating a threat to Jewish students is patently absurd even when the protests are not filled with Jews – which they often are. The belief that they represent a threat to universities beyond upsetting funding streams that run from rightwing robber barons to overprivileged private elite campuses is preposterous. And yet protesting students are threatened with repression everywhere. Why are they getting all the attention that we never got when we took over our campuses?

  6. 6)

    Then there is the overall political trajectory and tasks and perspectives for the working class. Marxists, pretty much by definition, take the long view on the necessity of the working class becoming conscious and involved in order to birth the new society referenced in the Gramsci quote above. Student protest is always supremely vulnerable to repression in the absence of mobilisation by those who directly create social wealth and keep society running. There is something going on at the highest levels in the United States that appears, to us, more like the climate of the Sedition Act of 1918 that sent anti-war activists to prison for long sentences, the Smith Act, which was used to similar effect in World War 2 and it’s aftermath, and McCarthyism, a “movement” involving unproven, uninvestigated public denunciations, doxxing, innuendo, ex-officio employment terminations, and other lawfare that destroyed lives by replacing due process with “reasonable grounds for belief in disloyalty”. Administrators are accepting the dangerous idea that criticism of Israel is tantamount to antisemitism. This is, no doubt, through some combination of choice and necessity, but we wonder how this propagates, embeds, and maintains itself in social institutions and networks that “should know better”. What does this say about the similarities and differences between the current political economic challenges and those of World War One and World War Two and its aftermath? And, “what is to be done”?

  7. 7)

    Principles, strategies and tactics – when CUNY students occupied campuses over several years during the late 1980s and early 1990s the first author remembers professors visiting occupied buildings and bringing huge bags of Chinese food for dinner and bagels and cream cheese for breakfast. They gave impromptu pep talks and cheered the principles of fairness, educational access, and social justice that were motivating students, as well as the youthful enthusiasm of their militant tactics. Looking back, we wish that a few more of them had shown enough respect for student protestors to critically engage with strategy and raise questions about the limitations of occupying spaces that do not generate surplus value, the ease of taking space, but the difficulty of giving it back, and what comes next after a campus occupation. The repression we see at university campuses may start with students, but it ends with everyone that gets in the way of the Anglo-American-Israeli war machine. We believe that most readers will agree on the principle that no state – even one that has been cleared by the ICC and the ICJ – should be allowed to commit mass murder without facing militant opposition. And the tactics today’s students are employing are clearly powerful: the whole world is watching as thousands of students across the planet draw attention to the collusion of their educational institutions with mass murder. They have wisely chosen to spend some time living in public to bear witness to the agony of Gaza. Consider this a call for strategies.