Pro Palestine campus encampments are a heroic fightback against institutional complicity in Genocide

Student activists across the world have taken to camping and barricading themselves at their universities in an attempt to bring attention to the ongoing genocide taking place in occupied Palestine. People of all faiths and none, including Muslims, Jews, and Christians, have been standing with one another as they seek to force their institutions to divest from the academic, cultural, military, and technological relationship they have with Israel.

The most recent images from campuses have seen universities willing to call the police to force the removal of protestors - images reminiscent of the policing tactics that have been used by Israeli forces across Palestine. This is unsurprising, As Angela Davis informs us in ‘Freedom is a Constant Struggle’:

The militarisation of the police leads us to think about Israel and the militarisation of the police there—if only the images of the police and not of the demonstrators had been shown, one might have assumed that Ferguson [Missouri] was Gaza. I think that it is important to recognise the extent to which, in the aftermath of the advent of the war on terror, police departments all over the US have been equipped with the means to allegedly “fight terror.”

It is in these sinews of connectivity that we understand the importance of everything that these students are standing up against - that such militarisation threatens us all. Gazans are being killed by the Israeli Occupation Forces through a demonisation that sits at the heart of the Zionist project, but there is a central logic to that violence that draws a straight line to the way that police in New York are willing to use riot gear to target predominantly people of colour protesting for their own rights, and the rights of others. In such an environment, students are being gaslit by their public officials as they are presented as being violent offenders, but as Ta-Nehisi Coates reminds us:

“And all the time the Dreamers are pillaging Ferguson for municipal governance. And they are torturing Muslims, and their drones are bombing wedding parties (by accident!), and the Dreamers are quoting Martin Luther King and exulting nonviolence for the weak and the biggest guns for the strong. Each time a police officer engages us, death, injury, maiming is possible... The Dreamers accept this as the cost of doing business, accept our bodies as currency, because it is their tradition.”

Now, more than ever, it is important that we stand by the students who are standing against the oppressive structures of violence that perpetuate a genocide in Palestine by the Zionist entity, but also stand against the ideological partners that sit in the highest offices in the western world. This is particularly at a time that the enforcement forces of this violent system are being sent into to disrupt these student encampments.

CAGE International stands with these brave students, and will continue to provide support to those being prosecuted for being on the right side of history. We will not permit their legacy to be reduced to being disruptive agitators, but rather celebrated as the heroes of a world that proclaims settler colonial apartheid regimes, and their supply lines, have no place in a future where justice sits at the heart of everything we wish to see.