#solidarity with palestine against apartheid

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Jonathan Ben-Menachem for Zeteo News (04.23.2024):

“Reprehensible and dangerous.” “Terrorist sympathizers.” “It’s not 1938 Berlin. It’s 2024, Columbia University, NYC.” The White House, Congressional Republicans, and cable news talking heads would have you believe that the Columbia University campus has devolved into a hotbed of antisemitic violence – but the reality on the ground is very different. As a Jewish student at Columbia, it depresses me that I have to correct the record and explain what the real risk to our safety looks like. I still can't quite believe how the events on campus over the past few days have been so cynically and hysterically misrepresented by the media and by our elected representatives. 

Last week, the Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) coalition, representing more than 100 student organizations, including Jewish groups, organized the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, a peaceful campus protest in solidarity with Palestine. CUAD was reactivated after the university suspended Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace in the fall. On Wednesday morning, hundreds of students camped out on Columbia’s South Lawn. They vowed to stay put until the university divests from companies that profit from their ties to Israel. Protesters prayed, chanted, ate pizza, and condemned the university’s complicity in Israel’s attacks on Gaza. Though counter-protesters waved Israeli flags near the encampment, the campus remained largely calm from my vantage point.

Columbia responded by imposing a miniature police state. Just over a day after the encampment was formed, university President Minouche Shafik asked and authorized the New York Police Department to clear the lawn and load 108 students – including a number of Jewish students – onto Department of Corrections buses to be held at NYPD headquarters at 1 Police Plaza. One Jewish student told me that she and her fellow protesters were restrained in zip-tie handcuffs for eight hours and held in cells where they shared a toilet without privacy. The NYPD chief of patrol John Chell later told the Columbia Spectator that “the students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner.”  Since then, dozens of undergraduates have been locked out of their dorms without notice. Barnard College, an affiliate of Columbia, notably gave students just 15 minutes to retrieve their belongings after returning from lockup and finding themselves evicted. Suspended students cannot return to campus and are struggling to access food or medical care. Students who keep Shabbat, and do not use electronics on the Sabbath, were forced to rely on technology in order to secure food and emergency housing. This crackdown was the most violence inflicted on our student body in decades. I implore you, as our Jewish Voice for Peace chapter does, to consider whether arresting Jewish students keeps us and Columbia safe.

Smears from the press and pro-Israel influencers, who have levied charges of antisemitism and violence against Jewish students, are a dangerous distraction from real threats to our safety. I saw politicians compare student organizers to neo-Nazis and call for a National Guard deployment, apparently ignorant of the lives lost at Kent State and in Charlottesville, and with very little pushback from national media. This is a repulsive form of self-aggrandizement that I can only assume is intended to preserve relationships with influential donors. Calls to more heavily police our campus actively endanger Jewish students, and threaten the regular operations of the university far more gravely than peaceful protests.  [...]

On Monday, I joined hundreds of my fellow student workers for a walk-out in solidarity with the encampment; we listened respectfully as a similarly sizable group of Columbia faculty held a rally on the library steps. Frankly, it didn’t feel much different from the environment during my union’s most recent strike on campus – I felt inspired again by my colleagues’ commitment to making Columbia a safer and better place to work and study.  Later that night, a Passover Seder service was held at the encampment. Would an antisemitic student movement welcome Jews in this way? I think not.  [...] Here’s what you’re not being told: The most pressing threats to our safety as Jewish students do not come from tents on campus. Instead, they come from the Columbia administration inviting police onto campus, certain faculty members, and third-party organizations that dox undergraduates. Frankly, I regret the fact that writing to confirm the safety of Jewish Ivy League students feels justified in the first place. I have not seen many pundits hand-wringing over the safety of my Palestinian colleagues mourning the deaths of family members, or the destruction of Gaza’s cherished universities. 

I am wary of a hysterical campus discourse – gleefully amplified by many of the same charlatans who have turned “DEI” into a slur – that draws attention away from the ongoing slaughter in the Gaza Strip and settler violence in the occupied West Bank. We should be focusing on the material reality of war: the munitions our government is sending to Israel, which kill Palestinians by the thousands, and the Americans participating in the violence. Forget the fringe folks and outside agitators: the CUAD organizers behind the campus protests have rightfully insisted on divestment as their most important demand of the Columbia administration, and on sustained attention to the situation in Palestine. And we are not alone. College campuses across the United States have followed Columbia’s lead. 

Jewish Columbia University student Jonathan Ben-Menachem wrote in Zeteo debunking the false "antisemitic" smears used to attack protests against the oppression of Palestinians on campuses.

[padawan-historian]

Black solidarity with Palestine against apartheid tomorrow and forever!

[mvrvmfotogrvphs]

United against Apartheid Israel.

JHB, South Africa. 28 October 2023.

[workersolidarity]

🇮🇱🇵🇸 Vile racist comedy from an Israeli comedian mocking Palestinian mothers whose children and babies have been killed in Israeli shelling and air strikes in the Gaza Strip. It is designed to dehumanize Palestinians to Israelis, who already treat Palestinians as insects to be squashed.

Israeli Zionism is no better than German Nazism, Italian Fascism, or any other strain of supremacist thinking and ideology.

#source

@WorkerSolidarityNews

[sweaters-and-vertigo]

when i saw the first newscast about “the israel hamas war” i knew something was missing from their reports.

i was ignorant of the entire history. all i knew was that israel was a “jewish state” and that was supposedly a good thing. i foolishly thought, “so, israel is a jewish state. my cousins are jewish, some of my friends are jewish. they’re all wonderful people and i love them. so israel must be a perfect reflection of the jewish faith”. i had no prior knowledge of israel’s oppression over the palestinians. there was no easily accessible information about it that i could find naturally.

but when i was watching the news in october, i felt a twisting in my stomach and i just knew there was more to the story. i can’t explain how i knew but i knew. i had to dig until my fingers bled to find any amount of information about palestine’s struggles. over the last several months, i feel like i’ve done a decade’s worth of research. learning about it all has been exhausting, confusing, stressful, and depressing. but most of all it made me feel very ashamed that i didn’t know sooner. i’ve always been such a strong critical thinker and had a very investigative mind. i don’t know how i never realized.

i’m still learning. every new thing i find is like a punch to the gut.

i’m sorry to all palestinians for my inaction. i’m sorry that i didn’t see this sooner. i wish that i had, so that i could have been there for you and with you earlier. but i’m here now and i want to help in any way i can. the injustices you’ve experienced have been traumatic enough for me. i can’t imagine what you’re going through. your strength in these times is so admirable, i just wish it wasn’t necessary.

and i’d thank all the jews who are fighting against zionism, against israel. i know you’re not doing it for me but thank you. y’all are so brave, smart, and kind. i’ve been reading stories from people who’ve lost friends and family because they’re jews who support palestine. that would be really difficult and i am so sorry if you’re going through that. but you’re doing the right thing and i hope you keep doing it.

i want to hear from muslims and jews, but only if you’d like to talk to me. i want to know your perspectives. i’m white and i’m not religious but i want to be your friend, or at least your ally. i just want to protect all of you. i want you all to be safe and happy. it seems like that’s a hard thing for you to find in this world right now but i want to help you find it, if you’ll let me. but if not, i will quietly support you from a distance. i just can’t not offer my help. i’m a helper, it’s in my nature.

[anti-zionist-jew]

Shout out to my haters. Thanks to your antics I’ve gained so many rad followers who stand in solidarity against genocide ✊🏽

[ritzy-biscuit]

✊🇵🇸🇵🇸

✍️ https://peoplesforum.org/againstapartheid

[hack-saw2004]

ONE HOUR AGO: our comrades at mit have established the scientists against genocide encampment on their campus!

[immaculatasknight]

Palestine solidarity in Ireland

[news4dzhozhar]

[breathedreamscream]

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A post shared by Gloria | Dissident ED Education (@nalgonapositivitypride)

[padawan-historian]

“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.”

~James Baldwin

[mvrvmfotogrvphs]

Blood on Israel's hands.

JHB, South Africa. 28 October 2023.

[workersolidarity]

The Second Nakba

Two different standards and enforced separation under the Law is the literal definition of Apartheid.

Anyone who can argue Israel isn't an Apartheid Regime requires a unique level of dishonesty. You literally have to live on another planet.

This is the ongoing Nakba, or forced removal of Palestinians from Palestine in favor of white European Jewish colonists. You sure never see the Israeli State steal Palestinian land and hand it to African Jews.

This is incredibly disgusting. The Israeli settlers not only acknowledge the Nakba, but celebrate it! They don't even deny their Human Rights violations. They're proud of stealing the homes of Palestinians.

[cornrowsandcornbread]

i cannot believe how evil the world can be.

[gottacaptcha-em-all]

if you watched the ballad of songbirds and snakes and didn’t recognize how it parallels the current. Sorry but you are fucking dense