Look at what is happening in America… We read in Troy Closson’s report in the New York Times: “Nearly 50 people were arrested at Yale University in New Haven on Monday morning, after arrests last week of more than 100 protesters at Columbia University in New York. The arrests sparked a wave of activism on other campuses, including MIT, the University of Michigan and Stanford University, as the protesters were calling for the divestment of their universities from companies with ties to Israel and a ceasefire in Israel’s war on Gaza».
The report is accompanied by an impressive photo album. Looking at the photos of the demonstrations and the arrests of the protesters, one word automatically comes to mind: 1968. Because what is happening today in American universities is reminiscent of the wave of mobilizations about the Vietnam War, which swept the USA and changed its face.
Gaza
THE ongoing carnage in Gaza takes American college students out on the street. The blood count, as the prominent Palestinian politician and activist Mustafa Barghouti puts it, is terrifying: “With200 days of Israeli attacks on Gaza have killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, of which an estimated 70% are women and children. In addition, an estimated 7,000 people are under the rubble and the injured number 76,000. Most of the infrastructure has been destroyed, including 70% of homes, all universities, and 33 out of 36 hospitals. In the West Bank the Israeli army together with the settlers have killed 486 Palestinians and injured more than 4,700».
Protest rally on Columbia campus
AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File
The hypocrisy
This magnitude of human loss in a population of approximately 2.1 million people is beyond all limits. In fact, it should be surpassing, because the USA and the EU support the ceasefire in words and in practice they support it strongly Israel. The carnage in Gaza is being done with American weapons. This is exactly why Gaza is turning into a global symbol for the new generation. Symbol of western hypocrisy. While the West praises rights and humanity, it is complicit in the Israeli campaign of revenge that primarily targets civilians.
Students at the world’s leading universities are not taking to the streets because they like Hamas – after all, there are a large and ever-growing number of progressive Jews among them. The male and female students revolt because they consider the ongoing massacre unthinkable, because they are fed up with the hypocrisy of the Western democracies, because they want to do the right thing. Young people’s lives are always guided more by moral rules than by self-interest, as Aristotle pointed out.
Since the arrest of protesters in Columbia
AP
Joshua Briz
The message
The mobilizations of American universities send a global message of peace and justice. They also show how old certain aspects of public dialogue are in our country. How ridiculous and unreal does the Mitsotakis government’s cliché that “occupations only happen in Greece” seem today? How shallow are various power pundits’ analyzes of Postcolonial populism, which favors minority group activism in universities? But how unfair and leveling does the rhetoric of a certain Leftist group that slanders American citizens with their governments and the military establishment?
I don’t know how the protests in American universities will turn out. But I know they are signs of a changing world. I also know that their basic slogan right now sums up the imperative of law: Immediate Cease Fire.
