So-called Gaza Solidarity Encampments, first set up April 17 at the Ivy League Columbia University in New York by supporters there of the reactionary Oct. 7 Hamas pogrom against Jews, have spread to a number of other elite campuses in urban centers. The leaders of these actions sympathize with Hamas and promote the destruction of Israel, the spread of Jew-hatred, and physical attacks or threats aimed at Jewish students.
Similar antisemitic attacks have been building for months.
While some students are attracted to these campus “protests” because of a desire for peace and an end to harsh conditions facing Palestinians in Gaza — in fact, the result of Hamas’ own actions — camp organizers seek to prevent any civil discussion or debate.
When three Jewish students walked through the encampment area on the Columbia campus April 21 they were met by a human chain of students and faculty who linked arms and marched forward in lockstep to “push them out of the camp.”
This action was organized by Columbia student Khymani James, who is a leader of the Columbia United Apartheid Divest group that demands the university stop all business or cultural exchange of any kind with Israel. In a video he says bluntly, “Zionists don’t deserve to live.” A Zionist, a code word used for Jews, is “a white supremacist,” he said. James now claims he regrets his remarks.
Two other Jewish students, Chaya Droznik and Jessica Schwalb, walked through the encampment. They recorded one participant, whose face was covered by a kaffiyeh, telling them, “I’m gonna do just like they did all the soldiers on Oct. 7 … yo, you all got smoked.”
More than 100 Columbia professors signed a letter defending students who support the “military action” by Hamas.
This fits with the curriculum at Columbia and like-minded meritocratic institutions, especially the study of 20th century history there, Ross Douthat writes in an April 27 New York Times opinion article. “The ambit narrows to progressive preoccupations,” he says, “anticolonialism, sex and gender, antiracism, climate.”
“Class critiques are mostly invisible, left behind in the 19th century with Karl Marx.”
“Note that these are usually children of the upper middle class,” he added, “18-to-29-year-olds in general are more likely to be worried about economic issues.” In this context, “Israel gets to be the singular scapegoat.”
The administration’s response to the occupation has been to make classes “hybrid” for the rest of the semester. Jewish students are advised to not come on campus.
Similar tent “encampments” have been set up at New York University, Harvard, Yale, University of California, Los Angeles and other upper-crust campuses. The Jew-hatred they promote involves, and draws the sympathy of, academicians and other privileged layers, but is deeply abhorrent to the vast majority of working people.
These actions are not spontaneous. They’re coordinated and well-financed by liberal nonprofits and foundations, which generously cover their well-remunerated full-time staff and expenses of groups like Students for Justice in Palestine.
The liberal media runs features pitching the events at Columbia as a modern-day echo of social protests in the 1960s.
But those actions came in the context of Cuba’s socialist revolution, the powerful Black proletarian movement that overthrew Jim Crow segregation, and the growing fight against Washington’s war against the people of Vietnam and their fight for independence and national liberation. They won the support of the working class, changing social relations forever.
Today’s pro-Hamas actions — including the encampments — support obliterating the Israeli state and expelling or killing the Jews there and are a deadly obstacle as well to the struggle of all working people in the region. Hamas leaders have made it clear their goal is to find a way to carry out more pogroms until their genocidal goal is accomplished.