Tin Soldiers and Biden Coming

Generation Z Finds its Vietnam

There are moments in history when it suddenly becomes clear that the rules have changed, and you are now in entirely new territory. Last week, Professor Carolyn Fohlin, an Economics professor at Atlanta’s Emory University, was arrested on campus, because she had verbally questioned the rough treatment of one of her students who was being arrested for protesting the Gaza War.

Video footage of the incident clearly shows that Fohlin used no force or violence herself, but even though she was a woman in her sixties, she got the full treatment: one cop twisted her wrist and threw her down onto the road, and rammed his knee into her back while another forced her arms together and slipped on the plastic cuffs.

At no point did Professor Fohlin put up any resistance. Face down on the ground, she shouted to the police that she was a professor. She might as well have been Saint Theresa of Avila for all the impact her protestations had on these thuggish automatons, who clearly did not care who she was or who saw them.

This is what impunity looks like, and it’s generally safe to assume in politics, when you see police behaving like this towards non-violent protesters, that the cops aren’t representing the moral high ground. On the contrary, at Emory, as in so many US campuses, the police are representing both a government that has been actively complicit in the annihilation of the Gaza Strip, and university administrations that have also made it clear which side they’re on.

Over the last week, police engaged in the kind of semi-militarised law enforcement practices that have become routine in the US for many years. Rubber bullets, flash bang grenades, beatings, phalanxes of police in Darth Vader riot gear, even reported snipers - all these tactics all been deployed against peaceful protests and campus occupations in more than 30 US colleges.

Similar methods have been used in Germany, where successive governments have all but made pro-Palestinian protests illegal, to the point when even minors wearing the colours of the Palestinian flag have been arrested, and the slogan ‘from the river to the sea’ has been made a criminal offence. Here in the UK, the police have so far been fairly restrained, despite persistent calls from Suella Braverman and others rightwing ghouls for a crackdown on ‘hate marches’ that, once again, have been overwhelmingly peaceful.

To some extent, this type of heavy-handed policing is the logical extension of longstanding attempts to delegitimize and suppress the pro-Palestinian movement, which began before the Hamas pogrom/raid on 7 October last year. The criminalisation of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement in Germany in 2019 and Michael Gove’s 2023 anti-Israeli boycott bill were all part of this general trend.

But now these same governments have either colluded directly in the insane destruction that Israel is inflicting on Gaza, or quietly accepted it as some kind of war-is-hell tragic necessity. The consequences of such collusion and passivity have been unimaginably horrendous and impossible to ignore. So far Israel has killed 35,000 Palestinians and injured tens of thousands, and left much of the Gaza Strip in ruins. According to the UN, rebuilding Gaza will take at least 16 years and cost £32 billion.

Who will do that rebuilding, assuming Israel allows anyone to do it? Where will Gaza’s nearly two million people live while they wait for houses to live in? Who will feed them? What hospitals will be available to them? What schools will the children of Gaza go to? What kind of society can possibly take shape in such conditions? Who kind of lunatic believes that anyone, either Palestinians or Israelis, will find security in such circumstances, let alone that a ‘two-state solution’ can emerge from these ruins?

The answers to these questions have been drowned out into the void of retribution, militarism and strategic delirium that has turned the descendants of the refugees driven out of Palestine during the first Nakba, into the terrorized inhabitants of another tent city. Yet still Israel’s backers insist that Hamas will be defeated, and that if/when that happens, the despised Palestinian Authority or some equally improbable international force can waltz back into Gaza, with the grateful acquiescence of the people who have been bombed, starved, traumatised and shot to pieces, and there will be some kind of ‘peace process.’

So many powerful people and institutions have held onto these ideas, without questioning whether they are achievable, and only now are some of them beginning to realise how Netanyahu played them. And these hapless culprits aren’t the Trumps, Mileis, or Orban, or any of the far-right ‘populists’ who currently menace western democracies. If Gaza is a genocide, it’s a liberal, democratic genocide, facilitated by governments that claim to uphold human rights, and which have often used violations of these rights as a pretext for military ‘intervention.’

Unable or unwilling to change course, these governments have coupled weak condemnations of Israeli behaviour with military aid and diplomatic support, even as the ground shifts under their feet. Because the destruction that Israel has inflicted on Gaza is so staggering, pitiless and intense, that more and more people are horrified and disgusted by it.

The international eruption of campus protests is a sign of this. A new generation has embraced Gaza and the Palestinians as their cause, just as previous generations once adopted Vietnam and Apartheid. Initially, faced with this upsurge of solidarity, Zionists and their supporters smeared the participants with the usual labels. They were privileged, naive, violent, historically-ignorant, decadent, terrorist-supporters etc. Inevitably, they were antisemitic. In the UK, as in the US, pro-Palestinian protesters have been accused of threatening Jews, making Jews feel unsafe, dividing communities, promoting violence, and supporting Hamas.

Few of those who make these claims had anything to say when Zionist ‘counter-protesters’ attacked students in their tents last week, while the police did nothing. But the pace and intensity of these protests show that these old tricks are no longer working. Out of the rubble of Gaza, an international movement has been born which shows no sign of abating, and it is in these circumstances that the police baton has been deployed to suppress criticism of the governments and institutions that are defending the indefensible. This is why pro-Palestinian protests are being banned in Europe. It’s why the police phalanxes were present at American university campuses last week. Such deployments don’t occur by accident, any more than the police riots in Chicago in 1968 or the 1970 shooting of four students at Kent State University were accidents.

It’s less than four years since Biden’s Democratic Party called for a new America in a brilliant campaign video that evoked Civil Rights activism, and showed scenes of violent police repression under Trump, accompanied by the Black Eyed Peas son, ‘The Love’:

It was a powerful statement, but now the love has gone. And Biden last week said nothing about the brazen police violence at Emory, or the attacks at UCLA, but condemned ‘acts of chaos’ on US campuses, and supported police efforts to restore ‘order.’ And over here, Commons Leader Penny Mordaunt warned UK protesters that they also face a ‘strict response’ if they attempt to replicate the ‘disgusting’ protests in the US.

But the tents are spreading. On Friday they were outside Sheffield University, where I work. Now they’re in Belgium and the Netherlands. When a movement achieves such momentum, brute forces rarely stops it. There are signs that the West’s obtuse, cynical and cowardly enabling of Israel’s carte blanche in Gaza is already hurting some of the governments or political parties responsible. This is what happens when you defend the indefensible or actively facilitate it.

Right now, Israel may be ‘winning’ the war in Gaza as it begins its assault on Rafah, but it is draining political support in one country after another, and so are its enablers. Police batons and tear gas can clear campuses, but they can’t bring that support back. Nor can bad faith accusations of antisemitism. There are, of course, antisemitic elements at the fringes of the Palestine solidarity movement, that must be resisted and opposed. But these minority voices do not define a movement that represents the only hope, in the long-term, of dragging Israel towards some kind of sanity, just as the anti-Vietnam war movement once did with America itself, and anti-apartheid did with South Africa.

That prospect may seem remote right now, but is no more unrealistic than the fantasy that Gaza can be bombed into peace, or that the annihilation of Gazan society will make Israelis feel secure. Neil Young once sang of a generation that was finally on its own as a result of the Kent State shootings.

Last week, the protesters of Generation Z had their moment of clarity, when police batons gave American campuses just a faint taste of the repression that Palestinians in the Occupied Territories have known for fifty-seven years.

And instead of smearing them, we should applaud their bravery, principle, and resolution, because they really are the heart of this heartless world, and they have shown more genuine moral leadership than those who set the cops on them, and folded their arms while Gaza was obliterated.