I’ve seen at least three videos recently of college students, each taken at the moment their schools voted to divest from Israel. Each time the crowd jumps to its feet, cheering and chanting and celebrating the historic moment. As you likely know, divestment campaigns on college campuses were one of the major sites of struggle against apartheid South Africa, and one of the levers that helped bring pressure to end the regime. Now, campuses are again a site of organizing for divestment against an apartheid regime. And it’s beautiful to see tangible movement victories, especially against a background of pain and despair where hope is hard to come by.
It’s hard to find hope right now, so hard. There’s no denying it. As I write this I learn of the renewed bombing of Rafah, where 1.5 million Palestinian refugees are trapped. There’s a sense, that rarely leaves me now, of a cloud hanging in the air just above us all. A cloud of devastation and anger that sits, rage-inducing and oppressive beyond measure. For some it makes action imperative, it compels us to break through the stagnation. For others the cloud makes it hard to act, because despair and feeling impotent or powerless to change things can immobilize us. But for more people than I can count I see it producing a deep bitterness. That bitterness, and what we do in its wake, is what I want to talk about today.
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