There’s no turning back
Gaza has changed all of us.
I’ll never be able to forget my own experience pushing my college to divest. It was ten years ago, and the target was fossil fuel investments, but the response that my university had to our reasonable demands – namely that it stop profiting from the destruction of the ecosystem and the warming of the planet – changed me. Acts as simple as hanging a banner from the administrative building or trying to deliver a petition to the board of trustees resulted in the police being called on us. Multiple students were arrested simply for trying to deliver a letter to the board, the real power at the school, which was of course composed primarily of millionaire businessmen.
I’ll never forget the look I got from one administrator as I entered their building. We had been camped outside for two weeks at that point, and even though the woman who saw me had no idea who I was, she knew exactly who I was. She knew my presence, our presence, meant disruption. And few things are more sacred to the neoliberal institution than avoiding disruption, even when the status quo is harmful investment in fossil fuel corporations, or genocide. And so my presence scared this administrator, and the cops were there within minutes. The feeling of being a student and having the university resort to violence rather than speak with you is immensely hard to forget.
But so too are the broader lessons I learned in student organizing. The feelings are indelible, and yet the bigger picture, the structural knowledge you receive when you go up against a large and powerful institution, stuck with me too. Within weeks of getting involved in that student push to divest from fossil fuels, and to get a coal CEO kicked off the board of our school, I had learned that universities didn’t quite work the way I had imagined. Growing up they had seemed to me, from a distance, to be centers of knowledge and places where life looks a little more like it’s supposed to; people pursue learning and community and aren’t as constrained by work and stress. And there’s a significant kernel of truth to that, but behind the facade is a power structure that cares infinitely more about investments and real estate than the student body. That truth has become more and more real over time, and has been violently laid bare by the boards and administrations themselves in recent weeks.
I’ve already talked about the campus Gaza solidarity movement with you quite a bit, and today I want to focus on a different aspect of the broader movement to Free Palestine. What I want to emphasize is that when I learned how my college really functioned, when I learned what they were willing to do to us instead of taking money out of fossil fuels and booting a CEO off the board, I was changed.
The impact of protest right now matters immensely. It’s impossible to quantify how important it would be if the movement for a Free Palestine in the West built enough power to force our countries to stop funding ethnic cleansing, to stop arming genocide, to stop supporting apartheid. The lives that have been lost are irreplaceable, and the lives that could be saved are invaluable. And, at the same time, we’re seeing millions of people, young and old and everything in between, change in profound ways. In that fact lies the reality that Gaza and Palestinians and this movement we’re seeing all around us are altering the future just as they work to alter the present.
One of the many driving forces changing how people across the globe think, not only about Zionism but about imperialism and society at large, is the simple fact that we cannot unsee what we have seen. The searing images, the haunting videos, the mass murders streamed onto our phones have already shifted both public opinion and the way millions of people think. For one, the approval of Israel’s action has plummeted. Recent Gallup polling shows that:
“All three major party groups in the U.S. have become less supportive of Israel’s actions in Gaza than they were in November. This includes declines of 18 percentage points in approval among both Democrats and independents and a seven-point decline among Republicans.”
These swings are notable largely because Israel retained such high favorability in the U.S., and across much of the West, for so long. Decades of propaganda began to fracture in recent years, and shattered in recent months. But it’s more than that – for millions of people across the world there’s also no unseeing U.S. complicity. There’s no unseeing how Israel and the U.S. are virtually alone at the UN, on the world stage, working to protect a genocidal state and enable a genocide again and again. Even as Israel kills yet another UN worker, bringing the total to 190 slain employees of the United Nations, the enabling and participation in Israel’s genocide continues.
People cannot simply forget these actions, these choices that the U.S. and Israel make day after day. I say that as a hope more than as a fact. I know that as people age they can leave behind the politics and values of their past. I know that plenty of hippies “aged out,” and that even some former Black Panthers became moderates over time. But others did not, even those who have been incarcerated for decades as a punishment for pursuing liberation. They stayed true to the vision of freedom and justice, at times because the harsh and unjust treatment they were met with made it impossible to turn back.
And while students are not facing repression that can be compared to what the Black Panthers and others have faced, they are repeatedly facing mass violence from the state as well as vigilantes. They have also seen how little their schools care about them, how little their government cares about them, and how deeply invested our entire system is in war and imperialism. Simply forgetting the lessons painfully shown to you, and even more so painfully beaten into you, is not likely. It’s hard to turn back.
Maybe most significant of all, there’s no going back for millions and millions of people because we’re increasingly being prevented from going back to any sort of business as usual. The rent is too high, the summers are too hot, it’s just too expensive to pretend that everything is okay – or to have a life where everything appears okay. Of course some people do have the choice, they could live comfortably and pretend that all is well. But, even for a growing chunk of this class, the horrors they’ve seen are too much, too gripping. Conservatives and mass media love to make fun of these “rich kids at Columbia” and elsewhere, but the truth is these kids terrify them. Class traitors terrifying them. The children of the rich and powerful deciding to fight for collective liberation instead of bolstering the status quo terrify those who want complacency and more of the same.
What we’ve seen, from Harvard to the University of North Texas to the streets of Washington D.C. and beyond is a broad movement for a Free Palestine. People who could stay home are joining together with people who may not even have a home in order to push this country away from genocide and towards a different sort of society where our resources go to those in need instead of the executives and investors of arms dealing corporations. It is these exact governmental decisions, the repeated choice to side with the super-rich and their interests ahead of the needs of everyone else, that make it so hard to turn back.
Students who have been attacked, and people everywhere who have seen horrors in Gaza beyond our comprehension, cannot simply forget. We’ve seen how violence abroad is connected to fascism at home. We’ve seen how Israel’s genocide in Gaza is connected to the war machine here in the United States. We’ve seen how it all comes together in a society structured to deprive the many so the few can hoard wealth and resources. Whatever comes next, there’s no turning back. We will struggle towards a better system, both because we want to see it come into existence and because we don’t have the option to return to a healthy status quo. We can’t turn back to the society we might be nostalgic for. That world doesn’t exist anymore; a new one must be built.
It's interesting. One of the many ways the establishment dismisses The Kids is by referring to the cliche of the 1960s hippie who became a Reaganite once they had a mortgage or whatever. I just don't see a similar pattern unfolding here. What is it about having a job and a mortgage that makes you OK with dead kids? (lol as if jobs and mortgages are still a thing).
Wow. This is an awesome speech, Joshua. And tying it all together - and to the place where most of us are finally fully engaged: recognising that there's no turning back. Once that rests in your guts... Thanks for what you are doing.