[News] In the face of repression, resistance thrives: Why attacks on the Palestinian student movement are failing

[Anti-Imperialist News]

mondoweiss.net
<https://mondoweiss.net/2023/12/in-the-face-of-repression-resistance-thrives-why-attacks-on-the-palestinian-student-movement-are-failing/?ml_recipient=107737154267907586&ml_link=107737053250193366&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=2023-12-17&utm_campaign=Daily+Headlines+RSS+Automation>
In the face of repression, resistance thrives: Why attacks on the
Palestinian student movement are failing
George Washington University Student Coalition for Palestine
December 15, 2023
------------------------------

It has been over two months since the beginning of the Zionist regime most
recent stage of genocide against the steadfast people of Gaza, in which
almost 20,000 of our people have been slaughtered by occupation forces.

Since the beginning of this month alone, we have watched zionist forces abduct
and parade
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/12/8/video-photos-appear-to-show-detainees-stripped-to-underwear-in-gaza>
bound Palestinian men through the streets of Beit Lahia, stripped of their
clothes, in a repulsive act of complete and utter dehumanization. We have
watched zionist forces murder over 1,000 of our people in a single day
<https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/gaza-witnesses-bloodiest-day-yet-israeli-massacres-enar>
in massacres in Shuja’iya, Beit Lahia, and the Jabalia refugee camp — the
bloodiest day for Palestinians since the beginning of this genocide. We
have watched thousands of Gazans gather in crowds near UNRWA centers
<https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67255822>, demanding food to
feed their families, who have been deliberately blockaded from fuel,
medical supplies, food, and clean water by the occupation. Millions have
been left to die of starvation and disease
<https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/11/world/middleeast/gaza-health-infectious-disease.html>,
promising a slow death to the remainder of Gazans who have evaded the
airstrikes.

Families screaming from under the ruins of their homes, fathers and mothers
desperately digging through the rubble for their children, bodies piled
into mass graves, faces burnt off, dismembered limbs, red hospital floors,
refugee camps and neighborhoods razed to the ground. These images have been
seared into our minds and the cries of our people pierce our souls every
minute of every hour of every day.

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For two months, we have felt the crushing pain of our people, and for two
months, we have been out in the streets and all over our campus protesting
for an end to this bloodbath and GW’s shameless complicity. We have
organized protests, letters, sit-ins, email campaigns and walkouts every
single week, demanding that GW terminate its investments in the companies
whose tanks, missiles, and war technology are being used to slaughter our
families and loved ones. In retaliation, this university, whose hands are
still red with our people’s blood, has attempted to silence and attack us
every step of the way.

These attacks culminated two weeks ago, when a doxxing truck
<https://gwhatchet.com/2023/11/30/doxing-truck-displays-names-faces-of-pro-palestinian-students-draws-ire-from-officials/>
operated by a far-right media organization drove through campus with the
names and faces of 12 student organizers emblazoned on the sides with the
words, “GWU’s Leading Antisemites.” The truck eventually drove to and
parked in front of the Elliott School of International Affairs, where we
were holding a sit-in
<https://gwhatchet.com/2023/11/30/pro-palestinian-students-hold-sit-in-at-elliott-school-disrupted-by-doxing-truck/>
demanding divestment, as a direct threat made against student organizers.
We began the sit-in silently inside the Elliott building, in order to
protect ourselves from the truck that we and administration both knew was
coming to campus that morning, yet we were forced to move outside due to
deliberately excessive restrictions from administration. Despite the
extreme mobilization of GW’s private police force and administrative
officials there to surveil and intimidate us at our protest, it was us and
our comrades who protected ourselves, holding up banners to block the
disgusting messages on the truck and keeping each other safe from the
“reporters” videotaping and harassing us. All the while, police stood by
monitoring to protect the aggressor’s private property instead of their own
students, despite the truck being parked illegally in a construction zone
for an hour.
[image: Demonstrators block the name and face of one of several students
being doxxed as "GWU'S Leading Antisemites" on a truck paid for by
far-right outler, Accuracy in Media on Nov. 29. (Photo: Taytum
Wymer)]Demonstrators
block the name and face of one of several students being doxxed as “GWU’S
Leading Antisemites” on a truck paid for by far-right outler, Accuracy in
Media on Nov. 29. (Photo: Taytum Wymer)

Following this attack, The GW Hatchet’s editorial board, who has refused to
publish op-eds under SJP’s name and has cowardly abstained from
condemnation of our people’s genocide, published an editorial
<https://gwhatchet.com/2023/12/04/staff-editorial-intimidation-harassment-have-no-place-at-gw/>
rightfully denouncing the doxxing truck; yet they fallaciously asserted
that “Chants of, ‘You know who keeps us safe? We keep us safe’ are cries
for help” to the University.

Let us be clear. “We keep us safe” is NOT a cry for help. It is, in fact,
the exact opposite: a cry of dignity, resistance, and radical community
that asserts our collective power as the organized masses in the face of
the institutions orchestrating repression and violence against us. The
Hatchet’s assertion is a mischaracterization, made in complete ignorance by
those who have no understanding of our people’s struggle or the nature of
our movement. It is a falsehood based on the erroneous premise that the
administration’s greatest fault lies in their failure to protect their
students, rather than in the attacks that they themselves have actively
waged against our community. Acts of hatred like the doxxing truck are the
direct and inevitable result of the criminal actions University
administration have taken, not simply a failure over the ones they haven’t.

So let us be specific. In the immediate aftermath of the start of this
genocide, University administration, particularly President Ellen Granberg,
put out statements
<https://president.gwu.edu/addressing-war-israel-and-gaza> condemning “the
recent attack on Israel,” without so little as an acknowledgment of the
brutal genocide that has made thousands of our people martyrs, seemingly
unable to even utter the word “Palestine” for fear of angering GW’s zionist
benefactors.

Following a vigil, in which we as a community of Palestinians, Arabs,
Muslims, and those in solidarity, gathered to grieve our slaughtered
friends and family, President Granberg released another disgustingly racist
and Islamophobic statement
<https://president.gwu.edu/thoughts-recent-campus-events-and-war-israel-and-gaza>
in which she slandered our vigil as a “celebration of terrorism.”

In late October, SJP held a projector action
<https://mondoweiss.net/2023/11/gw-palestinian-existence-is-not-terrorism/>
in protest of the abhorrent statements made by President Granberg and GW’s
continued refusal to divest from the machines of Palestinian death. Despite
being originally greenlit by campus police, GWPD shut down our action at
the behest of Dean Colette Coleman, after which President Granberg doubled
down on her anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia by condemning
<https://president.gwu.edu/response-projections-gws-estelle-and-melvin-gelman-library>
our action’s honoring of our murdered loved ones as martyrs and calling for
liberation from oppression and colonialism from the river to the sea as
“antisemitic phrases.”

Following national zionist backlash
<https://twitter.com/StopAntisemites/status/1716994962703724728> and
threats of zionist donors pulling funding
<https://gwhatchet.com/2023/11/06/alumni-call-on-granberg-to-form-antisemitism-action-plan/>,
GW dragged SJP through formal conduct hearings, where the student
organization was found in violation of a delusory policy around postering
as well as a farcical “noncompliance” policy. SJP was placed
<https://gwhatchet.com/2023/11/14/gw-suspends-sjp-for-three-months-after-anti-israel-library-demonstration/>on
disciplinary probation until the end of the academic year, prohibited from
posting any communications on campus, and banned from campus for 90 days.
[image: A protester holds up a sign with the words "SILENCING STUDENTS IS
FASCIST" at a Nov. 15 Student Coalition for Palestine demonstration
protesting GW's 90-day suspension of SJP. (Photo: Taytum Wymer)]A protester
holds up a sign with the words “SILENCING STUDENTS IS FASCIST” at a Nov. 15
Student Coalition for Palestine demonstration protesting GW’s 90-day
suspension of SJP. (Photo: Taytum Wymer)

We know that the doxxing truck was not an isolated attack on our community,
but the direct result of administration’s actions. When President Granberg
refuses to utter the word “Palestine” or to condemn this ongoing genocide,
she erases our people and issues tacit approval of Palestinian death. When
she weaponizes racist and Islamophobic language against us and refers to
our mourning as “celebration of terrorism,” she further dehumanizes us by
denying our right to mourn our dead, disgracing the names of our martyrs.
When Dean Coleman and administration shut down our protests, they publicly
declare that Palestinians do not and should not have the right to free
speech in the face of our people’s ethnic cleansing. When they drag us
through kangaroo courts and ban SJP from campus, they demonstrate their
resolve to crush every last space left for Palestinians to come together as
a community.

President Granberg and Dean Colette Coleman put out a statement
<https://president.gwu.edu/response-doxing-truck-campus> after the doxxing
truck left in which they “condemn[ed]” this incident, but we see this for
what it is: a transparent attempt to absolve themselves of their
responsibility in emboldening zionist hatred, violence, and repression. We
know who they are and what they stand for. We know where their interests
lie. Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim student organizers have been getting
doxxed and harassed for months to administration’s knowledge, and they have
refused to do anything. Only when zionist intimidation results in bad press
for the University are they capable of the bare minimum of a milquetoast
condemnation with no material steps to protect students from further
threats to their safety.

This is, again, a continuation of their policy of turning a blind eye to
violence and harassment against our community. Since the beginning of this
genocide, multiple students have reported incidents
<https://gwhatchet.com/2023/11/06/muslim-palestinian-students-call-for-university-support-amid-reports-of-islamophobia/>
of getting their hijabs ripped off. Palestinian students have been spat on,
and many have experienced incidents of verbal harassment. On the night of
October 7, in a disgusting incident in Kogan Plaza, Chabad Rabbi Yudi
Steiner yelled at a female Muslim student, drunkenly screaming “Allah
Akbar! Allah Akbar!” Steiner even attempted to get in the student’s face
and was only held back by several other students who afterwards tried to
coerce her into not reporting the incident to “keep this between us.”
Despite being supposedly banned from campus, Rabbi Steiner has continued to
participate in on-campus events, and administration, despite also being
aware of these other incidents, has deliberately ignored real incidents of
violence against our community, while painting even the most basic
expressions of Palestinian free speech as inherently violent.

Our administrators are not stupid, nor are they unaware of what they are
doing. On the contrary, they have expressed to zionist audiences their
desire to engage in scorched earth repression against Palestinians, limited
only by the unfortunate existence of legal and university policies.

Recently, the Student Coalition for Palestine, which formed in the wake of
SJP’s suspension, was informed of a recording from a Nov. 16 alumni event,
sent to us by an anonymous source. In the recording, parts of which are
clipped in the video below, zionist alumni and parents expressed horrific
sentiments about SJP and Palestinian students, rife with racist,
Islamophobic rhetoric and lies. Zionist attendees referred to our Kogan
Plaza sit-in where we read the names of our martyrs as a “Hamas campus
rally,” said that Palestinian students would commit “a bombing” of the
Hillel building, and claimed that our actions were “threatening to kill”
Jewish students, calling for immediate retribution and expulsion. Instead
of defending students from these racist tyrades, Granberg doubled down on
the hatred, stating that while she “can’t promise that expulsion will
happen… *[she] wish[es] [she] could*.” Further exposing her zionist
alignment, she expressed that existing free speech policies were the only
thing preventing her from openly waging a fascistic campaign of censorship
against Palestinian students. “Would that be something that the FBI would
arrest someone for?” she said, “and if the answer is no, then it’s not
speech that GW can punish. And, you know, *I really wish it were, honestly
I really wish it were.”*
[image: Student holds a sign reading "GW FUNDS GENOCIDE" at a Kogan Plaza
Sit-In on Nov. 9. (Photo: Jelina Liu)]Student holds a sign reading “GW
FUNDS GENOCIDE” at a Kogan Plaza Sit-In on Nov. 9. (Photo: Jelina Liu)

We live in the beating heart of US empire, surrounded by the white pillars
of buildings where the war criminals orchestrating Palestinian mass death
convene. We attend a university that is deeply integrated into the war
machine, whose administrators pocket the money to be made off our families’
corpses. Their attacks on our community are not mistaken outliers that must
be corrected, but the intended result of an institution whose financial
interests lie in militarism and the zionist lobby. President Granberg, Dean
Coleman, and other members of this administration, who extol “the right to
free speech” in their statements but express the desire to expel and punish
students for it behind closed doors, are shameful disgraces to this school
and its community. But we know that GW has been forcibly repressing
<https://gwhatchet.com/2023/02/06/column-gws-suppression-of-palestinian-voices-violates-academic-freedom/>
Palestinians for years, which the Office of Civil Rights is currently
investigating
<https://gwhatchet.com/2023/05/12/office-for-civil-rights-to-investigate-gw-for-alleged-anti-palestinian-discrimination/>,
and that the source of this moral rot lies far deeper than our current
administrators — it is intrinsic to the nature of the university itself.

When they greedily and shamelessly accept funding from zionist
institutions, and refuse
<https://gwtoday.gwu.edu/message-president-leblanc-student-association-resolution>
to divest from the companies aiding in the killing of their students’
families, the university is not failing — it is doing what it does best as
a piece of the war machine. They cannot be separated from the system of
imperialism and militarism, because they, too, are the system. So let us
not be surprised when they attack and repress us. Let us not be surprised
when they trample over their own stated “values” to appease the zionist
institutions that line their pockets. The University does not keep us safe
because it *cannot* keep us safe, because their material interests are
rooted in the lucrative business that is our people’s oppression.
[image: Student waves the flag of Palestine at Oct. 9 vigil for the martyrs
of Gaza (Photo: Taytum Wymer)]Student waves the flag of Palestine at Oct. 9
vigil for the martyrs of Gaza (Photo: Taytum Wymer)

This same business underlies the entire system of American imperialism,
around which our society is organized, and our oppressors are
demonstrating, through a coordinated campaign of repression and violence
against students, the lengths they will go to protect their bloodstained
capital. Universities across the country, including GW, Brandeis, Columbia,
and the Florida State University system, have suspended
<https://jewishcurrents.org/the-push-to-deactivate-students-for-justice-in-palestine-sjp>
or banned chapters of SJP from campus. The political charlatans of both
ruling class parties have united to villainize
<https://www.republicanleader.senate.gov/newsroom/remarks/mcconnell-terror-and-self-defense-are-not-the-same-thing>
Palestinian student organizers and pass bills attacking students as
supporting
<https://www.hawley.senate.gov/senate-passes-hawley-resolution-condemning-antisemitism-college-campuses>
“terrorists” and synonymizing
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/12/6/anti-zionism-is-antisemitism-us-house-asserts-in-dangerous-resolution>
anti-zionism and anti-semitism. Just over two weeks ago, three Palestinian
students in Vermont were shot
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/27/three-palestinian-students-aged-20-shot-injured-in-vermont-what-to-know>
while wearing keffiyehs in an act of zionist hatred. One of the students,
Hisham Awartani, will be paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his
life.

Their injustices threaten to overwhelm us, but we owe it to our martyrs,
our prisoners, and the millions of our people still resisting the genocidal
zionist occupation to continue the struggle for our people’s liberation.
They want you to feel helpless. They want you to believe that you are wrong
to demand that your institution stop funding genocide. They want you to be
afraid to speak up for fear of their retaliation.

Let us not be deceived. The University thinks that they can crush us by
sanctioning students and banning our organization, but what they don’t
realize is that this movement is so much larger than one organization or
individual, and our growing movement is evidence of the futility of their
tactics.

We know this repression represents a weak and desperate institution that
fears the growing power of the student movement. These administrations,
whose interests are fundamentally opposed to ours, are terrified that we
will see through their spiderweb of liberal hypocrisy and fragility and
become conscious of our potential collective power. In desperation, GW
resorts to panicked repression, but these tactics are backfiring on them.
They believe repression can halt our movement in its tracks, but in
reality, it is exposing the true nature of their interests and sharpening
the contradictions, forcing even the most liberal of students to confront
our institution’s brutality and their alignment with the zionist lobby
against our community.

As George Jackson, imprisoned Black revolutionary, wrote, “The other bees
will understand, they do understand… even those who thought the bear their
rightful ruler see him differently when he foams at the mouth, and bites at
his own tail.”
[image: Over 200 GW students walk out of classes and join a sit-in
organized by SJP and 11 other organizations on the steps of the
university's main library (Photo: Taytum Wymer)]Over 200 GW students walk
out of classes and join a sit-in organized by SJP and 11 other
organizations on the steps of the university’s main library (Photo: Taytum
Wymer)

We are witnessing a new wave of revolutionary consciousness amongst
students who see with more clarity than ever before that the path forward
must no longer be in liberal reform, but rather in our ability to build
power as a mass movement. Not only do other students see how desperate the
administration is to silence us, they are witnessing them fail again and
again while we continue to overcome every tool weaponized against us
through the power of our coalition and our organizing. Our movement
demonstrates to students that we have the ability to protect ourselves and
resist repression, and it is only growing. The illusion of hegemony is
fading, and it is our duty to replace it with a radical vision of
solidarity, resistance, and collective liberation.

As SJP wrote in a November 7 *Mondoweiss* op-ed
<https://mondoweiss.net/2023/11/gw-palestinian-existence-is-not-terrorism/>,
“We understand that liberation will never come from those who profit from
ethnic cleansing, imperialism, and militarism. We cannot and will not rely
on institutions that dehumanize our community and fund the killing of our
people to keep us safe.” So when we shout, “we keep us safe,” we assert
that we know our institution will not protect us, and that we are the only
ones who can build the power in our community needed to protect and
liberate ourselves.

They are losing, and we are winning. They are weak, but we have power. Let
their efforts fuel your resolve, because when we, the masses, organize
together, we can never be defeated. In the words of Pan-African
revolutionary, Kwame Ture, “The secret of life is to have no fear; it’s the
only way to function.” Do not lose hope. Do not be afraid. The path to
justice and return is walked hand-in-hand, guided by our martyrs, and lit
by the undying fire of our people’s resistance.

Liberation, undoubtedly, liberation nears.
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