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US Campus Pro-Palestinian Protests: ‘Outside Agitators’ and ‘Supercitizens’ 

In this article, Janet Slagter from WILPF US delves into the ongoing pro-Palestinian protests across US campuses, shedding light on the grassroots movements led by students against Israel’s actions in Palestine. She explores how these students are organising, the resistance they face from university and police responses, and the varied and creative strategies they employ. Additionally, the article discusses the successes and demands of these student activists and provides ways for allies to support their cause. Through this lens, she highlights the vital role of young activists in the fight for justice and the importance of WILPF’s ongoing support and advocacy.

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Janet Slagter
6 June 2024

WILPF is an activist, grassroots, social justice, organisation founded to stop wars. Current campus protests against the war on Palestinians are aligned with positions WILPF has taken and that we should continue to press for. How are the thousands of campus protesters, mostly students, organising against Israel’s war on Palestine and what forms of resistance do they face? What can we learn from them and how can we help them?  

This article focuses on five topics related to the US: campus protests, university and police responses, the range of students’ demands, student successes and how to get involved. 

US Campus Protest at a Glance  

Given the dearth of journalistic coverage, it is impossible to count the number of higher education campuses on which protests have been staged. There were at least 140 by 6 May. By 16 May, 2950 students, faculty and staff had been arrested on 66 campuses.  

Student strategies vary and are very creative. They have staged sit-ins, die-ins, marches, rallies, hunger strikes, occupations and graduation disruptions.  

Students have made at least 120 encampments. Some were quickly removed by police. Some have lasted weeks and range size from six to 100 tents. Most universities have had them removed. However, at Wesleyan in Connecticut, professors have taught classes among the tents and UC Berkeley has not threatened their students’ tent city. When officials at the New School in NYC took down their indoor student encampment, faculty established their own. 

During this spring’s graduations, students have subverted the usual order, turning their backs on speakers, walking out of the ceremonies chanting “Free, Free Palestine.”  

On some campuses, faculty have stood protectively in between students and police, like Annelise Orleck, the 65-year-old Dartmouth feminist labor historian and former head of Jewish Studies, whom the police dragged to the ground.  

Universities and Police Response 

Beyond the 2900 plus arrests, university officials have expelled students from classes and from their campus residences. They have attacked demonstrators and torn down encampments. They have beaten and tear-gassed students and closed campuses. Several universities have cancelled, postponed, or re-engineered graduations, and cancelled speeches, such as South Asian Muslim, Asna Tabassum’s, valedictory at the University of southern California (USC).  

Many schools have sent in police. At the university of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), city police watched (and filmed) for hours as 100 pro-Israeli counter-protesters disassembled the student encampment, kicked and punched protesters, and used strobe lights, firecrackers, sound blasts, bricks, pepper spray, wooden planks and metal poles on them, leading to 25 hospitalisations.  

Elsewhere, police have used rubber bullets and tear gas and “skunk”, a chemical munition developed in Israel. At Arizona State, police officials have been charged with attacking and removing the hijabs of four Palestinian students. 

For context, it is important to know that several states have passed new laws protecting police from any meaningful community oversight, making police into “supercitizens” with rights and immunities other residents don’t have. In addition, both public access and press coverage are being restricted. When the University of Columbia brought in police to end the occupation of Hamilton Hall and arrested over 100, they prohibited press and the public from entering campus. And most of the US mainstream press coverage is filtered through a bias that favours the state of Israel. 

Though UCLA holds the arrest record, it is significant that some of the most ferocious attacks were ordered at elite universities with multibillion-dollar endowments, such as Colombia, Penn, and Dartmouth, where many investments are connected to war profiteering.  

US national legislators are calling for protesters to be sent to Gaza and for international student protesters to be deported. They are threatening to remove federal funding from schools where students are allowed to protest the actions of the state of Israel, labeling these protests “antisemitism”*. More than 700 Jewish professors have signed a letter rejecting this definition. 

* The Antisemitism Awareness Act, [AAA] which easily passed the House of Representatives, contains a many-factored definition of antisemitism, which lists, as an example pertinent to the current situation, “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”  
This definition relies on and is quoted from: “Working Definition of Antisemitism,” International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, 2016.       

In another official rhetorical strategy used to delegitimise protesters and infantilise students, NYC Mayor, Eric Adams, a former cop, labelled protesters as “outside agitators,” a trope familiar to 1960’s anti-racist and anti-war protesters. The label suggests that non-student participants are suspect and should not be on campus. It suggests students couldn’t possibly develop their understandings, beliefs, and strategies themselves.  

Student Demands 

The wide range of students’ demands reveal deep learnings about political economy and universities’ processes. In addition to calling for their universities’ support for a permanent cease fire, students demand meetings with administrators to achieve: 

  • Divestment from weapons manufacturing companies and others profiting from Israel’s occupation of Gaza 
  • All war profiteers out of our universities 
  • Financial transparency 
  • Accept no funding from Zionist organisations that stifle students’ free speech. 
  • Creation of police community review boards  
  • Creation of an alternative model of crisis response 
  • Prohibit study abroad programs to Israel, Gaza or the West Bank until Palestinian students can be admitted 
  • Admission of students from Gaza to US universities 
  • Support the ICC call for further investigation of Israel’s actions in the war 
  • Divestment from all sites of settler colonialism 
  • End relationships and exchanges with Israeli universities and institutes. For example, Tel Aviv, which designs weapons systems and holds the corpses of 60 Palestinians  
  • Guarantees of free expression on campus 
  • Amnesty for students barred, expelled, and arrested 
  • Creation of Middle East Studies programs and Arab cultural centres  
  • Allow Palestinian flags on campus. 
  • Acknowledge Palestinian students, specifically 
  • Hire Palestinian professors 
  • All cops off campus indefinitely 
  • End “Palestine exceptionalism” limits on free speech 

Student Successes 

There is no one tactic that is successful and context matters. 

Students are strategising for effectiveness and safety. As they plan actions, they hold discussions of how much risk each is willing to take, given that many students have been suspended, kicked out of campus housing, and/or arrested. 

Many Palestinian students are organising in ways to minimise danger for themselves and their families, some of whom live in Palestine. For example, they choose not to use their surnames. To prevent administrative interventions and attacks by observers, some choose not to have speakers, but to hold quiet sit-ins where some leaders speak to the press.  

With respect to divestment, a universal demand, some student groups have achieved guarantees of negotiations with boards of directors, usually in the fall. A handful of schools have already agreed to divest. A few universities have also agreed to financial transparency. 

Successful negotiations have featured officials revoking student expulsions and desisting from legal prosecutions when students remove their encampments. 

The greatest success is the knowledge acquired actively protesting, in learning how universities actually work, in contrast to their polished published statements. Students experience power laid bare. They acquire hands-on political awareness, local and global. They learn to be organisers, with all the creativity they can muster. They learn to work together towards peace and social justice goals. Confronting power as they are brings lifelong transformations in thinking and action. We are watching future WILPFers. 

How to be Allies 

Many WILPFers are already involved. For those who are not connected to a campus already, some further suggestions are to exchange contact information with student activists and respond to their requests for physical, psychological, legal and other needs. Record their actions and share videos with other activists and with media. Write and speak about what you see.  

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Janet Slagter

Janet Slagter has been a member of WILPF member since 2000 and have served on the International Board since 2018 She is an emerita professor of Women’s Gender, and Sexuality Studies at California State University-Fresno where she taught Feminist Activism, Feminist Theory and Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Women for over 20 years and crafted campus policies on Sexual Harassment She has taught in Malaysia and Kenya and researched women’s movements in GuatemalaA peace, feminist, health access, and immigration political activist since the 1960s, she serves on the board of her local Rape Crisis Services center. 

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Melissa Torres

VICE-PRESIDENT

Prior to being elected Vice-President, Melissa Torres was the WILPF US International Board Member from 2015 to 2018. Melissa joined WILPF in 2011 when she was selected as a Delegate to the Commission on the Status of Women as part of the WILPF US’ Practicum in Advocacy Programme at the United Nations, which she later led. She holds a PhD in Social Work and is a professor and Global Health Scholar at Baylor College of Medicine and research lead at BCM Anti-Human Trafficking Program. Of Mexican descent and a native of the US/Mexico border, Melissa is mostly concerned with the protection of displaced Latinxs in the Americas. Her work includes training, research, and service provision with the American Red Cross, the National Human Trafficking Training and Technical Assistance Centre, and refugee resettlement programs in the U.S. Some of her goals as Vice-President are to highlight intersectionality and increase diversity by fostering inclusive spaces for mentorship and leadership. She also contributes to WILPF’s emerging work on the topic of displacement and migration.

Jamila Afghani

VICE-PRESIDENT

Jamila Afghani is the President of WILPF Afghanistan which she started in 2015. She is also an active member and founder of several organisations including the Noor Educational and Capacity Development Organisation (NECDO). Elected in 2018 as South Asia Regional Representative to WILPF’s International Board, WILPF benefits from Jamila’s work experience in education, migration, gender, including gender-based violence and democratic governance in post-conflict and transitional countries.

Sylvie Jacqueline Ndongmo

PRESIDENT

Sylvie Jacqueline NDONGMO is a human rights and peace leader with over 27 years experience including ten within WILPF. She has a multi-disciplinary background with a track record of multiple socio-economic development projects implemented to improve policies, practices and peace-oriented actions. Sylvie is the founder of WILPF Cameroon and was the Section’s president until 2022. She co-coordinated the African Working Group before her election as Africa Representative to WILPF’s International Board in 2018. A teacher by profession and an African Union Trainer in peace support operations, Sylvie has extensive experience advocating for the political and social rights of women in Africa and worldwide.

WILPF Afghanistan

In response to the takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban and its targeted attacks on civil society members, WILPF Afghanistan issued several statements calling on the international community to stand in solidarity with Afghan people and ensure that their rights be upheld, including access to aid. The Section also published 100 Untold Stories of War and Peace, a compilation of true stories that highlight the effects of war and militarisation on the region. 

IPB Congress Barcelona

WILPF Germany (+Young WILPF network), WILPF Spain and MENA Regional Representative

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Demilitarisation

WILPF uses feminist analysis to argue that militarisation is a counter-productive and ill-conceived response to establishing security in the world. The more society becomes militarised, the more violence and injustice are likely to grow locally and worldwide.

Sixteen states are believed to have supplied weapons to Afghanistan from 2001 to 2020 with the US supplying 74 % of weapons, followed by Russia. Much of this equipment was left behind by the US military and is being used to inflate Taliban’s arsenal. WILPF is calling for better oversight on arms movement, for compensating affected Afghan people and for an end to all militarised systems.

Militarised masculinity

Mobilising men and boys around feminist peace has been one way of deconstructing and redefining masculinities. WILPF shares a feminist analysis on the links between militarism, masculinities, peace and security. We explore opportunities for strengthening activists’ action to build equal partnerships among women and men for gender equality.

WILPF has been working on challenging the prevailing notion of masculinity based on men’s physical and social superiority to, and dominance of, women in Afghanistan. It recognizes that these notions are not representative of all Afghan men, contrary to the publicly prevailing notion.

Feminist peace​

In WILPF’s view, any process towards establishing peace that has not been partly designed by women remains deficient. Beyond bringing perspectives that encapsulate the views of half of the society and unlike the men only designed processes, women’s true and meaningful participation allows the situation to improve.

In Afghanistan, WILPF has been demanding that women occupy the front seats at the negotiating tables. The experience of the past 20 has shown that women’s presence produces more sustainable solutions when they are empowered and enabled to play a role.

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