FREE SPEECH

In standing up for Gaza, US

students have exposed the
limits of free speech
On campuses across America, we see a moral refusal among the young
to be complicit in violence accepted by their elders

By Priyamvada Gopal April 30, 2024

Message received: News of the protests at Columbia University has reached Rafah. Photo: ©Xinhua-Alamy
Stock Photo

And just like that…the stereotype changed. Until very recently, gen Z, including
students in western countries, were being lambasted as sheltered “snowflakes”
lacking in drive and ambition, too invested in safe spaces to engage with
uncomfortable ideas or exert themselves in challenging directions. Now the
problem seems to be that these same young people are not willing to be pacified by
either comforting pap or complacent indifference to injustice. They’ve rejected the
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As campus protests against Israel’s war on occupied Gaza spread across the United
States over the last several days, participating students have been transformed by
their detractors into nothing less than enemies of the state, seeking the downfall of
western civilisation itself. One liberal pundit harrumphed that students have been
indoctrinated by those three rather random witches—critical theory, postcolonial
studies and identity politics—who have ruined the western university. In another
familiar deflection, students protesting lethal violence inflicted by the heavily
armed and well-funded state of Israel on tens of thousands of trapped Gazan
civilians are also accused of being antisemitic, despite a number of Jewish students
being among them and vociferously refusing violence inflicted in their name.

No less startling was the response to these sit-ins from university authorities at
dozens of universities. Within hours of setting up their “encampments” (tents) on
campus quadrangles and lawns, most famously at Columbia University in New York,
students on several campuses found themselves subjected to ferocious and
manifestly disproportionate repression: security forces deployed using excessive
force, arrests, evictions, teargassing, pepper-spraying, suspensions, tasering,
campus bans, threats of disciplinary action and, in some cases, armoured vehicles,
snipers and heavily armed riot police. It is not inconceivable that one of these many
guns is actually fired before too long and yet another American tragedy ensues.

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Alongside students, some of their professors have also received warnings and threats
of disciplinary action from their employers for standing alongside or even just in the
vicinity of their students. They too have been arrested and roughed up, some,
ironically for asking why such excessive force was being used against students. One
viral video from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia shows a female economics
professor being thrown to the ground by two burly male police officers and
handcuffed as her spectacles fall off.

In an ironic reversal of the usual charge levied against students, the

demand for “safe spaces” now comes from the authorities

The heavy-handed and seemingly co-ordinated responses from university

authorities might have shown a more familiar logic if what was taking place could
conceivably be shoehorned into the category of a “riot” or even some kind of violentPrivacy
disorder. Given the overwhelmingly peaceful and well-organised nature of the
protests, to which media and eyewitness reports testify, universities and police
forces are coming up with bizarre charges such as “defiant trespass”, activated
within seconds of ordering people to leave the area. In an instant, what normally
should and does function as shared community space is turned into exclusive
private property so that its ordinary occupiers can be criminalised, their records
smudged forever.

No very good reasons have been provided for this level of repression. Instead, in an
ironic reversal of the usual charge levied against students, the demand for “safe
spaces” now comes from the authorities who claim encampments and sit-ins render
universities unsafe—although it is unclear quite how.

Over the last days, I’ve visited a sit-in at Princeton University in New Jersey where
arrests were made within minutes of tents going up. While police immediately had
the tents removed, the sit-in itself continues and grows. There are mounds of pillows
and blankets, food supplies, over-the counter-medicines and a small “library” shelf
full of books. Protesters sit around chatting, drawing, reading, working on their
laptops or listening to visiting speakers.

At each visit, I have been struck not only by the peaceability—and affability—of those
present but also the extraordinary attention and labour given to creating
determinedly inclusive and community-oriented spaces. There is a vision of
university communities as they should be that many managers might do well to
learn from. Posted guidelines underline the right to adhere to different beliefs and
faiths while holding a “shared humanity” within that diversity. They also enjoin “no
littering”, no drug or alcohol use, and respect for personal boundaries. To ensure
that no untoward face-offs take place, protesters are also asked not to engage with
counter-protesters, of whom there are a small number. Shabbat dinners are held at
the camp, as are Islamic prayers. I attended a Christian Sunday service at which the
journalist and ordained minister, Chris Hedges, also preached a stirring sermon
that put defying injustice at the heart of what such protests strive for, reminding his
listeners of the duty to refuse complicity and to insist that it was “better to suffer
wrong than do wrong.”

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Students supporting Palestinians protest next to a pro-Israeli event held by GWU for Israel in George

Washington University, Washington on 18th April. Photo: © Aaron Schwartz/ZUMA Press Wire

A profoundly moral and purposive refusal is at the heart of these campus uprisings.
It is a refusal to be complicit in the injustice of the horrifying ethnic cleansing
largely funded and armed by the United States government which is now also
seeking to protect Israeli leaders from prosecution for war crimes by the
International Criminal Court. It is a refusal by the young to mirror the supine
posture of so many of their elders, including university managers, as every single
one of Gaza’s twelve universities has been wantonly and deliberately bombed, some
badly damaged and others reduced to rubble. There are no stirring statements of
concern this time around, still less offers of support for “scholars at risk” even as
many academics, including internationally known scholars, in Gaza have perished.
Relatively few western academics have spoken up against this “scholasticide” and
certainly no university leaders.

Students are refusing this reprehensible silence. The sit-ins, growing by the minute
are also a refusal by young people to occupy the position of helplessness that many
well-intentioned voters understandably feel as governments ignore clear popular
majorities for a ceasefire and for an end to the violence. Theirs is a refusal to treat
morality as a pretty slogan without any bearing on our institutions and how they are
funded.

The refusal to put up with business as usual has resulted in clear-sighted and
ethically robust demands, though the details may vary with institutions and groups.
For the most part, protesting students are asking that their institutions, many of
which have vast investment portfolios for their huge endowments, to disclose their
holdings and then to divest from weapons and technology manufacturers with ties
to the Israeli military. These include companies such as BAE Systems, Lockheed
Martin, and Raytheon as well as Amazon and Alphabet, Google’s parent company. Privacy
They want their universities, to whom they pay fees, to delink from the killing fields
of Gaza. They want the leaders of their institutions to join calls for a ceasefire,
bringing an end to the relentless slaughter we have been watching on our screens,
and for the hostages to be returned to their families. Many are also calling for
universities to participate in boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel;
in this they echo a prior generation of students who called for precisely such
measures against apartheid South Africa—with eventual success, bringing apartheid
to an end. Boycotts and divestment are tried and tested tools of bringing about non-
violent change while sanctions are regularly used against governments which break
international law, as Israel has multiple times. There is little point in condemning
violence issuing from occupied regions if there is no willingness to bring powerful
non-violent measures to bear upon occupiers and their violence.

The protests have succeeded in showing Gaza—and the rest of the

world—that many Americans are horrified at what is being enacted in
their name and with their money

While the demands are, of course, important, the success or failure of the protests
does not rest on them. The truth is that the protests have already succeeded. They
have drawn the attention of the country and the world beyond to the profound
inadequacies and falsehoods of a media narrative that has, by and large, failed to
hold powerful politicians and lobbies to account. Whether they are lauded or
denounced, protesters have made clear that the United States’ policy of aiding and
abetting industrial-scale slaughter by Israel using vast sums of American taxpayers’
money is not with the unanimous consent of its citizenry.

The protests have succeeded in showing Gaza—and the rest of the world—that many
Americans are horrified at what is being enacted in their name and with their
money, and they want it to stop. The United States of America is no more a monolith
than anywhere else, however much consensus politicians manufacture amongst
themselves and try to enforce on their citizenry through an acquiescent media.

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A young girl in Rafah, Gaza, peers at a message of thanks written to US students. Photo: ©Xinhua-Alamy

Stock Photo

The protests have also succeeded in one other important way, if a depressing one.
They have shown all of us that brutality wielded outwards can and will be turned
inwards in a split second. A heavily militarised state which uses or abets the use of
force against civilians elsewhere is no respecter, ultimately, of its own civilians. The
willingness to unleash armed personnel and weapons on young people and their
professors has thrown light on a glaring democratic deficit, one that was already
evident in state policy but now takes the form of punitive measures against
dissenters.

It also reminds us, as historian Asheesh Kapur Siddique shows, that far from being
left-wing indoctrination camps, American universities are run by trustees and
boards filled with bankers, financiers and corporations, most of whom are on the
political right. The repression of these protests has thrown light on the grim reality
of a hollowed-out democracy and a routine authoritarianism which is more deeply
and dangerously embedded than can be conveniently pinned on one political party
or a single figure like Donald Trump.

“Free speech” was always conditional on not being properly

threatening to the status quo

Some have rightly pointed to the “Palestine exception” for free speech on campus,
but the levels of repression we are seeing also indicate that “free speech” was always
conditional on not being properly threatening to the status quo. This is why many of
the usual voices claiming to support free speech have been remarkably silent on the
ongoing repression of protest. It is also too easy to look at this appalling repression
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and think it a mistake on the part of higher education managers. It is not. It is
intended to send the message, loud and clear, that on matters of material import to
the powers that be—such as profiting from death-dealing weapons—dissent will not
be tolerated.

Students in the United States—and now also in Canada—are standing up to be

counted when it matters very much that all people of conscience do so. They are
taking action in the most peacefully disruptive ways at a time when clichéd stories
need to be challenged. They know that “power concedes nothing without a
demand.” Of those who claim to be liberal but are against these protests, the great
American abolitionist Frederick Douglass might say: “Those who profess to favor
freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up
the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean
without the awful roar of its many waters.” As today’s elders imagine that in
Douglass’s time and in subsequent terrible moments, they would have stood against
oppression, we are extremely fortunate that so many in the next generation are
willing to actually do so. Stand with them.

Priyamvada Gopal is a fellow of Churchill College and professor of postcolonial studies at the University of
Cambridge. She is the author of “Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent” (Verso)

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