Biden, Harris, Gaza and the Student Debt Smoke Screen

Despite living under military rule and apartheid, Palestinians have long centered education in the development of young people and boasted one of the world’s highest literacy rates. But now, the Israeli military has totally annihilated Gaza’s educational infrastructure, a type of systemic destruction known as scholasticide and educide—an attempt to eliminate education as a key path of Palestinian resistance. Israel has leveled all six major universities in Gaza, and of the 813 schools there, nearly 90% have been destroyed or sustained serious damage. One of the authors of this piece, Yousef Aljamal, attended one of these schools in Gaza, and that education enabled Aljamal to excel as a writer, researcher and teacher.

But the far-right Israeli government, as well as violent Israeli settlers, have been attacking Palestinian students with regularity for decades. Since October 7, thousands of students have been killed and dozens of scholars have been assassinated, including Gazan educator and storyteller Refaat Alareer.

In the United States, a movement of student encampments have honored the memories of Palestinian victims in many ways, building makeshift libraries named after Alareer and renaming buildings and spaces after some of the other Palestinians killed. And as these students — from Columbia to Emory to UCLA — demanded their institutions divest from Israel and weapons manufacturers, they used their tuition and debt as standing. They want their colossal payments for higher education divested from genocide.

The reaction against them was and has been swift, designed to demonstrate what happens — physically, mentally, materially — to those who challenge the economic status quo. The New York Police Department even made a hype video of riot police attacking the encampment at Columbia.

Meanwhile, the ruling class — recognizing student debt as a unifying issue among young people — is doing its best to weaponize and criminalize debt for the sake of a genocidal regime. David Frum, former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, tweeted in April that there should be ​“no student loan forgiveness for students arrested for disrupting other students’ educational activities.” The next week, a group of senators — led by Republican Tom Cotton — introduced the No Bailouts for Campus Criminals Act, which would ban student debt relief for protesters.

Paul Moore, former chief counsel at the U.S. Department of Education, declared in an op-ed that the Biden administration should ​“make an example” out of Columbia and eliminate students’ federal financial aid altogether, suggesting that taxpayers are funding ​“antisemitic intimidation and violence.”

Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz went further, saying any university that divests from Israel should ​“have its federal funding terminated.”

The rhetoric isn’t just extremist, it’s deeply unpopular. More than 80% of voters under 35 disapprove of how Biden is handling Israel, according to CNN—which is not surprising, given that the bombs destroying schools, universities and lives in Gaza were made in the United States, paid for and shipped by the Biden administration to Israel.

It would be easy to imagine that — were Biden serious about bringing young voters back into the fold — Biden would have changed course on Israel/​Palestine while simultaneously tackling another wildly popular issue, delivering broad-based student debt relief. Instead, Biden created a smoke screen, appearing publicly aligned with many left-wing activists on student debt cancelation while holding back on his power to deliver it. Will Vice President Harris act similarly? 

While progressive members of Congress, racial justice organizations, labor unions and debtors demanded full debt relief — or at minimum, $50,000 — the Biden administration in 2022 announced a mere $10,000 per person for borrowers earning under $125,000 per year, and an extra $10,000 for Pell Grant recipients. This means-testing cancelation to ensure the ​“right” borrowers earn relief ultimately cost everyone relief. Instead of the government canceling debts automatically, borrowers were put through a bureaucratic application process for eligibility.

Then, before a single penny of debt could be discharged, the courts facilitated the requests of right-wing plaintiffs and halted the process. Even worse, the Biden administration opted to resume costly student debt payments before knowing whether the Supreme Court would approve its proposal.

Leading up to the Biden v. Nebraska Supreme Court decision, the Debt Collective wrote a private memo to the White House painting a grim picture of a hypothetical scenario where debt relief is again promised, but on a slow, ineffective and doomed timeline. In true Democratic Party fashion, the Biden administration failed to heed the warning. While reporters championed Biden’s steadfast commitment to young people, it was student loan borrowers desperate for a jubilee who were being gaslit but could nonetheless see through that smoke screen.

A similar story has played out with borrowers defrauded by predatory, for-profit colleges, where much of the federal debt the Biden administration has successfully discharged has come from. The Biden administration has a comprehensive list of scam schools that have taken advantage of borrowers, but a response from the Department of Education to a records request filed by the Debt Collective indicates the Biden administration has not specifically contacted the borrowers who attended these fraudulent schools to inform them about ​“borrower defense” related to the scam schools — let alone following up with those borrowers or rightfully canceling their debts.

Perhaps the Biden administration is incompetent — or maybe they’re immobilized by political cowardice and would rather reap the rewards of a student debt smoke screen by publicly pretending to fight for relief.

Regardless, the outcome is the same. That’s why, in late May, the Debt Collective staged its Fund Education, Not Genocide rally in Washington — because, along with 40,000 Palestinian deaths, the destruction of the systems of education in Gaza is partly possible because of the massive financial investments that U.S. universities have in Israel.

Biden does know how to fight — when he wants to. The time should be now, not just for the millions with student debt in the United States, but for the 2.3 million Palestinians resisting ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza, whose educational infrastructure has itself been devastated.

But even if the drums of war stopped immediately, rebuilding Gaza’s educational and other infrastructure could take generations — perhaps some 80 years, according to one estimate. And these widespread attacks on the Palestinian systems of education cannot be separated from the widespread censorship and attacks on student movements in solidarity with Gaza.

There is no doubt that student encampments have been inspired by the resilience of the people of Gaza, or that these encampments have provided messages of hope in return.

This historic student encampment movement should be seized as an opportunity to support education everywhere. But it is also an opportunity for Biden and Harris to meaningfully reverse course on Gaza while improving the lives of millions of Americans — and for Harris to improve her chances of beating back Donald Trump in this year’s race for the Oval Office.

It’s time Democrats take real action. Their rhetoric no longer matters. Biden needs to lift the smoke screen and set fire to the crushing burden of student debt. Harris needs to follow suit.

We’re running out of time; we have a genocide to end and a world to win.