The Student Movement for Palestine Continues, Despite Crackdowns

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Jenny Maguire: I am the student union president [at Trinity College Dublin], and for the past year I’ve sat on a task force set up after our encampment last May. The university agreed to cut almost every tie with Israel, but it had no infrastructure to make sure the university did not reinvest in Israel — so, over the past year, with various experts and members across the university, that task force delivered a win. Trinity became the first university in the West to completely sever ties with the Zionist entity, after a decade of organizing and the support of not just staff and students, but the wider Irish society.

Lana Hakim: I am from National Students for Justice in Palestine, currently based in the Northeast. NSJP networks 350-plus chapters, making sure they are equipped with the necessary skills to engage and push their demands on campuses across the country. 

Momodou Taal: I’m a Ph.D. candidate in Africana studies at Cornell University, calling from Cairo. I’m in Cairo because I’ve self-deported from the U.S. In terms of carrying the work, I am looking into the march on Rafah and also trying to see if we can get our flotillas out. 

Maryam Alwan: I was part of the Columbia chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine until it was suspended by the university. Then I was part of the Columbia encampment. I was arrested because of it. One of my friends, Mahmoud Khalil, was kidnapped, and I’ve been trying to do a lot of advocacy to raise awareness about his situation.

Taal: First and foremost, I think there’s this climate of fear that has been created. This is what fascism is, right? But I also think we are perhaps a generation that is so used to getting things quickly that we don’t realize this is not a protest. Kwame Ture talked about the difference between mobilization and organization — you mobilize for one event or for a few things, but organization is how you continue to sustain a movement. We are engaged in a liberation struggle, and we know from history that these take years and sometimes decades before the oppressed win. We have been inculcated into a system that teaches us, ​“If you protest, you will get change. If you nonviolently protest, you will get change,” when we know that’s not the case. 

Power is not given up. It’s taken. So I’ll tell people all the time, you should never spread defeatism because we take our cue from the Palestinians, and they have not given up on their struggle. Secondly, it’s a liberation struggle; it’s not going to happen overnight. If you’re going to be doing Palestine advocacy, you’re going to be doing it for the rest of your life.

Hakim: Defeatism is most definitely a response to the brutal escalation of what we’re seeing in Gaza and the psyops tactics that the Zionists use all over media platforms to make us feel quelled. What we need to do is instead understand that this is a lull. We can combat this lull through revolutionary optimism and community defense and cross-movement solidarity, as a way of bolstering the united front we’ve created.

Alwan: This is a question I’ve thought a lot about, given that Columbia has been one of the centers of repression in the United States. Multiple members of our community have either had to self-deport or have been outright abducted by ICE. It’s really unprecedented. At the same time, it is not our role to be defeated by repression, because every time I open my phone and I see what’s happening in Gaza, there’s nothing that would make me too scared to say anything. I’ve faced two lawsuits at this point before I’ve even gotten my driver’s license, based on lies. My strategy is to make it backfire, which I think Mahmoud has done really well with his advocacy from behind bars. I also think that now is the point where students need to think about how to merge with the community. If we are able to merge the fight between the college campuses and broader struggles, then we’ll be able to find a way to be more effective and win.

Maguire: I completely agree with that — in your community, where your university exists — but also with workers unions and with trade unions. I think that relationship has been fundamental on an Irish level; it creates an inescapable truth that this is the direction things need to go. When every trade union on our college campus also has a divest mandate and solidarity networks between staff — not just in the academia side, but staff on every single level — that is when we build a base and community of spirit and hope that is undefeatable and lays a foundation for which no repression can pull its way into.

Maguire: Something that’s really struck me is being so aware of universities’ protest policies across the world. No matter who it’s for, we must be consistently calling out the restrictions on rights to gather and assemble, because that affects us all, and it fundamentally undermines our ability to organize. The idea of there being a protest lawn, where you go to protest, is ridiculous. Protest is a legitimate form of airing grievances, and I think a mass awareness of the restriction is something that transcends any political ideology.

Hakim: There are two pieces to this. There are the visa revocations and the deportations of pro-Palestinian students. The same institutions that refuse to divest from Zionism have essentially handed over these students on a silver platter. We are watching the state hunt down those who dared struggle against genocide, specifically, but also imperialism, capitalism, Zionism, any -ism that maintains U.S. hegemony. Now, we’re essentially seeing the gestapo being implemented in the barrios of Los Angeles. So we understand that pro-Palestinian students are being affected, and anyone who goes against the narrative of U.S. hegemony is too.

As far as the UMich surveillance we saw in April, feds raided the homes of pro-Palestine protesters, and then we saw the felony and misdemeanor charges that were then dropped. They hired private investigators to surveil, stalk, tail, with $3 million in spending. University of Michigan is one of the 60 blacklisted schools that the federal government had their sights on, and now UMich was essentially trying to be the good lapdog, and that’s resulting in proPalestine students at risk. 

We’re seeing the technologization and AI-ification of these policies. Not just banning protests or having designated protest zones, but having these raids, the COINTELPRO-level surveillance, the ID checkpoints, the license plate readers, the hyper militarization, with AI being implemented in all of these kinds of classification tools to send that information to the state. It is shocking; we all saw that video of feds barging into UMich homes. We also need to remind ourselves that this isn’t exactly unprecedented, given the history of liberation movements.

Taal: It’s the Gramscian notion of power, that power has to show itself when it’s most threatened. As much as the oppression looks so extreme, it’s not that they’re coming from a position of strength. It’s actually that they come from a position of weakness, that they feel so threatened they have to result in overt violence. I’m a Marxist, so I have a very material analysis and lens of institutions, so it’s unsurprising to me that this is what the university is for, the idea of an ​“ideological state apparatus.” These institutions reproduce the intellectual ruling class. So anything that challenges that — if you think about the liberated zones and the people’s universities — is a threat. Because you’re saying, ​“No, we don’t accept your legitimacy as an educational space. And this is what our spaces should be like.” 

It’s important to note, with all the technological advantages the state has, it’s still possible for us to fight and win, it’s not all powerful. There’s still human beings running this at the end of the day. We have to realize what the cracks are and what the contradictions are that we can expose.

Taal: Right now, the objective conditions for a mass anti-imperialist movement are there. So the question becomes, how do we create those subjective conditions that people are going to want to feel a part of something? I know this is cliché, but it’s about continually making those connections. People think, ​“Oh, Palestine is so far from the U.K., so far from the U.S.” But how many Israeli soldiers train U.S. police officers, for example? 

What’s interesting is that Zionism is clearly on its way out in terms of ideology, and I don’t think Zionism can be salvaged in the mainstream, but I don’t think it’s a guaranteed victory for us. I have a complete, 100% conviction that Palestine will be free, but it doesn’t mean that, on its way to liberation, the Zionists and the U.S. will not blow the world up. So it’s important to think about what we are putting in place for when it does eventually end. Those are the kinds of questions we have to wrestle with in our organizing spaces as well, which is difficult, because the immediacy and urgency of the genocide obviously becomes the focal point.

Alwan: I’m feeling hope for the first time in a while, with developments like the March on Gaza and the flotillas. We should not allow these moments to dissipate into thin air. I really think we should capitalize off of it, and try to organize more flotillas and more sustained pressure, not just within where we live and on our universities, but on the Zionist project itself.

Maguire: Not to be the outsider who’s giving all my opinions, but every four years, the conversation we see from the States and especially in liberal circles is ​“It’s not just about this election. It’s about so many other areas.” But these are the conditions in which organizing can occur. These are the conditions that organizing must be happening. Because if you wish to change — building strong coalitions and strong organized communities and empowering people on the ground and basing it in the radical politics of demanding a better world that is anti-capitalist, that is anti-Zionist — then these are the conditions we can take and push people forward and make it an undeniable and unavoidable situation that this is the new political. That is what we are trying to do here in Ireland as well. 

Taal: It’s also making sure people know the difference between a tactic and a strategy. Electoralism is not a strategy. It’s a tactic that can be used if it’s going to benefit the movement. I have no issue with it at a local level. I think a local level is actually important because of things like school funding for disenfranchised communities, for example. But again it’s a tactic to be used to advance a strategy to create a world we want to see. But to think we’re going to vote in anticapitalism is a bit silly.

Hakim: The Trump admin is not a unique evil; it is essentially the outcome of that intentional rightwing shift that has been crafted by both parties. Both parties have been complicit in enforcing militarism and imperialism that’s weakened oppressed communities all around the world. 

Alwan: Just organizing on a campus — especially if you were privileged enough to go to one of these quote-unquote prestigious schools — is enough to shift national discourse, if done effectively. That was what really surprised me with the encampments. We did not expect it to spread like that, but when they did, it introduced divestment into the media vocabulary. So I think that simply doing what we can to show the reality of what Palestinians are going through, and the fact that students are standing against it, is a way to shift national political discourse. I don’t really have faith in traditional lobbying and electoral politics.

Taal: Our enemies also have a long array of history, and we should have the same. When we think of the war on terror, it didn’t come out of nowhere. The logic of the war on terror is directly linked to the Palestine struggle. The figure of the Palestinian as a terrorist — and, more broadly, Arabs and Muslims as terrorists — is actually taken from the Palestinian struggle, how people were responding to Palestine and the Palestinian liberation movement. What it reveals to me is that there’s a heightened crisis in Zionism. Because what Zionists have relied on for so long in terms of coercing people, by way of propaganda and manipulation, no longer works for people. You’re seeing this at almost every level of society. What that reveals to me is that they are actually afraid and they know their position is one of precarity. A hit dog always hollers. They’re just lashing out.

Hakim: It’s Islamophobic in nature. The ADL and Greenblatt are quite consistent in their anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim speech. It’s important to recenter this and understand the significant amount of labor that student organizing has done to progress the Palestinian liberation movement. Students caused such a crisis on campus, raised political consciousness and elevated people power across these campuses. The strength of the student movement and the astuteness and skill of student organizers — who have part-time jobs, who go to school as well, who organize 40 hours a week on top of that, to push these demands — I think remains like an enigma and a conundrum to people to the Zionist project and the people who uplift that project that also hope to quell a rising majority. We’re such a confusion apparently, and I think that’s just an indication of the people power and the power of the student movement.

Alwan: I also think it’s interesting to learn more about the ADL’s history, because I believe it was also involved with spying on anti-apartheid activists in South Africa, and it has a long history of repressing movements, even while it claims to be a civil rights organization. I think they will always try to cast us as terrorists. The lawsuit that I’m in, and that Mahmoud is a codefendant in — they’re claiming we are somehow part of Hamas, and I think it’s just laughable, because it just shows the sheer desperation they have to resort to in order to delegitimize the Palestinian cause and the struggle for liberation against genocide that everyone can see with their own eyes. I do think the repression is probably going to get worse before liberation, but I also think it’s inevitable that Zionism is no longer tenable.

With everything that’s happening right now, from global actions to repression in the States, what do you think our movement should prioritize in the months ahead?

Maguire: Class-building. When they say ​“this is a Mexican riot,” or ​“these students are like little kids going out and doing student activism,” what they’re doing is distracting you from the fact that it’s a class struggle and a struggle of wealth, of extraction and exploitation, and fighting against that. That is where our conversation must be going, because then we become unbeatable. And that is how we not just see the decline of Zionism, and eventually see it become untenable, but as Momodou said, we must create a free Palestine. We’re not just looking for the end of Zionism and the Zionist entity. We’re looking for a free Palestine for Palestinians. To do that, we must build a complete consciousness and a movement together, rooted in solidarity across issues.