I feel a strange kind of hopelessness about Gaza and the cause of Palestinian human rights and autonomy. It is not that I believe that the State of Israel’s War on Gaza will never end; it must, if only because it is ultimately self-defeating. Nor is it because I believe that Palestinian statehood is further out of reach today than it was before 7 October; if anything, the Israeli slaughter of Gazans has made the case for Palestinian independence better than a decade of appeals to the abstract principles of human rights and self-determination.

The State of Israel has demonstrated that it cannot be trusted to behave like a civilized country – it has become the very model of a “rogue state,” from which its neighbors and the subject population that it has dominated since 1967 must be protected. In a way, the State of Israel’s own actions have made the BDS movement, which its leaders and its Zionist sponsors in the Diaspora have whined about for so long, almost superfluous. At least outside of North America, the case for cutting ties with the State of Israel and Israeli institutions is increasing easy to make.

Admittedly, divestment from Israeli companies and the boycott of its institutions remains as symbolic as it always was. It remains beyond the realm of possibility that governments and institutions are any more likely to cut themselves off from Israeli high-tech and security corporations, or from companies like Apple, Intel, Microsoft, and Google, among many others, which are deeply invested in the State of Israel. The integrated nature of the high-tech, neoliberal global economy makes complete divestment virtually impossible; It’s one thing to boycott an Israeli company, but something else again to boycott a non-Israeli company that does business with Israeli companies. (If you use a cell phone or a computer you are almost certainly doing indirect business with an Israeli company.)

Having said that, boycotts and divestment have never been about the actual material impact that they might have on the Israeli economy – they are about drawing a line with complicity and making an explicit ethical statement in a morally ambiguous world. Rest assured that the Quaker abolitionists of the 1850s who refused to wear blue clothes lest they support indigo plantations in the southern United States knew that their efforts would have a tiny effect on the slaveocracy. And when we refused to eat Granny Smith apples, drink FBI orange juice and smoke Rothmans cigarettes in the 1980s to strike a blow against the Rembrandt Corporation, I’m pretty sure no one expected that we would tank the Apartheid South African economy.

The point was to send a message, to performatively define the boundaries of morality and human decency. The indigo planters continued to thrive on their exports to Europe, and to those American customers who didn’t care (like the weavers who made cloth to outfit the US Army in blue uniforms) and to the vast European market that cared even less. White South African fruit growers and the Rembrandt Corporation continued to profit from global consumers who had no idea who owned what. Yet, the boycotts were a kind of political theater that kept the issue at the front of everyone’s mind; it was a form of what the Quakers called moral suasion – providing a kind of moral model that cannot be ignored.

One person, a hundred people, ten thousand, could not end the atrocity of the South’s “peculiar institution,” but every time a Quaker walked past in his black or brown frock coat, someone would know why it wasn’t blue. And while most universities, for example, have steadfastly refused to even consider divestment from the State of Israel, some have. More importantly, most are at least talking about it.

Princeton University lifted its ban on students arrested a month ago for their participation in a campus occupation just in time for its annual Reunion Weekend, when thousands of alumnae descend on the Central New Jersey college town for parties and reminiscences. More importantly, the university administration formally met with Princeton Israeli Apartheid Divest to discuss divestment. It is highly unlikely that it will happen, Princeton being Princeton, but the meeting explicitly legitimized the idea of divestment at crucial moment. And, by talking about it at all, it validated the idea that the State of Israel is the kind of country that one should consider divesting from – a rogue state.

That, too, is the value of the joint announcement this week by the governments of Ireland, Spain, and Norway that they will recognize a Palestinian state on 28 May. Suffice it to say that this diplomatic act will accomplish nothing of material value. Such as it is, the government of the State of Palestine is deeply contested, has few resources and little actual authority, thanks to the Israeli Occupation, and is more aspirational than actual. Still, it has diplomatic delegations around the world, missions in countries that have not recognized it and embassies in those that have.

The three European countries are latecomers to the list of governments which have recognized Palestine – 142 of 193 UN member states already have – and their diplomatic recognition is unlikely to usher in any more of a change for Palestinians than Sweden’s did a decade ago, but it is significant. How much so was clearly demonstrated by the State of Israel’s unhinged and overripe response to the announcement. “This evil cannot be given a state,” Benjamin Netanyahu frothed. “This would be a terrorist state.” The Israeli prime minister was clearly unaware that he has murdered 35,000 people, almost with his own hands, which is exactly what brought Ireland, Norway, and Spain for this point.

The recognition of Palestine will not, of course, change much in a practical sense but, like the Quakers’ dark clothes, it is a reminder and an object lesson in ethics. More importantly, like the campus demonstrators’ calls for divestment, it raises the question of Palestinian recognition, to be followed by independence, as a serious matter worth due consideration. All three of the European countries have close ties to the United States – Norway and Spain are members of NATO – and other American allies, like the Justin Trudeau government in Canada seem to be slowly moving from waffling to recognition. With a general election coming in Great Britain in a few short weeks, the Labour Party could well replace the deeply unpopular Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives as the government. Labour leader Keir Starmer has declared that he will recognize Palestine (albeit with strings attached) should he be elected the next prime minister.

The United States is gradually becoming isolated from its closest allies in its carte-blanche backing of the State of Israel, and even President Joe Biden’s unwavering support for the Israeli government… Well, at least it’s wavering. The president is still trying to have it both ways – talking tough about Rafah while keeping the arms pipeline open – but it is unlikely that he can do this indefinitely. Members of his own party, like Senator Charles Schumer, have publicly expressed doubts, former Senator Patrick Leahy, a true eminence grise of the Democratic Party, wrote this week that the State of Israel must be held accountable to the foreign assistance law that bears his name.

President Biden is the holdout.

What Ireland, Norway, and Spain, like the students in campus encampments across the country, have done is to make the recognition of Palestinian statehood, all of the issues that flow from it, like a ceasefire and the end of the brutal Israeli Occupation, and the ethics of being complicit in the slaughter of tens of thousand of Palestinians, something that cannot be brushed aside and ignored. I can hope that this is on President Biden’s mind, or at least his advisors’, as he faces a tough November election in against a Republican Party and presumptive nominee that pretty much owns the pro-Israel brand.

With the young voters essential to a Democratic victory slipping away with each waffling statement, and with the Zionist vote already committed to MAGA, the president has to make a choice. But such a choice demands the kind of moral courage that a career political insider simply does not possess. Can I hope for President Biden to find his baytsem and follow the lead of everyone around him? Or will he just put it off?

Such hope seems naïve.

26 May 2024

***

I walked down to the peace encampment at Rutgers University Newark today after teaching my summer class. The demonstrators have pitched their tents in the quad between the School of Public Affairs and Administration and the Law School, where Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a professor in the early-1970s, and where Elizabeth Warred earned her JD in 1976.

There was a lull in the encampment at the time; it was late afternoon, with the May sun shining on Palestinian flags fluttering in a light breeze and placards set aside for the next rally or workshop. The demonstrators were reading, talking, and napping. A university public safety officer looked on benignly from the security booth on Washington Street and a Newark Police officer scrolled through his phone while leaning on his black-and-white cruiser parked two hundred yards away on Warren Place.

Security wardens in blue vests appointed by the encampment organizers walked the grounds, stopping to talk. One of the libels directed against the peace encampments by their redhat critics is that they are “organized,” as if that is some kind of gotcha; evidently, they don’t believe that college administration and law students are capable of, you know, organization, so it must be evidence of dark forces (George Soros?) at work, pulling the strings. The State of Israel’s Christian nationalist allies always believe there is some occulted Jewish conspiracy pulling strings behind the scenes; it’s how they understand the world. But the implications and complications in this case make my head spin.

Apart from cautioning an errant demonstrator here and there to make sure they dispose of their wrappers from RU Hungry and the Green Chicpea in trashcans, there was no more for the security marshals to do than there was for the university public safety office or the Newark cop. The Newark peace encampment, like all the others, was a model of good behavior and, appropriately peace.

I approached a cluster of demonstrators standing near where Warren Place reaches a dead-end on the southwest side of the quad. A couple of them were a little cautious of me, in my tie and linen jacket – did they think cops wear linen jackets and straw hats? – but they dropped their guard and warmed up when I identified myself and told them that I was a history lecturer. Apparently, the History Department has cred on the quad.

One of the demonstrators, a history graduate student whom I took to be one of the organizers or leaders, told me that the encampment has been getting considerable support from the Newark community. Newark has a long and proud history of community activism going back decades. This is the city of Amiri Baraka (the father of the current mayor) and of 1967.

My late friend and colleague Clement Price, the brilliant social historian after whom the university’s Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience is named, once told me that, to really understand Newark, one always has to remember the struggle for justice in America. Newark is a Black city, with all of the weight of history that that implies, and that, as Clem showed in his seminal work Freedom not Far Distant: A Documentary History of Afro-Americans in New Jersey, means hope and struggle.

There is a plaque in the vestibule of Conklin Hall, where I have an office, commemorating the building’s occupation by the Rutgers-Newark Black Organization of Students (BOS) in 1969. “The Liberation of Conklin Hall fundamentally changed Rutgers,” Clem wrote in 2009. “It set the stage for the EOF (New Jersey Educational Opportunity Fund) program; it set the stage for an African-American Studies Program that matured into a department; it enabled the naming of the campus center in honor of Rutgers alumnus Paul Robeson… And in its daring and strategic-mindedness, the Conklin Hall takeover established a powerful narrative in the history of Rutgers that has as its center educational opportunity, justice, and an appreciation for honorable discontent.”

The struggle has always been there, on the streets of Newark, and on the Rutgers campus in University Heights, where one cannot breathe the air without getting a whiff of the struggle and the hope that has animated the community’s history. The peace encampment is part of that, so much so that it is hard to tell where the student community ends and the urban community begins; they are, in fact, one.

My friend the history graduate student said that the university administration has been restrained in its dealings with the encampment; perhaps administrators fear that they will alienate the Newark community that hosts their campus if they act aggressively. There are a half-dozen Masjids and Muslim community centers within a fifteen minute walk of campus. Indeed, Rutgers Newark has the largest proportion of Muslim and Middle Eastern students in its student body.

And maybe it isn’t so cynical. Many members of the university administration came up through the academic ranks in Newark, and they know the students, and the city’s activist history; some knew Clement Price, as I did, and most, I am sure, are committed to “opportunity, justice, and an appreciation for honorable discontent.” Earlier this month, Chancellor Nancy Cantor assured the university community, the Newark community, and the demonstrators that “we will continue to safeguard peaceful protest as a fundamental aspect of our institutional identity.”

We should hold her to that promise.

The history graduate student said that the demonstrators have started to get darker messages from the university’s higher administration lately. “They say that they’re planning some kind of festivities,” they said, “they are making noises about clearing us out before that.” Of course, they continued, “you can’t have your party spoiled by being reminded of genocide, can you?”

Will it come to that? University administrations across the country have been gripped with the mania of clearing out peaceful demonstrators, often with extreme violence. It is how academic potentates like Baroness Minouche Shafik of Columbia University show to their political sponsors that they are tough and serious; hard-nosed realists not to be trifled with, who are willing to compromise the very mission of the university for PR points.

One hopes that Rutgers Newark will be the exception, for there is nothing that more embodies what this university has come to mean since 1967 than the meeting of town and gown in the quad outside the law school in the service of peace and justice.

23 May 2024