Amid campus crackdowns, Gaza war triggers freedom of expression crisis
Amid campus crackdowns, Gaza war triggers freedom of expression crisis
Across the United States, “heads are rolling” at the top of some Ivy League universities amid a campus-wide crackdown on students protesting Israel’s war in Gaza, shining a spotlight on the question of freedom of expression worldwide, said UN Special Rapporteur Irene Khan.
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Genuine question. The sign in the thumbnail says, "We want Palestine to be liberated." What does that mean?
Is it advocating for the dissolution of the state of Israel? Like, "liberated" implies the removal of an occupier, no?
It can't just mean "stop the murders," right? Like, if that's the case it was say to liberate the "Palestinians," not "Palestine" right?
I just ask because I feel like the messaging on this is a bit all over the place at times, and calls for the abolishment of the state of Israel seem a bit extreme to me, and I'm trying to figure out if that's the actual stance people are taking.
Then you are basically implying the state of Israel can't exist without genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid.
Most of these protesters want a one state solution that doesn't discriminate between people based on religion or ethnicity.
Or they want a two state solution where a Palestinian army can protect Palestinians against Israel stealing their land, denying them health care and imprisoning their families.
I don't think that's what I'm implying though. I'm all for signs that say "end the genocide" or "equality for Palestinians."
I think my question is, does the sign in the thumbnail imply that the state of Israel can't exist without genocide?
I think it absolutely can, and that's why I was questioning the message on the sign, as it seems to oppose what you claim most of the protestors want.
If that's what you believe, then you don't actually disagree with the sign.
You only disagree with the narrative that the sign must be anti-Semitic.
Welcome to our world.
I think there are multiple priorities.
First of all they want the genocide to stop, that one should be obvious.
Secondly they need israel to stop the "slow" genocide, meaning stop taking peoples homes and doing the whole settler thing.
And then third there are probably some people that are capable of realising that the israeli goverment will never be satisfied, unless every palestinian has been driven from their home or killed.
These people come to the conclusion that israel needs to be stripped of any outside support because their repeatedly officially expressed national goal is genocide. They would argue that if you let yourself down to the level of hamas, then you should be treated the same way or at least not supported by western countries.
I agree with everything you said being the goal of the protests, but that wasn't my question.
My question was, "is this particular protest sign arguing for the abolition of the state of Israel?"
The sign seems to be advocating for things beyond what are listed in your post, which is why I asked the question.
Maybe I'm reading into the verbiage too much, but I have trouble coming up with an interpretation of "liberate Palestine" that is both a coherent and doesn't involve the dissolution of the state of Israel.
Maybe it's just going for vibes, and there wasn't much thought behind the choice of words, but it's the actual choice of words that threw me off.
I see what you mean. I think this protester would probably be already somewhat satisfied if at least a good chunk of the region were to get recognized as "palestine" and liberated from israeli occupation.
But yeah long term it would probably be best to slowly give colonized lands back to the people that lived there like we partially did with african colonies.
Would you not consider South Africa liberated through the abolition of apartheid? The white people in South Africa didn't get removed, they just no longer got to oppress the black South Africans. South Africa certainly wasn't free prior to that.
And I'd just like to point out that messaging criticisms like whether a particular protest sign says liberating "Palestine" or "Palestinians" is a very unimportant criticism relative to an ongoing genocide. These aren't people with power. Even if their protests were successful isn't not like their specific wording or viewpoint about what justice in Palestine means is going to translate to anything more than the actual protest demands - divestment from Israel, possibly at best less permissive US military support. You don't need to say "I oppose Israel's oppression... BUT".
I would consider the black population of South Africa liberated, absolutely. I'm iffier on saying that "South Africa" was liberated. But that's not a bad point at all.
But I think the thing that muddies this for me though is the use of "Palestine" instead of "the Palestinians." The issue is that there's a meaningful distinction between the two in the cultural zeitgeist, and they aren't therefore as interchangeable as "South Africa" in your above example.
But overall I don't hate that explanation/comparison. It works enough that I can reasonably interpret the person's intent with the sign through that lens. Thanks.
I do disagree with your second point though. A protest is, first an foremost, an exercise in messaging. The idea that the messaging doesn't matter is tantamount to saying the protest doesn't matter. I agree that this particular quibble is comparatively small, but I think nothing is more uncompelling than a protest that conveys "we don't know what we want, and we're mad as hell about it."
This is certainly just an opinion, but I think for a protest to be effective, it needs a fairly concrete set of goals, with well defined expected outcomes. Without that, the people you are protesting against have absolutely no incentive to change.
It's the Chick-fil-A problem to some degree. Exactly what steps does that franchise need to take to get people to stop boycotting? They took a lot of action in the wake of the bad publicity, and it made no difference to those who were boycotting it. (This isn't a defense of Chick-fil-A btw. Just an observation about the boycott.)
This is in direct contrast to something like a workers strike, where work is stopped until a concrete list of demands is met, and then people resume work. They act as a cohesive unit, and there are a concrete set of things that the target can do to make it stop.
And to be clear, I think that the student protests going on do have well defined goals. Get University money out of programs that support the state of Israel. I think the messaging was good on that front, at least at first.
Where it falls apart for me, and maybe this is just biased media coverage, but it feels like half the protestors don't know that that's the goal, as opposed to just general opposition the genocide. And that's why I think messaging is important, and needs to be policed, to keep the messaging clear. Anything other than that absolutely hurts your movement.
This is certainly just an opinion, but I think for a protest to be effective, it needs a fairly concrete set of goals, with well defined expected outcomes. Without that, the people you are protesting against have absolutely no incentive to change.
And to be clear, I think that the student protests going on do have well defined goals.
You have to realize this all just reads like someone who wants to "just ask questions" and meander about vague misgivings to downplay and discredit the protest right? You lead with focusing on messaging like you're at an ad agency critiquing a professional campaign, divert to a well-worn excuse that protest movements don't have clear goals, say that they do have clear goals, and then imply most of the protesters spending hours out there protesting somehow don't know them.
Like maybe you are just earnestly working through these thoughts and feelings, but this is basically the exact same things people who are JAQing off because protest makes them uncomfortable would say.
To give you context in case you've never experienced it, my first protest was against the Iraq war. It was seemingly well organized by a some major groups with institutional knowledge about setting up protests. People were bussing in to DC and the marching route was pre-planned and organized with cops along with way just to be sure that people stuck to the roads that were blocked off and there wasn't any confrontation with counter-protesters. And still, with all that structure, there were groups there protesting for marijuana legalization and communism and in-group sign wavers talking about Bush v. Gore. Trying to nitpick about "Palestine" or "Palestinians" or whether some people who are demanding divestment also calling for other more optimistic results is just misunderstanding how protests work.
This is a student protest. There isn't a protest boss who can go around and approve the wording on signs. Individuals can rally and self-organize to kick out someone saying something egregious like "death to the Jews", but this idea of "policing the messaging to keep it clear" is just not something you're ever going to get from a protest that isn't a single pre-existing activist organization with a hierarchy and top-down decision making.
There are no perfect protests, and people asking why they aren't perfect are often trying to discredit them rather than out of sincere support for the protest goals. That might not be because they don't approve of the goals themselves, just that they're a secondary concern to a desire for order or political concerns or just plain not liking protest as a means of change.
All fair points, and I don't disagree with any of them.
And yeah, I recognize my posts are rambly, but honestly, it's mostly just me jotting down thoughts. I'm not trying to write a dissertation, I'm trying to engage in conversation.
I do think there's levels to this though, right? Like, you list a bunch of other special interests that were at the Iraq protests that weren't policed, but there are certainly viewpoints that would have been, right? Like, if someone showed up with a, I don't know, a "just nuke'em, end the war, and get it over with" sign or something, that would have been policed, right?
Maybe not? Maybe anyone can join any protest for any reason? I tend to think there's some level of extreme that the group would self police, but who knows.
That said, the sign in question wasn't past that line by any stretch of the imagination. That wasn't even really the point of my original post though. I was more asking about what the messaging actually is.
I did go on a tangent about messaging because the guy two up basically said (to grossly paraphrase) messaging clarity doesn't matter, and I was just stating why I disagree. I did use the context of this protest though, so that's on me. I don't think this sign is out of line necessarily.
Ultimately my main point about messaging was that protests that don't have well stated outcomes (e.g. get troops out of Iraq or stop investing in Israel) are doomed to failure, as the group you are protesting against has no viable mechanism to capitulate.
There's probably a sub-point in there that if your stated goals are too fractured, it makes it impossible to capitulate as well?
Idk, I'm mostly just rambling again. I'm also not as invested in the conversation as I was three days ago.
We could have a whole dialog about which historical protests have led to meaningful change and which haven't and what distinguished the former from the latter. I'm no expert in protest philosophy (obviously) but I've seen protests make a difference and fall completely flat, and I think it'd be an interesting study to find out why, and to what degree coherent goals and messaging are correlated to success.
But, as I say, I'm not as invested as I was 3 days ago, so I'm probably gonna just do something else instead. Hope life is treating you well, and you've got an exciting weekend planned! :)
In most mass protests there isn't a source of authority that could decide who gets to be in the place the protest is. There's organizers and speakers who can ask them to leave, but if the problematic attendees don't just go along with that they don't have any inherent authority to kick them out. That doesn't mean saboteurs don't get kicked out, but it's more in the form of a bunch of people self-organizing to shout them down or put a human wall between them and the rest of the group. The student protesters have done this a few times when opponents try to infiltrate their ranks.
But it's not something you pull together because someone's sign isn't well tuned or one of hundreds or thousands of voices is demanding Exxon Mobile be immediately shut down when the actual goal is ending fossil fuel subsidies. Partly because you don't want to fracture a movement by kicking out your allies and partly because this is an entirely social endeavor organized among strangers and it's hard to get that arranged if people aren't instantly convinced it's necessary.
Yeah, no, for sure on all counts. As before, I'd imagine it'd have to be pretty egregious to rise to the level of removal. Makes sense.
OK, 2 paragraphs of background: Currently (and for the past decade) people in Gaza have had no control over their land or future - they are entirely at the mercy of the Israelis. You might see references to this as the "right to self determination." Palestinians in Gaza cannot leave, cannot trade with other countries, etc. Israel controls all land crossings and has a naval blocade on the sea, inspects all goods coming into Gaza, including limiting what goods Gazan people are allowed to possess. Attempts to give Gazans goods have been met with extreme hostility - see, for example, the freedom flotilla in 2010: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_flotilla_raid
If a country controls every aspect of your territory, that is by almost by definition an occupation. This article talks in depth about the definition of an occupation: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/menasource/gaza-israel-occupied-international-law/ (note atlantic council is a right-leaning source, https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/atlantic-council/). Here's a second source from the UN, back in 2022 before the current events. https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/10/1129942
So to answer your second question, "liberated" does imply the removal of an occupier. Under almost every definition, Israel is occupying Gaza and the West Bank.
To answer your first question, is it advocating for the dissolution of Israel? In general, no (yes, some people want that, don't "not all x" me). But if the real question is where do we go from here, how do we "stop the murders"?
If Israel relinquished control over the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, that would be what people generally call the Two-State solution. This is NOT the dissolution of the state of Israel at all, and in fact enshrines the state of Israel, but at a scale that give it by definition less than the entirety of Israel+Gaza+West Bank. While this has been the "liberal" position in the US, the US keeps voting against a real Palestinian state (https://apnews.com/article/un-vote-palestinian-membership-us-veto-8d8ad60d8576b5ab9e70d2f8bf7e2881). In other words, what we say we want does not match up with our actions. And Netanyahu has reiterated that this will never happen under his watch. https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-news-01-18-2024-73d552c6e73e0dc3783a0a11b2b5f67d
So if a 2-state solution is off the table by both the US and Israel, where does that leave us? Without a two-state (or one-state solution, with enshrined rights for Palestinians), the murders of Palenstinians will continue unabated. For example, in the West Bank (the other occupied territory), more than 200 Palestinains were murdered in 2023. https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/latest/palestinians-west-bank-2023-was-deadliest-year-record https://edition.cnn.com/middleeast/live-news/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news-12-16-23/h_b60eefa90fd1779f9b2b8cbf8d823c41
Apart from this, Israel would basically have to either push all the non-Jewish populations out of Israel (known as ethnic cleansing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing) or kill them all.
There is only so much space on a protest sign, I'm not even sure what they actually mean. I'll just explain what it means to me.
I just want civil rights for the Palestinians. Everyone deserves to be represented by a sovereign government. The Palestinians are denied this right by Israel. Israel has not made a good faith attempt in decades to resolve this, because it's incompatible with their goal of taking all the land for themselves. Driving the Palestinians off of their land is not a solution, that's ethnic cleansing. The Palestinians should be allowed to live on their ancestral land.
A solution could take the shape of two independent states, a single unitary state or some kind of federal construction as a middle ground. I don't even care which solution they agree to, they'd have to figure that out among themselves. But if they opt for a two state solution those 700.000 colonists need to fuck off out of the West Bank. The Oslo accords dictate which areas belong to whom in a two state solution.
If the Israelis don't want this they need to accept a solution where the Palestinians are represented in the government of all of Israel. I suppose in a way you could say that would be the end of Israel as we know it, but that doesn't mean they'd have to leave. They would just need to accept that they live in a multi-ethnic country. UN peacekeepers would likely have to hang around for decades.
I don't see any fair solution that isn't somewhat disadvantageous to Israel, but they kinda brought this on themselves.
I don't really disagree with anything you said, though I think it's a pretty loose interpretation of the literal words on the protest sign, which was the crux of my question.
Though, I do agree that a protest sign has limited real estate, and there's certainly an interpretation where the sign was more going for "vibes" than any attempt to be read literally.
I will say that, while I agree that Israel hasn't exactly been champing at the bit for a two state solution, I don't know that all the blame falls on them there.
As late as 2017 the position of Hamas was, "we will accept the 1967 borders, so long as we don't have to recognize the state of Israel as existing and we retain the right to take over all of the Israel portion as well at some later date." https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/5/2/hamas-accepts-palestinian-state-with-1967-borders
There's also the question as to whether any deal made with Hamas has much weight, as it's not the only leadership structure amongst the Palestinians. Fatah still has significant pull, and have largely been sidelined by Hamas. So any agreement made might not even mean anything, as a lot of Palestine don't align with the group you're negotiating with.
Mostly I say all that to say, the position is more complicated than just "Israel are being a bunch of dicks." Negotiating to any kind of peace is going to be a hugely uphill battle, even if the Israeli government was suddenly super invested in coming to a compromise. There is no clear solution to the problem.
Thank you for your elaborate response. Hamas is the inevitable result of what happens when you drive people off their land and lock generations of them up in a radicalization farm. Now they can't be reasoned with anymore. It's a monster that Israel created and later fed and exploited in some kind of divide-and-conquer strategy. Now they're dealing with the mess this got them into. This is why I assign Israel most of the responsibility, although the rest of the West is also to blame for supporting them.
I don't think Hamas would exist much longer if Israel were to commit to lasting peace in good faith. Or maybe they would transition towards a peaceful political movement, kinda like what happened with the IRA. The Palestinians would need help to get organized tho. Fatah taking over in Gaza seems like a reasonable first step.
I suppose you deserve some elaboration on the sign you were referring to in your initial comment. 'Palestine' could mean the West Bank and Gaza or that + all the territories that are currently considered legitimately Israeli. It's impossible to tell what she means and I don't really care.
I wouldn't walk away from attending a demonstration if I saw this sign. People are understandably upset and gravitate towards powerful short statements. I'm sure this girl doesn't wish harm on anyone innocent. Neither do I, but I do feel like Israel should be forced into one of the two solutions I listed in my previous comment if they don't work something out with the Palestinians on their own initiative. If that means the end of Israel as we know it so be it. They'd still be allowed to live in the area peacefully if it were up to me and I don't care if that country would be called Israel or Palestine
Is it advocating for the dissolution of the state of Israel? Like, “liberated” implies the removal of an occupier, no?
Remove the occupier (Israel) from Palestine, not completely from the map (although this would solve a few issues, it would also create many others. The two-state solution is probably the best one, but it doesn't work if one of the two states has an authoritarian far-right government that wants to commit a genocide)
What issues would removing Israel from the map solve, and what would happen to all the Israelis?
Well it would stop the oppression of Palestinians, but as I said, that's not a real solution and would cause many many other issues. The two-state solution is the way to go, but the Israeli fascists want to continue their genocide and oppressive politics.
I can't speak for them, but I think the world would be a better place if Zionists left Israel and came to the United States instead.
We have plenty of room for them in places like Wyoming, although it doesn't quite align with their fairytale novel.
Historically, weren't Jews living there even before Arabs? Why ethnic cleansing is allowed in that region?
You shouldn't be down voted like this.
Eh, I figured it'd happen when I posted. I don't really worry about it much.
I had a genuine question I was curious to get opinions on, and figured hearing what other people thought was worth loosing some meaningless Internet points, lol.
It's disheartening to me that genuine questions are the cause of so much ire, but when one reflects on basic human nature, it should be expected.
This is the thing, the far-right Israeli government (run by Nethanyahu) vs far-right Hamas are fighting each other. Innocent people die and that brings younger people who are siding for Palestine without understanding how complex the whole conflict is. There are no good sides here, both are extremists.
I've posted this several times and may give some background. Its from Amnesty International (2017):
Israel’s Occupation: 50 Years of Dispossession
For half a century, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip has resulted in systematic human rights violations against Palestinians living there. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2017/06/israel-occupation-50-years-of-dispossession/