BY JOE LOCKARD
I am not a stranger to protests on behalf of the Palestinian people and their right to self-determination. I have attended numerous protests in Israel and the occupied territories, including the 1983 Peace Now rally where a far-right murderer threw a hand grenade that killed the Israeli teacher and activist Emil Grunzweig.
At the end of the 1970s, I was with a small group of Israeli peace activists who, stopped en route by police to prevent us from attending an event in Hebron, sat down on the highway. That protest gave rise to an impromptu, hugely noisy sympathy demonstration by as many as one thousand Palestinian workers. Workers descended from a long line of buses carrying them home in the late afternoon, surrounded us, and prevented police from clearing us off the road.
During the three hours we sat there, traffic backed up for tens of kilometers toward Jerusalem in the north. Palestinians gave speeches, and one of our group, a reserve Israel Defense Forces officer nicknamed Musa, read a statement in Arabic into a bullhorn. A truck driver unloaded crates of large, sweet, dark Hebron grapes as a gift for the crowd to enjoy. Well after dark, the demonstration ended by general consent amid cheers as people returned to their vehicles.
That protest expressed Israeli-Palestinian amity and mutuality, the opposite of the encampments we have watched wax and wane on US campuses. It is deeply wishful thinking to assert that college and university encampments are “purposeful spaces of collective effort and inquiry,” as Rachel Ida Buff claimed in her May 17 Academe Blog post. These are not educational idylls that make better “people’s universities” than universities themselves. The encampments are spaces of unacceptable demands, threats, and ideologically bordered enclosure, not the shared goodwill I witnessed between Israelis and Palestinians on the road to Hebron.
At Arizona State University, where I teach, the encampment in late April comprised a few tents on the Old Main lawn. Administrators moved quickly within one day to end the encampment after repeated warnings that arrests would be made if people did not move. Of seventy-two people arrested for trespassing, only fifteen were affiliated with the university. Students received suspensions and campus bans, causing a few to miss final exams and not graduate. Free speech is not to be confused with a free campground.
Calls for the elimination of the Jewish homeland, Israel, or the deprivation of an equal Palestinian right to self-determination are equally abominable. It is exactly this eliminationism that gained voice at our university and many others where protesters chanted, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” There are frequent defenses that this slogan refers to civic equality. That is neither factual nor truthful. Hamas states openly in both its original and amended charters that liberating Palestine “from the river to the sea” would entail the liquidation of Israel and establishment of an Islamic state. The October 7 pogrom should leave no doubt that this means the liquidation of Jews together with the state.
When a crowd on a US campus begins chanting “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” they are repeating words endorsed by Hamas and the death threat embodied in them. For anyone aware of and sensitive to the history of massacres threatened and enacted against the Jewish people, this chant is the functional equivalent of the Nazi salute, “Seig heil!” Encampments have lent both indirect and direct political support to the theo-fascist movement that is Hamas.
The boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement—in which all the encampments participate—is no less problematic. With a history of over a millennium, boycotts and sanctions against Jews and Jewish communities are perhaps the oldest form of organized racism in the western world. BDS, today’s version of this ancient and much repeated call to separate and isolate Jews, requires a rejection or renunciation of Jewish self-determination. It demands a boycott until the “occupation and colonization of all Arab lands” ends—that is, until Israel no longer exists. BDS organizer Omar Barghouti has stated repeatedly that the “decolonization” process that the boycott represents can end only in the elimination of Israel. Despite the presence in the encampments of a few Jewish students, who attempt to provide a veneer of Jewish approval, Jewish communities throughout the United States overwhelmingly and emphatically reject BDS calls as antisemitism.
The antisemitism that has flourished in campus encampments has spread throughout the US educational system. A schoolmate in Arizona called my sixth-grade daughter a “Zionist terrorist”; her best friend in Massachusetts got labeled a “Zionist baby killer”; and Jewish children in Maryland report numerous hate incidents. Schoolchildren learn epithets from social examples in online media. Rhetoric from the encampments and their signage have flooded the media and provided models of how to insult Jews rather than work for mutual respect and empathy.
Colleges and universities achieve their best when we encourage open dialogue, when we seek justice for all, and when we serve peace rather than war. Sitting on the highway to Hebron, we found solidarity and shared protest by Israelis and Palestinians, much like that found recently in this year’s Joint Israeli-Palestinian Memorial Ceremony. Such mutuality lies beyond the blinkered rejectionism of US campus encampments.
Joe Lockard is associate professor of English at Arizona State University. He is a binational citizen of Israel and the United States.
