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The Gaza Solidarity Movement in the USA

Dave Stockton

The world is all too aware of the ‘ironclad support’ the United States, under President Joe Biden, gives to Israel. It was a US made F35, that enabled Israel to bomb the Iranian consulate in Damascus, creating the danger of regional war. US supplied bunker buster bombs have helped Israel destroy over half of Gaza’s housing. A bipartisan Bill has just passed Congress sending another $26 bn to Israel in military equipment and ammunition to be able to carry on in genocide in Gaza, where 34,000 mainly civilians and many children have been bombed or incinerated.

But there is another America. Back in early November last year 300,000 people packed Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C. in a national march for Palestine, the largest such protest in the country’s history.

Actions

Today yet another wave of mass action has been taking place. On April 15 many thousands of people staged protests across the United States denouncing the arming of Israel and the siege of Gaza. Actions included shutting down airports, including Chicago’s O’Hare, and Seattle-Tacoma. Traffic blockades of major roads and bridges took place in cities from New York to San Francisco. In New York the Brooklyn Bridge and in San Francisco’s iconic Golden Gate Bridge, were blocked during the morning rush hour. In Eugene Oregon 52 protesters were arrested for blocking the Pacific Coast Interstate 5 highway.

Protests by thousands of students have been taking place at over 50 US universities including some of the most internationally famous institutions like Columbia and Yale, Berkeley, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the University of Michigan, Emerson College and Tufts. School students have also walked out.

At New York University, NYPD officers moved to break up a protest by hundreds of students, tearing down tents and manhandling students and at Columbia, they arrested over a hundred. The Gaza Solidarity Encampment there, had been organised by the student-led coalition, Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace.

A new camp has re-appeared, and hundreds of Faculty members have denounced the university authorities for calling in the cops. And Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs, prominent economist and writer on sustainable development, stated that the ‘US is complicit in Israeli genocide’ and said the war in Gaza could end today if the US stopped supplying weapons to Israel.

Protesters are calling on their institutions to disclose and divest their finances and endowments from weapons manufacturers and companies with an interest in the Israeli occupation. They are also demanding an end to the bombing of Gaza.

Calls for repression

President Joe Biden said he condemned ‘the antisemitic protests’ and claimed there was ‘an alarming surge of antisemitism in our schools, communities and online’.

Republican senators called on Biden to send in the National Guard. Though this might seem dangerous, given historic memories of Kent State University Ohio when the Guard killed four and wounded nine unarmed students in May 1970, and set off another mass wave of anti-Vietnam War protest.

The antisemitism charge is the stock response of apologists for Israel’s monstrous war crimes, repeatedly employed to smear the huge pro Gaza movements that have developed in Europe and North America. Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine have said they ‘firmly reject any form of hate or bigotry’. In fact, especially in New York, the protests include large numbers of Jewish people, especially the young. Jewish Voice for Peace, an important mobiliser against the Israeli genocide, has issued a statement:

‘Instead of listening to the calls of Columbia and Barnard students to divest from the genocide perpetrated by the Israeli government, the university has called in the NYPD to arrest students, suspend them and even expel them. At present 85 students, 15 of whom are Jewish, are suspended’.

The alarming thing for America’s Zionists is that recent polls suggest a collapse in popular support. 55 per cent currently disapprove of Israel’s actions, in Gaza while only 36 per cent approve.

As in Germany, with the shut down of the Palestine Congress in Berlin on April 12, governments, police forces and university authorities are trying to criminalise protests, the more that people recognise the enormity of the Zionist state’s actions, with likely worse to come.

The encampments in the US are now being copied around the world. In every country, but especially those deeply complicit in Israel’s actions we need mass action in support of the victims of Israeli genocide, something that must intensify if the latter provokes an all-out war with Iran and the US and is Nato allies pitch in. Likewise if the long threatened ground attack on the million-plus refugees in Rafah is unleashed protests and mass direct must mightily exceed present levels. Anti-imperialists and anti-Zionists around the world should show their solidarity not just with people of Gaza and on the West Bank but with those bravely protesting in ‘the Belly of the Beast’.

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