Déjà vu…
For those of us who protested in the late 1960s and 1970s.
Calls for the National Guard. Police in riot gear that makes them look like aliens from outer space. Police on horses, riding them into the protesters. Police arresting people for voicing their opinion. All this brings back memories.
When I was a student protester I mainly cared about justice or the lack thereof. The first-ever demonstration I went to in Munich was in the summer of 1967, after Benno Ohnesorg, a Berlin University student, had been shot dead. He was killed during a rally in Berlin that protested the visit of the Shah of Iran, the first demonstration Ohnesorg had ever been part of. This didn’t stop right-wing sensationalist newspapers from characterizing him as a Marxist agitator, a student demagogue who was one of the organizers of the protest and who only got what was rightfully coming to him.
The police officer who shot Ohnesorg was acquitted of any wrongdoing, although it was later discovered that he was an informant for the Stasi – the East-German Secret Service, and that the police had covered up the truth.
I was a student at the university in Munich at the time, and joined the demonstration which followed Ohnesorg’s killing. It was uneventful because the police had been criticized for their brutal behavior in Berlin and exercised some restraint in Munich. But later on I experienced the same pattern again and again: a demonstration, a gathering, some other event had been quite peaceful, but law enforcement showed up in riot gear and clobbered, abused, and arrested people. Some papers the next day were full of lies, reporting about violent acts perpetrated by students, endangering law enforcement officers. I was there; I know this wasn’t true. Violence only broke out after the police started to hunt down and arrest people. Before you knew it, you’d be thrown to the ground and later found yourself in jail. No idea why.
These memories come flooding back when I read the reports about the events at Columbia University, Yale, Harvard, UC Berkeley, University of Southern California, Brown University in Providence/RI, University of Texas at Austin, and many other campuses across the United States. At Emory University in Atlanta/GA a professor was pushed to the ground, handcuffed, and jailed for eleven hours. She was charged with “battery of a police officer” – PLEASE watch the CNN video and decide for yourself WHO was battered.
When I was protesting against the needless killing of a fellow student, and later against the war in Vietnam among other reasons, I was motivated by feelings: by the perceived injustice that the powerful always were in the right. That laws didn’t apply impartially to everybody, but changed depending on which side of the fence you were sitting. That One plus One wasn’t always Two but could be called Five or whatever by law enforcement or the press with impunity. And while feelings were involved, feelings of empathy and compassion, they were guided and supported by rational thinking. Remember the iconic photographs of the Vietnamese children who ran, screaming in terror, after their village was bombed with Napalm?
I feel the same outrage, indignation, dread, wretched misery – words can’t really describe it – when I see images of injured children in a hospital in central Gaza. Heavily damaged buildings and vast stretches of rubble in most cities. Women and children clamoring for water and food in makeshift refugee camps. Crying mothers cradling their hurt sons and daughters. A burned-out vehicle where World Central Kitchen workers were killed. Or when I read the report of a 14-year-old Palestinian girl who, together with her family, was displaced several times from temporary shelters and who barely escaped the Israeli military when they were bulldozing buildings with people still inside. If this sounds hard to believe, please recall what happened to Rachel Corrie, American peace activist who was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer just about 21 years ago.
I’m writing this in solidarity with the many students who are risking imprisonment and being expelled from their universities because they can’t sit quietly and watch the atrocities perpetrated by the Israeli government. Who feel compelled to protest the complicity of the American government. Who call for a cease fire, for more aid for Palestinians, for Netanyahu to resign. The students ask their colleges and universities to divest from corporations which manufacture the weapons used to kill Palestinians, and to cut ties with Israeli businesses. (College and university endowments hold hundreds of billions of dollars in assets, for example, with Columbia University's reaching $13.6 billion in 2023). And I’m forever grateful for the many Jewish students who join the ranks of the protesters. Why should they be any less sickened and outraged by the horror unfolding day after day in Gaza. It’s a human, humane response and shouldn’t depend on religion or ethnicity.
Jewish students are not the only ones attending protests. Several Shoah survivors and their descendants strongly voice their opposition to Israel’s war on Gaza.
"There is a question of historical responsibility towards injustice, genocide, and fascism… If you are indifferent, if you do not take a stand, you acquire a degree of guilt without any doubt and I think it is imperative to assert opposition and even some degree of disadvantage and risk if you want to be guilt-free when history judges what's happening."1
This is a statement by Stephen Kapos who is 86 years old and whose family perished in the Holocaust. He also protests the conflation of Jewishness with Zionism, which in his view stokes the flames of antisemitism.
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who is Jewish, sent a similar message to Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “It is not antisemitic to hold you accountable for your actions”.
"No, Mr. Netanyahu. It is not antisemitic or pro-Hamas to point out that in a little over six months, your extremist government has killed 34,000 Palestinians and wounded more than 77,000—70% of whom are women and children…It is not antisemitic to point out that your bombing has completely destroyed more than 221,000 housing units in Gaza, leaving more than one million people homeless—almost half the population.” 2
As I write this, news updates report more demonstrations, more encampments, more arrests on campuses all across the U.S. So far, the crackdowns caused the exact opposite of what they tried to accomplish: they attracted MORE protesters. Sounds so familiar.
It is just so goddamned awful and now we have sent more money into that same situation. The USA government seems doomed to never learn these lessons.
Those cops have zero control over their emotions. Appalling.