In the United States, university campuses have become the epicenter of the state-led campaign to intimidate, smear and outright ban opposition to Israel\u2019s genocide in Gaza.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At Harvard University, the month-long campaign<\/a> against pro-Palestinian students has intensified following a protest organized by the Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC) on October 18.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After Israel\u2019s bombing of the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital<\/a>, which killed 500 people, hundreds of students marched from Harvard\u2019s Cambridge campus to its Business School in Boston, where they staged a \u201cdie-in,\u201d lying down in a symbolic act of solidarity with the two million Palestinians trapped in the Gaza strip.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The students demanded that the university disclose investments in companies \u201ccomplicit in genocide and human rights abuses toward Palestinians\u201d and for university president Claudine Gay to \u201cexplicitly name, condemn, and reject the anti-Palestinian racism, doxxing, and harassment Harvard students and alumni are facing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n During the \u201cdie-in\u201d portion of the protest, a Zionist student began walking over students as they lay on the ground, getting close to their faces to film them and, according to protesters, stepping on them. Footage aired on national news showed student protest \u201cmarshals\u201d intervening to protect the safety of the protesters. They formed a circle around the Zionist student, holding up Keffiyes (Middle Eastern scarves) and attempting to guide him away from the protesters while chanting \u201cshame.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n This non-violent action was seized upon by right-wing figures both inside and outside the college, who cynically portrayed the actions of the student marshals as an antisemitic assault.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Harvard Business School Dean Srikant Datar issued a letter days after the protest, condemning the supposedly antisemitic atmosphere on campus, and pledging that the school would undertake efforts to \u201cunderstand the experience of antisemitism at Harvard Business School\u201d while making assurances that \u201creports have been filed with HUPD and the FBI\u201d about the events at the protest, implicitly threatening the pro-Palestinian protesters with arrest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Billionaire hedge fund manager and Harvard alum Bill Ackman, a central figure in the campaign against students, seized upon the encounter to demand that the university suspend students involved in the protest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In a public letter to university president Gay posted on X (formerly Twitter), he accused the college of being insufficiently aggressive in repressing protests and punishing those involved. Referring to the chant, \u201cFrom the River to the Sea, Palestine Shall Be Free,\u201d he accused protesters of using \u201celiminationist language seeking the destruction of the State of Israel and the Jewish people.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ackman demanded that \u201cstudents involved in harassing and allegedly physically assaulting the HBS student on October 18th should be immediately suspended,\u201d arguing that waiting for the police department to review the die-in incident \u201cmakes no sense.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Following the public letter issued by the PSC and other student groups on October 7, correctly holding \u201cthe Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence,\u201d Ackman was a leading instigator in the blacklisting and far-right doxxing of students, calling for the university to release the names of students associated with the statement. Shortly afterwards, a billboard truck sent by the far-right Accuracy in Media (AIM) group drove around Harvard Square displaying the names and photos of students supposedly associated with the PSC statement, under the header \u201cHarvard\u2019s Leading Antisemites.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Additional pressure came from a letter authored by Joseph C. Shenker, senior chair of the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, on November 1 that was signed by two dozen top US law firms and addressed to deans of the top 14 law schools in the US. The letter slandered protesters as antisemitic and demanded that the universities take an \u201cunequivocal stance\u201d against pro-Palestinian students. The letter implicitly threatened to cease recruiting graduates unless dissent was stamped out on campuses nationwide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n President Gay followed-up on the right-wing backlash by sending a campus-wide email on November 9 that amounted to an endorsement of calls to repress student opposition. In her message, Gay portrayed Harvard campus as a hotbed of antisemitism and honed in on the \u201criver to the sea\u201d slogan used by protesters, writing that such phrases \u201c\u2026bear specific historical meanings that to a great many people imply the eradication of Jews from Israel and engender both pain and existential fears within our Jewish community\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As the WSWS recently noted in its reporting on the unprecedented censure in the House of Representatives of Rashida Tlaib<\/a> (D-Michigan) for her opposition to the Israeli genocide on November 8:<\/p>\n\n\n\n A major weapon in the arsenal of this smear campaign is the claim that the chant … \u201cPalestine will be free\u2014from the river to the sea,\u201d is a coded call for the extermination of the Jews who live in Israel\u2026 \u201cFrom the river to the sea\u201d is a longtime slogan of the Palestine resistance movement and is an expression of the perspective of freeing the Palestinian people from Zionist oppression over the entire land area from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, which comprises the West Bank, Gaza and the present-day state of Israel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After repeating this tired slander, Gay made clear that the college would crack down on further dissent, ominously warning that anonymous hotlines have been set up for \u201creporting bias\u201d and that police were monitoring \u201cthreats made against any members of our community.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n While initially falling short of Ackman\u2019s demand to suspend those involved in protests, she made reference to the FBI investigation of the video taken at the die-in, stating, \u201c\u2026once law enforcement\u2019s inquiry is complete, the University will address the incident through its student disciplinary procedures to determine if University policies or codes of conduct have been violated and, if so, take appropriate action\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n One day later, without referencing the results of any supposed police \u201cinquiry,\u201d Gay appears to have made good on her threat, as the local Harvard Graduate Students Union posted on X<\/a> that one student who had served as a safety marshal during the die-in was being evicted from campus housing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The far-right campaign against students has created a chilling atmosphere in which students are faced with threats to their physical safety as well as their future careers. Describing the effects of the doxxing against her, one Arab Muslim Harvard student told Teen Vogue, \u201cMy mother has been reached out to numerous times because of this… The high school where my brother goes is listed online publicly, which obviously puts him in danger too. This has, I think, very much gone far beyond backlash.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n At campuses across the United States, similar confrontations are taking place between right-wing forces representing the ruling class and organized groups of students who are rallying to oppose their administrations\u2019 complicity in the genocide of the Palestinian people at the hands of the Biden Administration and its Israeli client state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Last Monday, Brandeis University<\/a> banned the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, claiming the group \u201copenly supports Hamas, a terrorist organization.\u201d The university followed up the next day by sending police to violently shut down<\/a> and arrest pro-Palestine protesters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On Friday, Columbia University in New York suspended not only the SJP but also the anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) through the end of the fall term. Countless other actions have resulted in arrests of peaceful student protesters, including at UMass Amherst and Brown University.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The escalating attacks against the democratic rights of students by the state, media and academic institutions reflects the recognition and fear on the part of the capitalist class that the movement of the working class and young people against the slaughter of Gaza is part of a developing movement against capitalism itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n