Whether or not Israel's actions in Gaza are characterized as genocide, they are, by their sadistic nature - e.g. burying thousands of people alive under collapsed stone buildings, preventing food from reaching more than 2 million people for months - and the indiscriminateness of the killing - morally comparable to the slaughter of Jews, Roma, and others by the Nazis that led to the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Thus I agree with the New Yorker's Jewish-Russian-American writer Masha Gellen, who likens the slaughter in Gaza to the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto ( " In the Shadow of the Holocaust : How the politics of memory in Europe obscures what we see in Israel and Gaza today ," The New Yorker, Dec 23, 2023 )
As Americans, we must demand that the US immediately bring pressure on Israel to stop the killing in Gaza and to allow unlimited amounts of food and humanitarian supplies to enter the strip. If Israel does not immediately comply, the US should cut off military aid.
After so many months of slaughter, I am glad that many American University campuses at long last are seething with student protests against the genocide. So when I heard on local news that a protest encampment of Students for Justice in Palestine had begun on the UNC campus, where I am an alumnus, I hurried to have a look and determine how I might support it. Upon arrival in mid-afternoon, April 26, I found two to three hundred students sitting or standing on the lawn in front of the South Building. They had a lot of good signs and banners about stopping genocide. They also were chanting very loudly. Because of the cacophony of the mix with other noises (apparently, for part of the time, a boom box with pertinent rap music) I could not understand most of the words. Occasionally, I could make out the familiar refrains "Free, free, free Palestine," and "From the river to the sea." Many, perhaps half, of the students were wearing kaffiyehs. There could not have been so many Palestinian students, so I infer that the kaffiyehs worn by other students symbolized solidarity with the Palestinian cause.
My superficial impression from the high-spirited chanting and the scene filled with kaffiyehs was that the encampment was not so much demanding an end to genocide as supporting the Palestinian national cause. There is a difference. Suppose that during the holocaust there had been demonstrations to demand that the allies take military actions to destroy the rail lines to the death camps or facilities for extermination, but that the demonstrators had chanted instead slogans of Jewish or Israeli nationalism. I think that turning the hypothetical protest into a nationalist rally would have obfuscated the original purpose of stopping genocide, and I think that campus protests that become Palestinian nationalist rallies also distract from the goal of ending the slaughter by cutting off US military aid to Israel.
Moreover, Palestinian nationalist slogans or signs could be, or could be interpreted to be, supportive of Hamas, in which case they would be promoting more killing and possible repeats of the atrocities of October 7. It is unlikely that more that 1% of demonstrators on any of the campuses actually would support Hamas - perhaps none - but, by focusing on nationalist slogans and chants, the students give the impression to onlookers that they support Hamas and give fodder for the defamatory reporting on Fox news and for the McCarthyist tactics of politicians like Elise Stefanik.
The news reports often begin by characterizing the demonstrations as pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel. I wince whenever I hear either phrase. As Americans, regardless whether pro- or anti- this or that we should protest against genocide wherever it occurs. We also should demand that our government do what it can to end the senseless killing happening in Myanmar, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We do not have to be patriots of any of those countries to raise our voices, nor do we have to take any position toward the Palestinian national cause to protest the slaughter in Gaza.
At the protest I spoke with a young lady who had been leading some of the chanting with a megaphone. She was wearing a kaffiyeh. I mentioned that I was Jewish and she said that she was, too. She told me that the demonstration was anti-Zionist, without mentioning genocide or, I think, even Gaza. I told her that I had come to protest genocide in Gaza, but that I favored a two-state solution and so could not identify as anti-Zionist. She thought that I did not, then, belong at the demonstration.Then she backtracked and said repeatedly that I was welcome to stay and have some of the food available to the demonstrators, while still implying that I was not part of the event. So I stayed a while longer, but left with no intention of returning or otherwise supporting the encampment. I would, however, continue to raise my individual voice to protest genocide, to call for cutting off military aid to Israel, and also call for freeing the remaining Israeli hostages.
I hope that somehow all our separate protests will have a combined effect leading to decisive action by the American government to end the slaughter. Otherwise these campus protests will be viewed historically as having sociological, but not political, interest.
