Spring Again
A year ago, the Columbia Palestine encampment sparked a national student movement that eventually spread across the globe. As the Trump administration wages war against university students and the institutions themselves, Francesco Anselmetti argues that in the US, the campus remains a crucial site in the struggle for Palestinian liberation.
There’s hardly been a moment to breathe — let alone sit, take stock, commemorate. If April 17th marked one year since the largest anti-war protests in a generation, the picture now looks almost impossibly bleak. Flimsy and insincere as it may have been, it seemed natural at the start of this year to believe the ceasefire could be a small step, at the very least, towards the end of the nightmare. It turned out to be a mere intermission in a state of permanent war that the settler-colony has been working to entrench since it first stepped foot in Gaza a year and a half ago. Almost as staggering as the renewed intensification of the genocide is the unprecedented regional leeway enjoyed by the Israelis of late, with advances made on all fronts in the war of support for Palestine: South Lebanon all but pacified, new territory seized along the Syrian border, the continued invasion of the northern West Bank — the camps at Jenin, Nablus and Tulkarm — all as Sana’a comes under direct and sustained American bombardment.
Many of those brave enough to stand against the war machine over the course of the last year and a half now find themselves isolated and more than justifiably afraid. Extrajudicial detentions, kidnappings and countless other forms of intimidation form the expanded arsenal of state repression under Trump 2.0, used to bludgeon what remains of the anti-war movement on America’s university campuses one disappeared student after another. How do we protect each other? Who will be targeted next? Can anyone consider themselves truly safe? These are the questions on everyone’s minds. The more pressing and urgent the present becomes, the harder it is to invoke a past even as recent as last spring. Exhaustion, however, should not lead to nihilism: to belittle last year’s advances as illusory might be tempting, but ultimately something any serious collective project that seeks to respond to the current crisis — in all its brutal manifestations — cannot afford to do. Lest we forget that without any major concessions or gains to speak of, last year’s work still remains woefully incomplete.
Let’s refresh our memories. Last year, a wave of campus occupations in the United States and Western Europe quickly outpaced initial goals of institutional divestment from Israel and, for a brief moment, seemed to exert direct pressure on the Biden administration to halt military aid and accelerate ceasefire negotiations in Gaza. The protests represented a crucial — though still maddeningly insufficient — opening for the struggle for Palestinian freedom in the heart of an empire that has, for least half a century, been the guarantor of its subjection. But the enthusiasm of the spring, in scale at least, struggled to sustain itself into the new academic year. Legal and disciplinary procedures against students played their part, as did new measures implemented by incoming university administrations tasked with overseeing the resumption of business as usual. The presidential election and the Israeli pivot to war in Lebanon further complicated efforts to re-mobilise. Campus protests, as a result, were a rare sight this fall. By the time a ceasefire was reached in January, popular pressure was no longer really a factor being taken into consideration by the American government (the final push, rather, was seemingly motivated by Trump’s desire to taunt the outgoing administration with an overture by his lead international negotiator, Steve Witkoff).
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The recent onslaught of arrests and detentions, then, intersects with a moment of relative retreat which began months before Trump’s inauguration. This fact is fundamental to keep in mind, not to castigate the movement (though reminding ourselves of its shortcomings is always a useful task), but to clarify what exactly is new about the present crisis. The persecution and illegal detention of our comrades — Mahmoud, Mohsen, Leqaa, Rümeysa, Alireza, Momodou, Ranjani, Yunseo, Badar Khan, and many others yet to be named — is intolerable, and should be resisted at every juncture. In some cases, ICE has targeted recognisable leaders of campus movements, in others committed scholars and thinkers who form its rank and file. The net cast by the immigration authorities has been remarkably wide, with arbitrary visa revocations affecting students with no prior involvement in university politics. This is not to say, of course, that the detentions were not targeted (we know, in fact, that there are lists, diligently compiled and provided to law enforcement by a reliable coterie of Zionist snitches), but that an emphasis on their precision underpins the state’s current approach, one clearly focussed on instilling a generalised sense of fear, both within the movement and amongst its potential allies.
A much broader campaign of state repression and attempted institutional overhaul is at play, one in which students are far from being the only targets. The grotesque spectacle of the recent deportation flights to El Salvador is only the most visible example of what amounts to a campaign of mass deportation — some 40,000 people expelled in Trump’s first month in office — targeting migrant workers all across the country. The attack on higher education itself is not merely a response to anti-war activism, but, more accurately, the exploitation of broad support for Israel as a convenient casus belli for a conservative crusade long in the making. As intense as the attack may be, the targeting of disparate groups and interests, including liberal institutions, points to potential avenues for solidarity and popular resistance to the assault. There is hardly a better integrative, unifying category in this moment than that of the undocumented worker, one which the current administration seeks less to eliminate than to generalise and subordinate across all sectors of the workforce, including the academy. It begs restating, moreover, that the campuses that faced the highest levels of police repression last year tended to be those most proximate to inner cities and sites of active struggle beyond the university — the overwhelming police response functioning as much to maintain the domestic conditions for empire as it did to prevent the generalisation of the rebellion (think of Emory in Atlanta, Northeastern, USC and UCLA, the New York schools).
The present repression might differ from what the movement faced under Biden in scale, but the recent wave of arrests is hardly an innovation from the policies — the mass suspension of civil liberties to provide cover for Israel’s massacres — developed by the previous administration, or for that matter, a brutal regime of border violence that has preyed on immigrant communities for decades. For our purposes, the main substantive difference between the established order and a resurgent fascism is the former’s attempt to conceal and disavow the violence inherent in its operation. Precisely for this reason, and given the mounting liberal counterattack to the Trumpian offensive, the left must be capable of exploiting the breathing space any intra-elite conflict may afford it, whilst resisting the temptation to capitulate to a defence of a liberal order we know is culpable of genocide. The danger of self-dissolution into a congratulatory project of liberal ‘resistance’ is as serious a threat as any the movement presently faces. No anti-imperialist political formation worth its name can limit itself to such a project.
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Insofar as the legacy of the encampments was of a potential largely unexpressed, it’s not at all clear whether a comprehensive revision of strategy is in order. To be sure, the impulse to look for avenues beyond the university makes sense as a way to re-focus attention on the genocide still unfolding and replicate the ability, felt fleetingly last year, to apply pressure more directly on the levers of the imperial state. But it’s worth remembering that the scale of that leverage (amounting to a national force) was largely a function of the strength of individual campus groups. Indeed an arguable weakness of last year’s movement was the absence of any meaningful coordination on the national level, whether directly managed by the encampments themselves or steered by some kind of constituted body that could represent the movement before the state itself. Campaigns abound, both at national and local levels, though there seems to be no comparable relationship in the US between a mass movement and a vanguard of direct actionists, which in the UK, for instance, both operate largely outside of the university. All of this is to ask whether, short of a sudden, massive popular mobilisation to stop the genocide, there exists a space more conducive than the university to the continued development of the diversity of tactics necessary for a politics in solidarity with Palestine. The academy’s position in the intellectual-material infrastructure of empire is by now more than cemented, and, by virtue of its permanence in public eye, it remains chronically exposed to disruption, especially as students adapt the new risks this will entail.
What would it look like to push forwards within the boundaries of the university while remaining skeptical of the forces rallying to its rescue? And how can we build coalitions between and beyond campuses to recover (and overtake) the position the movement occupied not so long ago? We might find the beginnings of an answer, once again, in an appraisal of last year’s tactics. A crucial discursive advance scored by the encampments lay in the generalisation of a particular conception of the private university, one quite distinct from the exceptionalism that surrounds its usual presentation, both by its conservative critics and its liberal supporters. At stake for the encampments was less what the university says (the obsession of both the right and the center), but what it does with the value it accumulates from donors invested in its multiple functions: a source of symbolic capital, a channel for networks of influence and patronage, an organ of public discourse.
At its most incisive, the movement advanced a central claim: since it is primarily university’s membership (and its consumers, the undergraduates) that is responsible for its functioning, and, thereby, to the enlargement of its investment portfolio, it deserves a say in how the value it helps create is reallocated by university bureaucrats and investment managers. As donors are being mobilised to weather the storm of federal funding withdrawals, administrators are being provided with yet another argument to justify the management of their endowments by a class of experts operating beyond the purview of those whose work generates the value the university capitalises on — the very prerogative that underpins its ability to bankroll a genocide with impunity. The movement should prepare to counter these coming claims, whilst deepening the scope of social conflicts on which the demand for divestment might intervene, again covering ground already familiar from recent years: in struggles against weapons manufacturers, climate collapse, the carceral industry and rapacious public debt collectors. If the popular coalition of social forces necessary to face the current moment is to include the university then it must at the very least present itself as a credible ally, an institution worth saving — precisely not the networks of property, capital and war it presently embodies and sustains. “We observe,” students at Emory wrote last spring, “that there is nowhere on Earth ‘outside’ of [the] university.”
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The task is enormous, slow, painstaking — to a degree almost offensive in the face of everything currently unfolding. Is there any other choice? Even a year ago, the horizon of divestment seemed grossly insufficient when weighed up against the scale of Gaza’s suffering. But the demand was never intended to exhaust the movement’s potential. The most urgent and pressing demand was, then as now, to stop the killing; one never truly in reach for the encampments, but the prospect did ultimately appear on the horizon, however distantly, for a few blistering weeks. What this was, and what perhaps could have been articulated more consciously, was simply the expression of the same demand for an end to complicity at a national level, based on an identification of the two temporal planes on which imperial violence proceeds, and which the encampments were able to unify into a single target at the height of their power: the steady pace of financial collusion and the velocity of open war.[1] This perhaps — along with the ineffable, transformative joy that accompanies any effort to instantiate conditions of collective freedom, however limited, in real time and space — is the enduring legacy of last year. A return to that moment of political clarity, for Gaza, but also for ourselves, could not come any sooner.
A sense of just how late we are to the task: in December 1919 two seasoned anarchists arrived at the Ellis Island Deportation Center to board the USS Buford, along with some 250 other radicals identified for expulsion to the Soviet Union. They had dedicated much of the previous years to resisting the madness of an imperialist war which by its close had claimed the lives of tens of millions. In open defiance of their banishment, Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkmann wrote, in a final, hand-written invective against the United States:
If you hate injustice and tyranny, if you love liberty and beauty, there is work for you. If oppression rouses your indignation, and the sight of misery and ugliness makes you unhappy, there is work for you. If your country is dear to you and the people your kin, there is work for you. There is much to be done.
Francesco Anselmetti is a PhD candidate in History and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University.
[1] The Bad Side, “Summer’s Over: A Note on Politics and the Campus Movement”, September 23rd, 2024.
