Gaza, campus wars and watermelons
As two far-right Israeli government ministers once again torpedo a Gaza ceasefire, the Palestinian issue continues to roil campuses. Here’s some crucial context from This Week, Those Books. Sign up at https://thisweekthosebooks.com/ and get the post the day it drops. A four-minute podcast is here: https://thisweekthosebooks.substack.com/p/gaza-campus-protests-and-watermelons
The Big Story:
Spreading campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza.
- Pro–Gaza encampments have cropped up at more than 50 universities in the US, France, Australia, the UK and Italy.
- One of the earliest campus “occupations” for the Palestinian cause began in February at Goldsmiths, University of London. One of the most recent is Britain’s University of Warwick.
- The protests have divided university communities and controversially prompted police action and more than a thousand arrests in the US, open letters from faculty condemning the “repressive crackdown”, cancelled graduation ceremonies, passionate conversations about “free speech”, “genocide” and “anti-Semitism”, as well as some political grandstanding.
- Some students are demanding their university divest from corporations that profit from Israel’s war on Gaza, which has now killed nearly 35,000 people and injured nearly 78,000. Columbia University president Minouche Shafik has refused to divest from Israel but said the institution will also invest in Gaza’s health care and education.
- US President Joe Biden, who is running for re-election in November, faces growing domestic pressure over Israel’s actions in Gaza.
The Backstory:
The pro-Palestine campus protests feel like a throwback to the late 1960s, the era of student protests against the Vietnam War.
Other major student protests include:
- The 1970s and 1980s movement that led to 55 US universities and colleges partially or fully divesting from South Africa’s apartheid government
- The 2003 anti-Iraq war movement in the US, UK, Germany
- The 2020 Black Lives Matter global demonstrations
Opinion is divided on the value of student protests. In his book Campus Wars, Texas professor Kenneth J Heineman says it’s a “myth” that university anti-war protests “compelled US foreign policy makers to end our military participation in the Vietnam conflict. In reality…the US withdrew from Indochina because the war could not be won militarily”.
But Joan Donovan, an Assistant Professor of Journalism and Emerging Media Studies at Boston University, writes: “There is some truth to the popular protest slogan: ‘They tried to bury us, but they didn’t know we were seeds’.”
This Week, Those Books:
- A history of how student activism evolved.
- A story about the long shadow cast by war — on the young.
- Troublemakers: Students’ Rights and Racial Justice in the Long 1960s
By: Kathryn Schumaker
Publisher: New York University Press
Year: 2019
Though US-specific, Professor Kathryn Schumaker’s book is an important exploration of changing attitudes towards the proper role of children and young adults, in schools and colleges as well as society at large.
She looks at the nature of justice through the lens of the student protests of “the long 1960s”, which actually stretch into today’s conversations around systems of power and control.
In the actual 1960s though, American teenagers were coming into their own — as a force that had buying power and era-defining tastes such as rock and roll — but also with huge limitations on the extent to which they could upset the old order. In the early days, young people ran huge risks in being labelled a “troublemaker” and it took time for student activism to be seen as a heroic catalyst for change. Some might ask if growing consternation over the pro-Gaza campus protests is a sign that student activism is swinging back to the “troublemaker” category.
- War & Watermelon
By: Rich Wallace
Publisher: Viking
Year: 2011
Sometimes it’s a book for young adults that brings home the pathos of a defining moment in world history. So it is with Rich Wallace’s War & Watermelon, which is set in the summer of 1969. Neil Armstrong has become the first human to set foot on the moon; the radio is playing The Archies’ Sugar, Sugar; teenagers are speculating that the new Beatles album Magical Mystery Tour indicates “Paul McCartney is dead” and Woodstock’s heady message of music, peace and love is about to became a capstone for the Sixties.
And the war in Vietnam is looming over 12-year-old Brody Winslow’s family. Brody’s older brother Ryan will soon turn 18, when he must join the army to fight a war he regards as immoral. Mr Winslow want Ryan to apply for college and avoid the draft. Eventually, Ryan participates in a protest rally, is detained by police and helped out of a sticky situation by his father. In his own way, each Winslow boy takes one small step toward manhood.
A solidarity gathering for Palestine in Brussels in October 2023. Image by M0tty — Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0
N.B.: The watermelon has only a small role to play in the novel — a forgotten ball of the fruit and a heat wave — but the motif is appropriate in the context of the pro-Palestinian campus protests. That’s because watermelon imagery has become a global sign of solidarity with Palestinians.
Image by Vectronom Studios, Pixabay
Originally published at This Week, Those Books
