In Our Power: U.S. Students Organize for Justice in Palestine

Video and Edited Transcript 
Nora Barrows-Friedman
Transcript No. 429 (9 April 2015)

 

 

 

 

 

Zeina Azzam

 

 

 
After Israel’s 2008 – 2009 Operation Cast Lead assault on the Palestinians of Gaza, a new kind of student movement emerged on U.S. campuses. Our guest speaker describes it in this way in her book. “An important movement lead by young college students is taking shape across the United States. In the great tradition of other civil rights and human rights movements, activists are standing up to university administrations and the Israel aligned political organizations that routinely repress students’ speech on Palestine. In the face of significant intimidation, students have become powerful organizers in the Palestinian led boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. They challenge themselves, they challenge each other on the definition of solidarity and they educate their campuses about one of the most important human rights issues of our time. Indeed this movement of students seeking justice in Palestine has helped put the BDS campaign firmly onto the national map.”
 
Our speaker today, Nora Barrows-Friedman, describes this as a powerful turning point in the Palestine Solidarity Activism. She set out to document this movement. In 2013 and early 2014, Nora interviewed 63 student activists representing 30 different universities in 22 cities across 11 states. They along with others form the core of this movement and their voices constitute the powerful message in this book In Our Power: U.S Students Organize for Justice in Palestine. Of course, this new student movement in support of Palestinian rights faces many challenges from on and off campus opponents. But the strength and intelligence of the voices revealed in this book show us that truth, justice, and people power are resilient, and are prevailing in this new generation of activists.  Nora Barrows-Friedman is a journalist, an editor, radio broadcaster, musician and mother. She received her B.A. in humanities with a focus on Palestine from the New College of California in San Francisco. She’s also the recipient of a Lifetime Media Achievement Freedom Award from the Media Freedom foundation. 
 
From 2003 – 2010, Nora was the senior producer and co-host of Flashpoints, an investigative newsmagazine broadcast over the historic Pacifica Radio Network. During her time at Flashpoints, she began covering human rights issues in Palestine, and spent several months every year in the occupied West Bank, Gaza Strip and present-day Israel reporting from the ground.
 
I think this is one of the strengths in the book we are hearing about today. It’s clear that Nora has firsthand experience in perspectives from Israel and Palestine through her research and her interviews. 
 
Nora is currently an associate editor of The Electronic Intifada, an award-winning, independent online publication focusing on Palestine and Palestinian rights where she produces the weekly audio podcast, contributes investigative stories, and blogs about student activism, the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, and the violations of the rights of Palestinian youth under Israel’s occupation. She has written for numerous print publications and news services including The Electronic Intifada, Inter Press Service, Al Jazeera English, Truthout and Left Turn Magazine. She also contributed a chapter to the 2011 Project Censored anthology about U.S. corporate media’s lack of appropriate coverage of the situation in Palestine.
 
I will ask Nora to speak about her experiences, research and particularly about her book In Our Power, then we’ll open the floor for questions and discussion. 
 
I’m so delighted to have Nora Barrows-Friedman with us. Welcome.
 
 
Nora Barrows-Friedman:
 
Thank you Zeina and thank you so much to the Jerusalem Fund and the Palestine Center. It’s so good to be here today.
 
I wanted to begin by reading a few words by a friend and colleague of mine, Dina Elmuti, whose grandmother survived the Deir Yassin massacre, which happened sixty-seven years ago today.
 
“Palestine was never an empty ‘land without a people,’ and it never will be. Aggressors assume that survivors will forget. They fool themselves more than anyone else. Our narratives remain indestructibly woven into the fabric of our existence, grafted onto our bones and configured into our DNA, passed down from generation to generation. We will never forget what happened in Deir Yassin on April 9th, 1948. We will keep on telling our stories.” Thank you, Dina.
 
We’re at an incredible moment in Palestine solidarity movement history here in the U.S. I cover student activism at The Electronic Intifada and wrote this book about U.S. student activism on Palestine issues, and every day, pretty much without fail, I receive emails from students who are preparing for a divestment resolution — that is, a resolution to demand that the university pull its investments in U.S. or transnational companies that profit from Israel’s violations of the rights of Palestinians.
 
I hear from students who are challenging procedural obstacles put in place to crush divestment campaigning by administrations under pressure from Israel-aligned organizations. I hear from students who are planning an extraordinary mock checkpoint, mock wall or mock eviction action, or who are just getting their Students for Justice in Palestine chapter started, and are already facing intimidation and harassment by anti-Palestinian groups or individuals on campus.
 
It’s an exciting moment, but it’s also a nerve-wracking moment for students. With limited, or shrinking, or non-existent resources, students are determined to grow their campaigns by the skin of their teeth, amidst expanding attacks on this movement by well-financed, influential and intimidating organizations who seek to censor speech critical of the policies of the state of Israel.
 
With each direct action, students highlight the struggle of Palestinians every day; with each divestment resolution, whether or not those resolutions pass, they open the realm of discussions on Israel’s policies; with each flyer that they hand out on campus, they educate fellow students about issues that cannot be put back under the covers. Pro-Israel groups cannot debate the facts, so they are resorting to troubling and dangerous tactics intended to shut down discussion and violate the terms of academic freedom and freedom of speech.
 
Israel-aligned organizations are so desperate to shut down this kind of speech that they are spending time and energy and money attempting to litigate and criminalize dissent on campuses, as we saw with the spate of legal complaints filed against the University of California several years ago. These complaints attempted to say that by the mere presence of Students for Justice in Palestine chapters on several campuses, and the direct actions in support of Palestinian equality and justice and human rights, it created a “hostile atmosphere” and made some Jewish students feel uncomfortable and discriminated against.
 
Of course this is absurd. One legal complaint filed against the University of California at Berkeley went so far as to compare the campus climate for some Jewish students to the atmosphere at college campuses under the Nazi regime — an offensive and exploitative, desperate claim. These complaints were thrown out by the federal department of education, which stated that they had no legal basis and no evidence to prove that Jewish students were being harmed by speech.
 
This newly-invigorated attempt to conflate Judaism and Jewish people with the state of Israel is one of the most pernicious efforts of the Israel lobby, and is designed to slander activism in support of Palestinians. As many scholars and activists have pointed out, this conflation is not only offensive but it is dangerous and is, in fact, ironically, anti-Semitic in and of itself.
 
By presenting all Jews around the world as a monolithic entity incapable of opposing viewpoints and in full support of the state of Israel, a state that is built upon the ethnic cleansing and oppression of the indigenous peoples of that land, this conflation infers that all Jews, then, no matter where they are, are therefore directly responsible for Israel’s crimes — this is truly anti-Semitic.
 
It’s important to note this vocabulary used by Israel-aligned groups to shut down debate or actions in support of the rights of Palestinians — some pro-Israel students say they would feel marginalized by having to witness even a dramatization of what Palestinians go through on a daily basis — as though possible emotional distress or hurt feelings were more important to protect on campus than doing something about real-life violence against an occupied population.
 
As U.C. Berkeley graduate and current lawyer Yaman Salahi said in my book, when talking about mock checkpoint actions at U.C. Berkeley in the past, these checkpoint actions were actually cited in one of the legal complaints that was filed by Israel-aligned students against the University of California claiming that they were discriminated and harassed on campus because of Palestine solidarity activism. Yaman said that if students complained that they didn’t feel safe witnessing a dramatic re-enactment of a checkpoint scene, what do you think the real thing is like? He said, “That’s the point students were trying to make. If the theatrical version is horrifying to you, then you shouldn’t be filing this complaint against the university. You should be organizing against the occupation.”
 
Because they cannot debate the facts, Israel-aligned groups try, in these divestment debates on campuses, even at events and in classroom discussions, to derail the conversations and present this unequal, unjust reality for Palestinians as one of a simple matter of opinion, and pressure university administrations to “hear both sides.”
 
It is a fact that Palestinians are under a military occupation in violation of international laws and conventions. It is a fact that Palestinians in Gaza have suffered and resisted through countless invasions and genocidal attacks. It is a fact that Israel destroyed 100,000 homes and buildings last summer in Gaza, creating what the UN says is four million tons of rubble. It is a fact that Israel’s eight-year-long blockade on Gaza prevents the import of essential goods and reconstruction materials. It is a fact that 2,200 people were killed, including 500 children, over the summer. It is a fact that Israel targeted schools, hospitals, clinics, office buildings and beaches where children were playing soccer and not one official, not one soldier, has faced charges. Yet, that time will undoubtedly come.
 
It is a fact that after each sustained attack on Gaza, Israel’s weapons manufacturers enjoy spikes in their sales because, and this has been documented, they promote their weapons as “field-tested” or “combat proven.” It is a fact that Gaza and the West Bank and Lebanon have become laboratories for new weapons testing. The Guardian newspaper just came out with a report this week saying that Israel has supplied 60% of the world’s surveillance and militarized drone sales since 1985. Based on data collected by the Al Mezan Center for Human rights, a Corporate Watch investigation found that during the attacks on Gaza over the summer, at least 37 percent of those killed, or 840 people, died in drone strikes alone. Rania Khalek, my colleague at The Electronic Intifada, wrote a couple weeks ago that “Lost in the numbers is the psychological impact inflicted on the people of the Gaza ghetto, especially children, by the constant presence of drones buzzing overhead with the capacity to rain death on those below at any moment.”
 
It is a fact that Palestinian citizens of Israel are forced to live under dozens of state-sanctioned discrimination and segregation laws simply because they are not Jewish. It is a fact that Israel prevents the right of return for the seven million Palestinian refugees living in diaspora from returning to their homes and property from which they were violently expelled in 1948, and 1967, and today, simply because they are not Jewish.
 
It is a fact that some Israeli politicians have openly called for genocide against Palestinians, and this has been made clear over and over again with each election cycle and during each attack on Gaza. It is a fact that, as Rania reminded me in a talk she gave last week, Benjamin Netanyahu admitted that the wall that Israel has built in the West Bank is to prevent “a demographic spillover” of Palestinians from the occupied territories. These are not opinions. These are facts. And they deserve to have a platform on college campuses, free of censorship.
 
Because of these irrefutable facts, people are joining the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement across the world. This is an international, nonviolent, proactive campaign led by Palestinian civil society to hold Israel accountable because our world leaders won’t.
 
It’s clear that Israel advocacy groups can’t hold onto much support any longer as the veneer is pulled off of Israel every day, as independent media, as television images, and as student campaigns on college campuses expose Israeli policies for what they are. They are policies of apartheid, of segregation, of supremacy, of settler-colonialism, of exceptionalism, of unabashed racism that survives because of the U.S.’s addiction to keeping those policies in place.
 
Even if top U.S. officials, as we saw a couple of weeks ago, say that the occupation has to end, this remains empty rhetoric as the U.S. government will not entertain the idea of stopping its  billions of dollars in aid to fund Israel’s apartheid policies.
 
On August 1st, two weeks into the 51-day slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza last summer, President Obama said it was “heartbreaking to see it all unfold.” Corey Robin, a spectacular professor at Brooklyn College, remarked on Twitter, “As if he’s just a bystander, watching it all unfold.” Robin added, “Obama talks about Gaza as if it were a natural disaster, an uncontrollable biological event.”
 
Writing in The Intercept about the U.S. and Israel’s shared values, and the massive donations by the U.S. of cash, weapons and surveillance to Israel, Glenn Greenwald says a few days later: “Each time Israel attacks Gaza and massacres its trapped civilian population – at the end of 2008, in the fall of 2012, and now again this past month – the same process repeats itself in both U.S. media and government circles: the U.S. government feeds Israel the weapons it uses and steadfastly defends its aggression both publicly and at the U.N.; the U.S. Congress unanimously enacts one resolution after the next to support and enable Israel; and then American media figures pretend that the Israeli attack has nothing to do with their country, that it’s just some sort of unfortunately intractable, distant conflict between two equally intransigent foreign parties in response to which all decent Americans helplessly throw up their hands as though they bear no responsibility.” He adds, “Every Israeli action in Gaza has U.S. fingerprints all over it.”
 
This is why BDS exists, because as we all know, true change never comes from the top down. It always, always comes from the grassroots who demand that these types of human rights violations end. As we know from reading our history books, much of that grassroots activism, much of that monumental change begins here on campus, with students who are organizing between classes.
 
I want to read about the campus as a battleground and how Israel-aligned organizations are developing ways to suppress criticism of Israeli policies on campus. 
 
“Anti-Palestinian organizations have targeted solidarity movements on U.S. campuses for decades. But since the early 2000’s such groups have more urgently identified criticism of Israeli policy as something to be suppressed, precisely because campuses are places that encourage individuals to challenge the status quo and also because the campus-based Palestine solidarity movement is expanding year by year. Thus, national Israel advocacy organizations such as Stand With Us, which works closely with Israel’s foreign ministry, have been rapidly popping up on U.S. campuses and directly interfering with US-Palestine solidarity activism. 
 
Boasting a budget of more than $8.7 million dollars as of 2012, Stand With Us works with on-campus Israel advocacy student groups and other national anti-Palestinian groups to discredit activists, students, and faculty members who support Palestinian rights. Stand With Us members troll and harass Palestine solidarity activists and flood campuses with pro-Israel propaganda, especially during student-organized Israeli Apartheid weeks or Palestine Awareness weeks. Leading up to campus divestment hearings, members smear the boycott movement as anti-Semitic and promote Israel as a peaceful, progressive haven for diverse communities.
 
Alex Kane, a New York-based journalist, reported for the online publication Mondoweiss in early February 2014 about a secret document he obtained that exposed the group’s strategy to combat Israeli Apartheid Week events on campuses. In the document, meant to be a confidential memo to Israel advocates on U.S. campuses, Stand With Us offered grants of up to $200 to student groups to promote events such as a “Hummus not Hamas” party. The group also suggested how Israel advocates should deflect criticism about the state’s racist and violent treatment of African migrants, and offered talking points to denigrate the Palestinian-led BDS movement.
 
The large, influential, and well-funded AIPAC – the American Israel Public Affairs Committee – has a wing devoted to on-campus advocacy of Israel and organizes all-expense paid trips for student leaders to visit Israel. AIPAC promotes these trips as opportunities to “prepare young leaders to help build pro-Israel community on and beyond the campus,” noting that they help place students into meetings with US Congress members to help advocate Israel’s interest. Israel-aligned students can also become “Hasbara Fellows” (hasbara is a Hebrew word that translates to “public diplomacy”, frequently synonymized with “propaganda”), paid advocates for Israel found on 120 university campuses across the country.
 
In a “white paper” document released in 2013, the David project, a Zionist “educational organization” founded by Americans for Peace and Tolerance’s Charles Jacobs, encouraged student advocates for Israel to exploit personal relationships with different student organizations in order to get them to adopt anti-Palestinian positions, and to threaten faculty members who challenge the bias toward Israel in their coursework.
 
Writing in the Electronic Intifada about the David Project’s white paper, Abraham Greenhouse reported that the document examines the potential of students of color and marginalized communities to align with Palestine solidarity groups, and recommends tactics for Israel-aligned activists to steer such persons toward sympathy with Israel instead. The document, Greenhouse adds, “also suggests a manipulative strategy for seeking disciplinary action against faculty members critical of Israeli policies. Beyond suggesting the use of administrative mechanisms to suppress academic freedom, anti-Palestinian advocacy groups have encouraged activists, including full-time campus-based professionals, to cultivate relationships of an extremely questionable nature with campus administrators, and even with campus police.”
 
I’m going to read a section about the ways in which students have been organizing around the BDS call, demanding that their tuition dollars don’t go to support occupation in Palestine.
 
“Today, less than 10 years since the official BDS call against Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism was launched, the movement has grown exponentially around the world. Victories are being won as students, trade unionists, academics, faith-based groups, cultural workers, and human rights defenders campaign for Palestinian rights, using the BDS movement as a way to educate, energize activism, and, as in South Africa, make Israel’s occupation and apartheid system economically and politically unviable.
 
Hoda Mitwally of CUNY Law School in Queens, New York, told me that the BDS movement reinvigorated the Palestine solidarity movement in the mid-2000s. She said that the generation of activists that came before was torn apart by internal political debates. Instead of creating a strong solidarity struggle in the United States, activists were discussing political solutions for Palestinians in Palestine, such as one state versus two states. These were, she said, ‘things regarding the future of Palestine that I’m not sure if solidarity activists in the West really have a place to weigh in on. I don’t think that they have that place, actually,’ she said. ‘So with the BDS call, that really remedies it. Because here, we’re not calling for a political solution. We’re restoring agency to Palestinians to do that. What we’re doing is recognizing the privileges we have in the U.S., and the responsibilities that come with that by targeting corporations, by targeting government and military aid to Israel, and that’s ultimately how we can be most effective.’”
 
In that chapter I talk a little bit more about Berkeley, which I mentioned in my introduction. The Berkeley divestment resolution passed in April 2010. It was vetoed and then there was a vote to either uphold or discredit the veto, and the veto was upheld. But during that time in between the two votes, “Influential Israel-aligned organizations and the regional Israel Counsel excoriated the divestment resolution at U.C. Berkeley. Jonathan Kessler, a top official for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), stated plainly and openly at a conference in Washington, D.C. that AIPAC would, he actually said this, ‘make sure that pro-Israel students take over the student government and reverse the [pro-divestment] vote’ at U.C. Berkeley. He added, without nuance: ‘This is how AIPAC operates in our nation’s Capital. This is how AIPAC must operate on our nation’s campuses.’ It was clear that the pro-Israel lobby’s pressure was significant and would be unrelenting against the student senators.
 
One week after the divestment vote passed, the student senate president, Will Smelko, vetoed the resolution. It was a devastating turn of events for students who had worked so hard for this divestment success. Moreover, it showed how closely the pro-Israel lobby and governmental representatives were watching the campus divestment movement – and how much they were gearing up to stop such activism in its tracks. Smelko’s veto had to be confirmed in a vote by the student senate in order to make it legitimate, and pro-Israel lobby groups descended on the U.C. Berkeley administration with their full might to pressure senators to back the veto.”
 
Because of the ways in which Palestine solidarity campaigns are expanding, and because of the panic by on-campus and off-campus Israel lobby groups, we see a push to censor and shut down speech critical of Israel — as though if you just shove it under the rug, people won’t care about it and will just give up. These are acts of desperation, but they do have real consequences for activism.
 
We see students being forced to pay extra fees for security when they hold events with Palestine activists, thereby punishing SJPs for the possible actions of others, and restricting students’ abilities to hold events, with already depleted budgets.
 
We also see students defying threats of punishment by university administrations if they go forward with direct actions on campus — just last week, I covered a story out of southern California in which students at Pitzer College were denied permission to build a mock apartheid wall on campus, due to pressure from pro-Israel groups on campus who insisted that such a display would promote anti-Semitism — again, using this absurd rhetoric in order to censor free speech on campus.
 
The SJP group at Pitzer knew that their rights had been violated, and decided to construct the mock wall anyway. Liz Jackson, staff attorney with Palestine Solidarity Legal Support said, quote, “As it should, Pitzer claims to embrace a compelling interest in unfettered inquiry and the collective search for knowledge. Under California law, there can be no ‘Palestine exception’ to this policy.”
 
“The accusation that displaying a mock Israeli apartheid wall would target Jewish students is an attempt to divert the conversation away from the human rights policy issues SJP is attempting to raise; SJP’s activity targets the Israeli state, not any individual,” Jackson added.
 
A student I spoke with there said that Pitzer SJP is prepared to go through administrative proceedings as necessary to defend their rights to free speech and to organize on behalf of Palestinians’ rights. We have to support and stand with these students who are facing threats and being singled out by university administrations.
 
 
Faculty, too, are being pressured by outside political organizations to remain silent on Israeli policy in Palestine — of course we saw what happened to professor Steven Salaita and the University of Illinois who was essentially fired for tweeting about his outrage at the massacres in Gaza over the summer. He has filed a comprehensive lawsuit against the University for violating his rights of free speech and violating the contract of his employment.
 
At UCLA, we saw the attempted witch-hunt of professor David Shorter by an outside right-wing Israel advocacy organization, an attempt which failed miserably — they tried to get him fired because of a few books or articles he recommended on a reading list for his students, including a review that The Electronic Intifada published of a book critiquing Zionism.
 
For professors who don’t have tenure yet, or who are new to teaching, it can be a harrowing time to speak out against Israel’s crimes, because of the relentless intimidation and threats meted out by these outside groups insinuating that if they sign a petition in support of a divestment resolution, or put a book on their syllabus that criticizes the Zionist project, or even hold discussions in their classroom, they could have their entire academic career wiped out.
 
Student representatives of the Israel advocacy group called Stand With Us, and their employees posing as students, routinely sit in on classes and have told professors that they’re being watched. This is reflective of Israel-aligned groups panicking that they are losing their arguments, over and over again, and are resorting to threats of violence in order to stamp out discussions and debate. But the amount of fear-based panic that anti-Palestinian groups are employing cannot suppress the fact that the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement is growing, they cannot suppress scholarly critique of Israeli policies in the classroom, and they cannot bear that Palestine solidarity activism is becoming more and more mainstream.
 
They also cannot bear that Palestinian solidarity movements are linking up with other movements of liberation and struggle around the country and around the world. In my book, I dive into the growing intersectional alliances between different communities and the Palestine solidarity movement. I traveled to the U.S.-Mexico Border States, where students are marching hand in hand with Latino, Chicano and indigenous communities, fighting for immigrant justice and against state-sponsored detentions and deportations.
 
As we saw recently in the uprisings around Ferguson, and the national Black Lives Matter protests, Palestinian communities and Black communities are forging strong bonds of solidarity with each other. Students involved in LGBTQ liberation struggles and women’s reproductive rights, workers’ rights, and the rights of the disabled are linking up with Palestine solidarity coalitions.
 
I’ll read a little from the chapter on these extraordinary intersections of struggle.
 
“One of the clearest ways the United States and Israel exemplify their shared values begins with the walls both countries have constructed to keep others out. At the U.S.-Mexico border, which stretches from California to Texas, the U.S. government’s expanding practices of border militarization have reached unprecedented levels, and Israel has stepped in to not just share the technology it has field-tested on Palestinians, but to profit from this project as well. In March 2013, one of the two leading contractors for Israel’s Wall in the West Bank, an Israeli company named Elbit Systems, won its second contract, worth $145 million, to provide surveillance systems for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Elbit’s first contract with the U.S. government provided 450 unmanned drones to the Arizona Border Patrol in 2004. Writing in the Electronic Intifada, Jimmy Johnson reported:
 
The new DHS contract calls for ‘Integrated Fixed Tower systems’ that will ‘assist [Border Patrol] agents in detecting, tracking, identifying and classifying items of interest’ along the border. This contract largely reprises Elbit’s role in the Boeing contract. Initial installations will be in Arizona. Both the U.S. and Israeli projects affirm settler-state partitions of indigenous land: Palestinian land in the Israeli case and Tohono O’odham land in Arizona. The Tohono O’odham Nation is just one of several indigenous nations facing further partition because of U.S. and Mexican border policies. And both projects intend to stop the movement of persons under the guise of ‘security’.
 
In 2011, Schivone started organizing tours to the border wall with other students from Palestinian, Jewish, white European, and Chicano backgrounds, ‘just observing, seeing it firsthand’ he said. ‘And then talking about it, taking it in, discussing it, putting on conferences with students and speakers from all over the country from Palestine-oriented activism and from Chicano and human rights and border work. We put it all together and learned about each other’s struggles.’”
 
I also document how Israel lobby organizations are reacting to these strengthening ties between oppressed communities, and are trying to court communities of color to back Israel.
 
“Groups like the ADL are ‘particularly worried’ about the growing alliances between Palestine solidarity groups and the Latino community, writes Ali Abunimah in his book The Battle for Justice in Palestine. ‘For the ADL, Latino/a and LGBTQ individuals and groups are no more than passive recipients of Palestinian propaganda. The implication is that if any see a common interest, share similar experiences with Palestinians, or resist the use of their communities in Israeli propaganda, they have somehow been duped’, Abunimah notes.
 
Similarly, Abunimah adds that as Israel ramps up its racist treatment of African asylum-seekers, arresting and detaining thousands of people, sending them into squalid detention camps in the desert and planning schemes of mass deportation back to countries where they face violent persecution and imminent death, Israel’s propagandizing efforts to deflect criticism of such racist policies have been aimed at Black communities in the United States. As independent journalist David Sheen and author Max Blumenthal have so importantly documented during the past few years, Israeli politicians have incited violence and racist pogroms against non-Jewish Africans in Israel. Government ministers such as Miri Regev have been the face of Israel’s systematized racism toward non-Jewish Africans.
 
Appointed to lead the sector that determines the state’s policies affecting asylum seekers, Regev famously called African refugees ‘a cancer’ and then later apologized – not to Africans, but to cancer victims for comparing them to Africans. Another Israeli leader, Interior Minister Eli Yishai, did not feel the need to mince words when he claimed in 2012 that, ‘most of those people arriving here are Muslims who think the country doesn’t belong to us, the white man.’”
 
As I make the point in my book, this is not a radical, fringe movement anymore; it is not an isolated band of activists on isolated islands of U.S. campuses. This movement has teeth. This movement is supported by countless human rights and civil rights-based activism groups. This movement is supported by dozens and dozens of campus-based student organizations fighting for liberation, Black liberation, queer liberation, women’s liberation; by workers who fight for economic justice; by those on the front lines of prison abolition movements; by those fighting for the rights of the disabled; by those fighting to be seen and heard in this country and across the world. What is clear is that consensus in support of Palestinian rights is here.
 
This is an exciting time to be a student organizer on campus. This is a very important time. Despite the relentless attacks, despite the organized opposition designed to crush this movement, students and faculty are not deterred.
 
In my book, In Our Power: US Students Organize for Justice in Palestine, I was lucky to be able to document this movement at this very special and important time in history. I went and interviewed nearly 70 students from all over the country who are working day and night to campaign for Palestinian rights, at the same time campaigning for the rights of the people rendered invisible in their local communities. The connections are clear, students told me, between organizing for justice in Palestine and organizing for justice at the U.S.-Mexico border, and organizing for the rights of people locked into prisons, people under the thumb of layers of oppression in this country.
 
At the very end of the book, there’s a chapter about how students define solidarity, and the statements I got from students are incredibly moving and nuanced. I just want to end this talk by quoting two students from this chapter. Amanda Ghannam, a Palestinian-American SJP organizer and student at the University of Michigan at Dearborn, told me, 
 
“Solidarity is not saying ‘this is how Palestinians should resist; this is what they should do.’ It’s about elevating, respecting and supporting the voices of Palestinians who resist every day. It’s also taking responsibility for your own participation in it. As an American citizen, I do feel like I participate in it. I feel like the two halves of my identity are the occupied and the occupier. I have this passport, in a land that I grew up in, that without its support there might not be this occupation. And on the other hand, in my blood, is Palestine.”
 
Finally, at the very end of the chapter, and with the last quote of the book, is Omar Shakir, a law student at Stanford, which just passed a resolution. 
 
“He and his fellow student activists used to joke that more than 75 percent of their time was centered on student organizing, even though they’re paying an extraordinary amount of tuition to be there. ‘That’s all to say that anyone who’s involved in this movement has skin in the game,’ Omar said with a chuckle.
 
It would have been easier not to be an activist, he admitted. ‘It would have been easier to do almost anything else. It’s not just in terms of your academic career, but also families – even coming from a family that is Muslim or Arab in my case or for other members who are Palestinian – many families encourage their children to just focus on their own careers and not get involved in activism. So I think we all feel a sense of being in this together.’ In 2010, Shakir traveled to the West Bank with a richly diverse group of about eight student organizers from colleges on the East Coast and the West Coast, from different genders and ancestral backgrounds. ‘At one point, we went to the separation wall with a can of spray paint. And we spray-painted ‘reunion in liberated Jerusalem in 2030,’ Shakir recounted. ‘We all made a pact together that we were going to work to end the occupation and to have a Jerusalem in a liberated land where everyone was treated equally. We are all committed to that. We put that on the wall and took a picture. And all of us check in every year to see how we’re all working to get towards that goal.’
 
Shakir said that the pact speaks to the level of investment that the group felt working for justice in Palestine. ‘And [we] know that when the separation wall comes down, which is only a matter of time, the collective effort of students will have played a part in making that happen.’”
 
Thank you.

 


Nora Barrows-Friedman 
is a journalist, editor, radio broadcaster, musician and mother. She received her B.A. in Humanities with a focus on Palestine from the New College of California in San Francisco and is the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Media Freedom Award from the Media Freedom Foundation.

From 2003 – 2010, Nora was the senior producer and co-host of Flashpoints, an investigative newsmagazine broadcast over the historic Pacifica Radio Network. During her time at Flashpoints, she began covering human rights issues in Palestine, and spent several months every year in the occupied West Bank, Gaza Strip and present-day Israel reporting from the ground. She also worked with teenagers and young adults at a radio station and production studio they established at the Ibdaa Cultural Center in the Dheisheh refugee camp near Bethlehem.

Nora is currently an associate editor of The Electronic Intifada, an award-winning, independent online publication focusing on Palestine and Palestinian rights where she produces the weekly audio podcast, contributes investigative stories, and blogs about student activism, the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, and the violations of the rights of Palestinian youth under Israel’s occupation. She has written for numerous print publications and news services including The Electronic Intifada, Inter Press Service, Al Jazeera English, Truthout and Left Turn Magazine. She also contributed a chapter to the 2011 Project Censored anthology about U.S. corporate media’s lack of appropriate coverage of the situation in Palestine.