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Tents now occupy Voorhees Mall at the center of Rutgers University’s College Avenue campus, with students pressing their demands for justice for Palestinians and university divestment from companies doing business with Israel.
The encampment is one of dozens around the country, many of which have been met with police crackdowns and threatened suspensions of students. It is too early to know how the Rutgers administration will respond — I write this at the very early stages of the action — but it is clear we have reached a tipping point for this pointless and murderous war.
We are approaching 35,000 dead in Gaza, killed by the Israeli Defense Forces in what some call a genocide. The word is contested, but the unremitting assault by the IDF has exceeded all logical proportions. If Israel’s actions in the days following the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas could be seen as defensive — as the Netanyahu government and Israel’s supporters argue — the nearly seven months of total assault, which has leveled much of Gaza and has its population on the precipice of famine has left that thin rationale in tatters.
The quick spread of these encampments are evidence of a refusal to tolerate the kind of brutality being imposed on innocent civilians by an Israeli government — with material support from the American government. The 60, 80, 100 encampments have a singular message: Not in our name.
What we are witnessing in Gaza, after all, is a series of war crimes, that build on a history of repression. I agree that the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas also constituted a war crime, but we are seven months in and it is disingenuous for us to keep pointing to the 1,200 dead Israelis as a justification for the continued slaughter in Gaza, which I would call an ethnic cleansing, if not a full-on genocide.
Understanding the debates over what is happening in Israel and Gaza and on our campuses, which are linked, requires us to understand how divorced we have become from notions of evidence how much we have given in to our own biases. We have lost any sense of intellectual humility, and would rather engage in shouting matches and rely on absurd conspiracies (someone must be funding these kids? Who bought the tents?) to justify our preconceived beliefs.
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