Israel/Palestine post 10/7 - follow-on events/thoughts as relate to other countries

The pictures from Texas are horrifying.

Here's a good thread from Deb Cowen, a Jewish academic, on her experience speaking to the solidarity encampment at NYU:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1783118648242004348.html

Worthwhile pod ep from two leftist academics with Columbia/NYU history:

https://goodbye.substack.com/p/campus-crackdown-and-an-assessment

Today, we talk about everything that’s happening on campus from Columbia to NYU to Berkeley. Tyler talks about the responsibilities of faculty in these moments and what he thinks is driving a surprisingly strong faculty response to the arrests in New York City. We also talk about how to process the instances of antisemitism at these protests and Jay talks about some of the difficulties that have arisen with the leaderless activism model over the past decade or so

That pod also making the point that there are class divisions that will be showing up more in campus protests, in terms of adjunct faculty vs tenured faculty vs administration, w/r/t who calls the cops vs who protests because their students are getting arrested vs who gets arrested with their students

Go bears

there was one word that even looked misspelled to me, but no fucking way would i even think to check it, i was just “lol no way this mf gonna misspell anything in this venue, he in his space.

(and yes i learned that as an undergrad in the 90s sue me)

Faculty at @UTAustin are going on strike tomorrow to protest police and state troopers mass arresting and beating students. https://t.co/CsEscanZTI

— Writers Against the War on Gaza (@wawog_now) April 25, 2024

Xp I don't know if that was the word Hunt3r was thinking of when they said that, but it was definitely the word I was thinking of when they said that.

Interpellation is a concept that is quite useful, honestly, even if one isn’t a Marxist.

(and yes i learned that as an undergrad in the 90s sue me)

― Humanitarian Pause (Tracer Hand), Wednesday, April 24, 2024 7:41 PM (yesterday)

How many times did you have to read that Althusser Ideological State Apparatus essay as an undergrad? I think I had it in 3 separate classes! I actually think about interpellation a fair amount tbh, especially in the context of online discourse and "callout culture"

Ha, yeah, interpellated is the term that always tripped me up.

Likewise, Took me longer than expect to learn what “reify” meant, but that was mainly because I never heard it pronounced correctly(I.e. more Latin sounding)

2020s undergrads learn interpellate now too, though not directly from Althusser but via Judith Butler

i feel like my 90's Cal education must have been deficient because I never once had to read a single one of these things. nevertheless I still know what 'interpellation' means

the guy who destroyed every single university in Gaza has some thoughts: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/24/us/netanyahu-israel-us-college-protests.html

“What’s happening in America’s college campuses is horrific,” Mr. Netanyahu said. “Antisemitic mobs have taken over leading universities. They call for the annihilation of Israel. They attack Jewish students. They attack Jewish faculty.”

Fucken psycho.

Huge campus protest (Northwestern) swelled up out of nowhere directly across the street from my department office this morning. Vibes seem good, although the pigs were clearly itching to needlessly escalate from the get go (with a goddamn helicopter circling overhead for hours). But it seems like they finally took the hint and fucked off. For the time being.

The police responses are so over the top and obviously unnecessary I was wondering if any admin anywhere might get a clue and realize how fascist this makes them look (was just reading that my alma mater, Emory, sent in the state cops today)

not to mention that the movement is growing directly in response to the crackdowns, like duh??

There's protest going on right now where I am. A lot of cops are standing around but it doesn't feel like anything bad is going to go down.

xp Old Lunch - that protest at Northwestern le to a real fucking moment of whiplash on my Twitter feed this morning. i saw a tweet from the city's police department pop up saying, "we are monitoring the situation at Northwestern this morning but are not directly involved, direct all questions to Northwestern". IMMEDIATELY below that tweet was a video of the chief of police standing in front of the tents telling the students they would be arrested if they didn't disperse.

lying pigs, all the time.

christ the CPD is shameless

apparently the cops at Emory used irritant gas, tasers, and rubber bullets (https://emorywheel.com/emory-community-ashamed-after-police-detain-students-at-pro-palestine-encampment/)

or I guess the Evanston PD

yeah, it was the Evanston PD in this case.

The Daily Northwestern has maintained a solid rolling activity log throughout the day: https://dailynorthwestern.com/2024/04/25/campus/live-pro-palestinian-student-activists-set-up-encampment-on-deering-meadow/

I’m wondering about the Soviet flags at my protest. Why?

I’m going to chalk that up to the Party for Socialism & Liberation folks who have been at many of these

the famous liberty afforded to people by the benevolent soviet union

these are college students, of course they're gonna rock the hammer & sick

It’s probably PSL or RevCom related.

I have to say: I am proud of the youth.

xp
if it was the word “interpellated”

bingo-- though i know the word. and like said, i expected that space would be typo and error free haha, so i knew i had take a note.

had to

traditionally students are the shock troops for social change, which can lead to much good, but they generally are better at than capsizing the boat full of oligarchs than at navigation.

I’m wondering about the Soviet flags at my protest. Why?

― Never fight uphill 'o me, boys! (President Keyes), Thursday, 25 April 2024 bookmarkflaglink

Friend Infected With Left Wing Brain Worms - What to Do?

My ans: nothing. They are doing good

video of arrests at Emory:

https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2024/04/25/emory-university-pro-palestinian-protest-police-digvid.cnn

the professor at the end of that video who the pigs throw on the ground for speaking to them has been charged with assaulting a police officer

There’s an aspect to this that seems like inter-elite fight, where we’re watching a struggle between different class strata of faculty vs the administrators for control of the institution.

It’s probably PSL or RevCom related.

the professor at the end of that video who the pigs throw on the ground for speaking to them has been charged with assaulting a police officer

Maybe more for the antisemitism thread, but I still think there is a certain grey area that we haven't really figured out how to address/deal with with the rhetoric around "zionism," because the term "zionism" is not well defined. At least pre and during WWII, Nazi meant something specific, a member or supporter of the Nazi party. It seems like "zionist" means anyone who hasn't come to the conclusion that Israel should not exist as a Jewish state in any sense. And I think that is dangerous in combination with a lot of the rhetoric I hear - that zionists should die, that zionists should be targeted by terrorist attacks, etc. And this is "not antisemitism" because you can separate Jews into the good kind (anti-zionist) and the bad kind (zionist).

I don’t use the word because in my experience it was used by Turner Diaries types (i.e. Zionist Occupied Government)

also presumes that being a "zionist" is an immutable position that can't be changed via persuasion

Maoism is trending among younger people… as is the belief that Stalin was a great man … for gen x leftists (and boomers), there is some serious wtf
― sarahell, Friday, April 26, 2024 8:54 AM (thirty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I am obviously not a Tankie, but especially for younger people, all that they have seen is radical reactionaries and fascist-adjacent ghouls impose their ideological viewpoints upon the populace with little impunity. The urge to replicate this kind of authoritarian bullshit from a leftist ideological view is understandable, if misguided and ahistorical.

I think it's often shallower than that. Mao and Stalin get reduced down to avatars for "people who successfully opposed capitalism" and I'm not sure they think much past that dubious point

That said, I'm not seeing any pro-Mao or pro-Stalin sentiment among the young leftists of Montreal, and I wonder how concrete or significant this is. On the other hand, there is a legally legitimate communist party in Canada, so maybe it gets channelled into something slightly more defensible up here.

Maybe more for the antisemitism thread, but I still think there is a certain grey area that we haven't really figured out how to address/deal with with the rhetoric around "zionism," because the term "zionism" is not well defined. At least pre and during WWII, Nazi meant something specific, a member or supporter of the Nazi party. It seems like "zionist" means anyone who hasn't come to the conclusion that Israel should not exist as a Jewish state in any sense. And I think that is dangerous in combination with a lot of the rhetoric I hear - that zionists should die, that zionists should be targeted by terrorist attacks, etc. And this is "not antisemitism" because you can separate Jews into the good kind (anti-zionist) and the bad kind (zionist).

The issue is that by tying Judaism to a project like Israel, there is a narrow set of paths by which one can oppose the state without opposing the religion, according to the logic set up by the state itself. I am opposed to the state of Israel, but I am not opposed to Judaism or Jewish people. This tethering of a state apparatus to a religious identity is dangerous in all of its iterations— the same problem exists with Islamic states, and in the US (among others) with Christianity, despite our supposed "melting pot" nature.

The issue then becomes: what is the aim of tying the state to a religion? Who and what does this tethering aim to protect and exclude? Why?

That said, I'm not seeing any pro-Mao or pro-Stalin sentiment among the young leftists of Montreal, and I wonder how concrete or significant this is.

xps having been in tankie adjacent spaces most of these people really do know nothing and seem to think the sino-soviet split never happened. they like to use symbols of state power to project a strength and unity that the left doesn't have and there's a huge archive of a century of marxist-leninist theory for them to draw from with prepackaged answers to every question. crappy anarchist zines and ultraleft treatises on value don't have the same appeal. it's like marx said "the tradition of dead [actually existing socialist states] weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living"

there's a tendency to downplay this trend either because people don't come across it or because it's just embarrassing but it has been pretty damaging in the left even if most of the people involved aren't necessarily stalinists in a genuine sense

every socialist state is equivalent to them and anyone who has been hurt or whose family has been hurt by ostensibly socialist or just anti-imperialist regimes is chased out of a lot of left spaces if they talk about their experiences with a lot of racist assumptions projected onto them. it's really fucked up and white western leftists have done genuine harm to solidarity efforts between (for example) syrians and palestinians with their bullshit

I am obviously not a Tankie

― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table)

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