SSJ Statement on Student Protests
May 7, 2024
SSJ Applauds the Upsurge in Student Protest against the Genocide unfolding in Gaza, and is proud of our colleagues and members who have stood with their students. These students represent a broad range of ethnicities and communities: They are Palestinian, Jewish, Black, Latinx, Asian, Muslim and Arab. They are members of the LGBTQ community and of abolitionist communities already building more liberated futures.
As a humanitarian crisis and genocidal war in Gaza continues to deepen to surreal nightmarish levels, young people in this country have stood up and spoken out demanding justice and exposing institutional and government complicity. On dozens of college campuses coast to coast, Gaza solidarity encampments have been set up. Inside the encampments students debate, learn, pray, study, sing, break bread, make decisions together, and strategize.
We vigorously condemn the violent, McCarthy-like tactics of university administrators who have broken up peaceful protests and called riot police on campus after campus when no riots were occurring. University leaders have suspended students and student organizations and barred them from campuses, sanctioned and fired pro-Palestinian faculty, fanned anti-Muslim racism in ways that exacerbate the vulnerability of Muslims on university campuses, deployed antisemitic smears against protestors that endanger the safety of the large proportion of Jews in this movement, censored freedom of expression, and ignored or undermined academic freedom in a myriad of ways.
This is a historic moment of campus protest ignited by the rigid, repression, anti-Palestinian stance of college and university leaders. But it is more than that. It converges with the ongoing surrender to right-wing, regressive corporate interests that profit from the entrenched systems of oppression; and the retreat from racial justice, diversity, equity and inclusion and curricula that teach in a critical and radically inclusive mode.
In a period where repressive authoritarian policies loom on the immediate horizon, we call upon universities to reaffirm their stated commitments to academic freedom, inclusion, free expression, equitable safety, and the right to dissent. Students and faculty should never be censured or censored for expression of controversial ideas unless there is a direct threat posed to others.
Criticizing a government or an idea for which others are advocates should not be defined as threatening or denigrating. Specifically, we reject the idea that criticizing the State of Israel or the politics of Zionism is antisemitic. If the university foregoes its role as a space of critical inquiry and open debate, if presidents are willing to fire faculty on the order of politicians, seriously consider bringing National Guard on campus (which echoes with the tragic outcomes at Kent State, Jackson State and South Carolina State at Orangeburg, where in 1968 and 1970 student protesters were murdered), they have already succumbed to authoritarianism’s violent mandate. We will not tolerate this, nor allow it.
SSJ Executive Committee