‘Tipping point’: Attacks on pro-Palestine US campus protests show success of academic boycott, says renowned scholar

By Rabia Ali

ISTANBUL (AA) – As student-led protests against Israel sweep across US campuses in the face of law enforcement crackdowns, renowned academic Hatem Bazian believes there will only be a further surge in intensity, both in the demonstrations and attacks by authorities.

“The fact that universities, politicians … and other forces are taking steps to arrest students and prosecute them, shutting down Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) offices or chapters, is a clear indication that they are doing so because of the success, not the failure (of this movement),” Bazian, a long-time senior lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley and a co-founder of SJP, told Anadolu.

US authorities have been increasingly aggressive in clamping down on growing pro-Palestine protests from coast to coast, arresting hundreds of students in attempts to clear out encampments set up at several college campuses, including ones in New York, California and Texas.

As protesters and advocacy groups including SJP remain defiant, Bazian warned that attacks on “students, activists and those speaking for Palestine are going to get more intense.”

“This is a critical and transformative movement that has created a new energy, not only nationally in the United States but across the world, to oppose the ongoing Israeli government policies,” he said.

“History will judge this movement and judge this period correctly.”

- ‘History of boycotts is so critical to civil society’

The history of using academic and cultural boycotts as advocacy tools is “a longstanding tradition, both in the US and internationally,” Bazian explained.

“We could trace it back to periods of anti-colonial struggles in many parts of Africa and Asia,” he said, citing Gandhi’s movement against British colonial rule and the US civil rights movement.

Egyptians and Nigerians engaged in boycott of British and French during their struggle for independence and freedom, while in the US, the work around South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement was shaped by academic and cultural boycotts, he said.

“Especially as South Africa began to create what’s called Sun City, and inviting musicians and cultural producers to come and perform in South Africa,” he explained.

“This actually generated a mass opposition that crystallized in a massive boycott effort across US campuses and cultural sites – music halls, film festivals – and then also ended up with a boycott of South Africa in the athletic arena, prohibiting South Africa from participating in the Olympics. So, the history of boycotts is so critical to civil society.”

- ‘This moment is both quantitatively and qualitatively different’

For months, students across US university campuses have been protesting against Israel’s deadly war on Gaza, where it is accused of committing genocide.

In some, the pressure movement has been successful in achieving critical objectives.

According to the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), the University of Michigan’s Faculty Senate Assembly passed a motion calling on the university to “divest from companies profiting from Israel’s Gaza genocide.”

Another instance was the Harvard Law School Student Government passing a resolution “calling on the Harvard Management Corporation and all institutions and organizations in the Harvard community to divest from Israel's regime of military occupation and its Gaza genocide.”

A student and faculty-led campaign at Pitzer College in California forced the administration to close a study abroad program with the University of Haifa, the PACBI said in a statement to Anadolu.

Bazian stressed that the success of any such movement “is a cumulative and not instantaneous.”

When it comes to activism on Palestine, whether in the US or Europe, “we have to look at it over a 30 to 40-year trajectory,” he said.

“I do think that this moment is both quantitatively and qualitatively different in terms of how the mobilization is taking place. It is across the board from east to west, north to south,” he said, pointing out that demonstrations are ongoing at campuses “in New York, New Jersey, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, Michigan, Minnesota … and the West Coast, including Washington, Seattle, Oregon, California.”

“So, the quantitative landscape of student mobilization, academic mobilization, civil society mobilization is unprecedented,” said the professor.

All of this success has been achieved despite ongoing campaigns by the Zionist American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and pro-Israel organizations “to defame the opposition, to use power tactics to push political elites and leadership to suppress and target this activity,” he added.

- Reasons to boycott Israeli academia

Bazian explained that there is a need to engage in the academic and cultural boycott of Israel because its actions are in “clear violation of international law.”

“It practices apartheid on the Palestinians. It has a number of cases at the International Court of Justice, with the court issuing plausibility of genocide … in Gaza,” he said.

“All this, these collectively is a reason, or a cause for us, to actually engage in the cultural and academic boycott of Israel, to say that we should not treat Israel as normal in the broader sense of civil society, of academia and of cultural production.”

The PACBI pointed to Israeli universities’ “long and well-documented history of actively supporting Israel’s regime of military occupation, settler colonialism and apartheid.”

“Israeli universities maintain strong ties with Israel’s military and its weapons companies, including via joint research centers and hosting military bases on campus,” read the statement.

“Archeology faculties carry out digs on stolen and occupied Palestinian land, looting Palestinian cultural heritage and creating a narrative that erases Palestinian history. Law faculties elaborate the legal justifications for Israel’s crimes against Palestinians, undermining not only Palestinian rights but also international law.”

These same universities, the group said, are now actively supporting Israel’s Gaza genocide and scholasticide, a term used to refer to Israel’s systematic and deliberate destruction of Palestinian education.

The Hebrew University, for example, proudly proclaims it is providing “diverse logistics equipment to several military units,” the statement said.

“Tel Aviv University instituted a hasbara (propaganda) course on Israel's Gaza genocide. Tel Aviv University also boasts of having helped ‘make’ Israel’s propaganda-ridden case before the International Court of Justice, which found Israel is plausibly committing genocide.

“Technion has supported students, professors and alumni in the creation an AI-driven ‘army of robots [sic] to massively increase the impact of pro-Israel efforts on social media,’ pushing Israeli propaganda, whitewashing its genocide and repressing speech on Palestinian right.”

In terms of ties between Israeli and American universities, Bazian said Israel “has been integrated across many parts of the university and cultural landscape” in the country.

“At universities, including the one I’m part of, there’s a lot of exchange programs that send students to Israeli universities on a regular basis,” said Bazian.

“We host visiting scholars from Israeli universities … There are a number of programs that literally integrate research and try to normalize that which is not normal. Genocide is not normal. Apartheid is not normal. Human rights violations are not normal, supporting settlements and settlers is not normal.”

- ‘Tipping point materializing in front of our eyes’

Bazian said the increased aggression to silence Palestinian, Arab and progressive Jewish voices indicates Israel’s growing inability to defend its position.

“I see this as a failure of Israel … Overall, looking at it from a broader high-level reading of society, it actually points to Israel’s incapacity to alter the discourse,” he said.

There is a shift in public opinion and that is why Israeli supporters and pro-Israel organizations “are becoming far more belligerent,” he said.

“They are witnessing the collapsing standing of Israel in civil society and they are resorting to defamation, to calling anyone that speaks on Palestine antisemitic, which also devalues and undermines the work on antisemitism in the real sense,” said Bazian.

When it comes to young Jewish Americans, they no longer see Israel or Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing government as “representative of their identity,” he said.

“To be Jewish in America is no longer equal to being pro-Israel and supportive of Israel in all elements,” he added.

All of this, according to Bazian, is “a tipping point that is materializing in front of our eyes.”

“Israel, as a product, if we think of it in terms of a marketing, is no longer sustainable in relations to American society or Western society,” he asserted.