Ramzy Baroud
ISRAEL is
getting ready to annex the occupied Palestinian West Bank. The annexation will
be a major step backwards on the road to Palestinian freedom and will likely
serve as a catalyst for a new Palestinian uprising.
Though
annexation has been on the Israeli agenda for years, this time around, a “great
opportunity”–in the words of extremist Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel
Smotrich–has presented itself and, from an Israeli point of view, cannot be
missed.
“I hope we’ll
have a great opportunity with the new U.S. administration to create full
normalisation [of the Israeli occupation],” the minister was quoted as saying
by Israeli media.
This is not the
first time that Smotrich, among other Israeli extremists, has made the
connection between Trump’s advent to the White House and the illegal expansion
of Israel’s borders.
Two reasons make
Israel’s far right optimistic about Trump’s arrival: one, the Israeli
experience during Trump’s first term in office, where the U.S. president
allowed Israel to claim sovereignty over illegal settlements, the Syrian Golan
Heights, and occupied East Jerusalem; and, two, Trump’s more recent statement
in the run-up to the elections.
Israel is “so
tiny” on the map, Trump said while addressing the pro-Israeli group Stop
Anti-semitism at an event last August, wondering:
“Is there any
way of getting more?”
The statement,
absurd by any definition, caused joy among Israeli politicians, who understood
it to be a green light for further annexations.
Israel’s aims
for colonial expansion also received a boost in recent days. Following the fall
of Bashar al-Assad’s rule in Syria, Israel immediately began invading large
swathes of the country, reaching as far as the Quneitra governorate, less than
20 kilometres away from the capital, Damascus.
What is taking
place in Syria serves as a model of what to expect in the West Bank in the
coming months.
Israel had
occupied nearly 70 per cent of the Syrian Golan Heights in 1967. It cemented
its illegal occupation of the Arab region by formally annexing it in 1981
through the so-called Golan Heights Law.
That illegal
move came shortly after another illegal annexation, that of occupied
Palestinian East Jerusalem the previous year.
Although the
West Bank was not formally annexed, the boundaries of East Jerusalem expanded
well beyond its historic borders, thus swallowing large parts of the West Bank.
The West Bank,
like East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, are all recognised as illegally
occupied territories under international law. Israel has no legal basis to
maintain its occupation, let alone annexation of any Palestinian or Arab
region. It is allowed to do so, however, due to U.S.-western support and
international silence.
But why is
Israel keen on annexing the West Bank now?
Aside from the
“great opportunity” linked to Trump’s return to power, Israel feels that its
ability to sustain a genocidal war on Gaza without any international
intervention to bring the extermination to an end, would make the annexation of
the West Bank a far less consequential matter on the international agenda.
Even though the
International Court of Justice (ICJ) had issued a decisive ruling on the
illegality of the Israeli occupation on July 19, followed by the issuing of
arrest warrants of top Israeli leaders by the International Criminal Court
(ICC) on November 21, no action was taken to hold Israel accountable.
The annexation
of the West Bank is unlikely to change that, especially as Israel conducts its
wars and illegal actions through direct U.S. support.
Indeed, the
Democrat administration under Joe Biden has financed and supported all Israeli
wars, including the current genocide. Trump is expected to be equally generous,
or at least, not at all critical. All of this in mind, the annexation of the
West Bank in the coming weeks or months is a real possibility.
In fact,
Smotrich had already informed “workers of the defence ministry body in charge
of Israeli and Palestinian civil affairs in the West Bank” about his plans to
“shut down the department as part of an envisioned Israeli annexation of the
area,” the Times of Israel reported on December 6.
While such
annexation will not change the legal status of the West Bank, it will have dire
consequences for the millions of Palestinians living there, as annexation is
likely to be followed by a violent campaign of ethnic cleansing, if not from
the whole of the West Bank, certainly from large parts of it.
Annexation will
also render the Palestinian Authority legally irrelevant–as it was created
following the Oslo Accords to administer parts of the West Bank in anticipation
of a future sovereignty, which never actualised. Will the Palestinian Authority
agree to remain functional as part of the Israeli military administration of a
newly annexed West Bank?
Palestinians
will certainly resist, as they always do. The nature of the resistance will
prove critical in the success or failure of the Israeli scheme. A popular
Intifada, for example, will overstretch the Israeli military, which will likely
use an unprecedented degree of violence to suppress Palestinians but will
unlikely succeed.
Annexing the
West Bank at a time that Palestine, and in fact the whole region, is in turmoil
is a recipe for perpetual war, which, from the viewpoint of Smotrich and his
ilk, is the actual “great opportunity,” as it will secure their political
survival for years to come.
Michelle Chen
On a crisp November morning in
Ithaca, New York, scores of young people gathered on the sidewalk to cheer
their classmate, Sriram Parasurama, a second-year doctoral student in
horticulture at Cornell University. He should have been working on his research
on the connection between trees and fungi, but instead, he was wrapping up a
court hearing downtown. He had been banished from campus since his arrest by
the campus police department, following his participation in a Palestine
solidarity protest on school grounds in September.
Parasurama’s supporters met him and
two other students facing similar charges outside the courthouse. A legal
advocate for the students announced that after pleading not guilty to charges
of “obstructing government administration and unlawful assembly,” Parasurama
and another student, Yihun Stith, were offered a deal: a community service
stint in exchange for reducing the charges to disorderly conduct. A third
student’s case was dismissed on a technicality. The court’s response seemed
relatively light compared to Cornell’s initial crackdown on the protest, which
triggered disciplinary proceedings and suspension for several participants,
whom the administration had condemned for supposedly creating “an environment
of intimidation and fear.”
Campus activists remain locked in a
protracted battle with the administration about the freedom of expression in
higher education, amid some of the largest campus political mobilizations in a
generation. Having been stuck in a plodding disciplinary review process since
September, Parasurama told Truthout that university administrators are
“definitely trying to drag this out, make this as miserable as possible, both …
to diminish some of the attention and interest from students and other[s], as
well as, I think, just make the process more miserable for me, so that I then
agree to [a settlement] that I wouldn’t have [agreed to] a month and a half
ago.… Their goal is to get me to shut up and commit to not protesting anymore
and just focus on research, or the alternative of kicking me out of the
school.”
Expressive Activity
Cornell (where the author is a
postdoctoral associate) is one of dozens of universities that have introduced
new regulations on when and how protests can take place on campus, erecting
bureaucratic barriers for planning and registering protests. Cornell’s
enforcement of such rules has created a Kafkaesque review process, leading to
extraordinary penalties for student activists, including indefinite suspensions
and three-year bans from campus.
But Cornell’s treatment of activism
among employees — including teachers, researchers, clerical and custodial staff
— is more complex. Graduate student-workers, faculty and staff report that they
have faced surveillance, retaliation or job loss for protesting against the
genocide in Gaza. The university’s punishment of Parasurama, for example, has
not only led to his disenrollment but has also upended his federal grant
funding and preempted his employment as a researcher and teaching assistant.
Another graduate student worker in Africana studies, Momodou Taal, was also
temporarily suspended due to his participation in campus protests and was
barred from teaching earlier this semester. However, facing protests from
faculty and students, the university eventually backed down from its initial
threat to disenroll him, which would potentially have triggered his deportation
to the United Kingdom.
Cornell’s “Interim Expressive
Activity Policy” has been widely condemned by progressive faculty as a
dangerous overreach. While couched in bromides about encouraging “the free
exchange of ideas,” the rules explicitly restrict protests that may “disrupt the
regular conduct of university teaching, research, business, or other
activities”; impede access to university spaces; or engage in “Heckling,
interruptions, and other acts that intentionally attempt to disrupt speakers or
events.” The policy appears to be a direct response to pressure from pro-Israel
politicians and major donors, who have advocated for the suppression and
criminalization of Palestine solidarity protests. The targeted application of
these rules to student and worker activists on campus has crystallized the
fundamental power imbalance in higher education.
The protesters’ goal on September
18, admittedly, was to “disrupt.” Banging pots and pans as they marched into
the career fair at the university’s Statler Hotel, activists with Cornell’s
Coalition for Mutual Liberation delivered letters “indicting” two employers
featured at the fair for “war crimes and genocide.” The companies, Boeing and
L3Harris, are major weapons manufacturers that have supplied military
technology to Israel with the support of U.S. military aid, and have been
linked directly to attacks on civilians in Israel’s war on Gaza. That the
protesters were disruptive is not in question — what is in question is the
rationale driving the administration’s crackdown. (In an emailed response,
Cornell stated that its policy is undergoing a review process, that it has
solicited community input, and that it could not comment on individual
disciplinary cases.)
“It’s about the university trying to
create an image for itself that it can take to donors, take to alumni. And
staff, faculty and students are expendable in the process,” David Bateman, an
associate professor of government at Cornell’s Jeb E. Brooks School of Public
Policy, told Truthout. And in light of the vitriol Donald Trump and other
conservative political figures have heaped onto the Palestine solidarity
encampments in recent months, Bateman said, “there’s a real worry that the
university will become an arm of the MAGA state in coming years.”
The protest aimed to challenge the
business model of the neoliberal university: a corporation that is ostensibly
devoted to education but is financed and directed through lucrative industrial
partnerships and influential donors. The Department of Defense is one of the
top federal agencies funding research at Cornell, contributing about $50
million in the 2022-2023 fiscal year, according to the latest research data
report. One branch of the university, Cornell Tech, has collaborated with the
Israeli military through its partnership with the Israeli research institute
Technion, known for developing technologies that have been used in Israel’s
military assaults on Palestinian civilians.
The protesters not only embarrassed
Cornell by exposing its collusion with Israel’s military industries but also
called attention to the university’s role in supplying graduates to the
workforces of firms like Boeing and Technion.
“I think Palestine generally as an
issue kind of targets the core of imperial structure that … underlies a lot of
university institutions, not just Cornell,” Parasurama said. “This Statler
[Hotel] rally … was targeting weapons manufacturers, and our own trustees at
Cornell have investments in weapons companies. And so this is really striking
at the heart, I think, of what’s valued by institutions like these.”
The End of Teaching
This crackdown cannot be separated
from the business agenda of U.S. higher education, which has over the past
generation eclipsed the intellectual agendas of its scholars and students. It’s
becoming harder not just to protest the war on Palestine, but also teach about
it. Under the new expressive activity rules, mobilizing to stop a genocide may
likely be interpreted as an offensive act that could lead to dismissals or
suspensions. There is also the looming threat of students filing federal Title
VI civil rights complaints against academic workers who have publicly
criticized Israel, based on allegations of antisemitism.
According to Paul Kohlbry, a
postdoctoral associate in anthropology specializing in Palestine’s political
ecology, “Rather than ever saying, ‘You can teach X and not Y,’ … they allow
the popular outside pressure, through Title VI and other kinds of things, to
really chill speech. And then, behind the scenes, they just don’t give funds
for [teaching about Palestine].” In practice, he noted, the systematic
marginalization of progressive scholarship and pedagogy on Palestinian history
and politics sends a warning to faculty that “if you try to teach about
Palestine like that, you won’t have the backing of the higher ups at Cornell.”
Currently, Kohlbry argues, official
programs and events on Cornell’s campus that focus on Israel and Palestine
feature a sanitized, “both sides” framing, presenting Palestinian suffering not
as a roiling human rights crisis but rather as a question of rival viewpoints
between pro- and anti-Israel camps. Kohlbry himself became the target of a
police investigation into his involvement with the Palestine solidarity
encampment, which was later dropped.
One of the latest targets of the
administration’s intensifying scrutiny is “Gaza, Indigeneity, Resistance,” a
course scheduled for the spring semester with Eric Cheyfitz, a professor in the
American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program. Cornell’s Interim President
Michael Kotlikoff recently remarked that while he would not try to block the
course from being taught, he “personally [found] the course description to
represent a radical, factually inaccurate and biased view of the formation of
the State of Israel and the ongoing conflict.” The Cornell chapter of the
American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the Middle East
Studies Association assailed the comments as a breach of academic freedom and
political interference with a course that had already been approved by
Cheyfitz’s department.
Cheyfitz still looks forward to
teaching the course, as he has seen many students express interest in learning
about Palestine. “I know people get intimidated because their jobs are on the
line,” he said. “But the only way to resist is to teach those courses,” instead
of letting outside political pressure circumscribe their curriculum. “Once that
is closed down, there’s no point in teaching anymore. What are you doing?
You’re just silencing yourself. And that’s the end of teaching.”
The idea that higher education
should be insulated from commercial or governmental interference is a
relatively modern phenomenon, growing out of a 1915 declaration by the AAUP
outlining professors’ freedom to research, teach and engage in “extra-mural utterance
and action” without restraint or censorship. These principles went hand in hand
with the institution of tenure, which shields professors from retaliation or
dismissal without cause.
That kind of intellectual autonomy
is “a freedom that sort of sustains and underpins the very enterprise of
research, teaching and learning,” said Bateman. However, he noted that the
scope of academic freedom has receded steadily as the majority of instructors
in higher education become contingent, short-term, or part-time — and excluded
from tenure. He advocates for making academic freedom more inclusive and
interconnected with other issues of democracy and justice in the education
system, so that “anyone who is engaged in research, teaching or learning has to
be able to have this freedom.” Academic freedom, in other words, should be
embedded “within these other principles [that] apply more generally, such as
economic security, workplace economic protections … free-speech principles
generally.”
At the same time, most workers at
institutions like Cornell have neither workplace protections nor academic
freedom. Typically working as at-will employees, they can essentially be fired
for any reason at any time, as long as it’s not directly outlawed (for example,
not based explicitly on gender or racial bias). So for adjunct instructors,
office staff, and others who do not have access to tenure, speaking out on
Palestine is riskier. Could they be denied a promotion or harassed by coworkers
for hanging a Palestinian flag in their cubicle, or attending a campus protest?
Many academic workers, especially
staff earning hourly wages, “feel like they can’t attend rallies on campus at
all; even if they might get a lunch break in the middle of the day, they feel
like they have to be accountable for all of their time on campus,” one staffer
(who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of their position) told
Truthout in an interview. They added that, although workers have been told that
what they do outside of work time is their prerogative, they are wary of
political exposure. In reality, workers at Cornell and other institutions have
faced surveillance, public smears and retaliation from management over their
activism around Palestine. As hourly staff, they said, “in some ways, I have a
pretty strong divide between my working life and my private life, but if the
university is saying that anything I post on social media could be subject to
scrutiny from HR, then it’s like, okay, well, do I really have a private life?”
The ongoing suppression of teaching
and dialogue on Palestine hinges on the exploitative economic structure of the
corporate university. A four-year liberal arts education has become less about
learning than about maintaining a financial and commercial vehicle for
corporate and philanthropic investment; an academic machine for generating and
laundering profits and political influence. Meanwhile, undergraduate study
increasingly centers around preparing students for lucrative corporate careers,
while saddling them with wildly inflated tuition rates and crushing student
debt.
Yet the drive to corporatize and
commercialize higher education hasn’t stopped the right from demonizing
colleges as bastions of rabid ultraliberalism. Paradoxically, the conservative
caricature of academics as an elite “woke” mob has fueled attacks on affirmative
action, diversity initiatives, and other efforts to make academic and campus
culture more inclusive, even though in reality universities are becoming more
reactionary, authoritarian and — as the crackdowns on Palestine-related dissent
have shown — aligned with a right-wing foreign policy agenda.
“There’s something important about
not silencing ourselves ahead of possible censure,” said Mike Bishop, a
doctoral student in developmental sociology and former staffer who worked on
Cornell’s community engagement programs. A crucial challenge to the administration’s
“dehumanizing” treatment of Palestine solidarity activists will come from
students and workers organizing to “advance this conversation even just a
little bit, toward a direction where humanity of all people, especially the
people who are most oppressed, is centered,” Bishop added.
Academic Labor
The suppression of activism and
teaching about the plight of Palestinians represents how the academic labor
force has been subordinated to the business of the university. And it reveals
the need for a much more expansive definition of academic freedom and academic
labor rights. As long as the freedom to think, speak and organize is seen as
the earned privilege of a tiny sliver of the academic workforce, academic
freedom will ultimately be treated as disposable whenever the administration
deems it inconvenient. Academic freedom cannot be protected or practiced in an
academic environment rife with economic inequity. The challenges of organizing
a campus community around a cause like Palestine — economic instability, a lack
of democracy and autonomy in the workplace, the transience of precarious
faculty jobs — are exactly what a strong academic labor movement can help
overcome, especially as more and more of the academic workforce is relegated to
adjunct or contingent positions.
Calling out the commercial interests
and corporate exploitation at the heart of the university — as the career fair
protesters did — is a crucial part of challenging the neoliberalization of
higher education. But so is strengthening the leverage that faculty, graduate
workers, and others can wield within the ranks of the academic workforce —
through unionization, collective bargaining, and when necessary, withholding
the labor upon which higher education’s political economy depends.
Cornell Graduate Students United
(CGSU), a recently formed union representing more than 3,000 graduate
employees, has pursued academic freedom within the framework of labor rights.
Last July, CGSU negotiated a memorandum of agreement that commits the administration
to bargain with the union over any changes to working conditions that have been
imposed through the Interim Expressive Activity Policy. That has provided a
layer of legal protection for members like Taal and Parasurama as the union
tries to negotiate their reinstatement. (So far, CGSU reports Taal has resumed
his studies but remains barred from teaching, while Parasurama’s academic
future remains in limbo post-disenrollment.) More broadly, in ongoing
bargaining negotiations, the union is advocating for just cause protections, to
protect members’ ability to “express themselves as members of society or as
representatives of their fields of instruction, study, or research, free from
[Cornell’s] censorship or retaliation.”
It is no coincidence that the
mobilization of students and workers against the Gaza genocide parallels a
surge in labor organizing in higher education, with more than 100 academic
worker unions emerging over the past decade and about 20 strikes in the 2022-2023
academic year alone. The National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining
in Higher Education and the Professions has identified 35 academic collective
bargaining agreements, out of a random sample of 135, that explicitly protect
union members against discrimination for political activity. Alongside CGSU,
academic worker unions at Rutgers University, Brown, Harvard, the University of
Southern California and the University of California system have mobilized,
filed federal unfair labor practice charges, and in some cases, launched
strikes, in response to their administrations’ restrictions on
Palestine-related campus activism.
The protests over Gaza have
catalyzed resistance to the corporatization of the university. Yet in the long
term, the most effective challenge to the creeping authoritarianism in higher
education may be organizing for labor protections in tandem with academic
freedom. Because, while university administrations treat higher education like
a business, academic workers can reclaim academic freedom and educational
democracy in a world of conflict and repression, and redefine what a college
campus should provide for everyone who comes there to work, learn and live
together with dignity.
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