Since last October’s attack in Israeli territory by the Palestinian political group Hamas, and Israel’s genocidal onslaught that followed, political repression of protests by local, state, and federal authorities as well as public and private institutions of education has become the norm. This repression is spreading to encompass many areas of political activity that were once taken for granted as safe and more or less acceptable. Even the most peaceful forms of political speech and political activity are now openly under attack.
With the beginnings of campus protests against Israel’s war in Palestine, campus officials swung into action. In the United States, students peacefully protesting had their due process rights yanked away from them, were threatened with expulsion for various offenses against their school codes of conduct, and have even been attacked by their own campus police forces supposedly charged with protecting them. They have also been attacked and arrested by local and state police and targeted by right-wing members of Congress as antisemitic (even when large percentages of the protesters themselves were Jewish). At U.C.L.A., peaceful protesters were brutally assaulted by an organized group of right-wing thugs as campus police did nothing. Well-known professors at Columbia University and Northwestern University have been suspended, demoted, and threatened with firing for teaching basic facts about Zionist practices or joining or supporting their students in their protests. Ilan Pappé, the renowned Israeli historian who has been critical of Zionist policies was detained and harassed by Homeland Security officials while entering the U.S. Campus officials have spent the past summer trying to make it even more difficult for students and faculty to speak out against an obvious atrocity.
Journalists have been suspended or fired in record numbers for daring to report critically on the Israeli violence. Television and internet personalities have had their shows cancelled. Those that remain try to enact a weak objectivity in which they now show some of the effects of Israeli violence, but never analyze Zionism more deeply for its causes. They always remind us that Hamas supposedly started this, as if the oppression of Palestinians only began last year after October 7!
Climate protesters in the U.S. who defaced the protective casing of a work of art with removable paint were charged with crimes that could put them in prison for five years and force them to pay half a million dollars. In England, the Netherlands, and Germany, protesters practicing peaceful civil disobedience demanding that their governments address the climate crisis have been hit with longer jail sentences than ever before. They have also been detained in advance to keep them from participating in planned protests and have even been charged with crimes against national security and public safety.
And many states in the U.S. have proposed and passed laws that are clear attempts to criminalize protest of any sort. More than 300 laws have been put forward, and in most states are moving forward, that will limit or end the right to protest as we know it. Atlanta police are charging people who protest the proposed Cop City with crimes under the famous RICO Act, which was designed in the 1970s to charge and destroy the mafia. Some states are trying to label protesters domestic terrorists, and right-wing politicians have openly encouraged violence toward protesters.
But both in the U.S. and in the supposedly more progressive European nations, these repressive laws and policies are all being created in response to increased and intensifying protest and dissatisfaction with the capitalist system and its violence. As we increase our demands, our outrage, and our protests, they will intensify their attempts to repress us. Since they are only tens of thousands, the capitalists must use all the tools at their fingertips – their police, their laws, their courts, their government, their politicians, their media – to silence us. They have lots of money and lots of power.
But they are few, and we are many. We have the ability to organize, to use our numbers and our power and our position as workers in the economy to fight back. They are clearly out to silence us and stop us from fighting back. We can’t let them.
