Spirit of indivisibility
This week the University of Michigan brutally shut down the student encampment established in solidarity with Palestinians. Nearly 3,000 students have been arrested across the country as police, at the request of university officials, use violence to repress and punish dissent.
By now two things are clear. First, the calls to divest, boycott, and sanction Israel represent a shift in public perceptions and will continue to grow. Second, repression will become more brutal.
Calls for divestment are moving from campuses to faith organizations, labor unions, and other organizations holding collective funds. Students are looking not only at direct links to Israeli armaments, training of police, and development of surveillance techniques, but they are beginning to challenge connections between universities and weapons production.
To understand the power of this dynamic to unravel the foundations of the US military empire, we need to consider the great lengths militaristic money makers have used to repress even the mention of Boycott Divest and Sanction before October 7, 2023.
Perhaps the most well-known effort to silence and punish those who supported BDS prior to October 7th was the pressure brought against the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in 2019. Birmingham Alabama is Angela Davis’s hometown. In an effort to acknowledge her lifelong commitment human rights, the organization announced she would be the recipient of the Fred Shuttlesworth Human Rights award that year. The Institute said she was “one of the most globally recognized champions of human rights, giving voice to those who are powerless to speak”.
As soon as the announcement hit the press, the civil rights organization entered a firestorm of objections because of Davis’s support for BDS and the right of Palestinians to freedom and self-determination. The group ended up rescinding the award.
In response, Davis said,
“I have devoted much of my own activism to international solidarity and, specifically, to linking struggles in other parts of the world to US grassroots campaigns against police violence, the prison industrial complex, and racism more broadly. The rescinding of this invitation and the cancellation of the event where I was scheduled to speak was thus not primarily an attack against me but rather against the very spirit of the indivisibility of justice.”
That spirit of the indivisibility of justice is deepening across the country.
Thus, repression of dissent is intensifying. As encampments were being smashed, the President of Sonoma State was forced to “step down” because he agreed to take student demands seriously. In Washington DC, a well know member of the CODEPINK team was arrested and held overnight in a clear effort to target and intimidate that organization. The staff member had been listening to a hearing and had not attempted to disrupt anything. She was arrested as she quietly tried to leave the room. CODE PINK explained:
“Our staff member awaits a court date for a previous arrest and did not intend to be arrested today. At the time of her arrest, she was exiting a hearing room without saying anything or holding up any signs, just holding up her hands for a brief moment. This symbolic action alone has never resulted in an arrest in our last 20 years of protesting on Capitol Hill. No disruption was taking place.”
Now the US congress is attempting to go after nonprofit groups that support Palestinians and challenge the US military by removing their nonprofit status.
We are heading into a summer that will be guided by a new spirit of justice, demanding us to recognize connections of history, military violence in protection of profits, and longings of people for peace. That spirit grows stronger every day.