Gaza Protests in the Pacific Northwest
In my most recent post
I surveyed campus protest nationally. Here in wish to share happenings in the sleepy
Pacific Northwest where I and many of my readers reside.
Here in the Pacific Northwest we’ve only seen a forceful police crackdown at Portland State University. There
the university police asked Portland police to remove students occupying a
university library after talks over the lists of student demands broke down.
This was after the university “agree to suspend accepting any financial gifts
from Boeing until there could be a broader debate about the issue.” That was a
reasonable place to start. But PSU students made the mistake of assuming
they should get everything they were demanding. That’s not how negotiations
work!
Otherwise, protests around the region have been peaceful. At the University of Washington, after a week of encampments and
calls for it to cut its ties to the Boeing Corporation, the university refused
to do so. Addition demands include divesting materially from Israel and “ending
study abroad programs there,” and ceasing “the repression of pro-Palestinian
students and faculty.”
At Washington State University and the University of Idaho students
presented demands centered around calling for divestment from Israel to
their respective administrations. Then they returned to classes. One can only
hope that discussions behind closed doors at those schools will begin soon
Evergreen State University is the alma mater of
pro-Palestinian activist Rachel Corrie who was killed by Israeli troops
bulldozing a Palestinian home in Gaza in 2003. Administrators at Evergreen have
pledged to work toward divesting from “companies that profit from gross human
rights violations and/or the occupation of Palestinian territories.”
At Western Washington University a coalition led by Jewish Voice for Peace
and the Arab Student Association issued a letter to President Sabah Randhawa regarding
the Gaza situation. It called, among other things, for acknowledgement of
Western’s lack of protection for Arab students during the Israeli military
campaign, and complete divestment from all“companies and institutions” with
“investments, agreements and contracts” with the Israeli national security
apparatus. Early in the morning on May 14, the coalition set up a
tent encampment in solidarity with Palestine, and coalition members continue to
detail their positions via social media.
This is all as it should be. Students have made a splash with their
demands and building encampments on campuses. They, like high-powered lobbyists
in D.C. and Olympia, are a “special interest group.” Well-heeled interests
lobby politicians, engage in litigation and election candidate support to
peddle their influence: all very expensive activities.
The poor and marginal have always engaged in direct action; nonviolent
protest and even civil disobedience where laws or institutional practices are
judged to be immoral. All these actions except for law-breaking are protected
by the First Amendment and are the only way those without money can often be
heard. But we all know that breaking the law also has its place in movements to
make our world a better place.
From the students at North Carolina A&T who began the civil rights
sit-in movement in 1960, to anti-Vietnam War protesters who stormed the
Pentagon in 1967, students have often lit the spark that led to humanitarian
social change.
But direct action alone cannot change the entrenched policies of educational
and other institutions. These issues can only be tackled through deliberate and
gritty negotiations. Students can also become educators. In the Vietnam War and
South African divestment eras, students held teach-ins examining the issues and
giving attention to a wide range of their historical, sociocultural and
political dimensions. Western students have a series of events they’re calling
“Israeli
Apartheid Week” as I write.
In the words of Graham Nash from back in the day, children, “teach your
parents well”!
