Saturday 27th April, 2024

The latest anti-war movement is gathering momentum in the US, with thousands of youthful protesters taking to the streets and facing brutal suppression in many cities across the country. The Biden administration may not have expected last week’s police crackdown on a peaceful protest at Columbia University against the massacre of Palestinian civilians in Gaza to trigger a mega tsunami of agitations from coast to coast.

Today, the US police are struggling to contain the upsurge in anti-Israeli protests led by students with more universities joining the protest campaign. Crackdowns could be counterproductive in that they act as rocket fuel for protests in most cases.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has condemned the student protests in the US as antisemitic and demanded that they be stopped immediately. President Joe Biden is trying to do just that, but in vain. Regrettably, a section of corporate media stands accused of supporting Biden and Netanyahu, and vilifying the young protesters in the US.

They did likewise during the Occupy Wall Street campaign in 2011. They discredited the youth who rose against corporate greed and growing inequality in the US. But in this day and age, they cannot sway public opinion; they will only alienate their readers/viewers by being supportive of the Gaza war and the suppression of students’ right to protest in the US. There is no way the dissemination of information about the Gaza massacres can be suppressed.

US universities are no strangers to anti-war protests. One may recall that demonstrations against the Vietnam war rocked the seats of higher learning across the US in the late 1960s and in early 1970s. Universities became protest hubs. US students have also vehemently opposed other conflagrations such as the Gulf War, and despicable US interventions in Latin American countries to engineer regime changes.

Those protest campaigns also faced clampdowns, but this time around the intensity of police crackdowns has increased as never before. That shows how rattled Washington and Tel Aviv are.

The Biden administration has made a mockery of its much-avowed commitment to safeguarding democratic rights. The ongoing student protests could not have come at a worse time for President Biden with only a few months to go before the next US presidential election.

He is bound to lose a lot of votes, especially among the youth, on account of his government’s unwavering support for Israeli aggression against Palestinians. Donald Trump boasts that the US neither fought nor supported any war on his presidential watch.

The protesting US students’ message is loud and clear. They want a ceasefire declared immediately in Gaza and action taken to ensure that humanitarian assistance reaches the civilians trapped in the conflict zone. It defies comprehension why Washington cannot bring adequate pressure to bear on the Netanyahu government to stop offensive action in Gaza immediately. Mere threats of sanctions will not do.

If the US practises what it preaches to other nations, especially in the developing world, and at the UNHRC in Geneva, and pressures Israel to agree to a ceasefire, it will be able to save a lot of Palestinian lives, and protesting students will return to lecture halls in the US. Perhaps, Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, in retaliation for the massacre of civilians in Gaza, will also come to an end.