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At least thirty protesters arrested during pro-Palestinian protest at UT Austin
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- Title
- UT-Austin students hold pro-Palestinian protest on campus, at least 20 protesters arrested
- Word count
- 1246 words
I was thinking of making a megathread for these protests. I am in academia and the whole situation so far has left me incredibly bitter with regards to both universities as institutions and our state governments. A lot of the harsh response so far feels to me, in a weird way, like an attempt to avoid another 2020 protest situation. The powers that be seem to have learned a lesson from that summer and are working hard to make up for it now. It is absolutely sickening that there are a large fraction of fellow Americans who would love nothing more than to see some young people be harmed for protesting. Elected politicians even. I posted a relevant retrospective on Kent State in a separate thread that was prompted by reading about the news today.
I'm very glad for our institutions' pre-planning (although the slightest mention of SJP which we do not have a chapter of puts people on high alert) and I do actually think we would handle it well, we handled BLM well, but we don't have a heavy student protest tradition nor the interest generally.
But I'm so frustrated to watch institutions fail to do anything new. I cannot speak to the good behavior of all protestors, but never have all protestors toes the line. And if things turn into vandalism, property damage, or true threats to anyone, ok sure address those things but don't toss civil rights out the window.
It is times like this that I remember being told that DEI and other reforms in higher education are harm reduction because the institutions are built on white supremacy, classism, racism (sometimes literally built by slaves), sexism, etc. I already feel like I do so much harm reduction work.
I am worried about the fall and election season and the continued escalation of violence.
Yeah I agree. Re: protestor behavior, I'll just add that if you judge any protest movement by its worst actors, then one would be compelled to condemn them all. There is always a small minority that takes it too far. But from what I have seen, these protests have been peaceful (although disruptive – which is the point) until cops show up. They have also been diverse, I've seen plenty of Jewish students taking part as well.
Obviously the actors who do take things too far should be condemned. But calling in the police, or the state guard, or the national guard (which has not happened, yet) is an insane overreaction.
Agreed.
We've been told not to judge police by their worst members, and not to judge government by its worst members etc. why we demand this of protests especially with police provocateur being a proven repeated reality is totally unreasonable.
I'm prefacing this by saying this isn't intended to be a hostile comment, just raising the argument I've seen from some Jewish students and feel personally sympathetic to.
Obviously a lot of the protestors have a point and Israel under Bibi is committing heinous acts (almost no one will disagree with this). The concern some Jewish students have is it feels like a Nazi bar situation. Some of the protestors are using openly antisemitic and violent language that directly condemns Jewish people. I'm not talking about "river to the sea" or antizionism either.
There have been hateful slogans and chants that accuse Jewish students of dual allegiances, allege global conspiracies, and only serve to isolate liberal Jews that hate Israel's current government as much as the protestors. When these voices aren't immediately shouted down and kicked out of the bar (instead they're finding a toehold), it feels like a dangerous trajectory.
I understand that, I also think that protests lack the organization required to prevent bad actors from showing up - and may have no ability to actually remove them as they're also permitted to be present and protesting. Unlike a bar where it's the owner's prerogative. I cannot speak to any specific circumstances here - everything that is happening is going through so many layers of perspectives and second and third hand reporting, I know the students at Columbia agreed to prohibit off-campus participants at one point.
I do fully agree that those folks should be shouted down when possible, refused access to the protest proper by the protestors, etc.
I don't want hate speech to be present, and also in theory campuses can't actually distinguish as long as it doesn't cross from hate speech to illegal speech. Which scotus has made very narrow.
I want all my students (and these students) to be physically safe including Jewish students, some of whom are protesting too. I can't protect them from the discomfort though or even feeling unsafe, or we wouldn't have regular homophobic preachers too.
I just want you to know I get the complexity and I think campus admin could be actually addressing the hate speech better if they weren't using police to address the protest itself.
Sure, but you don’t need to make them featured speakers either. The problem is that it’s often the organizers who have these views, and I have very strong suspicions that the number of loudmouths who can’t resist yelling it are just the tip of the iceberg while the rest just know to not say the quiet part out loud.
For the most part, with genocides in general, your typical person on the street is going to be uncomfortable with the idea of doing it. But in their hearts they have a general sense that “man it would sure be convenient if those people would just. . . Go away.” That average sentiment is what provides room for the ghoulish among them to follow through. I feel like this mentality is prevalent on both sides of this issue. And the people who have it will say “Of course we’re anti-genocide” but will continue advocating for policies and methods of engagement whose only logical and realistic end-point is a genocide that is either successfully or unsuccessfully resisted. This is because they don’t want to take seriously the desires and fears of the other side.
The Israeli ones are obvious enough since the status quo will amount to a slow-moving ethnic cleansing campaign. And there is no serious alternative proposal besides “crack down on settler violence” which can only ever be a “pause” button taken by itself. It’s not a “stop” button.
But the Palestinian ones basically amount to a form of “demographic warfare” to eliminate Israel just through overwhelming the population by insisting on a “right of return” while still having a committed and explicitly genocidal terrorist group that nobody seems keen on wiping out. These aren’t factions that are serious about having peace.
The idea that you can have a “binational state,” which is the sort of “acceptable” proposal I’ve heard to justify how “River to the Sea” calls shouldn’t be taken as explicitly genocidal, are farcical. India has such a plural society and even they’re trying to figure it out. There are communal riots between religions, language groups, tribes, etc. all the time. The reason India hasn’t fallen apart yet is just because it has a whole lot more people and different groups to absorb the chaos without being too perturbed by it. The Levant does not.
Accomplishing this would require Israelis and Palestinians to magically figure out an entirely new form of nationalism that can survive the internal pressure of the terrorist groups within their own societies (and if by some miracle people did agree to this you can bet Right Wing Israeli parties would very quickly develop an armed wing to overthrow whatever “unity” government comes up to contest Hamas). One which has a massive amount of economic inequality between the sides and absolutely zero reason to trust each others’ intentions.
I don't think protestors are going to "solve" the problem. They're modeling more after the apartheid divestment protests. I have been explicit that I cannot speak to specifics because I truly don't know who is organizing what protest, but I also frequently want to sit college students down and educate them on the language they use and what it means. That said I know people who simply means freedom by the River to the Sea slogan. And whether that language is too specific to just mean freedom or not is above my pay grade.
The administration is failing them by not having those conversations and teaching them what they don't know. Police aren't helping that. (There can be multiple wrongs happening at once, but I hold college administration to much higher account for it.)
I think most people using the chant believe this. I don’t think there’s a malicious intent from most people. But words also matter and “river to the sea” doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for Jewish people in Israel. At the absolute best it’s a hopelessly naive proposal and at worst it’s genocidal.
I have been critical of most actions taken by the current Israeli government, and I don’t have a lot of sympathy for their loss of standing internationally. But it’s important to draw the line between Israelis and their government.
Definitely in agreement with you there.
I think the semantics lie around whether the intent is freedom across the entire land (which doesn't have to mean anything more than that) vs sole control of that entire land. And like I said, I don't have the expertise to parse whether that's reasonable or not.
But yeah, I just want my students safe.
As I asked others, I would like to keep the conversation on the protests rather than the broader conflict for this thread.
Protest tactics are incompatible with “conversation” or “education.” That’s sort of their point is they’re a form of engaging in aggression without explicit violence. The objective is to create a framework to force a conversation in a situation on more equal footing than the power dynamics would otherwise allow.
But I don’t think the culture of student activism we’re seeing is really equipped to do that second part, they’re too maximalist and doctrinaire in their demands. When you do that you’re not operating from a place of being open to dialogue.
I find it curious that this take is applied to Palestinians. Those looking to return were, in most cases, the same folks who were forcibly removed from their homes. There are still refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, and now Egypt comprised of people who originally lived in Israeli lands. I don't think there is a conspiracy to "eliminate Israel just through overwhelming the population" as much as it's a lot of displaced people who want to go home. However, if we look at Israel's foreign policy, that is explicitly to move as many Jewish people into Israel from the US, Europe, and Africa with full Israeli citizenship to form a solid Jewish majority. I can't tell if I misunderstanding your point, but from my reading it feels like a weird take on the current situation.
I moved from India to the USA a little over 30 years ago, and the thought of calling India my “home” at this point feels absurd to me. The India I grew up in, functionally, doesn’t exist anymore. I understand that it’s unfair that these refugees were exiled and haven’t been able to assimilate into wherever they had to be exiled to, but at some point I feel like being able to have an indefinite claim on a territory as your “home” starts to stretch plausibility. Passing down family stories about the ancestral olive grove as if that’s somewhere you’re entitled to go back to while failing to acknowledge the reality of the fact that a new nation has been built on top of it is simply not a mental model that’s operating in the real world.
It’s a version of the “golden age” thinking that conservatives tend to indulge in where they imagine there was a perfected form of America sometime in the 50s and all that ails modern society can be fixed if we just forcibly restored it. We just don’t recognize it as such because, unlike American conservatives, they don’t have a state with any power to speak of and we’re used to associating that conservatism with state power backing it up. But the underlying spiritual poverty of that way of thinking remains dysfunctional and is inconducive to resolving conflicts or producing a just outcome.
Israel’s policy is to maintain and ensure the viability of a Jewish state. They view the demands of the Palestinian movement as demands to destroy that state. If the desired outcome is a just peace between the two factions, it’s pretty clear that these are irreconcilable. Israel has a separate goal of destroying the viability of an independent Palestinian state. We rightly recognize the settler movement in Israel as an irredentist and unjust demand from Israel. But the “Free Palestine” movement seems pretty all-in on the most irredentist possible demands. Just because they’re much less capable of pushing those demands doesn’t make those demands any more sensible.
Can I request that the broader conversation about the war or possibly solutions or Palestinians or Israelis as a whole be moved to a different thread?
That's fair, sorry for contributing noise.
Yea, I agree with this. The two state solution can't really be described as attainable in the current climate, but it's an avenue of peace that's orders of magnitude more attainable than a binational state. This reeks of an attempt to sanitize what is at best a call for ethnic cleansing.
Yeah, and this includes protests one may otherwise agree with.
I've seen this happen in all kinds of protests, especially during the current polarised political climate. Issues with the protests on the 'other side' are often considered a sign something is wrong with them. But not the ones the very same person agrees with.
At the same time, I also agree with @Minori 's response later in this thread with:
As is usual with the situation of the Israeli-Palestine conflict, it's complicated. And there's no easy, clear cut solution. I really wish there was.
Yeah I definitely agree it's complicated. And I agree that both sides sometimes default to using the actions of the worst people on the other side to justify a dismissal. That being said, I do think it's a bit different when, for example, one side's stated purpose to protest what they perceive as genocide, vs when it's to protest like, mask mandates. To use an example. But that's not an issue of the outliers, but rather disagreeing with the central point of the protests, so I suppose it's not very relevant to the point.
Re: @Minori's point. Nazi bar situations are bad and should be avoided, I agree. My understanding, based on the reporting I have read, is that in the majority of these protests, with some exceptions, there has actually not been very much hateful language (especially if you do not include ambiguous phrases like "from the river to the sea" which I personally do not think should be counted). The biggest exception was early at the Columbia, but even then the hateful language was coming from people who were not students, and have since been excluded from the encampment there. I guess it doesn't really matter whether they were students or not as long as they were included in the protest, which is the point of the Nazi bar analogy, but nonetheless I just have not seen much evidence of violent or antisemitic language at the vast majority of these protests, and I think I have been following relatively closely.
Any such examples and language should obviously be condemned and if the student protestors are wise, the people using such language should be excised from the movement. From what I have seen at least this is generally been the case.
Agreed. I admittedly feel anxious about not acknowledging some of the "both sides" of things.
But advocating for the Guard is irresponsible and dooms this whole thing to end in even more violence I fear.
Several of my friends in academia—all of whom are pretty firmly in favor of DEI initiatives broadly—have told me that they feel like the way it’s implemented in their universities feels like it was designed more as a cudgel for administration to hammer their workforce with for not toeing the line than a sincere attempt to address the issues they’re meant to.
I told them that’s what it’s evolved into in Industry as well but they still refuse to believe me.
I don't actually feel that DEI is a cudgel at all. It's far more frustrating to be stuck in a Diversity 101 among people with doctorates who know the research and repeat all the same patterns of poor behavior, systemic inequities, etc. in the name of consistency or tradition. The work I do passionately wants to make changes.
If it was a better cudgel some folks would end up unconscious and possibly changing their future behaviors.
My meaning is that the system is fucked and DEI work is often just trying to cope with the fuckery. Because you can't stop the system from being harmful by its nature.
University of Texas - Austin is just the latest college campus here in the US to have student protests broken up by armed police often in riot gear. Specifically in Texas I believe the Dept of Public Safety are their State police force. I thought it was particularly relevant as it's the first major public university I've seen such news from and because the governor of Texas has told universities to "update" their free speech policies. As someone that works at a public university the idea that we can prohibit the content of speech (especially as we have to allow homophobic preachers) is key.
As staff, we can educate, we can support students who are upset and students who are protesting, and we have a protest team of admin that essentially shows up to make sure that protestors (and counter protestors) feel heard by upper administration, separate disparate groups, and ensure the policies that do exist about protests are followed. (For example police will escort marches, closer or further at their request, to ensure pedestrians are safe at road crossings, but they don't interfere otherwise) I don't have expertise in this particular sub-area of free speech in protests on campus in part because we haven't had any majorly disruptive protests since I've been here.
I didn't think this quite belonged in the megathreads, but I'd rather not litigate the actual conflict/war/genocide/situation/etc here.
I'm really genuinely concerned about the safety of students who, as far as I can tell, are acting out of their genuine feelings about wanting Palestinians to be safe. I don't know if UT is alleging some particular violation of their policies or the law, as the police didn't comment and said the university would. But it concerns me that multiple higher education institutions can find no way to better address these protests than violence.
In the case of Texas, this particular response is also extremely hypocritical. As the Washington Post reports,
In March Abbott signed an executive order clarifying that this right to protest didn't apply to criticizing Israel, thereby further proving that Abbott's push for "free speech" was only ever meant to apply one way. Or as one UT student put it, "Don’t have a dissenting opinion from state government or we’ll send in the police."
This whole thing is ugly. I did have a slight laugh at the UT students asking DPS where they were during Uvalde in a chant. They have a point - unarmed college students are much safer to arrest than an armed gunman.
Some concerned UT Austin faculty are planning a strike, starting tomorrow
NYPD is back at Columbia, and are breaching or have breached the hall that was being occupied. CBS is noting that this was a show of force (police riding on the roof of the vehicles) and that the lift used to break into the building hasn't been seen in use before.
Media is banned from campus, students are told to shelter in place or leave. The campus radio station keeps having their feed crashing. Students/protestors are being arrested and put in corrections buses. The coverage keeps cutting around as media keeps getting told to move.
Other protestors are possibly stopping the bus leaving, not sure that it isn't a new set of people entirely.
CNN live updates 4/30
This is terrifying. Yet more evidence we live in a hopelessly corrupt police state.
Every year that passes, I can’t help but feel more and more that our rights and democracy only ever existed in the hypothetical.
Additional articles about similar incidents across the country:
AP: National summary
Columbia University authorized NYPD to sweep student encampment
NBC News: Live Updates (National)
Arrests similar to this are still happening. Frankly, I'm not surprised.
What's worrying me is how little it's being talked about, including here. I'm hearing about it, but I follow some active pro-Palestine people, so of course I would. It bugs me, though, that circles adjacent to mine don't seem to be hearing or talking about it.
I'm reminded of the Black Lives Matter protests, and how the police violence that occurred during them was spread far and wide. I was glad that – though the violence itself was obviously abhorrent – it got spread around, as it was an important factor in teaching many people (including myself) just how broken and racist policing was as an institution.
The relative silence here, though, is deafening to me. Does anyone else feel this way, or am I just getting overly anxious? Because I'm really hoping it's the latter.
I'm hearing about it regularly, but I think in many ways I'm just overwhelmed by everything and I'm having conversations at work regularly due to working at a university. We don't have an encampment or an ongoing protest but I still feel the tension ramping.
I'm frustrated at universities that cannot handle the minor disruption and follow up with major disruption. Especially calling off campus police who don't have any of the community building, student rapport or relationships with the campus community. I'm proud of students protesting generally - though some do need some perspective on what is "extreme police brutality" compared to other incidents across the country, and that their language choices will matter in how the protests will get handled and how their views are taken - but scared for their safety.
I have to be honest, it's been near radio silence for me. I didn't know much about it until the original thread was posted. I'm still on the alumni council for my graduate program, many of my friends are still finishing up their PhDs, and I live in a town with 3 Universities. How am I not hearing more about this?!??
I feel like my social media threads still have a great number of posts related to Gaza, but I haven't seen any that have to do with the student protests. I feel like when BLM was at it's height I heard about it all the time, hell I went to protests. I'm not sure why this round feels so different.
I think it does depend on your locale some, my university has had a few small protests, nothing more than a march. In 100 miles only one has had major protests. Probably further but I don't want to do math.
But I think it's being brushed aside as "college kids" too
Definitely could be, and I'm jut getting older too. I guess I was surprised we're not hearing more about it considering the splash Davis made waaay back in 2011 with their own unwarranted police escalation.
To me, the entire situation in Israel is a story of two villains and no good guys. So it's bizarre to me that anyone would protest in support of either side. I have more important things to worry about than some conflict between two minor foreign powers that I have no control over. The whole thing feels like it was engineered to be an election year distraction.
The BLM protests were also far more widespread, so of course they got a lot more attention.
This sounds like the kind of thing I'd hear from someone who thinks "pro-Palestine" means "pro-Hamas," which I really wish I would never again have to correct.
Gaza is being bombed to rubble, and Palestinians are being slaughtered en masse for the crime of existing, with Israel constantly committing war crimes including collective punishment, the repeated destruction of hospitals, chemical warfare, and more. People are protesting because they want their countries to stop financially and politically backing a state that enacts such devastation, not because they have any love for Hamas.
If you think this is a manufactured distraction for an election year, you haven't been paying enough attention. This is a genocide.
I don't think the events in the middle east are manufactured for the election year. I'm noticing a pattern of divisive protests cropping up every summer during an election year.
That's more understandable, but the protests are real too. And sadly, so is the police response.
I can guess what you're thinking of for 2020, mind, but were there any protests before the 2016 election that might contribute to your thoughts here? Two incidences doesn't strike me as much of a pattern, otherwise.
Just doing a link roundup.
My own university threatened consequences for "structures" on the quad, which violate policy, but otherwise has left the protestors alone. There's been several conflicts between the protestors and Jewish students though where I think no one crossed lines into hate speech or threats but neither necessarily behaved well. (To my knowledge thus far).
Philadelphia Police Dept declines Penn request to remove protestors
NYPD officer fired a gun inside Columbia hall
Legal Defense Fund condemns violations against peaceful protestors
The faces of college protests: Interviews with protestors in four cities
(Satire) University President's Response to Student Dissent - Madlibs
My campus has the start of an encampment, and I swear my admin just needs to let it ride out the last week of class/finals.
I'm incredibly anxious that the reasonable heads I know are present won't prevail.