My dad marched against South African Apartheid. I march against Israeli apartheid.

It feels somewhat useless to talk about the student protests while Israel carries out the latest of its high tech crimes against humanity in the name of self defense. As I write this, military tanks are gradually expanding into Rafah, the concentration camps for Palestinians (that have long existed) are being revealed to the public eye, violent militias armed by fascists like Ben Gvir continue to attack families in the occupied West Bank, many universities in Gaza have been reduced to rubble. World leaders are cowering in the emptiness of their so-called redlines as pleas from the families of the Israeli hostages for their leaders to negotiate fall on deaf ears.

At this point, those who defend, diminish, and deny are simply choosing not to see. 

So again, it feels useless to talk about the student protests. But I will talk about them. Because oftentimes, they work.

The past two weeks I watched my friends get beaten and bruised by riot cops for sitting peacefully inside our university. Our “violent” occupations with their free libraries full of history books and impassioned speeches by staff members were enough for the school to call the military police on us, I guess. What are the students’ demands? Disclosement, boycott and divestment from Israeli collaborations and institutions that normalize apartheid. The same actions that the University of Amsterdam did without question when Russia invaded Ukraine. The same actions that students in the 80s demanded from their universities during Apartheid South Africa. We have seen this before, and we are seeing it again.

The media historically makes every attempt to demean the students, telling us that we are delusional and destructive hypocrites. I mean, okay–there’s not really a clear answer to the question of university complicity and hypocrisy. If we are to cut ties with Israeli institutions, why not American ones, for the arguably larger imperial destruction on the Earth? Why not other racist, ethnomaniac, misogynist, homophobic and imperialist countries that also use their universities as an apparatus to the nation-state? Shouldn’t universities strive for cultural exchanges and collaborative research despite potential political affiliations?

It really is a fair question that does not have a clear answer. So, to understand more about this, I read some of anthropologist Maya Wind’s book titled “Towers of Ivory and Steel”. She argues that Israeli universities are complicit in the oppression and marginalization of Palestinian students, functioning as extensions of the Israeli security state rather than as independent academic institutions. She provides numerous examples and elaborates on the connections between Israeli academia and the military, using her fluency in Hebrew to bring these once hidden documents to the international community.

For example, Tel Aviv University's shiny new partnership with the Israeli military for the "Erez" BA program, where "military and academic training are intertwined" to transform cadets "from civilians to elite fighters" (Wind 2024, 8). Israeli universities have historically played a role in supporting and perpetuating the occupation–Hebrew University expanded into occupied East Jerusalem post-1967, and Ariel University, established in the occupied West Bank, serves as an example of academic institutions acting as what she calls "pillars of regional demographic engineering" (14). These institutions contribute to the settlement enterprise and the broader Israeli strategy of territorial control.

These connections have always been known to Palestinians. Palestinian universities in the occupied Palestinian territories face severe restrictions, including frequent military raids and closures. Wind suggests this stronghold is part of a larger strategy to prevent the growth of Palestinian resistance, which is aptly demonstrated by the 2022 shooting and arrest of activist students at Birzeit university near Ramallah by a group of undercover IDF forces. 

As a result of this continued injustice, in 2004, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) was launched to protest Israeli universities' complicity in the occupation. PACBI asserts that these institutions are integral to "planning, implementing, and justifying Israel’s occupation and apartheid policies" (10). Which brings us to now, twenty years later, as students and staff across the world are demanding their universities no longer be complicit in supporting Israeli apartheid. 

The problem is that despite the philosophical quandaries about the diplomatic role of the university, it works. Academic boycotting can often work. It can work to bring about social change, it can work to demand attention to issues many are trying to live in ignorance about. Wind, in her book, draws parallels between PACBI and the African National Congress in South Africa. In her words:

“In the tradition of the African National Congress in South Africa and other Indigenous movements across the world, Palestinians are holding Israeli universities accountable for sustaining the violent settler regime that rules, dispossesses, and subjugates them. In South Africa, some white faculty and students heeded the call from the ANC—echoed by the international community—and demanded that their universities sever their ties with the apartheid regime and take meaningful steps toward decolonization. Palestinians are calling on scholars across the world to guide Israeli academics to demand the same.” (15)

Once again, we are seeing these movements now because we’ve seen them before. So, I thought of interviewing my dad, who was one of the students who marched in the late 1970s with the demands that his university divest from South Africa. His university had long-standing and elaborate ties with South African companies and universities directly involved in apartheid. We are talking millions of dollars. In sum, it took more than 5 years of negotiations, encampments, blockades, marches of thousands of people, and the construction of shanty towns on university lawns for the university to finally divest. But it worked. While the student protests obviously did not solely cause the fall of apartheid, they certainly could not have helped to sustain it.

I wanted to know what was similar and what was different about the movements happening now. My dad, though being clear that he was not an organizer and graduated shortly after the early years of the protest, explained the origin:

“At the time, the big social issue when I was in college was apartheid in South Africa, and certainly Bob Marley and his music was, you know, part of that. My school had a lot of investments in businesses, and one of the things we felt we could actually make a difference in was to push them to divest from their holdings in South African and Rhodesian companies.”

This was 1978. He explained that just 8 years earlier, widespread anti-war protests erupted that condemned the presence of the United States in Vietnam. Here we saw a lot of similar things–demands for transparency and divestiture from imperialism and weapons manufacturing. Encampments became ways to bargain for and violence against students, one being the murder of four student demonstrators at Kent State, which was still vivid in American public memory. The shootings sparked outrage and culminated in a student strike that started on May 1. Over 4 million students joined walkouts at hundreds of educational institutions. Historians believe that this student movement ignited public opposition during an already controversial American role in the Vietnam War.

He explained that before the anti apartheid protests, there were student movements advocating for a “nuclear freeze,” which unfortunately didn’t really accomplish anything. “The good thing about South Africa was that we had a very specific demand. Divestiture. It was not a grand abstract thing, it was something only the university could respond to.”

He didn’t really remember any encampments happening in his day (they happened later in the 1980s, after he had already graduated). I then explained to him that the encampments in our case were an escalation, because the organizers had been marching and negotiating with university before to no avail. “It’s an escalation”, I said. And to that he said “and it’s working.”

My Dad then takes a moment to talk about what is happening with various university staff in the US–some teachers being fired, suspended, or resigning because of pro or even neutral stances in regard to the Palestinians. “It’s a fine line you have to play so that you’re able to support the Jewish students on campus...but I understand the distinction between Zionists and Jews. There are many Jewish people who do not support Israel. I am one of them. I do not support what Israel has done.”

I then asked him why he thought his university took so long to divest from South Africa. “The people that control the funds, the investments, you know, I don't think they like getting pushed around. Certainly there might have been some support for South Africa within that group. They don’t want to be told where to invest, but it was hard for anybody in those days to side with South Africa…It became increasingly harder to do that. Just as now is the case, I think.”

He recalls his graduating class wearing armbands in solidarity with the ANC, as many graduating students are doing with keffiyehs and Palestinian symbols now (some being barred from doing so). “We didn’t have cell phones, we didn’t have social media. Your movement is much more widespread, solely thanks to social media.”

I asked him if he thinks the students' movement forced the university to reconsider its airtight investments. Did the horror of complicity eventually become too heavy to bear? In short, he does not believe they would have divested without it. “But, there were a lot of things going on about South Africa where they were not being allowed to participate in athletic events. And, so, it kind of arose to a crescendo, right? Where, basically, it became a moral issue, and it's the same thing that's certainly happening now.”

He followed with, “You know, I think sometimes these old people think ‘we don’t need to negotiate with students’. But you know, students do have power.”

And he’s right. I don’t intend to romanticize the students–there are obviously people doing much harder and much more important work than us. But our place does matter. Yes, some may become less engaged in ten years when they have a “real job”. Yes, some may become more disillusioned, more cynical, and more self-serving after their university years are over. But it’s precisely because we have less to lose (generally no career, no children, less responsibilities) that we should be fighting for the little things that we can change. 

While of course there are lingering effects, South African apartheid eventually did fall. And Israeli apartheid will fall as well. Our job as delusional, destructive, and hypocritical students is to push when and where we can.