There is Only One Solution, Intifada Revolution

A Report from Iowa City

My pro-Palestine pooch Oreo cavorting last Saturday in front of Iowa City High School.

As a onetime faculty kid who grew up in the immediate vicinities of major universities and went on to become a more-than-armchair Marxist, get a doctorate in US History, and live in college towns (DeKalb, Illinois and Iowa City, Iowa) for much of my adult life (on top of high school and nursery school years in Ann Arbor, Michigan), I am all too familiar with what it’s like to dance around academic and campus-town liberal Democrats.

“Trust Me, I’m a Historian”

I went down to an anti-Zionist/anti-genocide University of Iowa teach-in in Iowa three days ago. I started to get triggered right away by a liberal professor who was taking questions from students on the Pentacrest, the university’s big green front lawn. She was wearing a t-shirt saying, “Trust Me, I’m a Historian.”

I get that this was meant to be funny but the joke was lost on me. I have a lot of painful stories about untrustworthy liberal historians and academics. But I let my discomfort and trust issues pass and listened — or at least tried to listen. The discussion was largely inaudible to anyone not in the first two or three rows near the liberal professor. I asked that people raise their voices a bit and was informed that the university had instructed the teach-in not to use any amplification.

There were in my view two problems with this response: (1) I didn’t ask for people to use a megaphone, I just requested that they speak a bit more loudly; (2) what kind of self-respecting protest movement would honor an absurd university command to avoid amplification?

The Right Answer

So I leaned in further and tried harder to discern what was being said. I raised my hand to ask a question, which I posed in a voice loud (amplified?) enough for the everyone to hear: “Why are the nation’s ‘liberal’ universities cracking down brutally on students who have courageously risen up against US-backed genocide in Israel? Why the cold-hearted restrictions on free speech and public assembly at the big institutions of higher learning, including the University of Iowa, whose administration has told pro-Palestine students that no overnight encampments will be permitted and, apparently, that no amplification is allowed?”

The professor did not look pleased with the question. She deigned to give an answer except to say that different universities were “responding in different ways,” some quite honorable.

Hmm…like the University of Iowa, whose president has forbidden any encampments and where faculty — many intimidated by the Republi-fascist lunatics running the bright red state government in Des Moines — are an almost complete no-show for Palestine? Here below is a picture of a University of Iowa (UI) police officer and grounds crew looking over the remains of a pro-Palestine camp that the UI campus gendarmes tore down even as it was being set up this very morning.[1]

Let me give the right answer to my question, provided by the Revcoms (the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA):

“Why is this happening? Because fundamental interests of U.S. capitalism-imperialism are at stake. Because Israel plays a ‘special role’ as a heavily armed bastion of support for U.S. imperialism in a strategically important part of the world (the ‘Middle East’). And Israel has been a key force in the commission of atrocities which have helped to maintain the oppressive rule of U.S. imperialism in many other parts of the world. And this repression is happening because representatives of the ruling class in this country have a definite sense that if youth especially at ‘elite’ universities begin to seriously question and act against what this system is doing—if the system ‘loses the allegiance’ of large numbers of those students—that can be a big factor in creating a real crisis for the system as a whole, as happened in the 1960s: a crisis that, now more than ever, this system really cannot afford, when the whole country is already being torn apart by deep divisions, with bitter clashes right among the ruling powers. So, at the same time as they are bitterly divided, the ruling powers of this country are firmly united in their determination to punish and intimidate especially students at elite universities who have stepped forward to protest the genocidal slaughter of Palestinians. The ruling class is desperate to prevent opposition to its fundamental interests from spreading and involving masses of people, from all parts of society…”

And let me suggest a bit more on the why: because university presidents and boards of trustees are parts of an American ruling class that, however divided on various matters of domestic politics and governance, is united in support for the American Empire, of which Israel is a critical outpost; because higher education is particularly vulnerable to right-wing political and fiscal attack in a time of neoliberal fascist ascendancy, something that makes it even more willing than usual to play the role of running dog lackey for US imperialism.

“There is Only One Solution, Intifada Revolution,” Said with Amplification

I had to leave the teach-in because I had Oreo the dog with me and she wasn’t taking well to the event. But I returned to the Pentacrest in the afternoon for the official protest phase of the day. And guess what: it was amplified, courtesy of Iowa City High School students who didn’t give a fuck about warnings of repression from the university and the state’s vicious Republi-fascist governor “Killer” Kim Reynolds.

The noise now was loud and included the standard cool chants heard from coast to coast, including ones that have been falsely accused of being antisemitic:

From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free

From the Sea to the River, Palestine Will Live Forever

Biden, Biden you can’t hide, We Charge You With Genocide

Hey Israel, USA, How Many Kids Did you Kill Today?

There is Only One Solution, Intifida Revolution!

An excellent detailed report was given by a brilliant Black female student on the University of Iowa’s many investment and programmatic connections to the US military industrial complex’s partnership with the Judeo-fascist occupation and apartheid state of Israel.

I spoke, telling folks with great amplification that “intifida revolution” is required in the United States itself. I called for a heightened focus on the role of the American capitalist Empire.

Genocide Joe is Listening to His Own Longstanding US Ruling Class Imperialist World View

A leading local antiwar Democrat spoke a bit after me and said something that I found highly problematic. “Joe Biden,” the activist said, “is listening to the wrong people” on Gaza.

The implication was that Biden really wants to do the right thing but is being influenced by those who want to do the wrong thing.

No! Wrong!! Biden hasn’t been “listening to the wrong people.” The longtime warmonger Biden throughout has been listening to his own longstanding US ruling class imperialist world view, through which lens he views Israel as a critical and indispensable ally that the US must always back no matter how horrific its conduct. Like pretty much everyone else in the US establishment, Biden sees the US-Israel partnership as “unbreakable” because of Israel’s strategic value to American imperial interests.

Last July, nearly three months before the October 7 Hamas attack, Israel’s president Issac Herzog visited the United States to meet with Biden and give a speech before the US Congress. The U.S. House had just passed an absurd resolution preposterously claiming that the “Israel is not a racist or apartheid state.” (This ridiculous and Orwellian statement passed the House in a 412 to 9 vote.) During a sit-down with Herzog, Biden repeated a disgusting line he famously said as an openly Zionist US Senator in 1986: “If there were not an Israel, we’d have to invent one.”

The bloody-jawed imperialist “Genocide Joe” Biden (who led the charge for the mass-murderous US invasion of Iraq from the Democratic side of the US Senate in the fall of 2002) has repeated that revealing line more than once both in Israel and back in the US since October 7th. He and his fellow US imperialist rulers continue to fund, equip, and poltically, diplomatically and militarily protect Israel as it outrages the world and much of America’s youth by backing a genocidal ethnic cleansing that has so far murdered as many as 40,000 Gazans, most of the victims women and children.

Christian Fascist Nutjob Mike Johnson as an “Adult in the Room”

Meanwhile, the capitalist-imperialist Biden-Blinken-Council on Foreign Relations-Lockheed Martin Democrats have applauded the Christian Republi-fascist US House Speaker Mike Johnson for being an “adult in the room” by signing off on funding the continued US-Israeli crucifixion of Gaza as well as the US-provoked slaughter in Ukraine and the continued dangerous US provocation of Russia and China.

A Curious Biden TV Address

Lie’n Biden last Friday made a special nationally televised, Vichy-like address in which he played along with the Republi-fascist party’s pro-Zionist neo-McCarthyite right-wing witch hunt by deceptively linking the peaceful and educational anti-genocide college protests to “antisemitism,” “violence,” “chaos,” the “intimidation of Jewish students” and the disruption of the educational process. These are false charges. And when has Biden broken into the national television schedule to warn Americans about very real specters haunting America like epidemic gun violence, Christian white nationalist neofascism, and climate catastrophe?

How absurd.

“Protest Remains Peaceful”

Speaking of absurdity, here is the title of the headline atop the Cedar Rapids Gazette newspaper story that reported last Friday’s rally at the UI Pentacrest: “I.C. Palestine Protest Remains Peaceful.”

WTF! The students who rallied and marched through Iowa City’s downtown last Friday were and are profoundly peaceful. They marched precisely for peace. They reached out to others in the gentlest ways imaginable.

Nearly all the violence that has accompanied the campus protests around the nation has come from campus and city police, university administrators (who have unnecessarily ordered the clearing out of student encampments), and right-wing Zionist or pro-Zionist thugs.

How “Orwellian.” How Biden-esque.

An F for Professor McWhorter

Continuing on the absurdity theme, the New York Times recently published a ridiculous opinion piece by the conservative Columbia linguist John McWhorter. Professor McWhorter preposterously accuses the anti-genocide campus movement of being all about militant posturing and “gesture and performance” and utterly lacking in “constructive purpose.”

The asinitiy of this criticism is mind blowing. The pro-Palestine student demands and purpose this school year are abundantly clear in ways that should not puzzle a fifth grader, much less a “distinguished scholar” at an elite Ivy League institution: an immediate and permanent end to the US-backed genocidal Israeli assault on Gaza and academic institutional disentanglement from programmatic and economic connection to the racist occupation and apartheid state of Israel.

Sorry, Dr. McWhorter, but you get an F for the spring 2024 term. Feel free to interpret the letter broadly, professor!

All Eyes on Rafah

In other news, Israel has just told masses of Palestinians to leave the southern Gaza City of Rafah, to which hundreds of thousands of Gazans have fled from the US-Israeli assault. The long awaited and much feared, mass-murderous Israeli ground offensive into the city is by some reports imminent.

Biden previously told Israel “not to do this” but has now reportedly given Tel Aviv a greenlight to escalate its genocidal slaughter of the Palestinian people on the condition that it not start a full-on war with Iran. JFC.

So let’s see. The US-backed Judeo-fascist regime of Israel genocidally devastates the already sieged and otherwise tortured and terrorized open air concentration camp that is Gaza, sending hundreds of thousands of its residents to the strip’s southernmost big city. And now that very city itself and the people in it are in the crosshairs of racist, mass-murderous, judeo-fascist Israel, which slaughters women and children with weapons from the most powerful military force the world has ever seen.

“There is only one solution, intifada revolution,” applies even, no, especially, here, in the belly of the capitalist-imperialist beast: the American Empire is the main force behind this extreme criminality.

Tomorrow I will say a few things about repression in the red (or brown, as in brownshirts) state of Iowa.

Note

1. I went up to the officer in that picture. He was making fun of the protest signs and slogans. I asked him if there'd been any arrests and he asked me who I was and I told him I was a writer. He said he didn't have to tell me anything. I asked him "so are you feeling pretty good about yourself right now, taking down a little camp against racist genocide?" He told me to leave. I told him he was standing right in one of my dog Oreo’s favorite pooping spots: "she shits here a lot." I looked at one of the grounds- crew workers and told her I always clean it up. The cop smirked and I went over to the campus police headquarters, which is buried in a parking garage. There were three staff there behind a protective window looking at live feed of the torn-down encampment on a big telescreen. A guy behind the glass who looked like a hippie told me there'd been no arrests. I asked him why kids couldn't set up protest stuff there, next to the student union cuz I see people setting up various tables and activities there all the time. He looked at me like I was nuts.