The gulf between the young generation and the aging president could not be wider. It is as if they live on different planets. Protests have made their way to the cover of TIME and New Yorker magazines, and are being covered extensively by The New York Times and The Times (London).
While local police have brutally arrested more than 2,000 students, the anger felt by thousands of students on more than 200 campuses has not subsided. In the latest development, faculty members are beginning to join the students in their protests.
None of this has had any impact on President Joe Biden. On Holocaust Day, he lashed out at “the rise of antisemitism” in the US, a veiled reference to student protests. Israel has “not yet” crossed the redline for him. Thus, he continues to ship thousands of bombs to Israel.
Hopes of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas have been dashed once again. Of course, even if a deal were to be reached, Netanyahu has made it very clear that he still intends to invade Rafah.
He knows that if he were to call it off, his coalition government would fall, his tenure would end ignominiously, and he would have to appear in court to face political and judicial charges. To buttress his chances, Bibi has retorted back to Joe that if the US were to stop sending arms and ammunition, Israel would stand alone and fight until it attains total victory – something unattainable.
Because of their extremely anti-Palestinian attitude, the US and Israel stand alone with a handful of other countries. In New York, the UN General Assembly has passed a resolution calling for upgrading the status of Palestine. More than 140 nations, representing nearly 75% of the UN membership, voted in favour of the resolution. Besides Israel and the US, only 7 states opposed it – of whom some were tiny islands in the Pacific.
To justify their actions in Gaza, Netanyahu and his cabinet in Tel Aviv have woven a veil of lies which the students have shredded.
- Israel is engaged in a war of self-defence which is being carried out in response to Hamas’ attack on 7 October.
In fact, Israel, in violation of international law, has been occupying Gaza and the West Bank since the Six Day War in 1967.
- Hamas is hiding in hospitals and universities and using human shields to thwart the Israelis from hunting them down.
There is no evidence that Hamas is hiding in those places. The only evidence that exists is that of massive destruction of buildings and of massive deaths of children, women, and men, including doctors, nurses and teachers.
- Israel has the “most moral army in the world” and has killed fewer civilians than the US did in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.
There is no doubt that the US killed massive numbers of civilians in those countries. In Vietnam alone, it killed 3 million people. But the population of those countries was much larger than that of Gaza, which is home to 2.3 million. Israel has killed or injured nearly 5% of that population, displaced more than 40% and denied food, energy and medicines to 100%.
- US universities are breeding terrorists who are pro-Hamas.
Most protestors are students whose emotions are aroused by Israeli butchery they are witnessing day after day on their phones. They cannot focus on their studies and ignore what is happening to babies, children, women and men in Gaza.
- South Africa is Hamas because it filed a charge of genocide against Israel. That is beyond absurd. South Africa filed that charge because it experienced apartheid and genocide first-hand.
The student protestors are beginning to impact public opinion, not just in the US but also in Europe and Australia. The mainstream US media has begun exposing Israeli’s duplicity.
The US and Israel stand alone with a handful of other countries. In New York, the UN General Assembly has passed a resolution calling for upgrading the status of Palestine
On a recent episode on MSNBC, Ayman Mohyeldin showed that even though Gaza’s education system is in ruins, mainstream cable news continues to castigate American universities for letting antisemitic protests take place. He called out politicians and pundits for their “hypocritical hysteria.”
On CNN, Christian Amanpour interviewed a University of Southern California professor, Afua Hirsch, who said the point of free speech was to allow people to “say things that you might find uncomfortable or inconvenient."
CNN also featured a hair-raising article based on interviews with three Israeli whistleblowers who explained in detail the barbaric and gruesome torture being meted out to Palestinians who were detained at the Sde Teiman desert camp, some 18 miles from Gaza, for no apparent reason. Their clothes were removed and replaced with diapers. Their hands were tied, and they were blindfolded. They were not allowed to talk and were often forced to lie down, often on top of each other. They were beaten now and done, not to gather intelligence but to punish them for what happened on 7 October.
Finally, Piers Morgan, who has been waffling on the issue for a long time, put an Israeli government spokesman on the spot for refusing to state how many civilians had been killed by the IDF but who seemed to state with great confidence how many Hamas terrorists had been killed.
The clarion call for a change in US attitude toward Israel came from Professor Robin Kelly of UCLA, who has previously taught at Columbia University. He took Columbia’s president to task for harassing and arresting the students. He asked her to apologise to the students, acknowledge the loss of tens of thousands of Palestinian lives, and stop funding apartheid and genocide.
The tide of public opinion in the US has definitely begun to turn. At the graduation ceremonies at UC Berkeley, Chancellor Carol Christ began her speech by saying, “I, too, and deeply troubled by the terrible tragedy unfolding in Gaza,” and described the Palestine solidarity encampments on campus as “civil disobedience of the sort Berkeley has long-witnessed.”