At this year’s graduation ceremonies in New York City, there was no business as usual. Students at Brooklyn College accepted their diplomas while carrying pro-Palestine flags and wearing keffiyehs; at Columbia University students and alumni burned diplomas; at Hunter College and at City College police attacked pro-Palestine demonstrators who disrupted commencement programs.
The refusal of the Israeli war machine to stop its genocide, the unanimous backing of the imperialist governments worldwide for the Zionist program, the inability of “the international community” of imperialist states to end the slaughter and the determination of the Palestinians and their allies to resist has changed the thinking of millions of people around the world, including in the United States, the main backer and arms supplier to the Israel Occupation Forces.
Students protesting the U.S.-armed Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza have kept up their actions in U.S. universities despite police brutality, the threat of losing their degrees and, for international students, the threat of deportation. For anyone asking why, consider the following:
For nearly 20 months, they have witnessed on graphic videos the Israel Occupation Forces massacre tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, about 40% of them children, living in a strip of territory the size of Philadelphia. Now they witness the IOF stopping food from reaching hundreds of thousands of starving people.
They have seen the U.S. government — both under a Democratic and a Republican administration — feed the Israeli war machine and approve that genocide and starvation, approve the destruction of hospitals and schools, the murder of journalists and health workers.
They have felt their own university administrations’ cowardice toward government authorities and wealthy alumni coupled with callous brutality against their peers.
They have witnessed international legal organizations bring legitimate charges against Israeli political leaders for crimes of genocide. They believe the Israeli leaders and leaders of other countries who arm the Zionist state are both guilty. And they see no one punished for these crimes.
They have watched a worldwide movement grow. They know it must grow faster. But it has grown enough that the rulers flail around to repress it. And fail.
And more than anything else, the students watch the Palestinian people and their organizations, despite their suffering, refuse to surrender. Their example can inspire a lifetime of struggle.
There should be no surprise that under these conditions, students and others here speak out, sit in, scorn the university where they spent years striving for a degree and that some will use the perfect moment to speak out: commencement.
At George Washington University in Washington, D.C., Cecilia Culver ignored the typed talk she had turned in and called on the school to divest from Israel.
At New York University Logan Rozor condemned the genocide in Gaza. NYU President John Beckman accused Rozor of having “lied about the speech he would deliver.” Beckman failed to expose the lies of Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu about their complicity in genocide.
The rulers of governments and universities who excuse apartheid and ethnic cleansing teach a lasting lesson to today’s aware, active and alert students: These administrators under U.S. imperialism manage a system built on war, death, exploitation and lies. The students can submit or resist. They resist.
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Megha Vemuri resisted. Her “not preapproved” speech commended her fellow students who protested on behalf of Palestinians and denounced M.I.T.’s ties with Israel. School officials barred Vemuri from the graduation ceremony. She wrote in response, “I see no need for me to walk across the stage of an institution that is complicit in this genocide.”
And this is just a commencement.