Colonization reproduces itself through violent erasure.
Accounts of colonial violence must be systematically erased to justify, legitimize, and uphold the perpetual violence of colonization. We are seeing this interplay between colonial violence and erasure unfold on our screens in real time as the Zionist propaganda apparatus works to systematically erase accounts of the genocide being carried out by Israel in Gaza.
As Palestinian voices from Gaza, connected with Palestinian voices across the diaspora, and in solidarity with diverse voices of the global majority rise up in resistance to the settler colonial narrative predicated on whiteness, the propaganda infrastructure of Zionism, working hand-in-hand with the propaganda infrastructure of white supremacy, is organized systematically to silence these voices.
In Gaza, journalists witnessing and documenting the genocide are murdered. As of December 2023, more than 55 Palestinian journalists have been killed by Israel.
Universities are bombarded. Academic voices witnessing the violence are targeted and murdered. On December 7, 2023, the Palestinian academic, poet, and public intellectual Refaat al-Areer was killed in a surgical strike carried out by Israel.
Across the global diaspora, protests in support of Palestine are being pathologized, with protestors being criminalized.
In the U.S., at the core of the support for Israeli settler colonial violence, students protesting Israeli settler colonialism are being systematically targeted. Part of the organizing structure of the attacks targeting students is directed at U.S. Universities witnessing ongoing protests in solidarity with Palestine, pushing through various pathways of power (political, donor, board of trustees) to mark student protests as terrorist or antisemitic with the goals of disciplining and silencing these protests.
The goal is to discipline these spaces of articulation as Israel loses its global propaganda warfare. As voices registers built by Palestinians, amplified by the global majority, and circulated across global protests calling for ceasefire amplify, the communicative infrastructure of Zionist propaganda escalates the strategies of repression. Protesting students standing in solidarity with Palestine are being violently targeted, doxed, and threatened with loss of livelihood. University campuses are increasingly under attack, with the goal of pushing these campuses to actively discipline and censor the voices of protesting students standing in solidarity with Palestine.
Most recently, three Presidents of US universities, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, were pressed in a hearing before the House Education and Workforce Committee about the policies of the universities in addressing antisemitism on campus. All three Presidents noted that how their universities would respond to calls for Jewish genocide would depend on context.
Throughout the hearing, the Republican Elise Stefanik asks the Presidents to respond in "Yes or No" format if they would sanction calls for Jewish genocide.
As the Presidents drew upon the norms around free speech to point to context, Stefanik continued to press for a "Yes/No" response, turning the hearing into a performance that would draw in her voter base, building a narrative organized to target the "woke culture" or "diversity, equity, and inclusion" culture of Universities.
Erased from the five-hour exchange was any critical interrogation of what was being labelled as "calls for Jewish genocide." Implicit but not clearly articulated in the interrogation is the operationalization of protests in solidarity with Palestine on University campuses as "calls to genocide."
Of salience here is the framing by Zionists of the slogans "From the river to the sea" and "Globalize Intifada" as "calls for Jewish genocide."
The slogan, "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," emergent from Palestinian resistance to settler colonialism, is an expression of Palestinian sovereignty. Reflective of the right of colonized people to call for an end to the conditions of colonization, the articulation of sovereignty in the slogan is protected by the United Nations Framework on Decolonization. As an expression of resistance, the slogan makes the claim to justice, emergent from the voices of colonized peoples, challenging an apartheid occupation that is built on ongoing expulsions, displacements, incarceration, and violence.
The slogan "Globalize Intifada" is an expression of resistance. To frame it as a call for Jewish genocide is both disingenuous and violent, part of the settler colonial structure directed at silencing the right of the colonized to challenge the forces of colonization. For the colonizer, the voices of the colonized expressing the right to resist to violence, communicatively inverting the infrastructure of violence that undergirds the colonial infrastructure. In pathologizing the call for decolonizing resistance through the label of antisemitism, the Republican-led House Education and Workforce Committee upholds the narrative of Universities as infested with radical diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) agendas and antithetical to (white) civilization.
The White House is roped into this targeted attack on Universities, with a spokesman for President Joe Biden stating, "It's unbelievable that this needs to be said: calls for genocide are monstrous and antithetical to everything we represent as a country." Note here in the ongoing work of imposing a colonial interpretive frame on the slogans the denial of the interpretive capacity to Palestinians. This denial then is the basis of further erasure.
In other instances, an active disinformation campaign is at work in framing the Palestine solidarity protests as antisemitic. The slogan, “Israel, Israel, you can’t hide. We charge you with genocide,” is communicatively inverted, framed as calling for the genocide of Jews.
The targeted disinformation campaign directed at the University of Pennsylvania by right-wing lawmakers, picked up by democrats, further accentuated by the threat of funding withdrawal by donors, built the pressures that led to the resignation of President Liz Magill. Note particularly the organizing role of the threat of the loss of mega-donor sponsorship that speaks to the political economy of settler colonial censorship. Wall Street CEO Ross Stevens, CEO of Stone Ridge Holdings threatened to take steps that would cost the University approximately $100 million if Magill stayed on as president.
Evident here is the power exerted by far-right politicians and powerful donors in establishing the terms of conversation on university campuses. The key architect of the campaign, Elise Stefanik, is a Trump-supporting "Make America Great Again" far-right ideologue with a track record of platforming antisemitic speech, QAnon conspiracy theory, and the white supremacist Great Replacement Theory. The Zionist businessman Bill Ackman, amplifying the campaign targeting the Universities, circulates the far-right talking points about the "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" culture of "Woke Universities." Consider here Ackman's Twitter feed that is rife with conspiracy theories and supposed leaks about the DEI agenda of Harvard's African American President Claudine Gay. Ackman's Twitter feed and the ecosystem around it lays visible the interpenetrating relationship between white supremacy and Zionism, the framing of justice-based organizing at Universities as the DEI conspiracy that threatens white civlization.
This latest round of attack on free speech in universities mobilized by the right finds its bipartisan support in the white settler colonial infrastructure of the US. It works to silence Palestinian voices amid an ongoing genocide, seeking to turn attention away from the actual genocide being carried out by Israel. It further ensconces the power of the far right in attacking academic freedom on University campuses.
Most recently, three Presidents of US universities, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, were pressed in a hearing before the House Education and Workforce Committee about the policies of the universities in addressing antisemitism on campus. All three Presidents noted that how their universities would respond to calls for Jewish genocide would depend on context.
Throughout the hearing, the Republican Elise Stefanik asks the Presidents to respond in "Yes or No" format if they would sanction calls for Jewish genocide.
As the Presidents drew upon the norms around free speech to point to context, Stefanik continued to press for a "Yes/No" response, turning the hearing into a performance that would draw in her voter base, building a narrative organized to target the "woke culture" or "diversity, equity, and inclusion" culture of Universities.
Erased from the five-hour exchange was any critical interrogation of what was being labelled as "calls for Jewish genocide." Implicit but not clearly articulated in the interrogation is the operationalization of protests in solidarity with Palestine on University campuses as "calls to genocide."
Of salience here is the framing by Zionists of the slogans "From the river to the sea" and "Globalize Intifada" as "calls for Jewish genocide."
The slogan, "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," emergent from Palestinian resistance to settler colonialism, is an expression of Palestinian sovereignty. Reflective of the right of colonized people to call for an end to the conditions of colonization, the articulation of sovereignty in the slogan is protected by the United Nations Framework on Decolonization. As an expression of resistance, the slogan makes the claim to justice, emergent from the voices of colonized peoples, challenging an apartheid occupation that is built on ongoing expulsions, displacements, incarceration, and violence.
The slogan "Globalize Intifada" is an expression of resistance. To frame it as a call for Jewish genocide is both disingenuous and violent, part of the settler colonial structure directed at silencing the right of the colonized to challenge the forces of colonization. For the colonizer, the voices of the colonized expressing the right to resist to violence, communicatively inverting the infrastructure of violence that undergirds the colonial infrastructure. In pathologizing the call for decolonizing resistance through the label of antisemitism, the Republican-led House Education and Workforce Committee upholds the narrative of Universities as infested with radical diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) agendas and antithetical to (white) civilization.
The White House is roped into this targeted attack on Universities, with a spokesman for President Joe Biden stating, "It's unbelievable that this needs to be said: calls for genocide are monstrous and antithetical to everything we represent as a country." Note here in the ongoing work of imposing a colonial interpretive frame on the slogans the denial of the interpretive capacity to Palestinians. This denial then is the basis of further erasure.
In other instances, an active disinformation campaign is at work in framing the Palestine solidarity protests as antisemitic. The slogan, “Israel, Israel, you can’t hide. We charge you with genocide,” is communicatively inverted, framed as calling for the genocide of Jews.
The targeted disinformation campaign directed at the University of Pennsylvania by right-wing lawmakers, picked up by democrats, further accentuated by the threat of funding withdrawal by donors, built the pressures that led to the resignation of President Liz Magill. Note particularly the organizing role of the threat of the loss of mega-donor sponsorship that speaks to the political economy of settler colonial censorship. Wall Street CEO Ross Stevens, CEO of Stone Ridge Holdings threatened to take steps that would cost the University approximately $100 million if Magill stayed on as president.
Evident here is the power exerted by far-right politicians and powerful donors in establishing the terms of conversation on university campuses. The key architect of the campaign, Elise Stefanik, is a Trump-supporting "Make America Great Again" far-right ideologue with a track record of platforming antisemitic speech, QAnon conspiracy theory, and the white supremacist Great Replacement Theory. The Zionist businessman Bill Ackman, amplifying the campaign targeting the Universities, circulates the far-right talking points about the "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" culture of "Woke Universities." Consider here Ackman's Twitter feed that is rife with conspiracy theories and supposed leaks about the DEI agenda of Harvard's African American President Claudine Gay. Ackman's Twitter feed and the ecosystem around it lays visible the interpenetrating relationship between white supremacy and Zionism, the framing of justice-based organizing at Universities as the DEI conspiracy that threatens white civlization.
This latest round of attack on free speech in universities mobilized by the right finds its bipartisan support in the white settler colonial infrastructure of the US. It works to silence Palestinian voices amid an ongoing genocide, seeking to turn attention away from the actual genocide being carried out by Israel. It further ensconces the power of the far right in attacking academic freedom on University campuses.
As documented historically, the settler colonial structure continues to perpetuate violence by actively building communicative rules that silence the voices of the colonized witnessing the colonial violence and raising claims to decolonization. And as decolonizing struggles demonstrate, the power of resistance is held up by the resilience of the colonized in continuing to witness the violence of settler colonialism.