Waves of the Al-Aqsa Flood in American universities

With the protests displayed all over the world against the Israeli genocide that began on 7 October spreading to university campuses, a completely new stage has, as far as can be seen, been reached in the Al-Aqsa Flood process. The place where the university events are increasingly turning into a conflagration is the universities of the US, the accomplice that gives limitless and unconditional support to the Zionist regime.

University administrations that, since 7 October, have not published even the slightest message of sorrow or solidarity for the tens of thousands of people who have lost their lives in Gaza under the Israeli genocide were, by contrast, not at all slow to condemn Hamas as a terrorist organization because of the 7 October operation and to publish messages of solidarity with the Israeli people, and even after that day they continued their solidarity with Israel without ever mentioning Israel's crimes or Palestine's losses. Conversely, the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania were forced to resign, in a manner shameful for the history of American universities, because they had not banned the activities of groups organizing protests against Israel and demonstrations of solidarity with Palestine and expelled them from school.

This open pro-Israel partisanship of the administrations also silences from the outset those professors who might take a stance in the opposite direction, because the price of expressing an opposing view or taking an opposing stance is very clear. In American universities, which in our age hold the privilege of setting the bar for values such as academic autonomy and freedom of expression, the sea ends where one encounters the reality of Zionism.

At the point where university administrations display this open, hypocritical silence, the solidarity demonstrations with Gaza that began first at Columbia University and then spread to all American campuses have already become the largest university movement to spread to universities around the world since 1968 and the Vietnam demonstrations. This revolt by students against the university administrations and the political pressures on them is, however you look at it, a hopeful development regarding the mission of the university. It shows that commitment to all the universal, scientific and humanist values claimed in the name of the university cannot be set aside so easily, and that those who make these claims cannot easily keep up attitudes that contradict their own claims. However hypocritically one may behave, all the values claimed in the name of the university are perceived by the parties concerned as if a contract had been concluded. In fact, not only in the field of the university: when values such as democracy, human rights, freedoms and equality are claimed in the name of the West, even if some are hypocritically calculating against them, these values are rooted in society so deeply that they cannot be easily set aside:

Today, when it comes to Israel, the contradiction in which the US and Europe, and now all the university administrations, are stuck in the face of their own claims cannot easily be sustained. However great the arrogance, recklessness and repressiveness of the power that keeps that contradiction standing, the more open the contradiction becomes, and today it exposes the real relations of the world order.

The university events that spread from America to universities all over the world are the aftershock waves of the 7 October Al-Aqsa Flood, which will keep growing and force the world into a great change.

An interview that Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas's military wing and the name behind the Al-Aqsa Flood, gave only 7 years ago to Murad Batal al-Shishani, the editor-in-chief of BBC Arabic, is being widely discussed these days. In that interview Sinwar said that "Gaza is now the keystone of the whole world, and that when they move this stone a radical change throughout the world will be inevitable."

Indeed, on one side of what has happened since 7 October there is a relentless aggression displayed by Israel with the unlimited American armed force behind it. This aggression continues with the most merciless, the most savage, the most inhuman massacres that human history could witness. In the name of a show of force Israel is playing all its trump cards. It tries to spread fear by proving to people the killing capacity of its weapons. On the other side there is the nobility of Gaza, which, despite such a disproportionate force, continues to resist, turning its resistance into an epic, a heroism, and at the same time displaying its steadfastness, faith, patience and beauty in all the human values that have been fading into oblivion.

Gaza does not simply stand there as a victim, and with its resistance it does not merely point to a tyrant who "barbarically oppresses it." It points to a global brigand order that has made the whole world pay tribute to it, that dazzles the eyes of the world, that hides the truth from people, that kills, lies, exploits and deceives with the order it has built on lies, and that corrupts progeny and crops. In this global brigand order there is no place that has not been occupied, no one who has not lost their freedom in one way or another, to one degree or another. Perhaps the only people who have been able to remain free against this destructive order is the people of Gaza, and the only place is Gaza. That is why Gaza, as the keystone of the whole world, holds up the light of freedom to everyone.

American universities too are, at the administrative level, under the domination of this order. But as students see the betrayal by the universities they study at of the values promised to them when they enrolled, they see that these institutions too are captive, and they try to rescue them.

Prof. Dr. Cemil Aydın, Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, says, "The reputation of American universities depends on the success of the Palestine protests." The attitudes that the US, which today has the world's best universities, displays toward the Gaza solidarity that is in fact trying to save the reputation of its universities are not at all promising for itself. Perhaps the fact that more than 30 percent of university administrators are Jewish, against a Jewish population that does not exceed 2-3 percent in the US, may have a large effect on this. But one aspect of this new university movement that does not escape notice is that among the students who oppose the Israeli genocide with their protests there is also a significant number of Jews.

Thus, by moving into action, Gaza is not only changing the world order; it is also dissolving and deconstructing all the divisions, mental codes and discourses on which that order has fed until now. This global structure of exploitation will be dismantled and a new world established in its place, and this will be Gaza's gift to the world.