The mission of the university in the light of Gaza

The waters of the Flood that began in Gaza are rising with each passing day. As the waters rise, everyone who remains indifferent to this Flood, who does not take up position in accordance with it, appears destined to be left beneath the waters. We had related that Yahya Sinwar, the military head of Hamas, said in a statement to a BBC correspondent in 2017 that any stirring that began in Gaza would affect the whole world and would even trigger change throughout the world. Frankly, this gives a very good idea of how fertile the ground is in which the mind that leads Hamas has been planted.

Gaza, and Palestine in general, has been subjected for 75 years to every kind of cruelty of an occupation order the like of which has never been seen. Yet at the same time it displays a wisdom and quality that cannot be compared with other resistance movements shown against any occupation regime. The usual end of resistance movements against other occupation movements in history is that they end up turning into a movement of vengeance and retaliation. Most of them, after driving out the occupiers, adopted all of their occupiers' culture, values and ways of life, and so were in fact defeated in mind as well. This can be seen in India, in the governments of North Africa and South America, and everywhere else. Thus one of the most common outcomes of resistance to occupying movements is that the resisters gradually come to resemble their enemies. In his struggle against the Serbian genocidal war, Alija Izetbegović foresaw that this danger could apply to them too, if care were not taken, and issued a warning that would go down in history: a war is lost not when you are defeated on the battlefield, but when you come to resemble the enemy.

If the enemy kills children, rapes, tortures prisoners, then to do the same things to him when the opportunity arises, to try to take revenge, is the gravest defeat. And when you admire and adopt the values and way of life of the enemy you are fighting, you suffer the greatest humiliation of all.

The most beautiful aspect of the struggle of the Palestinians is that it has never aspired to resemble the Zionist forces, that despite all the cruelty it has seen it has never lost its dignity, its broad horizons and its deep philosophy of life, and that, on the contrary, it offers it to the world as a proposal with even greater nobility. Gaza does not want only a helping hand extended to it by the world against genocidal Israel. It invites people to see this genocidal, lying, colonial, brigand order that has taken the whole world captive, and to stand against it. That is, the people of Gaza invite people to awaken, to see their own condition, and to take their precautions against the colonial order that has penetrated them to the marrow. With the flood whose coming they have announced, the people of Gaza are announcing a catastrophe in which we find ourselves and which is rising higher with each passing day, and they are inviting people to board the ship of salvation.

The demonstrations that spread to American universities and from there to universities all over the world show that the invitation is increasingly finding its mark. The government's stance toward the demonstrations that began at American universities, Netanyahu's speaking as if he were issuing directives to universities in person, and the police interventions are increasingly casting a powerful light from the Gaza issue onto the conditions in which American society finds itself. It is bound to move rapidly from the humane defense of the children of Gaza to a debate about the state of freedoms in America, the autonomy of universities, freedom of expression and research and the future of democracy, and the dangers of the colonial tendencies of the US and of its domestic and foreign policies held hostage to Israel. These debates show that things will not go on as before in the US, in world politics, and even in the Middle East.

The government pressure, never shown against any other protests, on student actions in the US supporting Palestine actually shows what kind of soft underbelly the events have touched. The more the government increases its pressure on this matter, and the more demonstrations making a call of conscience against an open genocide are suppressed with police violence, the more fiercely the wind of change is bound to blow. Great powers, at the peak of their power, begin to no longer care about their image, and by starting to act contrary to what they always say, they in fact begin driving the nails into their own coffins.

Meanwhile, let us not fail to mention that there is a parallel between the university events set in motion by Gaza and the events of '68, in the sense of the phrase "history repeats itself." As is well known, the '68 student events began and developed all over the world as a rebellion against capitalism and against authoritarian and totalitarian regimes alike, including the Socialist Iron Curtain regimes, whereas in Türkiye they ran on an entirely different wavelength and in a different atmosphere.

To be fair, there are increasingly demonstrations at all universities in Türkiye too, whether Gaza demonstrations or ones saluting the university events around the world. But do university circles that raise the roof over a change of rector and make an uproar in the name of individual, scientific and sexual freedom, yet show no trace at all of this mobilization at the world's universities, not deserve particular attention?

Yet Gaza forces us to look anew, from a completely new perspective, at the whole world system, the narratives of individual freedom, all the theories of international relations, philosophy, sociology, history, the history of religions, and theology. In other words, even a university that cannot see the reality that Gaza illuminates has no future in our world. That is why universities that know themselves cannot remain neutral observers of what is happening. And those that remain neutral observers of what is happening will quickly move away from the quality that a university requires.