The Enemy Within
What they were not expecting, the ruling and managerial classes, was that the rebellion would come from within. They were not expecting six months of genocide, broadcast daily to our smart phones and laptops, to galvanize young people into action, and they certainly did not expect the manicured Ivy League campuses where their children carry on the traditions of the ruling and managerial classes to become encampments demanding divestment, boycott and sanctions. That working and middle class people, that minority groups, labor unions, teachers or parents would be potentially affected by the daily carnage is always a given, but the idea that solidarity, fierce solidarity could ever come from within must be, among the halls of power and the alumni associations, in the country clubs and private dining rooms right now, a bit like the urban legend: the call is coming from inside the house.
It is fitting that American campuses should become scenes of oppression and violence. It is fitting that the United States, while it has lectured the world on the meaning of democracy and freedom of speech should be beating, tasing and tear gassing their own children at the behest of a foreign power, quite openly suppressing right of assembly, free speech and expression. It is fitting that Western academia enact for us the passion play, the morality tale, the folk tale or the parable: the emperor has no clothes. It is fitting that the children of the ruling class should turn against their parents, should turn against the quiet complicity that keeps their fortunes running and become vipers in the nest. It is fitting that as the ruling class destroys all post-war international institutions and frameworks for justice, that their children should be the bodies on which the empire inflicts its rage in wild attempts at self-preservation, and that it should be their children being suspended from Columbia, NYU or Harvard, evicted from their housing and called a terrorist as the world watches the west descend into barbarity.
No one was predicting the world to wake up and see what has been happening for more than seven decades in Palestine and to connect those dots to all of the others, and no one was predicting that we would be, in our billions, so linked together in opposition to one of the most powerful and destructive alliances in world history, and no one could have predicted that we would have the rulers, the managers and the mouthpieces of that alliance running scared. They see the end of the empire on the horizon, they see the end of the entire settler colonial project worldwide and they have been hoping we haven’t noticed, hoping we can still be distracted and redirected. They were not counting on people under fifty caring about anything more than avocado toast, and they hoped those over fifty would be too colonised to object to holocaust, let alone to stand as a human shield between a college sophomore and a squadron of militarised riot police. There is a collective awakening happening, and it is important to remember, as Ilan Pappé and Norman Finkelstein and others keep reminding us, that regimes are their most dangerous at the end, during the death throes.
Vigilance. Courage. Solidarity.
