The genocide in Palestine: Students, space and silence
Dear friends,
As university goes back in the United States, the country’s colleges are prepared.
New York University has fenced gathering space and hired guards to keep people out. Similar deal at Columbia. Students demonstrating at the University of Michigan were arrested. Encampments at University of California are now banned.
It’s an epic doubling-down on the police violence, suspensions, censorship and expulsion that marked the end of the 2023-24 academic year.
The politics may be complex, but the reality that calls for resistance is not: the state of Israel is enacting a genocide of Palestinians, the US is arming, funding, and condoning it, and thousands of students and teachers of the colleges that form the elite foundation of western education refuse complicity. Which is why they must be suppressed. With echoes of Occupy, the Days of Rage, and other tactics of concentration and obstinance, the encampments of US universities were/are a contestation of and at the heart of empire.
Over the border wall in Mexico, students and allies who camped out for Palestine in May-June this year came instead from an anti-imperialism within which they share a condition with nations the US has long sought to control - with war, and also with things like economic sanctions, lopsided trade deals, and migration restrictions. The wall that marks the Mexico-US border, movingly described by Gloria Anzaldúa as “an herida abierta [open wound] where the third world rubs against the first and bleeds” is not just a physical barrier to the free movement of Mexicans; it is a vexed and sore psychological condition for many of the people I know both here in my adopted home and in the US.
“We are protesting on the one hand for humanitarian reasons” student activist Carla Torres told me in an interview we did early last month. “We cannot allow genocide anywhere in the world, no matter how far it is from us.”
Torres is a member of the Asamblea Interuniversitaria y Popular (Inter-University Student and People’s Assembly in Solidarity with Palestine), The interview was prompted by a panel that was being put together by my friend Daz Chandler for the Erasure and Defiance: The Politics of Silence and Voice on Palestine conference in Australia, to which I relayed some of the actions and context for student encampments for Palestine in Mexico.
Imperialism, from 'economic submission' to genocide
Torres shared that the ongoing student protest takes the view that “if we look globally” at what is happening to Palestine, “this is a situation that is happening more and more, is affecting other territories.”
“We know that if we don’t stop it now, it will affect us.”*
This view is grounded in Mexico’s political reality as a site of intervention for the accumulation of resources by the US and transnational business.
“We know what it is to be a country plundered from our lands. The enemy is common.”
By way of a recent example, Torres noted the Mexican government’s co-operation with the US on migration policy, through which migrants from all over the Global South seeking to enter the US face corralling, detention, deportation and other deterrence tactics from Mexican state authorities.
This is “economic submission” to the US by Mexico, said Torres - Mexico is compelled to agree to US demands due to reliance on US capital.
Control of migration for the US by Mexico is a current example of “elements that have us totally dependent; grabbed by the neck by imperialism.”
The former Mexican intelligence chief wanted in Israel for involvement in the Ayotzinapa cover-up
There are even more specific reasons why Mexican student activists and other human rights defenders in the country might see a common enemy in the state of Israel.
Young Mexicans in their first years of university in 2024 know well the story of the 43 students of the Ayotzinapa teacher’s college in the state of Guerrero who were forcibly disappeared by state security forces on the night of 26 September 2014.
“It affects young people a lot,” Carla said.
“It continues to be a very heartfelt case as it continues to not be resolved in this presidential term.”
Israel currently provides cover for Tomás Zerón, who was the head of Mexico’s intelligence agency when the student’s disappeared and is directly implicated in the case with charges for torture and tampering with evidence awaiting him in Mexico. He has been living in Tel Aviv since 2016.**
Then there’s Pegasus, which Zerón purchased for use by the Mexican government in 2014 and which was specifically used in the Ayotzinapa case to spy on advocates for the students, activists and journalists, as well as parents of the missing 43. “Battle-tested in Palestine”, as Anthony Lowenstein puts it, quoting Elbit Systems, in a Q&A about the border walls of Mexico and Palestine, Pegasus is spyware developed by Israeli that was used by the current AMLO government at least up until late 2022.
So, “the approach of Israel to Palestine is not foreign to us,” Torres continued.“It’s part of an overall strategy of imperialism, with the willingness to do whatever it takes,” to maintain the power of the state of Israel and gain territory for resource extraction.
“They will do whatever it takes. Even massacre an entire people to maintain that hegemony.”
Carla Torres referred to Mexico’s student encampments for Palestine as “a re-awakening” of activist spirit among a generation that completed high school via Zoom, stuck inside as the covid19 pandemic ravaged the country.
In contrast to the violent repression of protest in the US, Mexico’s encampments enjoyed relative peace. While student protesters can face other threats to their safety, it is forbidden by law for state security forces to enter autonomous university campuses in Mexico.
A key demand of the encampment at Torres' campus, that of the state-funded National Autonomous University in Mexico City, was that the institution investigate and break all academic, diplomatic and commercial ties with Israel.
This has not happened, said Torres. However, the demand for the Mexican government to break ties with Israel has since gained considerable airtime, building on the students’ demand of their institution.
Palestine beyond AUKUS
As I reflected with Daz, whose panel gathered perspectives from student mobilizations for Palestine in the West Bank, Ireland, Australia, Japan and the US, the differences in speaking about the state of Israel and Palestine between here in Mexico and Australia and the US have been notable to me. As a military partner of the US Australia’s refusal to act against the genocide of Palestinians is apparently set in stone, and the state is doing accordingly - the ruling Australian Labor Party abandoning Senator Fatima Payman, and the government repressing evidence about the drone strike that killed citizen Zomi Frankcom and six of her World Central Kitchen colleagues while they were delivering food aid, the public broadcaster sacking a presenter for re-tweeting a Human Rights Watch report showing that Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war.
A discursive western nation, a liberal democracy of the Global North, a former settler colony of the British Empire; the Australian state and media are strongly aligned with Israel, deeply influencing what Australians know and think about Israel and Palestine. Mexico’s diplomatic position, while ultimately likely to back the United States, is more ambivalent, drawing on a distinct history in the US-led world of nation-states, and that is reflected in political culture. For example, the official position of this year's Pride march in Mexico City included a demand to "end the genocide that is occurring in Palestine" and that the Mexican government take strong action to withdraw support for Israel, Zionist state and colonizer," and support Palestinians seeking refuge in Mexico. This, because violence such as that forced on LGBTIQ+ people throughout Mexico "knows no borders." For better or worse, it is not geopolitical hyperbole in Mexico to name colonialism, imperialism, and genocide, and certainly the brutality of the state of Israel is intimately recognisable.
(Better, I think, as I receive daily updates on the slaughter and displacement raging through Chiapas, where the proxy wars on people that are bound up with the interests of Mexico’s elites, the United States and transnational business, is also taking and curtailing the lives of babies and children and entire Indigenous communities. Which is also to say, in the face of so much horror I am glad to tell the truth and to know others who do too).
With thanks for staying with the trouble***,
Ann.****
*A sentiment also reflected in the words of Gustavo Petro, president of Colombia, which has ceased its coal exports to Israel in protest of the genocide: “What we see in Palestine will also be the sufferings in the world of all the peoples of the [global] South.”
**so, by the way, does Andrés Roemer, a former diplomat and broadcaster wanted in Mexico on sexual assault charges following the testimony of no less than 61 women; revelations that have been particularly mobilising for young feminists in Mexico who protest widespread misogyny, sexual harassment, rape, domestic and other gender-based violence, and femicide in the country.
***all my latest reporting is gathered on Linktree, you can also follow me on Instagram and X.
****I am available for hire! See my LinkedIn profile for the full list of writing, research, translation and education services along with my work history and endorsements. Let's work together!