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Over the past few days we seem to have been hearing more about the protests roiling the campuses of some of the most prestigious universities in the US over the ongoing crisis in Gaza than about the ongoing crisis in Gaza itself.
To say the conflict is a divisive issue is a massive understatement and other countries have seen their share of bitter debate and confrontation during protests on the streets of some major cities. But the US protests raise an issue tied to a key question about how universities should be run: the need to protect free speech and rigorous debate.
On countless occasions student protests have spread across civil society and prompted important change. But universities also have a duty of care and the absolute need to guarantee the safety of their Jewish students in the face of massive anger at Israel’s conduct of the conflict has presented huge challenges for university administrations.
But the news focus on the violence and arrests taking place on the US campuses has failed to pick up on some of the more interesting aspects of the demonstrations. Robert P. Jackson, a political philosopher at Manchester Metropolitan University, has recently been based at Columbia University in New York researching a book on the Palestinian thinker Edward Said. Said was himself a longtime professor of literature at Columbia.
Here, Jackson bears witness to some of the less discussed aspects of the protest camp at Columbia.
While the student protests have dominated nightly news bulletins in the UK, the killing has continued in Gaza where the death toll, according to the Gaza health ministry is approaching 35,000 people killed and 77,816 injured. Israel remains poised to launch its assault on Rafah, where more than a million Palestinians remain trapped.
But there are tentative suggestions that the frantic diplomacy of the past couple of weeks may be bearing fruit. A report in the Washington Post timed at 2.30pm on May 2 (an indication of how quickly things can change in this volatile situation) said that Ismail Haniyeh, chairman of Hamas’s political bureau, said the group views the Egypt-hosted negotiations in a “positive spirit”.
The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, meanwhile – after meeting with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu – said the proposal “would produce an immediate ceasefire, get the hostages home, alleviate suffering of the Palestinian people in Gaza” in the short term, adding that Israel had made “very important compromises” that “demonstrate its desire, willingness” to get the deal done.
We spoke with John Strawson of the University of East London, who has been writing and researching about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for several decades, who kindly answered our questions about the likely success of the ceasefire deal and its implications for a lasting settlement which might even lead to the establishment of a Palestinian state.
He explains how a lasting solution to the Israel-Palestine question will require the involvement – and cooperation – of much of the Arab world and will reshape the Middle East.
There maybe some tentative diplomatic optimism that some sort of a ceasefire deal may be taking shape. But while the assault on Gaza has dominated attention, certainly in the west, violent incidents on the West Bank have steadily increased over the past seven months.
Many of those incidents have involved ideologically extreme settler groups. But there appears to be strong evidence of the involvement of units of the Israel Defense Forces. One in particular was named recently by the US government which announced it was looking into sanctioning a battalion called Netzah Yehuda for human rights abuses on the West Bank.
Netzah Yehuda is made up of ultra-Orthodox Jews, or Haredim, who are usually exempt from service on religious grounds. They have been implicated in the widespread mistreatment, including some deaths, of Palestinian civilians on the West Bank.
In the event, after talks between Blinken and an extremely angry Israeli government, the US secretary of state said he would hold off on sanctions while he examined fresh evidence. Carlo Aldrovandi, whose research is centred on Middle East politics and whose PhD focused on ultra-Orthdox groups, explains Netzah Yehuda’s history and extreme ideology.
Beyond Gaza
As with pretty much everything that happens in the region, outcomes will very much depend on the domestic politics of all the players involved. Whether Netanyahu will be able to agree to the deal brokered by Egypt could depend on the acquiescence of two of the far-right members of his fractious and unstable cabinet: national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, both of whom are urging Netanyahu to proceed with the assault on Rafah without delay.
Hamas, meanwhile, is separately in talks with rival party Fatah, which runs the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank. Representatives of the two groups have been in Beijing in talks about reintegrating Hamas into the PA, something that would change the calculations once more.
But Hamas will also be consulting with Iran, which has its own agenda. Ben Soodavar, a political scientist at King’s College London who, focuses on the psychology of political decision-making in war, has looked at the tit-for-tat strikes, earlier this month, between the Islamic Republic and Israel. He believes the exchange – which had the world holding its breath in fear of a possible escalation – was largely performative, aimed at projecting an image of strength to their own unhappy populations.
No safety
Meanwhile in Gaza itself there are reports that more aid is finally beginning to trickle into the trapped enclave. This is not to say that famine is not still a serious threat. And there are reports that some Israeli extremists are trying to block aid trucks from crossing into Gaza.
The US is reported to be building its pier off the coast, and there was a BBC report last weekend that the UK ministry of defence was considering sending British troops to help unload aid supplies on the pier and deliver them to distribution points. But this report has not since been confirmed.
An independent report into the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (Unrwa) has found there was no evidence to support Israel’s claim in January that the agency had been infiltrated by Hamas or that any of its staff had been involved in the October 7 massacre.
This, writes Anne Irfan, a specialist in Palestinian refugee history at University College London, should satisfy the many countries that suspended their donations to Unrwa when these shocking allegations emerged. Many already have. But not the US or UK.
The distribution of aid in Gaza is a desperate and dangerous business. This was amply demonstrated when an IDF drone strike killed seven employees of World Central Kitchen (WCK) as their vehicles travelled along the Gaza coast road on January 1. Israel called the incident a “grave mistake”, but WCK said it had notified the IDF of the route its employees were taking that day.
Under a practice called “deconfliction”, commonly used in conflict zones, this should have ensured their safety. Deconfliction was first developed in the early 2000s and adopted by the United Nations as a way to keep its workers safe. But the concept was first developed by militaries to keep their own troops safe from friendly fire, and then adopted by journalists working in war zones.
But deconfliction has proved singularly unsuccessful at guaranteeing the safety of journalists, writes Chris Paterson, professor of global communication at the University of Leeds. He has been tracking journalists’ deaths since the early 2000s and seen how, especially when one or another warring party doesn’t approve of the news coverage, deconfliction has a way of breaking down.
As Peterson notes, in Gaza, where foreign journalists have been denied access so the world is dependent on locals for their coverage, deconfliction has failed completely, with 109 media workers killed so far – 10% of the total working there.
