This past Wednesday, a number of pro-Palestinian student groups and others who came to UCLA from all over California to protest the UC Board of Regents meeting. The Board was taking up a proposal (item "J1") for a new policy aimed at censoring pro-Palestinian/anti-genocide expression. The J1 policy would forbid so-called “discretionary” (optional) statements that are “political” or “controversial” from being posted on department homepages—for example, this Faculty For Justice in Palestine statement currently posted to the UC Santa Cruz Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department homepage. 

In case there was any question who and what this policy is targeting, the author of J1, Regent Jay Sures, called the UC Ethnic Studies Faculty Council’s use of the word “genocide” to describe Israel’s assault on Gaza “inflammatory and out of touch rhetoric.”

Think about it: The U.S. is backing Israel in slaughtering over 32,000 Palestinians, nearly half of them children, reducing Gaza to rubble, starving the entire population and massacring them when they try to get food, and academics in universities (which supposedly exist to study reality and pursue the truth) are being prevented from telling the truth about it! In protest, UCLA Faculty for Justice in Palestine issued this important statement in the Daily Bruin. 

This UC Regents resolution is part of a larger pattern of repression of pro-Palestinian voices in academia across the country, blatantly violating supposed rights of “free speech” and "academic freedom.” Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace groups have been suspended at Columbia University. Pro-Palestinian students have been doxxed and blacklisted. The presidents of Harvard and U Penn were forced to resign for not coming down hard enough on pro-Palestinian students!

As Bob Avakian put it in Revolution #17:

Why is this happening? Because fundamental interests of U.S. capitalism-imperialism are at stake. Because Israel plays a “special role” as a heavily armed bastion of support for U.S. imperialism in a strategically important part of the world (the “Middle East”). And Israel has been a key force in the commission of atrocities which have helped to maintain the oppressive rule of U.S. imperialism in many other parts of the world.

And this repression is happening because representatives of the ruling class in this country have a definite sense that if youth especially at “elite” universities begin to seriously question and act against what this system is doing—if the system “loses the allegiance” of large numbers of those students—that can be a big factor in creating a real crisis for the system as a whole, as happened in the 1960s: a crisis that, now more than ever, this system really cannot afford, when the whole country is already being torn apart by deep divisions, with bitter clashes right among the ruling powers. So, at the same time as they are bitterly divided, the ruling powers of this country are firmly united in their determination to punish and intimidate especially students at elite universities who have stepped forward to protest the genocidal slaughter of Palestinians. The ruling class is desperate to prevent opposition to its fundamental interests from spreading and involving masses of people, from all parts of society.

All this reveals, more “nakedly” than in “normal situations,” the actual dictatorship behind the outer shell of “democracy” of this country—and it shines a light on the strategic weakness of this system, when it does lose the allegiance of major sections of the people and this has the potential to spread to all parts of society, including among the dominant institutions of this system.

In this light, it was very important that there was a significant outpouring of pro-Palestinian students (in the middle of finals week!) against this new repressive policy, and that the revcoms were in the mix.

The night before the protest, dozens of students occupied the conference center where the Regents were meeting, before they were brutalized and kicked out by a massive force of police. On the UCLA Divest Instagram page they wrote:

When UC Divest entered the hotel, private security and campus security officers flocked to forcibly and violently remove us. People were caught on camera getting choked, punched, shoved, scratched, crushed between doors, and more. Within minutes of entering the hotel, Luskin turnaround [the area in front of the Conference Center] was flooded with cop cars. UC Divest held the space for approximately 30 minutes before police, in full riot gear, called for a dispersal order to remove us from the space.

Then UC Divest set up a tent camp right outside and spent the night there. The next day at the protest there were about 80-90 students, mainly Students for Justice in Palestine chapters and Divestment groups from UCLA, UC Irvine, UC Riverside, and UC Santa Barbara. After a very short initial rally we marched to the entrance of the Regents meeting for a public session. Once the Regents started talking about the J1 proposal, protesters began to disrupt, including a couple of us from the revcoms. Soon after, the security issued a dispersal order and forced everyone out. Then the Board of Regents announced that they were postponing the vote on J1 until May (and may be watering down the full repressive character of this).

Students continued their tent camp for another night at UCLA and then protested the next day at the Regents meeting demanding the UC system divest from corporations that produce weapons sold to Israel.

In the midst of all this, revcoms united with the resistance, but also struggled with students over how they understood the fundamental problem and solution. Some students were newer to political life and just wanted do something to stop this genocide. They hadn’t really thought much about why there’s so much repression against pro-Palestinian students and why Biden continues to back Israel even if it might cost him the election. There were students who think that a key reason all this is happening is because weapons companies are profiting off this genocide and buying off university administrations and politicians. There were a number of students who talked about “imperialism” and “revolution,” but didn’t really have deep understanding of capitalism-imperialism as a system, and tended to equate revolution with movement building. Some students were open to the revcoms and wanted to engage, while others got very uncomfortable and wanted to keep things within the narrow horizon of the current struggle on campus. In all this, it was important that the revcoms were in there uniting with the struggle, learning from what people were saying and contending over the deeper problem and revolutionary solution to all this.

Urgently needed: much more resistance like this! Much more discussion and debate over why this is happening and the revolutionary solution!