From Gaza to Manhattan and Back

– there were no legal observers allowed.

-there was no press allowed inside Hamilton Hall, including WKCR.

– it took over an hour for the student who was pushed down the stairs to get medical attention even though EMS was supposed to be on standby. They were told no EMS was available when they called .

– they arrested random people at John Jay who were not involved.

– students with swollen faces from being kicked repeatedly, lacerations, got tackled to the ground and thrown down stairs.

– multiple students so injured taken straight to hospital to be treated.

– EMS here at jail support treating many on site. This hadn’t happened last time. Clearly more brutal arrests.

A note from a faculty member at Columbia University, depicting the 4/30/2024 NYPD crackdown of Columbia students’ encampment. 

In the last few days, as university administrations across the United States turned to counterinsurgency measures against their students – suspending hundreds without proper procedure, inviting the police in to dismantle assemblies and conduct mass arrests of peaceful protesters, expelling students from their dorm rooms, erecting walls to shut off public spaces– I couldn’t stop thinking of a video I watched with my students back in January depicting the demolition of Israa University in Gaza. By the time the video was released, none of Gaza’s 17 universities were left standing. According to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, 4327 students and 90 university professors have been killed, some of them directly targeted and Gaza’s advanced system of higher education ceased to exist, leaving its 88,000 students with no prospect of continuing their education.

My students and I watched that video with horror and outrage. In less than a minute a building that once housed hundreds of graduate and undergraduate students, faculty, administrators, classrooms, libraries, laboratories, cafeterias and museums, was raised to the ground. If it is so easy to destroy a university in Gaza, were we really safe in our own universities back home? What makes us so sure that the educational institutions we cherish, our beautiful campuses, free and full of life, supposed shrines for the development of science and culture and the free exchange of ideas, will not one day collapse just like their sister campuses in Gaza city?

The association between Gaza and US and European higher education might seem strange for readers of Verfassungblog. Yet it is quite straightforward for many students and young people around the world. From their perspective, the brutalities of the war on Gaza are not that far away and there is a direct link between the utter devastation of Gaza’s higher education (termed by some an “educide” and “scholasticide”) and other assaults on the political expression of Palestinian students and their allies worldwide; frequent attacks, arrests and torture of Palestinian students and faculty in the West Bank; radical suppression of political speech, censorship and incitement against Palestinian students in Israeli higher education, police crackdowns of demonstrations, evictions and suspensions in universities in France, the UK, and in the US.

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What characterizes these waves of assault on the speech, well-being and lives of students is a politics of securitization and othering. From Gaza to UCLA, from the IDF, to police units and to university administrators, students who call to prevent a genocide in Gaza are not treated as students, let alone mobilizers of free speech, knowledge or value. Their rights are not protected, and their safety is not prioritized. Instead, they are marked as threats – as antisemites, as terrorists, as violent, they are under constant suspicion, and their status is conditional – at different levels of precarity. They can be suspended at an instant (if they are caught in the wrong demonstration on US campuses). They could be arrested and tortured (if they are activists in West bank universities). They can be suspended, detained, and interrogated for mild critical speech (if they are Palestinian students and faculty in Israeli universities). They could be carpet bombed, and their universities destroyed (if they are students in Gaza). They can be arrested, evacuated, and lose their status (if they demonstrate on US Campuses). Laws, protocols and procedures can hardly protect them – they are in fact constantly and arbitrarily rewritten by administrators and other officials to manage the supposed risk. University presidents issue statement after statement emphasizing “safety and security”, but always remaining vague, about the nature of the perceived threat and whose security matters (see for example here, and here).

But oppression and suppression of life, rights and freedoms on such a global scale also breeds solidarity and political unity. Students around the world stand for each other. In the US dozens of encampments were established in solidarity with Gaza, with the Palestinian led BDS movement and to show support for the Columbia encampment which was brutally attacked early on. Gazan students praise US student protest movement. Faculty members everywhere are protective of students and civil society organizations show their support. Of course, protest movements are complex alliances and there may definitely be some incidences of anti-Semitic sentiment or aggressive expression but these are few and on the margins. More often these incidents are instrumentalized to delegitimize the whole movement, amplify suspicion towards its members and reinforce the process of othering and securitization. The fact that there are slipups should not be used to delegitimize what is fundamentally a movement for justice. Just like Trump supporters overemphasized violent incidences and looting during the George Floyd protests, right wing Israel supporters emphasize objectionable speech to undermine the students’ anti-apartheid and anti-genocide movement.

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Students across the globe are watching closely. They count the dead in Gaza, they watch the ruins of schools and universities, they see the devastation and destruction. They are angry and they grieve, they do not accept their universities’ claim to neutrality, they demand responsibility. In a way they are the real protectors of the university – their struggle, their agitation makes real the very idea of the university as a free and fearless institution, erected for the good of the people rather than an exclusive, conservative institution that caters for business interests while hypocritically paying tribute to and teaching about democracy and human rights. They want change and they are willing to sacrifice their futures and sometimes their lives, to pressure universities to divest, to pressure authorities to stop funding the destruction of Gaza and Gazan lives. In that they don’t only follow a proud tradition of students’ movements for justice and freedom in the US, in Palestine and all over the world. They also do the work for all of us: if we are all responsible to prevent genocide – the global student movement is currently the only group that exercises real pressure on governments to prevent it.

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The Week on Verfassungsblog

This week, once again, the eyes of the world were focused on The Hague. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) had to rule on an application by Nicaragua, which aimed, among other things, to halt arms deliveries from the Federal Republic of Germany to Israel. According to Nicaragua’s allegation, Germany is in breach of its obligation to prevent genocide under Article I of the Genocide Convention and is actively contributing to the alleged commission of genocide in Gaza through its support of Israel. The ICJ rejected the request for provisional measures, but does this mean that the Federal Republic can now continue supplying arms to Israel? MICHAEL A BECKER argues that, even though at first glance it seems as if Nicaragua has lost the case, it is now much more difficult for the Federal Republic to resume arms deliveries to Israel after this procedure. However, even more interesting than the court’s orders are the separate opinions of the judges. STEFAN TALMON makes a similar observation and points out that Germany is now subject to strict due diligence obligations in this regard.

Not only on the international legal front but also domestically, the Israel-Gaza war continues to play a role. After German authorities issued a ban on entry against the politician Yanis Varoufakis, imposed several political activity bans, and dissolved a “Palestine Congress,” concerns and questions about the response of German authorities to protests against the Gaza war have particularly increased abroad. KAI AMBOS has looked into the events surrounding the Palestine Congress and asks: Is this the liberal constitutional state that Germany wants to present itself as on the 75th anniversary of the Basic Law?

We now turn to the USA. US abortion law is a mystery – for pregnant women, for doctors and even for outside observers. CAROL SANGER tells the story of Arizona, the current prize-winner of confusion: from the Wild West and Dobbs to the 2024 presidential election.

Next week, Chinese diplomats will commemorate three Chinese ‘martyrs’ who died in an accidental US bombing in former Yugoslavia. VINCENT K.L. CHANG asks that we pay more attention to Beijing’s recent push to juridify memory and the role it plays in China’s move towards authoritarian legality.

Rebuilding Poland’s rule of law after the havoc that PiS had wreaked was never going to be easy. MARCIN SZWED offers three principles and values that should guide the current administration’s efforts, emphasizing the importance of legality, legal certainty and citizens’ trust in public institutions.

Bernhard Wegener’s clear stand against the “sugary illusion of climate justice” on the occasion of the climate cases before the European Court of Human Rights was taken up by MANUELA NIEHAUS (now in in the English translation). She argues that climate litigation is an important tool in the hands of civil society, driving change, and that independent courts are an appropriate forum for the issue. BERNHARD WEGENER takes the conversation further (likewise now in English) and defends his argument that the complexities of climate change should not be before international human rights courts but are a task for democratically elected legislators.