By N. IRAZU

Last week, members of Workers’ Voice participated in a teach-in at the University of Massachusetts Amherst organized by Students for Justice in Palestine. The panelists were:

1)       Ashraf Hazeyen, who is a weekly political contributor to a number of Arabic magazines, a member of the Jordanian Philosophy Association, a political analyst for Roya (a Jordanian TV channel), and a professor of philosophy at the University of Rhode Island.

2)       Shahinaz Geneid, an active member of GENU-UAW, which is the Northeastern Graduate Student Union. She is also an organizing committee member of HAW-UAW, which is the Harvard non-tenure track academics union, and a rank-and-file member of both UAW Labor for Palestine and the Arab Caucus.

3)       Curtis Peace, a member of Central Ohio Revolutionary Socialists. They have been active in student organizing at Ohio State University, as well as organizing anti-fascist defense for drag shows, organizing for abortion rights, as well as being in the Protect Trans Lives Coalition.

4)       Dan Piper, a member of Worker’s Voice, a member of the Steering Committee of the Connecticut Palestine Solidarity Coalition, a union teacher in CEA and building representative.

5)       Luana Ribeiro, a member of the Brazilian PSTU (United Socialist Workers’ Party) and Rebeldía, the PSTU’s youth organization.

The teach-in was attended by around 60 students in person, as well as 15 online. The main theme was on the strategy and tactics of building a mass movement in solidarity with the struggle for Palestinian self-determination.

The first panelist to speak was Professor Hazeyen, who laid out the political groundwork of the current genocide in Palestine, dispelling Zionist myths and talking points. He emphasized the righteousness of the cause and related it back to his own organizing in the General Union of Palestinian Students in the 1980s.

Shahinaz Geneid, as a labor organizer, explained the type of work she is involved in within the UAW and the fight to build a pro-Palestine movement in the labor movement. Her main points revolved around building solidarity with Palestinian trade unions and supporting their demands, principally for the divestment from companies involved in the occupation of Palestine, and getting that demand incorporated into the union’s contract with their employer.

Curtis Peace gave an overview of the campaign that CORS carried out to get reinstated at Ohio State University after they had been disbanded on bogus charges of “supporting terrorism” due to their pro-Palestine activism. They described how the administration selectively administered a room reservation violation in order to punish CORS by disbanding it. CORS proceeded to carry out a successful public campaign, which put enough pressure on the university to force them to reinstate the group.

In the end, the university admitted that the decision taken against CORS in which they had “determined that there is reasonable cause to believe [their] organization’s activities pose a significant risk of substantial harm to the safety or security of our organization’s members, other members of the university community or to university property” was based on a single graphic of just one of their flyers, which just happened to have a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) logo that was not cropped out. Carrying out a public campaign against this blatant repression also helped build up CORS as an organization that was taken seriously in Ohio, one that was willing to stand up for the Palestinian cause of national liberation.

Dan Piper spoke on two points. First, he described the political situation in the Middle East, and second, the strategy of building a mass movement in order to combat the policies of the U.S. government.

On the first point, he emphasized the role that imperialism plays. The Arab world was carved up into different states by the victorious imperialist powers in the aftermath of the First World War, in order to ease imperialist domination by Britain and France. In our day, domination is held by the United States and is in big part facilitated by its military ally in the region, Israel. As one example, Piper mentioned how Israel broke the back of Egypt’s military during the time of Nasser.

The incredible geopolitical importance of the Middle East means that for the Arab masses to free themselves, they are going to have to change the world. Israel is the spearpoint in their ribs, and for Israel to continue in existence, the surrounding countries must be ruled by imperialist-backed dictatorships or monarchies, since the Arab masses despise the Zionist, settler-colonial state, and any democracy would have to bow to that pressure. The value of Israel, and something that differentiates it from the neighboring U.S. puppet-dictatorships, is that, as a settler-colonial apartheid state, the settler population of Israel closely identifies with its state and supports it, making it a reliable ally of imperialism. Piper pointed out that the Palestinian masses will find no imperialist sponsor, and that is why they must look for support among the other oppressed nations of the world, as with South Africa.

In the second aspect of his presentation, he focused on the building of a mass movement in this country to fight for Palestinian self-determination. He polemicized against the perspective of pushing for “winnable demands” like “ceasefire.” He pointed out that ceasefire is a demand that places conditions on the Palestinian resistance, something we should not do out of principle. He also noted that because it places demands on Palestinians, it can and is being co-opted by sectors of the U.S. ruling class, most notably by the Democratic Party, who use it to politically beat Hamas over the head with and to claim that it is the Palestinian resistance that is not accepting a ceasefire.

Thus, we must fight for demands that are able to mobilize the U.S. working class independently of the capitalist class and its parties. The movement and raise demands like “End All US Aid to Israel Now!” and “End the Siege of Gaza Now!” and “Free Palestine.” The experience of the Vietnam antwar movement shows us that if we are able to mobilize millions around these types of demands, we can win.

Luana Ribeiro, as a Brazilian revolutionary socialist, gave an internationalist perspective and shared her experiences organizing among the workers and the youth in Brazil. She placed great importance in the student movement’s need to link up with the working class if it aims to achieve any real change. She shared the experiences that the student movement in Brazil has been through over the last decade, particularly the experience of student strikes since 2013. She emphasized the democratic character of the student movement, in which mass assemblies were held every day, or even twice a day, in order to come to shared understandings of the actions necessary to be carried out in order to win.

For Ribeiro, it was of the utmost importance that students linked up with the working class in order to unify their struggles. She brought up the example of the struggle against the Brazilian dictatorship, and how workers would come to the university asking for help from the students in agitating for the release of political prisoners and the end of torture by the regime.

She ended her speech by linking this to the Palestinian struggle, explaining that the demand to divest from apartheid was in of itself a democratic demand, because when an institution has relations with an apartheid state, it dampens its own democratic character.

The students in attendance were engaged by the discussion; most of them were members of SJP or had been interested enough in the flyers to attend this event, which was on a Friday night. People who came wanted to learn how to raise consciousness, mobilize, and organize. For these very reasons after the teach-in was over a number of them stayed to talk to the panelists, as well as to Workers’ Voice members, who had a literature table in the room.

The youth of this country are grappling with a fundamental issue right now; they are learning what it takes to put a stop to imperialist aggression. The purpose of teach-ins of this nature are to provide guidance to young activists who feel a burning desire to ground their activism in deep political roots. They are the political descendants of all those who struggled against the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as of those who, due to their solidarity with the people of Vietnam, helped put an end to the Vietnam War.