There has never been a wider generational divide than between the post-war baby boomers and Gen Z and Gaza is what is dividing them. College students worldwide are mobilizing against what they perceive as a grave injustice and violation of human rights – a military campaign targeting defenseless civilians. Gen Zers are calling out the hypocrisy of the West.
Alexandra Dubsky
24 June 2024
Gen Z is often criticized for prioritizing their work-life balance. Gaza and the injustice against the Palestinians have given this generation their raison d’etre and a cause worth fighting for 24/7.
The student protests continue to put pressure on governments and institutions supporting Israel. Although, the protests have not reached the magnitude of the large student protests in the late 1960s against the Vietnam war or the 1980s against the South African apartheid regime, they are by far the largest student movement of the 21st century, with no end in sight.
Despite student protesters being beaten, arrested, dragged, mishandled, attacked by Zionist groups and vilified as antisemitic, the protests have continued. The movement has spread from US universities across the Atlantic and Pacific to campuses throughout Western Europe, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and Australia.
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Mohammed Abubakr
Yet many western elites do not see eye to eye with the protesters who were one of the first to call out the hypocrisy and media bias of western MSM. Gen Z grew up on social media and is well equipped to spot “fake news” and propaganda. No longer can western elites dictate what is seen and heard by controlling the narrative. Gaza is the first genocide happening in real time on TV and social media.
Since the initial protests last year in the US, university students and faculty have demanded their educational institutions sever ties with corporations supporting Israel. In May, protest encampments were erected at more than 80 campuses in the US.
Turmoil and violence spread at some of these sights after police raided the camps to clear out protesters. UCLA alone saw some 100 protesters arrested, following several other arrests across US campuses. Florida Atlantic University socialist student organization Solidarity is even holding a protest to support other college campus protests and against the police brutality some of them are facing.
Harvard made negative headlines when it barred 13 pro-Palestine student protesters from graduating in May 2024, the administration overruling its own faculty. In addition, the university suspended five students and sanctioned more than 20 others for their participation in a pro-Palestine campus encampment, which ended earlier in May. The group included the 13 senior students who were not allowed to graduate.
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On 30 April counter-protesters coming from outside the campus violently attacked UCLA’s pro-Palestine encampment. The police failed to intervene until hours after the clash started.
Professors who stand in solidarity with the student protesters are treated with the same indiscriminate brutality as the students themselves. On 1 May, a past chair of Dartmouth College’s Jewish studies department, Annelise Orleck, was thrown to the ground, handcuffed and reportedly arrested during a standoff with state riot police at the site of a campus pro-Palestinian encampment. 90 students were arrested that day.
Her mistreatment was filmed and posted, causing a worldwide uproar. Orleck later posted on X (formerly Twitter): “Those cops were brutal to me … I promise I did absolutely nothing wrong. I was standing with a line of women faculty in their 60s to 80s trying to protect our students. I have now been banned from the campus where I have taught for 34 years.” Adding that the police “tried to hurt me. They did hurt me. And they seemed to enjoy it.”
Famous New York comedian Jerry Seinfeld, 70, once an icon of liberalism and East Coast sophistication, was booed by pro-Palestine protestors in May as he gave this year’s commencement ceremony speech at Duke University in North Carolina. His introduction by the university president Vincent Prince was overshadowed by “free free Palestine” chants. Seinfeld was reported to have faced similar backlash in February when another group of pro-Palestine protestors gathered outside an event with the comedian in New York City, calling Seinfeld a “genocide supporter.”
Europe has followed suit. European student protesters are also demanding their universities disclose their Israel investments and divest from those companies who support the Jewish state in its military campaign in Gaza. This includes research in dual-use military technology.
The police brutality in the Netherlands was especially egregious. Police arrested some 125 students in May at the University of Amsterdam. In Berlin, the German police cleared a comparable encampment at the city’s Free University, with hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters.
Similar pro-Palestine encampments have been erected in the UK at Oxford and Cambridge, and demonstrations have been staged in Bristol, Leeds and Manchester. At France’s elite university Sciences Po students occupied a campus building in May. Many of them were taken away by the local police.
In Vienna, Austria, university students have also been protesting in solidarity with Palestinians in May. The makeshift tents at the University of Vienna’s Altes AKH Campus were cleared after three days. Protesters were arrested.
One Viennese protester, an adult woman in her 40s, spoke to iGlobenews on condition of anonymity. She was a Bosnian national and experienced the horrors of ethnic cleansing and genocide in the 1990s. In Srebrenica in 1995 over 8000 Muslim Bosnian men were systematically killed by the Bosnian Serb Army of Republika Srpska. “These kids [protesters] are so brave, nevertheless the level of brainwash and propaganda the mainstream media is spreading is horrendous,” she said. During the interview the Bosnian woman was asked by a counter protester what she thought of Jewish people and why she was being antisemitic. “I couldn’t believe my ears,” she said, “what does this have to do with anything here?”
The college council of the University of Cambridge’s wealthiest constituent college, Trinity College Cambridge, has reportedly voted to divest from all arms companies, according to the UK based news website the Middle East Eye (MEE). In February 2024, MEE reported that the college had $78 089 invested in Israel’s largest arms company, Elbit Systems, which produces 85 percent of the drones and land-based equipment used by the Israeli army. The news agency also reported that the college had millions of dollars invested in other companies that arm, support and profit from Israel’s war on Gaza.
In response to the MEE report, the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP), a UK based rights group, issued a legal notice to Trinity College in February warning that its investments “could make it potentially complicit in Israeli war crimes”.
Democracy needs Gen Z. Their message is clear: freedom of speech does not only apply to causes you agree with, international law is not a tool to be used discriminately and one Holocaust does not justify another one. What is happening to the Palestinians in Gaza is an injustice this generation will not forget and those who are complicit in this injustice will also not be forgotten.
