STUDENTS across America have risen up against the barbaric genocidal war being waged by Israel in Gaza and in support of Palestine in a wave of campus occupations and demonstrations that have swept through the US from the east to west coasts.
In the past week, this movement of students has intensified and spread as peaceful demonstrations calling for a permanent ceasefire, an end to US military funding to Israel, along with US universities ending ties and investments with companies profiting from the genocide were met with crackdowns from college authorities.
This mass movement of students fully erupted last week when the authorities at New York’s Columbia University called out the police to attack and arrest over 100 peaceful demonstrators who had camped on university grounds.
Following this assault on students in New York, similar encampments were set up by students at the University of California at Berkeley, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the University of Michigan, Emerson College and Tufts.
As the wave of student protests swept across US universities, the response of university authorities and both Democrat and Republican politicians has become more aggressive.
At the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, at least 93 students were arrested during a three-hour stand-off with the police with students refusing orders to disperse.
In an interview with SKY news, one young female student was asked: ‘Are you scared of being arrested,’ to which she replied: ‘No, I think the children in Gaza are more scared than me.’
Another student, Alejandro Tanon, told the AFP news agency that the US was at a ‘critical moment’ over the increasing mobilisation of students against America’s support for genocide.
This refusal to be cowed by the force of the police, and the identification of millions of young people across the US with the Palestinian struggle against Zionist occupation has created a massive fear in the American ruling class.
All attempts to portray opposition to genocide as anti-semitic has failed miserably, as even the bourgeois press has had to concede that the pro-Palestinian protests have drawn students from all backgrounds and religions, with many Jewish groups refuting these allegations.
So terrified are the US ruling class at this explosion of anger and mass uprising of student youth against American imperialism, and its support for genocide in Gaza, that the Republican speaker of the US House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, on a brief visit to Columbia University suggested that if the protests were not crushed quickly by the police then ‘there is an appropriate time for the National Guard’.
This raises the spectre of the National Guard shooting and killing of six students at a peaceful student demonstration against the Vietnam war at Kent State and Jackson State colleges in May 1970.
What is clear, is using the full force of the capitalist state against students is a sign of the weakness and desperation of the US ruling class as it confronts a fast developing mass movement amongst young people and workers against imperialist war and in support of Palestine.
The student movement in the US has set an example to the working class throughout the world that must be followed to its conclusion.
The working class internationally have the responsibility to finish off what the students across the US have started, by taking independent action against their own governments that support and arm the Zionist regime by calling general strikes to bring them down.
In the UK, the mass National Demonstration this Saturday to end Israel’s war in Gaza and for an independent Palestinian State is the perfect opportunity to force the TUC to end its shameful silence on Gaza and join with the mass uprising of students in the US by calling an immediate general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers government that will provide all the military assistance and aid that the Palestinian masses require to go forward to establishing the independent state of Palestine.
The working class has the power to end genocidal slaughter and end imperialism by going forward to workers governments and the victory of the world socialist revolution.
