This is an excerpt from Community Report.
The Israeli government now controls a violence-plagued food aid distribution system in Gaza, and President Donald Trump claimed victory in bombing nuclear siloes in Iran. Meanwhile, the mighty student protest movement of 2024 faces new obstacles. Pacifica’s Lisa Loving speaks with Jonah Rubin, the National Director of Student Organizing for Jewish Voice for Peace, about how his community of young activists continues to protest Israeli aggression in Gaza.
Lisa Loving
Let’s start though with Jewish Voice for Peace. What do you do?
Jonah Rubin
I am the Senior Manager for campus organizing at Jewish Voice for Peace. We are a large national organization with chapters across the United States and various cities. My piece of the pie is organizing our network of around 50 student chapters at colleges and universities across the United States, as well as working with professors and academic staff through our Academic Council.
Lisa Loving
What has come into focus for you over the past year and a half? It’s been an incredible time for student activism.
Jonah Rubin
Yeah, it absolutely has. And I think that we must consider the current moment that we’re in when we’re thinking about this moment of student activism. We’re witnessing the final stage of the Israeli military’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza through relentless bombing and starvation. We’re witnessing Netanyahu bent on expanding this war, most recently to Iran, and we know that the only thing that is going to stop him is unprecedented international pressure, and that’s why we need to be doing everything that we can, including stopping the flow of arms to Israel to save lives. We’ve seen daily shootings of Palestinians lining up for food, trying to get what little food they can from the few distribution sites that Israel has allowed. We’ve seen over 40,000 Palestinians expelled from their homes, where the city of Jenin has been under siege and under relentless bombings. In too many sectors across the United States, in too many places, in too many media outlets — this has been met with near total silence. The one place where we’re seeing this issue be brought to light consistently, where we’re seeing students focus on one of the premier moral issues of our time is on college campuses. Colleges and universities have a long and rich tradition of being at the forefront of progressive change in this country. We think about the organizing in the 80s against apartheid in South Africa. We think about the role of students in civil rights, or, more recently, the work in climate justice, and the way students have led on that. But even long before then, I’m living in Galesburg, Illinois, the site of Knox College, where Abraham Lincoln had the warmest reception for his famous series of debates arguing for the abolition of slavery that took place at Knox College. Colleges have been at the forefront of progressive change for as long as they’ve been around, and that tradition continues today, through the Palestine Solidarity Movement, that’s dedicated to ending genocide, ending apartheid and realizing a more just and more peaceful future. We’ve seen the students organize around encampments, around demands for divestment, around demands for academic boycott, for ending their own complicity, for saying they do not want their tuition dollars to be spent funding apartheid and genocide. And the reaction they’ve received has been tremendous.
Lisa Loving
What are the students thinking about, Jonah?
Jonah Rubin
What’s so incredible is that even as they’re facing tremendous resistance, tremendous repression from their administrations and from the state, their focus is continuously on Palestine, what they are thinking about day in and day out, is how to end the relentless attacks on their Palestinian colleagues. What they’re thinking about is how every single university in Gaza has been bombed, has been partially or totally destroyed, how people their age, instead of worrying about what they’re going to be studying, are worrying about where they’re going to their next meal is going to be coming from, that that’s where their focus is on every single day, they’re doing everything that they can in order to exert their political pressure to build power and to bring about this change, to bring about this cessation in this great moral tragedy of our time.
Lisa Loving
Last year at universities and colleges all over the United States, there was a movement of encampments. What was your take?
Jonah Rubin
There were tremendous moments of people getting together to imagine and build another world. These were places where people engaged in studying, conversations and political actions, where students with Jewish Voice for Peace would engage in Shabbat and holiday services to celebrate our faith and the justice traditions within our faith, to work together to say these are not normal times and we cannot act normally, that if universities exist, they exist for the students, and that universities need to behave as responsible global citizens. They need to not abuse their students’ tuition dollars. They need to not force their students to be complicit in horrifying human rights violations. And so, there was this atmosphere of mutual support, of working with each other, of organizing with each other, organizing with local groups. Some of the encampments ended up doing support for unhoused populations in their area. Some of the encampments ended up working with local environmental movements, with local economic justice and racial justice movements, to see the struggles that we face at home as intimately connected through everything from the money we spend to the people we hang out with to the things that our politicians vote for with the struggles in Palestine.
Lisa Loving
I’m remembering articles in the New York Times last year, specifically, I think about Columbia University, where people were complaining that folks from the local neighborhood were coming onto the campus. They were coming into the camps, as if that was an indicator of failure. I didn’t see any reporting about what you’re talking about now that the encampments were almost a form of local mutual aid. What are the students learning from this and how does that relate to what they’re studying in college?
Jonah Rubin
This is why you go to college, right? You go to college to work with new ideas, to meet people, in order to think about how the world could look better and different than it does right now. And so, these were students coming together to have those deep intellectual, those deep social, and cultural ideas into action in their daily lives. You mentioned seeing people from outside of Columbia’s campus. You know, I grew up in New York City, and I didn’t even know that Columbia was private property. It was just a part of the neighborhood. When I was in that neighborhood, you just went onto campus to hang out. It’s absolutely shocking to anybody who grew up in that area that this public institution was willing to close itself off from the world, to not have to answer a demand for justice. I mean, they were so committed to not even considering the students’ demands for justice that they were willing to fundamentally transform what this university is for the worst, all that so they wouldn’t have to discuss what human rights mean in our contemporary moment.
Lisa Loving
Years ago, in the 1980s, I was a student in the anti-apartheid movement, and we did a whole lot of things, but the whole world didn’t come down on us, right? Like what happened with the universities last year? What forces actually made the universities do that? It’s like the student movement itself had enemies. What a firestorm that was. Where did it come from?
Jonah Rubin
I don’t know if there’s any kind of one singular source that touched it off. I do think that it would be a mistake to attribute it all to the Trump administration. Prior to Trump’s election, even we saw universities already suspending students for extremely minor infractions like graffiti. We saw universities working with prosecutors and police for protests, for things that would traditionally be handled by internal disciplinary processes. We saw students be suspended and threatened with expulsion for silently studying in their libraries. And I think that this speaks to the ways that universities have been transformed over the past 20,30, years, the ways that universities have been taking up a politics of austerity. Have seen themselves as being much more concerned with profits and losses, with managing their portfolios, with rankings in the US News and World Report, with securing alumni donations in ways that have made them far less tolerant of traditions of student protests, and that has made them react far more harshly. Now on top of that, we see a Trump administration that has come in with its authoritarian tendencies, in which Christian Zionists have taken up massive positions of power and implemented a program designed to fundamentally transform the place of universities and the place of social movements for justice within the American landscape. But it’s certainly not something that originates with them. It’s certainly something that universities, with their ever increased reliance on donor funds, with their ever-increased reliance on us, News and World Report rankings, with their neo liberalization and their attention to being money making institutions, even if they’re nonprofits, have become far more repressive than they’ve been in the past.
Lisa Loving
There is a whole raft of new laws across the country limiting the free speech of students, strictly limiting their ability to gather in public and other things too. Some of those are new rules that universities established, and some of them are laws that were passed. And yeah, I think that they were passed before Donald Trump was elected, too. So how is that affecting your community of students now, and how will it affect them in the future?
Jonah Rubin
It’s a great question. I’d like to answer it narrowly in terms of how it’s affecting the Jewish community of anti-Zionist students, because so much of this is being done in the name of our community, in the name of protecting Jews, from a group of people who have never cared about Jews, from a group of people who are willing to link hand in hand with Nazis and anti Semites and Christian Zionists and have never had any concern about Jews or Judaism. We’ve had recent polling from GBAO that shows that about two thirds of us Jews think that Trump’s repressive attacks on campuses are making Jews less safe, that the moves that he’s taken in the name of combating antisemitism, are actually increasing antisemitism. That situation is even more so on campuses where students feel not only unsupported by these authoritarian attacks, but also gaslit as though their identities, as though the Jewish values and traditions of activism and social justice that motivate their solidarity with Palestine are being weaponized against them.
Lisa Loving
It seemed as if last year, the students were actually leading the United States. What is the role of college students, any kind of student in just society in the United States?
Jonah Rubin
I think we’ve always looked to colleges and universities as being at the forefront of progressive change. This was another moment in which we saw students mobilizing and challenging their university administrations, but also the entire rest of society to recognize the damage that we are doing by funding this genocide. It’s American taxpayers who are funding this system of genocide and apartheid, and it’s us as students paying tuition, as consumers buying goods, as citizens of a country whose taxpayers are going to fund this genocide, to stand up and refuse this call, to say, this cannot be done with our money. This cannot be done in our name.