Pro-Palestinian protests at US universities: a “lesson in humanity”? | P24 Podcast

We are tired of hearing complaints about young people, for abandoning civic causes or for withdrawing from the political debate. For many years, news has been reaching us about the growing anomie on university campuses in the United States, which we have become accustomed to seeing as places where generous and progressive ideas and political initiatives are gestated. They even told us that individualism had taken them by storm, that the social and human sciences were in decline in the face of the rise of the yuppi professions. Now, with protests against Israel’s violence in Gaza at so many American universities, instead of criticism of lack of interest comes criticism of excessive mobilization. What is happening?

Traveling back in time, it is worth remembering the pressure that young university students in America put in place for the Vietnam War to end. Nothing very different from today’s protest against human rights violations in the Gaza Strip. At the time, young people were accused of playing into the hands of the enemy, communism. Today, there are those who accuse them of anti-Semitism, as if the Government’s denunciation of the extreme right in Israel could be compared to ethnic hatred against an entire people.

Faced with the arrests of hundreds of students, with the police violating a free and sacred zone such as a university campus, pressure from the muscular right is increasing. There or in Paris, they demand that the army intervene or that public funding be suspended. But, wouldn’t it be desirable for young people to be horrified by the violence that is devastating the population of the Gaza Strip? It is not good for them to mobilize against the war and challenge the cynicism of realpolitik of the states? Isn’t it good that they feel entitled to be the critical conscience of democracies that are beginning to accept the indiscriminate death of innocent civilians too normally? Are young people moving beyond the peaceful protest that, as Joe Biden recalled, must be protected?

To reflect on these questions, in this P24 we listened to Joana Carvalho, one of the faces of the “Coimbra for Palestine” movement, at the University of Coimbra.

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