After Hamas committed the largest attack on Jewish people since the Holocaust, colleges and large cities all across the United States began seeing pro-Palestine and pro-Hamas rallies. The October 7, 2023 attack on Israel was viewed as decolonization by many groups including Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) which has over 200 chapters on college campuses. Here are some of their comments regarding the attack.
“Do not let Western media call this terrorism. This is DECOLONIZATION,” ~John Jay College chapter of SJP.
“As Muslims we have a religious obligation ordained by Allah SWT to support the liberation of Palestine by any and all means necessary,” ~SJP of Cal State University.
“Our people are waging an anti-colonial, anti-occupation, and anti-Zionist liberation struggle!” ~ The US Palestinian Community Network
The attacks were justified due to “over 100 years of Zionist [sic] settler-colonialism.” ~ The US Palestinian Community Network
Rather than bringing about condemnation, anti-Israeli comments were made all over college campuses in the United States, and by Palestinian sympathizers worldwide. In response to the decolonization statements made by SJP groups, Ivy League presidents were directly asked in front of the United States congress whether calling for the genocide of Jews on campus violated their code of conduct, policies, or rules regarding bullying or harassment. Instead of responding “no,” they each claimed it “depended on the context” or some sort of equivocation. Meanwhile, on these same campuses, misgendering a student is a punishable act and a violation of their policies regarding bullying or harassment.
Why did widespread pro-Palestinian support seemingly appear out of nowhere on college campuses and in big cities across the country? It is because the same ideas used by those justifying the Hamas attack on Israel have been taught to children in American schools for years. According to Racial Equity Tools, “Decolonization refers to ‘writing back’ against the ongoing colonialism and colonial mentalities that permeate all institutions and systems of government.” Furthermore, according to New Discourses:
Decolonization is therefore best understood as a deconstructive and reconstructive project within Social Justice to remove “white” and “Western” influence or centrality from essentially any and everything. Decolonizing university curricula often entails reducing the quantity of material studied that came from Western, white (and male) authors and researchers and replacing it with material that came from non-white and non-Western sources (see also, citational justice and research justice). Decolonizing hairstyles would refer to problematizing interest in, appreciation for, or appropriation of them by white people and challenging or disrupting “white” cultural expectations about them, which may only exist in tendentious accounts from critical race Theory or in the form of microaggressions (see also, cultural racism).
It is worth noting that decoloniality—a disposition toward decolonizing, in this sense—is explicitly a project within educational spaces under the critical pedagogy of Theorists like Joe Kincheloe. That is, there has been a deliberate project to train our educators in colleges of education to take up a decolonizing mindset and to make their teaching into activism in that direction.
In an article on PBS.org, written in 2020, an educator named Terry Kawi, wrote about “Decolonizing Our Classrooms.” She wrote of being an antiracist educator, and addressing “our own role in perpetuating racism and assess how we may be replicating the culture of power (or dominant culture and aspects of whiteness) in the classroom.” She said “Textbooks and core curriculum are manifestations of the culture of power,” and of course by “culture of power,” she is referring to Western society in the United States. “Educators who are antiracist have the capacity to teach and plan through a critical race lens,” Kawi states. She further writes, “It is also essential that we teach our young people about what racism is and model for them how to be antiracist. This starts with giving your students sanctuary within four walls to learn, practice, and speak up against injustice. Students must learn how to be antiracist and we must teach them.” And lastly, “There are many ways to approach this act of decolonizing the classroom.”
These ideas are being taught to students across the country and Ottawa County is not immune. The following photo was taken in the Grand Haven school district, showing that some GHAPS teachers are also spreading this rhetoric.
The ideas of critical race theory and antiracism are not only directly related to decolonization, but if you interchange the idea of Jewishness for whiteness, the rhetoric follows the same pattern: there is a systemic grievance that has to be deconstructed at any cost. This is evident when examining some of their claims about whiteness. “Whiteness is a malignant, parasitic-like condition,” wrote Dr. Donald Moss, in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. He further described “whiteness” as something that “easily infiltrates even groups founded on the protection of individuals, on democratic principles” and said that there is “not yet a permanent cure” [for whiteness]. The Harvard Magazine published an article titled “Abolish the White Race.” The author of the book Race Traitor, Noel Ignatiev, wrote, “The goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacists.”
These hateful ideologies dehumanize anyone that fits into a contrived category of oppressor, and has been embedded into all levels of academia, and has thus far received little pushback. It is Western ideals that academia and its educators and scholars seem to want to abolish. Disguised as lessons to reduce racism, children everywhere have been led to believe that Western principles of capitalism, representative democracy, and equality under the law actually systemically suppress groups of people based on their identity characteristics, and they have been taught to instinctively respond by taking actions to reduce oppression. When the same characteristics were applied to the Jewish people in Israel, American youth trained in this hateful rhetoric responded through massive emotional demonstrations, many not knowing what the phrase “from the river to the sea” even means. In their minds, in the name of eradicating oppression, no level of horror was too great for individual oppressors deserving of punishment. In the case of colonization, they do not want to admit a simple fact of the human condition: as time marches on, borders and the people living within them change, and new generations learn to adapt to the changes.
I will leave you with a parody that makes light of how quickly many uninformed American college students adopted Palestinian beliefs.
https://twitter.com/Israel/status/1721457922859729398?t=Np91LOsKSqMR4Fawl2SwLg&s=19