Students & faculty united: Slam CUNY’s complicity with Israeli racist terror

NEW YORK CITY, May 28—“Our safety will never come through ethnic cleansing. It will never come through apartheid” said the president of the Jewish Law Students Association of the City University of New York (CUNY) to a militant rally of 300 students and faculty in front of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. This rally comes on the heels of the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) racist terror-bombing of Gaza, which killed more than 275 people (one-third of them children) and displaced tens of thousands. (SEE CHALLENGE editorial from 6/9)John Jay was targeted because its criminal justice program collaborates with the NYPD and the IDF, and protestors demanded that CUNY cut all ties with Israel.  
One speaker pointed out that some faculty are former members of the IDF, and some Fulbright scholars are current IDF. A City College speaker told of several instances of discrimination against Palestinian students and a John Jay student connected the racist oppression of Palestinians to the racist terror faced by Black people in the U.S.  
Anti-imperialist union resolution adds momentum
Following the demonstration, on June 10, the delegate assembly of the 29,000-member Professional Staff Congress (PSC), the faculty and staff union at CUNY, passed a resolution calling Israel an apartheid state, calling on chapters to discuss support for “Boycott Divestment and Sanctions” (BDS), and demanding that the Biden administration end all funding of the occupation of Palestine.
The original resolution was co-sponsored by the PSC’s Anti-Racist Committee, the Academic Freedom Committee and the International Committee, where PL’ers have been active for years. A watered-down replacement resolution was introduced by the new PSC Executive Council, but delegates fought back with a series of amendments to restore most of the content of the original. Every proposed amendment passed, and the final resolution passed, 84-34, with the four principal officers voting against it.
Anti-imperialism vs liberalism, nationalism, and identity politics
While the student rally and PSC resolution were antiracist and anti-imperialist, only the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) calls for the unity of Arab and Jewish workers against ALL the bosses to smash capitalism: whether
Israeli, Hamas or the Palestinian Authority. PLP organizes the international working class for communism against all forms of capitalism. Nationalism is a capitalist idea and as long as this remains the main ideology leading the anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist movement, any new nation that arises will be ruled by capitalists. Is this the “liberation” that Palestinian and working-class Jewish masses really yearn for — capitalist oppressors “who look like me”?
Few other places in the world feel the defeat of the old communist movement more acutely than in the imperialist war-torn Middle East. It is among the regions where a new international communist movement is most urgently needed, from Palestine to Yemen. The old communist movement made many errors, including maintaining the wage system and promoting nationalism. Nationalism has never led to real workers’ liberation and, as PLP has analyzed elsewhere, was one of the driving forces that led to the reversal of the great Soviet and Chinese revolutions.
Pandemic winds down; fightback contagion spreads
PLP is organizing among students, faculty and staff who are angry at the CUNY administration and the politicians behind them. Protests followed at Hunter College High School, Borough of Manhattan Community College and City College against racist cutbacks, austerity budgets and racist entrance exams. At Kingsborough Community College, students and antiracist faculty have waged a years-long struggle to expose and remove a racist Zionist KCC administrator following racist public social media posts and link this fight to KCC’s racist treatment of its majority Black and immigrant students and campus workers.
The Zionists responded by attacking any faculty they could think of, from intimidation through childish threats invoking the fascist terrorist Jewish Defense League, to ongoing lawsuits, to hilarious op-eds in local newspapers attacking PLP and calling out CHALLENGE (NY Daily News, 2/13/19). Despite spooking some fake left revisionist and pro-Palestinian nationalist faculty who cowed to individualism and anti-communism under pressure, the struggle continues connecting KCC’s protection of fascist Michael Goldstein to CUNY’s racist ties with Israel and racist attacks on students and adjunct faculty. Our growing relationships with students, campus workers and militant antiracist faculty has strengthened despite the pandemic and our forces are preparing to broaden anti-imperialist fightback this fall. As the bosses gear up to recruit our students for the next imperialist World War III , they’ll be contending with a growing and battle hardened PLP on campuses from Brooklyn to the Bronx.
Organize a student strike, plant seeds for communist future
This rally and resolution against CUNY complicity with imperialist terror will help our growing movement expose the role of the university under capitalism to churn out workers and soldiers. Our tasks this fall include connecting these anti-imperialist and communist politics to the mass movement for a CUNY student strike for free tuition and rehiring the thousands of adjuncts who were fired during the pandemic.
Nationalism may be the color of the protests today, but the blood of our children is red the whole world over, and only communism is worthy of those we mourn! It’s not a “free” Palestinian nation we have to win, it’s a communist world. Join the fight for communist revolution! JOIN PLP!