May 13, 2025

The movement in solidarity with Palestine had a big win when a court order released Rümeysa Öztürk from a Louisiana detention center. On May 9 she returned to Boston. Mass support developed for Öztürk, whose arrest resembled a kidnapping by a criminal conspiracy.

The criminals were from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), whose actions looked like Nazi Gestapo. Four armed, masked agents seized Öztürk, and before anyone could stop ICE, it whisked her off to a detention center 1,300 miles from her Tufts campus and her friends.

If the MAGA cabal in the White House aimed at terrifying anyone who had spoken out or was acting in solidarity with the liberation of Palestine, this reversal in Öztürk’s case stopped it. Their seizure of Öztürk and other student activists like Mahmoud Khalil, along with the police beatings of demonstrators, may have aimed to stop solidarity demonstrations. So far it has broadened the support for Palestine as well as for all migrants ICE has targeted.

Can polls measure fear … or courage? What can be measured is whether people continue speaking and fighting. It looks like the MAGA crowd’s fear tactics failed. Not only has repression failed to stop student actions, it has provoked further struggle. This was shown on the U.S.’s Atlantic and Pacific coasts in mid-May.

At New York City’s Columbia University police brutalized and arrested antiwar student activists after they seized part of the Butler Library building for several hours May 9 in solidarity with Palestinian liberation. Students had renamed the space the Basel al-Araj People’s University, hanging up a banner that read “Strike for Gaza.” Students chanted: “We have nothing to lose but our chains!” (The Guardian, May 10)

Columbia’s student activists issued a statement on social media, saying: “We are facing one of the largest militarized police forces in the world. … but we have not wavered. … Palestine is our compass, and we stand strong in the face of violent repression.”

At the University of Washington, students held a sit-in at the Interdisciplinary Engineering Building, renaming it the Sha’ban al-Dalou Building after a Palestinian student who was burned alive in Gaza when Israeli forces bombed the Al-Aqsa hospital on October 14, 2024. Considering Boeing’s role as a donor for the building, as a weapons manufacturer for the U.S. military and its allies and its location in Seattle, the Boeing war merchants were reasonable targets.

A section of political activists allied with the student protest took direct action to disrupt police attempts to repress the students’ legitimate demonstration. As a result, a dumpster caught fire near the building and delayed the police attack.

The Donald Trump White House — as the Joe Biden administration earlier — has been joined at the hip with the Israeli war criminals. As these examples show, its repression has at this point resulted in a sharpened political solidarity with the liberation of Palestine. The antiwar movement has adopted ever more energetic actions, more self-defense and refuses to submit.

If 80 years ago the Soviet Red Army was the peoples’ compass, if 50 years ago the movement for liberation of Vietnam was the peoples’ compass, today the compass is in Palestine. And Palestine’s liberation struggle is pulling ever more people toward the revolution against imperialism and colonialism.