Robert Azzi is a photographer and writer who lives in Exeter. His columns are archived at robertazzitheother.substack.com

‘For over half a century, Israel’s strategic dilemma has been its inability to erase the Palestinians, on one hand, and its unwillingness to grant them civil and political rights, on the other,” Nathan Thrall, who just won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, wrote in “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama.”

“Explaining his opposition to giving Palestinians in the West Bank the same rights as Palestinian citizens of Israel, [former deputy prime minister] Abba Eban said that there was a limit to the amount of arsenic the human body could absorb,” Thrall continued. “Between the two poles of mass expulsion and political inclusion, the unhappy compromise Israel found was to fragment the Palestinian population, ensuring that its scattered pieces could not organize as one national collective.”

Today, those Potemkin-inspired poles have collapsed, and those scattered pieces — fragmented within the Israeli-occupied territories of East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank, as well as throughout a worldwide Palestinian diaspora — are fusing together, supported by an expanding pro-Palestinian solidarity movement rising to try to counter not only the genocide of the Palestinian people within their homeland but the erasure of their cultural and historical narrative.

An erasure in order to re-fortify a myth that Palestine was a land without a people available for occupation by a people without a land.

On New Year’s Day in 1972, I’m pretty sure it was 1972, I was arrested in Cairo, Egypt while taking photographs of anti-government student protests at Ain Shams University.

I, a non-student, was charged with inciting the riots and protests. Fortunately, due to the intervention of diplomats from the American Embassy and from editors at Newsweek, for whom I was on assignment, my incarceration was brief.

The next day, after being released, I went to photograph Mohamed Heikal, the editor-in-chief of the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram. When his secretary introduced us he recognized my name and as we were shaking hands he smiled and asked, “You’re the American who was arrested for causing trouble at our universities?”

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“Yes, sir.”

I was the inciter.

That memory came to mind as I was reading absurd speculations — increasingly prevalent — about how the encampments, protests, and demonstrations roiling American campuses must be the work of outside agitators and foreign interests, from George Soros to Qatar, who are both brainwashing naïve American students and threatening the security and safety of students who don’t support the protests, especially those who are Jewish and/or Zionists.

How easy it is to blame outside agitators. How easy, if you have privilege and power, to avoid being held responsible; how easy to blame pesky brown people in strange lands who (mostly) are neither Christian nor Jewish; people who believe, as I do, that the American government is complicit in the war crimes that the settler-colonial state of Israel is waging against the Palestinian people.

How easy it is to avoid recognizing that, as Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia, said: “This is the conscience of a nation, speaking through your kids, through young people, who are risking their futures, who are risking suspension, expulsion, criminal arrest, in order to wake people up in this country.”

All this rather than consider, as I do, that the protests that have now occurred on over 150 American campuses, over 50 of which have called in armed forces with over 2,500 arrests, while often unruly, are legitimate expressions of support for freedom and justice not just for Palestinians but for all oppressed and occupied peoples.

Today, I don’t believe what we are seeing today is just about quelling student protests, protests that demand that universities call for an end to the war and review their investments in Israel and collaborations with its military. It’s about American universities and colleges becoming increasingly complicit in the disenfranchisement and marginalization of the Palestinian people, both as a people and as a memory.

Globally, physical suppression of college students is not uncommon. During my lifetime it has been seen, not only at Ain Shamsbut in so many lands, including Chile, Egypt, El Salvador, Iraq, Syria, and today all across America, where at Columbia University President Minouche Shafik called upon riot police — perhaps re-imagining the Egyptian military model used to suppress dissent in her native land — to crush protests at one of the most elite education institutions in America, and where at UCLA law enforcement stood by and permitted violent attacks of peaceful protestors.