It is increasingly difficult to remain in peace when people are suffering. Peace isn't a one-off thing that we obtain, and then we move on. It has to be maintained and shared. When we say, "Never again," we mean it not just for ourselves, but for all people everywhere.
What is happening on college campuses across the country, with college students being pummeled by police, arrested, and then banned from attending the classes they paid for all because they occupied a building (which is as peaceful a protest as you'll ever find) because of their institution, and the country's, response and actions relating to Israel, is a gross breach of their 1st amendment rights. These institutions are playing in our faces, but that's what they do best.
We should ALL be angry about what's happening in Gaza because it's happening to people who were forcibly displaced from their homes and the land that was left to them by a state comprised of people who were forcibly displaced from their homes by the villainous excesses of a man who felt that wealth and power were better in the hands of his select few, and the economic powers who shared his views, and the world politics that let him get away with it until he declared war on them.
I don't need to look at pictures of snipers on roofs to know that college students whose families paid for a world-class education in political science, journalism, economics, sociology, and other social sciences and liberal arts are under attack by the police on the ground, and so are their teachers. We've seen the same thing during the Black Lives Matter marches only four years ago. And the time before that. And the time before that. All for the "crime" of protesting the unfolding genocide currently ongoing while on a US college campus.
You know those students still have classes to take but are being banned from the campuses they paid for? From the classes they paid for? These schools just gave themselves thousands of dollars for free by eliminating the services they were supposed to deliver by having their students, recipients of those services, barred from attending class. And remember their teachers experiencing those same bans. And yet some folks are saying it's the fault of those students and professors, that they shouldn't have exercised their 1st amendment rights to peacefully assemble and protest an unjust war in another country that the US is allied with. Make it make sense.
Peace sometimes gets folks into trouble because it's assumed that peace means that people will not be disturbed from going about business as usual and that economic and political powers can just continue to operate without accountability. And when it doesn't, Peace gets people arrested. Peace gets people attacked by dogs, beaten by police, jailed, bombed, and banned from places where they have the legal right to exist. Peace gets a restructured narrative by those in places of power to tell us that peace is not peace, actually. It is only because of political and economic powers that peace means war. None of our storied institutions in the US are exempt from histories of violence and oppression against both Jewish and Muslim people.
Peace requires a commitment to basic principles of human decency and fundamental human rights and a constant striving to pursue those ends, not just by any means necessary (a phrase I've been catching being tossed around a lot) but to build a world that pursues peace through unimpeachable justice and equity for all folks.
"Never again" means NEVER again for all people. Justice for Palestine.
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