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“Fuck Hamas,” it begins. “Fuck Israel. Fuck Fatah. Fuck UN. Fuck UNWRA. Fuck USA!” The Gaza Youth Manifesto for Change, published three weeks ago, is an angry indictment of (nearly) all sides in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, and it’s been getting a huge amount of attention on the internet and beyond.
The anonymous authors of the manifesto — eight secular Gaza college students, they say, three women and five men — are fed up:
We are youth with heavy hearts. We carry in ourselves a heaviness so immense that it makes it difficult to us to enjoy the sunset. How to enjoy it when dark clouds paint the horizon and bleak memories run past our eyes every time we close them? We smile in order to hide the pain. We laugh in order to forget the war. We hope in order not to commit suicide here and now. During the war we got the unmistakable feeling that Israel wanted to erase us from the face of the earth. During the last years Hamas has been doing all they can to control our thoughts, behaviour and aspirations. We are a generation of young people used to face missiles, carrying what seems to be a impossible mission of living a normal and healthy life, and only barely tolerated by a massive organization that has spread in our society as a malicious cancer disease, causing mayhem and effectively killing all living cells, thoughts and dreams on its way as well as paralyzing people with its terror regime. Not to mention the prison we live in, a prison sustained by a so-called democratic country.
…
We do not want to hate, we do not want to feel all of this feelings, we do not want to be victims anymore. ENOUGH! Enough pain, enough tears, enough suffering, enough control, limitations, unjust justifications, terror, torture, excuses, bombings, sleepless nights, dead civilians, black memories, bleak future, heart aching present, disturbed politics, fanatic politicians, religious bullshit, enough incarceration! WE SAY STOP! This is not the future we want!
It’s powerful writing, drawing on traditions of non-sectarian youth organizing — because young people often lack strong personal commitments to existing institutions, their organizing often operates outside of, and critical of, such structures.
But is the manifesto too good to be true? I wondered myself, the first time I read it. Edward Teller, a blogger at Firedoglake is wondering too, noting the international funders behind the Sharek Youth Forum, whose suppression by Hamas the manifesto condemns. Is the document genuine, Teller asks, or is its publication yet another chess move by one of the forces it’s ostensibly opposed to?
The Guardian ran an article on the manifesto over the weekend, interviewing several of its authors in Gaza. “The group,” the paper said, “is currently investing most of its time and energy in debating new strategies to pursue a web-based platform for change.”
Interesting. I’m eager to see how this story develops.
Update | I asked GYBO, via their Facebook page, if they had a response to the Firedoglake story, but they deleted my post from their wall. I’ve just emailed them to ask the question again, and will update if I receive any response.
Wednesday Update | I apparently owe GYBO an apology. As they noted on their new blog this morning, Facebook restricted their ability to post on their page yesterday. As part of that restriction, they say, posts to their wall on which they commented were automatically deleted by Facebook itself. If this is true — and I have no reason to doubt it — then my previous update was in error. Sorry.
GYBO hasn’t yet replied directly to the questions about their funding and affiliations raised at Firedoglake, but another post at their blog yesterday provided a bit more detail about their political perspective and goals. I’m still interested in hearing their response to the Firedoglake stuff, and I intend to ask them again via Twitter today, but I do want to make something clearer than I did yesterday.
When I borrowed Edward Teller’s formulation of the question of GYBO’s identity — “is the document genuine … or is its publication yet another chess move by one of the forces it’s ostensibly opposed to?” — I gave that particular analysis more weight than I intended. The reality is that the question of GYBO’s “genuineness” and that of the group’s affiliations are two separate questions. Whether GYBO is affiliated with funders outside of Gaza, or affiliated with people who are affiliated with such funders, is a separate question from that of what its goals and motivations are.
The folks at GYBO — or some of them, at least — got the impression yesterday that I was hostile to their project. That’s a mistaken impression, but the responsibility for the mistake is mostly mine, not theirs. Again, apologies.
Arizona’s new ethnic studies law, House Bill 2281, takes effect this week, and the internets are full of chatter.
The law, the brainchild of outgoing AZ Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne, has gotten a huge amount of attention, but its actual effect is still very much in doubt. We’re going to be hearing a lot more about this law in the coming months, so here’s a quick primer.
Let’s start with what the law doesn’t do. First, it doesn’t have any effect on college or university teaching — it’s aimed solely at K-12 education.
Second, despite the claims of folks ranging from Jezebel to Mother Jones, it’s not an “ethnic studies ban.” Instead, it’s a ban on four kinds of teaching — programs that “promote the overthrow of the United States government,” those that “promote resentment toward a race or class of people,” those that “are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group,” and those that “advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.”
If that list seems weird to you — if it seems like a right-winger’s fantasy of what ethnic studies are, rather than a description of any course or program you’ve ever been involved with — you’re not alone. Tom Horne crafted this law as a weapon to use against the ethnic studies program in the Tucson Unified School District, but the TUSD says — most recently in a resolution passed just last week — that they’re in full compliance with the law.
Indeed, the law itself bends over backwards to make clear that it’s not aimed at ethnic studies as a whole. It explicitly provides for the continued teaching of “courses or classes that include the history of any ethnic group,” including those which “include the discussion of controversial aspects of history.”
So what’s going on?
What’s going on is that Tom Horne has been on a public crusade against TUSD’s ethnic studies programs for years, and this bill is the fruit of that campaign.
Horne leaves office as schools superintendent today. (He was elected state Attorney General in November.) This morning he formally declared the TUSD Mexican-American Studies program in violation of HB2281.
The District now has sixty days to show the new superintendent that it’s in compliance with the law, though Horne contends that mere changes to the program won’t have that effect. “The violations are deeply rooted in the program itself,” he wrote this morning, “and partial adjustments will not constitute compliance” — they must jettison the program completely.
It’s not clear whether the incoming superintendent, John Huppenthal, shares that view. For their part, the TUSD intends to contest this ruling with Huppenthal, and possibly in the courts. If they’re found in violation the penalty would be a ten percent reduction in state support — a cut that Tucson’s superintendent says “would cripple the district, quite frankly.”
I’ll have more on Horne’s specific findings, and the district’s response, in a follow-up post.
“Whatever you want to do, just do it. Don’t worry about making a damn fool of yourself. Making a damn fool of yourself is absolutely essential.”
–Gloria Steinem
It’s the week between Christmas and New Year’s. Students everywhere are far from their universities, celebrating the holidays with loved ones. Campuses are ghost towns. Blogs like this one are running at a tiny fraction of their usual traffic.
…And nineteen UC Irvine activists are being dragged in front of a judge.
Today is three hundred days exactly since the UC Irvine administration building takeover that resulted in nearly two dozen arrests. The county DA announced just three weeks ago — in the middle of finals — that charges would be brought, and scheduled their appearance date for tomorrow.
December 29.
Cute.
Update | And no, this is not a random artifact of the bureaucratic system. A UC Merced student who allegedly participated in the disruption of November’s UC Regents meeting — ten months after the UCI occupation — was called for a court appearance today. This is an intentional effort to both disrupt the lives of these student activists and deny them the community support that they would otherwise receive.)
Posting is likely to be light for the next few days, though I do have a couple of things in the pipeline. If you’re desperate for a StudentActivism.net fix, I’ll be putting up links to some of the year’s most interesting, popular, and neglected posts over on Twitter all week.
studentactivism.net 
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