The wave of organization, encampments, and occupations in universities across the United States is currently one of the epicenters of the international mass mobilization tide against the genocide in Gaza.

Since October of last year, the genocidal aggression of the colonial and racist State of Israel has not stopped for a single day. They have left a trail of destruction of homes, hospitals, infrastructure… They intend to make Gaza uninhabitable and thus fulfill their goal of ethnic cleansing.

Furthermore, in all the major powers – classic United States and European imperialism, Russia, and China aspiring to be imperialist – the threat of militarism is growing significantly, especially since the beginning of the war in Ukraine.

But the massive mobilization on all continents, in all major cities of the world, has opened an international political crisis. The rejection of unconditional support for the genocide by the Biden administration could be decisive in this year’s presidential elections. In the UN Security Council, the United States abstained in a ceasefire vote. It is the first precedent in decades of unconditional support from United States’s imperialism to the Zionist State.

Now, in the heart of imperialism, a new moment of organization has opened up in universities. The encampments could give continuity to the mobilization and protests against the genocide over time. This is a huge difference from the massive marches against the war in Iraq, which were immense but soon yielded to majority support for the war, fueled by the September 11, 2001 attacks.

The encampments began at Columbia University, New York. The university authorities requested the New York police to repress their own students, leaving more than 100 detained. But far from retreating, the response of the student movement was to redouble efforts, starting a true wave of encampments throughout the country, occupying NYU and Yale in New York, reaching the Universities of California, Michigan, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Minnesota.

The movement rejects its government’s support of the genocide. They also demand an end to their universities’ investments in Israeli arms companies.

As well, students denounce that since the Israeli offensive on Gaza, Islamophobic attacks on students and teachers have multiplied, the cowardice of the authorities knows no bounds. Their response has ranged from virtualizing classes, trying to empty the faculties to calling the police to repress the students. They are capable of imprisoning their own students in exchange for the funds they receive from Zionism.

Faced with the wave of occupations growing across the country, presidential spokesperson Mike Johnson suggested the intervention of the National Guard against the students.

The establishment is harsh against students who reject genocide in the same way they are permissive toward the violence of the far-right, with Donald Trump as their reference. They repress students and accuse them of anti-semitism, but no police officer repressed demonstrators in Charlottesville in 2017, when neo-Nazi flags flew at the alt-right rally defending Trumpism, which had the slogan «Jews will not replace us».

The university movement not only faces the classic imperialist establishment but also has as an enemy the new far-right, which seeks to give Donald Trump a second term this year. While cowardly Democrats accuse anti-imperialist students of  being «anti-Semites», they allow and normalize the far-right’s ability to occupy institutional power. The same far-right that has created the conditions for attacks on synagogues and mosques in recent years. The same one that was responsible for the attempted coup on January 6, 2021.

The closest precedent to this wave of mobilization was the anti-racist rebellion of 2020, Black Lives Matter. Just as the embers of the rebellion against racist police violence had not yet cooled, now the fire of rejection of the genocide in Gaza is ignited.

Additionally, the United States is experiencing the most significant wave of unionization in four decades, with the organization of Amazon workers, Starbucks youth, auto workers, and many others. The youth who awakened in the face of racism and the far-right give historical impetus to the reappearance of the workers’ movement on the American scene and to the anti-imperialist mobilization.

University encampments thus blend into the historical situation with the reorganization of the working class and the anti-racist movement; and mobilization and protest may be turning into organization. The protests of students in US campuses coincides with the explosion of the immense university mobilization of 2 million people in Argentina. The Argentine student movement, which on April 23 demonstrated historic strength, not only faces a government hostile to public education, Milei is also a lapdog of imperialism and the genocide in Gaza that must be defeated on all fronts. Meanwhile, the example of student organization for Palestine in the United States spreads to other countries, such as France.

The rejection of genocide in Gaza, as well as the mass student mobilization in Argentina, can be a turning point in the international situation! The organization of students in the United States and Argentina can become an example of solidarity and international anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist organization that confronts the far-right; just as the student movement against the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement in the United States, and the wave of worker-student mobilization that began with the May events in France were.

For an international campaign of solidarity with the student movement, in the United States, Argentina and everywhere! For an end to the genocide in Gaza! Free Palestine!