US campuses erupt in protest as Naftali Bennett tours to whitewash Gaza genocide

By Musa Iqbal

“I’ve killed many Arabs in my life, and there’s no problem with that.”

In the United States, such a statement grants you the privilege of conducting a speaking tour across prestigious Ivy League universities and any opposition to it and the Zionist regime responsible for such killings leads to suspension, expulsion, and possibly even arrest.

This vile statement was made by former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett in 2013, who embarked on a speaking tour across various US institutions earlier this week, including Ivy League schools such as Columbia, Harvard, and Liberty University.

Bennett is among the worst of Zionist criminals, with a track record drenched in blood.

He was a military officer during the April 1996 Qana Massacre in Lebanon, where Israel murdered over 100 civilians who were seeking shelter and safety during the illegal Zionist occupation.

In an investigation conducted by The Electronic Intifada, it was revealed that Bennett greenlit the indiscriminate and horrifying shelling, which struck a UNIFIL base.

The Israeli occupation of Lebanon in the 1990s, in which Bennett was a veteran, was marked by horrendous war crimes and the intentional targeting of civilians and civil infrastructure.

Yet, Bennett’s commitment to flagrant war crimes did not end there. During his premiership, he oversaw egregiously illegal settler expansion into the occupied West Bank, violating international law and worst committing crimes against humanity on a daily basis.

Bennett’s university tour in the US was centered on whitewashing Israeli war crimes and defending the Zionist occupation. The tour was an attack on the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which has successfully pressured prominent brands to distance themselves from the Israeli genocidal regime and its allies.

The tour was an aggressive defense of the genocide perpetrated by the Zionist occupation over the past 17 months. It sought to leverage institutional resources and funding to ensure Bennett’s speeches proceed uninterrupted, leading to violent crackdowns on student dissent.

Indeed, academia has become a battleground for the Palestinian solidarity movement, arguably its primary arena within the United States.

In April 2024, student encampments were launched nationwide, calling for the disclosure and divestment of university ties to Israeli institutions. While Zionist media tends to dismiss university collaborations as “harmless,” organizations like the Israel Institute actively promote Zionist racist ideology within university curricula, even going so far as to craft Zionist-aligned course materials and deploy Israeli professors with Israeli military backgrounds.

Students have demanded an end to these collaborations and full transparency regarding any ties to the Israeli occupation.

While Bennett is welcomed with open arms, dissent and opposition to Israeli curricula and speakers are met with threats of expulsion and arrest. US President Donald Trump has vowed to crack down on the Palestinian solidarity movement, threatening universities with the withdrawal of federal funding should they continue allowing students to criticize Israel.

Trump perpetuates the false equivalency of anti-Zionism and anti-Judaism, using this narrative to justify pulling federal funding if universities fail to act against Palestine solidarity organizers.

He has even threatened to deport migrant students on visas if they engage in criticism of the Tel Aviv regime or participate in protest activities.

These threats, however, have not deterred students. Undeterred, students at Columbia University protested against Bennett despite being barred from entering his speaking event.

The following day, they returned to Columbia University and occupied a hall within Barnard College, echoing the tactics employed by the same student movement last year. Barnard recently expelled students involved in the previous year’s protests, reigniting campus demonstrations just as Bennett arrived.

Effectively caving to pressure from the Trump administration, Columbia officials immediately called the New York Police Department on the protesters, who proceeded to brutalize the students.

Yet, these brave students, whose numbers remain undiminished and perhaps even reinforced compared to last semester’s actions, are undaunted by the threats from both the university and the Trump administration.

They have vowed to continue their struggle against the university’s Zionist collaborations, while the Student Government Association has condemned the NYPD’s actions in a letter addressed to the Barnard College president.

Rather than dying down as world Zionism and the US government had hoped, the student movement is instead restrategizing and resurging. Bennett’s tour has only further mobilized students, not just in New York but also at his stops at Harvard and Ohio State University.

Students at Ohio State University demonstrated against Bennett, once again dismissing Trump’s threats. The Ohio Student Association fired back at Trump, publishing a statement that directly addressed the repression:

"We are calling out injustice and demanding accountability. Our voices create real change, and we won’t be silenced. This is our right. No authoritarian threat will take it away from us."

Harvard students also actively mobilized against Bennett, declaring that they will not welcome Zionist war criminals.

As the saying goes, repression breeds resistance. The student movement—and the Palestinian solidarity movement as a whole—understands that the Trump administration, in lockstep with world Zionism, is attempting to quickly “wrap things up” with the Palestinian movement, as it has exposed the role of American imperialism and threatened the very legitimacy of institutions once taken for granted in American society.

Recognizing Trump’s tactics, the movement knows that conceding an inch means giving up a mile. The struggle for Palestine experiences ebbs and flows, but it does not retreat.

Solidarity activists understand that repression is merely a reaction to the growing popularity of the Palestinian cause, yielding to such threats would mean surrendering hard-fought gains.

The Palestinian solidarity movement has profoundly transformed the fabric of student society, forcing institutions sustained by the decaying fruits of imperialism to either change course or face disruption and illegitimacy.

Universities pride themselves on being incubators of free thought, expression, and the leaders of tomorrow.

Students are now challenging this claim, while the state scrambles to suppress the growing popularity of the Palestinian cause. The Palestinian cause is here to stay and to grow—much to the dismay of Zionist imperialists.

Musa Iqbal is a Boston-based researcher and writer focusing on US domestic and foreign policy.

(The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Press TV.)

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