Ranjona Banerji | Palestine, and a tale of two democracies

It’s fascinating to watch how functioning democracies totally abhor any semblance of democratic behaviour from its citizens. You need go no further than the United States of America and the treatment of student protests right now.

America’s most liberal colleges — 21 at last count — have tried every trick in the book to silence their students — academic, admission-related, curfews and boundaries and now brutal law enforcement.

The students, oddly enough, continue to protest because they continue to believe that they live in a democracy and have a constitutional right to protest. They shout for free Palestine and for an end to genocide. Both of which sentiments upset the forces of democracy.

Maybe we should backtrack a bit?

College authorities from Harvard to Columbia to Barnard to Yale to NYU to Michigan to Stanford to Texas to Southern California are caught in a terrible bind. The end of the Second World War led to an acceptance that Europe’s Jews had been treated cruelly, brutally, unconscionably and abominably for thousands of years. The Holocaust made the world swear that antisemitism is unacceptable. As it is.

But with the formation of Israel in 1948, the milk of human compassion has been forced into an impossible choice — sacrifice the rights of Palestinians over the rights of Jews, and in particular the rights of Israeli Zionist Jews. And with that, human compassion is tainted and in effect, meaningless.

This is not the first time the poison of this choice has been exposed and it won’t be the last.

But the effects on the world’s notions of democracy are catastrophic. Or is that too strong a word for you?

That a sovereign democracy that set a democratic standard for the rest of the world to follow — albeit full of contradictions, warts, injustices and cruelty — finds itself forced to attacks its own citizens, its children, protesting against injustice because the sovereign democracy is forced by precedent to defend another sovereign country’s rights to annihilate people plus defend the other sovereign nation’s fragile sentiments about its identity, exposes every fault-line in such a democracy.

What are these students at American universities demanding that is so awful that they have to be restrained, hit with rubber bullets and denied education?

Let’s see if it’s hair-raising brutal stuff, one that any government, democratic or otherwise, would be forced to put an immediate end to, like demanding brutal killing of thousands, with particular emphasis on children and patients in hospitals… But what odd students, they seem to want peace, a ceasefire in Gaza, the end of apartheid of the Palestinian people within their own homeland which was handed by Western powers to the new state of Israel, and for the US government to stop funding genocide in Palestinian areas.

If it was against any other country but Israel, it is unlikely that the students would have found much pushback from college authorities, let alone the state administration’s law and order arms.

What then is democracy as the US understands it, as we understand it, as the world understands it?

Democracy in the 2000s appears to mean whatever the government of the day thinks it means. It could be majority rules in an unofficial poll, like Brexit. Or it could be “I don’t believe I lost even if I did” like Donald Trump and his supporters. Or it could be “because I got elected I can do whatever I want”, like in Turkey and India, with Recep Erdogan and Narendra Modi.

As we see it, all of those things. And not the few things that humans choose democracy for — freedom from monarchic rule, and the ability to makes the rules and choose the people to run the state that would not crush or rubber-bullet or destroy you.

And maybe it did work for a few decades. But the more appealing power became, the more hydra-headed notions of democracy have become. And so, in the world’s exemplar democracy we see democracy threatened by the upholders of democracy.

Will the students win? It’s a different world from the 1960s and 70s and the protests against the Vietnam War. And it’s a different world from the neo-lib-con world where young people became part of The System very early, contained and conservatised by the illusion of lots of money for everyone forever. The collapse of 2008 took care of that for the Western world.

For us in India, the illusion of faux historic greatness has confined us for the last 10 years, where the cracked shell of democracy is papered within, hiding from us its tattered state. We do not have the stamina to protest for ourselves effectively, forget the people of other lands. We watch this election season go past in the extreme heat, lacklustre, unable to believe what anyone says. We do not even have the luxury of knowing that apartheid and discrimination are wrong. Our notions of the past are stirred up so that we are in a perpetual confused spin — we cannot eat enough because we cannot afford to eat or we have so much to eat that we’ve forgotten that beyond our profusion of choice, there are others without anything.

Elected monarchies, old promises, past transgressions have all landed up in the same stodgy soup, in which we, the people, struggle to keep our heads above the surface. Student protests in India are not treated much differently than those in America. We are the mother of democracy, after all, where students have the right to study hard and listen to their parents. Not have protests like anti-national people.

It’s not this land is your land, this land is my land. It’s not into some heaven of freedom that we may awake. Unless we do actually wake up and speak up.

Maybe those students do have something going for them after all.