Dozens of NCSU students gathered Tuesday at the Court of Carolina to call for peace and solidarity with Palestinians, part of a nationwide wave of campus activism. As part of the NC Week of Action, vigils expanded across both UNC-Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University. Student-led organizers, such as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and the Muslim Student Association (MSA). At one point, a volunteer approached a passerby, offering copies of the Qur’an and inviting them to pause at the tables displaying infographics and elements of Muslim culture, including the Qur’an itself.
Reporters from The Free Pack spoke with several protestors throughout the day, asking their personal reflections and beliefs on the current conflict, and what message they hoped to inspire in the NCSU community. One student remarked, “That literature class is brand-new. The first semester they have ever offered it. That literature constantly comes back to the displacement of the people.” “In fact, my midterm is on the resistance of today versus resistance in the 1950s. What people are doing activist-wise.” Clearly, the ideas of Palestine and its history are beginning to seep into NCSU’s classrooms. In this particular literature class, the professor has students reading works from Palestinian authors, such as Ghassan Kanafani, notorious for his role as a leading member of the People Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which is a militant organization.
Drawing on those discussions of resistance, the student identified herself as an anarchist: someone who believes in the absence of government and rather the assumption of voluntary cooperation. “I’m sort of anti-government. You’re asking an anarchist this.” The student responded to a question about a two-state solution. “The thing is that the Palestinian movement brings out so many radical views from Palestinians themselves, having read some of this literature and seeing the people’s connection to ideas like Marxism. It’s not as radical as one might think.”
The question remains: what does the Palestinian Movement at NCSU’s campus stand for? Is it primarily a call for humanitarian solidarity, or does it reflect broader ideological influences such as Marxism?
Discussions also touched on sensitive issues such as Hamas and its conflicted label of either being a terrorist group or a movement for liberation. Some participants declined to label the group entirely, instead emphasizing the lens through which the Western media views Hamas, which they described as a capitalist framework that overlooked the history of occupation in Palestine. One participant expressed that “Hamas is a part of Palestine and did their job for Palestine as Palestinians themselves.” So, we asked the pro-Palestinian observers what they thought about the public perception of Hamas, which is Palestine’s closest semblance of a governing body and national military. Specifically, “What is it that makes Hamas freedom fighters and not terrorists”? After all, to be objective, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.
They basically all gave the same response: the difference lies in that they are resisting against an oppressive colonial settler regime that has been removing them from their land by violent force. One person elaborated that while they were a pacifist, sometimes violence is necessary when all other courses of action have not gained ground. Another said that they feel that they are much more comfortable with violence if it is necessary, saying that “Sometimes people need to die, and I think in this case that is true”. To their credit, it was Benjamin Franklin himself who is quoted “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
Hamas was chartered in 1988, and was initially funded majorly by the state of Israel to sow division amongst the Palestinians, in efforts to weaken the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization). This stream of funding is not restricted to the time period of Hamas’ inception; it has continued under Netanyahu, for example. For years now, Netanyahu has allowed mainly Qatar and Iran, along with other Muslim nations, to send millions of dollars in cash to the Gaza Strip.
From seemingly Napoleonic influences with respect to “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” He has openly admitted that his strategy is to allow the funds to keep flowing to keep the Palestinians divided between Hamas in Gaza and the PA (Palestinian Authority) in the West Bank, to prevent the formation of a unified Palestinian state. If you need further corroboration of Israel propping up Hamas, The New York Times led an investigation which revealed that the Mossad had tracked a secret Hamas hundreds of millions of dollars, and intentionally chose not to act upon the intelligence they gathered. According to a former Mossad economic warfare chief, Netanyahu was informed but did not pursue shutting down this stream of funding. Essentially, the motive for Israel creating Hamas was for them to have them as controlled opposition, since they knew they could not fully control all of Palestine, they wanted to at least make sure they could never unite to create a Palestinian state. According to the Brussells Morning Publication, it is stated that “Back in 2001, Yasser Arafat described Hamas as a ‘creation of Israel’…”
Another question we posed to the attendants of the event was when they thought this conflict started, as some say it began on October 7th, 2023, while others assert that this is a conflict that predates the modern state of Israel’s existence and goes back hundreds or thousands of years. One respondent said that you could attribute the start of this conflict to the Nakba in 1967, which was the mass displacement of roughly 300,000 Palestinians that occurred during the Six-Day War under Israeli control of Gaza and the West Bank. Another said that you could say it started in 1948 when the state of Israel was created, because that was the first large displacement of the Palestinians, where more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs (which is about half of Mandatory Palestine’s predominantly Arab population at the time) were forced to flee from their homes. The general consensus among them was that this conflict did not start on October 7th, 2023.
Many of the participants at the event also wore keffiyeh and even face masks, like the ones used in the COVID-19 pandemic, repurposed as Palestinian nationalism. The style of the keffiyeh’s varied, whether worn around a person’s neck or waist. While the precise meanings behind the COVID-19 masks were not explicitly stated, their presence alone evoked questions of suppression that characterized the pandemic years.
