The Nation’s Conscience, Part II - Read by Eunice Wong

Text Originally published May 08, 2024 Strangelove 2024 — by Mr. Fish University President Christopher Eisgruber met with the hunger strikers – the first meeting by school administrators with protesters since Oct. 7 – but dismissed their demands. “This is probably the most important thing I’ve done here,” says Areeq Hasan, a senior who is going to do a PhD in applied physics next year at Stanford, who is also part of the hunger strike. “If we’re on a scale of one to 10, this is a 10. Since the start of encampment, I have tried to become a better person. We have pillars of faith. One of them is sunnah, which is prayer. That’s a place where you train yourself to become a better person. It is linked to spirituality. That’s something I’ve been emphasizing more during my time at Princeton. There’s another aspect of faith. Zakat. It means charity, but you can read it more generally as justice…economic justice and social justice. I’m training myself, but to what end? This encampment is not just about trying to cultivate, to purify my heart to try to become a better person, but about trying to stand for justice and actively use these skills that I’m learning to command what I feel to be right and to forbid what I believe to be wrong, to stand up for oppressed people around the world.” Anha Khan, a Princeton student on hunger strike whose family is from Bangladesh, sits with her knees tucked up in front of her. She is wearing blue sweatpants that say Looney Tunes and has an engagement ring that every so often glints in the light. She sees in Bangladesh’s history of colonialism, dispossession and genocide, the experience of Palestinians. “So much was taken from my people,” she says. “We haven’t had the time or the resources to recuperate from the terrible times we’ve gone through. Not only did my people go through a genocide in 1971, but we were also victims of the partition that happened in 1947 and then civil disputes between West and East Pakistan throughout the forties, the fifties and the sixties. It makes me angry. If we weren’t colonized by the British throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century, and if we weren’t occupied, we would have had time to develop and create a more prosperous society. Now we’re staggering because so much was taken from us. It’s not fair.” The hostility of the university has radicalized the students, who see university administrators attempting to placate external pressures from wealthy donors, the weapons manufacturers and the Israel lobby, rather than deal with the internal realities of the non-violent protests and the genocide. “The administration doesn’t care about the well being, health or safety of their students,” Khan tells me. “We have tried to get at least tents out at night. Since we are on a 24-hour liquid fast, not eating anything, our bodies are working overtime to stay resilient. Our immune systems are not as strong. Yet the university tells us we can’t pitch up tents to keep ourselves safe at night from the cold and the winds. It’s abhorrent for me. I feel a lot more physical weakness. My headaches are worse. There is an inability to even climb up stairs now. It made me realize that for the past seven months what Gazans have been facing is a million times worse. You can’t understand their plight unless you experience that kind of starvation that they’re experiencing, although I’m not experiencing the atrocities they’re experiencing.” The hunger strikers, while getting a lot of support on social media, have also been the targets of death threats and hateful messages from conservative influencers. “I give them 10 hours before they call DoorDash,” someone posted on X. “Why won’t they give up water, don’t they care about Palestine? Come on, give up water!” another post read. “Can they hold their breath too? Asking for a friend,” another read. “OK so I hear there’s going to be a bunch of barbecues at Princeton this weekend, let’s bring out a bunch of pork products too to show these Muslims!” someone posted. On campus the tiny groups of counter protesters, many from the ultra orthodox Chabad House, jeer at the protesters, shouting “Jihadists!” or “I like your terrorist headscarf!” “It is horrifying to see thousands upon thousands of people wish for our deaths and hope that we starve and die,” Khan says softly. “In the press release video, I wore a mask. One of the funnier comments I got was, ‘Wow, I bet that chick on the right has buck-teeth behind that mask.’ It’s ridiculous. Another read, ‘I bet that chick on the right used her Dyson Supersonic before coming to the press release.’ The Dyson Supersonic is a really expensive hair dryer. Honestly, the only thing I got from that was that my hair looked good, so thank you!” David Chmielewski, a senior whose parents are Polish and who had family interned in the Nazi death camps, is a Muslim convert. His visits to the concentration camps in Poland, including Auschwitz, made him acutely aware of the capacity for human evil. He sees this evil in the genocide in Gaza. He sees the same indifference and support that characterized Nazi Germany. “Never again,” he says, means never again for everyone. “Since the genocide, the university has failed to reach out to Arab students, to Muslim students and to Palestinian students to offer support,” he tells me. “The university claims it is committed to diversity, equity and inclusion, but we don’t feel we belong here.” “We’re told in our Islamic tradition by our prophets that when one part of the ummah, the nation of believers, feels pain, then we all feel pain,” he says. “That has to be an important motivation for us. But the second part is that Islam gives us an obligation to strive for justice regardless of who we’re striving on behalf of. There are plenty of Palestinians who aren’t Muslim, but we’re fighting for the liberation of all Palestinians. Muslims stand up for issues that aren’t specifically Muslim issues. There were Muslims who were involved in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. There were Muslims involved in the civil rights movement. We draw inspiration from them.” “This is a beautiful interfaith struggle,” he says. “Yesterday, we set up a tarp where we were praying. We had people doing group Quran recitations. On the same tarp, Jewish students had their Shabbat service. On Sunday, we had Christian services at the encampment. We are trying to give a vision of the world that we want to build, a world after apartheid. We’re not just responding to Israeli apartheid, we’re trying to build our own vision of what a society would look like. That’s what you see when you have people doing Quran recitations or reading Shabbat services on the same tarp, that’s the kind of world we want to build.” “We’ve been portrayed as causing people to feel unsafe,” he says. “We’ve been perceived as presenting a threat. Part of the motivation for the hunger strike is making clear that we’re not the people making anyone unsafe. The university is making us unsafe. They’re unwilling to meet with us and we’re willing to starve ourselves. Who’s causing the un-safety? There is a hypocrisy about how we’re being portrayed. We’re being portrayed as violent when it’s the universities who are calling police on peaceful protesters. We’re being portrayed as disrupting everything around us, but what we’re drawing on are traditions fundamental to American political culture. We’re drawing on traditions of sit-ins, hunger strikes and peaceful encampments. Palestinian political prisoners have carried out hunger strikes for decades. The hunger strike goes back to de-colonial struggles before that, to India, to Ireland, to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.” “Palestinian liberation is the cause of human liberation,” he goes on. “Palestine is the most obvious example in the world today, other than the United States, of settler-colonialism. The struggle against Zionist occupation is viewed accurately by Zionists both within the United Sta… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe