Column | End each conversation with the phrase: By the way, I believe that Gaza should be liberated.

Intelligence coincides with critical thinking, as I first learned at grammar school and then at university. We read about contrarian thinkers who challenged religious, patriarchal or colonial ideas and learned a canon of statements and terms that contained a wealth of knowledge for the trained mind. ‘Il faut cultiver notre jardin’ said something about the perpetual journey towards more civilization, ‘cogito ergo sum’ gave weight to reason and contrasted it with sentiment. And when you came to the end of your speech, and wanted to emphasize the thing that was beyond discussion, it was ‘by the way, I am of the opinion (that Carthage should be destroyed)’.

Universities have traditionally been places where space is made for lessons from the past. The idea of ​​this is still fresh in minds speaking truth to power whispered. This non-violent political tactic that contradicts the incumbent power or a prevailing norm has been used throughout the (free) world for decades by young, committed people who still have energy to speak out against injustice while others are too busy with their own concerns. or have sunk into what James Baldwin once called ‘moral apathy’.

Protests are now flaring up in the United States in response to the war in Gaza. Students demand that their university end financial investments and other ties with Israel. What started at Columbia University has spread across the country. The New York Times When I typed this piece, there were a total of 800 arrested students.

Student protests fit into a critical tradition that, in my view, should be cherished, and not – as is currently happening – suppressed. Often enough they hold up a mirror to society and show a reflection that we do not necessarily like. This happened in the 1960s when students protested against segregation in America, the war violence in Vietnam, and later against the war in Iraq. Looking back, no one can deny the importance of the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s, or the mass protest, initiated by students, in Tiananmen Square, where the images of a lonely young man facing a row of tanks remain forever in our collective memory was engraved.

The war in Gaza also gives rise to protests in the Netherlands; last month against the exchange of knowledge between Leiden University and various Israeli institutes. Just like in the US, the demonstrators here are also regarded as rioters (in Leiden, demonstrators were chased into the shopping street) and just like in America, the protests here are regarded as anti-Semitic, in a Pavlovian reaction.

Semantic discussions about what freedom and security exactly mean come at the expense of a substantive conversation, which means that too little attention is paid to how it is possible that some universities have close ties with the Israeli government that is carrying out a genocide. One astonishing fact cannot be ignored, namely that all schools and universities in Gaza have been destroyed by Israel. Thousands of students and professors have been killed. Anyone who is affiliated with a scientific institute or who is even remotely concerned about the importance of science should condemn this.

I am no longer a student, but I want to shout to the protesters: keep doing what you are doing. Speak out against a university that claims to encourage critical thinking, but which in reality is less objective and even takes less responsibility than it itself promotes. And end every conversation with the phrase: by the way, I believe that Gaza must be liberated.

Karin Amatmoekrim is a writer and man of letters. She writes a column here every other week.

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