The Past Is Present

Oscar Hernández

Harvard Commencement Protest, 1985. Man on right is FBI agent shadowing protesters.

STUDENT ENCAMPMENTS ARE springing up in U.S. universities and now (May, 2024) here in Montréal. They are denouncing apartheid in Israel. They are demanding an end to Israel’s war against Palestine. They want their universities to divest from Israel.

Apartheid. Divestment. Déjà vu. Today’s protests awaken memories from 39 years ago and move me to share personal experience and ways the past is present: then, the brutal legacy of colonialism in South Africa, now a similar legacy in Israel and Palestine.

In the spring of 1985, I was a 25-year-old physics grad student at Harvard. Then, Nelson Mandela was in prison, considered a terrorist by South Africa and its Western backers. Rummaging through my pile of mementos, I found handwritten descriptions and musings from those moments.

My class notes, you could call them. One passage conveys a story I had heard during my years organizing:

“When former South African political prisoner Dennis Brutus was breaking rocks on Robben Island 20 years ago, a warden asked him how he could be so stupid as to think he could defeat the apartheid government. Dennis Brutus said to him: ‘How do you know you can never lose’ Quickly the warden replied, ‘America will never allow it.’”

Israel must feel the same as it bombs Gaza and organizes pogroms on West Bank Palestinian villages. But while the U.S. policy and its Western allies support Israel, much of their populations are repulsed by the blatant hypocrisy. My 1985 manuscript continues:

“…American corporations do not want to see the fall of the white minority government. And our universities invest in these corporations, not because our university presidents are immoral, but because universities are part of the corporate system.”

Spring 1985 started with student sit-ins and occupations demanding divestment. I remember the urgent discussions among anti-apartheid Harvard students. Should our campus movement join the growing civil disobedience protest? Our support for this earned us the label of the “radical” caucus.

With each passing day, events moved more students to support an occupation. Reverend Jesse Jackson came to speak at Harvard, and then at a rally in support of the Columbia University occupation. A National Day of Protest against apartheid was set for April 24.

Harvard’s Southern Africa Solidarity Committee (SASC), formed in 1978, was won over. We planned the occupation of 17 Quincy Street — one business day to occupy the Harvard Corporation headquarters, a fitting compromise with the initially reluctant.

In the swirl of discussion, we realized that the administration, unsurprisingly, had recruited informant(s). We moved delicately. Meeting the night before our April 24 action, we aired our reasons, and proposed to decide only on a list of candidate sites.

Entering Harvard Corporation Offices

Early on the morning of the 24th we went to our pre-action meeting dressed “nicely” (so as not to appear too student-like). A small group had been delegated to choose a site from the list. One person had become visibly uncomfortable during the previous night’s meeting and was absent that morning.

We walked to 17 Quincy St. from different directions in small groups. Evan carried a large, empty box. A particularly well-dressed Jen rang the door and announced a delivery. The double doors would have to open wide. Jen stalled with small talk while we arrived. We all began to pour in through the vestibule.

“As I walked thru the second doorway, the officer grabbed me with one of his outstretched arms. I went limp and sat on the floor. The guard’s preoccupation with 165 pounds of dead weight allowed many people to go by without even touching the guard.”

About 40 students entered the Corporation offices at 9:15 am on April 24, 1985. We introduced ourselves, explained why we were there, and pledged to leave at 5 pm. At the disciplinary hearing that followed, staff and administrators from 17 Quincy St. confirmed that protestors were generally courteous and civil.

When “the Chief of Harvard Police arrived and was told of the students’ procedures and guarantee to leave at 5 pm, [he] commented, ‘I can live with that.’… Promptly at 5 pm, having vacuumed the area they had occupied, the protestors left the building, as they had promised.” (Harvard University Committee on Rights and Responsibilities, Report on Incidents at 17 Quincy Street, April 24, 1985, and at Lowell House, May 2, 1985.)

The occupation was a public opinion success, leading the Harvard Conservative Club to invite New York City Consul General for South Africa Abe S. Hoppenstein for a meeting in Lowell House’s Junior Common Room (JCR) on May 2.

He was greeted by a loud protest that continued to be heard during the meeting, so they cut the meeting short and escorted Hoppenstein to a waiting car. But as my notes record:

“Ben jumped out and laid down in front of Abe’s car. A bunch of us joined in. Abe left his car and went back to the JCR. Most of the people went and stood in front of the doors to the JCR. … for two hours…”

Hoppenstein finally left the meeting room inside a huddle of Conservative Club members and Harvard Police who seemed to relish knocking down and stepping on the protestors blocking the path.

“The security guards grabbed Ben’s throat and lifted him off the ground. Zach said they tried to smash his head into the concrete and so he ran over and placed his arms under his head.”

Our final anti-apartheid protest of the Harvard school year occurred on commencement day, June 6. We organized a funeral procession with black coffins on the sides of which were written “Shoot this is a funeral,” “Racism kills,” “A Harvard investment.”

Surrounded by police and security, we were forced out. Ann, a physics postdoc friend of mine, mentioned to me sometime later that she saw our procession in the film The Return of Ruben Blades.

Social Justice Struggle vs. “Order”

The social justice struggle in 1985 went beyond the university anti-apartheid movement. In the United States the Pledge of Resistance was a national group formed in 1984 in response to the threat of a U.S. invasion of Nicaragua.

Just five years earlier, Nicaragua had ousted the U.S.-supported dictator Somoza, and the new Sandinista government brought in a mixed economy with agrarian reform and a literacy campaign. People signed the pledge to nonviolently resist U.S. aggressions towards Nicaragua and the rest of Central America.

In 1985, bills were pending in the U.S. Congress that would provide aid to the Contras, the armed opposition that carried out attacks on Nicaraguan civilians from its bases in Honduras. On May 7, 1985, as members of the Pledge, we occupied the J.F. Kennedy Federal Building in Boston, Massachusetts to demonstrate our opposition to those bills.

My Harvard friends and I were among the 569 people arrested, held overnight, and charged the next morning. Eventually the charges were dropped, and we did not need to appear in court after our May 8 hearing.

Harvard University, however, held disciplinary hearings for the aforementioned incidents. We were accused of violence, when in fact they used violence against us. Eleven students were formally admonished for the 17 Quincy Street occupation. In the Lowell House incident, the University was particularly critical of “those protestors who, in effect, imprisoned a guest at the University.”

Fourteen students were charged and in the end 10 required to withdraw from the University. This requirement was suspended with the warning that in the event of further misconduct, the suspension would be nullified, and they would really be required to withdraw.

Police forces in 1985 were not as heavily armed as now. To use heavy weapons once required calling the national guard or the army. Today’s militarized police forces routinely brandish terrorizing weapons against divestment protests.

On May 1, 2024 counter-protesters violently attacked the encampment at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). The next day police brutally dismantled the targeted encampment. Hours later, U.S. President Biden supported the police action: “Order must prevail.”

McGill University encampment — hardly the “heavily fortified focal point for intimidation and violence” the administration claimed when forcing its dismantlement.

On that same day, with pro-Israel counter-protesters threatening the McGill encampment, Quebec’s premier François Legault said, “The law must be respected so I expect police to dismantle these encampments.”

Pro-Palestine protesters at McGill’s encampment wore masks over concerns about retaliation, harassment and blacklisting from pro-Israel groups such as the website Canary Mission.

Backlash against student actions calling for divestment from Israel is a testament to their importance. Let us remember that the protests of 40 years ago succeeded, leading hundreds of universities to divest.

McGill became the first Canadian university to divest from apartheid South Africa in 1985. The U.S. enacted the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986, adding to international pressure on the South African government to negotiate with the “terrorist” Nelson Mandela. The negotiations led to Mandela’s unconditional release in 1990, the dismantling of apartheid, and ultimately to Mandela’s election as the first Black president of South Africa in 1994.

It is therefore very significant that on December 29, 2023, South Africa sued Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for the crime of genocide against Palestinians. Let us also appreciate Nicaragua’s March 1, 2024, suit against Germany at the ICJ under the Genocide Convention for arming Israel.

The Nicaraguan case was opened by Carlos José Argu?ello Gómez, who led Nicaragua’s ICJ case vs. the U.S. in 1986. Then, the ICJ held that the U.S. had violated international law by supporting the Contras and by mining Nicaragua’s harbors.*

In the face of these charges, we can imagine Netanyahu and his right-wing colleagues repeating the same brag that Dennis Brutus heard from his South African prison warden: “America will never allow it.” Yet they should also keep in mind U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s quip, “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.”

Epilogue, July 15, 2024

This article was finalized in the first days of May 2024. On May 14, the Harvard Crimson published an abridged version. That same day, Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine negotiated a peaceful end to their encampment in Harvard Yard with the University President. As part of the agreement students that had been placed on involuntary leave would be reinstated.

Yet a few days later, Harvard announced that 13 pro-Palestine protestors were suspended and not allowed to graduate, and this in opposition to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences recommendation and efforts that they be allowed to do so. More than 1100 undergraduates signed a petition urging Harvard College to overturn its decision.

During Commencement ceremonies, the Harvard President was booed at the end of his address whereas students who went off script during their speeches received a standing ovation for supporting “the 13 undergraduates that will not graduate today.” Then more than 1000 people walked out of the Commencement ceremony, again in support of the 13 students. On July 23 Harvard finally conferred diplomas on 11 of the 13.

On July 10, at 4 am, a private security agency hired by McGill University began the forced dismantlement of the student encampment. This was done in close collaboration with the City of Montreal police and the Quebec Provincial police.

McGill described the encampment as “a heavily fortified focal point for intimidation and violence, organized largely by individuals who are not part of our university community.” Anyone who had visited the encampment, as I did, could see how blatantly false McGill’s statement was.

McGill said that “people linked to the camp … engaged in antisemitic intimidation.” Their ostensible proof of this had been rejected by Quebec courts on two separate attempts during the hearings to get an injunction against the encampment. On the other hand, McGill has never made a mention of Palestine in any of its communications or court filings against the encampment, nor do they acknowledge the systemic anti-Palestinian racism that this omission entails.

Some campuses in North America have already announced their autumn protest dates. Rapper Macklemore’s “Hind’s Hall” summarizes it all very well:

The people, they won’t leave
What is threatenin’ about divesting and wantin’ peace?
The problem isn’t the protests, it’s what they’re protesting
It goes against what our country is funding
(Hey) Block the barricade until Palestine is free
(Hey) Block the barricade until Palestine is free

*Editors’ note: The United States simply ignored the ICJ’s ruling. Today’s Nicaraguan regime, despite the “Sandinista” label, is far different from the popular revolutionary government of the 1980s.

September-October 2024, ATC 232