Written by Sage Setty
Europe’s cultural and political recovery from the devastation of WWII was closely associated with a central ethical binary: did you comply with occupation or did you resist it? Compliance and resistance took on global legal implications, as primely exhibited in the Nuremburg Trials. De facto remonstrations through popular punishments—think processions of Paris’s German-associated women with their forcibly shaved heads. However, I would argue that in our globalized commercial and political environment, it is nearly impossible to escape complicity in some form of indignity or injustice. Most presciently, as the calls of student protests and demonstrations have reminded us for the past year, is the genocide in Palestine. Drawing on parallels between the post-war period and today, I will articulate the complexities of ethical binaries as they apply to modern colonial dynamics and make the case for student resistance.
Compliance and resistance are at the heart of political and ethical debates over how individuals and collectives engage with imperialism. In the early twentieth century this dynamic was largely limited to the dialogue surrounding Hitler’s empire. Since the post-war period, the existentialist debate of ethical responsibility in context of an oppressive or immoral state has evolved alongside global politics. As youthful arbiters of progressive thought, students groups have enduringly remained at the center of this development, engaging in debates against militarism, increased totalitarianism, freedom of expression, and, in a twenty-first century context—genocide and ecocide.
Yet, in 2024, it seems that a constructive framework of compliance versus resistance is no longer relevant outside of the most politically radicalized vocabularies. Or at least that is the impression left by its exclusion from the majority’s conception of their relationship to their state, their economy, and their individual ethical responsibilities. However, as October 7th approaches (by the publication of this article it will have passed) and Islamophobia, Antisemitism, and acute ignorance slink their way into the forefront of media coverage on the Palestinian genocide, it is essential to reinstate a reinvigorated notion of personal accountability. Everyone, everyone, must ask themselves—will I comply or will I resist?
On March 26, 2024 ‘rights expert’ Francesca Albanese reported at the UN that ‘the genocide in Gaza is the most extreme stage of a long-standing settler colonial process of erasure of the native Palestinians.’ In the most official forum possible, Albanese thus cemented the legal implications of Israel’s human rights violations. This identification creates an obvious association between Palestinian genocide and the Holocaust—the original source of the compliance/resistance framework. However, parallels run even deeper. Albanese’s evaluation emphasizes the idea that genocide is not isolated; it occurs as a manifestation of expansionist, imperialism and totalitarianism. In the past year, the realities of Israel’s violent totalitarianism have grown impossible to ignore. Nevertheless, Western governments, educational institutions, and companies continually fail to extricate themselves from the entity, with its persistent dedication to genocide. This issue pervades our own university campus.
Edinburgh University has enduringly aligned itself with the Israeli war machine. Facilitating the genocide’s inception, it was Chancellor Arthur James Balfour who signed the Declaration on Palestine in 1917 which the Edinburgh University Race Equality Network calls, ‘a monumental imperial act denying the Palestinian people the right to self-determination in their own homeland.’ Current Principial, Peter Mathieson chooses to remain aligned with this. Despite students pleas for divestment, our university still holds an estimated £782,921 in investments with Blackrock. On 20 June 2024, The United Nations Working Group on Business and Human Rights made clear that ‘the imperative for an arms embargo on Israel and for investors to take decisive action is more urgent than ever’ as ‘arms initiate, sustain, exacerbate, and prolong armed conflicts, as well as other forms of oppression, hence the availability of arms is an essential precondition for the commission of war crimes.’ This is a basic principle which has been established and re-established across the course of the genocide. And still, Edinburgh University fails to divest.
So it remains, that Edinburgh tuition dollars are financing the companies that finance genocide. Students, through this economic link, go from being satellite observers of this humanitarian crisis to nonconsenting financiers. To support the Israeli state is to support their extermination of the Palestinian people, with all its cosmetic similarities to the Holocaust. I do make aim to reduce the complex nature of dynamic. Just as with WWII, the entrenchment of complicity in our campus, our food, our way of life makes a level of entanglement impossible to avoid. We need only to return to post-war Paris to understand the dangers of over-simplification. I do not, per se, aim to shave your head and parade you down the street. No, rather I aim to stress that an admission of complicity, an acknowledgement of person responsibility, can give way to the potent forms of resistance and that is exactly what this crisis requires.
If the Palestinian genocide is not going to be countered on a systemic level, then individuals need to be in active resistance against the contributing parties. This decision will be made on October 7, 2024 at the University Court meeting. Edinburgh University students, led by the efforts of Justice for Palestine Society (JPS), have articulated again and again that the human rights laws being violated in Gaza should, undisputably, precipitate divestment.
Our university’s resolute Palestinian students have been preaching hopeful optimism despite Peter Mathieson and his administration continually falling short. In the likely outcome that our university decides not to divest, will you decide to comply or resist? To aid in your decision, I will quote a member of Edinburgh University’s Amnesty International chapter. At a meeting commemorating the work of Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani they said:
‘Remember who is carpet bombing Lebanon, remember who is bombing Gaza daily, when you think about who to believe and where to put your money.’
Remember what is human and what is political artifice. Remember that you have autonomy, to either comply or resist, and that there is a human cost to your complicity. More than anything, remember that this is not a forgone tragedy and that Gaza and the Palestinian people are not doomed. Palestine will endure, and as its does, the weight of your decision to either remain ignorant or fight for justice will only increase in importance. Pick your pill. Rise above. Resist.
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