Text of a speech delivered at the First Palestine Solidarity Rally of Fall 2025 at Princeton University. Organized by Students for Justice in Palestine to honor the memory of Aysenur Eygi, killed Sep 6th 2024 by the IOF in the village of Beita, West Bank, while protesting illegal settlements and the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Liberalism, as Professor of African American History Dr Robin D.G. Kelley (and others) have underlined, has led to (among other failed strategies for societal improvement ) carceral feminism. This is the (white liberal feminist) notion that systemic solutions to systemic problems that have led to violence against women, can be set aside in the mistaken belief that instead, things will improve if we just punish individual perpetrators by imprisoning them in a racist capitalist society that already relies on policing POC and economically downtrodden neighborboods heavily built up in the public imaginary as the hotbeds of such violence.

Forget funding impoverished schools and communities; forget providing housing and health care; forget linking toxic masculinity and violence to white supremacist war-mongering patriarchy, so as to address root causes of such violence. Oh no! Let us instead, take resources away from such efforts at systemic change and teach citizens to buy into liberal notions of “progress” underwritten by capitalist priorities of policing and so-called law and order solutions, that are meant to preserve the status quo that keeps ruling elites in power, safe in their ivory towers and gated compounds (what else is suburbia?) — whilst everyone else including immigrant workers of color must be policed, kept out, imprisoned, raped, deported, murdered. As Trump ally and former senior advisor Stephen Miller has repeatedly stated, it is a specific founding population of “Anglo-Saxon, Scots-Irish, and German” settlers who created the nation and only later allowed certain immigrants to join the original “core” of “white” settlers on Turtle Island.

Today, the whole world can see the effects of such liberal ideology and education on our campuses– with administrators representing ruling class interests under the guise of law and order liberalism, bringing in the police, arresting our students, denying them their hard-earned degrees, firing professors as they/we all stand together in solidarity to protest the slaughter and starvation of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Gaza; these same ruling elites authorized the kidnapping and incarceration of those POC immigrant students who stood up for justice like Mahmoud Khalil, Mohsen Madawi, Rumeysa Ozturk by demanding systemic change, as they linked their fight for Palestinian rights to those of workers everywhere, to women’s rights to reproductive justice, to solidarity with Black Lives Matter etc.

This joining together of different struggles for justice is the only way to defeat centuries-old genocidal imperialist and colonialist settler-occupation projects that link the histories of Turtle Island and Palestine. For all with eyes to see and ears to hear, it is crystal clear if it wasnt before, that all these struggles for justice, born from centuries of shared colonial, racist and gender oppression, are linked, and that none of us can escape the wages of violence set in motion by hateful ideologies that seek to separate us along the lines of class, race, gender, sexual, religious and national differences.

It is this shared struggle that Aysenur Eygi whose memory we honor today, lost her life participating in, because she recognized the importance of solidarity. Gunned down by the IOF with weapons our government supplies them with to keep the fascist status quo in place. To quote R. Kelley once more: “Defeating fascism requires recognizing that we need to stand in solidarity and fight for others as if our lives depended on it.”

And make no mistake, we are living under a creeping fascism right now, from Israel to the USA, one colonial imperialist entity shoring up the other. Within such a political calculus, we are all Palestinians–a fact Aysenur recognized, and laid her life on the line to defend. And the only way to halt the spread of the scholasticide that we have witnessed as part of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, is to insist and fight for the creation of Abolitionist Universities here, rising Phoenix-like from the ashes of liberal academia here on Turtle Island to reclaim our Commons.

No more liberal education but revolutionary education, producing knowledge not in service of the goals of Empire, but in order to hasten its demise, so that we can all finally, be free, from the rivers to the seas.

Standing in solidarity.

Fighting for others as though our lives depended on it.

Because, in fact, they do.

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