High School Protests & Repression in Jamaica, Queens

A summation published in April 2024 by Behind Enemy Lines – NYC

Introduction

Since Israel’s genocidal war against Gaza began in October, tens of thousands of people in New York City have taken the streets in near-daily demonstrations against the US-Israel war machine, confronting the reactionary media and sometimes the batons of the NYPD. While some of the protests have become routinized marches to nowhere, groups of youth and students have been a consistent presence, attempting to push them in a more confrontational direction.

We, a multinational group of 5 people in our 20s and 30s, began investigating high school walk-outs in New York City’s public schools. We focused on high schools as a site of struggle due to the reported repression students were facing, the class background and multinational character of New York’s public high school students, and the historic role youth have played in struggles against imperialist wars. We formed the New York chapter of Behind Enemy Lines, an anti-imperialist organization taking anti-imperialist politics to the masses and mobilizing them to confront the people responsible for this war. As a part of establishing our new chapter and orienting our work going forward, we see the need to sum up our work in the high schools so far, identify successes and weaknesses of our work, and reflect on our overall strategy. Above all, we hope this summation challenges anyone who wants to go beyond posting on social media and going to weekly protests to deepen their commitment to the struggle against imperialism by taking it to the masses.

High School Investigation, Agitation, and Protest

We chose to go to the Jamaica neighborhood in Queens to carry out agitation and learn more about conditions in four high schools in the area: Hillcrest High School, Jamaica High School, Thomas Edison High School, and Queens High School for the Sciences at York College. We focused our efforts here due to the concentration of schools in the area, the majority-immigrant population (large sections of Arab and South Asian families and businesses), and the ability for our crew to consistently go.

We prioritized going out as much as possible instead of taking time to meet, analyze, and discuss our strategy. Beyond briefly meeting before our outings and summing up afterwards, we didn’t have our first real meeting to discuss our strategic objectives until nearly a month and a half in. However, we would have learned and accomplished a lot less if we had spent more time in meetings talking to each other. It was crucial to be out in the world speaking to high school students and constantly experimenting with different tactics, summing up and learning as we went along.

Tactically, we used soapbox-style agitation and rapid flyering at Hillcrest where students get dismissed all at once in a massive flood. At Jamaica and Thomas Edison, students tend to trickle out more slowly and hang around the neighborhood after dismissal, which gave us more time to speak to students individually and in small groups. We found that at Queens HS, students were largely uninterested in what we had to say and we struggled to find ways to connect with them. But after some success gathering contacts and meeting with students at Hillcrest and Jamaica, we focused on those schools instead. We were particularly interested in Hillcrest because we read a news report that students at Hillcrest took to the halls of the school to protest a teacher who had posted a photo of herself holding a sign that said “I stand with Israel” on her Facebook. The New York Post called the student-led protest “one of the most frightening incidents of antisemitism in New York schools and colleges.” This reactionary slander accusing Palestine protesters of antisemitism is constantly parroted by politicians, zionists, and the media. Even though it was complete bullshit, it had a real effect on the mood at Hillcrest since it isolated students who protested the war. To be clear, there was nothing antisemitic about the protest at Hillcrest. We proudly say that being called antisemitic by the reactionary media is a good thing – it draws a clear line of demarcation between bootlicking genocide supporters and the people of the world who stand against the crimes of US imperialism.

The primary contradiction at Hillcrest was the repression, which came from the school administration as well as from the police. When students protested against the zionist teacher at Hillcrest, they were attacked by police, pinned against walls, and shoved into classrooms. The students who started the protest were expelled, and in the wake of the protest, other Hillcrest students faced suspensions of up to one month for as little as a pro-Palestine social media post. Students at Hillcrest also reported being selectively singled out by teachers for repressive measures when they wore keffiyehs or the Palestinian flag. The Hillcrest-Jamaica area is crawling with cops that shoo the children off the Hillcrest campus after school and harass them in the nearby train station. At Jamaica, students who had walked out of class in solidarity with Palestine were followed by the police and had their final grades in the class they missed for the walkout docked by a whopping 30%. While repression in Hillcrest played a more preventative role by controlling and containing expressions of dissent, the repression at Jamaica was more reactive to student protest. The more pervasive repression of Hillcrest students resulted in more political polarization between an apathetic majority and a small but advanced minority.

We ran up against a large section of Hillcrest students who were significantly more apathetic to the Palestinian cause than Jamaica or Thomas Edison students. Hillcrest was also the only school where we encountered genuine anti-Palestinian sentiment. Some students described losing friends over their support for Palestine (after all, who wants to be friends with someone who thinks bombing schools and hospitals is justified?). We heard many, often baffling reasons for not opposing the war, such as, “I’m Christian,” “I’m Black,” or “I’m gay.” Students would use their identities in these ways as an excuse for not taking up anti-imperialist struggle. This is the consequence of rampant postmodernism that shields people from having to take any action outside of their particular interests. After much discussion and trial-and-error, we decided not to respond to these objections on their own terms, such as “here’s why X identity should support Palestine”. Instead, we think it’s important to challenge all students by arguing that when the country we live in is responsible for a genocide overseas that has killed more children than all global conflicts in the past decade combined, we all have an obligation to fight it within the belly of the beast. If a person fundamentally doesn’t care that there’s a genocide happening, we should move on. They’re not going to be an asset to the struggle.

We encountered, on the one hand, general apathy among Hillcrest students, and on the other, a small number of students who were so outraged that they wanted to take action to challenge the other students’ apathy. Despite being more isolated, they felt a strong moral obligation to stand up in support of Palestine, and they weren’t dissuaded by the possibility of facing repression. We were happy we met these students and started working together very quickly, but we also learned about some illusions they had the more we talked to them. One was that they wanted to call for a “peaceful” protest thinking that calling it that would protect them from repression. We argued that protests get repressed regardless of what they’re called, but they also believed that it could appeal more to their peers if it was pitched that way since it would maybe calm their nerves. We mistakenly conceded to a plan that relied on a tepid majority spontaneously joining in on a protest instead of challenging students to step up and take responsibility for spreading resistance in their school. They proposed holding a rally outside of Hillcrest after school on 2/1, and marching after school the following day starting at Hillcrest and going through the neighborhood. The plan hinged on accumulating forces from one day to another without a real plan for how those forces would be accumulated without more outreach or struggle– wishful thinking we should’ve struggled against. Ultimately, we conceded leadership instead of thinking through and struggling out these kinds of plans with students.

This is where we also experienced drawbacks from taking action over discussing our strategy and tactics:

• We were hearing many of the same things from students over and over again and we didn’t pivot quickly enough to address them, like the specific repression that high school students were facing.
• We dragged our feet designing a new flyer and didn’t complete it until nearly two months later. We should’ve immediately set aside the time to design a new flyer and spent those two months taking it out, since we might’ve been able to win more people over to being a part of the protest.
• We could have done more to prepare for the actual conversations we were having since we had a better sense of what questions and disagreements some students had.
• Most of our crew were relatively new to doing this kind of work, so we suffered a little from our lack of individual experience. We could’ve put our heads together to get more things done better.

Since we lacked these regular critical discussions, we didn’t develop a strategy for how we could push things further. Instead, we were tailing many of the illusions our core group of students had without taking up enough leadership to pull off what we set out to do.

A day before the protest, students posted a flyer we had made together on a student-run Hillcrest Instagram page. The post caused a major stir among the school administration and the next day, the school targeted the students we were working with, sending one home with a two-day suspension and scaring the others into silence. Because we had not done any mass outreach to build participation in the walkout, the loss of that core group of students eliminated the possibility for the student-led protest we had planned together.

Instead of canceling the protest, we pivoted to using the two days to agitate outside the school to expose the wrongful intervention and sabotage of the protest by spineless school staff. Once students were dismissed, we called on students to stand in solidarity with their classmates who were punished. The entrance of the school was crawling with police, and it didn’t take long before they pulled up on us for using a megaphone. We kept going without a megaphone. Although we fell short of our original goal, we showed students that we don’t back down when we face repression and stuff doesn’t go our way. We came away from both days with several new contacts and a militant display at the school.

Aftermath

After the protest, we talked to the student who got suspended about what had happened. He told us his father was (understandably) worried, so he set up a meeting between us so we could explain what had happened, as well as who we were and what we were trying to accomplish. When we met, we could tell that his father was very supportive of the Palestinian cause, but we also learned that he was worried about entrapment. For over 20 years, authorities around the country have surveilled Arabs and Muslims in mosques and schools, and even framed people (typically teenage boys) for crimes that they otherwise wouldn’t have committed if they hadn’t been encouraged by law enforcement and federal agents. It wasn’t our first time hearing about this, so we were able to discuss the matter with him more deeply. Soon, he understood where we were coming from and that we weren’t trying to get his son in trouble with the law. He expressed support for our mission and said, “he has Taekwondo on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, but you can have him on Tuesday and Thursday.”

When schools punish students, they aim to make examples out of them to other students. Sometimes, getting in trouble at school also stirs things up at home and turns parents against their children. Although young people are being exposed to a genocidal war through horrific videos posted on TikTok and Instagram, schools are essentially forcing young people into submission and driving a wedge between them, other students, and their parents. The retaliation students face (whether from school, the police, or even their parents) can only really be fought by the students themselves. But there is also a not-too-distant history of student radicals in this country organizing militant resistance to a genocidal imperialist war we can learn from. We have to challenge students to stand up against imperialism and be defiant in the face of whatever the system throws at them, help win other people over to their side, and isolate those who stand against them. And we ourselves need to take responsibility to lead them through the twists and turns of the struggle.

Next Steps

We’re organizing regular meetings with students to continue making plans and in order to study the history of imperialism and the struggles against it more deeply. Students’ chaotic schedules have been an obstacle to regular meetings, but we’ll have to challenge students to sacrifice an hour a week if they’re serious about working with us – in contrast with what Palestinian children have been forced to sacrifice, it’s not asking much. Through these regular meetings, we hope to develop cohesive cores of students that will join Behind Enemy Lines, take responsibility for carrying out tasks, and make this a bigger issue for youth in NYC.

We’re recruiting dedicated people to fulfill this task. Our chapter is consistently going out to high schools, meeting with students, and taking out the Palestine Vote Pledge, but we’re limited by our present numbers and are looking for ways to expand. It will be possible to accomplish more organizational work (like making flyers, training new people, working through ideological barriers and contradictions, and even tasks like getting this summation done sooner) the more our chapter grows.

We’re making concrete plans to rally as many people as possible this Summer to take on the Democratic National Convention, currently scheduled to take place in Chicago starting August 19th. Behind Enemy Lines, which is based in Chicago, is currently waging a campaign demanding that the City of Chicago cancel the Death and Nakba Coronation (DNC, for short). We’re putting the Chicago DNC on the map for people this Summer, and we’re challenging youth to play their historic role in the greatest anti-imperialist struggle of our lifetime. We’re enlisting people to make the greatest criminals in the word shake and shit themselves. Are you in?