Massive student strike across Israel from April 10

The strike action will in effect shut down all the colleges & universities inside the state, and probably also the colonial College of Judea and Samaria of Bar Ilan University in the settler enclave of Ariel (http://gush-shalom.org/biu.html -- Uri Avnery on the College)
Perhaps the strike will turn into a long-term action, involving 250,000 students: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/846646.html

YET: For Israeli students to strike demanding an end to the Occupation and the brutality of their army, an end to the Great Wall of Palestine now being built, the iron cage suffocation of Gaza, never. To strike in solidarity with the great growing mass of the poor and underpaid and exploited workers, Jewish and Arab in the country, impossible. To strike in protest against the collaboration of Israeli academics with the war machine and defense industries in Israel, their own professors of Occupation, out of the question. Or in solidarity with Arab students in Gaza, the West Bank, al-Quds/Jerusalem, never. To end apartheid inside Israel --- or even to demand the creation of an Arab university in Israel, a need for decades, a non-starter. Strike to interrogate why so much is spent on the military in Israel and education is increasingly underfunded, hard for many students to frame such a question.

Nearly all of the striking Jewish students will have served in the IDF, including many of the women. And most of the guys will be in the active military reserves.

But this strike may radicalize some students and staff in unpredictable directions. Get them thinking a bit more about how power and hegemony operate. Begin to crack a bit the great bubble of denial in which so many of my fellow Israelis live. And sharpen their sense of the power they potentially could wield together by saying NO, BASTA, KHALAS. The incredible cost of the slaughter in Lebanon last summer (as most students stood idly by, or themselves served very actively in that incursion of death) one example.

Students and staff in Israel (and in Palestine) need to build a node of the IWW, Education Workers IU 620, maybe the time is now. http://www.ewiu-international.org/

A strike like this not for lower fees, but for peace & justice, humanity -- maybe somewhere ahead down a long road. Israeli Jewish students should read this every morning to start their day in the bubble: http://english.pnn.ps/

Most states have an army. Israel is an army that has a state. Perhaps typical is the comment of the spokesman of the Tel Aviv U Student Union yesterday: "As soldiers of education, we will stand guard and continue to fight until tuition fees are lowered and the budget cuts returned."