Yes, This is Deliberate Obstruction.

The administration is trying to normalize the violent suppression of pro-Palestine solidarity, so we have to normalize disruption.

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I'll pick up where The Dartmouth's reporting on the arrests at Fetterman's event let off: Dartmouth College's Freedom of Expression and Dissent policy- or as they unironically like to called it, FED- states that “protest or demonstration shall not be discouraged… so long as the orderly processes of the institution are not deliberately obstructed.”
 

I’m here to say that’s exactly our intention: to obstruct the orderly processes of the institution. When have
the masses ever enacted social change without disrupting business as usual? The administration and its
close ally, the carceral state, have completely sanitized the meaning of protest. They criminalize all forms
of dissidence except the kind in which we have to register our rallies with the college for approval —
which some members of our community like to caricature as silly little optics games — and they have
gone ahead and harassed us for those too. The only logical conclusion: Dartmouth is deeply insecure.

They keep shifting the goalposts for peaceful protest in an attempt to scare us into submission, not
realizing they’re validating the very fragility of their disciplinary mechanisms over our growing
movement. The more they suppress us, the more power we accrue. So they all but wish they could
fast-forward 50 years later when they can crown the achievements of past radical student movements —
those carried on the backs of racialized working-class bodies — in Dartmouth-branded websites and
buildings. Who’s really playing a silly little optics game?
 

True protest IS performative. In protest we perform a future world we want to live in by rehearsing its
material conditions in the now. Palestinians’ material conditions are one of relentless disruption on every
level — social, physical, psychic, spiritual, structural — so our protest has to be one of relentless
disruption on every level of the genocidal Zionist enterprise. That enterprise includes Dartmouth’s
decision to host a "dialogue" with the Democratic Party’s number one Israel enthusiast, Senator John
Fetterman, who has celebrated and mocked the killings of Arab people blown up by Israeli pagers: “if
anything, I love it,” he said. He calls himself pro-Palestinian, but by pro-Palestinian he means that
Palestinians are the cause of their own genocide and that, in bankrolling Israel’s indiscriminate assault,
he’s graciously saving indigenous subjects from themselves. But he’s right: he’s in the lights, he has a
microphone, and he’s not hiding. And we should be concerned that people can now go mask off with
white supremacist, chauvinist settler-colonial ideology and have the room laugh, clap, and cheer in
response.
 

Every day Palestinians are performing resistance, and every day they are taking on the burden of
educating the world on how to resist. The least we can do is be their students. Because when the
capitalist-imperialist American university inevitably spells its own demise, our teachers in the Palestinian
struggle for liberation will live on, forever.

Justice is our demand! No peace on stolen land!

This Letter to the Editor was originally submitted to the Dartmouth, but was rejected.