By Moustafa Bayoumi Sun 6 Jul 2025 09.00 EDT
The rules of the institutions that define our lives bend like reeds when it comes to Israel – so much that the whole global order is on the verge of collapse
Sereen Haddad is a bright young woman. At 20 years old, she just finished a four-year degree in psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in only three years, earning the highest honors along the way. Yet, despite her accomplishments, she still can’t graduate. Her diploma is being withheld by the university, “not because I didn’t complete the requirements”, she told me, “but because I stood up for Palestinian life”.
Haddad, who is Palestinian American, had been raising awareness on her campus about the Palestinian fight for freedom as part of her university’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. The struggle is also personal for her. With roots in Gaza, she has lost more than 200 members of her extended family to Israel’s war.
She was part of a group of VCU students and supporters who attempted to set up an encampment in April 2024. The university called in the police that same night. Protesters were pepper-sprayed and brutalized, and 13 were arrested. Haddad was not charged, but she was taken to the hospital “because of the head trauma that I endured”, she told me. “I was bleeding. I was bruised. Cuts everywhere. The police slammed me down on the concrete, like, six different times.”
But last year’s attempted encampment wasn’t even the reason Haddad’s degree is being withheld. This year’s peaceful memorial of it was. And how that scenario played out, with the university and campus police constantly changing the rules, illustrates something worrisome far beyond the leafy confines of an American campus.
Israel’s war in Gaza is chipping away at so much of what we – in the United States but also internationally – had agreed upon as acceptable, from the rules governing our freedom of speech to the very laws of armed conflict. It seems no exaggeration to say that the foundation of the international order of the last 77 years is threatened by this change in the obligations governing our legal and political responsibilities to each other.
We are ignoring the collapse of the international system that has defined our lives for generations at our own collective peril
This collapse began with the liberal world’s lack of resolve to rein in Israel’s war in Gaza. It escalated when no one lifted a finger to stop hospitals being bombed. It expanded when mass starvation became a weapon of war. And it is peaking at a time when total war is no longer viewed as a human abhorrence but is instead the deliberate policy of the state of Israel.
The implications of this collapse are profound for international, regional and even domestic politics. Political dissent is repressed, political language is policed, and traditionally liberal societies are increasingly militarized against their own citizens.
Many of us disregard how much has shifted in the last 20 months. But we are ignoring the collapse of the international system that has defined our lives for generations at our own collective peril.
On 29 April 2025, a group of VCU students met on a campus lawn to remember the forcible dismantling of an encampment briefly erected on the same space the year prior. The gathering was not a protest. It was more akin to a picnic, with some students using banners from past demonstrations as blankets. Others brought actual blankets. Students sat on the grass and studied for their finals, tinkered with their laptops, and played cards or chess. A handful of the 40-odd students sported keffiyehs.
It turned out the blankets were a problem.
Almost two hours into their picnic, a university administrator confronted the students over a social media post that had advertised the gathering. (“Come be in community with one another to commemorate 1 Year since VCU’s brutal response to the G4Z4 Solidarity Encampment. Bring picnic blankets, homework/finals, art supplies, snacks, music, games,” a local Palestinian solidarity group had posted.) Because of this post, the university considered the picnic an “organized event”, and since the students hadn’t registered the event, it was deemed a violation of the rules.
The rules at VCU had been changing because of protests for Gaza since February 2024.
The administrator told the students they could relocate to the campus free-speech zone, an area that had been established in August 2024 because of the protests of that year. “An amphitheater next to four dumpsters” is how Haddad described the area to me.
When students expose the violence of Israel’s occupation and genocide, institutions [...] become fearful
Sereen Haddad
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