The 40th anniversary all-class reunion of DGALA — the College’s LGBTQIA+ alumni association — at the end of July was my first time returning to Dartmouth since I graduated in 2015. One of the primary reasons that I wanted to attend this reunion was to advocate for increased support for student protesters and Dartmouth Divest for Palestine from DGALA. Like the other affiliated alumni associations, DGALA signed onto a joint letter sent to Dartmouth senior leadership on May 17, 2024 denouncing the College’s policing of student and community protesters, which was timely and needed.
However, although individual affiliated group leaders have advocated for divestment, none of the groups as a whole have taken a strong public stance on the reason that these students and community members were protesting: Israel’s well-documented, adjudicated, live-streamed genocide in Gaza and occupied Palestine, and Dartmouth’s investments in the weapons manufacturers. Nearly a year and a half later, these crimes against humanity only continue to escalate without any firm stance on the subject expressed by any of the affiliated groups.
At the DGALA reunion Awards Dinner, College President Sian Leah Beilock and all of the Presidents of DGALA in attendance, past and present, had a moment to address the group. As a former student community organizer and winner of the 2015 Ezekiel Webber ’00 Memorial Award for LGBTQIA+ Activism, I was very moved by the experiences shared by the lineage of DGALA presidents since its founding in 1984. But it seemed that most, if not all, of the past DGALA presidents were cisgender and white presenting, which was not surprising to me. Denouncing anti-queer actions and cultures is simpler and easier when you aren’t also marginalized along other lines of identity.
When President Beilock stated with conviction that she is committed to making sure that “everyone who sets foot on this campus feels included,” however, my mind immediately went to the student protesters who have faced criminal charges, academic suspensions and threats of expulsion for their advocacy calling for Dartmouth to divest from Israel’s genocide. Until recently, I did not realize that all of the student protesters who have been singled out and dealt individual punishments are transgender and/or non-binary. Let’s be clear — this punitive pattern is not simply an innocuous coincidence. In my experience, trans and non-binary people are overrepresented in communities advocating for Palestinian liberation because we have an intimate knowledge of the rhetoric of dehumanization and lived experience of risking our wellbeing in asserting our bodily autonomy. Furthermore, trans people are overpoliced and face higher rates of institutional discrimination and police violence than our cisgender counterparts. The gender identities of the student protesters facing the harshest punitive repercussions for their ethical dissent cannot be separated from this broader sociopolitical context. When I make such assertions, I’m doing so not only as an opinionated trans woman but as someone who has studied white supremacy, racism and transphobia and wrote a Master’s thesis on their intersections in the United States at the University of British Columbia.
At the awards dinner, I learned that the original impetus for the founding of DGALA was a crisis for queer students on campus when in 1984, members of The Dartmouth Review infiltrated a meeting of the Dartmouth Gay Student Association on campus and leaked the names of attendees. In this sense, support for marginalized students has been at the center of DGALA’s work since its founding. Interestingly, a SpeakOut interview with Kelly M. Bonnevie ’87, documents the predominant overlap between the Dartmouth GSA and the Dartmouth Community for Divestment from South African Apartheid at the time. Both of these groups were persecuted by The Dartmouth Review, which represented the dominant conservative campus culture, for their marginalized identities and advocacy for divestment from systemic white supremacist settler colonial oppression.
In his 1995 essay for The New York Review of Books, Umberto Eco identifies “Ur-Fascism,” or the enduring elements of fascist theories, including an inherently racist fear of difference, appeals to social frustration, a “selective populism” that serves a “People [that] is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will,” and patriarchal dominance with regards to gender and sexuality.
While they may benefit from being (mis)characterized as democracies, Israel and the United States are de facto fascist settler colonial nation-states. Like white supremacy, capitalism, settler colonialism and patriarchal cisgenderism, fascism is a violent systematized ideology that benefits from “common sense” notions of its neutrality, benevolence and inevitability. If critiques of these systems can be written off as overly political, polarizing, controversial or “woke,” the status quo can continue to be dictated by these dominant hierarchies without contest.
This is precisely why the new Dartmouth Kalaniyot group, which aims to deepen ties with Israeli academics, insists within its bylaws that “Kalaniyot activities and communications must remain strictly non-political.” If critiques of Israel’s genocidal ethnic cleansing and violent settler colonial campaign in occupied Palestine can be forbidden as “political communications,” the deep ties between the academic-industrial complex and settler colonial violence in both the U.S. and Israel may be conveniently ignored.
The Dartmouth-affiliated alumni associations are not random assemblies of like-minded alums — they are groups of Dartmouth graduates who belong to a community that faces marginalization in relation to systemic oppression in the U.S., whether it be in relation to racism, gender, sexuality, etc. Each of these types of systemic oppression are connected and are intimately linked to the Palestinian struggle for liberation.
Police officers across the U.S. are sent to Israel to train in violent suppression tactics tested on Palestinians and subsequently used on Black, Indigenous and disabled people in the U.S. Trans people in the U.S. face dehumanizing and scapegoating tactics that mark us for state-sanctioned violence and are remarkably similar to the genocidal rhetoric used to justify Israel’s ethnic cleansing and murder of Gazan children and families. The inherently racialized notion of “terrorism” was cultivated by the U.S. and Israel to justify violence against Palestinians and continues to be used to police West Asian Americans, surveil marginalized communities and violently enforce white supremacist nationalism in the U.S. The same artificial intelligence systems supplied by Palantir that help the Israeli Occupation Forces to target Palestinians for killing are now being used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to target Latinx communities for detainment, torture and deportation.
It’s time for DGALA and Dartmouth’s other affiliated alumni groups to affirm that none of us are free until all of us are free by taking the ethically principled risk of vocally supporting student protesters and divestment for Palestinian liberation.
Lyra A. McKee is a member of the Class of 2015 and Dartmouth Alumni for Palestine. Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
