This past week, two mass graves were unearthed in Gaza. Doctors in scrubs with their hands bound were discovered shot and buried underneath the wreckage of hospitals destroyed in raids by Israeli soldiers. Many of the bodies, including children, pulled from the mass graves show evidence of torture before being killed, while some showed evidence of being buried alive. Yesterday, while bodies were still being pulled from the sites, Joe Biden signed a bill providing a further $26 billion in aid for Israel’s war.
This is what the rapidly expanding wave of student encampments on campuses across the country are about: demanding that major American institutions divest from the Israeli genocide of Palestinians immediately. All across the country, students are protesting the war in Gaza and US institutional complicity by setting up protest encampments on campuses. The encampment movement began at Columbia University in New York, where students and faculty have been occupying the quad for over a week despite over a hundred arrests. Over the last week, the encampments emanated out to universities in California, Atlanta, Boston, Austin, Houston, Pittsburgh, Indiana, Minnesota, Ohio, St. Louis, Florida, Washington, Michigan, North Carolina, and several other ivy league campuses including Yale, Harvard, Brown, Cornell, and UPenn.
Student encampments are the latest wave in a swelling nationwide movement against the United States’ unstinting support for Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians. US universities have long been crucial material and ideological supports for the Zionist occupation of Palestine through research and development,
One of the most effective means at our disposal in the United States to push for an end to the current genocide in Gaza is through the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and other student organizations are calling for their universities to divest from Israeli companies and end their complicity with the ongoing genocide of Palestinians. Campus encampments are also demanding financial transparency and amnesty for students advocating for Palestine on campus. Contrary to many mainstream smears, organizers of the encampments have a sophisticated understanding of the exact role their universities play in propping up apartheid, occupation and genocide.
The campus protests put the dividing line into stark relief: on the one side are students, staff, and faculty standing up for justice and against genocide. On the other side are administrators of the corporate university defending their own interests and university investments in weapons manufacturers, surveillance tech companies, and war profiteers, which they would like to continue normalizing as an unquestioned role of educational institutions.
A Strengthening Solidarity
The encampments have produced incredibly inspiring scenes of students defying administrators and refusing business-as-usual while bombs are dropping on Palestinian families. Faculty at campus after campus are locking arms and being arrested in defense of their students’ right to free speech and in support of their demands. Across the country, Jewish students have come out in force to stand with Palestinians to refuse to allow Israel to carry out a genocide in their name. Passover Seders inside the encampments have emphasized liberation and called to end Israel’s war on Gaza.
Students and faculty have also highlighted the direct relevance of educational spaces to the current movement given the scholasticide in Gaza. According to the United Nations on April 18, more than 5,479 students, 261 teachers, and 95 university professors have been killed by Israel in Gaza, and over 7,819 students and 756 teachers have been injured so far, with the numbers growing by the day.
Nationally, SJP has organized the Popular University campaign as a counter to morally bankrupt university administrators, disrupting the now-typical role of universities as knowledge producers for empire. Free libraries with books on Palestine, abolition, and histories of liberatory struggles have popped up wherever encampments have appeared on campuses. The counter-spaces of the Popular University not only provide popular education, but add to mounting pressure around campus divestment demands.
Repression
University administrators across the board have responded to the outpouring of student encampments with unequivocal repression. It began with Columbia president Minouche Shafik, who worked at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund including during the 2011 Arab Spring, calling in the NYPD to arrest Barnard College students. While Zionists and their backers in the mainstream media seek any way to label student encampments as violent, police have moved in with astonishing violence against the peaceful gatherings.
After banning their valedictorian from speaking, the University of Southern California has now canceled their main commencement ceremony for their graduating class. After arresting dozens of faculty who were defending student protesters, NYU erected a literal plywood wall to prevent students from accessing a main plaza on the campus. Militarized Texas police on horseback, the same coward cops who failed to save children from a mass shooter in Uvalde, have swarmed the UT campus, violently attacking protestors and press alike. At Emory University in Atlanta, cops from various agencies stormed the tent encampment and tased an already handcuffed student on the ground. Meanwhile, a “Seder in the Streets to Stop Arming Israel” outside of Sen. Chuck Schumer’s home was met with hundreds of arrests.
Build the Movement
The repression is clearly intended to make the problem go away as soon as possible. But thankfully, university administrators are not class war strategists, and every act of repression has spawned an outpouring of solidarity and determination among students and communities. Indeed, the repression itself has played a major role in the rapid spread of the encampments across the country. The only way for administrators to “make the problem go away” is to divest from Israel. That must remain the resounding message from campuses nationwide.
This movement is ongoing, and its future is undetermined. Communities around universities have shown up as strong supporters of the movement and its demands. Ultimately, to flex popular power from below, the movement must draw on the strength of organized labor for Palestine. Faculty unions have already shown up in support and defense, and workers across sectors organized through “workers for Palestine” groupings are already beginning to link up with the student encampments.
While we reach for every tool in our movement’s toolbox to end our government’s backing of the genocide of Palestinians, let us remember the words of Diane di Prima:
When you seize Columbia, when you
seize Paris, take
the media, tell the people what you’re doing
what you’re up to and why and how you mean
to do it, how they can help, keep the news
coming, steady, you have 70 years
of media conditioning to combat, it is a wall
you must get through, somehow, to reach
the instinctive man, who is struggling like a plant
for light, for air
//
when you seize a town, a campus, get hold of the power
stations, the water, the transportation,
forget to negotiate, forget how
to negotiate, don’t wait for De Gaulle or Kirk
to abdicate, they won’t, you are not
‘demonstrating’ you are fighting
a war, fight to win, don’t wait for Johnson or
Humphrey or Rockefeller, to agree to your terms
take what you need, ‘it’s free
because it’s yours’