It has been over nine months since the Israeli government began its brutal campaign of genocide against the people of Gaza. Entire bloodlines have been wiped off the face of the earth, hundreds of thousands of buildings have been bombed, desperately-needed humanitarian aid has been aggressively blockaded, safe zones and refugee areas have been targeted, and prisoners have been beaten, raped, starved, and murdered.
Gaza’s health system has almost entirely collapsed. An open letter recently published by forty-five American medical volunteers details the daily horror and unimaginable trauma the population is being subjected to. A surgeon writes: “Gaza was the first time I held a baby’s brains in my hand. The first of many.” Another quote: “[E]very one of us on a daily basis treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head and chest.” The signatories believe that the death toll at this point has already surpassed 92,000.
It has also been over 76 years of relentless, oppressive, and dehumanizing occupation by the Israeli state of the Palestinian territories. Generations have been massacred and harassed by state forces and mercenaries, refused their legal right to return to their lands, suffered under apartheid-like conditions, and denied self-determination.
The United States government has, for several decades, committed their unwavering support, along with massive financial and military assistance, to this very Israeli state that has committed egregious war crimes, unconscionable violations of international law, and relentless, inhumane atrocities. Everything that America can and should stand for––freedom, democracy, human rights, peace––has been brutally violated when it comes to our government’s policy towards the Palestinian/Israeli conflict.
In understanding this reality, it becomes difficult, even impossible, to carry on with our lives as American citizens as if everything is business-as-usual. There exists an impregnable moral pull to express solidarity with and support of these people, and to fight against the institutions that are perpetuating these horrific realities. Martin Luther King Jr. notes concisely in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail”: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
Many Americans, including university students and organizations, have for decades taken up King’s call to recognize the mutuality, and the responsibility, of the injustice that is inflicted on the Palestinian people, and they have worked tirelessly to demonstrate and fight against their government’s complicity in these crimes against humanity. In the spring of 2024, however, this activism reached an unforeseen swell in momentum on university campuses across the nation.
It started as a student encampment on Columbia University’s campus quad. Police were called in almost immediately for a massive crackdown, and over 100 were arrested. In a classic case of blowback, dozens of other “solidarity encampments” were erected in universities across the nation over the next few weeks, peaking in numbers from around late April to early May. These encampments, which differed considerably in scale, numbers, and length, were treated almost uniformly negatively by the press, politicians, and university administrations. While some schools were able to successfully negotiate with the demonstrators, the message was clear for the vast majority of responses: the encampments had crossed a red line, and they were going to be removed, by any means necessary. What followed was a sweep of police crackdowns on student protestors, culminating in over 3,000 arrests in both public and private schools across the nation.
Notre Dame’s own campus was not immune to the encampment movement. On May 2nd, 17 students and staff were arrested after non-violently gathering on God quad. Compelling and insightful reflections of Notre Dame’s encampment experience from those who were arrested have been published here and here. They are worth reading and watching, and they articulate the special commitment that this school has to be a moral force for good in the world.
It has now been around three months since the erection of these encampments and their, often forceful, dismantling. The student movement that erupted in the last few weeks of the school year has now lulled as the summer months have crept on, allowing a time of reflection, healing, and learning. I talked with six different students from around the country––from Los Angeles to New Orleans to New Haven––to gather their general insights and perspectives on how this movement has affected them. The students came from different backgrounds and played different roles in their school’s encampment, ranging from a supportive but officially-neutral student journalist to a lead organizer. By collecting and comparing their experiences and reflections, as well as drawing parallels to Notre Dame’s encampment when appropriate, I hope to paint a broad, yet still very incomplete, picture of the general trends, patterns, and conclusions that can be taken away from this specific and powerful moment in American history.
Note: many of the students that I talked with chose to remain anonymous or use pseudonyms in order to speak freely about their experiences.
Standing for justice, standing against imperialism
The university encampments made up the largest student anti-war movement seen in America in decades. But in many ways, this movement was much more than simply “anti-war”––it was also a moment of solidarity for a people who have been occupied, denied self-determination, and systemically eliminated, through cultural erasure and physical massacres, for generations. And, more broadly, it was a show of solidarity for all peoples suffering under the same systemic violence.
Many students identified and related the ongoing occupation of Palestine with other territories that have historically been colonized and occupied by imperial powers. Okalani, a student at University of California San Diego, made this connection with her own family’s ancestry. “I’ve seen first hand the effects of US occupation in Guam and Saipan. And it’s kind of just second nature to me, in a sense, just because I’ve seen what land dispossession looks like in the Pacific,” she told me. “The same imperialist forces that are contributing to the possession or the oppression of native Chamorro people, as well as indigenous people from the Pacific, especially like Micronesia […] those same forces are contributing to the active genocide and oppression of the Palestinian people.”
The anti-imperialist lens adopted by this movement connected it spiritually and literally to former campus demonstrations rooted in decolonial struggle. Caleb, a student at Indiana University Bloomington, told me that “a lot of [the community protestors who came to IU] were people that were involved in past protests like the anti apartheid protests and anti Vietnam War protests.” The encampment movement has identified the militaristic, imperialist, capitalistic root as the issue that is creating conditions of exploitation and dehumanization. Common chants such as “From Palestine to Mexico, all these walls have got to go” and “From Palestine to the Philippines, stop the US war machine” globalize the issue of Gaza. An understanding of the underlying structures that lead to exploitation and oppression around the world has been instrumental to the strength and breadth of the coalition built around Palestinian solidarity.
Many students whom I talked with had been sympathetic to and active in the Palestinian solidarity movement for years, but what ultimately pushed them into further involvement was the immediate and ongoing genocide in Palestine. “I’m living in a world where I see war crimes and atrocities committed every day through my phone,” a student from Tulane University told me. This line was echoed by most of the students who I talked to. The atrocities witnessed in the last few months have been utterly impossible to ignore. Something needed to be done. In an act of escalation against the powers complicit in genocide, students turned to encampments.
Creating a new community
One of the dominant trends within social movements since the sixties has been the belief that the method of activism should reflect the kind of world that the activists are fighting for. The encampments are a manifestation of this trend. A student at George Washington University, who had helped to organize a coalition encampment shared by many universities in the DMV area, felt profoundly touched by the space that she and her classmates had created. “It was literally like, this is what liberation must feel like.” Many of the encampments, including the one at Notre Dame, identified themselves as “people’s” or “liberated” universities. It was not that they simply desired a better, more humane and open world; rather, they created a space that marked a radical departure from the dominant way of teaching and way of acting. “[Establishing the encampment was] reclaiming land from the university so that the university cannot use it for its capitalist imperative, and it was reclaiming it for the people,” the GW organizer told me. “It was an act of radical world-building.”
What did this radical world-building look like? “[IU’s encampment] was a very open space where anybody was allowed to come and eat and even just hang out,” Caleb remarked. At IU, as in many of the encampments, including at Notre Dame, a free library was set up, with not just books on Palestine, but books on radical perspectives and experiences that were often left out of the standard university curriculum. “They [also] provided food, water, [and] they had a ton of pillows and sleeping bags. Later on they started doing movie screenings, and they had teachings.”
“It was just a beautiful space,” reflected Okalani on the UCSD encampment. “Besides hosting rallies and demonstrations in general, on a day-to-day basis, it was kind of just a bunch of students getting together, creating art together, studying together, you know, learning together, watching performances, [and] dancing. It was really beautiful […] they’d have town halls, they’d do prayers, they’d create art, [and] they’d have spoken word performances. It was kind of a space where any student could come and go as they pleased if they just wanted to hang out and study. That was like the perfect space to do it.”
The student at Tulane recalled with similar fondness the encampment that they had helped to set up. “God, it was beautiful […] we focused a lot on teaching. We called [our encampment] The People’s Popular University for Gaza. There were a lot of times we would bring in people to discuss different issues or different elements of Palestinian culture. We had people talking about Judaism, Jewish culture, Jewish religious practices, and things like that as well. A lot of music, a lot of art creation. It’s really like a beautiful community space, you know.”
Support from the local community was crucial to the success of Tulane’s encampment, as it was for many others. Tulane “had a ginormous food area, tables on tables of food [that] people donated. We would ask people to stop bringing food because we just had more than we can handle.” Similarly, at Notre Dame’s encampment, a local mosque had donated so much food that baskets upon baskets of sandwiches were left over. The outpouring of love and support from community members and organizations demonstrated the connectivity and resonation that these encampments had over not just their own schools, but across all areas of civic life.
“I woke up every morning, and I had a sense of moral clarity in the encampment,” the GW organizer told me. “There was, you know, all the noise that we have to contend with, because the system that we live in and the powers that be spend billions upon billions of dollars on propaganda and tools, like [with] the attention economy and everything, to make us conform and to kill the revolutionary within us; [the encampment] was just like completely absent of any of that noise. And it was such… it really felt like the people’s space.”
The institutions that structure our society––our schools, government, military, universities, police force, markets––are inextricably linked to each other through strands of ideology built to perpetuate the status-quo. To uphold a truly radical worldview is to recognize the commonality of these institutions; to understand why and how they support and justify the others; and to try to build an alternative space challenging these ideologies and the people they harm. The students who participated in the encampments recognized this and asked themselves such questions as: how does my university, through its lectures, programs, funding, and investments, shape our government’s foreign policy, and inform how we view people living on the other side of the world? What does a better, more justice-oriented educational system look like?
“Liberated” and “people’s” encampments challenge the way that education and social structures have been used to shape human relations. Their radical world-building of a possible future society is what makes them so full of promise and hope. It is also what makes them so dangerous from the perspective of the entrenched institutions they seek to undermine.
Institutionalized violence
F’s involvement in the University of California Los Angeles encampment lasted only a few hours, but his experience culminated in one of the most intense nights of his life. On the night of April 30, F had been hanging out with some of his friends when group chats on his phone started lighting up. “People were just saying, like, get to the encampment right now, like come right now. Like we’re literally under attack. They’re throwing fireworks, they’re macing people, they’re beating people up, they’re tearing down the fences.” F and his friends rushed home, grabbed some supplies, and made their way to the encampment in the center of UCLA campus.
Before going in, there was a moment of hesitation. “I’m like, oh my God, do I actually want to go in? Because, now that I’m at the security checkpoint where people are leaving from, I’m seeing people with gashes in their heads. I’m seeing people with black eyes, people crying, their friends holding their other friends, just like the absolute worst of humanity. I’m having second thoughts, and then finally [my friend] points. My other friends are going ahead of me and she’s like, ‘are you coming in or not?’ I was like, OK, f**k it, yes.”
F had arrived at the encampment around 12AM, just hours after a group of Zionist counter-protestors had descended onto the encampment from three of the four sides, violently attacking the demonstrating students. The campus police, ostensibly at the encampment to protect student safety, did nothing to prevent or restrict the vicious attacks from outside individuals swinging pipes and throwing fireworks at the barricaded students.
Upon entering the encampment, many of his friends rushed to the front lines to defend against the attack, but F, being a biology major, decided to help those who had been wounded. “They had a huge medical tent, and it was just teeming with supplies. They had everything, it was actually insane. There were medics just running around back and forth, washing Mace out of people’s eyes. I’m a bio major. I’ve learned about first aid, and I feel like I should stay there. So that’s what I do. I just help other medics, and I help other people administer first aid for, like, literally 3 hours, from 12AM to 3AM. And there was no short supply of people; it kind of was a constant stream.”
F recounted a particular anecdote of a demonstrator that he helped to treat. The victim of pepper spray was thrashing on the ground, screaming for help, and when F and other medics tried pouring water into his eyes, nothing would happen. Then somebody realized that he was wearing contact lenses, preventing the water from reaching his eyes. After getting the lenses off, the injured person finally started feeling better. “He forgot why he was in pain and therefore got in this infinite loop of not being able to stop it. These people using Mace, they don’t understand what they’re actually doing to another person, clearly. I’ve been so lucky not to have been Maced in my life, but it was just pure agony to these people, and having to watch that and not even be really able to help, except to just say that the best we can do is wash your eyes out and just wait for the pain to go away… that was very difficult.”
The UCLA attack was an anomaly in the fact that Zionist counter-protesters, not school or state police, were the aggressors in the assault (In most cases, the counter-protesters were annoying, but rather harmless. At Tulane, a group of Greek Life kids “would sit [by the encampment] just sharing a six pack and occasionally yell stuff”). But the campus was far from the only one to experience brutal and disproportionate violence.
The students at Tulane were woken up from their tents at 4 in the morning to find an army of officers slowly encroaching on their encampment. “At least 200 riot cops in full gear show up and surround the side of encampments, as well as two armored cars with snipers on top of them, like real guns […] a guy would get in the back with a regular rifle, and another guy [with a] sniper rifle on top, and they’re pointing the guns at us.” The Tulane student told me that there were no more than a few dozen demonstrators physically at the encampment at this time.
Some students decided to stay in the encampment despite the intimidation; the majority of the demonstrators decided to leave and regroup in a location outside of the university. But after the students at the encampment were arrested, riot cops began to form a massive line and, with police cars stationed down the street just a few blocks away, began to slowly corral the remaining students in.
“The [riot cops] got to us and started pushing us.” At this point, the remaining protestors had figured out what was happening and had linked arms in a line. “Then they started firing these rounds at our feet; it was like a hard pepper spray, dust pellets basically. […] Then they push a dude in the line, shoot him in the chest with one of these pellets, grab him and pull him back.” The protestors dispersed, and though the student I talked with didn’t personally witness the fate of the targeted demonstrator, they later “saw a video, and they just beat the crap out of him […] he was on the ground, legitimately getting hit with batons and kicked.” The student I talked with suffered injuries as well, mainly bruises from getting pushed and sores on their feet from the pepper spray pellets.
After the police came in to dismantle IU’s encampment, Caleb told me that the officers had little regard for the safety of the demonstrators. “These kids would fall back into the tents; there was that real threat of hitting their head on stuff. They had no regard for these people’s safety. The only regard they had was to get them down on the ground and to carry them out, which was scary to see.” The police often made excessive shows of force and intimidation. “They had, I think, two snipers on two separate buildings looking down [at the encampment],” Caleb remembered.
Similar circumstances happened at UCSD. After what Okalani described as “military-grade crackdown” on the original encampment, the arrested students––at this point, there were about 40-50––were temporarily put into a building, with buses being prepared to drive them to the jails. Hundreds of students on the outside encircled the building to prevent these buses from leaving the campus. “I just remember […] distancing myself from the bus, and then seeing out of the corner of my eye over 60 riot cops who were there, and they brought in a cavalry [as well]. And I’m like, wow, these are a bunch of undergrads. And this is how you are responding to us, just standing here and peacefully chanting.” It was at this point that the police started taking their batons out and attacking the students to clear a path. “Students were being Maced, and arrests eventually went up to like 60 people in total.”
At the encampment at GW, the student organizer I had talked to was not there for the initial arrests––she had been studying in the library for one of her final exams the next day. But when she heard that the encampment was being attacked and dismantled by the police, she immediately rushed over. “We ran over to see who was getting arrested, and there were cops who formed a barrier. They started trying to push us back, but we couldn’t allow that to happen, because we needed to see who was being arrested. So we linked arms so we wouldn’t have to cede ground, and then they brought out the pepper spray. They started pepper spraying everybody.” The organizer told me that she was hit with pepper spray in both her face and on her back. The fact that she had her back turned as she was sprayed “is important to note because it meant that the [police] saw fit to use non lethal force on us as we were complying.” The officers entirely disregarded the safety of the students. “I mean, someone was so badly pepper sprayed she had to go to the hospital. I know that some of the people who were arrested needed mobility aids that were taken from them. I have another friend who was pepper sprayed and punched.”
In the vast majority of these schools, peaceful resistance was met with the powerful and violent reaction of the university administration, the state, or external parties. The overarching justification was to “prevent violence” and “establish order” on campuses. But the evidence demonstrates that external agencies, not the demonstrators, were overwhelmingly the source of the very violence that they were supposed to prevent.
“Law and order” has long been weaponized by politicians and those in power in order to suppress dissent and delegitimize righteous movements. To quote King for the second time: “So I have tried to make it clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or even more, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.” After King was arrested and jailed for non-violently demonstrating in Birmingham in 1963, he was met with the tasteless argument that the police who arrested him and his colleagues should be appreciated for “preserving order” in the city. What this “order” meant in 1963 was, of course, unconscionable legalized segregation and systemic violence against Black communities. What “order” means today in 2024 means, of course, unwavering support by the highest institutions in our nation towards the perpetuation of one of the worst humanitarian disasters in the 21st century.
Lessons to be carried forward
Despite the dismantling of his encampment, Caleb told me that he “I met people just through the simplest things. Whether it’s just playing soccer or talking about what’s going on around the university, even with small things, like handing out food, and just the power of community around people that have, you know, one common goal. And it was really beautiful to see. It showed me how powerful people can be when they all work together. I know it sounds cliche, but it was so apparent.” He also noted the uphill battle that the demonstrators faced in fighting against the deeply entrenched and powerful establishment. “Students can still come together and really fight for something, but at the end of the day, it takes a ton of people who are willing to sacrifice a lot in order to make real change.”
Okalani expressed her frustration with the response from UCSD’s administration, believing that “they don’t care about student well-being as much as they say they do.” She’s taken away a more skeptical and critical stance of these power structures “because, at the end of the day, we are all just numbers to them; we are replaceable, we are disposable.”
The student at Tulane took home two important lessons from their experience. “First of all, it’s really made it clear to me how institutions will respond when you get in the way of, one, their ability to make money, [and] two, their place in the imperialist machine. I think it’s also made it very clear to me how weak these institutions truly are when the people come together. Eventually they were able to bust us, but the truth of the matter is that it took days, because every time cops showed up, people would link up, and we would protect each other.” The power and potential of community was a resonant theme among all of the students that I talked with.
A student journalist at Yale covering the two encampments that appeared on her campus told me that she came to recognize the value that local journalism can bring. “Local and student papers can oftentimes report with more detail and precision that a national outlet can’t really do to the same level […] The national press will only come at the biggest moment or whatever, and see such a snippet, or just really segments of the larger picture that’s going on at the campus level, if that makes sense.”
The GW organizer I spoke with, who acted as a press liaison for her encampment, also came to similar conclusions on the limits around much of mainstream journalism. “It takes skill to speak to reporters, not in the sense that they’ll try to debate-lord you into saying something, because I can handle that. But it’s more like, to get our demands across, the more interviews I did, the more I realized how they look for specific sound bites.” With more experience, she was better able to articulate her views in a way that would translate well into the format most media companies are constrained to. She also expressed her slight regret, in hindsight, of not using other journalistic methods to publicize their views. “I think I would have released more op-eds [in hindsight], because we’ve released op-eds before, and they’ve been effective […] I think that would have given us extra opportunities to get our message out.”
Many other students also found areas of self-critique where the movement could have been better. While this was not the case with all of the encampments, some organizers implemented stringent security policies to monitor who came into the encampment area. “It kind of seemed like the organization [at UCLA] shot itself in the foot to that degree, where they were being too exclusive towards the end,” F said upon reflection. “But that’s just my own critique.”
At Yale, one of the encampments was initially quite strict about who they would let in; for a while, members of the press were not allowed into the area, including the student journalist who I spoke to. “That move in particular was criticized, particularly the fact that they weren’t letting the press into this space. I mean, I don’t really know if I’m in a position to be like ‘they should have done xyz better,’ but I do think letting the press in or not trying to monitor or remove members [would have been better].” The encampment loosened their rules later on, but it seemed like the initial poor optics of that decision was more harmful than helpful in the end.
That’s not to say that the organizers were wrong to be at times overly-cautious of who they were letting in. The GW organizer told me an anecdote about an infiltrator who “came in and planted stuff; like, he planted an anti-Semitic book, and then he wrote on the front page something like ‘this is the holy book of the encampment!’… it was so stupid… but you needed to be careful about that kind of stuff.” It’s a precarious line to balance on; how does an organizer insure the safety of their demonstration against would-be infiltrators and agitators with malicious intentions, while also being an open and inviting space, not simply for the sake of public optics, but for the health and comfort of the community built in this new environment?
It seems that the encampments who were more willing to embrace “big tent” policies were likelier to succeed than ones that trended towards more exclusive tendencies, both in terms of optics, but also in their amassed power to stand up against the institutions. The GW organizer believed that “the reason [her] encampment held out for so long was because of the tremendous community support” that was able to successfully defend against the large police presence. There was a reason that most police sweeps happened in the dead of night or early morning; these were when the encampments were at their lowest numbers.
The young student organizers who built this movement from the ground up were coming to terms with many of these problems for the first time. Some mistakes were made, and many invaluable lessons were learned in the process. It is doubtless that many of those involved will carry on their burgeoning knowledge and experiences towards better and more informed activism in the future.
Fighting for a better future
The spring ‘24 pro-Palestinian student encampments has become what appears to be a blossoming moment for a new generation of American activists, ready to follow in the footsteps of the anti-war and anti-apartheid movements against government policies towards Iraq in the 2000s, South Africa in the 80s, and Vietnam in the 60s.
The GW organizer told me that the encampment and her experience with SJP (Students for Justice in Palestine) “has just killed [her] social anxiety. It’s crazy. It’s actually insane the way that I’ve had to become comfortable with public speaking; it was like they beat me with it, you know?”
Caleb from IU had a similar experience. “I have social anxiety, so sometimes it’s very hard for me to go up and talk to new people and things like that. But [the encampment] kind of brought me out of my shell, [and it] made me realize that I want to get involved in my neighborhood.” Caleb told me that he sees his future in the labor movement. “I really want to get involved in community organizing. And I’m very passionate about labor rights, and I want to become a union organizer, and basically just, you know, fight for people that the system is f**king over, and trying to do what I can to make a difference.”
Okalani from UCSD is now “a million times more inclined to organize, as well as help organize” future demonstrations. “It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“If anything, [the encampment] has strengthened my commitment to the cause and to peace activism, and leftist activism in general,” the Tulane student told me.
F’s experience at UCLA has inspired him to become more involved in these kinds of movements as well. “I could get a first aid certificate or something. [I could] take some kind of classes, like maybe EMT classes […] some kind of class like that where, in the event that, exactly like what I did that night [of the attack], I could just be present, on the sidelines, ready to help people who do need to be helped. I feel like that’s probably a good way that I could get involved again.”
F told me that he feels much more comfortable being in the position of a medic than he does being on the front line, which comes with risks of being attacked or arrested. He brings up the important observation that activism can, and should, be different to everybody involved. While some may romanticize the role of the “activist” as one which involves being the face of a movement––rallying together the masses, valiantly waving the flag, standing face-to-face against the oppressive police forces that descend upon demonstrations––equally important are the organizers, medics, lawyers, writers, planners, donors, drivers, security, community support, and media liaisons working tirelessly, and often behind-the-scenes, to make the movement a success. The effort to build a more humane and just world will need the creative energies from people of all types of abilities, backgrounds, and talents.
The student journalist at Yale had come to very similar conclusions, especially regarding her role as a writer for her school’s newspaper. “I think I realized [that] as much as we need people protesting or lobbying for change, we also need people who are supposed to not be [directly] involved [and] report it as truthfully and accurately as possible. And that’s helping in its own way.” Still, she has come away with somewhat conflicted feelings on the journalistic neutrality that prevented her from being more involved in the encampments. “I was sort of realizing, as a journalist, even if you have strong feelings about one thing […] you are not expected to show any sort of opinion. And I think it was just difficult, and I just felt like I wish I could have done more, but I realized that’s because that was sort of my role [as a journalist] that that’s all I could do, honestly.”
Perhaps the greatest victory of the movement was that it helped to crystallize the commitments to justice and peace that will come to define a new generation of activists and advocates. If the police repression of the encampments was an attempt to demoralize the students and the pro-Palestinian movement, such efforts have overwhelmingly failed. Every student whom I talked with, including those who previously had little or no experience in activism, was either just as or even more motivated to continue their fight for a more just more peaceful world, across avenues that took advantage of their respective interests and talents.
The great psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon stated that “each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.” If there’s any reason to have hope for the future, it is in the commitment and inspiration these brave students have to come together as a collective, fulfill their mission, and fight for liberation, justice, and a true peace for all the peoples of the world.
