Read in Solidarity
length: 2 days
Palestinian writer and professor Refaat Alareer was murdered by the settler colonial state of so-called Israel on December 6, 2023. Forty days later, on January 15, 2024, people around the world partook in "Read for Refaat," a day of action that kicks off a week of solidarity events focused on reading out loud and in public Alareer's work, the works of other Palestinian writers, and works about Palestine. You can learn more about "Read for Refaat" on Publishers for Palestine's website, and you can read, download, and listen to what I read aloud that week here.
On April 26, 2024, 142 days after Refaat's murder, his eldest daughter Shymaa, her husband Muhammad, and their newborn baby Abd al-Rahman were also murdered by so-called Israel. This news comes just as yet another potentially pivotal moment for anticolonial organizing in the imperial core unfolds, with thousands shutting down and occupying college campuses across the settler colonial state of the so-called U.S., as well as abroad, in solidarity with Palestinians.
On April 27 and 28, I will be posting recordings of myself reading selections from the texts listed below, which include those on Verso Books's "In Solidarity with the Students" page, available to download freely there and below. If you record yourself reading from these texts and want to make those recordings available on this page, please contact me at [Work AT RiveraErica DOT com].
Source materials
In order to download the free books from Verso's website, you need to provide an e-mail and contact information; you can provide false information, but in case you're uncomfortable with that process, I've made them available for download them here.
Please note that I'm unsure why the first file is labelled as a ZIP file, but it should open up as an EPUB file. Also, for the selections from Verso, I apologize that I couldn't offer PDF files (though I may add them later on), as well as for the fact that these EPUB files are stamped with my name at the front. Finally, Ghost caps my downloadable files at 5 MB, and one of the books (Springtime, edited by Tania Palmieri and Clare Solomon) is 6.1 MB, so I'm not able to offer it for download here (yet).
From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine, edited by Sai Englert, Michal Schatz, and Rosie Warren
Towers of Ivory and Steel by Maya Wind
Human Capital by Laura Robson
The Case for Sanctions Against Israel, edited by Audrea Lim
The Verso Book of Dissent, edited by Andrew Hsiao and Audrea Lim
Occupy!: Scenes from Occupied America, edited by Carla Blumenkranz, Keith Gessen, Mark Greif, Sarah Leonard, Sarah Resnick, Nikil Saval, Eli Schmitt and Astra Taylor
The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney
TO THEM, WE ARE ALL OUTSIDE AGITATORS: ENCAMPMENTS & ESCALATION by Within Our Lifetime
April 27, 2024
content/trigger warnings: discussion and depiction of someone's home being destroyed by bombs
"I couldn’t bid my apartment farewell" by Tawfiq Abu Shomer, from From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine
"I couldnt bid my apartment farewell" by Tawfiq Abu Shomer
0:00
/214.2940589569161
This article was first published in Arabic on the website of the Palestine News Network. It was translated by Meriam Mabrouk, first published in English by the Institute for Palestine Studies on their blog and republished in From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine with permission.
I apologize to my library, filled with the memories of many years, because the Apache pilot only gave me a few minutes’ warning to save myself before they sentenced my small apartment to death. My heart aches for my apartment, which I built brick by brick with my own hands. I painstakingly selected each material, each tile, treating them as companions that would accompany me through life. I carried the packages of tiles with tenderness, just as I carried my firstborn child in his cradle. The joy I felt as each tile was laid and dried was immeasurable. I even distributed sweets around Gaza when I completed the row of tiles! Yet, the pilot decided to unleash their hatred upon my cherished tiles, dimming their brightness that I loved so deeply.
I had thought my son’s apartment next door would be a refuge when mine was destroyed. I had built it too, and another for my daughter. I reveled in the thought of having three independent apartments, all adjacent to each other. But a single bomb from a murderous occupier stole this happiness in mere seconds. The bomb obliterated the memories of choosing my bedroom furniture, which I had bought in installments. I regret not bidding it a final farewell.
I yearned to stand in the middle of the living room, filled with stories and memories, and salute this sanctuary of memories one last time. But all that remained were torn pieces after the bomb’s destruction.
Stepping on the fragments of my kitchen brings me immense pain. The pilot of the warplane took away my taste for traditional food, leaving me longing for my favorite flavors. How do I regain the flavor of my ceramic coffee cup, which had been a close friend to my writing projects? This cup was with me when I published four books, drops of bitter coffee seeping onto my pages. Now, I leave my traditional kitchen without seeing this cup because a bomb covered it in ashes and scattered its fragments among the rubble. My hands trembled as I collected its broken pieces.
Can I ever rid my two favorite plates of the smell of gunpowder? One plate was adorned by an image of a small black rose in the middle of white marble, the second was made out of polished metal. How can I get used to tasting food in my new shelter and forget the taste of these plates?
What caused my loss of appetite? At first, I thought it was due to losing everything and becoming homeless. But then I realized it was the absence of my two favorite plates. I can’t imagine ever adjusting to life without them. I never anticipated that the destruction of my apartment, and those of my son and daughter, would resurrect memories of my first cradle, seized by the Israeli occupier. Today, I feel closer to that first cradle than ever before.
Despite everything, I will continue to echo the words of renowned poet Pablo Neruda: "You can cut all the flowers, you can kill all the birds, but you cannot keep Spring from coming."
content/trigger warnings: graphic discussions and depictions of genocide
"The end of colonial government" by Samera Esmeir, from From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine
"The end of colonial government" by Samera Esmeir, Part 1
0:00
/286.2526984126984
"The end of colonial government" by Samera Esmeir, Part 2
0:00
/291.52362811791386
Danger looms heavy over Palestine. Israel’s production of the end times in Gaza is an enactment and a rehearsal, an attempted prefiguration of another end to come. If it is to be resisted, this danger must be diagnosed and named. What to say of this settler-colonial drive to incessantly start from scratch, to repeatedly empty the land of its Palestinian inhabitants, to insistently wish them out of existence, to tenaciously preempt the revolts of the colonized, nay, to prevent the thought of the thought of revolt? What does this relentless destruction disclose about the present and the future danger facing Palestinians from the river to the sea? And how does one mark this danger without reproducing its terms, affirming its destruction, indeed, taking on the position of the genocided?
The news media designation “the Israel-Gaza war” does not allow for comprehending this danger, but neither do the more critical formulations pointing to state violence, apartheid, and even genocide. These are all attempts, laudable and significant, at describing and opposing Israel’s subjugating and exterminating drive unleashed against the Palestinians. But even these formulations fall short of diagnosing the repetitive violation of an already violated land and people, the ongoing destruction of a life fashioned “from the ruins of earlier colonial desolations, the reprise of military raids in the hospitals that house the wounded from the same raids, and the insistence on transforming the largest open-air prison in the world into an open-air death camp. By centering the colonial mass killing of civilians and the apartheid-based government of the remaining living, these formulations do not catch up with the repetitive, cyclical rhythm of Israel’s obliteration machinery. Attention to this rhythm reveals Israel’s desire to wish Palestinians out of political and historical existence, to eradicate their historically cultivated way of life, to render them soulless bodies, to obliterate the conditions of the Palestinian inhabitation of the land—in short, the desire not to govern Palestinians.
To diagnose the looming danger, a sense, however intricate, of the details of the catastrophe in Gaza is necessary. These details fade when the images and reports from Gaza have become indistinguishable, even consistent and totalizing. But this totalization is not the outcome of the catastrophe as much as its modus operandi: catastrophizing totalizes to paralyze. Against this totalization, we may wish to find political instruction not in the hallowed ideals of an international order but in the details of the catastrophe: children who have no surviving family members, mothers who have lost their children, men who have ceased to be reliable witnesses and victims, elders reliving past forced displacements, injured girls dying from pain, bodies wrapped in bags, schools turned shelters and then death quarters, mass graves, dismembered limbs, disintegrated buildings, emptied neighborhoods, leveled streets, wrecked schools, fallen trees, squashed (infra)structures, flattened surfaces, banished shades, ubiquitous debris, blood that springs from the dust—land and limbs saturated with the two primary colors of destruction, gray and red. There are also the 1.7 million uprooted. Forced to move south to a yet smaller territorial stretch, many of them are murdered along routes of supposed safety while others are forced to leave behind loved ones unburied. Then there are the teachers, doctors, bakers, cooks, journalists, nurses, morticians, civil servants, volunteers, workers, and so many others; in their steadfastness and commitment to others, they have an intimate knowledge of the disaster in its collective, yet detailed, manifestations. These details tell of a danger not restricted to the killing of civilians but to the colonial desire to obliterate a place and its history, to evacuate the souls of the living, and to diminish the number of the governed. They also tell of formations of anticolonial steadfastness and resistance from the rubble.
Distinguished legal experts call the obliteration in Gaza genocide, which is the gravest of all crimes under international law. They note that Israeli officials stated their genocidal intentions and acted upon them. If technologies of artificial intelligence have availed civilians, en masse, of the means for collective obliterations, advanced weaponry and military systems provided by Western“states have executed the genocide of the Palestinian hostage population in Gaza.
As a legal category, the crime of genocide names actions calculated to bring about the destruction of a group as a whole or in part. It refers to the killing of members of a group, causing an injury to them, and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” Acts of genocide target the physical life of group members in the present. But the crime also describes attempts at exterminating or minimizing the biological future of the targeted group. Genocide includes “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group” and “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” Understood legally, then, acts of genocide target the life of the group in the present as well as in the future. The child is the figure extending the extermination in the present into the future. Eliminate children in the targeted group now, and you eliminate the future of this group.
Genocide is a clarifying frame for the unfolding Israeli extermination of the Palestinians. But what genocide in a restricted, legal meaning cannot fully frame are all those colonial obliterating acts that target not only the biological and physical life of a people but also houses, neighborhoods, mosques, churches, schools, streets, and finally, land—all those spaces that are not only the infrastructure of life in the present, but also the sites in which memory dwells, in which one can tell a story about her life, in which one inherits a collective life and can participate in it, in which one can perceive herself as a part of a more extended history, a past that exceeds her, and a struggle that marks her. Put differently, in centering the targeting of physical and biological life, present and future, genocide cannot frame the other target of the Israeli obliterating machine: the collective expansive existence of a resistant, resisting people, in short, its way of life, as it has been cultivated in struggle over time. Genocide as a frame is not sufficient to capture how Israel has been forcing Palestinians in Gaza, time and again, to start over and again, as though they did not exist before. The crime of genocide, despite its attention to physical, not only biological destruction, does not frame the destruction of the historicity of the Palestinians. This latter cruelty exceeds the gravest of all crimes under international law. It is what animates the repetitive, cyclical rhythm of Israel’s machinery of obliteration.
Israel seeks to eradicate a political collective existence cultivated historically through a bond with the land. This desire is expressed through the manifold efforts to terminate whatever protections the land offers Palestinians. Lacking a state to affirm their peoplehood, and in an international order that does not recognize non-peoples and whose constitutive unit is the state, the Palestinians have cultivated their sense of collective being, including their peoplehood, through their bond to the land they inhabit and from which Israel, through military and legal means, has repeatedly expelled them. The land has provided Palestinians with a collective existence in the world. As it maintains them in the world, the land protects them from vanishing into anonymity and endows them with historicity. The danger of vanishment was confronted in 1948 when the Zionist forces conquered most of Palestine and uprooted the Palestinians to make space for Israel. In Arabic, this vanishment from the land was named the Nakba, the Catastrophe. It indexes a double loss: of the land of Palestine and, consequently, of Palestinians. This is why the Nakba, or the severing from the land, was never accepted. Acquiescing to it would have been equivalent to consenting to self-destruction. Hence, the dual position of the Palestinian subject: she is at once marked by the catastrophe and cannot but struggle against it.
content/trigger warnings: discussions and depictions of genocide, scholasticide, and epistemicide
Selection from Chapter 6, "Academia Against Liberation," from Towers of Ivory and Steel by Maya Wind
Selection from Towers of Ivory and Steel by Maya Wind, Part 1
0:00
/255.6719954648526
Selection from Towers of Ivory and Steel by Maya, Wind Part 2
0:00
/253.62866213151926
Selection from Towers of Ivory and Steel by Maya Wind, Part 3
0:00
/244.15492063492064
Before the mass expulsion of Palestinians in the Nakba and the founding of Israel, Palestinians pursued higher education at leading universities in Beirut, Damascus, and Cairo. After 1948, Palestinians displaced from their homes and lands—whether to the Gaza Strip, under Egyptian governance, or to the West Bank, under Jordanian authority—continued to travel for study at universities across the Middle East as well as in the Soviet Union, Europe, and the United States. Yet with the 1967 military occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, Israel immediately escalated its war on Palestinian education. Palestinians were severed from neighboring Arab states and their travel severely restricted, closing off their opportunities to pursue higher education abroad. “Forcibly isolated from the intellectual and political life offered at universities across the Middle East and beyond, Palestinians in the OPT were compelled to establish their own system of higher education under the Israeli military government and despite its many obstacles.
The first comprehensive Palestinian institution of higher education was Birzeit University, on the outskirts of Ramallah. First opening its doors in 1924, the school of Birzeit later became one of several Palestinian institutions to offer associate’s degrees. But with Israel’s occupation, the institution’s administration began preparations to offer full four-year degree programs. Several years later, after waging a struggle against Israel’s military government to overcome its restrictive orders and demands for permit applications, the institution began enrolling students for bachelor’s degrees in 1972. Birzeit University became the first Palestinian university and has been a major center of Palestinian intellectual and political life for generations of Palestinian students.
From its early years, the Birzeit University campus was a site of Palestinian protest and a symbol of youthful civic resistance to Israeli military occupation. A hub of student activists advocating for Palestinian self-determination and articulating revolutionary anticolonial politics, the university was immediately regarded by Israel as a threat to its rule. The Israeli state was also particularly concerned about the university enrolling and potentially radicalizing Palestinian citizens of Israel and thereby fueling a broader Palestinian mobilization and liberatory politics. Almost immediately after Birzeit University opened its doors to enroll bachelor’s degree students, Israel began deploying the military to destabilize its educational programming. In 1973, the Israeli military closed the Birzeit University campus for two weeks, the first of fifteen such closures. Upon its reopening, the Israeli military governor of the occupied West Bank routinely invaded the campus to inspect classes, demanding copies of all assigned reading lists and textbooks for review and Israeli authorization. This campaign of harassment and suppression of academic freedom escalated with the Israeli military and Shin Bet arresting and interrogating senior Palestinian faculty and administrators and ousting and deporting the university’s president, Hanna Nasir, to Lebanon in 1974. Birzeit University and other institutions of higher education across the OPT have since become sites of continued struggle: the Israeli government has waged persistent campaigns to limit Palestinian education and repress resistance to its military rule, while Palestinian students and faculty have repeatedly defied Israeli military orders and continue to insist on their inalienable rights to education and to academic freedom.
Israel escalated its repression of Palestinian universities, then, in tandem with Palestinian popular uprisings. When the First Intifada erupted in 1987, Israel immediately targeted universities, labeling them sites of rebellion. Between 1988 and 1992, the Israeli military ordered the closure of Birzeit University, along with all Palestinian institutions of higher education, forcing faculty and students into underground study groups operating entirely off campus. The Israeli military surveilled and raided these study groups, terming them “cells of illegal education.” Students and faculty were arrested, interrogated, and sentenced to military prison for “public order” offenses for their participation in study groups, or even just for possession of a textbook. Nevertheless, Palestinian students and faculty continued to hold classes in defiance of Israeli military orders and kept the university alive. Sustained resistance across the OPT and the Palestinian Academic Freedom Network campaign in the United States that generated Congressional pressure ultimately forced Israel to permit Palestinians to return to their campuses.
With the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000, Israel tightened its control over Palestinian movement and further limited opportunities for students to travel within and outside the OPT to pursue higher education. The Israeli government severed ties between academic institutions in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip, preventing joint research, teaching, and collaboration across Palestinian universities. In the occupied Gaza Strip, the Israeli military issued a blanket travel ban, preventing students from studying at West Bank universities or at institutions abroad. In the occupied West Bank, the Israeli military constructed a checkpoint on the main road to Birzeit University to hinder student access to campus, limiting their window for learning and using their commute to class as an opportunity to surveil and interrogate them. While Birzeit University was most frequently targeted throughout the Second Intifada, the Israeli military routinely invaded all Palestinian universities to intimidate and arrest both faculty and students.
Israeli military invasions of Palestinian campuses remain routine, including the use of tear gas, rubber bullets, and live ammunition. In 2014, the Israeli military raided the campuses of Birzeit University, the Arab American University in Jenin, and the Palestine Polytechnic University in Hebron, confiscating computers, banners, and student union materials. In 2016 and 2017, the Israeli military raided student union offices and other buildings at Birzeit University and Al-Quds University, damaging property and confiscating computers, flags, banners, and political materials. Following repeated raids on the Palestine Technical University in Tulkarm, in 2015 the Israeli military formed a temporary base and shooting range for military training on campus.
Throughout its use of the base, the Israeli military injured at least 138 faculty and students with live ammunition, and the campus became a site of regular student protest met with violent repression by the Israeli military. In 2018, the Israeli military regularly stationed soldiers outside the Palestine Technical University campus in the Al-Arroub refugee camp, where they surveilled, interrogated, and injured students. The Israeli military raided the Al-Quds University campus in the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of Abu Dis every year between 2015 and 2019, confiscating political materials and injuring students. At Al-Quds University’s Hind al-Husseini women’s college in Sheikh Jarrah, Israel banned an academic conference in 2018, detaining conference participants and temporarily shutting down the campus as punishment. In offensives on the Gaza Strip, the Israeli military has repeatedly targeted Palestinian universities and colleges in aerial and land strikes, killing and injuring students, faculty, and staff. The strikes continually destroy campus infrastructure, which is rebuilt and then again devastated. In the 2008–9 offensive, fourteen of the fifteen institutions of higher education in Gaza were damaged by Israeli military fire, with six of them directly targeted. Three colleges and six campus buildings were entirely destroyed. In the 2012 bombardment, seven universities were damaged by Israeli airstrikes. In the 2014 offensive, Israel targeted Gaza from the land, sea, and air over the course of fifty-one days, destroying or severely damaging over 18,000 homes and vital infrastructure, including 148 schools and eleven higher education facilities of three universities. Israeli missiles struck the campus of Al-Quds University in the Gaza Strip, killing twenty-two Palestinian students. A missile fired at the campus of the Islamic University in Gaza left its facilities in ruins. The University College of Applied Sciences was also targeted by missiles, destroying its administration building, conference hall, computer laboratories, and many classrooms. These aerial strikes inflicted millions of dollars of damage on these universities, plunging them into an even deeper financial crisis generated by the Israeli siege.
On May 11, 2021, with the start of the Unity Intifada, Israel launched an eleven-day aerial offensive on the Gaza Strip. The bombardment killed 252 Palestinians, including 66 children and 5 university students.52 Israeli fire wounded over 1,948 Palestinians and internally displaced over 107,000 during that campaign alone. Aerial strikes made over 2,400 homes uninhabitable and damaged over 50,000 units, including the headquarters of major Palestinian, Arab, and International media outlets.
Samir Mansour watched his printing house and bookshop reduced to rubble as the Israeli military destroyed the Kahil building adjacent to the Islamic University, which also housed several major cultural and educational centers and labs with expensive equipment. The bookshop was beloved by the university community and frequented by its students. It housed diverse collections of academic and literary texts, some of which were originally translated by the bookshop. Mansour had carefully collected and printed over 100,000 books across genres, proudly serving his community for decades. He described arriving at his bookshop after the bombing:
"The scene was frightening, as the building had come to ruins with only a few books covered by thick dust spared from the destruction. Some books could be seen to be strewn across the floor at great distances from the place, as they washed away 40 years’ worth of memories since the founding of a library that served as a beacon and outlet for academics, intellectuals and science students in Gaza."
During the eleven-day offensive, all seven universities in the Gaza Strip were forced shut. In the wake of the campaign, they faced a long struggle to fully reopen. Israeli forces had bombed the Gaza Strip data center and communications network, disrupting internet service and forcing universities to suspend all online educational activity, which was essential throughout the pandemic. The Palestinian Minister of Communication reported that bringing in the necessary equipment to restore internet service in the Gaza Strip was impeded by Israeli restrictions, which he called “inhumane.” University students in the Gaza Strip decried the devastating effects of Israeli strikes. Iman Safi, a student at Al-Aqsa University, described the bombings as “causing a complete paralysis of life,” immediately derailing the academic trajectories of the hundreds of students who were maimed, whose homes were destroyed, and who lost family members in the aerial strikes. These students, Safi reported, were “in a state of dispersion, instability and homelessness.” Palestinian faculty and students know that the repeated aerial strikes on their universities are not coincidental. As Adnan Abu Amer, a professor at Ummah Open University, explained: “Educational buildings have always been primary targets for the Israeli forces in any attack on the Gaza Strip.” With Palestinian education regarded as a threat to Israeli rule, Palestinian universities are defined as military targets.
April 28
content/trigger warning: discussion of mass displacement and refugee exploitation
Selection from Chapter 7, “Refugees versus 'Palestine Refugees': Race and the Postwar International Regime,” from Human Capital: A History of Putting Refugees to Work by Laura Robson
Selection from Human Capital by Laura Robson, Part 1
0:00
/261.6627664399093
Selection from Human Capital by Laura Robson, Part 2
0:00
/258.9692517006803
Selection from Human Capital by Laura Robson, Part 3
0:00
/167.22709750566892
Selection from Human Capital by Laura Robson, Part 4
0:00
/211.22902494331066
The racialization of the refugee regime, already evident in the divergence between the destinies of Jewish and non-Jewish refugees, now became obvious in a still more dramatic way. In the 1948 war that birthed the new state of Israel, three-quarters of a million Palestinian Arabs were made refugees—not only by military strategies of expulsion during the war but also, perhaps more to the point, by the subsequent Israeli refusal to allow them to return. The attempts of the newly established “international community” in the form of the United Nations to deal with this new refugee problem layered on top of the older one revealed, above all, the extraordinary nonuniversality of the emerging refugee regime. The fact that different types of refugees were to be treated differently had, of course, been an evident aspect of the system from its early days in the 1920s, when the League explicitly declared that not all displaced or stateless people would qualify as refugees. Now, as the new Israeli government—backed by the UN, the IRO, and any number of private humanitarian organizations across Europe and the United States—moved Holocaust survivors out of European DP camps and into the towns, neighborhoods, and houses of exiled Palestinian Arabs, this long-acknowledged truth would become a formal legal commitment; indeed, the basis for a permanent legal premise that some kinds of refugees were entitled to more rights than others.
The emergence of Palestine as a test case for a racialized international refugee approach was, in part, a consequence of the UN’s own central role in the simultaneous birth of Israel and of the Palestinian refugee crisis. In November of 1947, following the British declaration of intent to give up its mandate over Palestine and turn the problem over to the UN, the General Assembly voted in favor of partitioning Palestine into a Jewish state and Arab “territories”—a decision whose implementation, as many at the time recognized, would necessarily involve the forcible expulsion of enormous numbers of Palestinians from the mooted Jewish nation. (At the time of the vote, Jews owned between 6 and 7 percent of Palestine’s land and constituted approximately 35 percent of the population; a previous British proposal for partition in 1937 had acknowledged that such a “solution” would require the removal of about 300,000 Palestinian Arabs, to create a much smaller Jewish state than the one being proposed now.) With the outbreak of war, this eventuality came to pass very quickly. In the first stage of the war, the so-called civil war that took place between December 1947 and May 1948, Zionist militias forced more than 300,000 Palestinians from their towns and villages. The second stage, in which the surrounding Arab countries declared war on the newly established state of Israel, saw the expansion of Israel’s borders well beyond the area proposed in the UN’s partition plan and the expulsion of a further 400,000 Palestinians. By the time of the armistice in 1949, a majority of the prewar Palestinian Arab population—some three-quarters of a million people—were refugees.
The United Nations, because of its own role in the conflict and because Palestine’s prominence made it a useful venue in which to assert the importance of this new form of internationalist authority, positioned itself in the war’s aftermath as the primary arbiter of the Palestine-Israel question. In December of 1948 it established something called the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP), which was intended to take over the tasks of the former United Nations mediator Count Folke Bernadotte (murdered in September of 1948 by Zionist terrorists) and work towards a “final settlement” of the Palestine question. With respect to the refugees, the commission declared that those “wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return.” To this end, the UNCCP was instructed to facilitate their “repatriation, resettlement and economic and social rehabilitation … and the payment of compensation.”
This first showdown between the new state of Israel and the newly formulated United Nations clearly demonstrated, and not for the last time, the total impotence of internationalist rhetoric in the face of Israeli intransigence. The Israeli government refused utterly to entertain the idea of Palestinian return, declaring not only that they would constitute a security threat but that “the reintegration of the returning Arabs into normal life, and even their mere sustenance, would present an insuperable problem.” Given the realities on the ground (quietly supported by the UN’s power brokers in the form of the United States and the Soviet Union alike), officials turned their attention instead to the question of relief. In late 1949 the UN created a new agency it called the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) to assist Palestinian refugees with the practicalities of their displacement. This organization—established as a temporary one whose mandate would have to be re-upped every three years—essentially marked the abandonment of the political project of a “final settlement” in favor of basic material relief for the displaced. The UNCCP, charged with representing Palestinian interests in the search for a political settlement, slowly withered into invisibility. UNRWA, charged with the nonpolitical provision of practical aid on the ground, was serving nearly a million people by 1951.
The introduction of these two organizations, representing an approach to Palestinians that purported to believe both in the necessity of immediate assistance and in the possibility of an eventual political solution, provided cover for the United Nations to make the decision—as one legal scholar has put it—“to exclude Palestinians from the ‘universal’ refugee regime incorporated in the 1950 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Statute and the 1951 Refugee Convention.” This exclusion rested on two separate legal bases. The first was through the Refugee Convention’s definition of the “refugee” specifically in terms of the Second World War, as someone who had had to leave his place of residence as a result of “events occurring in Europe before 1 January 1951” (one option for signatory states) or “events occurring in Europe or elsewhere before 1 January 1951” (an alternative option) and now could not return “owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted.” It was a definition whose application to refugees from a now-disbanded or ethnically reconstituted former colony was not at all clear—a circumstance Palestinian refugees shared with any number of other non-European displaced populations; for instance, the millions of people displaced almost simultaneously in the violent expulsions of Indian partition in the summer of 1947 and totally ignored by the makers of this new refugee regime. The second, arguably more functional basis for Palestinian exclusion was that no one could claim the protections of UNHCR who was receiving aid from another UN organization—so, in practice, the prior existence of UNRWA rendered impossible aid from UNHCR or protection under the convention.
Though it was by no means a unique experience for a displaced person to remain unrecognized as a refugee and therefore ineligible for UNHCR protection, some specificities of the category of “Palestine refugee” gradually emerged. Apart from the short-lived United Nations Korean Reconstruction Agency, disbanded in 1958, UNRWA was (and remains today) the only UN agency to deal solely with refugees of a single nationality. Its mandate did not really clarify who counted as a refugee or what their rights might be, and in the first years after the war relief providers often found themselves having to make essentially ad hoc decisions about who did and did not qualify for aid. As one Quaker worker in post-1948 Gaza noted, “We now feel the necessity of broadening our definition of refugee to include a considerable number of people who still live in their own houses but have been completely deprived of any source of livelihood due to the fact that their land is in the hands of the Jews.” Gradually, though, the UN began to enforce a procedural approach to Palestinian refugeedom that echoed its practical approach to the Refugee Convention from which Palestinians were formally and legally excluded: enforcing restrictions on the UNRWA rolls of refugees, limiting registration to those who had been physically displaced (rather than denationalized in place, as had happened to many Palestinians in Gaza), and requiring legal demonstration of claims of expulsion. By 1951 UNRWA had a serviceable legal conception of a “Palestine refugee,” which it began to use to determine eligibility for registration: “Persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict.” Palestinians who fell under this rubric were ineligible for UNHCR assistance or protection—partly because the UN did not want to confront Israel over its refusal to allow the refugees reentrance, but also because its Arab delegates feared that UNHCR resettlement practices would strip Palestinians of their right of return. “The refugees should be aided pending their repatriation,” the Saudi delegate declared, “repatriation being the only real solution of their problem.”
In other words, something truly important was happening here: the international community, in the form of the United Nations, was actively making the decision that there could be different categories of refugee, based on place of origin and method of dislocation. No one at the UN seriously disputed that the million or so displaced, denationalized, dispossessed Palestinians filing for international assistance by the early 1950s were, by any contemporary measure, refugees. But because they were not Europeans, and because they had been expelled as a consequence of a political project strongly supported by the UN’s main showrunners, and because admitting the permanence of their expulsion would anger so many in the rest of the Middle East and beyond, they could not be given the same political status as—for instance—the European Jews now being ushered into Israel with the approval and help of the IRO. The solution, then, was to subdivide the concept of refugee into different, distinct, particular legal categories, and to limit the possibility of seeking asylum in the West to only one of them. In the first instance, the concept of separate and unequal refugee status would apply almost exclusively to Palestinians, under the specific metrics of the 1951 convention. But the more general idea of differentiated refugee status based on point of origin and cause of expulsion would eventually come to dominate global systems of refugee law—not least because, as the Palestine case had now demonstrated, it offered a way to maintain a theoretical commitment to humanitarianism and the principles of the Refugee Convention while in practice closing off access to asylum, citizenship, and political rights to all but a select few.
Many relief workers within and without the UN, sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians and not infrequently hostile to the Israeli state that had violently expelled them in the name of ethnonationalism, understood refugee return as the only real and just solution to Palestinian exile.
But the UN, and especially the Americans, had very different ideas. In April of 1949 Truman’s secretary of state Dean Acheson went on a tour of the Middle East. He was preparing, on the president’s instruction, to put together a new scheme for the mass resettlement of Palestinian refugees across the Middle East: a solution that would help stabilize the new Israel and guarantee its demographic future as a Jewish state, but also provide invaluable labor for various regional development schemes. To this end, he put together a new commission and called it the “United Nations Middle East Economic Survey Administration,” a name that subtly but clearly reflected the intent not only to disburse refugees across the whole of the region but to do so with an eye to American-backed economic development and labor needs. When the UN’s formal negotiations with Israel broke down over Israeli refusal to allow refugees to return, George McGhee—the new assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs—convened his own meeting, to which he invited not only the main refugee relief agencies but also commercial enterprises with interests in the region: “Oil companies, construction firms, a steamship line, and State Department personnel.” To the disappointment of AFSC representatives, the conversation revolved not around repatriation but resettlement: in Iraq (an idea proposed earlier by the OSS and the M Project), in the Sinai, in the Jordan Valley, and in Syria. As in some earlier American proposals, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA, Roosevelt’s 1930s-era project to harness the Tennessee River as a source of energy for comprehensive rural development across much of the American South) served as a kind of model for developmentalist schemes that might now be deployed in Jordan and Syria—to the mutual benefit of the American companies charged with their execution, the commercial enterprises around the region who required political stability for continued profit, and the impoverished refugees who would populate the area in lieu of going home.
The Israeli military government set up its own formal committee on transfer almost immediately upon consolidating its grip on its territory. Its refugee-related goals were very clear: to prevent refugee return, devolve responsibility for the Palestinian refugee problem onto the surrounding Arab states, move refugees away from the newly created border, make the preservation of a Palestinian national identity impossible, and moderate the diplomatic pressures on the Israeli state from external actors. Though there was overlap between these goals and those of some American administration members and hangers-on (Joseph Schechtman, for instance, moved from the OSS and the M Project directly into a position with the Israeli Cabinet Transfer Committee where he advocated for a mass transfer of Palestinians into Iraq), the Israeli and the American positions were not the same. For Israel, the rationale for and commitment to enforcing continued Palestinian exile was clear. For the United States, the priority was to stabilize the region enough to permit unencumbered commercial and strategic development, a goal that could encompass any number of different approaches to the refugee problem and did not preempt irritation with what Truman, at least, often viewed as uncooperative behavior on the part of Ben-Gurion and his new administration.
content/trigger warning: reference to war crimes, discussion of genocide, some questionable language?
"Rebirth of Student Activism" by Hesham Yafai, from Springtime, edited by Clare Solomon & Tania Palmieri
"Rebirth of Student Activism" by Hesham Yafai
0:00
/250.65650793650795
One of the most remarkable features of the present wave of student activism has been its ability to place itself within a wider struggle: both with other areas of UK society under attack from the Coalition government, and with people in other parts of the world fighting for the right to education. We can see the former in events such as Goldsmiths’ occupation of Deptford town hall to protest at council cuts, King’s College London students joining RMT workers at tube stations to protest ticket office closures, and LSE students joining the fire-fighters on picket lines in solidarity with their efforts to prevent unfair contract changes. But to appreciate the movement’s internationalism, we need to return to 27 December 2008.
On that date Israel began its 22-day offensive against the besieged Gaza strip, in what Amnesty International has since called the ‘22 Days of Death and Destruction’. The official United Nations investigation into the attack found that Israel had committed war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity. While international leaders the world over trotted out their usual, tired chorus of rehearsed ‘condemnation’, in the UK hundreds of thousands of people joined demonstrations across the country as anger spilled out onto the streets.
Yet the anger did not end there. Students returned to their campuses and began to organize. There was an acknowledgement that the conventional democratic channels had failed them. To effect real change students realized they needed to self-organize and move to unconventional channels to fight the battles that lay ahead. In early 2009 students from the School of Oriental and African Studies occupied one of the university’s largest galleries in solidarity with the people of Palestine. The myth of the so-called ‘iPod generation’ had been exploded; suddenly, there was talk of the reawakening of the spirit of ’68. Dozens of universities soon followed, including Essex, Birmingham, Oxford, Cambridge and Manchester.
Students at the occupations began to organize effectively, ushered along by the visitations of experienced campaigners and activists from Tariq Ali and Alex Callinicos, to Ghada Karmi and Lindsey German. Lecture shut-outs, walkouts, demonstrations, stalls, stunts, planning meetings and large-scale events embraced colleges and universities up and down the country. It was truly a rebirth of student activism, transforming disempowered students to front-line resisters, spurred on by an injustice committed halfway across the world and signalling a new era in student politics.
The fact that British students were protesting in their name was not lost on the Palestinians, who sent thousands of messages of support and gratitude. Today, education in Palestine continues to come under attack from a variety of directions: the cantonization of the West Bank severely delays and periodically prevents students from reaching classes via check-points; the controlled Palestinian economy means tens of thousands of students wishing to study cannot afford to do so; strikes by UNRWA workers mean classes have to be cancelled; students constantly face risk of arrest and trial before a military court; schools and universities face closure and transmutation into military barracks; and so on. Despite these many adversities the Palestinians continue to struggle on and, remarkably, still exhibit the second highest literacy rates in the Arab world.
An international Right To Education campaign, which has its roots in Birzeit University, is gathering momentum: in the summer of 2010 it held an international conference in the West Bank. Right to Education week is slowly becoming a permanent fixture, and is helping to link up the various struggles across the world for a free and fair education. It is a struggle that crosses national borders, as has also been seen through the acts of solidarity with French and Greek students and workers.
So from Gaza to Golders Green, via Greece and beyond, a collective struggle is beginning to take place. International solidarity is back on the agenda and the sentiment of a shared cause is pervasive. Perhaps this sense of unity is best expressed through the statement most manifested in messages of solidarity between different groups across the world: ‘Our struggle is your struggle, and your struggle is ours.
content/trigger warning: discussion of economic precarity, use of an anti-Roma slur?
Selection from Chapter 1, "The University and the Undercommons," from The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney
Selection from The Undercommons Fugitive Planning and Black Study by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, Part 1
0:00
/278.0560544217687
Selection from The Undercommons Fugitive Planning and Black Study by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, Part 2
0:00
/281.5854875283447
Selection from The Undercommons Fugitive Planning and Black Study by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, Part 3
0:00
/99.65709750566893
THE ONLY POSSIBLE RELATIONSHIP TO THE UNIVERSITY TODAY IS A CRIMINAL ONE
“To the university I’ll steal, and there I’ll steal,” to borrow from Pistol at the end of Henry V, as he would surely borrow from us. This is the only possible relationship to the American university today. This may be true of universities everywhere. It may have to be true of the university in general. But certainly, this much is true in the United States: it cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment. In the face of these conditions one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of – this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university.
Worry about the university. This is the injunction today in the United States, one with a long history. Call for its restoration like Harold Bloom or Stanley Fish or Gerald Graff. Call for its reform like Derek Bok or Bill Readings or Cary Nelson. Call out to it as it calls to you. But for the subversive intellectual, all of this goes on upstairs, in polite company, among the rational men. After all, the subversive intellectual came under false pretenses, with bad documents, out of love. Her labor is as necessary as it is unwelcome. The university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings. And on top of all that, she disappears. She disappears into the underground, the downlow low-down maroon community of the university, into the undercommons of enlightenment, where the work gets done, where the work gets subverted, where the revolution is still black, still strong.
What is that work and what is its social capacity for both reproducing the university and producing fugitivity? If one were to say teaching, one would be performing the work of the university. Teaching is merely a profession and an operation of that onto-/auto-encyclopedic circle of the state” that Jacques Derrida calls the Universitas. But it is useful to invoke this operation to glimpse the hole in the fence where labor enters, to glimpse its hiring hall, its night quarters. The university needs teaching labor, despite itself, or as itself, self-identical withand thereby erased by it. It is not teaching that holds this social capacity, but something that produces the not visible other side of teaching, a thinking through the skin of teaching toward a collective orientation to the knowledge object as future project, and a commitment to what we want to call the prophetic organization. But it is teaching that brings us in. Before there are grants, research, conferences, books, and journals there is the experience of being taught and of teaching. Before the research post with no teaching, before the graduate students to mark the exams, before the string of sabbaticals, before the permanent reduction in teaching load, the appointment to run the Center, the consignment of pedagogy to a discipline called education, before the course designed to be a new book, teaching happened.
The moment of teaching for food is therefore often mistakenly taken to be a stage, as if eventually one should not teach for food. If the stage persists, there is a social pathology in the university. But if the teach- ing is successfully passed on, the stage is surpassed, and teaching is consigned to those who are known to remain in the stage, the sociopathological labor of the university. Kant interestingly calls such a stage “self-incurred minority.” He tries to contrast it with having the “deter- mination and courage to use one’s intelligence without being guided by another.” “Have the courage to use your own intelligence.” But what would it mean if teaching or rather what we might call “the beyond of teaching” is precisely what one is asked to get beyond, to stop taking sustenance? And what of those minorities who refuse, the tribe of moles who will not come back from beyond (that which is beyond “the beyond of teaching”), as if they will not be subjects, as if they want to think as objects, as minority? Certainly, the perfect subjects of communication, those successfully beyond teaching, will see them as waste. But their collective labor will always call into question who truly is taking the orders of the enlightenment. The waste lives for those moments beyond teaching when you give away the unexpected beautiful phrase – unexpected, no one has asked, beautiful, it will never come back. Is being the biopower of the enlightenment truly better than this?
Perhaps the biopower of the enlightenment knows this, or perhaps it is just reacting to the objecthood of this labor as it must. But even asit depends on these moles, these refugees, it will call them uncollegial, impractical, naive, unprofessional. And one may be given one last chance to be pragmatic – why steal when one can have it all, they will ask. But if one hides from this interpellation, neither agrees nor disagrees but goes with hands full into the underground of the university, into the Undercommons – this will be regarded as theft, as a criminal act. And it is at the same time, the only possible act.
In that undercommons of the university one can see that it is not a matter of teaching versus research or even the beyond of teaching versus the individualisation of research. To enter this space is to inhabit the ruptural and enraptured disclosure of the commons that fugitive enlightenment enacts, the criminal, matricidal, queer, in the cistern, on the stroll of the stolen life, the life stolen by enlightenment and stolen back, where the commons give refuge, where the refuge gives commons. What the beyond of teaching is really about is not finishing oneself, not passing, not completing; it’s about allowing subjectivity to be unlawfully overcome by others, a radical passion and passivity such that one becomes unfit for subjection, because one does not possess the kind of agency that can hold the regulatory forces of subjecthood, and one cannot initiate the auto-interpellative torque that biopower subjection requires and rewards. It is not so much the teaching as it is the prophecy in the organization of the act of teaching. The prophecy that predicts its own organization and has therefore passed, as commons, and the prophecy that exceeds its own organization and therefore as yet can only be organized. Against the prophetic organization of the undercommons is arrayed its own deadening labor for the university, and beyond that, the negligence of professionalization, and the professionalization of the critical academic. The undercommons is therefore always an unsafe neighborhood.
As Fredric Jameson reminds us, the university depends upon “Enlightenment-type critiques and demystification of belief and committed ideology, in order to clear the ground for unobstructed planning and ‘development.’” This is the weakness of the university, the lapse in its homeland security. It needs labor power for this “enlightenment-type critique,” but, somehow, labor always escapes.The premature subjects of the undercommons took the call seriously, or had to be serious about the call. They were not clear about planning, too mystical, too full of belief. And yet this labor force cannot reproduce itself, it must be reproduced. The university works for the day when it will be able to rid itself, like capital in general, of the trouble of labor. It will then be able to reproduce a labor force that understands itself as not only unnecessary but dangerous to the development of capitalism. Much pedagogy and scholarship is already dedicated in this direction. Students must come to see themselves as the problem, which, counter to the complaints of restorationist critics of the university, is precisely what it means to be a customer, to take on the burden of realisation and always necessarily be inadequate to it. Later, these students will be able to see themselves properly as obstacles to society, or perhaps, with lifelong learning, students will return having successfully diagnosed themselves as the problem.
Still, the dream of an undifferentiated labor that knows itself as superfluous is interrupted precisely by the labor of clearing away the burning roadblocks of ideology. While it is better that this police function be in the hands of the few, it still raises labor as difference, labor as the development of other labor, and therefore labor as a source of wealth. And although the enlightenment-type critique, as we suggest below, informs on, kisses the cheek of, any autonomous development as a result of this difference in labor, there is a break in the wall here, a shallow place in the river, a place to land under the rocks. The university still needs this clandestine labor to prepare this undifferentiated labor force, whose increasing specialisation and managerialist tendencies, again contra the restorationists, represent precisely the successful integration of the division of labor with the universe of exchange that commands restorationist loyalty.
Introducing this labor upon labor, and providing the space for its de- velopment, creates risks. Like the colonial police force recruited un- wittingly from guerrilla neighborhoods, university labor may harbor refugees, fugitives, renegades, and castaways. But there are good reasons for the university to be confident that such elements will be exposed or forced underground. Precautions have been taken, book lists have been drawn up, teaching observations conducted, invitations to contribute made. Yet against these precautions stands the immanence of transcendence, the necessary deregulation and the possibilities of criminality and fugitivity that labor upon labor requires. Maroon communities of composition teachers, mentorless graduate students, adjunct Marxist historians, out or queer management professors, state college ethnic studies departments, closed-down film programs, visa- expired Yemeni student newspaper editors, historically black college sociologists, and feminist engineers. And what will the university say of them? It will say they are unprofessional. This is not an arbitrary charge. It is the charge against the more than professional. How do those who exceed the profession, who exceed and by exceeding escape, how do those maroons problematize themselves, problematize the university, force the university to consider them a problem, a danger? The undercommons is not, in short, the kind of fanciful communities of whimsy invoked by Bill Readings at the end of his book. The undercommons, its maroons, are always at war, always in hiding.
content/trigger warning: discussions of genocide and settler colonialism, depictions of police/state violence, references to starvation and arson
"TO THEM, WE ARE ALL OUTSIDE AGITATORS: ENCAMPMENTS & ESCALATION" by Within Our Lifetime
TO THEM WE ARE ALL OUTSIDE AGITATORS ENCAMPMENTS ESCALATION by Within Our Lifetime, Part 1
0:00
/255.16108843537415
TO THEM WE ARE ALL OUTSIDE AGITATORS ENCAMPMENTS ESCALATION by Within Our Lifetime, Part 2
0:00
/267.0962358276644
TO THEM WE ARE ALL OUTSIDE AGITATORS ENCAMPMENTS ESCALATION by Within Our Lifetime, Part 3
0:00
/231.87156462585034
TO THEM WE ARE ALL OUTSIDE AGITATORS ENCAMPMENTS ESCALATION by Within Our Lifetime, Part 4
0:00
/232.12698412698413
After over 40,000 martyrs, seven months, and 75 years, the movement to Free Palestine in the imperial core has reached a watershed moment. We have been marching, chanting, engaging in mass protest and direct action for decades, trying to show the world that our people in Gaza are worthy of life as they bear witness to 75 years of genocide. Yet it was the steadfastness of the Palestinian people and their resistance forces who won the support of the global majority.
Over forty thousand martyrs and seven months have largely demonstrated that the tactics and strategy of the movement in the imperial core has hit its ceiling. Large marches, milquetoast speeches from celebrities, half-hearted solidarity from organizations that are not committed to our liberation have taken us as far as we can go. None of it has been enough. None of it has stopped the bombs from dropping or filled the stomachs of Palestinians being starved by the zionist entity. In fact, settlers have only grown more brazen in their violence—from the West Bank where they are regularly burning Palestinian homes to Gaza where they are committing unfathomable acts of horror against men, women, and children. Our cause has always been righteous, but now the image is clear to anyone looking that we are facing a monstrous settler colony committed to our annihilation as a people.
A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire
Yet, there are glimmers of hope in the belly of the beast. Our first real glimpse was April 15, a coordinated yet decentralized action that drove people all over the world to take action against points of production and logistics networks including ports, bridges, weapons manufacturers, financial institutions and more. The day of action was framed as “a shift from symbolic action” to materially effective action.
Over the past seven months of non-stop mobilization, the repression exerted by police, administrators, and politicians that we collectively have faced in all sectors of life has expanded and intensified. Death threats and doxxing have become the norm for people of conscience since October 7th. Unions have come under attack for expressing simple rhetorical (and not material) solidarity with Palestine.
Mobilizations are often indistinguishable from cop riots, with drone surveillance, arrests of youth, and repeated incidents of cops pulling off women’s hijabs quickly becoming routine. And students have been doxxed, harassed, suspended, expelled, evicted, and subjected to physical violence for supporting the rights of an exiled people to return to their homeland.
Although the universities, police forces, and politicians intend to force the people into submission with this wave of repression—to force us to accept that this genocide is inevitable and that we must allow it to proceed or else face severe consequences—it has done exactly the opposite. Seven months of this brutal repression have laid clear the task at hand and has forced all of us to become fearless. Protestors are not as frightened by the prospect of arrest as they used to be, students have been doxxed and have no reason to bite their tongues. As we confront zionism and imperialism, we are forced to confront the fact that we are not free at all and that any mobility we have within a dying empire can be stripped away in a heartbeat. So what is there left to do?
The students of the Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) coalition answered this question on Wednesday, April 17, when they set up the Gaza Solidarity Encampment on campus at 4 AM, insisting that they were not leaving until their demands were met. Columbia administration has shut down the university’s SJP and JVP chapters; suspended and evicted students; called the NYPD, FBI, Homeland Security, and even private investigators to surveil organizers; and allowed them to face a violent chemical attack committed by former IOF soldiers with no serious repercussions against the perpetrators. Columbia administration made it so deeply clear to its students that it does not stand with them and that its allegiance fully lies with the violent zionist project.
The struggle at the Gaza Solidarity Encampment has been historic, powerful, and awe-inspiring to today’s students across the country and those of 1968, who inspired the idea for a liberated zone on the lawn. CUAD has brought in students from other universities, dozens of organizations, and every day people who want to support what is seen not only as a serious escalation in movement strategy but a model for how the student movement can force power to concede to its demands. In only a few days, encampments have popped up all over the country from Cal Polytech to the City University of New York, from the ivy league to the public university. Within Our Lifetime salutes every student of every Gaza Solidarity Encampment and liberated zone and encourages everyone from all walks of life to plug into your local projects and support them however possible.
Confronting the Enemy
There is no further symbolic victory to be gained, there is no more “proving” that the Palestinian liberation struggle is just. There is no institution of power to appeal to, because every institution of power from the UN to the ICJ to our city councils and university administrations are corrupt and rotten to the core. Decades of electoral pandering has produced nothing but sellout politicians who demonize our resistance forces and our student organizing any chance they have. Years of appealing to the United Nations has produced international court rulings that are fundamentally incapable of stopping the bombs from raining on our people.
What these brave students have shown the world is that there are no allies within enemy institutions, no more appeals to be made, and certainly no more negotiating the terms of our existence and resistance. There is only an enemy to fight and a struggle that seeks victory. What is crucial in sustaining this moment is identifying clearly who our friends and enemies are. On the morning of the second day of Columbia’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment, President Minouche Shefik called on the NYPD to sweep the site and arrest the protestors. This same response was repeated at NYU, UT Austin, USC, Emerson, and more. At the time this statement is written, CUNY students are engaged in a standoff with the NYPD and CUNY Public Safety. On the first day of the CUNY encampment, CUNY students and community members successfully pushed out CUNY Public Safety from the encampment who had attacked members of the encampment with no justification. On the same day, CUNY Public Safety abducted a member of the encampment on the same day, a teenager, turned her over to the cops, and charged her with a felony for the crime of allegedly spraypainting the ground.
As the movement grows into a new phase, the terms of engagement with these enemies must be made clear. We cannot treat them as anything but hostile to our goals of ending the genocide of the people of Palestine. This is why we have made an effort to study, track, and report on the activities and capabilities of the New York Police Department. If they’re willing to throw us in jail and put us in the hospital every night for the egregious crime of using a megaphone without a permit, what would they do if we were on the precipice of truly throwing wrenches in the gears of the ongoing genocide? It is no use chanting “NYPD KKK IDF You’re All the Same” if we ignore the role of the US police forces in maintaining the status quo – which, for over 75 years, has included the genocide of our people. We understand the police as a functionary of US imperialism, and we understand that the zionist state wouldn’t last a Palestinian summer without the never-ending spigot of military and diplomatic aid provided to it by the US empire. If the police can quash the Palestinian solidarity movement on the streets of the U.S., that ensures that spigot does not have a domestic threat and can continue unabated.
At the same time as we assess who the forces of repression are, we must simultaneously be cautious not to let opportunists co-opt these spaces of revolutionary potential for photo-ops. Already, we have seen a number of individuals—many of whom have explicitly condemned the Palestinian resistance or even support the zionist entity’s existence—come and take photos, or even make speeches at the Gaza Solidarity Encampment. In New York, we’ve seen sell-outs like Alexa Aviles play revolutionary and take pictures at the Columbia encampment a year after helping evict Mexican and Latin American workers from Plaza Proletaria in Sunset Park. We’ve seen Alexandria Ocasio Cortez tweet in support of the encampments while demonizing “outside agitators” and condemning our resistance fighters in Palestine. Well-known intellectuals get on the mic and admonish us for daring to chant from the river to the sea, and implore us to consider the legitimacy of a settler-colonial state.
They are not our allies and they do not stand in solidarity with any of us. The attempt at co-optation by politicians, celebrities, and nonprofit organizations is a counterinsurgency strategy to de-escalate the encampments, de-fang the movement, and de-mobilize the momentum we have been building for so long.
Enough with De-Escalation Trainings; Where are the Escalation Trainings!
The movement trips over itself to provide endless trainings, webinars and infographics on de-escalation tactics to avoid bad press and antagonisms with police, zionist agitators, and university administrators. This is not inherently a bad thing and we are quite aware of the need to avoid pointless confrontation in order to build our camps and consolidate our forces. We ourselves have provided Know Your Rights trainings, for example, and employed this approach in specific protests and conditions. But like everything, we have a choice in what we prioritize and a responsibility to adapt to meet the moment. We need Know Your Rights trainings: but we also need Know Your Enemy trainings. We can choose to prioritize de-escalation trainings, or we can choose to prioritize escalation trainings. We can choose to learn how to build effective barricades, how to link arms most effectively to resist police attacks, or what type of expanding foam works best on the kind of doorknobs present in our universities.
This is not rhetoric — this is an urgent need. We will all share the inspiring images coming from Cal Polytech — but who will commit to studying and adapting those lessons to fit our conditions? These questions are a priority if we are serious about turning this movement from one that tries to advance our rhetorical position on solidarity and morality to convince power brokers of the righteousness of our cause, to a movement that becomes a power broker ourselves.
We are inspired by the Cal Polytech students — a student body where a fourth of the students do not have enough food to eat and have experienced homelessness — who were the first in this current period to take a building and fight off the police. We are inspired by the Columbia students who have shown a model on how to re-establish a camp after a police sweep and how to last for days at a time. We are inspired by the Emerson and Emory students who teach us to link arms in rows and build barricades to resist police assaults. We are inspired by the USC students who teach us that a single police car surrounded by hundreds can effectuate a de-arrest. These students are creative and adapt to their conditions and represent a shift in the solidarity movement from one of symbolic power to one that understands tangible power. We call on New Yorkers to learn these lessons and prepare for the next chapter.
No to Student Power – Yes to People Power
As we wrote nearly eight years ago, “the student movement can provide revolutionary leadership to a larger movement if it is integrated among broader progressive struggles to build power for oppressed people. But if instead the student movement is limited either solely to the specific struggles of students (tuition, student resources, etc.), or is isolating students from their communities instead of uniting them, the student movement becomes non-revolutionary or even counter-revolutionary.” This has not been more relevant than today, where new student encampments are established every single day.
There are several important lessons to draw from the rejection of the student power line — lessons that have been synthesized decades ago by revolutionaries in the United States and elsewhere, particularly the student movement integrated in the ongoing revolution in the Philippines.
Firstly, we note that it is crucial to keep our focus and demands on Gaza and the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. The protest itself can not be the dominating headline. And yet because our analysis of the Palestinian struggle is an internationalist one, part of these demands requires us to make our encampments and organizing relevant to the majority of New Yorkers who are not Palestinian, Arab or Muslim.
Our encampments exist in a city that is plagued by displacement, hunger, and state violence. If we limit our encampments to students alone, and on narrow demands that ignore the material context where we live — where our neighbors struggle and die — we are bound to fail. But if we force open the gates of the university, share our struggles, understand we have a common enemy and build our respective capacities to fight them on and off the campus — the universities are ours for the taking.
Secondly, it is more important than ever that we reject the so-called “outside agitator” line thrown at us by the right-wing media, cops, university administration, and so-called progressive forces. As the comrades in Cal Polytech teach us, “the distinction between student and non-student only enforces the gates between the university and its surrounding communities. By rejecting this difference we break open the gates.”
Emory students in Atlanta have declared “as clearly as possible, we welcome ‘outside agitators’ to our struggle against the ruthless genocide of the Palestinian people.” If we restrict political participation to students themselves, and only them, and turn away those at the gates, we are bound to fail. Students did not win in ‘68 by turning away the people of Harlem who threatened to storm the gates of Columbia, and neither will we now. In the eyes of our enemies in the belly of the beast, we are all outside agitators.
CUNY is for the People
That brings us to today — April 27, 2024. The CUNY encampment has entered its third day. The City University of New York is the key to New York City. What happens here determines the fate of the student movement in the rest of the City.
There are nearly 250,000 CUNY students in New York. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 50,000 New Yorkers work in the university system. CUNY has 25 campuses across 5 boroughs. The vast majority of college students (and their siblings, cousins, neighbors, coworkers…) attending demonstrations for Palestinian liberation do not go to the Ivy Leagues — they go to CUNYs. The high schoolers walking out of their schools for Gaza join the ranks of CUNY senior and community colleges year in and year out. CUNY was free for the vast majority of its existence — and our predecessors fought and won for open admissions — so that every New Yorker could go to CUNY.
That all changed when the first freshman CUNY class was majority non-white. Tuition and a restrictive admissions process was soon introduced, and now we find ourselves in a system that is desperately trying to become the UCLA of the East Coast — public in name only — whose prime beneficiaries are out of state middle or upper class students who have no connection to New York or its people. Now turnstiles, public safety officers, Starbucks, tuition hikes, and restrictive admission policies are everywhere you turn on a CUNY campus. Within Our Lifetime, formerly known as NYC Students for Justice in Palestine, was formed specifically out of this reality — Palestinian and Arab New Yorkers in the CUNY system who saw an isolation of the student movement and sought to bring the struggle out of the classroom and into our neighborhoods.
We encourage CUNY students to take stock of their campuses. Who are the progressive forces, who can be won over, and who must be politically isolated? Which buildings on your campus have the most favorable conditions to blockade doors and smuggle in supplies? Will student government and faculty push the administration to call off the cops? What of the student representatives in the Board of Trustees? Will the neighborhood the campus is located in support our struggle? Have we given them a reason to?
We salute the courageous CUNY students, alumni, faculty and community members who brought the struggle to the CUNY system. We are at your service.