Lessons from a Palestine solidarity encampment
Throughout the 1980s, thousands of university students across the United States participated in anti-apartheid protests on campuses to demand that their universities divest from companies operating in South Africa. They held sit-ins, took over campus buildings, and set up symbolic shantytowns on campuses. These protests had roots in the anti-Vietnam War movement of the 1960s.
There is historic precedence of students demanding more than symbolic gestures of solidarity with oppressed populations across the globe. Over the last several weeks, students at US university campuses have joined a global wave of student-led movements and demonstrations demanding ceasefire and an end to the war in Gaza. These demands have translated into increasing pressure on universities to divest from weapons manufacturers profiting from Israel's onslaught on Gaza, and disclose fundings received from Israel and the ends to which they have been used.
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The Israeli defence industry has long been a key player in orchestrating and militarily supporting repressive regimes across the world. Historically, weapons sold by Israel—and made with US aid and investments—have sustained the apartheid state of South Africa, supported Rwandan and Rohingya genocides, and aided "counterinsurgency" forces in El Salvador, Guatemala and Costa Rica, to mention a few examples. The current demands of divestments are echoes of historical and transnational calls against this structural complicity, impunity, and annihilation of entire regions for the sake of economic and political domination of a few.
It is this unified call for "divestment from death" that university administrations have been trying to curb and silence every time they have called in law enforcement agencies to crack down on protesting students and labelled them as violent agitators and trespassers on their own campuses.
However, with every abhorrent accusation of anti-Semitism and violence, the resounding response of protesters chanting for the freedom of Palestine reminds us of solidarities that transcend the convoluted media propaganda and official state narratives. They remind us of the rights to life and liberation that can only be collectively gained from simultaneous demands for ceasefire, decolonisation, and divestment.
It is within the context of this systemic, historical, and transnational violence that current protests in the US and their malignment by the state and media alike must be understood.
While the deployment of police and state troopers in campuses from Columbia to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) continues to be justified as a de-escalation measure, the absence of any force against pro-Israeli supporters brutally attacking protesters at UCLA in particular reveals the hollowness of the rhetoric of law and order behind which university administrators continue to hide.
Such selective crackdown on pro-Palestinian encampments and silence over pro-Zionist violence aim to drive home as well as outwardly project the country's official line on the ongoing war in Gaza. The state of Texas, for example, has twice sent law enforcement teams in riot gear and assault rifles to round up students, with the president of the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) proudly proclaiming in an email that "our campus will NOT be occupied" (emphasis ours).
However, despite the police repression against encampments last week, students of UT Austin, most of them undergraduates, have continued to reclaim the campus as a site of their protest. This week, protesters on campus announced a full day of teach-ins at the camp. Around 11am, we saw 50-60 students sitting on blankets in the lawn, a teach-in in session. The camp was set up on a big lawn facing south of the university tower. At 1:23pm, the UT Police Department (UTPD) sent out an email with a warning to disperse. Though intended to deter a congregation, even more people started showing up on the lawn.
Around 1:30pm, amid shouts of "You are being violent, we are being peaceful," police officials marched onto the lawn and formed a circle around the protest camp.
Later, we saw three men in state trooper uniforms carrying packs of Gatorade for their colleagues who had encircled the camp for several hours in the scorching sun. Meanwhile, voluntary medics pleaded with the police to allow them to access and treat protesters fainting from dehydration and heat. It took protesters chanting en masse to have the police, sipping on their Gatorade and biting into neatly sliced cucumbers and carrots, let medics retrieve and treat collapsing students.
Intermittently, we heard protesters shouting "Let them go!" in unison, indicating that the police had started arresting students again. Those being dragged and carried away shouted "Free Palestine," joined by swarms of protesters echoing their chant.
Amid cries of "Off our campus" and "Hands off our students," the police slowly took away all those encamping, leaving behind an assemblage of torn tents, scattered blankets, and overturned tables.
It was not long after the police evacuated the lawn that the students reconvened at the same location—cleaning the mess the police left behind and settling back in on the lawn, making it their own once again. One student picked up a cardboard placard to write "UT divest $45 billion from the machine of death."
While the state of Texas erroneously believes that it has one-upped the protesters and shown their allies whom they support, demonstrations countering the state's stance keep swelling and the momentum continues to build up. Since the campus protests began, the actions of the police in military gear have been met with chants of "APD, KKK, IDF are all the same."
The equating of Austin police with the US's ongoing legacy of the Ku Klux Klan and Israeli Defense Forces is a powerful statement from the protesters—one that must be thought through by the state and those supporting the crackdowns on students. To equate these three institutions is to reveal the interconnectedness of our oppressions and thus our struggles, both locally and transnationally. To call upon universities to divest from the Gaza genocide is to call for an end to the prioritisation of profits over life—theirs and ours.
The students at US campuses are thus joining and echoing the demands of liberation struggles across temporal and geographical divides. We are reminded, once again, that none of us can truly be free until we are all free.
Sarah Eleazar and Shafaq Sohail are graduate students at the Department of Anthropology in the University of Texas at Austin.
Views expressed in this article are the authors' own.
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