Anonymous Writer

On April 25, 2024, Indiana University students and supporting organizers established an encampment at Dunn Meadow, a 20-acre, grassy free-speech area at the IU Bloomington campus. At the time, several encampments for Palestinian liberation had already been established on university campuses across the United States and the world. The IU Divestment Coalition led the organizing of the encampment, demanding that IU end its partnership with the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Crane, Indiana, and divest its funding from the settler-colonial state of Israel. In this intervention, I provide a brief account of the IU Liberated Zone based on my observations and experiences in the encampment and supporting organizing efforts. In doing so, I reflect on the work and materialization of hope for Palestinian liberation through the realities of the encampment. I chose to remain anonymous due to the rise in “new McCarthyism” at Indiana University as well as growing threats to academic freedom in Indiana due to the passing of Senate Enrolled Act 202.

In its first few days, the IU Liberated Zone in Bloomington faced intense repression and violence set out by the university through the state police. As soon as news that the encampment would be created was out, the university assembled an ad hoc committee late at night on April 24, which created a new rule requiring authorization for the establishment of tents during protests at Dunn Meadow, citing an existing 1969 assembly policy. The original policy does not refer to ad hoc committees or permission requirements for using structures. Since the 1960s, Dunn Meadow has been the stage of many protests, and its status as a free-speech zone has been a reality at IU for decades. Nevertheless, university administrators used this policy and a previous 1989 report to justify a last-minute change of Dunn Meadow rules before the set-up of the encampment and, later, send the state police to remove the encampment.[1]

As news of police arriving spread, a wall of bodies formed to protect the encampment. Students and organizers crossed arms to cement bodies together. Voices sang loud, “Free, free, Palestine”. You will not pass. A few faculty members stood in front of the police line, protecting the students. You will not pass. Police held large guns and shields. Up at the Indiana Memorial Union tower, overseeing the students and the encampment, sat a police sniper. A man holding a sniper rifle aimed at the students from a distance. Inside the Indiana University Bloomington campus.

The state police came and violently pushed organizers and participants. A few key student organizers, many of whom are Black and Brown individuals, were targeted and arrested. Students and faculty arrested were taken and banned from entering the campus. A total of 57 participants were arrested. Despite having access to the tents, the violence continued. Police dragged and slapped and kicked and violated students’ bodies. Inside the Indiana University Bloomington campus.

One, two, three times. Dunn Meadow was cleared out, only to be occupied again. And again. And again. No matter the repression, the arrests, the bans, and the destruction of tents, students, and faculty, participants came back. Groups of participants stood in front of the local jail to welcome arrested ones once back on the street. Banned students and faculty were back on the sidewalk outside campus, right by the encampment, as soon as they were released. In addition to police violence, the IU Liberated Zone also faced many racist assaults. Despite such oppression, students, participants, and supporters endured, refusing to go on to normality as the genocide of Palestinians continued. The chanting continued. The drums continued. The IU Liberated Zone endured.

Free, free, Palestine.
Long live Palestine.
From the river to the sea.
Palestine will be free.
From the sea to the river.
Palestine will live forever.

The resistance and endurance of the IU Liberated Zone, despite all kinds of repression, was the work of hope. Hope is central to any struggle for liberation. Hope is, however, more than hoping. Hope is not about daydreaming about a future that seems impossible to achieve. Hope is more than wishing that something you want will materialize or eventually become true. Following Back (2021: 7), hope is work. Hope is:

…cultivated and shaped in the here-and-now by the practice of attentive witnessing, taking in what is happening, interpreting its meaning and the possible gifts to the future that might emerge. In this sense worldly hope is not a blind faith in the strength of the fakir’s rope or belief in an overseeing divine provenance. Rather, it is an attention to the present and the anticipation that something unexpected will happen and emerge from its ruins. Hope, then, is not a belief but an empirical question.

In this definition, hope is about paying attention to the world, analyzing and interpreting what you are witnessing, and anticipating what can emerge. Hope, as an empirical question, asks what is possible from the realities that we have today. The campus struggles for Palestinian liberation have shown us that hope is more than an empirical question. Instead, hope is work, not only as an “attentiveness to the social world in troubled times” (Back 2021: 3) but also as action and practice (Clarke et al. 2024). Hope is political action (Seikaly 2017). Hope is an ongoing refusal of all forms of settler-colonial oppression (Barakat 2021), and acting accordingly to support Palestinian life and memory. Hope is collectively doing the work of building the paths for Palestinian liberation and freedom.

Hope as work is a praxis (Hazlewood et al. 2023). According to Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (2000: 126), praxis is “reflection and action directed at the structures to be transformed”. At the IU Liberated Zone, the work of hope was informed by robust understandings and critique of the histories and present of the settler-colonial state of Israel and its historical efforts to eliminate Palestine. It was shaped by the work of disentangling the connections between IU and Palestinian genocide and the demand to dismantle the infrastructures of oppression, such as the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Crane and the university’s investments in the settler-colonial state of Israel. Hope encompasses the expansion of our political imaginaries of what is possible, becoming a key ingredient in actualizing activism, organizing, and action (Katz 2019). Hope as work is intentional in how it engages with its demands, the bodies involved in this work, and the delineations of what is possible beyond what exists today.

Collectivized Radical Care

As the IU Liberated Zone endured, a collective infrastructure for the social reproduction of the encampment was developed. People donated money, supplies, and food. People planned meals. People chopped vegetables. People prepared hundreds and hundreds of meals. People transported the meals. People set up the meals. People ate food together. People cleaned up. Existing collectively owned and community spaces in Bloomington served as the material infrastructure to store supplies and prepare meals, including housing cooperatives, a neighborhood center, churches. Various groups came together to ensure that those at the IU Liberated Zone would eat. This is collectivized radical care.

The work of hope as praxis requires collectivized radical care. Care is the work of social reproduction. Such work is about the “mundane and unspectacular practices by which we construct ourselves and reproduce society” (Katz 1991: 506). Here, care work was collectivized because it was performed through collectively shared labor. Angela Davis (1990) says that radical is grasping things at the root. Collectivized labor of care addresses the roots of the crises of capital, aimed at challenging the intersectional oppressions of capitalism and empire.

Radical care was necessary for the social reproduction of the individuals that made up the encampment. However, such care is also needed to maintain the collective. This type of collectivity is a coming together that is inevitably constructed in the everyday through social relations of care that seek to confront the roots of all types of interpersonal and societal oppressions with a horizon of liberation. The building of this collectivity is often filled with contradictions and conflicts, which were present in the encampment in many forms. We are living beings with flaws and imperfections who make up the same oppressive systems we are trying to destroy. Our work of hope is thus often contentious and flawed but also inescapable. Geographies of hope require such infrastructures of social reproduction to support the diversity of individuals and the collectives that materialize such geographies, fighting against oppressive systems and building liberatory alternatives.

Interdependence

The collectivized radical care at the IU Liberated Zone was interdependent. From the African ideology and philosophy of ubuntu, interdependence is radical interconnection and dependence between the individual and the collective. Often epitomized by the expression “I am because we are”, ubuntu is the understanding that the individual cannot exist without the collective and vice versa, challenging the status quo of individualism embedded in the colonial and carceral realities of racial capitalism and empire. The IU Liberated Zone demonstrated a politics of interdependence. Interdependence was present through a refusal to go back to normality while Palestinians were being murdered. Interdependence was present in the rupturing of normality on campus, in classes, on finals week, on final grades, and in the use of university public space. Interdependence was present in the bodies of students, organizers, and participants who occupied the IU Liberated Zone and constantly tried to recenter focus, discussion, conflict, needs, and activities beyond themselves to Palestinian liberation. Interdependence was about being accountable to the bodies of Palestinians, murdered, alive, and fighting to live. The work of hope at the IU Liberated Zone encompassed collectivized radical care for embodied interdependence to Palestinian liberation.

Hope Beyond Academic Grassy Fields

On August 2, 2024, as the encampment completed 100 days, university employees removed the remaining tents and the Sabiyah and Bassem Abu Rahmah Memorial and Al-Awda Memorial Gardens, vegetable gardens that had been cultivated by encampment participants in honor of martyrs for Palestinian liberation. Quickly, a metal fence was put up, surrounding the entire area of Dunn Meadow. A few hours earlier, an email had been sent, saying that “The heavy use of that space since April and placement of temporary structures unfortunately damaged the area, necessitating extensive repairs now that the structures have been removed”. Such actions were expected as, just four days earlier, on July 29, the IU Board of Trustees voted on a new expressive activities policy. The new policy asserts that any expressive activity cannot materially or substantially disrupt any activities or businesses of the university. The policy now established the requirement of permission to install any temporary structures. It prohibits the hanging of any signs or symbols onto the ground or on the exterior of any university structure or property. It prohibits the use of spray paint or chalk on any surfaces of university property. The policy affirms that it protects freedom of speech by restricting freedom of speech.

August 2, 2024 also marked 301 days of the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. Three hundred and one days of the ongoing assassination of mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, sisters, brothers, neighbors, friends. The loss of life and land has been a constant for Palestinians for decades. However, the Ongoing Nakba (Barakat 2021), the continuous settler-colonial violence pillage, violence, and destruction, have not eradicated Palestinian resistance, hope, and radical collectivized care for life and freedom in Gaza and across the world. Sherene Seikaly (2017) suggests that hope and despair are not separate or in opposition to each other, but rather inevitably interwoven as a “a troubled couple” (Seikaly 2017), as a pragmatic dialectic.

In knowing so, how do we continue the work of hope for Palestinians in the face of renewed oppression and destruction of the Liberated Zone? How can the infrastructures of collectivized radical care be sustained in the face of university enclosures on freedom of speech and even the use of space?

The truth is that the work of hope as praxis cannot be destroyed by the settler-colonial state or the university. Such work lives on through the geographic political bodies and memories of all Palestinians and those who do this work with the horizon of Palestinian liberation. So many students, faculty, and community members became involved in this struggle through and because of the encampment. The work of hope will continue. We must reshape the material contours of this work and continue to build paths for actualizing such horizons. We must continue to envision alternative realities of life beyond and outside the settler-colonial state, empire, racial capitalism, and the neoliberal university. This is precisely one of the main achievements of the IU Liberated Zone. To have imagined and dared to enact a world where the university is a construction of interdependent, intersectional, collectivized radical care and collectivized teachings and learnings. A world where Palestine is free.

Endnote

[1] You can read more about the history of this policy and the context of its recent change in the article “The real Dunn Meadow policy,” published by Indiana Public Media and available here: https://indianapublicmedia.org/news/the-real-dunn-meadow-policy1.php (last accessed 27 September 2024).

References

Back L (2021) Hope’s work. Antipode 53(1):3-20 https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12644

Barakat R (2021) “Ramadan does not come for free”: Refusal as new and ongoing in Palestine. Journal of Palestine Studies 50(4):90-95 https://doi.org/10.1080/0377919X.2021.1979376

Clarke A, Rogaly B and Senker C (2024) Hope as a practice in the face of existential crises: Resident‐activist research within and beyond the academy. Area 56(3) https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12952

Davis A Y (1990) Women, Culture, and Politics. New York: Vintage Books

Freire P (2000 [1970]) Pedagogy of the Oppressed (trans M Bergman Ramos). New York: Continuum

Hazlewood J A, Middleton Manning B R and Casolo J J (2023) Geographies of hope-in-praxis: Collaboratively decolonizing relations and regenerating relational spaces. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 6(3):1417-1446 https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486231191473

Katz C (1991) Sow what you know: The struggle for social reproduction in rural Sudan. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 81(3):488-514 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1991.tb01706.x

Katz C (2019) “Topographies of Hope.” Paper presented to the Summer School 2019 of the Collaborative Research Center SFB 1265 “Re-Figuration of Spaces” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAgxHMPDcVk (last accessed 27 September 2024)

Seikaly S (2017) The politics of hope: 1967 and beyond. Middle East Report 9 June https://merip.org/2017/06/fifty-years-of-occupation-3/ (last accessed 27 September 2024)

This is the fourth of our essays on Pro-Palestinian and Anti-War Protest on Campus; the first three can be found at https://antipodeonline.org/2024/08/05/pro-palestinian-and-anti-war-protest-on-campus/ Authors were invited to engage with such concepts as imperialism, militarization, settler colonialism, racism, gender, transnational Left solidarities, and the conflation of any critique of Zionism with anti-Semitism in the context of police and institutionalized violence against pro-Palestinian and anti-war protesters on university campuses in (and beyond) North America. Authors were invited based on their expertise and ongoing participation in critical discussions, and we would like to thank them, again, for their important contributions.