Dear Students and Comrades in Struggle for Palestine,
We dedicate this letter to you, and all those involved in movements for Palestinian liberation at institutions of higher education and throughout the world. Here, we draw strength for forward thinking from the reflections of comrades at our institution and underscore the following, as articulated by undergraduate students:
With so much focus on the brutality the UCLA Palestine Solidarity Encampment was subjected to, it feels important to highlight the moments of deep beauty, of grief, of community that were fostered here. Connected by shared beliefs in the right of the Palestinian peoples to be free from genocide, apartheid, and occupation, we broke bread, created art, sang, worshipped, and educated one another. This is what UCLA saw as a threat to be dismantled by some of the most militarized police departments in the world. This is what UCLA sat back and allowed to be attacked by Zionist aggressors. We will be back. We will not rest until UCLA divests.” — Students for Justice in Palestine at UCLA @sjpatucla, May 3rd, 2024
Introduction
It is May 23, 2024. The first encampment, the Liberated Zone, has been swept, but actions and mobile encampments persist. I bury my face deep into the last few pages of Abolition Geographies, reading and re-reading a passage about the postcolonial worldbuilding that Palestinian revolutionaries had begun to establish during the First Intifada while the world I am living jostles around me. Liberation, Gilmore argues, requires not only the material infrastructures of community care, but the abolition of all forms of bondage within our collective consciousness.
With regard to Gaza, Gilmore (2022: 482) states that “some of the women who worked in food processing discussed how the revolution-in-progress could not be sustained unless patriarchy and paternalism became as unacceptable and unthinkable as occupation.” I think back to the encampment and how many times they would feed us all in the midst of chaos. Just above the brim of the book that is quite literally doubling as my armor at this moment, the familiar crowd of harassers yells insults, waves Israeli and US flags, and tries to shove cameras between myself and my colleague to get a glimpse of what is happening in the building behind us. A man standing near us shouts, “Hey, you can see her f***!” Whether he is referring to my colleague, myself, or someone else entirely is not the point, as he attempts to render us all subject to misogynistic, dehumanizing humiliation.
[My colleague] glances at my expression hidden behind the book, checking to see if I am alright as the man repeats his distracting insult. “Did you hear that?”, she asks, using laughter as another kind of shield. I merely shake my head to suggest my disgust and remain rooted to the spot, calling on my week of student-led de-escalation training to remain non-responsive and to hold my ground. — FJP Member
In this moment, we ground ourselves in sumud. As Lara Sheehi says in an interview (Row 2023), “[w]hat’s so moving to me about sumud is that it resists at every turn: it resists psychically, it resists politically, it resists socially, it resists relationally, because it also refuses to bend to the process of atomization, which is the intent of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and empire.” We use our bodies to hold the barrier between the student protester teach-in being held inside Dodd Hall and violent counter-protesters attempting to break through us in defense of empire. Not long after, police arrived, forced their way into the building from the other side, displaced students, and blocked the entrance. That this is even a reality on a college campus, that police are called to “break up” a peaceful pedagogical space, is harrowing.
We write this letter of reflection from our place memories of being wedged between empire, protected by the police state, and students fighting for Palestinian liberation, brutalized by the police state; we understand that while empire has long been housed on university territory in the global North, and protected through policing, we had never quite felt this contrast so brutally close, and so clearly marked by tactics of gendered, classed and racialized police terror. We write this reflection in the spirit of a love letter to student freedom fighters at UCLA and throughout the world, in deep appreciation of their commitment to liberation and against genocide, and with the intent of narrating what it was like to stand with students in this zone of principled protest and reactionary, white supremacist counter violence. Instead of understanding colonial violence in our everyday classrooms where we visit radical geography landscapes through videos, poetry and storytelling, it was invigorating to hold literal ground together against empire.
Weeks prior police from multiple districts and at least two private security firms lined up alongside the sidelines of what had become a literal battleground at Royce Quad when a Zionist mob attacked the Palestine Solidarity Encampment at UCLA. They stood stony faced or chatted amongst themselves while students screamed for help, for them to do something to deter the brutal mob attack. As the violent mob threw fireworks, tear gas and planks of wood into the liberated zone, I remember holding our shields against the violent crowd trying to push through with a previous undergraduate student from one of my classes several years ago. We held the line against our attackers, and only hours later recognized one another. Our attackers, meanwhile, cheered their support of “the boys in blue” when they arrived to quietly dispel the crowd. 24 hours later, these same police would be aiming rubber bullet guns into students’ faces as they swept UCLA’s Liberated Zone. These students are the reason we continue to believe in universities as a potential building ground for abolitionist futures.
As faculty, we were often called into this space between a hostile crowd and students practicing liberation in order to help keep them safe. It is in this space where we encountered the carceral logics of a people who leverage racial and sexual violence to defend colonial occupation and US militarism. In this buffer zone, we were called into the building of an abolition geography. Here, we are making sense of this space of encounter and our own positionality as faculty. Chiefly, we understand ourselves to be students and stewards of the movement who have learned from these revolutionaries about the real work of boundaries, the necessary malleability of our community, and how to do multiscalar liberatory work within the geographies of the university.
We ground these lessons in the moments of care and beauty that have been rendered null by narratives of the violence at UCLA. How do we contribute to safety, to collective struggle, and do so responsibly and with love moving forward into the next phase of this movement? We uplift the lessons of the liberated zone(s) at UCLA to remind us of the reasons why we do this interpretive boundary work. We write with productive rage intended to counter all misrepresentations of the liberated zone as a space of violence perpetrated by students. We witnessed the very opposite as we accompanied students working together to reinforce collective care and safety on campus.
Lessons on Boundaries and (Not) Borders
The Zionist entity attempts a ground invasion into Lebanon as I write this in October 2024 and in between checking on some family in south Lebanon—who refuse to leave their homes—I am transported back to the many days and nights in our encampment where we had to mobilize quickly to secure our own ground. An image whirrs through my head of my peers and I standing behind shields, knees supple, legs bouncing, nearly a couple dozen police officers in riot gear in front of us who managed to enter the encampment. A throng of people around me in a tight crowd were belting, “Hold the line, hold the line, hold the line for Palestine.” In an extraordinary, united move, we managed to push the police out of our space. A cheer erupted from the crowd that moved many of us to joyous tears. If this space that we had created just a week ago was so dear to us, I can only imagine what it is like to push a force off your land that you, your elders, and your ancestors are in deep relationship with. I just checked the news again—the Zionists are struggling with their attempts to invade Lebanon. — Grad SJP Member
When the Liberated Zone was established on April 25th, the initial quiet of students convening around doughnuts and planning teach-ins was quickly interrupted by the violence of vigilante agitators, faculty disinterest, and rules put in place for student “safety.” Due to nightly harassment, students asked for more support in securing the camp’s safety for many days leading up to the April 30th attacks. The desire for safety was never a call for more police, but for a stronger community. The purpose of the Liberated Zone, and of safety and abolition more broadly, is not to conceive of kinder borders or a friendlier and more diverse police force, but to radically reorient the conditions of care to be unconditional, making borders unnecessary.
Where administrators and police have created borders to contain anti-colonial movement work, students have had to develop boundaries, defensive front lines to protect their defiant and unruly spaces of liberation. The boundary—physically fortified with chairs, umbrellas and plywood at night, then made “flexible” again in the morning according to fire codes—became a frictious site of encounter between racial-colonial-carceral power enforcing borders and an otherwise world. These are the sites of encounter and refusal that exist in all geographies and scales in which the knowledge of freedom meets the conditions of dehumanization and premature death. The encounter-space forged on campuses serves, too, as kind of portal that transgresses the university by calling out institutional culpability across capitalist spacetime; likewise, the students literally forged transnational geographies of solidarity between Palestine, BLM, the Philippines, Vietnam, Hawai‘i by calling in students from these diasporas of love and violence. The encampments, in their shifting forms and makeup and unyielding insistence to divest from capitalist-colonial systems and processes of brutality, invited everyone to be a part of the “we” of a free and transformed space.
Lessons on Scale and Place-Based Abolition
Sitting in the grass below the bright Southern California sunshine, I look up to see a woman in a hijab and a man who could be her husband walking through the Liberated Zone. They seem to be parents or relatives or simply admirers who have come here to witness what the students have constructed. They look around slowly and smile hugely—this I’ll always remember. They pose in front of the Palestinian flag at the entryway of the Liberated Zone for a photo. — FJP Member
The quieter, calmer moments of the encampment prompted us to practice the more uneasy parts of solidarity work. For example, a community member approached a few of us disgruntled with the programming for the day. After some conversation, it was very clear that we had diverging perspectives on a critical political point that forced open a question: How do we hone our politics as a newly forged collective? I remember noting the heat rise in my body as the community member and I engaged in a difficult political debate, attempting a solution for the programming for the day. We were interrupted with some commotion a few yards away—likely another Zionist attempting to infiltrate the encampment. We put our debate down momentarily and jogged together to the scene, heeding the directions of our other peers. On this, we could unite.
Who held decision-making power and how was any structure forged at all? In what ways should we practice approaching our own contradictions—both in theory and in practice? How do we repair harm with our own community members and practice forgiveness under such immense pressure? When the physical space felt steady, when we were not immediately confronted with fireworks or plywood or insults hurled at us, we were confronted with something else: Each other. We were confronted with delicately and lovingly refining our own praxis. — Grad SJP Member
As Noura Erakat (2020: 474) reminds us, “US white supremacy is a critical and catalyzing force of transnational solidarity.” Palestinian solidarity protesters at UCLA are part of a global movement rising against settler colonial logics and white supremacy. Accompanying students who mobilized this movement for Palestine on campus is not only the honor of a lifetime but is also at the forefront of what radical geography should and could look like in university spaces. Instead of despairing over the “global” university’s imperative to introduce students to sanitized versions of internationalism, Palestinian solidarity protesters at UCLA and beyond rooted themselves in a space of refusal, from within the belly of empire, and enacted bold and university-placed actions against genocide while demanding divestment. As undergraduate SJP organizers (Mármol and Jurković 2024) would later reflect, “Students experienced education that didn’t work to maintain the status quo. Instead, they experienced an education that was revolutionary and transformative.”
These months of action during Spring 2024 were bounds of sophistication beyond the volun-tourism and white saviorism promoted through university programming and international exchange programs. These result in students who return with travel diaries or selfies doing work with communities in contexts of oppression, violence or conflict. In the Liberated Zone, we witnessed students enacting a grounded political commitment to transformative justice and an expansive understanding of international solidarity and struggle from their own educational context and global North-situated positionalities. This means more than extracting experience or knowledge from the communities we hope to struggle with and for, or giving funds to those communities following transnational charity logics (Kaba 2021; Spade 2020). Rather than reproducing settler colonial logics, our role as radical geography educators should be to accompany students in the powerful praxis of liberatory, place-based knowledge-making and attempts to make our classrooms look and feel more like the pedagogies and praxis we witnessed in the Liberated Zone.
The campus encampments were not bound to the universities on which they were sited; they were not protests that adhered to the rules of civility and free speech. They were liberated zones, geographies of resistance defiantly modeling what abolition in this ongoing political moment requires. The encampments existed on scales that transgressed the extractivist logic that still lingers in the racist and colonial present of the discipline of Geography and many other social sciences; what must we do for radical geography to follow this pathway opened by students fighting for Palestinian liberation?
Students representing many religious communities and racialized, gendered and classed pathways, including Black, Arab, Native American, and radical Jewish diasporas, came together to do something transformative for liberating Palestine without reproducing colonial legacies that have perpetuated the occupation in the first place. As radical geographers, we write this love letter to students, as one small way of thanking them for allowing us to accompany their struggle for Palestinian liberation, as they move beyond the numbed indifference that often immobilizes action against injustice and violence.
Lessons on Solidarity: We Keep Us Safe
I don’t want the memories of the camp to be just about the various fascist mobs … [The students] established in a matter of days, sometimes hours, all of these infrastructures of care and sustenance. Free food, free medical care. People were making art, holding teach-ins and they had a whole slate of programs. Radical social justice organizations donated time and resources aiming to train folks in the liberated zone on first aid, street medic training and self-defense, as well as supplies coming in to strengthen the walls protecting students from violent attacks. That’s all really, really important. These things are all ephemeral and not necessarily legible but that are really real and material and have an effect in the world and connect us together. Thank you for showing us who “we” are. — FJP Member
The mantra that the students adopted, “we keep us safe,” arises from the Black Lives Matter movement and calls to abolish the police. While the focus of abolition in the media has been on police brutality, exorbitant municipal expenses, and community-based alternatives, the call fundamentally hinges on our ability to practice care through networks of decolonial, anti-racist and anti-capitalist relationship-building. That said, the socially and spatially shifting ground of “we” is the most important word and idea within “we keep us safe.” That this “we” is never fixed nor centralized but constantly negotiated is not just a Doreen Massey-inspired thought exercise (Massey 1994); it is the grounded practice of solidarity and movement work.
At times, faculty organizers for Palestine were not part of the “we”; this was especially true when the encampment was on lockdown. At other times we were in the thick of it. Accusations of Jewish students being barred from the encampment intend to deepen the identity warfare tactics currently tearing our university to pieces. These attacks on the image of the encampment deliberately disregard considerations of context surrounding the activities, programming and productive encounters of care and struggle forged across racialized, gendered and religious identities. These attempts to criminalize both the people and places associated with Palestinian liberation at UCLA is the ethnonationalist police state at work. The “we” of transnational solidarity is, thus, a practice that must be ever re-made (Gilmore 2022). These pathways of solidarity continue to be renewed and negotiated through routes of intimacy, “reinforcing deeds and gestures based on the visceral knowledge that the relationship exceeds political conditions and is the source of survival in the plural ‘we’…” (Erakat 2020: 479).
The “we” of anticolonial solidarity is intersectional; but in the space of encounter with the neoliberal university, we found no allies when up against the machine protecting private property. Rather than being permitted to negotiate on equal footing, to clean and disassemble the encampment, the Liberated Zone was bulldozed by Black and Brown employees, items carried to dumpsters that were guarded by contracted low-income security workers, and scrubbed clean by janitorial staff. Students who were able to reclaim items like blankets, tents, and sleeping bags would eventually donate them through their ongoing mutual aid organizing working with unhoused people in the area. Protecting private property interrupts so many possibilities for protecting one another.
The “we” of this global solidarity movement with Palestine is unstable in that it is not organizationally centralized, but a diffuse and too often censored minority of people committed to liberation beyond the white supremacist capitalist-colonial state. This commitment is paramount. UCLA—and other university sites of student struggle—hold a privileged seat in US empire, one which the UC Board of Regents has been unwilling to relinquish given the deep connections between federally funded research, higher education, and US militarism. Solidarity with Palestine looks like sacrificing prestige and funding and letting go of individualistic academic exceptionalism to be a part of a collective that holds without holding others back; centering Palestine is to center decolonial land relations and to disregard the sanctity of private property and the capital held therein; valuing radical Palestinian thought leadership means critically engaging with and uplifting Palestinian scholarship and rebuilding the Palestinian university; centering liberation means we hold one another accountable to all axes of intersectional solidarity.
Why and How We Continue
Spaces of freedom are constantly challenged by the recursion of white supremacist carceral systems that double down after successful movements toward liberation. We call for others to pay attention and act within this site of encounter between liberated zones and their policing counterparts as a means of remaining in constant struggle for Palestinian liberation on our university campuses. As the school year begins again with bans on masks in public places despite recent COVID surges, time, place and manner restrictions, and requests for the use of more munitions on university campuses, believing in the possibility of liberation can seem futile, even infantile. As scholars and practitioners of liberatory thought and action, however, it is our responsibility to remind our colleagues and students that the movement for the liberation of Palestinian, Black, Indigenous, and all colonized people throughout the world didn’t begin last spring—it has been repeatedly practiced in large and small demonstrations of refusal and collective care that persistently disrupt the global political-economic colonial order. Indeed, as our dear colleague Nour Joudah and her collaborators (2021: 101) state, “[f]or Palestinians, the moments that are often described as ‘unprecedented’ by the rest of the world are rarely so. This is not because nothing new happens but because in our experience—like that of so many Indigenous people—time collapses in on itself.”
Likewise, we will not see the end of this struggle this term or this year, even if more institutions do finally decide to divest. Our job is to show up and, especially the tenured among us, to speak up in a way that makes a comfortable return to censoring the mention of Palestinian rights impossible. Protecting “our” safety—that of abolitionists and activists of color—requires a disruption of comfort and the status quo. The Liberated Zone and its accompanying People’s University program have demonstrated exactly what radical geography theorizes but cannot always enact beyond the classroom: a disruptive place of radical care, and a portal into the world we want. This space brought faculty and students together in a way that benefitted all of us: we found nurturing relationships and communities, and the kind of support that had been notably absent.
In the long-term and wider scope, radical geographies cannot be limited to research and writing. As Joudah, Wahbe, Radi and Omar (2021: 104) remind us, “[f]or decades, Palestinians have been subjects of academic research that scholars use to understand the functions of settler colonial state power. Yet in moments of crisis, we are humbly reminded that research and writing are not enough … Scholarship without action normalizes the status quo and reinforces Israel’s impunity.” It needs to look like care returned to our students, not as worrying responsible adults, but as freedom fighters in our own right going beyond reactionary defense. It looks like participating in the work of rebuilding Palestinian scholarship and universities. It looks like challenging institutionally weaponized DEI structures that center the comfort of a privileged few over the rights of the disenfranchised they were built to presumably uplift. It looks like critiquing and creatively circumventing the bans on masking and protest. It looks like making and re-making spaces of care. All this looks like doing the slow work of abolition geography that will make it possible for more of us to step out into discomfort as the inevitable backlash arrives on our universities once again.
In solidarity,
Five Anonymous Members of Faculty for Justice in Palestine and one Anonymous Member of Graduate Students for Justice in Palestine at UCLA
References
Erakat N (2020) Geographies of intimacy: Contemporary renewals of Black–Palestinian solidarity. American Quarterly 72(2):471-496
Gilmore R W (2022) Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation (eds B Bhandar and A Toscano). New York: Verso
Joudah N, Wahbe R M, Radi T and Omar D (2021) Palestine as praxis: Scholarship for freedom. Journal of Palestine Studies 50(4):101-105
Kaba M (2021) We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (ed T K Nopper). Chicago: Haymarket Books
Mármol P and Jurković N (2024) We keep us safe. Public Books 15 October https://www.publicbooks.org/we-keep-us-safe/ (last accessed 4 November 2024)
Massey D (1994) Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
Row J (2023) Psychoanalysis under occupation: An interview with Lara Sheehi. The Racial Imaginary Institute 28 February https://www.theracialimaginary.org/viewing-room/interview-with-lara-sheehi (last accessed 4 November 2024)
Spade D (2020) Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next). London: Verso
This is the sixth of our essays on Pro-Palestinian and Anti-War Protest on Campus; the first five 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.