On Genocide, Zionist Propaganda and Student Activism – by Grim

“I held my gun so that the generations after me could hold a sickle…” -Palestinian song, Ahd Allah Ma Nerhal (By God We Won’t Leave)

“…[W]e have hope because we know, now more than ever, that these horrors in the name of upholding a racist settler-colonial occupation are not going to last forever. Anyone who ever thought it would will be astounded in hindsight.” -Rawan Masri, “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood Was An Act of Decolonization”

I, like most of Our comrades who organize behind the gulag walls, have been following the ongoing genocide carried out by the Zionist entity upon the people of Palestine with varied mixtures of feelings, with the number one emotion being unadulterated rage alongside an equal amount of awe at the steadfast courage of the Palestinian resistance and their allies throughout the Levant, or the “Middle East”.

You might think that the rage stems from the atrocious conduct that sadly has been par for the course of the Zionists since at least 1947 in the beginnings of what would become the Nakba carried out by the various Zionist terror organizations such as the Haganah, Irgun and LEHI who most infamously were responsible for the April 9, 1948 Deir Yassin massacre in which 250 defenseless Palestinians were slaughtered, including 100 wimmin and children, and then the village was subsequently looted and plundered. While I cannot deny that the daily depredations of the Zionist occupation forces raises my ire profoundly, the rage actually stems more from the stunning ignorance of the so-called “friends and supporters” of “I$rael” who voice their profoundly inaccurate, and most of the time entirely false statements, “hystory lessons on the so-called ‘conflict’,” (non)interpretations of international law, and most importantly their insistence on not calling the Zionist entity’s actions and policies what they’ve been since the start of the ethnic cleansing under Plan Dalet beginning in April 1948: genocidal. Many of these people are probably of the opinion as well that the vast majority of other settler-colonial projects (such as the United $nakes, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, etc.) were also not genocidal from their beginnings, likely using the age old excuses of blaming the so-called “savages” for provoking the “reasonable” and “peace loving” settlers into defending themselves and the land they mistakenly believe they didn’t steal thanks to their belief that God gifted or promised it to them in perpetuity because “he’s God” and “what he says goes.”(1) These “friends and supporters” of “I$rael” will do absolutely no research into the validity of their statements, instead choosing to equate the Palestinian struggle to liberate all of the hystoric Palestine and finally be free to return to their lands, with a genocidal Arab conspiracy to wipe out the Jews.

So in the interests of correcting the misinformation and lies, and cutting through the Zionist propaganda it stems from and in full solidarity with Our comrades across hystoric Palestine, in the diaspora, on campuses and in the streets, this article will attempt to deconstruct some of the most common discourse that is parroted in the bourgeois media which has fueled this latest round of anti-Arab hysteria and Islamophobia and crucially, the pattern of Amerikan rejectionism to Palestinian Liberation and indifference to the crimes of its client state.

It behooves all of us to study history, and studying the hystory of what has become known as the Palestinian-I$raeli conflict and the principal actors and organizations is not an exception to this rule.

So in that context, I will begin with one of the Zionists’ more devious lies; the so-called “I$raeli” “purity of arms” and its common usage, that “I$rael” never targets civilians or civilian infrastructure. Although any cursory observation of I$rael’s conduct from the 1948 Nakba to the present day would prove otherwise, We can look to none other than Zionist hero and first prime minister David Ben-Gurion for the proof. In his Independence War Diary, he set down on paper the military doctrine that would become standard protocol throughout the history of the Zionist project.

There is no question as to whether a reaction is necessary or not. The question is only time and place. Blowing up a house is not enough. What is necessary is cruel strong reactions. We need precision in time place and causalities. If we know the family – [we must] strike mercilessly, women and children included. Otherwise the reaction is inefficient. At the place of action there is no need to distinguish between guilty and innocent.(2)

This specific entry was written on January 1, 1948, one day after the Haganah occupied the Palestinian village of Balad al-Shaykh, the burial place of Shaykh Izz ad-Din al-Qassam (one of Palestine’s most revered resistance leaders of the 1920’s and 30’s), massacring over 60 Palestinian civilians, men, wimmin, and children, most while they were asleep in their homes. This massacring of civilians in their sleep over 75 years ago lines up exactly with the countless stories told by survivors of today’s indiscriminate bombings to the doctors that have been working nonstop within the largely destroyed remains of Gaza’s hospitals.(3)

Let us also remember that when Ben-Gurion wrote those words, the Zionist leadership at the time was working on “Plan Dalet”, finalized on March 10, 1948, which was the military blueprint for the ethnic cleansing of hystoric Palestine.(4)

To illustrate before moving on to the next topic, lets look back at two of the lesser known massacres during the initial Nakba; “Lydda and Ramla” and “Safsaf.”

On a blistering hot Ramadan day in July 1948, a Haganah general named Yitzhak Rabin (who would later become ambassador to Washington D.C., then “I$raeli” Prime Minister, then sign the Oslo accords on the White House lawn, then be assassinated for it by “I$raeli” reactionaries) descended upon the Palestinian towns of Lydda and Ramla with his unit and violently expelled approximately 50,000 men, wimmin and children.

In Lydda, dozens of Palestinians were gathered and detained in the Dahmash mosque and church premises, all unarmed, and were subsequently gunned down. Afterwards the Zionists gathered an additional 20 to 50 Palestinians to clean up the mosque and bury all of the bodies. After they had placed the bodies in their graves, they themselves were shot into the open graves and left there to bleed out and die. In total between 250 to 400 Palestinians were massacred in Lydda. An additional 350 more died after being expected and forced to march to the frontlines of the Arab armies in what would become known as the Lydda Death March.(5)

As a sidenote, the events that occurred at Lydda and the subsequent death march after, were a formative event in the life of a young George Habash, who was from Lydda, and in 1948 at age 19 left the American University in Beirut, Lebanon where he was a medical student and returned to Lydda during the war to help his family. The Haganah attacked the town soon after, and in the subsequent death march, without water or food, during Ramadan no less, his sister died before they reached the Arab army’s frontlines. This could possibly be one of the reasons which fed his uncompromising leadership and opposition to the Zionist regime as a pivotal leader of first the Harakat al-Qawmiyyin al-Arab (Arab Nationalist Movement) and then of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

Lastly, we come to the massacre at Safsaf during the initial Nakba. Though this is one of the lesser known atrocities of the Nakba, it is vital to the overall understanding, as a quarter of the 12 well documented instances of rape by the Zionists were recorded here. Those who remember the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War will know what happens next.

The Zionists started by cleansing the town by using their “patented” strategy of surrounding the town on 3 sides, firing into the air and into the sides of buildings in the hopes of driving the population out of the fourth, open side of the town. Then they entered the town, gathering up all of those who still remained in their homes, initially shooting and killing 12 young men. The remaining 52 men were caught, then tied together and thrown into a pit the Zionists dug, then subsequently shot and killed. Seeing this, the remaining wimmin of the town came and asked the Zionists for mercy. The Zionists told several of the wimmin to go and fetch water to the town. Once they moved away from the others, they were followed by the militiamen and raped, two of the women being killed in the process. The womyn who survived was a child of fourteen years old.(6) These are just a few of the massacres of civilians by the Zionists during the initial Nakba. If we line them up alongside others, for instance, the October 1953 massacre in the West Bank village of Qibya by Ariel Sharon’s (another past war criminal made prime minister) infamous unit 101 of the “I$raeli” Offense Forces (IOF) special forces, the October 1956 Kafr Qasim massacre, the full IOF support given during the 1982 Lebanon war to their proxies, the Christian Phalangist and Maronite militias, to massacre 2,000 civilians in the Palestinian refugee camps Sabra and Shatila (which in hindsight was probably the last time there was mass protests within “I$rael” by Jews over their regime’s crimes against Palestinians), to the more recent wars, such as during “Operation Cast Lead” in 2008-09 which the UN’s fact finding report (Goldstone report) called a “deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate, and terrorize a civilian population”, a certain pattern starts to emerge; one of ethnic cleansing and genocide, funded and with political cover by Amerika.

Genocide & Denial

Genocide, the word as well as the action hangs heavy over Amerika and “I$rael”, so much so that it has stopped many from speaking out and acknowledging the Zionist regime’s actions against Palestine as genocidal.

A comrade over at Slingshot Collective in Berkeley, CA wrote an article for their latest newspaper issue, trying to elaborate on the reasons behind the silence during an active genocide, and though I agree with many of their conclusions (not wanting to sound “anti-Semitic”, general Amerikan apathy and indifference to the suffering of others and not wanting to split the Democratic Party base leading to a Trump victory this election year), I think there are other, deeper explanations for this, as well as outright genocide denial.(7)

When most Amerikans and “I$raelis” think about the word genocide, it is inevitable that they will first think of the Holocaust. The mass shootings carried out by the Einsatzgruppen (Nazi SS mobile death squads) and the gassing and immolation of millions of Ashkenazi Jews are rightfully called genocide; and yet many of these same Amerikans and “I$raelis” forget the genocide of approximately half of the 2 million Sinti and Romani peoples (Gypsies) of German occupied Europe known as the Porrajmos in the Romani language, nor do they seem to remember the systematic massacres of Slavic, LGBTQ+, and disabled peoples along with many political dissidents during the same time period by Nazi Germany.(8) And so, the benchmark for both countries for some act to count as genocide is something which looks like the Holocaust; a massive extermination of people in a relatively short amount of time.

And yet, the Nazi genocide and Zionist genocide do not resemble each other structurally or in any other meaningful way.

Like the settler colonial regimes of the United $nakes, Canada, New Zealand and Australia among others, the genocides that took place upon the indigenous First Nations have taken place over many decades, a small act here, a large act there, and this is what the genocide of the Palestinian Arab people by the Zionist regime has looked like and continues to look like to this day.(9)

As this practice of genocide continues against the people of Palestine, so too does Amerika continue this practice upon the internal semi-colonies of New Afrikans, Chican@s, and the First Nations here on occupied Turtle Island. Amerika also has a very interesting, as well as appalling, history relating to the UN Convention of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide that bears mentioning.

After its founding convention in San Francisco in 1945, the United Nations set about sponsoring the creation of an international legal instrument for the prevention and punishment of genocide. The job for drafting this document was handed down to the Economic and Social Council of the UN General Assembly (GA) which retained several international legal consultants foremost among them Dr. Raphael Lemkin; an exiled Polish-Jewish jurist who had in 1944 coined the term ‘genocide’ in his work “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.” Lemkin, who authored most of the draft, submitted it in June 1947, and a month later it was rejected by several member states of the General Assembly, foremost among them the United $nakes, because of “important philosophical disagreements.” It was edited and then finally adopted by the GA on December 9, 1948. By 1951 enough countries had ratified it to afford it the status of binding international law; except for a partial ratification (with conditions and edits) in 1988 by the Reagan Administration, the U.$. has still not ratified the convention in its entirety.(10)

First off, lets look at what parts of Lemkin’s draft were so “philosophically disagreeable” to the United $tates. Lemkin was extremely thorough in the draft document, where he included linguistic and political groups under currently protected groups of racial, national, and religious groups. Also importantly, he included in the list of punishable acts (enumerated in Article 3 of the current convention) engaging in a number of “preparatory” acts such as developing techniques of genocide and setting up installations for the purpose of committing genocide.

Already we can see that if the above made it into the final draft, both Amerika and “I$rael” would have been in the ‘hot seat’, so to speak.

Lemkin also included preventing the “preservation or development” of the above groups as a punishable act as well as policies that would bring about the disintegration of the political, social, or economic structure of a group or nation (author’s note: Settlers & Neocolonialists Beware!).

Lastly and most crucially, Lemkin detailed 3 distinct and specific forms of genocide: physical, biological, and cultural. For physical genocide he included “slow death” measures such as the “subjection to conditions of life which, owing to lack of proper housing, clothing, food, hygiene and medical care… are likely to result in debilitation or death of individuals”, as well as “deprivation of all means of livelihood by confiscation of property, looting, curtailment of work, and denial of housing and supplies otherwise available to the other inhabitants of the territory concerned.” Biological genocide, apart from compulsory abortion and sterilization, included segregation of the sexes and obstacles to marriage. Cultural genocide included forced and systematic exile of individuals representing the culture of a group, as well as the destruction of a groups hystorical or religious monuments and the destruction of a group’s hystorical, artistic, and religious documents or objects.(11)

If one looks to the UN Genocide Convention today, it would be entirely accurate to say it no longer resembles in any meaningful way the original intentions of the author(s).

One might ask what the consequences of this are, and though there are many, I’ll only go into one.

Consequently, it has continued to further obfuscate what constitutes genocide, further allowing imperialist and reactionary regimes to continue policies of genocidal oppression, domestically as well as in the Global South. Yet as a direct result of this in the case of “I$rael”, many countries in the Global South have had enough of the genocidal Zionist regime. Most importantly South Africa (where the Zionists supported the apartheid regime before its collapse) charged the Zionist entity with genocide at the ICC (International Criminal Court) in the Hague. Many Central and South American countries, like Chile and Honduras, who both had to deal with genocidal reactionary regimes propped up by the support of both Amerika and “I$rael”, have both said enough is enough, and recalled their ambassadors to “I$rael” over the Amerikan funded genocide.(12) And also extremely important, and as a great way to segue into my last topic of this article, it has set off an explosion of support for Palestine from within the belly of the imperialist beast, in the U.$. but also all across Europe; vital to this effort has been Our comrades on college campuses across Turtle Island.

Student Activism and U.$. Attempts

to “Silence the Intifada”

When the first encampments and building occupations were setup, from Columbia University to campuses across occupied Turtle Island all the way to UC Berkeley, though I wasn’t surprised, (and forgive me for my emotional subjectiveness) tears of joy and pride sprang to my eyes as I watched the moving images on CNN move across the screen. Not since the Vietnam War and organizations like Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) have we seen the anti-war movement, nor the BDS movement since its iteration against South African apartheid, consolidate into such a huge outpouring of love, rage, and solidarity on college campuses.

I was sadly also not surprised when the Pro-Zionist reactionaries sent the pigs in to silence the movement, nor have I been surprised at the Zionist propaganda campaign attempting to label the entire Palestinian solidarity movement “anti-Semitic” and “violent”, even going so far (a la Stop Cop City activists) as calling all protesting for Palestine “terrorists” and “supporters of terrorists”. Here in the Bay Area, there have been lies spread saying that the BDS strategy is no longer viable or legally possible for UC Board of Regents to boycott/divest from the Zionist entity, which has been uncovered as a lie to get Our comrades at Berkeley to abandon their camp and goals. Whether divestment is possible, we can look to the success of the anti-apartheid movement in 1986 at Berkeley to finally pressure the UC to divest $3.1 billion from companies doing business with apartheid South Africa.(13) Aside from this it’s also been insane to watch the bipartisan effort, from Genocide Joe to the outer reaches of the far right, to attempt to get the masses concerned with some of the alleged rhetoric of individuals on campus and the violence at the encampments (which from numerous sources have been proven to be incited by Zionist counter-demonstrators and the pigs), to try to get everyone to somehow forget his “ironclad” support of “I$raeli” genocide. Sadly for Genocide Joe and his Pro-Zionist rabble in Congress, students on campuses across Turtle Island have dug in and refused the false images the imperialists and their media have tried to paint of them, and have let the imperialists know 3 things: We are NOT going anywhere, We will NOT be silenced, and PALESTINE WILL BE FREE!

As the college term wraps up for the summer and many in the Palestine Solidarity Movement, on and off campus, set their sights this summer on an explosive confrontation at the Democratic National Convention alongside many other avenues for protest and action, I’d like to give one bit of advice if any students or other outside comrades may be reading: I think aside from the also important avenues of protest and actions here in the belly of the imperialist beast, it would be extremely beneficial to send as many comrades (students or otherwise) to the West Bank this summer, to live and learn among the Palestinian people themselves. Black Panther Party leader Huey P. Newton saw the importance of this, which led him to visit Palestine as well as revolutionary China. So did our recently passed elder and comrade SeKou Odinga, member of both the New York Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army (BLA), who met several times with members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and other resistance factions under the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) umbrella at the time while building the international chapter of the BPP in Aligiers, even finding time to train with the resistance fighters in guerrilla warfare. SDS and what would become the Weather Underground Organization (WU) also saw the importance of this in the 60’s and early 70’s meeting with revolutionaries from Cuba, Vietnam, and other countries to learn about them, their life and their struggle from their own points of view and in their own voices.

As the Zionists have only continued the ramping up of repression in the occupied West Bank since Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, you could also play an integral role in getting the stories of Palestinians there back to the masses here in the U.$. as well as help in the already ongoing humanitarian efforts going on there. Just something to think about as we move into the summer.

In case you weren’t aware, We behind the gulag walls admire your unshakable and uncompromising support for Palestine’s liberation, and your unwavering courage in the face of wave after wave of attacks by Zionist reactionaries and their pig helpers. You inspire Us behind the wall and We can’t wait to see what you do next.

From the river to the sea,
Palestine will be Free!

Glory to the Martyrs

Freedom to the Prisoners

Healing to the Wounded

Revolution until Victory

Notes:

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=18348

#bayArea #Encampements #genocide #northAmerica #palestineSolidarity #prisonStruggle #propaganda #students #zionism

#FreeCaseyNow: On Casey Goonan and the Abandonment of Political Prisoners in the Pro-Palestine Movement

Casey Goonan is the only US political prisoner from the 2024 pro-Palestine student encampments. They are an abolitionist and anarchist who has dedicated themselves to multiple forms of prisoner support work and directly engaging with incarcerated comrades. The impact they’ve made inside is prevalent, as indicated by statements from their comrades Stevie Wilson and Hybachi Lemar. They’ve always pushed to ensure an understanding of Black struggle and revolt as central to their abolitionist work, and through understanding the totality of anti-Blackness the importance of an anti-police and anti-prison perspective was brought into any and all of their efforts towards liberation.

In June of 2024, they were arrested by a task force comprised of the FBI and other law enforcement agencies in connection with an alleged direct action which took place in solidarity with the UC Berkeley encampments which had been brutalized by police and zionists earlier in the year* . If convicted, they could face up to 20 years in prison with a minimum sentence of 5. The investigation and court proceedings are currently ongoing but a non cooperative plea deal is pending in which Casey will plea guilty to one charge to allow additional charges to be dropped. This plea deal does not include information or testimony against anyone else.

While Casey has received a great amount of support from decentralized community in New York, Chicago, California, and elsewhere, the pro-Palestine movement needs to be publicly and actively supporting them. Right now, their primary accomplices are those who personally know them, those who prioritize prisoner support, and fellow anarchists. Despite vague assertions of the interconnectedness of repression and struggles between the American policing and prison apparatuses to that of Israel, there has been little material manifestation from that understanding within the US pro-Palestine movement. Meanwhile, coordinated struggle between prisoners and outside militants has been a key point of success for Palestinian liberation.

We must recognize the necessity of attacking the infrastructure of occupation domestically. Amidst calls for escalation, it is of vital importance to defend those experiencing repression from the legal system. To not do so is to allow one of the state’s most well-funded and structured counterinsurgency tactics to take complete hold of movements. If people are abandoned to incarceration, the fear of repression will throw everyone towards inactivity. This need for defense is especially true for those facing charges beyond the more palatable ways of dissent, like marches and encampments.

State repression must be met with expanding our community resources to reach those inside. Bravery must be met with support.

It’s not surprising that, despite the large presence of the Palestinian diaspora in the American pro-Palestine movement, tactics focus primarily on vocalizing dissent through marches and making demands of the state, which are a far cry from the struggle within Palestine itself. This is partially attributed to the class character of the diaspora — a petty bourgeois group would have no investment in attacking infrastructure they partially benefit from even if that same infrastructure perpetuates the genocide of indigenous groups including Black people and Palestinians both domestically and globally. Equally, the motivations and interests of the community organizations and student groups that are largely in control of the movement not only harbor that class character but also rely on funding from the infrastructure they refuse to attack. Despite the student movement being referred to as an intifada, it’s activity is incomparable to what has occurred during the numerous intifadas leading up to the Al-Aqsa Flood.

Considering pro-Palestinian community groups and political organizations like USPCN, CJP/SJP, Dissenters, NAARPR, JVP and PSL are supplied with enough funds to bus people in for marches, plan conferences, and campaign for local policy, certainly donating money towards legal fees for those facing repression would be no issue.

Even with all the attention and credibility being given to the pro-Palestinian student movement and despite the numerous pro-Palestine student groups on university campuses, there have been no publicly circulated student-led support efforts for Casey. Outside of participants of the Columbia University encampment, there has been no mention of them from any other university space, most likely attributed to groups aligning themselves with certain tactics, a hesitancy towards anarchists, and the fear of repression.

Beyond the bare minimum of ensuring people are supported in obtaining adequate legal counsel, any revolutionary horizons with teeth require long term prisoner support. This practice is key to the current struggle that led to the Al-Aqsa Flood as exhibited by the rich history of organizing within prisons and the ongoing liberation of those being held hostage by Israel. In Khalida Jarrar’s words, “[t]he ongoing conquest to liberate prisoners is in tandem with the Palestinians’ constant and multifaceted struggle against colonialism. Hence, the slogan “emptying the prisons” is derived from and a core component in the Palestinian struggle through various stages in its history.”.

Those of us living under a plantation economy already have our own reasons to ensure incarceration is a central site of struggle. But if one does insist upon taking guidance from elsewhere and if one intends to “bring the Intifada home” or “escalate for Gaza”, Palestinians have provided plenty of methods for how carcerality can be attacked.

Casey understood this prior to their incarceration and there’s no doubt this knowledge influenced their own political horizons. If the pro-Palestine movement wants to also tote itself as an intifada they should take note of the militant organizing and support infrastructure within and between prison walls that occurs in Palestine. Abandonment of prisoners is where revolutionary ideals die.

Empty The Prisons Free Casey Goonan

For More Info and Updates on Casey
[email protected]
freecaseynow.noblogs.org
IG: @freecaseynow

Ways to Support Casey
– Organize a fundraiser for legal fees, commissary, or a nutritional package

– Host a letter writing night

– Form a defense committee

– Make + put up some propaganda

– Write to Casey

Readings Recs
A Practical Guide to Prisoner Support

Practical Abolition From The Inside Out

More Effective Prisoner Support

The Soledad Brothers Defense Committee: A Brief Consideration

San Quentin Six Defense Committee

A Spirit, Unbroken (Discusses the Martin Sostre Defense Committee)

Received by email.

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=13395

#abolitionist #AnarchistPrisoners #CaseyGoonan #Encampements #northAmerica #palestineSolidarity #PoliticalPrisoners

“The concentration of violent power in the hands of the few can occur unopposed if it is done quietly, if unnecessary provocation, which can set a process of solidarity in motion, is avoided—that is something that was learned as a result of the student movement and the Paris May.”

— The Urban Guerilla Concept, The Red Army Faction 1971

On 30 April 2024 — the 56th anniversary of the 1968 Columbia University mass arrests — the New York Pig Department besieged Harlem, locked down the entirety of Columbia’s campus, swept the Gaza solidarity encampment, and raided Hind’s Hall. This raid marked the end of the spring of the Student Intifada. Those of us who were at the barricades are still reeling from the experience. There are few moments in our lives where history opens its doors to us. Taking the leap through is disorienting, but the responsibility to make sense of this conjuncture falls squarely on those who take the leap.

Journalists and pundits have chimed in endlessly on the Student Intifada with a particular focus on Columbia University. Many of these pundits were nowhere near the action nor the partisans who made the action happen, thus they often get the basic facts of the action wrong. As one rebel once advised, “No investigation, no right to speak.” Additionally, the political orientation of the commentariat necessitated the silencing and erasure of the most radical flank of the movement. This flank played a vital role in not only the uprising at Columbia, but in the direction of the movement nationally. This essay is an attempt to both correct the record and offer up some political perspectives from a segment of this radical flank.

The next sequence of the Student Intifada remains elusive but it is important that interventions are made to push the movement in the correct direction. A minority with the correct revolutionary line is not a minority.

ARE WE REALLY PEACEFUL? WHO’S AFRAID OF OUTSIDE AGITATORS?

In the 13 days of protest on Butler Lawn, there was a pernicious narrative peddled by both sympathetic media and liberal student leadership: the narrative of the “peaceful protestors”. While this characterization was pushed by a portion of the encampment, it is not the whole story, and it is certainly not true of the minority group inside the camp who were essential to the initiation of the Student Intifada, and maintained influence over the politics and praxis of the protest until the sweep and raid.

Nonetheless, every official statement coming out of the encampment was padded with language about how peaceful, well-behaved, and non-threatening the action was. Those on the outside could have been tricked into thinking that we were all just a bunch of hippies braiding friendship bracelets in the grass.

There was a near-constant gesturing towards our right to peaceful assembly as citizens of the United States, paired with an incessant fear-mongering around the minority faction’s uncompromising support for armed resistance. This resulted in a de facto pacifist position that attempted to smother out the reality of what brought us to the lawn in the first place — a third world people’s war for national liberation — while also placing a ceiling on acceptable forms of action. To erase the armed resistance of Palestinians, which is supported by the entire Axis of Resistance, is to remove their world-making agency and reduce them to objects of pity. All this does is grease the wheels of the status quo and allow our rulers to continue the military and political targeting of the Axis without any internal dissent.

Any recourse to legality or peace was meant to win over moderates who belly ache over the sanctity of our “democracy” — the same “democracy” beheading infants in the tent camps of Rafah. These moderates are not our friends and many of them have gone back to their regularly scheduled programming after the installment of Kopmala as the Democratic presidential nominee. It is true that a portion of them have been won over to our side, and more will come as contradictions sharpen, but we do not tail the moderate line or play by their rules. This holds especially true when the moderate line throws militant factions under the bus, isolating us from the rest of the movement and exposing us to more repression from the genocidal state that everyone claims to be in opposition to.

There is a belief that these liberalizing rhetorical and strategic compromises, compromises that are fundamentally divisive and neutralizing, keep everyone safe.

Maybe we will protect ourselves if we speak the language of law-abiding pacifism and hide the radical faction from sight.

In practice, these compromises offered us no safety. The armed agents of the state viewed everyone on Butler Lawn as enemies in a war against their genocidal authority. In many ways, they were correct to view us as such. The collective demand for divestment from zionism undermines US hegemony and its military apparatus. There is nothing peaceful about this demand — regardless of how hard we try to contort ourselves in the name of respectability, or what tactics individuals choose to participate in. It is of no benefit to anyone to lie about the terrain on which we are fighting by papering over the stakes with flowery language. The enemy has a clear understanding of what they would lose if we were to win, so what’s our excuse? None of this is intended to promote recklessness, but our analysis must be unflinching in order to meet this moment. To be as radical as reality itself requires both discipline and fearlessness.

It should go without saying that many of the details and the planning of our work require an element of secrecy because of the nature of surveillance under the bourgeois-settler dictatorship. Not all work is done in the light of day, but we should never be dishonest about the content of our politics and what it would take to really win — both with the masses and ourselves. The reality of the matter is that we are engaged in class struggle against the most powerful empire in human history. The radical partisans in the encampment understood fully that our aims can only be attained through force and that these aims are righteous. This understanding is not shameful or reckless. It is a matter of fact.

The emphasis placed on how allegedly docile the protest was played right into the hands of the outside agitator trope that was pushed by racist commentators. Anyone perceived as “non-peaceful” was classified as a foreign threat to the pristine Ivy League finishing school. The more uncompromising edge within the encampment — comprised of students, alumni, faculty and non-students alike — were framed as unhinged “terrorists” who invaded the protest and brainwashed the otherwise “peaceful and good” student activists.

This division, that carries with it racial and class dimensions, is proving itself to be an essential component of the opposition’s strategy for crushing the movement. It became central to the criminal cases of the Hind’s Hall defendants. Students and affiliates had their cases immediately dropped and non-students were dragged through a months-long court and ACD process which included a state mandated “rapid reset program” led by a zionist organization, during which we were subjected to hours of racist drivel about the israeli right to unlimited genocide and the Palestinian right to die quietly.

This line of demarcation was also trotted out by none other than the premier raging war hawk, Hillary Clinton, who went as far as claiming that the “nefarious outsiders” were funded by foreign entities. On 22 September she went live with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria to speak about the Student Intifada and said, “There were already existing groups within our country and particularly on certain campuses, like Columbia, who had talking points. They had a plan for protest and disruption, and I watched it morph into something that was not student-led…There was something else going on here that was very troubling. We now have evidence of, obviously foreign money, foreign influence, the algorithms on TikTok which were anti-Israel right off the bat.”

Here, Clinton lays out a piece of the opposition’s long-term strategy for repression and counterinsurgency — manufacturing conspiracies alleging direct ties to state-designated foreign “terrorist” organizations (FTOs). These conspiratorial fictions can serve a multitude of functions, and fully unpacking them all is outside the scope of this piece, but for our purposes, two of these functions are immediately important: they lay the groundwork for lawfare in the form of material support for terrorism (MST) lawsuits and they manufacture consent for lethal violence against the movement in the core. In the case of the former, most of these lawsuits won’t stick, but this isn’t necessarily the point — the point is to demobilize the sector of the movement that poses the most danger to the status quo, and to make pariahs out of the factions within it who insist on the necessity of militant resistance against empire, both in the core and the periphery. The aim here is to criminalize solidarity with the resistance forces at the vanguard of anti-colonial class struggle, and to instill fear in the movement to deter necessary support for these resistance forces, while isolating the radical edge that is eager to escalate.

In the case of the latter, the US government and the zionist entity have spent the past year committing countless massacres against an entire people under the pretense of their ties to these resistance organizations that are designated by the west as “terrorists.” The US-zionist genocide of Gaza is a mass counter-insurgency campaign that seeks to destroy the popular cradle of resistance, the terrorist designation creates the state of exception that makes this mass slaughter acceptable. Our enemy is champing at the bit to apply this state of exception to dissidents in the core, and they are building dozens of cop cities across the country to make good on cracking down on domestic “terror”. As our struggle here intensifies and internationalist solidarity grows, they will not hesitate to put a bullet in any one of us, and they are laying the groundwork to do this with as much support from the backward Amerikan public as possible.

None of this should lead to compromises or demobilization, as it is but a fraction of what Palestinians in Gaza are enduring, but it is also perfectly natural to feel fear in the face of these realities. That said, fear cannot take the wheel. We have a historical duty to continue to throw our bodies on the gears of the imperial machinery. Those who are not able to do so themselves cannot waver in their solidarity with those who continue to do what must be done.

In the face of the opposition’s attempts to divide our movement between the good ones and the bad ones, between the peaceful insiders and the nefarious outside agitators, it is imperative that we are steadfast in rejecting these distinctions wholesale — no matter what level of activity an individual or organization participates in. This necessarily entails rejecting the colonizer’s language of peace and replacing it with the language of liberation. Fascism is here, alive and well, growing stronger by the minute. That said, this cannot be a peace movement, and if we are to fight and survive, it is high time we reckon with that.

A NEW FRONT, THE ARROW AND THE BULLSEYE

“I envy you. You North Americans are very lucky. You are fighting the most important fight of all. You live in the belly of the beast.”

— Che Guevara

Based off the 0.66% of Columbia’s investments that are publicly available, we know that it grew its 13.6-billion-dollar endowment in part through investing in corporations like Raytheon, Alphabet, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Caterpillar, General Dynamics and Airbnb, all of which deal in the business of colonial genocide and land theft. If this is what less than 1% of their investment portfolio looks like, we could safely assume that the other 99.34% would reveal just how economically and culturally bound up the university is in not only the apocalyptic zionist war on Gaza, but the plunder of the entire global south. There is a reason why the university is hellbent on refusing the demand to disclose all their portfolio, and it is not because they have nothing to hide.

The demand for Columbia to divest from zionism is, when understood in its totality, a call for the university to divest from imperialism altogether, which is why the police siege on Hind’s Hall was so violent and militarized. They ordered a standing army to attack us not because they are simply mean or irrational, but because this demand, and our willingness to exert force on them to obtain it, undermines the foundation of the institution itself. Divestment is a feasible reform and display of symbolic solidarity at a handful of small liberal arts colleges with less of a monetary and ideological investment in the US empire, but divestment from zionism at Columbia or any of the major universities would necessitate the total restructuring of these institutions and the entire university system.

Calling on Columbia University, a war-profiteering Ivy League, to divest from the zionist project forces them into a position that reveals the institution’s deeply embedded relationship with the global imperialist order and throws it into crisis. There is a revolutionary orientation here couched in a seemingly reformist demand. To pursue this political objective, one that is worthy of every ounce of our effort and tenacity, we would need to expand our political horizon from one of mere institutional reform to one of revolutionary upheaval.

Columbia University is an elite socio-cultural appendage of the US and its war machine. There is no reason to believe that the university has the ethical capacity to bend towards “justice” on the issue of genocidal zionism, even if only to save face. As an apparatus of the empire, the university answers to only two things: capital and organized force from below, most of which is classified as violent and illegal by settler-colonial legality. This was on full display when the Amerikan soft power media complex went into propaganda overdrive to condemn the seizure of Hamilton Hall as an act of violent escalation, even though no humans were injured during the action. What was violent for them was the window bashing and property destruction. For the enemy, property is sacrosanct — to destroy it or to violate their property relations is tantamount to committing acts of violence on the settler class.

When understood in its proper context within the US, legal action has limitations that we cannot respect without condemning ourselves to defeat. Above board action that appeals to the state’s morality is incapable of stopping a 13.6-billion-dollar war profiteering endowment in its tracks. This is to say nothing of the fact that the state will continue to ruthlessly criminalize and repress the movement, and, as this happens, more and more forms of action that were once considered above board will now be pushed into realms of extra-legality. I am not suggesting that everyone must participate in all levels of activity at this time, but the fetishization of legality is a direct impediment to victory and, indeed, being effective in any capacity.

If the radical flank of the Student Intifada is to advance to the level of struggle that is necessary to win, there will need to be a profound shift in our cultural values and how those values relate to our strategy and tactics. In other words, a cultural revolution is in order, and the changes that are required of us will throw a wrench in the gears of our own subjectivity. If our demand is that the universities divest from the US empire, then we must also divest from the lies that they sell us.

Too much of the work being done in the NGO-ified Left is predicated on the hyper-visibility and commodification of the individual: activist as influencer as brand. Of all the masters of this form, AOC is the most famous and repugnant by a long shot, but this problem permeates even the most radical spaces. It is intimately connected to the petit-bourgeois class position of most US leftists, who are bred into a striver ideology where everyone is an entrepreneur of the self, and every personality quirk is a small business opportunity. More than anything, all of this individualism is a serious liability and should be left behind. It exposes us to heightened surveillance, risk of doxxing, network mapping, and repression from the extremely powerful police state that we are trying to dismantle.

This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t have public-facing leaders — our movement needs leaders with charisma who can present radical ideas to the masses and agitate them into organization. But this leadership and public-facing work must be cultivated and disciplined through revolutionary organization — not through the knee-jerk individualism that is a direct impediment to collective action. The task for many of us is to become comfortable with being one of the many — swimming amongst the people like fish in the sea. Not to burrow under, not yet, but to blend — to hide in plain sight. This task runs contrary to every habit instilled and beaten into us, to every financial incentive associated with the liberal left. It problematizes our use of social media — where unfortunately much of the left idles along and runs their mouths — and the impulse to share obsessively. The cult of online hyper-visibility is a powerful tool in the hands of the repressive forces of the state, who use these platforms as sites of extraction and surveillance. Imagine every tweet is talking directly into the recording device of your enemy — is it really worth it? Will how much you’re revealing to your enemy jeopardize the real work and your ability to carry it out?

A shift away from this individualism, which is ultimately linked to professional aspiration, will change how we approach organizing altogether. The fact of the matter is that we do not yet have the organizational capacity to sustain long-term militancy, and the default liberal self-centeredness instilled in us as youth in the core is a massive impediment to building out that capacity. If we want to escalate, we must advance on the level of organization, which will require us to rewire the way we have been choreographed to approach this work. If we want our engagement with high-risk activity to shift away from spectacular one-off actions and into sustained, protracted resistance, then we need clandestine cadre formations, infrastructure to sustain them, discipline and commitment. This will require us to give up the trappings of “the good life” and release any ideas of this work being a career option.

The Gaza solidarity encampment opened up the space and time needed to experiment with this cultural transformation, and it led us to the discipline required to seize Hamilton Hall with only 46 people.

THE ENCAMPMENT AND THE SEIZURE OF HAMILTON HALL

The campus was on strict lockdown with 24/7 NYPD presence surrounding the campus and 24/7 public safety presence inside of the gates. Anyone without a CUID couldn’t enter or exit. There were no sex, drugs, or alcohol allowed in the camp, and no taking photos without each other’s consent. We were encouraged to cover our faces. During the daytime, comrades on the outside would print out and smuggle in boxes of radical literature from different encampments and movements across the world — students who had never heard of the Cal Poly Humboldt occupation or Stop Cop City or Basel Al-Araj from Al-Walaja were suddenly saturated in their politics. The radical partisans took control of political education. Teach-ins about the revolutionary struggle of the Korean people, the PFLP and Leila Khaled, the global uprisings of ‘68, and how to build barricades took place in between calls to prayer.

Day in and day out, the administration dragged representatives from the camp into hours-long negotiating meetings where they would give them the runaround and offer breadcrumb concessions to pacify the unruly mass festering on their lawn. The representatives would then go back to a very small, unelected, group of students in the camp to relay the news and strategize. This ad hoc group attempted to dictate the will of the entire encampment with very little accountability to anyone outside of their circle.

It became clear that Columbia was trying to tire us out and buy us off. Escalation was the word on everyone’s minds, and this was met with fear-mongering from the negotiating group. They were scared that if we rubbed university authorities the wrong way, it would cause them to give us a bad deal in negotiations — as if Shafik and Co. were ever coming to the table in good faith anyway. Out of either naïveté or opportunism, they seemed to believe that a demand as audacious as full divestment from zionism could be won through conversations with power and peaceful means alone.

The encampment was not threatening enough on its own to force divestment from the administration, but after the first round of mass arrests and subsequent backlash from the broader public, the university wasn’t ready to come in with a second raid. We were at a stalemate. The radical partisans began to meet in secrecy across the campus. In hidden corners and blindspots, away from the view of cameras and cops. The plan: seize Hamilton Hall. Just like ’68, except this time, our operation would be surgical and planned down to the minute. We would not be spontaneous; we would be disciplined cadre.

Negotiations continued to go nowhere but some members of the negotiating group thought otherwise. Regardless, this process was massively politicizing for less experienced students who still had faith in the ethical integrity of Columbia. It sharpened the contradictions between the more advanced cadre and liberals in the camp, and it bought us time to agitate, educate, and train.

Columbia attempted to fake us out with a loose threat to call in the National Guard. Choppers swarmed overhead but we didn’t move an inch that night. On multiple occasions, false alarms about imminent police raids spread through the camp. The experienced rads advised that everyone remain calm. Nobody flinched.

At the nightly camp-wide meetings, young students demanded transparency and accountability about the negotiation process. We were dissatisfied with what we all understood as attempts at containment from the administration and the clique negotiating on everyone’s behalf behind closed doors. The radical partisans continued to plan. We smuggled in barricading supplies under the noses of the pigs guarding the campus entrances. Crow bars, chains, angle grinders, bolt cutters, hammers, bike locks, ratchet straps, duct tape, epoxy, zip ties. We smuggled in 50 extra tents in under an hour. As time wore on, the entire encampment’s culture shifted away from one of compromise and negotiation to one of resolve and militancy. Groups of inexperienced protestors got curious about the possibility of taking a building. We started gathering our numbers inside the camp. When a Barnard grad announced that we needed to break open the gates and let all of Harlem inside, she was promptly recruited.

The partisans decided we would all wear head-to-toe Columbia merchandise and ski masks as our black bloc. The CU merch was a big “fuck you” from the outside agitators. In the days leading up to the action, we did multiple undercover passes of Hamilton Hall’s inside and the tunnel system that runs beneath it. Every camera was accounted for, every door drawn out, every floor of the building mapped with an inventory of exact numbers of useable furniture items for barricades. My comrade smuggled me a copy of the selected writings of Black Mask and Up Against the Wall Motherfucker by Ben Morea. They were the outsider rads from the Lower East Side SDS chapter who took Columbia’s mathematics building in ‘68. Their occupation was notoriously the most militant.

We continued to put pressure on the ad hoc negotiating group to get the green light to move forward with our escalation. They rejected and rejected and rejected. They too were trying to tire us out. In a situation like this, never back down, no matter who they are. We struggled against the de-escalators relentlessly, but also fought hard for unity, because it was important to us that our militancy was not articulated as just undisciplined people “doing whatever they want.” In our minds, the only legitimate escalation was one that moved the way the resistance moved.

On April 29, we woke up to a threat of a sweep from the administration. We decided we would go through with the plan that night, no matter what. Our numbers were small — only 46 as opposed to the spontaneous ’68 occupation when hundreds flooded Hamilton. But we had been training and we were tightly organized. Better fewer, but better.

We had one comrade hide in a janitor’s closet for hours and after midnight, when the Hall was already closed, they ran down to let the rest of us into the building. At the same time, on the other side of the campus, a smaller crew staged a feint to distract and confuse public safety. While public safety was thinned out, the Hind’s Hall 46 invaded the building and the camera team immediately took care of all the security cameras.

After 9pm on 30 April, the NYPD besieged Harlem, locked down the entirety of Columbia’s campus, swept the Gaza solidarity encampment, and raided Hind’s Hall. A military-grade Bearcat was used during the raid — pigs entered the building’s second story with guns drawn, and a shot was fired. The pigs threw stun grenades at those of us defending the barricades, we were badly beaten with fists and sticks. Bones were broken, protestors were thrown down flights of stairs, and journalists were locked inside the Pulitzer building so nobody could see what the pigs did to us.

MOTHER COUNTRY RADICALS

“Have you grasped the significance of the backlash? It has stung the fascist. The people are in foment, all of them, of all persuasion. They don’t dig midnight or dawn raiding parties, bullets with steel jackets, cowardly pigs perched upon their roofs, the same gases manufactured for use against the Vietnamese Liberators blowing back into their faces: Repression. Do you see the effect it has on the uncommitted? Comrade, repression exposes. By drawing violence from the beast, the vanguard party is demonstrating for the world to examine just exactly what terms their rule is predicated on — their power to organize violence, our acquiescence.”

— Blood in My Eye, Jonathan Jackson in a letter to George Jackson

Following the raid of Hind’s Hall, the NYPD swept all the other NYC campuses in less than a week. Many liberals blamed us for the police violence, negating the fact that violence is the only language the pigs know. There was much debate and naysaying around the militancy of Hind’s Hall. A common refrain was: “Oh, all Hind’s Hall did was get people hurt and get everyone swept! And it didn’t even win divestment!”

I will settle the score now and say that a substantial portion of the partisans who took Hind’s Hall knew for a fact that the seizure of a building would not exert enough pressure to win divestment, and neither would continuing to camp on the lawn. With the threat of a sweep looming over our heads, we knew what we had to do regardless of whether it would end in an immediate win. The demand of divestment was not the sole motivating force of the action — our vision and strategy were more expansive than this. Hind’s Hall was an attempt to move outside the bounds of listing demands and into a terrain of direct confrontation with the state committing a holocaust — one of many in Amerika’s sordid history. The radical faction wanted to raise the ceiling of militancy in the movement as a whole and reveal to the world that the question of Palestinian national liberation had brought the reality of anti-imperialist class war to the heart of the metropole.

Our enemy — whose front line is the NYPD — perceives this as a violent struggle to protect their status quo at all costs, and they will use any means at their disposal to do it. And so, when enough force was exerted onto the institution, they were forced to reveal the iron fist inside their velvet glove. The tanks came rolling down Amsterdam Avenue, and the militarized pigs were deployed on the Amerikan Ivy League youth, the very people who are supposed to be training to keep this machine running.

The morning after 30 April, Rebecca Weiner — the head of NYPD counterterrorism and their “Tel Aviv” office, also a Columbia professor — spoke at a press conference about how she was responsible for orchestrating the militarized raid. Her involvement laid bare the lethal web that connects Columbia, the NYPD, and the zionist entity. It proved that Columbia is not just economically invested in imperialism — its complicity runs much deeper than mere economic transaction. Columbia also serves as its own factory of racist state violence and is home to one of its chief stewards in post-9/11 NYC.

Comrade, repression exposes.

It is the duty of the radical to sharpen contradictions, to make it impossible to deny the contours of our situation, to expose the violent machinations of the imperial state in all of its brutal intensity, and to do it here, in the guts of Babylon. The struggle being waged by the resistance in the periphery is existential. It is a war for the future of humanity itself. Our resistance here in the core is an extension of that struggle, no matter how small or relatively underdeveloped it is. And it is to the Palestinian resistance that we owe our ability to mobilize here in a way unseen since the anti-imperialist movement of the late 1960s.

Hind’s Hall and the contradictions it exposed were registered by the masses in Yemen, who have shown us all what solidarity looks like through their unwavering, militant fidelity to the people of Gaza. At a weekly million-person popular demonstration in Sanaa, they held massive banners with images of the liberation of Hind’s Hall and the NYPD tanks on Amsterdam Avenue. Written on one of these Yemeni banners was a quote from Che Guevara: “If you tremble with indignation at every injustice, then you are a comrade of mine.”

Source: Unity of Fields

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/post/2024/10/29/no-peace-reflections-on-columbia-the-student-intifada-and-the-culture-of-counterinsurgency/

#alAqsaFlood #Columbia #counterinsurgency #Encampements #hindsHall #northAmerica #nyc #NYPD #palestineSolidarity #students

Charlottesville, Va.

We are a collective of autonomous actors consisting of students and community members from the UVA encampment for Gaza. We write this letter as a letter of consolation for our comrades, to whom we owe an explanation for the presence of cops and admin when we arrived on April 30th. We should have said this much earlier. We offer it now for reference as we step into this struggle for the long haul. We offer it to bring you comfort when you have to make difficult decisions about those who you thought were comrades.

1. No Peace Police

UVA Apartheid Divest (UVAAD) management and SJP at UVA became aware of plans for the encampment because a Palestinian student (who was part of a trusted community organization that had been called upon for support) broke an oath of confidentiality in an attempt to stop an encampment from forming. UVAAD, without the consent of the over 40+ organizations in the coalition, and SJP released a statement in community information channels explicitly disaffiliating themselves, condemning the escalation, weaponizing the concept of safety, and ironically, spreading a lie that white people organized the encampment.

The plan to occupy our campus was devised by trusted networks of primarily Black and brown students and community members, including Palestinians, that have been cultivated through long histories of organizing for Palestine and against state violence and abandonment in Charlottesville. Plans for an encampment occurred autonomously outside of the UVAAD structure.

UVAAD and SJP leaders decided, solely on the basis that they were not privy to details, that the encampment organizers were unprepared to address the threat of administrators deploying cops (as had been observed happening at encampments across the nation). Rather than recognize that it would be University administrators and police who would endanger folks at the encampment, UVAAD, and SJP leaders explicitly discouraged other students, faculty, and community members from joining in the escalation for Palestine—blaming the encampment
organizers preemptively for the escalatory actions of state actors and painting the organizers as those creating an “unsafe” environment. Down to the moment when they saw their former comrades being brutalized and taken away by riot police, UVAAD students were de-escalating this protest by telling the administration they would negotiate on behalf of an encampment they were never a part of and by getting on megaphones and telling energized student protestors to leave the area instead of continuing pressure or protecting the encampment, again under the guise of being a “leader”.

Safety means disrupting state violence and risking comfort for the possibility of a universe where safety can truly exist. To be undisruptive is to wait for the state to turn its weapon toward you.

2. Accomplices, not authorities: against any collaboration with the state or police

Abolition of violence, like genocide and settler occupation, means never cooperating with those that wield state violence—police or university leadership, who are the ones to make the call for violence at every single student protest.

The actor who positioned himself as UVAAD de facto Coalition Chair built relationships with Associate Vice President for Student Affairs Marsh Pattie and UVA Chief of Police Tim Longo and told them of protest routes and action plans. When confronted with concerns about security culture and state surveillance/violence, this same leader and those who supported him disregarded those concerns, thereby placing themself beyond reproach. The students who put their bodies on the line and were arrested and disciplined by those same administrators were
told that students like this SJP leader were cooperative and that they are the example of the “acceptable” student organizer. This makes them the ineffective student organizer, as the administrator admitted UVA never felt pressure from their collaborator.

Students who support collaborating with admin pose one of the greatest security risks to our movement organizing. In a post-9/11 Amerikkka, the use of “safety” as an excuse for increased policing can not be a tactic we fall for anymore. Admin lies and will call upon riot cops to protect their interests. The police state’s and University administration’s interests are not and will never be aligned with our interests and goals for liberation. What the police state and the University of Virginia are interested in is de-escalating us and our movement—their interest is in upholding empire, draining you, and infiltrating us. Anyone who builds relationships with the administration and police is actively working for the state and thus betraying our liberation movements. Further, safety cannot exist in the same universe where genocide occurs, but we believe we keep us safe, and the cost of inaction is too high for Palestinians in Gaza who are actively being murdered and calling for us to continue escalation within empire. WHERE IS OUR FUCKING RAGE.

3. Against Leadership: the movement must be self-activated, based on principles, and not dependent on personalities or politicians

When the police arrive at an action, their first question is always, “Who’s in charge?” This is not because leadership is essential to organizing but because it presents a vulnerability—a target to be infiltrated, weaponized, something to make an example out of, and spread rot in the movement from the inside out.

The desire to turn toward leadership organizational structures reinforces the oppressive system of “representation” in which participants of an organization become complicit in the leader/follower power dynamic, failing to take initiative or think critically about their leader’s actions. In this movement, we must begin creating collective decision-making structures promoting autonomy and self-determination. We must cultivate practices of self-defense and confidence in our principles that hold would-be rulers at bay. We recognize this is new, scary, and a way of organizing that requires imagination and intentional practice.

Organizers involved in planning actions in support of Palestinian liberation at UVA this year have watched a white Jewish student organizer in SJP position himself as the UVAAD de facto Coalition Chair. His self-appointed leadership took on a white savior role and people fell into the dangerous comfort of complicity as he made unilateral decisions for the coalition of over 40 student organizations, largely organizations of students of color. His decisions actively put the movement and those aligned with the Palestinian resistance in danger of authoritarian violence (police and administrators, the same) through peace policing and engaging with administrators to plan direct actions.

When BIPOC students, who were carrying a bulk of labor in the coalition, raised concerns about organizational structure and collaborating with the University administration in direct conversations and UVAAD coalition meetings, the white savior met their concerns with belittlement, paternalism, and laughter. This white man invalidated the lived experiences of Black and brown students, community organizers, and mentors—who know intimately the violence of empire—by calling into question their motivations to escalate for Palestine. He felt
emboldened to do so partially because he was coopting and manipulating the sentiments of several Palestinian students in SJP at UVA. Despite having reasonable concerns for their personal security, these Palestinian students were ultimately conflating their identities with a political praxis/organizing experience and thus felt comfortable peace policing others who were ready to escalate for Palestine.

Let us be clear: we don’t need saviors, and we don’t need leaders. We cannot offer leaders to be targeted. Collectivity is integral to our movement. While this sentiment was originally the intent of BIPOC students who formed a coalition effort for Palestine, it ended with those same students being alienated from the organization by this white leader.

Conclusion

Undoubtedly, there will be continue to be students who would rather be collaborators with university admin and the state. However, we speak to those who understand the need for disruptive tactics in the fight for Palestine, who understand courageous escalation is the only way to move towards liberation. You do not need to feel wedded to a structure like the UVAAD coalition, just because it exists, or because you were part of it. We must be willing to burn and regenerate, to compost what hurt us and our movement. Do not be afraid to change your
formation.

Do not underestimate the networks of community on this Monacan land. Solidarity is our strength. Our commitment to our principles and this struggle is our strength. This is why we established a solidarity encampment, where self-determination and autonomous escalation were encouraged without collaboration with cops and the University administration. To be in solidarity with Gaza and Palestine at large, we must understand that the state will never willingly choose the side of Palestinian liberation. We feel the urgency for mobilization more than ever.

We call upon UVA community members to stay grounded in the need for escalation and endurance.

Received by email.

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/post/2024/07/09/reflections-from-the-uva-encampment-in-charlottesville/

#Encampements #northAmerica #palestineSolidarity #studentProtests #virginia

Since the morning of April 17, student protesters opposed to Israel’s attack on Gaza have camped out on the Columbia University campus lawn. The student protesters said they would occupy the lawn until the university divests from companies with ties to Israel.

Columbia University Apartheid Divest, which is a coalition of more than 100 student groups, says it is calling for the university to financially divest from companies and institutions that “profit from Israeli apartheid, genocide and occupation in Palestine,” according to their online statement.

“As a diverse group united by love and justice, we demand our voices be heard against the mass slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza,” the group stated.

On April 18, more than 100 protesters at Columbia University were arrested and an on-campus tent encampment was removed after the school’s president gave the New York Police Department the green light to clear the protesters. Many of the students who were arrested have been temporarily suspended by the university.

On April 22, more than 150 untenured faculty members submitted an open letter in support of student protesters and against the NYPD’s engagement with campus protests. “In the face of these events, we stand with you,” the letter read. “You should certainly not be worried about being sanctioned for your political views. You should not be made fearful because police line the gates, ready to flood onto our campus at the invitation of the administration.”

Though police had cleared out the protest encampment after the students were arrested, a new encampment on a different lawn was constructed. This encampment remains active.

Starting on Friday, students at campuses across the country held walkouts in solidarity with the Columbia students who were arrested. Students at Brown, Princeton and Northwestern held protests on Friday and over the weekend.

Across the country, student on-campus encampments against the Israel-Gaza war have continued to pop up at colleges and universities, including: New York University, Yale University, University of Michigan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tufts University, Emerson College and The New School, Cal Poly Humboldt, Barnard, UC Berkeley, University of Maryland, Rutgers, Vanderbilt, Washington, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania, University of New Mexico, UNC Charlotte, UNC Chapel Hill, University of Colorado, Boulder, Michigan State, Rice University, Miami University, University of Houston, University of Alberta.

The campus of Cal Poly Humboldt, a public university in Arcata, California, has been shut down after a group of pro-Palestine protesters occupied a campus building and clashed with riot police late Monday.

Hundreds of students had gathered outside of Siemens Hall on Monday afternoon as part of a larger protest against Israel’s brutal military campaign in Gaza. Several protesters entered the administrative building, which houses the office of Academic Personnel Resources and Human Resources, and created a barricade, blocking doors with furniture, and setting up tents.

Around 8 p.m. there was a tense encounter between police and protesters. As police armed with shields, batons, and helmets walked into the building, protesters pushed back. One protester used a large plastic water bottle to beat a police officer’s helmet. The protesters were ultimately able to push the police back, and out the door of the building.

As students across the United States risk their freedom and education to take a stand for Palestine, their actions are absurdly denounced by University officials, poltiicians and mainstream media as ‘anti-semitic’. However it is the force with which Universities are responding to the protests that indicates their unrelenting racism and support for the genocidal Zionist entity.

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/post/2024/04/23/7473/

#Columbia #Divestment #Encampements #EndTheWarOnGaza #gaza #palestine #Palestinians #UniversityOccupations