Despite escalating threats of forceful (read: violent) removal amidst the always busy final days of the academic year, the Gaza Solidarity Encampment on Columbia University’s South Lawn has only grown larger and inspired similar protests at tens of campuses across the country. Arrests, suspensions, intimidation, and a media frenzy over antisemitism that distracted from news of the discovery of mass graves in Khan Younis attracted many times the number of students who originally planned the protest. One playfully wears a denim jacket screen-printed here on the lawn with the words “Minouche Sha-Fuck You” while others hold a Passover seder in which the occupation of Palestine and genocidal slaughter of Gazans is directly related to the memory of Jewish suffering under Pharaoh.
Everywhere the once private and mundane actions of daily life have been transformed into communal practices — waking up side by side on the wet grass, sharing meals, sharing space and supplies, borrowing clothing, brushing hair, charging phones, studying for exams — each a testament to and witness of continued presence. “I am here with you,” they say, “I see you.” Hundreds of students and faculty flooded the quad within minutes after the administration threatened to call the National Guard a week into the protest. In the unsteady quiet waiting for the midnight compliance deadline to arrive, the fullness of presence was a mutual assurance - “I will protect you.”
The cause of Palestinian liberation is not one of ideology. It does not concern questions of rights or interest. There are no debates about who should get what among a people who have long been intentionally excepted and overlooked by legal regimes. Rather, it is a resolute reaffirmation of dignity and humanity. The space that is held for ritual and prayer within the liberated zones attests to the moral character of this movement, deeply rooted in faith if not in a singular religion. Some students are propelled to action by their faith in God, all by their faith in each other. This is a politics of love, so radical in its insistence of respect for our fundamental nature, for life, and in its disavowal of the weaponization of identity and education. These students are teaching us how to be human again.
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Palestinians have never forgotten their humanity. Children invent new games to play among the rubble of their bombed and bulldozed homes, hospitals, and schools. Stateless and barred from moving freely within their homeland, harassment is met with smiles at checkpoints. Lovers share secrets and kisses and longing even when there is no electricity, no water, no bread. Rich traditions of poetry and storytelling document heartache and resilience. Olive trees are planted and tended with care, visual reminders of the rootedness of a people whose very existence has been politicized, an incessant and inconvenient negation of Zionism’s claims. As 14-year-old Lujayn writes, “I’ve become certain that the occupation can never destroy our faith, our strength, our courage, our goodness, or our compassion.”
Such steadfast refusal to cease being explains the gratuitous and depraved violence that has characterized Israel’s actions in Gaza and the zeal with which the IOF proudly stages photos among trophies of children’s toys and women’s underwear. It is the solidarity on display in the encampments that has spurred the unprecedented level of repressive disciplinary responses — outside law enforcement; eviction; violent arrests; mace, tear gas and tazers; walling off campuses, shutting off the water supply. As the students persistently remind us, such measures are of a far lesser degree than the genocidal war being raged against Palestinians. Yet it is the same logic, the same money, the same actors responsible for the violence both at home and abroad. And it is in the shared language of humanity, love, and resistance that students speak across so many divides, “we see you,” “we will protect you.”
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Simone Weil describes force as “that x that turns anyone subjected to it into a thing.” This is most obviously true in the case of deadly force, the use of which transforms a person into a corpse. Yet, she continues, “how much more varied in its processes, how much more surprising in its effects is the other force, the force that does not kill, i.e., that does not kill just yet.” This omnipresent threat of force has “the ability to turn a human being into a thing while he is still alive.”
Our world is one in which the liberal promise of freedom is more often experienced as fear and precarity. The institutions and ideologies of capitalism that have not yet killed us incessantly threaten our housing, our food, our climate. As people we have nothing without rights, and no rights without the proper, state-authorized documentation to prove it, much less the resources to fight to secure them. Protest movements that attempt to challenge the status quo but lack the conceptual imagination to see beyond the constraints of this regime have failed to secure meaningful change, merely shaking up the demography of the ruling class.
To be able to see one another, to affirm our dignity, our humanity, our existence regardless of nationality, religion, race, class, or political party, is to resist becoming a thing. As Timothy DeMay urges, “It is important for the expansion of repertoires of resistance and the creative engagement with asymmetrically powerful institutions and states that reparative, survival-based tactics of maintenance are understood and replicated as active and powerful alongside, not beneath, the more traditionally critical modes of protest like marches.” CUAD and other groups’ demands of divestment and support for a ceasefire (as well as the stoppage of development projects that displace local residents) advocate for concrete actions that would provide an immediate and actual guarantee of safety for those subject to violence. The moments of solidarity and witnessing within the encampments as within Palestine, smaller acts of survival and maintenance, have inspired hope that perhaps, finally, never again will truly mean never again. Returning to Weil, “only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how not to respect it, is capable of love and justice.”
From the river to the sea, Palestine will set us all free.