When We Are More

More Than Conflict

To write of ongoing protests against the genocide in Gaza, Palestine, is to speak of police brutality and state violence, of disclosure and divestment, of the chasm between university administrative leaders and student, staff, and faculty. This emphasis on confrontation diverts critical attention from vibrant movements for Palestinian liberation on college campuses today that have been unfolding since, and often preceding, the outbreak of new hostilities in October 2023. These movements were not born of or on October 7. (See, for instance the grassroots Palestinian Youth Movement [PYM] that precedes the current mobilizations, among manifold other youth- and student-led movements.)1 Indeed, the movements for Palestinian liberation have a long history on U.S. campuses from the General Union of Palestinian Students, which was born in the 1950s and found its climax in the first intifada of 1987, and Palestinian leadership in Arab Students Associations between the 1960s and the 1980s, to the rise of Students for Justice in Palestine responding to the call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) in 2005 (Palestinian Civil Society).

Student movements and their most recent iteration of encampments across the United States and beyond are nonviolent gatherings based in ethical demands to disclose and divest; they are equally places of study and creative praxis (Beckett). To cast them as confrontations between students and police is to impoverish their force.

To speak of movements is first and foremost to recognize the accumulative force of political education on Palestine and Israel.2 Where faculty are not substantially present in this critical enterprise, students have taken up the challenge to take back their university as a place of learning. To speak of movements is to recognize the encampments as one episode in a longer process of studying U.S. empire and its geopolitical ambitions, its racism and colonial histories, and the role of universities as corporate handmaidens to imperialism—all of which contribute to denials of the ongoing Nakba. To speak of these movements is to call for centering the history of Palestine and Palestinians in various registers of decolonization and resistance.

More Than Media Spectacle

To speak of a movement for Palestinian liberation is to buck the media spectacle of police brutality that catapulted student organizing around the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza onto the national stage on April 18, 2024.3 Accumulating experience, waning at times, changing course, movements are durational political gatherings marked by laborious care; they constellate heterogeneous social demands around a horizon, assiduously building contingent alliances. To move toward Palestinian liberation casts direct action and specific goals—like the call for BDS that the encampments are one part of—as one episode in a longer temporality of struggle. That ongoing struggle can encompass a range of actions: speech under censorship, study under emerging constraints on academic freedom, imaginative protest actions (artworks, archival projects, mourning rituals), just to name a few. Centering Palestinian liberation, many such actions ford differential vulnerabilities and different modalities of loss. 

We write of one such movement at UCSB. We do not speak for the heterogeneous coalition as a whole, but as one constitutive part: as Academics for Justice in Palestine (AJP), a collective of academic laborers (faculty, staff members, and graduate workers) committed to fostering education, speech, and action on justice in Palestine. (AJP correlates to the Faculty for Justice in Palestine [FJP] chapters across U.S. universities.);4 AJP collaborates with UCSB’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), UCSB Divest Coalition, and a dozen other student organizations that have joined forces in shaping campus activity around Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in the last seven months. 

Here, we reflect on lessons we have learned as our movement unfolds around us as an open-ended process. 

More Than the Present

UCSB has been a hotbed of student activism for decades, much like its sister UC campuses. We recall smoke and teargas and arrests in another era of antiwar protests, during which Bank of America in Isla Vista burned (February 1970; see Owens). Before that, there was the North Hall takeover, when the eponymous building on the UCSB campus was temporarily renamed Malcolm X Hall in October 1968 in a call to establish the Black Studies Department (Woo), and the April 1969 Chicano/a gatherings that produced El Plan de Santa Barbara. In 1989, students across underrepresented racial backgrounds went on hunger strike to introduce curricular changes and set up a Multicultural Center at UCSB’s campus (Cobarrubia et al.). UCSB is a historical site of social transformation through student mobilization and intellectual inquiry, with rich traditions of building collaboration across differences. 

One might say every U.S. campus is having such flashbacks to activist pasts. These histories tell us how students have always sculpted universities to the call of their generation. What better time for such histories when universities have begun to act as private equity firms in abrogation of their educational mission? As Marianne Hirsch writes, “The classes of 2024, 2025, 2026, and 2027 are learning that while a movement for social justice is building momentum across the globe, their school is content to once again take its place on the wrong side of history.”

Academics for Justice in Palestine started as an informal group in April 2023 to join SJP members and their comrades from El Congreso, Mauna Kea Protectors, MUJER, Environmental Justice Alliance, and Black Students Union as they set up a simulation of the Apartheid Wall on campus. It coalesced formally on October 9, 2023. The present collective draws its strength, cohesion, and momentum from this prior bedrock, forging new solidarities tailored for a present too accelerated for reflection. 

More Than the Sum of Its Parts

Movements are more than the sum of their parts, be that different groups in a coalition or different actions unfolding on multiple fronts. It would be impossible to catalog all the “events” that make up the AJP movement as the collective strives at UCSB to keep Palestinian liberation alive as a political horizon. Since October 2023, AJP has shaped and participated in teach-ins and study sessions, poetry readings and artwork, marches, and vigils. This constant creative praxis is built through regular meetings on campus where, on average, eighty to one hundred people have met every Monday since October 9. No publicity has been necessary, as people continue to come and bring their friends along. AJP vigorously fosters political education and creates spaces for public discussions on Jewish and Palestinian lives, histories, and futures. We have welcomed all to our teach-ins and meetings. At a public forum held in Isla Vista (December 2023), “Can We Talk About Palestine?” (published as a dossier in Jadaliyya), a vibrant conversation ensued between panelists and a self-declared group of Zionist students critical of the Netanyahu government. Respectful and lively, the exchanges exemplified what a university could be at moments of political crisis.5 To keep moving, AJP has insisted on a steady presence on campus to create social relationships and sustain collective mourning. Since March 2024, we have held weekly gatherings called “Let It Be a Tale” (referring to Palestinian educator Refaat Alareer’s poignant poem) on the library steps, inviting all who pass by the busy junction to hear the Gaza Ground Report (a weekly update on the war) and selected poetry from Palestinian and cognate creatives. We mourn and reflect, as a ritual, in these gatherings, amid the daily shock of a livestreamed genocide appearing constantly and nonlinearly on our handheld devices: these are intervals of repose and replenishment. AJP as a movement holds us steady through the coping and exhaustion, energetic upsurges and bouts of pain. Movements find rhythm, they improvise.

Movements also morph in scale and scope. What started as weekly poetry readings has evolved into a more ambitious and inclusive space. “The Square” invites faculty, undergraduate students, and graduate students to bring their expertise to the question of Palestine. So far, students have given ground reports on Cop City and Sudan, faculty have given reports on Peru and Nicaragua, and Jewish community leaders have led mourners in rituals of collective grief and unity. Talks on supply chains and ports, on global liberation struggles, on humanitarianism, on forced displacement, on anti-racism, and environmental damage are in the works. The door is open. Our various struggles for liberation must by definition be joint ones.

More Than the Classroom

AJP encounters students eager to talk about Palestine on a daily basis. Many graduate, faculty, and staff workers field questions while studying together; some teach Palestine–Israel in the classroom regularly. Others have difficult conversations in the corridors. Still others accompany students, when invited, to their hangouts. Then there is UCSB’s interdisciplinary muscle manifest in myriad centers, programs, and initiatives. Many now join our renowned Center for Middle East Studies (CMES) in creating campus spaces for intensive research and debate. Meanwhile, the AJP “Librarians and Archivists” group continues consolidating and amplifying the work of Palestinian scholars, artists, journalists, and other creatives killed in the war. They now run a website that students regularly use for resources and contribute to when they can.6 Another group “Researchers against War” produces resources on cash inflow from military contracts into UCSB and meets with workers in STEM labs around questions of ethical research, complicity in a global war machine, and the possibilities of divestment. Smaller groups have produced other resources—harassment response toolkits when students were bullied or doxed by racist peers on campus, rapid response communication methods when confrontations flared up, consultation teams when student protestors were asked to attend restorative justice proceedings, and media training sessions for students encountering cameras and reporters for the first time. Other teams of AJP members conduct publicity and outreach on social media, while still others take photographs and record videos of campus protests and events for our personal archive. Some faculty have worked extra hours to support members of student government bodies like Commission on Disability Equity, Student Commission on Racial Equality, Black Women’s Health Collaborative, and the Human Rights Board when they faced backlash for their positions in support of Palestinian rights. Others have actively supported organizations like the Young Democratic Socialists of America, the newly formed JVP–UCSB, the Queer and Trans Graduate Students’ Union, Muslim Students Association, and the Afghan Students Association on movement-building efforts. 

As knowledge-makers, our business is the production and dissemination of knowledge within and beyond the campus. How we come to “know” Palestine–Israel can cause harm and incite social violence; but there is equally an opportunity to recognize historical differences and to work toward redressing the injustices that arise from them. The movement turns inward to examine the conditions of academic labor at UCSB and outward toward the utter destruction of universities in Gaza. It also opens into California, toward the historically rooted and diverse diasporic Arab communities in California. Our state has the largest population of Arab Americans in the United States, with a sizable population of Palestinians (estimated at twenty-six thousand). It is incumbent on educators at public universities such as ours to engage students from these communities. 

More Than Coin

The movement for Palestinian liberation eschews institutional carrots. The UC president, Michael Drake, for instance, offered funding to every campus to address the climate around the war in Palestine–Israel. While investing those funds in fighting antisemitism was the first order of business, there has been no effort to support critical pedagogy proposals from AJP aimed at addressing all forms of racism, including anti-Palestinianism, anti-blackness, and Islamophobia. This is relevant because students on our campus opposing the current war on Palestine are predominantly students of color who have faced bullying, harassment, and doxing. Jewish students publicly critical of the state of Israel’s attacks in Gaza also face opprobrium for their anti-Zionist positions. AJP has insisted on recognizing the manifold harms all these students face. They are not at the center of the care the university institutionally extends toward the campus community in this time of war and genocide.

The coin is sometimes proffered as a lure. AJP has been invited to submit proposals to address the campus climate. We have offered proposal after proposal for critical pedagogies, campus events (for the well-funded Arts and Lectures series, for example), and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, none of which has been taken up. We are not surprised, even as we continue to have many productive conversations with our administration. What the university cannot recognize is a self-directed organization that has no institutional status. We occupy this blind spot without irony, knowing we are never short of ideas, creative labor, or love. There is always more.

But the undisclosed exchange of coin distresses. AJP embraces the BDS platform and collaborates with SJP, JVP, and UCSB Divest in crafting demands for disclosure and divestment. Many in AJP recall the BDS movement against South Africa in the 1980s and endorse the Palestinian-led BDS call launched in 2005. We know the U.S. empire will not yield its weapons easily and will keep its universities on a leash to this end. We’ve heard the congressional hearings. We remember UC’s role in building the atom bomb. Histories and futures of mass killings coalesce. To speak of a movement underscores a struggle that will continue with and beyond negotiations.

We Are More Than

Today, it is common to hear terms like “settler colonialism” or “racial capitalism” bandied about as a basic grammar for framing Palestine. The movement that is sparkling and vibrant on the national stage conceals this enduring hidden labor of education—in the university and in the streets—that has mobilized the potency of these frameworks to wrest Palestine away from terms like “conflict” and “historical animosity.” This is why we seek to rectify the present spectacle. The student actions are not sudden. Most campuses have built on their ongoing mobilizations for justice in Palestine. All actors are not unified. Nor can any movement be at such a sprawling scale. But they are present and nonviolent. Students are learning and thinking about their education in all the ways the university invites them to.

We join them in pushing the horizon of liberation. We are more than these parts, these times, these utterances. We are on the side of history that moves inexorably toward Palestinian liberation.

Bishnupriya Ghosh teaches in the Departments of Global Studies and English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research is in global media cultures, postcolonial studies, and environmental media studies. Her latest monograph, The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media, appeared in 2023.

Sherene Seikaly teaches in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a historian of capitalism, consumption, race, and slavery in the modern Middle East. Her monograph, Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine, appeared in 2016. 

Notes

1. 1. For more on the PYM, see the organization’s website at https://palestinianyouthmovement.com.

2. 2. See the website for the Palestine in Context project at https://www.palestineincontext.org.

3. 3. The violence against the Columbia University encampments on April 18 skyrocketed campus protests to the national stage. Historically, the first encampment was already underway at Vanderbilt University on March 26–27, 2024, when twenty-seven student protestors took over Kirkland Hall.

4. 4. For more on FJP, see the organization’s website at https://www.fjp-network.org.

5. 5. The first publication of the group represented by a few faculty members appeared in the local paper right after the war broke out in October 2023; see Academics for Justice in Palestine, UC Santa Barbara, “Who Is a Civilian?”

6. 6. See the AJP Librarians and Archivists website, Olive Tree SB, at https://olivetreesb.github.io.

Works Cited

1. Academics for Justice in Palestine, UC Santa Barbara. 2023. “Who Is a Civilian? The War on Palestine.” Santa Barbara Independent, October 17. https://www.independent.com/2023/10/17/who-is-a-civilian.
2. Beckett, Lois. 2024. “Nearly All Gaza Campus Protests in the US Have Been Peaceful, Study Finds.” Guardian, May 10. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/10/peaceful-pro-palestinian-campus-protests.
3. Cobarrubia, Kate, Rose Hoang, Jazmine Pamintuan, Francis Vergara, and Vonnie Wei. n.d. “Hunter Strike of 1989.” Department of Asian American Studies–UC Santa Barbara. https://www.asamst.ucsb.edu/community/history/hunger-strike-1989.
4. Hirsch, Marianne. 2024. “How a University Administration Relinquishes Its Educational Mission.” Columbia Spectator, May 5. https://www.columbiaspectator.com/opinion/2024/05/06/how-a-university-administration-relinquishes-its-educational-mission.
5. Owens, Tim. 2020. “The Bank of America Burning in Isla Vista on the 50th Anniversary.” Santa Barbara Independent, February 25. https://www.independent.com/2020/02/25/the-bank-of-america-burning-in-isla-vista-on-the-50th-anniversay.
6. Palestinian Civil Society. 2005. “Palestinian Civil Society Call for BDS.” BDS Movement, July 9. https://bdsmovement.net/call.
7. Woo, Frances. 2019. “North Hall Takeover, 1968.” A.S. Living History Project, October 9. https://livinghistory.as.ucsb.edu/2019/10/09/ofab.