From the River to the Sea

On April 29, 2024, the presidents of twenty Palestinian universities sent a public letter to students and faculty who established encampments on U.S. campuses in solidarity with Palestine. Seven of these presidents witnessed the destruction of their universities in Gaza by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). The remaining twelve presidents are in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, encountering systematic attacks on their university and larger community. Back in 2009, Palestinian scholars coined the term “scholasticide” to refer to the IDF’s systematic destruction of Palestinian centers of education (“Scholasticide”). Today, scholasticide has reached to the level of what the Palestine Feminist Collective calls “sophicide”—annihilation of intellectual and cultural sources of wisdom emerging from the land and disseminated by Indigenous knowledge-carriers. 

The Palestinian presidents’ letter begins with a heartfelt message: “In a moment of great darkness, your protests erupt and give hope for humanity that justice is not an abstract concept but a continuous struggle that connects us all” (“Palestinian Universities Send Letter”). Despite the unfathomable scale of destruction and loss they have experienced, these administrators recognize the risks students on U.S. campuses are taking by breaking the institutional silence about the unfolding genocide in Gaza.1 As a remarkable gesture of reciprocity, they commend the students’ courage as a source of inspiration to them. Would the presidents of U.S. universities who called the police and national security guards on their students hear the message of their counterparts in Palestine? Would they note that they are addressed in this letter by their absence? Would they recognize that their absent presence is a testimony to how they keep failing, not only their students and faculty, but also their colleagues in Palestine?

In spring 2024, I learned a lot from my students enrolled in my critical human rights course in the Institute for Global Studies at the University of Minnesota (UMN). The course is about the failures of institutional responses to human rights violations in Palestine and other settler–colonial contexts like Kurdistan and Xinjiang. This was the third time I taught the course and certainly not the first time I assigned readings on Palestine. However, it was the first time my undergraduate students made obsolete the physical and institutional boundaries of academia by bringing their political activism into the classroom and carrying the classroom into their political organizing. None of my students is Palestinian, but all of them are allies of the UMN Divest Coalition consisting of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Students for a Democratic Society, Young Democratic Socialists of America, and Students for Climate Justice. They do not represent a student movement as such, but their words give insights into the why, what, and how of this growing student movement for justice in Palestine.

Prior to the establishment of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, the UMN Divest Coalition organized rallies, die-ins, and teach-ins to pressure the administration to recognize the loss of Palestinian lives, support Palestinian, Muslim, and Middle Eastern students on campus, and divest from companies complicit in the war crimes in Gaza. None of these tactics elicited any response from the administration for seven months. Inspired by the establishment of encampments on other campuses, the Coalition set up tents in Northrop Mall on April 24, 2024. The police raided the first encampment and arrested seven students, one staff member, and one alumna. Within a few days, the Coalition set up another encampment in the same place, with even more tents and more students. In the name of “safety,” the UMN administration shut down all the university buildings around the encampment, denying student access to bathrooms, water fountains, and heated indoor space. When the university closed its doors to the students, however, the community outside the campus opened new doors. Local restaurants owned by Somali, Palestinian, and other immigrant groups donated food, water, and snacks. Punk and queer communities donated money to the Coalition’s account to help them maintain the encampment. Community members brought hands and feet warmers, pain medication, and personal hygiene products for those who decided to stay in tents.

In the middle of their finals, my students Lucas Plaman, Thea Wangsness, Lydia Hester, and Ella Kunstman actively participated in the encampment. Other students like Libby, Madelynn Shaw, and Ainsley Casper visited the encampment. By staying in the encampment, Lucas, Lydia, and Thea not only risked arrest but also put their graduation at risk. It should not be missed on any of us that the cost of not graduating is much higher than the cost of arrest in this country, where most public university students work multiple jobs to pay their tuition fees and cover their cost of living. You might ask: Isn’t it quite irrational to take such big risks? Aren’t they hurting themselves and their fellow students by disrupting the “normal” life of education? What is such disruption good for, given that students cannot stop the genocide in Gaza? Based on the final essays of my students who wanted their names mentioned in this essay, I want to address some of these questions. 

First, many students have already had their share of injustice, as they grew up in a world where school kids were killed by gun violence, Covid-19 patients were abandoned by the corrupt healthcare system, unhoused BIPOC communities were moved from one encampment to another by local governments, and racist police killed many Black men and women. In giving an account of his own political mobilization, Lucas Plaman stresses the importance of the George Floyd uprising: “I remember sitting in my backyard in June 2020, watching helicopters and planes carrying the press and National Guard over what used to be a quiet area. My neighborhood had also become a microcosm of social uprisings and state violence. In the weeks and months after the murder of George Floyd by Derek Chauvin, I felt connected to the shared pain and anger of everyone in the streets. As I protested with them, I felt resentment toward a system that, once again, had failed to fulfill its promise to ‘protect and serve’ the community.”

Thea Wangsness takes one more step and writes, “Our leaders and systems have not only failed us, but enacted violence against us time and time again, choosing to protect capital, property, and structures of domination over people, their lives, and any semblance of justice.” The protection of capital and property entails the production of surplus land out of the stolen land of Indigenous nations as well as the production of surplus labor out of the dispossessed, maimed, surveilled, incriminated bodies of BIPOC communities. Connecting the U.S. settler colonialism to Zionist settler colonialism, Madelynn Shaw engages with the work of literary scholar Chrystal Parikh to argue that we need to “step back and critically examine the intersections among Indigenous, Palestinian, and Black struggles for freedom and justice and migrant justice struggles against the violence of colonial borders.”

One way of examining intersecting justice struggles is to pursue what geographer Christina Sharpe calls “wake work.” Libby draws on Kevin Bruyneel’s reworking of the notion of “wake work” to refer both to the afterlife of chattel slavery in the United States and to the genocidal violence of settler colonialism across the world. What connects Black, Indigenous, and Palestinian activists, according to Bruyneel, is the continued unfolding of past oppressive structures, practices, and ideologies. Wake work involves cohabitating the world through a deeply informed politics of memory about the interconnected and persistent structures of oppression and colonialism. For Libby, the Gaza Solidarity Encampment was an example of this cohabitation where students ruptured the settler–colonial episteme with their un/imaginable lives. The encampment was as much about collectivizing pain and grievances as about drumming, dancing, and storytelling on the land of Dakota and Ojibwe people. 

In the encampment, solidarity was more than a means to achieve an end. Lydia Hester stresses that the transnational solidarity with Palestine and intersectional solidarity between students constituted a radical form of resistance:

Being at the UMN encampment and protests over the last two weeks has been difficult and beautiful at the same time. It has shown me how solidarity can be a radical resistance in itself. We stood in solidarity with Gazans and with one another. I found new friendships and strengthened the existing ones. Despite the fear of arrest and violence for being at the encampment, we created a safe space where we protected one another. Each time a police threat was imminent, we called friends and supporters to the encampment because we knew that we were far stronger together. The care that each person showed for one another was powerful—ensuring that each person felt warm enough, comfortable, and energized. We had brave marshals who monitored our safety and maintained transparency.

If solidarity is a radical form of resistance, as Lydia Hester argues, the condition of its possibility is grounded in principles that transcend individual identities and self-interests. I cite Lydia Hester again:

There were many opportunities for learning about Palestinian liberation and Palestinian culture at the encampments. The voices of SJP leaders were uplifted and respected which is very critical to the movement because it is these leaders who have lost family members and understand Palestinian liberation beyond just liberation as a concept. . . . The existence of a movement on U.S. campuses—thousands of miles away from Palestine—creates a necessary solidarity that transcends borders and identities. Through the sharing of culture, food, language, along with hopes and desires, we manage to create a reality where Gaza is not only a land in Palestine but is everywhere and is in all of us. This is evident through chants such as “By the millions, by the billions, we are all Palestinians.”

None of the students who wrote their final essays on the Gaza solidarity encampment assumes that their activism can stop the genocide. What they can stop for now is the investment of the UMN’s endowments into the corporations killing Palestinians. They demand immediate divestment. When University Interim President Jeff Ettinger agreed to negotiate with students on May 1, 2024, the UMN Divest Coalition decided to take down the encampment. There were mixed feelings about the Coalition’s decision. Some students like Ainsley Casper welcomed this minor victory: “Through the shared strength we found in each other, we were able to create a path forward to getting our demands met.” Others were not sure if there was anything to celebrate, given that the president had not yet committed to divest.

The Coalition members believed in their power and the power of the student movements across campuses, to make the board of regents to divest, as evidenced by their successful negotiation with Interim President Ettinger. On May 10, 2024, many coalition members, who work day and night to organize students like those in my class, addressed the board. Palestinian students from SJP participated in the public forum and addressed the regents, who are at least double their age and vested with the legislative power to make a change. Since October 8, 2023, these students have lost their family members in Gaza and seen the video recordings of how the bodies of their family members were mutilated. They spoke from this position of witnessing that which many of us cannot even imagine. They did not ask the regents to take a position against genocide, they rather asked them to uphold the principle of ethical and responsible investment enshrined in university policy documents by divesting from companies like Lockheed Martin, whose weapons have so far killed more than forty thousand Palestinian people. We will yet see what decision the board of regents will take.2

What to do now? Inspired by abolition feminism, Lucas Plaman writes, “Now is the time to build, to practice, and, yes, to study.” Stay with the trouble by persisting in the struggle for justice without retreating into resignation. Keep the slow work of abolition, even when it seems that there have been no wins at all. Ella Kunstman distinguishes the slow work of abolition from the urgent need to divest:

Today as students, especially those of us who attend schools on stolen lands and aren’t directly negatively impacted by colonialism, we need to ask the question of how our solidarity can center those most vulnerable with urgency, while acknowledging the slowness of the work we are engaged in. As students in the US, our money, whether in the form of loans, tuition, or scholarships, [is] paying for the ongoing genocide and occupation of the Palestinian people. The urgency of our present solidarity lies in pulling the money that is actively carrying out violence. The slowness, on the other hand, is how organizers over time have worked to dismantle colonialism, the way it functions within racial capitalism and how it connects across narratives of modernity and nationalism worldwide. . . . Our challenge now is in facing the many contradictions and solidarities we must juggle in the present moment, something so clearly stated by Davis’s quote which names how “abolition feminism is not afraid of contradictions” (Davis et al., 14). I have come to realize the importance of this sentiment over time in this class and in witnessing the UMN divest movement. Many of those who were quick to criticize organizers expected an absolute, a revolution of their own vision, a mindset I have previously fallen into. Perfect solutions don’t exist. . . . While the university is a colonial institution on stolen land that has previously let down students, we have to ask the question of whether working in conjunction with their power at this time is how we can take care of communities in times of transition while abolition in the long run is being fought for.

The students’ experiences of solidarity through the embodied practices of protest, encampment, community-building, and collective (un)learning reveal what is lacking in our institutional settings. These students want the entire system to change for good. And they have become the force of change. Their moral demand to stand in solidarity with Palestine, their economic demand to divest from weapon manufacturers, and their political demand for change make university administrations conceive of them as a serious threat. Everyone knows that the threat that these students pose is not that of antisemitism. These students come from all ethnoreligious, racial, sexual, and class backgrounds. They refuse to use the identitarian framework to define what has been happening in Palestine. These students are a “threat” to university administrations because they no longer buy into the corporatization of equity and justice, and they firmly stand against profiteering from inequality and injustice.

If the charge of antisemitism is manufactured to move our attention away from racial and genocidal capitalism, the mobilization of the right to “academic freedom” in defense drifts us away from what we could be doing to amplify our students’ struggle. I echo my Palestinian colleagues that justice is a continuous and concrete struggle. It is a struggle that can upend established hierarchies that reproduce the structures of oppression and genocidal outcomes. The growing student movements spearheaded by SJP chapters in the United States deeply challenges the established hierarchies of education by teaching those who are willing to learn a lesson for life—a lesson of liberation their predecessors started but could not complete. 

It is time to reclaim what neoliberal universities have stolen from radical movements and communities—the commitment to equity and justice. Neither equity nor justice can be confined to offices in the ivory towers of universities. No webinar can teach us these values, no administrator can serve as the dean to maintain and foster these values. Upholding these values means fighting for the land and life of Indigenous knowledge-carries from Minnesota to Palestine. That is why we better ask ourselves how to accomplish what Ella Kunstman urges us to do: “The community-led learning and community opportunities should make us all question how learning can exist outside colonial universities, and how centers of learning can continue to build relationships that provide care and solidarity and aren’t exclusive to university students.”

Serra Hakyemez is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Global Studies and McKnight Land-Grant Professor at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Her research concentrates on the weaponization of law in pursuit of counterterror war, with a special focus on the criminalization of the Kurdish national liberation movement since the 1980s. Her research was supported by the American Council of Learned Societies (2021–22, 2015–16), the Wenner-Gren Foundation (2020–21, 2013–14), and the National Science Foundation (2013–14).