Palestine and the Displacement of the North American University

Of course, it was neither the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, nor Israel’s massive retaliatory violence that miraculously politicized students on U.S. campuses. It turns out that many members of Generation Z, the “Zoomers”—who, to someone watching from another planet, may have appeared to be obsessively attached to their cell phones, detached from other humans, and ensconced in a more or less virtual life—had in fact already zoomed in on what was most essential. When thousands of young people across campuses and continents decide to take enormous risks to protest what they see as horrifying injustice, it’s not because they’ve been sleepwalking their entire lives, but rather because they have already been subjected to a violent and rude “education” in capitalist ethics. Routinely decried “wokism” takes on its actual curricular and thus political character here. As Aditi Rao, a graduate student at Princeton, puts it in her reflections in this dossier, “We were not establishing a campus left, but surfacing it” (emphasis added). Serra Hakyemez (University of Minnesota) reminds us that these are students who “grew up in a world where school kids were killed by the gun lobby, Covid-19 patients were abandoned by the corrupt healthcare system, . . . and racist police violence killed many Black men and women.” Addressing student protestors at his own campus, Nasser Abourahme (Bowdoin College) states it somewhat differently: “In fact, you were born into a temporality of crisis that is uniquely yours: indefinite secular stagnation on the one hand, and imminent climactic collapse on the other.”

Many of the organizations active in the protests that gained momentum in April 2024 had been established several years ago. Young Democratic Socialists of America (earlier known as Young Democratic Socialists) was founded in 1982; Students for Justice in Palestine in 1993; and Jewish Voice for Peace in 1996. By early April 2024, six months into Israel’s retaliatory attack, more than thirty-three thousand people had been killed in Gaza, of which at least thirteen thousand were children. Close to two million had been internally displaced and faced starvation (Motamedi and Chughtai). A far less lethal drama had also unfolded on U.S. campuses in the months preceding April. On December 5, 2023, Elizabeth Magill, president of the University of Pennsylvania, Claudine Gay of Harvard, and Sally Kornbluth of MIT testified before a congressional hearing about antisemitism on U.S. university campuses. Magill resigned on December 9, and Gay on January 2, 2024. On January 9, three members of the Freedom School for Palestine at the University of Pennsylvania wrote in despair about the media’s focus on these hearings and on the subsequent resignations: “Both Magill’s and Gay’s resignations triggered ‘breaking news’ updates from the New York Times. Over five thousand Palestinians have been killed since December 5 alone. Every article on the Ivy League, many have noted, is an article that’s not about the far more urgent violence in Gaza” (Francis et al.).

On April 17, Minouche Shafik, president of Columbia University, testified before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, responding to allegations of antisemitism on her campus. The same day, the first Gaza solidarity encampment rose at Columbia, with students calling for divestment from corporations that profit from Israeli apartheid and occupation. A student-led coalition of over 120 organizations, including Columbia University Apartheid Divest, Students for Justice in Palestine, and Jewish Voice for Peace, was the force behind the encampment (Prokupecz et al.). President Shafik called in the NYPD to dismantle the encampment, but the mass arrests that followed did not deter another encampment from rising the very next day (Wikipedia 2024b). By the end of the month, encampments had been established on several campuses. This particular mode of protest, which signaled an occupation of the university while simultaneously gesturing toward the camps of Gaza, was often met with harsh repression. On April 30, student protestors at the encampment on the University of California–Los Angeles campus were violently attacked repeatedly by counterprotestors while law enforcement stood by for hours without taking action (Ellis et al.). By May 3, over 2,950 protestors, such as Noëlle McAfee (chair of the Philosophy Department at Emory and a contributor to this dossier), had been arrested on over sixty campuses (Wikipedia 2024a). It did not take long for student protests to spread to other countries, including Canada, the UK, Italy, France, Bangladesh, Mexico, South Korea, New Zealand, and Egypt.

The protestors demanded divestment, financial transparency, and amnesty for those arrested, suspended, or otherwise punished by universities. Student and faculty contributors to this forum share accounts of their participation in these uprisings, often writing from the scene of their university encampments. All the pieces we are publishing in this forum are from U.S. and Canadian universities; time did not permit us to collect a wider set of reflections from other countries.

Undergraduate Matthew Molinaro (McGill) describes the space of Leila Khaled People’s Library for Palestine, where Arabic, French, and English readings of Gazan poetry intermingle with stories of revolutionary movements in Cuba, Algeria, and Turtle Island. “The specter of ’68 has been ubiquitous in glosses of the current movement,” notes Joshua Clover (UC Davis). “Beyond moral sympathies,” he avers, the U.S. university is itself “a colonial enterprise, from the founding of the great public universities as land grant institutions on land seized from first nations, through public and private universities’ current roles as landlords of a vast scale.” On a similar note, Neferti Tadiar (Barnard College), in the wake of a screening of Edward Said’s last lecture (2002) at Columbia University in April 2024, reflects on how our institutions are still indirectly but immovably invested in the settler colonial project.

But what hope for lasting change can arise from these spontaneous campus uprisings? Each university has specific investments or programs that need to be dismantled, Ania Loomba (University of Pennsylvania) reminds us, including the drone-mounted “robot dogs” developed in Penn’s “Pennovation labs” that are then sold to the Israeli government for the indiscriminate terrorization of Gazan children. “As I write, there is still a police presence on campus,” Genevieve Yue testifies from inside the first faculty solidarity encampment (Refaat Alareer) at the New School in New York City, where she addresses her students: “You created a space dedicated to freedom and peace, and in doing so, you’ve proven that such a world is possible.”

Bishnupriya Ghosh and Sherene Seikaly (UC Santa Barbara) provide vital context about the history of their institution. The university has been a “hotbed of student activism for decades,” from the North Hall Takeover (temporarily renamed “Malcolm X Hall” in 1968) to the BDS movement against apartheid in South Africa in the 1980s. “Movements find rhythm, they improvise,” observe Ghosh and Seikaly, while neoliberal institutions cling to the deadening and alienating system that shores up their future capital accumulation. In this way, universities, notes Sara Wexler (Columbia University), act exactly like money capitalists, committed to financial growth regardless of its links to “genocide or war.” The university is “haunted by the apparition of Palestinian resistance in Chapel Hill,” according to UNC graduate student Isaac O’Connor. In her galvanizing interpretation of Franz Kafka’s short text “Up in the Gallery,” Silke-Maria Weineck (University of Michigan) also invokes a haunting, as she wonders whether university administrators and regents might carry a repressed recognition of the violence in which they participate; whether, like the young man in Kafka’s parable, they might also, in some unguarded moment, find themselves weeping without quite knowing why.

What haunts the protestors, however, is another kind of ghost—it is perhaps the ghost of demolished Palestinian schools and universities. In 2009, Palestinian scholars coined the term “scholasticide” to name and repudiate the Israeli Defense Forces’ systematic destruction of Palestinian centers of education. But “sophicide” (the killing of wisdom) is more apt, declares Hakyemez, invoking the Palestinian Feminist Collective’s recent statement in Mondoweiss. Hakyemez echoes the voices of her own undergraduate students who recall the global uprisings incited in Minneapolis in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by Derek Chauvin in May 2020. Then as now, “solidarity can be a radical resistance in itself,” as UMN undergraduate Lydia Hester puts it. Alexandra Juhasz (Brooklyn College, CUNY) saves the lion’s share of her words for “the actions and missives” that are happening on the ground on U.S. campuses “as new violence unfolds in Rafah”—in her brief but evocative meditation on her own “evolving Jewishness.” While Jewish feeling surges in solidarity with Palestine, the dead letter of Zionism can no longer imagine a future beyond the (increasingly) repressive silencing of its rising opposition: “Nobody’s going to stop talking about Palestine at this point,” Steven Salaita recently remarked, borne out here by Taher Herzallah (University of Minnesota), who adds his own poignant words that “Zionism is unraveling because what was supposed to be unknown is now being exposed.”

New visions of universality and practices of radical pedagogy proliferate in these makeshift pro-Palestine encampments. Sofia Di Gironimo (Popular University) tracks the spread of zines such as First We Take Columbia and Defending the Camp that share “vital organizing information” and tactics of civil disobedience across rogue university spaces. The encampment becomes a supplement to the university, “the school of public life” as Ariella Aïsha Azoulay (Brown University) suggests, citing Rosa Luxemburg; it emerges as a space where students tear down the sacred barrier between thinking and acting, philosophy and politics. It is all the more dispiriting, thus, to watch the cowardly and criminalizing policy measures predictably taken by numerous academic institutions across the nation during the last few weeks of the summer (when students and faculty had yet to return to campus) to make sure that such remarkable spaces, and the experimentations with freedom and politics they enabled, are permanently shut down and are not resurrected any time soon.

Jodi Dean was suspended by Hobart and William Smith College for expressing views that “might make students feel unsafe” (Rossi) in her Verso Books blog article “Palestine Speaks for Everyone” (Dean). In her contribution to this dossier, Dean disentangles what it means to “feel safe” on campus when public expressions of shock, pathos, anger, and horror at relentless visual evidence of a livestream genocide are routinely discredited as “antisemitic” and thereby censored and sacrificed on the altar of Zionist state violence. “The student encampments spreading across universities in the US and around the world in April and May 2024,” Dean stresses, “are most remarkable for their insistent creation of a new structure of feeling.” Revolutionary political possibilities gather in the cracks of broken structures of feeling; it remains to be seen, however, whether the strong currents of an anti-identitarian solidarity that the student protests have created will carry us, indeed, from the river to the sea.1

The Editors

(Cesare Casarino, Frieda Ekotto, Maggie Hennefeld, John Mowitt, Simona Sawhney)

N.B. The contents included in this online forum are organized chronologically and time-stamped by receipt of submission.