“At UChicago, they were chanting, ‘40,000 people dead. You are fighting kids instead,’” says author and University of Chicago faculty member Eman Abdelhadi. “Palestine has laid open all the contradictions that are at the core of our society.” In this episode of “Movement Memos,” host Kelly Hayes talks with Abdelhadi and Alex, who participated in the Palestine solidarity encampment at Northeastern University, about what we can learn from the recent wave of student-led protest, and where the movement should go from here.
Music by Son Monarcas, David Celeste & Curved Mirror
Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.
Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. A wave of student-led protest has invigorated the Palestine solidarity movement over the last two months. As the school year comes to a close, some university administrations have made deals with student groups in order to end the encampments, which were demanding that their schools divest from the Israeli war machine. Some of these deals included concessions, such as The New School’s agreement to hold a Board of Trustee vote on divesting from weapons manufacturing and other military supply companies, and the school’s agreement not to penalize student protesters. In some cases, administrators have opted for a violent approach by asking police to break up the student-led encampments. More than 2,900 protesters have been arrested at campus protests around the country, as police in some cities have beaten protesters, fired rubber bullets, deployed tear gas, and brutalized students.
Today, we are going to hear from Alex, a student activist who co-organized the encampment at Northeastern University in Boston, and Eman Abdelhadi, a Palestinian author, activist and faculty member at the University of Chicago. The encampments at Northeastern and UChicago are now the stuff of history, following raids that dismantled the protests, but as Alex and Eman will explain today, the encampments will have a lasting impact on student organizers, their communities, and our movements. I was so grateful for the opportunity to discuss this movement moment with Alex and Eman, both of whom offer invaluable insights about what we can learn from the encampments and where we should direct our energies in this moment of transition.
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KH: Alex and Eman, welcome to the show. I am so grateful you could both join us today.
Alex: Thank you.
Eman Abdelhadi: Yeah, thank you for having us.
KH: Could you take a moment to introduce yourselves and say a bit about your work and your relationship to this movement moment?
EA: My name is Eman Abdelhadi. I am an assistant professor at the University of Chicago. I’m also a lifelong activist. My role, I’ve basically been in this movement in some version of it my entire life. Right now, most of my organizing is along three lines. One is on campus with faculty and staff, particularly around supporting students, but also doing our own political advocacy, particularly towards Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions. I also work with a group of other sociologists on organizing a BDS campaign for our academic discipline. Then I do on the ground community organizing in Chicago with an affinity group that works more on political education and direct action.
A: My name is Alex. I am a recently graduated senior from Northeastern University. I am a community organizer here in Boston. For the past four years, I’ve been doing on-campus organizing, primarily COVID prevention work and labor solidarity organizing with our on-campus unions. Over the past few months I have gotten more involved as well in on-campus Palestine solidarity organizing, and I’m now an organizer with our unaffiliated Palestine solidarity organizing group on campus called Huskies for a Free Palestine. And of course, I think it’s important to note that the distinction between the campus and the city should be more flexible than it is. So I kind of view it as “campus organizing,” but also just location and place organizing. I don’t really restrict myself to that, especially as someone who just graduated. What I do right now is a lot of communications-type work. I was also involved in participating in our encampment that took place at the end of April.
Kelly: Thank you for that background on the important work that you’re both doing. The recent wave of on-campus protests has reinvigorated the Palestine solidarity movement, and I think we will all be feeling the impacts of these mobilizations for some time. Can you talk about how these encampments came about and why you think this tactic proliferated in the way that it has?
EA: I think these encampments were an important escalation that is responding or that was responding to the intensity of the situation in Gaza. I had a moment, I came across an acquaintance at the UChicago encampment, and she said something that I think was really profound, which is that she’d been trying to live her daily life despite watching the horror in Gaza and how hard that was. The encampment was a moment in which daily life became about Gaza, that there was a merging of the attempt to live your day-to-day life and the witnessing and protesting of the horror of the genocide. So, I think that’s part of why the encampments felt so important and why they have felt so meaningful for a lot of people. In terms of tactics, I think that students have rightly understood that their university administrations have been trying to ignore them in whatever ways they can. The idea is that if they ignore them long enough, then this whole movement will go away. The encampments were just such a physical reminder that the movement is not going away.
A: I think my experiences match up with yours, Eman, where I feel like for us it was a natural escalation based on our complete inability to get any kind of progress through the tactics that we’ve been employing, both over the past several years with all the iterations of Palestine solidarity groups on our campus. We’ve had an SJP [chapter] for many years that has been repeatedly targeted and sanctioned by the university in a way that is definitely not levied against other groups, which we’ve [also] seen across universities. So when this genocide escalated in October and we decided to form an unaffiliated new student group to provide more flexibility, more autonomy, and try to consolidate our power outside of the grip of official university-sanctioned groups, immediately we did all of the things. We wrote letters, we delivered them, we had our community contact our administrators, we had public rallies both on private property and on public property, different events, educational art. We did everything that we had in our tool belt.
We realized that the more that we use those tools that they say we are allowed to use, and of course they’ll crack down on us for those, and the less progress that we saw based on those tools, the more important it was that we stopped trying to play by their playbook. In December, we had a sit-in in our student center. Again, we tried to, in some ways, talk to or reason with the admin that showed up to “discuss with us.” But they were there to punish people and they decided to sanction and to punish the students that offered themselves in good faith as mediaries between the sit-in students and cops and administration.
So when the new semester came around and we were dealing with the repercussions (because of course they levied disciplinary sanctions and even legal threats against students for occupying our own campus space), we were trying to deal with the repercussions of that and trying to deal with the repression. Particularly at Northeastern, being a private university, they’re extremely strict about their whole we are private property and you need an ID to enter our property and we can demand it at any time. So, we were searching for a tactic that not only escalated and applied more pressure on our admin because they were so hostile, but also challenged that distinction between campus and non-campus.
Like what you were saying Eman, we were searching for a tactic that challenged the safety and sanctity of normal life on campus. We were tired of letting campus life go on without disruption and then peppering in whatever disruptions we could. We realized through the inspiration of the folks who had been camping out, for example, at Stanford for a while, even last semester, and of course the escalations at Columbia and other very high profile universities, that empowered us and gave us the fight that we needed to finally escalate to what we had been aiming towards. I do really think that that tactic of reclaiming the space and resisting the arbitrariness of the separation between the campus and the community is a very powerful way to make an argument about who deserves life and who deserves resources. That’s at the core of our fight for Palestinians as well as the fights that we’re fighting at home.
KH: What you’re saying, Alex, about making a point about who deserves life and who deserves resources – it strikes me that this is precisely the kind of message that a lot of corporate journalists were working to erase in their coverage of these protests. I think we often find that if a movement is truly threatening to the status quo, and that that movement cannot be ignored, eclipsed, or erased, then it will be sensationalized. I found it especially infuriating in this case, because the messaging coming out of student-led protests was often so meaningful and so insightful. But rather than focusing on the words of student spokespeople, we saw journalists writing missives about how only spokespeople would talk to them, and how disturbing this was for them. And for those who don’t know, it’s actually a standard practice at protests to have trained spokespeople who are tasked with interacting with media. Journalists know to seek those people out, but in this case, some chose to pathologize group discipline about messaging and who was tasked with delivering it. And of course, all of this goes back to the primary problem with how these protests have been covered: Rather than confronting Israel’s violence, the corporate press has really zeroed in on the protesters and tried to make critiques of their disruptions and group cultures the issue, instead of Israel’s violence in Gaza.
I’ve been really impressed with the student organizers in their work to continuously bring the issue back to Gaza and keep the focus on the struggle for Palestinian survival and liberation. So in keeping with those priorities, I wondered if you all wanted to say a few words about how students have done that, and how that work has been core to the organizing of these protests.
EA: I will say that the situation in Gaza is so dire that we are in a race against time. The Israeli government, to me, is clearly panicking and clearly understands that this is their chance to get as much ethnic cleansing done before policy catches up with public opinion in the U.S. and in the West more broadly. So I think what we’re seeing here, there is an urgency to this moment that I think is being reflected in the encampments. But that urgency is also, we are losing more and more lives every day. The sooner we end this, the more lives we save. It’s just that simple. It’s an incredibly difficult situation to face. So I think the students have been very clear that this is what this is about, that they have constantly at every turn turned whatever gaze is directed at them towards Gaza.
One of my favorite chants out of the encampments has been about how many people are dead, and contrasting that with the administration. So at UChicago, they were chanting, “40,000 people dead. You are fighting kids instead.” I think this really reflects the kind of absurdity of this moment that Palestine has laid open all the contradictions that are at the core of our society and all the hypocrisies that are at the core of our society and the kind of sheer absurdity of trying to suppress this movement, in this way.
A: Re-centering the genocide, and always centering the lives that we’re fighting for has been a huge, huge theme across pretty much every encampment that I’ve seen, [and] all of the community agreements, especially all of the programming. I mean, as you mentioned, when you’re trying to “live a normal life” while vicious genocide is going on, you’re sort of pulled in all of these different directions and your attention is being begged to go to a million different things, many of them, much less important and much less urgent. And the beautiful part about establishing a strong and united space with a purpose is that you create space for focus and you create space for intense and focused solidarity.
What we noticed is that by creating a very clear and intentional space where the issue is what people are most focused on when they enter the borders of the encampment, not only did we strengthen our own focus by doing things like having a Liberation Library, by doing art builds with a focus on the current issue, by having speakers speak about the ties between Northeastern University and the military-industrial complex and the ongoing genocide and the deadly exchange; not only by having that programming were we able to recenter our own focus and actually become more........