For the last three weeks, students at colleges and universities all over the world have occupied buildings across their campuses, erecting tents and makeshift barricades in solidarity with the people of Gaza and in protest of what they say is their schools’ complicity in Israel’s ongoing siege on Gaza, which has killed at least 34,596 Palestinians since October 7, according to Al Jazeera.
College campuses have long been important sites of protest in the United States. One can draw a direct line from mass student-led demonstrations against the Vietnam War in the 1960s to campus occupations against apartheid in South Africa in the 1980s, to just last week, when Columbia University students took over Hamilton Hall and renamed it Hind’s Hall. The new name honored six-year-old Palestinian girl Hind Rajab, who was killed by Israeli forces along with two paramedics who had come to her rescue after she survived an initial attack by Israeli forces that reportedly killed the family members with whom she had been traveling.
Beyond drawing attention to the death toll in Gaza, many student encampments also have specific demands of their schools. Many colleges and universities in the U.S. are linked to the U.S. military, whether by serving as recruiting pools for arms manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin, or by investing millions of dollars in companies that students say are enabling the ongoing violence in the occupied Gaza Strip and beyond. Accordingly, the focal point of many student organizers’ demands across college campuses is that their universities divest from any such entities.
But as many students told Them, their demands also include asks that echo those of the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, including dismantling campus police departments and taking actions to mitigate the gentrification exacerbated by many university campuses. Many universities, however, have responded by inviting municipal police forces on onto their campuses to break up student encampments with alarming force. Administrators at the City College of New York and Columbia, for example, requested that municipal police forces respond to student encampments, resulting in mass arrests and reports of violence against protesters. Meanwhile, across the country, UCLA’s chief of police is facing calls to step down after student protesters were reportedly brutalized by pro-Israel counterprotesters, with seemingly little intervention from campus security forces.
Them spoke to six LGBTQ+ students at college campuses from Michigan to New York to hear why they occupied their campuses and how queer kinship has been an important part of their encampment experience.
I’m a queer, Jewish student at Barnard, and for the last couple of years of my life, I’ve been protesting for Palestinian liberation because I see all forms of liberation as inherently intertwined. I don’t believe that queer people can be free, I don’t believe that Jews can be free, I don’t believe that anyone can be free until Palestine is free. I think that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
I have never felt such queer love in my life than I have these last two weeks, because queerness is about unbridled showings of joy, solidarity, and love with those around you. When I sit with my peers in the dyke tent, or I go to the People’s Library and I read queer scholarship, when I teach my friends about how bell hooks felt about Palestine, when I am able to gather and see so many different people in solidarity, I’m reminded of the Dyke March that I go to every year in New York City. I’m reminded of these moments of queer joy that are inseparable and inextricable from passion, from protesting, from fighting for change.
It’s really important that, for queer people like me across the globe who read the Lesbian Masterdoc when they were 14, or were radicalized on Tumblr, to realize that the radicalization doesn’t start and end once you figure out you're queer and you find your queer community. Your queer community extends across the globe. It extends beyond just your intimate friends and beyond those you go to Pride with. It extends to the Palestinians in Gaza, the Palestinians in the West Bank. It extends to the Palestinian diaspora, it extends to Jewish people, it extends to people of color, it extends to Muslims. While we have our community, we also must always remember that we are part of one that is much broader and larger, and that we must fight for everyone because they fight for us.
The encampment’s been up for a little bit over a week, and it’s been really wonderful. Students do run a lot of the programming, are the point people and are the core organizers, but there is also a really insane contribution from the local community, and in terms of bodies as well — from people who are putting their bodies on the line in the encampment to people who take on volunteer shifts for food, trash, night watch, things like that. In a lot of these teach-ins, queerness is not explicitly at the forefront, but most of the organizers running these events, like talking about environmental justice in Palestine, are queer. Or a lot of the people in their departments are queer.
I think this encampment was really valuable to me in general because it showed me that we don’t have to always live in a white, alienated colonial imagination. That has been the most precious thing for me, and I think it’s very symbolic that it happened in spring as we go into summer.
The first encampment at Yale started April 15 with a daytime occupation, and became an official overnight encampment that Friday. The occupation was called Occupy Beinecke, after Beinecke Plaza, which was also occupied by anti-apartheid protesters who set up an encampment for two years to protest Yale investments in apartheid in South Africa. Our occupation was focused on creating a space for liberatory and anti-colonial education that the university often refuses to offer. So we held teach-ins on third-world feminism, ecocide and genocide and poetry, anti-militarization, and anti-imperialism, to understand our stakes in the struggle for Palestinian liberation. That’s part of us calling for divestment and calling for disclosure of Yale’s investments in weapons manufacturing.
At its core, having a space on your campus where people could live in meaningful, mutually supportive, accountable community, even if it was just for three days overnight — you don’t need a rainbow flag to make it a queer space. Creating those conditions of community care was queering public space. I’m thinking of the students that came to me during the course of the week who were like, “This is the first time I felt really at home at Yale.” That was really affecting to me, to hear that from people and know that we were making something that was for Palestinian liberation, for fighting the neoliberal university, and ultimately for a true queer way of living.
Nikhil: On a basic level, Palestinian liberation is a queer issue because queer people are everywhere. So a group of people being oppressed involves queer people in that group being oppressed. We see this talking point so often that queer people in Palestine are not accepted, or that being pro-Palestine and being queer are somehow contradictory. It’s a deeply non-intersectional take because it ignores the existence of queer Palestinian people altogether. It’s also more Islamophobic than anything — the amount of Muslim comrades I have in this movement who are either queer themselves or are just loving and caring towards me and all the other queer people I know completely belies that notion.
Sophia: There’s something about — creativity and optimism aren’t the right words, but the ambition of the Palestinian Liberation movement in general. As queer people, we’re used to the fact that the existing structures don’t work for us, and we’re used to living that on a daily level. We’re not doing what society expects. These are things that queer people do, and queer Palestinians, and the Palestinian resistance movement. It’s really interesting looking at all the ways that we're being creative and imagining new structures that will benefit literally every single person regardless of their identity.
I’m at the encampment because I am against my school, this school that I have to give $80,000 a year to, funding a genocide. It’s kind of impossible for me to continue to go here and not do something about it because it would just feel wrong. Every single time I’m at the encampment, it’s just been an absolutely amazing experience. Every day we have programming: they do self-defense teach-ins, we put together a people's library two days ago and a bunch of people donated books to it. It’s just been a really awesome community space to be with all of these other young people who are so willing to do the work and have these conversations and put themselves on the line to try to make the world a better place. Being there every day is inspiring. It’s not just the individual events that happen, which are amazing, but it’s just the fact that there are so many of us there willing to do stuff like this.
The mainstream news media are only reporting on the violence that is happening at these encampments, and they aren’t saying anything about the beautiful community that is happening here. The media did the same thing in 1968, so am I shocked that this is happening again? No. But I wish they would report about all of the beautiful moments that are happening, all of these amazing teach-ins that are happening, having Palestinian films screened at this encampment, and then having the director Zoom in to do a talk back about it. Not just Zionist “protesters” who are coming, not just the NYPD coming and harassing students, but all of these amazing, beautiful community-building moments and events that are happening at these encampments.
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