Driving back to our apartment from the ‘Liberated Zone’ on the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor Campus, I asked my friend, “What if this encampment went on forever?” The encampment’s social and economic structure seemed utopic. “It’s a glimpse into what a liberated world could look like,” my comrade replied. The utopic nature of the encampment stemmed from the solidarity-based social relations that it incubated. The encampment offered free food donated by local community members and businesses to everyone, including the city’s houseless people. Campers shared responsibilities in every task, from collecting garbage and onboarding new campers to making collective decisions about how to escalate their actions as part of the national student movement for university divestment from the ongoing genocide in Gaza. It featured a ‘liberation library’ with critical texts on Palestine, abolition, socialism, and other topics. Under canopies on the Diag, a mix of faculty, students, local community members, and activists participated in teach-ins, workshops, and collective readings led by campers and visitors. Dwelling within this setting led me to ponder: What does the solidarity encampment with Palestine mean? What political possibilities does it create? What kind of people does it build? Fighting for the liberation of Palestine, campers created a temporarily liberated university within the walls of the University of Michigan, and named it the “People’s University of Gaza.” The rise of these “universities” across U.S. campuses was aimed at raising the alarm on about the ongoing “educational genocide” or “scholasticide” against Palestinians in Gaza; that is, the the comprehensive and systematic destruction of Gaza’s educational infrastructure. By destroying most schools and all universities that existed in Gaza, and by murdering tens of thousands of students and teachers and university professors, Israel seeks to dismantle the foundations of Palestinian society and foreclose the possibility of its future. As for the framework of a “popular university”, it was inspired by the Popular University project (الجامعة الشعبية) associated with the Suleiman al-Halabi Department of Colonial Studies in Palestine. This project promotes popular (as in people-based) education and galvanizes the political role of knowledge production in the struggle for liberation. While the camp was initially a means to an end, it evolved into a place where a new community of learning was created. This transformation not only signaled the resurrection and empowerment of Palestinian education targeted for eradication by scholasticide, but also the reclamation of education itself. What do I mean by that?
Breaking the Ivory Walls
The contemporary academic system constructs walls around the intellectual and political potential of students and scholars. The neoliberal economic structure of the university, which ties it to the global military-industrial complex, inhibits the political efficacy possessed by scholars officially affiliated with the university, limiting it to primarily symbolic actions. Even critical and radical academic discourse—such as decolonization, feminist theory, or critical race theory – can be co-opted into the elite academic system which “values gestures of inclusion and parenthetical citation”1 over the actual reorganization of intellectual ethics and practices. When professional academics choose to protest against power, their options become limited to petitions, letters, and other forms of protest that appeal to values of academic freedom, representational politics, multicultural recognition, and other “Enlightenment forms of democratic participation.”2 These forms of protest fall short in actually holding people in power accountable, and more importantly in challenging the deep structural entanglement between the university, the state and the market. What sustains this complacency is the academic labor market, with its institutional surveillance, self-disciplining, and professionalization. That is, increasing competition for tenured positions, collegial relationships based on and limited by notions of ‘academic freedom’ and moral relativism, and the everyday performances needed to apply for grants, pass interviews, and impress administrators and other academics at conferences—all these factors discipline intellectuals into professional academics who are deprived of collective consciousness and power. The normative model of intellectual practice, in effect, becomes symbolic, co-opted, neutered, and essentially irrelevant.
In contrast, the educational journey and intellectual practice that the student movement is creating includes two integrated, and sometimes contradictory, paths: the path of the official academic institution and the path of student organizing, which in turn creates alternative and autonomous spaces, means of organization, mobilization, and self-education. This work fosters a generation with a radical collective political consciousness and organized collective power. Critical pedagogy suggests that a holistic educational experience should produce young critical subjectivities with creative agency in society and the world, capable of imagining a different world, of change, of determining their destiny, and of building a new future. As Henry Giroux puts it: “Education, in the final analysis, is really about the production of agency.” He continues: “All education is an introduction in some way to the future. It’s a struggle over what kind of future you want for young people. It is a struggle over the kinds of subjectivities that will make that future possible.” If the educational journey is supposed to provide the generation of the student intifada with the space to re-envision and re-create their future, this experience found its fullest expression through the establishment of the encampments. And yet, the encampment follows a distinct model of future orientation and community building, inspired by the history of the Palestinian intifada, hence the term ‘student intifada.’ Reflecting on popular education during the first intifada, Palestinian liberation pedagogue Munir Fasheh writes that “the opposite of institutions is not chaos or anarchy but mujawarahs.” When educational institutions across the West Bank were shut down by Israel, Palestinians created their own community-based spaces of learning, centered around the principle of mujawarah (or ‘neighboring’), where motivated individuals and groups engaged in “learning and building community and in weaving the spiritual-social-intellectual-cultural fabric among people.” The focus was on “rooted useful knowledge” rather than “rootless verbal knowledge,” and on “freeing thinking and expression” rather than merely ‘free thinking and expression.’ As Fasheh notes, ‘[p]eople in neighborhood committees did not waste time denouncing and demanding; they freed themselves from such distractions and, instead, felt free to form groups and do what needed to be done.’ This form of education was suppressed after the Oslo Accords, with the rise of dominant political and educational institutions. The ivory walls of the Western academic institution, in other words, have pervaded Palestine and much of the world. But like all walls, these too are meant to be climbed, surpassed, and ultimately broken. In the encampments, the fusion of living together and learning together gives rise to a new incarnation of mujawarah—a community-based form of education that cultivates a new community, one that is not just seeking liberation but actively embodying it.
Liberation Pedagogy at the People’s University for Gaza:
The encampment, as an anti-institutional space, introduces a new form of knowledge production, exchange and social relations. At the encampment, educational sessions were daily and consecutive, taking on a non-hierarchical, decentralized, and youth-led structure. Numerous people prepared materials, gave lectures, facilitated discussions, and even produced articles to add to the “liberation library.” The boundaries between faculty and students were broken, and the relationship was equalized, with students and non-students alike, across different ages, anchoring the process. Decisions were made with collective future liberation in mind, rather than individual career advancement. This model is not based on representation, but on human relationships and collective building. It is a pedagogical model guided by the tenets of liberation rather than academic freedom, a social model based on solidarity rather than competition, and a political model based not on individual representation, but on collective action against systems of dispossession. This model can serve as a blueprint for what a revolutionary scholarly space and a liberation pedagogy could look like.
The People’s University for Gaza placed Palestine and Palestinian knowledge at the center within the walls of colonial universities that have historically marginalized Palestinian existence and history and even continue to be complicit in their physical erasure. In solidarity with Palestine, campers decided to see the world through Palestinian eyes. I remember one day discussing the work of Palestinian feminist scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who describes how Zionist settler colonialism systematically targets, criminalizes, incarcerates, and kills Palestinian children, a process she terms ‘Unchilding.’ The systematic deprivation of Palestinian children of their humanity and lives, is deeply embedded in a global political and economic system that profits from such genocidal violence. Days before, Nadera, who has been galvanizing academics around the world against the genocide and was previously suspended from Hebrew University for calling for the “abolition of Zionism”, was arrested on charges of “incitement.” Walid Daqqa, the prisoner who, after 39 years in prison, was martyred in custody just two months before the encampment, is another intellectual model from whom we learned. He fathered a daughter, Milad, despite the restrictions of Israeli jails, by smuggling his sperm to his wife Sanaa, and defied Israeli prison bars by smuggling his writings to the world. In the camp, Daqqa came to life and helped us see how Israel’s war on Gaza is part of a broader policy aimed at eliminating both the geographical and psychological collective possibility of Palestinian nation-hood, in a process he refers to as “searing the consciousness” (“كَيّ الوعي”). We discussed how these colonial carceral institutions of power extend beyond prison cells and permeate our everyday life, through segregation and state education. A reading session organized around the thoughts of the young martyr Basil Al-Araj inspired some in the camp to ponder on the model of the “combative/engaged intellectual” (“المثقف المشتبك”), which speaks of an intellectual who chooses to be capable and unafraid to combat the systems that they are engaged in critiquing. Basil Al-Araj, who was martyred at the hands of the Israeli military at 3, embodied resistance as a way of life, he truly lived like a porcupine and fought like a flea. There were many similar teach-ins, too numerous to detail here, but what stands out is how the camp fostered a process of collective consciousness-building centered on the Palestinian cause of liberation from within the confines of the colonial university. While Palestine received centrality, the camp did not seek to exceptionalize Palestine as a cause or a people, but rather used education to frame Palestine as a universal cause of solidarity. At the camp, the focus was constantly on the intersection and similarities between various struggles. On the second day of the encampment, which coincided with Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, an Armenian student discussed the genocide committed by the Ottomans and connected it to the current displacement orchestrated by the Azerbaijani government, which is also backed by Israel. He read a poem by an Armenian author witnessing the genocide of his people, opening a conversation on how it parallels Gaza’s situation. A young woman from Tigray shared the history that led to her people’s ongoing struggle under the genocide being committed by the Ethiopian regime. We discussed how racism invisibilizes the struggles of nations in Africa and emphasized the need for students to actively seek out and speak up about the plight of the Tigrayan people. On a different day, a young Sudanese man then spoke about the history which led to the ongoing war and bloodshed in his homeland. We discussed how this conflict reveals the broader corruption that plagues many Arab regimes, as well as the complicity of normalizing states like the United Arab Emirates. On a different day, when three senior members of the Black community in Detroit recounted their experiences in the black liberation movement, a Palestinian took the microphone and said, “We have the face of George Floyd printed on the apartheid wall because at the time of his killing, we saw in him Eyad Hallaq, a 36-year-old man who was shot by Israeli police in Jerusalem. The American police that killed Floyd were trained by the Israeli police that killed Eyad Hallaq.” These connections underscored how different struggles interconnect when it comes to Palestine, which becomes an affront to the global military-industrial carceral complex. This work reinforced the concept of Palestine as a central cause and a mirror for all struggles against injustice. It contributed to expanding the political imagination of the movement and allowed those at the camp to view the fight for Palestine not as an exceptionalized form of suffering and victimhood, or what Ghassan Hage calls the Zionist appropriation of Holocaust memory—a form of “narcissistic victimhood” where it is “never again, for us” (Hage, 2013). Rather, Palestinian suffering in the camp became a reflection of various forms of white supremacy and ethnic cleansing, as well as the oppressive economic and political structures that are globally sustained.
A New World?
The People’s University for Gaza was creating a new kind of individual and collective consciousness. Essentially, in the camp, solidarity with Palestine became a choice to stand against the global capitalist-world order. In the camp, diverse groups with various beliefs and values—whether socialist, anarchist, Islamist, nationalist, LGBTQ rights advocates, or environmentalists—lived together, and learned together, and engaged in a daily dialectical process that began with Palestine and Gaza at the center and branched outwards. They engaged in ongoing dialogue about the meanings of solidarity, resistance, and liberation, and explored the significance of their collective slogans such as “There is only one solution, intifada and revolution,” and “We are thousands, we are millions, we are all Palestinians.”A radical political consciousness was being created, which made the choice of solidarity with Palestine the same as the choice of standing against the American regime and the entire global economic and political system, as one of the slogans chanted by the students who are protesting says: “Palestine will liberate us all.” Indeed, the universal banner of Palestine has created a third space for practicing cooperation and political thinking between different currents that fall outside the binary of the “culture war” between liberals and conservatives, a space that reflects the possibility of building a real radical alternative concerned with eliminating Zionism and all other racist and colonial regimes in the world. With this understanding, the student uprising in American universities is not only a front for the struggle for Gaza, but it is also part of a global front calling for the abolition of Zionism and all other colonial and racist regimes in the world and the achievement of sovereignty and self-determination for oppressed peoples everywhere. Education here is meant to build solidarity in a common arena and on a common front against all forms of oppression3. Abolitionists, Islamists, and environmentalists are all invested in Palestine as it relates to their particular causes and have directed their actions against the public institutions to which they belong by establishing their own independent institution within these institutions that is independent of the institution. The People’s University of Gaza exemplifies this mode of actual existing solidarity, transforming Palestine into both a field of knowledge and action. This constitutes the ‘liberated zone’ into a publicly controlled and student-centered arena, built on the purpose of taking charge over the university’s financial policy while directing their own radical pedagogical process. This process has created intellectuals who operate outside the jurisdiction of established power, challenging the dying capitalist-colonial world order, envisioning, and consciously working towards birthing a new world.
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- Jobson, Ryan Cecil. 2020. “The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn: Sociocultural Anthropology” in American Anthropologist 122, no. 2: 266. ↩︎
- It is important to note that these ideals are predicated on the exclusion of the communities they claim to stand for: Black people in America, the Indigenous people of Turtle Island, and Palestinians, all of whom the university is directly implicated in continuously dispossessing. Partidgie, Damani J. 2023. Blackness as a Universal Claim: Holocaust Heritage, Noncitizen Futures, and Black Power in Berlin. Oakland: University of California Press, 63 ↩︎
- Which brings us to the coalition politics on campus, where all ideologies and identities have rallied under the Palestinian cause to act in concert. Specifically, 90 student clubs are represented by the TAHRIR (Liberation Coalition) that ran the camp, in addition to local community members ↩︎
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Encampment Diaries is a series of essays addressing the significance of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at the University of Michigan, the university movement for Palestinian liberation more broadly, and the global movement for justice in Palestine. The author of this piece has donated their payment to the Legal Fund for Michigan Students for Palestine and encourages others to support this effort. This fund supports the eleven people charged by Dana Nessel, Michigan’s attorney general. Seven of those people have been charged with felonies for peaceful opposition to genocidal violence in Palestine.
Amir Marshi is a Palestinian PhD student in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan, hailing from the city of Nazareth.
