Four years ago, Refaat Alareer told a story about the 2014 bombing of the Islamic University of Gaza. “The missiles destroyed the English Department offices, including my office where I stocked so many stories, assignments, and exam papers for potential book projects,” he wrote. The IDF had bombed the university before, during “Operation Cast Lead” in 2008 and 2009, when such attacks led Alareer to wonder why Israel would choose to bomb a university in the first place. Alareer notes that the official reasons –– that the Islamic University of Gaza was a “weapons development center” –– were never supported by evidence. The answer lies elsewhere.
Alareer, a professor of Comparative Literature, was killed in an Israeli airstrike along with his brother, sister, and her four children this past December. The essay in which he describes the bombing of the Islamic University appeared in a book, Light in Gaza, which was one of the books in the small ad hoc library at the encampment at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor this past spring. Like many such encampments across the United States, it was swept and destroyed by the police at dawn, when most people were sleeping. In this case it was the morning of Tuesday, May 21, when Michigan State Police swept and destroyed the encampment and its library, pepper spraying and brutalizing students, arresting several of them and sending others to the hospital. The encampment was organized around a demand: that the University of Michigan first disclose and then dissolve its financial interest in the brutal displacement and murder of Palestinians, including the murder of Refaat Alareer, a demand which remains today even as the camp does not.
As thousands of students return to campus now, in early September, the space where the encampment once stood will host what feels less like genuine academic and intellectual life and more like a desperate spectacle, a caricature of a university. An earlier draft of this essay stated that “today students receive free t-shirts and branded water bottles under the same trees where, a couple of months ago, their classmates were assaulted by police at the request of university administration. On a sunny day, if the angle is right, you might still see marks on the walls of UMMA, the university art museum, where protesters were pressed up against the glass by state police protecting the sumptuous privacy of university regents while they entertained their donors inside.”
But repression is outpacing publishing timelines: on Wednesday August 28th, four people, including a recent alumnus, were arrested on the Diag during a welcome back event. Three of them were involved in a peaceful, silent protest; a fourth was simply walking on campus. On September 12, Michigan’s Office of the Attorney General announced charges against eleven people involved in the encampment, including seven felony charges. Those charged are, according to attorney general, “mostly students and alumni.” The universities in Gaza, meanwhile, once again bombed by Israel, are in ruins.
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Built in the early hours of Monday, April 22, the encampment at the center of Michigan’s campus was until May 21 one of the oldest in the United States. At one point more than one hundred and fifty people –– undergraduate and graduate students as well as people from communities in Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti, Dearborn, Detroit –– were sleeping at the camp. Many hundreds of people passed through the encampment each day, eating, talking, organizing, praying, and reading. Beginning the day the encampment was set up until the day it was destroyed by police, anyone and everyone could find three square meals a day, for free, on the Diag.
By Thursday, April 25, a small library was set up within the encampment. We called it the “Liberation Library” and we combined some books with an existing table of zines on anti-imperialism, abolition, anarchism, and the history of student politics. Khaled Mattawa, a poet and professor of English at Michigan, provided the first set of books on Arabic literature, Mahmoud Darwish, and so on. We collected a couple of recommendations from faculty, purchased some books ourselves, and received the first of two boxes donated from Haymarket Books, an independent press in Chicago. Next to the books and the zines were articles on Palestinian history and resistance, critiques of right-wing politics in India, and articles arguing for the abolition of university administration and a commitment to democratic governance by students, staff, and faculty. Teach-ins on the Ethiopian state’s genocide against the Tigrayan people and Egyptian politics since the 2011 revolution, among others, were given by graduate and undergraduate students.
But these are only a few sources of the many books that came into and passed through the encampment library. Those of us who initially worked to set it up have no idea how most of the books got there and now we have no idea where they have gone. There was initially a pair of bookends, then a bookshelf, and finally a second bookshelf. The books kept coming even as many of them were taken away, as we intended. A week before the camp was cleared, on a night when we thought the police might come, a friend and I began to write a small note on the title page of each of the library’s books. The notes are a trace of the encampment we intended for a future in which the encampment would no longer exist.
That future has arrived and so the encampment is gone. Many of those books in which we wrote a small note were still in the encampment early in the morning and so were probably destroyed by the police, crushed along with the tents, art, chairs, and tables. Someone lost their glasses in the raid, another their backpack. While in Gaza the universities were destroyed by bombs and multimillion dollar aircraft, students and faculty killed or maimed, in the United States it is merely pepper spray and heavily armed police –– in “riot clown costume,” as someone put it –– who tore apart some tents and, we presume, threw the remaining books in an enormous dumpster, along with everything else.
Details are revealing. An email from the University’s President sent to thousands of students, staff, and faculty the morning the encampment was cleared claimed that those at the encampment had “replaced Diag bricks with concrete.” Like much that is written and said by university presidents these days, this was a blatant lie. There were in fact bricks already missing the morning the encampment was set up, a sign, if anything, of the university’s malfeasance. Perhaps a week or so after the encampment began, this hole was filled with slate, into which was carved an image of a watermelon and a sprouting seed. A minor hazard, something that might cause a twisted ankle but nothing more, was repaired and transformed into a small but meaningful piece of art. Weeks later, it was destroyed and the artist slandered for “destruction of property.” Truth, in the hands of power, is turned on its head.
“But why would Israel bomb a university?” asked Alareer. Why is it necessary to clear a peaceful encampment, at the beginning of the summer, when so few are even on campus? “Knowledge,” Alareer wrote, “is Israel’s worst enemy. Awareness is Israel’s most hated foe. That’s why Israel bombs a university: it wants to kill openness and determination to refuse living under injustice and racism.” The encampment made visible an abiding awareness on the part of people living in the United States that their government, and an undefined portion of the “public” university’s $17 billion endowment, is financing the mass slaughter of people in Gaza in the name of democracy, invoking your security and your “interests”, using your dollars, as your representative. The demand for divestment, a ceasefire, an arms embargo, and the right of return, all logically follow from this awareness. Because those demands are intolerable and impossible from the point of view of those in power, the encampment rendering them visible must necessarily be removed. And if the encampment made awareness and the demands that follow visible, the books in its library contained the kind of knowledge with which awareness begins.
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At the same time, reading itself never freed anyone from anything. As the Palestinian novelist Ghassan Kanafani argued in a 1967 analysis of what he called “Zionist literature,” language can deceive, dehumanize and prop up a racist politics just as surely it can lead to knowledge and an affirmation of freedom. Five years after writing On Zionist Literature, in 1972, Kanafani, then 36, and his niece Lamis Najem, then 17, were killed by Israeli intelligence in Beirut. Those who planted a bomb in Kanafani’s car knew very well what they were doing: when language holds fast to reality, it is far less easily placed aside than the books in which we encounter it. It is the nature of language –– the language Alareer, Kanafani, and many others put to the page before they were killed –– to survive in the minds and memories of the living.
Several days after the encampment was cleared, the layout of the encampment was recreated in chalk outline: lines and drawings marked out where people ate, where the medical tent stood. In two dimensions, at least, you could still see art stations, prayer mats, and the library. In the library’s place, in fact, someone chalked a declaration condemning those who burn and destroy books. In the brief time before the markings were washed away, the space was occupied by university cops who looked over the chalk drawings with a habitually blank, deliberately uncomprehending gaze.
Because the encampment is gone, the space is as empty and as sterile as ever. Nonetheless something has changed. What is it? Now, for the many hundreds of people involved in the encampment, the emptiness is palpable, it is literally felt. If you or I feel an absence on the Diag, it is because we sense that something else is possible, something like what Amir Marshi calls “the people’s university” in an essay published alongside this one, today, in MQR.
But so long as those in power are financially and politically invested in the project of sustaining a Zionist and therefore racist state, they will continue to work hard to construct that silence that encampment was meant to fracture. They will use violence if necessary because they know the maintenance of their power depends on that silence, as does the precious image they have of themselves as innocent administrators, benevolent rulers, good masters. Their humanity and ours, on the other hand, the humanity of anyone whose consent sustains the endless flow of American arms to Israel –– $6.5 billion and counting since last October –– will never be fully realized without a more profound kind of divestment. This divestment must include but is not only about money.
The books in the library (gathered, read, taken away or destroyed) taught us that we might learn to let go of the disastrous illusions offered by those in power. These are illusions the powerful offer not just to those with less power, but also to themselves. One of those illusions is the idea that the systematic denial of human freedom and dignity can ever serve as the foundation for genuine prosperity and security. It cannot. Everything we have learned, since long before October 7th, teaches that the opposite is true.
In the coming weeks, as the academic semester begins, MQR will publish writing that speaks to the significance and meaning of the encampment at Michigan and elsewhere and the ongoing struggle to stand in solidarity, across difference, with those who work for some kind of justice in Palestine. The writing we hope to share is one very small continuation of the encampment, a refusal to remain silent and demand. The bombing, in the meantime, has yet to stop.
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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.
Daniel Weaver is a PhD Candidate at the University of Michigan studying mid-to-late 20th c. American and Sinophone cultural production and Marxist literary studies.
