I have found that the land is fragile, and the sea, light; I have learnt that language and metaphor are not enough to restore place to a place… The essential thing for me is that I have found a greater lyrical capacity, a passage from the relative to the absolute, an opening for me to inscribe the national within the universal, for Palestine not to be limited to Palestine, but to establish its aesthetic legitimacy in a greater human sphere. — Mahmoud Darwish, 1981
Do you remember the 15th day of our Gaza solidarity encampment? The 3rd or the 26th?
I remember the day when the rain almost swept us away. Wind as if a storm was brewing, against the smell of wet earth. Perhaps it was a Sunday, I can’t quite tell– but I remember the wet afternoon, the sky with its belly stripped open collapsing on us. You could smell the muddiness, as if a south asian monsoon teasing your tongue. Hopping around like gremlins in purple and yellow plastic ponchos, we tied tarp to keep the tents dry and firmly set on the ground. For a second it seemed as though the encampment’s liberation library would be carried away in the brief yet fierce downpour, but Francesca and Paige zipped over just in time, shielding the books with their bodies, as the water drenched their eyes, ears and toes. A makeshift space with a somewhat lopsided shelf and two plastic tables carrying an eclectic collection of donated books, journals, printed articles, and zines on the Palestinian liberation struggle and student uprisings, the library survived another day.
The Gaza solidarity encampment was an unusual object in the otherwise rigidly manicured UM campus1. Part of the broader Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) movement, the encampment was set up to disrupt “business as usual”, challenging the University’s investments in the ongoing genocide2. In doing so, it also created a space of imagination. On the first day of the encampment, once the 20 oddly-shaped tents made it past the early hours of dawn, we were struck by the expanse of this possibility. To be quite honest, we had no idea what to do with ourselves- what living collectively, in solidarity with a people far removed from us, on Empire’s periphery, truly meant. How could we imagine another, human world, and make it possible? And yet there we were, living on the Diag at one of the most “prestigious” public Universities in the United States, just as those fighting for divestment from Apartheid South Africa had done so decades ago. Someone left a handful of zines on a table and walked away. Dylan picked up a few, four and a half people gathered around a corner by the stone benches and started reading. What would it take to arrive at a liberated Palestine? How had we, in the “imperial core”, historically failed Palestine and how could we be in struggle with, and not just for Gaza? Throughout the day, the table grew, quickly transforming into the liberation library.
Making their way through the intricate web of tents decorated with Palestinian flags and banners demanding divestment, curious passersby, from within and outside the University would stop by to sift through the second-hand collection at the liberation library, grabbing a snack from the food tent, soaking in the bustling encampment. Some stayed, others left with a borrowed book. Most returned. I remember a sunny stranger handing me an issue of Ebb magazine from the liberation library, where Max Ajl was resolutely informing the world of how “israel is the purest expression of Western power, combining militarism, imperialism, settler colonialism, counterinsurgency, occupation, racism…” As many Palestinian revolutionaries, journalists and scholars have repeatedly pointed out, the current genocide, the siege of Gaza (over 17 years now), and the overall persistence of Israeli apartheid, is only made tenable by American imperialism. Not only has Israel been the largest receiver of American foreign “aid” (primarily military aid) for the past 50 years, the zionist project is key to sustaining, and also understanding the American empire. So much so that talking about Palestine– really talking about it– the pain and the hope of a people struggling for their occupied homeland, reverberating with the history of our colonized third worlds, is taboo in this country.
The Gaza solidarity encampment became the space to talk about impossible things that had little space in the American imagination. While most mornings were a slow awakening to donated coffee, the days began with camp meetings where we discussed daily chores, the latest news coming out of Gaza, conditions of other solidarity encampments across the country, and increasingly, across the globe. The final announcement was the day’s programming, which included various political education discussions, art and music workshops and so forth. Every afternoon, we would gather around the big white canopy, attached to the liberation library and a somewhat disorganized yet joyous DIY art table, which served as the common gathering spot. We had various teach-ins and workshops unpacking the diverse histories and geographies of our shared struggles under colonialism and its continued impacts, from Tigray and Sudan to Armenia and Kashmir. And everyday we delved deeper into the history of zionism and Israeli occupation. Sometimes we were lucky enough to hear from Palestinians who had dedicated their life to liberation. A few days after Israel’s extension of the genocide into Rafah, I remember listening to the powerful words of Mustafa Barghouti:3
It is either that you support the rights of people to have a life, or you support oppression, there should be no confusion about that… I promise you one thing, and I want you to convey this message to everybody. I speak on behalf of the Palestinian people, and we will never break, nothing will stop us from our continuous struggle for liberation. And there will be a day when we overcome, a day when Palestine will be free. And we will say, one of the reasons we are able to achieve freedom is your great solidarity with the Palestinian people.
Planning daily programming was a particular kind of chaos I have begun to miss. Voices overflowing with ideas, questions and debate in late evening meetings to finalize the events schedule for the next day, Mariam’s perpetually furrowed brows mediating dozens of suggestions and requests for events, Jonathan rushing around searching for something crucial yet eternally misplaced. You see, the chaos was not accidental but a symptom of hunger- a yearning to learn something real about our world beyond empire. This hunger transformed the encampment into a pedagogical experiment- a space to develop a collective, political consciousness that took seriously the realities and struggles of a world rendered dispensable by American imperialism.
Many of our discussions also focused on unpacking the particular role of higher education in strengthening America’s embrace of zionism. For instance, UoM boasts of an institutional complicity with Israeli apartheid that is both financial as well as ideological. Members of the TAHRIR coalition would routinely organize teach-ins, print out flyers, pamphlets and, if time permitted, make colorful zines illustrating the ways in which U-M’s 20 billion dollar endowment was deeply invested in the genocide, as well as the failing Israeli economy. Through billions tied to unscrupulous private equity, our endowment is invested in surveillance and military tech companies like Palantir that are “supplying Israel’s military and intelligence agencies with advanced and powerful targeting capabilities—the precise capabilities that allowed Israel to place three drone-fired missiles into three clearly marked aid vehicles.”4 But instead of interrogating our ties to the endless human rights violations committed in Gaza, UoM’s investment office and the Board of Regents worked to “shield the endowment from political pressure”, ie, to prioritize profits over human life.
You see, despite being a “public” institution exempt from city taxes, the University, wrapped in the prestige of its 20 billion dollar endowment, functions as an elite corporation. If one has lived in America long enough, you will learn that in the land of the free, corporations are bestowed with more rights than human beings. But Palestine has punctured the illusion of American democracy, just as the Gaza solidarity encampment unraveled UoMs perfunctory performance of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), to demand an honest, material accountability. For a brief moment, we bent space and time, overcoming the fallacy of borders to touch Gaza- its suffering and ceaseless pain constantly reproduced by this country, but also its steadfastness. Gaza transformed our Diag from a bland space disciplined by the American dream, to a place of imagination, where education was meaningful and accessible, and made up categories of students, workers, professors and outsiders began dissolving.
On May 21, UMPD assaulted UM’s Gaza solidarity encampment at 6am, arresting and attacking students and community members with batons and the chemical agent, deep freeze. The UM administration promptly erased the physical presence of the encampment. Yet the flavor of freedom lingers on our tongues, our solidarity and struggle remain. As my friend Salma says, “Palestine has become the language of collective liberation”, and so with Palestine, we persist.
- Despite being a public university, access and use of University property is strictly controlled by administration; nor is UoM’s education affordable, let alone public. ↩︎
- Demands for divesting from Israeli apartheid were recited dutifully every year on campus through all official channels: In January 2024, faculty senate passed a resolution supporting divestment; in 2017 Ann Arbor student government (CSG) passed a divestment resolution, while Dearborn CSG had been doing so for well over a decade. Yet, the Board of Regents have been quick to discard them with no meaningful engagement ↩︎
- A Palestinian activist and politician serving as the General Secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative. ↩︎
- UoM is invested in Palantir through the venture capital fund, 8VC. ↩︎
Ira Anjali is a member of the TAHRIR Coalition — a group of more than 90 pro-Palestine organizations.
