This essay is a part of Negation's Organizational Culture Dossier. The rest of the collection can be found here.
Last spring, I joined thousands of students across the nation and the world in protesting the genocide in Gaza and in attempting to force institutional divestment from Israel a lá divestment from apartheid South Africa in the 1980s, as well as divestment from defense stocks and establishing democratic oversight over endowments. The bravery and ingenuity demonstrated by student activists I worked alongside inspires me deeply. I am invigorated by their historical literacy, their eagerness to expand the Palestine solidarity movement’s methods beyond street protests, and by their political discernment, savvy and resoluteness in the face of severe and mounting repression.
In my experience with student organizing, one major task of our movements is to maintain projects between “generations” of student organizers. More experienced activists take accumulated movement knowledge with them when they graduate, which can lead to stagnation and the needless replication of errors. Some of my reflections on the encampment movement may be rendered obsolete by heightened administrative repression and resultant tactical segues away from the encampment format by student activists, but I nevertheless hope that these notes for BDS and abolitionist work on campus might prove helpful or generalizable beyond the encampment model.
University contracts and investments in Israel and the military industrial complex are substantial. In the University of California system alone, private funders of research like General Dynamics, Boeing, and L3 Harris produce the weapons used to massacre Palestinians. Weapons manufacturers like Honeywell (produces technology critical to the function of Israeli guided munitions) and Elbit Systems also use their subsidiaries to indirectly fund (and inevitably shape) University of California research. Opaque alternative assets in private equity and venture capital often allow for covert investment in the state of Israel and the corporations waging war on the people of the Levant while the small number of direct investments in public equities launder universities’ images. The scale of partnerships with companies that profit from and enable the occupation of Palestine and zionist genocide of Levantine peoples makes achieving institutional divestment from Israel one of the most important political goals that we can mobilize around in the imperial core.
Logistics and Security
An encampment model is a combination of a mass movement and a heist, which demands a careful balance between a robust security culture and a sufficiently permeable and responsive leadership structure. Security culture is a communal endeavor that ought to be enforced across the board, not a personal choice for individuals to opt into or out of. It is a matter of community security to enforce a degree of anonymity from all participants, so that retaliation against any one individual is made more difficult. Identities should generally be concealed and guarded with mask use and aliases in order to thwart police and university surveillance and retribution, but the group in charge of critical decision-making regarding political strategy and escalation is the main internal clique that needs to be especially clandestine.
It’s possible that the “clique” in charge of escalations and the folks in charge of the camp and negotiations with administration would benefit from remaining entirely separate and/or incommunicado. This is an approach stipulated by George Jackson in his field guide to people’s war against the American state, Blood in My Eye:
...in an urban guerilla situation the military proper must be hidden, separate from the political front, since unlike a classical… countryside struggle… with us the enemy is all around, within a few moments of strike. There should, I feel, be one branch that is purely political, operating the rent strikes, the breakfast programs, the People's Bazaars… Then there should be the super-secret branch – to enforce.
The resistance in Palestine also has distinct political and military wings. Adopting elements of urban guerilla warfare strategy likely necessitates student activists viewing themselves as engaged in people’s war against the American state, which they are whether they know it or not. In short, a development of consciousness must take place. This separation could also prove unwieldy and unwise in instances where the priorities and tactics of the “escalatory” and “political” cliques align.
There should be clear avenues by which interested parties can get involved with the logistical management and upkeep of the camp. Excessive safeguarding and siloing of non-sensitive matters like food preparation and supply distribution can jeopardize the encampment’s social reproduction.
Fear of infiltration generally shouldn’t impede momentum. Even in the case of high-risk escalations or “below ground work,” withholding relevant information at critical junctures can jeopardize communal safety as much as a zionist mole or leak can. The ability of zionist moles to sow internal discord can probably be partially undercut by openly fostering a culture of good faith assumptions and of putting political differences rather than interpersonal spats at the forefront of struggle between comrades. A tactic I observed being employed at Columbia’s encampment for dealing with zionist provocateurs that I thought proved effective is perhaps instructive and worthy of moderate extrapolation. Sometimes encampment security would allow zionists to enter the encampment itself and even “protect” them in doing so in order to undercut their political goal of provoking a spectacle to launder consent for our violent repression.[2]
Unity, Trust, and Cohesion
Stifling criticism from comrades and allies under the auspices of unity generally weakens the movement rather than strengthening it. Channels for constructive critique and self-critique ought to be formally incorporated into an encampment structure, or that of any long-term project. Interface between organizers and encampment participants, encampment participants and the broader community is important as a barometer of popular opinion, to gauge what is and isn’t working strategically and to discern when organizers need to change course, and to learn from one another and from our mistakes. We must use our proximity to one another to further our collective movement knowledge.
Establishing trust and fostering social cohesion is crucial. To develop this trust and social cohesion it is key to set and enforce guidelines and points of unity that maintain the safety of students and community members. For example, Columbia organizers were fairly effective in enforcing the prohibition of photos or videos of people without their explicit consent, and effective in managing the opportunistic press (the press mainly justifies our violent suppression, and they should be treated as enemies to be deftly handled until proven otherwise).
The encampment can also develop trust and social cohesion through exercises in popular democracy. The people on the negotiation team, if there is one, should be both accountable and available to the encampment masses. They should conceal names and faces, and use all manner of proxies and subtleties when dealing with the university administration, who will use any knowledge they have to retaliate; but they should understand that the campers by their numbers are the ones who elevated them to the negotiating table in the first place. They should meet every day with the campers to explain their strategy and incremental progress and should be easily recognizable around camp and perhaps even help out with more “menial” tasks. Campers, however faithful they may be to the global intifada, may lose faith in their leaders if it is not clear who comprises bargaining teams, what their principles are, and how vehemently they will stand by full divestment and amnesty for students. The bargaining team and organizers at Columbia seemed to me during the duration of my stay at the camp -- and from my limited vantage point as a non-organizer -- to be fairly consistently assessing and communicating the risk of mass arrest and retaliation to general participants. This assured me that community safety was an organizational priority. Several threats of mass arrest from administration prior to the liberation of Hind’s Hall were prevented from coming to fruition due to the effective mass mobilization of thousands of students and community members.
Many encampments across the country adopted a “traffic light” system to gauge activists’ risk levels in the case of arrest, on loan from civil disobedience actions like those spearheaded by Jewish Voice for Peace. “Green” identified individuals unwilling to take on any risk of arrest, “yellow” those who were hesitant to risk arrest, and “red” those who were willing to be arrested. When this was taken out of its original context—actions where the point of a given action was to get arrested en masse—it mutated into a de facto leadership structure in the absence of preexisting leadership structures. “Red” chats or groupings were sometimes used as a proxy for “serious people” worthy of being involved in and looped into political strategy, which excluded people with particularly precarious positionalities. People sometimes misrepresented their level of risk so that they could have a say in the decisions that affected them. Those most vulnerable to police assault—undocumented immigrants and so on—were sometimes left out of decision-making processes as a result of this de facto structure. They were unable to resist their invocation in absentia as cure-all wards against escalation or to shape escalations with their own concerns in mind, learning about political activity when everyone else did. Intentional democratic structures can help to dissipate some of these problems. The traffic-light system should only be used for its intended purpose, and flexibly at that, because different people might opt into or out of high-risk situations and actions at different times if given proper information to contextualize their decision.
Building Social Infrastructure
Building social infrastructure—here defined as the mechanisms for maintenance and growth of the encampment, like task-oriented subcommittees and cliques—on the fly and with a constant air of crisis is dangerous and should be avoided whenever possible. It creates power vacuums and opportunities for reactionary and liberal entryism. It allows for the domination of decision-making processes by charismatic actors, and it can facilitate the sidelining of multiply-marginalized people. Social infrastructure should be carefully crafted and maintained in advance of an encampment or other ambitious and long-lasting project. It is especially critical to immediately put in place mechanisms by which to mediate and resolve conflict, before such conflict arises, and to emphasize proper methods of issuing constructive criticism.[3]
Building social infrastructure on the fly under intense pressure can enable interpersonal mistreatment, abuse, and exploitation along gendered and racial lines. Misogyny and sexual violence are often thought of as individual, personal “issues,” but are in fact a tactic of counterinsurgency with broad-reaching consequences. When abusers are not isolated and disempowered promptly, they jeopardize not only the safety of individuals but the longevity and effectiveness of the entire movement. Gendered violence has a debilitating and demobilizing effect on its victims and on organizations as a whole. Victims tend to leave while abusers do not, which results in heavy turnover and an inability to grow and consolidate knowledge gained from practice. This in turn leads to the constant replication of entry-level mistakes. Misogyny inhibits the development of movements.
Studying the Enemy
Study enemies carefully. The prized tactic of lone vigilante zionists at encampments was sleep deprivation. Zionists, especially on open campuses, disrupted students at night with noise and light harassment. If you know that zionists are likely to harass your camp at night, adapt to this. Don’t drop the ball on disability justice by assigning people with light or noise sensitivities or other pertinent disabilities to tents close to the perimeter of the encampment. Consider adjusting the optics of chants and mobilization in response to the shifting degree of antagonism with zionists in the daylight vs. at night. Appeal to liberal sensibilities in the daytime, (hopefully metaphorical) knives out when you are defending the turf and your very bodies from physical attack by white supremacist vigilantes at night.
Identify internal divisions among different kinds of enemies and make use of them. In the case of police and administrative hostility at the University of Pennsylvania, there was political division between Penn, Drexel and Philly police forces, as well as between Philly Police Department (PPD) and Penn administrators, which wound up working in our favor as the police delayed sweeping by many days and kept their trademark hostility and brutality relatively minimal. We also had a sympathetic District Attorney, Larry Krasner, one of the first self-billed “progressive prosecutors” in US history, known for his laissez-faire approach to protests. Krasner even showed up to the Drexel encampment, and dismissed charges against all but three of the Penn students who attempted a sit-in at Fisher-Bennett Hall. PPD refused to immediately sweep us as Penn admin requested them to do, which points to different factional concerns among our enemies. PPD perhaps cares more about their own optics and less about Palestine qua Palestine compared to the determinedly zionist college administrator-donor class. Such tensions can conceivably be played off one another. However, of note is that in the half-year since the student intifada, Krasner’s power has been severely limited in Philadelphia, largely to afford the PPD free reign in clearing unhoused folks from Kensington as part of Mayor Cherelle Parker’s gentrification plan.
Studying our enemies also means identifying common allies, including in the most practical sense. As we voluntarily camp outside, we should understand that homeless people can be our natural allies and build bonds of solidarity however possible. Doing so broadens our political horizon and simultaneously betters our understanding of police tactics. The police swept Penn’s encampment at the same time of day that they swept Kensington (early morning, before activists and journalists woke up), and with the same protocol. We might have been able to anticipate our own sweep, save more materials and protect more people from harm had we analyzed police’s formulaic behavior towards homeless encampments and invited unhoused people and their analysis of the state into our struggle.
The Terrain of Campus Struggle
The terrain of campus struggle is impacted by factors like whether the campus is private or public, open or closed, on a semester or quarter system, rural, suburban or urban, the quirks of individual administrators, etc. Escalations at public universities sometimes exceeded those at private universities in scale and in militancy. The open/closed campus dynamic is perhaps as influential on the character and size of encampments and the degree of zionist harassment and confrontation activists faced as the socioeconomic and demographic composition of schools and surrounding areas. Columbia soon became a student of other campus uprisings, particularly of the most militant school movements in the south and in California. We saw the role that the open/closed campus dynamic played perhaps most dramatically at UCLA, where the encampment was vulnerable to zionist fascist paramilitary attack aided by Los Angeles politicians and celebrity bankrolling as well as by the nearby Persian zionist diaspora community. UCLA became a site of urban warfare, while USC, in contrast, was seemingly in a state of siege from its inception, and thus insulated from both zionist attack and community support.
The encampment model can clarify the cause to the public and render it impossible to ignore. Perhaps most importantly, encampments can serve as a meeting point of likeminded people with the shared political goal of stopping the genocidal global order and of building something new in its place. That connection can facilitate more radical and ambitious political activity suitable to the urgency of the moment. Perhaps the most promising aspect of the above ground encampment format is how it might help replenish the political underground in the United States—in time, the above and the below ground might work in coordination with each other in pursuit of common political goals.
There's a real need for above ground political work, because we do need a mass movement. Above ground political projects can help develop internationalist socialist consciousness. There’s also a need to shut down weapons manufacturers, to throw wrenches in the reproduction of empire immediately. The question is, how do we do that effectively and in a way that doesn’t throw us in prison for life, or fund and bolster weapons manufacturers and the racist criminal justice system even further? The more of us there are, the better solutions to that question we might be able to conjure up. Much of our crisis is a crisis of political atomization. There are many politically engaged people thinking about the same issues in isolation. We need to find one another.
Tactics and Political Education
Tactics are tools in an arsenal to be used and discarded at will. The encampment model is one tactic in a broader constellation of tactics. Becoming inflexibly attached to strategies is inadvisable, as is putting community members at risk of unstrategic arrest and brutalization if there is a way of foreseeing and avoiding such an outcome. This funnels movement resources into bail and into replacing stolen equipment, which can demoralize the movement if there are no gains to show for it. Disbanding at the first hint of repression without resistance is inadvisable as well, though. Everything is something of a balance between contradictory considerations and impulses.
One of the primary tasks of political education at this juncture, at encampments and beyond them, ought to be rendering legible the connections and resonances between different struggles. The world police order, the violence meted out by racial capitalism, link us in socialist internationalism and within a shared totality. The university as real estate tycoon, as landlord, as a police precinct, as the blunt power and force of the administrative and donor class and of state violence link so many of us in struggle against the university as it is and the social order it upholds.[4]
I hope that this moment yields a massive popular reckoning with the limitations and dangers of the neoliberal university’s market restriction and shaping of knowledge production and the social relations it reproduces (i.e. knowledge production in the bourgeois university directly contributing to the development of weaponry). Universities act upon surrounding communities and built environments perhaps most tangibly through their real estate holdings and the private police and security forces they command. Universities contribute significantly to gentrification, a process of racial dispossession.[5]
Consider trying to make inroads with (organized) labor whenever possible. Something I was constantly thinking about at encampments in New York City and Philadelphia was, these private security guards hired to uphold increasingly arbitrary rules as retribution against student protestors, how many of them are ideologically committed to their hired positions and how many could be persuaded to help instead of hurt protestors? Many seemed to me to be apathetic, if not sympathetic.
Gentrification and Settler Colonialism
Gentrification in American cities is a twin phenomenon to the Judaization of East Jerusalem and other parts of historic Palestine. Settler colonialism and gentrification are not identical processes, as Indigenous dispossession in the modern era is an originary racial dispossession and constitutes primitive accumulation, but gentrification is one subsequent type of centrally coordinated dispossession on racial terms often operational in the settler colonial context. Clarifying the similarities between frontier-style settler colonialism in Palestine and gentrification in the US is a way of meaningfully linking state violence and racism from here to Palestine. American and Israeli assemblages of policing and surveillance in service of logics of dispossession, containment and elimination take cues from one another and have a direct interface with one another from the US to Palestine and beyond. (US policing was not initially developed in its colony of Palestine; technologies of maintaining the racial order in the US or of exporting Euro-American racial order globally were developed prior to (mainly) 20th century colonial exploits in historic Palestine here at home on Black, Chicano, Indigenous, racialized, migrant or essentially criminalized populations, and honed during the war on terror in the aughts, which is a point that can get lost or muddied in reactionary distortions of the colonial situation.)
Try to avoid clinging to post hoc narrativization that is more ideological than accurate. We’re in the business of dealing with reality, and must frankly assess what works and what doesn’t, who is accomplishing what and at what juncture and how. For example, it’s worth noting that, while Columbia’s encampment was excellent and admirably executed and served as an inspiration and a blueprint for many other campuses, they were not the first to escalate into taking buildings or to expand into other areas of campus. Once the struggle reaches an ebb, movement intellectuals have an urgent duty to humbly and properly record the struggle they took part in so we can take correct theoretical conclusions from the course of events.
Hopes
I hope protestors consider a greater diversity of “escalations” beyond building capture and broadly share and learn tactics for evading police brutality and arrest. We ought to encourage creativity in terms of escalatory tactics, and adjust our approach for what is most politically impactful or educational to the public, in different terrains and conditions. At Columbia’s encampment, I heard one of the veterans of 1968’s student occupation discuss how the militancy of those who occupied the Mathematics building helped repel police the longest. The Mathematics building in ‘68 also had the most “outside agitators.” Perhaps as a counterpoint, the militancy of those who occupied Hind’s Hall did not ward off NYPD’s wrath in 2024. The state’s repressive apparatus has grown significantly in the decades since ‘68, and the difference in police response was likely informed by an array of factors including that the United States’ interests in Vietnam in 1968 were not identical to its longstanding interests in upholding Israeli occupation of Palestine in 2024.
I hope protestors find creative ways to cost the university funding and prestige. The idea is to make it such a political liability to have investments in Israel and the war machine that universities (and corporations, and our political institutions) will indeed divest - which would mean a remodeling of the entire university and its funding streams. What student protestors are demanding, concomitantly with divestment from genocide and apartheid, is a democratization of the gutted, neoliberal university so that staff, faculty members, students, and precarious academic underclasses like adjuncts are politically empowered, not wealthy unelected donors and asset managers.
I fear the broader movement might fall into the pitfalls of negotiations and antidemocratic concessions. Self-appointed negotiators must not betray the movement, and there must be mechanisms by which to hold these negotiators accountable so they don’t accept terrible deals over and against popular will of the demonstrators. We must stay grounded in our cause, which is the (re)instatement of Indigenous political sovereignty, the demolition of colonial structures and processes and of the entire colonial dynamic, from the river to the sea—and beyond, destroying the autocratic and reactionary Arab leadership that maintains zionism, western hegemony and capitalist modes of production and accumulation.
The best case scenario is that these protests cost universities bitterly and result in genuine divestment, rather than the reshuffling of endowments through dark money hedge funds to give the false impression of material divestment, like the University of California did with fossil fuels (there has to be consideration of the latter outcome and of how to tackle it, though). In turn, I hope very much that this institutional divestment will play a pivotal role in toppling Israel, just as the student movement was important in toppling apartheid South Africa. I hope that we study our parent movements closely and rigorously, as well as noting where our circumstances diverge, so that we might at least make our own, new mistakes. I want us to bravely join the course of history. I want us to do our part to help free Palestine.
Notes
- George Jackson, Blood in My Eye, (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1990), 20.
- This is discussed in further detail on The Negation Nightly Radio Hour - EP 45.
- Vicki Legion, Constructive Criticism: A Handbook, (Foreign Languages Press, 2022).
- For further reading, I'd suggest the following from The Mapping Project: "Zionism, Policing and Empire", "Boston's Colonial Universities Grab Land for Profit, War, and Medical Apartheid", and "The Architecture of Banishment". I'd also recommend "Automating Banishment: The Surveillance and Policing of Looted Land" from the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition.
- For further reading, I'd suggest this reader prepared by the Democratic Socialists of America Los Angeles Political Education Committee: The Politics of Removal: Displacement from Los Angeles to Palestine.