SUMMER’S OVER
A Note on Politics and the Campus Movement
Any worthwhile analysis has to start from the searing fact that so far, nothing we’ve done has worked. “We” meaning the million-plus people who have taken action for Gaza in the US; “worked” meaning stopped the killing. A year of marches, rallies, and sabotage has so far failed to end the genocide, or even slow the delivery of bombs. It’s with full knowledge of this screaming stasis that we offer a reflection on the encampments of this past spring.
We see them as an awesome phenomenon. Nothing, so far, has worked—but nothing has struck back at the matrix of imperial interests and ideologies with the force, breadth, and fearlessness of the students and their allies, who sent panic and hatred pulsing through every rank of the establishment. Nobody could be surprised that the official response was so self-righteous and briskly violent. The real shock was the scale—and the crashing, tyrannical spectacle. That so many administrations saw reason to call in municipal and even state police forces; that so many university presidents approved crackdowns whose live-streamed sadism would be a PR nightmare: this zeal was already bizarre. That snipers stood watch on rooftops at Ohio State and Indiana, that an NYPD officer at Columbia shot live ammunition into Hind’s (formerly Hamilton) Hall, that the throngs of bat-wielding fascists who descended upon UCLA were first met with collegial courtesy by the cops who the next day made over two hundred vicious arrests over the course of shredding the camp: every rabid episode was stupefying in its extravagance. Together they add up to a picture of how the will to obliterate Palestine has ramifications for every layer of organized power. It’s not just the effect of a single lobby (though that obviously exists). Support for this genocide is now a feature of a massive—and thickly integrated—reactionary alliance. By trying to slash its financial sinews, the camps laid bare its vigor and size.
Meaning that last spring—at UT-Austin, UT-Dallas, UW-Madison, Emory, Northeastern, Dartmouth, Emerson, Portland State, Cal Poly Humboldt, University of Virginia, Virginia Tech, Washington University, CCNY, Arizona State, University of Arizona, SUNY-Stony Brook, USC, NYU, and UCSD, as well as at the dozens of other campuses that saw outright onslaughts by campus security and police—the sheer bravery of the students became an objective political force.
* * *
Summer’s over. It’s our belief that the students (along with their comrades) are far fromhaving exhausted the power they amassed last spring.
Universities agree. The police rampage at the University of Michigan during a die-in at the end of last month is one clue. And UC police have just beefed up their arsenal of military-grade crowd control weapons: pepper balls, projectile launchers, and new drones at UCLA alone. Evidently, last term’s more than three thousand arrests, plus suspensions, expulsions, evictions, and criminal charges didn’t strike administrators as sufficient deterrence or intimidation. With any luck, they’re right. Bans on masks, tents, and outdoor sleeping are now widespread, as are fresh, shameless insults to the very concept of political speech. At Indiana University, no protests within twenty-five feet of buildings; at the University of South Florida, no protests after 5 p.m., or in the last two weeks of the semester. Many institutions now require that on-campus rallies secure approval beforehand, as at Rutgers, where a “Free Expression Notification Form” must be submitted in advance for the “Free Expression Permit” necessary to hold “Free Expression Forums” likely to involve ten or more people; this includes the use of chalk. And at NYU—where last April students were pepper-sprayed, beaten with nightsticks, and thrashed with metal chairs after the president called in the NYPD—“Zionist” has effectively been declared an official protected class.
The bloom of batshit policies takes the measure of the insurgency’s strength—yes. But the revenge on the movement registers not only its enormity and spontaneity, but also (to a degree) its novelty. Clearly there are precedents and comparable moments. But we think that last spring’s burst of quad and building occupations amounts to a new and elevated genre of threat. The fierce defense of the encampments represented a vital forward leap for anti-imperial political practice—historically a scandalous, predictable weak point for vast swathes of the US Left.
By attempting to saw through the fiscal link between higher education and the assault on Palestine, students have confronted the fact of empire and their place in it with thrilling rage—and focus. Divestment, as a demand, is being thrust upon civil society institutions that fall within the blast radius of an array of direct actions and insurgent tactics—but its economic and ideological effects are potentially long-range. Which is to say the students have found, in the university, a point of real, if complex, leverage. This feels new. The spring mobilization was more daring, more coherent, and more dynamic than any US war resistance in our lifetimes.
This spring’s movement, then, represents an advance beyond the 2003 mobilization against the invasion of Iraq. The marches of two decades ago remain the largest in world history. In the US, they were an appeal—a symbolic, democratic, stirringly popular appeal, issued by millions before the fall of the first bombs—to the state architects of the devastation. Against the profit-seeking slaughter, a mural of dissenting citizens; against the crusade to uproot Saddam, the slogan “regime change starts at home.” This moment is different. It draws on different groups, proceeds from different premises, avails itself of different tactics, and arrives at a time of spirited (if embattled) left militancy on many fronts. And the particular placement of Palestine—meaning the Palestinian people’s steadfast resistance to elimination, in spite of the overlapping constituencies bent on their demise—has compelled a new generation to come face to face with the urgent, essential paradoxes of building an anti-imperial politics within the belly of the imperial beast. The movement has confronted these paradoxes, though not transcended them—not yet. That will take the fall of empire. Nothing, so far, has worked.
But things move. Sometimes fast. Our task now is to try to see the encampments from within and without. That is, we want to give an account of this spring’s propulsive power, as well as assess what mark it left on the political arena, an arena in which the perpetuation of this genocide—and the continued US buttressing of the now-flailing Zionist project—will be decided. We hope first to review (at a glance) the arsenal of interests drilling into “the university” from the outside. Then we’ll attempt to give an account of the many pressures that prevail on the campus itself, at this moment of institutional implosion—and the role of the encampment, as a tactic, within this era of crisis. Finally we’ll show what power the students still have to rip a hole in the apparatus of genocide and colonial war.
We return, then, to April 17, when Columbia students set up the very first tents.
* * *
That morning, the university’s president, Nemat “Minouche” Shafik, wasn’t in New York. She’d traveled to Washington, DC, to make an appearance before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. Since December, the committee had been holding hearings on antisemitism—a scourge apparently roaring through college campuses since the events of October 7. “Are you familiar with Genesis 12:3?” asked Georgia Republican Rick Allen at one point, citing the moment the Lord gives Abram a great, blessed nation. “Do you want Columbia University to be cursed by God?” Shafik replied, smiling, “Definitely not.”
The tableau was sickening and, of course, telling. On one side, a congressional representative and mouth-frothing agent of the religious right. On the other, a liberal cosmopolitan and leader of an Ivy League, and in this case, an Egyptian baroness and former VP at the World Bank. Two distinct and supposedly clashing cultural expressions of elite power, speaking in vastly discrepant registers—each one smirking or even scowling at the other. But they converged on a vital point: The time had come to smash the campus Palestine movement.
We reproduce this little scene because we think it exposes an important feature of last spring’s repression. That is, the enormous state pressure to justify the daily massacres in Gaza had already been bearing down on universities heavily, constantly, and publicly, before a single tent was pitched. It was clear then, though it’s now been somewhat eclipsed by the sheer power of the spring mobilization, that the brilliance of the encampment strategy came in large part as a response to the crackdown by administrations on Palestine rallies as early as October—the banning of Students for Justice in Palestine at a number of institutions, and severe disciplinary actions in many, many cases—and to the wider array of forces already fixated on the students. Shafik’s audience that morning was huge: not just Congress, but Zionist donor networks, major business leaders, the entire Republican Party, nearly all of the Democrats, and the doddering and proudly bigoted President of the United States. So Shafik’s pliability in the face of questioning reflected a threat from the whole edifice of US power: eliminate the protests, or we’ll eliminate you.
That had already happened, twice. First Liz Magill, president of the University of Pennsylvania, then Claudine Gay of Harvard stepped down as a result of the backlash from their statements before Congress. Despite their craven performances, it was nevertheless agreed that they hadn’t shown enough disgust for pro-Palestine students. A letter calling for their resignations—and that of Sally Kornbluth of MIT—appeared immediately, signed by seventy members of Congress.
UPenn, Harvard, MIT, Columbia—prestigious universities are a fetish of national “discourse.” They play on a colorful medley of hypocrisies and resentments: about elites, meritocracy, cultural liberalism, and the youth. So in the racist, surrealist farce of the Congressional hearings, it makes sense that these were the four institutions to, in a sense, be put on trial.
While Shafik prepared for her date with Congress, a lower-profile, but just as telling inquisition was taking place at the City University of New York.
At a school like Columbia, rolling in cash and basking in the (ambivalent) spotlight of national attention, presidents mostly answer to soft-power cliques, and only in the most extreme cases get a direct thwack from Congress. Public universities, on the other hand, are subject to routine, humiliating threats from the state governments that decide their budgets. Here, culture-war malice collides with fiscal austerity and electoral pandering. For instance: since Andrew Cuomo created a government blacklist by executive order in 2016, any public institution that has a BDS commitment is explicitly barred from state funding in New York. It was only logical, then, that in late October, Kathy Hochul, Democratic Governor of New York and mascot of the upstate lumpen bourgeoisie, appointed former Court of Appeals judge Jonathan Lippman to head a third-party review of “antisemitism” on CUNY’s twenty-five campuses.
This is the same Jonathan Lippman employed by Latham & Watkins LLP, a law firm which boasts a robust “Israel Practice” representing public and private businesses in the Zionist state—finance, tech, drugs, oil and gas. The same Jonathan Lippman who chaired the Commission for Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform, on which he proposed, after activists demanded that Rikers be shut down completely, that the jail be decentralized into a network of “state-of-the-art, borough-based” facilities. (Put simply: build more jails.)
Lippman’s army of pro-bono attorneys had been spotted across CUNY campuses—exiting presidents’ offices, crashing student meetings, selecting students to interrogate, and inviting them, eagerly, to report instances of discrimination. Their mission: assess the legal avenues for disciplining CUNY students and faculty under the auspices of antisemitism—without running afoul of the first amendment. CUNY had already made headlines, months before Al-Aqsa Flood, when the student graduation speaker at CUNY Law had denounced “Israeli settler-colonialism”; Eric Adams, who spoke later in the program, used his time at the podium to lambaste her, provoking widespread right-wing news coverage. (The New York Post: “Stark Raving Grad.”) Lippman was the state’s revenge.
The parallel was striking. Republicans in the national legislature toppling presidents at UPenn and Harvard; Democrats on a witch hunt inside the “Harvard of the working class.” That both phenomena could occur in lockstep was the result of two raging reactionary currents running together into a Palestine Panic: both the decades-long infrastructure for stamping out criticism of Israel through intimidation and legal action—perfectly compatible with the liberal Zionism of most Democrats—and the more recent, even cutting-edge, networks of far-right activists that have laid siege to education under the sign of fighting “woke.”
“Conservatives need to create a strong association between Hamas, BLM, DSA, and academic ‘decolonization’ in the public mind,” read a tweet by conservative mega-influencer Christopher Rufo less than a week after October 7. “Connect the dots, then attack, delegitimize, and discredit. Make the center-left disavow them.” The disavowals were already flowing freely. But to identify pro-Palestine students as the next major foe in the holy war against higher ed: this was a genuine innovation. Rufo took his own advice. He personally worked to identify, as he revealed proudly to Politico the day Gay resigned, the necessary “narrative, financial, and political pressure” to get rid of her, and from there, turn the nascent panic over antisemitism into a nationwide assault on the campus:
I’ve run the same playbook on critical race theory, on gender ideology, on DEI bureaucracy. For the time being, given the structure of our institutions, this is a universal strategy that can be applied by the right to most issues. I think that we’ve demonstrated that it can be successful.
On April 26, a few days after the first raid of the Columbia encampment, Eric Adams logged into a private Zoom call with a number of very powerful people. Many if not all of those assembled were members of a WhatsApp chat that included at least twelve billionaires and ninety more multi-millionaires—such as Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, Dell CEO and founder Michael Dell, the (now infamous) hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, Israeli real estate moguls, and Jared Kushner’s brother. The chat was called “Israel Current Events.” Members had already met with former Israeli PM Naftali Bennett, ambassador to the US Michael Herzog, and current war minister Benny Gantz.
The Zoom with Adams had convened to exhort him to help “change the narrative” in Israel’s favor; the meeting was mostly about Columbia. Leaked chat logs exposed an array of potential enticements: the dangling of campaign donations, the promise to secure private investigators to infiltrate campus. Most significant, however, was the offer to convince Shafik and her trustees that the mayor and police should be given total freedom to destroy the movement on campus however they saw fit.
So when students and their allies seized Columbia’s Hamilton Hall a mere four days later, renaming it Hind’s Hall after a six-year-old girl slaughtered by the IOF, the war-like, sensational storming of the building wasn’t a “blunder” by Shafik or the NYPD. It was absurd, obscene, exorbitantly brutal; it was also a show of pathetic obedience to a faction of affluent bigots, who made the encampments the bright red bullseye of their hugely capitalized attack.
Which explains the stunning sight on April 30: the NYPD rolling up Amsterdam Avenue in a tank.
* * *
New York is special, but not that special. The events above provide a vile glimpse of what came hurtling against students all over the country.
But “the university” is a strange thing, governed by its own curious laws of motion. It plays a specific, paradoxical role within the state and civil society. A degree is a painfully pricey passport to white collar employment—but the campus itself still figures as a kind of ideal community, whose beautiful freedoms follow from its (seeming) distance from market rules. And after the gutting defeat of the twentieth century left, the academy came to look like the last bastion—or haunted graveyard—of radical politics in the US.
This is an old story; too old. The neoliberal revolution, which we won’t go over here, has since torn through the membrane of humane cliché. Thanks to the churn of macroeconomic forces and decades of protracted struggle on and around the campus, it’s become easier to speak frankly about what “the university” actually is: a landlord, a hospital, a police force, a hedge fund, and/or a union-busting boss.
It’s worth noting, however, that the campus has for a long time served as the most consistent, robust base for Palestine solidarity in the US. This is a function, in part, of the total banishment of the “issue” from formal politics. Since the Second Intifada, this forced exile to the university has compelled SJP chapters, inspired by successful divestment campaigns against apartheid South Africa, to zero in on the institution’s investments—looking its corporate liberalism straight in the face, responding tit-for-tat to its cynicism and hypocrisy.
Here’s a handful of facts thrust into public relevance by the mobilization. (It’s very difficult to get hard numbers—hence the demand this spring for full disclosure of investments.) Protestors at the University of California called for divestment from assets that amounted to $32 billion dollars, including $3.3 billion invested directly in weapons manufacturers that sell to Israel. Columbia University Apartheid Divest’s proposal to the “Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investment” at Columbia, pointed to ties to the war profiteer BlackRock and nearly $5 million of Columbia’s endowment “going directly to Airbnb and other companies that profit from the displacement of Palestinians and the development of illegal settlements.” Then there’s the money that comes from contracts with the world’s most powerful engine of war. At Johns Hopkins, defense contracts bring in twice as much money as tuition; MIT, Penn State, Carnegie Mellon, UT Austin, and Georgia Tech all bring in over a billion per year from the US military or Department of Defense.
The laser-focused threat to these contracts, stakes, and partnerships is what made the university a point of genuine—and to trustees, outrageous—leverage for the Palestine movement. Because appended to these death-dealing portfolios (however tenuously or incidentally) is a new generation of students. It was their fury, their bravery, their magnificent will to plunge the campus into crisis which proved so decisive in April and May. Where did this will come from? And how do you explain their strength and speed? Which is another way of asking: in 2024, what’s a student?
These undergrads are far more indebted than their forebears. And in general, they’re less white (though the recent rollback of affirmative action will reverse this trend). Not to mention that the value of the degree itself has fallen sharply—with the result that college no longer resembles a staircase out of the working class. Like everything else in a hyperfinancialized society, it’s a gamble. The students who got their skulls slammed by nightsticks this spring, then, aren’t the longhairs of the ‘60s and ’70s, revolting against the shameful comforts of middle class existence. (This was always a mere stereotype, shedding no light on, say, the City College occupation in Harlem in 1969, or the Third World Liberation Front mobilization in California in 1968.) The flamboyant image of the university nevertheless persists in public fantasy, especially for the right—hence the sub-Machiavellian stratagems of someone like Chris Rufo.
This is a nationwide student population, spanning the whole political spectrum, with fewer hopes, fewer illusions about university life, staring down decades of asphyxiating debt, and soon to be thrust into a hostile economy in which their expensive diplomas supply less and less protection. And for the left-wing among them, their coming-of-age was the 2020 Rebellion, making their first experience of politics the mass movement against racial terror: fleeing or fighting the police.
That was the background. So it was striking to see how the movement traversed this strange terrain. Seven months into the genocide—which for student organizers was seven months of official hypocrisy and wall-to-wall vilification—the time was ripe for a new maneuver. In fact, a frontal confrontation: a way to exploit the campus setting’s peculiar combustibility.
The rallies gave way, suddenly, to the seizure—and defense—of space.
* * *
“And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus—and you’ve got to make it stop!” These words, roared by Mario Savio before a Berkeley sit-in in 1964, soon achieved iconic status, and won an illustrious place for the Free Speech Movement in two (deeply linked) left lineages: direct action, and campus radicalism. (Allusions this past spring were more often to the students of 1968, who owed much to 1964.) Less famous, though just as revealing, are these lines from the same speech: “We’re going, once again, to march up to the 2nd floor of Sproul Hall. And we’re gonna conduct our lives for awhile in the 2nd floor of Sproul Hall. We’ll show movies, for example.”
Ferociously jamming the machine’s gears with bodies—and “we’re gonna conduct our lives for awhile.” In the best, most impressive cases, encampment militants succeed at both. That’s the tactic’s power, and special allure. It’s worth reviewing how this works. An encampment can be a number of things: a festive, provocative eyesore, or a base from which to launch disruptions. Or if the space itself is crucial, or even the source of the conflict—as when a network of tents and treehouses unfurls in a Georgia forest about to be razed—the encampment is a living obstacle, a blockade of flesh and bone. Maintaining this takes people. Lots of people, actually. Which is one reason why so much attention is paid to the distinctive feeling produced by this practice, its singular hazards, pleasures, texture. Slapping together an ephemeral social life that’s somehow flexible but functional, inviting but fiercely defended: it’s a hard, hard balance to strike.
We take this tactic seriously. On more than one occasion, we’ve been shocked by its lovely force. Hijacking a park or square, unplugging a particular place from everyday hatefulness and alienation, securing and sustaining a zone where there’s no money or hunger or cops: these are real, profound phenomena. A captured patch of grass or concrete is reborn as liberated territory—a chance to live life, remake life. That is, to practice (or prefigure) freedom, for a moment, or for a month. Variations on this experience—Zuccotti, Syntagma, Taksim, Tahrir—have served as blast furnaces for the left politics of our age.
At the same time, each of these names a trauma, betrayal, failure, or bitter limit. It bears repeating: nothing, so far, has worked. Those who sneer at the recurrence of occupations, however, or see them only as a morbid symptom, have yet to reckon fully with the role of escalation within an ongoing popular process. A tactic can break through a political impasse or jack up the stakes of a debate, clarifying and even electrifying a genuine antagonism. That’s what took place this spring. And we know that this mobilization could only appear with such intensity because many of these students had already lived through real experiences of insurgency. Recent history has compelled them to view resistance tactics—occupations, de-arrests, vandalism, many forms of sabotage—as features of any practical left-wing repertoire. It wasn’t always like this. (We were touched to see a line from our translation of Palestinian revolutionary Basel al-Araj quoted in at least two communiqués by autonomous groups: “The beginning of every revolution is an exit.” One seized a building at the University Chicago, the other released five hundred cockroaches into the office of the UC president.) As students and their comrades flung themselves against police, we saw the deep imprint left by the George Floyd Rebellion, and how this crop of radicals has been inflamed by the fight to Stop Copy City. And insofar as the spring marks a moment in the specific history of the campus, they’re also the heirs to 2009: the watershed mobilizations of Occupy UC.
Nevertheless: we want to hone in on what made this direct action distinct. When they’re not doing battle with cops, encampments work out a blueprint for a novel way of being. Their “program” is their everyday practice: the improvised form of life that ripples vividly among the tents. But this spring’s political backdrop was daily massacres, live-streamed genocide. Two massive, ruthless questions therefore plowed through the campus encampments. How can this form of action—seizing a particular quad or building—stop the slaughter on the other side of the planet? And how can this strategy—putting pressure on endowments—intervene meaningfully in a minute-by-minute emergency? The first is a problem of space; the second, a crisis of time. So the greatest difficulties in strategy sprang from the blood-soaked separations that make up any imperial scene.
How to remain faithful to Palestine, to the Palestinian resistance, as they stare down the barrel of genocide in the midst of their war of liberation? This is a real question. We understand those who answer it by advocating maximal, spectacular tactical risks. It’s one way of honoring the monstrous gravity of this moment.
It made sense, then, that vigorous debate unfolded on many campuses between escalation and negotiation. The issue was knowing how much or which kinds of confrontation could be helpful in forcing the institution’s hand—though many resented that “the institution,” beneath contempt, was still a factor at all. Adjustments in outlook were necessary. Forms of sabotage familiar from other movements didn’t have the same effect. In the Weelaunee Forest, a torched bulldozer is its own reward: a literal and immediate impediment to the enemy. But the object of the campus encampments was a portfolio, a set of policies, the idiocies and lethal complicities of bureaucracy and elite opinion.
Escalation vs. negotiation: there’s no exact answer, no hard set of rules. Every campus is different. And struggles like this develop and even flip with startling cunning. We’ve seen many, many times how liberal de-fanging and co-optation—the “safety-ism” decried this spring—can pose a mortal threat to a movement. The same can be said for militant formlessness and political illegibility. Without firm answers, we can only hope to ask the right questions, holding ourselves to the discipline of the constant, present catastrophe.
But even the shrewdest strategic thinking gets spit out into a hateful paradox: In order to rise to the occasion, to practice fidelity to Palestinian liberation, to oppose in genuine fashion the world that empire makes and rules, non-Palestinian militants in the global North will run up against the fact that what connects them to Gaza now is not just their radical conviction, but their proximity to complex mechanism of the pitiless imperial state. They are in the heartland of empire. No amount of tactical escalation can overcome this; the enormous distance between periphery and center won’t be transcended by force of will. More crucial is recognizing that one of this killing machine’s great advantages, allowing it to dominate and outmaneuver us time after time after time, is that it moves at two scales, two speeds. Empire cultivates deep, long-term structures (like the financial links between US civil society and the occupation) while manufacturing the bursting urgency of bombardment, point-blank murder, and second-by-second obliteration.
Opposing both processes, tooth and nail, is our titanic, essential task. The encampments, by menacing a whole web of investments while drawing reactionaries at home into open combat, came close to actually doing this. They were a real—which is to say, rare—experience of politics.
* * *
But the promise of escalation right now is to send radical demands slamming against the formal political process. Within the confines of this conjuncture—the obscenity of this emergency—success will look like movement within the murderous state itself. There’s no need to relish or dwell on this. But we think it’s important to understand it. Many who hurled their bodies in April and May against everything the US has wrought will find this claim incensing, even disgusting. We don’t blame them; it is.
It’s also a sign of our current weakness. Nothing, so far, has worked. And movement within the state—if it happens—will fly in the face of a whole league of powerful interests, and will therefore require hard pressure from several directions. Launched just in advance of the campus mobilizations in April and May was the Uncommitted movement: an attempt to use the Presidential primary to trigger a legitimacy crisis within a Democratic Party responsible for this genocide. Uncommitted drew half a million people into its orbit. That number, though not decisive, is big. The ad-hoc campaign was driven by a different constituency from the encampments—progressive electoral organizers, Palestinian advocacy groups, first in Michigan, then in eight other states. That project posed the question of divestment directly and publicly, at the level of the US state, and made Palestine a clear fissure in the media coverage of the DNC. Distinctions in rhetoric and tactics notwithstanding, then, Uncommitted proceeded from an impulse similar to the campus militants’, and not just because the neoliberal university looks a lot like the Democratic Party. Unmask figureheads as warlords (university administrators, the US president) and try to extract specific concessions (divestment, a permanent ceasefire)—all as a way of opposing both the infrastructure of Israeli colonialism and the present annihilation of Gaza.
The real (but limited) power of these two forms of solidarity doesn’t come purely from their institutional contexts—the campus, the Democratic Party—but in the strategic, dynamic relay between them. They needed each other. The encampments have already propelled the demand for divestment close to the political mainstream. Thanks to the students, BDS is a fact to be reckoned with—though it’s mostly been bemoaned and raged against. That academic workers represented by UAW attempted a strike across six UC campuses after the assault on the encampments is a monumental and deeply welcome sign of the times. Thanks to Uncommitted, after months of repulsive waffling about “ceasefire” by the Democratic establishment, the widespread progressive demand has advanced to a full arms embargo of Israel, now, a demand that has fed back to and been taken up by the people in the streets. This is a new thing in US politics. It’s hard to picture what practical difference can be made without this kind of weakening of imperial consensus. And it’s impossible to imagine any of this transpiring without the escalation on campus—the will of very young militants to strike at the surface of US barbarism.
* * *
It’s fall. Meaning that the ball is once more in the students’ court. We know they face new obstacles, new threats. We know that many of them and their comrades face outrageous court cases and disciplinary hearings in the coming weeks and months. But we are astounded by the political distance they’ve already traversed. As the country goes stomping through the pageant of another dismal presidential contest, the noise and lights intended to wipe our minds of the ongoing carnage, nothing can thrust Gaza back to the political forefront with the power, clarity, and canniness of a revitalized student movement. The authoritarian response this spring is proof that the university remains a worthwhile target—given its placement at the blaring crossroads of so many interests, social processes, cultural manias, and moneyed cliques.
It’s also true that our belief in the campus movement comes from firsthand experience. We’re still trying to fully grasp what we saw and took part in—still stunned by it, still moved by it. And it happens that two of our group were in the West Bank for the first weeks of the mobilization. We’ll never forget being asked by an excited shepherd for more “news from the American universities”; we’re still thinking about the teenage girl, whose home was demolished by settlers, who spent the afternoon absorbed by TikToks of the encampment at Columbia, sitting on the floor of the tent where her family now sleeps.
Making chaos on campus—with or without encampments—is still valuable and still effective. Right now, it’s one of our most crucial tools. The students will decide how best to use it, now that summer’s over.
The Bad Side is a group in New York City.