Student Intifada: Reflections from the 2024 Palestine Solidarity Encampment Movement

A critical reflection from Unity and Struggle on the recent demonstrations on US campuses in solidarity with Palestine that exploded this summer.

In the Spring of 2024, Columbia University students led an encampment on campus calling on their university to disclose their financial investments and to divest from Israel. After months of sustained but ineffective protests against the Israeli military’s genocide against Palestinians, many were inspired by the Columbia occupation to start university occupations on over fifty campuses around the country.

Unity and Struggle members participated as staff, students, alumni, or nearby residents in encampments and protests in Georgia, Illinois, New York and Tennessee. In May, we hosted a call with members across cities to draw out lessons, successes, and limitations of the student intifada. We find inspiration and hope in the student movement, which represents a novel intervention in the ongoing genocide thus far. Below, we identify five contradictions, tensions, or questions that the student movement has posed. We hope that identifying questions can help revolutionaries critically analyze the moment to carry lessons onto the next phase of struggle for a free Palestine.

1. Temporal constraints

The encampments were subject to significant temporal pressures brought on by their spontaneous origins and the swiftness of university and police repression.

For example, though the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia had been planned by student activists for months, the initial camp only lasted for one day before being cleared by police. The longer-lasting encampment was thus a spontaneous, ad hoc one, established by onlookers and supporters watching the initial arrests. Many other encampments around the country were also spontaneous and quickly erected, though they certainly drew upon existing SJP, student activists, and Palestinian solidarity infrastructure, including an encampment how-to guide circulated by SJP.

The willingness of university administrators and local law enforcement to move in quickly was unexpected for Columbia University, whose previous President had repudiated the university’s use of police officers to quell the 1968 protests. (Lee Bollinger, in 2008, said: “You simply do not bring police onto a campus.” Citation here. While it has been reported that NYPD had been previously barred from arresting students since 1968, it should be noted that in 1996, 15 students were arrested by NYPD after a student occupation of Low Library for Ethnic Studies. Citation here.) Similarly, the use of chemical weapons on students and faculty by Georgia State Police within a few hours of the establishment of Emory’s camp came as a surprise after an occupation by Emory students against Cop City just last year faced relatively less repression.

Of course, police repression of student activists has been used in different parts of the country for some time now. In the UC system, student building occupations have been met with arrests and police violence for decades, including the system wide tuition-hike protests of the 2009-2010 school year. Many of these UC building occupations were daily cleared and re-established.

As news of swift repression of Palestine solidarity camps spread, newly establishing camps scrambled to prepare for police action. Yet, more preparedness did not necessarily translate into more success, especially given university and state willingness to use increasing levels of force against students and other protestors. We applaud those who moved to circulate the lessons from earlier encampment, occupation, or university movements and ask how in the future we might more quickly circulate those lessons while widely sharing the skills necessary to engage contextual strategic analysis.

At some schools, people thought about repression in terms of the history of their particular universities. In the future though, we’ll need to think of cross-campus, city-based histories as well as the national and international political situation. What was done at one school sometimes affected other nearby schools. For example, the media backlash in response to the use of chemical weapons at Emory may have contributed to the decision by the admin and police to refrain from chemical weapons at UGA. In an opposite example, the use of force by police at Columbia and CCNY may have given public sanction to the use of force at other NYC schools.

Temporal pressures meant that encampments often had to deal with the challenge of constructing organizational processes on the fly, under time constraints not often experienced by student organizers, who had often not established a system of operations or political unity in advance. While we highlight a number of tensions and contradictions later on in this piece, it’s worth noting that the constraint of time – the need to respond quickly, to defend camps immediately – was a significant external factor in making conflict resolution and strategic assessment difficult.

Finally, the timing of the encampment movement at the end of the school year meant that some university administrators could make the decision to wait the encampments out, wagering that students would disband voluntarily as the semester ended. In negotiations, some university administrators offered students the concession of holding discussion and votes on divestment after the end of the school year, in exchange for dismantling the camps. While some students may have initially wagered that universities would seek to protect the normal operation of commencements, the coming end of the school year more often became an important source of leverage for university admin. And while professors and graduate workers could use the threat of a grade strike at the end of the school year to disrupt campus operations, support for grade strikes were not widespread enough among faculty to be effective. The UC UAW’s attempt to go on a grade strike was halted by a judicial injunction, marking a limit to organized academic labor’s legal capacity to fight for non-academic causes and the tactic of withholding of grades to do so.

2. Negotiate or Escalate?

A central tension in the encampments was over whether students should seek to negotiate with administrators or to escalate their tactics to more militant confrontation. The threat of police violence and school disciplinary actions pushed some students to accede to administrative constraints in order to continue their encampments and prevent arrests. Admin requests often centered on restricting encampments to university affiliates only, preventing “outside agitators” from entering, or banning the use of tents for students to sleep in outdoors. Advocates for negotiation sometimes argued that negotiation was necessary to win student demands, to keep the encampments open so they could build greater power, and to keep students, particularly Palestinian and other students of color, safe from state violence.

Others advocated for a more militant strategy of escalation, believing that negotiation with administrators would be ultimately futile. This group argued that students needed to take on riskier tactics in order to assert greater power and solidarity with Palestine. This escalation strategy largely expressed itself through building takeovers (most notably at Cal Poly Humboldt and at the Hind’s Hall takeover at Columbia) and more active, militant camp defense against right-wing outsiders and police (picture UCLA), as opposed to principles of nonviolence and non-engagement.

Escalation sometimes meant that many seasoned and militant organizers, who were more likely to take on red roles, were arrested, suspended, and barred from returning to the encampments, sometimes leaving less experienced and less militant students to continue. This may explain the shift in later weeks at some campuses to escalations which were more limited – i.e., the taking of a building at UCLA or CUNY, but only for a few hours, with students dispersing before any arrests could be made. (Note, however, that at some universities suspensions failed to prevent some militant students from returning and continuing to escalate.)

As revolutionaries, we of course support such escalation tactics as a matter of principle. But we also think that the efficacy of negotiation or escalation depends upon the balance of forces within a given encampment’s particular context. More successful escalation, for example, would require a broad-base of support within the university beyond the student activist layer (staff, faculty, other students), and beyond the walls of the university (outside organizations, community support). The use of escalation tactics without buy-in from staff, in particular, could produce new rifts between students and custodians, maintenance workers, and dining hall workers: the very people who make the university run, but who are largely left out of conceptions of whom the university is comprised of.

Negotiation on the other hand, could concentrate power in the hands of a few select negotiators, going against the more militant desires of others in the encampments. At many campuses, the establishment of negotiating committees was an opaque process, and negotiators were sometimes not accountable to the larger student movement. Moreover, while negotiating was often framed as a necessary tactic to defend students, particularly Palestinian, Arab, Black and immigrant students, from violent repression, not all campuses faced the same immediate repression. At Northwestern, one of the earliest encampments to reach a deal with administration, the school’s location in the city of Evanston, and not Chicago, meant that the Mayor of Evanston would have had to first authorize CPD to enter Evanston and do an encampment sweep. That this leverage was not used was a missed opportunity. Students won some concessions – a center for Muslim students, and five scholarships for Palestinian students – but did not win any core demands around disclosure and divestment, other than vague promises of disclosure to “internal stakeholders” and the formation of a new “advisory committee.” While we think negotiation can be a useful tactic in some cases, it’s worth considering how concessions can be structured in a way that furthers future action around divestment.

We also welcome the increasing student interest in militant tactics and developing the skills necessary to mount vigorous defense. But it’s worth asking how the overwhelming force of state violence, and administrator and government willingness to deploy it, produces limits on the effectiveness of escalation. (More on this below.)

Finally, it’s worth considering what the theory is behind the strategy of escalation. At a basic level, spectacles of escalation certainly inspired other universities to throw down and to consider new tactics and more militant encampment defense. But what is the larger goal of escalation? It is it to invite repression and thereby lay bare the fascist character of the state and its support for Zionism? Is it to involve large numbers of people in the experience of militant struggle and push the limits of what’s possible? If so, we should ask: is that working? Moreover, how does escalation accord with the stated goal of the encampment movement of Palestinian liberation? How do the strategies of negotiation and escalation bring us further to achieving this?

We want to suggest that decisions to “escalate” may have also been motivated by emotional and subjective factors. After months of witnessing the Gaza genocide and failing to find meaningful ways to halt it, many of us felt hopeless and aware of the left’s limitations in finding an adequate strategy for the anti-war movement. Perhaps escalation served as a release valve for those bad feelings, a search for cathartic release in confrontation. In assessing escalation tactics next time, we should consider how our own feelings structure the kinds of actions we want to take.

3. Organization, decision-making, and conflict

In the encampments U&S members observed and participated in, occupations generally took 1 to 5 days of planning before the initial action. (The exception was the Columbia encampment, which appeared to have ‘dress rehearsals’ through rallies and disruptions and took several months of planning.) At some universities, however, there had already been months-long to years-long relationships/collaborations with SJPs and other groups on campus; at other campuses, there were relatively weak histories of Palestinian solidarity organizations.

For occupations that had a solid foundation of relationships, it seems that they were able to handle the stress test of repression and continue to organize, or bounced back quickly. More on this below. For those that didn’t have that foundation, it seemed that those coalitions could crumble once the state started to lash out with violence. Does this mean more time should be spent in the planning practicing, or relationship building before an action, especially on campuses not having a history of collaboration with different groups on Palestinian solidarity? Should a history of collaboration (or lack thereof) determine what kind of actions a coalition should/could take? From our experiences, it seems that more so than specific pre-planning, building relationships of trust was key to developing encampments which could respond to a constantly changing political environment.

Inevitably, conflicts between participants arose in these highly pressurized environments. For some encampments, there were no containers to hold these tensions, whether they were pre-existing or developed through the course of struggle. One tension that loomed in some encampments was how the occupations would interact with administrations. For example in Emory, the more radical wing seemed sidelined and helpless to prevent more liberal elements from engaging with admin and preventing escalation. ​​​​​​​

Tensions around race were also present in many encampments, from the perception of a lack of centering of Palestinian and Black voices, to outright anti-Black racism, to questions of safety for Black and Brown participants as repression became increasingly severe. Racial fault lines – including between Black and non-Black organizers, Palestinian and non-Palestinian POC organizers, and white and Black organizers – were present at many camps, though the political/tactical allegiances of different racial groups were not always consistent. For example, at some camps, people of color called for less militant tactics, seeing escalation as a form of white adventurism, while at other camps, people of color tended to represent the more militant wing. A myriad of contradictions present in the encampments sometimes led to a crumbling of trust and divisions between participants based on racial difference.

For example, at one university, the occupation was planned by a mix of students and nonstudents, but when it popped off, the nonstudents were rejected for their tactical choices and perceived as ‘white anarchists.’ Without a larger core of student support, and with the rejection of nonstudents, the occupation was unable to sustain itself. Alternatively, at another university, the radical faction arguing for more escalatory tactics was comprised mostly of Palestinian and other students of color. This group had to contend with a more moderate wing, more interested in negotiation and keeping the encampment closed to outsiders, and interpreted this as a function of their whiteness and elite university privilege.

At the heart of these conflicts was a strategic question: To hold a certain terrain, to push certain demands on certain powers, who needs to be at the center? Across campuses, differences in tactical approaches were interpreted in terms of racial divides, insider and outsider, though not always in the same way.

4. Encampment model, repression, and safety

The encampment model, most recently widely utilized in the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement, developed in a previous era in which the right to protest in public space was more widely accepted. After years of heavily militarized repression against Black liberation movements (Movement for Black Lives, the 2014-2015 Ferguson uprising, the 2016 Baltimore uprising, the 2020 national George Floyd Uprising), militarized domestic police tactics against protests has become standard. The encampment model itself may rely on bourgeois norms of public protest that have been eroded in recent years in some cities, especially those with large militarized police forces (such as NYC and Atlanta). While much thought went into safety planning at the encampments, we want to ask: in an era in which the state is willing to embrace violent repression against the children of the bourgeoisie, what degree of tactical training or student defense would have been able to withstand the NYPD’s violent seizure of Hind’s Hall?

Of course, not all encampments were cleared as immediately and spectacularly. In Humboldt, the Cal Poly encampment found itself able to hold space for longer, as local police had to coordinate with nearby police forces to have the numbers to break the building takeover. Every encampment had to assess its numbers, its mass appeal, and its preparedness, and at the same time compare these numbers with the size, power, and political support of the local police to crack down. How might these assessments lead to tactical retreat or tactical flexibility in the future?

That’s not to say there is no such thing as preparing for risks—many encampments used a color-coded system to identify who was willing to take certain kinds of risks or sized up the chances of repression and got out people who didn’t want to risk their jobs or safety. But as encampments continued and escalated, concerns about safety and repression sometimes centered around disparate force used against Palestinian, Black, and POC protestors.

Sometimes safety concerns were used to argue for a more conservative approach, to not escalate protest tactics. Other times, safety concerns were dismissed by white organizers who didn’t appreciate the disparities in experiences. At a Southern university, Black and brown students called off a building occupation after somebody, presumably a white person, graffitied in the building. The failure to recognize that the occupation was a more militant tactic than graffiti, or perhaps the failure to recognize that this action would not enjoy student support, ironically emboldened a conservative approach. This begs the question of how nonstudent militants might better read the room and join up with others to steer movements towards more confrontational tactics.

Additionally, the question of safety in pro-Palestine student protest environments is a complicated one. The threat of Zionist violence, and institutionalized Zionist power, raises the stakes of what one might reasonably expect to face for protesting. For example, at Columbia students faced direct violence such as being targeted by a motorist and being sprayed with chemical weapons. Similarly, students can now expect to face repression backed by Columbia’s Task Force on Anti-semitism, which made tamping down student protests its number one concern; there are more and more reports of Zionist students manipulating Title VI compliance to get staff or faculty fired; and in at least one case students have started suing the university for “lost time” in class due to protests, setting a prescendent of financial consequences for allowing protests to continue.​​​​​​​ On the one hand, the space Zionists are given to commit direct violence, and shape administration-led repression opens up doors to discrimination that particularly affects students of color, Muslim and hijabi students the most. On the other, anyone openly fighting in solidarity with Palestine is a potential target.

Lastly, the encampment movements have struggled to balance objective threats of safety with their ability to organize. Many questions have come up around how to integrate the hundreds of newly activated campus organizers while maintaining a high level of security. In most cases, students are prioritizing safety over pragmatism, for example creating and burning endless numbers of chats, setting admin-only posting permissions, and setting expectations that decisions be made very quickly among small numbers of people. While the spirit of such decisions is to protect one another, all of these examples have down sides, such as making chat admins and student leaders more vulnerable, unable to reproduce themselves with new organizers, unable to share information quickly or effectively, and tends toward an authoritarianism many in the movement grow to resent. In many cases the secrecy and endless lists of “best security practices” are simply not rooted in reality. While the balance between security and ability to organize is always a difficult tension to navigate, and is one that exists generally on the left beyond the student intifada. However, it is important for organizers to ask themselves why they are taking certain precautions, if it these precautions are based in a material assessment of the security threats they are currently facing or might expect to face, and how these measures will support organizing, rather than hinder it.

5. Bourgeois Rights or Free Palestine?

Through national chats, online comments and posts, and on-the-ground discussions, a tension developed between centering Palestinian liberation and engaging with eroding bourgeois norms or rights.

The demand to focus on Palestine and not focus on the rights to protest, free speech, or assembly was widespread. We applaud the resistance to collapse the student intifada into discourses about liberal rights.

At one university, students invited in non-students to help plan and carry out the occupation but stressed that the occupation would stay centered on Palestine. When repression came down, students rejected support from faculty when that support focused on students’ right to protest at the expense of focusing on Palestinian liberation. This decision begged the question of how to form alliances while holding down some core principles and not losing the political content. It also raised questions about the role of labor. Faculty and staff defending what they might view as workers’ rights (right to dissent, right to assemble) and organizing within a repressive labor context (a ‘right to work’ state, weak tenure protections) offered support that fell short of student expectations. We raise that faculty and staff defense of bourgeoius rights ultimately could be used as an organizing opportunity, to divide the enemy (the admin) and make allies who might later escalate with our support. This kind of defensive united front–making a base of support as broad as possible–can have broader political effects in cities or even nationally as opinions about mayors or police shift.

Conclusion 

These can be demoralizing times: despite the urgency and necessity to win and stop the genocide, the left has found itself struggle to find the tactics needed to achieve victory. But the student intifada radicalized large numbers of young people, producing a generation to have anti-imperialism at the center of their politics, no easy feat in the United States. Perhaps we can think of it as a rehearsal to sharpen our collective skills. It will take many more battles to free Palestine.

Obviously, however, rehearsal is not sufficient. Again, there’s urgency. The school year is just beginning. Some possible ways to continue to wage the struggle: militants could coordinate blockades of logistics infrastructure; a mass movement in the streets could erupt; continued campus organizing over summer to prepare for a militant fall. One potential new strategy we’re already seeing are the rolling encampments at Columbia and UCLA in which students target particular events but disperse before arrests happen.

We would encourage students to not only study the movements that have come before them (including struggles more recent and potenitally relevant than 1968 or 1985), but to pay close attention to the coordinated moves and countermoves we are starting to see nationally. For example, there may be some movement over time to further restrict democracy on campus (consider for example University of Kentucky’s proposal to abolish its University Senate) – how might the student intifada respond by forcing new avenues of democracy on campus? A similar method could apply to targets and escallation plans – how might students work to identify and exploit fractures on campus rather than continue to make demands on immovable targets?

Additionally, the more layers students are able to bring into this fight the better. Not only does it make the movement for Palestine stronger, it opens up the spectre of what is possible on many fronts, which weakens the ruling class creates a stronger position for fights in the longer term. While we applaud the student intifada for keeping “all eyes on Palestine,” organizers must remember that the fight for Palestine is not wholly separate from fights around unions or workplace issues, to reduce (or completely abolish!) the purview of police, to open up access to higher education to new layers, or finding meaningful ways of collaborating with community groups, etc.

And, finally, we must keep our eyes on repression! What are the implications for the fact that there are no “safe” spaces to protest anymore, not even elite universities? Perhaps some will be scared, perhaps some will decide to move protest off the campus, perhaps some will become even more emboldened. This is all maybe dependent upon the outcome of pending court and expulsion cases, but either way it is something to track.