Why We Must Support the UArizona Student Encampment

Reflection on the importance of supporting the growing anti-war movement.

Before a reader jumps to any preconditioned presumption, I’ll qualify as such: I was raised in a relatively conservative Jewish household. I am a longtime Sonoran Desert dweller, I earned three degrees at the University of Arizona (’13, ’16, ’21), and my doctoral dissertation focused on the Israeli occupation of Palestine. But more than any of that, I am a person trying to move through this world with great care for others, for the land.

Are you one, too?

On March 26, 2024, Vanderbilt students began a sit-in that’s since inspired a mass mobilization across university campuses globally. Columbia University’s “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” began April 17; on April 18, University President Minouche Shafik authorized the New York Police Department to sweep the encampment. The students since rebuilt and dug in deeper, with support from community members and neighboring schools like NYU, The New School, CUNY and scores more, gaining momentum for what some are calling the ‘Student Intifada’ (uprising).

As I write, over 100 encampments are blossoming worldwide, from Cal Poly Humboldt to the Sorbonne in Paris, and beyond. There have been more than 30 police raids in these spaces—spaces founded on peace, prayer, radical inclusion and learning, and the co-envisioning of new worlds. As I write, the Israeli Occupying Forces (IOF) have massacred more than 34,500 since October 7, 2023; including unrelenting horrors such as, more recently, the hundreds of bodies—decomposing, with zip tied hands—discovered in mass graves near al-Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis.

We’ve collectively borne witness to the genocide of Palestinians over these 206 days (and counting), and, we’ve taken note of the University of Arizona’s silence as every last university across Gaza has been decimated—over 6,000 students murdered, alongside 261 teachers and 95 university professors. This scholasticide is part of the intentional effort to comprehensively annihilate Palestinian society—to destroy learning, life.

On October 11, 2023, President Robert Robbins’s Executive Office emailed the greater University of Arizona community: “As a public university, we have both the obligation and the opportunity to support and defend free speech and open dialogue. We recognize that the First Amendment protects speech and demonstrations, even for ideas and opinions that most find objectionable or hateful. I want to be clear that SJP is not speaking on behalf of our university. But, they have the constitutional right to hold their views and to express them in a safe environment.” This email framed the community’s outrage and ambitions to protest atrocity as a threat, as dissent to be squandered. This was further underscored by the University of Arizona’s Office of Public Safety’s April 19, 2024 communications, warning parents and members of the campus community against student groups’ plans for “Israeli Apartheid Week.”

Whose public? Whose safety?

Who amongst us gets to decide the lives, the collective actions, the futures worth protecting?

The students and their allies involved with the University of Arizona Palestine solidarity encampment are worth protecting. Are worth uplifting and centering. As educators, as a community, we must learn from and center their demands, which include: We know that the UA is not only complicit in this war, but is an active player, profiting from the manufacturing of weapons that inflict irreparable damage in Palestine, as well as locally, across the US/Mexico borderlands / unceded O’odham and Pascua Yaqui territories. This call urges public solidarity, accountability through transparency, divestment from the occupation, an end to the repression and surveillance of student organizations, alignment the US Campaign for Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) and demilitarization.

Attune to these calls for justice, focus on dismantling this war machine. To understand and support these encampments is to better grasp the interconnectedness of struggle and work together towards a world without borders.

photo: Indybay.org