Palestine from UCLA: The Camp(US), The Worker, The Archive

By Salih Can Aciksoz (UCLA), Hannah Appel (UCLA), Susan Slyomovics (UCLA), and Bharat Jayram Venkat (UCLA)

All this pales alongside everything happening in Palestine.

The Palestine solidarity encampments that sprang up on college campuses across North America and beyond are not only enactments of solidarity for the cause of Palestinian liberation and protest against the Israeli occupation and apartheid regimes that culminated with the genocide in Gaza; they are also tests of the potentials and limits, possibilities and impossibilities of free speech, academic freedom, public space, and more broadly, political life in the heart of the empire. As such, the encampments, and their violent repression and dismantling by state power, make visible aspects of our prevailing political circumstances–which are also our academic and labor circumstances–that are not necessarily evident in their absence. 

In this short piece, we offer our reflections on what we, as UCLA faculty members, anthropologists, state employees, and activists from very different backgrounds have learned from our engagements with the UCLA encampment. We organize our piece around three interrelated questions: How do the utopian and dystopian aspects of our camp(US) resonate with the spatio-political dynamics of other camp(US) spaces in California and elsewhere? How are the encampments connected with ongoing labor justice and academic freedom struggles on our campuses? What kinds of fugitive archives have been produced through this moment?

THE CAMP(US)

The encampment was a space of beauty, creativity, self-organization, and education, militantly peaceful in contrast to the vitriolic self-proclaimed Zionists who came every evening to taunt and shout slurs from beyond its borders (Nersessian 2024). Student-led encampments created space for new forms of learning and transmission. At UCLA, the daily posted schedule included time to discuss readings and ideas–from the work of Franz Fanon to the political situation in Eritrea, as well as guest lectures from faculty members, activists, and visiting poets, amongst others. Faculty hung out at an information table, stocked books for the “Edward Said” library, and in the same fluid allocation of camp spaces, participated in study groups and attended Muslim and Jewish prayer services. A mask mandate was implemented to protect vulnerable members. There was free food, water, sunscreen, and medical care for everyone, stocked with supplies donated by the larger community of support, one that extended far beyond the edges of the encampment into the sprawling geographies of southern California. The encampment was a site of prefigurative politics. It was university life as it could be, one that was structured through principled learning and struggle, mutual aid and mutual education, rather than the neoliberal logics that have taken over higher education. It was not only a rejection of the politics of the university–a tear in the fabric of the order of things–but a temporary experiment with a utopian alternative. It was exemplary of how things could be otherwise.

Yet, the encampment was reclassified as unpermitted by UCLA’s Chancellor Block, enabling an arrayed set of police forces to criminalize the students involved as well as the very space itself. In the early morning hours of Thursday May 2, the encampment was destroyed, the space was cleared, and protestors were violently scattered or arrested. That night police made over 200 arrests, most of them students. In the multi-agency policing regime that followed, UCLA spent 12 million dollars (Steinman, 2024) on armed private security forces who prowled campus for months, demanding ID cards at entrances and stalking students and faculty into buildings.In an email communication to a larger listserv of faculty supporting students, one professor shared that a graduate student had reached out to them in fear after security guards, with hands on holsters, had followed the graduate student into a UCLA academic building, and then into a room.

While recognizing the encampment’s utopian aspirations, we must also attend to its reclassification and destruction, because it reveals a broader pattern. The camp itself is prominent in anthropological literature – protest encampments, detention camps, refugee (Feldman, Peteet, Malkki 1995), transit and internment camps (Arendt 1976, Starn 1986, Katz 2022). Recently, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a ban on homeless camps by the city of Grants Pass, Oregon. Wielding the ruling like a cudgel, California’s Governor Newsom swiftly called upon cities to take a no-tolerance, brutal approach to homelessness, insisting that they either dismantle homeless encampments or have their funding withheld. Similarly, refugee camps and temporary shelters in Gaza have repeatedly been the target of Israeli strikes, even as it is Israel itself that forces people into these settings. Finally, the University of California system has preemptively cracked down on student protest encampments for the coming academic year, putting in place even stricter rules that forbid encampments and, similar to the situation with homeless encampments, threatening to withhold funds if these policies are not put into place.

The camp has a dual existence, utopian and criminal. Arguably, the two are connected. In our view, it is precisely its utopianism, its challenge to state power and the status quo politics (which include choking the university of public funds, centering power in the upper echelons of administration, and supporting genocide), that make it a target for reprisal. Claims of the camp itself as a site of disorder and violence are an alibi for the state’s own violence. Nowhere was this clearer than on UCLA’s campus, when students, faculty, and staff in the encampment were brutally attacked by a mixed group of mostly men that included self-declared Zionists and Proud Boys in their ranks. Many faculty and students suffered injuries, including lacerations from pipes and projectiles as well as attacks with mace or pepper spray. The LAPD assembled behind the attackers and watched the events unfold for hours. Only one of the attackers was eventually arrested, months later, after a CNN investigative report. Charges were quickly dropped. Nevertheless, the attack became a convenient excuse for Chancellor Block to re-describe the peaceful encampment as a magnet for violence (the direction of the violence, against students, is irrelevant to his claim), thereby necessitating its removal. To be clear, the extension of this logic would also require the removal of any student who has been stalked or attacked for any reason. By this logic, the victim is the problem, not the attacker. In so doing, Block effectively conscripted these Zionist, white supremacist attackers into the ranks of the repressive state apparatus (if they weren’t already there). What they started, an assemblage of police forces from across California finished the next night.

THE WORKER

Faculty members with the privilege of tenure–true of each of us –have extraordinary privilege and latitude of expression, action, and (though little explored) organizing. And yet, historically, when the professoriate was for the most part male and white in the late 1970s, the majority of faculty at the University of California (with the notable exception of UC Santa Cruz) voted down protections afforded by unionization because intellectual work was not seen as a labor issue. As some of us and our colleagues were violently beaten by those self-proclaimed Zionists and Proud Boys, and the following night, beaten and arrested by LA-area law enforcement, our labor conditions were clearly violated. The University of California is a workplace and one cannot labor without the precondition of academic freedom: in this case, the capacity to teach, talk, and protest about Palestine.

Bringing together labor and academic freedom issues, the Faculty Association of UCLA spear-headed an “Unfair Practice Charge” (State of California, 2024) against our employer, the University of California (Crosnoe, 2024). This document emerges from a proto-union, a faculty entity which has the right to indict the university by seeking legal remedies through the state of California’s Public Employment Relations Board (PERB). It builds on the prior unprecedented strike of United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 4811, the union which represents forty-eight thousand University of California workers. As the first union strike on behalf of Palestine solidarity, striking workers declare that the administration’s actions constitute unfair labor practices and demand disclosure and divestment related to UC financing Israel’s war on Gaza.

The faculty’s 581-page charge is ethnographically rich and constitutes an archive of the sort we talk about in the following section. The document includes descriptive task force reports, text messages with the administration, collective faculty and department letters of support, lengthy lists of academic signatories, and local newspaper and photo coverage. It also responds to new, ruthless administrative directives on faculty conduct during strikes - you cannot talk about the strike in your classroom; you cannot talk about the strike with academic workers - the contravention of which leads to consequential disciplinary actions threatening academic freedom. These restrictions are significant for potentially hundreds of professors at UCLA who “research and teach on labor law, labor-capital relations, Israel/Palestine, anti-Palestinian/ Arab/Muslim racism, university governance, socially responsible investment policy, imperialism, colonialism, and other related topics. UC’s rules essentially make these topics off-limits. As such, on its face, the rule purports to dramatically curtail academic freedom” (ULP 2024, 12). This builds on longstanding UCLA administration efforts to constrain the ability to teach or present student or faculty-initiated programming about Palestine. In 2011, for a review essay on the state of public anthropology, Nicolas de Genova noted UCLA’s exceptionally chilling atmosphere, where “anthropologists continue to face back-lash, criticism, and censure. “Campus Watch,” a project of the right-wing Middle East Forum, “monitors” Middle East studies in North America, publishing censures of academic conferences and classes” (De Genova 2011, 495; see also Goldberg and Makdisi, 2009; and more recently Kelley, 2024; Palestine Legal, 2023; Deeb and Winegar, 2024).

For years, western academic institutions have produced an ever-expanding class of overpaid administrators, courted a raft of donors’ narcissistic gifts, and normalized investments in weapons of war. This moment of union activism and widespread student, staff, and faculty-supported strikes at the University of California–alongside and in support of the Palestine solidarity encampments–demand a rethinking of what it means to organize collectively as faculty on college campuses, building power not only as scholars but also as workers to force our institutions onto the right side of history. 

THE ARCHIVE

Look here and here. The first is the live archive of UCLA’s chapter of Faculty for Justice in Palestine. The second is the live archive of a group of UCLA faculty who originally convened to support University of California-wide UAW strikes in 2022 and continued organizing to defend student protestors. All of us are affiliated with both groups.

We four cannot narrate the power and complexity of what has happened on our campus in the wake of October 7th, but we can draw your attention to the archives–these two and more–as repositories of extraordinary narration that already exist. These are repositories of action, and they might in turn move all of us to act, to organize, to countenance the role university campuses–and each of us therein–must play in the struggle “to stop funding this occupation, apartheid and ongoing genocide, which is a culmination of 75 years of settler colonial oppression and brutalization of indigenous Palestinians by the occupying Israeli state.”    

These archives narrate eight extreme months at UCLA. On the one hand, November 2023 to June 2024 were full of extraordinary solidarity. Deep organizing from Students for Justice in Palestine, Muslim Students Association, Jewish Voice for Peace, Faculty for Justice in Palestine and the UAW disrupted UCLA’s complicity in genocide. As college campuses drew the eyes of the world, UCLA students and workers built a beautiful encampment and organized the first labor strike in US history in solidarity with Palestine. On the other hand–and often in response–the University administration, off-campus Zionist agitators, white supremacists, and of course, the police met that deep organizing with physical, verbal, and bureaucratic violence. Between those extremes the archives also hold more indeterminate spaces. For instance, the UCLA Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Muslim, and Anti-Arab Racism, (which includes anthropologists Aomar Boum and Shannon Speed) was convened by and charged to report to the same UCLA administration responsible for so much violence. The Task Force has used their administrative sanction to produce two extraordinary reports, intentionally and explicitly exceeding their mandate, writing “While we were not tasked with producing a report, the violence against our students has occasioned this action.”   

While there is a long history of Palestine solidarity organizing and its suppression on the UCLA campus, the UCLA chapter of Faculty for Justice in Palestine convened in winter of 2023, declaring in our Core Principles Agreement, “We are forming in the heart of the 2023 Israeli bombardment of the besieged Gaza Strip which has resulted in catastrophic loss of life, destruction of critical infrastructure, unparalleled forced displacement, and unimaginable carnage. We understand that the current genocide is rooted in nearly a century of settler colonial violence waged upon Palestinian life and land and that so long as freedom is deferred, violence, death, and exodus will only continue.” We publicly announced our formation in the UCLA Daily Bruin in January 2024. “Despite the university’s position and lack of protection, we as UCLA Faculty for Justice in Palestine choose to condemn racial genocide in our classrooms and the public sphere, support and defend our students and exercise our rights to academic freedom. We reiterate that we believe in justice and freedom for Palestine, are committed to our responsibility as teachers and scholars to teach and produce knowledge about Palestine.” By April more than 1400 University of California faculty and staff had signed a letter supporting the right to protest in the UC system, stating that  “Student protests at the University of California change the world. Entire academic departments owe their existence to nonviolent student protests at the University of California. The nationwide student movement to end the Vietnam War can trace its beginnings to nonviolent student protests at the University of California.” This letter was covered in the Los Angeles Times.

Students set up UCLA’s first Palestine Solidarity Encampment at the end of April. After beautiful days of teach-ins and discussions, seder and salat, and harrowing nights of escalating self-proclaimed Zionist aggression, 48 hours of horrifying Zionist, white supremacist and police violence cleared the encampment in the early morning hours of May Day. Eighteen collective statements in support of the encampment came out within the week, from the Departments of Chicana/o and Central American Studies, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Institute on Environment and Sustainability, UCLA Black, Latinx, and Native American (BLNA) Faculty Collective of the David Geffen School of Medicine, Mathematics Department, Political Science, Sociology, Labor Studies and others.        

There is so much more in these archives–testimonials from volunteer medics who attended to students wounded by Zionist and white supremacist attacks; amicus briefs authored by Fair and Just Prosecution countering a case brought in US District Court charging the UCLA encampment with anti-semitism;  guidance for how faculty can support the UAW strike and then revised guidance after the UC system took a union-busting page from Starbucks and Amazon playbooks by jurisdiction-shopping for a conservative Southern California judge who offered a temporary injunction against the strike. These archives, among countless others, offer a record of struggle. A record of building power. These archives do not ask us to look backward, as archives are often imagined and theorized, but rather urge us to move forward, toward the beginning. Disclose. Divest. We will not stop, we will not rest. Free Palestine. 

References

Arendt, Hannah. 1976.  The Origins of Totalitarianism. San Diego: Harcourt.

Crosnoe, Alexandra, 2024. “UCLA Faculty Association files unfair labor practice charge against the UC.” Daily Bruin, June 3:  https://dailybruin.com/2024/06/03/ucla-faculty-Association-files-unfair-labor-practice-charge-against-the-uc

De Genova, Nicholas. 2011. “Year That Trembled and Reel’d”: Reflections on Public Anthropology a Decade after 9/11: Review Essay.” American Anthropologist, 113 (3): 494–5.

Deeb, Lara and Jessica Winegar. 2024. “Resistance to Repression and Back Again: The Movement for Palestinian Liberation in US Academia.” Middle East Critique, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2024.2375669

Katz, Irit. 2022. The Common Camp: Architecture of Power and Resistance in Israel–Palestine. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Kelley, Robin D. G. “UCLA’s Unholy Alliance.” Boston Review, May 18. https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/uclas-unholy-alliance/

Goldberg, David Theo and Saree Makdisi. 2009. “The Trial of Israel’s Campus Critics.” Tikkun 24 (5): 39-41. https://doi.org/10.1215/08879982-2009-5015

Malkki, Liisa. 1995. Purity in Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology Among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Nersessian, Anahid. 2024. “Under the Jumbotron. May 6, 2024. London Review of Books: https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/may/under-the-jumbotron.

Palestine Legal, 2023. Reverberations of October 7: Mobilization against Genocide Undeterred By Peak Anti-Palestinian Repression: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/548748b1e4b083fc03ebf70e/t/664fbc07860df7037ba81300/1716501546613/Pal+Legal+Report+Reverberations+of+Oct+7th

Starn, Orin. 1986. “Engineering Internment: Anthropologists and the War Relocation Authority.” American Ethnologist 13 (4): 700–720.

Steinman, Sharla. 2024. “UCLA’s contracts with CHP, LAPD reveal costs associated with police on campus.” Daily Bruin, July 23. https://dailybruin.com/2024/05/30/uclas-Contracts-with-chp-lapd-reveal-costs-associated-with-police-on-campus

State of California, Public Employment Relations Board. 2024. Unfair Practice Charge. September 19. https://cucfa.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/2024091911030320240919FirstAmendedChargeTOC.pdf