Introduction
This is a write-up from an event from the Leading Change Network’s (LCN) Learning Series on Organizing for Liberation: Hope & Solidarity in Global Student Movements for Palestine that took place online on the 12th August, 2024.
Over 60 people from 14 countries joined to hear stories from frontline student organizers in the U.S., Canada, and France. It was moderated by Besan Jaber (activist, researcher, and analyst at Georgetown University) and the panel featured these diverse speakers:
- Corinne Shanahan, student organizer, Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine, US
- Ryna Workman, NYU Palestine Solidarity Coalition, US
- Sara Rasikh, U of T Occupy for Palestine, Canada
- Khaled Abu-Qare, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Sciences Po, France
We explored key themes around hope, resilience, and community building that have kept the momentum going.
It has been a tough year, full of stress, full of tensions, full of emotions, but it has also been a year full of hope, full of inspiration. Our community has grown. We started with a couple of students – now, there’s hundreds of people who are proud to wear the keffiyeh at Sciences Po. There are hundreds who are chanting for Palestine. The silence has been broken within many spaces. And that’s a very important achievement when it comes to professors, students, and academics. So yes, it has been a long year, but it’s also a year to remember on different levels. It’s a year to remember that millions have marched for Palestine across the streets. Millions have organized. There will always be hope because we have a just cause. We are inspired by the resilience of our people. – Khaled Abu-Qare, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)-Sciences Po
Key Lessons from the Student Movements for Palestine
Throughout the panel discussion, the speakers shared important lessons and reflections from their work in the student movements for Palestinian liberation. While many of these lessons are rooted in the unique context of university spaces, they are also universal to liberation organizing across various contexts.
Disrupting the status quo is effective in university spaces that emphasize politeness and respectability over true liberation
In academia, decolonization is often discussed abstractly, divorced from concrete reparations. This stems from an emphasis on politeness and respectability over radical change and true collectivism. The speakers criticized academia’s tendency to reduce decolonization to essays and lectures without acknowledging its role in oppressive systems.
Recognizing the inefficacy of obedience in such cases, student organizers have sought to organize for concrete material wins. Drawing inspiration from other wins such as the movement for fossil fuel divestment, they have sought to bring focus on the money by demanding divestment from weapons manufacturers and instead reinvestment in Palestinian liberation. By disrupting “business as usual,” we can make meaningful progress towards decolonization.
Being in the university space is a really interesting space to think about anti colonial liberation…You cannot say that you’re fighting for that without being willing to make sacrifices and acknowledging your positionality in all of this. I think that coming to terms with that this year has been really eye opening, and really made me very appreciative of what the encampments were doing in terms of being a space of collective education, and pushing back against this idea that universities have to have the monopoly on what it means to learn and grow together. My vision of anti-colonial liberation is when we can learn together without being a part of these oppressive spaces and systems that come with being a member of the University. – Ryna Workman, NYU Palestine Solidarity Coalition
The civil way of protesting things according to our governments, especially in the West, means obedience. It means that you need to keep your mouth shut and just move on but I don’t think that works anymore; I think this movement has really invited everyone around us to think of the ways we need to redefine what democracy means. Although there is a long history of academic work rethinking democracy, now this time [we are thinking] in terms of material and physical action. We are applying what we think democracy means, what progress means, what civil institutions mean, what law means. – Besan Jaber, activist, researcher, and scholar at Georgetown University
When the university took us to court with the injunction, they asked the judge to rule that students must get permission before protesting in the future. This reveals how threatening protest is to the status quo and how unwilling the university is to acknowledge or allow its true purpose. Disrupting business as usual, especially economically, is how real progress is made on demands. That is something we’ve learned. – Sara Rasikh, U of T Occupy for Palestine, Canada
The importance of distinguishing lack of comfort from lack of safety in university spaces
Student organizers have experienced that universities often restrict tactics that cause administration discomfort, claiming that they make other students feel unsafe. It’s crucial to distinguish between the lack of comfort and actual lack of safety. However, there is an over-conflation of comfort and safety, and universities often prioritize making others feel comfortable over ensuring actual safety of the students. The speakers also reflected on the importance of building community power to push back against universities’ attempt to control the narrative and dictate what one can or cannot do.
When we talked about the IOF killing this many people in October alone, and we wrote that on a chalkboard, the University said that it made people feel unsafe. That didn’t make anyone unsafe. Seeing the names of martyrs under the age of one on a chalkboard does not make you feel unsafe; it makes you uncomfortable. You like to pretend that you don’t know what’s happening, but that doesn’t make you unsafe. What makes you unsafe is when you have police officers in every single NYU building all of a sudden because of claims against your safety. That makes students unsafe.
To me, respect is also about leaving room for people to vocalize their own stories and perspectives and, again, not taking it personally. This dichotomy of safety and discomfort is something I’ve been thinking a lot about. How do we make sure we are creating safe spaces but not coddling people for their comfort? Because that’s not how we grow, that’s not how we change. Seeing the University weaponize that safety aspect has been really scary to witness because it’s putting a lot of other people in harm’s way. – Ryna Workman, NYU Palestine Solidarity Coalition
Building coalition with other movements and addressing our own biases and positionality enables us to grow stronger in solidarity
When there are a myriad of issues to solve in the world, we can sometimes fall into the mindset that organizing for one of those issues means not organizing for another. Student organizers, however, have found strength in recognizing abundance over competing for resources, and in naming the interconnectedness of issues. For example, in encampments that defy property relations, students faced brutalization and eviction – a reality commonly faced by unhoused residents, predominantly in black and indigenous communities. By recognizing this overlap, students can fight against the same enemy with these communities, using encampments as a tactic to delegitimize the foundations of the settler colonial state.
Student organizers have also addressed anti-blackness and racism in their organizing work, as students bring their biases and worldviews into the organizing space, and as universities play a role in gentrifying and displacing local people. By constantly learning and working toward collective liberation, student organizers are able to build power through the interconnected nature of struggles, centering solidarity with Palestine.
Members from the audience also shared their takeaways regarding the importance of solidarity. Some mentioned that the solidarity across all the ‘Us’-es and identities that we hold in this movement has been a major source of hope. Others reflected on the importance of global solidarity – from the student protests in Bangladesh to those standing up to the wave of islamophobia in India – and how they realized that it is all connected to the Palestinian cause. As one speaker articulated, “Solidarity is the backbone of resistance as a whole.”
To me, anti-colonial liberation means dismantling the structures that not only perpetuate oppression but also create justification within society and our consciousness for the existence of that oppression.
It’s about reclaiming the right to exist, dignity, and autonomy. For me, it also means acknowledging my positionality. I live in Tkaronto, and I am an uninvited settler on this land. So, when I stand up for Palestine, it goes hand in hand with supporting landback movements in the city and across Turtle Island. Another thing that keeps me going is the awareness that my tuition money, and of course my tax dollars, are complicit in war crimes, apartheid, and genocide. – Sara Rasikh, U of T Occupy for Palestine, Canada
A good example of recognizing shared struggle and, along with that, recognizing a common enemy, is the the solidarity we saw from Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard, which is the group advocating for an end to fossil fuels on campus. They were heavily involved in our encampment, very supportive, participated in the encampment, and shared a lot of resources on the back end about divestment campaigns. That was a really good example of solidarity on that front. But [there was] also a recognition that Palestine is an environmental issue, and that gains towards one don’t detract from gains towards the other. Recognizing that there’s abundance for all of us, and not having a spirit of competitiveness or urgency or scarcity in organizing is really important when there are shared issues across struggles. – Corinne Shanahan, student organizer, Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine, US
If there weren’t people in the encampments who were black, who were pointing out these problems, they wouldn’t have been addressed at all. And I think that’s the harm. And that’s why I am inspired by the collective nature of the encampments, even though it really puts a spotlight on the things we have to work on. I’m very grateful for that, because I don’t know what this movement would look like if we decided the same way the University decides that Palestine is not an issue, or if in our own movement, we decided anti-blackness was not something we cared about. And so to me, it is this tension that I think is healthy and good for movements to have, because that’s how you move forward. – Ryna Workman, NYU Palestine Solidarity Coalition
Q&A with the Participants
The audience actively engaged through live discussion and the Zoom chat, asking questions and raising various points for further conversations. Below we introduce some questions and the responses from the speakers.
On anger and frustration…
One such question was: How can we channel the frustration and anger we feel from insensitive/unempathetic/harmful zionist narratives into such meaningful efforts day after day?
It’s an issue that we face on a daily basis, especially if you have personal connections. You have personal stories. You are having to deal with all this with your life, your work, your family, your studies. And in addition, you’re basically demanding an institution or a state or a regime to take a position against a genocide. And it is a challenge. We are all angry. We have the right to be angry.
It’s important, I believe, to acknowledge our feelings, to acknowledge our anger communicated through our community within our comrades. But it’s also important to always remember that we are fighting for a just cause, and that it’s a marathon. And sometimes in a marathon, you have to be strategic in how you act on your anger. This is something we would face a lot of times; there are many provocations when it comes to organizing for Palestine by Zionist groups, even by the institutions. There are traps that are set to make you look bad in the media to say ‘These groups of people who are organizing, they are dangerous. They are making people uncomfortable, unsafe. They’re not doing anything good.’ And these traps aim to basically intimidate you. They aim to make you think and say, like, okay, I should keep support for Palestine in my heart. I shouldn’t organize. I shouldn’t act on it.
It’s important that this anger is communicated because it’s not healthy to keep it inside. It’s important that it is shared with your communities. And it’s also important to understand the strategy you’re applying because it differs. What you can do in France is not the same as you can do in Canada, maybe, or in the US, or in other spaces. – Khaled Abu-Qare, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)-Sciences P
On protecting ourselves and building trust…
There was a lot of interest from the attendees around the question of how to build trust and protect each other against the risks of Zionist harassment and intimidation. People shared tips on how to onboard new members, starting with low risk roles that do nor compromise the big project, and providing a mentor or a partner to walk with members as they learn the protocols at the actions.
Additionally, protecting data and privacy was brought up as an urgent topic. Advice was shared from choosing strong passwords (16+ passwords) and checking public information about self online, to striking a balance on LinkedIn between career growth and not leaving oneself vulnerable to the particularly vile harassment and doxxing campaigns that people have been subject to for their Palestine activism.
There was an event at school that we were planning to disrupt. It was a celebration for students who were halfway through law school, and we were planning to go and hold a banner, and also hand out flyers. It was a situation where there were new people who wanted to participate. So we assigned new folks to low-risk roles where their participation wouldn’t compromise the higher-risk roles, and their participation wasn’t totally critical to the success of the project. However, they could still feel like they had participated in something meaningful and made a difference by doing it. So, finding ways that you can onboard people in low-risk ways that don’t compromise the success of a larger project was really successful for us. We ended up handing out tons of flyers, and it really radicalized the people that participated. Ensuring that when people do participate, you circle back with them after and continue to build that trust over the course of several actions was key. – Corinne Shanahan, student organizer, Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine, US
At the end of the session, the Zoom chat was filled with care and gratitude for one another. One audience member summed it up perfectly: “A key takeaway is finding my invalidated emotions of community here, even though briefly.” We hope to continue holding these spaces to share our feelings and learnings with each other, building hope and solidarity through the agency and power of those who are resisting, and have resisted in the past, colonial oppression.
Resources Shared from the Session
- “I grant you refuge,” by the Palestinian author Hiba Abu Nada, who was martyred by an Israeli airstrike on Oct 20 2023
- Global Solidarity Tactics for Gaza
- The Silenced Project: Stories from Solitary Confinement, A podcast with advocates for prison reform in the US state of Michigan, fighting to put an end to the practice of solitary confinement in their state
About the Series
The Organizing for Liberation Learning Series seeks to delve into the inspiring stories of resistance, exploring how individuals and communities have found hope and power amidst adversity. By examining past liberation struggles and analyzing current Palestinian organizing efforts, we aim to build a space for collective learning, reflection, and action. The series consists of public events focused on uplifting stories and experiences of those organizing for liberation, as well as action learning circles, a close-knit virtual space focused on continued learning, solidarity, and action. You can read more about the series here.