One year ago today, students from UW-Madison established the Gaza Solidarity Encampment on Library Mall. As tens of thousands of Palestinians were killed, violently displaced by Israeli genocide, and forced to live in encampments, our convictions compelled us to stand in solidarity. We could not sit idly by while students in Gaza watched Israel intentionally demolish their libraries, schools, city centers and, in time, every single university in the Gaza strip. The encampment was also personal to us as UW-Madison students: our university contributes to this ongoing genocide through irresponsible financial investments tied to Israeli militarism.
What has become manifestly clear is that there are no checks on Israel’s aggression. We are 570 days into this genocidal onslaught against Gaza. Israel continues its widespread bombardment of Gaza and has not allowed food to enter Gaza since March 2nd. Our political elites safeguard this impunity, and our public institutions help foot the bill. As a consequence, Israel continues to massacre EMTs, healthcare professionals, refugee camps, children, journalists, and others without consequence.
Our encampment had two central demands: to disclose university investments and divest from companies complicit in the Israeli-American genocide of Palestinians. These demands push against the current model, according to which universities function as financial managers of massive endowments, aiming to maximize revenue whatever the moral cost. We oppose this model, and we have precedence for doing so. In the 1960s and 1970s, UW-Madison students were among the first to demand that universities divest from South African apartheid. Indeed, that movement had the moral clarity to see that the struggles of Black South Africans under apartheid are intertwined with those of Palestinians living under Israeli settler-colonialism. This anti-apartheid student movement successfully pushed UW to withdraw millions of dollars in holdings from apartheid South Africa. We inherit their moral vision. Our university’s investment policy must be accountable to its students, faculty & staff. We must not support oppression abroad while preaching about the beneficence of the “Wisconsin Idea” at home.
In making these demands, the UW-Madison encampment aspired to create a beloved and liberatory community and comprised people of all faiths and backgrounds, including many Jewish community members. It sought to engage in the valued UW-Madison process of “shared governance,” participating in conversations with ASM, graduate students, staff, and faculty across the university. Additionally, the encampment fostered forms of ongoing community, friendship, activism and solidarity. Across the city, people continue to organize. Palestine lives in every Tatreez circle, Dabke line, and teach-in and rally that recognizes Palestinian rights and popular resistance.
The university administration’s response was punitive. Chancellor Mnookin authorized 4 police units armed with riot shields and other military-grade equipment to brutalize protestors. Faculty, students, and community members were left bloodied, thrown to the ground with torn clothes, trampled, beat with batons, arrested, charged with misdemeanors and felonies–all for demanding that our tuition and labor not support Israel’s genocide in Palestine.
Mnookin tried to pad these aggressions, claiming that the power of civil disobedience comes from “respect[ing] the laws we share” and “accept[ing] that there are consequences for violating them,” a reckless reference to MLK’s Letter from Birmingham Jail that she deployed in defense of repressing student activism, rather than honoring the long solidarity between Black and Palestinian liberation struggles. On a more accurate reading of King, a protester’s willingness to “accept” the penalty of civil disobedience is not a moral validation of the penalty, but a recognition that the unjust status quo inevitably turns to repression and violence in response to just demands. Positioning herself this way, Mnookin not only aligns herself with those who opposed integration and an end to apartheid, but also provides cover for the current federal attacks on pro-Palestinian and international students.
Though Mnookin weakly decries the attacks on international students in op-eds that tie international students’ worth to their productivity and service to the state of Wisconsin, her administration’s decisions to attack students with violent force, to restrict our ability to protest via new “expressive activity” policies, and to drag students through punitive disciplinary processes and sham hearings has set the stage for the federal actions she claims to oppose. We must remember that the vision of a university grounded in research and teaching for the public good was first attacked from within.
As universities such as UW-Madison and Columbia are threatened with funding cuts and repressive federal oversight under a weaponized and ahistorical definition of anti-semitism, they–we–have a choice: Reverse path and stand against the “Palestine exception” that has allowed for this violence towards international students and pro-Palestinian activists, or accept the terms of the federal administration and let the university crumble. We stay steadfast in our demands for a UW-Madison that rejects complicity in the genocide of Palestinians by disclosing and divesting from all investments tied to Israeli apartheid and settler colonialism.
As others have said before us, another world is possible. We fight for a UW-Madison that rejects its foundational complicity in Indigenous death and dispossession, from here to Palestine. Return the land, abolish the police, end all forms of apartheid and settler colonialism. Our demands have a long, long arc, and we will remain here, fighting for them, until Palestine is free, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
