MODELING WORLDS (UTOPIAN FUTURE SERIES #6)
Photo by Brian Wegman 🎃 on Unsplash.
It’s day 15 of the Princeton-Gaza solidarity encampment. Also called the Popular University of Gaza at Princeton. We welcomed the dawn with meditation and yoga. We had our morning meeting at 9, study hall at 10, lunch at noon, teach-in at 1:30, and a faculty rally at 2:30.We had a dabke dance lesson at 5, and now we’re in the middle of our nightly town hall meeting.
I say “we” as if I’ve been here from the start. This is only my third visit to the encampment. I’m not part of any of the teams that organize and run this place. I haven’t done a late night, overnight, or early morning shift yet. I wasn’t here for any of the actions and occupations that made the news. I don’t know if I even saw them on instagram when they happened. I think I saw posts about them a week later, mixed in with posts from organizers at other campuses across the country. It wasn’t until last week that I finally got myself here. I don’t know—I don’t say “we” thinking that I’m an integral part of this operation, but something about this place makes me feel part of it.
Did that happen the first time I walked on and felt the very not-of-this-capitalist-world vibe? Or when I held hands and danced a traditional Palestinian dance with strangers (truly the stuff dreams are made of)? Maybe it was when I asked how I could help and was put to work cutting umbrellas off of lawn chairs (because apparently that makes them a “structure,” which takes this from a “legal” to an “illegal” protest)? In any case, it feels like I’ve been grafted in. To the point where it would be weird to say “they.”
Anyway, we’ve been keeping this daily schedule for almost five weeks. Yet if someone were walking down the main thoroughfare of Princeton, going about their daily business as a student, townie, or tourist; on their way to PJ’s Pancakes, Hoagie Haven, or the university bookstore, they might not even know we were here. We’re on a long, rectangular lawn in the middle of campus called Cannon Green, only a stone’s throw away from Nassau Street, but completely hidden from the view of anyone on it by the Hall of the same name, which houses the administrative offices of the university president.
This has its advantages and disadvantages. If we were visible from the street, on one hand, we’d probably pick up more supporters who happened upon us. On the other hand, our marshalls would have a lot more counter-protestors on their hands. On one hand, we’d be a more direct disruption to the town, which would accelerate what we’re trying to do. On the other hand, being a bit removed has created a feel of oasis, undercommons, clearing. In any case, it’s occasioned the university’s approach of mostly letting us alone until reunions, when they will certainly move against us to clear space for events (or really, just to restore a sense of normalcy and aesthetic nostalgia for returning alumni).
We can’t be seen from the street, but right before our town hall meetings, we can certainly be heard from it. “Free free Palestine” and other chants, bolstered by bucket drumming, remind us why we’re here. Which you’d think would be hard to forget. But the immersive nature of the encampment, and the work of keeping this movement going, rightfully makes this encampment a living organism in its own right, to the point where one can lose sight of its auxiliary existence in support of people who are huddled together not in protest encampments but in forced internment camps.
Tonight’s main business is what we will resolve to do in anticipation of reunions. The convener lays out three options gathered from the people of the encampment: 1) to shut down on our own terms, or 2) continue strong until reunions and 2A) not resist when campus police clear us out by force, or 2B) resist and face further arrests, suspensions, degree withholdings, and other punitive measures from the university. After taking a few clarifying questions, the facilitators send us off to discuss the options in small groups. I don’t really know anyone here, so just like at every conference, seminar, or new church I’ve been to, I simply find a group of kind-looking folks (not hard to do at a gathering like this) and plop down on the outside of the circle.
A younger, maybe college-age person is saying, “Given how the administration is stone-walling even our basic attempts to facilitate a face-to-face conversation, I don’t think any other victories are in the cards. And I don’t think it’d be worth it for more folks to be banned from campus or have their status put in jeopardy, at this point. We’ve accomplished some incredible things—I think we end on a high note.”
An older, peace-and-love-looking gentleman jumps in as soon as she finishes: “I hear you on that, but I think we should remember that one of the things we’re doing here is shining a light on the moral failures of campus leadership. They’ve already embarrassed themselves by the authoritarian way they responded to the admin building sit-in, and by the very stonewalling you mentioned. Now we have an opportunity to tie a bow on all of this by forcing them to take the very visible and very gross step of using force on hunger strikers, disposing of and wasting tons of needed supplies, and very obviously moving for the sake of the aesthetics of reunions.
As this continues, just like at most conferences and seminars I’ve been to, I’m doing a lot of active face-listening. Soft “mmms,” eyebrow work, eye contact, the full gamut. I’ve just about worked myself up to jumping in and saying something. Here we go—a couple seconds of silence in between comments. I give the universal shy-but-want-to-speak sign: I look around the circle and take a deep inhale through the mouth—
“Alright, everyone, let’s bring it back together!” I hear one of the conveners projecting her voice from a few paces away. I exhale in relief. But let the record (and my participation grade) show that I was about to cook.
One or two spokespersons from each small group shares what they discussed. Not unexpectedly, a well-meaning white man chimes in a bit too frequently (in support of option 2B), not leaving sufficient room for others to speak up, and missing all social cues to that effect until the main facilitator respectfully asks to hear from those who haven’t spoken yet. A young woman from the group next to mine takes the floor. She, like several others, is not coming down hard in favor of 2A or 2B so much as against option 1. She closes her remarks with this:
“While it’s certainly important how we end this, I’d venture that it’s even more important to keep it going as long as we can, because of how deeply we are being changed with each day of this action. We are modeling the kind of world we want to live in, and that is perhaps even more impactful than whatever policies, reforms, or concessions we have won or will win through our tactics.”
I catch an amen right before it leaps out of my throat. I add a more context-appropriate “say that” to the chorus of finger snaps, mmm’s, and yesssses. She’s preaching, though. She may not have known it, but that word was for me. Really the only thing about this experience that hasn’t felt like utopia to me has been the stated aims of this and the other encampments. Financial and military divestment from Israel, academic and cultural boycott of Israeli institutions, forging affiliations with Palestine, public call for ceasefire.
Noble, beautiful, powerful—absolutely. But not radical. Not getting to the roots of the issue. Which is the ongoing existence of and support for institutions that were founded as academic bulwarks for genocidal projects not dissimilar from the one we’re protesting now. Structures that simply aren’t capable of operating the way we’re demanding them to; structures that could only do so if abolished and redesigned from scratch. Structures that operate within political and economic systems birthed out of and inherently oriented towards domination.
I might call myself an anarchist, but she’s the one articulating the anarchic ethos—the real change is in the means, not the ends. The encampment is way more than leverage for reform—it’s the substance of revolution. Why did it take me this long to realize it? What we’re doing right now is a proto-general-strike. Modified, microcosmic, implicit, but it’s there. We all, to various degrees, have interrupted, altered, or paused our regular work and lives, recognizing that the best way to stop an atrocity is to grind to a halt the system that enables it. We’ve withdrawn our support of and participation in it. We’ve reclaimed the space and resources that we’ve apportioned to institutions that are no longer serving us. And to the degree that we’ve sacrificed our regular forms of sustenance, we are mutually aiding each other to carry on.
While I was caught up in epiphany, the assembly voted for option 1. Enough people feel that further concessions are not forthcoming, and there’s no need for (or purpose in) letting police confiscate and/or waste the prodigious amounts of food, medical supplies, camping equipment, books, rally signs, and other materials we’ve amassed here (2A). Let alone risk additional arrests, suspensions, or withholding of degrees (2B). And I get it. From the operative political perspective of many folks here, it makes complete sense. Pack it up, regroup, and be ready to send out the bat signal for a quick-strike action or two during reunions.
It might be just about the end in many folks’ minds. But I’m just getting started over here.
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It’s day 21 of the Princeton-Gaza solidarity encampment. Or day 3. Depends on whether you mean Princeton the university or Princeton the town. The past three weeks have been a whirlwind, and today will be yet another climax in a seemingly endless series of earth-shattering, world-building events. This evening we are meeting with delegates from several active or dispersed encampments from the New York and Philly areas (there are over 15!) to discuss putting together a mid-atlantic strike network. In our preliminary conversations with them, the main topic of interest has been what advice we can offer them towards making the transition from campus-based protest to town-based general strike. Not that we’re seasoned experts. But we have done it, sort of. Which is wild to say.
After the week three town hall meeting, I took a day to marinate on the idea of the encampment being the thing. I talked to a couple folks from my town hall small group, and the woman I’d met at the art corner, and the dabke instructor, and they all connected me with people who might be on board with my idea. I joined the marshalls and sent out a couple of signal messages about it. Before I knew it, we were presenting the idea of the general strike at what was intended to be the final, largely ceremonial and symbolic, town hall meeting of the encampment. Out of the three hundred or so people there, about sixty folks voiced their support, including the folks I already knew were in. Sixty people at least provisionally on board with the idea of blowing their lives up. The most incredible thing I’ve ever witnessed.
All of that was the easy part. Next came the actual blowing up. I reached out to my colleagues at work and told them I’d need to either take a leave of absence or resign. I spent several days trying to figure out, or justify, how I could continue to work. My job is taking care of kids—isn’t that work that needs to go on even throughout the revolution? Surely my work and my organization aren’t part of the enabling of this genocide, or even of capitalism and the state.
I thought about Leila, my sweet, selectively mute 9-year-old, and the way she raised her hand and spoke out loud to the whole group for the first time last week. How I want to continue advocating for her to get connected with a specialist who can help her with tools for working through social anxiety. I thought about Daniel, my senior who needs support in figuring out how to pursue a trade or vocation that fits his gifts and motivations. I thought about Sandy, my 8-year-old who comforts her crying friends by taking them over to the compassion corner and helping them identify their emotions and needs from the lists on the posters.
It hit me just how much I’d be giving up. But I realized that our goal was for everything to grind to a halt. In its current form, at least. In its current relation to the existing systems. As much as I loved caring for those particular kids, my doing so did enable their families to continue life as normal. Which is what my comrades and I needed to disrupt.
My supervisor and coworkers were surprisingly sympathetic to what I needed to do. I should’ve had more faith that they’d be able to see the connection with what our org does. Morally, and even philosophically for the most part, they were with me. But logistically, the choice was to abolish ourselves or to maintain our place in the nonprofit industrial complex, whose beholdenness to the systems we’re fighting I now see more clearly than ever. I hold a sliver of hope that as we build our new reality, they’ll be more able to see themselves in it.
For now, I’m no longer employed there, but I am still doing childcare! With adults I do a bit of political education and writing, but my main contribution to the day-to-day work of the encampment is pretty much exactly what I was doing before—playing games with kids, helping them with reading and writing, supporting them in their own intellectual curiosities. Gathering and supporting other tutors. And providing a space for them to be with their peers and their non-parental adult caretakers.
Our encampment site is a barn just a couple miles away from campus. The most vulnerable of us have been allotted some farmland that we miraculously got permission to stay on, through some unexpected connections and surprising sources of solidarity. As a collective, we’re encamped in several places now. Jail. State prison, some of us. The old office complex that some are squatting in. Some on campus, still. When one location gets raided or repressed, we regroup at one of the others.
Shelter, food, and healthcare have been harder to come by over the past week, for sure. But the systems that were put in place during the first three weeks are continuing to sustain us in this new phase. We’re not yet as self-sufficient as we’d like to be, but we’re working on a call to put out to local food providers to join us first in striking, then in taking over the means of production. Hopefully the mid-atlantic network will do the same. We’re trying not to think too much bigger than that just yet, although we’ll need to reach the worldwide scope of the campus movement if we’re to have any hope of ending either a genocide or the relationships that make it possible.
