As alumni of Metropolis College of New York (CUNY), we’ve at all times felt proud. CUNY is the most important public city college system within the nation and boasts a inhabitants of majority Black and Brown college students.
As college students from working-class backgrounds, we noticed CUNY as being extra reflective of our metropolis’s various demographics than the personal and elite universities. The inherent variety of our campus communities offered us with a useful training that went far past the syllabus – we realized from the realities and histories of our friends. At CUNY, we realized construct neighborhood. We realized to organise. And we spent our time mobilising for Palestinian liberation.
Final month, college students and staff set up a Gaza solidarity encampment, exhibiting the true potential of CUNY to change into a individuals’s college. Years after we graduated, we headed again to campus to assist organise and witness this historic motion.
The encampment introduced five demands to the CUNY administration: divestment from corporations and navy contractors complicit within the Zionist genocide and occupation; boycott of educational establishments complicit in Zionist settler-colonialism; solidarity with the Palestinian nationwide liberation battle; demilitarisation of the campus; and a return to a completely funded, tuition-free individuals’s CUNY.
Whereas the main focus was on ending CUNY’s complicity within the genocide in Gaza, the encampment constructed a neighborhood primarily based on solidarity and care. De-occupiers organised each day meals, an accessible meals pantry, and a 24/7 medical tent in case of emergencies. Each day, the encampment provided political training, film screenings, and actions for youngsters.
The encampment additionally paid homage to the wealthy historical past of radical organising at CUNY and in Harlem. It drew on the legacy of our elders who mounted an analogous occupation in 1969 to demand instructional fairness for Black and Puerto Rican college students by way of their Five Demands. The scholars publicly renamed Metropolis School to the College of Harlem. In 2024, echoing this mobilisation, we additionally raised 5 calls for and declared in a banner: “Harlem College: est. 1969, re-est. 2024”.
We additionally sought to rekindle the legacy of the scholar protests of the Eighties, reclaiming the Shakur-Morales Pupil and Group Heart which was established again then and forcefully closed by the college administration in 2013. We named the encampment’s political training programme the “Shakur-Morales-Kanafani Individuals’s College”, including a reference to the late Palestinian mental Ghassan Kanafani, who was assassinated by Mossad in 1972.
On the encampment, college students and CUNY alumni, school and neighborhood members created one thing extraordinary: a collaborative, protected, and transformative house rooted in radical love and a dedication to Palestinian liberation.
However the encampment was not meant to be a utopia that provided peace alone. It was an escalation that threatened the hegemony of the college administration and its pursuit of revenue from colonisation and battle. In different phrases, the encampment threatened the college’s establishment, and that in its essence isn’t a peaceable course of.
Because the Palestinian mental and martyr Basel Al Araj said, “The start of each revolution is an exit. An exit from the social order that energy has enshrined within the identify of legislation, stability, public curiosity, and the larger good.” The CUNY Gaza solidarity encampment marked the scholar motion’s development from battling the constraints of a neoliberal profit-driven college to brazenly defying college authorities and outrightly refusing to be policed and ruled.
When campus police have been despatched by the college administration to dismantle the de-occupation, protesters spontaneously pushed them out. This second was a show of collective energy that we, as former scholar organisers, by no means anticipated to witness on campus. The collaboration of scholars, staff, and neighborhood had expanded the chances of resistance within the stomach of the beast.
The encampment continued to demand that CUNY clear its fingers of Palestinian blood and return to being a individuals’s CUNY. As an alternative, the college administration responded by inviting armed policemen to spill extra blood – that of its Black, Brown, working-class CUNY neighborhood. In accordance with protesters, the NYPD and Public Security broke bones and smashed tooth. The very campus on which we had united for the reason for liberation became a battleground as tons of of policemen violently invaded.
As alumni, students, activists, and organisers, we had by no means been underneath any illusions concerning the conservative politics and revenue motive that drive the CUNY administration. Since 2018, CUNY college students have been organising in opposition to CUNY’s $1.09m investments in weapons and surveillance know-how corporations. As an alternative of heeding our calls to divest years in the past and regardless of scholar governments voting for divestment, CUNY reacted by increasing its genocidal investments. In 2021, we realized that CUNY had spent a whopping $8.5m on contracts with corporations implicating in supporting or cashing in on Israeli apartheid and battle crimes.
Because the Zionist entity escalated its 76 years of colonisation and dispossession right into a full-scale genocide, college students have been left with no alternative however to reply accordingly with extra decisive motion, establishing protest camps and occupations.
Although we anticipated CUNY to answer the encampment with repression, we have been shocked by the sheer violence of its response. As an alternative of heeding the decision of its college students, CUNY despatched the NYPD to brutalise protesters and arrest virtually 200 of them, slapping 28 protesters with life-altering felony expenses.
And in an excessive act of betrayal, after the crackdown, the CUNY Board of Trustees simply launched a decision to spend $4m on a personal safety agency that advertises its providers to police pro-Palestine protests and “specialists” who have been skilled by the Zionist entity.
College students who maintain encampments and resolve to escalate now for Palestine achieve this as a realisation of their elders’ legacies. All through the previous century, US college students have escalated in opposition to the Conflict on Vietnam and South African apartheid. The reason for Palestinian liberation is equally a righteous one, and the college intifada is simply a fulfilment of their responsibility.
For that reason, we are saying: escalations are noble and needed to finish universities’ participation within the genocide in Gaza. The perfect time to escalate was yesterday. The second-best time is now.
We additionally reject the “exterior agitator” dog-whistle. All of us are affected by faculty directors’ selections to fund genocide utilizing taxpayer cash and scholar tuition. There isn’t any dividing line between college students and neighborhood. CUNY campuses needs to be accessible to everybody, with out gates sealing training off from surrounding communities.
This racist rhetoric is simply employed by the CUNY administration to deprive present college students of the collective knowledge of the bigger pro-Palestinian motion. As alumni and organisers, we will share with college students our experiences of previous calls for being ignored; of the Israeli Occupation Forces being welcomed on campus lengthy earlier than October 7; of exploratory committees and conferences with administration losing organisers’ time whereas Palestinians die. In flip, we’re impressed by and study from new escalations that scholar organisers courageously introduce. The battle for liberation is determined by information that’s collectively developed between one technology of resistance and one other.
Directors, nonetheless, depend on scholar actions having a brief institutional reminiscence. They search to alienate scholar organisers from the wealthy legacy of Palestinian and anti-colonial resistance – sealing off this data in books that should be learn however by no means practiced. Alumni-student collaboration is a direct menace to the directors’ technique of ready out scholar actions till organisers graduate.
Given CUNY’s full and utter failure to rise as much as this historic second regardless of its posturing as a social justice college, we invite our fellow alumni to affix and uplift the campus motion – a individuals’s motion – for Palestine. Divest from CUNY till CUNY divests from genocide.
Stop all donations and collaborations with this college which makes use of alumni affect to bolster its fake picture of social justice training and inclusivity. As an alternative, put money into Palestinian life, liberation, and the scholar motion that has courageously paved the best way for our collective liberation.
The views expressed on this article are the authors’ personal and don’t essentially replicate Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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