Amidst the Tents: A Bass Lab Fellow's Story in the Pro-Palestinian Movement
At 4:00 am on April 24th I was wide awake, energized by stepping into a legacy of student rebellion that has shaped history.
My steps took me to USC on a covert mission. I thought about what drove me to that moment: decades of US-funded apartheid, destruction, and death.
Since Oct 7th, I've battled swirling anxiety, depression, despair, heartbreak, frustration, and confusion amidst an ongoing war that has unimaginably obliterated Gaza. One day, I read a news story about a pregnant couple that was murdered. The doctors performed a surgery that somehow removed the living infant from the deceased mother's womb. It was only the latest in a string of horrors. This one sent tears streaming as I imagined the bleak future of a child born into orphanhood, apartheid, and inescapable violence. It was a gut punch that knocked me into action. What other outlet is there for an internal maelstrom of emotion?
By 5 am, I joined a cadre of students I was meeting for the first time and we began building the USC Gaza Solidarity Encampment. When the USC Department of Public Safety (DPS) officers told us we couldn't build tents, we obliged. We turned our energy to erecting signs that voiced our demands.
Everything was fine until DPS returned to tear our signs down, citing university policy violations. We decided to hold them up, ensuring authorities wouldn't silence our cause. Boiling with rage, I watched as a group of my allied students sat peacefully doing yoga and meditating. The juxtaposition of the DPS officers' actions, my rage, and my allies’ unbothered peace could not have been starker.
Protestors are forced to hold signs after DPS tears them down. (Brian Van Der Brug/LA Times)
Eventually, I took a short walk to my house to join a meeting. It was a great meeting that I enjoyed participating in until LAPD helicopters and a wildly active group chat stole my attention. Support was being requested. I took the rest of the meeting on my phone as I rushed back to campus. What awaited was chaos. Details are still unclear on what led to DPS officers attempting to arrest somebody with their knee pinned on the arrestee's head.
I imagine an officer attempting to take student protestors' property led to resistance and the officers' escalation.
I watched my allies rush to clear equipment and property from the encampment while everyone else encircled the chaos with the DPS officers. Feelings of defeat had me distraught. But the arrestee was released, and the protest continued. We circled Alumni Park, shouting chants for our demands and, ultimately, a Free Palestine. As the protest swelled, speakers like vice presidential candidate and Black Lives Matter co-founder Melina Abdullah and USC professor and author Jody Armour graced the megaphone to uplift our cause.
Vice presidential candidare and BLM co-founder Melina Abdullah speaks to the protestors.
I had to leave again, this time for class, enduring the most painstaking three hours of my life. As I sat in the final class that I needed attendance participation points for, I agonized as I read live updates online and the messages in our group chat. An army of police in military-grade riot gear descended on campus. The usual mid-class 10-minute break was anything but usual: my classmates gathered to enjoy cookies and camaraderie while mental anguish had me glued to my seat. Alone.
I was pained by the feeling of being stuck in a class that felt irrelevant compared to what was happening outside the classroom doors. I was pained by the thoughts of my allies being arrested. I was torn by the dilemma of whether I was willing to risk arrest or play it safe. I was angered by the reality that exercising free speech could lead to arrest whenever authorities arbitrarily declare a free speech gathering to be unlawful.
When class finally ended, I burst from the room feeling liberated from a carceral-like confinement; meanwhile my allies peacefully succumbed to actual incarceration. As I watched freedom snatched from people advocating for Palestinian freedom, rage returned. I ranted and raved at LAPD officers, who I deemed actively complicit in this violence. I told an officer the story about the Palestinian baby who was born to dead parents.
"This is what you're supporting by arresting us! How do you sleep at night knowing that?" I shouted.
"I sleep real good," an officer responded with nonchalance.
"Yeah, 'cause you're a f****** pig!" F*** a paycheck. You couldn't pay me a million dollars to do what you do."
The LAPD forms a ring as they arrest student protestors.
Most people probably would never erupt like that. Most people don't have the extensive experiences with police that I do: experiencing racial profiling, being falsely accused, attempted coercion into a knowingly false confession, having money stolen by officers, being shot by a rubber bullet while leaving a protest, and witnessing the murder of a high school classmate, Jontell Reedom. The list of other Black people whose unjust murders I've witnessed is too long, yet it only pales in comparison to the list of innocent Palestinian murders, murders that these badges invariably supported through their actions.
Fortunately I had something to be grateful for: I was allowed to wake up in my bed the next morning. The 90+ jailed protestors weren't allowed that fortune. I closely followed our group chat as student organizers scrambled to determine our next move. What started as a "die-in" demonstration at noon evolved into a resurrection of our encampment—but without the tents or any sleeping equipment like blankets since. Apparently, that was "against school policy." We found that strange considering sleep equipment wasn't an issue when students camped overnight only weeks prior when Travis Scott visited campus. Meh. The discomfort didn’t keep me from dozing off, if only for a few seconds…
CLICK! TSS TSS!
The sound and force of lawn sprinklers hitting my face forced me awake and we all were forced to choose between sleeping on wet grass or dry concrete. We chose concrete; It had me waking up the next morning with a sore back. I felt like I was jumped. Despite USC weaponizing arbitrarily enforced rules and being targeted by lawn sprinklers, we remained steadfast in our mission.
I didn't know what to expect when staying at what was deemed an "illegal" encampment with people who were strangers 48 hours ago. But these strangers met me with generosity, kindness, mutual aid, support, all the makings of true community. Donations and logistical coordination ensured that three meals, coffee, snacks, sleeping materials, and intentional programming were offered to all who joined. At USC, a place notorious for rich white people, elitism, and snobbery, I was able to engage in programming that included speeches, dialogues, and teach-ins that reflected values steeped in BIPOC decolonial ideology.
Every day involved scheduled programming to educate and engage students.
Moving to South Central to attend USC made me an unwitting part of their legacy of gentrification at the behest of its students and faculty. My response was to support anti-gentrification efforts and find other USC students who did. The Gaza Solidarity Encampment finally connected me to a community of folks with meaningful shared values and the passion to act on them.
The only thing that marred the sense of community was omnipresent paranoia. But not from me. Organizers worried that if zionists, school officials, or police knew their identity, it would lead to doxxing, surveillance, and other repercussions. Because of this, we were encouraged not to share real names, provide too much information about ourselves, or show too much of our face. It's shameful that fear of authoritarian retaliation infected a beautiful communal space.
Paranoia turned to realized fear. Three days into our resurrected encampment, dozens of LAPD vehicles returned to our campus gates as we hosted a Jewish candlelight vigil: another notable juxtaposition, a peaceful religious ceremony interrupted by threats of militaristic enforcers. Organizers notified our community of supporters, sending a flurry of messages and posting requests on social media for allies to flood USC's and LAPD's phone and email lines, calling off the militarized response. Somehow, it worked. Our encampment lived to see another day.
Signs of solidarity adorn the encampment.
As the founder of a community-based organization, I struggled to balance the responsibilities of preparing for a wellness resource fair we hosted and supervising eight interns. However, once the event finished, I could focus more on supporting the encampment. Somewhat. After seeing how valuable the encampment programming was and how overworked and burned out the lead organizers were, I took on a leadership role in planning programming. I was honored to connect students to intentional political education and cultural, artistic, and wellness activities. During the day, I was swamped with work meetings/tasks and encampment meetings/tasks. Late-night work sessions that usually lasted from 9 pm-5 am were my routine for finishing my final projects for the semester.
My work sessions were usually interrupted by news doom scrolls. My attention was siphoned by what was happening in Palestine, other college campuses nationwide, and our own. It was so disheartening to see our borne in compassion, humanity, and justice be grossly mischaracterized as ignorance, harassment, and anti-semitism. Most of our lead organizers were Jewish. Our programming consistently featured Jewish religious rituals and teach-ins. One of the most memorable occurred when student members of Jewish Voice for Peace led a discussion sharing their experience being raised zionist and eventually breaking away from the ideology.
Our encampment was an environment of non-violence, inclusion, education, and community. I guess none of that mattered to politicians or our own university President, Carol Folt. In every campus-wide email or social media post, she deceived people, saying we refused meetings with her, harassed students, disrupted campus activities, and posed a threat to campus safety. The irony of someone who professes to prioritize student safety twice, siccing agents of state-sanctioned violence on peaceful students would be humorous were it not for what I witnessed at UCLA's pro-Palestine student encampment.
A pro-Palestinian demonstrator is beaten in an attack by counter-protestors on the UCLA campus (Etienne Laurent/AFP/Getty Images)
