One memory from the Princeton Gaza Solidarity Encampment, or more precisely one memory of its aftermath (though the very nature of this memory is to blur the distinction), has not left my mind.
Following the removal of the encampment from Cannon Green, the central lawn on Princeton’s campus located right behind the main administrative building Nassau Hall (which campus tour guides like to proudly note was one briefly the nation’s capital), the university immediately fenced off the entire green. Usually open to typical college activities like full-of-themselves grad students lounging and reading Foucault or frat bros playing spikeball, the existential threat of student activism was apparently so great that the university went to the rather comical lengths of fencing off the entire area and putting up large electronic screens proclaiming the area was closed off as the university prepared the lawn to be a centerpiece of the imminent pageantry of alumni reunions and graduation ceremonies. At stake for the university, seemingly, in this lawn was Princeton itself, insofar as the university is equated with its pristine image as some hallowed hall of scholarship and statesmanship; fencing off the lawn became a physical manifestation of the entire closed-off narrative of the university, where everything must be carefully managed to construct the university’s self-understanding as some sacred temple of American academia.
Waking past this elaborate attempt to impose order, though, I would see, right there on the lawn the university invested so much psychic energy in the pristineness thereof, a patch of dirt and darkened grass in the midst of all the green. That patch had been the site of the encampment’s food table, a beautiful space where people gathered to eat, declaring their independence from university-provided meal plans through mutual aid as community donations sustained student protestors for every single meal of the day. Even with the end of the physical presence of our encampment, with the end of the food table directly, its legacy lived on in that patch which abruptly disrupted the lawn: In the midst of the narrative presented by the University, the carefully constructed, closed-off myth of pristine, coherent Ivy League identity, here was this open wound, this physical scar on the landscape that ensured no such imposed closure could be possible. Here was the embodiment of the being otherwise of the encampment.
My encampment experience was certainly an open wound for me, in the rather literal sense of a case of respiratory illness that lasted beyond the encampment acquired while hunger striking in solidarity with the famine faced by millions in Gaza, but also a more profound psychological sense of wanting to sit with the experience and reflect on the importance of its memory that became embodied in every cough. While the physical encampments at most campuses have come to often forced, abrupt, violent ends, I am interested in sitting with this darkened patch of grass, this mark of the opening of minds and epistemic revolt represented by the student movement in the face of narratives which have attempted to close off Palestinian life, denying the importance of Palestinian global struggles for justice or even their very existence. While we cannot say yet what tangible gains might be won by student movements for divestment and Palestinian life, I believe we can confidently say that how college students, and people across the world, think will not be the same after.
As part of my sitting with the scar of the encampment, I found myself constantly asking other participants their thoughts and reflections, to the point where I simply decided to sit down and record these conversations as a sort of informal oral history project. With this long preamble out of the way, then, I want to now offer reflections derived from recording and returning again and again in my mind to these interviews. Performed with other graduating seniors who participated in the Princeton encampment, I believe they offer a window into how, in excess of any direct victories that may come, the encampments are already paying dividends as a moment of profound thinking anew, a moment of working through concepts through action that will inform our relationships to the halls of power and activism for the rest of our lives.
Princeton, Princeton, You Can’t Hide / You’re Supporting Genocide
Our scar on the grass ruining the university’s pristine lawn is perhaps the perfect metaphor for one unifying theme of the encampment and reflections on it: a deep sense of disillusionment with the university, a heightened awareness of its (many) limitations. Chants and speeches at the encampment were often explicitly directed toward promoting this disillusionment, emphasizing the university’s present and historic investment in colonial violence. At the same time that chants forcefully highlighted the university’s complicity in the current Israeli slaughter in Gaza, speeches made clear that current moment is situated in a broader genealogy of the violence underpinning America’s elite universities, including investments in slavery and its legacies and the dispossession of Indigenous Americans. For student activists, the encampment was a moment of divestment from the university in general, a space to understand earlier events in one’s Princeton career in light of thinking through the university’s place in structures of violence.
Memories of having to struggle for inclusive housing, reflections on the university’s failure to address the student health epidemic, and cynicism about the unfulfilled promises of diversity and inclusion that have not actually altered the fundamental structures of the university to be more inclusive all came to the front of activists’ minds through the praxis of the encampment. In struggling against university struggles through embodied gestures like protests, chants, and occupying space, there was also a mental struggle, a working through of the sheer degree of violence which underpins the university and the Western colonial project it supports.
While we cannot say yet what tangible gains might be won by student movements for divestment and Palestinian life, I believe we can confidently say that how college students, and people across the world, think will not be the same after.
Fanon quotes are perhaps a cliche of writing about the current moment in Palestinian liberation, but I’ll indulge in quoting him here because I think the encampments earned students the right to quote those words that they put into tangible practice and ripped away from the effort to domesticate Fanon in classrooms and theory journals. In concluding Wretched of the Earth, Fanon writes about the new moment for thought inaugurated by decolonization, a profound moment of possibility that emerges when one realizes that colonial powers are “never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe” and remembers “what sufferings humanity has paid for every one of their triumphs of the mind.” With a historical consciousness that exposes the hypocrisy of colonial institutions, there comes the possibility of finding new modes of being in the world: “Come, then, comrades, the European game has finally ended; we must find something different. We today can do everything, so long as we do not imitate Europe.” This Fanonian movement, from disillusionment to radical possibility, is exactly the movement student activists experienced, as the harsh realization of the profound human cost of the university’s image as some hallowed hall of humanistic inquiry led to an ambitious thinking through and practicing of new forms of scholarship and action.
From Palestine to the Philippines / Stop the U.S. War Machine
For Fanon, colonialism represents the “dragging [of] men toward mutilation,” the imposition “upon the brain [of] rhythms which very quickly obliterate it and wreck it.” In colonial systems of classification and control, the logic of “economic development” and talk of “output, and intensification, and ‘the rhythm of work,’” man finds himself torn “away from himself.” The holistic human being is transformed into an individual cut up into many parts, each aspect of life segregated and heavily regulated in the interest of economic output. This, in the experience of many student activists, was the reality of their time at Princeton, where, for all the talk of liberal arts, the reality of the university is one of intense pressure to pursue economically productive studies at the expense of one’s connection to their very identity and humanity. One student noted that for all its talk of wanting to build student communities and support student mental health, in reality the University adopts an intensely neoliberal approach, one where students are left isolated and alone and expected to find individual solutions to what are, in reality, collective, structural problems of overwork and a toxic culture of hyperproductivity. This feeling of alienation was especially pronounced in student activists who studied STEM, all of whom repeated the sort of implicit attitude in STEM programs of endless problem sets with no time to stop and contemplate the human, ethical stakes of one’s studies. As one engineering student put it, students are expected to solve problems about cars and missiles and never encouraged to take the time to stop and ask who built them and for what end. The humanities are no panacea though: The seminar room often devolved into the stage for performances of erudition, a place to appear right and “smart,” which alienates the student from the actual stakes of reading for their own life as ethical actors. Student activists paint a picture of four years at a place where the sheer expectation to get work done, to complete readings, and pass exams, divorced one from the actual meaning of the activity of learning.
The encampment represented a stark contrast for these students, a new model of education that, ironically, the university could learn from. The Gaza Solidarity Encampment was a space of learning through praxis, a space of struggling against the mutilation of man through forging new connections across different liberation struggles and connecting learning to ethics. If the contemporary neoliberal university so often encourages neglect of humanity, telling students to set aside their own needs and ethical qualms for the sake of finishing their degree and heading off to a dubious employer, the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, in stark contrast, was a place where every moment was permeated with purpose. Every student spoke about feeling an intense urge to be at the encampment all the time because, in a far cry from mindless problem sets or overly abstract seminar conversations, every moment in the space felt like it was connected to concrete questions of ethics and justice. You could do your engineering problem set while at the encampment, but you would be doing so knowing your very presence in the encampment was sending a message and, just across the lawn, would be a professor leading a teach-in about technology and apartheid: Finally you could ask who built the missile in your p-set, with whose money, and how to stop it from being used.
Teach-ins and public lectures were a major feature of the encampment, with topics that emphasized intersectional and interdisciplinary thinking: From decolonizing the history of math to connections between Palestinian liberation and Kashmir, Korea, and Black liberation, the encampment proposed a model of education that, rather than colonial mutilation and segregation, emphasized connection and grappling with a more integrated picture of the world. This education was not just in the more formal programming, though; it was wrapped up in every moment students spent in the encampment. This is perhaps best represented in frequent chants, like “From Palestine to the Philippines, stop the US war machine” and “From Gaza to Mexico, all these walls have got to go,” which, aside from being catchy, also, in the very act of chanting, compel the chanter into a way of existing in the world, one where they are an ethical actor who sees the necessity of challenging empire everywhere. This education had a genuine impact on students, who reported many different ways the encampment experience made them think more deeply and critically. As just one example, students reflected on thinking more deeply about their ethnic and religious backgrounds, feeling compelled to learn more about how they connect to the Palestinian struggle.
Crucially, this education also happened in solidarity with members of local communities, destroying any pretensions of abstract ivory tower debate. Teach-ins were open to be attended by all, not just those who achieved whatever arbitrary mix of test scores and debate team trophies is in vogue with admissions offices today, and talks were just as likely to be held by local activists and community leaders as they were by university faculty. The encampment was a space of struggle to bring into being the scene of solidarity across the global South and its allies offered by Fanon: “What we want to do is to go forward all the time, night and day, in the company of Man, in the company of all men. The caravan should not be stretched out, for in that case each line will hardly see those who precede it; and men who no longer recognize each other meet less and less together, and talk to each other less and less.” Rather than the segregation imposed by colonial classification, the encampment was a space of connection, of literally physically being near to one another as Fanon calls for, all for the sake of “starting a new history of Man,” a history where the rules and narratives of the old violent order were decentered in favor of new methods of thought and action. No amount of shallow university community service initiatives or new interdisciplinary centers could achieve the sort of education the encampment offered students as rapidly as it did: In three weeks, students found themselves transformed by a curriculum rooted in questions of ethics and justice, one where action and solidarity beyond the walls of the university happened alongside moments of theoretical reflection and discussion.
This taste of a different way of thinking is something the university can never take away, no matter how thoroughly it resods the grass on Cannon Green.
Who Keeps Us Safe / We Keep Us Safe
Given the emphasis on the connection between thought and action proposed in the encampment, it feels right to end by noting just a fraction of some of the tactics of the encampment and the questions they raised for activists interviewed. Written in the form of a list, rather than any neat, wrapped-up reflection, in the spirit of radical openness which has been core to decolonial struggle from Fanon’s rather open-ended conclusions to his famous texts to the encampment moment. They are offered here as fragments in the hopes that perhaps someone who participated in an entirely different encampment, with an entirely different history and context, might nevertheless find it suddenly moving to return to their own encampment memories and think again, and again, and again.
- The choice to have an encampment: How should we think about bodily presence in relationship to activism? What impact does simply being in a space have as a tactic of activism? How can architectural thinking be applied to the encampment?
- Staging a hunger strike: How can we rethink our relationship to discourses of health and safety? What does it mean to reject a sort of scientific, quantifiable understanding of the body in favor of one where the body is intimately connected to ethical struggle?
- Hosting religious services at the encampment: How can we understand our religious traditions as tied to struggles for justice? How can we understand them as tied to communal obligations? What does it mean to present oneself as religious in public generally and leftist spaces specifically?
- Mutual aid (Ex. community donations of food and supplies, attitude of not working with police and relying on each other): How might we rethink law and order based understandings of safety? How can connections between community and university students be sustained and viewed as important? How do we make university students genuinely care about what happens beyond their studies and the university bubble?
One question, though, has an answer, one that was answered in one of the call and response chants at the encampment: “Who makes history?” someone would cry, and everyone would respond “We make history.” 
David Chmielewski is a recent graduate of Princeton University.