What the Solidarity Encampments Demand w/ Nicki Kattoura and Charlie Markbreiter (05/01/24)
Death Panel podcast host Beatrice Adler-Bolton speaks with Nicki Kattoura and Charlie Markbreiter about the proliferation of Palestine solidarity encampments, their experiences at the encampments at CUNY and at Columbia, and to share a call to action for today, May Day: strike in solidarity with the people of Palestine.
Note: This episode was recorded shortly before the coordinated raid on both the CUNY and Columbia encampments on the evening of April 30th. In our view the NYPD last night proved many of the points we make below.
More on the call to action here.
As always, support Death Panel at www.patreon.com/deathpanelpod
Transcript by Kendra Kline. (Kendra is currently accepting freelance transcript work — email her if you need transcripts or visit her website)
Nicki Kattoura 0:01
The encampments have captured the attention of every institution of higher education to focus on Palestine, and an opening has showed itself to us. And so now is the time for risks and to be brave, like Bisan said. We need to do more. The bombs are still dropping, and we have to act as though every day of the genocide will be the last one. It can end today, and we need to convince ourselves that we can win, but it would require risks and personal sacrifice to make that possible.
[ Intro music ]
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 0:54
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So today. I have two great guests joining me for a roundtable on recent student uprisings against the genocide in Palestine and solidarity encampments that have been set up at dozens of college and university campuses all over the world.
First is Nicki Kattoura. Nicki is a Palestinian writer who has been published all over the place and his essay from mid October 2023 in Mondoweiss, called "I will never be the same" is a must read. I'm still thinking about the final paragraph of that essay where Nikki writes:
We have auditioned to the world for their sympathy for 75 years while the faces and bodies of our martyrs haunt us and their self-written eulogies follow us. I will never be the same, and neither should you.
Nicki, welcome to the Death Panel. Thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Nicki Kattoura 2:51
Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here virtually.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:54
And then we also have Charlie Markbreiter here on the line. Many of our listeners may remember Charlie from what is perhaps our most listened to episode ever, Panic! At the Gender Clinic, which Jules is also on, from before she joined as a full time co-host. And Charlie is, as you may guess, a dear friend of the Panel, one of the co-creators of the legendary Death Panel Reading Group. Charlie teaches at Queens College in New York and is getting his PhD at the CUNY Graduate Center, researching 21st century trans cultural production. His first book, a mix of theory, fiction, criticism and fan fiction, called Gossip Girl Fanfic Novella, is available from Kenning Editions. Charlie, welcome back to the Panel. Appreciate you coming on the show, as always.
Charlie Markbreiter 3:34
Thank you so much for having me, Bea.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 3:36
Now I just want to call out from the top that Charlie and Nicki have a really important call to action to share with you all today, that you can act on today.
And so first, I'm just gonna set us up and then we're gonna get right into that at the top before we jump into the larger discussion. And as I mentioned, today, we're gonna be talking about the thousands of students all over the world who have been setting up encampments in solidarity with Palestine, on the campuses of colleges and universities, as well as the broader context of the uprisings against genocide, demands for divestment, and of course, most importantly, the genocide in Gaza itself.
So these are not all coordinated actions. No one today is here speaking on behalf of any of the encampments. This is a decentralized series of groups who are all acting at once, and while each encampment has different demands, and the politics of each encampment are not the same, we are seeing that across many encampments, students have been demanding material divestment, for colleges and universities to own up about the way that their endowments and the intellectual production of higher education, from cultural work to the sciences, is tied up in and running cover for aiding and abetting, perpetuating genocide in Palestine.
And the encampments have been demonized by politicians, universities, public intellectuals and people just trying to normalize the ongoing, escalating settler colonial violence. Students have been suspended, expelled, evicted from their housing, arrested, campus police, regular police and state troopers have violently cracked down on the encampments. And students have been fighting back and holding their ground in a few really awesome cases especially that have been very inspiring.
So we're gonna get into all of that, and there is a lot to get into today, but to start us off, Charlie and Nicki, can you just sort of talk a little bit about why you're both here today, what position you both are speaking from, who you guys are, what you've been doing recently supporting these encampments, and then I think this would be the perfect time to set up and get right into the call to action.
Nicki Kattoura 5:35
Thank you for the introduction. Charlie and I are both members of Writers Against the War on Gaza, also known as a WAWOG, depending on your preferred intonation. WAWOG is an organization of writers, artists, cultural workers, filmmakers, people who oppose Israeli settler colonialism as a means to sort of build a cultural front for a free Palestine.
We recognize as an organization that the war on Gaza is not only fought through missiles and airstrikes, but that it is also in many ways an information war. There are cultural and media institutions that are not just complicit, but are actively manufacturing consent, so that when we see the image of a child being pulled from underneath the rubble, that that has already retroactively been normalized.
And so there's also the twin recognition that this is not just a genocide that is killing individual Palestinians, but that it is a genocide that is killing a people and actually eviscerating it, entirely erasing it from history. It is part of the reason that the Israeli army has destroyed every university in the Gaza Strip, why bookstores and libraries and archives and writers and artists and poets and professors have all been targeted in the relentless bombing of the Gaza Strip.
Charlie Markbreiter 6:51
I would just add that in terms of the action item that Beatrice mentioned at the top, and also in terms of the consent manufacturing, from the media that Nikki mentioned, as I'm sure Death Panel listeners have noticed by now, coverage of the encampments has kind of ranged from -- I guess from the far right side, I saw a New York Post headline that was like "Harvard Has Fallen," so we're getting that.
And then kind of on the more ostensibly "well-meaning" but actually elite capturing and we have a kind of centering of free speech rhetoric and the "rights of students," which obviously, student safety is extremely important. We strongly reject the suspensions, the evictions, the multi-year bans from campuses bsome of these schools have doled out, as well as the speed at which they have sent in riot cops and snipers, and, you know, state troopers. So it's not that all of those things aren't important. But that coverage has sort of unfortunately, but deliberately obscured the fact that there is an imminent invasion in Rafah right now.
And it is very convenient for US and Western media to kind of be doing free speech discourse on college campuses instead of thinking about the impending attack. So in response to this, people on the ground in Gaza were asking us to refocus attention there. And also there have been calls from multiple encampments to kind of escalate what has been happening and just say, like, no, we're not here to have like a sleepover. The encampments are great, but they're not ends in and of themselves.
The reason we're doing this is to end the genocide in Gaza. The reason we're doing this is for our schools to divest immediately.
And so one way that we are pushing for that is by calling for a strike, and we just put out a call for a strike. It's also coming from SJP National [Students for Justice in Palestine] as well as PYM [Palestinian Youth Movement].
And for people who are not maybe in school right now, the timing of this is really significant because a lot of schools are in finals. So what we're calling for is for the semester to be fully canceled.
As a teacher, I can say none of my students even really wanted to do finals anyway. So hopefully there'll be happy with the call to just not do them. To fellow adjuncts, I would say, you didn't want to grade all those anyway, just don't do it. And for any tenure track faculty who might be listening to this, I would say this is a great opportunity for you to use your job security and the healthcare security that comes with your position to go on strike.
Nicki Kattoura 10:07
Yeah. So as Charlie said, this is a student led movement, and we are heeding their calls. But when we say that something is student led, it implies that there is a following, or that there are people that are responding to their leadership. And so we are calling for a strike - no class, no grades, no finals, no commencement.
We are on day 207 of this genocide. And there is an impending invasion of Rafah, where over 1 million Palestinians are currently trapped. And on top of that, we have seen some of the most brutal repression on our college campuses - snipers on rooftops at Ohio State, State Troopers being called into UT Austin, faculty at Emory being slammed to the ground, students being mass arrested, beat up, suspended, evicted, and given 15 minutes to collect their possessions.
So this is absolutely about Gaza, but why would you want to grade or give your labor to an institution that has shown that not only do they not care about the demands, but that they're willing to engage in such violence against their students, faculty and staff.
So we hope you take this call seriously. There is no moment, at least in my knowledge, of such an opportune time to withhold your labor. The encampments have captured the attention of every institution of higher education to focus on Palestine, and an opening has showed itself to us. And so now is the time for risks and to be brave, like Bisan said, we need to do more.
The bombs are still dropping, and we have to act as though every day of the genocide will be the last one. Not that we are looking to the future on God forbid, day 300. Like, it can end today. And we need to convince ourselves that we can win, but it would require risks and personal sacrifice to make that possible.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 11:55
Thank you both so much for laying that out. And listeners, you might be listening to this right now — we are releasing this on May 1st, on May Day. The strike is happening today. So if maybe you're on your way to work, you're commuting at this moment, you can participate in this today. I know that there are a lot of listeners who are in some way entangled in higher education, who are part of the Death Panel community, but for folks who are not specifically working within universities or sort of entrenched in the academic milieu, let's say, are there ways also that folks can join in on the strike in solidarity?
Nicki Kattoura 12:34
I think one way is reaching out to people that you know, and trying to convince them to strike is one great way to get involved. Another would be to show up to the encampments, especially as more colleges -- Columbia University just announced that they're trying to get the encampment down by 2pm today. And as the administration starts to crack down more on the encampments, the more people there are, the less successful they will be. And lastly, what I would say is keep focusing on Palestine, keep focusing on Gaza. This is not over, and we shouldn't start talking about it until it is.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 13:06
Thank you both so much for laying that out. I really hope that our listeners do join in on this, and that maybe it inspires other people in other industries to try and also coordinate things in solidarity.
And ultimately, one of the reasons we wanted to talk about the encampments is that this is a really important moment in terms of resistance and protest. This has been a collection of decentralized actions. There are a bunch of different occupations going on at different universities and colleges. Obviously, this also extends beyond the United States, to universities and colleges all over the world. And there is not one org that has coordinated all this.
So hopefully we can get through some, you know, specific examples of the stuff that's been happening. And ultimately, as you both were saying, this is a movement that is student led and looking at their demands is really important. And part of that demand is that we're, again, centering folks in Gaza and reminding ourselves what the core of everything needs to be. And we've seen some great examples of that coming out of the encampments.
And Charlie, you're at CUNY. You, I'm assuming have been -- well, I saw pictures of you at the one in CUNY. Would you guys like to sort of get into what it's been like to be in and around the ones in New York?
Charlie Markbreiter 14:26
Okay. Super happy to talk about what has been happening at CUNY. Okay, so for listeners who may not be familiar, CUNY is the biggest public university system in New York City. It stands for the City University of New York, and it has campuses dispersed kind of throughout the five boroughs.
So the encampment went up on Thursday at CUNY's City College of New York or CCNY campus, which is in Harlem, and the reasons for choosing CCNY are kind of manifold. One is just kind of on a logistical level. It's one of the sort of more centralized CUNY locations, it's in Manhattan. Second is that it is also the site of a really historic uprising in 1969, which is when Black and Puerto Rican students actually took over the campus for I think 17 days.
And as I'm sure will be unsurprising to anyone familiar with the CUNY system, basically kind of the way that they have always branded themselves is sort of like the "poor man's Harvard," but CCNY in particular was known as the Rhodesia of Harlem, because their admissions policies really favored white working class students, even though they're obviously in a majority Black neighborhood.
And so in the 1969 uprising, and one of the major demands was for CCNY in particular and CUNY in general to have a student population that actually represented not just the demographics of Harlem, but the demographics of New York in general, and the students won. CUNY implemented an open admissions policy and went no tuition. And the demographics of the school immediately shifted.
This was so successful that they actually, in a backlash, would go on to reinstate tuition and reverse the open admissions policy, because they were like hold up, too many working class Black and brown New Yorkers are getting free education, we need to do some counterinsurgency. So the organizers really wanted to draw historical parallels between the 1969 uprising and the present. And one thing that Nicki has said that really has stuck with me is like, on the one hand, it's really beautiful, seeing these two moments in conjunction, but it's also really depressing in a way, because it's like, you know, 1968, 1969, that was a long time ago.
And it really shows you the extent of the repression at college campuses, and obviously, in the US Empire more generally, that we've had to wait so long between these two moments. But yeah, in terms of the encampment itself, I'd say that one of the most amazing things that I have seen kind of there and in general was the NYPD on the first day, I think, prepared to sweep the campus. It's a much smaller space than some of these other schools.
So I think they kind of thought it would be easy. And immediately when they went in, the students kind of surrounded the officers and sort of pushed them all into one kind of centralized location, and then pushed them physically off the campus. And it worked. They haven't been back since. We know that they are likely planning to retaliate.
There is a -- so we're recording this on Monday. The organizers have set a Monday deadline for CUNY Chancellor Felix Matos to come to the encampment and negotiate in good faith, which he has not done so far at all. Instead, he has been doing things like sending his toadies to tell negotiators that they cannot have bathrooms on campus unless they take down the Palestinian flag. Within Our Lifetime organizer Nerdeen Kiswani gave a speech in which she told us that the line that administration had told them was, to quote, "porta potties for your Palestinian flag."
And one small win was that they were shamed so aggressively for this, that we got porta potties the next day. So yeah, I think one final thing that I want to add also is that the way that the CUNY union works is we have something called the PSC, which combines graduate students, staff and faculty.
And for decades, this has been a huge problem because the sort of more senior union membership has really railroaded the organizing of their rank and file. And we have seen these divisions kind of be reproduced at the encampment, where it's been really amazing to see PSC rank and file at the encampment, supporting their students, helping them do lessons on campus, just kind of hanging out and just supporting however they can.
And at least at the time of this recording, we have not seen any union leadership even come to the encampment. We haven't seen them help negotiate on behalf of their students. We have not seen them even do a picket line. And that has been super disappointing as a PSC member and I think is just yet another reason why this pushing for a strike feels so important. Because hopefully it is a way for unions like the PSC to really step it up and not only support their students, but really see divestment as a labor issue.
Nicki Kattoura 20:49
Yeah, so I think I mean, Columbia, I can't remember how long it's been -- I think we're on day 10 now, maybe 11. It's been amazing to see the sort of organic nature of these encampments. When the mass arrests happened, after Shafik called the NYPD on her own students and 108 students were arrested, the encampment was still going, even though they had arrested a lot of the organizers.
This is also paired with the sort of narrative that happened the day before the encampment started, where Minouche was testifying in front of Congress for allegations of antisemitism -- antisemitism here being the phrase "from the river to the sea," or anything to do with Palestinian freedom. You know, the encampments are -- unless the police are there, calm and like very jovial.
People are -- I haven't -- you know, you don't spend any money at the encampment. There's food, there's blankets, phone chargers. People talk to each other. People are building together. I know that -- I think it's at Columbia, where there's a zone for a student who has severe nut allergies, so there's a nut zone.
There are people who are caring for each other in a variety of ways - political education, prayer, but also the demand that Palestine is free, right? They're not forgetting that divestment is -- is the main demand here. And I think that a lot of these encampments have sprung up in response to the severe police repression that students at Columbia were facing, when Shafik called the NYPD on our own students. But I also think that what it points to is that the pressure point for demanding divestment is at every university.
Every university is -- maybe I shouldn't say every, because I'm not entirely sure, but I would say the vast majority are invested in weapons manufacturers, are invested in the Israeli occupation. And the encampment is hitting a nerve, because why else would you send the police on your own students? We have then seen across the country, at UT Austin, at Cal Poly, at Emory, at USC, rubber bullets, riot cops, and just severe state violence against students.
But the students aren't intimidated either. I mean, just now, today, this morning, Shafik wrote an email to the Columbia community saying, we will not divest from Israel, the encampment has to come down. And they distributed it to the encampment in like these paper packets and you open Twitter and the students have said, like, no, we're not leaving. Some have written "Columbia will burn" on the -- on the packet.
It's unbelievable. I mean, it's not unbelievable, but it's inspiring to see that the students recognize that the repression is a scare tactic or is a distraction. It's a very real threat, of course, but nobody has dismantled their encampment in response to it. In fact, NYU had an encampment, the riot police came, arrested 20 faculty and 120 other students, and now there's another NYU encampment somewhere else. So the movement isn't slowing down and I think that's why we're seeing such intense police repression.
Charlie Markbreiter 23:58
Just to build off of what Nicki said, I think one thing that has been really notable to me is how much the students connect police repression to Palestine in particular, and to US militarism more generally. So one way that they are doing that is being like in New York, we know that the NYPD actively trains with the IOF, and even outside New York, we know that it's super common for soldiers to come back from tours and become police officers.
And you know, when people are like, golly gee, how are they being so militarized? It's like, well, maybe think about the fact that we did the War on Terror, had a surplus of hyper-militarized former soldiers, and then just let them come back and be cops. And one quote from Aimé Césaire that has really stuck with me -- I'm paraphrasing -- is basically what he says, in the context of Nazism is, what surprised the Europeans about Nazism was not the brutality, but the fact that it was being unleashed against other Europeans, when before that, it had been unleashed against the colonized people of the world.
And so I think, even as we are shocked by, you know, video footage of police officers zip tying students or arresting philosophy professors, we really need to follow the students' leads and understand that like, this is happening because of US imperial warfare and also obviously because of the way that this warfare is also enacted internally and domestically, within the US every day, against unhoused people, against Black people, like just because it's happening to college kids now isn't the only reason we should like suddenly start caring.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 26:08
100%. Thank you both so much for laying out such a sort of comprehensive picture. I mean, I think in some ways, you kind of both already brought us there, but I wanted to sort of drill down for a second on the focus and the purpose, self-stated purpose of these encampments, which I really appreciated, for example, the statement that came out of the Emory encampment that explicitly names and pushes back against, for example, outside agitator framings, stating:
As the Palestine Solidarity Movement rips across college campuses, college administrators and government bureaucrats are rushing to denounce anyone taking action as an outside agitator. Those who grease the gears of the war machine think that this rhetoric will erode public support for actions at Emory. They are wrong. We want to say as clearly as possible, we welcome outside agitators to our struggle against the ruthless genocide of Palestinians.
And this is, I think, a good example of something that both of you were sort of hitting on in that breakdown, which is that in particular, a lot of the kind of resistance work that we're seeing does involve narrative and political education, partially because that is one of the weapons of normalization that we are up against, that is part of what sort of justifies and gives the "permission" for these universities to both enact violence on the students, right, but it fits into the sort of bigger picture, right, like not just of something to do with the protest itself, but that the bigger project of resisting genocide involves cultural and normative work as well.
And that's part of what these encampments are doing functionally is through addressing the material and immaterial connections that exist between universities, Israel, and war production, from something as simple as the example that we talked about recently, with, you know, disability technology, assistive technology being made at universities, funded by the Department of Defense, and these end up prototype Israeli tanks, right, from the very literal appropriation to the more diffuse and harder to pin down immaterial work of normalization, of normalizing the repression or the rejection, arrest, suppression, etc., of people who support Palestinian Liberation.
You know, we're seeing a bill rushed through Congress right now, legislation moving very quickly, that is targeting US nonprofits, basically explicitly targeting Students for Justice in Palestine, and Palestinian Youth Movement, because of like using this sort of nonprofit status to target or involved in or supporting pro Palestine protesting, and it passed the House. It was introduced, I think, in November in the House. It just was introduced into the Senate, called A Bill to Amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to Terminate the Tax Exempt Status of Terrorist Supporting Organizations.
And the bill basically gives like a single US authority to strip nonprofit orgs of their nonprofit status, basically with no limitations, no recourse, no accountability, based on merely this sort of declaration that they are terrorist supporting organizations, which is building on -- this is an intensification of an already pre-existing legal regime that uniquely targets and singles out solidarity with Palestinian liberation, which is something that we also discussed earlier this year with Maryam Jamshidi on the show, who's an expert in international law and wrote a great piece for LPE Blog about it, called "Students for Justice in Palestine, Governors for Authoritarianism in Florida." But you know, we're seeing these narratives sort of in real time that are being pushed back against.
And I think it's important to sort of drill down on the focus that a lot of the work that's going on in these encampments, both you know, Charlie and Nicki, you gave great examples of this, a lot of it is this kind of work that has to happen in the level of counter propaganda.
Nicki Kattoura 30:26
I think, and this is where I think the essay that you quoted from that I wrote came from, which is "I will never be the same." And I think after 207 days, I would hope that the majority of people will never be the same. I think what this genocide has done, and what we've seen, children crying for their parents, parents burying their children, mass graves in Khan Yunis, and at Nasser Hospital, and in Gaza City, the bombing of Al-Ahli Arab Hospital -- we've seen it all.
It's a livestreamed genocide that is unprecedented. And it's changed me, and changed everyone I know and work with on a fundamental level.
And it's interesting to see the sort of media try to spin this and think about, well, why are these students doing this? Like, what's in it for them? Who's funding them? You know, things that make no sense. And it's because most people with a heart and a soul can't stand by and watch this happen?
I think this genocide has, and continues to foment a sort of mass existential crisis that cannot reckon with the fact at least personally, like, how do we let this happen, and why hasn't this stopped? And are we all seeing the same thing? We're being told that whatever happened on October 7th justifies the last 207 days, and it can't, and it doesn't.
And I think, you know, these repression tactics, shutting down SJPs, suspending students, evicting them, is because I think, on some level, the state or the university, or I don't know who the subject here is, but is aware that Zionism is collapsing, it is in its last dying breath. And therefore the brutality and the repression escalates as well, not just here, but in Gaza, as we've been seeing. And so that's what I would say. I think people know the truth, the truth is very straightforward.
And I think the extent of the sort of manipulation of the truth is what is -- you know, is why people are escalating to these tactics. Why outside agitators are of course joining in on the student movement, because the student movement, yes, it's students leading it, but the goal of divesting is to the benefit of everyone - divesting from weapons manufacturers, fossil fuel companies, the Israeli occupation.
One thing I want to say is I think that at least, you know, when I was in college, the guiding repression of being anti-Zionist was the culture of fear. Faculty were disciplined, students were put on this website, Canary Mission, people were told that they wouldn't get the job opportunities. And most importantly, they were -- or most significantly, maybe, they were called antisemitic.
And we're still seeing that, that any sort of condemnation of a genocide that has killed over 40,000 Palestinians is somehow, in some warped way, antisemitic. I think people are shifting away from the rhetoric of that. And therefore the culture of fear is in many ways imploding. It doesn't exist, it doesn't have the grasp. People are being called antisemitic. It means less, because people know that they're not. And I think the repression on these encampments are, in many ways, a way to, or what you just mentioned about this nonprofit tax status, are all a way to sort of recapture that culture of fear.
But people are principled, and people have been seeing with their own eyes what these big institutions -- the President -- how many people have called for a ceasefire, the majority of people, and the President continues to not demand one, even though he could make it in a phone call. We've seen, you know, the UN be completely ineffective in demanding for a ceasefire. We've seen the ICJ say that Isreal is plausibly committing genocide and still, as they were reading the ruling that Israel was plausibly committing genocide, they were still dropping bombs on the Gaza Strip.
We see institutions like the New York Times, that have this credibility, as you were saying, that are known as being these massive cultural and media institutions that share the truth, and what's their tagline, "All the news that's fit to print," publish Screams Without Words, that makes this grandiose argument that Hamas systematically used sexual violence on October 7th, and then have nothing to back it up with, no evidence, or any evidence that they do have has been debunked. And they still haven't retracted the piece.
And we're seeing these universities, I mean, there was that picture from UT Austin, where state troopers were standing facing students and there was the UT Austin slogan, "What happens here changes the world."
State troopers menacing students at UT Austin, standing next to a University sign with the slogan “What starts here changes the world. It starts with what you do each day.”
Universities that have messaged consistently that they want students to better the world, that they should strive for justice and all these things, and it's all aesthetic.
I think people are seeing through it. There is no material change. And there has been no university that has actually called, except for Wesleyan, I believe, for a permanent ceasefire.
And so when you see that paired with worsening images coming out of Gaza, with the most horrific things that you could ever see, and you say, I don't think -- it can't get worse than this, and then it does. And still you are being maybe gaslight almost seems like too mild of a word, to believing that you're wrong, and that this is the way things need to be, and that there is a reason for all of this, whether or not Hamas has tunnels or whether or not they're in hospitals. None of it justifies what we've been seeing.
And that's sort of the mass existential crisis that I think we're seeing, that has been not just the result of watching this genocide unfold in real time, but also organizers and Palestinians that have refused to stop demanding freedom.
Charlie Markbreiter 36:03
Yeah, I fully agree with everything that Nicki said. And I feel like one thing that his response really crystallizes is I think, before October 7th, or before the encampments, it was easier to kind of have the line of like, oh, we're doing this "for Palestine," out of the goodness of our hearts, because, you know, we're kind people.
And when you see that university administrators care more about protecting their financial ties to the Zionist entity than they care about the physical safety of their own students, staff and faculty, I feel like it really reveals that this is not something that's, quote unquote, just for others, or for Palestinians.
This is also for you. You are seeing how Zionism distorts the funding priorities, the physical safety priorities, the educational priorities of your own school. They do not care about you. They do not care. They do not care if you're tenured, they do not care if you have followed all their rules. They will attack you, they will expel you, they will evict you. So I feel like that has really shown a lot of people that this is a movement with Gaza. This is not a movement like “for” Gaza, if that makes sense. You're fighting something that impacts you as well.
And yeah, I think the second thing I would just add about kind of the aesthetics of hasbara that Nicki pointed to is, I think an outlet like the New York Times, part of their -- not just them though, but kind of like the broader liberal strategy for narrativizing Israel is like oh, self defense, like the beacon of Western values in the "Middle East," and it's been increasingly hard for them to maintain this line, not just in light of their own incompetence, like the Screams Without Words piece that Nicki mentioned.
They like hired someone who had no real reporting experience, let alone experience reporting on a genocide. It was like her and her nephew who had like just graduated college and whose only real experience was as like a food reporter. And they were like, don't worry, just get some testimony and we'll like doctor the coverage for you.
But yeah, it's not just that they are clearly being shown as fumbling. But also the fact that like, you cannot really maintain this sort of liberal narrative as Zionists talk about how proud they are of committing mass murder. Kind of like the word for this that me and Nicki have used is like sassy genocide, which you see from the videos of IOF soldiers parading with women's underwear and shoes that they have stolen from people they've just killed, of the Israelis not just blocking aid shipments, but setting up trance DJ raves outside the checkpoints. I don't know. It's just like they're -- the list goes on.
And so I feel like the combination of that with the kind of livestream of horrors and sort of first person accounts from Palestinians being like this is happening to us has really crumbled the means of hasbara production.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 40:05
And I think that this is a really important point to focus on, because I'm sort of thinking back now to the George Floyd uprisings in 2020. And the kind of timeline of counterinsurgency that we ran into in that context was like, you know, in two weeks, we went from like burning down a police station to like budget negotiation demands, you know.
It was a really interesting, and I think, important moment of sort of delegitimizing a lot of mainstream media, like the New York Times and showing them for what they were, because you really saw, you know, for example, basically immediately media operations, stepping up to tirelessly sort of undermine the George Floyd uprising, through sort of selectively pointedly only reporting on certain aspects of reality essentially, and they were encouraging people to think about the uprising in specific ways.
And in turn, you know, we saw these kinds of narrative trends develop. There was a sort of similar moment where there was a discussion of sort of the peaceful protests framework rose up, and I think it would be good to sort of address that a little bit and, you know, make a defense of, for example, the kinds of things that often we're told sort of stretch the bounds of respectability, like when protests are not peaceful, and that's okay.
And those people still don't deserve violence. And the kinds of ways that, for example, in terms of demands, one of the demands and calls to action that you guys mentioned in the top is to step things up. And, you know, a lot of the folks who are students in college right now were in high school during the George Floyd uprisings.
Thinking back to that moment, you know, I was recently talking to Vicky Osterweil about this, I was reminded of just all of the things that felt possible in 2020, you know, like, they were worried that the National Guard wasn't going to be enough to contain the uprisings in 2020. We saw the counterinsurgent propaganda machine turn on the lights and go into full gear.
I think folks who are participating in these movements now are very aware of the sort of counterinsurgency that we're facing, which is why I think the work stoppage and the strike demand within the university context to sort of end the semester and refuse to accept these kinds of negotiation tactics from the administration, where you have some universities -- I think it was Cornell targeted and suspended the students that were involved in negotiating with the administration, for example.
So I think it was Rasha Abdulhadi who was saying this the other day, like, you know, you really don't have to negotiate with the administration, you can just push them and insist that they meet your demands, right? And so I think we're seeing a moment where we're four years out from some of the largest uprisings in US history that is recent memory.
Folks were in high school, right. Four years later, we've got I think a really important movement that needs to grow, needs to continue, like go through summer, right? End the semester now, stop the work on universities now, keep -- continue putting in the work on the encampments.
Nicki Kattoura 43:27
I completely agree. And I think that the focus on peace is actually the wrong -- or peaceful protests, rather, is the wrong sort of framework to view this as. It's to understand why they're doing it, which is for Gaza, and for freedom.
The counterinsurgency has, as you mentioned, like already begun, you know? AOC is walking into the Columbia encampment, after supporting the funding of the Iron Dome, or voting for the funding of the Iron Dome. And Columbia students made a statement saying, we are not trying to work with normalizers. I think what is the reason that the police repression is so strong, and maybe I've already said this, is because the student movement isn't dying down.
Even if they take the encampments down, what happens in the fall? Divestment is still the target. And I feel that way about, you know, the demand for ceasefire. Ceasefire now, like, yes, absolutely, a ceasefire. But after 207 days, that is the floor. I want -- and what's interesting is in the same way that 2020 saw a sort of -- the word abolition came into everyone's vocabulary, since October 7th, people are talking about Palestine as a settler colonial struggle, or an anti colonial struggle, which maybe wasn't the case a few years ago.
And so now, I think there is a real push to refuse that cooptation of language, that we are beyond just demanding a ceasefire, but we are demanding an end to the occupation, or demanding an end to a state that can and has the power to, with full impunity, to bomb a population of 2 million people, kill 40,000, injury 80,000.
And with the flip of a switch, shut off all food and water from entering the Gaza Strip. I think that's where we need to go and where a lot of people have already been. A ceasefire is like just the bare minimum. And after 207 days, it doesn't even feel like it is enough.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 45:18
It's not. Absolutely not. I mean, what -- there's no excuse, and there is no forgiveness for the last 200 plus days. I don't think that the sort of movement to support Palestinian Liberation is ever going to be the same again.
And I am proud to have like witnessed this profound shift and recognition of Palestinian self-determination and movement away from the kinds of sand traps that for years, I think, have sort of dominated and restricted the political horizon on which we can talk about what a free Palestine means.
And I think that what's happening right now, what is so important, more so than, yes, this is a historic student uprising in the United States and globally, right. However, what I think is more important, and more should be our focus, right, is how can we actually recognize and respect and do justice to Palestinian Liberation, in a total sense, right, not just in a -- in a nice -- in a way that sounds nice, in a killing peace, as Rasha would say, and I think it's been great to see that example out of Emory where they said, you know, outside agitators isn't gonna fucking work on us, guys.
And then in Atlanta, you know, folks put cement in the toilets of the Marriott Hotel for hosting an event with the Atlanta police, in solidarity with the crackdowns on Emory, in solidarity with Stop Cop City, the murder of Tortuguita, they put cement in the toilets, they put shrimp on the toilet seats, shrimp on the side, they released crickets, pulled the fire alarm, I'm very here for it.
You know, we saw students at Cal Poly Humboldt who bonked the cops on the head with a water dispenser bottle when defending a barricade of the building they were occupying. I mean, these are also -- you know, we're talking about a generation of people who were raised, you know, taught that the state wasn't going to keep them safe when someone came into their school with a gun and that they needed to rely on each other, save each other, build barricades.
And I think we're seeing a reflection of that in the widespread masking that we're seeing also at protests as well. Obviously, it's not perfect, it's not 100%. But it is impressive and noticeable to the point that we're also even seeing stuff like in The New York Post, "COVID shutdowns, isolation to blame for pro-Palestine protests, experts say."
Nicki Kattoura 45:18
Yeah. There is the -- there is the saying, or I don't know if it's a mantra, the slogan, that Palestine will free us all. And it is in a variety of ways. But you know, what you mentioned about Emory, Stop Cop City, the legacies of the 2020 uprisings, the ongoing pandemic, have all been talked about through the lens of Palestine over the last 200 days, and it is the same police, and people have already made these connections, the police that are beating students on college campuses are the ones that are also flying to Israel to work with IOF soldiers.
And that this is the product or the result of what Cop City in Atlanta would produce, that we are also talking about the sort of environmental ramifications of dropping thousands of bombs on the Gaza Strip, the amount of carbon emissions that are emitting from there, that these encampments are actually pushing against all of that, right, because the demands are not just divestment. And for a lot of them, it's not just disclose where the endowments are invested, it's also to get cops off of campuses.
That has been for NYU, and a few other schools, a central demand, to get IOF trained cops off campus. People are articulating those solidarities quite literally in their demands. And in the encampments, people are masking, people are taking care of each other. And we can see at UCLA, like the response to that, when yesterday, Zionist counter-protesters showed up to the camp and there was a sign in the encampment saying that one of the protesters was deathly allergic to bananas, and that no banana should be entered into the camp.
And what do Zionists do, they showed up with bananas. And so there was that -- like the sort of intense counter of what these encampments are trying to do, we see that in real time with counter-protesters. But yeah, I think everything you're saying is -- this is not a movement that dies with police repression. We've actually seen it get more intense or more widespread.
Charlie Markbreiter 49:48
Yeah, I think in a way, the way that bathrooms and bathroom access has emerged as a kind of flashpoint across multiple campuses is a way to sort of understand how this moment has emerged from both the 2020 George Floyd uprisings, as well as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
I mean, just thinking about CCNY, in particular, I mean, this is happening in a city where there are no public bathrooms. Like, if you want to use a bathroom in New York, you better be ready to pay for like a $4 drink at Starbucks. And what that does is it's a way to control public space. Because if you can't go to the bathroom, you can't really be in a public space for a long period of time, which is, of course, in a city like New York, partly a way to crack down on our unhoused population by restricting their access to the bathroom. And so not only is it an accessibility issue, but it's also a policing issue, because people who are trying to just use the bathroom wherever, because they can't use it inside, can then be arrested.
And we see this same tactic to restrict their access to public space and then hyper police them now being applied at schools like CCNY, although we've heard that encampments across the country, bathroom access has been weaponized against students. And that's why I feel like it's really interesting that this retaliation in Atlanta specifically targeted bathrooms, because it's obviously like an amazing image or whatever, if anyone hasn't seen it, like a toilet with cement in it, with a little shrimp on the toilet seat, I think because the original like police conference or whatever that was there, was advertising like shrimp on the side. So this was they're like, okay, you don't want to let us use the bathrooms? Well, you can't use the bathrooms either.
But yeah, I feel like TLDR, the reason that bathroom access has been such a flashpoint is because it is emerging from these sort of twin connections between hyper policing and accessibility. And it is really cool to see students push back and fight for their own right to use the bathroom on campuses that they are paying already to be at.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 52:31
Absolutely. That's a great point about the bathrooms. I hadn't thought about the poetic justice of specifically targeting the cops' bathrooms too. You know, I think one of the things that we're really seeing right now is the reporting that is coming out of Gaza, right, this is only like a fraction even of the horrible shit that's happening. And even that, right, is so obvious. You know, we're talking about mass graves where there are patients with IVs still in, zip tied, executed children, right? Like, this is so blatant and vicious and violent.
And what you have is this kind of, you know, it's almost like a pitch session. And everybody's throwing everything at the board, right, trying to get the whole focus on these encampments, from Netanyahu saying that he has evidence that 20,000 US students were like ‘trained in Iran’ in the last 90 days. And that, you know, the White House called the protests blatantly antisemitic, "echoing the rhetoric of terrorist organizations." Nancy Pelosi is blaming Russia, saying that it's got a Russian tinge to it.
And then of course, you have the masking framings, the people saying well, you know, like everything from, oh, the pandemic is over, to you should take off that mask so that you don't appear so threatening. I think a great and really fascinating example of this is this piece from -- ugh, from Dave Weigel in Semafor, called Behind the Mask: Why the New US Campus Protesters Cover Their Faces.
And you know, this includes as ridiculous stuff as like a quote from someone from the Anti Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, who's the president of the Anti Defamation League, which is, you know, a pro-Israeli propaganda and legal machine and this quote from the Dave Weigel piece says, "No masks on campus. This isn't Fallujah, this is Morningside Heights.”
I mean, like fucking ridiculous shit, right? And this kind of idea of like, oh, everyone at the protests masking is just virtue signaling, which completely flies in the face with, you know, as both of you are saying like, this is about taking care of each other, down to the bananas. You can really see the kind of weaponization of vulnerability that Zionism is really sort of relying on at its core.
And what I really appreciated in this Dave Weigel piece, which is again attempting to throw everything and the kitchen sink at these encampments, you know, in the hopes something sticks, there's this great quote from someone he spoke to, some activist who's there, Olan Mijana, who says:
To us, [it's about communicating] that we deny the Biden administration's narrative about COVID, that it's no longer a big deal. It's about collective safety. And it's also about connecting his COVID neglect to the very issues that we're marching for.
So you have, I think, again, the kind of connections that we're seeing beyond just the student encampments, in other movements right now, there is fortunately, I think, a focus and a lens of sort of using discussion around building solidarity for Gaza, that has sort of roped in and sucked in different angles, whether that's coming from a kind of pure COVID angle, coming from the angle of the politics of education, right, there's so many different ways to enter this right now.
And I feel like what we're seeing is ultimately a kind of unification of the real, honest reckoning of exactly what the state is for, and exactly what we're up against, which is ultimately an international extractive militarized regime that disables and kills so many, that shapes and reduces people's lives, that poisons the earth and the air. This is not just a genocide of people and a way of being and a way of life and a family and a community and a place, but it's also literally trying to kill everything that's on the land, right, to make the land sterile and clean for a refresh. And ultimately, these kinds of settler frameworks, right, when we're talking about the enclosure, the extraction, the kind of relationship of sovereignty between Palestine and Israel, what I think is most important to focus on, for our purposes now, towards the basement floor of an immediate permanent ceasefire, is to think about the way that the enclosure and death of Palestinians is taken for granted and seen as an entitlement that Israel has a right to.
And that's sort of the kind of framework that I think is primary right now. But I really appreciate how many people are not only making sure to kind of focus and refocus on Palestine, but also to draw these bigger connections and make sure that, you know, we're sort of, in a way, not through planning, but just through inspiration and proximity, I think, that works against attempts at counterinsurgency, because it just helps strengthen the foundations of the political analysis that everyone's going into it with.
Charlie Markbreiter 57:47
I think you're totally right, Beatrice. I think that arguably one reason that the Biden administration probably thought that people wouldn't care about their Palestine policy is because they had just been responsible for and continue to be responsible for mass death from COVID-19, for mass disablement from COVID-19.
And instead, I think what they saw was the reverse, was people being like, are you fucking kidding me? We just saw you guys do mass death to us. You continue to do shit about COVID internationally, and now you're going to try to do another mass death event in Gaza? Uh, no fucking way.
And something I also wanted to add in terms of why I think the media has been so adept at shifting focus away from Gaza is that we've seen years of free speech on campus discourse. In my -- I've been paying attention to this in terms of anti-trans pundits, in particular, so you know, having people like Milo Yiannopoulos, or Ben Shapiro on campus, to kind of like debate the validity of trans lives or whatever, you know, and we are seeing this from the exact same publication.
So just as the New York Times spent years writing op-eds about how Matt Walsh should be allowed to have free speech on campus to talk about why trans isn't real, they probably are recycling the exact same op-eds and just plugging in different nouns to be like, free speech on campus, most important thing is free speech. And so I think that's also a really interesting connection.
Nicki Kattoura 59:47
I think there is a narrative that the media is focused on the encampments to obscure the recent horrors in Gaza, the three mass graves found at Nasser Hospital, the one in Khan Yunis at Al-Shifa, the one close to the Turkish Hospital in northern Gaza, the settler attacks in the West Bank. I mean, it is worse than it has ever been. I think, though that that might be giving the media a little more credit than they have, because -- because the New York Times and other outlets have been so adept in using the passive voice to talk about what's happening in Gaza, it wouldn't surprise me and it's disappointing that it doesn't surprise me, that they wouldn't use the passive voice or try to spin the story in a way that suits their narrative regardless, like even if these encampments weren't happening.
You know, I wrote that essay, "I will never be the same" in October about Al-Ahli Hospital, and I'm -- every -- every 17th of the month, I think about the fact that that hospital bombing happened, and we don't talk about it anymore, because so many other horrible things, apocalypses have happened since then. Clearly the focus on free speech, and maybe I shouldn't say clearly, but to me, the focus on free speech and the encampments itself are more of a counterinsurgent tactic. This is about undermining a militant student movement that has no indication of slowing down.
Yes, the semester is coming to a close, and students might leave for the summer. But what happens when they come back? The target is still the same. What's the chant? Disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest. And so that's why there's the focus on "outside agitators" or demonizing outside agitators. That's why there's the focus on the safety of Jewish students, which has always been the sort of target and main priority or focus of stories around Palestine, how people feel, the way words make them uncomfortable, as if a word can be even remotely the same to white phosphorus, or an airstrike, or a bombed hospital, or a mass grave.
The sort of redefining of what safety means, safety versus comfort. And the fact that when we talk about the safety of Jewish students, we are also not talking about the fact that Jewish and Palestinian and Black and brown students are being brutalized by the police, sent in by the very same administration that is saying they want to keep their Jewish students safe. There are so many contradictions just happening in the timespan of these encampments.
And students are catching on, which is why the repression isn't working, which is why these encampments are growing in size, which is why when an encampment comes down, it comes up the next day, and why, you know, Cal Poly has occupied a second building, why they sent in a bulldozer to Cal Poly to get students out of the encampment or their occupation. I think people are fed up. Like what else is there to lose after what we've seen? And at the same time, you know, we're still seeing there's -- I had a friend phrase it to me, and she said there is the darkest possible obverse of these encampments is in Rafah, when recently, Israel bought 40,000 tents, and has placed them outside of Rafah, which is the southernmost town in Gaza, where over a million Palestinians are currently trapped, seeking refuge because they've -- most of them have fled bombardment in the north or Israeli invasion from the north.
Those 40,000 tents built by Israel are seemingly to push people in Rafah out to prepare for another ground invasion. It can't happen, it will be catastrophic. And we're supposed to act like these encampments are the impediment to our safety, when in fact, they're actually calling for our safety. They're calling for collective safety.
They're calling for freedom. And they're bringing together so many different struggles, right? These encampments are not just for divestment. These encampments are also to get cops off campus, as I've said. They are about practicing ways of disability justice and safety. They are spaces of education to learn, not just what the state's priorities are, but also as we've seen with colleges and newspapers and all over, how many institutions around us actually collude with the state, and are actually spokespeople for the state, even if they say that they are quite literally not.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:04:11
Very well put.
Charlie Markbreiter 1:04:12
I feel like I'm always just like, yeah, everything Nicki said. But yeah, once again, everything Nicki said and again, everything Nicki said. I feel like ideally, what we would love to see is for the strike to be just one part of the broader effort to push this movement off of college campuses. We saw yesterday in New Orleans, in what used to be known as Jackson Square, the first non-university encampment, and it was immediately swept by the police.
And of course, I think we can understand why, because this is a broader claim against settler colonialism in our cities, beyond the college campus, and it's an attempt to retake public space and to do so without being hit with policing as a consequence.
I think that university administrators are hoping that, you know, summer is going to come, maybe commencement will be a little dramatic, but then everyone will just kind of go home for the summer, and things will die down.
And I think kind of the more liberal sides of the movement are like, okay, it's fine. Like we can kind of just pick up again in September, in three more months. And I feel like, you know, Nicki is always saying, like, you know, in this case, okay, so you want to pick stuff up in three more months? Basically, what you're saying is, you're okay with three more months of genocide, you're okay with Rafah being invaded. You don't actually think we can win this. You're expecting this to still be happening in September, and you're okay with that.
And we're not okay with that.
And that's why we would push for people to strike, we would instead of pushing "outside agitators" or non-students off the encampments, we stand with the encampments that have actively welcomed people from the neighborhood, unhoused people, kind of just anyone who's interested in not just joining this movement, but in helping to bring this movement beyond the student population, beyond the campus, and together with Palestine.
And I really hope that is what we are going to see in the upcoming months.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:06:40
Hear, hear. There is nothing to wait for, and there is no better time. Absolutely. And this should, I hope, continue through summer, step it up, do whatever you can.
Today's May Day. If you're listening to this today, go for it. If you're listening to this later, go for it also.
And to quote Rasha Abdulhadi, throw the sand under your fingernails into the gears of genocide if you have to. And Rasha put it very well, I think, in our most recent conversation, the second part of which we released last week, called A Killing Peace Part Two, and Rasha said:
We must unlearn settler colonialism if we want to keep each other alive, not just in Palestine. I think that the settler colonial project here has proven it is incapable of creating a more perfect union that will keep even settlers alive, much less Native peoples who are colonized, displaced, have survived multiple campaigns of eliminationist mass violence and displacement, and still fight, and still insist on land back and liberation. The abandonment of any project of life-making worldwide must be addressed. And I do not know how to say it any more simply than that.
Thank you both so much for coming on the show today. Nicky, Charlie, deeply appreciate it. And I've really enjoyed having this conversation, getting to hear from both of you about what you've been up to. And I appreciate you bringing this call of action to our listeners also.
Nicki Kattoura 1:08:01
Thank you so much.
Charlie Markbreiter 1:09:37
Thank you so much, Bea.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:08:05
And just to close us out, and to underscore the importance of this call to action, in recent months, many people have shared a poem called If I Must Die by Palestinian poet, Refaat Alareer, who was murdered four months ago.
The poem was written shortly before his death, and he said that it was addressed to his eldest daughter Shaima, who last week herself was murdered by the settler colonial state of Israel.
Martyred alongside her family. Including her children. Refaat's grandchildren.
And so to close this out today, I'm going to read it now. May their memories and the memories of everyone killed by settler colonial violence for the last year, 75 years, 200 years, 1000 years, be for a revolution.
If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself—
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale
Thank you all for listening today. Nicki, Charlie, thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been a wonderful conversation. And I really appreciate you bringing this call to action to our listeners.
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