"University administrators want to control every single aspect of students’ social lives, such that they can only produce a limited, finite set of outcomes: one where students will not question the ruling class, but will only socialize in ways that reproduce the social order, and only socialize in ways which maximize profits for the ruling class and uphold the aims of American empire.
Stray from that and you will be destroyed.
And that’s why you are being lied to about these encampments."
~ Steven W. Thrasher
"In the four encampments I have visited, it has felt so good to not have to pretend—as so many universities, publications and politicians seem to want us to—that everything is fine and we must just get back to normal by pretending what is happening isn’t happening. Everyone knows police could come in at any second and beat the shit out of them; but they know what’s happening in Gaza is far worse, and so they’re willing to take the risk.
As a professor, it has felt good to pick up trash with my students, and to learn about how to roll a keffiyeh or sing Pesach songs with them. For all four encampments I visited erased a lot of divisions: between young students and old teachers; between faculty and staff; between Jews, Muslims and Christians; between formal members of a university community and our neighbors; between students of different universities (and their peers who don’t go to college).
Like the the Poor People’s Campaign Martin Luther King was planning when he was killed in 1968 (which was supposed to be a shanty town encampment of white, Black and Chicano poor people on the National Mall) the Gaza solidarity encampments have been a taste of what might be possible when everyone freely gets what they need—and when people unite across divisions to share shabbat, salah, and a demand to end war.
And that’s why, so often, you are being lied to about them."
~ Steven W. Thrasher
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