Hashem Amireh was sitting by himself in a conference room when his friends texted him, around 5:30 a.m. on April 30, to say that UNC campus police were coming to dismantle the Palestine Solidarity Encampment on the quad.
Amireh, a doctoral student in economics who serves as president of the UNC-Chapel Hill graduate student union, had spent much of the previous four days at the encampment but wasn’t on-site that morning because he’d walked 20 yards away from his tent to get some work done in Gardner Hall. When campus police began arriving, Amireh hopped in his car and did a quick loop around campus to get a sense of how large the police presence was, he says. By the time he got back at 6 a.m., police were already arresting protesters in the encampment.
Amireh accompanied the six protesters who were arrested (three UNC students and three non-students, according to the university) to the Orange County Courthouse. (Thirty other protesters were detained and cited for trespassing but released on-site.) Then he returned to campus to attend a vigil outside Wilson Library that Faculty for Justice in Palestine organized in the afternoon. Following the vigil, Amireh and hundreds of others marched to South Building for a rally, which escalated when UNC interim chancellor Lee Roberts arrived with dozens of police officers, who forcibly reinstated an American flag that protesters had removed and replaced with a Palestinian flag.
The following week, Amireh received notice that he was banned from campus and suspended from UNC on disciplinary charges related to his participation in the protests. UNC has not publicly announced that it suspended any student protesters, though in early May, hundreds of faculty members signed a petition calling on university administrators to drop protest-related disciplinary charges against 15 students.
Amireh says his suspension and campus ban are temporary but indefinite. At an upcoming hearing, university officials will decide whether to revoke or sustain the suspension, he says. For legal reasons, he can’t currently get into the details of what the university is alleging as grounds for his suspension. In an email to the INDY, a UNC spokesperson wrote that “federal privacy laws prevent disclosure about conduct cases.” The INDY independently confirmed that the university suspended Amireh.
Amireh, who is Palestinian Jordanian, has helped head up the pro-Palestine student movement at UNC since November, a month after Israel began to decimate Gaza in the wake of a surprise Hamas attack that killed almost 1,200 Israelis and saw hundreds more taken hostage. In the weeks since commencement, action on UNC’s campus has quieted as students have cleared out for the summer, but the war has dragged on: around 120 hostages remain in Gaza, many of whom are believed to be dead, and Israeli air strikes and ground operations have now killed more than 36,000 Palestinians, including at least 7,797 children.
Ahead of Amireh’s disciplinary hearing at UNC, the INDY spoke with him to learn more about the mechanics of the student movement and to hear his thoughts on administrators’ justifications about the university’s response to the movement and the war.
INDY: The pro-Palestine student movement at UNC is rooted in part in a call for the university to disclose its investments with Israel and divest from them. Why?
AMIREH: In the United States, we still have universities, companies, and all sorts of other organizations doing business with the Israeli government. When a university does not divest from Israel, it contributes to the continuation of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians and the atrocities being committed in Gaza. A lot of our organizing has been inspired by the student anti-apartheid movement to divest from South Africa in the 1980s. [Editor’s note: The INDY contacted UNC for comment regarding students’ demand for divestment but a university spokesperson did not address that issue.]
What has the student movement at UNC looked like over the past seven months? And which student groups have been involved?
We’ve had a lot of conversations about how we should approach the call for divestment. There’s been a question of “How do we bring attention to the issue so that the university will listen to us, and not just create noise and go by the wayside?” There was a feeling that if we wanted to make our voices heard, we needed to be more, I think, audacious with our moves. In November, there was a sit-in in an administrative building that marked an escalation for student movement tactics. Then there were several rallies and teach-ins and banner drops, and then we set up the encampment in April.
UNC, Duke, and NC State chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) have been involved, as well as Graduate and Professional Students for the Liberation of Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace.
Why did you set up the encampment?
We want to be something that you can’t ignore. This isn’t just about divestment; it’s about bringing attention to a genocide. The encampment also has symbolism to it as well, which is that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Palestinians in Gaza are currently living in tents.
On April 30, police came to dismantle the encampment after it was up for four days. What were you doing at the encampment before it was taken down?
There were a lot of teach-ins about Palestine, movie screenings, people who were just chilling and talking, people doing work, religious services including Muslim and Jewish services.
The university said we were disrupting university operations by having tents on the quad, which is ironic, because once they took down the encampment, they put up barricades, so now no one has been able to use that space. [Editor’s note: UNC took down the fencing around Polk Place on June 2, a month after it was erected and several days after the INDY interviewed Amireh.] At least with the encampment, there were people using the space—I mean, really using the space. And other students were still able to go about their day and get to class.
But in some ways, the goal of the encampment was to disrupt, right? To be something that people can’t ignore?
It’s a balancing act. It’s tough, because you want to be present, you want to be in people’s face about it, but you also don’t want to turn people off. But sometimes, the severity of the crimes means that we have to lean into the disruptive aspect of things. People are able to just go about their day and not really pay attention, and sometimes you have to keep escalating until people start paying attention. Before we had the encampment, how much news coverage did the protests get at UNC? Almost none.
But again, it wasn’t something that was hindering people from living their lives. In fact, during the flag incident, like in the heat of it, I saw three girls who were completely uninvolved with the protests, they came over with food they’d gotten from Raising Cane’s and set up shop on the same bit of quad where the flag incident was happening.
Several hours after the encampment was dismantled, protesters removed the American flag from the Polk Place flagpole and replaced it with a Palestinian flag. Why did protesters do that?
I personally was not involved in that. But removing the American flag and putting up a Palestinian flag is a valid form of protest. The week before that incident took place, the United States had passed a bill to give the Israeli military, which is currently engaging in genocide, $17 billion. Therefore, the removal of the U.S. flag is in itself a valid form of protest, and putting up the Palestinian flag is a symbol of solidarity for the Palestinians and the Palestinian cause.
The “safety update” that UNC posted on its website about the events of April 30 cites “throwing full water bottles at University leaders and others,” “leaving a voluminous stream of trash and belongings that required a major clean-up operation,” and “intimidating fellow students or other passersby who were not engaged in the protest” as activities that student protesters engaged in that were not peaceful, as well as removing the flag.
No one was being intimidated just because they were passing by. We consistently collected our own trash and actually transported it and threw it out somewhere else because we didn’t want to overflow the trash bins that were close to the encampment. When the police came—and we’ve seen this at other universities, too—they tore through the encampment and made it look awful, and then the university sent out a photo to try to make it look like we’d dirtied up the quad.
I didn’t throw any water bottles, so I can’t really comment on what was going on in people’s heads. If I had to guess, it came from a place of anger. The police started the violence. They were brutalizing students around the flagpole. Students were being pushed and maced. A student in a wheelchair was pushed down with a barricade thrown on top of her.
[Editor’s note: The INDY contacted UNC for comment regarding the photo of the encampment that university officials disseminated on April 30, but a university spokesperson did not address that issue. Regarding allegations of police brutality, the spokesperson wrote that “UNC Police will investigate all allegations and complaints of misconduct against any member of the Department.” ]
The News & Observer published a photo that depicts you in an altercation with a counter-protester. Can you provide any context around that photo?
He attacked a student, as you can see in the photos that INDY Week posted. I was intervening to ensure the student’s safety.
You and other student protesters were suspended in the wake of the events of April 30. What can you tell us about the suspensions?
I have not been charged with any criminal offenses. The allegations outlined in my suspension are simply false. It is my opinion that UNC is using false allegations against me in order to silence me as a prominent Palestinian voice advocating for Palestinian liberation on campus. I cannot comment on the specific allegations at this time.
In an interview with Chapelboro last month, Interim UNC Chancellor Roberts said there’s been a rise in antisemitism on campus, citing “an arson threat against a Jewish fraternity building;” “the slogan that is written at the gates of Auschwitz, written on a whiteboard,” and “swastikas and antisemitic slurs written on Jewish students’ dorm room doors.” Roberts said, “I know some people have tried to deny that there’s any connection between these very active pro-Palestinian protests and the clear rise in antisemitism. I think that’s a stretch. It seems clear, at least to me, that there is a connection.”
It is the university’s responsibility to publicly acknowledge hate speech and threats. That shouldn’t be swept under the rug. But making the conflation that these incidents are results of the pro-Palestine student movement is irresponsible. It’s important to acknowledge that there was a large Jewish contingency that was part of the encampment. The president of SJP at UNC is Jewish. So there is this attempt to try to villainize the movement as antisemitic, and it’s honestly quite dangerous to associate us with antisemitic actions that had nothing to do with our movement.
When Lee Roberts came in with all of the police officers to put the American flag back up, there was a UNC Hospitals Police Department officer, and there’s a video of him where he spits on the Palestinian flag. And yet we don’t see administrators making a public statement about that, even though there’s a clear connection between that action and anti-Palestinian discrimination. So there’s a double standard of what discrimination the university speaks out against and what it’s willing to let pass.
You mentioned that the pro-Palestine movement at UNC is inspired in part by the movement against South Africa’s apartheid regime. In the Chapelboro interview, Interim Chancellor Roberts said he attended college “in the late 1980s, [at] the height of the anti-apartheid divestment movement” and that at that time, “there was a broad consensus, of course, that apartheid was wrong, and [efforts] to bring about the end of apartheid were justified.” He said that the difference between that movement and this one is that “there’s clearly no consensus that Israel has to be punished and that companies should divest.” What do you think of the distinction Roberts drew?
If you look at the Daily Tar Heel archives, College Republicans and a group called Students for America were both very much against the anti-apartheid movement and were trying to bring it down. In 1986, when the student anti-apartheid movement built shantytowns in the quad—similarly to our encampment, to bring attention to the issue—they were taken down and five students were arrested. But before that happened, these groups going against the anti-apartheid movement had their own set of counterprotests. They built a Berlin Wall in opposition to the shantytowns. So there very much was a controversy around that movement, and there was resistance from the university. It took years to get UNC to divest [from South African companies] back then.
You’re the president of UNC’s grad student union. How does the pro-Palestine student movement align with the grad student union’s cause?
Fighting for liberation is a universal value, whether it’s the liberation of workers, or the liberation of Palestinians, or liberation of Black people in America. All of these issues are interrelated. In the United States, we have rising inequality, and the status quo is unsustainable and harmful. We have allowed forces within this country to separate us by trying to vilify different groups in order to prevent us from working against the system that really is disenfranchising the masses in this country.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
[Editor’s note: The INDY contacted UNC for comment regarding the university’s response to an encampment that protesters and others characterized as peaceful and not disruptive to university operations. A UNC spokesperson referred the INDY to the “safety update about recent events” on the UNC website and to a statement from Interim Chancellor Roberts and executive vice chancellor and provost Chris Clemens. “The leaders of this group ended our attempts at constructive dialogue” and “repeatedly and knowingly violated state law and University policies that provide for peaceful demonstrations,” the statement reads.]
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