On a Saturday about a month ago, I walked up to Polk Place on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus and was greeted with a common scene for any college green. 

Students laid out on blankets in the grass, communing peacefully. They braided each other’s hair, read books, and created art. Lawn chairs were spread out in a circle for the conversation I was after, and I settled into the grass to talk to a couple of different students and faculty members about what the officially named Triangle Gaza Solidarity Encampment meant to them. 

UNC had joined the international movement of students occupying public space on campus to become physically, visually, and literally unavoidable. These students leveraged their existence and bodies to take up space, to draw the attention of the administrations they endorse with their tuition and knowledge. Their demands are simple: “Disclose. Divest. Otherwise, we will not stop. We will not rest!”

Meanwhile, the students bustled about, synthesized outside threats from the administration, and strategized responses, figuring out how best to disseminate helpful action items for supporters. My friend, the communications liaison for the UNC Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), raised a megaphone and shouted out, “A reminder that the UNC administration does not want us here. They are actively trying to make the place hostile!” By then, the administration had halted trash collection services around Polk Place and locked the buildings containing bathrooms around the green. These were incremental steps to pushing the students out, leading up to a strategic, surprise police confrontation. 

Have you heard of the 3.5 percent rule? Political scientist and public policy professor Erica Chenoweth found it only takes 3.5 percent of the population to force systematic change. Crunch the numbers, and all it would take is every other student in college to be on the side of demanding that something changes—and something would change.

The students are not alone. Professor Emily Rogers sits on the Duke faculty and says her role is using her “power and security to protect students” and “listening to what student organizations are asking of us.” Allyship in action, a guard for what it truly means to transition knowledge into praxis—there are professors across the nation using their standing within academia to buttress student action. (Rogers was arrested the following Tuesday by police who took away her cane and shoved her to the ground.)

Abi, a Duke student in attendance at the UNC encampment, describes it as an atmosphere that is “so loving, so caring.” As a Jewish woman, she attended Shabbat within the encampment. When it was time for Muslim students to say their prayers, Abi reflected on the human chain others formed around them, protecting their interfaith community from the counterprotesters. She says the UNC encampment is exciting because it’s public space, a place to converge and build momentum.

Erie, a NC State University student and member of the Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA), calls the encampment a “grassy, centric, perfect environment.”

“We’re visible, and that represents the idea of what’s possible, ” Erie says.

Leslie Kramer, a student at Meredith College, says that coming here is a reminder that you’re not alone in your fight. Ennis, an NCSU student who is also a YDSA member, says that, “strategically, Chapel Hill is the place to have it because the decision makers are here.”

Elyse Crystall is an English professor at UNC and holds a doctoral degree. She points out that UNC is actively in community with the town of Chapel Hill and its history. Across the street, the Peace and Justice Plaza is where the Occupy protests took place. Community outrage often confers with student activism.

“We haven’t bought any food,” Crystall says, because the community has donated so many provisions. This university is the center of the community: if anything is happening, it’s happening here.

Kramer notes that thinking of protestors as either students or nonstudents is an arbitrary divide.

“They wanna divide us between schools, but this is a fight for everyone,” Ennis echoes.

“The media will frame us as students, but we’re acting as ordinary people,” Erie adds. “Anyone can encamp anywhere relative to a seat of power.”

Born in 1999 myself, I understand the world these college students grew up in. Through school shootings, loss of health-care rights, and police brutality, we watched as the cops ran away from protecting us and the government actively harmed us, and we learned that direct mutual aid is the only way to make a difference. My generation is spitfire embodied. We no longer take our rights or liberties as guaranteed, so we fight like we have nothing to lose.

Students from other local colleges have been involved in efforts at their own institutions. At Meredith College in Raleigh, students launched an SJP chapter this semester and held a die-in protest with nine students. While small, it was still engaging. 

“The impact is different, but all still important,” Kramer says, 

Erie says that the UNC encampment is a great reference point, and she is learning here how to replicate these actions elsewhere. It’s a hands-on education. 

“You can’t Google this, you know?” she says.

Abi notes the difference between public and private universities and how Duke tends to “manage [its] image.” She says that it can be difficult for students to organize and collaborate, as things tend to “get shut down before traction can build.”

But that didn’t stop Duke from holding its own Stop Scholasticide rally in early March. Duke Academics and Staff for Justice in Palestine held a vigil for the educators, students, and schools killed and destroyed in Gaza, gathering on Duke’s campus and calling for Duke to condemn Israel’s actions.

“You shouldn’t be confronted with this and walk away OK.”

Abi, a unc student

Abi proclaims that, student activism aside, it’s important that Gaza has the biggest spotlight. In contrast to our peaceful green, every university in Gaza has been destroyed, and that’s why we’re here, Abi says. “They are going after scholarship and knowledge because those things are dangerous.”

University students who are learning to use their voice are a threat to the powerful. Abi emphasizes that the killing of children in Gaza means there is “no one to remember, to carry on” the legacy of what it means to be Palestinian.

“We can’t just stop the deaths and killing, but we have to humanize the culture … and realize that there is more suffering than death,” Kramer says. 

Abi says people must think of the atrocities as more than a statistic, that these are not “just Palestinians,” a label washing away the individualization of each death.

“You shouldn’t be confronted with this and walk away OK,” Abi says.

“If us feeling OK is more important than the genocide, then we are not OK,” Kramer affirms.

The members of the circle on the grass reflect on what our duties are as American bystanders.

“As an American, you need to subject yourself emotionally” to the immense fear and grief that is coming from our country’s funding and support, to “feel that grief every day,” Abi says.

On college campuses across the nation, demanding that universities stop funneling tuition dollars into Israel’s industrial-military complex, the masses gathered are generating hope like a precious resource. 

“Hope is what’s going to save the Palestinian people. They are going to save themselves. We are building up the hope, and hope is action to them,” Kramer says. From across the world, they add, Palestinian children have to find the hope within themselves to survive once the bombs stop; our duty as residents of an imperialist nation is to resist our system and foster that sacred hope.

Ennis says he hopes that this is a focusing moment, that it “radicalizes everyone in it or that walks by it.” He compares it to how anyone who was protesting Vietnam will remember that time. Protests that spur movements are reference points for radicalizing one’s beliefs; they root “values that stick through lives.” He tells me about how Vietnam protests are an entry point into conversations with elders who are ambivalent about the Palestinian cause.

When I tell Crystall, the UNC English professor, that I’ll come back on Tuesday to photograph the encampment, she crosses her fingers.

“Hopefully we’re still here by then,” she says.

They were, but not for much longer. 

That day, following morning arrests, UNC students raised a Palestinian flag in the quad as counterprotesters chanted “USA.”

They then supplanted it with Old Glory. Did they understand what was behind each decorated fabric waving in the wind? 

Kramer says it is often hard to imagine the “sheer scale of human suffering” happening in Gaza. The foregone era that people are imagining as pacifying enough to return to is “still apartheid and oppression.”

As I am leaving, a Palestinian student shares some thoughts with me.

They condemn U.S. actions as a “bipartisan consensus for continued war for the benefit of the Western empire.” They say the current spread of encampments is “international solidarity.”

“For the first time,” they say, “I feel less alone.”

Elim Lee is a Georgia peach who took a detour in New England and came back to her roots in the South this past year. Her least-in-progress, most-finished project is her children’s book Needle and the Too Big World. Follow her on Twitter at @wellwhatgives and Instagram at @elimscribbles.

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