By Conor Tomás Reed
The greatest honor of producing a book within and for social movements is to see its most impactful chapters being written off the page and into the world today. When I published New York Liberation School: Study and Movement for the People’s University in the summer of 2023 — about how Black, Puerto Rican, feminist educators and students at the City College of New York and CUNY revolutionized US higher education and social movements — I could not have predicted that CUNY’s historic call for a ‘People’s University’ would radiate into ‘People’s Universities for Palestine’ in April 2024 across the world. That month, I gave out dozens of free copies of my book to the City College, Columbia, and New School encampments in New York City. I held multiple teach-ins to relate CUNY’s militant legacies to these present upheavals.
I started to promote the book in May 2023, sharing how 20th and 21st-century CUNY students and educators like Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Assata Shakur rooted themselves in the university to build enduring counter-institutions as battles for control over social infrastructure. Coalitions constructed radically new relations within existing structures — within the same classrooms, buildings, and cities designed without these changes in mind. At the heart of the book was a celebration — that our Black – Puerto Rican – Third World – feminist – queer – disabled – revolutionary cultures have radiated outwards for half a century since the 1969 Harlem University takeover. Its participants’ writings have served as mobile liberation zones, portable classrooms passed hand to hand, generation to generation.
I’m proud that many of the universities where I shared our CUNY legacies would soon remix these space-transforming tactics on their own campus grounds. This, of course, didn’t occur overnight. After the October 7 Hamas attack that killed 1,195 people in southern Israel, the responding Israeli/US genocide in Gaza and the West Bank led to unprecedented global calls for a ceasefire. This relentless neocolonial massacre has now killed, by some estimates, almost 200,000 Palestinians and has obliterated schools, hospitals, shelters, escape routes, and food distribution sites — anywhere people sought refuge. For many who have long recognized Palestinians’ humanity, we know that history didn’t start on October 7. 1917, 1936-39, 1948, 1953, 1956, 1967, 1982, 1987-93, 2000-5, 2006, 2008-9, 2014, 2017, 2019, 2021 — all of this context is needed to comprehend the preconditions for the October 7 attack, as well as Zionism and US imperialism’s century-long war to erase Palestine and enact regional regime change.
During the Fall 2023 semester, as Palestine advocates across US universities wrote statements and organized protests to denounce the genocide in Gaza, NYC groups like CUNY for Palestine, Within Our Lifetime, Palestinian Youth Movement, and Jewish Voice for Peace mobilized hundreds of thousands to undertake daily mass direct actions across our city. Mega-coalition groups like Columbia University Apartheid Divest, formed in 2016 and comprised of “100+ Columbia University student groups who see Palestine as the vanguard for collective liberation,” became reactivated for this new moment of popularized militancy. By January 2024, a coordinated blockade of multiple NYC bridges and tunnels demonstrated that resistance to the genocide in Gaza was becoming more tactically intricate. Akin to the multi-ethnic, anticolonial, feminist dynamism that shaped the legacy of Harlem University, a diverse array of actors shaped the stakes and possibilities of transforming our society by centering the liberation of Palestine.
Even so, a central contradiction emerged: our seismic waves of marches and intersectional visions transformed social consciousness in leaps to embrace anti-Zionism and Palestinian liberation but could not end — let alone abate — the Israeli/US catastrophe in Gaza. Some historical comparisons are useful to show how such impasses have been routed by pivoting from the street to the university. Early 1960s US Black freedom and antiwar struggles shifted from nonviolent civil disobedience and legislation campaigns to late ‘60s university uprisings and draft opposition via campus occupations and material sabotage of ROTC/military offices. Similarly, the early 2010s Black Lives Matter mobilizations then cascaded onto campuses in 2016, and then again in the 2020 uprisings. Astute observers could have anticipated that mass street solidarity with Palestine would at some point become the “Student Intifada” — indeed, some Gaza solidarity encampments like at Columbia were secretly planned months in advance — but it still took the nation by surprise.
The courageous efforts to autonomously launch over 130 university encampments around the US strategically changed public discourse in defense of Palestine while revealing liberalism’s inadequacy to confront the genocide in Gaza or to challenge the exterminationist vision inherent to Zionism and US imperialism. Students, campus workers, and community accomplices (all of us inside/outside agitators) widely rejected the callous framing that this was all an anti-Semitic scourge, a free-speech fuss, or an imminent danger to university communities. The backlash against our encampments was so intense precisely because of how pivotal we were to remaking the national political ecosystem. However, as police and Zionist assaults shifted on-the-ground concerns to collective camp defense, and as mainstream news narrowly covered the camps’ evictions rather than link these tactics to Israeli military and settlers’ dispossession and erasure of Palestinians, organizers were faced with the challenge of transnational solidarity efforts becoming parochially focused and mediated.
In New York City, as the NYPD repeatedly attacked the Columbia, New School, NYU, and Fordham camps, the CUNY Gaza Solidarity Encampment led by CUNY for Palestine was a beautiful flourishing convergence space at City College in Harlem that — for six days (April 25-30) — was largely left undisturbed by police and Zionist aggression. For this reason, it’s invaluable to assess what kinds of remarkable study and movement happened when a Gaza solidarity encampment in the largest public urban university in the country was free to exist. We remixed the legacy of Harlem University and its Five Demands into a new Five Demands for a free Palestine and a free CUNY. Poets, filmmakers, scholars, musicians, healthcare workers, neighborhood organizers, brilliant rowdy children, and teary-eyed elders all took to the mic alongside our CUNY family to articulate a liberatory vision for our People’s University for Palestine, our Intifada University.
Drawing upon myriad lessons from Harlem University, Occupy Wall Street, Hurricanes Sandy and Maria recovery, pandemic mutual aid, and migrant solidarity, our encampment provided what universities should for free — classes, a people’s pantry and hot meals, childcare, medical care, a library, place to rest, an imaginative debt-free space beyond neoliberalism. CUNY on Strike led a huge assembly of Professional Staff Congress union members who voted to undertake the first wildcat strike in CUNY’s history in a spirited demand to end the genocide in Gaza from where we are institutionally rooted. The college’s open grounds design allowed tens of thousands of supporters to stream in and out for several days, for hundreds to sleep overnight, and for the camp to be a refuge for people bruised by other university crackdowns. We also fed and sheltered unhoused/precariously housed community members, including recent Central American and West African arrivals, in a tangible refutation of anti-immigrant sentiment stoked by city officials and racist media. I was honored to speak about New York Liberation School to crowds who shone with inspiration for their movement ancestors and future descendants in a beloved continuum of justice.
Near-hourly teach-ins fused Gaza with broader anticolonial scales of solidarity in the city — resisting joint NYPD/Israeli military training, disrupting Zionist landlords in the Bronx whose rising rents fund settlements in the West Bank — as well as across the globe — Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Haiti, the Philippines, Kashmir. Although these often took the form of unidirectional lightning lectures rather than facilitated collective sharing, a reflexive spirit arose day by day in which some teach-ins became more participatory. Dialogues continued and overlapped on-site and into the night on what had been absorbed each day. One pedagogical highlight was a direct action training by a seasoned organizer that, while activating an embodied sense of our political power, presciently showed how under-prepared the encampment was to defend itself.
Our encampment was a truly sacred site of learning and advocacy until it was brutally destroyed on April 30 by CUNY management and the NYPD, who attacked and arrested over 170 people (28 of whom faced felony charges). That same night, the police swarmed Hind’s Hall at Columbia twenty blocks south with guns drawn and a shot accidentally fired, and across the country, a Zionist mob assaulted the UCLA encampment. Within a few weeks, by Spring graduation, all of the NYC encampments — including the Lama Jamoush Center, a 7-story de-occupied building at New School — had ended or were destroyed. Meanwhile, in Latin America and the Caribbean, encampments in Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere were also ongoing or just launching. Across the hemisphere, even when they are suppressed and dismantled, these university-transforming insights continued to flow outwards this summer and into a new academic year.
We’re in a new phase of the Palestine solidarity movement — which is, at its heart, a global revolutionary movement — that must remain focused on ending the Israeli/US genocide in Gaza while being attentive to how it is rapidly metastasizing. Aimé Césaire warned over 70 years ago how the dehumanization of colonialism over there boomerangs to become fascism everywhere. Israel and the US have established precedents in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon for modern indiscriminate warfare, a laboratory of horrors to come on the world stage. And now, with exploding pagers, phones, and walkie-talkies, we see a new era of colonial-imperial telecommunications terrorism. The direct field of struggle has widened beyond Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Egypt, Syria, and Iran. The world’s center of gravity has redefined into a movement against Israel and the US military-industrial complex as a precondition for collective liberation.
At CUNY, the cynical attempt to paint Palestinian and Palestine solidarity organizing against Israel as anti-Semitic has been challenged head-on to not allow racists (including congressional panels) to define what racism is. To condemn a country’s policy of extermination toward the people whose land it’s occupying is a commitment to justice, not racism. We extend this analysis to any settler-colonial occupation, not just Palestine. Israel’s militarized apartheid regime in the Middle East, which the US bankrolls and arms for regional influence, does not represent the Jewish Diaspora. It rather distorts and makes a mockery of Jewish people’s broad histories of coalitional anti-racist radicalism that we can and should uplift. As I wrote in my book and elsewhere, these spurious charges of anti-Semitism at CUNY (in such 2016 and 2024 reports) have been a Trojan Horse for a crackdown on Palestine advocacy and anti-racist organizing and often contain threats to defund CUNY’s emaciated budget even more.
The hypocrisy of these charges is that very real episodes of anti-Jewish violence have been enacted by racial supremacists who have shot up synagogues, wielded tiki torches on college campuses, and believe in bizarre conspiracies of Jewish economic supremacy and genetic replacement. Swastikas and anti-Black graffiti have appeared on our CUNY campuses, campus police and NYPD racially profile us, admissions and graduation rates decline for Black and Latinx students, and an ongoing war of terror has put Arabs, Muslims, Sikhs, and other racialized communities in the crosshairs. A staunchly exceptionalist pro-Israel defense imperils our ability to confront the vast field of racism and austerity against many more people that is actually rampant.
Our New York City struggles are now evolving into an abolitionist anticolonial movement against the police and Zionism, in a crisis moment with mayor Eric Adams’ pro-cops, pro-jails, pro-capitalist dystopian hellscape being broadly rejected and now investigated with federal indictment charges. Meanwhile, NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban’s resignation and a recent police mass shooting against transit fare evasion have sparked new direct actions on the streets, subways, and campuses. One of the most impactful developments is young people re-attuning to an internationalist framework, but now interweaving our movements with feminist, queer, abolitionist, and collective care ethics that earlier liberation struggles elided. So we’re seeing Palestine be conjoined with Sudan, the Congo, Black and indigenous struggles in the hemisphere, disability justice, feminist and queer anti-Zionism, and a blossoming movement against Cop Cities and militarism everywhere.
As we continue to recalibrate and rebuild People’s Universities for the liberation of Palestine and the world, I urge everyone:
- Reflect upon this period of movement uprising followed by political repression and how future escalations can learn from this one. Collectively read on-the-ground aftermath assessments of the encampments (see here and here) so that no insurgent lessons go unabsorbed.
- Learn from Palestinian and regional resistance to Zionism — in particular, the organizational strategy of “unity of fields” that offers a distinctly spatial coalitional approach that could be replicated elsewhere. More broadly, recommit to studying our liberation movements across the globe and revitalize your methods and scope of learning in the process.
- Conduct power-maps to chart out solidarities you can make with others in your area’s schools, other workplaces, community centers, and neighborhoods. Practice direct democratic assembly so that everyone is a teacher, everyone is a learner, and everyone makes decisions. Welcome surrounding communities long exiled from universities to join your collective process.
- Create direct action strategies with goals, timelines, targets, messaging, and then tactics that best correspond to them, rather than being reactive and only focusing on a small familiar range of tactics. Skill up to learn how to defend liberated zones (even when it means to disperse and regroup to avoid mass arrests).
- Document and archive your struggles as you’re in them (i.e., don’t start from square one each semester or academic year!) — you are building upon a long liberation legacy that others will inherit from you.
- Organize tuition strikes and grade strikes on the way to broader cross-sector strikes. Infuse actions like the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) dockworkers strike with an anti-imperialist Palestine solidarity focus to halt US weapons shipments.
During CUNY’s upheavals — past and present — living rooms, classrooms, colleges, streets, neighborhoods, and the entire city compose the field of struggle: each classroom a potential coalition, each campus a counter-institutional foothold, each neighborhood a vital force to defend and organize with others. If education is the practice of freedom — as Paulo Freire and bell hooks teach us — then where, how, and with whom we study and move is of the most profound significance. We invite you, our New York Liberation School accomplices, to be nourished by these lessons as we strategize our futures together.
Palestine is everywhere! May our universities, living spaces, and all of us be transformed in this process.
AUTHOR BIO
Conor ‘Coco’ Tomás Reed is a Puerto Rican~Irish, gender-fluid scholar-organizer of radical cultural and educational movements in the Americas and the Caribbean. Coco is the author of New York Liberation School: Study and Movement for the People’s University (Common Notions, 2023). At the CUNY Graduate Center, they are a 2023–25 Visiting Scholar at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics, and are on the Board of Directors for CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies. Coco is co-developing the quadrilingual anthology Black Feminist Studies in the Americas and the Caribbean (Malpaís Ediciones), and is a contributing editor with LÁPIZ Journal and Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative. They have been immersed in almost two decades of struggles at the City University of New York and in New York City around transforming education and public space, anti-imperialism, police and prison abolition, solidarity with Palestine and Puerto Rico, reproductive rights, housing justice, and beyond. Instagram @newyorkliberationschool