By Jennifer Kelly
As a founding member of UCSC’s Faculty for Justice in Palestine and a scholar of Palestine, I provided three teach-ins and study sessions for the encampment: a teach-in on Day 1 to inaugurate People’s University, a study session mid-month on the policing of Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian and her scholarship, and a teach-in at picket line in its first days to celebrate the coalition between the UAW Strike for Divestment and the Encampment, which both shared the goal of bringing business-as-usual to a halt during a genocide in which our universities are complicit. In what follows, I will provide snapshots of the content of these teach-ins and study sessions that trace the three main arguments that I offered students: why it is incumbent on us as witnesses to a genocide to do more than witness; how this genocide, itself, continues a long history of Israeli state violence; how the state, military, and university collude in the past and present silencing of Palestinian scholarship; and why it is critical to insist on removing cops from our campuses.
During the 31 days before the brutal militarized police raid on UCSC’s Palestine Solidarity Encampment on May 31, 2024, the People’s University for Gaza thrived. It was a site of intentional community, intellectual exchange, political organizing, mutual aid, and shared food, laughter, dance, joy, and tears. The Encampment was a site where my partner and I routinely brought our three-year-old, who had her own camp name—“Piglet”—and who felt nothing but safety and protection in the space of the camp. Meanwhile, our university administrators spent the month vacillating between praising their own allegedly outsized tolerance of freedom of speech and painting the Encampment as a dangerous place rife with antisemitism and violence understood as property damage (reader, a sidenote: a. our administration, in fact, has no tolerance for diversity among Jewish students as our Encampment was—of course—staunchly against racism, imperialism, and antisemitism, with 1/3 of the encamped student organizers anti-Zionist Jews and with regularly organized anti-Zionist shabbats and seders; b. property damage is not violence and neither is blocking campus entrances; and c. the Encampment routinely discouraged property damage as a practice and cleaned the space and its surrounding environments on a daily basis). This disparagement of the Encampment was, of course, intentional. It provided the justificatory logic for the eventual—and inevitable—police raid: itself a collusion of militarized police and the university, unleashed on our students, without any regard for the context of a livestreamed genocide, which, has claimed the lives of over 186,000 Palestinians, that our students are both witnessing and, rightly, risking everything to protest.
Beyond Witnessing
As I formulated the comments for my People’s University workshops, I drew on my work as a scholar of Palestine whose book is about solidarity tourism in Palestine and the role of the witness and drew from public-facing work I had recently written on witnessing during a genocide. I spoke to students, in the first instance, about what is incumbent on us all as witnesses to a genocide and what we need to do beyond witnessing across these contexts. As my workshops were in the month of May, I explained how, for eight months, we had witnessed a genocide live-streamed on social media. How Israel had murdered over 34,000 Palestinians—a number that has now reached 42,000 confirmed with 10,000 still under the rubble, and other estimates of 118,900 murdered, and others putting that number at186,000 dead from direct or indirect causes from bombardment, rubble, disease, starvation, and forced displacement. I explained how those murdered are mothers, daughters, sons, uncles, aunts, fathers, grandfathers, infants, neighbors, health care workers, journalists, and patients. How each person murdered by Israeli state violence is a whole world, a whole universe.
I explained how, for every teach-in I had done for those past eight months, I had to update this number over and over again. Every day, a new massacre, an updated body count. And each day, while the movement for a free Palestine grows, Palestinians continue to be treated as unreliable narrators. They are accused of fabricating the numbers of their dead, of bombing their own hospitals, of dying by stampede rather than by the Israeli soldiers who shot them. The first ask of the witness to a genocide, I argued, is the work of believing Palestinians when they speak.
This is the work of heeding Palestinian warnings based on generational experiential knowledge of Israeli state violence. This is the work of reading, the work of anchoring ourselves in Palestinian studies as a field, as a body of scholarship. I reminded students that it is not a coincidence that every encampment has a liberation library and that ours, in particular, had teach-ins every morning and study sessions every afternoon. This is the slow, long work of a lifelong commitment to learning from and with Palestine, taking in the literature and scholarship produced out of Palestine as a daily practice. This is the work of substantively engaging Palestinian scholarship on Palestine in our syllabi and in our research and in our organizing and turning to Palestinian studies to understand what we are witnessing and how to realize actual—and not nominal—decolonization.
The second ask of the witness to a genocide, I explained to students, is what Palestinian writer and clinical psychologist Hala Alyan describes of the witness, including the diasporic witness, to remain undistracted and undeterred. To remain undeterred, for example, by caricatures of student organizing—so rampant on our campus as in the aforementioned administrative missives—and attempts to silence pro-Palestinian speech. I suggested that this is the labor of enumeration, the listing witnesses do over and over again, the numbers of dead repeated, the flattened neighborhoods and cities named, the entire families deleted from the civil registry, the relentlessly bombed hospitals and universities and bakeries, and the hundreds of Palestinians who settlers and soldiers have murdered in the West Bank since October. With our students, we as faculty repeat all the other lists: The U.S. is bankrolling all of this carnage at a minimum of $3.8 billion per year, and 68 percent of the weapons Israel imports to kill Palestinians come from the U.S. The U.S. has protected Israel from criticism and accountability by vetoing 45 U.N. Security Council resolutions from 1972 to 2023 that have attempted to hold Israel responsible for its crimes. The massacres Israel is committing every day would be impossible without the U.S. enabling and exonerating Israel at every turn. Enumeration, I offered, is the work of continuing to remember, to name, to list, to diagnose past and present Israeli state violence until it comes to its inevitable end. I stressed that this is not the work of just today, or tomorrow, or this week, or even this year, but this is lifetime work. The work of renewing your resolve, taking radical care of each other, and continuing to read, enumerate, and act until Palestine is free.
The third ask of the witness to a genocide, I explained to students, is to act, over and over again, every day, as much as you enumerate and list acts of Israeli state violence. To camp out and refuse to be moved until your demands are met. To not watch Palestinians be killed one by one and do nothing. To speak of Palestine wherever you go. To scream for a ceasefire and an end to the siege and a free Palestine in every corner of your world. To stand hours in line at your city council resolution meetings. To refuse to confuse discomfort with danger. To not be afraid to face baseless accusations of antisemitism. To make calling your representatives part of your morning/mourning routine. To do the long work to sustain disruption, from boycott, divestment, and sanctions organizing, to protests, to shutdowns, to bail funds, to demanding dropped charges, to not letting U.S. warships—like blocking of the pinkwashing SS Harvey Milk in April—make their way to Gaza. To speak the truth in all the worlds you inhabit.
In my teach-ins, I worked to emphasize two more aspects of this organizing labor: one, doing it within the space of the university, and, two, doing it under the ever-present threat of police violence (a redundancy of a term as many scholars of policing argue since policing is violence). As we wrote in our FJP statement in support of the Encampment at UCSC:
There are no universities remaining in Gaza. All 12 institutions of higher education in Gaza have been leveled by the Israeli Occupation Forces, using U.S.-supplied armaments. Since October 2023, the state of Israel has murdered at least 95 university professors and 756 teachers, leaving over 608,000 students without any access to education. This murderous state violence is alongside the 34,000+ Palestinian civilians killed in the indiscriminate bombings, snipings, ground occupations, and the forcible capture, torture, and assassinations of Palestinian medical workers, human rights organizers, and journalists we have witnessed over the past over 200 days. The people of Gaza are currently enduring forcible starvation, in a constant state of famine and “catastrophic living conditions,” according to the March 28, 2024, International Court of Justice’s indication of additional provisional measures to prevent genocide. These horrors are a continuation of nearly 76 years of Zionist efforts to destroy Palestinian civil society and erase Palestinian knowledge-making practices, culture, land, and history. We, as educators in a public institution, are committed to the imperative that public education must always serve the greater public good, unconditionally support our students’ organizing efforts, and embrace our own obligation as faculty, staff, and instructors to condemn this scholasticide and the University of California’s complicity in it.
Those of us who work and think and learn within the university, I explained, have every obligation to grind its operations to a halt until it divests from the war machine. Indeed, as the conveners of the Global Strike for Palestine insisted, “if there is no functioning university in Gaza, there should be no functioning university anywhere.” We must hold our universities accountable for the harm they enable, and feign is inevitable.
Policing Palestinian Scholarship
To illustrate this point, in my study session on policing Palestinian feminism, which centered on Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian and her work, I emphasized this profound collusion of universities, police, and the military in the policing, surveillance, and silencing of Palestinian knowledge production. Shalhoub-Kevorkian is a renowned Palestinian feminist legal scholar and anthropologist, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, and a professor at Hebrew University. It is impossible to overstate her importance across multiple fields: anthropology, feminist studies, legal studies, and childhood studies. She is a scholar of what she calls unchilding: the theft of childhood under settler colonial military occupation, as in Palestine, where children are forced to adopt conditions of adulthood under brutal military regime. As the Palestinian Feminist Collective writes:
Her three decades of groundbreaking research has had an immense influence on how scholars around the world understand violence and trauma. Her work sheds light on the critical elements of abuses of power (both hidden and apparent), experiences, and residues of ongoing and cumulative trauma that children and families face intergenerationally under conditions of long-lasting systemic oppression and dispossession. She has made extensive contributions to our understanding of women, children, and families living under military rule, notably in her most recent book, Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding.
The collusion of the Israeli police, the military, and the university in targeting Shalhoub- Kevorkian has been relentless. In late October 2023, Hebrew University leadership demanded she resign for signing a petition in defense of Palestinian children under Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza: a scholar of childhood suspended for defending children. In March 2024, the university suspended her for calling for Zionism to be abolished on the Makdisi Street Podcast. They reinstated her two weeks later. She was then detained and questioned in late March at Ben Gurion Airport, returning from academic travel. On April 18, Israeli police arrested Shalhoub-Kevorkian and kept her overnight in horrific conditions before a court ordered her release, rejecting the police’s demand to keep her imprisoned longer. In 972 Magazine, Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s student and mentee Shahrazad Odeh wrote:
According to her family, police officers raided her house in the Old City of Jerusalem without warning, searching and confiscating her books, papers, notes, and interview transcripts. During her interrogation and detention, the officers subjected the 64-year-old to ill-treatment and practices that amount to forms of torture: she was strip-searched, yelled and cursed at, and thrown in a cold, isolated, and urine-smelling cell infested with cockroaches; the cell was kept illuminated throughout the night with bright, buzzing lights to prevent her from sleeping; and for some of the time her hands and feet were shackled.
The ceaseless attacks on her—from the university disparaging her work to the Israeli press slandering and ridiculing her in misogynist takedowns of her work—show the limits of critique in settler colonial universities. She is being persecuted for daring to name Zionism for what it is: a settler colonial racial project. In my study session, students co-read an article by Shalhoub- Kevorkian’s that I teach in most of my classes: her 2016 piece “The Biopolitics of Israeli Settler Colonialism: Palestinian Bedouin Children Theorise the Present,” which positions Bedouin children as theorists of the colonial condition and integral producers of knowledge; it further demands that scholars understand the violence at the site of knowledge production that animates the Zionist settler colonial project and understands Palestinians—and particularly Palestinian children—as always already worthy of suspicion and contempt. This violence at the site of knowledge production, which we spoke about together, is one that has characterized Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza for the past eight months—and the 76 years before that.
I ended my study session with Odeh’s final words in “The Orchestrated Persecution of Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian:”
The voice of Shalhoub-Kevorkian echoes today on American campuses. The attempts by elite universities to silence and villainize calls to stop the genocide in Gaza and demands for a free Palestine only prove that these modalities of violence are copied and transferred across borders. And like the repression on U.S. colleges, the relentless attack on Shalhoub- Kevorkian has disrupted the status quo enjoyed by Israeli academia, which for too long has pretended to allow freedom of expression while simultaneously taking an active part in the Israeli war machine and its hegemonic narrative. By targeting people like Shalhoub- Kevorkian, the Hebrew University is teaching Palestinian scholars and students alike that there is no place for them there. The academy, after all, remains “Israeli, public, and Zionist.”
Students and I spoke about the clear resonances this case has for what we are witnessing all around us, with the violent repression of critiques of Zionism on U.S. campuses by the police and state agents. It shows us exactly what the police protect and the degree they will go to protect it. And it shows us how our campuses are beholden not to the values they ostensibly espouse but to the war machine, defense contracts, and the silencing of anti-war activism.
Cops off Campus
Finally, across both my study-sessions and teach-ins, I emphasized the political and intellectual import of Cops off Campus—as a movement, as an imperative. The demands of UCSC’s Solidarity Encampment for Gaza were (and are): DIVESTMENT, the demand for complete divestment from weapon-manufacturing companies and research collaborations with weapon manufacturing industries; DISCLOSURE: full transparency to all UCSC and UC-wide assets including investments, donations, and grants; COMPLETE ACADEMIC BOYCOTT: cutting ties UC wide with all Zionist institutions—including study abroad programs, fellowships, seminars, research collaborations, and universities; END ACADEMIC REPRESSION, ending the targeted repression and policing of pro-Palestinian advocacy on our campus; COPS OFF CAMPUS, stop surveillance and violence against students, sever all ties with SCPD, and no cop training facility on campus; and, finally, END THE SILENCE, a call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire and an end to the occupation and genocide in Palestine.
That, among these demands, Cops off Campus is central and speaks to the many ways Black liberation and Palestinian liberation organizers, researchers, and theorists have long connected the abolition of prisons and policing to the struggle for a free Palestine. As we learn from those who study colonialism and policing, militarized policing is redundant because the professionalization of policing dovetailed with militarization from its inception; police violence is redundant because policing is violence; racist policing is redundant because policing has always taken shape through racism, via enforcing enslavement and protecting colonial expansion.
As we read, enumerate, act, as we ground ourselves in Palestinian scholarship and insist on Palestinian futures, we must also condemn scholasticide and insist on the right—everywhere—to education that is not under bombs and siege. And we must also insist on our campuses without cops, where students are safe from racialized violence, from military occupation to police presence. These are the collective commitments that insist on a futurity that treats all life, including Palestinian life, as precious. A futurity that refuses the business-as-usual of death-dealing industry, a futurity that actually translates to a future of radical care and love for us all. A future where Palestine is free—from the river to the sea—and a future where abolition means the abolition of prisons, policing, militarism, and colonial violence everywhere. That our Encampment was brutally dismantled by police days later, called in by our Chancellor and Executive Vice Chancellor who had spent the previous month vilifying our students and paving the way for exactly that response, only solidifies our demands and reinforces our resolve: cops off our campus, an end to state violence, and anti-colonial solidarity until liberation.
AUTHOR BIO
Jennifer Lynn Kelly is an Associate Professor of Feminist Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research broadly engages questions of settler colonialism, U.S. empire, and the fraught politics of both tourism and solidarity. Her first book, Invited to Witness: Solidarity Tourism Across Occupied Palestine (Duke University Press, 2023), is a multi-sited interdisciplinary study of solidarity tourism in Palestine that shows how solidarity tourism has emerged in Palestine as an organizing strategy that is both embedded in and working against histories of sustained displacement. Her next project, co-edited with Somdeep Sen (Rothskilde University) and Lila Sharif (Arizona State University) is Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Palestine, the next volume in the Detours Series at Duke University Press after the inaugural Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai’i. She is also a Founding Collective member of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism and UCSC’s Faculty for Justice in Palestine.
