It is Day 250 of the genocide in Palestine.
While shells bombard Rafah, massacres across central and northern Gaza continue with hundreds of thousands on the brink of starvation. Violence against Palestinians is escalating in the West Bank, while the perpetrators of these crimes enjoy the unwavering support of the US war machine.
37,746 Palestinians have been killed since October 7. The people of Gaza and the West Bank face a dark chapter in their history, but this pattern of abuse from Israel did not begin on October 7, 2023. We are in the 76th year of the Nakba that never ended. Palestinian life has constantly been at risk since the establishment of the Zionist settler-colonial project in 1948.
Even before October 7, the Israeli Defense Forces had killed 323 Palestinians between May 2022 and May 2023. Even before October 7, Palestinians had found themselves forced out of their homes through settler violence. Even before October 7, Israeli forces had shot dead at least 34 Palestinian children in the West Bank between November 2022 and August 2023. Young boys playing soccer, children who did nothing but walk in the streets of the neighborhoods their ancestors created. There is no limit to the horrors committed by Israel towards the people of Palestine.
It should be Day 48 of the Palestine Solidarity Encampment at UCLA.
On April 25, students decided to stand against UCLA using our tuition, our labor, and our campus to fuel the genocide in Palestine. The community that bloomed at Royce Quad was a beautiful space of student and worker solidarity with Palestinians in their ongoing struggle for liberation. Never did I feel so close to my peers at UCLA than when I was among those tents. We were united against oppression, colonization, and genocide.
Despite this, our university chose not just to stand back as a terrorist mob violently attacked us for hours, but to capitalize on the assault, inviting the police to tear down the encampment the next day. A few weeks later, when students stood up to reclaim our campus at Kerckhoff Patio, police were on the scene within hours.
It is easy to lose sight of why we resist. People across our community are, rightly so, directing anger towards the administration of Gene Block; the private security that has taken over our campus; and the police who have, time and time again, responded to peaceful protest with violence and arrest. As these acts of repression escalate, so does our anger. This is natural and this is justified, but we cannot let our anger live without purpose.
We must ground our resistance in the people of Palestine, the tens of thousands who have had their lives stolen by a genocidal state and the millions more who wonder if they will live to see another day. It is by honoring our martyrs that we will rebuild our community around the rightful cause of ending this genocide. We must remember their names as we escalate for a free Palestine in our lifetimes.
The police brutality we witnessed on June 10 was the latest in a series of shameful acts by the UCLA administration, but it will not be the last. The UC’s cold inhumanity has never been clearer than their near-instant response to the third encampment at the Tongva Steps. As students and workers vowed to read the names of every Palestinian martyr, a blaring dispersal order soon drowned out attempts to honor the dead. UCLA responded faster to Shapiro Fountain being colored red than when terrorists spilled students’ blood – real blood – on the grass of Royce Quad.
Compare UCLA’s callousness with the inherent humanity in uplifting and honoring the dead. Mourning is an act of protest, and provides a uniquely powerful opportunity for a community to coalesce and channel their collective grief towards action and meaningful change.
The power of mourning, and its role in the resistance, is recognized by Palestine’s oppressors. That is why, two years ago, Israeli police assaulted and beat the pallbearers at the funeral of renowned journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was murdered by the IDF while covering their aggression in the West Bank. On June 10, police at UCLA echoed this brutality by silencing students who had gathered to mourn and grieve; colonizers all play from the same rulebook. We must counter their inhumanity with a reminder of what we are fighting for: a world where the people of Palestine can live freely. A world where we no longer have to mourn more with each passing day.
This is what SJP sought to do when they set up three new encampments across campus. Despite the militant police response, these demonstrations were centered around both the martyrs and our community. It was clear that the protesters’ safety was of the utmost importance to the organizers; SJP members ensured that all members of the day’s first encampment understood their plans following dispersal and were aware of the risk posed by law enforcement. This transparency remained as protesters moved to Kerckhoff Patio and mobilized to Dodd Hall: organizers know that in the face of repression, we keep each other safe. Compare this with UCLA Admin’s complete lack of transparency, community, humanity.
Immediately after the police violence, UCLA immediately started its effort to discredit the protesters and the Palestinian cause. With the peaceful protests taking place during finals week, UCLA’s administration decided to emphasize the disruptions they caused to exams. Specifically, they capitalized on this remembrance coinciding with Finals Week. In a campus-wide email, Associate Vice Chancellor Rick Braziel condemned that students were supposedly “blocked from entering classrooms” for their final exams. In the day’s first encampment, not a single building entrance was obstructed. UCLA chose to remove it anyway.
When ordered, students dispersed to Kerckhoff Patio, where they still did not block entry to any rooms in which final exams were taking place; only a single door into Moore Hall faced the encampment, with several alternative entrances available. Again, it was UCLA that chose to clear Kerckhoff and Moore Halls. It was UCPD and UCLA-hired security that burst into final exams, student offices, and study lounges to force students outside.
It was UCLA that chose to clear Kerckhoff and Moore Halls. It was UCPD and UCLA-hired security that burst into final exams, student offices, and study lounges to force students outside.
It didn’t matter that protesters had gathered to peacefully mourn the martyrs: UCLA had constructed its narrative and was going to see it through. Students peacefully left Kerckhoff Hall and moved behind Dodd Hall, leaving three of its entrances unobstructed and open. That didn’t stop UCPD, CHP, and private security from moving in with less-lethal weapons and pepper bullets. It was UCLA, not the protesters, who chose to convert Dodd Hall from an exam site into a makeshift detention center.
Braziel decried “violent attacks on safety personnel and law enforcement,” somehow failing to mention the person left concussed after being thrown down the stairs by police. Nor did his email have any mention of the peaceful protester who was unlawfully grabbed and pinned down by police forces, while she stayed behind the police line and peacefully chanted for her fellow students to be released from detention.
UCLA still insists that the protest’s timing is evidence that the student movement consists of outside actors, and uses this to defend their violent crackdown. UCLA lacks the moral clarity required to see that the atrocities carried out against Palestinians do not pause for finals, and that GPA is an empty number when it is awarded by an institution that fuels genocide across the globe. As we fight, we cannot stop resisting out of convenience, because the massacre of Palestinians will not either.
Administration and the UC Regents place so much effort into the construction of their false narratives because they know that when we stand together, we will win. Students, faculty, and workers are UCLA, and we now face a monumental choice. We can accept the administration’s lies, carefully designed to turn us against each other, or we can rebuild our community around the memory of the martyrs, and the knowledge that we will see a free Palestine in our lifetimes.
We saw these two options in action this Monday, when our administration again responded to a mourning community with brutal police repression. We can either have a campus overrun by law enforcement, a campus built on intimidation and subjection, or one that strives to honor those who had their lives stolen by Israel, in a genocide bankrolled by the US. Our administration can tear down as many tents as they want. But we cannot, and will not, rest until the spirit of the Palestine Solidarity Encampment lives across UCLA. It is past time to reclaim our campus.
The violence directed by institutions of power towards peaceful protesters at UCLA and around the globe is difficult to watch. Seeing your fellow students get arrested, shot with rubber bullets and tear gas is a gut-wrenching experience in itself. However, this violence does not even compare with the strife and violence that the citizens of Palestine are subjected to on a daily basis.
The formation of the state of Israel has compromised every Palestinian’s quality of life in unprecedented manners, violently relegating them to second-class citizens in their native homeland. For 76 years, Israel has systemically inflicted oppression, discrimination, and human rights abuse upon the Palestinian population.
The innocent children that are martyred for holding a toy car in their hands. The mothers that carry the bodies of the babies they nurtured to life, the fathers that weep over the lifeless corpses of what used to be their beloved sons and daughters. This is why we continue to fight. This is why we continue to push back against morally bankrupt institutions who value the US dollar more than human lives.
On January 25, Al Jazeera published the names of some of the child martyrs. Since the beginning of the war on Gaza, over 15,000 children have been killed. Thousands more have been killed since the beginning of the Nakba, in a decades-long genocide. Know their names. We urge you to mourn, and channel your grief to action. They will not die in vain. They will be redeemed.
Any perspectives shared in this article are the opinion of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ASUCLA Student Media.
