Written May 1, 2024
In April 1985 when I slept on the steps of Hamilton Hall for 3 weeks I'd never heard the sound of a police barricade dragged across a sidewalk. I'd lived in New York for a year and a half and no one had ever told me which parts of the city I was allowed to walk on or how or when--I'd never been patted down. I'd never stood next to someone in uniform searching one of my bags. Maybe there was a surveillance camera on some highway I drove, to catch speeders--but if I'd seen that now-ubiquitous plastic panopticon eye, that camera that's everywhere now, I wouldn't have known what it was. At some point during the Hamilton anti-apartheid blockade, on a fine raw day, Columbia sent over a guy in a suit with a video camera whose viewfinder opened to the side, which he panned over us and we smiled and posed and told whoever we imagined would watch the movie that we weren't going anywhere until divestment: take our money you're making money from by dispossessing, policing, and killing people and put it somewhere else. We see you.
What I saw last night, just shy of forty years later, as Columbia stepped out of the way so the New York police and its handlers could turn its campus into a military training ground--"This area is frozen, you need to walk north," said the Apex security guard, born twenty years ago, as I stood by the 116th Street subway entrance, as if he were saying "It's about to rain"-- was like a speeded-up film of every colonial violence we've permitted since 9.11, unreeling beside the kind of clarity and integrity and courage that's flowed like a river beside every colonial violence ever invented. The students had made their peaceful village of "Divest from genocide, we see you," and their baroness president had evicted and razed and detained them, and they'd returned, and she'd begun to move against them again, via evictions and surveillance, and they'd taken a building, in the wee hours, turning the place we'd slept into a place they could stand again and maybe their city and their country might hear them from there. For us it was the people of Harlem and of South Africa whose lives were being fed into the machine while we were asked not to notice, to keep it moving, to walk north--before us it was the people of Vietnam, and now it's the people of Gaza, and tell me what happened to your tears when you saw that they'd renamed the building for HInd Rajab, a six-year-old girl we all watched die as her Israeli murderers prevented anyone from helping, and I'll tell you what part of your soul you've managed to keep from the gears of this machine, and what you're likely to be willing to do in this next chapter when all the colonial violences come home.
At the end of 2002 I visited Israel and occupied Palestine with the first delegation of Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace. The only time I've ever had a gun pointed at me was on that trip, in Bethlehem, when the Bethlehem University professors' beautiful welcoming new year's dinner was interrupted by the sudden imposition of a curfew. Young Israeli soldiers drove up in Border Police jeeps blaring orders in Hebrew and then got out, first carrying their weapons we'd paid for, then dropping to one knee and aiming them at us, the crowd of adults and children pressed against a wall at the restaurant entrance, trying to leave. The taxi driver who got us back to the hotel cut his lights at one point as we watched the soldiers shooting up into apartment buildings, then running in. "Colonial nightmare," Sarah Ihmoud wrote on an Instagram video clip of a recent West Bank raid, robot soldiers crashing in the dark through someone's sleeping place, screaming orders, tearing up bedding, tipping over chairs, kicking people scrambling for their clothes and for their children screaming.
Last night as the NYPD and the suits who pull its strings brought to an end a long era in American "higher education" and began a new one, the students locked out of their own college pressed against the gates and said Palestine's name for hours, and kept on as the new machinery we paid for was wheeled up Amsterdam Avenue to try to stop them. As the white-shirts pranced their armored phalanxes into place, to chant Move, Move the way they'd been trained, to try to "clear" the street, the students were still yelling it: Free Palestine. "They're not gonna kill somebody, calm down," one young woman said into her phone. One of the speakers had said just before the raid, "I want you to be fucking loud when they take your friends."
I was going back & forth between looking at what was happening in front of me and looking at my phone--I saw there one of the police videos (they'd barricaded the journalists in the School of Journalism, in case we needed a frank tutorial in the difference between learning and doing), in which they poured up the steps of that school building I knew, and hammered one of the locked classroom doors open, and swept in the way thousands of US soldiers swept into Iraqi sleeping places, that raised weapon, that sweep, the way Israeli soldiers swept into bedrooms in Bethlehem and Jenin when I was visiting, that colonial horror Sarah Ihmoud was watching and calling its right name in Palestine now. Last night the training site wasn't the bedroom of someone I'd just met in Bethlehem or Jenin but a classroom I knew, in a university I attended. It's here, it's home, and the students are making it impossible to think about much else other than where are you standing in relation to it.
