The Gaza Solidarity Movement

Since you last heard from us here, a wave of protest activity has swept universities around the world, as students and their supporters have established encampments and building occupations in solidarity with Palestinians facing genocide at the hands of the Israeli military.


As we said at the beginning, this is a generational clash between those who benefit from a world order founded on colonial violence and those who consider it unconscionable. Although the encampment movement peaked with the end of the semester on most campuses, the larger movement in solidarity with Palestine and against colonial violence worldwide continues.


To support demonstrators, we offer this list of action resources covering security culture, digital security, phone safety, protective gear, direct action strategy, street tactics, jail support, and first aid.

The Gaza Solidarity Encampments

On April 17, students at Columbia University set up an encampment. On April 18, the university administration brought in massive numbers of police to arrest the demonstrators and crush the encampment; yet in response, students established a new encampment, bigger than the first, inspiring copycat actions around the country.


Students at Cal Poly Humboldt campus in Arcata, California occupied a building in solidarity with people in Gaza, precipitating a clash in which they faced down police from around the region and ultimately drove them off campus. They defended their occupation for a full week.


We published reports from participants in encampments at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and an interview with participants in an encampment in Mexico City, along with an analysis of the challenges that the movement has confronted and what it would take to move beyond them.


Hypocritical politicians have dishonestly alleged that this movement—which involves a large number of Jewish anti-Zionists—is motivated by anti-Semitism. Our coverage of the situation in Palestine has been directed by Israeli anarchists as well as Palestinians. This is not an ethnic or religious conflict; this is a situation in which a state military motivated by explicitly colonial values is carrying out a genocide.


To offer more context for this movement, we published a history of the previous high-water mark of campus occupations, in 2008-2010.

Meanwhile

While reporting from within the encampments, we have also kept up with other fronts—most recently, publishing an essay by Peter Gelderloos debunking the idea that “green energy” could address the climate crisis. We also contributed the introduction to a book about the Russian anarchist and anti-fascist Aleksei Sutuga and published a report describing how popular resistance in the Kurdish province of Wan prevented the authoritarian Turkish government from imposing its preferred representatives in the municipal government despite their having lost the election.


We also observed April Fool’s Day, Steal Something from Work Day, and May Day.

Zines

We’ve produced zine versions of many of the aforementioned articles about the encampments, including the initial report and subsequent statement from the occupation at Cal Poly Humboldt, the reports from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the University of Texas at Austin, and our analysis, “Why the State Can’t Compromise with the Gaza Solidarity Movement”. We’ve also released a one-sheet handout, “This is About Stopping the Genocide in Palestine,” exploring the stakes of the movement.

Languages

In the past month and a half, we have added several of our articles in Japanese as well as Polish, Basque, Greek, Spanish, and French.


If you can help us translate our work into any language, please contact us!

What Drives Us

As usual, everything we do is the fruit of volunteer effort. We don’t seek anything in return—we just want to do our part to create a future with less oppression and misery.


All of our projects are copyright free. We distribute them for free, without advertisements of any kind, or else sell them for the costs of production and delivery alone. If you want us to be able to expand the scope of our efforts, you can support our projects financially—but the most important thing is that you undertake creative efforts of your own.

For a world without capitalism, the state, or any other form of domination!