Building the Camp: Insights from the Occupation at the Refaat Al-Areer
Voices from the Refaat Al-Areer Occupation, UGent
Introduction
When the plan to occupy one of Ghent University's buildings was announced at the end of April, people’s imaginations were filled by the scenes of police violence and student resistance from The City University of New York to Cal Poly Humboldt. Against this backdrop, the reclaiming of the Refaat Al-Areer, formerly known as the university forum “UFO”, is harder to situate in the ‘Student Intifada’. People passing by could observe big groups of students sitting in circles discussing for hours on end. The few onlookers who stayed to figure out what was going on would often be left more confused after hearing a twenty-minute discussion on how to organize the tents and which lights to turn off at what hour inside the Refaat Al-Areer. For the even fewer people who decided to participate in these discussions, they first needed to navigate the “finger-system” through which facilitators appointed a speaking order. Along with the many other hand signals, focused agenda points, and a multitude of working groups with different mandates, engaging in these ‘spokes councils’ posed a challenge to most people.
The spokes councils were upheld as an example of ‘real democracy at work.’ Stressing the students’ use of rational and “peaceful” dialogue, testimonies offered a counternarrative to that of activists taking over university buildings and provoking police confrontations. As all ties with ‘Israeli’ universities were eventually cut, supporters among staff, media, and the public quickly expanded this framing to argue that the UGent model of “peaceful” protesting could be imitated by other encampments to similar success.
In this essay, we challenge such framing, arguing that there is no greater misconception that threatens to distort ours and the broader student intifada’s contribution to the struggle for Palestinian liberation. When supporters reduce our efforts and successes as the outcome of rational dialogue and “peaceful” protesting, they misunderstand what happened in the Refaat Al-Areer to create this change and discourage the need for sustained engagement. Moreover, we challenge narratives that view the academic boycott as the end rather than the means of the student intifada. By recognizing academic boycotts as the starting point and not the goal of our struggle, we focus on how to create and sustain spaces for organizing with the resistance to dismantle the underlying structures of the Zionist entity. It, therefore, follows that while the latest iteration of the student intifada began with calls for academic boycott and divestment, it ends with a free Palestine, from the river to the sea.’
Our Radical Praxis
To situate the Occupation of the Refaat Al-Areer in the broader student intifada, we must first rid ourselves of the idea that we either choose between the stone or the pen in organizing against complicity in the ongoing genocide. As the First Palestinian Intifada highlights, resistance requires both the use of slingshots and ink on paper. During the Intifada, one front was fought by the ‘Children of the Stones’, who resisted the Israeli Occupation Forces' (IOF) overt violence and attempts at intimidation by using stone-throwing, tire-burning and barricading. Another front was waged in the underground schools that defied the military decree, which closed all schools and universities in Palestine 'until further notice'. What was meant to put pressure on the Intifada, led to the replacement of Zionist education with a liberation pedagogy built on collective learning and a curriculum consisting of Palestinian history and resistance. While the fronts were different, the people moving between them were not. The person who threw rocks in the morning would deliver the afternoon lecture on Palestinian Resistance Poets and, in the evening, show his youngers how to use a slingshot or where to hide from armed soldiers.
Similarly, today's student intifada consists of multiple fronts, each shaped by differing levels of material and political involvement in the genocide, and by local formations of state violence and repression. While encampments across Turtle Island faced overt displays of police brutality through violent evictions and legal repercussions, contributing to a praxis-oriented towards ‘defending the camp’. Our occupation faced co-optation, depoliticization and legal repression, contributing to a radical praxis of community building, direct action and principled solidarity with the Palestinian resistance.
While “community building” can rightly be read as a weak response to genocide, we argue that any change that we might have affected was the outcome of our prefigurative politics. That is, our rejection of a distinction between our struggle now, and in the future, instead focusing on how “the struggle and the goal, the real and the ideal, become one in the present”. Before many of us knew what prefiguration meant, we embodied it—putting into practice what Ackelsberg described when living with the Mujeres Libres, as preparing for the revolution by “participating in activities and practices that are themselves egalitarian, empowering and therefore transformative”. This included a commitment to building consensus through collective and horizontal decision-making. Practically, this meant daily (or more) spokes councils in which people part of or visiting the occupation, would come together to discuss the pressing issues facing the group. The issues, presented by ‘facilitators’ in consultation with the different working groups would range from practical discussions of living together, political disagreements and actions, all oriented towards maintaining our momentum and disrupting our university.
That said, important critiques of prefigurative politics stress that we will never be able to create spaces free of racism, sexism, classism, ableism, and transphobia unless we transform the underlying systems of oppression and material relations they rely on. Not only will we reproduce these systems through our own internalized attitudes, but we continue to be embedded in material relations that depend on extracting value from black and brown bodies to recreate itself. Throughout the occupation, instances of racism against Arab women recurred through accusations of ‘wanting everyone to support Hamas’, ‘being too aggressive’, or ‘making (white) activists cry’, especially when expressing support for the resistance or the need for principled solidarity. Rather than addressing these comments as expressions of racism that need to be transformed through accountability processes, they would be brushed aside, ignored, or normalized. Disregarding the women’s positionality and proximity to imperial and genocidal violence, their opinions and emotions were reduced to ‘aggression’ and, in turn, either policed or dismissed.
Considering this, prefiguration brings together the broader struggle toward a liberated Palestine, with internal practices of radical care, accountability, and transformative justice. This brings us to the final, and maybe the most important dimension of our praxis: what does a ‘liberated Palestine’ refer to? Far from a question which we can answer by ourselves, we must interrogate the struggle we claim to be in solidarity with, including the principles that have guided this struggle since the arrival of the first Zionist settler in Palestine.
After a week of occupying the Refaat Al-Areer and the death toll in Gaza reached at least 35,000, our rector remained adamant that he would not call ‘what was going on in Gaza’ a genocide, let alone cut ties with any ‘Israeli’ institutions. At the same time, criticism grew within the occupation that it felt more like a ‘summer camp’ than a space for radical action and principled solidarity. Seeking to settle these tensions and refocus our efforts, we decided to introduce the Thawabet, or ‘red lines of the Palestinian struggle’ at the next spokes council. Out of the 33 articles that were written into the Palestinian National Charter, we focused on introducing the three constants: (1) Palestine is an indivisible territorial unit, from the river to the sea, with Jerusalem as its indivisible capital, (2) The non-negotiable right to return for all Palestinian refugees to the homes and lands they were exiled from since the beginning of Zionist colonization, and (3) The right of resistance in all its forms to end the colonization of Palestine.
Rather than defuse tensions, the introduction of the Thawabet led to one of the most agitated discussions of the occupation. Particularly among staff and students who had not been engaged in the previous spokes councils, the introduction of the constants was regarded as a small group’s attempt to impose their political principles on the wider occupation. The immediate response included a member of staff calling how the Thawabet was brought in as ‘Stalinist,’ while another stressed that we should not talk about the right to resistance to secure broad public support for an academic boycott.
Far from new, these tensions get to the heart of principled solidarity and how we should understand our contribution to the Palestinian struggle for liberation. Beyond student encampments, the Thawabet remains a key point of contention between the Palestinian Resistance and the Palestinian Authority (PA), and organizations that operate under the PA’s sphere of influence, such as the BDS National Committee (BNC). Reiterating the member of staff who declared that we should not talk openly about armed resistance, the BNC and subsidiary BDS-groups have consistently presented boycotts as an ‘alternative to violence’, securing legitimacy among Western liberal democracies. Similarly, the day prior, we had been visited by a worker from the Palestinian embassy who insisted that ‘the most important constant in the struggle is the right of self-determination, so If Palestinians want a two-state, that is their choice’. Both the demonizing of armed resistance, and the re-interpretation of the Thawabet to include a two-state solution, have been criticized as tactics to repress the multitude of Palestinian political voices and actors. In turn, ensuring that the PA retains control over Ramallah and continues its ‘security coordination’ with the Zionist entity through which they target and persecute radical dissidents.
In the occupation, the disagreement around the Thawabet appeared as a conflict between strategy and principled solidarity (and in turn prefiguration), highlighting the assumption that asking for reforms from institutions such as the university or the Zionist state is more strategic than action geared towards radical change. To address this assumption in our discussions and confront the limits of institutional change, we had to constantly ask who this thinking serves. Are we asking for reform because we believe it will further the cause of Palestinian liberation? Or do we ask institutions to change to be more comfortable working under them?
Interrogating our radicality, these questions prompt us to recognize that ‘strategy-as-reform’ often translates into accepting, and in turn, supporting the colonial status quo. The inconvenient truth is that no matter what we do to ‘change’ universities, the Palestinian Authority or the Zionist Entity, they are manifestations of a colonial world-making project in which genocide and ethnic cleansing will be facilitated so long as it remains profitable and aligned with imperial interests. The discussion regarding the Thawabet thus made us revisit our own politics – not the politics upon which the struggle for the liberation of Palestine is founded. Who are we to contest and discuss the red lines of an anticolonial movement while occupying a building under the name of a martyr who would denounce such discussion of ‘strategy’ as betrayal? Are we mobilizing for an academic boycott because we believe in the just cause of the liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea? Or are we mobilizing for an academic boycott because we are naive enough to believe that the Zionist entity can be disciplined into respecting human life? Are we centering the liberation of Palestine within a radical new world? Or are we centering the reform of a genocidal colonial project?
Conclusion
Shortly after we were evicted, our rector sought to regain control of the narrative by commending the students for bringing attention to Gaza while asserting that the decision to cut ties was an internal process. Reaffirming his liberal authoritarianism, the rector began rewriting what had happened since the 7th of October. This rewriting hides the work of staff and students to expose the UGent’s complicity in the genocide, and how the decision to cut ties was taken. It hides that in a matter of weeks, the rector went from stating that he would never cut ties with ‘Israeli’ research partners to committing to cut ties with all ‘Israeli’ universities. It hides that throughout the occupation, the rector used every means of repression available to him to silence us, from concessions to co-optation, intimidation, police, and finally, the judicial system. It hides that no matter what he does, the rector or any other person in power will never be able to stop us from organizing and enacting change.
While the rector continues to applaud his students for ‘bringing attention to Gaza’, we praise the resistance and resilience of the Palestinian people. Without the resistance, we, or any other part of the student intifada, would not be together working towards a liberated Palestine. Without the resistance, we would not have met one another or been able to build a community centered on radical praxis and collective liberation. And without the resistance, we would not be able to lay bare the truth of “Western” liberal democracies' material and political support of the genocide. To fully appreciate what the student intifada is, we need to de-centre academic boycott as the culmination of our movement and center our capacity to create a space in which collective liberation is both imagined and practised
Ultimately, we know now that the eviction freed us from the constraints of needing to be “good" students, peacefully organizing for “realistic” demands. Without the occupation, we are no longer limited to academic boycotts or asking the institution we are part of to change. In hindsight, disbanding the occupation will represent the moment at which the dam withholding the current was lifted. Like water, we will disperse everywhere, coalescing in the river and the sea, until the day Palestine will be free.
Revolution until victory.
Notes
1. Hussein, Yamila. The Stone and the Pen: Palestinian Education During the 1987 Intifada, The Radical Teacher, 74, 17-22. 2005.
2. Hasian Jr, Marouf, and Lisa A. Flores. "Children of the Stones: The Intifada and the mythic creation of the Palestinian state." Southern Journal of Communication 62(2) pp. 89-106. 1997.
3. Silwadi, Najwa, and Peter Mayo. "Pedagogy under siege in Palestine: insights from Paulo Freire." Holy Land Studies 13(1) 71-87. 2014.
4. We are grateful for our comrades at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Gaza Solidarity Encampment for teaching us how to hold our ground in face of repression. See: Defending the Camp: a Report from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Gaza Solidarity Encampment, https://nl.crimethinc.com/2024/05/01/defending-the-camp-a-report-from-the-university-of-illinois-urbana-champaign-gaza-solidarity-encampment.
5. Maeckelbergh, Marianne. “Doing is Believing: Prefiguration as Strategic Practice in the Alterglobalization Movement.” Social Movement Studies, 10(1), pp.4. 2011. https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2011.545223.
6. Ackelsberg, Martha. A. Free Women of Spain: anarchism and the struggle for the emancipation of women. Indiana University Press. 1991.
7. Bhattacharyya, Gargi. The futures of racial capitalism. John Wiley & Sons, 2023. Pp.
8. Kaba, Mariame. We do this' til we free us: Abolitionist organizing and transforming justice. Vol. 1. Haymarket Books, 2021. 156-161.