It has been more than a year since israel commenced its genocidal assault on Gaza. Armed and enabled by the US government, the Zionist entity has slaughtered more than 42,000 captive Palestinians within this timeframe while also systematically destroying Gaza’s civilian infrastructure and killing tens of thousands more by starvation and preventable disease. Nor has israel’s genocidal rampage been limited to Gaza—Zionist forces have murdered hundreds of Palestinians in the West Bank within this timeframe, aggressively expanded israel’s settlement enterprise, and launched repeated attacks on Yemen, Syria, Iran, Lebanon, and Iraq.
In the past week, israel’s aggression both in Gaza and across the region has reached unprecedented heights. As part of its ongoing effort to ethnically cleanse and erase Northern Gaza, it has imposed a total siege on the area, preventing all food and aid from entering it for the past 13 days. Deliberately assassinating journalists in the northern Gaza Strip, few bravely remain to broadcast to the world. Simultaneously, Israel has launched an all-out invasion into Lebanon, displacing over a million Lebanese citizens and slaughtering nearly 2,000 in recent weeks.
UChicago United for Palestine called this action to interrupt business as usual at the University of Chicago, whose financial and institutional ties with the Zionist entity mirror its objective role as a colonial outpost on Chicago’s South Side—gentrifying neighborhoods and surveilling, policing, and displacing the people who live here. Our experiences during last year’s encampment taught us that our demands—disclosure, divestment, and repair—would not be taken seriously without demonstrating our willingness and ability to use every means at our disposal, including suspending the daily operation of the university. We called this action in conjunction with an international movement against a civil society, state, and international order that prop up the Zionist entity, facilitate its genocide in Palestine, and enable its war of expansion in Lebanon.
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On the afternoon of October 11th, following a rally that drew more than 150 students, community members, and faculty, protestors locked the main gate of the University of Chicago shut before hanging a banner reading “FREE PALESTINE – HANDS OFF LEBANON.” This was the first of a series of autonomous actions that marked the end of the Week of Rage for Palestine and Lebanon, as we passed a year of genocide in Gaza.
Protestors later marched to a statue commemorating the University’s involvement in the development of the nuclear bomb. A speaker said: “Today, Palestine and Lebanon are being used as the testing grounds of technologies built by universities like this one.” Tags reading FREE GAZA, FUCK THE BOMBS, and KEEP ESCALATING proliferated, and balloons full of paint were thrown at the statue. He continued: “our ultimate message today is that we can pick apart this university, and when we do, we can build something better in its place.” When the crowd regrouped and began to march north to disperse, UCPD cut into the middle of the march, targeting several protestors.
As cops resorted to violence far beyond what we’ve seen in past protests, we witnessed the crowd band together to protect each other as protestors moved to surround a squad car. The twenty-minute standoff that ensued was Hyde Park’s most intense confrontation between protestors and police in recent memory, and the bravery and commitment displayed by dozens of people let the march hold its ground against UCPD and CPD for longer than anyone presumed possible. In the face of this substantial escalation of police violence, the crowd reacted instinctively and successfully prevented more than a dozen arrests.
Eventually, UCPD and CPD realized that protestors would not budge of their own accord. Sergeant Grays Sr. began to issue orders. First, he demanded the driver of the squad car run over protestors: “Just drive!” The car tried and failed to drive through the crowd, which again refused to yield. This prompted Grays and another UCPD officer to repeatedly pepper spray upwards of twenty protestors, one CPD captain and another CPD officer. When the crowd held together and continued to de-arrest despite the pepper spray, CPD joined in to beat protestors with batons—one later remarked that “that was fun for a little while.” Like before, when confronted with police violence we worked to help each other: people circled around the crowd washing eyes and teaching others to do the same.
Whether on campus, in the city, or in the street, the Palestine movement must recognize and confront its enemies: the university, the police, American civil society, and the state, all of which collaborate to facilitate dispossession, land theft, and occupation at home and abroad. The people who locked the gate did so to shut down a university that has refused to even acknowledge the destruction of all Gazan universities, much less the ongoing genocide. It symbolized how, while we walk to class every day, the schools in Gaza are bombed, while israel’s genocide against Palestinians continues and the university remains materially and intellectually invested. Protestors painted the nuclear bomb statue red to expose the university’s culpability in the nuclear weapons program, a fact they memorialize through a statue that was explicitly designed to reflect “the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion, but also ha[ve] the shape and eye sockets of a skull”—mirrored in the present by its ‘neutral’ research and development programs which directly abet the slaughter in Gaza and Lebanon.
When UCPD and CPD came at protestors with batons, attempted to run people over, and mass pepper-sprayed in a drastic escalation of police violence from prior protests at the University, the crowd responded instinctively, recognizing that we must protect each other from the university’s agents of brutality. The people who spontaneously decided to surround a squad car, confront two police departments, and not back down in the face of pepper spray and batons realized that UCPD and CPD stand between us and divestment: the police are an occupying force, and the solidarity movement for a free Palestine will have to go through them.
In Palestinian culture, there is a state of being called sumud, which translates to steadfastness. The Palestinian people have remained steadfast for a century, planted firmly on their land and resisting all zionist attempts at displacement and ethnic cleansing. Over the past year of escalated genocide, Palestinians in Gaza and Arabs facing zionist attacks across the region have not, for a single moment, abandoned their sumud: their commitment to their land, their people, and their right to live with dignity and pride.
We will never stop fighting as long as they face genocide and occupation. We will remain steadfast and committed in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for liberation, and the cause of all those who face brutal violence and occupation from UCPD and CPD every day. And we will not stop fighting until Palestine is free!
This release is issued by UChicago United for Palestine (UCUP), a student coalition calling for the immediate end of israel’s genocide against Palestinians, an immediate ceasefire, and the immediate end of israel’s siege on Gaza and occupation of Palestine. This coalition is committed to the liberation of Palestine and supports the ongoing campaign demanding that the University of Chicago cut its ties to the Israel Institute on campus and also supports the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions movement.
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