Political Education

As this issue goes to press, American students are taking back their schools. In defiance of administrations that have been quick to call in the riot police, students across the country have occupied their campuses, setting up encampments to demand Palestinian freedom, divestment from Israel, and an end to the genocide in Gaza. 

I write to you from Columbia University, where I just finished my last semester as a lecturer in freshman composition. On April 17, Columbia students peacefully camped out on the eastern half of the South Lawn. The next day, after the NYPD — at university President Minouche Shafik’s invitation — cleared the encampments and arrested over 100 protesters, the students took over the western half of the lawn. I’ve never been prouder as a teacher. I am in awe of those students’ humor and their fearlessness. 

Columbia, like many universities, is a place where students learn how to follow rules, moderate their opinions, maximize productivity, and ask for permission. Instead, these students are being radicalized by violent encounters with power. Even the students least likely to exercise their right to be contrary are starting to close read the disingenuous emails from the administration about complicated situations and extraordinary times, and to question their anodyne appeals for dialogue when they refuse to say the word Palestine. 

Far be it from me to overstate the significance of what happens on an Ivy League campus (we’ll leave that to the Atlantic or the New York Times). But the response from those with power — campus administration, the mainstream media, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, even Benjamin Netanyahu — has shown how afraid they are of these peaceful demonstrations.

I imagine that many students on campus are also afraid. It must be scary to be confronted with the truth of your own groomed complicity with a murderous nation.

Last semester, when the war began, I had a student who was afraid they would be called up to serve in the Israeli army. I wasn’t afraid to tell them what I thought: I am against war and killing and don’t want you to leave school to do so. Nor do I want you to threaten your life, or worse, your soul. 

I didn’t know, then, the scale of the killing to come, though I did know the Israeli response would be gruesome. But there are so many images I’ve seen since then that affirm that death itself is not to be feared, but cruelty is: skin peeled away from muscle, children without limbs. The student protestors ask us to remember that their grievances go beyond U.S. campuses. They are holding ground to remember where blood has been spilled.

Students want to learn how to tell the truth. How do my students tell their parents that their campus wasn’t unsafe until their administration called the cops on peaceful protestors, had them zip-tied and hauled downtown, and evicted them from their housing with 15 minutes to gather their things, then invited right-wing demagogues to the steps of the library to call for the National Guard? How does 18-year-old Hafiza Khalique, profiled in this issue, explain what it was like to be summarily suspended from NYU as she was doxxed and harassed by virulent Zionists for her act of protest against the killing in Gaza?

I keep thinking of a young girl with a bob and bangs from the 2002 documentary, Jenin, Jenin. “I’m not afraid of these cowards,” she swears, as the camera pans to an Israeli armored tank. She reminds me of an eight-year-old at the City College encampment in West Harlem, who got on the mic and said, “To all the cops listening … we ain’t scared of you!”

Over the past several years, I’ve been working on unionizing contingent workers like me so that together, we have power. Unionized university workers have more protections if we protest than non-unionized workers and undergrads, especially at private universities — a point that Dylan Saba of Palestine Legal makes in Lylla Younes’s profile of Khalique. Still, though my position on this campus is precarious, the only thing I had to lose was my work until they invited the NYPD here. As Khalique says, “If I lost this university and my housing and my first year of college, at the end, at least I still have my dignity. At least I still have my values intact. At least I’m not supporting a genocide. It may seem like I lost everything to the public, but really, I lost nothing to myself.” 

Students are disrupting campus life because we all should be disrupting the status quo as this war rages on. They’ve learned how their own universities are invested in a country that has bombed all 12 of Gaza’s universities. No Gazan student has been able to attend school since November 6, 2023.

In this issue of Lux, we amplify the voices of those, like Khalique, who work past fear. We have Astra Taylor on Cop City activists, who are facing terrorism charges and criminal conspiracy laws that were designed to combat the mob. Laura Jedeed covers EMTs processing their workplace trauma through theater. And editor Cheryl Rivera writes about how mutual aid becomes more than charity as it confronts police power. 

As ever, our writers are seeking out new ways to understand the strategies and tactics we can use to push against fascist tides. Editor Yasmin El-Rifae profiles comedian-organizer Morgan Bassichis, and contributing editor Molly Crabapple revisits the anti-Zionist Jewish Bund’s reaction to a similar crisis in the 1920s. And E. Tammy Kim spoke with a feminist journalist who is a member of the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate about her experience covering the war and occupation.

Finally, Jenny Odell writes about our namesake Rosa Luxemburg’s collection of the plants near her prison cell. Everywhere we see a wall, a barricade, from the campus to the prison, we can find something that grows.

See you out there,
Natalie