Too Entangled with Israel: Actions Toward Alternative Infrastructures
New infrastructures are rising, new networks and coalitions. The Western air is changing in charge, becoming heavier to breathe, and it feels exciting, as if sedentary dissidence is standing up. It also feels like a type of honesty is emerging, where narratives previously accepted as false yet still automatically recited can now dissolve and reveal a much clearer skeleton of power.
Since the October 7th, 2023 Hamas’ attack on Israel and the subsequent genocidal military escalation, more than 40,000 Palestinians have been murdered and Gaza has become an uninhabitable zone of collapsed infrastructure, torn buildings, and rotting corpses. Many international laws have been broken, and the disregard for civilian life is unprecedented in the speed and public nature of extermination witnessed on our little phone screens.
The calls to boycott, divest and sanction (BDS) have been getting louder across Europe and the USA. The active dissolution of democratic principles such as freedom of speech and freedom of movement, most notably in Germany and the USA, bleeding into the Netherlands, is pervasive. (Let us keep in mind that 68% of Israel’s arms are supplied by the US and 29% by Germany, quite in line with the level of state-sanctioned aggression against opposition movements.)
The Interfering State
There are several examples of bizarre situations that have recently unfolded across the West, demonstrating the infringement of free speech and mobility in educational spaces. On April 12th, an event called “The Palestinian Congress” took place in Berlin, co-organised by the Jewish Voice for Just Peace, dedicated to analyzing “Germany’s role as one of Israel’s key allies and considering possible strategies to build effective resistance.” The German state proceeded to freeze the bank account of the association funding it (Jewish Voice for Just Peace) as well as impose a Schengen-wide entry ban on key-note speakers such as Yanis Varoufakis and Palestinian surgeon Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, who were both blocked at the airport. Dr Abu-Sittah was later prevented from entering France and the Netherlands, and retreated to the UK. The ban has since been overturned after a court battle on the grounds that it hindered freedom of expression and mobility. The jungle is messy.
Shortly after, on April 17th in “the land of the free”, Columbia University President Minouche Shafik was called to testify before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce on grounds of anti-Semitism on campus. The tax-exempt status of the University, as well as the state-awarded research grants and other funding, was explicitly at risk of being cut if her reactions were too mild or incorrect. Why was Congress questioning the head of a presumably private university and threatening to defund it, blatantly influencing its policies? Requesting lists of dissident staff and students?
The collaboration of Israel and the West in the development and sale of dual-use technologies (for both for civilian and military use ) is paired with an acute fear of bubbling civilian discontent.
Ivy League schools in the US run on state research grants, tuition fees, and massive additional endowments (Columbia has more than $13 billion) invested in various hedge funds and other companies across several industries, many of which have direct ties with Israel (Nimbus cloud computing for the IDF, for instance, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Alphabet, and Amazon). Over the past two decades, about 100 US colleges have reported gifts or contracts from Israel totaling $375 million, as outlined by the Department of Education. The gifts are presumably from the Israeli lobby, which is so strong in the US that even though Biden’s ongoing military support for Israel may cost him the upcoming election, he is locked in a deadly position.
On April 18th, following Shafik’s testimony, approximately one hundred students built an encampment on a large courtyard in protest, chanting, living, and reading together on campus, calling to boycott, divest, disclose, and sanction. Riot police were immediately called by Shafik, who wants to keep a stable incoming flow of money into the University, and BAM: suspensions, arrests, and gratuitous police violence involving tear gas and other anti-riot measures revived a model of how to deal with a few hundred students in tents. This is a model that escalates violence and seems to sharpen parallel student mobilization, since shortly after, student-led encampments calling for academic divestment spread rapidly across the U.S., Canada, and now Europe. These movements often involve students and staff, and have resulted in more than 2000 arrests across 60 higher educational institutions in America so far.
Why are these violent actions perpetrated by university administrations in collaboration with state organs, revealing fear and even paranoia? The aggressive riot police, the dogs, the tear gas, the rubber bullets? Freezing bank accounts, blocking academics from lecturing? The answer can be found in the skeleton of power, in the intricate entanglement of public and private funding. The collaboration of Israel and the West in the development and sale of dual-use technologies (for both for civilian and military use) is paired with an acute fear of bubbling civilian discontent.
Let us turn towards Europe to untangle some of the recent unrest. Since October 7th, more than 90 scientific development projects involving Israeli companies have been approved and collectively awarded multi-billion contracts by EU countries. University ties in the sphere of science, technology, and engineering between Western and Israeli institutions are deep, and academic divestment must transcend simply discontinuing Erasmus programs.
The demands in European educational institutions are generally similar to those listed in American universities, requesting disclosure of all ties with Israeli institutions, companies, and educational establishments, as well as discontinuing all academic contracts and collaborations by fully divesting from “Israeli companies that profit from genocide, apartheid, and the exploitation of Palestinians and their land.” In Amsterdam and the USA, where student encampments were violently attacked and bulldozed, the list was extended to include points such as no riot police on campus and no aggression towards students.
Student Encampments as Hubs of Learning
There are two student movements close to me, since I was born in Slovenia and studied in the Netherlands. The Amsterdam student encampment, which started on May 8th on a small island and patch of land at the UvA (University of Amsterdam), and the Ljubljana encampment, which started on May 9th in a lecture hall at FDV (Faculty of Social Sciences – part of the University of Ljubljana). These encampments have certain similar characteristics, but differ greatly in the university’s reaction to their existence and demands.
Both the Ljubljana and Amsterdam encampments were organized by student groups that prioritize collective informal learning and are part of initiatives that organize autonomous curricula for educational activities: teach-ins and panel discussions in Amsterdam, and years of anti-imperialist workshops, summer schools and reading seminars in Ljubljana, organized by the Slovenian Collective of Democratic Students (Lista demokratičnega študentstva – LDŠ). Most student encampments have a small library, and according to Alina Lupu, Amsterdam-based artist and activist, the participants learn in real-time “how to talk to each other, how to stay silent, how to ask questions, how to interfere.”
The encampments somewhat differ in size, as Ljubljana is a smaller locality. At FDV, 25 students camped in the lecture hall, and in the evening discussion sessions, the numbers ballooned to 50 or even up to 150 during essential meetings and discussions such as press conferences or negotiations. The encampment in Ljubljana lasted for six full days, until the demands addressed to FDV were all met on Monday, May 13th.
The encampments are a technique to exert pressure, but also a technique of communal learning and building an alternative infrastructure or mode of operation, one that emulates the process of unionizing.
In Amsterdam, the encampment counted up to 1000 students throughout the day of its existence, as it was violently destroyed by bulldozers and riot police in the middle of its first night, less than 24 hours after it formed. Multiple people were injured, detained, and arrested. The violent reaction of the UvA administration triggered a gruesome week of sleepless nights, continuous protests, barricades in the city, injuries perpetrated by police officers, reports of undercover police profiling and arresting activists, and the largest pro-Palestinian protest to date on Saturday, June 11, attended by 15,000 people. Student encampments also rose in Groningen and Utrecht, with protesting tracked in many other cities in the Netherlands in response to and in support of the chaos in Amsterdam. On the same Monday, May 13th, that the Faculty of Social Sciences in Ljubljana met the demands of its students, there was a massive student and staff walkout at the UvA, as their demands had still not been met and the violent repression of dissident actions and voices became the norm, commissioned by the university administration and the mayor of Amsterdam.
We must understand that the students’ encampments do not happen impulsively. As Alina Lupu explained to me in a short interview: “The first encampment took time to be planned because you don’t spontaneously show up with the tents. You also have to make sure you have support structures in order to organize things like legal support, a media task force for yourself, supplies, and everything else. And of course things follow from that. People are very generous. They send food, they send supplies for the kitchens. But in order to first achieve an encampment, you need to organize.” She described handing out slips of paper with a list of legal rights to the audience next to the encampment in Amsterdam, and the person she handed them to said: “No thanks. It’s not necessary. I’m a lawyer. I’m here for you.”
Similarly, the Slovenian Collective of Democratic Students (Lista demokratičnega študentstva – LDŠ) described an autonomous organizational structure whereby the logistics team coordinated the quantities of food and necessary materials, while external volunteers brought warm meals. In both encampments, there was a reported feeling of mobilization, community, camaraderie, and learning. Participants of both encampments specified the presence of consensus decision-making and general assemblies rather than democratic voting. This is a method of decision-making that aims to reach a synthesis of opinions based on transparency and communication, through self-reflection and wider reflection, according to LDŠ. The encampments are a technique to exert pressure, but also a technique of communal learning and building an alternative infrastructure or mode of operation, one that emulates the process of unionizing.
Due to the ongoing protests and infrastructural damage, the UvA has shifted to online education, much like Columbia University before it. In its place, mobilized students and non-student allies have opened the Shadia Abu Ghazaleh Campus of The People’s Free University, to criticize the colonial, capitalist and neoliberal oppressive structures of the current educational institutions. On May 25th, it opened its doors with the following statement: “As we deconstruct said structures, be that mentally or by literally taking bricks out of the ground, we need to build in other places. Our barricades will only ever be as strong as our solidarity, as large as our community, and as fierce as our militancy. As we take down the UVA, the city becomes our University. This Saturday we will get together to learn from and with each other.”
Dynamics of a Wider World
Why certain institutions responded differently, like FDV, or Trinity College in Dublin, or the Confederation of Spanish Universities (CRUE), which all accepted the students’ demands and presumably divested from Israeli companies, is probably tied to the details of their economic ties and the general positioning of their government. Slovenia, Ireland and Spain have been relatively active in supporting Palestine compared to other EU member states and have less to lose economically than the German and US universities. The UvA’s reaction points towards valuing its economic and academic entanglement with Israel more than the needs of its staff and students, despite meeting the one demand to disclose all its links.
The fact that it is now common for robocops to be invited onto campuses by university management to exert crowd control techniques on students exercising their right to free speech and the need to take an ethical stance shows how fragile many of the principles of democracy we grew up with in the West truly are.
The fact that it is now common for robocops to be invited onto campuses by university management to exert crowd control techniques on students exercising their right to free speech and the need to take an ethical stance shows how fragile many of the principles of democracy we grew up with in the West truly are. The ongoing question of the legitimacy of violence perhaps needs more space and time to be addressed. It is related to Israel’s claim of self-defense, the legitimacy of the Hamas attack on October 7th, as well as the strong need for student protestors to move past the label of non-violent protest. Most official social media accounts associated with the student encampments in Amsterdam explicitly claim the right to property damage and other infrastructural sabotage as a legitimate response to the ongoing state-sponsored violence in Palestine that they are protesting against. In the context of escalating violence against students and the rapidly rising death toll in Palestine, the notion of mandatory peaceful protests should indeed be challenged.
There is some criticism of the student encampments worth considering: that they’re dragging media attention and resources away from the core conflict, or that students are cosplaying urban war zones in the case of Amsterdam or the more violent US encampments – “Bring sanitary pads! Bring water!” But despite this critique, the student encampments occupy space and must be respected and supported, as they seem to be the beginning of a widening ‘ horizon of hope’, where an alternative infrastructure is under construction while the slow dismantling of the current skeleton of power has begun. The encampments are important both conceptually and practically, as they exert pressure and influence policy, or at least draw attention to the many links between Western universities and the Israeli military industrial complex. In an obscure text called People as Infrastructure by A.M. Simone, I came across this quote: “At the same time, these makeshift formations amplify the complexity of local terrain and social relationships by engaging the dynamics of a larger world within a coherent, if temporary, sense of place.” The encampments enable mini-worlds and build different modes of relating, organizing, learning, and conveying information, as well as principles of retaliation to oppression. Student encampments are essential nodes of activity in the sense of semi-institutional, autonomous zones in which anti-oppressive facilitation techniques are practiced and self-organizing networks grow.
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Cover photo by Mateo Vega.
