In spring of 2024 (April 25th to May 2nd), a group of student organizers and community members at UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) built and ran a Palestine Solidarity Encampment on the plaza in front of Royce Hall.
By Ryuji
In spring of 2024 (April 25th to May 2nd), a group of student organizers and community members at UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) built and ran a Palestine Solidarity Encampment on the plaza in front of Royce Hall. Though originally contained to one lawn, it was rapidly expanded in the next few days, reaching the walls of Royce Hall and Powell Library and the top of Tongva Steps. There were demands directed at the university: to provide disclosure of funds, divestment, to abolish policing on the campus, to acknowledge the genocide. The encampment was to stand until these demands were met.
April 25
Artwork decorates every surface of the encampment, and gatherings and celebrations take place routinely. On the evening of the first day, my friend helps lead a Passover Seder. Surrounding the celebration are students drawing and painting on poster paper in various languages, all calling for a free Palestine.
Mutual support and aid are fundamental to the functions of the encampment. There is never a shortage of food. The first night, between the hours of 11 pm and 4 am, I stay up and organize every donation. The boxes and bags and piles on the wet grass are dried and grouped and sorted. There are people who come up periodically throughout the night for food, and there is always something they can eat.
The same night, I stop by the medic tent and ask for a toothbrush; they tell me they have none but would request for some to be brought. By the second night, there is a small bucket overflowing with toothbrushes and travel-size toothpaste.
The food supply grows throughout the week. There are donations and catering and leftovers, and for every meal, there is food for every dietary restriction I know of. Everyone who comes to the kitchen is fed. For everyone who comes, there is a promise of food—something even our university refuses to guarantee.
April 30 to May 1
The night our encampment was violently attacked by zionist agitators, the administration, the police, and the absurd amount of private security our university hired, who were all well aware of the situation, did nothing. Dozens of students and community members were injured, far more traumatized, with all holding the line and taking turns treating those who were wounded.
No arrests were made that night.
May 1
On my way to class, I am made aware of the cancellation of classes resulting from the attacks the night before. I am already dressed anyway, and there is nowhere else I’d rather be than encampment. I head back.
For an hour, I pick up trash at the site of the attack. The lingering smell of the chemicals makes my nose burn. I head back to the center of the encampment, and help prepare water bottles that can be used to wash out mace and pepper spray and tear gas from the eyes.
I overhear that the university has ordered a sweep; the police are planning on dismantling our encampment that night. I realize I may be down to the last few hours here. I video call my best friend living hours away; I show her around as best I can. The supplies donated by countless people, the art tent where we imagined and created visions of a free Palestine, the kitchen where I made so many new friends, the artwork plastered onto every blank surface. The poster renaming Royce Hall as “Intifada Hall.” The olive tree in the center of the encampment. The Palestinian flag flying high above it.
She tells me it looks like Ramallah, like the West Bank. She tells me it reminds her of her home.
May 1 to May 2
An hour of frustrating conversation with administration, and the sweep is confirmed. My friend tells me he is staying inside as long as it takes. I tell him I will take his belongings, and he requests that I take his laptop and computer bag. For ten long hours, I am standing outside of the encampment and holding onto the bag like my life depends on it.
The encampment is violently dismantled, and over 200 students and faculty and community members are arrested. In the coming months, subsequent actions—including a second encampment I was unable to attend—are surveilled and quickly and forcefully torn down.
I had always had a habit of carrying bandaids, but ever since the attacks on our first encampment it had become routine.
I narrowly escape a kettling. I am pulling leaves off my sweatshirt from the bush I had run out from; we are all checking in on every familiar and unfamiliar face we see. I hear calls for a medic. I run over to the bench in the hopes that my antibiotic ointment and gauze pads will be of use.
It is my friend on the bench. He has been shot in the chest with less-lethal ammunition.
I am panicked but I help a medic patch his wound. I ask if he is okay, and the first words out of his mouth are this: “The cops were beating a girl right in front of me, and I couldn’t do anything.” He worries about the wellbeing of another while reeling from a shot to the chest.
I hold his hand with both of mine until a car arrives to take him to the hospital. (I can’t tell if I’m holding onto his hand for him or for myself.) He gets in the car, I watch them drive off, and a group of zionist agitators nearby begin taunting me loudly.
Twenty more students are arrested that night, detained for hours on the floor of Dodd Hall.
Countless students stand by, protesting until they are released well into the late hours of the night.
2024 November 1
Six months from the dismantling of our initial encampment, at a commemoration event organized by faculty members, I visit the lawn where my friend’s tent was pitched. I send him a photo and a short text; he replies: “We will always have that patch of grass.”
It does not feel like half a year has passed. Over these months, the university has yet to display meaningful action, continues to endanger the lives of students practicing their right to protest, and has yet to divest or cut ties with entities supporting this genocide.
As I finished the final draft of this photo essay, the Palisades Fire broke out in Los Angeles. The flames were visible from many areas of campus; evacuation warnings and orders were sent out in areas adjacent to ours.
I thought of Gaza.
How it feels to watch a home and a city burn, how it feels to not know where to go or who to turn to, how it feels not knowing whether loved ones are safe or not, how it feels being given no time to pack, to run, to grieve. To live through this in conditions where there are no safe evacuation routes, destinations, reliable sources of information on where to get the next meal, clean water, or supplies.
The same greed which drives the destruction of Palestine brings about destruction to our own front door. The climate crisis exacerbated by the dropping of countless bombs does not know borders, and it will continue to tear life apart.
Through this, I saw the people of Gaza sending their best wishes to residents of Los Angeles. Mutual aid groups, notably run by community members and students—not organized by University administration or government officials, sprang up across the city. Simultaneously, I saw news of police disbanding and threatening those who made efforts to support their community members. (The same police who received millions more in funding while the fire departments’ budgets were cut.) I was reminded again of the importance of community, of building trust and solidarity with the people around us.
The conflation of legality with morality in a system in which capital is prioritized over human life leads to a precarious situation in which condemnation in the form of state-sanctioned violence against pleas for an end to violence is normalized, and at times, praised. If a protest is for human life but against the interest of capital gain, power used to repress protestors is framed as necessary.
Throughout all of this, we are urged to become desensitized as witnesses to the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian people.
We see how human life is so brutally crushed and burned and bombed and torn, literally, in front of us, and on our screens, and we hear these stories as they happen to the families of the people we love.
We are measured on what we can contribute financially, to the economy, our rest and recovery are for the sake of a return to contributing labor and results. And we are told that there must be a rationalization to this, one which makes it excusable. We see and we live in a reality in which we experience immense oppression firsthand, but it is our grief and our rage and our fatigue that is pathologized, medicated, and suppressed.
It sometimes feels impossible to heal grief that is ongoing. As Gaza rebuilds from over 470 days of genocide within 77 years of a brutal military occupation, we must remember to hold the repression we face in a wider context. To understand that the violence we witnessed on our campus, and the escalation of violence we have seen since October 7th, is a continuation of decades of violence, and that this violence is a symptom of a wider system which sees certain lives as disposable in the pursuit of power and profit. That a temporary (and arbitrary) ceasefire is the bare minimum, that there must be fundamental change to ensure that this can never happen again, that the Palestinian people deserve life and dignity in the land that is rightfully theirs.
We keep moving forward because we choose to, because the people on the ground, in Palestine, do not have a choice, because the week we lived is barely a fraction of the horror they have lived for 77 years.
Ryuji is a student at UCLA, who has submitted this piece anonymously.
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