that's how the light gets in

reflections from the front lines of the student intifada

Photo taken at the Gaza solidarity encampment at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

Sunday, May 5, 2024

As I write this, the Gaza solidarity encampment at my alma mater, the George Washington University, is concluding its eleventh consecutive day. I’ve been down at GW’s campus nearly every day since the encampment began, holding space alongside hundreds of other students, faculty, alumni, and community members. During that time, I’ve watched the protest evolve considerably in both size and scope from what it was when it first began—from the handful of tents that sprung up on the north side of University Yard (since renamed by protesters as Shohada’ Square [Martyrs’ Square]) early last Thursday morning, to a secondary encampment set up on the street by community members after police put up barricades around the quad, to the current full-scale occupation of the entire lawn that sprung up after protesters stormed the barricades late last Sunday night. For the last week or so since the liberation of the square, the situation has remained in a sort of uneasy equilibrium—for the most part, D.C. police have kept their distance, refusing (at least for now) the university administration’s requests for their help in clearing the encampment.

More so now than perhaps at any other point in my life thus far, I feel like I finally understand what Lenin meant when he said, perhaps apocryphally, that there are “weeks where decades happen.” Even as a writer, I don’t know if I have the words to describe the feeling of watching the events of the last two weeks unfold—not just on GW’s campus, but on the more than 100 college campuses across the country that have erupted in what Palestinian student movements are calling the ‘Student Intifada.’ The sheer scale of everything that has happened—the protests themselves, as well as the repression they have faced from university administrations and militarized police forces—has stretched, perhaps to breaking point, my ability to make sense of it all.

As GW’s encampment has expanded and entrenched over the last week and a half, the overall atmosphere of the protest has evolved as well. What started out as a fairly ordinary demonstration of community members showing up to support the handful of students camped out on the other side of the fence has since transformed into something different, something entirely new altogether. Alongside the same general atmosphere of fiery outrage and righteous indignation that has pervaded the encampment since it began, there has also opened up a new and thoroughly unexpected current of joy, community, and radical creativity—the creativity of people coming together, under circumstances beyond their control, to collectively imagine new ways of knowing and caring for and existing alongside one another. More than just a campsite, more even than just a protest, what has sprung up on this and countless other campuses around the world is an experiment in radical possibility—a glimpse, albeit a fragile and perhaps ephemeral one, into the way things could otherwise be.

• • •

The students at GW, like their counterparts at so many universities across the country and around the world, have repeatedly referred to their encampment as a ‘liberated zone.’ On the surface, this may come across as simply another example of the revolutionary hyperbole that is so commonly employed by self-styled student radicals. What, one might ask, is so ‘liberated’ about a handful of tents that will almost certainly come down when the semester ends in a few weeks (if the police haven’t already cleared them out)? Upon closer examination, however, it quickly becomes clear that the answer to this question is everything. The moment the first tent was pitched, and again when the first barricade was toppled, the space that the students have since rechristened as Shohada’ Square was liberated—not just from the direct authority of GW’s administration, but from the oppressive institutional logics of a university whose primary purpose is to produce indebted, obedient cogs in the capitalist machine. The boundary of this liberated zone marks the point at which the George Washington University ends and the Popular University for Gaza begins.

Standing in Shohada’ Square, it’s hard not to be struck by the extent to which the usual mechanisms of bureaucratic authority and top-down administration that define the neoliberal university (of which GW is a paradigmatic example) have apparently fallen away altogether. What’s even more striking, however, is just how little these trappings of institutional power seem to be missed. In the face of hostile indifference from the university administration, the students running the encampment have set up intricate and incredibly efficient networks of mutual aid and community care to ensure that everyone sharing space at the encampment is safe and fed and cared for. Three or four times a day, cars arrive loaded with trays of hot food—sometimes donated by local restaurants, sometimes cooked in the homes of community members—to feed the hundred or more people who are assembled in Shohada’ Square at any given time. Near the entrance to the square, next to a statue of George Washington that has been painted over with slogans and decorated with a keffiyeh and a Palestinian flag, there is a supply tent—one of several scattered throughout the encampment—where volunteers distribute medical supplies, blankets, and personal care items to anyone who may need them. On the other side of the Washington statue, another tent houses the Refaat Alareer Memorial Library, where a donated bookshelf overflows with all manner of radical and liberation-oriented literature. At the center of the square, a whiteboard lists out the day’s schedule, including prayer times for observant Muslims, and each time the call to prayer is announced, non-Muslim encampment participants form a circle around their praying comrades to protect their privacy and allow them to pray in peace.

The encampment’s ethos of collective care and autonomous self-organization is both reinforced and reflected by the call-and-response chants of “Who keeps us safe? We keep us safe!” that periodically echo off the walls of the surrounding buildings, accompanied by instructions for waterproofing one’s tent or reminders not to speak to the police. All around, there is a general sense that some veil of institutional legitimacy has been lifted—a collective acknowledgement that the figureheads and systems of authority in which we have been conditioned from birth to place our blind faith can no longer, in fact, be trusted. Despite coming from all walks of life, the participants of the encampment all seem to share the crucial understanding that we are the ones who keep us safe; that in the absence of any institutions we can trust to act in our best interests, it is both our political duty and our only option to rely on one another. It seems to me that if revolutionary change really is possible, if we really are going to bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old, then that new world—whatever it ends up looking like—must be grounded in this same understanding of what Martin Luther King famously called our “inescapable network of mutuality.”

In media coverage of the encampments, much has been made (the vast majority of it in bad faith) of the calls for ‘intifada’—the Arabic word for a revolutionary uprising—that have become a mainstay of student protests for Palestine. It’s true that revolutionary rhetoric is ubuquitous at these demonstrations, but it seems to me that a narrow focus on the immediate content of the speeches and chants themselves misses the point altogether. The real revolutionary potential of this moment, I think, derives not just from the scale or intensity of the protests themselves, but from something far more fundamental—the possibilities for new modes of community and solidarity that they have opened up in our collective imagination. In a recent essay for the Boston Review, my dear friend and former professor Ayça Çubukçu writes that the global movement for Palestinian solidarity, with the ongoing student mobilizations at the fore, “has succeeded—even if too briefly yet—to stop the world for Gaza.” Ayça isn’t wrong about this by any means, but even her observation doesn’t quite go far enough. In fact, the students who are courageously occupying college quads and academic buildings across the globe have done more than just stop the world—they’ve begun, however fleetingly, to remake it.

• • •

No one in Shohada’ Square has any idea what the coming days and weeks have in store for the liberated zone that these students have formed. Perhaps the police will move in to clear the encampment tomorrow, or the day after, or next week. Perhaps the university will opt to simply wait it out, to allow the encampment to naturally disperse when the school year ends and students begin to go back to their hometowns. Perhaps this new community that we are collectively trying to build together will collapse under the enormity of its own imagination and ambition, succumbing to the same unholy combination of malign outside influences and crippling internal contradictions that have brought down so many experiments of its kind before. Or perhaps, of course, we will win.

But regardless of what happens, regardless of whether the liberated zone is reclaimed by those in power and fenced off (literally or metaphorically) once again, nothing will ever change the fact that there was a moment, however brief, when it was in fact liberated. Everyone who has encountered this experiment in radical possibility—from the students camping out in the square to the passers-by who stop on their way to class or the office to gawk at the spectacle—will carry the memory of it with them for the rest of their lives, some small part of them forever changed by the knowledge (whether conscious or unconscious) that they have seen with their own eyes this evidence that another world is, in fact, possible. There is, as Leonard Cohen said, a crack in everything—that’s how the light gets in. The liberated zone at Shohada’ Square, like the countless other liberated zones that have sprung up on campuses around the world, represents a crack in the edifice of the status quo. Perhaps it’s just a hairline fracture, or perhaps it’s something more structural—but regardless of what kind of crack it is, sealing it up won’t do anything about the light that has already gotten in.

About a week and a half ago, while scrolling on Twitter, I came across an article in The Independent about the encampment at Columbia University, which at that time had just entered its tenth day. (Columbia’s encampment has, of course, since been cleared following an incredibly violent invasion of the campus by the heavily militarized NYPD.) The article highlighted how student organizers at Columbia had diligently studied the university’s infamous protests against the Vietnam War in 1968, which were met with similarly violent repression and which have achieved a somewhat mythical status in the history of student activism. Organizers of Columbia’s Gaza encampment, the article explained, had intentionally sought out this history, going into the university archives to study the tactics and methods of the 1968 protesters. Another article I found informed me that several of the encampment organizers had taken an elective history course titled “Columbia 1968,” through which they had managed to connect with and learn from university alumni who had taken part in the 1968 occupation. In both articles, students who were interviewed made it clear that they saw the current protests not just as an echo of the past, but as an active part of the same historical current.

It’s not difficult to imagine that, just as the current generation of student activists have done with 1968, their successors will someday seek out the lessons and legacies of 2024 in much the same way. It’s not difficult to imagine that in ten or twenty or fifty years, long after the crack in the existing order opened up by our present moment has closed once again, the inheritors of this moment’s legacy will find their path illuminated by the light that has already managed to enter through it—just like the light from the crack opened up in 1968 has illuminated the path for the students who are now carrying forward that revolutionary torch. We can only hope that eventually, we reach a point where the combined destabilizing effects of all these cracks in the status quo becomes so great that the entire thing collapses in on itself.

• • •

Again and again over the last few weeks, I’ve found myself returning to Arundhati Roy’s famous assertion that “another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” Ever since the morning of April 26th, when I first arrived at the newly-formed encampment in response to a call for public support, I’ve been hearing with increasing clarity the soft but unmistakable breathing of this other world as she approaches. Even through all the cacophony of songs and shouts and protest chants, her steady respirations have grown harder and harder to ignore with each passing day.

Like I said, what happens next to Shohada’ Square is anybody’s guess. Whether the encampment will succeed in its demands, whether its current momentum will translate into something larger and more sustainable, whether it will even survive another day—all of these are still very much open questions. But regardless of what the coming days and weeks may bring, it seems clear enough to me that at least for now, a new world is still on her way. For now, I can still hear her breathing.

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culture shock is a blog by the Indian-American writer, essayist, and cultural critic Pranay Somayajula. Click the button below to subscribe for free and receive new essays in your inbox: