In January, the U.S. pro-Palestine campus encampment movement began making headlines again as a target of renewed repression. The student protesters—who called on universities to divest from Israel, support a ceasefire in Gaza, and allow free speech on campuses through demonstrations, building occupations and later, a series of encampments on campuses across the country—had already been targeted with expulsions, disciplinary retaliation, harsh treatment by armed police, and more over the past sixteen months of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Activists are organizing against these restrictions: Columbia University students are suing administrators over mass arrests at their encampment in 2024, a group from the university is organizing to identify international student activists after President Donald Trump signed an executive order to cancel the student visas of pro-Palestine protesters.
Nyki Duda
Tents lined up during the pro-Palestine encampment at DePaul University in Chicago, May 2024.
The encampment movement shares some common roots with a smaller, less well-known movement of student occupations in which I took part more than fifteen years ago, after Israel’s first major assault on Gaza after Hamas came to power. Today’s student movement has grown and radicalized the debate around Israel’s occupation, helped along by public sentiment that has swung against Israel, and they’ve paid the consequences for it. Meanwhile, our protests succeeded mostly in planting a seed for future change.
In mid-February 2009, I’d just arrived in St. Andrews, a wealthy, conservative town fifty miles from the Scottish capital of Edinburgh, for a year abroad. The First Gaza War had just ended with a unilateral Israeli ceasefire, after its forces launched attacks on Gaza City, Khan Yunis and Rafah, killing more than 1,100 Palestinians. Before October 2023, Israel launched two more major military operations in Gaza, killings hundreds more, while Hamas attacks killed dozens of Israelis.
The realities of those days seem surreal now: Israel had only begun its blockade of Gaza, and Hamas had been in power for just three years. Few people outside of the region seemed to understand much about Palestine, and it was barely covered in mainstream news—I had only learned about the fuller history of Israel’s occupation of Palestine a few semesters earlier from one of my first college professors, the international relations scholar Stephen Zunes. We had no TikTok, Instagram, or smartphones to give us eyes on the ground; YouTube and Twitter were only just catching on.
Even so, when I wandered into a lecture hall hoping to learn what had been happening in Gaza, it was crowded. I was greeted by a tall, thin man in a green army jacket. Today, Patrick O’Hare is a senior researcher in social anthropology at the University of St. Andrews whose research and writing focuses on waste production and processing. But in 2009, he was just another anthropology student, part of the group that had organized the film night I was attending in an effort to spur student action.
“I just remember innocent people being killed by Israel and no one doing anything in St. Andrews,” O’Hare recalled to me.
“The response on campus had been really lame, and I was burning inside,” says alumna Seema Patel, who now works in public health. “The Islamic Society had been too scared to put out a statement.”
A few weeks earlier, inspired by the nascent Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, students at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies in London had launched an occupation of the Brunei Gallery, demanding the school cut ties to the Israeli arms industry. The movement quickly spread to other U.K. campuses. The list would soon include St. Andrews, after leftist students gauged interest among attendees at the film night.
“A small group of us were convinced of the potential impact of an occupation . . . if we got the numbers,” O’Hare says. “So we called a general meeting to which a lot of people turned up, and we pitched the occupation idea, which was supported unanimously.” With the vote, Scotland’s most prestigious university joined a list of at least twenty-seven student occupations, the last of which ended that March.
Nyki Duda
The student occupation of Lower College Hall at Scotland's St. Andrews University, February 2009.
On February 18, 2009, we rushed the posh Lower College Hall, and set up camp. Inside, we hung Palestinian flags, shared snacks, made decisions by consensus, set up communication with other occupations, hosted speakers, and created an open space for students to learn about Palestine. It lasted about a week. For Patel, the experience was also about creating a political community: “Mainly, I occupied to find like-minded people on the issue.”
Messages of support came flooding in from pro-Palestinian voices, but for O’Hare, the “most important of all” were the links made with institutions in Gaza. Patel remembers she “had never been as connected” as she felt after we received a letter from a university in Gaza. At the same time, we debated issues that are still being discussed all these years later: Is it antisemitic to say “from the river to the sea”? How should we understand Hamas? And, hauntingly: Is this ethnic cleansing? And at what point should we call it genocide?
Nyki Duda
A student prepares a banner for the occupation of Lower College Hall at Scotland's St. Andrews University, February 2009.
Student occupations in Scotland called for an end to national contracts with Eden Springs, which sources water from the Golan Heights, Syrian land that has been occupied by Israel since 1967. We also demanded that St. Andrews cut ties with BAE Systems, a military company that provides components for Israeli fighter aircraft, collects aid for Gaza, and creates scholarships for Palestinian students. Though our occupation was no massive success, we won some concessions: O’Hare is co-chair of the St. Andrews Education for Palestinian Students program, which came out of the occupation and grants annual fee waivers to two masters students.
Like the 2024 encampments, the occupation movement of this time was a seed of politicization. The St. Andrews action counts among its veterans change-makers including academics, artists, nonprofit workers, and activists from Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas. I even interviewed another 2009 occupier, now a lecturer in intelligence and security studies at the University of Leicester, about Gaza for The Progressive last year.
“It was one of my best experiences at St. Andrews as a student,” O’Hare says. “The coming together of different sections of the student body was particularly noteworthy: people who were anarchist, Muslim, Arab, liberal, human rights activists, a real mix.
Nyki Duda
Seema Patel and Patrick O’Hare stand in front of a group of fellow students during the student occupation of Lower College Hall at Scotland's St. Andrews University, February 2009.
Compared to the 2024 encampment movement, the 2009 U.K. occupations were tiny. But by the time our movement ended, it had inspired students at two U.S. campuses in New York, Rochester University and New York University, to incorporate demands around Palestine into their own anti-austerity protests.
Our protest was targeted with some repression—Patel recalls private security were called in on the last day of our negotiations with administration. Water in the building was cutoff, and we received some online harassment and backlash from pro-Israel students.
But while the movement against Israel’s genocide in Gaza has grown, so has the repression against it, in the United States and beyond. One first-year student at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who preferred to remain anonymous, told me that watching “images being broadcast of the terrible things that are supposedly happening for my safety…specifically as a Jewish person, made me feel responsible.”
Since the encampment, Northwestern has enacted restrictions on assembly and speech, which the student says seem to only be applied to what the administration perceives as protests. When students set up a sukkah, or hut, in solidarity with Gaza for the Jewish holiday of Sukkot in October, the administration sprung into action. “Our thing was, they shouldn’t have a problem with it, because it was a religious structure,” they say. “But nope, that didn’t fly. They brought cops in to deconstruct it in front of us that night, which sucked.”
Stephen Zunes, a veteran of the anti-apartheid movement in solidarity with Black South Africans in the 1980s and a regular contributor to The Progressive, sees parallels between that movement and the student movement in support of Palestine. Much like the Gaza solidarity encampments, Zunes told me, the boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign against South Africa “included encampments, what we called shantytowns, modeled after the poor living conditions of South African Blacks” living under white rule. But while students in the 1980s were punished—Zunes was arrested for his activism—they were not targeted with bans from their campuses or harsh legal charges, as pro-Palestinian student protesters are now facing.
“Where shantytowns were allowed to stay up for months during the anti-apartheid struggle, encampments [for Gaza] were torn down within hours at the same universities,” Zunes says. Vincent Boudreau, the City College of New York President who called police in against protesters, was Zunes’s classmate at Cornell, and was also arrested multiple times for his anti-apartheid activism. “And here he is,” Zunes says, “calling the cops to come in and attack people.”
As to the explanation for this heightened repression, Zunes says, “I think the biggest single reason is that they can. They can use the excuse of antisemitism to go after people, and so a lot of liberals who might otherwise be sticking up for these groups on civil liberties grounds feel that they’re obliged to crack down . . . . I don’t doubt that if they could have been as repressive towards anti-apartheid people in the 80s, they would have.” But he also notes that protesting in general has become more difficult in a post-9/11 world. (Though it’s since expired, the 2001 Patriot Act’s “national security” provisions were ultimately used against activists in many cases.)
Linda Quiquivix, a geographer and the author and illustrator of Palestine 1492: A Report Back, sees the repression of student protesters as an indication of the limits of the university as an institution rooted in empire and colonialism. She says that when she visited several student encampments at universities in the Los Angeles area in 2024, students told her they felt the protest camps were “a safe space for them to finally talk” about Israel’s genocide of Palestinians.
Nyki Duda
Protest signs made during the pro-Palestine encampment at DePaul University in Chicago, May 2024.
Quiquivix also sees the occupations as an experiment in mutual aid— the “creation of another world,” if on a small scale, with students organizing amongst themselves and with surrounding communities to manage everything from shelter to food and waste. She compares this type of organizing to that of the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011, and the international Arab Spring uprisings from which they took inspiration—including in Egypt, where revolutionaries established an encampment in Cairo’s Tahrir Square weeks before overthrowing the longstanding dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak.
“It’s something that I haven’t seen in my lifetime,” Quiquivix says of the pro-Palestinian encampment movement. “I know that Occupy had something like that. But the closest I can recall to seeing something like that is Tahrir Square.”
In spite of the crackdown against student protests, the encampment movement sparked a network of student-led occupations at colleges across the United States, Canada, and parts of Europe. Their efforts, Zunes argues, have “radicalized the discourse on Israel-Palestine,” and made it “more legitimate to not just critique the occupation, but to question Zionism itself.”
“I think that the encampments, for these students, have been life-changing, because they have been able to feel . . . that they can create another world, they already know it,” Quiquivix says. “I think it was an enormous seed.”