This Is How We Win: Lessons from the Bay’s Pro-Palestine Encampments

A year has passed since the almost-insurgency of last spring’s pro-Palestine encampment movement, which saw more than 130 encampments sprout from university quads and plazas in nearly every state, as thousands of students came together to demand that their schools end complicity with Israeli occupation and genocide of Palestinians. This was a movement with crystal-clear demands, mainly falling under a single header: divestment.

If every camp shared the same demand, it should be easy enough to judge how successful they were, I thought. But hidden within every movement's ledger of successes and failures are countless debates on political strategy and yet-to-be realized tactical attempts. If one were to go beyond the ledger, dig up the earth below, might we answer how the movement arrived here, with some fronts ending in limited victory and others in bathetic loss?

On the one hand, San Francisco State University (SFSU) achieved its core demand of divestment from the Israeli war machine. Meanwhile, not 20 miles away, the encampment at University of California, Berkeley ended with the promise of a task force, amounting to an administrative take on delay, deny, depose, which is to say, the status-quo. And what to make of the building occupations at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, which were intense but ended without clear victory?

To help answer these questions, I spoke with seven participants across these three universities: UC Berkeley, SFSU, and Cal Poly Humboldt. Nearly everyone agreed that the movement is not over, but that an ongoing wave of repression nationwide has forced it to regroup. For this reason, most of the participants asked not to be named for fear of reprisal. As I write, the Palestinian people are being met with unassimilable violence and horror: in Gaza the death toll is over 50,000 (though this is likely an undercount), one in five people are facing famine, and the US and Israeli governments show no sign of ebbing support for the continuance of hellfire. The movement’s sense of urgency may have receded for now, but it remains crucial that those invested in Palestinian liberation ask not just what we can do in the face of a vast opponent, but how we win.

The Chain at San Francisco State University

The SFSU encampment began on the afternoon of April 29, 2024. On the quad abutting Malcolm X Plaza and the Cesar Chavez Student Center, a crowd of hundreds, containing both students and faculty, linked arms and formed a human barrier. Many were masked, eyes covered with sunglasses, a sea of keffiyehs. The crowd encircled the quad as an inner group hastily laid down tarps and tents. The purpose of this human chain was to defend the inner group as they staked territory.

Such scenes became familiar throughout spring’s student intifada, because it was partially a movement predicated on the defense of reclaimed territory, and big crowds help with this. The encampments were also a spectacular visual strategy, and the human circle tactic is a charismatic one; but more than just spectacle, it is trust made physical—a sum of parts constituting a whole whose form and content is an alliance against surveillance, admin, police. 

About two weeks later, the camp that had sprung so quickly from the earth came to an end just as suddenly. There was no violent intervention from police or counterprotesters. Surprising seemingly everyone involved, Lynn Mahoney, SFSU’s president, agreed to investment disclosures and a timeline for discussing divestment from companies complicit in the occupation and genocide of the Palestinians. While a welcome surprise, this meant a shift to a scene far less charismatic than the lively camp that adjoined Malcolm X Plaza. As summer approached, the fight entered the sterile walls of the university, into rooms with the president and administration where negotiations took place.

Such rooms were the destination of last year’s movement for divestment, despite the fact that they share no resemblance to the communal and disruptive power of the encampments. This is not a criticism, but an analysis I share with others on the nature of movements with limited demands. Protesters who ended up in negotiation rooms were not mistaken in strategy, far from it; it is simply the place that specific demands, when they are issued, come to rest. But what occurs inside the negotiation room depends entirely on the real power that is established outside, power which could be glimpsed in the linked arms at the camp’s earliest moment.

How did such a large formation come together? The tactic’s memetic quality gave an impression of spontaneity, but organizers I spoke with at SFSU made it apparent that the bonds among those present went beyond the surface.

From the Picket to the Occupation at SFSU

The origins of the powerful solidarity among and across faculty and students at SFSU is worthy of a story of its own, one I’m not equipped to tell. For the purposes of this story, however, where I wanted to know what led to strong divestment negotiations at SFSU, I was told by those I spoke with that December, 2023 is a good starting point. Just two months after October 7th, the California Faculty Association (CFA) went on strike over California State University (CSU) management’s failure to settle on a contract demanding pay and working condition improvements. 

An early moment of alliance between faculty and students could be glimpsed during the strike. Students showed up in strong numbers to the picket line, particularly those who were already organizing for Palestine in the wake of October 7th. When the encampment formed in the spring, over 100 faculty helped make up the human circle that protected the camp. As the camp grew in size over the coming days, talks with the administration began. How these talks were conducted, and how information should flow between camp and talks, would be informed by those same CFA comrades. 

James Martel and Blanca Missé, professors of political science and French respectively, and both active members of the union, noted that the encampment used an open bargaining model, borrowed from the labor movement, to exert pressure on administration. Open bargaining is premised on taking negotiations out from behind closed doors where a privileged few are tasked with representing the rank and file into wider participation and transparency. Early open bargaining sessions took place within the camp, with president Lynn Mahoney present. The public was invited to observe. 

Mahoney arrived casually, sporting jeans, a fleece jacket, and an orthopedic boot—that peculiar style of well-off Bay Area sexagenarians that calls no attention to itself and yet if a maxed-out 401k got dressed in the morning it would wear exactly this. Accompanying her were two lackeys. The three administrators were encircled by a keffiyeh-clad crowd of hundreds, painted banners with liberatory slogans, and the red, green, black, and white of the Palestinian flag. If one judged off of images alone, it was clear the balance of power fell on the side of the camp.

This set the tone for future negotiations. “They understood the formidable method of workers’ democracy in action,” said Missé. In practice, this meant every decision within the camp, every request that admin made, was handled collectively. This was a time-intensive process, but it demonstrated a rigid unity that made it difficult for admin to single out perceived leaders and steer them to capitulate. Combine this with faculty wielding the threat of labor stoppage over any attempts by the school to break up the camp, and you had a multi-pronged weapon pointed toward admin at the negotiating table. 

As Martel notes, “We made it very clear that if they called the cops there would be a wildcat strike.”

The fight for divestment is about solidarity with Palestinian liberation, but it’s also a struggle over learning conditions. University administrations control students’ learning conditions, basically entirely for the worse. They also control academic working conditions. Here lies the symmetry between the CFA strike and the camp: groups struggling amidst decaying conditions with a boss who couldn’t care less—until shit goes down at work. 

The camp is a disruption, but a minor one on its own. People can step around it, plug their ears to the chants. When disruption of grading and classes is on the table though, the boss starts to listen. 

Martel and Missé indicated as much: the early alliance between students and faculty likely led to the SFSU encampment’s impressive, yet limited, success of divestment from Lockheed Martin, Leonardo, Palantir, and Caterpillar. As well, it showed that their struggles are not separate, but that their fights in fact depended on one another, a shared thread looping across the strike and the soil.

Surveillance, from within and without, at UC Berkeley

At the University of California, Berkeley, the camp was laid not atop grass and soil, but upon the unyielding stone of Sproul Plaza—a site overloaded with history of protest, from the Free Speech Movement in the ‘60s, to Occupy Cal and its precursors in the late 2000s, to antifascist demos in 2017. The unfriendly ground went from literal, to metaphorical, then back again to literal. By being situated in front of Sproul Hall, the encampment was essentially on top of the campus police department’s offices. The proximity heightened preexisting, and legitimate, paranoia, and the mood would pervade all the organizing that took place that spring, participants told me. 

If SFSU’s camp was notable for overcoming divisions—student/worker, camper/non-camper, org-member/unaffiliated—Berkeley’s was one of rigid, but familiar, divides. Under the influence of a de facto camp leadership, the camp decided early on to hold assemblies in the morning rather than evenings. According to participants I spoke with, this effectively reserved decision-making to those who could stay overnight at the camp. Other divides were swiftly drawn: SJP vs. other radicals, people of Palestinian or Arab origin vs. non-Palestinians, non-Arabs. 

“I could start to feel the way that these divides were becoming more salient,” a student participant told me. 

There was an emphasis on security—from police, administrators, counterprotesters, infiltrators—but in practice this meant mutual distrust across sowed divisions.

When it became clear several weeks later that negotiations were stalling, the promise of momentum began to shift to the developing United Auto Workers (UAW) 4811 unfair labor practice strike. UAW 4811 represents the majority of academic workers and researchers throughout the University of California system, so a work stoppage could have been a powerful escalation.

While the camp was busy maintaining itself (which it did quite effectively, the longest running encampment at 22 days), union members gathered pledges from rank and file members to sign a strike authorization vote in the wake of police violence at various UC campuses and, in particular, a violent nighttime attack on UCLA’s camp on May 1, 2024 by far-right and Zionist counterprotesters.

After the strike vote passed overwhelmingly, the first tragedy presented itself: time. The end of the semester was just a few days away. UAW organizers asked the camp to run at least a few days into summer to provide dual leverage of camp and strike, but camp leadership refused. Not only did the camp face pressure to make a deal with administration, there were calls to drive down to University of California, Merced where the UC Regents meeting was taking place. The UC Regents is the governing board for the UC system as a whole. It is the body responsible for investment decisions and thus was deemed by camp participants (and history) as a viable target in pressuring the system on divestment. The camp voted to disband and focus its numbers on the Regents meeting.

Whether this was a tactical error wouldn’t matter. The second tragedy came down, this time from an Orange County judge issuing a temporary restraining order against UAW 4811, ruling that a work stoppage would cause “irreparable harm” to students and the university. There would be no strike at Berkeley. The negotiations would fizzle out, yielding that death knell of social movements: a task force. But what did the task force conclude? At the end of 2024, it released a recommendation: no divestment. Delay, deny, depose.

The Great Leap Indoors; the Bonk Heard Round the World 

The division and distrust at Berkeley doesn’t explain its failure to accomplish its stated aims, at least not totally. Even if it had looked more like SFSU in terms of student/worker alliances, the UC’s investment portfolio is magnitudes larger, and administrators—along with their armed wing, the police—will defend it accordingly. The strike represented a tactical expansion—a leap from student movement to worker movement; how swiftly the UC quashed it showed that this new unity was a threat. 

At California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, another leap was made—from outdoors to indoors, the first school to do so. 

On April 22, a group of about 40 students, alumni, and community members entered Siemens Hall, a centrally located building where the university’s president and provost work, and were almost immediately greeted by police. Arcata police in riot helmets attempted an incursion into Siemens Hall, dismantling a barricade of reappropriated chairs and desks. (Some Twitter scholars lovingly referred to the construction as a “chairricade.”)

In a video of the scene, the occupiers are dressed casually: t-shirts and shorts, most in masks, but they retain the subdued cuteness of campus dress. The vibe is more “Occupy 2011” than “student intifada 2024”, where, among the insurgent wing of the latter, full black bloc and heads wrapped in keffiyehs would become the reasonable attire commensurate with the level of repression. However, these casual communizers did not lack an insurgent spirit. Objects quickly begin flying from communizer to cop. A vessel whose course is slightly off regrettably misses the cops but leaves a satisfying red splat on the wall.

Is it ketchup? One revels at the readily available materials in this building, transformed from bland office accoutrements into weapons for fighting the police. This, I think, is what it means to communize something—to reach into the made world during a flare of antagonism and pluck out what’s needed to sustain the fight. Things that appeared debased suddenly shimmer with utopian capability.

Take, for instance, an iconic character in the crowd of Humboldt occupiers: hovering above defiant chants of “We are not afraid of you!” a protester used a 5 gallon water jug as percussion to match the meter of the crowd’s message. When the cops made their big push, the occupiers linked arms and pushed back. They successfully wedged the police back into the foyer of the building, and as one cop began indiscriminately swinging his baton at the heads of occupiers, the jug, still hovering above it all, delivered four righteous and firm bonks upon the heads of the cops. The moment was posted to X and quickly went viral.

This now-notorious scene only barely captures a key component to the successful defense of the occupation: the police were surrounded by a massive crowd. While cops were fighting through barricades and bonks from the inside, they were being pinned into a narrow doorway by the crowd outside. “The cops got kettled,” is how one participant put it. Human circles win again. Plus barricades. And bonks.

Like Berkeley, Humboldt did not walk away with a compelling deal. But, as a 24-year-old participant who asked not to be named because of fear of repercussions told me, we should be cautious in reducing victory to a single appearance. 

“The win was the virality; the propaganda of the deed,” they said.

This point is hard to deny. During moments of revolt, the fulcrum upon which antagonism pivots, the point at which it tips from minuscule to mass scale, often appears in the form of a meme, or a framework that can easily be taken up and repeated. The linking of arms to form a human barrier is one. The pitching of tents on quads is another. The occupation of a building, waving a water jug in front of a cop skirmish, yet another. 

When such a framework is found, the exuberance of its spread is magical. Social media feeds seem to cohere into an electrifying focus, the disorder forming an order. Dead artifacts of the past are suddenly brought back to life: in the wake of the events at Humboldt, a 15-year old zine on how to occupy a building that originated from the 2009-2010 West Coast anti-austerity university protests was updated and recirculated. Even Fox News pitched in to help.

Whither or wither

One day after a police raid brought the week-long occupation of Siemens Hall to an end, Hamilton Hall was occupied by protesters at Columbia University in New York City. Inspiration is an elusive quantity, and cannot be attributed as the sole cause of a wave of escalations that followed, but under the right conditions, witness to bravery and militancy is enough to catalyze action. Inspire literally means to breathe in; we can’t live without it.

A similar elusive quantity pervades the experience of participation in the encampment. Everyone I spoke with described camp as beautiful, painful. However rife with internal conflict, one called it “a commune unto itself.” This participant of UC Berkeley’s encampment, who also neglected to be named, went on: “It is a site of participation, of learning how we can take care of each other in the face of risk.”

And the risks are great. The Bay has seen some of the most severe punishment across the movement as a whole.

In April, 12 Stanford students who occupied and barricaded themselves inside the president’s office were hit with felony charges for vandalism and conspiracy to trespass by Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen. Casey Goonan, a 34-year-old Bay Area native was charged with federal arson in late June for a series of alleged arsons in solidarity with Palestine on UC Berkeley campus. Though it has not impacted the Bay directly, the recent targeting of Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, Momodou Taal, Mohsen Mahdawi, and others by ICE has produced a chilling effect. As repression rains down over the movement, I’m aligned with participants I spoke with in their belief that the bonds forged via care and conspiring toward collective risk will be what buoys them through the enemy’s attempt to flood the movement with fear.

But the mood among participants is not hubris. For the most part, fear and repression has succeeded in quelling the student intifada. Showing up for those facing charges, and resisting the university’s attempt to restrict political speech and protest opens a new front in the fight.

So the fight is by no means over. The universities and the state have thrown everything they have at the movement for Palestinian liberation. It’s clear that in order to fight back, and to win, more fronts need to be opened, more divisions breached. The high-pitched moments of movement virality are essential for injecting energy and tactical ingenuity into sites of struggle—they are accelerants. But without thick networks of solidarity—an element far more difficult to represent—the blazes will simply burn out, tamped by the overequipped repressive apparatus. This is where the movement currently stands.

The uncommon level of organization at SFSU was built slowly over time; the bond between union and movement depended on a preexisting bond between rank-and-file union members. The sites where there are long-term efforts to strengthen and politicize rank and file—for example, within UAW 4811 at the UCs—will be the proving grounds for the fusion of militant tactical expansion with the labor movement strategy. When this fusion occurs, it will become apparent that militancy and organization are in fact the same thing, and we will wonder why for some reason we spent years saying the former when looking at a movement from the outside, the latter when looking within. 

Outsides and insides. These are the formal descriptors of the encampment movement, the camp and the building occupation. But within each itself are questions of outsides and insides. Who will fill them? Who will defend them when the cops come? And when the cops break up the occupation, what are the weapons of retaliation? A flood of our own will require not just students, but workers too; not just campuses, but the cities and towns as well. Militants and organizers and unionists and the regular sympathetic—every arm linked to another.