As alumni of the City University of New York (CUNY), we have always been proud. CUNY is the largest urban public university system in the country and has a population of predominantly black and brown students.
As working-class students, we saw CUNY as more reflective of our city’s demographic diversity than private, elite universities. The inherent diversity of our university communities provided us with an invaluable education that went well beyond the curriculum: we learned about the realities and stories of our peers. At CUNY, we learned how to create community. We learned to organize ourselves. And we spent our time mobilizing for Palestinian liberation.
Last month, students and workers established a solidarity encampment in Gaza, demonstrating CUNY’s true potential to become a people’s university. Years after graduating, we returned to campus to help organize and witness this historic action.
The encampment presented five demands to the CUNY administration: divestment from businesses and military contractors complicit in the Zionist genocide and occupation; the boycott of academic institutions complicit in Zionist settler colonialism; solidarity with the Palestinian national liberation struggle; demilitarization of the campus; and a return to a popular, fully funded, tuition-free CUNY.
While the goal was to end CUNY’s complicity in the genocide in Gaza, the encampment built a community based on solidarity and care. Disposers arranged for daily meals, an accessible pantry, and a 24/7 medical tent in case of emergency. Each day the camp offered political education, film screenings and activities for children.
The encampment also paid homage to the rich history of radical organizing at CUNY and Harlem. He built on the legacy of our elders who organized a similar occupation in 1969 to demand educational equity for Black and Puerto Rican students through their Five Demands. Students publicly renamed City College to Harlem University. In 2024, echoing this mobilization, we also raised five demands and declared in a banner: “Harlem University: is. 1969, re-est. 2024.”
We also sought to revive the legacy of the student protests of the 1980s, reclaiming the Shakur-Morales Student and Community Center that was established at the time and forcibly closed by the university administration in 2013. We named the political education program of the “Shakur-Morales” camp. Morales-Kanafani People’s University”, adding a reference to the late Palestinian intellectual Ghassan Kanafani, assassinated by Mossad in 1972.
At the camp, CUNY students and alumni, faculty and community members created something extraordinary: a collaborative, safe and transformative space rooted in radical love and a commitment to Palestinian liberation .
But the encampment was not meant to be a utopia offering only peace. This was an escalation that threatened the hegemony of the university administration and its quest for profit from colonization and war. In other words, the encampment threatened the status quo of the university and, in essence, it is never a peaceful process.
As Palestinian intellectual and martyr Basel Al Araj said: “The beginning of every revolution is an exit. An exit from the social order that power has established in the name of law, stability, the public interest and the common good. The CUNY Solidarity Camp in Gaza marked the student movement’s progression from a struggle against the constraints of a profit-driven, neoliberal university to an open defiance of university authorities and a categorical refusal to be monitored and governed.
When campus police were sent by the university administration to dismantle the de-occupation, the protesters spontaneously chased them away. This moment was a display of collective power that we, as former student organizers, never expected to witness on campus. The collaboration of students, workers and the community had expanded the possibilities for resistance in the belly of the beast.
The encampment continued to demand that CUNY wipe its hands of Palestinian blood and become the people’s CUNY again. Instead, the university administration responded by inviting armed police officers to shed more blood – that of CUNY’s black, brown, working-class community. Protesters say New York Police and public safety broke bones and knocked out teeth. The very campus where we united for the cause of liberation turned into a battlefield when hundreds of police violently invaded the campus.
As alumni, scholars, activists, and organizers, we have never had any illusions about the conservative politics and profit motive that drive the CUNY administration. Since 2018, CUNY students have been organizing against CUNY’s $1.09 million investment in weapons and surveillance technology companies. Instead of heeding our calls for divestment years ago and despite student governments voting to divest, CUNY responded by increasing its genocidal investments. In 2021, we learned that CUNY spent a whopping $8.5 million on contracts with companies involved in supporting or profiting from apartheid and Israeli war crimes.
As the Zionist entity escalated its 76 years of colonization and dispossession into a full-scale genocide, students were left with no choice but to respond accordingly with more decisive actions, creating protest camps and occupations.
Although we expected CUNY to respond to the encampment with repression, we were surprised by the violence of its response. Instead of heeding its students’ call, CUNY sent the NYPD to brutalize protesters and arrest nearly 200 of them, hitting 28 protesters with life-altering criminal charges.
And in an extreme act of betrayal, after the crackdown, the CUNY Board of Trustees just introduced a resolution to spend $4 million on a private security company that advertises its services to police pro-protests. Palestinians and “experts” trained by the Zionists. entity.
Students who organize camps and decide to leave now for Palestine do so as a wake-up call to the legacy of their elders. Throughout the last century, American students have spoken out against the war in Vietnam and against South African apartheid. The cause of Palestinian liberation is also just, and the Academic Intifada is only a fulfillment of their duty.
It is for this reason that we say: the escalations are noble and necessary to end the participation of universities in the Gaza genocide. The best time to escalate the situation was yesterday. The second best time is now.
We also reject the whistle of “external agitators”. We are all affected by the decisions of university administrators to fund genocide with taxpayer dollars and student tuition fees. There is no dividing line between students and the community. CUNY campuses should be accessible to all, with no barriers separating education from surrounding communities.
This racist rhetoric is only used by the CUNY administration to deprive current students of the collective wisdom of the broader pro-Palestinian movement. As alumni and organizers, we can share with students our experiences of past demands being ignored; Israeli occupying forces welcomed on campus well before October 7; exploratory committees and meetings with the administration waste organizers’ time while Palestinians die. We, in turn, get inspired and learn from the new climbs that student organizers are courageously introducing. The liberation struggle depends on knowledge developed collectively between one generation of resistance and another.
Administrators, however, rely on student movements with a short institutional memory. They seek to distance student organizers from the rich heritage of Palestinian and anti-colonial resistance – by locking this knowledge into books meant to be read but never put into practice. Alumni-student collaboration poses a direct threat to administrators’ strategy of waiting for student movements to graduate.
Given CUNY’s complete and utter failure to rise to this historic moment despite its posture as a social justice university, we invite our alumni to join and support the campus movement – a grassroots movement – for Palestine. Divest from CUNY until CUNY divest from genocide.
Cease all donations and collaborations with this university which uses alumni influence to reinforce its false image of social justice education and inclusion. Instead, invest in Palestinian life, in liberation, and in the student movement that courageously paved the way for our collective liberation.
The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.