On the evening of Friday, May 17, 2024, organizers at the University of Chicago (UChicago) occupied the university’s Institute of Politics (IOP) building. Organizers renamed it Casbah of Basel Al-Araj and put out a call on a newly formed Telegram channel for community members, students, and alumni to “bring tents” and “come prepared to stay while.” The Student organizers described the IOP via Instagram as “a breeding ground for politicians, bureaucrats, [and] nonprofit functionaries” from former U.S. presidential advisers to CIA recruiters. The organizers chose to rename the occupied building after Basel Al-Araj, a martyred Palestinian intellectual and political prisoner who was vocally critical of the Palestinian Authority.
The occupation of the building came after a disruptive rally held on the first day of alumni weekend and was part of a series of organized actions on campus. Organizers established “Cabash of Basel Al-Araj” after an initial encampment on April 29 outside of Edward Levi Hall. Levi Hall is the University’s primary administrative building, named after a U.S. Attorney General who assumed his position in the wake of the Vietnam War. The building is a specter of the imperial legacy protested by UChicago students over five decades prior. The first encampment was dismantled by the university’s police force on May 7 to give the university time to prepare for alumni weekend, which was then disrupted by the Casbah of Basel Al-Araj.
The encampment, like many university encampments across the United States, was adorned with vibrant movement art, visited by a lineup of speakers, and endorsed by a broad coalition of grassroots organizations in Chicago. Each day of the encampment included an alternate curriculum and schedule that departed from the University of Chicago’s traditionally stringent pedagogical norm. Teach-ins at the Popular University for Gaza included, but were not limited to: Abolition 101; Narcan Training; Tahrir Square and the Egyptian Revolution; Environmental Justice; Revolutionary Poetry; Signs for Palestine, American Sign Language Training; History of U.S. Jewish anti-Zionism; Medical Apartheid in Palestine; Political Data Tool Training; Somatics for the Revolution; and The History of the Displacement in Hyde Park.
And like many university encampments across the nation, it was also located in the predominantly Black, heavily policed neighborhoods of Hyde Park, Kenwood, and Woodlawn.
The University of Chicago has one of the largest private police forces in the nation. It is situated in Cook County, home to Cook County Jail, which is also one of the country’s largest psychiatric facilities. The University of Chicago stands as a stalwart manifestation of imperialism’s inward-facing form, an exposed underwire of an electronic cable whose rubber coating has been cut back to reveal all the places where community care is substituted for outposts of the military and prison industrial complex.
Ultimately, the profoundness of the first encampment had little to do with its uniqueness, and far more to do with its ubiquity. The story of the University of Chicago Popular University for Gaza is the story of many encampments unfurling across campuses nationwide, which is to say that it is a story about Palestine and escalation for Gaza within American imperial structures.
I would be remiss to write this piece and not tell the stories of the Palestinians in Gaza who were memorialized within the first encampment at UChicago — of the namesakes behind the Refaat Alareer memorial library, the Hamza Al-Dahdouh media liaison tent, and the Dr. Hammam Alloh medic tent.
Refaat Alareer was a published writer and beloved professor at the Islamic University of Gaza, a university that has been completely destroyed by Israel, along with every university in Gaza — a fact the President of the University of Chicago, Paul Alivisatos, refused to acknowledge in negotiations with students. Refaat loved FC Barcelona and playing Ping-Pong. He was murdered by an Israeli airstrike in December 2023 along with several of his family members.
Hamza Al-Dahdouh, the son of famed journalist Wael Al-Dahdouh, was one of several journalists documenting the early days of the Israeli-forced starvation of Northern Gaza, a starvation which has now engulfed the entire Strip. Hamza wrote a short obituary for his mother, who was martyred in the first month of the genocide. Israel killed Hamza in a targeted drone strike. He was martyred in January 2024 while driving back from a reporting assignment along with his colleague Mustafa Thuraya.
Hammam Alloh was a kidney specialist working around the clock in the now-destroyed Al Shifa Hospital. He was a trusted senior mentor to many younger doctors, despite only being in his 30s, and an incredible practitioner who turned down more lucrative job offers in the broader Arab world to serve his homeland. He was expecting his first child. Alloh is remembered for refusing to leave his patients’ side. He was martyred in November 2023 on a rare visit he took outside of the hospital, to his family home near the medical complex.
Organizers of the encampment spoke about not settling for anything less than a complete disclosure of the University of Chicago’s investment portfolio, a total divestment of from any weapons manufacturers within that portfolio, an end to partnerships with Israeli institutions, and a comprehensive repair of injustices perpetrated by the university, including acknowledgment of Israel’s scholasticide. Additionally, as part of the demand to repair, students demanded that the University allocate funds from the university’s private police force to housing and education on Chicago’s South Side. A comprehensive explanation of student demands was posted on Instagram. Encampment organizers held the strategic upper hand against the administration. They secured eight positions for Palestinian scholars in Palestine to work and study at the University of Chicago as a part of the university’s Scholars at Risk program, which provides opportunities for academics facing violence in their home countries. This win was a precondition for negotiating with the administration and did not require the disbandment of their encampment.
In their meticulous construction of the encampment, a microcosm of the kind of world they want to live in, the students were enacting a simultaneously principled and flexible political strategy, clearly shaped by a history of Palestinian, Black, abolitionist, and generally materialist organizing that had been unfolding in the city since before their birth. This strategy has culminated in particular hallmarks of organizing like those articulated in the rainbow coalition of Fred Hampton, a chair of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party who formed a broad socialist coalition of working class, Black, and Hispanic communities across the city. He was murdered in 1969 by the FBI for his revolutionary work and was a figure studied, revered, and referenced by many of the encampment’s organizers.
On April 30, a day after the first encampment’s inception, students found themselves glued to their screens, watching as the New York Police Department brutalized and arrested their peers at Columbia University. On May 6, the students huddled around their phones in horror, watching as Israel began its ground invasion of Rafah.
At around 4 a.m. on Tuesday, May, 7, at least 40 officers from the University of Chicago’s private police force raided the Popular University for Gaza, waking students up, brutalizing them, discarding their belongings, and destroying the encampment. The officers threatened suspension and arrest by distributing evacuation warning pamphlets to the students an hour and a half into the raid, informing the students of plans to academically and criminally punish the protesters. Nevertheless, the students held the front lines of their encampment for over three and a half hours, chanting: “The whole world is watching…. over 40,000 dead, you're arresting kids instead… you came for our tents while we were sleeping because you’re afraid of our power when we are awake.”
In a now-viral interview with Fox News Chicago, protester and PhD student Christopher Iacovetti spoke eloquently while on the police barrier of the rally following the first encampment’s destruction. He tells a reporter that he asked the police officers what it would take for them to stop following orders. “I would ask them how many kids have to die… so what if it was 50,000 kids, 200,000 kids, a million kids, the whole Gaza ghetto?” For Iacovetti and many protesters, the genocide in Gaza was enough for them to stop following the orders of their university.
“They gave us some ridiculous notice… that participants in the quad encampment, which no longer exists thanks to [the police], are facing like an interim leave of absence as well as a criminal trespass charge,” Iacovetti said to Fox News Chicago. “I have no idea if that's just a scare tactic or if it's real but it doesn’t matter because the difference between us and people like these cops is there are limits to when we continue following orders… when [Gaza] is being systematically starved, slaughtered, every hospital bombed, every university bombed… 40,000 people murdered, 15,000 children murdered, the entire population on the brink of starvation… we are not following orders and it doesn’t matter what you do to us because there are principles and there are human lives that matter more than our careers and our futures.”
In the background of the news clip, students can be heard chanting “We are the encampment,” a sentiment that organizers repeated throughout the days leading up to the raid.
Some of the student organizers I spoke to affirmed that while the encampment may be physically destroyed, its ideology remains. In the spirit of Hampton's ideological legacy, they echoed his words: "You can jail a revolutionary, but you can't jail a revolution."
After the dismantling of the first encampment, the organizers promised to continue their effort to force their university to disclose, divest, and repair for Gaza. Such a promise manifested in the calls to bring camping supplies to the IOP lawn and occupy the IOP building, now known to the students as the Casbah of Basel Al-Araj. As they proceeded with this campaign, it is in Hampton’s legacy that I levy my only critique of the encampment, which is necessarily less about its physical organization and more about its ideological underpinnings: popularizing revolutionary action in the face of injustice. If the Nakba is ongoing, the limit to our order — our compliance with the imperial university’s strictures — should have dissolved long before Oct. 7. If the existence of the University of Chicago requires the occupation of the South Side of the city and the displacement of its inhabitants, the limit to ‘orderly conduct’ should have dissolved with the university’s construction. If the oppression of all people is indeed connected, the limit to our order has not existed for the entirety of our lives. Why have we waited until now to stop following orders?
In these moments, our professed ideological commitments must manifest tangibly, a sentiment well articulated in an article by Mohammed El-Kurd published in Mondoweiss in March.
El-Kurd writes: “Are we indeed ‘all Palestinians’ as we chant on the streets of New York and London? If so, this rallying cry must abandon metaphor and manifest materially in resistance and refusal. Because Gaza cannot stand alone in sacrifice… fragmentation means that different things are asked of us in different locales. We face disparate challenges and circumstances. Can we reverse the effects of fragmentation?”
Ultimately, to resist this fragmentation is to inch closer to the plight of the oppressed. I urge students to continue to think about what dissolving the limit to order inevitably means, about what all of us becoming Palestinian necessitates — bringing to light the conditions that empire inflicts onto the rest of the world which have been obfuscated in our own country. This inevitably requires escalating political agitation until the formation of a new world, and in the process, becoming “wretched,” to borrow the verbiage of Afro-Caribbean revolutionary and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. Campus suppression, arrest, and brutalization are not new phenomena for students in Palestine, nor are they new phenomena for the Chicagoans living mere blocks from where the encampment once stood. The time for escalation is long overdue.
As Fanon himself foretells, “The need for this change exists in a raw, repressed, and reckless state in the lives and consciousness of colonized men and women. But the eventuality of such a change is also experienced as a terrifying future in the consciousness of another ‘species’ of men and women: the colons, the colonists.” From the more formal structures of settler colonialism to the displacement of an entire community for the construction of a university, oppression is a project that begins with violence, creating the position of “wretched.” This inciting violence alone should have been enough to escalate, long before a genocide unfolded.
Now, the most intensified iteration of the ongoing Nakba is unfolding. American-made and funded bombs continue to blow Palestinians to pieces, all with the help of university investments in the military and prison-industrial complex. For the people of Gaza, the eventuality of violence has made it such that there is neither a choice to be wretched nor Palestinian, these are one and the same. The eventuality of these circumstances remains a choice only for the students.
Equipped with the long legacy of militant organizing in their city, and hyperaware of their position within empire, these students have already chosen to refuse to be complicit in genocide.
