On Dec. 11, 2023, I joined 40 Brown University undergraduate students for a sit-in at University Hall. We refused to leave until our demand was met. By dusk, we were arrested and forcibly taken out of the building by Brown University and Providence police officers, where we were met with hundreds of Brown students chanting and singing in celebration of our action. Our only demand was for the university president, Christina Paxson, to publicly commit to forwarding and endorsing the 2020 Advisory Committee on Corporate Responsibility in Investment Policies (ACCRIP) report, which “recommend[ed] divestment from companies that facilitate the Israeli occupation of Palestinian Territory,” at the next Corporation meeting in February 2024. ACCRIP, which consisted of three faculty, student, and alumni representatives each, and two staff members, was tasked with considering matters of “moral responsibility in the investment policies of the University,” and acted as an advisory body to the president of Brown University. It was dissolved after the ACCRIP report was issued and replaced by a smaller committee (the Advisory Committee on University Resources Management (ACURM), which held increased presidential oversight on membership. The Corporation is Brown’s highest governing body and votes on whether issues like divestment can become a material reality.
Our coalition of 41 students, or Brown Divest Coalition (BDC) 41, formed quickly. I found out about the action just two days before I committed to it, and those two days were truly very long, stressful, and full of meetings. I tried to work out the impossible task of whether the action would work and if it was worth the risk I took for myself. I realized that I knew very few of the people sitting-in with me — I had only one friend in the group before the action. I met the organizers the day before the action took place. It also became clear that among the student organizers at Brown, there were many conflicting opinions regarding this action and the level of risk it posed. The main organizers, however, were unwavering. They stood strong in their convictions that this was indeed necessary and worth the risk, giving speeches to a room full of doubtful students that arrest and student disciplinary action was a justifiable price for what we might achieve– namely divestment and the ability to redirect attention toward Palestinian liberation. Others felt that the choice to implement this action was not a smart one.
I was filled with my own anxieties about poor and rushed organizing, and a deep sense of worry in not knowing the people I was committing to doing this with. I continued to wonder, were my peers participating in this action because of a privileged sense of self-martyrdom, eager to prove that they were “here for it?” I didn’t want a sense of performativity to result in a reckless action. Did people only want me to participate so that we could reach our critical mass to do the action? So that they could do the action? Some were more patient about anxieties like these. Others had less energy to give. While the anxiety was palpable, we continued our collective planning to discuss what escalation strategies everyone was comfortable with, our hard lines, and our limits. That final meeting, meant to discuss strategy and messaging, to ensure we were centering the right principles in our activism, and to evaluate whether we had reached our critical mass of students to conduct a sit-in, lasted around seven hours.
The next day, after University Hall had closed and the 41 of us were being arrested, the Providence Police Department and the Brown Department of Public Safety refused to handcuff us, walk us to Providence Police Department vans, and hold us in official police custody. It was what they had done to the 20 members of Jews For Ceasefire Now (JFCN) who had conducted a sit-in less than a month before in the same building as per the university's standard practice. But having learned about the negative publicity generated by circulating photographs of Brown University students in handcuffs, the University administration kept us in the building, inviting Providence police on campus to book us for trespassing within our own University. The University asked the officers to turn University Hall into a makeshift jail: fingerprinting, photographing, and booking us in the building itself. I panicked. A large part of our actions were motivated by achieving messaging and publicity: How will the media portray us? What images and words can we release that will move people into fighting for Palestine? So then, what was the point of this action without the image of the same carceral system that racializes and criminalizes Palestinians affecting even the most elite? What was this action without “the money shot?” The organizers stood strong. If they had similar anxieties, they did not show it (“Everyone, it’s a scare tactic”). Instead, the organizers told us we’d exit the building holding our arrest papers up, and it would be just as powerful an image, and just as strong a story. They were right.
The quickness with which the organizers jumped to solutions, under tremendous stress and pressure, speaks to the Palestinian philosophy of sumud, roughly meaning steadfastness in Arabic. Sumud, as Lena Meari writes, is not “a means to an end, a denial of the coloniality of current life for the liberation of future life, it is a political being/becoming and a continuous engagement with the flows and constraints of the colonial situation that endows Palestinians with forces to endure their lives, through and in opposition to, the fixed colonial terms and relations promoted by the colonizers and those Palestinians constrained by the terms of normalization with them.”
In other words, sumud is not just isolated acts of “resistance,” but also the daily and mundane refusal to surrender to colonial authority and its ability to penetrate all aspects of Palestinian life, including the interior psychic world of Palestinians. In acknowledging that our situation is remarkably different and not placed on the same scales of material power and deprivation, I still think that our organizing has and continues to hold a fidelity to Palestinian practices of sumud and resistance. We have drawn from the immeasurable strength demonstrated by a people who not only continue to survive but continue to resist nearly a century of colonization. While being interrogated by the Shabak (the Israel Security Agency), Ibrahim El Ra’ii challenged the occupation forces, “Have you ever interrogated a table? I am a table now. Go interrogate a table. If it talks back to you, come to me and you’ll find that I have become a mountain.” Sumud, then, is imagination. It is the power of possibility in a situation in which one is presented with none. It is constant articulation and reinvention of the self. Ibrahim is a table and a mountain incapable of giving the occupation forces what they demand, even as his body is held captive in a small cell where he is beaten, restrained in painful positions, deprived of sleep and food, and where all of his material conditions are defined by his captors. Even as Ibrahim’s physical state deteriorates, the mind remains strong. He can think his way out of the torture. He can resist confession through the mental nourishment of knowing he is protecting his people and that he is as mighty, defiant, and unbreakable as a mountain.
During our arrest, we were presented with no options. The police dictated where we were booked and charged, the order we were booked in, and what exit we left the building through (they released us at three different exits on three different sides of the building, hoping to spread our supporters, who gathered around the perimeter waiting for us, thin). To see possibility in this, to be quick on one’s feet in the face of police attempting to negate all possibility, is the practice of sumud. When I was panicking and the organizers were steadfast, swiftly communicating an alternative course of action that allowed us to be creative, inventive, but simultaneously defiant, it was sumud. Likewise, it was sumud when all 41 of us stayed at that last meeting before our sit-in for seven hours to negotiate our terms and boundaries for the action as a collective. Most of all though, sumud draws its energy from community and a deep sense of love for one another and the principles that animate our movement. The ability to shift gears and move in unison only came from the deep sense of solidarity and trust we had begun to build with each other.
After the arrests, I had grown fearful that support for us and Palestine would fade away, that the relationships formed would dwindle and we would go our separate ways, united by nothing more than a commitment to a free Palestine. Those fears have been disproved each day. What I once thought was frail and fleeting relationships has changed into my understanding that our ideological connection and commitment to action is just the surface of deeply shared values. What had the potential to be a fleeting moment of student rebellion, has grown into a steady movement grounded in shared values and a collective practice of sumud.
The action I participated in came after JFCN conducted their own sit-in of 20 Jewish students, and it was followed by many other actions: a hunger strike, protests against Admitted Students Day, appearances at Brown University Community Council meetings, and an encampment. This insular timeline only discusses the campus organizing at Brown, but as Professor Loubna Qutami again stressed to us in a teach-in at the encampment, our actions fulfill and maintain a long line of student resistance and protest, from the formation of a Palestinian Student Union in Cairo, al-’Urwa al-Wuthqa in Beirut, the Organization of Arab Students in the United States, and many more Palestinian student organizations created immediately post-Nakba, to the development of a transnational General Union of Palestinian Students in 1959, to now. This emphasis on our actions as moments in a lineage and revolutionary tradition that supersedes us was one of my greatest sources of comfort and strength. It spoke to the immediate community that I felt here at Brown, but also to a global system of solidarity movements that transgresses time. Not only are we not alone in the fight for a Free Palestine, but we are actively learning from those that came before us, who so graciously leave us with the knowledge of their own organizing efforts. I hope to have done the same, to have offered the same comfort the Brown hunger strikers felt knowing that their starvation held the defiance of the Palestinian political prisoners who committed to the same practice before them.
In recognizing that the power of the student movement here is the result of the brilliance, commitment, and labor of so many of us collectively, I’d also like to share that anxieties and factionalism are natural parts of popular organizing. I recall a lecture where Professor Loubna Qutami explained various strains of Palestinian feminism and their differing stances on how feminist issues fit into Palestinian liberation. Similarly, in any liberation movement, dissent within the movement is instructive to give the movement the momentum it needs to keep going. Accountability needs to be sustainable through collective clarity on the reasons for which we fight. A commitment to being in the community, even through differences, will help you through.
