In the cold, early days of February 2024 in Providence, Rhode Island, I sat on the ground nestled among hundreds of my peers in a room at Brown University’s campus center. Leaning on each other, we filled the little space between us with our hands rocking back and forth in unison, striking our bodies and creating the loud percussion accompanying our chants. Those of us who were standing tapped the ground; the whole room was vibrating with music, emotion, and tactility. We had just announced the end of an eight-day hunger strike by 19 of my fellow brave student comrades, but there was something more in the air. As the genocide in Gaza continued to unfold, we held our grief in our collective solidarity and yelled out, from the deepest parts of ourselves, for a glimmer of hope. From Turtle Island to Palestine, we called upon the strength of our ancestor’s spirits to fuel the sumud (Arabic for steadfastness) of our resilient kin in Gaza. With the bittersweet end of the hunger strike as the third major action after two student sit-ins were met with arrest by the university, we left the campus center with the painful knowledge of our Palestinian kin’s inability to escape the forced Israeli blockade. This realization, though sobering, fueled our belief that this movement has only witnessed its beginning. We affirmed our commitment to continue on, unyielding, until Palestine attains its freedom. As the tune of the ancestor’s song grew louder and louder every time another person joined the crowd, an uneasy feeling fluttered in my chest: is this hope?
In the weeks after, I struggled with what to feel and think of the idea of hope. I mulled over its applicability in a context of genocide. I questioned the possibility of hope, and whether or not it holds any serious power in animating transformation on an individual level and a collective one — for the movement and the world. I talked with my parents, friends, and fellow organizers about it; I discussed it with peers in class and I read works by scholars from various geographies and temporalities. Being born and raised as a third-generation stateless Palestinian refugee in Lebanon, I came to realize early on in life what hope, or the lack thereof, means for many of us. My existence, like many others, constitutes a loophole in the nation-state project and therefore continues to threaten its sustainability and the regulated exclusions on which it is formed. Growing up like an ivy plant between the cracks of the systems that govern our world, I had pushed away hope in any endeavor as a feeble excuse for accepting powerlessness. Looking toward my exhausted and overworked father and mother has always reminded me that hope has never been a part of our familial lexicon. As Ahmad Diab eloquently puts it, “Rather than enduring existential crises, Palestinians learn to deal with existence as a crisis.”
Despite this vexed relationship with the notion of hope, as the student movement grew on campus, I felt forced to reckon with a new orientation to hope and the feelings of guilt it procured at times. How dare I feel a sense of hope stemming from the hunger strike on a safe U.S. campus while my people continue to be forcefully starved and slaughtered in the thousands? My parents and grandparents’ consistent experiences of betrayal by their leaders and the settler-colonial regime taught them better than to frivolously hope to take center stage. I believe the intergenerational cynicism I have inherited taught me to reject hope to preserve my own sanity and avoid disappointment as I navigate survival when denied existence.
How do I then grapple with a sense of intergenerational, existential hopelessness — passed on like a wretched inheritance — while tens of students from all walks of life, some of whom I have never met, put their academic lives, careers, and bodies at risk? How do I reject hope when my student comrades, who are not Palestinian, give their time, effort, and resources generously to this collective cause? How dare I not feel hope when they dare to scream in the hundreds, demanding the university divest its endowment from companies associated with the settler colony’s violence; when they dare to imagine a better, more caring, more just, and more equitable world that safeguards Palestinian life? How do I reject hope when my peers practice sustainable world-building practices from inside the campus movement that holds powerful implications for our communities, from the local to the global?
These thoughts, among others, continued to linger within me. The Brown Gaza Solidarity Encampment, which began at the end of April 2024, represents one formative moment in this trajectory of feeling and thinking hope in a time of genocide. There, the palpable theories from our Palestine in Comparative Ethnic Studies classroom converged with the material action a hundred or so of my comrades committed to and helped organize. After the accumulation of several dispersed actions for Palestine on Brown’s campus this school year, which built on a legacy of decades of student activism, the Brown student encampment was but one site of a student rebellion of historic, national, and international proportions. While our action was largely indebted to Columbia University’s student’s spearheading of a steadfast encampment, our power only grew as the number of encampments expanded across the country and beyond and continues to grow as I write this.
Retrospectively, every now and then, I have to look at the images and videos from the week of the encampment to remind myself that it was real. This sentiment is met with wonder when shared with many of my non-Palestinian friends who are committed to fighting for Palestinian liberation. How can I even begin to explain to them the tearful disbelief of my parents, who for so long had urged me not to wear my Keffiyeh in public for fear of persecution? How do I convey the transformative power the student movement has given to us Palestinians watching on and participating when a hundred or more students, mostly non-Palestinian, locked hand in hand, dancing the traditional Palestinian Dabke on the main green, while popular Palestinian music played on big speakers? Solidarity in those moments did not only take on the form of support, but it was also immersed in a courageous and accountable ethos of sharing struggle and pain. Our resolute solidarity ultimately fueled durable, radical hope.
For a full week, as I spent time on the main green, I constantly reflected on this microcosm of a world we were building together: a world where we recalled our ancestors daily to guide us, where we took care of the land which hosted us, and where belonging was defined by a shared caringness and truth to one another, rather than state citizenship. We continuously rooted every decision we collectively took in the Palestinian revolutionary tradition which rejects colonialism, carcerality, and any other agents of imperialism and oppression. This is not to say it was a perfect world, for we made many mistakes to which we held and still must hold ourselves accountable. The encampment became an experiment in an attempt to best carve spaces for collective healing, reconciliation, and moving forward through and in the aftermath of the action. This is to say, I have never learned and reflected on “solidarity as revolutionary worldmaking,” as Robin Kelly puts it, throughout all of my first year as an undergraduate at this institution as much I have done so through the praxis of being at, engaging with, and co-shaping the People’s Plaza on the main green.
As I unconsciously catch myself humming the tune of the ancestor’s song, I realize that, indeed, the voice of my ancestors never leaves me these days. I often find myself asking: what would my ancestors think of this? While I have always kept a habit of preserving my late grandfather’s spirit in my consciousness, I cannot help but recall his voice more loudly than ever since the encampment. Time and time again, I think of his trek from Akka in Palestine to Saida in Lebanon during the 1948 Nakba. I try to imagine what thoughts and emotions he must have experienced as he was expelled from the only home he had ever known. I regret never asking him for more details as a child before he passed. A lot about him and that time remains cloudy, a gap in my and our collective histories as Palestinians. But the student encampment at Brown, along with the greater transformations in Palestinian studies and Palestine solidarity movements today, teach me to fill in these holes in our hearts and histories with that which is needed to build a different world.
A queer feminist approach to world-making rooted in decolonial radical love is what I turn to here. Sarah Ihmoud powerfully explains, “to practice feminism in the midst of bearing witness to genocide is to embrace love as a radical consciousness, as a radical decolonial politic of fighting for life. To practice feminism in this moment is to hold each other through the vast darkness of our grief, to walk with each other hand in hand, to bear witness to landscapes of death, and, [...], to tell the truth.” At moments during organizing where I felt my grief transform to anger, a friend reminded me once of their favorite Palestinian truth: we keep fighting not because of hate for those who have wronged us but because of our love for a life denied and our love for one another. How can I not hold onto hope when my people in Gaza exemplify radical love of land and life every day? How can I not maintain hope when my student comrades sustain themselves and their movement with radical love for the land and life of which people in Gaza remind us daily? Our refusal to be complacent in the heart of the empire is the bare minimum of love and care we can show our people in Gaza who constantly refuse to be silenced and erased from history.
I am writing this piece while watching videos of the invasion of Rafah — what was a day ago the last site of refuge in the Gaza Strip. What is it to find hope amid tremendous grief? In my first nine months at Brown University alone, I watched 61 of my comrades arrested for peacefully protesting the university’s investments in apartheid and illegal occupation. I helped care for another 19 students who went on a hunger strike for eight days. They starved their bodies in order to achieve the same demands. I helped operate an encampment where a hundred or more students slept in freezing temperatures in tents. In between, we held tens if not hundreds of rallies, protests, art builds, teach-ins, and film screenings. The result of this was not only a university administration concession that pushed our student movement for Palestine a few steps forward on a much longer path to come at both the campus level and the national level; it was also the reimagination of the question of Palestine for hundreds of students and future leaders as something much larger than a geopolitical question: Palestine is becoming, in the minds of many, a question of how we want to fundamentally rearrange our world. Our chants have begged many to channel their disillusionment with the current world order into action. What is the kind of world our ancestors’ voices call us to imagine, and therefore, create? How can we build a world where our radical love and care for the land and each other is not rendered impossible or merely hope, but realized as a cornerstone of our shared humanity?
