Oct. 7, 2023, will remain ingrained in my mind for as long as I live. Upon waking up, my father told me the news: Hamas had launched an attack on the Israeli regime. But what the Zionists would unleash upon the people of Palestine, he told me, would be worse than anything we had ever seen before. And nothing could have prepared us for what was to come.
I have never seen so much human suffering. I have never seen so much blood. So much pain. So many bodies and limbs dismembered and demolished homes. On my screens, I have seen babies blown to pieces, people being burned alive, entire families wiped out, and parents digging up the remains of their children from under the rubble, using only their bare hands.
These images burn in my mind as I try to sleep, as I walk to lunch, as I go through my classes in a daze, pretending I care about computer science and the design of urban spaces. My family and I call each other and say nothing – sometimes, we just cry together. I continuously ask myself: what is there to do? Where have our leaders gone? Where has humanity gone?
Desperate for an end to the genocide, my parents have taken to tying Palestinian flags to our windows, attending every protest, and wearing their keffiyehs everywhere they go. My grandmother — who has been fighting for Palestine since the 1980s — refuses to give up. She sends us photos nearly every day from the front lines of the Chicago protests, reminding us that we are not alone, and to sustain our energy in action.
But why do I – and my family – who are Colombian and Chilean, not Palestinian at all — spend every day thinking of, and weeping for, a people that are so far away? My first thought is simple: we are human. We recognize human suffering, no matter how distant it may be. But I also know that my family survived the horrific state violence, torture, and exile of Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile (1973-1990). My grandfather was disappeared, and my father — who was only a year old — was kept in a torture center while my grandmother lived in hiding, searching for her son.
We care about Palestine because we know, firsthand, the bloody violence of imperialism all too well. We know massacres, imprisonment, torture, and dispossession, all in the name of economic interests. We know what it’s like to live in the diaspora and to dream of returning to a land which you were banished from. More than anything, I know that my family did not defiantly and deliberately survive and resist these horrors for me to stay silent during the extermination of others.
In December of 2023, when the idea to have another Brown University student sit-in came up, my sister and I didn’t hesitate to be a part of it. We had organized this sit-in in the wake of the shooting of one of our Palestinian classmates, Hisham, and his two friends in Vermont. We organized it because our university was silent, ignoring the rise of anti-Palestinian violence in the U.S., ignoring the genocide, and ignoring the demands for divestment that Hisham had also been a part of.
I wish I could have documented this better, I wish I remembered every meeting and conversation. It has all become a blur.
Dec. 11 was the day of the sit-in. We met at 8 a.m. in the basement of the Campus Center, our bags packed for the day with our laptops, snacks, and a little plastic bag with our IDs and $50 in cash. We helped each other write the emergency support number on our abdomens, and put on T-shirts that read “Divest for Hisham.” At 9 a.m., we crossed the Main Green and entered University Hall.
What I remember most from the day was the singing. In that building, where business as usual had continued in the heart of an active genocide, we sang as loud as we could. We sang for hope, for liberation, for life, for our Palestinian brothers and sisters, for this new world we would build out of love.
We sang until 5 p.m., when we were told that, if we didn’t leave the building, we would be arrested for trespassing. But we insisted that we would not leave until President Paxson listened to our demands. There, as we waited for our impending arrests, we continued singing, assured that we were standing on the right side of history. They knew better than to drag us out in handcuffs this time, something they had done about a month earlier when 20 students from Jews for Ceasefire Now enacted a sit-in in the very same building. The university couldn’t afford more media backlash. So, they began to set up a makeshift police processing facility inside University Hall. As they arrested each one of us, one by one, we linked arms tighter and sang even louder.
I was among the last few to be arrested. As they took my mug shot and my fingerprints, there wasn’t a doubt in my mind: I knew I was doing the right thing. I knew that my parents, my grandparents, and all my ancestors who have fought for liberation were there by my side, giving me the hope and courage necessary for the moment.
When I was released from the building, all I remember was the singing of hundreds of people and cameras flashing. Suddenly four, five, perhaps even 10 people had wrapped their arms around me so tightly as the crowd chanted my name. The night was quite cold, but there I was, with people I had never talked to before until that day, all of us firm in our determination to fight for, life, for freedom, and, ultimately, for Palestine.
The sit-in didn’t change our administration’s mind. President Paxson would not present the ACCRIP report to the Corporation. Hence, in February, 19 of our student comrades went on an eight-day-long hunger strike. On the last day, we confronted the Corporation members and watched as they ignored us, arrogantly piling their plates with food in front of the hunger strikers. But we couldn’t give up. In April, we launched our encampment for Gaza. With the encampment, we finally got an agreement, which will allow the Corporation to directly vote on divestment in October.
But it took years of organizing, and hundreds of petitions, letters, protests, and rallies this year alone. It took 61 of us to get arrested, 19 of us to starve our bodies, and over 100 of us to sleep in tents for a week, refusing to leave the Main Green. It took Hisham getting shot and enduring paralysis. It took the massacre of over 38,000 Palestinians, the starvation and displacement of over two million, and the destruction of all the universities and nearly all the hospitals in the besieged Gaza Strip. This is what it took for Brown University to simply consider divesting.
During these past seven months, I have learned more than I have ever learned in any classroom. I have learned about myself, my family, and the people around me. I have learned about empire, money, power, and greed. I have witnessed levels of violence I never thought were possible. I have seen Zionist students laughing at us while we read the names of martyred Palestinians. I have heard the painful silence of my university. I have come to understand that their line of reasoning fundamentally parallels that of Israel and the United States: Black and Brown bodies are disposable. I have learned just how much violence empires are willing to deploy, and how many lives they are willing to tear apart, in order to protect their power. More than anything, I have learned that this genocide in Gaza — and the broader occupation of Palestine —- is simply one particularly gruesome manifestation of an entire world order that will stop at nothing to protect capitalist profit and consolidate power.
While our taxes fund this genocide, our own community dies of hunger. The knee-on-neck restraint that killed George Floyd was learned from a training exchange with the IDF. The dictatorship that detained and tortured my grandfather was supported by the U.S. government and possibly linked to the Israeli government as well. But Palestine is exposing the interlocking relationships between oppressive powers and the intimacy that has and must continue to define relationships among the oppressed. Palestine is showing the cracks of and shaking the very foundations of our world order. This is why the Western powers are scrambling to suppress and erase it.
In these past nine months of genocide, I have also learned about love, solidarity, and kindness. I have learned about a hope and resistance so powerful that it has lasted over 75 years. I have learned that protest takes the form of the tears shed in a classroom, of dabke being danced on campus, and of sharing a plate of maqluba with your comrades. Protest exists in the tight hugs, laughter, and songs shared between hunger strikers, encampers, and organizers. I have learned about revolution, solidarity across nations and peoples, about the struggles of our ancestors that continue to this day.
Looking around at the people that have been a part of this struggle makes me think of David Ben Gurion’s sinister quote: “the old will die and the young will forget.” We, the young, have not forgotten – we carry the memory, and we will carry forward with the struggle. We have kindness in our hearts and bravery in our souls. We are not afraid. And we have the knowledge and a profound belief that this new beautiful, gentle, and free world is not only possible, but inevitable.
As Chilean President Salvador Allende once noted, “To be young and not a revolutionary is a biological contradiction.” We carry on his words as a promise to build this new world together.
