On April 22, around 20 California Polytechnic State University, Humboldt (Cal Poly Humboldt) students held a peaceful sit-in in Siemens Hall to protest the ongoing genocide in Gaza. The administration quickly responded by calling law enforcement. Dozens of police officers arrived on campus and demanded that the students leave the building. The students refused. Police officers resorted to violence: they beat students with batons, pushed against them with shields, and arrested and dragged at least one student out of the building. Police officers also injured and arrested protesters outside of the building. Officers remained on campus until 11 pm that evening. Immediately after they left, students established an encampment around the building in solidarity with Palestine and with the students inside Siemens Hall.
On April 29, a week after the encampment was established, police officers were back on campus; they raided the encampment and arrested more than 30 people.
The violent repression of the Cal Poly Humboldt protesters lays bare the brutal reality that any challenge to the oppression of Palestinians, even through peaceful protest, is met with militarized force aimed at preserving the status quo. The student activists were demanding accountability and divestment from companies linked to Israeli human rights violations. Yet the authorities responded with the very same aggressive tactics used to subjugate Palestinians, revealing how solidarity with the victims of occupation is itself treated as a criminal threat.
As a student at the university, I felt compelled to join my peers and comrades at the encampment to protest the ongoing genocide in Palestine. I felt proud to be part of a student body that demanded our university be financially transparent and divest completely from companies affiliated with Israel. The nationwide wave of student-led occupations and encampments in solidarity with Gaza across North America can be viewed through the lens of anti-colonial resistance, which challenges the "apolitical" framing employed by university administrations around financial investments with ties to Israeli state violence. We are politicizing these issues by taking material action to demand divestment and accountability.
The harsh police crackdown only strengthened our resolve. The encampment became a symbol of our defiance, a reclamation of space where we could freely organize and voice our unwavering solidarity with the Palestinian people's struggle against ethnic cleansing and occupation. We would not be cowed by the repressive forces seeking to silence us.
Through criticism of the injustices perpetrated by the Israeli regime and a dedication to the Palestinian struggle for liberation, we are arming ourselves with education as students to fight for the rights of the Palestinian people. Our encampments embody this ethos, serving as bases to organize, agitate, and educate about the realities of settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing that our universities' investments contribute to and benefit from. We will not remain idle academics but will take action in solidarity with the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions.
The California State University (CSU) system has $2.5 billion in its endowment fund investments. Of this fund, $3.2 million are investments made indirectly to companies based in Israel through ownership of shares in mutual funds that hold Israeli equities (stocks) and corporate bonds in their portfolios. These mutual funds are widely spread and decentralized, which, conveniently, makes it difficult for the CSU to determine how much of those funds actually go toward Israel. The nature of the endowment fund is compartmentalized and not entirely in control of the CSU system but rather in that of investment managers. While external professionals manage the CSU's endowment fund investments, the university system is still accountable for ensuring its investments align with its values and principles. Any investments tied to companies operating in Israel, no matter how indirect, contribute to the oppression of Palestinians and the occupation of their lands. The CSU should take a proactive stance in divesting from all such holdings, even if it requires scrutinizing the portfolios of mutual funds and other commingled investments.
In response to our core divestment demand, Cal Poly Humboldt administration said that their investment portfolio is indirect, broad, and managed by outside fund managers: “Our estimates put the potential indirect investment in the areas that are asked about at less than 1% of the investment portfolio of more than $51 million. Of this, our estimate of potential defense investment is less than 0.5% of the entire portfolio, though that can fluctuate over time.”
Weeks after the encampment was raided on April 29, students continued to advocate for divestment. On May 6, a group of students presented the University Senate Executive with a thorough resolution calling for divestment. The petition created in support of the resolution reads, “The resolution calls for Cal Poly Humboldt, including its associated foundations and auxiliaries, to disclose and divest its holdings from corporations and funds profiting from genocide, ethnic cleansing, and human rights violations, both directly and indirectly”. This resolution was drafted by students, staff, and lecturers. In the summer months, there are fewer opportunities for students to interact with the administration, and therefore less momentum of student pressure for divestment.
In May, the Academic Senate of the California State University system voted on and passed a resolution calling for socially responsible investment strategies. This resolution aimed to push CSU to reconsider investment ties to companies linked to human rights abuses, endorse campuses taking steps towards ethical investing and establish system-wide policies and oversight for responsible investment strategies. The resolution urges the Academic Senate of the California State University system to reaffirm its condemnation of violence against civilians, and further argues that “evidence-based critiques of policies and military strategies enacted by the government of Israel must not be construed as a priori Anti-Semitism.” The resolution advocates for the CSU system to have open conversations about pursuing ethical investment practices, develop a policy to divest from corporations profiting from genocide and human rights violations, create a committee to verify socially responsible investing and distribute this call for action widely to CSU stakeholders. Overall, it pushes the CSU to increase transparency around investments and shift towards ethical investments.
This resolution was sent to the CSU systemwide board of trustees. The board met from May 19 through May 22 while hundreds of protestors gathered outside their meeting in Long Beach, California. The meeting lasted for days, and ultimately, the board did not discuss the resolution. This meeting ended with public comment from CSU professors, students, and staff. The CSU Board of Trustees' stunning failure to even discuss the resolution reeked of cowardice and willful ignorance. Despite being flooded by the voices of hundreds of passionate protesters imploring them to act, the trustees carried on with business as usual. The trustees wasted an opportunity for CSU to display moral leadership and created even more frustration and distrust among its students and staff.
Despite the Board's refusal to consider adding the resolution as an agenda item and discussing divesting from companies tied to Israeli occupation and weapons manufacturing, students remained undeterred in their advocacy for Palestinian rights through campus activism. And it was this persistent campaigning that prompted a harsh backlash from university authorities, seemingly threatened by any meaningful challenge to the institutional status quo.
Also in May, I completed my bachelor’s degree at Cal Poly Humboldt. However, I, along with at least 68 other students, have been placed under an interim suspension, alleged to have committed multiple violations, including unauthorized building entry, non-compliance with university officials, destruction of property, and more. I have been barred from graduating, viewing my transcripts, or accessing my final grades. I was also not allowed to physically return to campus or take part in any campus-related activities without risk of criminal violations. I just concluded my degree in Environmental Studies and have supposedly been equipped with the knowledge of how settler colonialism, environmental issues, and social justice are all connected. My program, and the broader university, teaches the evils of colonization and its rippling effect on Indigenous people and the living world. My professors have taught me the importance of recognizing power, privilege, and our relationship to the environment. And yet, although I just finished a degree from a university that prides itself on teaching social action and “hands-on learning,” in the same breath this institution touts these qualities, it just as quickly enacts violence on its students for demonstrating them. These tactics of criminalization and dispossession are deployed under the guise of institutional order, causing immense disillusionment and frustration with academia. The policing of dissent on campuses mirrors the broader structures of anti-Black racism, settler-colonialism, and militarized suppression of movements for liberation in both U.S. and Palestinian contexts. The framing of the encampments as violations of rules around "unauthorized building entry" and "destruction of property" (as I was informed by the administration via email) mirrors the narratives of environmental protection that Laurel Mei-Singh critiques as smokescreens obscuring the dispossessed violence enacted against minoritized communities. By mobilizing police forces to raid the encampments and make arrests, universities reveal the underlying logics of racial capitalist domination and settler colonial territoriality at play. The contradiction between the professed values of social justice and the institutional reality could not be more glaring. While touting environmental stewardship and Indigenous rights in the classroom, the university's actions betray an entrenched allegiance to structures of oppression when they prove inconvenient. The harsh punishments my peers and I faced for putting our education into practice exposed the hollowness of academia's revolutionary posturing.
Yet our perseverance nurtures decolonial political ecological praxes rooted in transnational solidarities that unsettle such territorializing imperatives. On May 11, I was barred from walking at the university’s official commencement ceremony. Instead, I walked with nearly 40 classmates at an alternative ceremony, attended by 150 community members, friends, and family at Humboldt for Palestine’s Free Palestine commencement. We gathered outside of the Eureka courthouse, where we’ve been calling for a ceasefire for months. Each of us dedicated our graduation to a child murdered by Israel in Gaza. It was a meaningful and symbolic ceremony. On that day, I gave a speech, shared in brevity in this essay:
What more can we say about the intentional destruction of Gaza's infrastructure? There seem to be endless ways to analyze the horrific acts that Israel is enacting on the Palestinian people. What is the point of analyzing a genocide as it unfolds before our eyes? There is clear evidence of the systematic destruction of life on every level in Gaza. While our words need to be met with direct action and advocacy, there is something to be said about the role of higher education in how we respond to such acts of violence and dispossession.
While bearing witness to such atrocities can feel hopeless, critical analysis is crucial for formulating an effective response. The intentional demolition of civilian infrastructure is part of a broader strategy of oppression, ethnic cleansing, and the debilitation of Palestinian society. By deconstructing these policies and laying bare their racist underpinnings, we can overcome narratives of justification and counter them with moral clarity. Careful examination of Palestinian history enables us to not only comprehend the full context of the Israeli occupation but also envision viable paths toward self-determination for the Palestinian people.
To quote Edward Said, “We can not fight for our rights and our history as well as future until we are armed with weapons of criticism and dedicated consciousness.” Only by educating ourselves on the root causes of Palestinian resistance to the Israeli occupation can we have the "dedicated consciousness" needed to properly comprehend and confront what is happening to the Palestinian people in Gaza and beyond. This also includes a full understanding of the history of Palestine, as well as the foundations of the Israeli occupation and the violence it has enacted on the Palestinian people for decades. Higher education equips us with the "weapons of criticism" — the analytical tools to cut through propaganda, deconstruct narratives, and see situations like the genocide in Palestine with clarity. To develop this "dedicated consciousness" around the Palestinian struggle, we must study the histories of settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and dispossession that have systematically stripped Palestinians of their land, rights, and self-determination. Our education should provide an honest examination of how the Nakba of 1948 forcibly displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and how the occupied territories have endured decades of dehumanizing military occupation, illegal settlements, home demolitions, and entrenched systems of apartheid. Only by fully reckoning with these harsh ground realities can we contextualize Palestinian resistance not as senseless violence, but as an inevitable response to ongoing subjugation, oppression, and the negation of even the most basic human rights.
Earlier this semester, my professor, Gabi Kirk said that the most important relationship in a young person’s life is their relationship with reading and writing. As we celebrate our graduation, I can't help but wonder, what is this relationship like for young people in Palestine? For the nearly 15,000 children murdered in Gaza, what was this relationship like for them? What would their weapons of criticism and dedicated consciousness have sounded like? With more than 80% of schools in Gaza no longer functioning, it’s clear that there is an intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system, an action known as ‘scholasticide.’ [And according to UN experts] another 195 heritage sites, 227 mosques, and three churches have also been damaged or destroyed, including the Central Archives of Gaza, containing 150 years of history.
The destruction of libraries, universities, and archives represents an attack on Palestinian children's ability to connect with their culture, identity and narratives through the written word. Without access to these vital repositories of knowledge, how can young minds cultivate the critical thinking skills to contextualize their oppression? In systematically devastating Palestinian children's relationship to literacy, language, and written discoveries, the Israeli occupation is in effect waging a war on the preservation of Palestinian identity, history, and spirit itself. It is an unconscionable form of physical and intellectual subjugation designed to perpetuate a cyclical crisis for the next generation.
As we take in this information, I want to say that the second most important relationship in a young person’s life is their relationship with their community. This community here is one that I have been privileged enough to be a part of over the last seven months. It has taught me the value of long-lasting organization and sustaining people towards a common vision. That vision is a free Palestine. That vision is a world in which Palestinian children get to grow up feeling safe and achieve milestones like graduating from college and using their voice to firmly stand for freedom and liberation. Our community of students, activists, and advocates plays a vital role in ensuring the Palestinian people's stories, histories, and cries for justice do not go unheard or erased amid the intentional destruction of their educational and cultural institutions. By nurturing our relationships with reading, writing, and community-building, we equip ourselves with the tools to contextualize and amplify Palestinian resistance from an academic setting. Let this commencement be a reminder of our duty to wield knowledge as a weapon against injustice, wherever oppression persists. The struggle is lifelong, but our bonds of communal purpose will sustain us.
Thank you all, Free Palestine.
Header photo courtesy of Ash Renee
