Photo by Ellie Chun/OutWrite
Content warning: discussions of genocide, colonialism, anti-Indigenous racism
On Thursday, April 25, UCLA activists erected a pro-Palestinian solidarity encampment in Dickson Plaza. The organizers intend to remain in place until UCLA has fulfilled their primary demand for divestment from corporations and institutions complicit in the genocide of Palestinians. Over a hundred students congregated behind makeshift barricades, many with tents for overnight stays.
The encampment’s other demands include:
- Complete public transparency of the University of California system and the UCLA Foundation’s spending and income.
- UCLA’s public denouncement of Israel’s siege of Gaza.
- The abolition of academic ties with Israeli universities.
- The end of asymmetrical policing of pro-Palestinian advocacy, including severing UCLA’s connections with the Los Angeles Police Department.
Its ultimate goal is liberation for Palestinians and an end to the siege of Gaza.
“We have an amazing community here that really is putting Gaza first and continuing to hold them in our hearts,” said Marie Salem (she/her), a media spokesperson for the encampment. She highlighted that nearly two million Palestinian people were displaced and over 25,000 were killed by military strikes during the past 200 days, as reported by the International Court of Justice.
Although Israel’s full military blockade of Gaza began in October of last year, the oppression of Palestinian people has its roots in the colonial ideology of late 19th century Europe.
The genocide of Palestinian people is rooted in the ideology of Zionism, the goal of which is to create a Jewish state through settler colonialism. Theodor Herzl, the father of modern political Zionism, claimed in his seminal 1896 work The Jewish State that a Zionist state in Palestine would “form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.”
Herzl situated Zionist claims to Palestine in the framework of European imperialism, including the creation of a “land-acquisition company” explicitly modeled on the British East India Company and other colonial joint-stock corporations. Zionist plans for securing territory drew heavily on the scorched-earth tactics of their “colonial-political role model,” Cecil Rhodes, who dispossessed millions of Africans while founding the apartheid state of Rhodesia.
As Ze’ev Jabotinsky, an early Zionist, wrote in a 1923 essay on the difficulty of forming the State of Israel, “Colonization can have only one aim, and Palestine Arabs cannot accept this aim.”
Israel succeeded in creating a Jewish majority state in Palestine. Indigenous resistance, however, persisted from Israel’s creation to today.
Throughout the afternoon of April 25th, protestors worked on creating signs calling for Palestinian liberation. That evening, activists in the encampment read the Gaza Liberation Seder written by Jewish students arrested at Columbia University’s encampment and distributed matzah for a Passover Seder led by Jewish Voice for Peace at UCLA. Before beginning the celebration, though, the organization acknowledged the ongoing efforts of the Tongva people in the Los Angeles Basin to reclaim stewardship of their land.
Israel’s settler colonialism in Palestine is inextricably linked to the United States’ settler-colonial nationhood. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, as Zionism cohered, the United States began systematically stripping political sovereignty from the people indigenous to the land we currently call the United States.
In 1884, the U.S. established blood quantum regulations to determine who it viewed as Native, seizing the sovereign power of self-definition from Indigenous people. Three years later, the Dawes Act divided and appropriated Native landholdings on the basis of settler-established blood quantum laws. The ultimate goal of the Dawes Act was to eradicate both Native culture and Native sovereignty over their communally held lands.
The U.S. colonial project is ongoing; cities with large Indigenous populations — and those that border reservations where Indigenous nations hold sovereignty — often convulse under excessive policing and even random citizen killings.
U.S. settler colonialism, as perpetrated in Texas, California, and Hawai’i and attempted in Cuba, Sonora, and Nicaragua, shares a common goal with Zionism: the eradication of Indigenous power in favor of American and European territorial control and economic interests.
Official U.S. support for the State of Israel dates back to 1922, when Congress endorsed “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” The resolution was co-sponsored by Hamilton Fish III, who mourned that American participation in World War I resulted in “no conquered lands, no territories, no indemnities or reparations except to pay for our army of occupation,” and Henry Cabot Lodge, who called Native Americans “an inferior race” and white-Native relationships “a frightful risk.”
During the Cold War, support for Israel endangered U.S. relations with other Middle Eastern powers, including crucial ties with Egypt. Undaunted, the U.S. continued providing billions of dollars and huge quantities of armaments and munitions to a country that began four wars between 1947 and 1989.
On April 25, 2024, the U.S. reaffirmed its commitment to Israel’s settler colonialism by sending $14.1 billion in aid for Israel alongside $1 billion earmarked for humanitarian support in Gaza. U.S. support for Israel reinforces its legacy of repeated and persistent oppression of Indigenous peoples.
As queer people, our work towards liberation cannot stop at national lines or the assimilationist social institutions of a Western neoliberal society. Israeli laws protecting LGBTQ+ people cannot erase the fact that those rights apply to a highly select set of queer people: Israelis. Centering the right to marriage or military service that Israelis enjoy masks the struggle of Palestinian queer people for the right to food, water, self-determination, and safety.
As Salem put it, “we can’t continue on at a university and learn inside the classroom and discuss social justice or discuss case studies, and then not put it into practice outside the classroom.”
The American 1850s pro-slavery intellectual William Gilmore Simms wrote that colonialism “is the moral necessity of all the Anglo-Norman breed.” His words find a mirror in those of Jabotinsky, who argued “that Zionism is moral and just. […] There is no other morality.”
Appropriation of land held by Indigenous peoples continues to shape repressive economic and cultural regimes in service of ongoing international exploitation. Our efforts for liberation must recognize the connections between structures of settler colonialism worldwide. In doing so, we can make space for the complexity and necessity of Indigenous sovereignty, guided by principles of solidarity and self-determination.
I encourage readers who are unfamiliar with current Indigenous-led anti-colonial movements to explore Decolonize Palestine — particularly their reading list — and the Land Back movement. Centering Indigenous voices is crucial to avoiding replicating the exploitative, Western-dominated structures we seek to dismantle.
For Salem, the encampment is, “a space of love and community.” Standing in solidarity and with love for the Palestinian people is a radical act, given that settler-colonial hatred and dehumanization are deeply entrenched in U.S. society. The solidarity encampment is a physical representation of a principled commitment to fighting for self-determination and the networks of support and organization necessary to maintain that commitment.
Said Salem, “We can last. We’re staying here until UCLA divests.”
Credits:
Author: JQ Shearin (She/Her)
Artist: Ellie Chun (She/They)
Copy Editors: Ariana Castro (She/Her), Gwendolyn Hill (She/Her), Emma Blakely (They/She/He)