In feminist collaboration and solidarity with Dana Olwan, Véro Vélez, Kyles Gemmell, Asch Quattawi, Morgan Bassichis, Kinneret Azaria Alexander, Yoav Litvin, Jesse Strauss, and Dylan Rodríguez.

Located on the ancestral homelands of the Lummi, Nooksack, and Coastal Salish peoples, Bellingham Washington embodies the contradictions of a quaint Pacific Northwest college town. On the surface, it is a progressive enclave between Seattle and Vancouver, British Columbia; underneath, it is fundamentally shaped by racial and colonial violence—from the times of European settlement and genocidal dispossession of Indigenous communities; to the city’s active support of the strongest KKK chapter of the early twentieth century; to recent ICE raids and overt white supremacist aggression; to the constant hum of low-intensity violence—such as the recent voter-approved tax-funded expansion of the county jail that was pitched as a trauma-informed solution to an overcrowded jail in a town marked by the aggressive criminalization of poverty, addiction, homelessness, and survival.

As a social justice–branded public university tucked away from the limelight of the University of Washington’s flagship Seattle campus, Western Washington University (WWU) embeds many of these contradictions. Its administration absorbs and redirects the very progressive, BIPOC, and LGBTQ student protest movements and faculty that it celebrates in its DEI mission. As Professor Véronica Vélez articulates, WWU has a history of watering down radical student protests precisely through its claims to allyship.

This context frames the two-week encampment—and the administration’s placating strategy to student demands that worked to whitewash the fundamental tensions between protesters and administration. Organized by WWU’s Arab Student Association (ASA) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), the encampment attracted upwards of 300 students, and hundreds of faculty, alumni, and community members, culminating in a rally and occupation of an administrative building and the eventual signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that ended the physical encampment.

This auto-ethnographic piece offers a partial archive of questions, contradictions, and insights that emerged before, during, and after the encampment. We summarize three temporal snapshots through a series of roundtable conversations. As scholars of queer transnational decolonial abolition feminisms, we resist the pull to tell the easy story, the story of victory or failure, the story of solidarity attained. Instead, we hope to contribute to the longevity and accountability of our movements through critical self-reflection and growth.

Held in the weeks leading up to the encampment, the first dialogue, Palestine and the Politics of Feminist Solidarities, convened feminist and queer scholar-activists to discuss the histories, problems, and potentialities of trans-bordered decolonial feminist and queer solidarities with Palestine. Professor Dana Olwan opened the discussion by contextualizing the encampments across U.S. campuses, citing Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira’s 2008 “Open Letter to All Feminists” which called upon feminists to ally with Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim women in their commitments against U.S. imperialism, white supremacy, and war. Olwan also named the problem of Palestinians being marginalized within the solidarity movement, drawing from Sherene Seikaly’s work to presciently remind us that “Palestine [is] neither a laboratory nor a problem,” nor a career stop, nor a cause célèbre to pick up and drop; Palestine is our collective future to which everyone of conscience must commit.

Romanian feminist scholar and filmmaker Mariangela Mihai drew from her experiences in communist Romania to analyze the authoritarian state’s power to erase cultural distinctions. Dr. Mihai discussed the ways in which both capitalist and communist states rupture trust among neighbors, families, and communities to undermine revolutionary solidarities. She asked: how can we, instead, turn to modes of intimacy and granular memories of solidarity that persist against state power in order to mount effective support of the Palestinian people? Additionally, alumni Kyles Gemmell and Asch Quattawi spoke of their work as campus leaders to disrupt the pitting of marginalized students against one another. Substantive solidarity, all panelists agreed, requires us to put ourselves on the line, and to insist that no one is expendable.

Held at the height of the encampment, during Israeli Apartheid Week, the second panel on Jewish Anti-Zionisms convened a diverse group of Jewish activists to challenge the conflation of Judaism and Zionism that is being weaponized to shut down support of Palestinian human rights. Professor Tamara Lea Spira’s framing comments articulated a fundamental tension over the recentering of “Judaism” within the conversation, pointing to the largest force that supports the Zionist state: Christian Zionists. Dr. Spira posed questions about how we build a future predicted upon revolutionary hope, love, and collective liberation.

Throughout, panelists challenged the false equivalencies between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, which we see enshrined in law everywhere from House Resolution 894 to the IHRA redefinition of antisemitism that has swept college campuses to ban dissent. As all panelists agreed, IHRA serves to thwart a much-needed critique of Israeli apartheid, while ironically helping to obfuscate real acts of antisemitism that grow more and more commonplace as we witness the intensification of fascism and white supremacy globally.

Mizrahi scholar-activist and educator Kinneret Azaria Alexander disrupted the false binary of Arabs and Jews that erases Mizrahi, Arab, and Sephardic Jewish cultural and linguistic identities, histories, and interests. Alexander recentered a fundamental politics of collective liberation among and between Palestinians and Jews of Arab descent. Alexander’s comments integrated familial histories of Iraqi Jews as well as the scholarship of Ella Shohat, and her activist work within the JSWANA Bay Area Collective and the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN).

Independent radio-producer and journalist Jesse Strauss drew from his familial genealogy as the grandson of Polish Holocaust survivors to frame his staunch opposition to genocide and dispossession of the Palestinian people. He articulated a fundamental lesson he had learned in his family: never again means never again for everyone. Strauss also argued that there is no such thing as safety for one group of people that is actively predicated upon the harm of another.

Israeli military dissenter, author, and independent scholar, Yoav Litvin debunked ideas of Zionism as self-defense, instead drawing from psychological research to show how Zionism is an aggressive ideology and practice of settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing. Activist, writer, and cultural worker, and JVP activist, Morgan Bassichis passionately argued that their commitment to a free Palestine aligns with their principles and life’s work in opposition to violent systems of military and carceral control. Bassichis credited queer and lesbian feminist elders for the traditions of struggle that new generations of antizionist Jews are inheriting; Bassichis also demanded a space to dream—and therefore prefigure—a world premised upon solidarity, care, and genuine safety.

Coming out of the encampments, the final conversation, MOU as Counterinsurgency: the Politics of Negotiation within the Diversity Machine, brought our collective together with abolitionist organizer and distinguished professor Dylan Rodríguez whose perspective from the University of California system and scholarship on counterinsurgency deepened our analysis of repression and where to go from here. We all engaged in a critical analysis of our movement to more closely align our future work with the needs articulated by Palestinians surviving the unthinkable terrors of the present.

We discussed the ways that, by bureaucratizing the encampments, universities both neutralized the protests—just in time for graduation—and successfully obfuscated the encampment movement’s main goal of full divestment from machines, ideologies, and practices of killing in which we are forced to participate on university campuses.

Questions raised included: Where are we now, and, specifically, where did the MOUs leave us? How might we contend with the ways in which easy narratives of campus organizing victory further fold dissident movements in support of the ongoing and unfulfilled call for Palestinian freedom into the university diversity machine?

We also discussed the complexities of the Harris nomination, which has served to further polarize the fragile coalition that emerged last year to hold Biden accountable for his support of Israel. By raising these questions, we hope to invite collective reflection so as to unsettle the absorption and redirection of the most radical energies of the movement in times when a fascist liberalism reasserts itself as a form of pacification and amnesia drug for all but those who cannot afford it.