Inside The ‘Student Intifada’: A Roundtable With Campus Organizers

By Maximillian Alvarez

May 4, 2024

 Video
Source: The Real News Network



Seven months into Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, a student-led grassroots movement is spreading across the US and beyond, hearkening back to the student protests of the ‘60s that played a pivotal role in ending the US war in Vietnam. In what is being called the “student intifada,” with over 100 encampments going up at different college and university campuses, students, faculty, grad students, and other campus community members are exercising civil disobedience, occupying space on campuses, defying brutal repression from administrators and police, combatting skewed and wildly lopsided narratives in corporate media, and pressuring their universities to “disclose and divest” their investments in companies and financial institutions connected to Israel.


Studio Production: Adam Coley, Cameron Granadino, David Hebden
Pre-Production: Maximillian Alvarez, Jocelyn Dombroski

TRANSCRIPT

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Welcome everyone to The Real News Network. My name is Maximillian Alvarez. I’m the editor-in-chief here at The Real News, and it’s so great to have you all with us. Before we get rolling today, I want to quickly remind you all that The Real News is an independent viewer and listener-supported grassroots media network. We don’t take corporate cash, we don’t have ads, and we never put our reporting behind paywalls. We got a small, but incredibly dedicated, team of folks who are trying their best to lift up the voices from the front lines of struggle here in the US and around the world. But we cannot continue to do this work without you and your support, and we need you to become a supporter of The Real News now. So please head on over to therealnews.com/donate. Become a donor today, I promise you it really makes a difference.

It is being called the Student Intifada, a grassroots protest movement spreading to different college and university campuses around the country involving students at over a hundred campuses, setting up encampments, occupations and protests to demand an end to Israel’s US-backed genocidal war on Gaza and its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and to pressure university administrations to disclose and divest their institution’s financial ties to the Israeli war machine and the military industrial complex. What we are seeing in these encampments is an escalation of tactics by student organizers, grad student workers, faculty, and other campus community members who have been organizing and protesting since October 7th. And in many cases, well before. Encampments have been set up at big and small campuses, public and private, from the Ivy League campuses of Columbia University, Harvard and Princeton to flagship state universities in Michigan, Minnesota, Texas, Arizona, Ohio, and Florida. From Cal Poly Humboldt to the Community College of Denver. And encampments are even cropping up in countries like France, the UK and Ireland, Canada, New Zealand, Jordan and Japan.

But we are also seeing a corresponding escalation of tactics from the establishment, from the police, from the university administrative and donor class, from Zionist counter protesters, and from a hostile corporate media. On Tuesday night, April 30th, exactly 56 years to the day after the 1968 student occupation at Columbia University was brutally squashed by the New York Police Department. At the request of Columbia University President Minouche Shafik, an army of hundreds of New York police officers stormed the Columbia campus this week demolishing the encampment, raiding the occupation at Hamilton Hall, kettling students, faculty and student journalists on campus. Arresting over a hundred people. And at that same time, mayor Eric Adams sent another army of cops to raid the City University of New York encampment. Police have been storming our institutions of higher education, violently cracking down on protesters and bystanders on campuses from UT Austin and Texas to Emory University in Georgia.

Videos of professors being slammed to the ground and dragged away unconscious have been going viral. Videos of Zionist counter protesters instigating violence while campus security and police stand by and let it happen have also been circulating widely. And we’re going to check in soon with our LA-based reporter, Mel Buer, to talk about what she saw firsthand two nights ago at the UCLA encampment and elsewhere in Southern California. We are standing right in the middle of history and what happens next depends on what we all do now. The stakes are incredibly high, the violence is very real, and the fate of this struggle will hinge on the bravery, courage, conviction, strategy, and solidarity of those on the ground, and the support and protection they get from their campus communities, the public and from each other. And while the corporate media, cops, and politicians hell-bent on defending Israel at all costs, do what they can to squash this movement into unbeing.

Let it never be forgotten that the reason we are here now is because there is a genocide happening in real-time. Funded by our tax dollars, supported by our elected officials. Tens of thousands killed, generations of Palestinians have been wiped off the face of the earth. Gaza itself is a pile of rubble; hospitals, homes, universities and schools obliterated. Over a million people displaced, disease and forced starvation are killing children, elders, men, women, everyone, as we speak. This is a systematic slaughter, and people of conscience everywhere, including on college campuses, are doing whatever they can to stop it. And today, as we always do with The Real News, we’re going to take you directly to the front lines of struggle so you can hear for yourself what is happening on the ground at these encampments, what people are feeling, what they’re doing, and what you can do to get involved.

We’ve got an incredible live panel of encampment organizers and participants from Stanford University and Indiana University Bloomington today. We were hoping to have folks from my alma mater, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, but they are buried with organizing tasks at the moment, graduation is going on, so we wish them well and we will check in with them later, if you haven’t already listened to my podcast interview on The Real News or from earlier this week with student and grad student organizers at the University of Michigan. We’re going to get to our panel very soon and we’re going to hear from our guests about what’s going on on their campuses. But before we do, we want to give y’all some updates from other encampments where our extended Real News team have been reporting from. So let’s get rolling. First up, we’ve got a video interview with a student organizer of the Johns Hopkins Gaza Encampment right here in Baltimore. This interview was recorded earlier this week by former Real News staff reporter and amazing all around journalist, Jaisal Noor. Let’s play that clip from Jaisal now.

Speaker 2:

We have five demands and they’re all related to divestment and divulgement of Hopkins and their investment in weapons manufacturers like Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, places like that, who are all complicit in the genocide of the Palestinians, and in many cases are making the weapons or designing the targeting systems that are murdering innocent civilians. So our big request, our top line demand, is that Johns Hopkins University immediately divest. That it pulls its money out of investments in these companies, and instead chooses to invest them in literally any other company that is not currently and actively complicit in the genocide. The other demands are related to divulgement. Of course, they’re not totally 100% crystal clear about what their demand, rather what their investments are, and who has the exact amounts. So we want them to be very clear and show the student body exactly what financial ties to Israel they have, where those ties are and in what amounts. We want them to be clear with that, so we have some accountability with the divestment.

After that. The rest of the demands are related to the demilitarization of the university campus. The APL, the Applied Physics Laboratory often has a lot of involvement with the United States government; rocketry, that sort of thing. So we want a demilitarization of campus so that campus resources are not contributing to that genocide. And we want the university to really take up its mission that it proclaims and that the University President, Ron Daniels, proclaims, that the university is a place for democracy to grow and thrive. That is what we’re asking for here today. But unfortunately, the university has a long track record of not hearing students’ demands when we ask nicely. So this is what happens. We don’t want to do this encampment. We don’t want to live in a world where we have to put ourselves on the line for suspension, expulsion, arrest, all sorts of problems just to stop a genocide. But the fact of the matter is that unless we do this, the university will not do anything. So that’s why we’re here.

Jaisal Noor:

So what do you say to people that are concerned that this movement is inherently anti-Semitic because you’re protesting Israel?

Speaker 2:

So the first thing I would like to get at is that we very, very strongly condemn anti-Semitism, as strongly as we condemn Islamophobia, racism, sexism, homophobia. All these sorts of things, there is absolutely no place for any of them in our encampment. We’ve gone to great length to ensure that that does not sort of boil over. There’s a couple counter protesters up by the encampment, they’re holding an Israeli flag. We’re not engaging with them, we are not yelling at them, we are not shouting at them, we’re not getting violent with them. So this very much is not against certainly Jewish people, it is very much against Zionism. And I think the proposition that being Jewish inherently means you’re Zionist or that you need to be Zionist is a complete fallacy. I think that’s sort of a designed position that if the Zionist state can permanently link itself to Judaism and make anti-Zionism appear anti-Semitic, then they’ve won this battle. Then you can’t say anything bad about the state of Israel without being an anti-Semite.

But come on folks, look at the national political situation. Bernie Sanders is one of the largest critics of the state of Israel, a renowned Jew. A lot of our organizers are Jewish, have Jewish family members. So many of us have deep ties to that Jewish community, and that’s not what it’s about. We’re not going to synagogues and yelling slurs and being mean to people. We are here having a peaceful protest on campus asking for one thing and one thing only, and that’s to stop a genocide. I’m obscuring my face because I would not like to, if possible, be suspended, expelled, and I would like to avoid arrest, among other things. But we don’t know what action the university is going to take. Within the first couple hours of us being here, admin made at least two attempts to try and get us to take down parts of our encampment and then another attempt to actually have us vacate the area entirely. Both of those failed to great delight.

It’s not unreasonable to expect that campus might try and retaliate against students, despite their tendency to proclaim that they’re these champions of democracy and free speech. There is a very real risk that at some point students might be getting expelled, suspended or arrested. And so covering our faces, I think for a lot of us, is a way to ensure that anonymity as much as possible. And that for our mere presence here, that we are not going to see extreme deleterious consequences. That being said, I know there are plenty of us here that if push comes to shove, are willing to be suspended, expelled, and arrested.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Thank you so much, Jaisal, for that report. And everyone should be following Jaisal’s work, if you’re not already. Follow him on social media, J-A-I-S-A-L N-O-O-R, incredible reporter. He’s already on the ground doing more coverage as we speak, and we thank him so much for going to Johns Hopkins and talking to that student organizer who we of course granted anonymity to protect their safety under these very real threats that we are seeing around the country. And I think students have every right to take these precautions because we have seen firsthand how counter protesters are trying to expose their identities, get them fired, get job offers rescinded and ruin their lives. And we, at The Real News Network, will always take whatever precautions we need to protect the safety and rights of our interviewees, and we’re going to do that today.

But next we want to go to Columbia University where of course everyone has been talking about the police raid that happened this Tuesday and many of the encampments we’re seeing around the country sprung up after seeing the encampment at Columbia University. We got a video interview from Columbia before the raid, and this is with an undergraduate of Palestinian descent, which our Real News engagement editor, Ju-Hyun Park, recorded on Columbia’s campus this past weekend. Now, again, keep in mind, of course this interview was recorded before Tuesday’s police raid, but I think that makes it all the more important to remember what students were doing there in the first place and what voices the university and the police are actually trying to silence. Let’s play that clip from Columbia now.

Speaker 3:

Honestly, the people of Gaza are the lifeblood of our struggle, and I think just seeing the overwhelming support from the people of Gaza themselves saying that they see us, they see what we’re doing, they appreciate it. And I think also being a Palestinian myself and having the privilege to be a Palestinian in the diaspora while there are currently no universities left in Gaza, I understand that I have the obligation for my peers in Gaza, for my family in Palestine, to use this university as my platform to call for divestment. In addition to its financial ties, so it has shares in companies that indirectly profit off of Palestinian occupation like Airbnb, but it also is funding military companies like Raytheon that have direct links to the occupation. As well as the financial ties, we also call for an academic boycott of Israel. So Columbia is opening the Tel Aviv Global Center. We have dual degrees with Israel as well as several research opportunities that Palestinian students like myself will never be able to attend due to visa issues. So we also call for complete academic boycott of Israel.

I would say that it’s a unifying movement and that it’s an inclusionary movement. I have never seen the student body galvanized for something this quickly and this intensely and this persistently. Just two days ago, Columbia College voted almost 77% for Columbia College to divest. CUAD, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, represents over a hundred organizations on this campus who are all unified for the struggle for divestment. So I genuinely think that this is a unifying movement, and I think that the administration and a lot of external media is trying to manufacture this otherwise. I think the administration fails to learn from its mistakes that every time it suspends us, every time it comes down with heavy force, the student body only galvanizes further.

The unjust suspension of SJP and JVP was months ago. And after that, the student movement only grew stronger. After 108 arrests of our peers from the student university administration deploying the NYPD, overriding the University Senate and deploying the NYPD on its own students, the students by the hundreds were ready to jump the fence and start a second encampment. So I think that despite administration’s repression, despite administration sanctioning violence against its students, that we are more galvanized than ever. I would say once again that this is a unifying movement and that it’s honestly being manufactured by the media, that it’s anything other than that.

And I think that what makes this encampment so beautiful and the people who enter the encampment so beautiful is that we all understand that the Palestinian liberation struggle is the litmus test of our time; that you cannot have Jewish liberation without Palestinian liberation. You cannot have Black liberation without Palestinian liberation. And that’s clear in our demands as well. When we call for no more land grabs in Palestine, we also call for no more land grabs in Harlem. We call for no more land grabs on the Indigenous Lenape land that we’re standing on. So I think everybody in this encampment is truly dedicated to complete divestment, and we understand that that complete divestment is what is unifying us.

I’ve honestly, at this point in time, I think we’ve all learned to take what the administration has to say with a grain of salt. We know that they’re not negotiating in good faith, and we know that no statement that they release is indicative of when they’re going to come, of when they’re going to risk another sweep. So honestly, I’m just inspired that no matter how many statements are being released by Shafik and the administration, how many new moving finish lines are introduced, the students are still here and they’re still galvanized, and they will not stop and they will not leave the encampment until we get divestment.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Again, that interview with an undergraduate at Columbia was recorded this weekend before the overwhelming police raid that ended the encampment on Tuesday, at least temporarily. And we learned through the brave and noble and incredible reporting from student radio journalists at Columbia who were reporting in real-time on Tuesday that the campus community did not receive an email from President Minouche Shafik alerting them that this army of police was about to raid campus. And we are also being told through those journalists that police will have a permanent presence on campus for the rest of the month, even after graduation. So whatever you think about these protests, I mean, you should think about what it means that we’ve got state police permanently occupying our campuses right now in defense of a foreign government and squashing the rights of our students at our institutions of higher learning. So that’s what we’re here to talk about. And I’m incredibly grateful to our engagement editor, Ju-Hyun Park, for going to Columbia this weekend, recording that interview. And of course, thank you so much to the student organizer for speaking with us.

Now, before we go to our live panel where again, we’re going to talk with folks from Stanford University and Indiana University, and we’re going to talk to them live about what they’re going through and what’s happening on their campuses. We want to check in with our real news staff reporter, Mel Buer, who is based in LA and has been running around the past week covering the encampments and the violent repression of those encampments at UCLA, USC and more. And if you guys haven’t already, go watch Mel’s appearance on Democracy Now from earlier today where she broke down what she saw firsthand at the violent Zionist counterdemonstration and police crackdown on the UCLA encampment on Tuesday. Mel, thank you so much for joining us, especially after getting up at four in the morning to go on Democracy Now, how are you holding up?

Mel Buer:

Oh, I’m hanging in there. Thanks for having me on. I’m so excited to be a part of this live stream. I think it’s incredibly important.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, we’re excited to have you, and so grateful for all the great reporting you’ve been going out and doing there, being on the ground, getting the bear mace all over yourself, just like student organizers themselves. So I want to turn it over to you and ask if you could take the next few minutes to sort of walk us through what you’ve been reporting on, what you’ve been seeing across Southern California over the past week.

Mel Buer:

Sure. I think maybe the best place to start is just to kind of get a bit of a tally of the number of encampments that have sprung up over the last couple of weeks. The first one being a building occupation at Cal Poly Humboldt, which is about 10 hours north from where I’m at in Los Angeles. Those undergraduate students held a building for almost 10 days before they were summarily evicted by the police, and they’re currently regrouping, as far as I know, trying to figure out what to do, bailing folks out of jail. The UC system has 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, at least 6 campuses that have encampments. The most recent one that sprang up was UC San Diego yesterday, that also experienced some pretty hefty police response.

We have students at Occidental College, a private college, that have also set up their own encampment who are trying to finish the job of negotiating actual divestment procedures with Occidental College because those negotiations that they had originally won when they occupied an administration building last semester fizzled out quite quickly over the break and into the new semester. So that’s what they’re working on.

And then we also have a couple more encampments with the CSU system, so California State University, LA and I think Northridge, both set up encampments yesterday in the last couple of days, and I will be heading to those encampments at some point in the near future to talk with students there. So we have from the North to the South, we have an incredible amount of college campuses, universities, even potentially some city community colleges that are setting up demonstrations and encampments in solidarity and in struggle for Palestinian liberation. Obviously, the one that’s been the biggest in the news recently is UCLA. I was at UCLA last week on the first day of their occupation as they were setting up and experienced quite a wonderful couple of hours of solidarity; students studying together, you could really see that they were determined to stick it out and to force or pressure the UC system to divest from their relationships with Israel and with the Imperial war machine, of which there are many.

And really it’s kind of hard, I’m still processing the last couple of days because these students have grown in number, they built out their encampments. They were doing their best to really de-escalate any sort of aggression from the pro-Israel counter-protesters, which have been causing a ruckus frankly for the last four or five days. Came to a head just two nights ago, and the LA Police Department and various other state agencies then used that violence as an excuse to clear the encampment last night. And they waged essentially all-out war against those students and their allies for six or seven hours last night and finally cleared the encampment just this morning at five AM local time. So it’s been a bit of a whirlwind the last couple of days.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, and I’m sure folks have been seeing your footage, like your cell phone footage, going around over the past 48 hours. And I imagine folks who’ve seen it have been as horrified as everyone here was to see it, with echoes to January 6th, seeing these Zionist counter-protesters just essentially be allowed to go in and wreak this havoc on non-violent encampment protesters. And then, yeah, the kind of ongoing and escalating battle that we saw through your footage of the violence thereof. The very physical violence that materialized in very physical injuries for people. And you yourself, as we talked about, were covered in the mace that was being sprayed all over the place. Of course, we know instances over the past few months of Zionist counter-protesters also instigating violence at these encampments and these protests, even spraying skunk water on other students at Columbia. And as y’all said on the Democracy Now segment with the panel that you were on this morning, the visual parallels to what we are seeing between Israel and Palestine and Zionist counter-protesters in these encampments is hard to miss.

And we again, we’re so grateful to you for being our eyes there and showing people what they’re not seeing on CNN or hearing from people like Anderson Cooper who are all trying to paint these encampments as being run by outside instigators, that they are threatening the safety of Jewish students, even though so many of the organizers of these encampments are Jewish students themselves. So it’s really vital to get that on-the-ground perspective. And I just wanted to ask you one more question before we go to our live panel. You have a long history of covering protests on the ground. You were there at the Yellow Vest protests in France. You were there in Minneapolis at the George Floyd Uprising in 2020 while we were here in Baltimore. And in many ways, it feels like this is sort of like a next chapter in that story. I wanted to ask if you could just comment on that in terms of the protests themselves and the police response that you were witnessing.

Mel Buer:

Yeah, we were talking about this the other day. The other night, and now last night, and seeing what police departments across the United States have been engaging in on college campuses feels to me sort of like the opening salvo to the next chapter of what was essentially began, I would argue in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2020, and moving forward. And what we are seeing is, every year, because of perhaps failed defunding strategies at various police departments or this growing sense amongst the powerful classes that run this company… Company, this country. Yeah, okay, this corporation that is a country, there’s this sense within this crisis of legitimacy that’s been happening that they’re kind of losing the thread, and folks are becoming increasingly more agitated, increasingly more dissatisfied with the way things are run here. And especially now with our ostensibly, quote, air quotes, “progressive president,” pumping billions into wars across this globe, especially in the occupation in Palestine and the continued bombardment of Palestine folks are fed up.

And the police response here was very reminiscent of some of the images that came out of the 2020 uprising. I think they’re even better funded than they were in 2020. I think they’ve also sort of replenished their ranks with young police officers who maybe, quote, “missed out on the action.” I mean, I’m speculating here, but it felt like 2020. And I’ve been gathering text messages from colleagues who were out there last night who were astounded at the level of brutality that these police officers were [inaudible 00:28:05] out to students. And so I think with the DNC on the horizon, the election, this continued, just today, Biden, right before we went on air, President Biden had some formal remarks about the campus encampments. And one essential quote here is, “Dissent is essential for democracy.” He said at the White House, “But dissent must never lead to disorder.”

So he has no plans to change how he is handling this ongoing genocide in the Middle East. He has no plans to change his own thoughts about how he interacts with Israel. So you can kind of see where we’re headed. I think no matter who ends up in the White House in November, we’re going to see more of this, and it’s going to continue to be a conversation that we’re having. And we are going to continue to see images coming out of mostly incredibly peaceful dissent. They’re going to get more graphic, I think, and hopefully we will be here to tell stories about the resilience of these protesters. Obviously, we have all of these in encampment folks who have come on today to talk about the incredible work that they’re doing.

And I got to tell you, I was mad impressed by these students holding their own, putting together barricades regularly as they were getting ripped down by these counter protesters and really taking care of each other, especially when the folks who are supposed to be protecting the students are standing by or locking themselves in buildings or not picking up the phone. And the last thing I’ll say is the future is bright with these folks in it. And I am proud to be a part of this movement, and I’m proud to be telling stories of this movement, and I look forward to continuing to do that.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Oh, yeah. Well, Mel Buer, thank you so much for your reporting. Keep it up. But please get some rest as well.

Mel Buer:

Thank you.

Maximillian Alvarez:

We need you out there. And for everyone watching, if you’re not already, please follow Mel on any and all social media platforms where she’s giving regular updates from the ground in Southern California and beyond, on these encampments. We’re going to keep covering this across the country and increasingly across the world as best we can. We’re going to keep checking in with Mel, but yeah, until the next live stream, make sure that you’re following her on all platforms because you’re going to get more updates. Mel, thank you so much for all the work that you’ve done over the past week. Thank you so much for checking in with us. We’re going to let you go get some sleep, but we’ll see you soon.

Mel Buer:

Thank you. Have a good rest of your live stream.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Hell yeah. So again, we are a small but mighty team, fiercely dedicated to lifting up voices from the grassroots of struggle. And that is not going to stop here or anywhere in the future. And now we want to take y’all to our live panel where we’re going to talk directly with student, grad student and faculty members, organizers and participants in different encampments at Stanford University and at Indiana University. And you may have been seeing more news stories coming out of those encampments, including a fucking sniper on the roof at Indiana. But we’ll get to that in a minute, pardon my French.

I want to start, since we have our folks from Indiana University on here, I want to start there since we were just talking about California, and then we’re going to go to our group from Stanford. But I wanted to ask if we could just go around the table in this first round, start by introducing yourselves to the live stream viewers and listeners. And in the next three to five minutes, a piece, can you just give us breakdowns of the past week to two weeks from your vantage points, give our listeners the on-the-ground perspective about how you got involved in this movement, what it looks and feels like on the ground, what the response from the administration and the campus community has been, especially over the past few days as police repression has escalated across the country. So let’s go to our folks from Indiana University. Aidan, can we start with you?

Aidan Khamis:

Yeah. So I’m Aidan Khamis. I’m a leading organizer with the Indiana Divestment Coalition that’s leading this encampment, and also separately an organizer with the Palestine Solidarity Committee. And so particularly, we’ve had an interesting past eight days because we began our encampment on Thursday. And what initially happened is, on the day of our encampment, we were met with state police, state troopers. The administration was very, very quick to bring down military-level force. And on that first day, we also saw the snipers, which I would say continued for three days. And so what had happened is initially on that first day, we had some 33 arrested, which included faculty and students for participation in their encampment. All of them were sent to a site on campus, a warehouse, then processed and sent to a jail. Next, we had a day of relatively quiet, though there was a lot of psychological warfare speeding around the encampment, going quiet on the radio scanners, so on and so forth, drones.

But come Saturday morning, they doubled down with an even larger onslaught consisting of, at least on the police line, 60 SWAT, if not more. Again, military-level force, a BearCat tear gas grenade launchers, police armed with assault rifles, pepper spray bullets, and again, those snipers. And so on that day, I was arrested along with 21 other individuals. And again, the same processes. Now the university has… We’ve held, we rebuilt our encampment each and every time. The police got pushed off each and every time regardless of the raid. And so now we’re in day eight, and we’ve seen a relatively minimal police presence. Which again, we think the university is again engaging in that psychological tactics.

What’s interesting too is we also have to deal with the counter-protestor issue. They haven’t necessarily escalated to violence, but we’ve dealt with pods of individuals coming to harass the camp, speaking of sexual obscenities towards protesters, saying Islamophobic rhetoric and very firmly anti-Semitic rhetoric referring to the Jewish students participating in the encampment as, “You are not Jewish whatsoever.” And so we are holding strong and firm until we get those demands. And again, these students are committed. They’re committed because many of them see what is taking place in Gaza, and they know that although we’re experiencing a brutal level of force, it is a minuscule amount compared to the sheer atrocity being unleashed in Gaza. But I can hand it off to Anne to give it from her perspective.

Anne:

Yeah. Thank you, Aidan. Thank you The Real News for having us on today. Everything Aidan said is a really accurate description of what’s happened. So just to go over the points so far, there have been two really violent police raids of camp. So these are extremely militarized state troopers that the administration has invited into our campus. Some things that didn’t go over is that the encampment is taking place in what is known at IU, and what has been known for over 50 years, as a designated free speech zone, as a designated assembly ground. Dunn Meadow has had many, many, many different kinds of encampments, occupations, shantytown, tent cities, by many names over the years, specifically in Dunn Meadow.

And the night before the encampment began, the Provost Rahul Shrivastav created an ad hoc committee to create a brand new rule that said something about how temporary structures needed prior approval. And it was supposedly under that new ad hoc committee, changed a long-standing 55-year plus policy that enabled state police to come through and just do violence to our students, and additionally some faculty. And so there’s just layers of administrative cruelty to this that is really upsetting to see.

I think the other thing that I would also add, just for people watching, there’s encampments all over the country right now, all over the world right now, but for those who have not yet visited one, I want to say that both the level of violence that you might see from afar is worse and scarier on the ground, but also the level of courageousness and resolve of the students that are organizing it is also so much greater than what you can possibly capture through a screen. And I guess I should have introduced myself. My name’s Anne, I’m a graduate student and union organizer, and I’ve been participating and attending the encampment almost every day, so I’ve seen this with my own eyes.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and Anne, just real quick before we toss it to our panelists from Stanford, could you just say a little bit about how the grad students and the grad union, y’all were just on strike. I mean, could you say a little bit about how you’ve entered this movement from the grad student perspective?

Anne:

Yeah, absolutely. There’s a lot that you could say about how labor and Palestine are interconnected, a lot about the way that normalizing this kind of militarized assault on protest affects labor. But I’ll say that even a really simple example is that less than a week before the encampments, we were on strike and we had tents up at the picket lines, and it was perfectly fine, because of course, a tent on a college campus is perfectly fine. But the reason that these tents are not perfectly fine is because these tents are there as part of a protest against a genocide in Gaza. And that’s what has been enabling this onslaught. I’ll say as a graduate, as a union organizer, as a union member, it has been really powerful and important for me to make sure that I… Oh, I’m so sorry. What is happening?

Maximillian Alvarez:

You’re good. Yeah, like you were saying, as a grad student, organizer, worker organizer, as a member of the union.

Anne:

Yeah, sorry. So one thing, our union membership has not yet had a chance to… We represent 1,300 members, so we have not had a chance for all of those members to come together and vote and discuss on our feelings towards the encampment. But our leadership has come… We haven’t had a chance to have a meeting in a month because of the strike and this encampment, but our leadership, and as well as many of our members, but just to speak for our leadership, of which I’m a part of, we have really thrown our support both behind the encampment and especially behind condemning this assault on our students. We are instructors. And so when we see… The only way I can describe the police raids is like watching a tank like maul through a group of students and faculty. So we see this as an assault on our students, and we really condemn this to our fullest extent.

Additionally, a week before the encampment began, and the day before our strike began, IU faculty voted overwhelmingly no confidence in President Pamela Whitten, Provost Rahul Shrivastav and Vice Provost of Faculty and Academic Affairs, Carrie Docherty. There’s a lot that can be said about the absolute fiascos and mismanagement that these three administrators have done to this university. In particular, their anti-Palestinian sentiment. But I’ll just say that that is immediately one of the shared demands of the union and of the IU Divest Coalition. So as a union, we really see our struggles very much as interconnected, and we are doing what we can to support our students and support our students right to protest for and to the genocide in Gaza.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah. And let’s roll right into talking to our folks from the Stanford encampment. Building on this, I want to go to our first guest from Stanford who is an undergraduate whose identity we are protecting out of security concerns, but we want to hear from our anonymous undergraduate encampment participant here, and then we’re going to hear from a faculty member as well. So can we go, and just for a couple minutes, can we hear from your perspective, our Stanford undergraduate here about what the past week has been like for you, from your eyes, what you’re seeing, what you’re feeling, and what the response from the campus community, the administration, has been?

Speaker 7:

Yeah, I mean, firstly, thank you guys so much for having us on. It’s really appreciated to have a platform to share what’s been going on. We’re nothing honestly compared to what our peers across the country, and even in Indiana, have been doing in terms of police presence. Stanford is a relatively protected campus. It’s a private university, and Stanford has been relatively adamant about maintaining their discipline and their punishment and penalty, keeping that really internal. We started our encampment Thursday afternoon after a rally that had around 800 attendees. And at that rally, we had just really began setting up an intifada wall on our lawn in the place directly across from where our former 120 day sit-in was. And after we set that up, we circled and had a lot of chants, essentially protecting the folks who were setting up encampments. Yeah, it really just picked up from there.

Within only a little short while we had hundreds more attendees, hundreds more participants, we had really been able to build this amazing base of people who were able to support us. That very night, Stanford administration came into the encampment with police and issued letters that said essentially something to the effect of, “If you don’t stop camping, you’ll be receiving Office of Community Standards violations.” That morning, or the day after, or maybe a day after that, they issued Office of Community Standards violations, which could be as much as suspension and as little as a quarter of probation. They issued those letters to about 15 people, a majority of us, Arab and Muslim, and to the others Black or Brown students that were not Arab or Muslim, and as well as some anti-Zionist Jews. But they issued those sort of arbitrarily and gave them to the folks that they assumed were in leadership of organizing.

However, since then, the camp has really grown. We’ve been able to expand and have really just been working against obviously the administration in a lot of ways. At the end of the day, what they’re trying to do is silence our ability to stand up for this. And similar to what my peers at Indiana said, what we’re experiencing is really just a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of what people in Gaza are experiencing. So if anything, this feels more of our moral responsibility to act this way and take these actions, and remain steadfast.

Again, we are really not facing as much police presence or repression as our peers across the country because we are such a protected campus. But we have been facing a lot on that psychological warfare level. We’ve had administrators lurking, quite literally lurking in the shadows, taking videos and pictures of us in order to report us to the Office of Community Standards. We’ve had, very late at night, APEX security guards, who are standards private security, follow students home and take videos of them. We’ve had them do that at night as well, just trying to get our faces, trying to intimidate our safety marshals, really just doing whatever they can to derail us. But we remain, and we’ll stay here. We’ve been here since, today is one week of our encampment, and we plan to stay for the long haul.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And can I just ask on that last point before we go to Professor David Palumbo-Liu, can you just say a little more about what you and your fellow students are feeling right now as you try to… I mean, again, we are protecting your identity here so folks can hear from you without your future, your enrollment, your safety, being compromised. And for folks watching, could you just say just a little bit about why that’s so important? What the kind of thoughts that are going through in your mind, the minds of other students right now who are trying to stand up for this, but who are in a position where the futures you’ve been working towards your entire lives to get to these universities and get to the next step are the things that are being threatened?

Speaker 7:

Yeah. Quite honestly, it feels a little bit silly to be in a position where I want to protect my identity in order to protect my future because we already just live in such an insane position of privilege. I mean, every university in Gaza has been destroyed. Tens of thousands of kids have had their [inaudible 00:46:52] stripped from them. And I’m already in a better position than majority of people there will ever be in. It does feel very silly to think this way. But also, the university is intentionally trying to deal with us from the inside out and trying to really knock us down and knock down our capacity and our power to organize against this genocide. I guess they need to sort of… I think the only reason that I’m personally remaining anonymous is because I am nervous about more retaliation from the university.

I’m one of the students who faced charges. Wrongfully, but did face charges. And I think we are all just in a very vulnerable position. And I think quite honestly, the administration is aware that we’re in a vulnerable position. I personally, as well as a lot of the other organizers, I do feel a lot of fear. I feel a lot of anxiety just surrounding even being near the encampment just because that will be exacerbated into such a larger issue. And at the same time, I also feel a lot of passion and community every single time I’m around. For every ounce of fear that I have or every ounce of anxiety that I have, it’s really very quickly doubled and tripled by the amount of energy and passion and excitement that I get from being around fellow organizers and being around people who believe in these just causes.

It’s an anxiety-inducing situation, but also, again, it’s a fraction of a fraction of what folks in Gaza are facing. And it is our moral responsibility. So as much as possible, we are doing our best to stay grounded not in anxiety and fear, and to know that there’s power in numbers and we protect each other.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, thank you again so much for coming on and sharing your perspective with us. We really, really appreciate it, and folks around the country desperately need to hear it. Again, right now as we speak across corporate media all week, we’ve been hearing folks talk about students, but very few talking to students. So even getting to just hear from your perspective is so invaluable, and we really, really appreciate it.

And we want to also get a faculty perspective on this. And we’re very fortunate to have Professor David Palumbo-Liu here with us who is a faculty member, has been involved in Palestine solidarity organizing for many, many years. David first, please, introduce yourself to the good livestream viewers and listeners, and tell us what it’s been looking like for you the past week as a faculty member and also as someone who, as I said, has been in this movement for a long time. How does this feel different to you?

David Palumbo-Liu:

Well, thanks for having me on, Max. It’s wonderful to see you. I wanted to say something first about the Biden quote that Mel mentioned about being disruptive. And I’m reminded of this great quote from Howard Zinn who said, “They accuse us of disturbing the peace. There is no peace, we’re disturbing the war.” So I think that reverse and much more real perspective is important to get out there. And I have to say that as you said, I’ve been involved in Palestine work for a while. I’m a member of the organizing collective of USACBI which is the US Campaign for the Cultural and Academic Boycott of Israel. And many years ago, we started an initiative called Faculty for Justice in Palestine. And it was sort of an embryonic idea, and it really laid sleeping for some time. We had maybe five chapters. And then in November, just by coincidence, two major organizations had their meetings in Montreal, and one was American Studies, and the other one was the Middle East Studies Association.

And progressive and radical faculty members from both organizations, and we knew each other quite well, set up a separate mini-conference where we wanted to discuss what we could do to help the movement. And we decided to reanimate the Faculty for Justice in Palestine and to in fact hand it over to a new group of people because we wanted to make sure it was organic, it was built from the ground up, given the capacity and the interest. And right now, we have a hundred chapters across the country. And our primary motivation right now is to support students, because students is where all the energy is coming from.

And I wanted to add this in terms of Stanford, because I think it’s such an important point to add. In the autumn, spontaneously, Stanford students started a sit-in way before anything else had happened, and they occupied The Plaza for 120 days, day and night, this was the longest-standing protest at Stanford’s history. And they stayed their day and night. Even over the winter break, they were there. And this was, I think, instrumental in essentially training the administration. The administration hasn’t been bad, and one of the reasons why it hasn’t been worse is because the students taught them what this was about. I mean, administration still is problematic, but I think the students deserve so much credit for bringing this issue not just to their fellow students and to faculty, but to the administration itself. And yes, the administration finally dismantled and there’s a long story behind how that happened. They dismantled the sit-in after 120 days.

And then Columbia happened, and what was amazing to me is students went out and built an encampment. I mean, these are people who have been sleep-deprived, had missed classes, had missed their families, had sacrificed everything. And within a few days, the encampment popped up again and has turned into a huge movement because not only are they replenishing the sit-in participants in terms of the individuals, but all sorts of other organizations on campus have chimed in.

I’ll just say one last thing. One of the most beautiful moments in the new encampment so far was that we were about to begin classes there. And we heard all this commotion and we looked up and there were all these students from the Black Student Union marching with, waving Palestinian flags, all dressed in black, but most importantly and impressively, bringing food. And they said they were inspired by the Black Panthers Free Breakfast Program, and this was how they were going to show their support to the encampment. So I really want to underscore how collaborative, how much solidarity there is, how much commitment, how much energy there is. And the students are amazing.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Hell yeah. Well, I know our dearly departed colleague, comrade and mentor and legendary former Black Panther, Marshall Eddie Conway is out there smiling somewhere right now on hearing that. Now, there’s so many things I want to talk to y’all about, but I know we only have a limited time left. And I want to assure our viewers that as always, we’re going to commit. The Real News is not a one-and-done network. We dig in and commit and we keep showing up and keep reporting as long as we need to. That’s why we’re still reporting on East Palestine Ohio. That’s why we’re still reporting on the genocide in Gaza. That’s why we’re still reporting on the police repression that’s happening to citizens, not just on college campuses, but all across this country. If you watch The Real News Network, you know what we’re about, and we’re going to be here trying to cover this movement as it develops.

So this will not be the last live stream that we do, nor will it be the last podcast or article that we publish. So please stay tuned for more. And again, please follow our journalists online, follow Mel Buer, follow myself, follow great journalists like Jaisal Noor, follow our Real News account for more updates in between published segments.

But I wanted to take the last round that we’ve got here before we got to let everybody go, to sort of talk about where we are headed, where things go now, and how this movement is growing and how these different encampments can or are already learning from each other and building on each other and devising strategies for dealing with hostile media, hostile administrations, police, repression. I want to just take advantage of the fact that we have folks from different encampments here who are directly in communication with each other and talk about where this goes and what folks watching and listening on campuses and off campuses can do to help.

And so I’m going to turn things back over to our folks over at Indiana University in a second. But just one point that I wanted to underline that came out in the first part of this live stream, from Mel Buer’s report from LA to what Aidan at Indiana University was talking about in terms of a BearCat; these armored cars, these armored police, these hordes of police marching into campuses. These do not come from nowhere. I remember myself as a student anti-fascist or a grad student, anti-fascist organizer at the University of Michigan years ago, when we were all part of this coalition to stop Richard Spencer and his Nazis from coming on campus. And we stood down and brawled with them at Michigan State University in 2018.

I remember standing there in Lansing on a cold winter day while we were surrounded by police facing people with Nazi tattoos all over their bodies and seeing a BearCat, an armored car with Michigan State University on the side of it. And wondering, what the hell does Michigan State University need a BearCat for? And this is what the kind of cumulative response from the police and the ruling establishment has been to protest movements of the past and what it has been to the 2020 uprisings that we saw spread across this country and across the globe.

The police do not ever want to be caught off guard like they were in 2020 again. And their response is to build Cop City. Their response is to build up and fund more the police departments that are now storming our college campuses. So we need to see this in a long historical perspective, and we need to take seriously where that path is leading. And so I want to again, turn things back over to our panelists to have the final word here to tell us where the resistance is leading, where we are going from here? And what these different encampments, what this movement can do to build mutual support within their campus communities, across campus communities, what’s already happening in that regard, what folks listening should be on the lookout for and what they can do to help? So any final words y’all got on that? Aidan, I’m going to toss it back to you, then we’ll go to Anne. So I’ll shut up and y’all just kind of hop in when you’re ready.

Aidan Khamis:

So I’ve really been thinking about this so much lately. And I think there’s two points I really want to discuss. And I think the first one refers to seeing how the state is willing to go to protect fascists, and realizing that within the context of say, business as usual, given the absence of escalation, the absence of protests and so on and so forth, there appears discursively like a contradiction between far-right fascists and facilitation from the state.

But now what essentially these encampments have done has brought that veil down, has allowed the state to reveal itself as this violent machine, that these values are not necessarily, they’re not principled by any means, but really guided by just assertion of force. And has showed that they’re not in fact contradictory, that they serve each other mutually. And especially in suppressing those who see to dismantle the genocidal structure that we have in play.

Secondly, what I think too is we’re in a very interesting liminal space, because outside again of this occupation encampment movement, the Student Intifada, there is a place to grab institutional power to act on that front while having disruptions and so on and so forth. But given the context of the encampments, given the context of schools becoming just so forceful with militarized police and so on and so forth, it’s really about holding firm in protest and causing that internal crisis.

I might have cut.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, Aidan, you’re cutting out just for a second.

Aidan Khamis:

Did I cut?

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah. We got you back now?

Aidan Khamis:

Yeah. Did I cut out? Yeah, can you hear me?

Maximillian Alvarez:

You are cutting out. Why don’t we check your connection real quick. We’re going to toss things to… Oh wait, but you seem okay now. All right, you’re back on, Aidan, go for it.

Aidan Khamis:

Okay. I should be… Am I? It’s cutting out for me again. I think going forward with Anne.

Maximillian Alvarez:

You’re good on this end. Go for it.

Anne:

Yeah, I can go. Yeah, I think one is we should just really continue following the lead of these student movements just in every single way that we can. We should not lose sight that the encampments are demanding justice in Palestine, an end to the genocide in Gaza. At minimum, that means for everyone in these areas, especially the students, faculty and staff, just go to these encampments and support them. There are so many layers in which our universities especially are complicit in this violence that is being done to their students just for their supposed crime of protesting genocide. I already mentioned the ways in which President Pamela Whitten and Provost Rahul Shrivastav and Vice Provost Carrie Docherty have really invited these militarized forces onto campus. You mentioned the BearCat. There was a BearCat. So absurdly Bloomington, a city with a population of like a hundred thousand has its own BearCat, but on Saturday we saw the BearCat from Indianapolis. So there were two BearCats in town.

And I mean, just thinking about how much this endangers not just our students, but the entire community, when there is a sniper on the roof of one of the tallest buildings in town, when there are riot troops with tear gas and other kinds of weaponry, that endangers all of us. Aidan mentioned, referring to the arrest, arrestees were taken away on an IU bus, and then they were taken to an IU facility, and then they were taken to the Monroe County Jail. So there are just levels of complicity in every single administrative position. And I would really urge everyone affiliated with these universities to support these encampments, physically go down if they can, and also to withdraw their consent. The graduate union has put out a call asking for everyone to withdraw from any kind of service committee they are for this administration.

Whether that’s all these bizarre committee work that faculty members are expected to do all of the time. At minimum, this administration is a lame-duck administration, our administration, that has been voted out just by the vast majority of faculty less than two weeks ago. And I would really urge just everyone who is at all involved in work at this university to withdraw their consent from enabling this university to continue doing this kind of violence to our students just because they are protesting genocide. I would just really affirm that these student movements are so inspiring, so clear-headed about their need and their political goals that I, on every single campus everywhere, I would encourage everyone in the community, especially within these universities themselves to support them.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And Aidan, if we got you back, any kind of final words before we toss it to folks from Stanford?

Aidan Khamis:

No, yeah, just back to what I was saying. I was saying the idea of the encampment as its own form of protest outside of generally the ways in which other organizations, SJPs, so on and so forth, have protested complicity. It’s interesting because it’s causing that internal crisis. And in that way it’s about supporting the encampment. And I think Anne put on it, and about faculty and community members, their support means furthering that. And putting the university in position where it has no other option, where its hand is forced. You can’t beg the hand to move itself. By standing firm and standing steadfast, that’s how we really accomplish it, because there’s going to be the up and downs. We have the low days where we’re just kind of left to figure things out. And that can be difficult, but it’s about really committing yourselves to that principle first and foremost, and getting people to commit to those principles.

It might be hard sometimes. Sometimes it’s hard because in these situations, a lot of our emotional tendencies come out, but remembering that this is for a larger cause, something beyond yourself, just transcending your ego. That’s what will really persevere this movement, because there’ll be ups and downs, there will be high points, there will be points like when Columbia took Hamilton Hall. And then there will be low points seeing the repression that followed. And it’s about balancing through and really sticking.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Oh, man. Aidan was really on a roll there, but I think that we got the near total amount of that. But I am so sorry to everyone watching and listening, we’re having a little internet connection difficulties with Aidan. But I hope that you could hear most of what he was saying just then. I want to toss things back to our anonymous undergraduate from Stanford, and ask if we could say a little more from your perspective about where this is all going, what folks on and off campus can do to get involved? And how this movement is growing or can grow and should grow as we continue into this struggle?

Speaker 7:

Yeah. I really want to echo a lot of what Aidan and Anne said. The work that we’re doing now is really just laying the groundwork for overall liberation. There cannot be Black liberation without Palestinian liberation. There cannot be Indigenous liberation without Palestinian liberations. Our struggles are all inherently interlinked. And I think one of the most important things that we’ve had to remind ourselves, really just jumping off of Aidan’s point, is this is not about us. It has never been about us and it’ll never be about us. We are people living in the heart of the American empire, and we are people who are trying our very best to really unlearn what we’ve been taught. And even at these universities, Stanford prides itself on teaching its students to think critically and providing them with the skills necessary to change the world around them.

And then we will take those skills that we’ve been taught and we’ll take the critical thinking skills that we’ve been taught and the literature and the history that we’ve learned and apply that to our world today. And then we’ll be criticized for it. And I think one of the most important things as well is just learning that every single thing that we do will inevitably be criticized. I mean, every single camp across the country, every single pro-Palestinian movement across the country, has been called anti-Semitic, has been called a slew of terrible things, whether it’s terrorists or anti-Semitic or racist or whatever it may be. And we know, realistically, that none of that is true. It’s the same way that your feminism will be accused of being anti-man, and your fight for Black liberation will be accused of reverse racism. Everybody will do their very best.

The oppressor will always find a way to appropriate, co-opt and manipulate the language of the oppressed and to claim victimhood and then to justify the violence that they’re using against the activists of our generation as self-defense. And we know very clearly and very, very obviously, that the Student Intifada is only now. Or is not starting now, and it’ll continue for years and years to come. Palestinians have been fighting this fight long before us, and they’ll be fighting this fight long after us. So it’s important that we ground ourselves really in this understanding that this is not about us, will not be about us, and people will try to poke holes in our narrative no matter how hard we try. It’s important that we remain steadfast and grounded in our morals and our disciplined values.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Hell yeah. Well, David, I want to toss it to you to round us out on, again, your faculty perspective there at Stanford. How is this growing? What happens now? What can folks do to get involved? And then Aidan, if your connection’s good, please do hop in right after Dave, give us your final word and we will close out. Oh, you’re muted, Dave.

David Palumbo-Liu:

So I’ll be really brief. To begin with talking about the militarization of the police. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Remember that a lot of the munitions that the police have come from their army surplus from the Iraq and their Afghan war, and the conditions upon which they get them is often, “If you don’t need them, we’ll take them back.” So there’s an incentive to use them, not just symbolically, but in very real and deadly ways. And this will age me immensely in terms of your understanding. I was in college when Kent State happened, when Jackson State happened. These things are real. And I want to really underscore how this is so dangerous and we need to keep on top of it and really be active about pressing back on it.

Second point, do you know that the house just passed the IHRA definition, right? That equates any criticism of the state of Israel with anti-Semitism. And that’s going to be an incredibly powerful tool for… I mean, it already is, but now that it has the US government sanctioning it, it’s going to become even worse. So I think going forward, we really have to develop other tactics or add other tactics onto our inventory of things that we can do because we’re going to be much more strategic about how we act on campus.

Third point, I have a love-hate relationship with the university. I recommend you all reading Robin D. G. Kelley’s letter to the president of Columbia that came out in Boston Review, in which he correctly says she just threw the entire university under the bus. It wasn’t just students, it wasn’t just faculty. The very idea of the university was completely tossed over to the right-wing. And the right-wing is after not only Palestine, although primarily Palestine now, but any kind of independence the university might have.

So in that regard, I think we have to be both defenders of the university, but I also think we shouldn’t fetishize the university. There are all sorts of other learning spaces that we can create and maintain that are not dependent on the approval of the university. And I think we should really stay strong in developing those spaces. Other tactics, this is going to be a challenging, challenging world. We have a presidential election coming in. We might very well have a full-blown fascist coming into office. So we need to lean on each other even more. And the Palestinians have shown us again and again how that resolve is absolutely necessary.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Hell yeah. Aidan, we got you back for final word.

Aidan Khamis:

Yeah, can you hear me?

Maximillian Alvarez:

Mm-hmm.

Aidan Khamis:

Yeah, and so I think just echoing what everyone has said. My final point was, what I was trying to get to, is really, and I think about this and I might add a little religious touch as a Muslim, because especially I can’t deny it, with this being about Palestine, but I asked and I contemplated myself, what does it mean? This period we’re going through with such difficulty in face of brutalization and highs and lows, and how do we navigate all that? And it’s really through submission. That’s the word of Islam, submitting to Allah. And this submission, this steadfastness, this faith in principle is ultimately what will have us persevere. And I think everyone has said that today, no matter the way, no matter how, it’s that core, that essence that is guiding us, and that will prevail and that will make us victorious. And I think that’s something we can all think about and agree about and hope to continue.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, folks, that’s going to do it for this Student Intifada livestream here at The Real News Network. I cannot thank our guests enough for giving us their time and for taking this past hour to share with us their on-the-ground perspective. Again, this will not be the last time that we are covering the Student Intifada movement, the encampments, the fight. As we’ve been covering for months and months and months to end the genocidal war on Gaza, we are going to continue to report on the ground. So again, thank you to my colleagues, Mel Buer, Ju-Hyun Park, Jaisal Noor, everyone here at The Real News who is hustling their butts off to try to give folks the news that they are not getting on piece-of-shit channels like CNN with folks like Anderson Cooper. But we won’t get into that. Now, if you want the real story from the grassroots of struggle, you come to The Real News and we’re going to keep delivering for you.

So again, I want to thank our guests for joining us today. I want to thank our correspondents for all their hard work. I want to thank everyone in the studio booth right now for all your help in putting this together. And of course, I want to thank you all out there for watching, for listening, and for caring. For The Real News Network, this is Maximillian Alvarez signing off. Again, before you go, please head over to therealnews.com/donate. Become a supporter of our work so we can keep bringing you important coverage and conversations just like this. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other, solidarity forever.

David Palumbo-Liu:

Thank you.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Thank you so much for watching The Real News Network, where we lift up the voices, stories and struggles that you care about most. And we need your help to keep doing this work, so please tap your screen now, subscribe and donate to The Real News Network. Solidarity forever.