We See You: The Encampment as a Radical Reimagining

Written by Abdelrahman ElGendy – Published 7 May on Protean

“I’m 25 years old. I’ve lived my whole life in Gaza City, and I have never felt hope like I do right now,” says Bisan Owda, the now internationally recognized Palestinian journalist who has covered the Israeli genocide of her people for the past seven months. In a video published on her Instagram account days before, Bisan appears teary-eyed and shaking. She describes the Palestine solidarity encampments erupting across US campuses over the past couple of weeks as having infused her veins with magical feelings. Suddenly, she says, she can imagine a world where the genocide has ended, where she is back in Gaza, rebuilding her city and her home.

I watch Bisan’s video while lying on a tarp in Pittsburgh’s Schenley Plaza, facing the University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning, surrounded by a half circle of tents and hundreds of protesters. A symbolic fence of little paper Palestinian flags planted firmly in the grass, each bearing the name of a martyr, encircles us. In the encampment’s center, a large desert-brown tent carries a sign plastered across its side, declaring the area a “Liberated Zone” in bold red lettering.

This zone, initiated on April 23rd by a coalition of Pitt students, is one of dozens set up by student activists on university campuses across the United States in a stand with Palestine, following the lead of Columbia University students. The Columbia student protesters established their encampment at dawn on April 17th to demand that Columbia divest from weapons manufacturers and other companies supporting the occupation and its genocidal campaign in Gaza. Tensions escalated when the following day, Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, responded to the encampment’s demands by summoning the police to disperse the crowd, resulting in the NYPD’s arrest of over a hundred students on trespassing charges. The move backfired, causing the Columbia encampment to expand significantly: students occupied and barricaded Hamilton Hall for four days until the police violently raided the building, fired a gun, and forcibly removed the students. The NYPD arrested over a 100 protesters in the process, brutalizing many. Columbia’s encampment ignited a nationwide student movement demanding that their respective universities divest from the occupation—academically, financially, and otherwise.

“For the first time in our lives as Palestinians,” Bisan says in the same video, “we hear a voice louder than the sound of their bombs.”

Since seeing Bisan’s face lit with hope, I’ve been asking myself: What do the encampments offer that stirred such visceral reactions in Bisan, her fellow Palestinians, and all of us in this struggle? What is different here that Palestinians in Gaza hailed the movement as an “American Student Intifada”?

For the past few days, I’ve been watching videos of the arrests at different encampments on repeat. One video in particular captivates me from Columbia. It shows the police, clad in riot gear, dragging Maryam Alwan—a Students for Justice in Palestine organizer—away in handcuffs while she smiles. Her fellow protesters cheer her on, their chants reverberating throughout the space: “We see you. We love you. We will get justice for you.”

The three short lines unlocked something inside me, and I think of them as I stroll through our Pitt encampment. The banner with the encampment’s ground rules rises at the center, setting the foundation for a community governed by referenda arising from its people. A medic tent, fully stocked with first-aid supplies, medications, and masks, stands ready, while stringently followed cleanliness and no-loitering measures maintain order. Comrades lounge on the grass, absorbed in literature from the encampment’s liberation library, built by its members. The air carries the gentle hum of multi-faith prayers and speeches. Panels focus sometimes on learning, but mostly on unlearning. Poetry nights and film screenings take place throughout the week. Along the sidewalk is parked a Free Ice Cream for a Free Palestine van, and nearby, protestors offer a free massage table to fellow protestors. Support from encampment members and the wider community ensures a consistent supply of food and drink. When the police clashed with the encampment, arresting three protestors, the group rose and formed a human chain around the sidewalk, arms firmly interlinked for hours into the night to shield the comrades holding their ground on the grass.

I look around me and feel chills. I’m transported back to Cairo’s Tahrir Square in 2011, walking among its tents with banners declaring, in handwritten Arabic calligraphy, the three central demands: bread, freedom, social justice. I hear the thud of chants, I see the field hospital run by the doctors of the revolution, I watch the passing of five different spoons in and out of a single bowl of ful. I look around and remember my six years in prison for protesting the vicious 2013 Egyptian military coup, working with other political prisoners to reshape our world behind the prison bars into the world we always dreamed of.

We struggle: one riot at a time, one hunger strike at a time, one prisoner-run school at a time, one handhold at a time. I marvel at how when one witnesses such moments, one becomes acutely aware of the rupturing and reshaping of history in real time. I think again: what does The Encampment as an entity—in a revolution, in prison, or on a university lawn—offer us as a structure?

Since the launch of the Pitt encampment, its members have been asked by curious passersby and social media followers: Who’s sponsoring this? Which organizations are funding the encampment? It is difficult, especially in the United States, for many to imagine a system built outside traditional organizational structures—the ideology of institutionalism deeply ingrained in their minds. What I ache to articulate to the people directing those questions to me is how the route that passes through this encampment is not one of empathy, allyship, or a peace built on our dead bodies. I find myself once again recalling the chants of Columbia’s students, what I’ve come to term the Three Commandments of the Encampment: “We see you. We love you. We will get justice for you.”

The Encampment teaches us to see. It shows us that there is no need to be in another’s shoes if our shoes are one and the same. That, to borrow the words of Iranian-American poet Solmaz Sharif, we don’t need to lay down in one another’s chalk lines to experience each other’s suffering if we are already cohabitants of the larger chalk lines that delineate our collective brutalized body. In The Encampment, seeing transcends passive observation and becomes a deliberate political choice. I see you, and you cease to be the Other. I see you, and we become one.

The act of seeing in The Encampment teaches us to abolish empathy as an extension of colonial violence and recognize the hierarchical structure it instantly imposes: those whose empathy is constantly sought, and those who must appeal for “re-humanization”. The path that starts with empathy leads to performative allyship and materializes in NGOs and charities: entities that serve to obstruct and contain radical change, managing dissent by integrating it into the state apparatus, accountable first and foremost to donors and institutional patrons. Empathy then, with its top down method of looking, ultimately reinforces the same institutional structures against which The Encampment rises in the first place. 

Instead, the encampment urges us to embrace not empathy, but radical love. 

To move from empathy to love is to abandon the temporary, safe experience of patting the backs of those who struggle from afar—an action mostly intended to appease one’s own conscience—and to instead stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them, bearing the ramifications of the struggle and becoming inextricable from its participants. The path of radical love leads us towards accompliceship, ignites revolution, and culminates in emancipation from a white supremacist, Western-hegemonic world order. 

Standing against a stream of suspensions and assaults on campus protestors; faculty members are forming human chains to protect students and getting arrested in their stead; Columbia’s WKCR, the student-run radio station, is toiling to counter the professional media’s disinformation about the encampment; an Emory student is being hauled away by four police officers while singing the chorus of a Black church classic: “This joy that I have—the world can’t give it to me, the world can’t take it away;” student protestors are occupying and renaming a main Columbia campus building after Hind Rajab, a six-year-old Gazan girl martyred after surviving an occupation-bombed vehicle that killed her entire family, whose final words were “I’m so scared, please come. Come take me. Please, will you come?”—Empathy does not do that; love does.

The trail that passes through The Encampment also does not end only with peace, but justice, a conviction rooted in a deep awareness of the interconnectedness of its inhabitants’ liberation. Peace often enters the conversation as a euphemism for the quiet death of the oppressed, a convenient acceptance of the inevitability of eradication. Justice rejects this premise and works to dismantle the structures and conditions that perpetuate the glorification of this so-called peace.

While The Encampment hopes the path to justice can be peaceful, it demonstrates time and again that the institutions which constitute the guts of the empire—those whose survival hinges on our collective subjugation—are the ones that incite and enact violence. We have all watched what happened to comrades at Columbia, NYU, Emory, USC, UCLA and others: brutal force, batonschemical irritantsTasersmounted policemobsrifles and snipers on rooftops. The path to liberation from these imperial structures is marred by violence only because the perpetrators of oppression enforce violent conditions that render that liberation impossible otherwise; they choose to brutalize the seekers of justice. But despite the temptation of the momentary rest “peace” provides, The Encampment teaches us justice is the only end goal worth seeking.

The existential panic with which the state and its institutions react to The Encampment and its inhabitants thus becomes entirely understandable. It embodies something antithetical to the institutionally enshrined profit motive, to structural investment in disparities, to the criminalization of poverty, and to widespread militarization. It replaces a model of top-down organizational sponsorship with a horizontal, grassroots, mutual aid-based structure grounded in care.

In the warmth of a shared blanket on a cold sidewalk at night in Egypt’s 2011 Tahrir Square, a Tora prison cell, or a University of Pittsburgh lawn; The Encampment offers a radical reimagining of society, not merely protesting the world as it is, but actively constructing it as it should be. Epitomized in every chant of Who keeps us safe? We keep us safe, The Encampment poses an ultimate threat to the perceived indispensability of status quo structures.

Afew days back, Untold Palestine, an independent platform for digital storytelling about Palestinians, posted a video from Gaza in which Palestinian children, men, and women address the student protesters. Standing among the tents to which the occupation’s genocidal campaign has displaced them, amidst the rubble of their homes and the fragments of dreams and futures, amid the sand kissing the soles of their feet, they hold signs bearing the names of US universities with Palestine encampments. They say, “Thank you. Your actions mean a lot to us. We send our love.” 

We see them. They see us. I watch this, heart palpitating, and can almost taste the shimmer of this intentional, transnational seeing in the mist of their eyes; the rhizome of radical love vibrating in the air, crossing the borders, all borders; the black, white, green, and red of it. The Encampment teaches us that this, for a beginning, is enough. It teaches us that this is the only thing that matters, the only path forward. 

Sawfa nabqa huna. We are here; we will remain. Because, as Palestinian poet Fady Joudah says, we are not afraid of love from the river to the sea. ♦


Written by Abdelrahman ElGendy and first published on Protean

* Abdelrahman ElGendy is an Egyptian writer, translator, and activist. He is a Heinz fellow at the University of Pittsburgh’s Global Studies Center, and a Dietrich fellow at Pitt’s Nonfiction Writing MFA. His work appears in The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Guernica, AGNI, Truthout, Mizna, The Markaz Review, Mada Masr, and elsewhere. ElGendy is the winner of the 2024 Courage to Write Award by the de Groot Foundation and was a finalist for the 2021 and 2023 Margolis Award for Social Justice Journalism.