Opinion: “Be Revolutionary” But Don’t Set up Tents in Protest of Genocide

The State Police Special Emergency Response Team (SERT) “highly trained in defensive tactics, use of specialty control devices, arrest [and] dispersals of crowds”, invaded UMass Amherst in coordination with other heavily armed units on Tuesday, May 7. They arrested more than 130 peaceful protestors, razing social infrastructure in the process. Hundreds more were present to protest the ongoing genocide of Gaza and to demand that UMass disclose partnerships with, and divest from, entities affiliated with Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Officers covered head to toe in riot armor were deployed at the behest of campus leadership to dismantle tents that were pitched “outside the limits of the land use policy”. The violators of this petty infraction were swiftly repressed on public university property. Meanwhile, those who continue to violate international humanitarian law in service of a live genocide that has killed more than 14,000 children and maimed and traumatized tens of thousands more, are met with upstream material support from UMass, in the form of contracts and investments.

From the moment the encampment was erected around noon on May 7, until the police arrived a few hours later, the organizers took care to foster a peaceful, dignified, and pedagogical environment. In keeping with the weeks and months at UMass leading up to the night’s events, as with student protests elsewhere, Tuesday’s rallies in solidarity with the people of Gaza provided students with a safe and hospitable outlet to express their moral convictions and intellectual opinions. The space was open and accessible, faculty members led teach-ins, participants engaged in serious dialogue, and an autonomous library loaned books on the topic of Israel and Palestine. That was until the atmosphere intensified on account of police, who began to mobilize outside of the Whitmore Administration Building as “negotiations” were taking place inside the building. Wasting no time, police officers  broadcast orders to those exercising their first amendment right to free speech and assembly to disperse beyond an extreme radius from the center of the camp. This made it harder for observers to bear witness to the ensuing events, which began with the arrest of UMass faculty and culminated in the brutalization of UMass students.

When the Patriots lost the 2018 Superbowl, riots broke out at major choke points on and off campus. Glass bottles and other projectiles were thrown indiscriminately, furniture was burned, property was damaged, and 12 people were injured. But only six were arrested. Tuesday’s Gaza solidarity protest was antithetical to that mayhem. It was educational if that word is to mean anything. It was safe if there is any substance to safety. Sending in state troopers to threaten a community of students taking a sincere interest in pressing global issues and playing an active role in the social process of liberation, and to arrest those standing courageously in solidarity with the wickedly oppressed, is not only an affront to education, it is an inherently dangerous choice, as the ACLU of Massachusetts has since pointed out.

We are told that deploying the police was an “absolute last resort”, and yet they advanced with premeditated precision towards the students no more than seven hours after the students had begun to gather. Upholding the university as a place of education calls for exactly the opposite response. If UMass aims to produce intellectuals rather than intellect workers, if UMass aims to be more than a place that trades in commodified vocational training, it must recognize the students’ right to peaceful nonviolent protest, the ultimate manifestation of education.

To those with any moral principles whatsoever, it should be clear how eminently reasonable the protestors demands to disclose and divest are. As members of the UMass community, they do not want to be associated with the institutions and functionaries that pull the levers, design the parts, and manufacture the racism that enables the slaughter of innocent Palestinians. As human beings we are deeply disturbed by the systematic decimation of hospitals; the amputations absent anesthetics; the precision targeting of ambulances; the wholesale loading of mass graves; the carpet bombing of neighborhoods; the industrial demolition of universities; the forced displacement of millions; the measured starvation of populations; the murder of forty thousand people denied freedom of movement. If you are not distressed by any of this, as morally deprived as that would be, then you ought at least to be ashamed, in the name of civil liberties, that students in America attempting to express themselves freely, to learn about the world, and to end a genocide in a peaceful manner were violently prevented from doing so at UMass Amherst. This comes as Rafah, a “safe zone”, is being bombarded by an IDF that’s armed to the teeth with American equipment.

Tyler Poisson is a resident of Northampton.