There are six steps to an earthquake:
Tectonic Plate Movement: Moussa Hanafi
On April 13, 1987, Moussa Hanafi, a fourth year student from Rafah, was shot in the throat by an occupation army sniper on the Birzeit University campus in Palestine. At the time of his death, 20 year-old Hanafi was waving a Palestinian flag, a forbidden act deemed transgressive by the occupying entity. Fearing his body would be seized by the soldiers that were looking for it, students smuggled it from the West Bank all the way back to Rafah in order to give him a proper burial. I plow the internet for a picture of him; the search results are overwhelmed by photos of his nephew named after him. He was killed in an airstrike by the same occupying entity on November 4, 2023.
Stress Build-up: First Intifada
On December 9, 1987, nearly eight months after Hanafi’s murder, a settler truck driver crashes into four Palestinian workers from the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza killing them. Twenty years after the six day war, zionism’s continuous plundering of Palestinian land and bodies precipitated the inevitable ripening of a revolution ready to bare fruit. The First Intifada thunders across the territory for over 5 years. The occupation mobilized over 80,000 soldiers to shut down riots. Teenagers were beaten. Human Rights Watch decried the use of excessive force, and was unsurprisingly ignored.
Pause.
The word انتفاضة Intifada translates to “uprising” more literally, it refers to “a shaking off.” An act of refusal characterized by revolt. It is the result of years of unsanctioned oppression, where the oppressed shoulder the burden of their liberation, rejecting the status quo through various acts of resistance. Intifada conjugates love of land with a dedication to freedom.
Play.
The First Intifada raged until September 13, 1993 concluding with the signing of the Oslo Accords: a deal brokered by the Clinton administration that left the West Bank vulnerable to the expansion of settlements, helmed by a Palestinian Authority who sold into impotence.
Faults: The Ensuing 37 Years
The decades have brought a slew of cataclysms: A second intifada (September 2000-2005) which concluded with the IOF’s withdrawal from the Gaza strip, in exchange for its subsequent Ghettoization, multiple aggressions, full-scale wars on both Palestine and Lebanon, hundreds of thousands killed. A land devoured by an insatiable governing entity that continues to this day its campaign of settlement expansion and mass displacement.
Then came October 7, 2023. The final act: Genocide; the logical conclusion of any colonial project. When Time revealed that over 95% of settlers felt their army was using an appropriate or not enough force in Gaza, I was wholly unsurprised. In 2006, 88% of them supported the war on Lebanon, sending their children to the northern border to sign missiles on their way kill us.
A colony is a parasitic tumor. Its aim is to exterminate the indigenous population, take over the territory, then rewrite history to instill and reinforce its own mythology by claiming ancestral connection to the land it occupies.
Release of Energy: Columbia University
On April 17, 2024, day 193 of the ongoing genocide, 5,000 miles away from Gaza where the quasi totality of universities have been decimated, students at Columbia University cognizant of their institution’s role in funding and profiting off the annihilation of Palestinians pay homage to the 1968 generation protesting the Vietnam War by setting up an encampment on campus, declaring it the “Liberated Zone.” The demand is simple: Disclose + Divest.
Columbia has an endowment fund of $13.6bn. Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a coalition of campus groups that is one of the organisers behind the current protests, has identified a series of investors that it wants the university to sever ties with. They include BlackRock, the asset management giant; Airbnb, which has offered rentals in the occupied West Bank; Caterpillar, whose bulldozers Israel has used; and Google, which has faced protests from staffers over Project Nimbus, which provides artificial intelligence services to Israel.
Source: Apartheid to fossil fuels: Columbia’s history of divestment before Gaza
With a pending Rafah invasion where the occupation army has tanks positioned at the Kerem Shalom crossing waiting to enter the furthermost city in Gaza where 1.5 million people are sheltering in tents, the media saw an opportunity to divert attention away from the genocide by littering the internet with thinkpieces about “antisemitic” student protests.
Propagation: Mass Refusal
At the time of writing, 53 US campuses have set up encampments. As of April 26, they are joined by Sciences Po in Paris, marking the spread of the student movement to Europe.
In response, police forces with riot gear have been deployed all over the country with a couple of campuses going as far as allowing snipers on their rooftops, and some, like University of Minnesota turning off the water. Sound familiar? That’s because it is.
Foucault’s Imperial Boomerang tells us that oppression methods used by the empire on its colonies is bound to be practiced on its own citizens. Gaza is not an exception; it is a proposed blueprint. What happens there, will not stay there, and the repression methods unfolding on college campuses are telling us so. This is the canary in the coal mine.
Effects:
A dying empire’s worse enemy is a unified populace aware of its own power. A dragon whose fire is fading out and knows it’s dying, will take the whole world down as it meets its end. There is a lot to fear in the months, and years ahead, but one thing to remember is liberation is a collective duty. The more of us there are, the likelier we get free.
Further Reading:
Autobiography Of Gaza, by Diaa Wadi, trans. by Nour Jaljuli, Mizna
Mute Giants: Is Ethical Journalism Dead? by Busra Erkara, Platform 24
Two Litanies for Palestine, by Rasha Abdulhadi, The Offing
the butcher, by Ghinwa Jawhari, Split This Rock
Spring Sonnet, by Zeina Hashem Beck, The Rumpus
Israel's Ecocide of Southern Lebanon, by Farrah Berrou, a’anab