A Personal Account of the LA Palestine Encampments

I had been cynical about DSA for a few months. The stress of adjusting to a role in leadership, national level strife, and the normal aches and pains of movement had taken on a new weight in the face of the death of my favorite person. I was sick of talking about things I couldn't control as close as my own family or as far away as Palestine. I wanted to do anything. So on April 25th, when the message came that arrestees from the USC Palestine encampment needed people to greet them when they were released, I drove to jail support.

Hours of waiting later, when the students trickled out with their keffiyehs and citation cards, freezing because the southern California night is so much colder than the daytime and people dress for success, not arrest, I was happy to witness them making history and meet their simple human needs in return. We fed them lukewarm pizza and wrapped them in blankets before they talked to the press, looking like survivors of a shipwreck trapped in air bubbles (except for the few the counter-protestors had thrown water on to make their hours in jail even more miserable). I wondered if socialism is as simple as giving someone you don't know a water bottle because you trust that they are fighting for the right thing. 

I liked the feeling of witnessing. Thus, three days later, comrades and I visited, as ambassadors from a foreign land, the UCLA Palestine Encampment. 

I am glad I was there the night there were no counter-protesters, so I can describe it as it was without outside instigation. There was food! A medic tent! A library! A prayer area for Muslim students and a Jewish Seder! Even daily scheduled programming, including a screening of “Battle for Algiers”.  We found our friends first (because you always find your friends first at these sorts of things) and discussed the business of the day: whether the encampment still needed supplies moved, impressions from Labor Notes, and most of all, the miracle around us. 

I was amazed. The past few months had made me skeptical of collective action in ways I didn't register until I felt my spirits lift at the immediacy of the problems at hand—who had a charger, what time did the movie start, who would stay with a comrade overnight. Direct action—Chicken Noodle Soup for the organizer’s soul. 

It made it all the more heartbreaking when the encampment was attacked and dismantled a few days later. In the heat of trying to find YDSA comrades, coordinating jail support for the latest batch of arrestees, and endless discourse about the consequences of bringing shields to protests (which for the record, will get you “rolled up” by police in L.A. County), there was a pressing need to maintain existing commitments. It was tempting to dismiss May Day parades and priority campaign events as incidental to the student uprisings, but the presence of the broader labor movement and left at each encampment showed that all projects in defense of the international working class were intimately connected. 

The work did not cease in its immediacy and importance, but it became more abstract. How could we fund supplies for newly founded encampments? How could we connect with leftist media personalities to amplify the voices of students? How could we develop people being mobilized to stay in the work long-term? And above all else, how could we use the zeitgeist to deepen the impact of a pre-planned vigil at City Council member Katy Yaroslavsky’s office asking her to join us in bringing a ceasefire resolution to the nation’s second largest city?

Being in the conjuncture feels like swimming where the waves of two oceans meet each other. Moving through it to a specific destination is all the more absurd. But as onerous as the organizing journey was, it was needed to sustain the energy of the spontaneous student uprisings. The boring work is beautiful. The boring work sustains life.

The vigil went well, but it went without me. [Link to Instagram Post w/ Vigil Images]

A week after my visit to the UCLA encampment, a comrade from another local DSA needed a ride home after retrieving items post-arrest. We looked, a little sadly, for their backpack. I knew from word of mouth that the police had thrown everything from the site of the encampment into a dumpster two days before, but sometimes we need to learn things ourselves to know them to be true. 

As my new acquaintance searched, I watched the campus authorities perform a stilted flag ceremony where there had once been a homemade barricade. The green lawn seemed empty in a way I would never have felt it to be if I had not visited the encampment. The performance of restoring order was such a shallow thing when I closed my eyes and remembered the community built there. I mourned how much more we could have done if the students taking graduation photos and walking to Friday night parties had joined us before.

My comrade said they accepted the backpack was gone and was ready to go home. As we walked toward the car in the golden May light, I thought about the vigil across town and I appreciated that the beauty of collective movement, no matter how small in comparison to the beast we live inside, is that there are always enough people to leave no one behind. There are always enough people to care about people they don't know—here or across the world. There are always enough people to rise again.

DSA-LA continues to support freedom for Palestine via strike support, political education, student organizing, and of course, advancing a ceasefire resolution through LA City Council.