A Genocide is ongoing in Palestine. A Genocide. A Genocide is ongoing in Palestine. It has not ceased and does not cease if we look away, and the University of Pennsylvania, with all its power continues to look away. It has not condemned Israel, and it has not divested from Israel. For this, Penn is complicit in the genocide of Palestine.
Foremost, this is the message of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment last spring and it is the message of the 2024-25 Disorientation Guide. The mechanisms of Penn’s complicity are detailed in our other articles: Who Owns Penn? – Palestine Writes, Penn’s Wrongs – Penn’s Ties to Hillel International Harm Both Jewish Students and Palestinians – Crackdown: Open Expression in Post-Encampment Penn. It is important, however, to also give space and focus on the heart of the struggle: the needs of the Palestinians facing genocide from an apartheid state, Israel. So, let us focus again on Palestine and the liberation of all peoples. From victory to struggle, police violence to joy, through the encampment, let us walk back into the fight for freedom.
What is Victory?
Long Live the student intifada
Victory looks like the University of Pennsylvania divesting from the evils in which it is invested rather than punishing the members of its community who dared to challenge authority and demand change.
Victory looks like a free Palestine, where liberation aligns with the thawabit –– the inviolable national rights of the Palestinian people. Victory is a Palestine where children are not limbless and orphaned. Victory is a unified Palestinian state where all religious and ethnic groups can coexist in peace. Until there is justice for the people of Palestine, there cannot be peace. There is no home for an ethnostate in a truly liberated Middle East. That is the bare minimum. That is victory.
When considering the question of peace, it is always important to ask peace for whom. Israel, continuing to occupy Palestinian land while ethnically cleansing and displacing Palestinians is not peace.
Israel, systematically depriving Palestinians of food, water, and shelter while holding them imprisoned is not peace. Israel, regularly carrying out violent attack on Palestinians–the latest of which have killed more children in a matter of days than the resistance efforts have in the past ten years–is not peace.
Colonization is not and will never be peace. Palestinians, like all oppressed peoples, have the right to resist their oppressors by any means necessary.
@up.against.the.occupation oct. 11 2023
LONG LIVE THE STUDENT INTIFADA
Zionist media propaganda has posed a constant threat to our safety and our mission. There is no internal division within the encampment that compares to the external hatred we have endured: chemical attacks, sexual harassment, in addition to racist and Islamophobic wake-up calls in the early morning hours. Western media works tirelessly against us, but we persist with the people of Palestine in our hearts.
“Financial transparency is bad business sense.”
Interim president larry j. jameson
May 10, at 5:30am, Philadelphia Law Enforcement (i.e. PPD) was dispatched to the Gaza Solidarity Encampment — The Freedom Camp — on College Green at the behest of the UPenn administration. Hundreds of bike cops, riot cops, strike force, counterterrorism, and Penn Police stormed the camp with wooden batons in hand… Even onlookers were harassed with batons, including press, medics, and other students and faculty.
@up.against.the.occupation
Protests were met with intense brutality from Israeli-trained police: a dislocated shoulder, double-cuffing resulting in swelling and loss of circulation, hair pulling, trauma to the head when dragged from the statue, knees on backs and to the face, and bruised arms from general excessive use of force. People’s belongings were taken off their person discriminately at arrest.
@up.against.the.occupation
UPenn and its Zionist allies have not, cannot, and will never be able to decimate the cause — the generational movement for liberation — that grounds us all in community.
As the people of Gaza have taught us, we shall not be moved. We shall never be moved.
Penn Disorientation Guide 