Chris Gazaleh looked out at the crowd of about 50 students, all sitting on the lawn outside of Gleeson Library at the University of San Francisco. He raised his hand as he asked a question:
“Who knows who Handala is?”
Only a half-dozen hands shot up.
“My Palestinians out here,” Gazaleh said with a smile.
Gazaleh, 40, has been making art in San Francisco since he arrived from Detroit some 20 years ago. He joined the General Union of Palestine Students (GUPS) while attending San Francisco State University, and began melding his artistic talent with themes of Palestinian agency and resistance.
He, along with other GUPS members, pushed to install a mural of Edward Said, the Palestinian philosopher and scholar, at San Francisco State’s student union. Later, he began painting walls around the city, honing his postmodern compositions and eye for color.
But at USF on a blue-skied Friday in the first week of May, Gazaleh took on the role of historian, explaining how a simple cartoon sketch drawn by Naji al-Ali in 1969 became a symbol for the Palestinian diaspora. It depicts a 10-year-old boy named Handala, with his back turned to the audience and tiny hands clasped behind him.
From paintings to murals to endless examples of graffiti, Handala is a crucial element of the culture’s folk art, Gazaleh argued. The image speaks to how Palestinians have “turned their back” on the geopolitical machinations of the West, and serves as a rallying cry for the diaspora’s right to return.
“Unfortunately, we have a lot of sellouts in our midst. But the Palestinian struggle is the people’s struggle,” Gazaleh told the crowd of about 50 students, who nodded quietly in return.
“Remember: The worst thing about having privilege is not using it,” he added.
It’s been nearly a month since college students around the Bay Area began setting up protest encampments in support of Palestine and against the Gaza war. According to the Gaza Health Ministry, more than 35,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military since October, when Hamas militants surged into southern Israel, killing an estimated 1,200 people and taking around 250 hostages.
The San Francisco actions are part of a wave of similar protests across the country, inspired by the early militant action of students at Columbia University in New York City, MIT in Cambridge, Ma., and Cal Poly Humboldt, among others.
But while the media coverage has focused on the strife between students and the administrations they’re pressuring, the unprecedented action around the pro-Palestine encampments has informed and energized a new generation of activists in a way that conventional protests cannot. These camps coalesced knowledge, radical theory, and tactical planning in myriad communal sessions, giving those new to social movements an elegant way to dive into the deep end of activism.
As Susu Steyteyieh, a student organizer at the University of San Francisco and frequent speaker for the encampment, told me in the first week of occupying campus: “The camp has grown and grown, and it’s even bringing non-students to ask questions about the genocide. A lot of young people are learning this for the first time.”
Like at many other sites, the students in San Francisco have focused on a core set of demands: That the universities publicly condemn Israel’s war efforts, disclose and divest from university investments and endowments that have ties to Israel, and end academic partnerships with Israel-backed figures.
The final days of May, however, have brought a conclusion — albeit uneasy — to the city’s protests.
The longest-running encampment, located at SFSU, wound down its full-time occupation on May 15 after reaching a tentative agreement with school president Lynn Mahoney and the SFSU administration.
(“Just as earlier groups of student activists caused us to reflect on how our investments aligned with climate action and, more recently, with social and racial justice, Students for Gaza has pushed us to reflect on and commit to working with the SF State Foundation to review and draft a revision to our existing environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investment policy statement,” SFSU’s Mahoney said in a statement.)
The encampment at the USF, meanwhile, came to a disruptive end when the administration demanded protesters leave by 3 p.m. on May 14 — and then tore down remaining tents and levied suspensions on students this Monday.
(“We took careful and considered steps to ensure the safety of our campus community while protecting both free expression and academic freedom. The shift from a peaceful protest to campus disruption that monopolized USF’s resources was swift as violations of our policies and procedures escalated,” USF said in a statement.)
While USF administrators have made some vague commitments to call for a ceasefire and form a coalition to review its investment portfolio, the reaction at the University of California San Francisco’s Parnassus campus was more violent: Mere hours after students set up a rally and camp on May 13, police officers arrived to remove banners, tear down tents, and arrest one person for noncompliance.
It’s not exactly the revolution these young activists wanted or imagined, surely. But again and again, through multiple visits at SFSU and USF, I learned from students that pressuring their schools to negotiate and ultimately take on demands was but one purpose of the encampments. Just as significant was the experience of building a second home for young people to organize and lead radical protest for the first time, fueled by what they see as a moral imperative to stop a war of attrition that is decimating civilian lives.
Jacob, a 20-year-old journalism student at SFSU, had been to a number of protest actions for various social justice issues since they were in high school. But the camp was their first time getting fully involved in an operation — and the moment has left a lasting impression, Jacob told me.
(Like most others in this story, Jacob asked to be identified only by first name and age, due to concerns about retaliation from the university or employers.)
“It’s the sense of community that is the biggest thing. I’ve met so many people from such a wide, diverse range of backgrounds who are united on this front,” they said. “Being in close quarters with people who were formerly strangers — that’s been a driving force for me and others.”
Later at SFSU, I met Raymond, 22, who had very little experience with direct action prior to the encampment. It was his first day at the site, and his eyes gleamed as he scanned the hundred or so tents that had sprouted over the first week of May. He told me he wanted to educate himself through conversations and events like teach-ins at the camp, and then radicalize others who “have good intentions” but remain confused or ambivalent about the Palestinian struggle.
“A lot of these student movements in the past, especially here at San Francisco State, were for the right causes. And college administrations, so many times, have been on the wrong side of that history,” Raymond said. “We’re living in a moment of history right now. It’ll be in textbooks. I just wanted to be involved. And this encampment made it happen.”
As with Gazaleh at USF, the camp at SFSU had drawn in many non-student voices who had deep experience in activism and organizing. Jacob noted that a variety of faculty members visited the encampment, speaking with students and sharing past experiences. (“We’ve gotten to trust our educators on a whole new level,” they remarked.)
The ability to create a central hub to recruit, organize, and educate is crucial, especially because heightened “social pressure” makes it appealing for students to take a stand, says Lisa Mueller, a professor at Macalester College who is an expert on modern protest movements. She also suggests that college students are “uniquely advantaged” because they have the time and energy to devote to activism — without risking losing a job or other responsibilities typical in post-college life.
“The so-called ‘fresh blood’ is really vital for protests to grow to the size where they can really make leaders quake in their boots,” Mueller says. “There’s been some really fantastic social science based on data from the Arab Spring, showing that the people on the periphery of social movements really helped drive participation and the major wins of that uprising.”
Omar Wasow, a professor at UC Berkeley, agreed with Mueller and added that the current encampments recall the sit-in protests of the 1960s, when young people desegregated lunch counters and stores by occupying space.
“The thread is that it’s a form of embodied activism. You’re really putting your body in a place that forces a crisis,” Wasow said. “And an encampment strategy creates a daily crisis. That is powerful both in the sense that the administration has to think about it every single day. And it also becomes an episodic arc for the media to check in on. But it has potential challenges, too. It can be hard to come to a satisfying resolution if you have big, maximalist demands and no easy way to go home.”
The students in SF learned from internal tensions and deliberations, too. One protester at SFSU who asked not to be named told me that a contentious battle over camp leadership had created some fissures and discouragement. Another challenge was the media frenzy, especially with outlets parachuting in with little context, knowledge of protest, or respect for security measures. Another protester told me about waking up in their tent at dawn, only to realize that two broadcast cameras were pointed right at the entry, waiting for them to appear like some kind of zoo animal.
But navigating these roadblocks is part of the learning process, according to Sarah, a 21-year-old student at USF. As an Arab woman growing up in the Middle East, she had long known about the trials of Palestinian people. In the last few years of attending SFSU, Sarah had joined a variety of protests led by large organizations. It was only in the aftermath of October 7, however, that she decided to begin organizing with a core group of students.
“It was more like a trial-and-error kind of thing where students would gather around and kind of work on things self-organized, not really reaching out for any kind of support until the encampment finally went up,” she said.
As the encampment grew, however, Sarah noticed that it drew a swath of people who did not personally have ties to Palestinian, Arab, or Muslim culture.
“I definitely think that for them, it resonates with their own personal identities and how their people have been marginalized and have oppressions to fight,” she concluded.
We had talked in the shade of a giant spruce tree, adorned with a seven-foot-tall poster of student demands and a shrine decorated with candles, spiritual herbs and flowers. When I returned this week, there was a sign on the ground.
“We will return,” it read.
