The revolt caught Nora by chance. Many years after the Israeli occupation forced her family to leave Gaza and move to California—where she was born, raised, studied economics, married Omar—Israel began bombing her parents’ homeland, which she only knew on vacation and has not set foot in 20 of his 25 years. Many of her relatives died in an offensive that has already claimed the lives of 35,000 people. The world witnessed, with sadness, with anger, with indifference. In the United States, a handful of students got fed up, took over their universities, organized camps and protests reminiscent of those with which her grandparents denounced the Vietnam War. The police repressed them, the university expelled them. And for Nora, the largest student uprising in recent years, the one that could resonate the most in her history within the Palestinian diaspora, caught her visiting a friend in Mexico.
Then, the National Autonomous University of Mexico, UNAM, took over. The students of the great house of studies in Latin America, a symbol of excellence in the academic field and that of political protest, met in an assembly and, like their peers from north of the border, organized a camp that demands a “stop to imperialist genocide in Gaza” and the breakdown of diplomatic relations between Mexico and Israel. The camping began this Thursday, with more than 40 tents and around a hundred people, including Arabs and Jews, on the esplanade between the rectory and the library. Nora was one of the first to arrive.
University protests in solidarity with Palestine have set American news on fire. From California to New York, the police have repressed students who were demonstrating on dozens of campuses in more than twenty states. The images have gone around half the world. More than 2,000 young people have been arrested since April 18, according to a count by the AP agency. Reactions have varied from the chancellor of Columbia University, Minouche Shafik, who requested police intervention; to that of the Pulitzer Prize (the most prestigious award in the world of journalism, based precisely in Columbia), which has expressed solidarity with ”the tireless efforts of journalism students on the university campuses of our country, who cover the protests and riots with great personal and academic risk.” Now, the flame has spread to Mexico.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1,200 people. The Israeli response, with a much more powerful arsenal, has destroyed Gaza, killed 35,000 people, unleashed hunger and doubled poverty. Since then, Nora says, “they have been very frustrating months because my family is in Gaza, they have been displaced many times, we have lost a lot of family members due to the incessant air attacks and bombings. Every day we wait for the bombs to stop, but people protest and still there seems to be no end. We hope that with global solidarity and pressure from the people, economic pressure, cutting relations with the colonialist occupation of Israel, the bombs on our people will stop,” she says in English.
Nora’s tent was among the first three to be erected when, at 12:00, there were still more journalists than protesters at UNAM. She doesn’t shake her hand when greeting, her husband, Omar, shakes it for her. She wears a long pink dress that also covers her head and the traditional white kufiya on her shoulders. She learned about UNAM and its significance as a symbol of Latin American university independence thanks to a friend of hers. She told him about the student movement of ’68 and how it was repressed in Tlaltelolco, about the 1999 strike, about “its history of autonomy, of protest, how respected it is as an institution, what it means to the Mexican people. Historically, they have managed to change the political atmosphere and I think it is very plausible that the actions that people take in their own environment, like here in their own school, influence the people who make decisions. “I am very hopeful about the actions of this university,” she celebrates.
“No alcohol, no joints, no narcotics, no fucking”
The camp becomes lively throughout the day. An assembly is held to establish the rules—one of them, “no alcohol, no joints, no narcotics, no fucking,” to maintain an environment of “political alert”—the tasks are divided into “brigades”: one to be in charge of security, another of provisions, another of dissemination and relations with the press, one that offers first aid and psychological support. The main demands are, in their words: stopping the genocide and ending the Zionist occupation; breaking relations between UNAM and Israel (study agreements, exchanges); break diplomatic relations between Mexico and Israel following the example of Colombia; stop the international repression of the student movement with Palestine; release prisoners imprisoned in protests.
The goals are lofty and almost impossible to achieve, virtually identical to those demanded by American students. “Sometimes they call us deluded, but even though political movements have to be concrete, they are also movements of imagination, of putting our efforts into something that seems non-existent, but that can have a replica. Here and now we are creating a history and a memory. It may seem like I say it with an air of grandeur, but history is not made from the grandiose narrative that is taught in classrooms. It is when someone decides to imagine that things could be different. Mexican students are not going to end the Government of [el primer ministro israelí, Benjamín] Netanyahu, but position ourselves with the voice and with the body in an aesthetic, narrative, discursive act, of saying: ‘Here we are,'” reflects Karime Rajme, with that speech of living words of philosophy graduates.
Rajme is part of the assembly that organized the camp. She is 29 years old, she studied at UNAM and now she is a film critic and teaches classes. Her last name is Lebanese, but Mexico has already seen three generations of her family born. She doesn’t know the land of her great-grandparents. Rajme quickly summarizes the meaning of the protest: “We are urgently calling for a genocide to stop.” The influence of the protests in the United States has been key, but the UNAM camp is not just a replica, she says, but an attempt to create “a space in Mexican society to discuss and express those social actions, to bring them together.” . “Although in the United States we see this more direct relationship with financing, military, intelligence and weapons support to Israel, I believe it is a global movement. She said it [el presidente colombiano, Gustavo] Petro this morning: the fact that a people dies is a condemnation of all of humanity,” he concludes.
It is unclear how long the camp will last. The call is indefinite, and it is unlikely that the police will repress the protesters here as they have done in the United States—as an autonomous institution, security forces need to enter UNAM accompanied by university authorities—and the relationship of Mexico and Israel, despite having economic and diplomatic agreements, are light years away from the proximity between Washington and Jerusalem. The duration of the protest will depend on the strength of the students and the noise they manage to make. The idea, in principle, is to hold on until next Wednesday and evaluate then.
Beyond the great original political objectives, students are clear that what is asked for is one thing and what is achieved is another. Noise, spreading protest, is a real and affordable goal. “UNAM has a very big political burden inside and outside the country, it is expected that other schools will be encouraged. I think it could escalate to other people continuing on the same path,” confides Renata Aguilar, 22 years old and a history student, while she sets up her tent. “This should have started from day one, not today, when it has been almost seven months of Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people. I hope it lengthens, gets bigger and many more people come,” agrees Alan (24 years old), who literally has the last name Palestine, although he does not have any known ancestors in the Middle East. He irons it out: “Regardless of whether it is my name, this should concern anyone who is human.”
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