At UCSC, Palestine solidarity encampment settles in for extended stay

The rainy weekend didn’t make for good camping weather. Yet on the campus of UC Santa Cruz, over a hundred students and community protesters braved the chilly drizzle to camp out overnight in tents and hammocks fanned out across Quarry Plaza within the newly christened Gaza Solidarity Encampment. 

This veritable tent city, established last Wednesday, snakes through the gully at the center of campus —  about 350 feet long, running from the Quarry Plaza parking lot to the entrance of the Quarry Amphitheater, and with an estimated 150 to 200 full-time campers sleeping there, according to Sasha Stetler, a student spokesperson for the encampment. That number doesn’t include the hundreds of students and community members who filter in and out for the daily programming, teach-ins, conversation and meals served within the span of an average day. 

Indeed, the “People’s University” component of the camp — as student organizers have dubbed the ongoing teach-in — featured an array of presentations from students, faculty and other local luminaries. Sunday’s offerings included a sociology professor speaking on Mexico and Palestine, a history professor giving a lecture on Palestinian novelist Ghassan Kanafani, and an Armenian dance lesson. The encampment has been posting the daily teach-in schedule on its Instagram.

Beyond the addition of a packed schedule of events programming, the encampment has expanded dramatically since its assembly on Wednesday following a May Day march. The outdoor kitchen now spans three tents, with three meals a day and hundreds of servings of snacks and energy bars for the taking in between. Saturday’s dinner menu included quesadillas, black beans, pico de gallo, roast peppers and onions, and diced jalapeños on the side — plus a side salad. 

“We want to make it known that we want people to come throughout the day, check out our programming, even if they’re not necessarily sleeping at the camp,” Stetler told Lookout. “We don’t want people to feel like they have to be in camp to engage with our community because that’s not the case at all.”

The Gaza Solidarity Encampment, a creation of the UCSC chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), is one of many pro-Palestine tent cities that the national group’s student members have constructed on college campuses across the county.

A physical encampment is an activist tactic that escalates activism beyond ephemeral protests like rallies: These mini-cities are unmistakable, unavoidable presences on such campuses. CNN reports that over 2,000 people have been arrested at Palestine solidarity encampments, which have now spread beyond U.S. schools and throughout Europe, Asia and Australia. 

Such encampments, UCSC’s included, are a challenge to administrators designed to provoke reform to university policies regarding investment in the Israeli economy and the military-industrial apparatus. 

In media releases and public statements, the SJP has said the encampment will disband once the university boycotts and divests from Israel. “We are using our power as a student group … escalating, to ultimately get a long-term plan for divestment for Palestine,” a student protester said via megaphone during a community forum Saturday evening. 

The student group was actually successful in provoking an initial meeting with UCSC administration. Stetler, the spokesperson for SJP, told Lookout that group members had a meeting with Chancellor Cynthia Larive on Saturday. 

The UCSC communications office was closed over the weekend and no one responded to a request for comment. Previously, UCSC spokesperson Scott Hernandez-Jason told Lookout that “the continued safety and well-being of our students and employees remains our highest priority. … We also continue to support free expression while ensuring that our teaching and research mission continues unabated.” 

Stetler — who noted she was not on the negotiation team — said administrators were trying to dismantle the camp due to issues related to fire safety. “The fire marshal has been coming nearly every day,” Stetler noted. “He does an inspection of the camp and tells us what we need to do. As the camp expands, it’s become harder to comply with the fire marshal violations. But we want everyone to be safe, so we’re trying to comply.” 

Stetler said the camp has been frantically trying to shrink its presence and reorient the arrangement of tents and hammocks in order to comply. 

Indeed, on a rainy Saturday afternoon, frenetic campers were moving sandbags, rearranging fencing and structures, and negotiating the reorganization of the camp footprint in order to remain in compliance. 

That preservation would be on the mind of the Santa Cruz solidarity encampments is perhaps unsurprising given recent events. Across the nation, similar encampments were being dismantled, students arrested by police or battered by violent counterprotesters. 

Last week at the University of Texas in Austin, police arrested 140 pro-Palestine protesters, prompting UT faculty and staff to issue a no-confidence vote in the university president for his heavy hand. At Columbia University in New York, police stormed a building occupied by pro-Palestine protesters and arrested dozens, dismantling their encampment after two weeks of administrative threats. 

Meanwhile at UCLA, counterprotesters threw objects at the encampment and then released live mice into it in an attempt to scare protesters. Days later, police officers arrested over 200 who refused to disperse, ultimately clearing the camp.

The incident in Los Angeles is close to home for the UCSC encampment community. As a sister University of California school in a similar political climate, the possibility of counterprotesters or police raiding the encampment were all very present concerns. 

On Saturday evening, campers held a community forum by megaphone outside of Cafe Ivéta, which sits under the Graduate Student Commons building within the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, and which has been closed since the second day of protest. 

The need to defend the camp against police raids, or preferably to prevent such a raid in the first place, felt like a present danger. “We’re gonna come back and fight stronger if we do get arrested,” said one protester during the forum, who did not want to give their name. “It’s something that we’ve prepared for and we know that it’s going to come.”

Stetler said there hasn’t been any police escalation as of yet, but organizers are anticipating it, “probably within the next few days.”

Meanwhile, Stetler said the campers were unsettled by the appearance of surveillance cameras in places that they hadn’t been previously. “It seems like every day there are new cameras surrounding the camp,” Stetler said. She said she was unsure what the administration’s goal was with the surveillance, which had been another point of contention in the initial negotiations.

I asked Stetler whether the encampment was worried about counterprotesters akin to what had occurred at UCLA. Stetler said they had seen hostile people approach the camp, but “not at the scale that you’ve seen at UCLA.” 

“It’s mainly just been a few people that’ll come throughout the day and say their grievances,” Stetler added. “We have a very hands-off policy, we just really want to deescalate and disengage. They’re entitled to their opinion. They come, they check us out, they say what they don’t like about it, and then they leave.”

The camp did suffer a public image blowback from what Stetler believes was the work of agents provocateur, who spray-painted antisemitic graffiti in the middle of the night. 

“That was not affiliated with us at all,” Stetler said. Stetler believes that it was the work of a group of non-students who arrived in the middle of the night, who spray-painted when no one was looking. She says the camp suspects the same group posted the image on social media, because the graffiti was up only very briefly before campers painted over it. 

Given UCSC’s decentralized campus, the Gaza Solidarity Encampment is not as much of a deliberate nuisance as comparable encampments in places like Berkeley and Columbia: Classes still go on as usual, and most of campus life outside Quarry Plaza is unaffected. 

Still, it’s not all business as usual for the UCSC community: The quarry location of Cafe Ivéta, situated directly in the center of the encampment, has been closed since Wednesday. Typically on weekdays, the cafe is a hive for the diffuse, 2,000-acre campus. But starting on Thursday, a sign hung outside the door, stating that Ivéta staff were closing early to join the protest. 

“The encampment presents a serious challenge to our ability to stay in business,” Danielle Bilanko, the manager and co-owner of the UCSC campus location of Cafe Ivéta, told Lookout. She said the university advised them to close the cafe on Wednesday as the encampment grew.

The cafe employs about 27 people, some of whom are full-time, non-student employees, Bilanko noted: “A number of our employees are experiencing financial difficulties and said they would like to go back to work as soon as possible.”

But Ivéta staff to whom I spoke to felt differently. One employee, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, said she was thrilled about the protests and had been spending a lot of time at the encampment. 

“I am in full support of the protests and encampment,” the employee told Lookout. “As an anti-Zionist Jew, this is something I am incredibly passionate about. From the staff I have conversed with, they all seem to be in support of the protests and understand the importance of interrupting the flow of capital to get our point across to the university.”

Meanwhile, Bilanko said that the cafe was broken into and that vandals covered the cafe’s security cameras and stole dining room chairs. Bilanko noted that she was unsure, but thought perhaps some food and beverages might have been taken.

“I returned on Saturday morning, but the barricades had extended to the parking lot and also covered the rear entrance to the cafe, so I was unable to get in to determine whether there was any additional damage or theft,” she said. “As of Sunday morning we have not had any communications with the protesters or any further communications from the university.”

Bilanko’s account conflicts with that of the encampment, where multiple people say they spoke to Bilanko. Stetler said the cafe hasn’t been barricaded and is still accessible.

“We did see a few people go into the cafe the other night, which really they should not have done,” Stetler said. “It was not OK for people to break in, and we did speak with the manager about it, and clear things up with her, because we don’t want to disrespect their business whatsoever.”

Stetler continued: “There’s so many people here, and it’s really hard to kind of regulate everybody’s actions, but they didn’t do any damage. They kind of just moved around chairs and blocked the security camera.” Stetler added that the security cameras had been a source of fear, particularly those pointed directly at the community forums. Bilanko did not respond to a request for additional comment by publication time.

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