F*** You, We Aren’t Leaving

Writing from the encampment

May 06, 2024

This post was originally published on Danaka’s SubStack Proof That I Am Alive. You can subscribe here.

By Danaka Katovich

I’ve been fighting off a small cold all week, the kind that makes your throat feel extra dry and eventually tickles you into coughing a handful of times. There’s nothing serious to it, just a vague discomfort that felt exacerbated by sleeping, or not really sleeping, in a tent on the quad of the university I graduated from some years ago. The ground is hard, I don’t feel settled in enough to get a blow up mattress. We have a blanket lining the floor for a pathetic layer of cushion. I still laid awake at four in the morning unable to fall into a stable sleep. I drifted off, then I heard the athan.

Here, sun is shining slightly through the tent and people in the encampment settled in for the night. All I can hear is birds chirping and just an occasional car whizzing by on Fullerton. I’m quite familiar with this place, I lived a lot of important moments at it. I’ve studied under this tree that I’m sleeping under now. It could be the virus my body is keeping at bay or just the fact that I’m not sleeping where I normally am, but what’s mostly keeping me up is the reason why I’m here in the first place. I’m kept awake by the fact that the world feels like it’s finally turning upside down — the only normal response to the horror we’ve all witnessed in the last six months.

A week ago I wrote about our collective responsibility that we all have just based on the fact that we were plucked from history to be living through this. In March I wrote about losing my mother. Now, Mother’s Day is approaching and I’m thinking about her more than ever. She represents my most personal experience with grief, and she is also the person that taught me how to camp. There’s a lot of grief here and my camping skills failed to stick around into my twenties. We could speculate on whether or not she would be proud of me for trying my best to be a small thorn in the side of power since she died — but all I know is she was rolling in her grave when I struggled to pitch a tent.

At seemingly all university encampments around the United States, students put up free libraries named after Dr. Refaat Alareer, the Palestinian professor, writer, and poet that was killed by Israel on December 6, 2023. I remember exactly what I was doing when Dr. Alareer died — I was walking from the grocery store to my dad’s house in California and my friend told me the news over the phone. It feels like decades ago now. Refaat was insanely funny. And I think of him a lot at the encampment because he loved Chicago and deep dish pizza. And because a lot of my professors have stopped by to support us here, and I couldn’t fathom losing them like Refaat’s students lost him. They’ve taught me to ask the right questions about the world and guided me into a more meaningful life where I can appreciate what’s in front of me. What happens when they’re all gone? Every university in Gaza was destroyed and thousands of educators murdered in cold blood. In the West Bank, Palestinian students get thrown in arbitrary military detention for organizing. It doesn’t really matter that we are having trouble sleeping outside. It just matters that we are here.

The week before we started the encampment at DePaul, Israel killed Refaat’s oldest daughter and newborn grandchild. Forty thousand stories exactly like that is why we’re here. Then the Zionists arrived and told us we were the baby killers and terrorists. Their words don’t even sting anymore. Bisan, a beloved journalist in Gaza said the encampments gave her hope for the first time in her entire life. I couldn’t possibly care what a Zionist thinks about me.

When left alone, our encampment is sort of a great microcosm of the world I want to live in one day. People take care of each other. We provide for each other. We share and feed one another. All of that though, is just a side effect of our greater political purpose. Collectively, our university endowments invest billions of dollars into the genocidal Israeli regime. The chants about universities funding the slaughter of Palestinians isn’t just a slogan, it’s our political reality.Presidents and boards of directors are insisting that divestment is impossible and they may be right. Some of our institutions invested so thoroughly into violence that they will collapse if they stop doing so. Our politicians and institutions made war and genocide the investments with the highest returns and now they’re starting to feel the sting of the fire they started. But the masses don’t have investments or returns — just back breaking debt. And their dignity still left to be demanded. The further they push us down this road, the more people they are creating with nothing left to lose and the entire world to demand.

So, we enter day seven of our encampment tomorrow. Zionists and cops finally showed up today. And I’m thinking of Refaat again, who when Israel announced the evacuation orders of Gaza City said, “Fuck you. We are not leaving.”

This post was originally published on Danaka’s SubStack Proof That I Am Alive. You can subscribe here.

Danaka Katovich is the co-director of CODEPINK.